In the late 1940s when Rock was born, then through & until the drug culture changed society & Rock/Pop in the mid `60s, the focus of the lyrics was usually on how much someone loved another & how they longed to be with them, whether it was a statement about how good it is to be with them now, or how sad they are to not be with them anymore. The comment & the feelings were coming from the singer, but the focus was on another person, not themselves.  the are simply the conduit, the modifiers, and the subject is another person.

In the mid `60s, the drug culture and the slow corruption of society starting with the JFK assassination quickly expanded people’s minds and showed them that our government wasn’t the rock of Gibraltar that we thought it was — a president was killed right before our eyes, and the government cronies who took over were sending us into battle in a place 10,000 miles away that had nothing to do with the security of America — a lot like what’s been happening since 2001. These events & many others of the turbulent `60s could have & should have separated us, but they brought us together. The lyrics were about how we could make a better world, about loving each together & living in peace & harmony, and inciting us to use our brains & think for a change. It was the beginning of the socio-political message. Due to the drug culture, lyrics sometimes were abstract impressions pieced together simply because they sounded good with no inherent meaning to them (e.g., “I Am The Walrus”) or only to the lyricist.  NOTE: Steely Dan did this in the `70s, but they got that inspiration from the `60s counter culture, namely the Beatles, who did just about everything first — except combined Jazz, Rock & Pop.

As the `70s began, we kept exploring the “We” theme of lyrics for a while, but we slowly drifted into the Me Decade, and with that came a lot of lyrics about self-indulgence & making yourself feel good at all costs. The start of the decade showed us the dark side of self-overindulgence with the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, JIm Morrison & Janis Joplin, but it didn’t stop us.  The Eagles sang about hedonism, and Fleetwood Mac & others dove into it & saw their relationships & lives come apart for the sake of it.  Disco was the bedrock of narcissism & even its music was tailored simply to entertain the audience & to allow them to put on their own performance on the dance floor. Originally, the performers where the musicians and the focus was on them. People danced to music of the `50s & `60s, but the music wasn’t necessary tailored to fit to a particular beat so it could be danced to, and the aesthetic art of the talent to create it wasn’t put on the backburner like Disco did to it — Disco was solely invented to A) entertain a crowd non-stop, because the focus had shifted to THEIR needs being more important than the performance, and B) make it cheaper for bar owners to entertain their patrons. it was also born out of mindset that even if you didn’t have talent, you could do something in music that was easier to do that would gain you notoriety & possibly make a living doing it, thus the club DJ was born,and DJ’s are bigger now than ever, even releasing “new” music they created using other people’s talent & songs.

Disco was so pervasive in music that virtually every musician tried to do a Disco-themed song, including those who had no business doing it, and many were doing it trying to kick-start a sagging career. The Bee Gees were the prime example of this, as they were slowly becoming a nostalgia act when they decided to tap into the fever of Disco in its early days, and they are still the gods of Disco to this day, for better or worse. I’ll never forget Disco Demolition NIght in 1979, the radio/baseball promotion where people were encouraged to bring their Disco albums to Comiskey Park so they could be destroyed in 1979 — that was the beginning of the end to Disco, but the style & its influence wouldn’t stay dead, as many `80s performers & beyond appropriated the sound, and the Electronic, Rap/Hip-Hop & current Pop genre owes a large debt to Disco & its repetitive pulsating beat.

Underlying Disco was a fringe backlash that led to Punk, which seems to be as opposite a direction as you could go musically, but it had a lot of common principles. For starters, once again instead of spending years to hone a talent, instead of learning to spin records, you could simply learn the basics of an instrument & stop there, then practice those elements into the ground so it looked like you were really good, then simply do that over & over again with no further progression.  Just like Disco audiences, the Punk audiences weren’t content with letting the performers be the sole entertainment, so they started moshing long before it became a fashion in `90s Grunge.

By the early `80s, the focus of lyrics turned back to another person rather than the singer, but this time, it was highly sexual & objectified women. Every Hair Metal band in the 80’s had a song & video about how much they loved having sex and a beautiful woman would be in the video as eye candy. What was interesting was how a guy who looked like a girl & was about 140 dripping wet would try to act tough & sexy (to the opposite sex) in spandex & makeup, the proceed to tell them how they’d like to have sex with them because they were hot & needed sex — and women bought it & loved it.  This wasn’t the case with all bands, as New Wave melded the fringe Punk music with Pop music and created sounds from the likes of Blondie, U2, REM & others, and it attracted an audience that was tone-deaf to Hair Metal & mostly a bit more intelligent. Digital synthesizers created a new British Invasion, and for the most part of the `80s, if you looked gay & sounded British, or if you grew a lot of well-coiffed hair & looked androgynous, you could get a record deal.  Mainly due to MTV & the music business becoming more attuned to image rather than substance, talent took a backseat to the packaged presentation.

In the `80s, it was expected with the advent of Disco & Punk that `70s Prog & Hard Rock would die a fast death, but it melded into Pop instead, as Rush, Saga, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Journey, Rainbow, Ozzy and other related acts moved into the 80’s with a more Pop-accessible sound that sold for the 1st half of the decade. The lyrics were darker in tone & more serious in their content than typical Hair Metal & had keyboards & harmonies, usually with a melodic & high-range singer, vs Hair Metal that focused on guitars, group unison backing vocals & a singer who sang “tough” & usually had blond hair. The focus in the `80s Prog Pop was still on the other person, but most of the lyrical content was about the dark side of love — when it goes wrong. This isn’t virgin territory, as Country music had been exploring this ground for decades — listen to Hank Williams Sr music from the `40s to prove that.

In the `90s, Grunge hit like a baseball bat across the collective heads of American culture, not just music — ti even affected fashion. Gone were the primped hairstyles & the sleek video stars — the new guys (mostly from Seattle) were wearing a lot of flannel and were a throwback to Punk & looked like unwashed 70’s rockers, and they were pissed. All their songs were about how their life & the entire world sucked & how it affected them. The focus shifted to themselves & it was dark & depressing. The same feelings were being conveyed, in that someone is hurt by something, i.e., more of the same insipid whining we’ve been getting since day one of the Rock revolution, but the focus wasn’t another person — virtually every sentence began or contained the words “I”, “me”, “my”, “myself” & “mine”. This marked a focus shift that has persisted to this day in Rock/Pop as Post-Grunge has endured for many years beyond its life expectancy.