Is Pop Music Getting Less Intelligent?
mattritter.me
mattritter.me
It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. I think it's good that anyone can try their hand at making music, but at the same time, the saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall.
Or, maybe I'm just getting old?
So with 1000 songs to choose from for the hot 100, you'd expect OK songs, but with 100,000 to choose from, you'd expect in a meritocracy much better songs.
Of course, the hot 100 is hit and miss. An example of a song which was made using affordable DAW software is, I believe, Crank That by Soulja Boy which is a song I personally dislike, take that as you will.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0sYj4wxyk0
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjVGJ3YFDc8
Been plenty of great acts who couldn't play instruments well for decades, so either yes, you are getting very old or you're remembering a lot of artists being a lot better than they actually were.
Now get off my lawn!
People looking to invest the minimal amount of time required studying in order to perform is not a new phenomenon. The pop charts of previous decades were filled with pretty terrible guitar playing for example.
Sure there were some great exceptions along with a bunch of dedicated session musicians to add that professional slickness, but that's no different from today's for-hire producers.
Personally, I think it's fantastic. While mainstream pop has become overwhelmingly homogeneous over the last decade, underground and alternative hip hop have arguably become the two most innovative genres of music of the last 40 years.
That said, it works both ways, and as you pointed out the static to noise ratio is still pretty bad. I think the biggest issue is still the fact that the loudest voices get the most attention, and those voices still belong to the big three record labels.
When we are talking about Pop charts hits, we are talking about songs quite often made by a small set of producers. The job title of these guys is strikingly adequate. They are manufacturing a product according to the specific requirements of the record labels+radio stations ecosystem. That's why the result is so often generic - it's a result of using some formulas which are proven to work for decades.
*On the other hand the "modern" tools created so many new amazing genres and styles that the net result might be not detrimental at all :)
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RczjGgSu4VU/VIs3dccjucI/AAAAAAAAL...
from http://prooffreaderplus.blogspot.ca/2014/12/most-popular-son...
Pop music is stupid because it's catchy. It's always been that way, always will be.
"My results confirmed what Briggs had described: unique words and total words have risen over time, but the ratio has gone down significantly. This would suggest that pop lyrics have in fact gotten less eloquent."
I'd have to disagree... this just implies that modern pop songs are more lyrically repetitive, which is not immediately a sign of "less intelligence". It may be less enjoyable to some of us or you might call it "more insipid", but given the definition of intelligence (italicized because that's an important phrase in this paragraph) chosen at the beginning, it's still pulling from a larger vocabulary, and that still implies higher intelligence by the definition.
"Smarter people putting out more repetitive/insipid music" doesn't seem too shocking a result to me... the intelligence of a songwriter puts an upper bound on the intelligence of the song they can produce, but no lower bound.
There are still some confounding factors that could be at play though: Increased ethnic/cultural diversity could simply be introducing significantly more slang vocabularies into the songs. Rather than implying that any one performer is using a larger vocabulary, that would simply imply a certain dialectal diaspora, which wouldn't prove anything about the individual musicians.
So, now the part where I question the definition of intelligence being used. "Vocabulary size" isn't a bad choice of proxy for at least a fun analysis, but perhaps instead of graphing the years as a whole, each song should be analyzed for things like word count, then we can look at the population statistics instead of the summed words. If the individual songs are as a whole using more vocabulary, I would consider that stronger evidence than if the songs all turn out merely to have dialect differences. In fact it's completely mathematically possible for the set of all Top 50 songs in later years to use more different words as a whole even as each individual song is simpler than the individual songs of the past.
And, if this really was a real effect, if word gets back to the pop song creators, the very act of observing the vocabulary has gotten more difficult could well cause the pop songs to get simpler over the next few years....
Has pop music been getting stupider? Was it ever intelligent? Probably not. I think the issue is pop music is more common now than ever as only handfuls of artists can afford a solid marketing budget.
[1] http://www.ideosity.com/ourblog/post/ideosphere-blog/2010/01...
And that would be the wrong answer because... ?
Whatever this means, it sounds like "The grass was always greener in the pastures of my memory" or some such, which is true but not relevant to, you know, actual history.
