Explicit and Symbolic Violence in Rap Music, 1992-2014

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Art and Politics

Abstract

This paper explores the legitimacy of public and scholarly indictments of rap music as violent and misogynistic. Though most scholarly investigations of rap music agree that rap is very violent and misogynistic, these are often based on small samples and subjective interpretation, leading to unclear, and sometimes outright contradictory results. In this paper, we utilize several computational and systematic manual methods for analyzing the content of rap music, drawing from a dramatically larger sample of rap songs (n=2142) than in past studies. Contrary to the majority of past research, we find that violent content in rap lyrics has declined over time, both at the word and song level. Conversely, we find that misogyny and objectification are more prevalent than past estimates suggest, and have systematically increased over the past two decades. Such findings exemplify the dangers of employing unsystematic intuition-based content analyses, and encourages the use of newer and more reliable analysis strategies.

Authors

• Nick Bloom, Duke University

• Brian Aronson, State University of New York-Stony Brook