Think of the lyrics of your favorite pop song. Are they like Taylor Swift's "All Too Well," which narrates the story of a breakup, jumping back and forth in time and building a world through vivid descriptions of past memories? Or are they more like David Bowie's "Fame," which evokes feelings and impressions conjured by the phenomenon of fame rather than telling a story?
To understand the role of storytelling in contemporary pop music, researchers at UC Berkeley created a machine learning algorithm that can identify narrative storytelling elements in song lyrics. In a new study, they used this algorithm to analyze more than 5,000 pop songs that made the annual Billboard Hot 100 list between 1960 and 2024, charting how storytelling in popular music has changed over the past 60 years.
"We wanted to see if computational methods could measure the stories that are present in songs in order to help us understand how storytelling in music has changed on a larger scale over the past half of a century," said study first author David Bamman, an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
The analysis revealed some interesting trends. One might expect that storytelling in pop songs peaked in the 1960s, when ballad-driven folk singers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel regularly topped the charts. However, the researchers found that narrativity in songs has actually been on the uptick since the 1990s. This is due in large part to the rise in popularity of hip-hop, which is rife with narrative and storytelling.
For example, Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" was ranked the fifth most narrative of all the songs analyzed, right ahead of Taylor Swift's "All Too Well," which came in sixth. The lyrics narrate a day in the life of the rapper who is trying to find romance and connect with friends while surviving racism and police surveillance in South Central Los Angeles.
"Many of us are excited about the computational modeling of cultural data because it grounds some of the claims that can be made from a smaller set of examples. When you have this larger set of data, you can get a picture of literary changes or developments that are clarifying and often go against the prevailing wisdom in that field," said study corresponding author Tom McEnaney, an associate professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese at Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Center for New Media.
Literary theorists have traced the evolution of literature and song from the Greek poets Homer and Sappho to 19th-century romantic balladeers, with some asserting a distinction between "ballads," which they see as a form of storytelling, and "lyric poetry," which they see as an expression of immediate emotions or impressions.
But while the poetry of Sappho and Yeats may be timeless, it likely didn't make anyone's Spotify Wrapped this year. Until now, few researchers have studied how storytelling appears in the pop music that makes up the soundtrack of our everyday lives.
"There was this assumption that poetry gets into popular music through hip-hop, and that hip-hop is the most lyric of genres," McEnaney said. "If literary theory also tells us that lyric is non-narrative, then we wouldn't expect to find hip-hop as the main driver of narrativity in popular music. But when you get to the 1990s, you just see the narrativity score shoot through the roof. This turns on its head the last 30 years of literary approaches to hip-hop."
Inspired by the Boss
Many of Bamman's friends and family are big fans of Bruce Springsteen, but he never really understood the hype. That changed one day when he was waiting in a store in Paris, and Springsteen's "Thunder Road" came on the radio.
"I finally got it, because the song is a story," Bamman said. "It was really clear that Bruce Springsteen is a storyteller, and I could see how that would resonate with people."
For more than a decade, Bamman has been developing computational tools that can be used to analyze literature and film. In a study published last year, Bamman and his team used facial recognition technology to track how much time actors of different genders and racial backgrounds appear on screen in popular films, confirming that Hollywood has gotten more diverse over the past two decades.
After realizing the importance of narrative in Springsteen's music, Bamman wondered if these same computational methods could be applied to storytelling in music. Working with a group of undergraduate students, he approached McEnaney, an expert in literature, music and media studies, to begin a collaboration.
"A lot of people in cultural analytics have been working on measuring narrativity in lots of different genres, such as in social media texts," Bamman said. "But there's been less work on measuring narrativity or even operationalizing it within songs."
Along with Berkeley undergraduate students Sabrina Baur, Mackenzie Hanh Cramer and Anna Ho, the team read through the lyrics of more than 1,000 popular songs, using a set of objective criteria to score the degree of "narrativity" for each one. Song lyrics were judged to be more narrative if they included particular agents or characters, described a sequence of events that occur over time, or created a world that could be seen and felt.
The researchers then used these scores to train a machine learning algorithm that could score thousands of additional songs.
In addition to revealing an increase in storytelling over time due to the rise in popularity of hip-hop, they also found that storytelling appears to be a marker of prestige in country music. Grammy-nominated "Best Country" songs had more narrative elements than other songs from the same album.
"People often think of hip-hop as a primarily Black genre and country as a primarily white genre," McEnaney said. "Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter is only the most recent challenge to that assumption, and at a moment of absolute racial divisiveness in the country, it's interesting to think about how those genres are the most popular genres and also have this shared interest in telling stories."
