The musical shift: How modern pop music is reflecting the emotional state of a generation

I picked up my headphones that were sitting on my pillow and placed them firmly over my ears. Scrolling through the song list on my phone, I tapped “Wow.” by Post Malone and let its edginess play through my speakers. In the song, good ol’ Posty sings about how nobody liked him when he was a normal person, but the moment he became famous, now everyone wants his attention. I let the song finish and the next one plays, “Without Me” by Halsey. She sings about how her boyfriend betrayed her trust by cheating on her with someone else. The next one, “Let Me Down Slowly” by Alec Benjamin. He begs a girl to let him down gently and not break his heart.

This is the average person’s pop playlist. “Bury A Friend” by Billie Eilish, “i’m so tired” by Lauv and Troye Sivan, “Kills You Slowly” by the Chainsmokers. Even from the titles alone we see mainstream songs are getting noticeably darker. Artists don’t shy away from releasing sad ballads about death, heartbreak, anxiety, depression and suicide. They even released an anti-suicide anthem by Logic and Alessia Cara called “1-800-273-8255” which topped the charts within its initial release and was performed at the 60th Grammy Awards.

Turns out I’m not the only one who noticed the growing sadness playing through our phone speakers. Researchers at the University of California looked at 500,000 songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015, and ranked them all according to their prevailing “moods”. “‘Happiness’ is going down, ‘brightness’ is going down, ‘sadness’ is going up, and at the same time, the songs are becoming more ‘danceable’ and more ‘party-like,'” co-author Natalia L. Komarova told The Associated Press.

Another study by academics at Michigan's Lawrence Technical University focused only on song lyrics and also discovered that pop music is getting angrier and sadder. They used a program which ranked songs based on a “sadness index” of 0 to 1. They looked at over 6,000 songs over the last 60 years and found that, “the average scores for fear, disgust, anger, and sadness in each year’s chart-topping singles rose gradually over the decades, while joyfulness declined”. Songs in the 1950s continually scored over 0.70s in joy, while most of the songs nowadays score around 0.10s in the same emotion.

But unlike the 1950s, when they had just come out of the Second World War and happiness was everywhere, much has changed. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “[Major Depressive Disorder] affects more than 16.1 million American adults, or about 6.7% of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year”. The statistic is similar in Canada as well. People are afraid more than ever before with the threat of terrorism looming around every corner and in our own homes, tension is rising. Divorce rates have hit record highs, mothers are in the workforce and no longer staying home to be with their children, bullying in schools, many forms of abuse, and unhealthy eating habits have all been affecting the mood of the youth in negative ways, and like every youth in every time period, music is a form of escape from their reality.

In an article by Psychology Today Canada, Dr. Robert Berezin, M.D., a psychiatry doctor at Cambridge, noted, “people put on music that matches their sad mood rather than music to cheer them up [...] it doesn’t depress us more, it is comforting.” The sadder people get, the more they turn to sad music to make themselves feel better. This is something anyone can relate to, even myself. The feeling that someone - in this case, the artist - understands your feelings enough to write a song about it, is very comforting. This is not a bad thing. In order to fully deal with and process the pain we are feeling, we need to feel it and acknowledge it. In a sense, cheerful and happy music only works to sweep the feelings “under the rug”, whereas sad music helps to heal. Many people also turn to sad music for the messages, not just the sad feeling. We want to hear our pain reflected back at us in the form of song lyrics, as it creates a sense of connection.

But does this mean happy, cheerful music is gone for good? Not exactly. Just like we gravitate to sad music when we are sad, we also gravitate to happy music when we are happy. Even though happy music doesn’t make us feel any better when we’re down, doesn’t mean it’s not needed. There is still a place for songs that our cheerful in nature - considering how fast “Happy” by Pharrell Williams blew up. The #1 song on the Billboard 100 is still “Old Town Road” which isn’t depressing in the slightest!