Pathology of Contemporary Song Lyrics

Song lyrics, as an interartistic and interdisciplinary genre, follows principles that are often overlooked in many contemporary musical works. The growing dominance of commerce and industry over art, and the subsequent mass production of musical works, have overshadowed many of the literary and musical values and conventions of song lyrics. The excessive focus on quantity over quality has led contemporary lyrics to face serious challenges and flaws. These issues have not only destabilized the position of lyrics but have also negatively influenced the artistic taste of audiences. The present study aims to identify and examine the most common structural and content-related flaws in contemporary lyrics and to analyze the underlying causes of their emergence. The data of this research include a selected sample of popular lyrics from pop, traditional, and fusion styles, analyzed through a descriptive-analytical method, utilizing qualitative content analysis, and considering the principles of literary criticism and lyric studies with regard to structural and thematic features. The findings of the research reveal eleven recurring types of flaws in the structure and content of contemporary Lyrics. These flaws include the mixture of standard and colloquial language, defective rhymes such as redundancy (īṭā) and pleonasm (shaygān), inconsistency between positive and negative verbs, faulty rhyming patterns, weak composition such as omitted words or phrases, inappropriate expressions, incorrect use of prepositions and misplacement of sentence components, redundancy, diminishing the status of the beloved, gender bias, incorporation of foreign words, lack of cohesion and coherence, misinterpretation or arbitrary reading of lyrics, and excessive focus on melody at the expense of lyrical quality.