Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades | Hacker News Reader

Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades

nature.com

35 pointsjonifico11 comments

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This has been posted several times lately; discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39862404

Maybe need to check if HN headlines have become simpler and more repetitive over last decade

Well... :P https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39879758

Bo Burnham, on the subject, 10 years ago.

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

A cousin, a very good guitarist, once said, People complain about punk rock, but the Beatles weren't exactly Stravinsky. He was talking about the tunes ("This is the third three-chord song in a row."). But he could have said, Lennon and McCarthy weren't exactly Da Ponte.

The Beatles did experiment a lot though. A lot of their songs have very obscure chords and modifications for their time when it wasn’t easy to find information.

The songs that algorithms push on social media and that Major record labels are promoting are more simple... There are plenty of independent works out there that have great complexity and depth to them, but now that the Internet is firewalled, most people don't see the deeper and more talented works out there.

Independent artists are working furiously just to be heard, but now that payola is the ruling model for music, it's become really hard to find better music.

Until the dominance of large companies controlling visibility of what the public sees changes, we'll be stuck in the dark ages for good music. It's a shame.

It's because the singer and songwriter are no longer distinct. Pop used to mean a beautiful new rendition of an Irving Berlin or Cole Porter song. Or a hitherto underappreciated song like "Mack the Knife." Now everyone's writing their own songs and it's a disaster. Few realize this.

Solo singer-songwriters have been virtually nonexistent in pop charts for the past 15 years

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/hardly-any...

The artists themselves are usually coauthors with other people they collaborate with. I'm not aware of a modern day figure with an analogous role to one someone like Irving Berlin had at the time. The songs that chart today are lyrically new and are not new covers of songs from 10-20 years ago. There is no more Great American Songbook in the sense of songs that are written once and covered many times.

Rick Beato also made a video about this, using some examples.

https://youtu.be/mQoWUtsVFV0?si=Ndr7sjqSQjkdcD2o

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