Music and lyrics

As song writers adopt the “I, me and myself” philosophy in their songs, researchers track a trend of narcissim and hostility in popular music

A couple of years ago, as his fellow psychologists debated whether narcissism was increasing, Nathan DeWall heard Rivers Cuomo singing to a familiar 19th-century melody. Cuomo, the lead singer and guitarist for the rock band Weezer, billed the song as “Variations on a Shaker Hymn.”

Where 19th-century Shakers had sung “ ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,” Cuomo offered his own lyrics: “I’m the meanest in the place, step up, I’ll mess with your face.” Instead of the Shaker message of love and humility, Cuomo sang over and over, “I’m the greatest man that ever lived.”

 

The refrain got DeWall wondering: “Who would actually sing that aloud?” Cuomo may have been parodying the grandiosity of other singers — but then, why was there so much grandiosity to parody? Did the change from “Simple Gifts” to “Greatest Man That Ever Lived” exemplify a broader trend?

Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesised, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

“Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,” DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent the results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.

Defining the personality of a generation with song lyrics may seem a bit of a reach, but DeWall points to research done by his co-authors that showed people of the same age scoring higher in measures of narcissism on some personality tests. The new study of song lyrics certainly won’t end the debate, but it does offer another way to gauge self-absorption: the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The researchers find that hit songs in the ’80s were more likely to emphasise happy togetherness, like the racial harmony sought by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder in “Ebony and Ivory” and the group exuberance promoted by Kool & the Gang: “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.”

Today’s songs, according to the researchers’ linguistic analysis, are more likely be about one very special person: the singer. “I’m bringing sexy back,” Justin Timberlake proclaimed in 2006. The year before, Beyoncé exulted in how hot she looked while dancing — “It’s blazin’, you watch me in amazement.”

“In the early ’80s lyrics, love was easy and positive, and about two people,” saysTwenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University. “The recent songs are about what the individual wants, and how she or he has been disappointed or wronged.”

Of course, in an amateur nonscientific way, you can find anything you want in song lyrics from any era. Never let it be said that the Rolling Stones were soft and cuddly. In “Sympathy for the Devil”, the devil gets his due, and he gets to sing in the first person. In 1989, Bobby Brown bragged that “no one can tell me what to do” in his hit song about his awesomeness, “My Prerogative.”

Country singers have always had their moments of self-absorption and self-pity. But the classic somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs aren’t necessarily angry. When Hank Williams sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, he didn’t mention trashing his sweetheart’s car, as in “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood: “I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights.”

“The culture isn’t going to change wholesale overnight, and neither are song lyrics,” Twenge says. But she has some time-honored common-sense advice for people who want to change themselves and their relationships.

“As much as possible, take your ego out of the situation,” Twenge says. “This is very difficult to do, but the perspective you gain is amazing. Ask yourself, ‘How would I look at this situation if it wasn’t about me?’ Stop thinking about winning all the time. A sure sign something might not be the best value: Charlie Sheen talks about it a lot.”

©2011 The New York Times