{"id":28878,"date":"2017-07-21T05:39:12","date_gmt":"2017-07-21T09:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=28878"},"modified":"2017-07-19T21:04:10","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T01:04:10","slug":"from-love-songs-to-sex-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2017\/07\/from-love-songs-to-sex-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"From love songs to sex songs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"640px-Beyonc\u00e9_e_Jay-Z\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Popular music used to favor love songs. \u00a0In popular music today, the theme of romantic love has been largely replaced by songs\u00a0that are just about sex.<\/p>\n

My fellow Patheos blogger<\/a> G. Shane Morris has written about this in The Federalist,\u00a0<\/em>citing several studies that confirm the change.<\/p>\n

His\u00a0discussion, quoted and linked after the jump, includes\u00a0readings of both old love songs and the new sex songs. \u00a0(Caution: \u00a0Some lyrics are not appropriate for underaged audiences, though they are the ones buying most of the songs.)<\/p>\n

\n

Morris\u00a0associates the switch from love to sex to \u201cthe disappearance of courtship,\u201d as dating and romance are increasingly replaced by crass sexual hookups.<\/p>\n

He does, however, point to a few exceptions, some\u00a0traditionally romantic love songs that rise through the muck.<\/p>\n

From G. Shane Morris,\u00a0Today\u2019s Sex Songs Are Making Love Songs Go Extinct<\/a>, The Federalist:<\/em><\/p>\n

Turn on your local hits station (you know, the one where Justin Bieber plays on the hour) and you\u2019ll notice what I\u2019ve noticed: Almost every song that has anything to do with men and women is about sex. I\u2019m not just talking about the throbbing beats or breathy vocals. I\u2019m talking about the lyrics.<\/p>\n

Gone are the syrupy vows of eternal devotion I heard on the radio as a kid. No one belts out \u201cI will always love you!\u201d anymore. Instead, they\u2019re \u201cIn the bed all day, bed all day, bed all day,\u201d and no, Zayn Malik is not sleeping. Something has happened to pop music, and though an occasional song still comes along that\u2019s genuinely romantic, the vast majority of them are celebrations of raw sexuality, with references to body parts, specific acts, and (if you\u2019re listening on an uncensored medium) loads of explicit terms.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not going crazy. The transition from sap to smut is real, and research proves it. . . .<\/p>\n

Back in 2011, Albany psychology professor Gordon Gallup and student Dawn R. Hobbs\u00a0published a study in\u00a0Evolutionary Psychology<\/em><\/a>\u00a0showing that 92 percent of the 174 songs that made it into the Billboard Top 10 sometime during 2009\u00a0contained what they hilariously dubbed \u201creproductive messages,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0including references to \u201csex appeal,\u201d \u201carousal,\u201d and \u201cgenitalia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billboard reports<\/a>\u00a0that lyrical occurrences of the actual word \u201csex,\u201d\u00a0have surged<\/a>\u00a0relative to \u201clove,\u201d which peaked in 1988 and has plummeted since. \u201cSex\u201d peaked in 2009 with Ciara\u2019s \u201cLove Sex Magic,\u201d and Jeremih\u2019s \u201cBirthday Sex,\u201d both of which hit the top 10. And while it\u2019s still going strong, artists today seem to prefer other, often more explicit terms.<\/p>\n

A new study this year<\/a>\u00a0by Drs. Jennifer Shewmaker and Andrew P. Smiler with Brittany Hearon is the most extensive so far.\u00a0Published in\u00a0Sexuality and Culture<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>their research examined \u201csexual stereotypes in popular music lyrics across five decades.\u201d Their title says it all: \u201cFrom \u2018I Want to hold Your Hand\u2019 to \u2018Promiscuous.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[Keep reading. . .]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Photo of Jay-Z and his wife Beyonc\u00e9\u00a0 singing \u201cCrazy in Love,\u201d \u00a0by idrewuk \u2013 originally posted to Flickr as Hello hubbie!, CC BY 2.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=10579989<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Popular music used to favor love songs. \u00a0In popular music today, the theme of romantic love has been largely replaced by songs\u00a0that are just about sex. My fellow Patheos blogger G. Shane Morris has written about this in The Federalist,\u00a0citing several studies that confirm the change. His\u00a0discussion, quoted and linked after the jump, includes\u00a0readings of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":28880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,32,41],"tags":[5622,3013,1758,5623],"class_list":["post-28878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-family","category-music","category-sex","tag-hookup-culture","tag-love-songs","tag-popular-music","tag-sex-songs"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom love songs to sex songs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Popular music has always favored love songs, but pop music today has largely replaced the theme of romantic love with songs that are just about sex.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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