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... Well, music does not figure at all in the study, not even tangentially, and it is considered an external, non cogent variable.

 

BUT we get to know what happened to soing lyrics. You might have guessed it too: they have become simpler and angrier, as well as more and more self-referential, following the "I Me Mine" drift, ironically anticipated half a Century ago by George Harrison in the song of the same name.

 

Analysis of 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's proven that words accentuate feelings (such as sadness or melancholy) evoked by music, in a turbocharged sort of way. We kinda knew that words added something to music: we didn't need any help from science to ge that. But with "brain imaging" we have a scientific proof of which different areas of the brain 'songs with lyrics' tend to excite, as opposed to instrumental music.

 

Moreover, the linguistic terrain is a fertile one for any technophile priest willing to search for 'serious statistical coincidences'  and thus to replace slippery philosopher's stones with hard Big Data evidence.

 

(...)

 

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. SO, in short, we stick on the fly to what is easier to understand.

This could explain 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.