Pop songs favored along the American coasts and in hip European cities often feature dense lyrics tailored to connoisseurs of world-weariness and subtle relationship problems. By contrast, the average Asian pop song has rather simplistic lyrics, rarely going beyond declarations of mutual infatuation. Genres like grunge and goth have no equivalents in these cultures. Based on this evidence, a Martian student of our pop culture would conclude that there is far more misery in developed countries.
Could pop lyrics be a simple function of per capita income, as opposed to complex cultural factors? Consider Japan, a rich Asian country where the latest in pop despair is celebrated like there's no tomorrow.
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3 comments:
I think you have the correlation mixed up. I think lyrics should be plotted against divorce rates. Divorces rates then may be related to income per capita.
it's funny, because if you think about it, a language like Hindi doesn't even have words properly corresponding to angst, despair, frustration, crisis.
Are divorce rates higher among hipster rockers? Are they more likely to come from divided families? My casually considered response to E. is that higher divorce in richer countries reflect the same income effect. Divorce is expensive.
I think Urdu, which was the language more likely to be heard in Mughal courts, has a richer vocabulary of despair than Hindi. Urdu poetry revels in angst. Were Urdu speakers wealthier?
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