negative effects of rap music essay

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Experts debate hip-hop’s influence on American culture, youth, for better or for worse

By CHRIS KILLION

Rap music is very influential and can have positive or negative effects, according to some experts.

?To say there is no influence and no effect is na?ve,? said Murray Forman, professor of media studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Today, rap has become a popular genre. It originated in the 1970s in South Bronx and is part of hip-hop culture.

Hip-hop encompasses everything from dance and fashion to music. Forman said rap is the vocal and lyrical aspect of hip-hop.

Hip-hop has become increasingly popular over the years and its influence is felt throughout society.

?It is a known fact that hip-hop has taken over, in a sense, the mainstream youth culture,? said Emmett Price, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, who teaches hip-hop culture. ?So, the young kids from the age of being able to speak to going on to high school are influenced by hip-hop culture whether they listen to music or not.?

There has been a long, ongoing debate whether hip-hop, especially rap, the musical aspect of hip-hop, has a negative or positive influence.

There have been studies done that show a correlation between rap music and increased criminal behavior, sexual activity and drug use.

Ralph DiClemente and his colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta studied 522 randomly selected African-American females from the same area between the ages of 14 and 18. The researchers were interested in how exposure to rap music videos affected the subjects? health.

The researchers placed the young women into two categories: high exposure or average to low exposure. Average exposure was about 20 hours per week.

The researchers found that after a year the subjects? viewing habits did not change. Those in the high exposure group were more likely to take sexual risks and were less apt to use a condom. The high exposure group was less likely to disagree with their boyfriends about sexual behavior.

The high exposure group was also more likely to have sexually-transmitted diseases, be being drinkers and use more drugs.

DiClemente said this does not mean that rap videos cause such behavior, but there is a strong association.

Other experts have also seen an association.

Price said he thinks it is ?horrible? how the lyrics speak as though women are not equivalent to men. Also, the presence of derogatory remarks about race and the concept of love of money as well as the image portrayed in rap music that drugs and sex are common, all have negative impacts on those listening.

?A lot of these notions are not notions that we want to pass down to the young kids without the proper contextualization,? he said.

Price said talking about sex in the music is not bad, but it becomes bad if the rappers do not put the notion in the right context.

Susan Weber, a music therapist at MMB Music, Inc., in St. Louis said if someone is rapping over and over again about killing cops, someone is more likely to kill cops because people are susceptible to suggestions.

Many experts have agreed that rap?s greatest effects are on children, where its influence can be particularly strong.

?A lot of young people listen to their [rappers?] lyrics and take their word as law,? said Salome Thomas El, a principal of an elementary and middle school in inner city Philadelphia, who has been interviewed on ?The O?Reilly Factor? on Fox News about the issue of rap and its effects on children.

He said children ?live what they learn and learn what they live? and many of these children coming from broken homes look up to the rapper.

?A lot of times he [the rapper] becomes the teacher,? Thomas El said. ?He becomes the role model to these young people.?

He said he has seen rap music and videos influence his school children negatively. He said the school children are using profanity and wearing baggy pants. Girls dress like the women in the videos, who are oftentimes inappropriately dressed.

Forman said he is skeptical of reports that say rap and hip-hop are negative. He said there are other factors that play a role as well, such as a broken home, psychological problems or economic depression.

Some experts have seen that there is potential for rap to have a positive influence.

Thomas El said he knows all rappers are not negative because some are doing positive things. His issue is they do not rap about those positive things.

?Some of these guys are very astute businessmen, I mean, Jay-Z owns his own record label,? he said.

Soul music was grafted into the political movements during the civil rights era and hip-hop is capable in some of the same ways to be ?grafted onto some of the new power politics in the early 21st century,? Forman said.

Many people have seen rap have positive effects on society. It is an artistic form and allows people to express themselves in a positive way.

Forman said rap helps young artists get out of economic depression. The young artists help their family, friends and neighbors overcome economic depression as well. Rap opens doors for young artists to express themselves.

Rap also allows for young blacks to articulate a certain cultural perspective and help others understand what is going on in the minds of young black people in the urban environment, he said.

Price said the music was about expression.

?At a certain level we need to listen to what these folks [rap artists] are saying because they are in a sense telling us perhaps what?s wrong in society or they may be telling us what?s good in society,? he said. ?So, in a sense, I think it?s all important.?

He also said the innovation involved in rap is ?fantastic.? He also said the use of a turntable as an instrument by scratching it and the adoption of the new dance styles mixed with the old styles is ?phenomenal.”

