Well lyrics and instruments certainly haven't gotten better. Drum machines and electronic effects have taken over for instruments and lyrics are about as shallow as they can be right now.
Well today's lyrics are worse in at least one objective way: number of unique words.
In the "good old days" you could at least count on a verse, chorus, different verse, chorus, etc. structure. Then at some point they were doing "chorus, chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus...". Soon we'll be lucky to get more than a repeated sentence fragment.
Depends on what you define as "the good old days."
Latin church hymns, for example, largely use the same corpus of Latin for lyrics, but no one is about to accuse Mozart or Beethoven of a crisis of originality in lyrics.
Right. I occasionally hear local word-rich rap and it is low quality lyrics overall. In particular, it’s like they explain every line with ten more lines, as if their listener was an idiot who cannot read between these.
If I looked for a good metric, I would probably take min(word per meaning and touch), but that would raise a question on what ‘meaning and touch’ is. Nonetheless, good lyrics always seem to be un/under-spoken or sharp cut.
Ok fine, objectively there's less lyric content and more repetition; and subjectively the lyrics aren't exactly getting more insightful or laconic to compensate.
Lyrics are guaranteed to improve over the very long term, as language change gradually renders old lyrics literally unintelligible.
There may be an objective sense in which a song from thousands of years ago has better lyrics than one from today, but nobody can perceive it through the language barrier.
