Towards Selfishness and ´Materiality´ a Diachronic Study on the Evolution of Pop Music Lyrics in America (From 1970 to 2020)
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Towards Selfishness and ´Materiality´ A diachronic study on the evolution of pop music lyrics in America (from 1970 to 2020) Lorenzo Sosso English Studies – Linguistics BA Thesis 15 credits Spring 2021 Supervisor: Philip Clover Towards Selfishness and Materiality2 Table of Contents Abstract…..3 1 Introduction…..4 1.1 Aim & research questions…..4 2 Background…..5 2.1 Situational background…..5 2.2 Theoretical background…..6 2.3 Specific Background and previous studies…..10 3 Design of the study and methodology…..11 4 Results and discussion…..12 4.1 Categorization of the references…..12 4.1.1 The theme of narcissism…..17 4.1.2 The theme of lust…..20 4.1.3 The theme of love…..22 4.2 Study limitations…..25 5 Concluding remarks…...26 References…..27 Appendices…..31 Towards Selfishness and Materiality3 Abstract This paper investigates the change/evolution over time of the most relevant themes contained in the most popular song lyrics, namely love, lust, and narcissism, in America. The study will conduct an analysis of two corpora of songs from two different periods (early 1970s and late 2010s), as they appeared in the American chart Billboard, in order to provide valid results both in terms of quantitative distribution and qualitative delineation of such themes. Furthermore, those results will be processed with the purpose of defining a co-relation between modern American society and modern American pop music. In light of this research, it is argued that this co-relation is represented by the two elements of selfishness and materiality. Towards Selfishness and Materiality4 1 Introduction Music is one of the oldest arts ever existed: it has been accompanying humankind for 40000 years (Killin, 2018) and now permeates almost every aspect of our lives. Despite the impossibility of stating with certainty how music influences society, it is possible, however, to see how music is a mirror of society (Rabinowitch, 2020). In particular, pop music (among all kinds) appears to be the most relevant when it comes to interpreting social changes. This is due to its intrinsic quality, namely being popular music (used in its literal, broader sense), or, in rough words, “music as a product conceived for the largest audience possible” (“Popular music”, 2021). For this reason, this paper purposely chose pop music as the starting point to conduct an analysis on the possible inter- relations between music and society. Of course, the primal component of music is sound, and words are an accessory element. However, even if so-called sound studies (focusing solely on non-verbal components of music) are emerging in connection with sociology studies (Thibeault, 2017), this study will only analyze the verbal (linguistic) element in pop songs, trying to find results that may represent a valid starting point to connect music and sociology. More specifically, the analysis will be of a diachronic type, meaning that it will put in comparison two corpora of song lyrics from two different historical periods (from 1970 to 1974, and from 2016 to 2020), in order to acknowledge any relevant changes occurred in almost fifty years’ time. 1.1 Aim & research questions The aim of this paper is to provide a reliable picture of how lyrics have changed across time, both quantitatively and, above all, qualitatively. Once those results have been found, the last concern of this research will be to find a connection between the evolution of the contents in lyrics and the changes in society. The research questions that will drive this analysis are, thus, the following: RQ 1: How the content of music lyrics in American pop music has changed across time? RQ 2: Is there a reflection of the results achieved on the actual American society? Towards Selfishness and Materiality5 In light of the results achieved, furthermore, my specific claim is that pop music has changed in a way that reflects an increased focus on selfishness and ´materiality´ in society. 2 Background 2.1 Situational background This study analyzes two corpora of pop lyrics from two different periods, within the same socio-geographical context, the U.S.A. It is thus necessary to briefly frame the content of this paper in a way that reflects the particular societal details involved. “In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music” (Mauch et.al, 2015, p.1). A concise definition of pop music (the definition slightly differs from the one of “popular music”) can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary: “music appealing to the popular taste, including rock and pop and also soul, reggae, rap, and dance music” (“Pop music”, 2021). Its main quality of reflecting popular taste is the reason why I chose to investigate specifically in this field of music, being more representative