How Music Has Changed

If you’re like me and you lament the decline in the quality of popular music since the days when you were a teenager, there’s actually some new research indicating that your lament is not simply based on your personal listening preferences. Rather, there has been a change in popular music that’s not something we should be celebrating. Europeon researchers recently took on the task of analyzing the words in more than twelve thousand English language songs from the years 1980 to 2020, all from a variety of genres including pop, R and B, country, rap and rock. What did they discover? Not only are songs becoming simpler and more repetitive in their construction, but there has been a decrease in positive messages, and an increase in lyrics that are self-centered, angry, and sad. Here at CPYU we say that music is both a map and a mirror. As a mirror, it tells us what’s happening in the lives of our kids. As a map, it tells them how to live. Once again, we learn that our kids need the hope of the Gospel.