He may live at the highest of the charts, but no one’s putting The Weeknd up for a Nobel Prize for literature.
A recent study showing a steep decline in songwriting skills over the past 40 years used folk crooner Bob Dylan’s award from the sainted Swedish institution of an example of how much music has modified.
To attract their conclusions, a team of researchers from Europe pored over the words to roughly 12,000 songs in English across a wide range of genres from rap to rock to R&B, written between 1980 and 2020, The Guardian reported.
Their findings were exactly as anyone over the age of 40 may need suspected — lyrics have turn into simpler, more repetitive, angrier and more self-obsessed.
“What we’ve got also been witnessing within the last 40 years is a drastic change within the music landscape — from how music is sold to how music is produced,” said senior study writer Eva Zangerle, recommendations systems expert on the University of Innsbruck.
The study declined to call and shame any newer artists, but as an alternative spoke of how lyrics could be a “mirror of society,” reflecting a culture’s shifting values and preoccupations.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, targeting emotions expressed, repetitiveness and word alternative, particularly to see how often difficult or unusual words were used.
“Across all genres, lyrics had a bent to turn into more easy and more repetitive,” Zangerle said.
The period studied saw great change in the way in which we relate and take heed to music, the experts noted, starting from vinyl records originally of the Eighties to today’s streaming platforms and their algorithms.
Study results reinforced previous research that suggested a decline within the variety of upbeat and positive lyrics over time, giving approach to an increase in anger, disgust or sadness.
“Rap music has turn into more angry than the opposite genres,” Zangerle noted.
Songwriting has also come to have fun self-obsession, the professionals identified — words like “mine” and “me” are far more popular today.