English Pop Music Found To Be Among World’s Most Depressing – Dave’s Diary

Pop music.  What comes to mind when you think about popular music?  Iggy? Beiber? Taylor?  Pop music by definition is fun, breezy, catchy and not too thought provoking.  Depressing is not a word you would use to describe pop – unless you are a geeky mathematician with time and a super computer on your hands.

A recent article in the UK Daily Mail shed some light (but not lite) on American Pop music.  A new study shows that the collective of English language pop music is among the most depressing works in the entire world. Mathematicians gathered billions of words from the musical works around the world including books, news outlets, social media, music lyrics and more.

The number crunchers determined the 10,000 most frequently used words in ten different languages, and then had native speakers determine if each of the words had a positive or negative connotation.

Pharrell’s “Happy” notwithstanding, English lyrics were

considered to be more negative words than Russian literature.

In fact, only those good time guys- the authors and movie makers in China and Korea were considered to be less happy than English lyric Pop songs.