33% hit songs mention drug use & alcohol, says research

NEW YORK: Chances are your teenage kid has heard these lines before — “Let’s party, everybody bounce with me. Sip champagne and burn a little greenery.” It’s not a plan for a New Year’s Eve party but the lyrics of rapper 50 Cent’s Disco Inferno, which hit number three on charts in 2005.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who studied the lyrics of hundreds of popular songs, found that one in three mention alcohol or drug use. “We’re learning that media affects a lot of different health behaviours,” said researcher Brian Primack. “Tobacco in movies, for example, is now known to lead to smoking. We started realising adolescents are exposed to two and a half hours a day of music. What’s in the music?”

Primack and his team, who presented their findings at a medical meeting, looked at the top 279 songs on the Billboard charts in 2005. They found that 33% made references to alcohol and drug use.

Nearly 80% of rap songs mentioned substance use, followed by 37% of country music lyrics, 20% of R&B/hip-hop and 14% of rock songs. Only nine% of pop songs referred to drug or alcohol use.

The researchers only included songs that clearly referred to using drug and alcohol. They also named the substances which included alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, inhalants, hallucinogens, and substances of unknown origin.
 
Rap music contained the most references to alcohol, marijuana, while country music commonly made allusions to alcohol, as per the research presented at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting in Washington.