6 ms·

Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier

52 points by ccnafr 7y ago

codetrotter 7y ago
Interesting article. Too bad they resort to a clickbait title as opposed to the title used for it here on HN. My willingness to post an article on social media to share it with others is inversely proportionate to the clickbaityness of its title. If it has a clickbait title I ain’t posting it. And this one does, so I won’t. Too bad, because the article is good.
- the_pwner224 7y ago
  I don't use social media aside from HN and Reddit so maybe this isn't possible, but why can't you just post a link to this over at your social media sites along with the same HN non-clickbait title?
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    Social media site in question would show a preview with the original title displaying much more prominently than my added text. Also even if they didn’t I’d still be hesitant because as soon as anyone follows the link the original title would be all up in their grill.
- theoh 7y ago
  Just post links to the studies the article is based on: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171274#d3e449 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171... http://jpms.ucpress.edu/content/30/4/161.abstract http://jpms.ucpress.edu/content/30/4/161.abstract I don't get the HN fussiness about clickbait titles. If there's a way to vouch for the content (and if it appears on HN, there is) then the problem goes away. Similarly, you could post "This sounds like clickbait, but it's a good article!" which neutralizes the threat and wastes nobody's time.
- wubnf 7y ago
  It's the BBC, I don't know what you expect.
- briandear 7y ago
  So the clickbait was actually providing the payoff it promised? The article was good, so you aren't going to post it because its title was too catchy? "Clickbait" is when you get suckered into clicking bad content via a catchy headline. It isn't clickbait when it's actually a good article that "delivers" on the headline's promise.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    It’s a clickbait type of title because it doesn’t convey a good reason to read the article on its own — it’s enticing you to click in order to find out whether the article is of interest or not. HN non-clickbait title: > Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier Original clickbait title: > Is pop music really getting sadder and angrier? It needlessly formulated the title as a question to intrigue people to click it. Writing the titles in this way serves no purpose but to waste people’s time by tricking them to click through. I refuse to partake in the further proliferation of any article that practices this style of writing titles. Clickbait titles need to die. The only chance we have of getting rid of them is to not give them traffic. That won’t ever happen of course, but at least we have the useful policy here on HN to shield us from being manipulated by the titles when we decide what we want to read and not.
pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
They played "Happy" too much.
empath75 7y ago
It seems implausible that music is angrier than it was at the height of grunge and industrial and gangster rap in the mid 90s.
- derefr 7y ago
  The article is about "pop music", not music generally. The article is asserting that pop music—you know, the music that is considered a strictly middle-of-the-road, top-40, polished studio-establishment production; the music that is safe to play over the PA in a restaurant, and is used as an image-song for a character in the latest summer blockbuster; that kind of stuff—is what's getting sadder/angrier. Which is surprising. It reflects a change in what people consider an acceptable emotional range for pablum. It's as if airplane food started tasting like something. It's something that deserves an explanation.
  - empath75 7y ago
    I’d just like to see how he scores songs that charted like Smells Like Teen Spirit, Closer, You Oughta Know, Creep, Beautiful People, etc.
jeltzWasRight 7y ago
Wowee! Of course, it's not like the BBC is a reliable souce of musical trivia... In general, there's no utility in algorithmic analysis of music or lyrics. Consider the lyrics to the song these girls are singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyg025aR-VY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyg025aR-VY I mean, it's like reading a poem written by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. It's so bad you want to feed your sensory organs to ravenous dogs. It doesn't even lose its repulsive potency through translation or subtitles. Does that mean anything to anyone? To me, it means the lowest common denominator is as tasteless as ever.
peterlk 7y ago
