New study. Today's songs are sad.

[tippy5]

https://psychcentral.com/news/2019/0...ul/142306.html

Interesting analysis of listener changes.
Brought about by listeners preferences to experience, not necessarily what the artists dictated/made.

No wonder why we like acoustics!

[GHS]

They're right, so much either angry or depressing music. Makes me want to put on my old Turtles and Monkeys albums and smile again!!! " C'mon down to my boat baby" we'll be "Happy Together", even on "Rainy Days"..

[Riverwolf]

If it wasn't for sad songs we would not have much to learn.
Amazes me that folks think songs like Wild Horses, Wish You Were Here,
and even You are my Sunshine are love songs...
Listen to the lyrics...

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by tippy5

No wonder why we like acoustics!

Methinks "acoustics" have nothing to do with lyrics being sad,angry, or joyful

Originally Posted by Riverwolf

If it wasn't for sad songs we would not have much to learn.
Amazes me that folks think songs like Wild Horses, Wish You Were Here,
and even You are my Sunshine are love songs...
Listen to the lyrics...

Yes and sad and angry songs have been around for centuries
But the study was conducted using word recognition (most likely computer) so in this instance, I don't think what "folks think" have much to do it.

Personally, (if) this trend of accurate,( given one study does not a trend make) in listening and music, is not all that surprising, as I think our society in general has accepted that angry, arrogant, and dismissive has now become the new PC, and as Bruce Hornsby put it " Just the way it is" but for me, the subsequent line tells the bigger truth "Ah but don't you believe it"

[Johnny K]

"The analysis also revealed some variations: Songs released in the three years of 1982-1984 were less angry compared to any other period, except for the 1950s."

Must be the Synth Pop years. Maybe hair metal was strong too?

I read the article and I am not surprised by any of it's finding, especially the 90's, which had a ton of great music.

I'm not sure why music should be any different than the rest of the arts. Art reflects life and life is mostly a grind.

[Earl49]

My wife and I have a running joke. With most singer-songwriters we hear, we often look at each other and ask. "Did you bring any cheese to go with that whine?"

[Nyghthawk]

Sad songs are nothing new. Read the lyrics to Greensleeves. How about Danny Boy? Streets of Laredo? Red River Valley? Green Grow the Rushes? The Highwayman? The list is all but endless. Happy songs are harder to come by even historically speaking.

[Riverwolf]

Originally Posted by KevWind

...as I think our society in general has accepted that angry, arrogant, and dismissive has now become the new PC...

Me too.
I had recently started a thread about why people don't smile much anymore.
Some folks just like being sad and/or mad.

[mdhttr]

My long-time guitar-playing buddy and I have a habit of doing exaggerated fake cries after we finish a song. We play a lot of old bluegrass and country tunes, so sometimes it seems like they're all that way.

Of course, there's the old joke about what happens when you play a country song backwards (this would be on an old school LP turntable for anyone who finds that statement confusing). You get your wife back, your truck back, your job back, your dog back, etc.

[chistrummer]

Originally Posted by GHS

They're right, so much either angry or depressing music. Makes me want to put on my old Turtles and Monkeys albums and smile again!!! " C'mon down to my boat baby" we'll be "Happy Together", even on "Rainy Days"..

Plenty of angry music back in the 60's.

[H165]

My wife and I have a running joke. With most singer-songwriters we hear, we often look at each other and ask. "Did you bring any cheese to go with that whine?

My wife and I have a playlist titled: "Depressing Songs By Women" which we started as a joke about 20 years ago. It has become huge. Alison Krause expanded it quite a bit.

Of course the other Krause, Allison, has the top spot in the list "Depressing Songs About Women".

[Martie]

This is so true! I was listening to the Phoebe Bridgers album last week and, beautiful as it is, it depressed the heck out of me. Lovely songs and melodies etc., but the closer I listened, she was talking about being a killer, stabbing someone, suicide, being 'blue' all the time, funerals and all kinds of misery inducing shenanigans. It's still a beautiful album (kind of), but it's typical of a generation who don't seem to know who or what they are anymore(for reasons beyond the scope of this forum!). And yes, songs have always been a great place to express all manner of feelings and emotions, but there's also a distinct lack of humour balancing things out these days. Very sad...literally.

