As evidenced by their song, "Do The Evolution", Pearl Jam appears to be well-versed in evolutionary theory. But was the advent of grunge the most radical change in the course of modern music history? |
As I Lay Dying is not the kind of music
your parents are going to understand. You can hear them now as they cover their
ears, “Turn off that racket! My ears are bleeding! You call that singing? He’s
just screaming! Back in my day…” and so on.
With this extraordinary popularity, you’d think that his type of music would still be going strong, but one look at today’s pop music chart and you’ll quickly see that there is little on there that resembles the music Elvis brought to the world. On the contrary, there are styles of music on the charts now that Elvis never could have imagined. At the time this article was written, the #1 song on the Top 100 Billboard chart is “See You Again”, which sounds nothing like the music that was popular prior to the 1990s.
In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science,
evolutionary biologists and computer scientists “come together” to advance our
understanding of pop music’s evolution. The
researchers analyzed 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100 charts from
1960 to 2010 in order to identify the greatest musical revolution in recent US
music history. Was it the famous “British Invasion” led by the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones in the 1960s?
Could it be the rise of synth-pop and electronic music by the
likes of Madonna, Duran Duran, or Howard Jones in the 1980s?
How about the meteoric rise of those late 80s hairbands like
Bon Jovi, Poison, or Warrant?
The biggest upheaval occurred in 1991, but not with grunge…it was with hip-hop. Starting in the mid-80s, rap and hip-hop began climbing a steady ladder to the mainstream, with the help of artists like Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, Salt-N-Pepa, and LL Cool J. But 1991 was a watershed year with huge breakthroughs for hip-hop artists like N.W.A., Ice Cube, Ice-T, 2Pac, TLC, and Public Enemy. The radical changes in lyrical content and delivery, arrangement, and the diversity of sounds culminated to make hip-hop one of the most innovative changes to music in recent history.
With these powerful tools to analyze how music has evolved over the past 50 years, one has to wonder if it is possible to predict how music might sound in 2065.
Contributed by: Bill Sullivan
Contributed by: Bill Sullivan
Matthias Mauch, Robert M. Maccallum, Mark Levy, Armand M.
Leroi. The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010. Royal Society
Open Science, May 2015 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.150081
Salimpoor, V., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music Nature Neuroscience, 14 (2), 257-262 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2726
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