Quote: (07-26-2015 05:25 PM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:
I think women's obsession with themselves and obliviousness to the outside world is being reflected in pop music as well.
Back in 2011, a news story made the rounds that said the lyrics in pop songs were getting more narcissistic, with "I" and "me" appearing more frequently than in generations past.
The story was based on a computer analysis that examined trends in hit songs. This wasn't broken down by gender, but I wonder if the rise in this kind of lyric isn't due to women's domination of the Top Ten in the past ten years.
I remember hearings songs like "Genie in the Bottle" and "If You Had My Love" back around 2000 and thinking the thrust of those lyrics was more narcissistic than almost anything I'd heard. This seems to have gotten worse when Taylor Swift arrived on the scene and ratcheted this up to a whole new level.
If this is the case, a pretty good argument could be made that women's inclusion in any given arts genre damages that genre because it makes its focus more insular and less outward looking. As much as the grandstanding of U2, Springsteen, and Sting annoyed me back in the old days, at least they looked at ideas, issues, and other people, not just themselves.
More people, means any one person risks having less importance in this world. Listen to modern R&B pop. R&B that once had lyrics of "love" are now flat out singing sentimentally "I'll fuck you all night long, better then the last guy you left me fore and I took you back from, bc I'm better at hitting that pussy." Literally, verbatim lyrics like that.
People are so worried about the "I" in music, that besides the guys writing the arrangements and playing the music, the cleverness required to convey that same message without outright saying it, has fled the industry. R&B, (Rap obviously), much of rock, and now country. I call it "sounds of music," and "Audible Marketing set to Music-like sounds." It's not music anymore, it's audible marketing.