In different genres over the last 40 years
Modern songs have really gotten worse over the past decades, at least in terms of lyrics. Now these are not the thoughts of amateurs or professionals, but the conclusions of scientists.
A study published two days ago suggests that the lyrics in modern songs are inferior to those of songs written decades ago. For analysis, scientists took thousands of compositions in English from a wide variety of genres, written between 1980 and 2020.
The scientists' verdict is clear: In all genres, texts tended to become simpler and more repetitive. Additionally, song lyrics have also become much more self-centered, with words like «I» or «mine», began to occur much more often.
Over the past decades, rap lyrics have degraded the most — It is in this genre that the most active repetition of lines within one composition is observed. In addition, rap music has become more angry, although this trend applies to all music in general.
Our research examines the evolution of song lyrics over five decades and across five genres. From a dataset of 353,320 songs, we extracted lexical, linguistic, structural, rhyme, emotional, and complex descriptors and conducted two complementary analyses. Essentially, we find that song lyrics have become simpler over time in many aspects of the lyrics: vocabulary richness, readability, complexity, and number of repeated lines. Our results also support previous studies that showed that song lyrics became more negative on the one hand and more personal on the other. In addition, our experimental results show that listeners' interest in lyrics varies across music genres and depends on the year the songs were released. It is noteworthy that rock listeners like lyrics from old songs, and country fans — words from new songs.