How Pop Music Became Simpler, Darker, and More Self-Centered

Popular music is one way a culture expresses its values and rehearses its moral vocabulary. By looking at song lyrics from a particular time and place, we can get a glimpse of what was circulating through the cultural mindset at that time.

What does today’s popular music say about us?

Even if you don’t like listening to it, it’s still bound to reach you one way or another: through a car radio, in a store, at a party, or in a clip you find on social media. We can’t avoid pop culture entirely because it’s something we all swim in.

Lyrics Have Become Darker

A new study published in Scientific Reports analyzed song lyrics across several decades using two datasets: 377,812 songs from WASABI, a large database of commercial music, with songs in the study covering 1960-2010, and 5,580 Billboard Year-End Hot 100 songs from 1960-2023. The researchers used language-processing models to score lyrics according to ten categories from Moral Foundations Theory: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Purity/Degradation.

Over five decades, popular lyrics shifted toward darker moral expression. One of the clearest changes was that songs expressing Care declined while songs expressing Harm increased, especially after the 1970s. Moral ‘vice’ categories such as Degradation, Harm, Cheating, and Subversion showed some of the biggest increases, while Care, Loyalty, and Purity declined.

This doesn’t mean music is making people less moral. Lyrics can be complicated: anger, sadness, and fear in a song aren’t always a celebration; sometimes they are a description, a confession, or a way of channeling difficult emotions. Art often explores themes of harm, betrayal, lust, rebellion, and despair because those are part of human life, not necessarily because it’s promoting those values.

But patterns still matter. And what does this change say about the emotional atmosphere of modern culture?

Lyrics Have Become More Self-Centered

Another recent study published in PLOS ONE analyzed the top 10 songs each year from 1970-2019 across the United States, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong. The researchers found that first-person singular pronouns such as “I,” “me,” and “myself” increased significantly in the United States and Germany, but not in Japan or Hong Kong. The rise of self-focused lyrics appears strongest in more individualistic societies, which may reflect a broader pattern of social atomization.

First-person expression doesn’t automatically mean selfish or narcissistic; great art can be deeply personal and confessional, while still expressing bigger truths. But across decades of popular music, the rise of “I-language” matters. It suggests a cultural shift where the self becomes louder, more central, and more dominant. Part of this trend may trace back to the countercultural movement of the 1960s, which helped turn unfiltered self-expression into a sacred cultural value.

Lyrics Have Become Simpler and More Repetitive

In addition to modern lyrics becoming darker and more self-centered, they’ve also become simpler and more repetitive.

One 2024 study published in Scientific Reports analyzed 353,320 English-language song lyrics from 1970-2020 across five major genres: rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock. The researchers found that lyrics have generally become less complex over time, including lower vocabulary richness, easier readability, and more repeated lines.

Repeated line ratio increased over time across all five genres, with the strongest increase in rap and the weakest in country. The study also found that choruses made up a larger share of song structure over time, so lyrics have increasingly shifted toward more repeated hooks.

This fits a general cultural drift away from complexity, sustained attention, and richer forms of language. It’s also another symptom of an increasingly shallow culture that often rewards what is quick, catchy, repetitive, and easy to consume.

Conclusion

Taken together, these findings suggest a broader cultural shift: popular music has become more centered on the isolated self, darker in moral tone, and more repetitive in form. This doesn’t prove that our culture is failing, but it does tell us what we keep hearing, what we keep rewarding, and what we are slowly learning to accept as normal.

It’s unclear how much of this cultural shift is bottom-up versus top-down. Popular music often needs to be filtered through producers, record labels, streaming platforms, playlist curators, and algorithms before it ever reaches our ears. Does this shift in modern lyrics reflect changing preferences or has it been used to change our preferences? At this point, it may just be a feedback loop.

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