Short explanation: the music industry has discovered that capturing the teenage market pays dividends and teenagers are emotional. Unrelated anecdote with a different explanation: I had a fascinating conversation with my parents recently. They are both children of the 60s and grew up in San Francisco. We often share music just to talk about it. I was playing some heavier (dubsteppy-metal) music to them, and wanted to dig into why they didn't like it. The reason that I like heavy music (especially at shows) is because it is very rare that I get to cut my rage loose, and let it flow. Mosh pits are the only place I can think of where this is an acceptable form of self expression. This feeling is sometimes a good gateway to making me feel like I can win (aka, be alright) when I'm feeling down. I asked them if what I just described, and the feelings that the music engendered made intuitive emotional sense to them. Regardless of whether they agree that it's positive or negative, does that emotional drive resonate with them. And the answer was, shockingly to me, "No". Through our conversation, we settled on a convenient narrative (with absolutely no research or sources to back it). In the 60s and 70s, the rebellion was not against the machine, it was for betterment. They saw the moon landings, and went to concerts in Golden Gate Park that sang about love and freedom for all, and they said that there was a feeling that anything was possible. You just had to do it. And there were lots of problems, but we made progress, it just took doing. While there is likely some rose-tinted-ness about this recollection, I found it interesting that this was not the way I grew up seeing the world. I grew up with the narrative that everything was wrong, everyone was wrong, and so fuck everything - tear it down. A short list: Rage Against the Machine Eminem System of a Down Our convenient narrative was that when our leaders act in bad faith, the result is generations of damage (i.e. the Vietnam war), and that this is reflected in culture. Interestingly, this polarizes both ways politically. So you get a feedback loop of culture becoming more extreme to differentiate itself while serving a polarizing society. Aside: I'm so happy to see charts with error bars!
- empath75 7y ago
  The 1960s were almost apocalyptically bad— the arms race, vietnam, lynchings, inner city riots, bombings, assassinations, etc. There was plenty of angry protest music— there just wasn’t much of an angry audio aesthetic.
fwip 7y ago
I think the 2010-2013 peak is interesting - pop music was more upbeat than it had been since 9/11.
maxxxxx 7y ago
Seems it goes up during bad times and then down during good times. Makes kind of sense. Pop music often tries to be counterculture.
- randomdata 7y ago
  That is the basis of the 13-year cycle theory[1], but this is showing that each cycle never recovers, so to speak, resulting in a continual trend towards sadder and angrier. [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/4082568/the-theory-of-the-13-year-rock-vs-pop-cycle-alan-cross/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4082568/the-theory-of-the-13-year...
rdiddly 7y ago
I'm a fan of generally more aggressive music, and I'm also an old fart, but whenever I'm (usually accidentally) exposed to anything from nowadays, it sounds "too happy" to me - saccharine, treacly, shallow, heavy on notes 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the major scale, full of "millenial whoops" (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=millenial+whoop https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=millenial+whoop) and so on. So hearing that "pop music is getting sadder and angrier" surprises me.
- henearkr 7y ago
  Precisely, the millenial whoop carries a little bit of bitterness because it is a minor third. It would be totally different with a major interval (then it would sound closer to some excerpt from the electro-pop era). Edit: I just got aware there are also a lot of minor third in most of the "happiest" electro-tunes, so I am off the point. Maybe it is something else then, like how it is accompanied, the drums, etc. For example, I don't feel very happy when I hear a lot of synthesizer "hand claps" and too much pitch vibrato.
athroway 7y ago
I wonder how much is it due to general attitudes towards profanity and generally colloquial speech being increasingly relaxed. They only analyzed the word content, not the meaning of the songs per se.
charliebrownau 7y ago
Or maybe Pop Music reflects the current market audience Maybe its not pop music that changed and its model but infact its the market they alaways aim at thats changed
fithisux 7y ago
This is true. They swapped happy HiNRG / Eurodance with the ....t we see today. It is music for psychos, it does not make you happy. Even newer Italo Disco (my favorite) is getting sadder, it has lost that happy melodies of the 1986-1989 era or the happier early Eurobeat 1988-1993 sounds. Even moder Eurobeat is getting dark (MeganrgMan has not, thank you). We are heading to a depressive and dystopian pop/rock/disco style. Bye bye Venga boys, bye bye Dr Alban, bye bye Alexis and GoGo Girls , bye bye Mel&Kim or Jackie Rawe, we will not see you again.

