Is society getting more vain, or just more lazy?

You have got to be kidding me.
According to the NY Times, a researcher has posited that music lyrics prove people are more vain today than in years past. How did Nathan DeWall come to this conclusion? By listening to the Billboard 100 from each year? Reading songs and noting changes in the voice and tone of today's lyricists? Asking artists about the intent of their music, and how society has played a part?
Not even close.
According to the Times article, DeWall and associates completed "A computer analysis of three decades of hit songs" showing "the words 'I' and 'me' appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in 'we' and 'us' and the expression of positive emotions."
In other words, they Googled a bunch of songs and called it a day.
DeWall extrapolated that lyrics using "I" more often than "we" are narcissistic? This is not academic research. This is a dorm-room game. The only educational use I could imagine for this paper is a Highlights Magazine introduction to logic: "Say kids, how many fallacies can you find in this article?"
The idea that a sentence in the first person is about the speaker is so facile that it makes me wonder if DeWall has ever read anything outside of PsycNET (where his paper is on sale for $12). Why does DeWall assume that anyone singing the word "I" is talking about himself? In the 1975 song "Isis" (a "Me Decade" lyric Dewall's computer search conveniently avoids by beginning with songs from 1980), Bob Dylan sings about trekking to ice-covered pyramids and plundering graves. Is this proof that a segment of our society was made up of intrepid robbers? What percentage of the overall population is represented by this use of the "I" pronoun?
Of course, in the context of the song any listener knows the lyric is a story, a myth, a tall tale in the way Jimi Hendrix spoke of chopping down a mountain with his bare hands, or the Beastie Boys described the illict uses of a whiffle ball bat. By hypothesizing that the meaning of a word is the same in any context, DeWall proves that he is a researcher of the laziest order.
There are dozens of statistical points to be made as well:

• the 1991 dawning of Soundscan, which tracks sales of music at purchase instead of the unreliable methods of marking sales that came before, neatly cleaves DeWall's data pool,
• the shrinking sales of music means that a 2007 #1 sold far fewer copies than a #1 from the CD era.
• a song's chart position does not always signify it's import to society - is "Ebony and Ivory" more indicative of American race relations than, say, Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" just because sold more copies?
• the relatively small sample that is contained in a list of hit songs from 27 years would indicate a single song would stand for a large segment of the population. Does "My Heart Will Go On (Theme From Titanic)" really represent a lion's share of the population's self-worth in 1997? Would society be less vain (or whatever that song seems to represent to DeWall) if it had been on the charts for another week, displacing whatever came on after it?

DeWall owes an apology to his colleagues for tarnishing the image of psychology with this psudo-science. Might I suggest a few verses from the Beck songbook: "I'm a loser."