The paper aims to explore the relationship between the evolution of popular music lyrics during the last 60 years and society’s moral values and sentiments that manifest through them. The present article is important because it provides an opportunity to examine moral values and sentiments at a larger scale than any individual song or artist could provide.
Researchers from the University of London’s Queen Mary College, based in the Centre for Digital Music, have been using artificial intelligence to analyse more than 380,000 songs from 1960 to 2023. The scientists are specifically interested in the representation of moral virtues (such as care and benevolence) and moral evils (such as harm, deception, and subversion) in the lyrics, as well as general emotional trends. In particular, the researchers are trying to find out if popular music is becoming more cynical and focused on vice over time and how this trend could be related to broader cultural shifts.
Music as a measuring instrument in changing trends
The basic psychological hypothesis behind the present research is that music acts as a “barometer” of cultural values. By a barometer, we mean a reference point or a sensitive indicator of changing trends. In this case, a barometer can be understood as a specific function of music, which reflects the overall direction of cultural values. This is similar to the function of an actual barometer, which measures changes in air pressure and serves as an indicator of approaching bad weather. Thus, when it comes to the cultural domain, the lyrics of popular songs serve as a barometer for measuring the collective attitudes of caring, loyalty, harm, and other moral dimensions, as well as people’s feelings of anger or disgust.
The researchers make use of the so-called Moral Foundations Theory, which assumes that human morals can be structured using certain dimensions, namely care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. The study finds a way to relate music to society by demonstrating how moral values in song lyrics change throughout time, thus potentially reflecting shifts in cultural values. It is essential to note that popular songs can both predict public attitudes and reactions to events based on certain moral values and help shape them.
Research overview
The study analysed two different song datasets. The first one consisted of ”approximately 377000 English-language songs from the WASABI dataset spanning 1960 to 2010,” while the second one comprised ”5500 songs that appeared on Billboard year-end charts between 1960 and 2023. This enabled the researchers to investigate both a diverse song pool and the most popular tracks year by year, thus gaining a comprehensive understanding of lyrical trends. The study was led by Dr Vjosa Preniqi and senior author Dr Charalampos Saitis and included the collaboration of Queen Mary University of London researchers.
The researchers applied transformer-based language models, the algorithm underlying modern computerised natural language processing, which were fine-tuned to identify ten categories of ideas associated with moral foundations theory. They analysed the lyrics for words and phrases that signalled the presence of virtues and moral values (such as caring, loyalty, and purity) and vices (such as harm, cheating, subversion, and degradation) as well as sentiment and emotional reactions (such as anger, disgust, and other emotions). Thanks to these computational tools, the scientists could track changes in moral and emotional language use in music lyrics from the 1950s to the present decade. Furthermore, these trends were analysed using music genre and the gender of the performers as controlling variables.
Music in terms of morality and emotionality
The first significant observation is a decrease in the use of moral virtues such as care, decency, and socio-interpersonal connection in popular music lyrics over the last six decades. Concurrent with this decline is the rise in the use of terms that indicate the presence of moral vices, including harm, cheating, subversion, and degradation. This trend implies that the lyrical content’s moral message has shifted from promoting virtues to emphasising the flaws and weaknesses of immoral conduct.
Another crucial finding of the study is the so-called “emotional darkening” of the lyrics: the tendency of the songs’ sentiment to become more negative throughout the years, with a significant increase in the use of words reflecting anger and disgust. The researchers also discovered that emotion trends were not the same for different music genres and that they varied depending on whether the song was performed by a male or a female artist.
Lyrics of certain genres tended to reflect care and social bonding, while others expressed more anti-social and rebellious tendencies. Lyrics performed by females were more caring and less concerned with aggression and betrayal, while the same themes were more prevalent in the songs performed by males or those with mixed gender crews (though the latter were considered with caution due to potential biases in the data).
Read More: The Influence of Movies and Music on Mental Health
Author’s perspective
The researchers explain that these results demonstrate that popular music acts as an indicator of long-term patterns of cultural shifts. The author notes that music serves as a means for societies to narrate stories of kindness, conflicts, and wrongdoing; therefore, the transition from virtues to vices implies that humanity experiences transformations in identity, as well as social and emotional norms. The researchers argue that instead of music being a passive reflection of society, it shapes thoughts on specific issues and how people view each other.
They claim that the rise in vice themes and dark emotions is not necessarily an indicator of “music corrupting society,” but rather a sign that musicians and listeners are engaging with the symptoms and causes of stress, discord, and fragmentation in more explicit and direct ways than ever before. By applying algorithmic linguistics to psychological frameworks around morality, the study finds new ways that these fields of study intersect when it comes to mental health, social stability, and shifting public sentiments. The researchers view the popularity of music as a vital source of information on the evolution of moral values in society.
Conclusion
The lyrical content of popular music has changed between 1960 and 2023 in terms of moral sentiments and affect balance. Specifically, tendencies indicate a decrease in the presence of prosocial moral sentiments (care and honesty) and an increase in antisocial ones (harm and deception), as well as a rise in negative emotions. Notably, these tendencies were consistent across various genres and genders of musicians, which suggests that they represent some general tendencies. Thus, it can be argued that popular music acted and continues to act as a barometer of society in terms of its moral and affective balance.
This is why the study is valuable, not only from the perspective of music psychology but also cultural shifts and change in the frameworks of identity and aesthetics. This can be useful in the context of recent public debates on mental health and social bonding; studying the evolution of song lyrics can help understand the changing perceptions of caregiving and violence, as well as attitudes towards loyalty and betrayal.
References +
Neuroscience News. (2026, June 24). Pop music echoes a growing culture of vices. Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/music-lyrics-vices-cultural-barometer-30956/