This Rap Song Helped Sentence a 17-Year-Old to Prison for Life

Credit... Chris Burnett; documents courtesy of Racine County Court

Supported by

By Jaeah Lee

Ms. Lee is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a 2021-22 Knight-Wallace reporting fellow.

March 30, 2022

Tommy Munsdwell Canady was in middle school when he wrote his first rap lyrics. He started out freestyling for friends and family, and after two of his cousins were fatally shot, he found solace in making music. “Before I knew it, my pain started influencing all my songs,” he told me in a letter. By his 15th birthday, Mr. Canady was recording and sharing his music online. His tracks had a homemade sound: a pulsing beat mixed with vocals, the words hard to make out through ambient static. That summer, in 2014, Mr. Canady released a song on SoundCloud, “I’m Out Here,” that would change his life.

In Racine, Wis., where Mr. Canady lived, the police had been searching for suspects in three recent shootings. One of the victims, Sémar McClain, 19, had been found dead in an alley with a bullet in his temple, his pocket turned out, a cross in one hand and a gold necklace with a pendant of Jesus’ face by his side. The crime scene investigation turned up no fingerprints, weapons or eyewitnesses. Then, in early August, Mr. McClain’s stepfather contacted the police about a song he’d heard on SoundCloud that he believed mentioned Mr. McClain’s name and referred to his murder.

On Aug. 6, 2014, about a week after Mr. Canady released “I’m Out Here,” a SWAT team stormed his home with a “no knock” search warrant. Lennie Farrington, Mr. Canady’s great-grandmother and legal guardian, was up early washing her clothes in the kitchen sink when the police broke through her front door. Mr. Canady was asleep. “They rushed in my room with assault rifles telling me to put my hands up,” he recalled. “I was in the mind state of This is a big misunderstanding. ” He was charged with first-degree intentional homicide and armed robbery.

Prosecutors offered Mr. Canady a plea deal, but he refused, insisting he was innocent. “Honestly, I’m not accepting that,” he told the judge. He decided to go to trial.

I have been reporting on the use of rap lyrics in criminal investigations and trials for more than two years, building a database of cases like Mr. Canady’s in partnership with the University of Georgia and Type Investigations. We have found that over the past three decades, rap — in the form of lyrics, music videos and album images — has been introduced as evidence by prosecutors in hundreds of cases, from homicide to drug possession to gang charges. Rap songs are sometimes used to argue that defendants are guilty even when there’s little other evidence linking them to the crime. What these cases reveal is a serious if lesser-known problem in the courts: how the rules of evidence contribute to racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Federal and state courts have rules requiring that all evidence — every crime scene photo, DNA sample, witness testimony — be deemed reliable and relevant to the crime at hand before it is shown to a jury. The strength of these rules, however, ultimately rests on the discretion of judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys. Each side makes its case as to how the rules should apply to a particular piece of evidence; the judge makes the final call. Cases like Mr. Canady’s can hinge on interpretation — whether a police officer, prosecutor, judge or jury sees the lyrics as creative expression or proof of a criminal act.

im out here

Courts typically treat music and literature as artistic works protected under the First Amendment, even when they contain profane or gruesome material. The small number of non-rap examples that I found — only four since 1950 — involved defendants whose fiction writing or lyrics were considered to be evidence of assault or violent threats. Three of those cases were thrown out; one ended in a conviction that was overturned.

Research has shown that rap is far more likely to be presented in court and interpreted literally than other genres of music. A 2016 study by criminologists at the University of California, Irvine, asked two groups of participants to read the same set of violent lyrics. One group was told the lyrics came from a country song, while the other was told they came from rap. Participants rated whether they found the lyrics offensive and whether they thought the lyrics were fictional or based on the writer’s experience. They judged the lyrics to be more offensive and true to life when told they were rap.

“The findings suggest,” the authors wrote, “that judges might underappreciate the extent to which the label of lyrics — and not the substantive lyrics themselves — impact jurors’ decisions.” Simply describing music as rap, they concluded, is enough to “induce negative evaluations.”

The Irvine findings mirrored those of a study conducted by Stuart Fischoff, a psychology professor at California State University, Los Angeles, almost 20 years earlier. Dr. Fischoff presented 134 students with one of four scenarios about a young man and asked them to rate their impressions of him across nine personality traits, including “caring-uncaring,” “gentle-rough” and “capable of murder-not capable of murder.”

