Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? | Hacker News Reader

Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?

pudding.cool

137 pointsbpierre36 comments

Open articleView on HN

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323762

More on the "scrollytelling" they used here: https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-scrollytelling...

I personally found it a great way to tell the story. It didn't interfere with my reading experience at all.

Yup. It doesn't make my scrolling janky or slow, it just works. Not tried on mobile yet, however.

Works just great on iOS 10.

Works great on Android too.

I think Rihanna's Umbrella takes repetitiveness to its endgame pretty thoroughly...

I wouldn't immediately blame artist dumbing-down for this phenomenon, if it exists at all, but I think it's more a producer thing where looping and morphing cool lyrical snippets, along with deep rhythmic beats, creates a satisfying modern musical experience.

Have you heard this remix? It's so incredibly catchy...

https://youtu.be/URxzu8EFBVY

Rihanna pushes the boundary even farther in "work". I think there might even be a level of snarky self-awareness with the way she just dissolves that one word into a group of repeated noises.

The production is the legacy of max Martin and dr. Luke they have it down to a science.

Repeating the word "work" does has a more poetic utility as a depiction of working. Even allowing the pronunciation to devolve can be interpreted in this way.

I think you are right that it is self aware. It can get quite meta if you read it as her depicting the mundane nature of work as her... work.

Thanks for making me think about that!

I guess it's satisfying if you aren't into thought provoking media.

Point well taken, and of course you are correct...what is more subjective then musical taste?

Definitely. Rhythm and beats are more important now, with dance culture, than they ever were years ago. It's a shame that it comes with a dumbing down of lyrical content sometimes.

I'd be surprised if Umbrella were all that close to the highest. Other Rihanna songs like S&M, Work and We Found Love In A Hopeless Place seem far more repetitive (at least to my intuition of what qualifies as repetitive).

Clicked on this not expecting much ... wow. Detailed analysis and an absolutely beautiful format for the information. I'll definitely be bookmarking this site.

This is a fun analysis. One of the flaws with comparing only lyrics is that there are some songs for which lyrics are not the source of diversity in the music. For example, Send Me On My Way is very repetitive in its lyrics but has lots of non-lyrical diversity in the vocals. Turn Down for What is very repetitive in its lyrics, but the vocals aren't the melody. This analysis speaks to the following trend in music: how simple are the lyrics?

I don't think you should think of dance music vocals as lyrics in the traditional sense. They're as much about sound and texture as they are about meaning.

Can't think of a better example than Daft Punk's Harder Better Faster Stronger. Very repetitive lyrics on paper, but so much more when rendered as audio.

Nor rap, as it doesn't generally have a verse/chorus structure. Claiming it's not music aside, fans tend to describe it more as poetry, which is generally non-repetitive.

I'm guessing it would be extremely repetitive for poetry though.

Would be interesting to know whether repetitiveness of lyrics affects international sales vs English speaking ones.

I would expect native speakers to be more sensitive about lyrics complexity then others - and international people might even prefer simpler lyrics due to them being easier to understand.

What a great, refreshingly non lazy article.

Presentation was exceptionally well done, I would pay for more content like this!

Hit their index for lots more great stuff. This is at least the third of their pieces I've come across and I've been impressed each time.

https://pudding.cool/

repo is here: https://github.com/polygraph-cool/song-repetition

Maybe some change is coming ... this song just won Eurovision (European Pop music competition) yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qotooj7ODCM

This confirms research done by Joan Serra et al., reported in http://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-music-idUSBRE86P0R... (original paper: http://mtg.upf.edu/system/files/publications/srep00521.pdf).

Both analyses show that the music of 1967 was the most varied of the period studied.

For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend "The Song Machine", by John Seabrook. Music is no longer written by single songwriter-singer, it's manufactured on an assembly line to optimize for 'hits'. Hits are to record labels as unicorns are to VCs :)

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/books/review/the-song-mac...

Another classic from this site from a few years ago which showed the range of lyric vocabulary in hip hop.

https://pudding.cool/2017/02/vocabulary/

Would it be possible to assess the musical repetitiveness by doing this type of analysis on midi versions of the songs?

I'd also be curious which songs were the least repetitive for each decade.

You can do this, but probably not with midi because it would be hard to find. Check out Echonest. There are ways to pull immense amounts of audio information out of songs...

I'd be concerned that midis are too often simplified to manage a meaningful sample.

So the only thing I see lacking in this is props to Knuth. His intuition seems to have been right on the mark.

Interesting that they only go back to the 60s - lyrics in the 50s were very simple and repetitive.

I don't think it really matters which decade is looked at, as the underlying principals are the same... Music to dance to is almost certainly going to have simpler lyrics. That was just as true with the Rock And Roll in the 50s as it was with the Pop-Dance tracks of today.

You can pick popular tracks to dance to from any decade with simple lyrics:

50's: Tutti Frutti - Little Richard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F13JNjpNW6c

60's: Cold Sweat - James Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8f4s9fm-CE

70's: Rock and Roll - Led Zeppelin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bv_ALKkTjQ

80's: I Feel For You - Chaka Khan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX9E44mClKs

90's: Tubthumping - Chumbawamba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCkmIyC6v00

00's: As The Rush Comes - Motorcycle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGH8rnraxoE

10's: Get Lucky - Daft Punk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5EofwRzit0

Wow this presentation is great. Anyone know what visualization libraries are used here?

I would expect an n-grams approach to be a better measure.

I can't be the only one that finds it hilarious that there is a duplicate article about repetitive pop lyrics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com