How Popular Music’s Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy Article

I have not nor does the article suggest that you are dumb. The reply you replied to in this post was a reply to someone else's post.

If you want to understand my comments, try to watch this three times in a row:

<== Do Not Watch this without an aluminum hat!

However, I hope you are at least using a VPN to connect to the Internet, otherwise they will find you...

[If you haven't read some of the articles about Anonymous lately you may not realize that the comment above is a joke.]

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...s-gotten-less-sophisticated-over-time/381410/

Now, I am in no way trying to make this political (I like this place because I don't have to deal with that too much), just trying to show that what we see in pop culture and music is reflected in other places. The article link shows the decline in content of presidential speeches. But the decline in the content of presidential speeches has been going on since the 19th century. I don't think anyone is going to argue that the decline in our culture has been going on that long but the decline in speech content has. The writer of the article argues, basically, as the president reaches a wider audience his speeches are dominated by the lowest common denominator. Democratization leads to "dumber" speeches to reach a wider audience. Same thing happens with those that bash the education system based on test scores declining since the 60s and also comparing those test score to other developed nations. Except we tested prep school students in the 60s, now we test everyone. The scores aren't comparable without significant adjustment. Compared to much of the rest of the world we educate a wider swath of the population longer and don't just stick kids in trade schools where they are left out of the college prep education process and testing.

So, to bring this around to the topic at hand, while it feels we are declining, is it possible that music is just reaching a wider audience now than ever before so necessarily, just like presidential speeches, the lowest common denominator comes into play? Educated music exists for the same educated group, there are just more people listening to more music. And also, we have to take into account who is buying music (country fans and adolescent girls) versus who is just stealing it. That will also skew what gets produced. So perhaps people are just as smart and educated, and dumb and uneducated, as they ever were, it's just we now have the ability to reach (and measure) further than we ever did before? I don't know if any one part counts for all of it, just saying it may not appear as bad as it seems at first glance.

 

If the subject is literacy I hope this post is not intended an example.

 

Even better choice. Full disclosure though, I'm no prog-head. I don't even like the word prog, or the term progressive as it applied to music, but it is what it is at this point. Sort of like 80's New Wave is still "new". Would a more progressive prog be called "post prog"?
Prog for me is hit and miss, and much of it an acquired taste. I may be acquiring more of a taste for it lately, but back in the day I listened to plenty of American party rock. For example, Boston's "Party" was none too deep, nor was "More than a Feeling" or "Don't Look Back".

 

My mistake- sorry to assume. I don't like the word Prog, but I have no problem w/ progressive. I used the term prog-head in jest (thus the looney icon), as Prog has a pretty negative connotation.

I don't know how you could be more progressive; either you're actively seeking to break barriers or you're not. To me post-prog sounds like new wave/punk, i.e. what came after progressive rock. Or maybe what progressive bands became once they stopped being progressive and started being self-referential; i.e. not breaking any new barriers just doing more of the same. For example, my fave band Yes stopped being progressive after Relayer- or w/ a stretch maybe after Going for the One, though I'd draw the line after Relayer.

I think Progressive rock is pretty hit and miss for most all of us who like it. I certainly don't like every progressive rock band, nor do I even like all the albums by those progressive bands I do like, even my fave band has some clunkers (though they came after their progressive era had ended).

 

Bingo.

I think the author of the study has found something. Using a small-but-not-too-small sample of songs, roughly balanced across genres, he's found that the "reading level" of pop music has declined between 2005 and 2014. The tool he's using, as far as I can tell, is a crude and incomplete measure of the sophistication of lyrics. I think it's too crude and incomplete a tool to draw any sort of broad, definitive conclusions from, but it's more information than absolutely nothing; maybe you can look at it alongside other data and get something more. He's also found that, according to the tool, the "reading level" of lyrics in country music is higher than that of hip-hop and R&B, but I wouldn't give any credence to that result, since the tool could easily be biased in favor of or against different genres. (The author himself describes how that bias could work in the text of his post.) The author is straightforward about the limitations of what he's doing, and seems to think of this sort of analysis more as "fun" than as anything else. (I know where he is coming from--I also think playing with data is fun.)

There's really no finding in the results of the study strong enough to support the assertions that the author of the piece in the original post is making.

 

since when were popular songs enjoyed or hated based on only lyrics? Isn't there also some MUSIC involved?

 

"...is not intended AS an example"

 

I've thought the culture in the USA has been going down the tubes for a long while.
If only George Carlin could have found those tubes, we could have plugged them.

at 2:34

 

I pretty much agree with most everything you wrote here.

I think a clearer picture of the dumbing-down as evidenced by language comes through movie dialogue. Watch any 1930s or 1940s movie and check the language. It might come as a shock.

