Today at The Wire, writer Philip Bump examined whether there really is a link between hip-hop's rise in popularity and acts of violence. The informal study was brought on by a piece of audio uncovered by Mother Jones in which Republican Mississippi senate candidate Chris McDaniel pins an uptick in gun violence in Canada on rap music.
The audio is from some point in between 2004 and 2007, but Bump nonetheless pulled crime data from the FBI and chart data from The Whitburn Project that shows an inverse relationship between the popularity of rap music in the gangster rap period (defined here as from 1991 on) and violent crimes in America. Click over the post in order to view the two graphs.
Of course, even this inverse relationship is mostly meaningless, as there are thousands of factors that influence the number of violent crimes in America. But that's also sort of the point.
[via The Wire]
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