52 points by ccnafr 7y ago

Interesting article. Too bad they resort to a clickbait title as opposed to the title used for it here on HN. My willingness to post an article on social media to share it with others is inversely proportionate to the clickbaityness of its title. If it has a clickbait title I ain’t posting it. And this one does, so I won’t. Too bad, because the article is good.

the_pwner224 7y ago
I don't use social media aside from HN and Reddit so maybe this isn't possible, but why can't you just post a link to this over at your social media sites along with the same HN non-clickbait title?
- codetrotter 7y ago
  Social media site in question would show a preview with the original title displaying much more prominently than my added text. Also even if they didn’t I’d still be hesitant because as soon as anyone follows the link the original title would be all up in their grill.
theoh 7y ago
Just post links to the studies the article is based on: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171274#d3e449 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171... http://jpms.ucpress.edu/content/30/4/161.abstract http://jpms.ucpress.edu/content/30/4/161.abstract I don't get the HN fussiness about clickbait titles. If there's a way to vouch for the content (and if it appears on HN, there is) then the problem goes away. Similarly, you could post "This sounds like clickbait, but it's a good article!" which neutralizes the threat and wastes nobody's time.
wubnf 7y ago
It's the BBC, I don't know what you expect.
briandear 7y ago
So the clickbait was actually providing the payoff it promised? The article was good, so you aren't going to post it because its title was too catchy? "Clickbait" is when you get suckered into clicking bad content via a catchy headline. It isn't clickbait when it's actually a good article that "delivers" on the headline's promise.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  It’s a clickbait type of title because it doesn’t convey a good reason to read the article on its own — it’s enticing you to click in order to find out whether the article is of interest or not. HN non-clickbait title: > Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier Original clickbait title: > Is pop music really getting sadder and angrier? It needlessly formulated the title as a question to intrigue people to click it. Writing the titles in this way serves no purpose but to waste people’s time by tricking them to click through. I refuse to partake in the further proliferation of any article that practices this style of writing titles. Clickbait titles need to die. The only chance we have of getting rid of them is to not give them traffic. That won’t ever happen of course, but at least we have the useful policy here on HN to shield us from being manipulated by the titles when we decide what we want to read and not.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago

They played "Happy" too much.

empath75 7y ago

It seems implausible that music is angrier than it was at the height of grunge and industrial and gangster rap in the mid 90s.

derefr 7y ago
The article is about "pop music", not music generally. The article is asserting that pop music—you know, the music that is considered a strictly middle-of-the-road, top-40, polished studio-establishment production; the music that is safe to play over the PA in a restaurant, and is used as an image-song for a character in the latest summer blockbuster; that kind of stuff—is what's getting sadder/angrier. Which is surprising. It reflects a change in what people consider an acceptable emotional range for pablum. It's as if airplane food started tasting like something. It's something that deserves an explanation.
- empath75 7y ago
  I’d just like to see how he scores songs that charted like Smells Like Teen Spirit, Closer, You Oughta Know, Creep, Beautiful People, etc.

jeltzWasRight 7y ago

Wowee! Of course, it's not like the BBC is a reliable souce of musical trivia... In general, there's no utility in algorithmic analysis of music or lyrics. Consider the lyrics to the song these girls are singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyg025aR-VY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyg025aR-VY I mean, it's like reading a poem written by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. It's so bad you want to feed your sensory organs to ravenous dogs. It doesn't even lose its repulsive potency through translation or subtitles. Does that mean anything to anyone? To me, it means the lowest common denominator is as tasteless as ever.

