The evolution of song lyrics

[caught gesture]

Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades - Scientific Reports

Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we...

www.nature.com

 

[Beave]

tl;dr






(I'm joking! Well, not entirely. That article IS really long.)

 

[restorer-john]

In essence, we find that lyrics have become simpler over time regarding multiple aspects of lyrics: vocabulary richness, readability, complexity, and the number of repeated lines.

It takes 7 people to publish a "scientific report" to state the bleedin' obvious. It's not just song lyrics that have been dumbed-down it seems.

 

[radix]

Rick Beato goes off on some current lyrics.

 

[IAtaman]

Napier and Shamir21 investigated the change in sentiment of the lyrics of 6150 Billboard 100 songs from 1951 through 2016. They find that positive sentiments (e.g., joy or confidence) have decreased, while negative sentiments (e.g., anger, disgust, or sadness) have increased.

Brand et al.13 use two datasets containing lyrics of 4913 and 159,015 pop songs, spanning from 1965 to 2015, to investigate the proliferation of negatively valenced emotional lyrical content. They find that the proliferation can partly be attributed to content bias (charts tend to favor negative lyrics), and partly to cultural transmission biases (e. g., success or prestige bias, where best-selling songs or artists are copied). Investigating the lyrics of the 10 most popular songs from the US Hot 100 year-end charts between 1980 and 2007, DeWall et al.18 find that words related to oneself (e.g., me or mine) and words pointing to antisocial behavior (e.g., hate or kill) increased while words related to social interactions (e.g., talk or mate) and positive emotions (e.g., love or nice) decreased over time.

Sound about right, anecdotally. Every once in a while I check the Global Top Songs on Spotify. Usually 50% of top 10 would be marked as explicit.

Interiano et al.23 investigate acoustic descriptors of 500,000 songs from 1985 to 2015. They discover a downward trend in “happiness” and “brightness”, as well as a slight upward trend in “sadness”.

I guess that is a reflection of the evolution of the overall mood of the world since 80s to today?

 

[restorer-john]

I guess that is a reflection of the evolution of the overall mood of the world since 80s to today?

De-evolution I would say.

Devo: 50 Years of De-Evolution 1973–2023

Read Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review of the album.

pitchfork.com

 

[Cbdb2]

In essence, we find that lyrics have become simpler over time regarding multiple aspects of lyrics: vocabulary richness, readability, complexity, and the number of repeated lines.

It takes 7 people to publish a "scientific report" to state the bleedin' obvious. It's not just song lyrics that have been dumbed-down it seems.

All you need to say is one word "rap".

 

[mhardy6647]

I mean, of course -- back in our day, we had gems of lyricism.

... and they gave Dylan, and not these guys, a Nobel prize in literature. There is no justice, I'm tellin' ya.

 

[Anton D]

All you need to say is one word "rap".

Well, no.

From the cited article:

" Indeed, among the evaluated musical genres, rap is the one in which lyrics play the most prominent role."

"...As expected, the results also show that lexical descriptors have a more prominent role in rap,"

Another article:

Song lyrics are now more repetitive and simple, study confirms

Since 1980, the lyrics in songs in English have become less complex and more angry, researchers have concluded.

www.newsweek.com

From the article: "Rap songs however, were a slightly different story. Since 1980, the authors found that the lyrics in rap songs contained more words with three or more syllables."

I don't think we can boil this down to "I blame rap."

 

[JeremyFife]

Who cares that mainstream music is simplified, that it reflects short attention span, tik-tok culture.
There is still art and poetry and there always has been (always will be).
This criticism is not new: every old generation says the new stuff is dumb, every new generation produces amazing, wonderful things.

Listen to the good stuff