Last March 28, a study was released by J. Kepler University. It analyzes and compares lyrics of - just - 353,320 songs, released in the last 40 years, and in five styles: rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock.

 

For some reason, the researchers (Parada-Cabaleiro, Mayerl, Brandl, Skowron, Schedl, Lex and Zangerle,) are all, and only, computer science/AI experts... What are the results? Over the years, music has become... well, THAT does not figure in any shape or form as part of the study, not even tangentially. BUT we get to know that lyrics have become simpler and angrier, as well as self-referential (following the "I Me Mine" direction ironically anticipated half a Century ago by the Beatles.)

 

Analyzing song lyrics has proved to be an academically fertile ground for several reasons. There is a tendency to believe that song lyrics are a (fairly) faithful mirror of the (changes in) values and norms of a certain society, such as our liberal one.

 

Furthermore, it seems proven that words accentuate the feelings (e.g. sadness or melancholy) evoked by music, in a turbocharged sort of way. We kinda knew that words added something to music: that we could intuit without any help from science. But "Brain imaging" now has provided us with a scientific proof that 'sung songs' (i.e. with lyrics) tend to excite different areas of the brain compared to instrumental music.

 

Moreover, the linguistic terrain is a fertile one for technophile priests and their machines, who are delighted to look for 'serious statistical coincidences' with the Big Data, to replace slippery philosopher's stones, potentially insidious when a hard proof is required.

 

(...)

 

Other scholars (psychologists Varnum, Krems, Morris, Wormley and Grossmann - 2021,) have determined, basing the study on observation of 14,612 songs between '58 and '16, that the complexity of the lyrics is inversely correlated to the amount of new 'content' available (i.e. songs.)

 

The sense that Grossman et al. found in this correlation is that men are "cognitively tight-fisted" (that is: our brain capacity is limited) and, as our need for processing increases, the brain refuses to get involved in non-lethal topics, such as music: it decides to hold processing resources (you never know!) by taking mental shortcuts.

 

And in short, we stick to what is easier to understand on the fly. Which explains why, today, the first 10/15 seconds of a song are the ones that count, as they are the ones helping us to determine whether to 'skip' a song or not.