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.

Perceived and Induced Emotion Responses to Popular Music

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 472-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yading Song ◽  
Simon Dixon ◽  
Marcus T. Pearce ◽  
Andrea R. Halpern
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Web Site ◽  
Dimensional Model ◽  
Music Training ◽  
Emotional Quality ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Categorical Model ◽  
Musical Excerpts ◽  
Emotion Model ◽  
The Difference

Music both conveys and evokes emotions, and although both phenomena are widely studied, the difference between them is often neglected. The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between perceived and induced emotion for Western popular music using both categorical and dimensional models of emotion, and to examine the influence of individual listener differences on their emotion judgment. A total of 80 musical excerpts were randomly selected from an established dataset of 2,904 popular songs tagged with one of the four words “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” or “relaxed” on the Last.FM web site. Participants listened to the excerpts and rated perceived and induced emotion on the categorical model and dimensional model, and the reliability of emotion tags was evaluated according to participants’ agreement with corresponding labels. In addition, the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) was used to assess participants’ musical expertise and engagement. As expected, regardless of the emotion model used, music evokes emotions similar to the emotional quality perceived in music. Moreover, emotion tags predict music emotion judgments. However, age, gender and three factors from Gold-MSI, importance, emotion, and music training were found not to predict listeners’ responses, nor the agreement with tags.

The Rise and Rise of K-Pop

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Howard
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
Central Component ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Success

K-pop, Korean popular music, is a central component in Korea’s cultural exports. It helps brand Korea, and through sponsorships and tie-ups, generates attention for Korea that goes well beyond the music and media industries. This essay traces the history of Korean popular music, from its emergence in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the influence of America on South Korea’s cultural development and the assimilation of genres such as rap, reggae, punk, and hip hop, to the international success of Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ and the idol group BTS. It explores the rise of entertainment companies, how they overcame the digital challenge, and how their use of restrictive contracts created today’s cultural economy. It introduces issues of gender and sexuality, and outlines how music videos and social media have been used to leverage fandom.

Talking Black in America

English Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Walt Wolfram ◽  
Kellynoel Waldorf
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language Diversity ◽  
Language Differences ◽  
African American Language ◽  
Global Status ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The 1960S

African American Language (AAL) is the most widely recognized – and controversial – ethnic variety of English in the world. In the United States national controversies about the speech of African Americans have erupted periodically for more than a half-century now, from the difference-deficit debates in the 1960s (Labov, 1972) to the Ebonics controversy in the 1990s (Rickford, 1999) and linguistic profiling in the 2000s (Baugh, 2003, 2018). Further, the adoption of performance genres from AAL into languages other than English, such as hip-hop and rap, has given the speech of African Americans even wider international recognition and global status (Omoniyi, 2006). The curiosities and controversies about African American speech symbolically reveal (1) the depth of people's beliefs and opinions about language differences; (2) the widespread level of public misinformation about language diversity; and (3) the need for informed knowledge about language variation in public life and in education.

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 “Vai viņa daļa dzīvo manī?” Smokija Mo dziesmas “Kas ir radītājs” interpretācija popkultūras un reliģijas studiju kontekstā

Ceļš ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Ņikita Andrejevs ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Definition Of Religion ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self

The Russian hip hop artist Smoki Mo has frequently referenced religious and spiritual topics in his lyrics. The composition “Who is the creator” discusses the positive and negative replies to this question. The lyrics are interpreted as a popular culture text with the aim to discover how popular culture texts can function as religious ones and how popular culture can function as religion. The article employs a functional definition of religion to explore how the studied text discusses existential questions and struggle with identity that religion also is concerned with. The popular culture itself is understood in the article as the meaning and value that people ascribe to mass culture products, such as popular music, in their everyday lives. The article also summarizes the possible issues with reading popular culture texts as religious ones to avoid misinterpretation due to researcher’s indebtedness to traditional religious definitions or to scholarly traditions of interpretation. The article also employs the notion of spirituality to connect the ideas expressed in Smoki Mo’s lyrics to a relevant ideological framework. The understanding of the “creator”, “God” and other theological notions in the lyrics is closely related to the broad features of modern spirituality that include the focus on the individual self and universal statements rather than particular religious traditions. In this way, the studied composition in itself is an expression of modern spirituality dealing with existential questions.

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.

