JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Love songs have been around for a very long time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AT LAST")
ETTA JAMES: (Singing) At last...
SUMMERS: Are today's musicians still writing about love, or is the love song dying?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AT LAST")
JAMES: (Singing) ...My love has come along.
SUMMERS: That's the question David Mora and Michelle Jia set out to answer in their recent essay in The Pudding. They looked at the top 10 most popular songs for every year from 1959 to 2023 to try and figure it out. David and Michelle, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MICHELLE JIA: Thank you.
DAVID MORA: Thank you.
SUMMERS: What inspired the two of you to look into this?
MORA: Yeah. We were really interested in how artists present themselves not just as themselves, but as characters in a story or in a persona across time and how that's changed as society has changed. And as we were exploring that, we started to think about the way that these performers - whether that's Nicki Minaj or Elvis - related to love and romance, which is so central in this whole dataset in pop.
And we started to ask this question, you know, there's so much grumbling, particularly from the older generation, about how love has been lost, true romance isn't represented anymore, that we said, well, is this really there in the data? And what we found was really surprising and interesting and let us just completely change the way we thought about what is love and how do we talk about it.
SUMMERS: OK, and when we try to figure out whether musicians are still writing about love or whether the love song's dying, I mean, to answer that question, I feel like you've got to define what a love song even is. And in your essay, you start by looking at songs that you classify as serenade. So these are kind of, like, the most straightforward songs about love, like "Can't Help Falling In Love" by Elvis Presley.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CAN'T HELP FALLING IN LOVE")
ELVIS PRESLEY: (Singing) Wise men say...
SUMMERS: What makes a serenade a serenade?
JIA: I think when people imagine love songs, there's almost two big categories. The first one is the obvious one, which is you the singer are in love with someone, and you're singing to them direct. And that's what a serenade is. It's like a declaration of love from one person to the other. The second kind, like everything else, is there's a whole world of songs that are about love, but aren't that direct. And that's what the rest of the essay gets into.
SUMMERS: According to your analysis, the popularity of serenades has declined from 23% of top songs to only like 12% of top songs. But you two make the case on this essay, David, that that is not enough to prove that the love song is dead. Tell us why.
MORA: Yeah. Well, obviously, you have a very simple relationship when you love someone, they love you back and everything is great. But there's so much more discussed in pop. And I think we started sort of with the serenade, where love is great and everything's simple. And I think the obvious category would be when there's heartache. There's the second category; songs like "Yesterday" by the Beatles.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YESTERDAY")
THE BEATLES: (Singing) I said something wrong. Now I long for yesterday.
SUMMERS: All right. Now, I've got a question, if I can, about these songs about pursuing love. There are two examples that come to mind for me. There's something like, say, "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles. And, completely different universe, there's something like "Buy U A Drink" (ph) by T-Pain, which are two songs that anybody who hears them knows, they do not sound anything alike. And yet you guys make the case that, lyrically, they're quite similar. Tell us how.
JIA: I think we tend to get caught up in genre or in style a lot when we think about music, and so we're like, oh, yeah, T-Pain, like, that's so sonically different from the Beatles. But because we focused on lyrics, we were able to drill down into, like, what's actually happening in this T-Pain song?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BUY U A DRANK (SHAWTY SNAPPIN')")
T-PAIN: (Singing) Baby girl, what's your name?
JIA: He's in the bar. He wants to buy someone a drink. That's honestly really vulnerable. Like, I know you're T-Pain, but what if she says no? Like, that's still...
SUMMERS: What if she says no?
JIA: What if - she might say no. So it's, like, still that moment of you see someone, you're kind of into them and you're making this gesture towards further closeness. And both those songs are about that.
SUMMERS: Well, let's dig into another category. And we will not get too dirty here because we are on the radio, but there is also the sexual confidence category, which was pretty much nonexistent in the '60s, and then there was this huge surge of popularity in the 2000s. What do you think that all of these trends show us about how the expression of love and music has changed over time?
JIA: Sexual confidence was a big category for us because we knew it was kind of, like, the elephant in the room. A lot of the times when people talk about the, quote-unquote, "decline of love songs," they usually refer to the rise of songs that are primarily about sex. And one thing that we felt strongly about is there's a whole spectrum of human connection and how we think about that. And there's many different ways, you know, culturally, morally to think about where sex and romance sit next to each other. But for us, we were like, this is all part of human connection, and this needs to be a valid part of human expression.
SUMMERS: David, if you can, could you give us maybe a couple of examples of those sexual confident songs? I'm having a hard time not picturing one Justin Timberlake in my head right now.
MORA: Yeah. So one iconic one from the early '80s was "Physical" by Olivia Newton-John.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PHYSICAL")
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN: (Singing) Let's get physical, physical.
MORA: If you think of modern ones, you have "Work" by Rihanna and Drake. You also have "WAP" with Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WAP")
CARDI B AND MEGAN THEE STALLION: (Rapping) Now get your boots and your coat for this wet, wet, wet. He bought a phone just for pictures of this wet, wet, wet.
MORA: And so I think it's really interesting to see how obviously the tone, the explicitness of the songs has changed over time, but I think that that sexual confidence was there in the '60s. They may be different form. And maybe now it's becoming more acceptable to express it in other ways, but it's still there. So even though we see the surge in the 2000s and since then to modern day, I think that we still see the thread running through all of pop.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WAP")
CARDI B AND MEGAN THEE STALLION: (Rapping) I wanna whoop.
SUMMERS: David Mora and Michelle Jia, thanks for joining us. You can read the full piece on The Pudding's website. Thank you.
JIA: Thank you.
MORA: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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