Last March 28, a study was released (mainly) 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 we cannot know, because it wasn't an object of the studio (?!) BUT the lyrics have become simpler and also angrier, as well as self-referential (as I Me Mine by the Beatles ironically anticipated half a Century before.)

 

Analyzing song lyrics is 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, a turbocharging of sort.

 

Let's say that the words add something we could intuit without the electronics, but from "brain imaging" we also know that sung songs (with lyrics) tend to excite different areas of the brain compared to instrumental songs.

 

Finally, the linguistic terrain is fertile for technophile priests and their machines, delighted to be able to look for 'serious statistical coincidences', rather than slippery philosopher's stones, in the great numbers of music." (...)

 

Other scholars (Varnum, Krems, Morris, Wormley and Grossmann - 2021,) this time psychologists, have determined, based on 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: 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.