![]() If you live in a repressive society, songs about lovers making suicide pacts provide a cathartic release. They didn’t take my advice-they preferred tyrannically disciplined music for their tyrannically discipline society- but I believe my view is psychologically sound. ![]() I suggested that characters in a repressive, overbearing culture would probably listen to songs about deadly love affairs. (I have some theories why that might be the case, but this isn’t the place to share them.) Curiously enough, Japan-Germany’s strident ally in World War II-also has a historical fascination with dark impulses and suicide in its popular culture.Ī few years ago, people working on a very successful dystopian TV show asked my advice about the songs in the soundtrack. I note that newspapers in Nazi Germany frequently reported on the suicides of unhappy lovers-reading about these deaths was, for whatever reason, of great interest to the rank-and-file citizens of that regime. When I researched the history of suicidal love songs, I reached the conclusion that conformist or authoritarian societies are especially fascinated by these stories. That’s true whether you’re looking at the rocket’s red glare or simply announcing that “We are the champions” or “We will rock you” or “We’re not going to take it.” Instead of declaring a nation’s independence, she is asserting her own. That’s what you do with an anthem-you tell the world who you are and what you stand for.īut anthems also convey a sense that you’re embattled and surrounded by enemies on all sides. Swift is just presenting a different kind of anthem. People are already familiar with declamatory anthems in such settings. I suspect that this harmonic structure explains Taylor Swift’s effectiveness in those huge sports stadiums. Just try rapping over a 12 bar blues pattern by comparison, and you will see why the newer approach is more hip-hop friendly.) (That’s also why these four-chord patterns are so suitable for hip-hop. It typically gives a song the quality of an anthem-those vamps provide a harmonic support for assertion, not resolution. The emotional temperament of this static and repetitive approach is intriguing. You can hear the future in hit songs long before any campaign slogan grasps the new reality. (For more on this, see my “15 Observations on the Emerging Vertical Dimension of Cultural Conflict.” ) But the hot cultural tone is larger than any political agenda, and cuts across party lines. The experts try to analyze this in terms of politics-because they analyze everything in terms of politics nowadays. That unprecedented event could not have happened if the prevailing ethos wasn’t predisposed to hot (not cool) and down (not up). Pundits trying to make sense of Oliver Anthony-who went from an unsigned artist living in a trailer to a hitmaker with a number one song over the course of a few days-may want to probe these larger cultural shifts. And the end result is the same: gloomy songs with harsh lyrics. But those two forces are, of course, interconnected. ![]() My view is that the root causes here are more societal and cultural, and less built on individual personality traits. “The recent songs are about what the individual wants, and how she or he has been disappointed or wronged.” “In the early ’80s lyrics, love was easy and positive, and about two people,” notes psychologist Jean Twenge. Some have suggested that this change is due to a rise in narcissism. Love still conquers hate-but just barely. ![]() (By the way, I highly recommend Chris’s Substack Can’t Get Much Higher. My favorite guru of music data analytics, Chris Dalla Riva, has sent me this chart showing the increasing share of Billboard #1 hits in a minor key. Around 85% of songs were in a major key back in the 1960s, but in more recent years this has fallen in half. This rise in minor key songs has been dramatic. It doesn’t help that handheld devices, earbuds, and other pervasive technologies have turned music into something consumed alone, not communally as it was in past.Īnother telltale sign of sad songs is the minor key. The slow tune is no longer dreamy music for couples, but sad, lonely music for the isolated and depressed. ![]() But the average tempo of a hit song has been getting slower since the dawn of the new millennium, but slow dancing has almost disappeared. Not long ago, this tempo was a rarity on the Billboard chart-and when you did hear a slow song it was usually a romantic love ballad for slow dancing. “It tends to be fairly slow, often between about 60 to 70 beats per minute-like a relaxed heartbeat.” “The most obvious feature of a sad song is the tempo,” explains music psychologist Michael Bonshor. So what songs do sad teens want to hear during a bummer summer? ![]()
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