scholarly journals Why are song lyrics becoming simpler? a time series analysis of lyrical complexity in six decades of American popular music

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. e0244576
Author(s):  
Michael E. W. Varnum ◽  
Jaimie Arona Krems ◽  
Colin Morris ◽  
Alexandra Wormley ◽  
Igor Grossmann
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Pathogen Prevalence ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Information Landscape ◽  
Do So

Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture’s shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplicity is accompanied by a widening array of novel song choices. We do so by using six decades (1958–2016) of popular music in the United States (N = 14,661 songs), controlling for multiple well-studied ecological and cultural factors plausibly linked to shifts in lyrical simplicity (e.g., resource availability, pathogen prevalence, rising individualism). In years when more novel song choices were produced, the average lyrical simplicity of the songs entering U.S. billboard charts was greater. This cross-temporal relationship was robust when controlling for a range of cultural and ecological factors and employing multiverse analyses to control for potentially confounding influence of temporal autocorrelation. Finally, simpler songs entering the charts were more successful, reaching higher chart positions, especially in years when more novel songs were produced. The present results suggest that cultural transmission depends on the amount of novel choices in the information landscape.

scholarly journals People Prefer Simpler Content When There Are More Choices: A Time Series Analysis of Lyrical Complexity in Six Decades of American Popular Music

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. W. Varnum ◽  
Jaimie Krems ◽  
Colin Morris ◽  
Igor Grossmann
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Time Series Analysis ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Real World ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Information Landscape ◽  
First Time

Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of shifting norms, affect, and values at the cultural level. One remarkable, recently-uncovered trend is that successful pop songs have increasingly simple lyrics. Why? We test the idea that increasing lyrical simplicity is linked to a widening array of novel song choices. To test this Cultural Compression Hypothesis (CCH), we examined six decades of popular music (N = 14,661 songs). The number of novel song choices predicted greater lyrical simplicity of successful songs. This relationship was robust, holding when controlling for critical ecological and demographic factors and also when using a variety of approaches to account for the potentially confounding influence of temporal autocorrelation. The present data provide the first time series evidence that real-world cultural transmission may depend on the amount of novel choices in the information landscape.

Why 1955? Explaining the advent of rock music

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Road ◽  
Elvis Presley ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Frank Sinatra

At the time, 1929, 1939, 1945 and 1968 all seemed important turning points in the track of our civilisation. By contrast, as anyone alive at the time will attest, 1955 seemed like an unexceptional year in the United States at least. Right in the middle of the ‘middle-of-the-road’ years of the Eisenhower presidency, 1955 hardly seemed like the year for a major aesthetic revolution. Yet it was in the brief span between 1954 and 1956 that the rock aesthetic displaced the jazz-based aesthetic in American popular music. Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey, Patty Page, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Kay Starr, Les Paul, Eddie Fisher, Jo Stafford, Frankie Lane, Johnnie Ray and Doris Day gave way on the popular music charts to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, The Platters, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Carl Perkins and the growing legion of rockers.

Carols and Music Since 1900

2020 ◽  
pp. 328-345
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cold Weather ◽  
Santa Claus ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Holiday Celebrations

This chapter defines and describes a core repertory of seventy-five Christmas songs that have been frequently recorded for popular consumption in the United States since 1900. Song titles in the repertory enjoy an enduring presence on the Billboard charts and on twenty-first-century streaming platforms. While traditional Christian carols from before 1900 survive in this repertory, secular popular songs introduced between 1942 and 1965 dominate. Christmas narratives, whether religious (birth of Jesus) or secular (arrival of Santa Claus; holiday celebrations set in cold weather), provide consistent points of reference for carol and song lyrics respectively. In some cases, Christmas songs have added new characters (Frosty the Snowman; the Little Drummer Boy) to a season centred on stories. Popular Christmas songs also explore the varied temporal nature of this holiday as event, season, and annual recurrence.

Easy listening? An analysis of infidelity in top pop, hip-hop, and country song lyrics over 25 years

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 795-807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra Alexopoulos ◽  
Laramie D. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sexual Content ◽  
Emotional Tone ◽  
Song Lyrics

Although it has been established that sexual content is common in popular music, the extent to which this content references cheating behaviors is unclear. Given the prevalence of infidelity among Americans, it is important to examine how infidelity is portrayed in media targeted to young adult listeners. To explore these portrayals, we conducted a content analysis of the 1,500 most popular pop, hip-hop, and country songs in the United States over a 25-year period examining the frequency and nature of infidelity in music. Findings revealed that infidelity was discussed in approximately 15% of popular music, and was most frequently discussed in hip-hop songs. Both negative and positive consequences to infidelity were depicted, and were most often accompanied by a nonchalant emotional tone. Gender portrayals of song characters were consistent with previous research. Implications for young listeners in the context of social relationships are discussed.

scholarly journals Comparing Brazilian and North American songs about money

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-273
Author(s):  
Ruben George Oliven
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Intense Process

This article compares Brazilian and North American popular music. If focuses on the lyrics of songs composed mainly in the first half of the twentieth century when an intense process of national building was taking place in Brazil and the United States. Several of those compositions became classics. Those songs were and still are very popular because they echoed and continue to echo the social imaginary of both countries. It is for this reason that popular music is so crucial for the understanding of both societies.

scholarly journals Nisei Politics of Identity and American Popular Music in the 1930s and 1940s

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-119
Author(s):  
Susan Miyo Asai
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Immigration Legislation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Popular Music

Growing nationalist thinking and anti-immigration legislation in American politics today calls for a critical historicizing of the continuing ambiguities of U.S. citizenry and notions of what it is to be an American. The identity crisis of Nisei-second generation Japanese Americansresulted from the complex intersection of America's racialized ideology toward immigrants, California's virulent anti-Asian agitation, and the economic and political power struggles between the United States and Japan in gaining dominance of the Pacific region.

