Does Music Cause Violent Behavior?

Whenever an act of violence occurs in a seemingly normal setting, such as a school, people are always looking for something to blame it on. One of the most common focuses for this blame is music. The "experts" examine all the things that went on in the individual's life and try to find a culprit for the freakish display of violence. Often the subject is found to have been listening to whatever brand of devils music is plaguing society at that time. Today the evil genre is Rap music.

Lyrics to rap songs often include controversial lines that could be seen to promote things like violence, sexism and discrimination. Songs from popular artist such as T-pain, Flo Rida and Eminem all feature lyrics that are less than positive towards men, women, whites, blacks, children, and in some cases their own mothers. They often have songs about gang related violence and talk about women doing thing that should be reserved solely for a couples special "alone time". And in many of the more recent exhibits of violent behavior listening to rap music is claimed to be one of the culprits, along with violent video games and eating red meat on Fridays.

Previous genres of music to have held the title of "Violence causing Music" is the greats such as Heavy Metal, Rock N' Roll, the Beatles (because I don't consider them Rock) and Elvis (also not Rock). One thing that all of these murderer creating genres have in common is that, in their day and age, they were new, different and talked about things that previously weren't talked about. First it was sex, then drugs and alcohol, violence and now it's just derogatory comments regarding anything, everything.

So do I think that music is a scapegoat for violent behavior? No, I think that any violent behavior that occurs is purely on the part of the individual. There should not be any "Young Jeezy made me do it" excuses, because the only thing that made it happen is the person responsible. People are so keen to find a reason for previously normal people that have a violent episode to have said episode that they cast the blame on things they don't agree with, such as music, violent video games and eating red meat on Fridays.

But what people forget is history. History is a recounting of people doing seriously messed up things for absolutely no reason, or for some thin relatively pointless reason. Why did Hitler do what he did? Because he was crazy, not because he listened to jazz, or whatever the controversial music was of that time.The problem with blaming music on the violent behavior of certain individuals is that humans don't need a reason. And by trying to solve the problem by "fixing" music the real culprits are ignored. Which just allows for violent behavior to continue.