What can 40 years of song lyrics tell us about society?I analysed the lyrics of 1,600 pop songs going back to 1985. Our music appears to be getting gloomier, less future-looking and more self-obsessed1/6
Music both reflects and shapes our culture. When I turned 18 in 2011, it felt like most pop music was about partying and drinking. The frequency of words like “club”, “bottle”, “vip” peaked in this year – then fell dramatically in the late 2010s…2/6
But as well as social norms, the lyrics also reflect deeper societal moods. Back in the 1980s, sentiment analysis shows, pop songs were often about positivity and anticipation. Since then, they have taken a turn towards anger, sadness and even disgust3/6
Affection and desire have, and always will, dominate music.But while songs in the 80s and 90s typically spoke to the devotional side of love – “forever”, “soul”, “always” – modern songs are more likely to reference the physical: “taste”, “body” and “sex”.4/6
Most telling of all, I think, is that music is becoming considerably more self-obsessed. It was common for popular songs of the past to contain lots of collective words “we”, “us”, “together”. Today’s songs, however, are narcissistic, dominated by “me”, “myself” and “I”5/6
Today’s songs are designed to narrate to be listened to alone, narrating our immediate physical desires. But there is an interesting counter trend in the data…More in my column (free link) ? www.thetimes.com/article/c060…
As a child of the 1980s the music of the era had a profound effect on me as people can guess from my occasional subtle 80s music references in the headlines so I find this kind of analysis utterly mesmerising.
Perhaps as a nation we might feel better and more united if we listened to more 1980s and 1990s music.