What does the music you listen to say about you? And what does the music that is published say about us, as a society? A group of scientists from the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has tried to answer these and other questions by analyzing tens of thousands of songs released between 1960 and 2023. The result is a vast study which has just been published in Nature and leaves a fascinating conclusion: in the last six decades pop has become more depressing.
The question is obvious: Why?
Much more than music. Anyone who has listened to music while working, playing sports or simply walking down the street will have experienced that songs are much more than an artistic expression: they are also a powerful lever capable of altering our mood. Not only that.
Music, from the most sophisticated to the most popular, points directly to our emotions and obsessions. Aware of this, a group of researchers including Vjosa Preniqui, from Queen Mary University, decided some time ago to embark on a peculiar exercise: grab tens of thousands of songs mainstream and analyze their lyrics to find out what they are talking about.
Almost 400,000 topics. The team examined more than 380,000 songs published between 1960 and 2030, hours and hours and hours of music composed by artists from several generations who sing about their obsessions.
To be more precise, the researchers worked with two large music archives. The first consists of more than 377,000 songs with lyrics in English released between 1960 and 2010 and that have been added to the WASABI database. The second is made up of 5,500 songs extracted from the Billboard charts and that cover a longer period that extends from the beginning of the 60s to 2023.
Objective: language. To manage such a musical collection, the researchers They turned to AI and language analysis techniques. They also focused the focus on a very specific aspect of the songs: they were not as interested in the harmony, instrumentation, rhythm or complexity of the compositions, as their lyrics. The focus was on language, emotional language and its relationship with morality. That is, what were the songs about? Of fidelity, decency and friendship or of conflicts, deception and rebellion?
The goal, as Preniqi and his colleagues explain in his paperis to examine “the evolution of moral expressions in pop music lyrics” over six decades. It may sound very abstract, but the researchers paid attention to ten great timeless topics: ‘care’, ‘harm’, ‘justice’, ‘cheating’, ‘loyalty’, ‘betrayal’, ‘authority’, ‘subversion’, ‘purity’ and ‘degradation’. They also looked at the artist singing: whether it was a man, a woman or a mixed group.
What did they find out? That today’s popular music is much darker than what our grandparents and parents listened to. By comparing the lyrics of the 60s with the most recent ones, Preniqi and her companions found that they have become “increasingly negative”. “Our results reveal an increase in moral vices and a decrease in expressions of virtues, along with an increase in negative feelings, anger and disgust,” they explain in the article of Nature.
In short, today it is much easier to listen to songs that are about infidelities, hurts or degradation than in the 60s, when it was more common to sing about purity or mutual care. “This change, which extends until the 2020s and varies depending on the genre of the artists, highlights that expressions oriented to vices and emotional charges have increasingly gained prominence in music lyrics. mainstream“, concludes the study.
Can it go further? The research provides some figures that help to better understand this transformation. In WASABI the letters related to degradation shot up by 52%, those associated with damage by 49% and those referring to deception by 48%. References to subversive acts also rose 41%.
In the Billboard lists, which extend the ‘photography’ until 2023, the panorama is not very different: references to deception skyrocketed by nearly 71%, to degradation by 62%, to subversion by 50% and to injuries by 36%.
less uplifting. If we look at the lyrics that deal with ‘virtuous’ behavior the trend is the opposite: Songs that talk about caring for others decreased by 24%, those dedicated to purity by 12% and those about loyalty by 11%. Again the trend is similar in WASABI and Billboard.
The researchers did notice changes depending on gender of the artist (men and mixed groups seem more given to negative lyrics) or musical genresalthough these latter data must be handled carefully because there may be important imbalances in the samples analyzed.
And what do the authors say? They claim that their study helps us understand both the evolution of popular music and our own obsessions. “Music is much more than entertainment, it is one of the ways that societies tell stories about themselves. By looking at song lyrics over several decades we can see how emotional expression and moral narratives evolve over time,” reflect Preniqi.
“What we discovered was a gradual shift away from language associated with virtues such as care and decency toward themes that reflect conflict, harm, and other moral concerns. These patterns depend on several factors, such as musical genre and impact, but offer a fascinating perspective on the evolution of cultural values and emotional expression.”
Images | Spencer Davis (Unsplash), QMUL and Vjosa Preniqi et al. in Nature
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