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Abstract
Music lyrics have been long proven to have emotional as well as moral effects on individuals and society. Among genres of music, rap music, being an important part of American music street culture, is special due to the more important role of lyrics in rap songs. This study took rap lyrics as our research focus and tried to explore their mental influence, taking suicide as the target. A total of 5348 popular rap songs from 1995 to 2018 were obtained from the dataset of Billboard music chart, accessed on one Github public source. Suicide rates over the last two decades were available on the website of the National Institute of Mental Health. Moreover, this study also included several factors that were proven to be strong predictors of suicide, such as unemployment rates, divorce rates, GNP, etc. A regular regression model and distributed lag model were constructed. The result suggested rap lyrics, mentioning words related to death and negative emotions, could be significantly correlated to suicide rates in the same period. For one unit increase in rap lyrical mentions percentage, the model estimated suicide rates in the same period will rise by around 108 per 100,000 population. The one-year lag association was also significant based on our distributed lag model, and these relationships were confirmed with the cross-correlation analysis. This association implied that there might be a shared cultural context or societal factors that contribute to both the prevalence of these lyrics and the occurrence of suicide. Therefore, the study suggested that there is an important societal issue at play, which requires further investigation and attention. The findings of this study could inform future research on the cultural and societal factors that contribute to mental health issues and suicide, particularly among vulnerable populations who are more likely to be exposed to rap music.