9 ms·
Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study
- piuantiderp 3y agoWhat has become "better" culturally over the past 50 years? It is a race to the bottom, just like everything else. Mass market, mass enshitification
- dgan 3y agoI stopped listening to radio many years ago, because how predictable and simplistic i thought the songs were. Literally couplet, refrain, couplet refrain, a little variation of 10 seconds, refrain It is insultingly dumb. A happy enjoyer of Be'lakor here (EDIT: and old Infected Mushroom:)
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y agoIf we want AI to be able to generate all of our music, and of course we do, then we have to make it easy for them.
- diggan 3y ago/me runs away while listening to techno, house and drum&bass... Sometimes repetition/simplicity is not so bad, and apparently I'm not the only one who is fine with it.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoHate Haiku too, so ... formulaic. Of course I'm being snarky. I've learned to love constraints in part perhaps because of a part of my brain wants something familiar. A familiar voice seems to be why I seem to enjoy an otherwise second-tier song if it is by an artist I like. Familiarity seems to be why I pretty exclusively listen to songs with Western tonality. But creativity too seems to come from constraints. And we appreciate the artists/poets that do something original within those boundaries. To be sure of course, anyone can string together 5-7-5 syllables (and perhaps too 3 chords of refrain/chorus/refrain/chorus/bridge/chorus) but we know the good stuff when we hear it.
- Joker_vD 3y agoOh, today the formula is basically "couplet, refrain, refrain, refrain". Writing a whole second couplet? Who has time for that when you can polish your refrain for more ear-worminess.
- djaouen 3y agoThis has serious “Get off my lawn!” vibes lol
- defrost 3y agoand yet, ostensibly, this is an objective result: A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020. It's in Nature and open to peer review: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x Regardless, it's hard to deny that PhD's today have been dumbed to a three minute music video level ( /s ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoSYO3fApEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoSYO3fApEc
- derbOac 3y agoIt's also consistent with previous studies in certain ways: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop-music-has-actually-gotten-worse-8173368/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop... https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/ https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/ https://www.mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove-why-pop-music-all-sounds-the-same https://www.mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove...
- AniseAbyss 3y agoUsing more difficult words that still boils down to love and sex. Honestly thank god for J pop and K pop at least I can't understand a word of it.
- peutetre 3y ago> Honestly thank god for J pop and K pop at least I can't understand a word of it. Well that's not the case. They use a lot of English. It's Easter. Have some chocolate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKqgE4BwAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKqgE4BwAY
- 3y ago
- newzisforsukas 3y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- bluetidepro 3y ago“Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.” Haha
- tempodox 3y agoToday’s youth hasn’t been what it used to be for at least 2000 years. We must have been on a steady decline for millennia. Just imagine how smart and noble our distant ancestors must have been!
- 082349872349872 3y agoOne afternoon, ca 440 BC, Leucippus and Democritus were sitting on their tripods doing bong rips (Leucippus had scored it from his Scythian dealer), when Democritus said: Democritus: Dude, like sweet is just whatever people say is sweet, and the same goes for bitter, and we get taught which is hot and which is cold and which colours are which, but have you ever thought about ... like ... it could be that that's all in our heads, man ... y'know in reality, there's like nothing but atoms; atoms and void between them. Leucippus: Woah
- lifeisstillgood 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucippus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucippus I think my kids would prefer your approach to teaching history than the stuff they currently get. That and the musical Six :-)
- peutetre 3y agoSimple can be good. Amyl and the Sniffers are good simple. Simple that's hard to achieve: - Guided by Angels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z--D1flPLnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z--D1flPLnk - Hertz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb5Ja6V4OeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb5Ja6V4OeY
- diggan 3y agoSee also: various minimal sub-genres, like minimal house, where simple is one of the goals.
- loudmax 3y agoFor another example of minimalism, here's the Kronos Quartet performing Philip Glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr_xhO02Ikw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr_xhO02Ikw Listening to this has two benefits: 1. People around you will notice you listening to fancy high-brow music and they'll conclude you must be a very smart person. 2. It's actually really good (whether or not point 1 holds in your case).
- kstenerud 3y agoSounds like the punk rock of the early 80s. Simplistic, repetitive, angry.
