Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I think it's more that... to be popular, you need to fit the tastes of many people, and the best way to do that is by being generic, rather than specialized or niche. So pop music is essentially about finding the common denominators in tastes, and sticking to only those features. Obviously that's going to lead to music which is simpler, more repetitive, and therefore broadly appealing. And it's the music industry which selects for this, as it's the most profitable formula (and the reason for the trend of things getting simpler over time). But as individuals, I'm not sure that's what people necessarily prefer.
Also people can seek their better targeted, more appealing music elsewhere so pop doesn't need to fill these shoes.
- person A likes musical features W,X,Y,Z
- person B likes musical features I,J,K,Z
- person C likes musical features A,B,K,Z
Z is a common feature they all like, so it's very popular. K is the next most common feature, but not quite as popular as Z. Making a song that only has features K+Z is bound to be more popular than one that is solely made of Q+D (which no one likes). Mind you, features could be anything from rhythm, time, timbre, melodies, as well as other emergent stuff.
But having song with features K+Z is not Person C's favorite music, and rather a song which has features A+B+K+Z would be Person C's preferred music, but the industry doesn't select for that since A+B aren't common features everyone likes. And a song consisting solely of K+Z is simpler than one which has A+B+K+Z.
However, making a song of solely of feature Z is too simple, and hence doesn't work. As if there's a minimum complexity requirement to meet in order to be a song. Hence K+Z works but a song solely of Z doesn't. And K+Z isn't necessarily anyone's ideal/preferred music, even though it's popular.
Also, making a song of A+Z would probably stand to be somewhat popular, but not as much as K+Z. And so, a lot of popular songs seem repetitive, because they all use common features, such as feature Z in this example.
I see this not just in music, but in tons of different artistic areas. I think interior design most notably for me - SNL recently did a great send up of this with their "AirBnB Designers" skit, https://youtu.be/H5E5DkBXyfw
Back on the music front, I see this with annoyingly repetitive Spotify recommendations that I find nearly infuriating. My music tastes may be "pop-basic and bland", and at first I liked how I could just start with one song and then Spotify would create a playlist of related songs that I would (usually) like. Except it was always like the same 30-60 related songs. After a while I started hating using Spotify recommendations, they were always so incredibly annoyingly repetitive. Perhaps I'm just dumb and missed something, but I wish there was a way to tell Spotify "Please, for the love of God, just scramble your algorithm a bit and give me new recommended songs in the same genre!"
No, I don't remember where that's from. But it seems to fit.
Also, TIL that's actually a proper name rather than only a generic term.
this thread's turning into a decent example of why i hate talking to people about music. no matter how polite or reasonable someone is otherwise, there's like a 90% chance they have all these weird value judgements tied up in what people are listening to. it's incredibly tedious.
Tedious is the perfect word for it.
Wow, that's a lot of "top 40 hits". More than 134 new "hits" per week for the last 50 years! Are these really all "popular" songs? Because that number seems like the analysis must cut well into the long tail too.
I'm not totally sure why what plays on the radio plays on the radio, but I feel like there's a mix of what's actually popular and what was selected to become popular by industry insiders.
My only complaint is how short songs are now. Everything is tiktok optimized.
Latin pop is much bigger and often is present. Kpop makes regular appearances. And now joining their Carribean music cousins are Afrobeats tunes.
This mirrors a broader trend. There really isn’t a majority anymore or a popular culture. There are only a million fluid ever changing niches and subcultures, seemingly so rapidly changing and evolving that they can’t even be named.
When was this ever the case? I'm not trying to be a dick, honestly. When was that statement true?
This is also true of pretty much all genres too I'm not trying to put anyone down here. The level of quality across all music is just exceptionally high these days.
But also https://youtu.be/eSuK_5zW2iM?si=2g9xUznIm1nCxhqV&t=653
It was also the case years ago, but somehow even moreso today.
I fully agree that quality outside of the mainstream / performance artists is better than ever though!
From a band that focuses on the poetry and word play and who now draw in collaborators from about the globe and routinely pack venues.
The music is minimal but from song to song constantly inventivelt simplistic.
