Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#2Interesting 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.
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#3They played "Happy" too much.
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#4It seems implausible that music is angrier than it was at the height of grunge and industrial and gangster rap in the mid 90s.
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#5Wowee!
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
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.
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#6It seems implausible that music is angrier than it was at the height of grunge and industrial and gangster rap in the mid 90s.
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.
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#7Short 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!
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#8I think the 2010-2013 peak is interesting - pop music was more upbeat than it had been since 9/11.
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#9Seems it goes up during bad times and then down during good times. Makes kind of sense. Pop music often tries to be counterculture.
Re: Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier
#10Short 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…
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.