The Rising Compass reads what popular music is saying. Not how it sounds, not if it's catchy, not if it's good or bad. It reads and analyzes the messages contained in the lyrics of songs. It is a clinical tool that emits data. It does not pass judgement or have an opinion. It reflects, with precision, what the lyrics dominating culture are actually saying.
The Rising Compass exists because I wanted a way to *prove* that the lyrical content of popular music was heading in a negative direction. Doing that required a visualization that was easy to understand and based on a controlled data set. It also required a way to gather that data, which meant automation of the thinking and classification of the lyrics themselves.