Popular Music Lyrics Are Becoming Less Emotional, New Study Finds

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds

Across decades… artists who broke through more recently wrote with less sadness and more anger than artists who debuted decades earlier. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Janis Joplin, all stars of earlier decades, ranked near the top for sadness among the 230 acts studied, a group that runs from Elvis Presley to Taylor Swift.

Across decades, positive and negative emotion words again declined at comparable rates. According to the authors, shifts across decades were generally larger than changes inside individual careers, which hints that broad cultural forces may matter more than an artist’s own growth.

“Music is not just entertainment. People use songs to regulate their emotions, understand themselves, develop their identities and feel connected to other people. That makes lyrics an interesting record of what artists — and potentially the audiences and cultures around them — are choosing to talk about,” said William Chopik, co-author and former associate professor in the Department of Psychology, in a statement. “So, when we see large-scale declines in emotional and social language, it raises interesting questions about whether the way we express feelings and relationships has changed more broadly.”

Individual artists differed widely. Curtis Mayfield, The Supremes, and Marvin Gaye ranked among the heaviest users of positive words, while Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, and Public Enemy ranked among the lightest. Genre shaped the average tone more than the trend. Compared with pop, R&B and soul songs used more positive and more social language, while metal leaned toward negative emotion, anxiety, and anger. But when the researchers tested whether genre changed how lyrics shifted over time, only 13 of 192 comparisons showed any difference, a rate close to what random luck alone would produce. Artist gender, home country, and solo versus group status were also mostly unrelated to how emotional or social the lyrics were.

Heartache is fading from the lyrics of popular artists, and joy is not taking its place. The pattern held broadly across rock, rap, country, and soul alike, which points to forces beyond any single genre, possibly industry-wide pressures.

“People often become more emotionally regulated and invest more in meaningful relationships as they age, so we might expect that lyrics become more positive or relational across an artists’ career,” said Logan Gibson, lead-author and MSU research associate. “Instead, positive emotions and social references declined. That suggests song lyrics may be strongly shaped by artistic, cultural or industry-level forces.”