From ’80s new wave to ’90s grunge to the latest pop singles, music has changed a lot over the decades. However, these changes are not just in terms of sound. The lyrics have also evolved over time.
So what has changed about the lyrics that you can’t get out of your head? Eva Zangerl, a researcher at the University of Innsbruck, and her team analyzed 12,000 English-language pop, rock, rap, R&B, and country songs released between 1970 and 2020 and found that I found that the lyrics became simpler and more repetitive. This trend is especially noticeable in rap and rock, but also applies to other genres. Another thing Zangerle’s team has discovered is that lyrics tend to be more personal and emotional now than they were more than 50 years ago.
Know the words…
“Just as literature can be thought of as a depiction of society, lyrics can also reflect societal norms, emotions, and values that change over time,” the researchers wrote in their paper. . study Recently published in Scientific Reports.
So Zanger created a dataset to explore the different ways lyrics have changed. She and her colleagues used Genius, a virtual music encyclopedia that also provides information on release year and genre. From the lyrics dataset she created, the team extracted data related to song structure, language, emotion, and complexity. Her five genres – pop, rock, rap, R&B, and country – were chosen because they are the genres with the most popular lyrics on the streaming platform. last.fm.
Two types of analyzes were conducted regarding music. The first looked at the most common lyrical trends in each release year. The second part looked more closely at how the lyrics are viewed online, their characteristics (e.g. emotion), and year of release. Researchers obtained view counts from: last.fm Number of plays for lyrics from Genius.
How often you look at the lyrics is surprisingly important. Unlike song play counts, this statistic shows how important lyrics are, regardless of the popularity (or lack thereof) of a song or genre.
…and its meaning
What can lyrics tell us about different genres and eras? The results of our initial analysis indicate that certain features are most important across genres, such as repeated lines, choruses, and emotional language. I did. The genres where emotion was most important were country and R&B.
Repeated lines have increased over the decades in all genres analyzed, with later lyrics containing more choruses than earlier lyrics. These increases are further evidence that songs have become simpler and more repetitive since the 70s.
Lyrics were also more personal and angrier across all genres studied. Personal lyrics, identified by the number of personal pronouns, increased particularly in rap and pop, but saw a modest increase in rock and R&B, and remained roughly flat in country. Anger and other negative emotions (expressed in words associated with these emotions) also increased across genres. Here, rap specifically had the highest increase in anger, while country had the lowest increase. Positive emotions decreased for pop and rock music, but increased slightly for rap music.
After looking at the results of the second analysis, Zangerle found that older rock songs had more lyrics plays than newer songs, and the opposite was true for country songs, with older songs having fewer plays and newer songs having more plays. I noticed that there are many. This means that the popularity of country lyrics compared to rock has increased over time. The number of hearings had nothing to do with this. In other words, interest in the sound of the song was unrelated to interest in the lyrics.
Over the decades, music seems to have become simpler, more repetitive, more emotional, especially angry, and more personal. Although the study did not examine what events or social changes influenced this trend, the researchers still had some sociological insight. They think that pop is all about record sales and what’s popular from one moment to the next, but the preference for old rock songs means that rock’s main audience is middle-class. It shows class and opposition to commercialism. Emotionally charged words can also convey feelings about social change.
“The role of lyrics is understudied and we believe the results can be used to further study and monitor cultural outcomes and social change,” the study states.
Scientific Reports, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x
