Pop music has gotten sadder over the last 50 years
Debating the merits of today’s popular music versus the successes of the past is largely a matter of taste. But whatever your opinion on the subject, one thing is clear: pop music is objectively darker and more stressful than ever.
The compelling statistics are presented in a study by psychologists at the University of Vienna recently published in the journal Scientific reports. After compiling every weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1973 and 2023, the team used standard preprocessing methods to break down the lyrics of 20,186 songs. They then fed these lyrics into a custom algorithm to rate the songs based on their positive or negative sentiments.
As they predicted, the researchers identified a “substantial increase in negative and stress-related language” over the past five decades. Additionally, it seems that the lyrics of hit songs in the United States have gradually become simpler over the years. According to the study authors, these findings correlate with increasing reported rates of depression and anxiety, as well as previous research on increased negativity in news media and fiction books.
However, the team’s examination made some unexpected discoveries. First, they identified no clear association between increasingly dark and stressful songs and changes in median household income. Second, major traumatic societal events, including September 11, 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic, have not resulted in even darker songs. On the contrary, these crises seem to have produced a rise in more positive and lyrically complex pop songs.
“Surprisingly, societal shocks like COVID-19 coincided with attenuations rather than amplifications of these trends, indicating a preference for emotionally incongruous music,” the team wrote, although they did not draw a direct link between the two topics.
“Although the study applies a quasi-experimental, interrupted time series approach to examine changes surrounding major societal events, the analyzes remain observational in nature,” they added. “Thus, any differences observed before and after events such as 9/11 or COVID-19 represent temporal associations and not definitive causal effects. »
Regardless of the topic or complexity, the researchers believe their findings highlight the importance of music in society, particularly its ability to help listeners understand and navigate an often difficult world.
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