- 082349872349872 3y agoI, for one, welcome that GWAR played NPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1187572267/gwar-tiny-desk-concert https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1187572267/gwar-tiny-desk-con...
- RajT88 3y agoGWAR is amazing. I have never heard a band with live sound production so good.
- 28304283409234 3y agoUntil you listen to The Warning. https://youtu.be/97Pxe9KTgJc?feature=shared https://youtu.be/97Pxe9KTgJc?feature=shared
- jihiggins 3y ago"insultingly dumb, i listen to metal" "check this out, this top 100 musician isn't mainstream so you probably haven't heard of them" this thread's turning into a decent example of why i hate talking to people about music. no matter how polite or reasonable someone is otherwise, there's like a 90% chance they have all these weird value judgements tied up in what people are listening to. it's incredibly tedious.
- shufflerofrocks 3y agoKindered soul here. People are way too aggressive about this stuff, and not even in an objective manner. Tedious is the perfect word for it.
- Jensson 3y agoSome people view culture as a competitive sport.
- seunosewa 3y agoThe article doesn't tell us about the magnitude of those changes. 5%? 50%? 500%?
- willcipriano 3y agoExample of this from today: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1bqcrmk/beyonc%C3%A9_makes_huge_changes_to_the_lyrics_of_jolene/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1bqcrmk/beyonc%C3%... Really illustrates the point.
- cm2012 3y agoI strongly believe we live in a golden age of music. Did you know 40%+ of Spotify payouts go to independent, non-agency artists? There's SO much good new music coming out in every genre. And you can access 95% of it for like $15 a month.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago... What a dystopian way to define "golden age", you'll-own-nothing-and-rent-forever-happily-at-whim-of-corporate-algorithm aside.
- Ryder123 3y agoI think they’re referring to something different than you are.
- insickness 3y agoTo be fair, there are both positives and negatives. The positive is that the barrier of entry is almost negligible. For less than 20 bucks, anyone can get their song onto the largest platform in the world, accessible to anyone on it, in days. Compared to handing out CDs or cassettes, this is a universe of difference. You no longer have to pander to major record labels to get your music out there. The downside, of course, is monetization. Even if you get a million streams, which is extremely difficult, you'll only make $4-7k.
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoMy 91-year-old grandmother used to use Audacity to record audio from such services on her PC. She would the edit the .mp3 metadata and put them on an old-school iPod. I told her that I would kick her out of the house and send her to a nursing home unless she started entering into license agreements and mailing royalty checks to the appropriate parties, and she hasn't done this since, so a win for morality I guess.
- cm2012 3y agoYou can buy the same music as digital files or as blue ray. Don't use spotify if you don't want to.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kaesve 3y agoDon't forget Knuth wrote the paper on complexity of song lyrics https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355
- yread 3y agoThese guys have 80m views pretty mainstream with not so simple or self-obsessed lyrics Half alive - Still feel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOOhPfMbuIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOOhPfMbuIQ What I think is a major difference now vs then is we don't get any major non-English language hits. Globalization?
- zingababba 3y agoAll I know is your taste in music sucks.
- dinkblam 3y agothanks for objectively confirming subjective prejudices
- tiptup300 3y agoIt seems a lot of vocal older folks will use this as evidence of an inferior future. I believe instead that this is probably moreso evidence that the systems in power that spread music have only grown more efficient both in creating profit as well putting out homogeneous simple music.
- drewcoo 3y agoIf "more efficient" means fewer, tighter oligopolies, then you and the "vocal older folks" may both be right.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zachmu 3y agoInteresting to think of this as an analog to refinement culture, where instead of endless elaboration and adding complexity, they are stripping away all unnecessary elements to discover the platonic ideal of marketable music.
- ErigmolCt 3y agoBut refinement culture is all about high quality...
- n4r9 3y agoI'd not heard of refinement culture until now. I Googled it and it appears to be to do with how sports strategies and advertisements are finely tuned to squeeze out the maximum probability of success. Which sounds like "heavily optimizing for a certain metric" is a better description than "high quality", and applies also to pop music.
- zachmu 3y agoAs I understand it, refinement culture has nothing to do with quality per se, rather it's about the elaboration of tropes and other recognizable patterns. Think ornamentation rather than architecture.
