Field Test: Hello Darkness, My New Friend

You may think of pop music as upbeat, and if you were listening to the radio several decades ago, you’d be right: 85 percent of Billboard 100 hits between 1965 and 1969 were in a major key, a mode that—especially when combined with a fast tempo—evokes a happier mood. But Adele is a far cry from The Monkees, and between 2005 and 2009, songs written in a major key made up only 43 percent of the chart-toppers. Why is pop music becoming such a downer?

The stark shift toward melancholy is no fluke. When researchers analyzed more than 1,000 Top 40 hits spanning five decades, they found that American popular music has been getting consistently sadder over time: The best-selling songs are not only likelier to be in a minor key but have also become longer and increasingly downtempo.

Of course, there’s more to a song than its technical components—a recent hit by LMFAO and an oldie by the Beach Boys may both be fast songs in a major key, notes McGill music historian David Brackett, but they hardly have “the same aspect or mood.” Yet other analyses of popular culture suggest a general trend toward the dark and stormy. “Songs that sound unambiguously happy seem trivial now,” says Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga and a coauthor of the study. “People have veered into things that are more complex on an emotional level, perhaps as an unconscious marker of sophistication.”

Schellenberg points to the Flynn effect—the well-documented observation that our collective IQ scores are rising over time—and notes that one possible explanation for it is our growing cultural complexity, something that moodier music may be reflecting. But what if we’re getting sadder, not just more sophisticated?

Psychologist Terry Pettijohn has crunched the unemployment rate, the death rate, and other socioeconomic indicators into a composite he calls the General Hard Times Measure. When the GHTM is plotted against the number one song in each year, it seems clear, Pettijohn reports, that “upbeat songs are preferred during good times.”

Still, there are outliers. “Macarena,” which listeners in Pettijohn’s study rated as the least meaningful song of the bunch and “Candle in the Wind,” rated most meaningful, were back-to-back hits in 1996 and 1997—even though nothing especially significant shifted that year for the nation as a whole.

Vague clues to our collective psyche may indeed be hidden in pop music, but we should be careful not to draw a clear, solid line between hit songs and national mood. “That’s one of the things that makes music so interesting,” Brackett says. “It’s ambiguous.”

Sliding toward sadness?

1967: She Loves You The Beatles

1974: Waterloo ABBA

1998: Everybody Backstreet Boys

2009: Love Game Lady Gaga