Taking the rap?

Can music be blamed for deviant behaviour? Dr Raj Persaud reaches some surprising conclusions

The killing in January of two teenage girls caught in a gun battle between gangs in Birmingham prompted Culture Minister Kim Howells to attack rap music as glorifying violence, and so contributing to the recent spate of gun-related killings.

The statement led to fevered debate in the media, but the usual format was for someone from the music industry - a singer or producer to defend the genre, while a "cultural commentator" backed the minister.That psychologists have been studying the effects of music on the mind for some years now completely escaped the media's coverage of the issue leading - as usual, to a gross simplification of the controversy.Backing up the ministers point of view - which became rather isolated after the initial statement, as he seemed to decline to defend his argument by not giving any more interviews on the subject - is actually a lot of scientific research.

For example a survey, from the Children's Hospital of Harvard Medical School, of violence and weapon carrying in music videos broadcast on TV found that rap music used more violence than any other genre - and was only just pipped to the top spot by 0.3 per cent for weapon carrying.A series of experiments where young people are exposed to music videos from different genres and then assessed for their effects has indeed found a negative impact for rap music. In one experiment conducted at the Department of Psychology from the University of North Carolina, rap music videos produced significant attitude changes such as an increase in endorsing the use of violence to get your way.

Given that the tragedy which produced this controversy in the first place involved the death of two young women, and rap music has been accused of being particularly misogynistic, was this also a possible link? An especially resonant finding was that of psychologists from the University of Florida who discovered that listening to rap music produced significantly more negative attitudes toward women in male students.

Perhaps even more significant - given the materialistic excess in the form of flamboyant use of expensive cars, clothes and lifestyle in the content - was the effect of these videos in increasing materialism. It is the combination of inculcating a "get rich quick" philosophy with the endorsement of the use of violence as a way of achieving your ends, which is likely to be a particularly potent and negative cocktail, speculate psychologists.

An even more worrying finding came from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the General Leonard Wood Army Hospital in Missouri USA where attendees of a clinic for disturbed adolescents were interviewed about their musical preferences. Those who preferred rap music over other musical genres had more behavioural problems, sexual activity, drug and alcohol use and even arrests.

But what about young offenders themselves - after all this was the key thrust of the minister's initial statement. In a study by music psychologist Susan Gardstrom from the University of Dayton, Ohio, over a hundred adolescent felony offenders were questioned about their musical listening patterns. Rap music was the predominant choice across all crimes and 72 per cent believed this musical genre influenced the way they felt at least some of the time, and four per cent perceived a connection between listening to this kind of music and their criminal behaviour.

So far the weight of the scientific evidence would seem to overwhelmingly support the minister's case. Certainly one wonders why he didn't come out fighting a bit more strongly with this kind of data to defend his position.However, as is usually the case when it comes to a scientific attempt to understand human behaviour, the situation is a bit more complicated than that.

The other key finding from this kind of research is that there is a very negative attitude to rap music in the population at large and in particular amongst white people. One US study used the opportunity of a rap musician on murder charges to survey the local population on their attitudes to rap, and found that the defendant was seen as more likely to have committed a murder simply because he was a rap musician. Indeed the research, conducted by the Media Psychology Lab of the California State University in Los Angeles, found writing rap lyrics more damning in terms of adjudged personality characteristics than was the fact of being charged with murder.

Another study, which demonstrates the huge bias against rap, was conducted by Winona State University in the USA. One hundred and forty-six participants from the general population read a violent lyrical passage and were led to believe it was either a rap song or a country and western piece. They were then asked how offensive and dangerous they thought the song was. When the subjects were told the lyrics were from a rap song, reactions to the lyrics were significantly more negative.

This raises the question of whether rap is the victim of prejudice from mainstream culture and it's this bias which leads to assumptions about its negative effects.

But what about that spate of research mentioned at the beginning of this article, which seemed to list a series of negative consequences from listening to rap? What I omitted to tell you then was that practically all those findings also applied to the genre of heavy metal music, though not to genres like R and B or mainstream pop. For example heavy metal music videos had more weapon carrying than rap, though the two genres were significantly ahead of all the others.

So rap probably is guilty of producing negative effects in listeners, but so are some other genres, like heavy metal, yet it's rap that attracted the headlines and media scrutiny, while the relatively white audience for heavy metal has been left alone.

A recent study found a strong association between heavy metal music subculture and suicide rates across regions of the USA, as measured using variables like subscriptions to heavy metal music magazines. Heavy metal music is indeed often seen to embrace many more dark themes like violence, suicide and nihilism compared to other genres.

So a more complex picture now emerges after looking at the actual data on the issue. It does seem that young people could be vulnerable to being influenced if they listen to a lot of negative messages in their favourite music. However these negative messages are not the sole preserve of rap, though it does need to consider getting its house in order and perhaps consider the benefit to its audience of considering more positive messages.

It is notable that it took the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, one of the leading grunge rock groups of recent times, to produce a heartfelt denunciation of the genre's nihilism from his wife Courtney Love at his funeral. It is a pity that history has to repeat itself so often and we only examine what the music might be really saying after a terrible tragedy has happened.