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A new study tested whether that baseline has been shifting, tracking the biggest hits across 50 years and three continents. <\/p>\n
Counting the words<\/p>\n
Marius Golubickis, a psychologist at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU<\/a>), worked with colleagues to count pronouns in hit songs.<\/p>\n The team treated words like \u201cI\u201d and \u201cme\u201d as small markers of self-centrism. Decades of language study sit behind this logic. <\/p>\n People who dwell on themselves say \u201cI\u201d more, while \u201cwe\u201d and \u201cus\u201d tip attention toward the group. The Beatles caught the mood early, naming a 1970 track \u201cI Me Mine.\u201d<\/p>\n To build the sample, the team pulled the ten biggest hits from every year between 1970 and 2019 in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong. That came to 2,000 songs and nearly 391,000 words.<\/p>\n The western climb<\/p>\n American hits behaved as earlier work had hinted. <\/p>\n Across the five decades, they leaned more and more on first-person singular words, a slow, steady rise in pop lyrics<\/a> built around the self.<\/p>\n Germany told nearly the same story. Self-focused language rose at almost the same pace, fitting how closely the two countries track on measures of individualism<\/a>, the cultural habit of prizing the person over the group.<\/p>\n What drives the rise is harder to pin down. A separate analysis<\/a> finds hit lyrics have grown simpler and more personal over time, and economic swings seem to nudge the numbers. <\/p>\n The eastern exception<\/p>\n Japan and Hong Kong broke the pattern. Self-focused language barely moved across the same 50 years, holding roughly flat from the 1970s through the 2010s.<\/p>\n This is the part no earlier study could show. Research on song lyrics had stuck almost entirely to the West, so no one had checked whether rising self-focus was a global tide or a local current. <\/p>\n Until this study, that question had no answer.<\/p>\n Side by side, the contrast is stark. Western hits started higher on self-focus and kept climbing. The East Asian songs started lower and stayed there \u2013 two lines drifting apart instead of rising together. <\/p>\n Both Japan and Hong Kong lean collectivist, valuing the group ahead of the individual. Their music holds that value steady even as the wider world changes around it.<\/p>\n A surprise holdout<\/p>\n One older finding did not repeat. Years ago, when American hits were studied, \u201cwe\u201d and \u201cus\u201d appeared to fade as \u201cI\u201d and \u201cme\u201d climbed, as if concern for others were being crowded out.<\/p>\n This time, the words of togetherness held their ground. Songs grew more self-focused without growing any less focused on other people. <\/p>\n The two trends moved on their own, rather than trading off. <\/p>\n A longer window may explain part of the gap, and the two kinds of words may not be opposites the way the older reading assumed.<\/p>\n Either way, \u201cme\u201d did not rise at the cost of \u201cus.\u201d Nor did the other pronouns shift in ways that tracked the cultural divide.<\/p>\n Culture sets the tone<\/p>\n The split lands in familiar territory for cultural psychologists. <\/p>\n Books, advertisements, and news coverage from East Asia have long carried lower levels of self-focus than their Western counterparts, and pop music now joins that list.<\/p>\n That consistency suggests the difference is no fluke of one medium. <\/p>\n Something about how individualist and collectivist societies raise people, speak to them, and sell to them leaves a mark on the words that top the charts.<\/p>\n Broad research<\/a> finds individualism climbing across much of the world, yet the lyric trend is uneven. <\/p>\n The pattern holds in two Western countries and flatlines in two East Asian ones \u2013 hardly universal.<\/p>\n The narcissism debate<\/p>\n Heightened self-focus tends to travel with narcissism<\/a>, a trait built on grandiosity and a craving for attention. <\/p>\n People who score high on it really do say \u201cI\u201d more often than others, which is why pronoun counts have become one way researchers track the trait across populations.<\/p>\n Some researchers argue that narcissism rose for decades in countries like the US, in step with individualism. <\/p>\n The picture is contested, though. A recent meta-analysis<\/a> questions whether that rise was as steep or lasting as once claimed. <\/p>\n The lyric data sits inside that unsettled debate rather than settling it. What the songs reveal is a marker moving one way in the West \u2013 not proof that listeners themselves have all turned inward.<\/p>\n Studying cultural changes<\/p>\n What is new here is the reach. Until this study, the rise of self-focused music was a Western story by default. Now there is direct evidence it stops at the cultural border.<\/p>\n That changes how researchers can study cultural change. Records like hit songs let them trace a society\u2019s mood across decades, as long as no single region\u2019s path is mistaken for the world\u2019s. <\/p>\n Future work could turn to other records and genres, such as books reaching back centuries or charts split by style, to test how deep the divide runs.<\/p>\n For now, the headline is simple. \u201cMe\u201d did not conquer everywhere. <\/p>\n The songs that top the charts in Japan and Hong Kong still sound like they belong to a different cultural universe than the ones climbing American and German Playlist.<\/p>\n Fifty years of data suggest that gap is not closing.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal PLOS One<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013 Check us out on\u00a0EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by\u00a0Eric Ralls<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Earth.com<\/a>.
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