Drug Culture in Music: Songs That Expose and Glorify Drug Use
This paper examines how drug use and drug sales are portrayed across a range of popular songs, exploring the tension between music that glorifies drug culture and music that critically exposes its consequences. Drawing on tracks by 2Pac, Spoon, 50 Cent, Ed Sheeran, and Third Eye Blind, the paper analyzes the motivations behind these artistic choices and what each song communicates about the social realities of drug use. The paper also reviews two academic studies—by Cameron Duff and Bridger Doak—that investigate the relationship between adolescent drug use, music preferences, and the normalization of drug culture among young people.
- Introduction: Music, Drugs, and Social Commentary: Framing the relationship between music and drug culture
- 2Pac's 'Changes': Drugs, Race, and Economic Despair: Crack, racism, and the black underground economy
- Spoon and 50 Cent: Glamorization and the Underground Economy: Two artists portraying drug culture differently
- Ed Sheeran's 'The A Team': Mourning the Human Cost: A portrait of addiction and street-level suffering
- Third Eye Blind's 'Semi-Charmed Life': Unfiltered Glorification: Crystal meth celebrated without social critique
- Research on Music, Drug Culture, and Adolescent Normalization: Academic studies linking music to adolescent drug use
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its argument in close reading of actual song lyrics, quoting specific lines and explaining what each reveals about attitudes toward drug use.
- It covers a genuine spectrum of artistic perspectives—social critique, ambivalence, logistical description, mourning, and outright glorification—giving the analysis real range.
- Academic sources are integrated at the end to contextualize the song analysis within broader research on adolescent normalization of drug use, strengthening the paper's credibility.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates textual analysis applied to popular culture artifacts. Rather than offering vague generalizations about music and drugs, the writer selects specific lyrical passages and interprets them within their social and historical contexts—for example, linking 2Pac's crack references to the 1990s crack epidemic and the racial politics of the "war on drugs." This technique shows how close reading of non-literary texts can yield substantive cultural criticism.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a framing introduction, then moves song by song through five case studies arranged roughly from social critique to pure glorification. The final section shifts to peer-reviewed research, connecting the lyrical analysis to empirical findings about music's influence on adolescent drug attitudes. The reference list follows APA formatting conventions.
Introduction: Music, Drugs, and Social Commentary
The social problem of using and selling drugs is a recurring theme in popular music. Music has simultaneously been accused of glorifying drug culture and praised as one of the few outlets through which users can honestly confront the realities of that culture. Clearly, the relationship between drugs and music is a complex one. This paper examines the motivations for artists to incorporate drug culture into their songs, what they presumably gain from doing so, and what society may gain from engaging with such music.
2Pac's 'Changes': Drugs, Race, and Economic Despair
The first song this paper examines is "Changes" by 2Pac, a work remarkable for the breadth of social injustice it addresses — injustice that remains alive and well today. In this song, the treatment of drugs is deeply intertwined with the issue of racism and the severe socioeconomic disadvantage facing African Americans. Consider the first drug-related lines 2Pac delivers: "Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares / One less hungry mouth on the welfare / First ship 'em dope and let 'em deal the brothers / Give 'em guns step back watch 'em kill each other" (lyrics.com).
One notable aspect of 2Pac's reference to drugs is his use of crack, a substance closely associated with low-income neighborhoods. At the time the song was composed, the United States was in the grip of a severe crack epidemic in many communities. Tupac's reference to crack also invokes the economic disadvantage from which he came. The way he first mentions it is extremely revelatory: his remark about giving crack to children because it means fewer hungry mouths on welfare encapsulates a profound sense of despair and helplessness in the Black community. The lyrics imply the apathy of much of white society toward disadvantaged Black Americans, and suggest that this apathy begins to creep into Black society as well.
This implied apathy appears again in the lines: "Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right / 'Cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonight" (lyrics.com). Here, the reference to crack operates metaphorically — both white and Black people are treating one another badly, as if intoxicated. Yet Tupac also makes a more literal reference to crack when he addresses the drug trade as an underground economy sustaining low-income African Americans.
This underground economy is illustrated in the song's dialogue, in which a young man says, "I made a G. today," to which Tupac replies, "But you made it in a sleazy way / Sellin' crack to the kid." The young man responds, "I gotta get paid," and Tupac answers, "Well hey, well that's the way it is" (lyrics.com). These lines capture the crisis confronting the Black community: the drug economy was one that caused community members to turn on one another, selling crack to their own children. The earlier reference to prisons "packed and filled with blacks" further connects the song to America's war on drugs, which many experts have characterized as a new manifestation of racism — an indirect means of incarcerating Black people in large numbers.
Spoon and 50 Cent: Glamorization and the Underground Economy
The band Spoon offers a more ambivalent perspective on drug culture in their song "The Way We Get By." The song both glamorizes drug use and exposes its realities. It opens with the lines: "We get high in back seats of cars / We break into mobile homes / We go to sleep to shake appeal / Never wake up on our own" (genius.com). These lyrics clearly reflect the unglamorous reality of addiction — the petty theft required to sustain a habit, waking up disoriented among strangers. Yet the chorus, which simply repeats "And that's the way we get by / Way we get by," seems to celebrate this lifestyle, lending it a sense of pride or significance. The song also proclaims that sharing marijuana is "the way to my heart," suggesting that real emotional connection has been displaced by a shared substance.
50 Cent is a rapper who famously described selling drugs as the means by which he launched his career and escaped the projects. While many of his songs reference the drug trade, "Corner Bodega" is devoted explicitly to that subject. As one lyric states: "You can go and cop coke from the corner Bodega / Hit the highway and take it to a town near you / And get that money man, get that money man" (genius.com). The song describes the logistics of moving a "brick" — a kilogram of drugs — to Pennsylvania and driving a car with out-of-state license plates to avoid detection. 50 Cent even notes that selling drugs in the projects had become too dangerous after Mayor Giuliani deployed task forces on mountain bikes throughout public housing. The song thus offers a detailed portrait of the drug economy in the 1990s: as New York law enforcement cracked down, dealers were forced to relocate their operations to surrounding states. For many, this underground economy was the sole source of income, and the song documents how dealers adapted to shifting political pressures.
References
Azlyrics.com. (n.d.). Semi-Charmed Life. Retrieved from http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/thirdeyeblind/semicharmedlife.html
Azlyrics.com. (n.d.). The A Team. Retrieved from http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/edsheeran/theateam.html
Doak, B. (2003). Relationships between adolescent psychiatric diagnoses, music preferences, and drug preferences. Music Therapy Perspectives, 69–76.
Duff, C. (2003). Drugs and youth cultures: Is Australia experiencing the 'normalization' of adolescent drug use? Journal of Youth Studies, 433–447.
Genius.com. (n.d.). Corner Bodega. Retrieved from http://rap.genius.com/50-cent-corner-bodega-coke-spot-lyrics
Genius.com. (n.d.). The Way We Get By. Retrieved from http://rock.genius.com/Spoon-the-way-we-get-by-lyrics
Lyrics.com. (n.d.). Changes — 2Pac. Retrieved from
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.