peterlk 7y ago

Short explanation: the music industry has discovered that capturing the teenage market pays dividends and teenagers are emotional. Unrelated anecdote with a different explanation: I had a fascinating conversation with my parents recently. They are both children of the 60s and grew up in San Francisco. We often share music just to talk about it. I was playing some heavier (dubsteppy-metal) music to them, and wanted to dig into why they didn't like it. The reason that I like heavy music (especially at shows) is because it is very rare that I get to cut my rage loose, and let it flow. Mosh pits are the only place I can think of where this is an acceptable form of self expression. This feeling is sometimes a good gateway to making me feel like I can win (aka, be alright) when I'm feeling down. I asked them if what I just described, and the feelings that the music engendered made intuitive emotional sense to them. Regardless of whether they agree that it's positive or negative, does that emotional drive resonate with them. And the answer was, shockingly to me, "No". Through our conversation, we settled on a convenient narrative (with absolutely no research or sources to back it). In the 60s and 70s, the rebellion was not against the machine, it was for betterment. They saw the moon landings, and went to concerts in Golden Gate Park that sang about love and freedom for all, and they said that there was a feeling that anything was possible. You just had to do it. And there were lots of problems, but we made progress, it just took doing. While there is likely some rose-tinted-ness about this recollection, I found it interesting that this was not the way I grew up seeing the world. I grew up with the narrative that everything was wrong, everyone was wrong, and so fuck everything - tear it down. A short list: Rage Against the Machine Eminem System of a Down Our convenient narrative was that when our leaders act in bad faith, the result is generations of damage (i.e. the Vietnam war), and that this is reflected in culture. Interestingly, this polarizes both ways politically. So you get a feedback loop of culture becoming more extreme to differentiate itself while serving a polarizing society. Aside: I'm so happy to see charts with error bars!

empath75 7y ago
The 1960s were almost apocalyptically bad— the arms race, vietnam, lynchings, inner city riots, bombings, assassinations, etc. There was plenty of angry protest music— there just wasn’t much of an angry audio aesthetic.

fwip 7y ago

I think the 2010-2013 peak is interesting - pop music was more upbeat than it had been since 9/11.

maxxxxx 7y ago

Seems it goes up during bad times and then down during good times. Makes kind of sense. Pop music often tries to be counterculture.

randomdata 7y ago
That is the basis of the 13-year cycle theory[1], but this is showing that each cycle never recovers, so to speak, resulting in a continual trend towards sadder and angrier. [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/4082568/the-theory-of-the-13-year-rock-vs-pop-cycle-alan-cross/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4082568/the-theory-of-the-13-year...

rdiddly 7y ago

I'm a fan of generally more aggressive music, and I'm also an old fart, but whenever I'm (usually accidentally) exposed to anything from nowadays, it sounds "too happy" to me - saccharine, treacly, shallow, heavy on notes 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the major scale, full of "millenial whoops" (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=millenial+whoop https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=millenial+whoop) and so on. So hearing that "pop music is getting sadder and angrier" surprises me.

henearkr 7y ago
Precisely, the millenial whoop carries a little bit of bitterness because it is a minor third. It would be totally different with a major interval (then it would sound closer to some excerpt from the electro-pop era). Edit: I just got aware there are also a lot of minor third in most of the "happiest" electro-tunes, so I am off the point. Maybe it is something else then, like how it is accompanied, the drums, etc. For example, I don't feel very happy when I hear a lot of synthesizer "hand claps" and too much pitch vibrato.

athroway 7y ago

I wonder how much is it due to general attitudes towards profanity and generally colloquial speech being increasingly relaxed. They only analyzed the word content, not the meaning of the songs per se.

charliebrownau 7y ago

Or maybe Pop Music reflects the current market audience Maybe its not pop music that changed and its model but infact its the market they alaways aim at thats changed

fithisux 7y ago

This is true. They swapped happy HiNRG / Eurodance with the ....t we see today. It is music for psychos, it does not make you happy. Even newer Italo Disco (my favorite) is getting sadder, it has lost that happy melodies of the 1986-1989 era or the happier early Eurobeat 1988-1993 sounds. Even moder Eurobeat is getting dark (MeganrgMan has not, thank you). We are heading to a depressive and dystopian pop/rock/disco style. Bye bye Venga boys, bye bye Dr Alban, bye bye Alexis and GoGo Girls , bye bye Mel&Kim or Jackie Rawe, we will not see you again.