Premium
Sing a Song of Drug Use‐Abuse: Four Decades of Drug Lyrics in Popular Music–From the Sixties through the Nineties
Author(s) -
Markert John
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
sociological inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.446
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1475-682X
pISSN - 0038-0245
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-682x.2001.tb01108.x
Subject(s) - lyrics , counterculture , harm , prosocial behavior , popular music , heroin , musical , motif (music) , crack cocaine , rock music , psychology , aesthetics , art , drug , criminology , literature , social psychology , psychiatry , art history
Songs dealing with illegal drugs have long dotted popular music. It was not until the aftermath of the sixties youth counterculture, however, that drug lyrics became a recurring musical motif. In the decades since, the lyrical treatment of drugs has undergone change. Heroin and cocaine have largely, though not exclusively, been treated antagonistically, with the animosity toward cocaine becoming more pronounced after crack cocaine was introduced in the mid‐1980s. Marijuana, on the other hand, has generally been perceived as innocuous, if not positively assessed, and this treatment has crossed the decades into the nineties. In more recent years, however, the positive assessment of marijuana has undergone change, with younger musicians more likely to decry the harm that drugs do than older musicians do. This prosocial aspect of contemporary popular music has been largely ignored.