Rap Music and the Code of the Street

• In Event: Portrayals of Crime, Criminality and Punishment in Music

Abstract

An alienated street-culture exists in the inner city and has rules regarding respect, violence, retaliation, the drug trade, staging areas, families, the mating game, and hope, i.e., ‘a code of the street’ (Anderson, 1999). These rules are themes that can be found in rap music lyrics. Themes found in rap lyrics were compared to the properties and practices of everyday life in the inner city, hence the code of the street. A systematic random sampling strategy was used to collect data from over a thirty-one day period of rap music accessed from the “Rap Radio” station on the Internet radio station Pandora. The portion of the code pertaining to respect was found to be the most significant in the lyrics analyzed. This supports Anderson’s (1999) argument that respect is at the heart of the code of the street and indicates that rap music is influenced by the street-culture

Authors

• Christina McNamara Crabtree, Sacramento State University

• Dan Okada, Sacramento State University