“Nothing More to Be Done”: Palliative Care Versus Exerimental Therapy in Advanced Cancer

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana Löwy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Palliative Care ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Experimental Therapy ◽  
Incurable Cancer ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Experimental Therapies ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Individual

The ArgumentPatients suffering from advanced, incurable cancer often receive from their doctors proposals to enroll in a clinical trial of an experimental therapy. Experimental therapies are increasingly perceived not as a highly problematic approach but as a near-standard way to deal with incurable cancer. There are, however, important differences in the diffusion of these therapies in Western countries. The large diffusion of experimental therapies for malignant disease in the United States contrasts with the much more restricted diffusion of these therapies in the United Kingdom. The difference between the two reflects differences in the organization of health care in these countries and distinct patterns of the professionalization of medical oncology in America and in Britain. The high density and great autonomy of medical oncologists in the United States encourages there the diffusion of experimental therapies (regarded by some as expensive and inefficient); the lower density of these specialists in the United Kingdom and their task as consultants and not primary caregivers, favors the choice of more conservative (for some, too conservative) treatments. Theoretically, the decision as to whether patients suffering from advanced, incurable cancer will be steered toward an experimental therapy or toward palliative care depends on the values and beliefs of these patients and their physicians. In practice, however, such choice does not depend exclusively on the individual' cultural background and ethical values, but is also strongly affected by the — culturally conditioned — Professional and institutional structure of medicine

Hip-Hop and Trivialisation of Martin Luther King Jr. in Didier Awadi’s “Dans mon rêve”

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Ives S. Loukson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black People ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
Martin Luther King

As far as hip-hop is concerned, it is a truism that, Didier Awadi counts as one of its influential leading figures. The famous musician from Senegal takes advantage of hip-hop as medium and participates in disseminating its values in the world. Awadi’s creativity aims at conscientising Black people whose misery, according to him, is due to an internalised negativity about themselves. The artist pursues this objective in “Dans mon rêve” by staging MLK as a historic benchmark and source of inspiration to Africans. My paper attempts to highlight why the use of hip-hop as medium of pop culture does not effectively serve that creditable objective by Awadi. I also review the provocative trope of African pop-artist as a modern griot, raised a decade ago by the United States-based scholars. Theoretically, Stuart Hall’s conception of culture and Guy Debord’s theoretical complexity in his attempt to dismantle the monopoly of the spectacle inform the study.

scholarly journals ‘Art’s in pop culture in me’: Posthuman performance and authorship in Lady Gaga’s Artpop (2013)

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 239-257
Author(s):  
Nathalie Weidhase ◽  
Poppy Wilde
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Media Criticism ◽  
The Real ◽  
Female Self ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Lady Gaga ◽  
Current Return

Ten years after her eccentric entrance into the pop scene with ‘Just Dance’, Gaga’s image is now markedly less edgy, in part due to her current focus on her film and TV acting career which requires a different image. In her musical work, Gaga is known for referencing artists that came before her in her music and music videos, and she has previously pushed the assumed boundaries between pop and art. This bricolage of influences often gives rise to claims of inauthenticity where rapidly changing and subversive image has left critics questioning who the ‘real’ Lady Gaga is. Moving beyond limited and value-laden discourses of authenticity, we instead suggest that her performances exemplify a posthuman approach to art and/as subjectivity. In the posthuman view, one’s ‘self’ is not a singular, static, autonomous individual, but a subjectivity that is emergent; an entanglement between entities, both human and non-human. Posthuman theory consequently troubles dualistic binaries, such as those between male/female, self/other, subject/object and human/machine/animal. This allows for a critique of anthropocentric hierarchies, instead arguing for a rhizomatic acknowledgement of the different entities in the subjectivities that emerge. We suggest that Lady Gaga’s work on her 2013 album Artpop exemplifies this approach, as Gaga fashions her body to resemble artworks and wears visual references to (female) artists that came before her. She incorporates different objects, machines, animals and others into her performances, thereby embodying a posthuman subjectivity. This work therefore signifies a reconsideration of what it means to be an audio-visual-artist and challenges not only the sanctity of self, but also the Romantic model of the male artist and singer-songwriter which persists in much popular music media criticism. However, problematically anthropocentric approaches remain throughout via Gaga’s foregrounding of self, and her current return to more muted performance styles might be seen as indicative of the difficulties of living a posthuman life in a humanistic society and marketplace.

The racial politics of hybridity and ‘neo-eclecticism’ in contemporary popular music

Popular Music ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Middleton ◽  
Roger Beebe
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
Consumption Practices

This paper explores some forms of rock/rap hybridity and a historically related shift toward a greater eclecticism in consumption practices in popular music in the United States in the late 1990s, a period marked by the decline of rock as the dominant mode of popular music. This decline has repercussions not simply for a musical style, but additionally for the privileged subjects who are both the producers and consumers of that music: predominantly white, middle-class males. A number of different strategies have emerged which attempt to develop new positions for these white suburbanites to occupy in the contemporary music-cultural terrain in order to re-assert their hegemony as both producers and consumers. On the producers' side, the most common strategy has been to develop hybrid forms which combine rock with styles of its musical competitors – most notably, of hip hop music and culture. On the consumer side, the response has been the emergence of a ‘neo-eclectic’ form of listening where a number of formerly disparate or even hostile musical forms are consumed by a single (white suburban) individual.

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