of the society in which it is produced and consumed, unlike other kinds of ´elite´ music, less indicative of general trends. A dissertation on such a broad topic may lead to complications, unnecessary for the purpose of this study; however, some considerations about the musical macro-change, which has occurred between the two periods in analysis, must be made: “the early twentieth centuries witnessed the expansion of music publishing, recording, and production in the United States; the rapid exportation of music into the global economy; and the increased availability of music of all kinds in any number of media” (Graham, 2013, p.12). This expansion is at the heart of pop music prominence, causing an increasing interest in terms of production and consumption, until it turned, towards the end of the 20th century, into a multi-faceted reality, where more and more cultural sub-layers overlapped (Starr and Waterman, 2003). In particular, modern pop music in the U.S. has been characterized by the appearance, roughly between 1984-1995, of rap/hip-hop music culture, that Towards Selfishness and Materiality6 drastically changed American pop music both in terms of form and content of the lyrics (Richardson & Scott, 2002). This will be evident when analyzing the results obtained, as this specific genre was not broadly present during the 1970s. 2.2 Theoretical background This study aims at carrying a multi-layered research. Starting from the semantic-based analysis of song lyrics, it will try to put it in relation with the evolution of American society. This kind of approach is part of a specific field of research that goes under the name of applied ethnomusicology (Dirksen, 2021). Although not new, this discipline is relatively young, dating back to 1950, when Dutch musicologist Jaap Kunst first coined the word, combining two terms referring to pre-existing fields: musicology, generally referring to all sciences related to music (Harap, 1937), and ethnography, simply “the study of the beliefs, social interactions, and behaviors of small societies” (Naidoo, 2012, p.1) . Out of modern debates around this discipline, it emerges that being able to univocally define ethnomusicology is almost a utopic effort. As Dirksen pointed out in her dissertation, “this [issue] is due in part to recent interest in uniting, under a single identifying label, many strands of professional activity that have traditionally fallen outside the boundaries of mainstream ethnomusicological scholarship” (Dirksen, 2021, p.2). In addition to that, “the data and methods used are derived from many disciplines found in the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, and the physical sciences. […] It is impossible to encompass them all within one definition. […] Ethnomusicology cannot be adequately defined as an interdisciplinary activity. It is too diffuse, too amorphous” (List, 1979, p.1). This paper mainly draws from two kinds of disciplines operating together: semantics, and some elements of sociology (that belongs to the broader field of ethnography). Semantics will be the theoretical base which will make the collection of data coherent and cohesive, while the sociological aspects will represent the frame on which the application of the semantic results will be applied. Consequently, the research will consist of two macro-sections: the categorization of the data according to specific semantic fields, and their consequent discussion in relation to the sociological frame. Towards Selfishness and Materiality7 Concerning the categorization of the songs, three main theoretical frames of semantic nature will be used: the semantic fields of love, lust, and narcissism. As visible later in this paper, more categories have been individuated, of whom the most quantitatively relevant is the theme of jilting; however, due to lack of relevant research surrounding it and its low productiveness in terms of useful results, it will not be actively included in the study. Before introducing the theories used, it is useful to provide a brief definition of semantics, as this paper will almost exclusively deal with meaning, rather than mere words. The most concise and effective definition of semantics can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them” (“Semantics”, 2021). In this paper, a clear-cut distinction between the above-mentioned areas will not be made, as both logical and lexical semantic concept will be used. The first theoretical frame comes from the acknowledgments of researcher Anna Wierzbicka, who, in the conclusive part of her dissertation about the semantic delineation of the concept of love, determined three main factors concurring in individuating and defining the concept of love: This shared meaning [love] includes three components, based, respectively, on thinking, feelings, and wanting. The ‘thinking’ component requires a long-term relationship: if person X loves person Y, then X often thinks about Y.