The term sadboi has been taking hold within groupbool for some time now. It all started when pb was intervened by several people within the span of his bi-monthly blonde listening sessions. He elaborated this encounter further on his blog but in summary, he was defensive about being called a sadboi and went to great lengths to empirically prove that he’s not. However that situation got me wondering, aren’t we all sadbois in some respects, albeit some more than others?
origin
So what exactly does it mean to be a sadboi?
There are varying definitions out there ranging from someone that is perpetually lamenting about their past relationships (while avidly listening Drake or Bryson Tiller) to one that uses their emotional sadness to manipulate others. At groupbool, we’ve come to qualitatively describe sadboi as a mood where someone is down in their feels and doing a bit of soul searching. The impetus does not necessarily have to be a relationship but it’s most likely caused by ruminating over something in the past that no longer remains (think blonde).
I was looking at the feed while writing this post and interestingly saw this for pb 🤔
More importantly, with the nature of a sadboi being inherently introspective, one of the major ways in which this trait manifests is through the music they listen to. Given the visible nature of gb’s listening history, we are usually aware of when someone is going through their sadboi phase. A sadboi’s music taste is not necessarily depressing but has qualities similar to the one’s described above. Usually the tracks are low energy and somber with a musical quality that is far from cheerful.
i guess it (was) valentine’s day
Following up to Valentine’s day, oc made a playlist to help fellow sadbois really get in their feels. The gb crew each added around six to seven tracks with our unique interpretation of what it meant to be a sadboi. This was an interesting experiment that ended up creating a phenomenal playlist covering a wide variety of genres and artists. It showcased that we all have a different flavor of sadboi within us.
This was the perfect opportunity to continue pb’s work and quantitatively measure what defines
a sadboi while also answering the age old question of who was the biggest sadboi
after all. Spotify offers details regarding the meta features of a track such as tempo, danceability etc.
However the most appropriate features for measuring sadboi were valence and energy. Valence describes
the musical positiveness conveyed by a track where more cheerful and euphoric tracks have a higher
valence value. Energy, surprisingly unrelated to tempo, is the perceptual measure of intensity
of a track. Spotify’s api documentation says that “energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and noisy”. 1
Naturally, I assumed that a typical sadboi track, with their dark musical quality and downtempo energy, would fall on the lower end of the spectrum. There were a total of 40 tracks added to the sadboi playlist and the tracks had the following distribution.
For both audio features, the playlist spans most of the spectrum but the tracks are more
concentrated towards the bottom half. It’s interesting to note that most of the tracks hover
around the median of the distribution as I would expect them to be close to the [0.0, 0.3] range.
who is a sadboi?
The sadbois need love playlist had some high valence/energy tracks that were clearly outliers from the rest. This probably plays into the fact that we all have different qualitative definitions of what defines a sadboi or maybe they were leaning more towards the nature of love than sadboi.
Generally the tracks tended to have lower valence and energy values. I also found that genre is not important but rather the sentiment they evoke. For instance the lofi track “i’m closing my eyes (feat. shiloh)” does not contain that many words but it carries a sense of remorseful remembrance. This feeling is echoed in Frank Ocean’s “Moon River” given the subject matter and a heart-wrenching rendition of Audrey Hepburn’s classic.
In an naive and intuitive attempt at quantifying someone’s sadboi, I factored in a weighted
valence and energy to output a value between 0 and 1. A higher value would denote
how much of a sadboi someone is. This is by no means an exhaustive measure especially considering
the subject matter of a track is not even taken into account but it gives us a jumping off point
in quantifying someone’s intrinsic sadboi.
Here are the results for the entire gb squad.
These results were quite surprising as I assumed that pb’s taste would out-sadboi mine. Perhaps it was the emotional state I was in or maybe I am actually the most sadboi sadboi within groupbool.
So you might be wondering why go through all this trouble to quantify how much melancholic music one listens to. Well, the answer is more complex to dive into here but I think that music has an intrinsic balancing mechanism. When one listen to music that mirrors their current emotional state, it tends to nudge the listener towards homeostasis like two negative numbers being multiplied to a positive result. So being a sadboi may in affect be a healthy outlet and not so bad after all 😉.
Lookout for a sadboi meter sometime in the near future. You will be able to use this to quantify your how much of a sadboi you are based on your spotify listening history.