The first scenario described “an 18-year-old African American male high school senior,” a track “champion” with “a good academic record” who made “extra money by singing at local parties.” The second scenario described the same person but added one detail: “He is on trial accused of murdering a former girlfriend who was still in love with him, but has repeatedly declared that he is innocent of the charges.” The third scenario did not mention the murder but instead asked the participant to read a set of rap lyrics by the young man. The fourth mentioned both the murder and the lyrics.

Dr. Fischoff found that the participants who read only about the lyrics reacted more negatively to the young man than the group who had read only about the alleged murder. “Clearly,” he wrote, “participants were more put off by the rap lyrics than by the murder charges.”

At Mr. Canady’s trial in 2016, prosecutors presented evidence that was largely circumstantial. A firearms examiner testified that one of two guns the police found in Ms. Farrington’s apartment, an unloaded .38-caliber revolver, matched the type that the police believed killed Mr. McClain, but conceded there was no way to be certain it was the same gun. Mr. McClain’s cousin testified that he had seen the victim carrying a gun he described as a “black .380,” which prosecutors proposed was similar to the other gun — a loaded pistol — found in Mr. Canady’s home. The government’s theory was that Mr. Canady had killed Mr. McClain and stolen his gun.

But no witness or physical evidence placed Mr. Canady at the crime scene. Mr. McClain’s cousin said that he saw the victim argue with a young man on the day of the murder. He noted that Mr. Canady was one of several people present but not part of the argument. (Mr. Canady told me that he knew Mr. McClain from the neighborhood and that they had friends in common.) A witness who had told the police that he heard Mr. McClain and Mr. Canady discussing guns denied it on the stand.

That’s where the lyrics came in. On the final day of testimony, prosecutors played “I’m Out Here” twice for the jury, first at full speed and then slowed down. A police investigator, Chad Stillman, testified that he heard Mr. Canady say “catch Semar slipping” and other lyrics that he believed alluded to the murder, including references to an alley and bullets hitting a head. Mr. Stillman also read aloud four excerpts from lyrics that Mr. Canady wrote while in jail awaiting trial — a cellmate had turned them over to officers — and interpreted their connections to the crime. “It’s consistently about shooting people,” he said. The lines “blood on my sneaks that’s from his head leaking” and “his last day i took that, im riding around with 2 straps,” Mr. Stillman asserted, referred to Mr. McClain’s head wound and the two guns found in Mr. Canady’s home.

Mr. Canady tried to tell his attorney that the investigators had misheard his song, that an isolated vocal track on his computer would prove he did not name the victim. Where investigators heard “catch Semar slipping,” he said, the actual lyrics were “catch a mawg slippin’,” a slang reference to “someone on the opposite side” and a phrase that he had used in at least one other song.

During cross-examination, the defense attorney pointed out that several of the lyrics Mr. Stillman mentioned did not match the facts of the murder, including the reference to blood on sneakers, “a big Glock with 50 in it,” and an “opp car” — meaning a car belonging to a rival. (The court would later acknowledge that there were, in each of the four exhibits, “other lyrics that do not bear a resemblance to this crime.” One excerpt even ended with a critique of gun violence, in which Mr. Canady condemns all the “killing for no reason” that surrounded him.)

Asked whether he was familiar with rap composition — that boasting and violent imagery are conventions of the genre — Mr. Stillman replied, “Vaguely,” and admitted that he wasn’t sure whether rappers told the truth in their lyrics or not. “I don’t know those artists, you know, what they’ve been through,” he testified. “I know a lot of rappers come from really shady pasts where they’ve committed a large amount of crimes, and they like to brag about those crimes through their lyrics.” (Mr. Stillman, who no longer works for the department, did not reply to a request for an interview.)

Prosecutors relied heavily on the songs in their closing argument. “I think it’s best described as really a tale of two Tommy Canadys,” an assistant district attorney told the jury. “The defendant described it best in his own words,” he added, when Mr. Canady said, “‘I’m handsome and wealthy, with a monster in me.’”

During their deliberation, jurors asked to listen to “I’m Out Here” two more times. After an hour and a half, they found Mr. Canady guilty on both counts. In March 2017, just before his 18th birthday, Mr. Canady was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 50 years.

The rules of evidence are supposed to prohibit the presentation of “character evidence” — information that simply impugns a defendant or reveals past wrongs — to avoid biasing jurors. The use of rap lyrics in Mr. Canady’s case was an example of what legal scholars sometimes call racialized character evidence: details or personal traits prosecutors can use in an insidious way, playing up racial stereotypes to imply guilt. The resulting message, as a Boston University law professor, Jasmine Gonzales Rose, told me, is that the defendant is “ that type of Black person.”

