Abstract
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 for potentially confounding influence of temporal autocorrelation. Finally, simpler songs entering the charts were more successful, reaching higher chart positions, especially in years when more novel songs were produced. The present results suggest that cultural transmission depends on the amount of novel choices in the information landscape.
Highlights
Music is a human universal [1, 2], and it is known to influence cognition, affect, and behavior [3,4,5]
We gathered cross-temporal data covering a period of six decades (1958–2016) on lyrical compressibility, amount of novel songs produced, and ecological, socioecological, and cultural variables linked to patterns of cultural change in previous research or plausibly related to trends in aesthetic content
We explore the possible impact of other socioecological factors that might plausibly affect lyrical simplicity
Summary
Music is a human universal [1, 2], and it is known to influence cognition, affect, and behavior [3,4,5]. Because songs—and popular song lyrics—can be so rich in meaning [6, 7], social scientists have long explored the ways that such lyrics intersect with some fundamental social processes, including identity formation and person perception [8,9,10,11,12,13]. Social psychologists have begun to view music as a cultural product and to examine the ways that popular music lyrics reflect important aspects of psychology at the cultural level; the content in popular lyrics indexes changing norms, affect, and/or values [5, 14,15,16,17,18,19]. DeWall and colleagues explored popular song lyrics as a “window into.
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