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Pop Music Is Increasingly about “Harm and Degradation”

Pop Music Is Increasingly about “Harm and Degradation”

Last updated on: July 17, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Pop Music Is Increasingly about “Harm and Degradation” 2026-07-11T17:41:14-04:00 Gene Veith

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Complaining about young people’s music has become a cliché of getting older, as have complaints about society’s moral degeneration.

A study of the lyrics of pop songs over the last 60 years, though, suggests that we geezers are right!

The website Study Finds reports on a study that found, in the words of the article’s title, that Pop Songs Have Grown More Immoral, Meaner Over Past 60 Years. It tells about a study published in the journal Scientific Reports entitled Evolution of Moral Expression in Song Lyrics.

The team of European researchers took nearly 400,000 English-language songs from between 1960 and 2023, divided into two datasets, one consisting of published songs and the other consisting of Billboard charting “hits.” They developed an AI language tool trained to identify moral themes by recognizing language related to ten moral dimensions. No, not Ten Commandments, but a framework used in moral psychology that sorts values into five pairs, a “virtue” side and a “vice” side: Care vs. Harm; Fairness vs. Cheating; Loyalty vs. Betrayal; Authority vs. Subversion; and Purity vs. Degradation.

Notice that none of these moral dimensions measures “sex,” the criterion that many people have in mind when they complain about the “morality” of a song. “Purity” is not defined in terms of sex, but in terms of “spirituality and sanctity.” Nor does the study measure behavioral issues such as the use of alcohol or drugs. The kind of immorality the study focuses on is harming people, by hurting or degrading them.

Here are the findings:

What emerged was a consistent pattern across both datasets. Vice categories, including Harm, Cheating, Subversion, and Degradation, all rose over time. By the study’s models, 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%. In the Billboard data, the jumps ran even sharper for some categories: Cheating rose about 71%, Degradation roughly 62%, and Subversion around 50%.

Virtue categories largely declined. Care, which captures empathy and concern for others, fell about 24% in the larger dataset and 30% in the Billboard set. Purity, tied to themes of spirituality and sanctity, dropped as well.

“Our findings reveal an increase in moral vices (e.g., Harm, Cheating, Subversion), and a decline in expressions of moral virtues (e.g., Care, Purity), alongside a rise in negative sentiment, anger, and disgust,” as the original researchers put it. “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.”

Genre, of course, was a factor. The Study Finds story says, “A model’s ability to flag Harm and Degradation was strongest when trained on metal lyrics, which fits metal’s long history of dark and rebellious themes. Purity and Authority came through most clearly in religious music. Care was easiest to predict in R&B and Soul/Funk.”

Then again, the overall trends crossed genres. As the researchers say, “The largest changes between the Vietnam War Era and the War on Terror were observed for Degradation (+41.8%), Cheating (+36.8%), Subversion (+26.6%), and Harm (+25.1%), alongside a decline in Care (20.6%). Genre-specific comparisons indicate these shifts occurred individually within Rock, Pop, Country, and Punk, suggesting a broad cultural pattern rather than a compositional artefact.”

As the researchers admit, popular music serves as a mirror of cultural attitudes. But it also influences the culture. “Often, the social, political, and cultural issues are reflected in the music lyrics of their time, which serve as a mirror to society, highlighting issues such as racial inequality, gender discrimination, and political unrest.” At the same time, popular music “can influence listeners’ emotions and behaviours. When conveying positive messages, they can inspire and uplift, while negative or aggressive lyrics might have adverse effects on mood.” On the whole,

Music fosters social bonding and emotional synchronisation, making it a powerful force in shaping collective attitudes. By examining moral rhetoric in lyrics over decades, this work addresses a significant yet overlooked dimension of how popular music may both reflect and shape societal values.

The 1960s, of course, were supposedly the time of generational rebellion, of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” but songs back then were paragons of virtue compared to the succeeding decades, which have descended deeper and deeper into the vice side year after year.

Photo: Enzifer, a guitarist of Urgehal, a Black Metal band from Norway, at the Metal Mean Festival, in Méan (Belgium) on the 20th of August 2011 by By Vassil – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16361890

moral decline in popular music

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