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Is Pop Music Getting Less Intelligent?
- apeacox 11y agoNice job! :-) I think that music (melodies, riffs, combination of sounds and notes, etc...) are getting very stupidier. I don't have tools nor skills to test this assumption, just my hears. Try to listen MTV for some month and you'll see that a lot of new songs are very similar to other ones. I mean, too much similar.
- sanoli 11y agoA musician friend of mine (classically trained, but works with pop music for decades now) says that's true, and the reason is that much music today is heavily rhythm centric, and everything else around it is ending up less complex or less diverse (don't remember which). I don't really know if it makes sense, as I haven't really been keeping up with mainstream stuff. Not that I don't like it, I just don't have as much time, and I found a suprising new love for older music that has kept strong and my music time goes towards it.
- grumblestumble 11y agoThe idea that rhythm is somehow less "intelligent", "complex", or "diverse" has all kinds of terrible connotations. Does your friend wear a powdered wig and perform for the ladies of the court?
- sanoli 11y agoNo, the idea is that today's pop music is rhythmically less diverse. Where is this mainstream pop music with such complex, diverse rhythms? Let me know where to tune it. He compared contemporary jazz rhythm sections to contemporary pop as an example, vs. both genres in past decades.
- blake_himself 11y agoI'll venture Radiohead's 'Reckoner': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wCJPm19XYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wCJPm19XYQ
- prewett 11y agoThat's 'cause they've been recycling the same four I, IV, V, vi chords for years :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- baldfat 11y agoPop Music was ever Intelligent? Seriously
- grumblestumble 11y agoTwo words: The Monkees.
- cle 11y agoI applaud the author for not succumbing to the superciliousness of William Briggs. The irony of the linked article "Proof That Music is Growing Worse" made me chuckle a bit, and then made me feel a little disappointed. Thank you for providing an interesting, objective analysis without injecting unfounded opinions.
- hortisimo 11y agoIs the pope catholic?
- Jgrubb 11y agoThere has been terrible pop music since pop music began. Try and make it all the way to the end of this song from the golden 60s - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhYLz63csS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhYLz63csS0
- goatforce5 11y agoI dunno... I quite like that song. It feels like a good example of psychedelic pop. Similarly, there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uo9tMoew6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uo9tMoew6o (Yummy Yummy Yummy by Ohio Express) which has fairly silly lyrics, but it's undeniably a good (ie, catchy) pop song.
- mgmeyers 11y agoI'd argue that this is more of a subjective terrible-ness. Technically, this song more skillfully crafted than a lot of pop music today. Even on a basic level, no auto-tune = you actually need to be able to sing (to some degree).
- logicfiction 11y agoSongs used to require more skillful performers. That skill and complexity has in large part been reallocated to engineers and producers who actually have to program and edit on a much more sophisticated level these days to do things like make the auto-tune actually sound good (whether or not you subjectively like the effect).
- smhenderson 11y agoI kind of like it, the Hammond organ at least. As far as intelligence, at least this song is trying to comment on what was current at the time with a nod towards a political message. Who cares what games we choose Little to win, but nothing to lose It's easy to see it as nonsense pandering now but I think people really bought into these types of songs when it came out. Now do kids today listen to pop music with a message? I'm not qualified to say because I tend to listen to music that came out around the time of the song you cited so I'm biased. But I'm sure my parents thought music was stupider when I grew up then when they did, that's just a natural progression. I think the author's methodology is a bit too rigid to define music as stupid or not. Without examining underlying nuance, I don't see how you can fairly judge the differences.
- seunosewa 11y agoThe article doesn't answer the question it set out to answer. The poster, being a (fellow) programmer, was (probably) more focused on working out how to scrape the data than on figuring out how to determine the intelligence of a song's lyrics reliably. The methods he came up with don't answer the original question at all.
- justaman 11y agoIts been proven that repeating short phrases results in a catchier tune. The impact marketing has made on music is terrible to say the least. In recent years especially it has become more about what sells that what has emotional resonance. Has pop music been getting stupider? Was it ever intelligent? Probably not. I think the issue is pop music is more common now than ever as only handfuls of artists can afford a solid marketing budget.
