Here’s another look at the changing lyrical content of popular music. Is it really getting dumber?

Over the last decade or so, there’s been a number of studies into the lyrical content of popular music with most of them postulating that things are getting dumber (here’s an example.) But now there’s a study that points to the contrary.

Crosswords.tips (you can probably guess what they do) analyzed the lyrical content of more than 5,000 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart since 1970. The goal was to see how the language used in the lyrics of popular music has evolved over the last five decades.

Here are some highlights. I quote from their press release:

• 2023 was the year with the most diverse lyrics, with Billboard 100 artists using 185 unique words per 1,000.
• Pop music is getting sadder: there was a 35.4% probability of a song being “negative” in the 1970s, rising to 48.1% in the 2020s — and peaking at 52.6% in 2019.
• T-Wayne’s “Nasty Freestyle” (2015) is the most lyrically diverse hit of the 21st century, with 81.52% of the words only used once.
• Pop music contains 4117% more profanity in the 2020s than in the 1970s, rising from an average of 0.6 to 25.3 profane words per 100.

The study comes with some nifty stat tables.