Songs ‘angrier, gloomier and simpler’ than 50 years ago
“Everything is beautiful in its own way,” Ray Stevens sang in 1970. The Carpenters asked “Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?”, and Sammy Davis Jr promised that he could make “the world taste good” in another No 1 single the following year.
Fifty years later, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande sang “It’s coming down on me, water like misery”, The Weeknd imagined “drowning in the night”, and Post Malone said “this was doomed from the get-go”.
The lyrics of the most popular songs have become gloomier and angrier over the past five decades, a study has found, and there has been an increase in “negative sentiments” and a decrease in “positive emotions”.
Researchers from the University of Innsbruck in Austria analysed 12,000 English-language songs across a range of genres, including pop, rock, rap, country and R&B.
They examined the structure and lyrics of songs, including the number of verses, how often the chorus was repeated, how many different words were used, the types of rhymes, how many syllables the words contained, how many adjectives and adverbs were used, and how often “uncommon” words appeared.
They also studied “emotional descriptors” in the lyrics, including indicators of anger, happiness, brightness, sadness and disgust.
The first finding of the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, was that the lyrics of the most popular songs had become simpler and more repetitive.
“We find that pop music lyrics have become easier to comprehend over time,” the researchers said. “Not only does the lexical complexity of lyrics decrease, but we also observe that the structural complexity has decreased.”
They also found that “the emotion described” was more negative, and that lyrics “have become more personal”.
They reported “a decrease in positive emotions for pop”, tallying with previous studies that found “a downward trend in happiness and brightness, and a slight upward trend in sadness”.
The authors said: “As shown for R&B, also for pop and country, a tendency towards more negative lyrics is displayed over time.”
They cited a 2018 study that analysed the lyrics of 6150 Billboard Top 100 songs from 1951 to 2016, which found that “positive sentiments, such as joy or confidence, have decreased, while negative sentiments, such as anger, disgust or sadness, have increased”.
The researchers added: “We observe a trend towards angrier lyrics across all genres.”
They speculated that lyrics had become simpler because nowadays, “music is mostly listened to in the background”.
“We are surrounded by music - it is pervasive in society and serves many functions. People listen to music to relieve boredom, fill uncomfortable silences, foster social cohesion and communication, or regulate emotion.
“When it comes to listeners liking or disliking a track, the most salient components of music, alongside the ability of a song to evoke emotion and the singing voice, are a song’s lyrics. We found they have become simpler regarding multiple aspects [such as] vocabulary, readability, complexity, and the number of repeated lines.
“Our results also confirm ... that lyrics have become more negative on the one hand, and more personal on the other.”
– The Times