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25. It's official: pop music makes you dumb and uncreative

To wrap up this series, I will talk about music. It's the most powerful mass media vehicle because it touches the body, the mind and the spirit. And guess what: studies show that pop music is so bad it's making people stupid and killing their creativity. Does it really come as a surprise? Are you shocked? Read on.

A study conducted by data analyst Andrew Powell-Morse with the #1 songs on the billboard charts for the past 10 years shows that lyrics are getting measurably less intelligent: chart-toppers in 2006 had a 3rd to 4rth grade level, and in 2016 the level has dropped to 2nd grade. This means the level of intelligence of pop music today is equivalent to that of a 7-year old. And the tendency is for lyrics to keep getting dumber. Are you curious to know the dumbest songs of all? Hits by Maroon, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Kesha and Lady Gaga are among them.

It's not just the lyrics, though: besides being dumber, pop music is also duller and more homogenized than ever. Researchers in Spainused a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset to analyze pop songs from 1955 to 2010. Through complex algorithms, the team lead by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.

"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse," Serra told Reuters. "In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations—roughly speaking chords plus melodies—has consistently diminished in the last 50 years." In short, the variety of sounds used in music today has decreased dramatically. The timbre of songs, that is, the number of different tones they include—for example, from different instruments—has also become narrower.

Algorithms are used by producers to determine which song will be commercially successful, and then they pass it along to performers. Half a dozen producers are responsible for all top-chart artists, and the result, combined with the impoverishment of lyrics and sounds, is that everything sounds the same.

In 2008, Adrian North of Scotland's Heriot-Watt University published the largest study to date of musical taste, involving 36,000 people from 60 countries After 3 years of work, he discovered that the most common trait among listeners was creativity. The exception was pop music lovers—no wonder. And there's more: the music industry deliberately brainwashes us and overrides our personal tastes by blasting the same songs over and over on the mainstream media. According to Mike Rugnetta from PBS Idea Channel , that's akin to a musical "Stockholm syndrome," when victims of kidnapping may begin to sympathize with their captors over time.

A song is not played everywhere because it's popular: it becomes popular because it's played everywhere. Repetition has a profound effect on us. That's because of what psychologists call "mere exposure" effect, according to researcher Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis from the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas. We tend to like things that we've either consciously or unconsciously encountered before. There is more activity in the emotional regions of our brain when we are listening to music we are familiar with—even if we don't like the music.

Music and social engineering

Music has ceased to be a form of art and individual expression: pop music today is merely a product, standardized and highly digitalized, that follows a rigid top-chart formula targeted at pleasing specific audiences. A whole team of engineers, producers, writers, editors and marketers work to make the product perfect for consumption. The performer has zero input in it. Renowned theorist Theodore Adorno even questions if what we hear today is technically still music. Music is meant to be played with instruments and express the inspiration of its author, turning organic feelings and ideas into melody and lyrics. Pop music, on the other hand, is like a ready mix cake to be consumed with minimum attention spam and intellectual effort.