Official Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcbSOjIzjQ
Live @Nottz Arena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cGo4isi1Tw
Lyrics: https://www.google.com/search?q=mork+and+mindy+song+sleaford...
We can start with the Police, all three of whom he's done: tell us who nowadays is as good as Andy Summers or Stewart Copeland? Or Sting, of course.
Or watch The Wrecking Crew. Or Hired Gun.
This is true even of relatively conservative genres like what we now call classical. It has often taken advantage of at-the-time state of the art developments in metalworking and acoustics to create new sounds.
The tools being digital does change the dynamics of this process, but that sort of change is still a familiar part of the musical tradition.
Democritus: Dude, like sweet is just whatever people say is sweet, and the same goes for bitter, and we get taught which is hot and which is cold and which colours are which, but have you ever thought about ... like ... it could be that that's all in our heads, man ... y'know in reality, there's like nothing but atoms; atoms and void between them.
Leucippus: Woah
I think my kids would prefer your approach to teaching history than the stuff they currently get.
That and the musical Six :-)
The downside, of course, is monetization. Even if you get a million streams, which is extremely difficult, you'll only make $4-7k.
So I would argue the contrary: this is the golden age of personally owned digital music collections. If you do want such a thing, it's very easy to amass a collection well into into hundreds of gigabytes through legally available and conveniently accessible ways. It's just that the majority seems to prefer subscription model for most of their music (although many still purchase their favorites).
I wish things were as good for videos as they are for music. There, the trend seems to be the opposite, with platforms increasingly locking down high-quality downloads and pivoting towards pure streaming. You can still buy DVD or BluRay, but prices on those are increasingly insane (like $100+ for 4K).
More complex music is still around. We didn't have polyrhythms in the 80s and genres of math rock, prog, and funk are thriving. They're just not top 40.
Maybe if they push it far enough and hard enough in that direction we'll get some cultural pushback / revival?
In fact reports no relationship:
"As for RQ2 (Which role does the popularity of songs and lyrics play in this scenario?), we conclude that while song listening counts do not show any effects"
They don't even use data for popularity over time. They have this information,[2] they just don't use it.[3]
It's mind boggling. Your paper advertises that popular music is becoming more repetitive. You have data about which music is most popular over time, but you throw it out and just look at current listen counts. You find current listen counts has no relationship to lyrical repetitiveness. Then you publish your paper. It makes me speechless.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x#Tab4
1. Angst will probably always be the teenage condition but I don't think the distance between what's being recorded and what teens and young adults are feeling is as great as it was in the 90s.
2. Music listening is so much more fragmented now that even if some artist hooks into some underserved emotional need, it might just grab its group of followers and then sorta descend into its own little subculture, safely away from the mainstream. The third and fourth lines on any contemporary festival act list has a lot of acts that fall into this category.
3. Kurt Cobain was this unusual combination of wanting to be anti-authority, anti-establishment, alternative on one hand, but then very ambitious and seeking fame and record deals on the other. It's paradoxical but he was that and that combination of attributes is really good for changing the mainstream music scene but I don't think most people can live in that contradiction for that long and therefore people like that are rare.
In my view, we're in a sort of repeat of 00s R&B. Lot of substanceless tunes with honestly seriously vulgar lyrics but immensely catchy and fun. The main difference is this version is less danceable (but also more subject to dance routines on TikTok!). And I don't mean it in a pejorative way, not every good song need to be meaningful.
What I think is a major difference now vs then is we don't get any major non-English language hits. Globalization?
But really the OP article is about lyrics and I think it’s safe to say that the songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole were more complex than top 40 pop today mostly is.
This isn’t artist’s fault, or ‘this generations’s’ fault. This is an industry being pushed by a few algorithms that control the diffusion of new music to people which are optimising for this kind of thing.
This is an interesting period to sample. The late 60s and early 70s were a high watermark for pop and rock music. Pop music evolved considerably from the 40s (Crooners and jazz-dominant hits), through the 50s and early 60s ("the American Songbook"), to the emergence of psychedelic rock and the cerebral singer-songwriter in the 60s. The increased prominence of genres light rock in the 70s and hair metal in the 80s would drag complexity down.