“There’s always this bias,” said Andrea Dennis, a University of Georgia law professor who has been studying the use of rap in criminal cases since the early 2000s, “that this young Black man, if they’re rapping, they must only be saying what’s autobiographical and true, because they can’t possibly be creative.” In 2016, Professor Dennis teamed up with Erik Nielson, a University of Richmond professor who studies African American literature, to compile a list of trials in which rap lyrics had been used as evidence. They found roughly 500 defendants, whose cases they discuss in their 2019 book, “ Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America .”

I worked with Professor Dennis to track down court documents for more than 200 of those defendants, including their race, how lyrics were used against them and the outcomes of their cases. We found more trials involving rap lyrics in the past decade than during the heyday of the war on crime in the 1990s, which suggests that the practice has become more prevalent despite a broader awareness of racial disparities in the courts and the need for reform. We identified about 50 defendants who were prosecuted using rap between 1990 and 2005, but we found more than double that number in the 15 years that followed.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a single driving force behind this trend. As some scholars have pointed out, the rise of social media, online music platforms and the popularity of rap means that the police and prosecutors have easier access to lyrics and videos. Over the years, courts that have weighed in on the matter of rap evidence have overwhelmingly ruled in favor of admitting and interpreting them literally. Of the cases where court or correctional documents specified the defendant’s race and gender, roughly three-quarters of the defendants were African American men. (Professors Dennis and Nielson note that in some states, such as California, the defendants they identified are predominantly Latino.)

While rap was rarely the only evidence presented in a case, it often played a key role in a prosecutor’s line of argument. Some used snippets of written lyrics or a recording to indicate a confession or articulate a motive. One prosecutor in California argued that lyrics from a notebook found during a search of the defendant’s home showed his intent to murder: Three round bursting real military weaponry / Leaving cold cases for eternity . Others used music videos to show that a defendant had access to a weapon similar to one found at a crime scene or that multiple defendants were in a gang. We found that courts often acknowledged that rap lyrics were prejudicial but still admitted them, concluding that their probative value was greater.

That’s what happened in Mr. Canady’s case. Before his trial, Judge Emily Mueller held a hearing to decide whether to admit several sets of lyrics Mr. Canady wrote while awaiting trial. Judge Mueller acknowledged that introducing rap lyrics to a jury unfamiliar with the genre might cause them to “think this must be some bad guy.” She considered each line in turn. Ambulance come and pick him up aint no face on em / Police come and pick me up aint got shit on me . “It does refer to the face, which I think can refer to a head shot,” she said. “The ambulance coming to pick up the person, and then police coming to pick up the writer. ‘Aint got shit on me,’ which I assume means they don’t have any evidence.” She decided to allow the lyrics because they constituted a sufficient “nexus” to the crime — an idea that’s appeared in numerous rap cases and has been criticized by some for being a meaningless standard. “While I am cognizant of the prejudice,” Judge Mueller concluded, “I don’t believe that it is undue prejudice here.” (Judge Mueller declined a request for an interview.)

Deborah Gonzalez, the district attorney who covers Athens-Clarke County in Georgia, said rap lyrics present a conundrum for prosecutors whose job is to prove guilt. She cautions those in her office against relying on rap lyrics without context or other convincing evidence, but she also sees how they could be valuable. “We’re in this Catch-22,” she said, describing trying to decide whether something was a threat or creative expression. “That’s where it sometimes gets a little iffy out there, when you can’t say that it’s 100 percent one or the other.”

Prosecutors also used rap to justify harsher sentences. In sentencing hearings, information that is off-limits during a trial, like character evidence or prior crimes, is fair game. Of the cases we reviewed, a majority of defendants went on to serve sentences of 10 years or longer; roughly a quarter received life sentences, and at least 17 people received death sentences, including Nathaniel Woods, a Black man in Alabama who was convicted of serving as an accomplice to the murder of three police officers. Mr. Woods maintained his innocence; another man, Kerry Spencer, confessed to the murder and was convicted in a separate trial. When Mr. Woods appealed his verdict, however, prosecutors countered by presenting evidence that included lyrics he was alleged to have written while in jail awaiting trial: Seven execution-style murders / I have no remorse because I’m the fucking murderer . / Haven’t you ever heard of a killa / I drop pigs like Kerry Spencer. Mr. Woods was executed in 2020. He had adapted the lyrics from a Dr. Dre song.