- raymondh 3y agoA lot of classic popular songs also had low information content: https://happyhollyproject.com/2014/04/27/flowcharts-and-song-lyrics/ https://happyhollyproject.com/2014/04/27/flowcharts-and-song...
- jl6 3y ago> according to an analysis of more than 350,000 top 40 hits Wow, that's a lot of "top 40 hits". More than 134 new "hits" per week for the last 50 years! Are these really all "popular" songs? Because that number seems like the analysis must cut well into the long tail too.
- dist-epoch 3y agoProbably multiple top 40 charts from multiple countries.
- 1123581321 3y agoThe method in the paper seems different than what was reported. They used a last.fm dataset of two billion listens across 50 million songs. They enriched the data and restricted the study to 1990-2020 to create a balanced dataset of the 350k songs for training their stat tools. Then they analyzed 2,400 songs per genre with that, 12,000 total. I didn't see "top 40" mentioned in the paper.
- eddieroger 3y agoTop 40 is a descriptor, not a list. Every genre can have their own Top 40, though it is most commonly associated with pop music (again, a term that doesn't specifically mean what it says). And there's not a unique Top 40 for any given time period - for example, in the US we had both American Top 40 with Casey Kasem and Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40s, so that's a potential 80 right there (despite there was usually overlap).
- CPLX 3y agoBillboard publishes dozens and dozens of charts every week each with various formats and criteria.
- antifa 3y ago> Are these really all "popular" songs? I'm not totally sure why what plays on the radio plays on the radio, but I feel like there's a mix of what's actually popular and what was selected to become popular by industry insiders.
- dist-epoch 3y agoEvolution at work. The music industry is so much more competitive today, in the past very few could afford to make music, now anybody can do it. There is so much supply now that bad songs die much more quickly and only the fittest survive.
- seattle_spring 3y agoThe article is about simplistic styles though. There are an enormous amount of "bad" songs that don't seem to die.
- dist-epoch 3y agoHow can a song which is liked by tens of millions of people be "bad".
- seattle_spring 3y agoSurely if you spend any amount of time listening to Top 40 music, you’d know the answer to your own question.
- hackable_sand 3y agoThe art world has a lot of different experiences to offer if you gave it a chance.
- seattle_spring 3y agoDid you mean to respond to someone else? Listening to Top 40 is basically the definition of “not giving the art world a chance.” It’s not like it’s a secret that almost all of it follows a very simplistic formula.
- dist-epoch 3y agoWhat do you think is harder to make, a song which 1000 people like (avant-garde art, your favorite underground band...) or one which has 800 mil views on YouTube. > a very simplistic formula. Go ahead, make one, get 100 million views, make a cool few $ with little work.
- ErigmolCt 3y agoPopular songs are addapting to a mainstream modern listener which requires repetitive melodies that are easily memorable
- amelius 3y agoSo why did the preferences of the mainstream modern listener change?
- AddLightness 3y agoDecrease in cultural homogeneity and increase in diversity. Have to keep simplifying to appeal to a broader and broader audience.
- crowcroft 3y agoThe medium (or in this case the distribution) is the message. This isn’t artist’s fault, or ‘this generations’s’ fault. This is an industry being pushed by a few algorithms that control the diffusion of new music to people which are optimising for this kind of thing.
- noduerme 3y agoIt's also the case that song structures have shifted as recording and songwriting has become more often sampling and copy/paste than capturing an entire live performance. A lot of top 40 songs now couldn't even exist without the digital tools that enabled them. The use of sampled repeated vocals as background lines might skew the results a bit.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoMusic creation is always closely tied to technological progress though. At any point in a music's history you can find plenty of works that would have been impossible to create even a decade or two earlier. This is true even of relatively conservative genres like what we now call classical. It has often taken advantage of at-the-time state of the art developments in metalworking and acoustics to create new sounds. The tools being digital does change the dynamics of this process, but that sort of change is still a familiar part of the musical tradition.
- dhosek 3y agoA pretty information free article. I would note that looking at the first singles from the Beatles, they were simple repetitive songs (three chords? too complex, let’s do two instead!) Add in that their baseline of the 70s also would be the apex of the popularity of progressive rock.