Él Es Chicano?

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Richard Cruz Davila
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
First Person ◽  
Second Person ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Do So

This article considers questions of authenticity in two versions of Doug Sahm's “Chicano”: Sahm's original, recorded with the Sir Douglas Band in 1973, and Rumel Fuentes's 1976 cover version. Some critics and listeners considered Sahm's original, written from a first-person Chicano perspective, a gaffe, since Sahm was in fact not Chicano; however, employing Allan Moore's notion of authenticity as authentication, I argue that Fuentes's cover version is at once an endorsement of Sahm's original and an authentication of it. To do so, I begin by elaborating Moore's three-part typology of authenticity, and how this typology recasts authenticity as authentication. I then place Sahm's appropriation of a Chicano identity within a longer history of racial crossing in American popular music before providing historical context for each artist, and for each version of the song. Finally, by discussing the two versions in terms of Moore's typology, I argue that the cover authenticates the original through what Moore calls second-person authenticity, which he describes as a validation of the listener's experience.

Banding Together

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer C. Lena
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Texas ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Creative People ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Death Metal ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Government

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? This book explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles—ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States—the book uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music. The book discovers four dominant forms—avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditionalist—and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the government-purposed genre, which the book examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, the book looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.

scholarly journals Trends in Themes of Popular Music from 1998-2018: A Media Content Analysis (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois Kwon ◽  
Daniela Medina ◽  
Fady Ghattas ◽  
Lilia Reyes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Media Content Analysis ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Individual

BACKGROUND The United States have seen an increase in depressive-anxious symptoms and suicidality in the past couple years within the adolescent population. The effects of pop culture, including music, is a factor that is worth exploring to better understand the context in which adolescents view themselves and society. OBJECTIVE This study analyzes the lyrics and music videos of the most popular music of multiple genres to better understand music theme trends. METHODS The frequencies of themes of 1052 total American and Latin songs were collected from the Nielsen Music and Billboard’s top 100 chart performance from 1998-2018 for Hip-Hop/R&B, Pop, Latin, Country, and Rock/Metal genres. Themes from songs were identified, quantified, and categorized using a rubric into negative, neutral, and positive by three different reviewers. Analysis was performed using two-tailed t-tests and a generalized linear model. RESULTS Popular songs were reviewed for positive, negative and neutral themes in three-year intervals for ease of analysis purposes: 1998-2000 (n=148), 2001-2003 (n=150), 2004-2006 (n=148), 2007-2009 (n=156), 2010-2012 (n= 150), 2013-2015 (n=150), and 2016-2018 (n=150). There was a significant increase between all the interval years in the percent of songs with negative themes by 180% across all genres (P=0.01), while there was no significance in the difference of frequency of songs with positive or neutral themes by year respectively (P=0.01). There were significant differences in the number of negative themes found across genres (P=0.01), with Hip-Hop/R&B having the highest frequency (62.5%) of negative themes when compared to each of the individual genres (P=0.01). CONCLUSIONS This study shows there is an increase in the frequency of negative themes over the span of 20 years across all genres, with Hip-Hop/R&B having the highest frequency compared to other genres. These findings point to the potential impact of music in popular culture on society and can help shape discussions between caregivers and their adolescents as well as the primary care provider and the adolescent patient.

scholarly journals Estimating the incidence of cocaine use and mortality with music lyrics about cocaine

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulin Hswen ◽  
Amanda Zhang ◽  
John S. Brownstein
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ordinary Least Squares ◽  
Cocaine Use ◽  
Distributed Lag ◽  
Distributed Lag Model ◽  
Lag Model ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Music Lyrics ◽  
Overdose Mortality

AbstractIn the United States, cocaine use and mortality have surged in the past 5 years. Considering cocaine’s reputation as a fashionable social drug, the rise of cocaine mentions in popular music may provide a signal of epidemiological trends of cocaine use. We characterized the relationship between mentions of cocaine in song lyrics and incidence of cocaine use and mortality in the US. Incidence of cocaine use from 2002 to 2017 was obtained from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and cocaine overdose mortality rate from 2000 to 2017 was obtained from the Centers for Disease Control. Distributed lag models were fit using ordinary least squares on the first difference to identify associations between changes in cocaine lyric mentions and changes in incidence of cocaine use and mortality. A total of 5955 song lyrics with cocaine mentions were obtained from Lyrics.com. Cocaine mentions in song lyrics were stable from 2000 to 2010 then increased by 190% from 2010 to 2017. The first-order distributed lag model estimated that a 0.01 increase in mentions of cocaine in song lyrics is associated with an 11% increase in incidence of cocaine use within the same year and a 14% increase in cocaine mortality with a 2-year lag. Lag-times were confirmed with cross-correlation analyses and the association remained after accounting for street pricing of cocaine. Mentions of cocaine in song lyrics are associated with the rise of incidence of cocaine use and cocaine overdose mortality. Popular music trends are a potentially valuable tool for understanding cocaine epidemiology trends.

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