Is Pop Music Doing for our Culture What it Once Did?

Back in 2011, NBC News featured a piece lamenting changes that a group of academics had identified in the popular music we listen to. They reported  - "It would seem that the popular music we listen to today has become more 'me'-centric, less 'we'-centric, when compared to hits from decades past -- at least, that's what a team of finger-wagging psychologists are saying in a new study analyzing the lyrics of pop hits from 1980 to 2007. What's more, they argue that the increase in 'me me me' lyrics reflect a nationwide increase in that 21st century affliction: narcissism." 

Twenty-seven years seems like a good sampling period, touching on two full generations, each of which have their own broad taste in music, and three or four seven-year cycle groups, which granulize trends in musical interests even further. It is enough for one generation to fully express a perspective, or point of view, that they can pass along to a subsequent generation, normalizing that attitude, right or wrong.

The researchers went purely on objective data: "Researchers used a text analysis program to examine song lyrics for the 10 most popular songs (according to the Billboard Hot 100 year-end chart) for every year from 1980 to 2007. They found that the decades-old songs were more likely to use more first-person plural pronouns (we, our, us), while the newer lyrics contained more first-person singular pronouns (me, my, mine)." 

The researchers also noticed that "modern songs aren't just more 'me'-focused -- they're also meaner, the study shows. Researchers saw an increase in angry, antisocial words in pop songs as the years went on -- words like kill, hate, annoyed, damn, and fuck."

More than a decade has passed since that study was reported, and a person could argue that our cultural divisions have grown even more defined over time, expressed through increases in hate crimes, and through events of civil disobedience, noticeably the January 6, 2021 assault on the nation's capitol. 

A person could ask "What good is a Pop music that drives people apart?" And more to the point, why is it happening?

Pop music has literally been an expression of the vox populi, and until fairly recently, the people's voice has risen up against a host of shared oppressors: banks, the man, the government, the law, and so on. The '70s began to surface some divisions - The Allman Brothers didn't need Neil Young, and visa versa - but Pop music didn't seem to become internally divisive until the advent and widespread popularity of the internet. Clearly, divisions within the general population have been exacerbated by the introduction of the smart phone, and the social network, both of which have been instrumental in the isolation of their users, and to the plethora of "me-me-me" apps to which it has given birth.     

Digital tools have provided everyone with the ability to compare their experience with life with those of others, and inevitably that has put jealousy, greed, pride, and the rest of the deadly sins on steroids, primed by a raft of apps providing easy acess to individual publishing platforms. Some users have become effective marketers, image creators, purveyors of exploitive messaging. And the independent music producer ethos of the last 20 years has provided "artists" championing every one of those attitudes, with plenty of support for every angry, special-interest-group grievance. It has all added up to a fractured soundtrack of revolution designed around the circular firing squad.

There can be no practical response or solution to this vexing situation, for Pop music is a barometer, not a steering device, right? 

Or is it? And if it is more than an expression, but rather a driver of societal change, perhaps close attention should be paid to those at the wheel. That is a great deal of what the CCJ is all about. - RAR