Hip-hop & violence, misogeny, etc.– From shared knowledge to common knowledge

I'm copying this from Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen), which quotes a Roland Fryer piece in the Wall Street Journal:

In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.

We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…

Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?

To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.

That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.

Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.

The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.

Here's a link to the Ted Talk.

And here's a comment I made over there:

Interesting. Here's a post I wrote back in February. It's about the depiction of sex in novels from Pride and Prejudice through Fifty Shades of Grey. I speculate that what's going on there is the conversion of shared knowledge about sex to common knowledge. I wonder if something similar is going on in hip-hop: "Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much."

The 19th Century Anglophone novel

Fryer mentions using "modern text analysis" to determine the content of hip-hop lyrics. That phrase covers a number of techniques, including topic modeling. In his 2013 book, Macroanalysis, Matthew Jockers applied topic modeling to a corpus of roughly 3000 19th century Anglophone novels. One of the topics he identified as WIVES AND MARRIAGE. Thus cluster map shows the words in that topic:

This graph shows the frequency of that top for male (M) and female (F) authors and authors whose gender could not be determined from meta data (U).

That topic is on the rise during the century. That doesn't speak directly to my point about explicit treatment of sexuality, but it is suggestive.

Jockers also found a topic he called AFFECTIONS PASSIONS FEELINGS OF ATTACHMENT:

I note that that topic doesn't seem to have any language relating to overt sexuality. Whatever the passions are, they don't seem to be overtly sexual.

That topic decreases through the century:

Has interest shifted from affection and toward overt sexuality? Perhaps. But we can't really tell from the evidence on offer.