In my day the music was better. How many times have you thought this, or heard it said to you by older relatives and friends? The truth is that it is tastes that remain anchored to the past, and not music that gets worse or better over time. But there could really be a small grain of truth in the boomer grumbles of the older generations: if not uglier, pop music in the last 40 years seems to have become simpler and more repetitive, especially when looking at the lyrics of the songs. Or at least, that's the conclusion reached by a team of Austrian researchers in a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The study examined over 12,000 English-language songs published between 1980 and 2020, spanning five musical genres: rap, country, pop, rock and r&b. The researchers analyzed several characteristics of the lyrics and music of each song, such as repetitiveness, lyrical complexity, and emotionality. And they then connected the results with the year the songs were released, to verify how the musical panorama of so-called “pop music” has evolved over the last 40 years.
As we were saying, the results revealed a tendency to simplify and make texts increasingly repetitive. That is, to use a lesser variety of words, and to repeat verses and refrains without variations more often. In particular, this lower lexical and structural complexity has been accentuated in rock songs and rap pieces of recent decades. In the case of rap, the lyrics seem to have become increasingly emotional over the last 40 years, while those of r&b, pop and country songs show a tendency towards negativity. Furthermore, for all the genres analysed, there is a tendency towards increasingly angry and autobiographical (or perhaps self-referential) texts, as demonstrated by the growing use of terms such as “me” and “mine”, that is, “I” (or “me “) it's mine”.
The analysis therefore offers the image of a musical panorama that tends to be increasingly uniformly composed of catchy and easy-to-remember tunes, which do not particularly require the listener in terms of lexical understanding or attention. What caused these stylistic changes is unclear, but researchers hypothesize that it may depend, at least in part, on changes in the way music is consumed, and in particular on the fact that it is increasingly listened to as a background: as a soundtrack that keeps you company while you do something else, and not as a form of art or entertainment to which you devote your attention.
Shorter songs and all the same, yet no one can do without Spotify