English song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive in the last five decades. This is the conclusion of a study that has analyzed thousands of English rap, country, pop, R&B and rock songs published between 1970 and 2020. This is the main conclusion of a study published by the magazine ‘Scientific Reports’ led by researchers from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, which further states that all genders show an increase in the use of words related to anger.

Music is omnipresent in people’s daily lives and its lyrics play a fundamental role when listening to them, the authors report in their article. However, the complex relationships between the lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades and the gender-specific variations They still don’t know each other completely.

This work investigates the dynamics of English lyrics in Western popular music across five decades and five genres, using a broad set of lyrical descriptors. Thus, from a data set of 353,320 songsthe researchers extracted lexical, linguistic, structural, rhyme, emotion and complexity descriptors, and performed two complementary analyses.

In essence, the team led by Eva Zangerle discovered that the lyrics of the songs have been simplified over time in several aspects: richness of vocabulary, readability, complexity and number of repeated lines. For example, the number of different words used in songs has decreased, especially among rap and rock songs.

Although the number of words with three or more syllables has increased in rap songs, explains a magazine summary, the researchers suggest that, the general increase in lyrical repetitiveness across multiple genres has led to simpler lyrics in general.

More negative and personal

The results also coincide with those of previous research according to which the lyrics have become more negative, on the one hand, and more personal or emotional, on the other. All the genera examined showed a increased use of anger-related words.

Regarding emotions, the use of emotionally positive and negative words increased in rap songs. In R&B, pop and country songs, emotionally negative lyrics did so. In another analysis of the visualizations of the content of the topics in the Genius online song lyrics platformthe researchers observed that the lyrics of older rock songs tend to be viewed more than those of more recent rock songs.

However, the most recent country song lyrics tend to be seen more than older themes of this genre. This could indicate that rock listeners prefer lyrics from older songs, while country listeners prefer lyrics from newer songs, the authors note.