How Does Rap Affect Society

With popular music being present almost everywhere today, teenagers listen to countless hours of music. Music as a whole has a variety of genres, each one particularly different. Rap music has had a very long reputation of being a form of music that represents violence, sex, gangs, drugs and alcohol abuse, and strong profane, negative attitude towards people in general. Despite all of this, rap has generated a huge fan base, made up of teenagers. Although rap is commonly seen as having a negative effect on society, rap has had a numerous amount of positive influences on society.
Ethan is a teenager that lives in New York City, New York. He is in the constant presence of popular music, and with the rap genre rising constantly he listens to a lot of rap music. At home, …show more content…
“The data showed very little correlation between the crimes in the lyrics and their counterparts. For example, a significant crime drop between 1993 and 1995 is easily seen while crimes mentioned in rap lyrics are steadily increasing." (Hemphill). However, they did find that as the number of positive messages mentioned in songs went up, the population had a lower suicide rate. This shows that all of the negativity in the raps songs does not affect Ethan, but the positive lyrics do influence him. Today's media portrays rappers as being unadmirable, low-life thugs. This is largely because they believe that rap lyrics portray women as dirty sex toys, express hatred towards authority and people, and the excessive use of explicit language. The University of Pittsburgh researchers found that, “About one-third of hit songs have some form of explicit reference to drug, alcohol or tobacco use.”. With a rap song appearing on the Billboard Hot 100 list about every other song, this is a lot of songs about drug, alcohol or tobacco use. Social media usually only focuses on the undesirable aspects of the