- alpinisme 3y agoBut the 70s don’t have a monopoly on complexity. Swing bands, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway show tunes, etc. were the pre-rock popular music genres with notable complexity.
- Loughla 3y agoSwing bands as complexity? I played a shit load of swing music on scholarship during college. It's super SUPER repetitive. It's good. Don't get me wrong. But it's very repetitive.
- alpinisme 3y agoSure, it’s dance music so it can’t be too wild. But Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie. These guys had varied songs that included (limited but real) improvisation, differing tempos, etc. But really the OP article is about lyrics and I think it’s safe to say that the songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole were more complex than top 40 pop today mostly is.
- dhosek 3y agoSome are, some not so much. Consider, e.g., Jeepers Creepers. There are plenty of simplistic lyrics in the Great American Songbook.
- jddj 3y agoPop music and literature both reached a peak in formulaic-ness just in time for the LLMs to codify it. Maybe if they push it far enough and hard enough in that direction we'll get some cultural pushback / revival?
- Applejinx 3y agoI don't think we'll get a choice. LLMs do that sort of thing far better than us. It's a 'be careful what you wish for' monkey's paw.
- darby_eight 3y ago[dead]
- f6v 3y agoYou can’t blame people. Our ancestors probably went into a state of trance with much simpler “music”. The brains didn’t change all that much since then.
- int_19h 3y agoWhy the quotes around "music", though? Music can be very simple; complexity is not what makes it music.
- teddyh 3y agoMusic Was Better in the Sixties, Man (2012) <https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/music-was-better-in-the-sixties-man https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/music-was-bett...>
- kjkjadksj 3y agoThis all depends on your era of course. How many 12 bar blues songs are there I wonder, hundreds of thousands perhaps?
- Rury 3y agoI'm not sure they make the correct conclusion (ie that people necessarily prefer simpler music when facing options). I think it's more that... to be popular, you need to fit the tastes of many people, and the best way to do that is by being generic, rather than specialized or niche. So pop music is essentially about finding the common denominators in tastes, and sticking to only those features. Obviously that's going to lead to music which is simpler, more repetitive, and therefore broadly appealing. And it's the music industry which selects for this, as it's the most profitable formula (and the reason for the trend of things getting simpler over time). But as individuals, I'm not sure that's what people necessarily prefer.
- binary132 3y agoSurely you’re not suggesting that the common denominator is continually getting lower and lower.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoIf the market was mainly national and now it's increasingly global, why wouldn't it?
- makeitdouble 3y agoAs there's more sources exposed to the public all around (not just a few radios and a few tv shows) and tastes diverge, that would be the natural outcome. Also people can seek their better targeted, more appealing music elsewhere so pop doesn't need to fill these shoes.
- bobthepanda 3y agoAlso pop is now more global than ever and intentionally targeting more global audiences, and so there’s a lot more to average about.
- contravariant 3y agoIf the audience grows that is precisely what this hypothesis would predict.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoSongs are a lot more than their lyrics and there are a great many wonderful and popular songs that have _no lyrics at all_. Lyrical complexity isn't really a good measure of the overall complexity of a song. Anyway, a lot of this because of the rise of dance music which is often more about rhythm and timbre, and vocals if they exist at all are often background and used more as texture than as the driving force behind the song.
- deldelaney 3y agoHow soon until AI replaces simple Autotune Kanye? With deep Autotune Kanye.
- c6400sc 3y agoResearchers compiled lyrics to songs from five musical genres (rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock) that were released between 1970 and 2020. This is an interesting period to sample. The late 60s and early 70s were a high watermark for pop and rock music. Pop music evolved considerably from the 40s (Crooners and jazz-dominant hits), through the 50s and early 60s ("the American Songbook"), to the emergence of psychedelic rock and the cerebral singer-songwriter in the 60s. The increased prominence of genres light rock in the 70s and hair metal in the 80s would drag complexity down. I think if they took the period 1920-2020, the trend would not be prominent.
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoGlad someone finally quantified what everyone is obviously noticing. At this juncture, since the entertainment industry can't take risks anymore for new ideas, it's high tine that AI simply displace it entirely.