I think if they took the period 1920-2020, the trend would not be prominent.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355
Also, the linked Science article is just a summary. The full paper (not paywalled) is at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x
As a very vocal oriented person (though as I like extreme metal, I often can't understand them), that was fascinating to me, as music and vocals are so very connected to me.
Historically often librettists where responsible for texts. For example in opera there the librettist was as important as the composer and his texts might have been used in multiple operas.
Among the most famous examples would be the European hymn Freude schöner Götterfunken. The text is by Schiller and the music by Beethoven.
That said, repurposing music with new lyrics is very common. For example, the Star Spangled Banner is "new lyrics" for a older English drinking song.
Anyway, a lot of this because of the rise of dance music which is often more about rhythm and timbre, and vocals if they exist at all are often background and used more as texture than as the driving force behind the song.
Really illustrates the point.
https://happyhollyproject.com/2014/04/27/flowcharts-and-song...
It is insultingly dumb.
A happy enjoyer of Be'lakor here (EDIT: and old Infected Mushroom:)
Sometimes repetition/simplicity is not so bad, and apparently I'm not the only one who is fine with it.
Of course I'm being snarky.
I've learned to love constraints in part perhaps because of a part of my brain wants something familiar. A familiar voice seems to be why I seem to enjoy an otherwise second-tier song if it is by an artist I like. Familiarity seems to be why I pretty exclusively listen to songs with Western tonality.
But creativity too seems to come from constraints. And we appreciate the artists/poets that do something original within those boundaries. To be sure of course, anyone can string together 5-7-5 syllables (and perhaps too 3 chords of refrain/chorus/refrain/chorus/bridge/chorus) but we know the good stuff when we hear it.
The music industry is so much more competitive today, in the past very few could afford to make music, now anybody can do it.
There is so much supply now that bad songs die much more quickly and only the fittest survive.
> a very simplistic formula.
Go ahead, make one, get 100 million views, make a cool few $ with little work.
just market-based natural evolution at work
The international audience usualy does not understand the lyrics because it does not speak English.
So it does not care at all.
That leads to funny cases where childish sounding pop music wiht juicy texts gets played everywhere.
I recently read an article about a pop song about small dicks which was popular in europe for some time.
The artist got invided to a live performance in a Spanish Kindergarten.
A-well-a everybody's heard about the bird!
Bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, bird is the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a don't you know, about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird
A-well-a
A-well-a everybody's heard, about the bird!
Bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a don't you know, about the bird?
Well! Everybody's talking about the bird!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird
A-well-a bird!
Surfin' bird
Pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa
Oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Well-a don't you know, about the bird?
Well! Everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird
A-well-a oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Ba pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.
Regardless, it's hard to deny that PhD's today have been dumbed to a three minute music video level ( /s ):
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop...
https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/
https://www.mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove...
Honestly thank god for J pop and K pop at least I can't understand a word of it.
Well that's not the case. They use a lot of English. It's Easter. Have some chocolate:
The peaks of genre/subculture popularity are not, necessarily, mainstream.
"Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby, Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe"
Words are hard to find
They're only cheques I've left unsigned
From the banks of chaos in my mind
And when their eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Is all I want to say to you
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Their innocence will pull me through
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Is all I want to say to you
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
They're meaningless and all that's true
The fact that it became a chart hit only proved his point - kinda like the cow clicker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
And just in case that didn't hammer it home, the remastered video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm97VG_QIXI
Notice how bored everyone looks. The sheer lack of energy. The guy pausing to light a cigarette and mount it on his guitar. The repetitive wave of the "audience" that holds awful, amateurish drawings of their faces (i.e. any moron with a synth could produce this crap).
It's a bit like looking at Picasso's bull in a grotesquely comical way...
- Guided by Angels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z--D1flPLnk
Listening to this has two benefits:
1. People around you will notice you listening to fancy high-brow music and they'll conclude you must be a very smart person.
2. It's actually really good (whether or not point 1 holds in your case).At this juncture, since the entertainment industry can't take risks anymore for new ideas, it's high tine that AI simply displace it entirely.