Evidence rules not only fail to curtail racial bias in the courts; they also enable it to thrive in plain sight. That’s why a growing number of scholars, lawyers and legislators are calling for rethinking the rules themselves. Take Federal Rule 403 , which gives judges the power to exclude relevant evidence if it has a much higher risk of creating unfair prejudice or confusion, or misleading a jury. What if that rule required judges to first assess whether the burden of proof could be met without evidence like rap lyrics? Prosecutors are already asking this question in Athens-Clarke County, Ga., where Ms. Gonzalez, the district attorney, has studied Professors Dennis and Nielson’s work.

Or what if the rules simply barred rap lyrics in the first place? That’s what two New York state senators, Brad Hoylman and Jamaal Bailey, hope to achieve in a bill they introduced last fall . If passed, it would be the first to prohibit prosecutors from using rap lyrics or other creative expression as criminal evidence “without clear and convincing proof that there is a literal, factual nexus.” The bill, which has garnered support from musicians including Jay-Z, Meek Mill and Kelly Rowland, was approved in committee in January and awaits a full vote.

In 2019, two years into his sentence at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wis., Mr. Canady asked the court to grant him a new trial. His lawyer, Jefren Olsen, argued in a brief that Mr. Canady’s trial attorney had demonstrated ineffective counsel by failing to obtain the original recordings of “I’m Out Here” and that the judge should not have admitted the written rap lyrics in the first place.

“The parties argued a great deal” about “whether Canady’s lyrics as a whole constitute posturing and braggadocio or a representation of who he is and what he does,” Mr. Olsen wrote. The overall effect was to convince the jury of “Canady’s general bad character” without necessarily proving “his specific conduct in this case.” In July 2020, Mr. Canady finally obtained the original song mix and the isolated vocal track that he believed would give him the chance to prove his innocence.

Getting a new trial, however, requires clearing a high bar. Defendants must typically prove that the original lawyers or judge committed a serious error, and they must make a convincing case that without the error, the jury would have been likely to reach a different verdict. Arguments having to do with the interpretation of evidence do not often meet that threshold. Only Mr. Canady knows whether he is innocent. But the rest of us must ask ourselves what we’re asking jurors to judge, what we’re ultimately putting on trial, when the evidence is rap.

In May 2021, the judge who presided over Mr. Canady’s trial denied his request for a new one. (In Wisconsin, the circuit court oversees both the trial phase and the first appeal following a conviction.) Mr. Canady has since challenged the decision in the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. In a new brief, his attorney, Mr. Olsen, argues for a stricter relevance standard to be applied when the evidence in question is rap lyrics. If the appeal is successful, it could set a new precedent in the state.

Meanwhile, Mr. Canady continues to write in prison. “Music is the only way I know how to vent,” he told me. “I pour my heart out, and let my soul do the singing.”

Jaeah Lee is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a 2021-22 Knight-Wallace reporting fellow. This story was reported in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations and student researchers from the University of Georgia School of Law.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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A Flawed Perception of Hip-Hop

“This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years.” - Fox News Analyst Geraldo Rivera.

This sentiment appears to be a relatively popular one. According to a poll published by the Pew Research Center in 2008, more than 70 percent of Americans believed that rap had an overall negative impact on society. Some rap and hip-hop songs do indeed glamorize destructive behavior like substance abuse and violence.But artists like 21 Savage and Meek Mill, whose music sometimes lionizes illegal activity, also lament these very crimes, and the fact that they occur disproportionately in low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods. When rappers do decide to celebrate these crimes, it is often simply because that is the type of music that sells.

21 Savage’s “Nothin New,” which appeared on “Issa Album,” his latest album and his first composition to reach number two on Billboard’s Top 200 chart, explains this motive. In the lyrics, he says, “They thought I only rapped about murder and pistols / I’m tryna feed my family, I ain’t being political.” Sometimes, even for rappers like 21 Savage who are known for their thuggish lyrics, the only way to generate revenue is to produce what people want to hear. For reasons beyond the scope of this article, that often includes the lionization of violence. Rappers don’t necessarily intend to set a poor example for America’s youth—they are simply trying to do what it takes to earn money, just as any other professional does. Moreover, many rappers come from impoverished neighborhoods and realize that, if they don’t seize the opportunity to make music that sells while they have the chance, they may never get another shot.

