Were Songs Better When We Were Kids? Like A Billion Times Better?

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My parents and all their friends were Frank Sinatra-Dean Martin fans when they were in high school. Those high school friends stayed as their social circle for their whole lives. And they never grew out of that music. Well, my father never did. My mother expanded her musical horizons— always loved Frank Sinatra but came to see Jimi Hendrix play when I booked him at Stony Brook. She’d call me and ask me if I could get her Jefferson Airplane concert tickets. And in the end she was probably listening to Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin more than Sinatra. But she was an exception, primarily because she had a son in the music business. Most people are more like my father— stuck in the music that they loved at a pivotal point in their lives, the music that wa the soundtrack of their young lives and that they used as part of their self-identification. So… I didn’t want to sound like one of them when I saw this article in The Guardian about a study showing that song lyrics are getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed. But the unnamed writer, from Agence France-Presse, but the readers at ease right off the bat: “You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday. Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.”

Of course we are getting older— ever single one of us. But I got what he was getting at. In any case, a team of researchers analyzed the lyrics of 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020

Senior study author Eva Zangerle, an expert on recommendation systems at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, declined to single out an individual newer artist for having simple lyrics.

But she emphasised that lyrics can be a “mirror of society” which reflect how a culture’s values, emotions and preoccupations change over time.

“What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape— from how music is sold to how music is produced,” Zangerle said.

Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.

For the study in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated.

“Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Zangerle summarised.

The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.

Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as “me” or “mine” becoming much more popular.

The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades, Zangerle said— adding that it obviously had the most lines to begin with.

“Rap music has become more angry than the other genres,” she added.

The researchers also investigated which songs the fans of different genres looked up on the lyric website Genius.

Unlike other genres, rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.

Rock has tumbled down the charts in recent decades, and this could suggest fans are increasingly looking back to the genre’s heyday, rather than its present.

Another way that music has changed is that “the first 10-15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not,” Zangerle said.

Previous research has also suggested that people tend to listen to music more in the background these days, she added.

Put simply, songs with more choruses that repeat basic lyrics appear to be more popular.

“Lyrics should stick easier nowadays, simply because they are easier to memorize,” Zangerle said.

“This is also something that I experience when I listen to the radio.”

I asked a gaggle of friends, mostly involved with the music industry one way or the other— I meant who else would I know?— and almost everyone said, like me, “I don't listen to much new stuff.”

My old pal, Jack Badger, a bass player, and music connoiseur I’ve known since the ’60’s, added that the premise of the article makes sense to him intuitively. “From what I understand a lot of top ‘artists’ these days rely on a small group of songwriters, so the material is becoming stylistically homogeneous. I sometimes watch a musician/producer named Rick Beato on Youtube He breaks down songs from a musical structure perspective and has often commented on how traditional forms have gone out the window. Instead of verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, etc., new songs tend to go right to repetitious fragments. I recently listened to Spotify's Top Ten streamed songs worldwide, and only two sounded like actual songs to me. Turns out that both were written by Taylor Swift. I've also started watching the video of her Eras Tour just to get a feel for what the hype is all about. I guess you had to have grown up with her music to fully appreciate it, but she knows how to put on a show. And her songs are very personal, so yeah, like the article says, there's a lot of ‘I, me, mine’ going on. The world is self-absorbed, so it's no surprise that a lot of music reflects that.

Charlie’s one of our friends from way back too— and he agrees. “Totally,” he wrote. “You don’t realize you’re in a golden age / renaissance until it’s over. The explosion of innovation and creativity in rock, folk, soul, etc in less than a decade in the ’60s was unparalleled, having to go back to the traditional Classic symphonic era for any comparable breakthrough and genius. The extraordinary music (so many different groups), profound lyrics (Dylan), joyful optimism (Motown) carried a generation and future listeners to places they’ve never been. Even now some of the more interesting YouTube music videos are of very young adults listening to the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix for the first time and getting their minds blown. To me, unfortunately for the past 20 years most of the music has done nothing and gone nowhere new. (Old fogey syndrome? Ha). The last great push was grunge in the early ’90s, 30 years ago.  Still love putting on the headphones or ear buds and blasting the 60’s— which is not to say I don’t enjoy a lot of punk, new wave, alternative and some rap from the 70’s to 90’s. Though those needed the 60’s breakthroughs as their foundation. PS couldn’t resist - got tix to the Hollywood Bowl in July to see Willie Nelson and Dylan; figure even if they’re terrible— it will still be great.” 

