The American love song is in trouble, an NPR announcer said Wednesday during a radio piece that included a study done at Brigham Young University.
It might be more precise to say it this way:
The American love song is troubled.
A BYU team studied the lyrics of the top love songs of 2019 and found that 86% of them illustrated insecure attachment.
For example, the research team said the No. 33 song that year demonstrated both anxious and avoidant attachment styles. The song, “Youngblood” by 5 Seconds of Summer, features the line “You push and you push, and I’m pulling away, pulling away from you.”
Romantic attachment style is a primary indicator of how well a relationship is functioning and music may influence the attachment style of young listeners at a time when their music consumption spikes and they are experiencing their first romances, BYU researchers said when they published their study in a 2022 edition of the journal “Psychology of Music.”
Attachment theory is a developmental psychology explanation for the emotional bonds and relationships between people. Some people have secure attachments, but others fit into three categories of insecure attachments.
The BYU team analyzed 87 of the top 100 songs — 13 weren’t about love, such as “Baby Shark.” Of the 87, five songs were coded neutral and 8% portrayed secure attachment.
The researchers broke down the 86% that illustrated insecure attachment into the three categories, according to PsyPost:
- Avoidant attachment (distances oneself to prevent emotional closeness), 33.33%.
- Anxious attachment (seeks constant reassurance and attention), 27.59%.
- Fearful attachment (strongly desires closeness but becomes distrusting and fearful when connection is provided), 25.29%.
Songs in the study included “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish, “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper and “ME!” by Taylor Swift. The BYU team coded all of those songs as portraying insecure attachment.
The team coded “Thank U, Next,” by Ariana Grande, as portraying an avoidant attachment style, lead researcher McKell Jorgensen-Wells told NPR.
Another note about troubled music came last summer, when “sad” was the most-searched term by Gen Z listeners on the music app Spotify, according to a news release.
Jorgensen-Wells was a BYU graduate student at the time of the study. She worked with another graduate student, Janna Pickett, and BYU professor Sarah Coyne.
They noticed major differences in musical genres.
“Rap and hip-hop and R&B were more often focused on sexuality, and pop was more often focused on love,” Jorgensen-Wells told NPR.
The BYU team said “parents, teens and educators should be mindful of the lyrics adolescents listen to, working together to ensure adolescents navigate music’s messages about romance in a positive way.”
There were other takeaways.
A majority of the songs the BYU team examined included at least one element of sexualization, PsyPost reported. Those songs tended to exhibit the avoidant attachment style.
Songs that did not contain any sexualization were more likely to be secure and less likely to be avoidant.
Genres mattered, too.
Pop songs were less avoidant, though not more secure. Rap and hip-hop songs were more likely to be avoidant and less anxious, with the singers saying they did not need emotional closeness and thrived on their own.
Rap and hip-hop stars do need love, writer Jesse Washington told NPR.
“They do, but they’re not going to tell you,” he said, because love is soft and vulnerable and hip-hop is about being seen as tough.
The BYU study did not establish a causal relationship between listening to certain types of music and adopting a romantic attachment style.
The NPR story went on to look at a second study that found that popular music lyrics have shifted over the past 40 years from themes of love to lust.
“The study conducted a comprehensive analysis of the top 40 songs from Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 single charts for every five years between 1971 and 2011,” according to NeuroscienceNews.com.
The study noted that 8- to 18-year-olds consume an average of 16 hours of music per week.