Rap Music Influence

Music. Music is something that every person has had experiences with throughout their life, whether they seek it out or not. I always thought of music to be one of the most comforting things, for when I was sad, angry, anxious, or any negative feeling, I would listen to “Moonlight Sonata” and it would immediately send me back to the years of Baby Einstein discs that my mom played excessively when I was younger (thinking it would make me somewhat intelligent, I can imagine), or even to my favorite childhood movie: Fantasia. Music had such great power, and it was up until a seemingly normal day in middle school that I thought that to be a positive thing.

I was going about my day, listening to god-knows-what, and I saw a headline that caught

Many have found correlations between those that listen to rap music and those that live under the severe influence of drugs and alcohol, most at a young age. As a letter from Brown University states, “Subjects with greater exposure were 3 times more likely to have hit a teacher; more than 2.5 times as likely to have been arrested; twice as likely to have had multiple sexual partners, and more than 1.5 times as likely to have contracted a new STD, or used drugs and/or alcohol at follow-up”("New Research Explores Effects of Rap Music on Adolescents."). These statistics are staggering, but I was also curious as to how they came to be. Was this about the music at all, or merely just a societal accompaniment of those that rap music attracts? For me, personally, I always liked to listen to music to which I could relate to; hear my own world through the words of another. Maybe the controversial issues that are being dealt with in these songs are attractive to those that are living the words that are being spoken. Although this thought wasn’t all that comforting, it certainly made me feel better than just thinking that the music was what was instigating this negativity amongst