11
votes
The most popular songs today are sadder than they were fifty years ago: can cultural evolution explain this negative turn?
Link information
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- Title
- Why are pop songs getting sadder than they used to be? - Alberto Acerbi & Charlotte Brand | Aeon Ideas
- Published
- Feb 4 2020
- Word count
- 1550 words
I don't like this analysis for a couple of reasons. Number one is that I have (largely unfounded) doubts about how effective sentiment analysis is on poetry. For instance, if a song features the word "hate" or "stop" it will be considered to have negative sentiment, but with poetry we may be dealing with "stop the hate", which is a positive message. And what about messages like "F--- tha police"? Even to human ears it's highly subjective if it's positive or negative, because to some it may be empowering and to others it may seem like anarchy.
The other big issue I have with it is what the authors themselves had essentially admitted; it's too broad a question to give meaningful answers to. It's like asking why a woman would want to get an abortion or why someone might decide to end a relationship; not only is it multivariate, it's also extremely subjective.
Sentiments aren’t really markers of moral good or bad. “Fuck the Police” is unabashedly and unambiguously an angry song. The only question is how justified that anger is, but the “sentiment” is anger.
That's only part of the emotion, though. There is such a thing as negative anger and positive anger. What about Fuck You (and likewise, Fuck You)? All of them are full of angry words, but the effect is empowerment, which is a positive sentiment.
As another view to why I think this is a problematic analysis, consider the idea of the protest song. They can have messages that focus on the negatives of what they protest or they can have messages of the positivity of what they are trying to achieve, but they still have the same positive effect in the end.
Perhaps a better way to phrase what I am trying to say is that intent is a much better way to analyze music than lyrical sentiment.
That’s imputing moral value (positive/empowering vs. negative/destructive) to the sentiment though. The sentiment itself is fairly clear, the value is subjective and based on your point of view.
I don’t actually think intent is all that important for music. For the most part it’s something you engage with on a pretty raw emotional level. Consider how rarely people actually pay attention to lyrics.
Like Pumped Up Kicks gets played like a fun pop song because the sentiment of the music is pretty upbeat and the tone, from the subject’s perspective, is happy even though the lyrics are dark, vengeful, and murderous. The contrast is part of the joke.
Another example, without getting lyrics in the way, is the opening sequence to the show Dexter. It’s all fairly mundane, getting ready in the morning stuff. It’s just framed in a way where everything seems kind of violent. Having a sentiment of blandness and routine contrasted with the fact that he’s a serial killer is the whole point. They juxtapose sentiments with positive or neutrally charged emotions against things that we intellectually know to be bad.
It seems like you are disagreeing with me but at the same time you are giving me examples that back up what I am trying to say. People ignoring lyrics is a great example of why analyzing sentiment is not useful, and the Dexter opening is a great example of why it is more important to examine intent in a piece of art.
Rolling back to context, we were talking about sentiment analysis being used to determine whether a song is negative or not and building from that to discuss what this might imply about societal trends.
It's not going to get you any insight into layers of meaning or subtlety, but for macro-analysis it's not a big problem. Intent is too individual or particularistic to affect the averages in any systemic way (though I'm open to arguments about there being a systemic change in people's levels of sophistication in engagement with music that might make them better tuned to irony and juxtaposition). It's kind of like BMI. It doesn't work for individuals, but it is very useful to track population level trends and changes because, in aggregate, there aren't enough jacked people to tip the trends over.