Hip-hop has been criticized to have its own negative effects on teenagers and their decisions regarding sex for years now. Public health researchers are studying the culture of hip-hop, including the rap lyrics, in order to let parents in on the meaning of this genre of music to their teens. The point behind this is to ultimately come up with effective health messages in the music and leave parents with understanding for this type of music which their teens are interested in.

Miguel A. Muñoz-Laboy, an assistant professor in the department of sociomedical sciences at Columbia, said “There’s definitely a popular opinion that hip-hop is music that is bad for you and makes people do crazy things. We need to try to see how youth understand their own culture without imposing our own adult judgments.”

From research in the journal Culture, Health and Sexuality, girls were noted as “consistently vigilant about maintaining control over their bodies and space.” Many of the teens who were a part of the study actually had sexual experience, but it wasn’t the sexuality of the music or dancing which acted as the main influence on their sexual actions. It was actually alcohol, drugs, and peer pressure which directly brought them to sexual encounters.

Dr. Muñoz-Laboy said, “The lesson for public health workers is that hip-hop is not just music but a support system and social structure that dominates youth culture.”

There are still questions regarding hip-hop’s influence on early sex. Research from the RAND Corporation was published in the journal Pediatrics that concluded that it was not sexual lyrics, but degrading lyrics which could be the negative influence. For this study, they interviewed about 1.400 teens within a span of a couple years and found out that sexually degrading lyrics were the most influential to the teens in order to promote early sex. “Degrading lyrics” meaning those lyrics wherein “women are seen as sexual objects, men as insatiable and sex as inconsequential.”

Steven C. Martino, a behavioral scientist at RAND, remarked “We need to teach teens that these portrayals of women and sex don’t represent reality.”

At present, a leading scholarly work on this culture is the book “The Hip-Hop Generation” written by Bakari Kitwana, an artist of the University of Chicago. It focuses on how hip-hop can actually be used to communicate with the teens who enjoy it. “That’s far more powerful than any negative influence the music may be having. Hip-hop is a generational phenomenon that has united young people. If that’s not understood, you’re going to miss a lot,” remarked Mr. Kitwana.