I’m the problem, it’s me: Turns out, pop lyrics are stuck in a loop
New research suggests a trend towards simpler, more repetitive lines - and towards lyrics focused increasingly on the self.
One of the enduring cliches in popular culture is the older music fan — usually, but not always, a middle-aged male — bemoaning the state of contemporary popular music. “Songs were so much better in my day,” he says.
Well, even the most well-worn cliche contains a tiny kernel of truth. New research suggests that, at least when it comes to lyrics, there is a trend towards simpler and more repetitive lines.
A team of European researchers analysed lyrics from 353,320 English-language songs released between 1970 and 2020, using machine-learning algorithms to identify each song’s key linguistic features (diversity of words, repetition of lines, terms relating to emotion). They then created a representative subset of 12,000 songs from across the rock, rap, country, pop and R&B genres, for further analysis.
In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, they state that lyrics have become simpler on multiple fronts: richness of vocabulary, readability, complexity, number of repeated lines. This holds true for all five genres, though the specifics varied.
Rap, for instance, more than doubled the ratio of repeated to non-repeated lines, while for country the increase was more modest.
“There’s more rhyming lines and also more chorus,” the study’s senior author Eva Zangerle, a computer scientist at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, told Scientific American.
The researchers also found that music has become more emotionally negative, with terms of anger and sadness becoming increasingly common. And it has become more centred on the singer, as shown by the higher frequency of pronouns such as “I” or “me.”
These findings are supported by earlier research. A 2019 study by Kathleen Napier and Lior Shamir, published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, found that expression of sadness and anger had grown in popular music, from the 1950s to 2019.
A 2011 study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts analysed the 10 most popular songs in the US from each year between 1980 and 2007 and found that lyrics had become increasingly self-focused, and contained terms relating to anger and antisocial sentiment.
What’s driving this evolution? There are plenty of theories.
In today’s attention economy, simple, repetitive lyrics may be the most efficient way to hook the listener. In addition to the fact that most people already have too much media and information coming at them, on-demand streaming has turned the act of listening to music from an active to a passive activity.
We are usually doing something else while we listen: working, driving, doing the laundry.
As such, we are more likely to add to our playlists something like Miley Cyrus’s 2023 hit Flowers — with its simple, repeated refrain of “I can love me better”, which features 22 times in the song — than something like Patti Smith’s Birdland (1975), in which she sings of “shaman bouquets”, “helium ravens” and “melted sand” that “coagulated like a river of glass”.
Meanwhile, the taboos around negative emotions — particularly anxiety, loneliness, sadness and despair — have fallen away, with discourse around mental health and trauma going mainstream. And so Cyrus sings of not finding the love she wants, needs and deserves. And rappers sing of anger, disgust and violence.
Does that mean music today is objectively worse? That’s a debate science can’t really settle. There is no objective way to answer it, is there? “One man’s cringe is another man’s tattoo,” as the band Dance Gavin Dance put it, in 2022.
