Posted on 02/19/2020 12:27:56 PM PST by C19fan
Are popular songs today happier or sadder than they were 50 years ago? In recent years, the availability of large digital datasets online and the relative ease of processing them means that we can now give precise and informed answers to questions such as this. A straightforward way to measure the emotional content of a text is just to count how many emotion words are present. How many times are negative-emotion words – ‘pain’, ‘hate’ or ‘sorrow’ – used? How many times are words associated with positive emotions – ‘love’, ‘joy’ or ‘happy’ – used? As simple as it sounds, this method works pretty well, given certain conditions (eg, the longer the available text is, the better the estimate of mood). This is a possible technique for what is called ‘sentiment analysis’. Sentiment analysis is often applied to social media posts, or contemporary political messages, but it can also be applied to longer timescales, such as decades of newspaper articles or centuries of literary works.
(Excerpt) Read more at aeon.co ...
Cause sad songs say so much.
Being a Generation Xer, two of my favorite sad songs are Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” and The Motels “Only the Lonely”. Of course loved Carmen “stealing” the melody from Rachmaninoff and he wrote a Rachmaninoff like instrumental middle section in the long version of the song.
Manilow basically did the same thing on "Could This Be the Magic?" which he lifted from Chopin.
“Why are pop songs getting sadder than they used to be?”
A hot Climate Emergency?
Popular songs for me today are 30 to 50 years old. It all depends whose definition of popular and what you consider a song. Synthesized voices, rap, hip hop and other trash don’t even qualify as music.
Doomers.
There are only a finite number of [western music] notes?
I suppose most transgendered Starbucks baristas with $90K in student debt who are hooked on heroin and concerned the planet won’t be able to support life in twelve years don’t have a heck of a lot to be cheery about.
What could possibly be sadder than any Morrissey song?
Hm, my old boss said I have hang-ups. I wonder if that's an example of what she meant.
Popular songs for me today are 30 to 50 years old. It all depends whose definition of popular and what you consider a song. Synthesized voices, rap, hip hop and other trash don’t even qualify as music.”
Agreed.
The 1970s had songs that could make you hang yourself if rope was near in an instant.
Seasons in the Sun. Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word, At 17, Cats in the Cradle, Send in the Clowns, Wish You Were Here...
Just Brutal.
My personal all-time favorite is the Alan Parsons Project’s “Silence and I”. Andrew Powell’s orchestration is just fantastic.
The ultimate has to be Nilsson’s “Without You”, of course knowing the fact the writers of the song (Pete Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger) ultimately wound up hanging themselves.
Cause sad songs say so much.
....clever my brother Daniel. ...
I live in the musical past so I wouldn’t know. All I do know is that much of what I hear sucks. The new stuff I hear on the Underground Garage kicks as much ass as any rock and roll ever did and it’s sure as hell not “sad”. Who’s got time for that?
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