Learn the truth behind the way rap affects your brain.
Some claim that rap music is unhealthy because it commonly contains vulgar and aggressive subject matter, but how true is this? We know that music can have a healthy impact on your brain and body through music therapy, but can music have potentially negative health effects too?
Well, the answer may be a bit more complicated than you’d expect. Follow along with us today as we explore whether rap music really is bad for your brain. In this article, expect to read about the following topics:
Before we get into how rap music affects the brain, we should first understand how music overall affects the brain.
The science is that listening to music you enjoy can actually activate your brain’s reward system. When you feel the need to dance and sing, that’s your brain releasing dopamine and making you feel like you’ve just done something great. Listening to music can also make your brain release serotonin, the happiness hormone, increasing the feeling of happiness you receive from the music.
But music can also affect your mood in other ways. Good music can make you feel more happy, but if you’ve ever listened to a slow piano song before, you know that happiness isn’t the only thing that music can make you feel. But why does music elicit such an emotional response in us? At the end of the day, music is just invisible energy, right?
Well, studies done by Harvard suggest that the reason music makes us feel emotions may be an evolutionary trait. The earliest humans and mammals all used sound as a way to evaluate their environment and sense predators. If a predator was near, and it made sounds that the mammal recognized, the sound had an intense impact on the brain, eliciting the flight or fight response. When hearing was used in this way, it was hyper-focused on a specific sound, the same way that the human ears can focus on a conversation. When you’re having a conversation with someone, the messages that they are communicating to you make you feel certain ways, similar to how sounds made early mammals understand their environment.
Music works in a similar way. Each kind of music has a different tempo, cadence, speed, and intensity that makes it convey a certain message to the listener. If the song is fast and high-pitched, the brain associates it with happy things. If the song is slow and mellow, our brain associates that with sad things. Because of this, music can intensely affect the way we feel.
This is the reason why so much controversy tends to surround aggressive or negative music. People fear that if they listen to music that promotes a negative message, it will negatively affect their overall mood.
A lot of popular rap music tends to include a lot of cursing, threats, and sexual themes, but is this really a bad thing? Well… it’s difficult to give a solid yes or no answer. For some listeners, violent and misogynistic messages are alarming. If a person does not like the music that they are listening to, it will have a negative effect on them — but this isn’t exclusive to rap. If a listener likes the rap songs they’re listening to, the music will cause dopamine levels to increase because of the enjoyment. If used properly, rap music can work just as well as any other kind of music to improve mental health! So rap music overall is not bad for you unless you generally dislike it in the first place.
But are the negative messages that tend to be prevalent in rap music bad overall? Well, at the end of the day, rap is a means of brain stimulation for the listener and self-expression for the artist. While both of those things are subjective, they usually result in mostly good. Art as a means of expression does not always need to be positive or censored. In fact, some of the best pieces of art are very disturbing, but this art still has merit because of the symbolism and truth within the negativity.
Some sources claim that rap and hip-hop music can rot your brain and implant negative ideas that lead to a negative effect on mental health. In fact, there have been studies done that prove in some instances, music with violent ideas can cause people to be more accepting of violent acts. Some also claim that listening to negative music can associate good feelings with negative states of being.
It is true that in some instances, negative music can affect people’s thought processes, but such music does not scientifically affect the brain negatively. Listening to rap music will never cause your brain inherent harm. Rap music can also contain valuable themes that spark important conversations and raise awareness for issues, so if you’re concerned about rap music having a negative impact on you in any way, then it may be better to gravitate away from rap with vulgar themes.
Though rap music is generally not bad for your brain, there are certain trends in rap that can affect mental health.
As we discussed previously, rap songs tend to contain negative messages that can have an impact on the listeners. While this does not necessarily have an effect on brain health, it can have an effect on mental health and attitude.
If you are exposed to any message long enough, it will ingrain itself in your mind in some form and affect your mood. If enough people call you attractive, you’ll start to believe them, just like how if enough rap songs tell you that violence and misogyny are okay, you may become more tolerant of those things. Of course, this may not be the intention of the song, but such a thing can happen anyway. When listeners internalize these negative messages, it can potentially cause lower self-esteem among other mental health problems.
But rap can also promote positive mental health as well. These are a few of the many ways it can do so:
A lot of rap artists choose to use their music to communicate important messages and spark discussion on important topics. One example is NF. NF, or Nathan John Feuerstein is an American rapper who subverts the norms of rap by using his songs to create discourse around mental health struggles. NF’s music frequently focuses on his past mental health struggles and how he overcame them, creating music that can motivate and comfort those facing similar struggles.
In this way, NF uses rap as self-expression. He expresses himself through the music and allows others to express themselves through him. This is another way rap and other forms of music are used to positively influence mental health.
On that topic, rap and freestyle rap can be a tactic used by many as a means of self-expression and catharsis. Freestyle rap can even be used in music therapy as a way to help people channel and express their emotions. So sure, in some scenarios, rap can be the catalyst for aspects of poor mental health, but it just as easily can do the opposite. Rap is a diverse genre containing music of all tones and tempos, so it’s not fair to generalize it by saying something like rap music is bad for your brain.
As we said at the beginning, this question is hard to give a yes or no answer to, but the closest answer we can give is no.
Just like in any art form, there are going to be problematic pieces of music that promote negative messages and cause controversy, but that does not mean the entire genre is bad. This kind of music may even be enjoyed by a wide audience. Music is like people. Most people are not completely good or completely bad, but no matter what there are going to be people who both like and dislike any given person. You may be the nicest person ever, but chances are that someone will still choose not to like you. Music is the same way. Music is subjective, so there really is no definition of good music or bad music, it’s based on what you enjoy.
So although some rap can cause mental health problems, rap is in no way bad for your brain. If used correctly, rap can even be good for your brain. Music is a wonderful thing that unites us, heals us, and helps us express ourselves.
