The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds
There’s a reason a grandparent’s record collection feels so different from what’s topping the charts today, and it goes beyond sound. Over the past six decades, the words woven into popular music have drifted away from themes of care, loyalty, and purity, and increasingly toward themes of harm, degradation, and rule-breaking. Now researchers have the numbers to back it up.
A study published in Scientific Reports analyzed the lyrics of hundreds of thousands of English-language songs, drawn from two separate datasets, one covering 1960 to 2010 and another tracking Billboard chart hits through 2023, to measure how the moral character of popular music has changed over time. Expressions of moral “vices,” things like harm, cheating, and rule-breaking, have climbed sharply, while expressions of moral “virtues,” like care, purity, and loyalty, have fallen.
Song lyrics have long been treated as a kind of cultural mirror, reflecting the values and attitudes of the era that produced them. If that holds true, then the picture coming back over the past several decades is one of shifting moral priorities, at least in the music that becomes popular.
Researchers are careful to call the study descriptive, not a verdict. They cannot tell whether darker lyrics are nudging broader cultural attitudes, or whether shifting social values are simply turning up in the music people make and celebrate. That relationship may well run both ways, with music reflecting culture and shaping it at once, though a correlational design cannot prove the point.
Source: StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.com/pop-songs-have-grown-more-immoral-meaner-over-past-60-years/