Glad, bad, mad and sad

Is pop music really getting gloomier? A recent article in the Indy suggested so, listing happy songs of the 1960s, such as 'Daydream Believer' by the Monkees, 'She Loves you' by the Beatles, 'Shout' by Lulu - well, she may have been happy but it didn't exactly fill everyone else with joy did it? They could have included 'Glad all over' by the Dave Clark Five! Now glad is a word you don't often hear nowadays.

But apparently psychologists have recently shown that hit songs have become progressively sadder in the last half a century of pop music, analysing 1000 songs and showing that with each passing decade they have become more reflective and sombre. To contrast the two decades:

1960s: 85 per cent of  songs in a major key, 116 beats per minute;
2010s: just 42 per cent in a major key, 100 beats per minute.

The report suggests it's because people nowadays think they are smart, and happy music is a cliche. Life's more complicated, and we want our music to reflect that.

So the pattern goes: 1960s: carefree; 1970s: Abba kitsch; 1980s: Wham and glam;1990s: Grunge's angst;
2000, post-millenium tension of Radiohead and co.

All I can say is that Tears for Fears' (that's a pretty pessimistic name for a band if ever I heard one though their original name was History of Headaches) 'Mad World' reached no 3 in the charts in 1982, but when it was used by Michael Andrews in the Donnie Darko soundtrack, sung by Gary Jules  and given a much slower pace and lashings of melancholy it was a Christmas number one in 2003. It's a mad world and it's getting madder......