Peace Up, A-town Down: Exploring the Evolution of Popular Music

PLOS ONE, 2021

Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture’s shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplicity is accompanied by a widening array of novel song choices. We do so by using six decades (1958–2016) of popular music in the United States (N = 14,661 songs), controlling for multiple well-studied ecological and cultural factors plausibly linked to shifts in lyrical simplicity (e.g., resource availability, pathogen prevalence, rising individualism). In years when more novel song choices were produced, the average lyrical simplicity of the songs entering U.S. billboard charts was greater. This cross-temporal relationship was robust when controlling for a range of cultural and ecological factors and employing multiverse analyses to control...

University of Chester, 2021

TESOL Quarterly, 1992

Murphey and Alber (1985) postulated a pop song (PS) register and described it as the "motherese of adolescents" and as "affective foreigner talk" because of the simple and affective language. THe PS register was further characterized as a "teddy-bear-in- the-ear" to capture its diskless communicative qualities. More detailed analysis of a larger corpus (Murphey 1989, 1990a) have notw been done which support the earlier description and further show PSs to be repetitive, conversation-like and about half the speed of spoken discourse. This simplicity, teir highly affective dialogic features, and their vague references (ghost discourse), allow listeners to use them in personally associative ways. THese discourse features and the song-stuck-in-my-head phenomenon (discussed below) make them potentially rich learning materials in and out of the classroom.

Music & Science, 2023

A recent examination of charting popular music before and during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that popular music lyrics during turbulent socioeconomic conditions had more negatively valenced words, providing support for the Environmental Security Hypothesis. However, the use of chart data alone cannot speak to what individuals are listening to against the backdrop of COVID-19. The present mixed-methods case study examined a crowdsourced playlist (n = 55 songs) created by Australian residents during an extended lockdown in September-October 2021. Qualitative analysis of the lyrics demonstrated that the selected music expresses a closeness to others, references to the current situation (such as illness and staying at home), negative emotions (including confusion and fear), a positive outlook (expressing perseverance and a will to survive), and a changing sense of time. Quantitative analyses compared the "pandemic playlist" songs to charting songs during the first six months of the pandemic in 2020 and the same period in 2021 (n = 28 and 26 songs, respectively) with regard to their musical features (using scraped Spotify API data) and lyrical content (using Diction). The findings indicated that the songs included in the "pandemic playlist" differed significantly from the charting songs in 2020 and 2021 by being higher in energy (relative to 2020 and 2021) and less acoustic (relative to 2021). Additionally, the lyrics of the "pandemic playlist" songs had significantly more positively valenced words. These differences suggest that people believed music selected in response to the pandemic ought to be upbeat and realistic (playlist suggestions), but popular songs were relatively pensive and reflected uncertainty and isolation (chart data). These findings broaden our understanding of music listening behaviors in response to societal stress.

The Journal of Humanistic Education and Development, 1997

The lyrics of the 25 most popular songs in America for each of 4 decades (the 1950s. 1960s. 1970s. and 1980s) were content analyzed for value themes. Using ethnographic content analysis, 9 value themes or messages were extracted from the 100 songs. The most frequently occurring theme related to romantic love. Implications for counseling are discussed. Rock 'n' roll (a term inspired by the sexual metaphor heard frequently in pre-rock blues lyrics) became a symbol of unrest and rebellion for adolescents during the 1950s (Hopkins, 1970). That legacy continues today (Barnard, 1986; Lull, 1985; Rouner, 1990, Toohey, 1982). According to Hebdige (1979), rock, and related popular music, has always promoted values and perspectives found outside of the mainstream of adult society. The lyrics of these songs speak mainly to the concerns, frustrations, and dreams of teenagers (

This collection of eleven essays offers an assortment of approaches to popular music analysis and addresses some controversial issues within the growing field: the value, goals, and appropriate contexts and methods of analyzing popular music, what constitutes a musical text-explored earlier by Allan F. Moore in Rock: the Primary Text-and the construction of musical meanings. 1 Building on Richard Middleton's Studying Popular Music, 2 the book is a coherent collection of essays concerning ways of interpreting music, interspersed with sample analyses that take into account the larger social, cultural, and historical contexts of the works considered. A wide variety of musical genres and styles are discussed: pop, rock, R&B, soul, rap, house, television and film soundtracks, and to a lesser extent, country, smooth jazz, and metal. Most of the songs considered were recorded in the last four decades of the twentieth century, with the majority dating from either the 1970s or the 1990s.

Symbolic Interaction, 2006

American Behavioral Scientist, 2005

This is the intro for a special issue that I edited for American Behavioral Scientist (Volume 48 / Issue 11). It featured contributed articles by Scott Appelrouth, Willian F. Danaher, Joseph A. Kotarba, Paul Lopes, Jan Marontate, Vaughn Schmutz, Erin Trapp, and Jean Van Delinder.

European Journal of Education Studies, 2020

While the intimate connection between music and emotion has been variously studied, the focus has predominantly been on Western classical music. Different musical features have often been linked to particular emotions (e.g. Major mode = happy, Minor mode = sad). Comparably fewer studies have investigated the link between Popular Musical forms and the expression of emotion focusing on distinctive features. In this paper, we examine the nature of expressiveness in highlife music in relation to how listeners consciously use it for emotional reasons. We look at the place of lyrics as against other distinctive musical features in the identification of the two commonest basic emotions (happiness and sadness). Analysis of the data reveals that whereas specific musical features in highlife may play a role in the communication of happy and sad emotions, the greater emphasis lies in the lyrics. Article visualizations: