Born in the USA: US Public Opinion in Popular Music, 1958-2020

• In Event: Popular Culture: Communicating and Shaping Political Attitudes

Abstract

This paper examines how music is used as a form of political communication, and how popular music reflects public opinion on polity, politics and policies over time. Currently, the study of political communication tends to overlook the role that popular music plays in communicating politics, for the most part focusing on the allegedly more serious political communication conveyed by the media, political candidates, and parties. Existing studies on the political meaning of music are usually confined to either broad overviews on how music has been associated with political communication mostly through protest, propaganda, and censorship; studies that qualitatively analyze the lyrics of individual songs in case studies; or focus on specific events such as the Dixie Chicks publicly criticizing President George W. Bush for invading Iraq. To the best of our knowledge, there are no comprehensive empirical studies of politics in popular music that are able to investigate the changing salience of politics over time as reflected in popular music.

Recent advances in text analysis, however, raise the possibility that new quantitative tools will give us new perspectives through which to grasp the importance of the relationship between politics and music. In this paper, we argue that music very often is used as an instrument of political commentary; an expression of political identity of (sub)cultures, race, gender, states and nations; a tool of political mobilization and recruitment; an instrument of political power to support or suppress political ideas and groups, or as a tool for musicians to act as agents of change, raising awareness for political issues, causes and candidates.

We build this argument using a dataset of the lyrics of roughly 30,000 popular music songs which we have scraped from the US Billboard Hot 100 charts back to 1958. This dataset therefore comprehensively reflects the most popular music of the past six decades in the US, and we use these data —in concert with new text analytic methods— to study the role that politics has played in music over time.

In the first step, we use vector models to identify the set of political songs in our lyrics data set. We then use dynamic topic models within this set of political songs to analyze the evolution of political topics in the Billboard songs over time. Finally, sentiment analysis allows us to measure the political standpoints musicians and songwriters have publicly taken in their songs.

Our results show that music has played an essential role in communicating politics over time. Political topics are present in a significant subsample of pop songs and all major political events such as wars or presidential elections, as well as all prominent politicians who have shaped US politics in the past, and important political institutions have left their traces in pop music. Further, we are able to unveil the very critical stance that pop music has taken on US politics in the past more than 60 years. We conclude by arguing that based on these results music should be featured more prominently in political communication and public opinion research than currently is the case.

Authors

• Mona Krewel, Victoria University of Wellington

• Thomas Pepinsky, Cornell University