 

Are Americans truly less competent now, than they used to be? Has anybody actually proven that?

Maybe we ought to begin properly, by confronting that premise. I'm not being negative about the article. It's a good article. It's just tricky, because it begins by asking the reader to accept it as a given, that idiocy is on the rise, and then continues with a "beacuse why" argument. But I can't accept that second statement without proof of the first.

In musical terms, let me put it this way. What if somebody here posted a thread titled "Bob Dylan was never highly regarded as an artist, because he couldn't sing." It's that kind of statement that sets up a false assumption, and people respond to the second premise without questioning the first.

 

Music is not intended to educate. It is often used to indoctrinate.
Intelligent people know not to get their education from radio, TV, or movies.
Sadly, a lot of people take all three media far too seriously.
People are moved by music, it is that simple. Some people listen to the words and take them seriously, often to the point of calling the songwriter a "genius" for pinching them in a soft spot.

My point being that the article is no doubt a fact, but no more so than it ever was.
It is just that in the past intelligent insightful lyrics that had something to say were revered, perhaps, as during the whole hippie and rock periods , too much so.
Now intelligent insightful lyrics are pushed to the bottom of the pile, and the music industry sees a whole lot more money in playing to the lowest common denominator.

I can't imagine having lyrics like "chew dabacka chew dabacka spit" be popular in the 60s.
Now it is a hit. That sort of tells me something about the direction society is taking.

Lyrics aren't necessarily getting dumbed down. People just are not going for the lyrics that are not and preferring the ones that are shallow and empty.
It is the music fans who have dumbed down, they decide what gets sold.

 

Around the time when Justin Bieber had his first hit, the music industry blog hypebot dot com held a competition for songwriters to write the most generic pop tune as market analysis had shown the more generic a song would be, the better it would perform in the marketplace a/k/a sell. Around the same time, they also reported on an algorithm that would permutate popular catch phrases with the goal of generating lyrics, and thus, they asked the songwriters to do a better job.

It should be fairly obvious that market analysis played a huge part in the perceived decline of charting songs' lyrics. If labelheads were lead more by their own instincts in their daily business practice than by mere statistics, that may not have happened. But for this, of course, you need to have such an instinct as a labelhead.

 

Not to get waaaay of topic, but about that movie dialogue -- the dumbing down is deliberate and being done for financial reasons.

Hollywood studios realized about 25 years ago there was a huge non-English speaking foreign market. So they made blockbusters less talky and made the talking they did have very simple, so they could be understood by those with a limited grasp of English.

There's probably a term for this in marketing but I don't know it. Anyway, it's an example of how the role of corporations in the global economy negatively affects entertainment.

 

Wasn't there a thread about this study just a few weeks ago? Maybe these should be merged.

Aren't movies always subtitled or dubbed?

 

Neil said it...

 

...and he said it again...

 

That is true. And it's not just the language, but also the subject matter/execution. Of course, there's always been movies just for entertainment sake, but Hollywood used to have a much larger percentage of movies that aspired towards art, i.e. depicting some aspects of the human condition in an attempt to enlighten and/or elucidate. Nor Hollywood seems much more focused on blockbusters, rom-com's and escapist type films. The thoughtful, artistic movies seem to come more from independents.

 

Actually, in science, things don't get proven. Studies are done that either support the hypothesis or not. If enough studies support something and few fail to support it, it becomes accepted as fact until/unless subsequent studies show something else. The problem w/ studying hypotheses that shed a negative light on our society- esp. the government- is who funds the vast majority of research?

While there are some studies that support the notion that our people are becoming less intelligent/competent, most of the evidence is anecdotal. But studies have shown that we read books much less than in the past. Studies have shown a shocking increase in illiteracy rates among high school graduates. There are many studies which illustrate the failures in our education system, all of which led to teacher accountability and mandated testing students. It's already been pointed out above how idiotic this is, leading to regurgitating facts becoming the focus as opposed to teaching critical thinking skills. I'd postulate that the fact our government came up with and mandated this program and the public accepted it as evidence of our intellectual decline.

There is no conclusive evidence that we are becoming less intelligent or less competent, but there's enough out there, combined with my own observations, that it's something I personally have come to believe. But it's far from being accepted as fact.

 

Good idea. Can you provide a link or the name of that thread? I'd like to check that out.

 

I remembered there were more posts in it (or was there a third thread?), but here it is anyway:
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/dumb-lyrics-literally.437050/
That one was about the study. This one is about an article that referenced the study. No need to merge I guess.

 

I don’t know, but listening to Progressive Rock lyrics does seem to have a certain impact on the brain’s speech and language processing regions.

 

Thanks.

 

Whachoo talkin bout Max?

 

Everything is Awesome.