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 ...
Average age on here is 50s doo-wop... What Pop music...?
The antidote from Otis Redding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTVjnBo96Ug
How about “He Stopped Loving Her Today”.
“Rock n Roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.”
Like that one, too. O, my gosh, what about For the Good Times?
We might mention "Patches" (not the Clarence Carter song, the Dickey Lee song), "Ode to Billie Joe" by Bobbie Gentry or "Sukiyaki" (Ue o Muite Arukou) by Kyu Sakamoto which were dark in the 1960's but by-and-large I agree that modern songs are darker on average.
LOL, that’s why they say when you play a country song backwards,
You get your house back
You get your dog back
You get your best friend Jack back
You get your truck back
I like the song but never listened to the words closely.
I will listen with the lyrics on screen.
I am sorry they bring back painful memories but I am glad that you can still listen to the song and like it.
I got one of those from a break up with a fiance.
Big difference is it hasn’t bothered me for maybe 10 years now.
That particular girl wasn’t worth it :)
One Day at a Time...
Moody River, your muddy water
took my baby’s life.
Pat Boone
Most songs today do not have enough content to be sad. Go back to 60s/70s... Ugh. To start, almost any song from The Carpenters, Bread... for specific songs:
“That’s the way I always heard it should be” Carly Simon
“Send in the Clowns” Judy Collins
Oh and, of course:
“I don’t like Mondays” Boomtown Rats
80s picked up quite a bit thanks to the synthesizer but a couple were out there:
“Dancing with Tears in my eyes” Ultravox
“Think of Laura” Christoper Cross
“Tears in Heaven”, now there’s one.
Feathered Hair , platform Shoes - and easy women.. What a time to party!!
The Real-Life story of The Cowsills was anything but happy.
One of my all-time favorite bands The Smithereens (RIP Pat!), had a bunch of ‘em.... Especially “In a Lonely Place” which featured a then unknown Suzanne Vega, great song!
Heh. Sounds about right.
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