If modern music just isn’t tugging at your heartstrings the way the tunes of your youth used to, you might be an old fuddy-duddy who can’t find good music anymore. But researchers also suggest that popular song lyrics express less emotion than they used to.
A massive study from Michigan State University, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, analyzed 38,467 songs across 230 artists spanning from 1947 to 2024. Lead author Logan Gibson and co-author Jan Brascamp tracked everything from Hank Williams and Marvin Gaye to Nine Inch Nails and Taylor Swift to figure out if music changes over time because artists age, or because the world itself is rotting into a hollow, emotionless wasteland where humans forgot how to emote.
Popular Music Has Changed Dramatically Since the 1940s, and It’s Not Just the Sound
Apparently both things are true. Lyrics have steadily lost positive and negative emotional charge over the decades. Old-school legends like Marvin Gaye and the Supremes would spill their guts all over vinyl records, yet today’s tracks are, at least according to researchers, noticeably less emotional, with sadness plummeting and joy all but gone, and mentions of friends and family all but disappearing. The one thing they found throughout modern song lyrics is anxiety.
Art is just a reflection of the times, so that feels appropriate.
Turns out, both are happening. Lyrics have steadily lost both positive and negative emotional charge over the decades. Old-school soul legends like Marvin Gaye and The Supremes used to spill their guts about love and social connections. Today’s tracks? Not so much. Sadness has plummeted, joy has evaporated, and mentions of friends and family have cratered. The only thing actually rising in modern song lyrics is sheer, unadulterated anxiety.
But what’s especially weird is that the shift to a motionless nest in lyrics usually happens as people get older, settle down, and lose much of their youthful vigor. Modern musicians are doing the exact opposite. Their lyrics are colder, more isolated. Again, it’s awfully reflective of a time in which loneliness is skyrocketing and human-to-human connection is being whittled away by powerful forces that have taken a divide-and-conquer approach to social engineering.
The study co-author William Chopik says that since music is how we explore ourselves, this broad drain on emotional language means something bigger is going on. I think I’ve hinted at a few possibilities throughout this article. We may never get a definitive answer to such complex questions, but — and I’m just guessing here — if we want our music to be more emotional, maybe we should try fostering a society that encourages true freedom and self-expression, not one that rises by sacrificing humanity for success.
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