I don’t know… I’m not sure I agree or at least I’m not fully convinced. I think more likely, pop has always been aimed at the largest audience, and hence has been less complicated lyrically than other forms of music… I think the division is between people who make music as a form of art (yourself and many others) and those that make it as a commodity (qualified with the notion that the division isn’t as neat as people like to make out). So, coming back might be part of it, but it could just be that there is a lot more commercial pop vs. other kinds of music out there, if that makes sense?
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It’s not just pop though. It crosses genes. Folk, Rap, rock, country. Popular music has to have broad appeal that people relate to but how they relate does change in terms of averages I think. Leonard Cohen style lyrics, for instance, currently do not currently have broad popular support to the extent that they did in the time of youthful Boomers. It’s like how irregular rhythm guitarcentric prog will never be as broadly popular as Michael Jackson for honestly solid reasons, but it’s also true that in the 70s pop and radio music was more interested in that kind of prog than it is now and thus more people were exposed to it that way and some even grew to like what they might not otherwise have liked.
I’m just saying on the music-maker side of things the resistance to this approach to songwriting is very real and very standardized outside of music cultures who deliberately value this aesthetic against the current norms. It’s fine really. As an artist if you choose to be hard-headed and make stuff people don’t like as much then that’s on you. But ime the current reality is still that most people just don’t like to think sit and too much when they listen to music and subcultures of music that are geared to that don’t get much exposure outside of their little echo chambers.
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Yeah, when I’m saying pop, I don’t mean necessarily as a genre, but more as a mode of production, if that makes sense?
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I think it’s been all downhill for lyricism since they decided fol de dol, mush a ring doma doo dom a da, diddley eye de dee, weren’t cool any more.
I mean for sure hip hop is getting less wordy and slam poetry like but for a while some of the most popular music was all about poetry.
Big step up from how much is that doggy in the window and bicycle made for two (thank you Max Matthews!)
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I’m guessing the Danelectro featured here?
It is indeed sexy and I must show it to my daughter playing bass downstairs (you can borrow a bass and amp from the library here!), though watching them really makes my Fender Jaguar itch get angry again (not only the quintessential surf guitar but Kevin Shields’s and J Mascis’s too).
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Just showed that video to my daughter and she told me “that’s a Jazzmaster daddy, not a Jaguar”.
I feel successful at parenting.
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I disagree actually though with this part specifically. There are more types of music being made by more people and they are more available to other people than at any other point in human history.
Pop pop (as in like million-dollar stuff made by A list celebs) is more complicated and musically intelligent too. And honestly, though I don’t know it to be true, I do believe it likely has a broader range of lyrical topics than in the past. People are simply freer to sing about more things than they were in the past.
But on the whole I still think the trend for 40 years in music has been specifically and intentionally antagonistic towards lyricism with a few pretentious and begrudging exceptions made for an occasional consciousness rapper or old-school rocker like Steven Wilson when they pull enough of an audience despite cultural norms. Having actually had it explained to me over and over again for the majority of my adult life has made it clear that for a very long time (since before I was born actually) people mostly have really sincerely wanted this kind of music to die and be forgotten about entirely. And… I believe this effort has mostly worked largely because lyricism often detracts from other music/dance experiences and so would never have been as broadly popular in the first place outside of 60’s protest culture, which was a rediscovery of 30’s protest culture so far as I can tell.
The antipathy is real. It’s like a social contagion, something to be ashamed of, a punchline. So long as that is the dominant cultural vibe among musicians and music-fans then music will continue on a trajectory that minimizes lyrics and things that diverge from that vibe will continue to be unpopular, niche, and generally derided.
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Sure… I’m just noting that there is more than one definition pop, and that it can also mean produced in a particular way?
Sure, I totally agree with that. But since it’s often consumed by girls and women, it often gets a bad rap…
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Classic…
They were babies… 
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Finland has a long and prestigious history of music education. Not surprising to me at all.
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I actually have a vivid memory of his death. It still makes me incredibly sad, maybe more sad than John Lennon’s death because it was Gaye’s father who pulled the trigger.
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I’ve listened to this song so much in the past few weeks and I’ve yet to grow tired of it.
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Oh god, the sand in her braids!
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I am late to the discussion on the complexity of song lyrics of newer music, but I found this video to be…how do I put this?..a little biased? I like Rick Beato a lot, but when he does a video about how today’s music sucks, he engages in some selection bias. He compares some new songs currently popular on Spotify to one of the Beatles greatest songs. And he does this sort of thing a lot in his “Today’s music is awful” videos, which I think he makes too often. He’ll compare some random song that’s popular right now to a pop song from the 60s-90s, but that we still remember. You can find songs that were popular back then for a week or a month that have been lost to history because people realized they sucked. Some popular music has always sucked. Eventually, we forget about those songs. The ones we remember are the good ones. Selection bias. And honestly, there are some songs that have survived that don’t suck that have really simple lyrics. And you mentioned War Pigs earlier. In this video, Beato complains about one of these new songs rhyming a word with itself. War Pigs does that in the opening verse, and most people agree it’s one of the greatest anti-war protest songs ever. But it literally rhymes masses with masses.
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Oh, I’m about to be eviscerated, but….he uses Beatles’ songs as examples of well-written lyrics? As opposed to — waves hands wildly — millions of other examples from the same era?
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