That there are articles claiming music has been getting dumber and simpler at MusicRadar is not in itself news.
...
Only jazz
and classical music remain on a complexity par with one another and are
certainly more intricate than other, newer genres, but even they have both
become simpler.
The team concluded that the fact that there are more people
making music has to be a contributing factor to the increased simplicity.
That's right, the 'more people' being you and us – we're all basically to
blame.
"The observed results could partly be attributed to
the rise of more homogeneous and less complex genres in recent years," the
study said. "However, our analysis indicates that even enduring genres
like classical and jazz have undergone a noticeable simpliļ¬cation compared to
their origins.
"Our study highlights that the democratisation of the
composition process and the advent of new technologies and platforms have
fostered the development of genres characterised by reduced complexity relative
to earlier eras."
The science behind the fact that music has become less
complex is probably more interesting than the fact itself, and it's a shame the
team didn't analyse the reasons more. We'd say that the increased use of
technology has meant a decreased need for understanding complex music theory,
and maybe that has resulted in less complex tunes.
...
There is probably a vast sampling bias afoot that gives me no reason to take the results very seriously. The history of classical music is full of peaks and valleys and cycles of complexity and simplicity. The complexities of polychoral polyphonic music by the likes of Tallis was followed by the absolutely threadbare scores of figured bass and recitative in Italian opera and Lutheran liturgical music. The proverbial high Baroque era gave way to the simplicity of the galant style and that, in term, slowly mutated into the nascent Romantic era. So I just can't buy any claim that music has been getting simpler as if it were a bad thing. When paradigms in musical organization reach a saturation point past which hardly anything new can be added, I guess, "then" styles give way and new approaches to conceiving of organized pitch and rhythm across time can get invented or embraced. From Monteverdi to Art of Fugue was a generations long process. Mind-bending complexity and schematic simplicity have co-existed in music for a long time. Scores don't always tell you even the half of anything. You can go look at the musical puzzles in a work like J. S. Bach's Musical Offering and get a sense that just that one single line by itself will not directly tell you how that crab canon is going to go unless you're a well-trained musician who knows how to read that kind of score. You could look at a musical puzzle where you get one line of written music and you have to know from contrapuntal practice, for instance, that that single line is supposed to be set in canon against itself in two treble voices while it is eventually answered in its own inversion by a bass voice and all this from a single solitary line.
So what about lyrics in pop songs? Well, Ethan Hein has written a bit on that lately. Naturally, as I like reading him, I'm sharing his thoughts.
If simple lyrics were defined by the use of monosyllabic words then, hey, Peter Gabriel's "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" comes off as super dumb on paper.
But how simple is the song, really?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8xPWyyjmFMThe lyrics can seem downright juvenile in their monosyllabic simplicity and the gnomic referentiality of the lyrics will mean nothing to anyone who has never heard of Milgram's experiment (let alone read rebuttals to and criticisms of the ethics of Milgram in even conducting the experiment). Gabriel's lyrics are really, stupidly simple. The music even seems simple enough with its spare textures. But the song is, I suggest, not a very simple song at all. It's still one of the weirdest things Gabriel's written across his career.
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