Mean?

June 27th, 2026| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

A recent study in Scientific Reports, “Evolution of Moral Expression in Song Lyrics,” from researchers at Queen Mary University, London, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, claimed pop songs were getting meaner!

They analyzed the lyrics of several hundred thousand English-language songs, comparing two separate datasets, one from 1960 to 2010, and the other from 2011 to 2023. Expressions of immorality—things like harm, cheating, and rule-breaking—have, apparently, risen sharply, while those of morality—like care, purity, and loyalty—have dropped. (Why am I not surprised?)

Also interesting was their discovery that lyrics by female artists tended to score higher on care, loyalty, and betrayal, while male and mixed-gender artists tended to score higher on harm, degradation, and subversion. (Why am I not surprised about that either?)

Pop-song genres with a leaning towards moral themes were religious, and R&B. Oh, and metal! (Now I’m surprised!)

Reported Study Finds:

There’s a reason a grandparent’s record collection feels so different from what’s topping the charts today, and it goes beyond sound. Over the past six decades, the words woven into popular music have drifted away from themes of care, loyalty, and purity, and increasingly toward themes of harm, degradation, and rule-breaking.”

Lyrics of popular music can be considered a sort of cultural mirror, reflecting the current values and attitudes and mores. So this means that current values and attitudes and mores are shifting … to the meaner side. (And you’re not surprised, I’m sure!)

An AI language tool was used to spot those moral themes in song texts. It scored each song across ten moral dimensions, drawn from a framework in moral psychology that splits values into five pairs, each with a “virtue” side and a “vice” side: Care versus Harm, Fairness versus Cheating, Loyalty versus Betrayal, Authority versus Subversion, and Purity versus Degradation. Each song got a score between 0 and 1 on every dimension, with higher numbers meaning a stronger presence of that theme.

Degradation changed by roughly +52% in the larger dataset over the study period, Harm climbed about +49%, Cheating rose nearly +48%, and Subversion increased by around +41%. All virtue categories declined.

Concluded the authors:

These findings reveal that shifts in lyrical morality co-occur with broader societal changes in values and identity, underscoring how popular music may serve as a cultural barometer for evolving moral norms.”

The largeness of scale is hard to ignore. When a signal this consistent shows up across nearly 400,000 songs spanning more than six decades, and holds in two separate datasets, it’s not easy to write it all off as noise.

Meanness is everywhere it seems, even in song.

Do deliver, Yahweh, for the devout one has come to an end,
for the faithful have disappeared from among humans.
Falsehood they speak, one to his fellow;
with the lip of smoothness, in a double heart, they speak.
May Yahweh cut off all lips of smoothness,
the tongue speaking big things—
[those] who have said, “With our tongue we will prevail.
Our lips are in our own [power]—who is lord over us?”
Psalm 12:1–4

So God will take action:

“Because of the devastation of the afflicted,
because of the groaning of the needy,
now I will arise,” says Yahweh;
“I will set in deliverance, the one who pants for it.”
Psalm 12:5

Ultimately, the only one whose words are pure is God!

The sayings of Yahweh are clean sayings,
silver refined in a furnace on the earth, distilled seven times.
Psalm 12:6

Those we emulate. And those we follow.

SOURCES (of ideas, numbers, and words): Study Finds; Scientific Reports