- kens 3y agoKnuth's famous paper "The Complexity of Songs" (1977) deserves a mention. He describes how most songs of length n require a text of length proportional to n. But he goes on to prove the complexity of Old MacDonald had a farm as O(sqrt(n)), the complexity improvement of Twelve days of Christmas, the O(log n) song 99 bottles of beer on the wall, and finally the O(1) song That's the way I like it by KC and the Sunshine Band. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355 Also, the linked Science article is just a summary. The full paper (not paywalled) is at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x
- WalterBright 3y agoI often find that, with a new popular song I haven't heard before, I can correctly guess the next line of lyrics.
- hollywood_court 3y agoI find myself doing that with songs and also with a lot of film and TV. I do it so often that it annoys my wife. At first she claimed that I simply watched the show before watching it with her, but for some reason I am able to guess the next words in the dialog more often than not.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thom 3y agoEven so, is it really a big deal? There is more - and more varied and complex - music now, than there has ever been at any point in history. And you can find and access almost all of it instantly! Who cares or even knows what's in the charts these days? I can be a huge kids-these-days curmudgeon about music, and the recommendation algorithms aren't even that good, but I have found more music in the last five years that I truly love than I did in the entirety of teens.
- spyspy 3y agoAgreed! My hot take among my millennial friends is that popular music today is way more varied and interesting than what we grew up with. Sorry 50 cent. And it’s not like that music disappeared. We get both! My only complaint is how short songs are now. Everything is tiktok optimized.
- BipolarCapybara 3y agoMore than TikTok optimized, stream optimized. Artists get paid by individual stream, so they make their songs shorter in hopes of getting more streams per album.
- darby_eight 3y ago[dead]
- thom 3y agoI've not noticed that, if anything I'm always delighted to find a 3-minute song these days, it feels like a bit of a lost art.
- gardenhedge 3y agoI always thought most songs were too padded out. E.g chorus repeated 3+ times
- bobthepanda 3y ago
- gpsx 3y agoI think one reason for a change in music could be the "downfall" of record labels as a big driver in the music industry. You can blame them for taking a big cut away from the artists, but the whole industry did a lot for developing the music. I had thought about this more from a perspecitve of the use of very talented studio musicions to help bands, but it may have impact on writing too. Of course, even if that was an effect on quality of music in any way, I think people have much bette access to music now than ever before. I couldn't afford to buy records or cds back when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s.
- airstrike 3y agoMore likely correlation than causation, IMHO
- willis936 3y agoFrom these set of facts it seems more like the thing lost is curation. People have more freedom and choice now so the top 40 are more representative of what more people want to listen to. More complex music is still around. We didn't have polyrhythms in the 80s and genres of math rock, prog, and funk are thriving. They're just not top 40.
- Semaphor 3y agoI recently found out, that songwriting and writing the lyrics can be very much separate. I was reading an interview of the metal band Sulphur Aeon, and apparently the songwriter writes the music, and then hands it over to the vocalist, who writes the lyrics for them. As a very vocal oriented person (though as I like extreme metal, I often can't understand them), that was fascinating to me, as music and vocals are so very connected to me.
- LordHeini 3y agoThis is a very common thing in music and I would say more the Norm than one might think. Historically often librettists where responsible for texts. For example in opera there the librettist was as important as the composer and his texts might have been used in multiple operas. Among the most famous examples would be the European hymn Freude schöner Götterfunken. The text is by Schiller and the music by Beethoven.
- Semaphor 3y agoInteresting. With older music, it’s kinda expected, as (especially church) songs often have "to the melody of" parts. Just did not think it would be the same for contemporary.
- anamax 3y agoFWIW, Elton John and Bernie Taupin worked the other way at least some of the time. (Taupin wrote lyrics and then John wrote the music.) That said, repurposing music with new lyrics is very common. For example, the Star Spangled Banner is "new lyrics" for a older English drinking song.
- yegle 3y agoI'm really surprised no one commented about suno.ai.
