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What do hip-hop and economics have in common?
In this talk, Harvard economist Roland Fryer shares that while hip-hop often gets blamed for controversial lyrics, the genre is uniquely primed to reflect on deeper societal issues.
Using the tools of an economist, he analyzed hundreds of thousands of songs— uncovering how the genre can offer a voice to the unheard.
And, if we're willing to listen, shed light on the complexities of race, class and opportunity in a way few other mediums can.
Do you remember where you were when you first heard the Sugarhill Gang?
Now what you hear is not a test.
I'm rapping to the beat.
And me, the groove, and my friends, we're going to try to move your feet.
Okay, you kind of remember it?
Okay, I'm a professor, so here's your quiz.
Everybody say hotel, motel.
Okay, stop that, stop that.
We can't have that kind of fun.
I work at Harvard.
I first heard that song like 1985.
It was a block party in Daytona Beach, Florida.
And people were moving in ways I'd never seen before.
Now, I'm not talking about my friend Man Man.
I'm talking about my grandmother.
She was doing stuff I can't unsee.
She was like down in here.
And I was like, whoa, grandma.
That was 40 years ago. and hip-hop has taken over.
It is the most popular music genre in the world, particularly among young people.
Its effect on music, on language, on clothing, on social media, even to a data nerd like me is immeasurable.
But somehow, that's all obvious, right?
It didn't really dawn on me until a few months ago.
I'm a Peloton addict.
And I went to New York for the live ride.
And I'm in the studio.
We're 35 minutes in.
I don't know how to simulate.
I was thinking about this.
How do you simulate the bicycle?
Here we go.
I was 35 minutes in.
I peeped the person next to me.
And her handle is rider2000 and they get us up out of our saddles.
35 minutes in and on beat.
She gets up out of the saddle, she starts screaming and pounding the handlebars kill kill kill murder murder, murder.
Scared the crap out of me.
In that moment, I realized two things.
Number one, Hip-hop done made it, y'all.
There is a middle-aged white woman from Charleston, South Carolina, talking about murdering somebody in public.
And number two.
According to some of y'all, because of those lyrics, she's likely to murder someone this afternoon.
And I'm selfish.
I want to know who.
Hip-hop is everywhere.
I collected data, we collected data, a team of us collected data on every radio station in America.
And for every radio station, we know the genre of the song.
Now, to collect the data, first, we went and got literally every radio handle.
And for every radio handle, we have the broadcast frequency and range from each one of them.
And then we have the genre.
And then for some of the radio stations, we actually have the playlists that were on the radio.
And for those playlists, of course, we have the songs.
We analyzed every lyric that has been played on many radio stations in America.
Now, it took a team of us to do this.
And with the advances in AI, we made more progress in the last six months than we made in the first 10 years.
Now you can imagine having research assistants sit and listen to a bunch of hip hop and score it all day long.
AI has been much, much more helpful.
We've looked at the evolution of the types of hip-hop played on the radio over the last 40 years.
The bottom is what I call alternative or what they call alternative or experimental hip-hop.
Think outcast.
It's a small portion, but this is the kind of hip-hop that pushes boundaries.
The second is conscious or lyrical hip-hop.
Think Kendrick Lamar, who was brilliant enough to win a Pulitzer Prize for his lyrics.
That's the next sliver.
The big part is mainstream hip-hop, the type that's played on the radio most of the time.
Think Jay-Z or, I'm a little older, Run DMC.
Now at the top, that's where the controversy is.
That is street rap, or think Dr. Dre, Tupac.
What I want you to get from this is that that was a small portion of the overall hip-hop played on the radio for the last 40 years.
Now, of course, it increases in the last 10 years, but even still, a minority of the hip-hop played.
Now, as I said...
We have hundreds of thousands of songs we've processed and we have the lyrics for each one of these songs.
We train the AI to grade each song in terms of how misogynistic it was, how violent the content is, how profane the language is and the drug references.
Over the last 40 years, hip-hop music has gotten five times more misogynistic, five times more violent, five times more profane.
Only two and a half times as many drug references.
Now, what are you supposed to do?
I've heard about this my entire life.
My grandmother who raised me, when she'd find a CD I was hiding and she said I know you don't listen to this filth honey.
What do you do?
Maybe we should lean in.
You know, maybe we should just have an award for the most extreme hip hop song, right?
I've always wanted to go to the Grammys.
I don't think the Grammy's are going to do it, so maybe we should have a Grammy.
So what we did was we scored every single song on the four dimensions I described and we took a look and we said who is the winner for the most extreme hip-hop song of all time?
Now, before I tell you, One song was so extreme that the AI refused to grade it.
I'm not lying to you.
Well, clearly the Achilles heel of AI is hip-hop because AI refused to look at it.
I got an email from Claude that says, man, I just got this job.
I'm not reading this stuff at work.
I mean, it's...
Okay, I didn't get that email, but in my head, it would be interesting.
The winner of the first annual and only ever Grammy Award goes to About That by Masterpiece.
Whoa.
Now, I want to wrap you a few bars.
During rehearsal, they were like, nope, cut that part out.
What to do?
I agree these lyrics are crazy.
And people have been talking about it for a long time.
You remember Geraldo that said hip-hop is the worst has been done more damage to black people than racism.
Cynthia Tucker said, you can't listen to all this language and have it not affect you.
Cynthia Tucker's amazing.
Civil rights activist. do you know she actually sued Tupac?
Do you know how tough you have to be to sue Tupac?
But the question really is, at least to an economist, is does it actually hurt?
Because there have been times in my life in which the things that you would view as profane were actually comforting to me.
In 1993, I was 15 years old, and I drove to a prison to visit my father.
And after our little visit, I got back in the car.
That's actually how I learned how to drive a stick shift.
I drove second gear all the way there.
I got back in the car, and I put in the Minister Society soundtrack.
And MC8 came across the speakers.
And he said, a fucked up childhood is why the way I am.
It's got me in the state where I don't give a damn.
Somebody help me.
But no, y'all don't hear me, though.
I guess I'll be another victim of the ghetto.
Now, that would score high on profanity and violence.
But in that moment, it scored high on comfort.
And so the question I've asked myself for more than a decade is does this actually help or does it hurt?
We have places where hip-hop went before it went to other places.
And because of those radio frequencies I talked about, I can actually see in the data there are kids who have very similar backgrounds, live in similar homes, have similar parents.
One is exposed to some type of lyrics, and another is exposed to another.
And we can relate those and we do to 40 different variables that measure social and economic progress.
Things like teen pregnancy, things like unemployment, income, crime.
On every dimension, all 40 of them.
We find zero evidence that hip-hop has a negative effect on any outcomes.
And what you see is a statistically no relationship.
But if anything, slightly downward sloping, which means exposure to hip-hop, made things if anything better, not worse.
And I know some of you are thinking, what about the lyrics?
I've got two daughters I adore.
We listen to hip-hop, but not Master P. What about those lyrics?
Blaming hip-hop for its unvarnished truths is like faulting a photograph for the subject matter.
I was told my entire life that hip-hop causes inequality.
Well, if you actually process hundreds of thousands of songs and relate it to outcomes, the data actually suggests the opposite that inequality causes hip-hop.
So the solution is simple.
If we want gentler lyrics, how about we work together to change the social conditions that produce the lyrics?
Thank you.
And we can dance.
It's not going to hurt you.
That was Roland Fryer at TED 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
