Name: In Defense of Hip-Hop | Roland Fryer | TED
Uploaded: 2026-03-06T21:39:50.000Z
Duration: 12 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Do you remember where you were when you first heard the Sugar Hill Gang?

me the groove and my friends were gonna try to move your feet.

It was a block party in Daytona Beach, Florida, and

people were moving in ways I'd never seen before.

Now, I'm not talking about my friend Manman.

That was 40 years ago, and hip hop has taken over.

It is the most popular music genre in the world, particularly among young people.

It has its effect on music, on language, on.

Even to a data nerd like me is immeasurable.

It didn't really dawn on me until a few months ago.

And I went to New York for the live ride.

I peep the person next to me, and her handle is ride or die 2000.

And they get us up out of our saddles 35 minutes in.

And on beat, she gets up out of the saddle, she starts screaming and pounding the handlebars.

There is a middle aged white woman from Charleston, South Carolina, talking about murdering somebody in public.

And number two, according to some of y', all, because of those lyrics, she's likely to murder someone this afternoon.

A team of us collected data on every radio station in America.

And for every radio station, we know the genre of the song.

So as this interactive graph gets more red, that is the spread of hip hop across every county in America.

Now, to collect the data, first we went and got literally every radio handle.

And for every radio handle, we have the broadcast frequency and range from each one of them.

And then for Some of the radio stations, we actually have the playlists that were on the radio.

And for those playlists, of course, we have the songs.

We analyzed every lyric that has been played on many radio stations in America.

Now, it took a team of us to do this, and

with the advances in AI, we made more progress in the last six months than we made in the first 10 years.

Now you can imagine having research assistants sit and listen to a bunch of hip hop and score it all day long.

We've looked at the evolution of the types of hip hop played on the radio over the last 40 years.

The bottom is what I call alternative, or what they call alternative or experimental hip hop.

It's a small portion, but this is the kind of hip hop that pushes boundaries.

The second the yellow is conscious or lyrical hip hop, think Kendrick Lamar, who was brilliant enough to win a Pulitzer Prize for his lyrics.

The big part in the middle is mainstream hip hop, the type that's played on the radio most of the time.

Think Jay Z or I'm a little older, run DMC now at the top, that's where the controversy is.

That is street rap or think Dr. Dre Tupac.

What I want you to get from this is that that was a small portion of of the overall hip hop played on the radio for the last 40 years.

It increases in the last 10 years, but even still a minority of the hip hop played.

Now, as I said, we have hundreds of thousands of songs we've processed and we have the lyrics for each one of these songs.

So I have a graph here to show you how lyrics have evolved over the last 40 years.

We train the AI to grade each song in terms of how misogynistic it was, how viral, violent the content is, how profane the language is, and

Over the last 40 years, hip hop music has gotten five times more misogynistic, five times more violent, five times more profane, but

only two and a half times as many drug references.

My grandmother who raised me, when she'd find a CD I was hiding, and

she says, I know you don't listen to this filth, honey.

Maybe we should lean in, you know, maybe we should just have an award for the most extreme hip hop song, right?

Now I don't think The Grammys are going to do it.

So what we did was we scored every single song on the four dimensions I described.

We said, who is the winner for the most extreme hip hop song of all time?

Now, before I tell you, one song was so extreme that the AI refused to degrade it.