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I've been editing music pages a bit lately and I've been wondering about a lyrical phenomenon I sometimes notice that I'm unsure how to describe. Basically, it's the tendency of some singers to return to the same word or phrase in multiple songs throughout their career. More specifically, it's when these musicians also tend to work in really abstract or Phrase/Word Salad Lyrics. In that sort of context it's very... debatable that those are Arc Words because their meaning isn't entirely clear and for all anybody knows it might not really mean anything.
The best example I've seen is the page for Beck. A lot of his lyrics are just nonsense, jokes, or mental images that fit the mood but someone noted that he has quite a few words he uses unusually often, like "plastic", "cyanide" and "whiskey" and put this in the page as an example of Arc Words.
The main page for Arc Words defines them as appearing throughout an arc, used as a motif and clarifies that they are "not... a phrase that ends up popping up a lot due to being used a lot in the plot". So it's pretty clear to me that this is the wrong trope to put that example under. But what is this trope? I'm sure it's not new but I don't know exactly what it is.
It's not a Lyrical Tic because it's not a filler word or sound. Is it Author Vocabulary Calendar? The music examples for that one seem to fit really well.
Also: this could probably be a whole forum topic or discussion but is there any sort of style guide or anything for pages about popular music? If it has lyrics it's (usually) a form of narrative art but it's pretty different from a lot of the other stuff we see in pop culture. Meanings are often obscured, stories are vague and often left completely open to interpretation, there aren't necessarily well-defined characters and sometimes it's not even entirely clear whether the singer is singing as themselves or the 'narrator' of the song who is some sort of character.