My research into Saturn and mundane culture began with a simple curiosity: could Saturn’s transit through the zodiac correspond with observable patterns in popular music? I had been introduced to the idea that songs seemed to reflect the symbolism associated with the zodiac sign Saturn occupied when they were released. Santeria by Sublime, for example, was released while Saturn was in the sign of Aries—a Mars-ruled sign traditionally associated with aggression and confrontation—and centers around a narrator fantasizing about violence toward his romantic rival. I wanted to know whether observations like this were merely anecdotal or whether something larger could be measured.

I began by categorizing Billboard’s all-time Hot 100 rankings according to Saturn’s sign at the time each song was originally released. An unexpected pattern emerged. Twenty of the Top 100 songs were released while Saturn was in the sign Libra, the sign of Saturn’s traditional exaltation, compared with 62 across the broader dataset. At the opposite end, only 30 songs in the final 595-song study were released while Saturn was in the sign Pisces.

That result led me to examine retrospective rankings as well. When I categorized each of the four editions of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, I found an opposite result. The 2004 list, for example, contained only 13 songs from when Saturn was in Libra but 89 from when Saturn was in Pisces. The contrast fascinated me: Billboard’s ranking was built from commercial chart performance in real time, while Rolling Stone was attempting to evaluate music retrospectively through cultural and critical significance.

What began as a curious experiment about music consequently became a much larger investigation: if different Saturn periods repeatedly correspond with measurable differences in the kinds of music society produces, rewards, remembers, and canonizes, what might that tell us about the relationship between planetary cycles and collective human behavior?

That question has become the foundation of my ongoing research into Saturn, culture, and the patterns through which societies express themselves over time.

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