When rappers do indeed resort to “being political,” they often receive a flurry of backlash. In his last album, “Revival,” Eminem strongly chastised Donald Trump and was immediately rebuked by many listeners including prior fans, many of whom promised never to listen to his music again.

Nethertheless, rappers do continue to speak out about structural issues in American society that lead to the problems we still see today in black communities. In “Nothin New,” 21 Savage says, “Shit gettin’ outrageous / Treat us like slaves then they lock us up in cages / Young, black, poor, ain’t had a father since a baby / Why you think we skip school and hang out on the pavement? / Why you think we ridin’ ‘round with choppers off safety?” With these lyrics, he addresses how disproportionate rates of African American incarceration spark other issues that plague poor black communities. In Meek Mill’s “Wins and Losses,” which reached its zenith at Billboard’s number three spot, Meek Mill criticizes the low quality of education available to many poor African Americans. “My teacher always used to tell me you gon’ lose n**** / That’s why I never went to school n****,” he raps. Kendrick Lamar also weighs in with his track, “m.A.A.d. city,” on his platinum album “good kid m.A.A.d. city,” saying, “They say the governor collect all of our taxes, except / When we in traffic and tragic happens, that shit ain’t no threat,” further rebuking institutionalized racism that leaves many black families without sufficient aid.

There are also many songs that directly condemn violence and drug abuse in poor black communities. In “Polo and Shell Tops” in his album “Dreams and Nightmares,” which reached number one on Billboard’s chart, Meek Mill says, “Homies murder other homies just to make a brick,” criticizing both violence and the influence of illegal drugs. In Wale’s “Ambition,” in which Meek Mill is featured, he mourns this illicit lifestyle. Yet he also rationalizes it, saying, “Only hope I had was selling dope / Was on my grind cause times was harder than a cellar floor.” He argues that lack of economic opportunity pushes many African Americans in impoverished communities toward illegal activity.

To argue that hip-hop has harmed black people more than modern racism is to ignore these messages, among many others. Though some songs do indeed glorify illegal activity that is disproportionately found at alarmingly high rates in low income black communities, plenty of songs lament these issues and critique their causes. Many songs that highlight issues in the black community are exceptionally popular, which indicates that these messages are heard, if not always widely understood. If opponents of rap music can listen to these pieces and still insist that rap only sends negative messages, they should listen closer.

—Contributing writer Uzochi P. Nwoko’s column, “Where Rap Meets Race,” explores how predominant motifs in rap impact the black community.

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Negative Effects of Hip-Hop and Rap

3 Pages 729 Words March 2015

The media has a lot of influence on people’s lives. Music is very powerful. It can control people’s emotions and change the way they act. What people see in music videos or lyrics may affect what they do, especially teens. One of the music genres, hip-hop, caused many arguments since its appearance in the late 20th century. The reason is some hip-hop song lyrics include violence, sex, vulgar language, drugs, and alcohol use. Unfortunately, teenagers are the number one fans of this music. Most parents worry about these negative influences of hip-hop and rap on the teenagers still too young to choose what is right or wrong. They as well as educators need to control or even stop this music. I strongly believe that hip-hop and rap music have lots of dangerous effects on today’s youth, especially the violence, sex, and bad language. An example of the negative effects of rap and hip-hop music is violence. Rap and hip-hop music provides teens with a sense of mimicking of singers. Some of them have no important role model in their lives, so they look up to a rap or hip-hop artist. When a role model influences teens, they tend to do and say the same things that person does. In some ways, this could have a negative impact on youth. For example, one of rap groups, N.W.A. sang a song, “F_ _k the Police” in 1988. This song expressed hatred and violence towards police. The words, “Beat the police outta shape, When I’m finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath, of cops, dying in L.A., Put in my clip, it all depends on the size of the gat.” This song depicted images of gangs, guns, and violence, yet it became very popular. These violent lyrics in songs can be a trigger for some teenagers to start fights, even kill others. Teens can act violent like their role model listening to and singing along with the lyrics. It tends to send harmful messages to its listeners and does not lead to moral lives. Next, one of the negative effects of rap...

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Negative Effects of Rap Music on the Youth

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The Negative Effect Of Rap Music On Teenagers

Category: Music , Sociology
Topic: Music Industry , Rap Music , Teenagers

Pages: 4 (1712 words)

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Three times more likely to hit a teacher
Over 2. 5 times more likely to get arrested
Twice as likely to have multiple sexual partners
1. 5 times more likely to get a sexually transmitted disease, use drugs, or drink alcohol.

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