Get Off My Lawn And Give Me The Old Songs!

by Kevin Burton

   Look out kids, there may be science behind my old-man curmudgeonality.

   It seems newer songs are really not like the songs of old.

   Furthermore, technology is partially to blame.

   I’m having a good day!

  “If you feel curmudgeonly for thinking ‘They don’t make hits like they used to,’ be reassured; science has (somewhat) got your grumbling back,” wrote Amy Glover in the Huffington Post under the headline “It’s Not Just You ― Pop Songs Really Have Changed In One Crucial Way”

   “Earlier this year, a study came out looking at more than 12,000 songs’ “lexical, linguistic, structural, rhyme, emotion, and complexity descriptors,” Glover wrote.

   “The scientists behind the research found that ‘lyrics have become simpler over time regarding multiple aspects of lyrics: vocabulary richness, readability, complexity, and the number of repeated lines.’”

   “And it turns out that pop songs have gotten shorter, too. The Washington Post reported that the average length of songs in the 1990s was 4:14; in the 2020s, it’s dropped to 3:15.”

   “Songs like Taylor Swift’s Midnight Rain ― which runs for a mere 2:45 ― could be factoring social media and streaming platforms into their production,” Glover wrote.

   “Speaking to The Guardian in 2019, Mark Ronson said, “all your songs have to be under three minutes and 15 seconds because if people don’t listen to them all the way to the end they go into this ratio of ‘non-complete heard’ which sends your Spotify rating down.’” 

   The New York Times adds,  “From Spotify to TikTok, the goal is to create music that will grab a listener’s attention from beginning to end” ― in practice, that means “to keep streaming consumers engaged, it is increasingly common for songs to begin in medias res (or seemingly in the middle of the song) — with a hook, followed by a hook and ending with another hook.”

   There has always been a push-pull between musicians creating works of art and record companies producing works of commerce. Glover wrote more about the length of songs, whereas I am more interested in the lyrical content, the notion that songs have been dumbed down over the years even as America itself has been dumbed down in the aggregate.

   So I looked for the study.  I can’t be sure I found the same study Glover wrote about. What I found is a study published in Scientific Reports, ”Parada-Cabaleiro, E., Mayerl, M., Brandl, S. et al. Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades.”

   The study finds songs getting simpler, angrier, more self-centered and sex-obsessed over time. Here’s a chunk of the study:

   “Studies investigating the temporal evolution of lyrics predominantly focus on tracing emotional cues over the years. For instance, Dodds et al. identify a downward trend in the average valence of song lyrics from 1961 to 2007. Napier and Shamir 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. 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. 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.”

    “Alongside changes in emotional cues, Varnum et al. find that the simplicity of lyrics in pop music increased over six decades (1958–2016). Similarly, Choi et al. study the evolution of lyrical complexity. They particularly investigate the concreteness of lyrics (concreteness describes whether a word refers to a concrete or abstract concept) as it has been shown to correlate with readability and find that concreteness increased over the last four decades.”

   “Furthermore, there is also a body of research investigating the evolution of lyrical content (i.e., so-called themes). For instance, Christenson et al. analyzed the evolution of themes in the U.S. Billboard top-40 singles from 1960 to 2010. They find that the fraction of lyrics describing relationships in romantic terms did not change. However, the fraction of sex-related aspects of relationships substantially increased.”

    To summarize: This body of research is shaking its scientific, intellectual booty to the rhythm of my particular biases. And I dig that, baby!