My findings suggest that while the lyrics of modern RnB music are pretty different from artist to artist, while the themes explored in the genre have remained relatively consistent. Love, women, dancing, and jewelry are some of the top themes explored in the genre, and these themes have been consistent across the years I studied.
As we saw with the dendrogram that showed how most popular modern RnB songs were pretty different stylistically due to the many clusters, most modern RnB artists write songs that are very different stylistically. The topic models that showed the most frequent themes and that they stayed proportionally similar over time, corroborating the idea that RnB music tends to explore similar themes.
Topic models can "unearth hidden semantic structures in textual data" as they are essentially "networks of collocation terms that, because of the co-occurence across documents, can be assumed to refer to the same semantic domain" (Topic, 2023). Since most of the top modern RnB songs had similar topics and the proportion of these topics stayed pretty similar year to year, it can be concluded that RnB artists tend to sing about the same themes.
The implications of these findings could be interpreted in a number of ways. On the one hand, they suggest that RnB music has a certain level of consistency in terms of the topics it explores. This could be seen as both a strength and a weakness - on one hand, it provides a sense of familiarity and continuity for listeners who are drawn to the genre, but on the other hand, it could be seen as limiting or repetitive.
However, the fact that the lyrics themselves are stylistically different from artist to artist suggests that the genre is still evolving and adapting to changes in culture and society. This could be seen as a positive development, as it suggests that modern RnB music is constantly evolving and responding to new trends and cultural shifts.
Upon further research, I found that RnB music was a commercial success in the 1990s and early 2000s, and has since shifted towards a more melancholic sound. Artists like Ella Mai and Rachel Chinouriri have "expressed frustration with being mislabeled as RnB when their music leans more towards indie-pop (Complex, 2023). RnB might not be as dominantly mainstream as it once was, but it continues to adapt to changing trends and influences, proving its vitality (Complex, 2023). Recent articles about RnB music have discussed how the genre of RnB music has been going through an "identity crisis" (The Culture Crypt, 2023). Ultimately, it was the mislabeling and reluctance of artists to be associated with RnB that have played a significant role in shaping the perception that RnB is not profitable, which lead to the genre's fall from grace (The Culture Crypt, 2023).
Despite these challenges, RnB music has remained quite popular, which is a testament to its consistency and adaptability. While the themes explored in the genre remain consistent, the stylistic diversity of lyrics reflects the ongoing evolution of this genre. These findings shed light on the understanding and interpretation of RnB music as a genre and have broader implications for the analysis of popular music as a whole.
One potential issue is the sample size, as I only selected 47 songs to analyze. Additionally, the selection of songs that I chose to analyze influences my findings. If I had decided to not differentiate by popular or unpopular songs, and analyzed a wide range of RnB music, it is possible that I could have gotten different results, and my findings cannot be representative of the genre as a whole.
Another potential issue is the accuracy of the text analysis tools that I used to analyze my results. These tools could affect the validity of my results if I used them in a biased way or didn't account for certain issues like buggy code or an error I didn't notice.
Next steps for this project could include expanding the time frame, analyzing more songs, or analyzing other genres of music to see how lyrics have changed over time in those contexts. This might allow for a more nuanced and stronger analysis of the RnB genre as a whole. It might also be interesting to examine the impact of social and cultural factors on the lyrics of R&B music, such as changes in societal attitudes towards gender, race, and sexuality. This could be done by incorporating music criticism from music journals and analyzing the ways in which their discussion of RnB music has evolved over time, and whether the narrative of RnB going through an "identity crisis" holds up.