[Bob Womack]

My best high school friend and I had a category in 1974 we called "suicide folk." I think the last album we consigned to that bin was the Pousette-Dart Band, before we went opposite ways in life. But looking back, the tone of the stuff was still pretty uplifting.



Bottom line seems to be that fifty years of social experimentation have led society down a depressing path.



Bob

[muscmp]

Originally Posted by Earl49

My wife and I have a running joke. With most singer-songwriters we hear, we often look at each other and ask. "Did you bring any cheese to go with that whine?"

that's funny earl! i pretty much feel the same. altho, sometimes i have to wonder about the angst.

play music!

[Steve DeRosa]

Originally Posted by Johnny K

...Songs released in the three years of 1982-1984 were less angry compared to any other period, except for the 1950s...

Originally Posted by Earl49

My wife and I have a running joke. With most singer-songwriters we hear, we often look at each other and ask, "Did you bring any cheese to go with that whine?"

Originally Posted by KevWind

...I think our society in general has accepted that angry, arrogant, and dismissive has now become the new PC...

'Taint exactly new, Kev; except for a fleeting respite or two it's been going on since the mid-60's - and I think we can both recall the dramatic change at that time, if an artist's music wasn't sufficiently "heavy" or "making a statement" they were dismissed by the "critics" as irrelevant. Took quite a few years, before folks began to wake up and realized that some very talented people were marginalized as a result...

When I was a classroom teacher I used to play for my kids on a regular basis - mostly traditional material to supplement Reading or Social Studies lessons, but also a healthy helping of the pre-1967 R&R/R&B I grew up with; unsolicited comments included "How come they don't make music like that any more?" "Gee, Mr. D., it must have been really cool when you were growing up (duh, yeah...)" "Why does all the music sound so angry now?" and the like. Keep in mind that these are 9-11 year-olds we're talking about here - and my classroom career extended over 30+ years, so we're also talking about two generations of students...

Originally Posted by muscmp

...sometimes i have to wonder about the angst..

In the apartment building next to the one where I grew up there was a thirtyish couple, both afflicted with multiple sclerosis: the wife was confined to a wheelchair while her husband - who only had full use of the left side of his body - held a full-time job (traveled back and forth on the NYC subways in those pre-ADA days), attended to her (extensive and often highly-personal) physical needs, and would wheel her to the local outdoor restaurant every Saturday night (weather permitting) for their weekly "date"; in spite of their very real and ever-mounting challenges (she passed away before her thirty-fifth birthday, he eventually became wheelchair-bound and passed at age 42) I have never met a more hopeful, more upbeat, more mutually-loving couple in my life. There's a wise old proverb by a wise old man, that states "as a man thinks in his heart, so is he" - and other than the self-generated difficulties caused by a life of post-success consumption, I can't think of a single so-called "generational spokesperson/prophet" of the last 50-odd years who can lay claim to encountering (much less overcoming) comparable hardships. In a nutshell (and paraphrasing Earl), quit your whining and buck up: you're welcome to your stage and your opinion, but the world doesn't revolve around your 24K solid-gold posterior - we all know you're in it for the money, so don't look to drag us down with you...

Frankly, I believe there's a ready multi-generational audience for some new non-novelty, artistically-worthwhile music-just-for-music's-sake; unfortunately, just as Prokofiev stated in response to the atonal trend in 20th-century "serious" music, "there are still so many beautiful things to be said in C Major," it's going to require deprogramming three generations' worth of conditioning for the greater public to accept that not everything need be a total downer - that music can be both valid and fun, without resorting to the snide and/or off-color commentary that too many coffeehouse wannabes equate with "humor"...

For the singer/songwriters here on the AGF - anyone up to the challenge...?