The saddest number one song of all time, according to science
Let’s be truly honest with ourselves: there are a couple of miserable things about Christmas that are worth addressing candidly.
While I am at risk of sounding like a Scrooge for highlighting Christmas misery, and I suspect this one might play the biggest role in that narrative, ultimately, plunging yourself into financial desperation in the name of that is certainly one. Endless rounds of ‘Secret Santas’ result in several trips to the gift aisle at Lush, which could all be avoided if we all agreed to neglect the holiday’s celebration of consumerism and just give each other a hug instead.
But perhaps the main reason why you should turn to affection over consumerism this Christmas is because, I would suspect, people need that a little bit more. Let’s face it, times are incredibly rough out there, and the new year doesn’t show a great deal of promise that it’s going to get much better. Any feelings of loneliness or heartbreak that exist within that are likely to be compounded by the overly romantic atmosphere of the holiday season, and so there’s something about a warm embrace that might just remedy the pain, a little bit more than a cherry apple bath bomb.
So, in light of this festive social consciousness, whereby we are going to avoid all things desperately sad, it’s only right we decipher what songs are truly avoidable. Heartbreak has a way of bleeding its way into the festive soundtrack, either through George Michael or Elvis Presley, and so those songs are somewhat unavoidable. But, the number-one track that science has deciphered as the most sad isn’t festive, and can therefore be left off any Christmas playlists.
In yet another move of twisted dystopia, Spotify has collected metadata on each of 35million songs in their database, accessible through their web API, that includes a valence score for every track, from zero to one. Tracks with a low valence score are considered to be the saddest, and one classic hit has come out definitively at the bottom to take gold.
Roberta Flack’s 1972 track ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ has been labelled the saddest by science. An obviously reductive take on what is a tender, complex and achingly beautiful song, but nevertheless, one to avoid if you’re worried about despondency this winter.
Now, here is arguably where science and data has let us down, because it’s only considered sad for its tempo. Lyrically, it is a beautiful song that celebrates the profundity of maternal love, which during Christmas, would only have heightened meaning. But according to science, it’s tempo saddens it, even though Flack herself admitted that it was crucial to the song: “The tempo and arrangement of the song came as a part of the way I felt the story of the song. When you express your feelings about the first time you ever see a great love, you don’t rush the story.”
Despite the song’s subject specificity, it has gone on to become a universal ballad of heartfelt love, and ultimately, that’s where the genius of the song exists. But maybe nuance has been completely lost in this new age of digital singularity, and so its slow profile renders it deeply sad; in actual fact, as I convince you to deliver heartfelt hugs as a Christmas present to your loved ones this year, Flack’s song will actually act as the perfect soundtrack.
