With the rise of social media and the splintering of media audiences, culture in America feels increasingly individualistic and personalized. Everyone has a different feed, mediated by an algorithm, and the monoculture of the past is all but dead, replaced by a growing diversity of niche fandoms. According to a new study published in PLOS One, pop-music lyrics could be the canary in the coal mine for this trend toward individualism.

Over the past half century, the use of personal pronouns like “me,” “myself,” and “I” have been on the rise in popular songs in Germany and the United States, per a team of psychologists led by Marius Golubickis of United Arab Emirates University. Golubickis and his colleagues analyzed the lyrics of the top 10 songs from 1970 to 2019 in the two countries, and compared them to lyrics from similar songs in Japan and Hong Kong. While songs from the Western countries showed a steady increase in the use of self-focused language (compared to first-person plural pronouns like “we” and “us”), the same measure stayed relatively flat in the East Asian societies. 

Read more: “When You Listen to Music, You’re Never Alone”

The authors say that these findings may reflect broader cultural shifts toward self-centrism in individualistic societies, but they also seem to be contingent on culture. “Even in a highly globalized world, where music and media circulate across borders, Japan and Hong Kong didn’t show the same rise in self-focused language that we observed in the United States and Germany,” Golubickis said in an interview with PLOS staff. “This suggests that local cultural norms may continue to shape expression in powerful ways.” 

In other words, the trends toward individualism are neither universal nor inevitable.

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