Psychological analysis of more than 20,000 Billboard Hot 100 songs from the last 50 years notes an increase in negativity and increasingly simple lyrics. But there is always love in times of cholera (or rather, covid).
It’s not a matter of opinion or tastes. Pop music, in general, has become darker and simpler over the last 50 years.
The analysis was not carried out by music critics, but by psychologists from the University of Vienna, and on the 11th at Scientific Reports. The investigation analyzed 20,186 songs which entered between 1973 and 2023 and concluded that language associated with stress and negative feelings increased substantially in the lyrics of major hits in the United States.
To arrive at these results, the team compiled all weekly Billboard Hot 100 charts, which ranks the 100 most popular songs of the week based on a weighted formula that includes physical and digital sales, radio plays and audio and video streaming.
The team applied standard pre-processing methods to extract and process the letters and then used a personalized sentiment analysis algorithm, designed to measure the emotional charge present in the texts.
In addition to increased negativityresearchers identified a parallel trend: the lyrics of pop hits became progressively simplerin an evolution that the authors place in dialogue with broader social phenomena.
The study states that the observed patterns correlate with increased reported rates of depression and anxiety and with previous research that points to greater negativity in other cultural spheressuch as news presented by the media and literary fiction, explains the team in the study.
But the new analysis brings surprises. The team found no clear associations between the increasingly darker tone of songs and changes in median household income; nor did it confirm the hypothesis that major social shocks produced even more negative music. On the contrary: traumatic events like the 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with increases in more positive songs and even more lyrically complex. It’s a pattern that the authors interpret as a possible preference for emotionally incongruous music in times of crisis.
Although the researchers used an “interrupted time series” strategy to compare periods before and after significant events, it is important to emphasize that this study is an observational study: the differences detected are temporal associations and do not allow establishing cause and effect relationships.
But the results undoubtedly reinforce the power of music in our lives and the effect it has on our emotional state.
Tomás Guimarães, ZAP //
