You're not getting older, song lyrics are indeed getting worse

Remember good music? Bands and artists that defined generations like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Eagles, The Grateful Dead. Nowadays, you can’t find any sound that can compare to them. What happened?

Some might say different eras simply have different tastes in music, but according to the British newspaper The Guardian, a scientific study shows that song lyrics have become simpler, angrier, more repetitive, and more self-centered.

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The study was published by the scientific journal Scientific Reports and involved a team made up of experts from Johannes Kepler University, the Linz Institute of Technology, and the University of Innsbruck in Germany. Plus, the Nuremberg University of Music, in Germany.

Image: Anna Rosar / Unsplash

“In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity”, the study states.

The research highlights the importance of music lyrics as an art form, singling out Bob Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016.

“Just as literature can be considered a portrayal of society, lyrics also provide a reflection of a society’s shifting norms, emotions, and values over time”, write the researchers in the study.

According to The Guardian, the team of researchers went through more than 12,000 English-language songs in such diverse genres such as rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock spanning four decades, from 1980 to 2020.

Newsweek writes that the research team found that, as years went on, the songs became simpler, and the number of different words also decreased.

One theory that Newsweek highlights is that this is related to how music consumption has changed over time, taking songs and lyrics for granted as their availability grew thanks, first, to CDs and then to online algorithm-based streaming services.

In other words, we take music for granted, with many people not actually paying attention to the lyrics and having songs as mere background noise.

Forbes also points out that newer generations allegedly have shorter attention spans, discovering new music through social media platforms such as TikTok.

Lyrics becoming simpler was not the only thing that was different. Researchers also argued that the songs became more self-focused in contrast to previous decades.

The content of the songs also changed throughout the decades. Negative words and feelings also increased as time went on.

Asked by The Guardian, senior study author Eva Zangerle, from the University of Innsbruck, refused to single out one of the newer performers or bands that reflected this overall trend.

Zangerle, however, told The Guardian that she believes that lyrics can be a “mirror of society”, reflecting how a culture’s values, emotions, and concerns can change and evolve through time.

This begs the question: What type of music will people will be listening to in 20 or 30 years?

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