- harmok 3y agoIsn't this a duplicate of a previous thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39862404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39862404
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- srcreigh 3y agoYou'd think a study with this title would include analysis indicating a relationship between popularity, release date, and repetitiveness of lyrics. It doesn't. In fact reports no relationship: "As for RQ2 (Which role does the popularity of songs and lyrics play in this scenario?), we conclude that while song listening counts do not show any effects" They don't even use data for popularity over time. They have this information,[2] they just don't use it.[3] It's mind boggling. Your paper advertises that popular music is becoming more repetitive. You have data about which music is most popular over time, but you throw it out and just look at current listen counts. You find current listen counts has no relationship to lyrical repetitiveness. Then you publish your paper. It makes me speechless. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x#Tab4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x#Tab4 [2]: http://www.cp.jku.at/datasets/LFM-2b/ http://www.cp.jku.at/datasets/LFM-2b/ [3]: https://zenodo.org/records/7740045 https://zenodo.org/records/7740045
- snapplebobapple 3y agoThe same can be said about popular people, its why longform content had sich a resurgence. There us a minorityof us drowning in the simpletonification of the world.
- zharknado 3y ago<L’homme armé has entered the chat>
- rufus_foreman 3y ago>> Popular songs are simpler and more repetitive than they used to be A-well-a everybody's heard about the bird! Bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, bird is the word A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a don't you know, about the bird? Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word! A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird A-well-a A-well-a everybody's heard, about the bird! Bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a don't you know, about the bird? Well! Everybody's talking about the bird! A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird A-well-a bird! Surfin' bird Pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa Oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa pa oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Oom m-oom m-oom m-oom M-oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-oom m-oom m-oom M-oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-oom m-oom m-oom M-oom m-mow mow Oom m-oom m-oom m-oom M-oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow Well-a don't you know, about the bird? Well! Everybody knows that the bird is the word! A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird A-well-a oom m-mow mow Pa pa oom mow m-mow Ba pa oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow Pa pa oom m-mow mow
- bitwize 3y agoWe are n(ever)* getting back together
- Daub 3y agoAlso... The shot length of movies is getting shorter.
- yieldcrv 3y agoInternational audience loved simpler English just market-based natural evolution at work
- LordHeini 3y agoNo that's not true. The international audience usualy does not understand the lyrics because it does not speak English. So it does not care at all. That leads to funny cases where childish sounding pop music wiht juicy texts gets played everywhere. I recently read an article about a pop song about small dicks which was popular in europe for some time. The artist got invided to a live performance in a Spanish Kindergarten.
- mkl95 3y agoAt some point, Prog pop/rock was relatively popular and influential. Some pretty complex pieces became hits. Nowadays the big labels are selling extremely simplistic music - it's much cheaper to produce and perform than something averagely complex (not to mention something like prog rock), and it makes them mindboggling amounts of money.
- irongeek 3y agoI still listen to a lot of prog rock as well as classical, more than I did when I was a teenager or in my 20s. But I also occasionally listen to current popular music with my teenage daughters. Some of it I like, some I do not, but myself and my daughters all agree that they would like to hear some big change in popular music. Not saying it should be a return to something like grunge, but it would be interesting to hear something different like that style was.
- CoolestBeans 3y agoPart of me agrees that pop is ripe for that sort of upheavel but my arguments that it won't happen are: 1. Angst will probably always be the teenage condition but I don't think the distance between what's being recorded and what teens and young adults are feeling is as great as it was in the 90s. 2. Music listening is so much more fragmented now that even if some artist hooks into some underserved emotional need, it might just grab its group of followers and then sorta descend into its own little subculture, safely away from the mainstream. The third and fourth lines on any contemporary festival act list has a lot of acts that fall into this category. 3. Kurt Cobain was this unusual combination of wanting to be anti-authority, anti-establishment, alternative on one hand, but then very ambitious and seeking fame and record deals on the other. It's paradoxical but he was that and that combination of attributes is really good for changing the mainstream music scene but I don't think most people can live in that contradiction for that long and therefore people like that are rare. In my view, we're in a sort of repeat of 00s R&B. Lot of substanceless tunes with honestly seriously vulgar lyrics but immensely catchy and fun. The main difference is this version is less danceable (but also more subject to dance routines on TikTok!). And I don't mean it in a pejorative way, not every good song need to be meaningful.
- chriscappuccio 3y agoMake 'em say ugh