Nearly 92 percent of songs in the Billboard Top Ten charts for Country, Pop, and R&B in 2009 contained reproductive themes, with an average of 10.5 reproductive messages per song, according to an analysis by psychologists at the University at Albany in New York. And the trend extends back more than 400 years.
“A content analysis of these messages revealed 18 reproductive themes that read like topics taken from an outline for a course in evolutionary psychology,” the authors of the study, Dawn R. Hobbs and Gordon G. Gallup, said.
The study, “Songs as a Medium for Embedded Reproductive Messages,” was published September 12 in Evolutionary Psychology (PDF).
There were a total of 340 reproductive references in the 57 Top Ten songs taken from the 2009 Country charts, an average of nearly 6 reproductive references per song.
Songs from the Pop charts had even more reproductive references, with 513 reproductive references in the 59 songs, an average of 8.7 references per song.
The Top Ten songs taken from the R&B charts had significantly more reproductive references than either Country or Pop. The 58 R&B songs had a total of 973 reproductive references, an average of 16.8 reproductive references per song.
Songs on the top rankings in 2009 had more reproductive messages per song than songs by the same vocalist in the same album that failed to make it into the top ten charts.
The researchers also found differences between the music genres and type of reproductive references. The most common reproductive phrases in country songs were related to commitment, parenting, rejection, and assurance of fidelity. For Pop songs the most frequent reproductive phrases were related to sex appeal, reputation, “hooking up,” and assurance of fidelity. For R&B songs, sex appeal, resources (luxury items, cars, money), sexual acts, and social status were the most frequent type of reproductive references.
To determine if the presence of reproductive messages was an enduring feature of song lyrics, the researchers examined Top Ten songs for the years 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, and 1999. They found that the number of reproductive references in the songs has remained relatively stable, with one exception: the amount of reproductive references in R&B songs had sky-rocketed since 1989.
Similar results were found in songs and operas dating back as far as 1597.
“The fact that some popular recordings are only instrumental with no lyrics (e.g., Chariots of Fire), while others are sung by artists in a foreign language (e.g., Volare) strongly suggests that the instrumentation, melody, tempo, sex of the artist, and sound of the singer’s voice, along with subtle nonverbal cues of sincerity and emotional commitment conveyed by intonation of the artist are all important components,” Hobbs and Gallup explained.
“Nonetheless, our results show that the number of reproductive messages contributes significantly to sales/popularity, and this implies that listeners are in fact processing at some level (wittingly or not) the evolutionarily relevant portions of the lyrics contained in many popular songs,” they continued.
“In our view, the ubiquitous presence of these reproductive themes is a reflection of evolved properties of the human psyche.”
