The relationship between art and reality has never been a one-way street. While we often discuss how media influences behavior, we spend far less time considering the reverse: how life shapes art, how trauma finds its way into melodies, and how the streets echo through our speakers. This is particularly true when examining the evolution of hip-hop and rap music over the past decade, especially in the years following what many call the “xandemic”—the wave of prescription drug abuse, particularly Xanax and other benzodiazepines, that swept through communities and profoundly shaped the soundtrack of a generation.
The violence and darkness that permeate much of contemporary music aren’t manufactured in a recording studio vacuum. These songs emerge from real neighborhoods where gunshots interrupt dinner, where friends become memorial posts on Instagram, where the choice between poverty and crime feels like no choice at all. When a rapper talks about carrying weapons or losing friends to street violence, they’re often narrating their Tuesday, not fantasizing about someone else’s life. The music becomes a mirror held up to communities that mainstream America would prefer to ignore, and the reflection is uncomfortable precisely because it’s authentic.
Consider the shift that happened around 2017 and into 2018. The SoundCloud rap era brought with it a generation of young artists who weren’t just rapping about violence but were documenting a specific kind of numbness, a pharmaceutical haze that settled over youth culture. Artists like Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD, and countless others created music that reflected the reality of their lives: depression medicated with street drugs, anxiety drowned in lean and pills, trauma processed through Auto-Tune. When XXXTentacion rapped about violence—both inflicting it and experiencing it—he was articulating experiences from his own chaotic life. When Juice WRLD sang about pills and heartbreak, he was describing his actual struggles, struggles that would ultimately claim his life in 2019.
The xandemic wasn’t just about substance abuse; it represented a broader mental health crisis among young people, particularly young Black and brown youth dealing with intergenerational trauma, systemic poverty, and the daily stress of survival. The music that emerged during and after this period reflected that crisis. The violent imagery, the nihilism, the casual references to death—these weren’t marketing strategies. They were symptoms of a generation processing collective trauma through the only outlet available to them.
It’s worth examining how this differs from the moral panics of previous decades. When critics attacked N.W.A. in the late 1980s for “Fuck tha Police,” they conveniently ignored the reality of police brutality in South Central Los Angeles that the song documented. When Tupac and Biggie’s music was blamed for promoting violence, few mainstream voices acknowledged that both men were murdered, proving that the violence they described wasn’t fiction but prophecy. The pattern repeats: society condemns the art while ignoring the conditions that create it.
The post-2017 era has seen this dynamic intensify through social media. Drill music, which originated in Chicago and spread to New York, the UK, and beyond, provides perhaps the clearest example. Drill artists often rap about specific conflicts, diss deceased rivals, and document ongoing feuds. Law enforcement and critics have blamed drill music for perpetuating violence, with some platforms even removing drill content. But this analysis gets the causality backward. Drill music exists because young people in neighborhoods like Chicago’s South Side or Brooklyn’s Brownsville live in environments where gang conflicts are generational, where blocks become territories, where a teenager’s life expectancy can depend on which street they walk down. The music doesn’t create these conditions; it reports on them.
What changed after the xandemic was the emotional tenor of the violence being described. Earlier gangster rap often carried a sense of bravado or even celebration, a defiant middle finger to a society that had written these artists off. Post-xandemic music frequently sounds more resigned, more melancholic, more aware of the futility. Young artists rap about violence with the exhaustion of combat veterans, because in many ways, that’s what they are. The trap beats slow down, the Auto-Tune warbles with genuine pain, and the lyrics reveal young people who know they might not live to see thirty.
The pharmaceutical aspect added another layer of complexity. Xanax, Percocet, codeine, and other substances became both coping mechanisms and creative influences. Artists made music while high, about being high, attempting to process why they needed to be high in the first place. The violence in this music often feels dissociative, viewed through a chemical fog that both numbs and preserves the pain. When Pop Smoke rapped about violence with a slowed, menacing delivery, he was creating from within a culture where young people medicate themselves against trauma—and then he became another statistic when he was murdered at age twenty in 2020.
Critics who demand that artists “do better” or “stop promoting violence” reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of art’s relationship to truth-telling. Should war photographers stop documenting carnage? Should journalists stop reporting from conflict zones? The artists emerging from America’s most neglected communities are, in many ways, doing the same work: showing us what we’d prefer not to see. The difference is that they’re doing it with 808s and hi-hats instead of cameras and notebooks.This doesn’t mean all violent or dark music is automatically valuable or that artists bear no responsibility for their influence. But it does mean we need to ask better questions. Instead of “Why is this music so violent?” we should ask “Why are these communities so violent?” Instead of “Why do these artists glorify drugs?” we should ask “Why are young people self-medicating at such alarming rates?” The music is the symptom, not the disease.
The years since 2017 have shown us that when you give young people experiencing trauma a platform, they’ll use it to tell the truth as they know it. That truth includes violence, substance abuse, mental illness, and loss. It also includes resilience, creativity, community, and hope—though these elements often get less attention. Artists like Kendrick Lamar have explicitly wrestled with the responsibility of representing these realities without glorifying them, but even Kendrick acknowledges in his music that growing up in Compton shaped his worldview in ways that can’t be sanitized for comfortable consumption.
The uncomfortable reality is that much of the music that disturbs us most is the music that most faithfully represents life for millions of young Americans. Art imitates life, and when life includes watching friends die, dodging bullets, and medicating unbearable pain with whatever’s available, the art will reflect that. The question isn’t whether artists should make this music—many of them have no choice if they want to be authentic. The question is whether we’re willing to confront the social conditions that make such music possible, or whether we’ll continue blaming the artists for showing us what we’ve allowed to exist.
Until we address the root causes—poverty, systemic racism, failing education systems, lack of mental health resources, the flood of illegal weapons into urban communities, and economic systems that offer young people more opportunities in the drug trade than in legitimate business—the music will continue to reflect these realities. And perhaps that’s exactly what it should do. Sometimes the most important role of art is to refuse to let us look away.
