A topic I have circled back to repeatedly is the decline of both high-brow and low-brow culture. It is bad enough if you just look back at the last ten or fifteen years, but if you look further back, the decline is absolutely unbelievable. Earlier today, I was reminded of a Beach Boys song, California Girls, which was released in 1965. There is a structure, the guys can use their voices very competently, and there is a simple, yet catchy melody. It certainly shows that some of the band members were classically trained.

In 2020, however, Cardi B rapped about her “wet-ass pussy”:

I feel disgust and revulsion for that kind of music. These two songs are just randomly chosen. I could easily pick dozens of songs from the 1960s and 1970s, and contrast this with today’s commercial products. You do not even have to dig deep. Just look for some of the hits of that time. Today’s melody and lyrics, in contrast, are simpler and it seems that hardly any professional musician or singer has been properly trained. This is captured quite well in this analysis of popular songs with a key change, which is discussed in more detail in this video:

Surely, this has nothing to do with a general decline in intelligence, i.e. music has become simpler in order to appeal to an audience that has lower standards. However, I find it entirely plausible that such music is pushed in order to provide people with less intellectual stimulation as they listen to music. It would be great to do a long-term study in which kids get exposed to the best of 1960/1970s music and a different group who gets fed today’s slop. The latter group would probably end up with an IQ decrease of three to five points.

By the way, if you go to your favorite non-biased search engine, Google, and look up the release date of “California Girls”, the benevolent algorithm corrects your misspelling and instead informs you about the release of Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”. I am sure that this happens without any human intervention at all. Surely, nobody would have an interest in suppression knowledge about the Beach Boys classic. Besides, imagine the shock if you wanted to look up “California Gurls” and Google instead sent you to a video of the 1965 song. I am not sure the modern audience could even handle it.