- ghaff 11y agoThere are a whole variety of readability tests [1] and many of them consider some of the variables such as word length that he did. Mind you, readability is not the same thing as intelligence. Especially in pop music, I wouldn't expect to see a lot of "SAT words." I'm not sure how you can really measure intelligence of song lyrics but, that said, some sort of complexity metric is probably a reasonable proxy to consider. [1] http://www.ideosity.com/ourblog/post/ideosphere-blog/2010/01/14/readability-tests-and-formulas http://www.ideosity.com/ourblog/post/ideosphere-blog/2010/01...
- cousin_it 11y agoSo, the post says that pop lyrics are getting stupider because the ratio of unique words to total words has went down, though both total words and unique words have gone up. I'm not very convinced. How do you know that the right metric isn't something like unique/sqrt(total)? Can we figure out the right metric from first principles?
- dandelany 11y agoNo. The post says that this was Briggs' original claim. This post proceeds to "dig deeper" and concludes "I think it’s difficult to definitively call today’s music 'stupider'".
- jerf 11y agoI think the article may have provided evidence for the opposite of what the author seems to believe: "My results confirmed what Briggs had described: unique words and total words have risen over time, but the ratio has gone down significantly. This would suggest that pop lyrics have in fact gotten less eloquent." I'd have to disagree... this just implies that modern pop songs are more lyrically repetitive, which is not immediately a sign of "less intelligence". It may be less enjoyable to some of us or you might call it "more insipid", but given the definition of intelligence (italicized because that's an important phrase in this paragraph) chosen at the beginning, it's still pulling from a larger vocabulary, and that still implies higher intelligence by the definition. "Smarter people putting out more repetitive/insipid music" doesn't seem too shocking a result to me... the intelligence of a songwriter puts an upper bound on the intelligence of the song they can produce, but no lower bound. There are still some confounding factors that could be at play though: Increased ethnic/cultural diversity could simply be introducing significantly more slang vocabularies into the songs. Rather than implying that any one performer is using a larger vocabulary, that would simply imply a certain dialectal diaspora, which wouldn't prove anything about the individual musicians. So, now the part where I question the definition of intelligence being used. "Vocabulary size" isn't a bad choice of proxy for at least a fun analysis, but perhaps instead of graphing the years as a whole, each song should be analyzed for things like word count, then we can look at the population statistics instead of the summed words. If the individual songs are as a whole using more vocabulary, I would consider that stronger evidence than if the songs all turn out merely to have dialect differences. In fact it's completely mathematically possible for the set of all Top 50 songs in later years to use more different words as a whole even as each individual song is simpler than the individual songs of the past. And, if this really was a real effect, if word gets back to the pop song creators, the very act of observing the vocabulary has gotten more difficult could well cause the pop songs to get simpler over the next few years....
- wambotron 11y agoPop music from 1959 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgaZZl_GVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgaZZl_GVg Pop music is stupid because it's catchy. It's always been that way, always will be.
- cbd1984 11y agoIf you ever want to get some perspective, look at the songs which were actually popular, not the ones preserved in the playlists of oldies stations. https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1958/hot-100 https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1958/hot-100
- ScottBurson 11y agoAh yes, The Chipmunks with David Seville. Real highbrow stuff there. (And I loved that record when I was 10 :-)
- tarentel 11y agoThat song was actually popular though. It obviously wasn't as popular as any of the songs on that list but it did peak at number 3.
- blfr 11y agoAt least the titles seem to have gotten less intelligent and... ruder. https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RczjGgSu4VU/VIs3dccjucI/AAAAAAAALes/XlZaGN81Ooc/s1600/billboard.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RczjGgSu4VU/VIs3dccjucI/AAAAAAAAL... from http://prooffreaderplus.blogspot.ca/2014/12/most-popular-songs-containing-most.html http://prooffreaderplus.blogspot.ca/2014/12/most-popular-son...
- kolev 11y agoPopular music is the music listened to by most people by definition. Most people are not very smart (not to say they are stupid). Therefore, pop(ular) music will never be intelligent as it needs to attune to a lot of people that are not that smart. I got tired of the gimmicky pop years ago and switched completely to classical and folk music.
- Practicality 11y agoIndeed. It should never be surprising that the mainstream is mediocre. It has to be. That's what mediocre means. Mediocre people often prefer to refer to themselves as "average," but it's the same thing.
- Dewie3 11y ago"Average" just means that, while "mediocre" means average + negative connotation. You're the one who is using a word with more baggage than the straightforward, "by definition" meaning (probably to do with some statistical distribution). Average is not always bad, unless you think that being non-average is inherently good. And having average music taste is about as harmless/inconsequential as average-ness goes - you like the music you like. That's it. Anything beyond that is more about social signalling and stratification than it is about the enjoyment of the music itself.
