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The Weeknd up for a Nobel Prize for literature.A new study showing a steep decline in songwriting skills over the last 40 years used folk crooner Bob Dylan’s award from the sainted Swedish institution of an example of how much music has changed. To draw their conclusions, a team of researchers from Europe pored over the words to roughly 12,000 songs in English across a variety of genres from rap to rock to R&B, written between 1980 and 2020, The Guardian reported.Their findings were exactly as anyone over the age of 40 might have suspected — lyrics have become simpler, more repetitive, angrier and more self-obsessed.“What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape — from how music is sold to how music is produced,” said senior study author Eva Zangerle, recommendations systems expert at the University of Innsbruck.The study declined to name and shame any newer artists, but instead spoke of how lyrics can be a “mirror of society,” reflecting a culture’s shifting values and preoccupations.The study, published in Scientific Reports, concentrated on emotions expressed, repetitiveness and word choice, particularly to see how often difficult or unusual words were used.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame career will forever be intertwined with that of another 1960s folk legend: Bob Dylan.So what did she think when the “Blowin’ in the Wind” bard received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016?“I thought, ‘Oh, how Bob,’” Baez, 82, told the Hollywood Reporter. “I mean, people differ about whether or not he deserved it for his writing, but whatever — I thought he was a great writer of music. It moved me for half a century and millions of people ever since.”But Dylan was a no-show in Stockholm to accept the prestigious honor.

LONDON -- Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers are among 13 authors in the running for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.Britain’s Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, is on the longlist announced Tuesday for the 50,000-pound ($69,000) prize with “Klara and the Sun,” a novel about love and humanity narrated by a solar-powered android.

The World Food Program has won the Nobel Peace Prize, organizers of the award said Friday. The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895.