Love and lack of love are the absolute protagonists of popular music, from pop to song, from hard rock to soul. Men compose more songs where romantic relationships and sex go hand in hand, while they dedicate more pieces to what we call romantic love, without explicit sexual allusions.
Who says this? A team of American psychologists who have studied the lyrics of 1,250 popular songs composed between 1960 and 2008. According to them, the theme of the songs reflects gender stereotypes: women are expected to focus on romantic love and relationships, and that men influence sexual behavior.
What is the song about?
Researchers have extracted the following data on popular music of the last half century, in which love and sexual themes are the undisputed queen:
– 71% of the songs are love songs.
– 57% of the songs include the word “love” in their lyrics.
– 22% of the topics refer to sex, usually through a metaphor.
– 14% of the pieces have lyrics that treat the body as a sexual object, especially the female one.
– Of the 1,250 songs analyzed, 827 were performed by men, 328 by women, and 95 by duos or mixed ensembles.
– More than half of the rock compositions and similar genres were about love, dating and relationships; in the case of rap, more than half of the songs talked about sex and the female body.
– Among female performers, the proportion of songs about relationships has remained constant over five decades, oscillating between 78 and 83% of the total.
– Among men, the percentage of sentimental themes has been falling –in the 60s it was 69% and now it is 59% -, with the exception of the 80s, a very ballad decade, when it grew to 78%.
– In the 60s, only 6% of the songs performed by women alluded to sex. Between 1970 and 2000, the figure rose to 16-21%.
– In the case of men, the percentage of compositions in which sex appears went from 7% in the 60s to 20-29% in the 70s, 80s and 90s, to jump to 40% from the year 2000.
These data have been extracted from the American magazine Billboard, which since 1940 has published weekly lists of the most played songs and the best-selling albums in the United States. Their listings successes are internationally recognized and are considered among the most reliable in the music industry, the media and the public.
