Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? (2017)
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Catholicism allowed for polyphonic music, where the words (in latin) were layered to produce very beautiful music. An extreme example is Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium that has 8 choirs of 5 parts each:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT-ZAAi4UQQ
However Protestantism required the words to be in English and sung without polyphony - so that they could be understood by all. For example another work of Tallis's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4fHU0Nales
Byrd in particular wrote a lot of works in the Catholic idiom that he had to hide, for writing such music could have got him killed.
https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/music/william-b...
This is stated a bit too broadly. Some protestants preferred that, others didn't. Bach didn't have a problem with polyphony, for example.
Sicut Cervus (a setting of Psalm 42) is such an example.
How crazy is this thought, my lady: although you are craving for my death, if you do not help me by looking at me with that scornful countenance that gives me life, and which I miss so much: then, since who has no life cannot die and he who has life must die, then—if you give me life, you'll have my death, and I, through death, will gain my life.
From the Wikipedia article above
Martin has written or co-written 22 Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits, most of which he has also produced or co-produced, including Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" (2008), Maroon 5's "One More Night" (2012), Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" (2014), and The Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face" (2015). Martin is the songwriter with the third-most number-one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon (26).[4] In addition, he has had the second most Hot 100 number-one singles as a producer (20), behind George Martin, who had achieved 23 by the time of his death.[4]
Another article that covers Max and his competition. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/hit-cha...
But the opposite has happened on the other end of the spectrum. Emancipator or Bonobo (or Romare or Pilotpriest or or Nicola Cruz or Nu or Pantha du Prince or Sampha) are just leagues better than what we had even ten years ago. Sure the mass market is drinking down Fast and the Furious 9 or Transformers 11 or Spiderman ∞, but the quality of the films that are targeted at the intelligentsia is head and shoulders above what we used to have. Even television has stratified.
I think the internet has something to do with it. People follow people that are smarter than them because they learn from them or they interact with smarter people more because they tend to get upvoted more, but there is a window of potential interaction. None of my family members are on HN and very few of them follow me on Twitter (out of the 130+ of them). Then you move the smart people to the smart cities and the normal, day-to-day interaction that would have happened no longer does.
It also might be that you have only now discovered that there is something better than beyonces and x-men movies. That doesn't mean that there weren't anything good before, just that you haven't seen it.
Deaf people?
Arguing musical taste is rather pointless anyway.
Speaking of Kanye, I actually think his last album was his best and that if he hadn't launched it with the following he built up when his work wasn't as developed (pre-Twisted Fantasy) his work would have a quarter of the following or less than it does today. He's one of the rare artists that keeps innovating after hitting it.
The only place I see at least some measure of really quality work in the past compared to today is fiction: Tom Robbins, Greg Egan, PKD, and many, many others. There are some contemporaries I like better (Ted Chiang) but I don't pretend it's not a matter of personal taste. But TV or music or even most film that's pre-2005 is almost unconsumable it's so flat compared to what the 1%-ile is today.
Technology has made music production so much easier and higher quality than before. I don't know much about non-electronic music, but I reckon for under a grand you could set up a half decent recording studio in your garage, and it's so much easier with computers to mix and master tracks than it was in previous decades.
I can find amazing techno tracks on Soundcloud and Beatport that are produced by some guy in his bedroom in Berlin that only a few hundred people in the world have also found.
Just the other day I found a track on Soundcloud that was produced in Melbourne back in 1997 that only ever had a single release of a few hundred CDs. I managed to track down the producer on Facebook and get a high quality .wav download of it. There's no way that kind of obscure stuff would've found its way to me pre-internet.
All a matter of taste. There might have been a proliferation of genres, especially if you start enumerating all the (absolutely identical-sounding unless you are a trained maniac) varieties of Scandinavian Death Metal or electronic music, so it might be easier to come by something you like today, but it's not any better than what survived from 300 years ago, I would hazard a guess that very little, if any, of kanyes and deadmou5-es will survive even 10 years, let alone 300.
Many people wouldn't consider electronic music to be music or high brow. Many people are close minded.
Even within the electronic music scene, there's people that will dismiss genres as being not "real" music. A lot of people shit all over tech house for instance.
Not that anything needs to be high brow, but I do find GP's comment that there's more high quality music now than ever before to be rather closed-minded to begin with.
There may be more music (classifying, for a moment, anything that has that label as actually being music) made today, both due to the population increase and to it being easier and cheaper than ever to produce something and throw it to the masses, in case it sticks. But there's probably a lower proportion of quality music being made, for the same reason -- it's just to easy to make and disseminate stupid derivative junk.
Any examples?
1 - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFuV9vMFVluW9CAOdS4Oluw
$ echo "GlooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOoria" | wc --bytes
35
$ echo "GlooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOoria" | gzip | wc --bytes
34
Unexpected! echo "GlooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOooooOOoria" | gzip --no-name | tail --bytes=+11 | head --bytes=-8 | wc --bytes
16We'll look back on the days of "Versace" and "Gucci Gang" like they were poetry.
I remember my mother tutting at The Police in the 80s for repetitive lyrics such as 'Message in a bottle'
The visualization of the compression algorithm in particular seems very bespoke.
And a whole category on it: https://pudding.cool/#how
And a repo for a "scrollytelling" library by the author: https://github.com/russellgoldenberg/scrollama/
Source inspection is hard as it's all been bundled, but you can see some of the json data in there, and some custom functions to do the plot interactions. The plot code is almost certainly D3 (based on some of the non-obfuscated calls).
Spoiler: Lyrics do seem to get more repetitive.
With NCD you can measure, for example, how similar two lyrics are, or even group similar songs together.
5 of the top 10 repetitive songs are dance tracks, either electronic or R&B.
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
--1984, George Orwell
Did they ever test this...?
These pages are written by freelancers who are paid thousands of dollars per story. It's insane, especially if they don't browser test the product.
That is, in many cases, subjective and debatable.