That, and it seems axiomatic among the PC crowd that Kids These Days are getting dumber and dumber, which has held true so long that it's amazing that our great-grandparents qualified as sentient beings, as opposed to, say, slime mold.
As to the rest, I think my example was enough to say I don't think generation has much to do with deepness or intelligence.
We're all looking for that other 10%.
Thank you for providing an interesting, objective analysis without injecting unfounded opinions.
Similarly, there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uo9tMoew6o (Yummy Yummy Yummy by Ohio Express) which has fairly silly lyrics, but it's undeniably a good (ie, catchy) pop song.
As far as intelligence, at least this song is trying to comment on what was current at the time with a nod towards a political message.
Who cares what games we choose Little to win, but nothing to lose
It's easy to see it as nonsense pandering now but I think people really bought into these types of songs when it came out.
Now do kids today listen to pop music with a message? I'm not qualified to say because I tend to listen to music that came out around the time of the song you cited so I'm biased. But I'm sure my parents thought music was stupider when I grew up then when they did, that's just a natural progression.
I think the author's methodology is a bit too rigid to define music as stupid or not. Without examining underlying nuance, I don't see how you can fairly judge the differences.
You're the one who is using a word with more baggage than the straightforward, "by definition" meaning (probably to do with some statistical distribution). Average is not always bad, unless you think that being non-average is inherently good. And having average music taste is about as harmless/inconsequential as average-ness goes - you like the music you like. That's it. Anything beyond that is more about social signalling and stratification than it is about the enjoyment of the music itself.
The nature of these words show a clear bias that being non-average IS inherently good, at least when you are talking about quality. Music is clearly a qualitative arena, and therefore, average means, "not exceptional," "not special," "not distinguished" and "not excellent"
Ergo, my point is, the parent to this discussion is correct, "average" music can never be exceptional as the difference between average and exceptional is what defines those very words.
I am simply trying to use the word mediocre to make more obvious what average means when it comes to quality.
To be fair, there is a non-average that is below normal as well, with related words: Poor, sub-standard, deficient, defective, inferior, etc. So, being worse than average is even worse than being average. Again, in terms of quality.
Of course, average in another arena, such as average height, for example, is neither bad nor good. But height is not a measure of quality.
Contrast average with "Odd. Weird. Freak. etc."
> Music is clearly a qualitative arena,
Strongly disagree.
Or are you saying that a music's popularity, in terms of how many people listen to it, is how you determine it's value?
That is definitely an interesting way of looking at it. I can't say it's not a valid way of measuring it.
Hmm... it looks like we agree much more on this point than I thought.
Something being average denotes that it is commonplace. Not everything that is commonplace is subpar to something that is not average. Sometimes those things are just weird, odd, subpar or undesirable. And sometimes, they are indeed exceptional. And no, something being "odd" or "weird" isn't always or solely average people just "not getting it". Sometimes it's just subpar, weird and odd. I know, I know, it's a profound-sounding quote by Einstein so that means it must be relevant in every situation..
In the case of music, people with peculiar tastes will sometimes think of the mainstream music as being lame and uncultured. In reality, those mainstream listeners might get the exact same enjoyment out of listening to their mainstream music, as those with more peculiar tastes get out of listening to their music. But at least those with special taste get some kicks out of feeling superior, so they've got that going for them. You can call that the smug-hipster-bonus.
Tip: if you wait a minute or so you can reply to the actual comment. There is a short delay between a comment being posted and being able to reply to it, for some reason.
Whether or not this applies to mainstream music seems to be where we differ.
I believe the Einstein quote is still relevant to this discussion, even if it is possible to misuse the quote. Similar to wine, art and other things of quality, when you first start to learn something the basic, simpler things seem better. Most people start by drinking fruity wines, enjoy simplistic art and like pop music. Also, while you are still enjoying simple things it's hard to understand why someone would want something more refined.
However, once you have experienced the basic level you will eventually want to move beyond it and enjoy things of higher quality. Higher quality wine, music or art requires that you move beyond average.
I believe a more refined musical palette will always move you beyond pop music. Again, similar to fruity, sweet simplistic wine, that doesn't mean you didn't enjoy the basic experience, it's just that you now want something better.
Whether or not the things one would eventually move onto are truly better seems subjective to me, hence why I think "better music" is a qualitative thing.