Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity. We find that pop music lyrics have become simpler and easier to comprehend over time: not only does the lexical complexity of lyrics decrease (for instance, captured by vocabulary richness or readability of lyrics), but we also observe that the structural complexity (for instance, the repetitiveness of lyrics) has decreased. In addition, we confirm previous analyses showing that the emotion described by lyrics has become more negative and that lyrics have become more personal over the last five decades. Finally, a comparison of lyrics view counts and listening counts shows that when it comes to the listeners’ interest in lyrics, for instance, rock fans mostly enjoy lyrics from older songs; country fans are more interested in new songs’ lyrics.
  • @foggyEnglish
    6•2 months ago

    Girl, shake dat laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy

    Shake that laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy

    Girl, shake that laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy (candy girl)

    That laffy taffy

    Girl, shake dat laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy

    Shake that laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy

    Girl, shake that laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy

    That laffy taffy (candy girl)

    That laffy taffy

  • @PunnyNameEnglish
    6•2 months ago

    You show us everything you’ve got
    You keep on dancin’ and the room gets hot
    You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy
    You say you wanna go for a spin
    The party’s just begun, we’ll let you in
    You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy
    You keep on shoutin’, you keep on shoutin’

    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day

    You keep on saying you’ll be mine for a while
    You’re lookin’ fancy and I like your style
    You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy
    You show us everything you’ve got
    Baby, baby that’s quite a lot
    And you drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy
    You keep on shoutin’, you keep on shoutin’

    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
    I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day

    Kiss “Rock and Roll All Nite” 1975

  • @jeffwEnglish
    5•2 months ago

    Two things stand out to me:

    This implies that the structure of lyrics is shifting towards containing more choruses than in the past, in turn contributing to higher repetitiveness of lyrics

    The two main data sources for our investigation are last.fm and Genius. Given the nature and history of these platforms, in particular last.fm, the studied LFM-2b dataset is affected by community bias and popularity bias.

    So, what we’re really looking at is that popular songs (those that withstood the test of time, not necessarily popularity on release) of yesteryear were more complicated. So, this basically just confirms that we only care about the good music from the past and we forget the boring and repetitive stuff. And not even necessarily more complicated, just fewer repetitions of the chorus. I’d care more about a comparison that controls for chorus repetition and chart position/popularity

  • RedEye FlightControlEnglish
    4•2 months ago
    Hard to see, ooh
The hang ups we have today
Said we need to strive for more liberty
Lift yourself upon your feet, let's get it on
Lift yourself up on your feet, let's get it on
Lift yourself upon your feet, let's get it on
Lift yourself upon your feet, let's get it on
Lift yourself upon your feet, let's get it on
Lift yourself upon your feet, let's get it on
Lift yourself upon your feet, let's get it on
The hang ups we have today
Said we need to strive for more liberty
Lift yourself upon your feet
Lift yourself upon your feet
Lift
Lift your, lift your, lift yourself
Lift, lift your, lift your, lift your, lift your, lift, lift
Hard to see, ooh
The hang ups we have today-ay-ay
But they don't really realize, though
This next verse, this next verse though
These bars
Watch this some shit, go
Poopy-di scoop
Scoop-diddy-whoop
Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop
Poop-di-scoopty
Scoopty-whoop
Whoopity-scoop, whoop-poop
Poop-diddy, whoop-scoop
Poop, poop
Scoop-diddy-whoop
Whoop-diddy-scoop
Whoop-diddy-scoop, poop
  • DomiEnglish
    3•2 months ago

    For many songs the lyrics are completely irrelevant and are simply used as another instrument. So there’s not much point measuring how repetitive lyrics are because music itself is repetitive.

    Not every song has to be a lyrical masterpiece, or as two wise robots once said:

    Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock

Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock 
Rock, robot rock