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“WE learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school,” proclaimed Bruce Springsteen in one of his paeans to the transformative power of music. The New Jersey rocker has seldom been guilty of understatement, but there’s a grain of truth in this line from No Surrender (1984).
In my early teens, the idiosyncratic observations and complexity of songs by Joni Mitchell, Peter Gabriel and Be Bop Deluxe instilled a lifelong love of language. David Bowie led me to the work of Jean Genet, William Burroughs and the New Wave of science fiction. Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat (1976) taught me about syllepsis, a rhetorical device: “She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running, like a watercolour in the rain.” These were songwriters who respected their audience. Do contemporary musicians offer the same level of sophistication and challenge?
There’s a trap for older listeners here: the nostalgia-fuelled temptation to cherry-pick a crass chorus from the current download chart and compare it to a classic line from one’s youth.
Fortunately, the question has now been tackled through detailed and objective research (Parada-Cabaleiro et al, “Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades,” Nature, 2024). Investigators from Germany and Austria conducted a computer-based content analysis of more than 350,000 song lyrics in English, from the period 1970-2020. They took into account factors such as year of release, popularity and genre – their sample included rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock.
The key finding was that popular songs have become simpler and easier to understand over time. This is reflected in a decline in richness of vocabulary and structural complexity. Lyrics have become more repetitive over the five decades studied.
In addition, there were shifts in theme and tone, with an increase in anger and other negative emotions. This was reflected in increased use of ”hate” and ”kill” in lyrics. In addition, subject matter became more personal, as reflected in increased use of ”me” and “mine.”
These are fascinating findings, but the team’s rigorous assessment of song lyrics across time and genre provides no explanation of the changes identified. In the words of a song that predates the era covered by the study: “There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear...” (Stephen Stills, 1966).
A firm conclusion in relation to the trends reported would require complementary studies of the psychology, sociology and economics of listening. However, changes in the structure and activity of the ”music biz” are likely to have had a significant impact on songwriting.
Let’s start with a strange loop involving the part played by the authors of the paper from Nature. Dr Parada-Cabaleiro and associates suggest their findings could be used to improve “personalised music and recommender systems.” The best-known of these is Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” function. In other words, the research aims to refine algorithms that nudge consumers to buy more of what they bought earlier. By supporting this shift from chance discovery to targeted selling, Parada-Cabaleiro et al are likely to amplify the very trends they report. By selling listeners more of what they think they want, the music industry offers the consolations of familiarity rather than confronting us with something unexpected, playful or complicated.
Another major influence is the recording industry’s business model. Between 1970 and 2000, artists were allowed more freedom to develop and experiment before huge returns were expected. Mott the Hoople released five albums before achieving a Top Ten ”hit,” including one that didn’t chart at all. Before receiving a gold record for His ‘n’ Hers (1994) Pulp recorded three commercial flops. In the 2020s, record companies expect instant success and ready-made hits, often with covers of classic hits, or songs written on behalf of the artist and targeting a specific commercial niche. These trends – exacerbated by Simon Cowell’s hideous hybrid of soap opera and cattle market, The X Factor – do not support risk, controversy or complexity in the creation of music or lyrics.
For the marketing teams of major record labels, shifting musical product involves careful management of an artist’s looks, image, media coverage and sound production. To protect their investment, music corporations will tend to avoid lyrics that undermine the brand they are trying to build.
For many years now, musical rebels-without-portfolio have championed issues where there is a high level of existing approval, or battles already fought and won. There’s plenty of fractious sentiment in contemporary music, but it seems undirected and abstract: anger is vaguely expressed and unthreatening to corporate interests.
For example, there is much to admire about Lorde’s Royals (2013): there’s a quirkily compelling melody, an interesting arrangement and her voice is a distinctive contralto. Her critique of acquisitive materialism is, however, superficial: “But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your time piece/ Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash/ We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair.”
In contrast, and released in 1986, Heartland by The The tackled issues of class and wealth more vividly and explicitly: “This is the land where nothing changes/ The land of red buses and blue-blooded babies/ This is the place where pensioners are raped/ And the hearts are being cut, from the welfare state.” It’s hard to imagine a song this complex, unsettling and politically engaged reaching the UK Top 30 in 2024.
There are plenty of great lyricists working in the 2020s – Joe Solo, Thea Gilmore, Otis Gibbs, Katherine Priddy and the partnership of Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane. And, of course, there are mainstream artists producing interesting work, such as Peter Gabriel and Kendrick Lamar.
But sadly, as Parada-Cabaleiro et al have demonstrated, there is an evident decline in the quality of lyrics across the dominant forms of popular music. Reflecting on the recording industry’s support for songwriting leads to the conclusion that LP Hartley was right to assert that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
