Death A Growing Topic In Pop Music

Pop music, particularly new rap from the past year, has latched onto death. It is now an in-vogue topic to discuss. A song about suicide, Logic’s “1-800-273-8255” (named for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline), was even nominated for Song of the Year at this year’s Grammy awards.

Logic’s song “1-800-273-8255” helped raise suicide awareness in 2017 
Credit: ambrosiaforheads.com

A study performed by Quartzy showed that there has been an overall rise in death as a topic in pop music since the early 1980s.

To determine what Quartzy refers to as the “deathliness” of pop music, the researchers examined the lyrics of 15,000 songs from 1958 to 2016. (All the tested songs had at one point appeared on the Billboard 100 chart.) The researchers labeled a song “deathly” if it contained one or more of the following words: die, died, dead, death, kill, killed, killing, murder, murdered, slaughter and slaughtered.

According to an accompanying chart, songs in 2016 had the highest percentage of “deathly” words. Just under 24 percent of all songs studied from that year contained at least one of the buzzwords.

The researchers noted that newer pop music songs generally contain more words than their predecessors. This means that any word, regardless of whether it is death related, is more likely to appear in a song. The study adjusted for this by inflating the percentage of “deathly” songs by the number of fewer words used in a past era. For instance, if the average song in 1970 had half as many unique words as songs in 2016, they multiplied the percentage by two.

According to the Quartzy article, the rise of rap music might be one cause of the seemingly steady increase in death as a topic in pop music. A New Yorker story about the proliferation of morose topics in rap music from last year in particular highlighted this trend.

“If hip-hop has historically focused on invincibility,” writes author Carrie Battan, “this generation is fixated on mortality…The sound is a sincere expression of anguished youth, but it’s also a backlash against a previous micro-generation of hip-hop artists obsessed with self-actualization and revelry.”

This new wave of hip-hop seems to be following the overall trend in pop music that accepts death as an important issue.

Depression, Mental Health and Death

The sub-genre of mainstream rap that exploded in popular culture last year features young artists who often speak about death and contemplate mortality.

Lil Uzi Vert is part of a new wave of rap music that regularly discusses death 
Credit: billboard.com

Sometimes known as “SoundCloud” rap (SoundCloud is an online music streaming platform that many of the artists use to release songs), the genre is produced in a DIY manner. Many times the songs discuss the intricacies of mental health. One rapper, Lil Uzi Vert, had a tremendously popular song last year called “XO TOUR Llif3.” The song and particularly the music video are full of dying-related lyrics and imagery.

The chorus has numerous lines discussing death and also suicide, including: “Baby, I am not afraid to die,” and “Push me to the edge, All my friends are dead.”

This song is just one of many to come out in the past year that were written by young rappers who are willing to discuss death in a public forum. Other rappers of this genre include XXXTentacion, Lil Xan and Trippie Redd.

The trend to publicly acknowledge mental health issues and thoughts of a morbid nature could be signs that death is indeed becoming less of a taboo topic in mainstream society.

It’s sometimes hard to tell in these songs if the artist is being genuine or is creating a fictional character. Regardless, it is interesting to note that the younger generation is willing to be so open about death, dying and mental health.