A day later he e-mailed me again to share his worries that “AI crap could replace all the arts except for the most discerning people. It’s like mediocre sci-fi. There’s just something major off about it. The music itself is too soft, sterile, lyrics vanilla, but they steal the voices pretty well.”

That prompted his son, Jamil, who had worked for me at Reprise as an A&R guy long ago, to send this AI Beatles thing

Jamil’s a very agreeable guy. I’ve known him since he was born, when we were all living in Amsterdam. His a lot younger than Charlie, Jack and myself but said “True overall, but there are still a lot of great bands from the last 20 years... just not mainstream. He suggested these songs for me as ones he likes that fly in the face of the research.

Vampire Weekend-

White Sky

French Cassettes-

City Kitty

Declan McKenna-

Rapture

STRFKR-

Julius

Mitski-

Townie

Jawny-

Strawberry Chainsaw

The Beaches-

Desdemona

Judge for yourself. I had never heard any of them, except for “White Sky,” listened to them and liked them all enough to listen to them again… not Bob Dylan, but not especially simple, repetitive, angry and self-obsessed either.

Ira Robbins was founder and publisher of one of rock’s most prestigious early journals, Trouser Press (1974-1984) and is now the publisher of Trouser Press Books. He isn’t impressed. “Nonsensical research like this,” he told me, “takes a clumsy (if inadvertent) step back toward the days of the PMRC culture police. It is absurd to try and distill the emotional tenor of popular music across its many forms and exponents. If the implication is that the words of pop songs mirror the tenor of society at large, then what exactly do these ‘findings’ tell us about ourselves or our culture?  ‘Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive.’ The Ramones, Archies and A Taste of Honey might disagree...

Max Goldberg, the son of another of my old colleagues and a life-long millennial hip-hop fan and former rap journalist, had a quick insight on this as well that I figured I’d share “It makes some sense to me,” he wrote, “in that rap supplanted rock as the commercially dominant genre over that time period and a lot of hip hop relies on lyrical rhythm and repetition in a way that rock doesn’t.

David Kahne is a Grammy-winning producer who was the head of A&R at 415, at Sony, at Reprise and at Warner Bros and who very much does still listen to new music and he kind of agrees with some of the conclusions in the study. “Been sussing it out as time has gone by,” he told me. “One thing they don’t mention is that music composition is focusing more on rhythmic composition rather than harmonic. So, making a beat and pulling the kick drum slightly early in the bridge, and the snare late…. most of the beat makers know nothing about harmonic composition. Look at this graph:

4 chords rule now. If I hear a key change in a song, I feel like Beethoven has been reincarnated. But, I just found a great punk band in L.A. and I’m going to do a track with them and put it in a movie. And I found a wonderful female singer too, and will do some work with her. So much more music now, but the same amount of great stuff. I call it the bigger haystack with the same number of needles in it.”

I got this last contribution from an old friend, a high-profile industry celebrity active in music curation, who asked I not share his name. His point is that “Contemporary popular music, and its lyrics, are a reflection of culture. The article is consistent with that. People are barraged with media: commercial media, social media, streaming media, free media, subscription media, blog media. It's a noisy world fighting for attention and consumption at all costs. Music is no exception unfortunately. Audiences have a shorter and shorter attention span. So songs, like advertising, follow the same best practices: hook the largest audience as fast as possible and drill memorable (simple) repeat impressions (repetition) of a short lyric/refrain. Thematically, the vanity and competitive nature of social media are popular underlying motifs ("I'm better than you"), many times coupled with any kind of shock value (anger, violence, sex). If something, anything connects, cookie-cutter, repeat. That is the echo chamber that exists today in an exaggerated way.  From a production perspective, many songs follow a similar framework and sound, which shouldn't be a surprise, as many use the same producers and engineers (or emulate them). For lyrics, many use the same songwriters. If this sounds more like cold calculated commerce than artistry, trust your instincts.”