Edgy, sexy lyrics dominate popular love songs

Beyonce Knowles in Los Angeles, February 24, 2007. Popular music is still dominated by love songs but the innocent words of former hits have been replaced by edgy, sexual words and bad language, according to a new study.

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Popular music is still dominated by love songs but the innocent words of former hits have been replaced by edgy, sexual words and bad language, according to a new study.

"There's a drastic shift from more abstract, gentle words to more edgy and profane," Chad Swiatowicz, of the University of Florida, said in an interview.

He studied the ten most popular songs from the Billboard's online archives from 1968-1971, or what he calls the classic era, and 2002-2005, the modern era, including 1968's "Sunshine of Your Love" and 2003's "Crazy in Love."

"There was no use of profanities, certainly no f-words in the classic era, and in terms of suggestive themes, those were also pretty uncommon in the classic era."

Although some songs were cheerful celebrations of love, others had a more bleak outlook on relationships. Infidelity was also a more common in modern songs, possibly because younger people were more likely to have had parents who divorced, according to Swiatowicz.

He examined music from the two eras, 80 songs in total, to find out how modern pop music dealt with the war in Iraq by comparing it with music during the years of the Vietnam war.

But when he realized that very few of the most popular songs were about the war, he took a step back and let the songs speak for themselves.

While he won't attribute the increase in edginess and profanity to any one cause, he speculates that the root of it is typical teenage rebellion and the adolescent desire to separate themselves from their parents.

"Ever since pop music became a (cultural) force ... it's been targeted to adolescents and young adults, and so that sub-culture is a means through which to distinguish itself from the working adult, from professional adult society," he said.

"Kids want to have a different kind of music than their parents, and often there's a kind of rebellious attitude involved as well."

He points out that while hip-hop and rap songs were present in his modern era selection of songs and did not exist in the classic era, it wasn't just rap music that included profanity, sexual references, and general edginess.