​VIOLENCE: Hip Hop is not to blame

There is one correlation between the two that you can in fact make; Hip Hop does not cause crime, but rather it reflects the crime that is actually taking place. Jeff Lauer said it perfectly; “Hip-hop was primarily born out of economically poor, urban areas in the 1980’s. These are the kinds of areas that experience high gang violence and drug use, so it was natural for early hip-hop artists to encompass these topics in their music. For example, Nasir Jones, whose first release was Illmatic, was a portrait of the gang infested New York City of 1994.”