- Practicality 11y agoContrast average with "Exceptional. Special. Distinguished. Excellent. etc." The nature of these words show a clear bias that being non-average IS inherently good, at least when you are talking about quality. Music is clearly a qualitative arena, and therefore, average means, "not exceptional," "not special," "not distinguished" and "not excellent" Ergo, my point is, the parent to this discussion is correct, "average" music can never be exceptional as the difference between average and exceptional is what defines those very words. I am simply trying to use the word mediocre to make more obvious what average means when it comes to quality. To be fair, there is a non-average that is below normal as well, with related words: Poor, sub-standard, deficient, defective, inferior, etc. So, being worse than average is even worse than being average. Again, in terms of quality. Of course, average in another arena, such as average height, for example, is neither bad nor good. But height is not a measure of quality.
- mgmeyers 11y agoI wouldn't think testing vocabulary would be a very good indicator of music's intelligence. In my mind, music has been getting less intelligent because the tools to make music these days have made the barrier to entry almost non-existent. No longer do you need to study and practice various musical/performance skills for years to be a musician and put out a record. All you need is a computer and some software. It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. I think it's good that anyone can try their hand at making music, but at the same time, the saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall. Or, maybe I'm just getting old?
- kstenerud 11y agoThe barrier to making music is low, but music is measured by how popular it becomes, which depends upon your composing ability.
- sliverstorm 11y agoWe already see how low-quality content can go "viral" on the internet. It seems clear popularity does not equal quality, unless you tautologically define quality as how popular it is.
- harvestmoon 11y agoIf anything, I think lowering the barriers to entry should result in higher quality hit songs. For a hit song to occur, it has to become popular, which means a certain amount of oomph. So with 1000 songs to choose from for the hot 100, you'd expect OK songs, but with 100,000 to choose from, you'd expect in a meritocracy much better songs. Of course, the hot 100 is hit and miss. An example of a song which was made using affordable DAW software is, I believe, Crank That by Soulja Boy which is a song I personally dislike, take that as you will.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
- protomyth 11y agoIt seems like a topic that is really going to need a bit more research and analysis. I don't think a vocabulary test quite does it. Comparing something like Elvis Presley playing "Hound Dog" to Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" would make me think that modern pop is more intelligent.
- cbd1984 11y ago> Comparing something like Elvis Presley playing "Hound Dog" to Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" would make me think that modern pop is more intelligent. And that would be the wrong answer because... ?
- protomyth 11y agoOh, I would say Taylor Swift is the more intelligent writer and its right, but I'm not sure a simple vocabulary test and a large sample set is really the way to go. I do bet if you asked music critics, they would say Elvis's writer (not sure on that song or other) is more intelligent. Age polishes the fun history.
- cbd1984 11y ago> Age polishes the fun history. Whatever this means, it sounds like "The grass was always greener in the pastures of my memory" or some such, which is true but not relevant to, you know, actual history. That, and it seems axiomatic among the PC crowd that Kids These Days are getting dumber and dumber, which has held true so long that it's amazing that our great-grandparents qualified as sentient beings, as opposed to, say, slime mold.
- protomyth 11y agoYou remember the fun stuff as more fun and deep the farther you are away from it. Its polished by age. This results in people believing that things were better then. I'm sorry, but I don't write formally on HN, and I doubt if I ever will. As to the rest, I think my example was enough to say I don't think generation has much to do with deepness or intelligence.
- normloman 11y agoHaving less unique words doesn't mean anything. I'm sure Hemingway used less unique words than Dickens. Does that make him stupider?
- recursive 11y agoI don't think unique-words/total-words can be used directly as a metric for intelligence of lyrics. In any body of text, I'd expect that ratio to go down as total-words increases. For some extreme example, if there is one total word, then the ratio is 1.0. If there are infinitely many words, then the ratio is 0.0. That doesn't really say anything about how intelligent they are. Without knowing anything specifically about it, I'd expect unique words to roughly scale logarithmically with total words for a constant "intelligence", whatever that means.
- return0 11y agoThe mainstream part of pop has always been equally stupid. I have a hunch that i can't prove, however, that the 'eclectic' part of pop has become significantly dumber. We don't have as many distinct new genres as in the 90s for example, and that may mean that music is more homogeneized in general.
- cbd1984 11y agotest