Do Song Lyrics Influence Behavior?

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The whole affair seems so quaint now: In the mid-1980s, the United States had honest-to-goodness Congressional hearings over song lyrics.

Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister, along with John Denver and Frank Zappa, testified. Senators played videos for Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” and hoisted album covers from the likes of Def Leppard as evidentiary support for claims that the music industry aimed product at children, according Susan Baker, the wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, “to promote and glorify suicide, rape, sadomasochism, and so on.” Tipper Gore founded The Parents Resource Music Center to help adults control children’s access to music with violent, sexual, or drug-related content.

We got black-and-white “Parental Advisory” stickers on albums.

Perhaps influenced by the public controversy, we had a few episodes of “music confiscation” in our house. Madonna’s “Material Girl” upset my father, because it promoted the wrong message to young girls about how to value men. (I guess he never heard the “Like a Virgin” track, which I'd have thought had more potential for parental disapproval.) Dad tried to take away my Prince albums, but I only gave him New-Power-Generation-era Prince, which I didn’t mind losing. And he confiscated my brother’s copy of 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty as they Wanna Be” after hearing “Me So Horny” blasted one afternoon. (Smooth, bro.)

At the time, I remember a sort of surprise at my dad’s indignation. I liked the sassiness of “Material Girl” and I had never particularly thought though its message. Kids liked “Me So Horny” because it seemed raunchy and illicit in a distant, safe way—like giggling at a poop joke. No one I knew seemed to take either tune as instruction.

So does music really influence kids?

I found a number of studies that actually bothered to prove that music has explicit lyrics, including an analysis written up in the New York Times and a student paper assessing rap music. However, these articles and other papers show little to no concrete tie between lyrics and behavior. To gauge levels of offensiveness, the student paper’s writers surveyed other students for their impressions of the rap lyrics, a methodology that doesn’t directly assess action taken under the music’s influence. A Rand Group study found through interviews that kids who listen to raunchy songs claim more sexual promiscuity.

Yet how many of the kids proclaiming music’s deleterious influence would have tumbled—pun intended—into promiscuity or illegal behavior anyway? The limited studies available look at lyrics in a vacuum, separated from other experiences, as though nothing else in kids’ lives influences their world views and behaviors.

As a few analyses point out, youth may seek explicit music because they find it cathartic—and in some of these cases, adults and friends should have concern. Other children may simply like the song’s beat or the thrill of the illicit, without ever having the intention to enact what they hear. Knowing the music a teenager loves could encourage helpful conversations about why they love it that could provide necessary context for whether a parent or peer should have concern about their musical preferences.

After all, environment, from the people with whom we spend our time to the places and contexts of our lives, matters far more to our world view than dirty songs, the lyrics of which we may not even have registered.

Explicit music has fairly widespread popularity—and illicit behavior doesn’t track in parallel to the number of its fans. (If it did, we’d really have a problem.) I’ve read plenty of horror stories—and watched numerous slasher flicks, especially in my teens—without even the slightest impulse to harm anyone. I love rap and hip hop music, and my life tends to the terrifically tame.

Further, if we believe that explicit lyrics cause problems, wouldn't the converse also have truth? Yet I didn’t catch the pervasiveness of Pharrell’s widely popular “Happy” sparking epidemics of cheerfulness.

What do you think?

Do song lyrics influence behavior?