Evidence that pop music is getting sadder and angrier

Short explanation: the music industry has discovered that capturing the teenage market pays dividends and teenagers are emotional.<p>Unrelated anecdote with a different explanation:<p>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&#x27;t like it.<p>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&#x27;m feeling down.<p>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&#x27;s positive or negative, does that emotional drive resonate with them. And the answer was, shockingly to me, &quot;No&quot;.<p>Through our conversation, we settled on a convenient narrative (with absolutely no research or sources to back it).<p>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.<p>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.<p>A short list:<p>Rage Against the Machine<p>Eminem<p>System of a Down<p>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.<p>Aside: I&#x27;m so happy to see charts with error bars!

I&#x27;m a fan of generally more aggressive music, and I&#x27;m also an old fart, but whenever I&#x27;m (usually accidentally) exposed to anything from nowadays, it sounds &quot;too happy&quot; to me - saccharine, treacly, shallow, heavy on notes 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the major scale, full of &quot;millenial whoops&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=millenial+whoop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=millenial+whoop</a>) and so on. So hearing that &quot;pop music is getting sadder and angrier&quot; surprises me.

This is true. They swapped happy HiNRG &#x2F; 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&#x2F;rock&#x2F;disco style.<p>Bye bye Venga boys, bye bye Dr Alban, bye bye Alexis and GoGo Girls , bye bye Mel&amp;Kim or Jackie Rawe, we will not see you again.

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

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.

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

I think the 2010-2013 peak is interesting - pop music was more upbeat than it had been since 9&#x2F;11.

Interesting article. Too bad they resort to a clickbait title as opposed to the title used for it here on HN.<p>My willingness to post an article on social media to share it with others is inversely proportionate to the clickbaityness of its title.<p>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.