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A six-decade study of pop lyrics finds care and decency fading, harm and contempt rising. The charts may be telling us less about music than about ourselves.
The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good.
Luke 6:45
THE CHARTS HAVE A FEVER, and last week somebody finally took the temperature.
A study out of Queen Mary University of London, published on the twenty-fourth of June, fed some 380,000 songs into a machine built to sniff out the moral weather of a lyric, and what it turned up was a slow, six-decade tilt. The words for kindness, for looking after your neighbor, for plain decency got thin.
The words for cruelty, for cheating, for the curled lip and the cold shoulder crept up. Sixty years of the top of the pops, and the needle drifted from please toward get lost.
You can hear the sermon this wants to become: music got worse, kids these days, the whole world going to the dogs, and it left the music streaming on to keep them company.
It is a satisfying little sermon, and it is mostly bunk. Because the honest reading is slower than that, and a good deal less fun at the party. The charts are not a chest X-ray of the human soul. The genres that rule them have changed out of all recognition since 1960 — the crooner in his dinner jacket gave way to the kid with the drum machine — and anybody who thinks the past was innocent has never listened hard to what the past was actually singing.
Nostalgia is a liar with a lovely voice.
And yet. Set the whole clever study down for a second, and an old line from Jesus goes right on humming underneath it. Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. A hit is a whole culture talking in its sleep — saying out loud, to a beat catchy enough to sell, the thing it already half believes and is a little ashamed to admit at dinner. The song is the confession. The chorus is the part where we all join in.
But a song is a two-way street, and this is the part the headlines miss. It comes out of a heart, yes. It also goes back into one. What a people sings is partly a confession of what it loves and partly a rehearsal of what it is busy becoming, the way you practice a scale until your fingers find it in the dark. And what goes for a whole jittery civilization goes, God help us, for the ten sad songs on your own repeat.
So the real question was never whether the charts got meaner. That one's for the sociologists, and they can have it. The question is closer to the bone than that, and it has your name on it. What have you had on a loop lately — in the earbuds, in the car, in the tape deck of the skull that plays whether you cue it up or not? What line have you sung to yourself so many times that you've quietly started to believe it? And when you finally hear the words coming out of your own mouth, is that the person you meant to practice into being?
"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable — if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Philippians 4:8).
Or, if you'd rather: play those.