Posted on 02/19/2020 12:27:56 PM PST by C19fan
Are popular songs today happier or sadder than they were 50 years ago? In recent years, the availability of large digital datasets online and the relative ease of processing them means that we can now give precise and informed answers to questions such as this. A straightforward way to measure the emotional content of a text is just to count how many emotion words are present. How many times are negative-emotion words – ‘pain’, ‘hate’ or ‘sorrow’ – used? How many times are words associated with positive emotions – ‘love’, ‘joy’ or ‘happy’ – used? As simple as it sounds, this method works pretty well, given certain conditions (eg, the longer the available text is, the better the estimate of mood). This is a possible technique for what is called ‘sentiment analysis’. Sentiment analysis is often applied to social media posts, or contemporary political messages, but it can also be applied to longer timescales, such as decades of newspaper articles or centuries of literary works.
(Excerpt) Read more at aeon.co ...
Actually once Bill Hicks died, he ran out of material to steal.
Sinatra’s “Songs For Only The Lonely” and “No One Cares,” both masterpieces, were released in the 1950s.
Beck’s superb “Sea Change” was released in 2003.
Those are about as sad as you can get.
Teen Angel
The Rachmaninoff 2nd piano concerto spawned three songs: Full Moon & Empty Arms, I Think of you, and Eric Carmen’s plagiarized All By Myself. Quite a melodic piece.
Sad has always sold.
What is different and produced and bought now is anger and hate. Ignorant anger and hate, but anger and hate all the same.
Some of the old songs had sad content without sounding “sad”. Green Green Grass of Home (Tom Jones), MacArthur’s Park (Richard Harrison), Timothy (the Buoys), You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (Dusty Springfield), Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow (Shirelles), and many others.
Two of the Top songs of the 60s (as voted by Freepers) are “You’ve Lost the Lovin’ Feelin’) and “Sittin’ at the Dock of the Bay”. Pretty sad stuff. The ‘90s Grunge Music was pretty sad as well. The early ‘80s was mostly upbeat New Wave stuff. These things go in cycles.
Human secularism is a dreary path
A Boy Named Sue...Happy or Sad??
Happy, his father did what he had to do to make sure his son could stand up for himself.
“Timothy”..the only pop song about cannibalism...or did they eat the ship’s dog? (Now we know what happened to “Shannon”!)
I thought that whiny self pity garbage started with the grunge era?
Rupert Holmes wrote that. You may know him better from his other song, "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)"
One Is The Lonliest Number
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