Pain, hate, sadness, crying… How many times have we heard these words in the most fashionable songs, in those lyrics that we cannot get out of our heads, accompanied by music that we do not stop humming? “Stay, the nights without you hurt”, they said, without going any further, Quevedo and Bizarrap in that hit that never stops hitting nightclubs, radios and mobile phones all over the world.
Someone might wonder if the most popular songs today are sadder than those of 50 years ago. In fact, a group of researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of Tübingen not only wondered about this issue, but also carried out a study to shed some light on the matter. They did what is known as a “sentiment analysis.”
“Sentiment analysis is often applied to social media posts or contemporary political messages, but it can also be used on longer time scales, such as decades of journalistic texts or centuries of literary works,” Alberto Acerbi and Charlotte Brand point out. lead authors of the paper published in the journal Evolutionary Human Science.
The basis for this type of study is the availability of access to large data sets online and the relative ease of processing them. The specialists used two different sets. One contained the songs featured on the year-end Billboard Hot 100 charts. These are songs that achieved great success, at least in the United States, from The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (from 1965, the first year they took into account) to Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk (from 2015, last year included in the article). The second set of data was based on lyrics from the Musixmatch site, a catalog that includes more than 12.4 million songs in 50 languages.
With this information they analyzed the verses of more than 150,000 songs in English. “We included examples from around the world, which gave us a larger and more diverse sample. What we found were the same trends that we had seen in the songs on the Billboard charts, so we can be sure that our conclusions can be generalized beyond the main successes, “the researchers point out.
His conclusion is clear: Popular songs in English have become more negative in the last 50 years. “The use of words related to negative emotions has increased by more than a third,” say Acerbi and Brand. “If we assume an average of 300 words per song, every year there are 30,000 words in the lyrics of the top 100 Billboard hits. In 1965, around 450 of these words were associated with negative emotions, while in 2015 their number exceeded 700”, they add.
On the other hand, the words linked to positive emotions decreased in the same period of time. There were more than 1,750 references to optimism in songs in 1965, and only about 1,150 in 2015. “In absolute numbers, there are always more words associated with positive emotions than negative ones. This is a universal feature of human language known as Pollyanna’s principle (the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones),” the experts explain.
The bias can be seen even by looking at single words: The term ‘love’ has almost halved in 50 years, going from around 400 to 200 occurrences. ‘Hate’, on the other hand, wasn’t even mentioned on any of Billboard’s top 100 songs until the 1990s but is now used between 20 and 30 times on each annual chart.
An earlier UK study of moods in up to 500,000 songs found that between 1985 and 2015, there was a decline in what the researchers defined as “happiness” and “brightness,” along with a slight increase in mood. “sadness”.
These tags were the result of algorithms that analyzed low-level acoustic characteristics, such as tempo or key. These aspects of the Billboard Top 100 Songs were also examined and found that the hits on this famous list have become slower and their minor keys (perceived as more somber and sad) are now more prevalent.
“One of the great theories of cultural evolution indicates that culture changes over time following in part the same principles of Darwinian natural selection. In other words, if there is variation, selection and reproduction, then we can expect that the most successful cultural traits remain fixed in the population while others become extinct”, point out Brand and Acerbi, who collaborated in their study with Alex Mesoudi.
Based on this hypothesis, the scientists tried to verify if the composers were influenced by previous hits and if the songs of famous artists of the last decades (such as Madonna, who managed to place up to 36 of her songs on the Billboard Hot 100 lists) were also influenced. they had more negative lyrics.
The results obtained led the authors to consider that negative information “seems to be remembered and transmitted more than neutral or positive information”. “The rise of negative lyrics in English songs is a fascinating phenomenon, and we show that this may be due to a widespread preference for negative content,” they conclude.
