
Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier - ccnafr
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190513-is-pop-music-really-getting-sadder-and-angrier
======
peterlk
Short explanation: the music industry has discovered that capturing the
teenage market pays dividends and teenagers are emotional.

Unrelated anecdote with a different explanation:

I had a fascinating conversation with my parents recently. They are both
children of the 60s and grew up in San Francisco. We often share music just to
talk about it. I was playing some heavier (dubsteppy-metal) music to them, and
wanted to dig into why they didn't like it.

The reason that I like heavy music (especially at shows) is because it is very
rare that I get to cut my rage loose, and let it flow. Mosh pits are the only
place I can think of where this is an acceptable form of self expression. This
feeling is sometimes a good gateway to making me feel like I can win (aka, be
alright) when I'm feeling down.

I asked them if what I just described, and the feelings that the music
engendered made intuitive emotional sense to them. Regardless of whether they
agree that it's positive or negative, does that emotional drive resonate with
them. And the answer was, shockingly to me, "No".

Through our conversation, we settled on a convenient narrative (with
absolutely no research or sources to back it).

In the 60s and 70s, the rebellion was not against the machine, it was for
betterment. They saw the moon landings, and went to concerts in Golden Gate
Park that sang about love and freedom for all, and they said that there was a
feeling that anything was possible. You just had to do it. And there were lots
of problems, but we made progress, it just took doing.

While there is likely some rose-tinted-ness about this recollection, I found
it interesting that this was not the way I grew up seeing the world. I grew up
with the narrative that everything was wrong, everyone was wrong, and so fuck
everything - tear it down.

A short list:

Rage Against the Machine

Eminem

System of a Down

Our convenient narrative was that when our leaders act in bad faith, the
result is generations of damage (i.e. the Vietnam war), and that this is
reflected in culture. Interestingly, this polarizes both ways politically. So
you get a feedback loop of culture becoming more extreme to differentiate
itself while serving a polarizing society.

Aside: I'm so happy to see charts with error bars!

~~~
empath75
The 1960s were almost apocalyptically bad— the arms race, vietnam, lynchings,
inner city riots, bombings, assassinations, etc. There was plenty of angry
protest music— there just wasn’t much of an angry audio aesthetic.

~~~
rch
I'm surprised at the proportion of people who have never heard of the Weather
Underground and the SDS.

~~~
empath75
There was also plenty of right wing terrorism (the Klan in particular)

~~~
rch
I don't support right wing terrorism (the Klan in particular).

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rdiddly
I'm a fan of generally more aggressive music, and I'm also an old fart, but
whenever I'm (usually accidentally) exposed to anything from nowadays, it
sounds "too happy" to me - saccharine, treacly, shallow, heavy on notes 1, 2,
3 and 5 of the major scale, full of "millenial whoops"
([https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=millenial+whoop](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=millenial+whoop))
and so on. So hearing that "pop music is getting sadder and angrier" surprises
me.

~~~
henearkr
Precisely, the millenial whoop carries a little bit of bitterness because it
is a minor third. It would be totally different with a major interval (then it
would sound closer to some excerpt from the electro-pop era). Edit: I just got
aware there are also a lot of minor third in most of the "happiest" electro-
tunes, so I am off the point. Maybe it is something else then, like how it is
accompanied, the drums, etc. For example, I don't feel very happy when I hear
a lot of synthesizer "hand claps" and too much pitch vibrato.

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fithisux
This is true. They swapped happy HiNRG / Eurodance with the ....t we see
today. It is music for psychos, it does not make you happy. Even newer Italo
Disco (my favorite) is getting sadder, it has lost that happy melodies of the
1986-1989 era or the happier early Eurobeat 1988-1993 sounds. Even moder
Eurobeat is getting dark (MeganrgMan has not, thank you). We are heading to a
depressive and dystopian pop/rock/disco style.

Bye bye Venga boys, bye bye Dr Alban, bye bye Alexis and GoGo Girls , bye bye
Mel&Kim or Jackie Rawe, we will not see you again.

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empath75
It seems implausible that music is angrier than it was at the height of grunge
and industrial and gangster rap in the mid 90s.

~~~
derefr
The article is about "pop music", not music generally. The article is
asserting that pop music—you know, the music that is considered a strictly
middle-of-the-road, top-40, polished studio-establishment production; the
music that is safe to play over the PA in a restaurant, and is used as an
image-song for a character in the latest summer blockbuster; _that_ kind of
stuff—is what's getting sadder/angrier.

Which _is_ surprising. It reflects a change in what people consider an
acceptable emotional range for pablum. It's as if airplane food started
tasting like something. It's something that deserves an explanation.

~~~
empath75
I’d just like to see how he scores songs that charted like Smells Like Teen
Spirit, Closer, You Oughta Know, Creep, Beautiful People, etc.

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athroway
I wonder how much is it due to general attitudes towards profanity and
generally colloquial speech being increasingly relaxed. They only analyzed the
word content, not the meaning of the songs per se.

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maxxxxx
Seems it goes up during bad times and then down during good times. Makes kind
of sense. Pop music often tries to be counterculture.

~~~
randomdata
That is the basis of the 13-year cycle theory[1], but this is showing that
each cycle never recovers, so to speak, resulting in a continual trend towards
sadder and angrier.

[1] [https://globalnews.ca/news/4082568/the-theory-of-
the-13-year...](https://globalnews.ca/news/4082568/the-theory-of-the-13-year-
rock-vs-pop-cycle-alan-cross/)

------
fwip
I think the 2010-2013 peak is interesting - pop music was more upbeat than it
had been since 9/11.

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codetrotter
Interesting article. Too bad they resort to a clickbait title as opposed to
the title used for it here on HN.

My willingness to post an article on social media to share it with others is
inversely proportionate to the clickbaityness of its title.

If it has a clickbait title I ain’t posting it. And this one does, so I won’t.
Too bad, because the article is good.

~~~
briandear
So the clickbait was actually providing the payoff it promised? The article
was good, so you aren't going to post it because its title was too catchy?
"Clickbait" is when you get suckered into clicking bad content via a catchy
headline. It isn't clickbait when it's actually a good article that "delivers"
on the headline's promise.

~~~
codetrotter
It’s a clickbait type of title because it doesn’t convey a good reason to read
the article on its own — it’s enticing you to click in order to find out
whether the article is of interest or not.

HN non-clickbait title:

> Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier

Original clickbait title:

> Is pop music really getting sadder and angrier?

It needlessly formulated the title as a question to intrigue people to click
it.

Writing the titles in this way serves no purpose but to waste people’s time by
tricking them to click through.

I refuse to partake in the further proliferation of any article that practices
this style of writing titles.

Clickbait titles need to die. The only chance we have of getting rid of them
is to not give them traffic. That won’t ever happen of course, but at least we
have the useful policy here on HN to shield us from being manipulated by the
titles when we decide what we want to read and not.

