science confirms how much sadder music has become in recent decades

There is a certain generational arrogance – which, I admit, I am sometimes guilty of – in stating categorically that “in my time the music was better”. This phrase, well known, it must be said, is generally received with complacent glances to heaven from the youngest, who see in it only the grumpy nostalgia of someone who does not understand the present. But science, with methodological coldness, has decided to enter the debate and, to everyone’s surprise, to prove the ancients right. A monumental study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports analyzed more than 20,000 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1973 and 2023 and came up with a verdict as clear as it was disturbing: popular music has become progressively simpler, angrier and, above all, profoundly sadder.

This is not a question of “thinking” or nostalgia. We’re talking about natural language processing (NLP) and algorithms applied to dissecting the lyrical structure of half a century of pop culture.

What researchers Markus Fuitti, Urs Markus Nater, Claus Lamm and Maurício Martins discovered is that the vocabulary associated with stress, pain and despair has exploded over the past five decades. On the other hand, the data shows that the complexity of words and the expression of positive feelings fell.

“Our analysis reveals a significant increase in stress-related language, as well as a decline in positive sentiment and speech complexity over five decades (…) The increase in the use of negative language follows the well-documented increase in stress, anxiety and ‘diseases of despair’ in the population.”

For those born in the 1970s and whose tastes were shaped in the 1980s, as is my case, this statistical graph is felt on the skin, not as data, but as an emotional memory. I remember that the soundtrack of that era, even melancholy, carried an intrinsic vitality. There was an inspiring passion, an almost naive impulse on tracks like “Walking on Sunshine” or even on the synthesized wails of New Order. Sadness had a rhythm; the melancholy was dancing. There was an implicit belief that the future, no matter how uncertain, still existed.

But then the switch flipped. And if I had to pinpoint the exact moment when heavy music joined absolute nihilism, I would say it was the explosion of grunge.

It was there, in the early 1990s, that despair ceased to be a passing feeling and became an aesthetic, a way of life and, tragically, an act of death. Music went from being a refuge to a broken mirror of a generation that saw no way out.

It’s no coincidence that the study now shows an increase in the language of isolation and anger. We saw this happen in real time. We’ve seen icons like Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell – frontmen I’ve had the opportunity to closely analyze in their careers – turn their lyrics into farewell letters long before their physical end. The same goes for Layne Staley and Scott Weiland. Self-destruction was not a performance; it was the raw material of art. Grunge taught us that screaming about pain was valid, but it also showed us that sometimes, screaming is the only thing left before silence.

The Nature study validates this perception by listing terms such as “cry”, “pain”, “kill” and “hate” as the new currencies of contemporary letters.

“The most common lyrics related to study stress include ‘cry’, ‘hurt’, ‘drug’, ‘miss’, ‘lonely’, ‘fight’, ‘kill’ and ‘hate’ (…) Songs with simpler lyrics tend to achieve greater commercial success than those with more complex lyrics.”

When we see songs like Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River” or the devastating “Hurt” (whether in Reznor’s voice or in Johnny Cash’s sepulchral reinterpretation) appearing among the most negative, we understand that popular music has become a vehicle for these “diseases of despair”. The lyrical complexity of a Bob Dylan or the emotional architecture of a Queen have been replaced by monosyllabic repetitions of anguish or empty hedonism. Art, as Hegel and Sartre (quoted aptly cited in the article’s introduction) suggest, reflects the spirit of the times. And our time, it seems, is running out.

Interestingly, the study provides a fascinating sociological twist: during acute and real crises, like 9/11 or the COVID-19 pandemic, this trend toward negativity was interrupted. In these moments of real panic, the public was not looking for the mirror of sadness, but for the window of escape. People rushed toward complexity and positivity, using music as a tool for emotional regulation, a kind of auditory morphine.

“Surprisingly, social shocks like COVID-19 have coincided with attenuations, rather than amplifications, of these trends, indicating a preference for emotionally incongruous music, which can serve as a form of emotional regulation, such as escapism. »

It’s proof that when the outside world is truly on fire, no one wants to hear a song about their own house burning down. We want Stevie Wonder. We want the “YMCA”. We want to remember what it was like to feel joy without guilt.

This dichotomy brings us to the age-old chicken-and-egg question: Has music become more depressing because society has gotten sick, or has the omnipresence of nihilistic pop culture accelerated our emotional decline? When I study the science of religion, I see this as a symptom of a greater void, of a loss of transcendence where art has stopped pointing to the divine (or the human sublime) and has begun to delve only into our most earthly neuroses. We exchange the mystery for the exposure of the wound.

So when I say “it was better in my day,” it’s not just because I was younger, had better hearing aids, and was less addicted to cynicism. It’s because the soundtrack of my youth, even in its darkest moments, still believed it was worth being alive. Today’s music, according to science and my tired ears, often seems simply to document, with frightening and simplistic precision, the reasons why so many people stopped believing.

The Verdict in Practice (or The Polarization Mixtape)

To make this thesis a reality, the study did not only focus on the abstraction of algorithms. Researchers have ranked the ranges that best represent the extremes of this emotional spectrum. On the one hand, the soundtrack to our collective collapse; on the other, the auditory vitamin D that we persist in searching for when all seems lost.

Discover the examples cited by research that define these two eras of feeling:

The shadow side (negative and stressful):

Kendrick Lamar – We Cry Together Nine Inch Nails – The Perfect Medicine Elvis Presley – Injured Justin Timberlake – Cry Me A River 21 Savage – Red Opps

The solar side (positive and complex):

Stevie Wonder – Do I Do It People of the village – YMCA Bruno Mars – That’s what I like Michael Jackson – The Man in the Mirror Rihanna – Please don’t stop the music