Reflections of Popular Culture in Music

Consider the subject matter, content and point of view of today's top songs and identify lines which contain poetic merit. What do these songs, as a whole, say about our modern American culture? In particular, what do these songs say about your generation as the greatest consumers of music media? How are gender roles represented in popular music? How is success measured?

In music today, and the decades before, have helped to shape and change everyone around us. Clothing, group of friends, hairstyles, etc. are all judge by what a person listens to, or what their favorite artist is like. People are shunned from a group of people if they don’t choose to like the same type of music, and even groups have formed that only listen to a certain type (I.E. “Head bangers”). This fascination with music has grown so much on people in the past decades and as the music industry has been changing, it affects the world as a whole. Specifically in the United States, the top ‘billboard’ artists don’t even have to be good at songwriting, or singing at that and just have to adhere to what people like, and how to make money off of it.
Today’s number one hit in the U.S. is “Break Your Heart” by Taio Cruz. This song centers on the singer being a ‘heartbreaker’ and saying that he pretty much doesn’t care about women and he is “hard to please”. Poetic devices are hard to find in this song, but there are a couple deficiencies. “I’m only gonna break break your break break your heart” is repeated so many times in the song that it seems to take away from the rest of it. There are only about 5 short verses included in the repeated line of this song, and this is a prime example of how it doesn’t really matter how good at songwriting or singing a person is, it’s just how catchy the song is.
Number 10 comes in with “How Low” by Ludacris. This song shows a distinct pattern in the views of women in rap. The song is all centered on girls dancing and “dropping to the ground”. These lyrics aren’t quotable for school-purposes but having the song summarized in one line shows their songwriting flaws and the song as a whole having a very poor quality.
In the rap/hip-hop dominate charts, an actually artist pops out. At 19 is “Breakeven” by The Script. This is a song about the heartbreak of a man over a girl. The songwriting is above par but it still sticks out compared to all the others in the charts. “She finally met a man that's gonna put her first/While I'm wide awake she's no trouble sleeping” shows the difference between the heartbroken man and the girl whose already found another guy. This song is a prime example of the ‘decent’ songwriting happening in today’s charts.
These songs don’t summarize even half of the billboards of today’s popular music. This just helps to understand what the standards are of the music industry today.