Does The Sex Cause The Music Or The Music Cause The Sex?

According to a research by the RAND Corporation in Pittsburgh, teens that listen predominately to music with degrading sexual lyrics are twice as likely to have sex within the following two years. RAND is a leading healthcare organization in the U.S. The research involved telephone interviews with 1461 participants from ages 12 to 17. The participants were first interviewed in 2001, and then again in 2002 and 2004 to see if music choice influenced lifestyle changes. 51% of the heavy listeners of degrading lyrics started to have sex within the following two years, while only 29% of the ones who listened to music with minimal to no degrading lyrics began having sex within the following two years (“Dirty song lyrics can prompt early teen sex”). The main genre of music being blamed for this sex surge is rap. Next in line is R&B and “rap rock.”

The question is whether the music is influencing this behavior, or merely commenting on a behavior that is already prevalent in society. It seems extreme to blame lyrics for the spread of STDs and teen pregnancies. True, the youth listens to an average of 1.5 to 2.5 hours of music a day with 40 percent of the songs referring to sex, but is this content change driven purely by the artists (“Rap music blamed for teen pregnancy”)? Perhaps, the artists are commenting on what they already see in society. Teens relate to this music, because it speaks about issues that they themselves may be thinking about or experiencing. Content may not even have changed that much, when you look back to artists like Elvis. Music has always had sexual connotations, but today, the lyrics just seem more blatant. Society also displays sex more than it did during Elvis’s time, from TV content to advertisements. Music could just be following this trend. Music appears in this case to be the easy way out of an issue that is yet unsolved.