Hip Hop In 6 Charts

Using data to see what cars, social media and drugs rappers use

What drugs are rappers using? What social media?

You can get a sense of trends from listening to hip-hop, but in this day and age RapStats (from Genius) lets you run lexical searches across their whole database of lyrics.

This leads to a whole fun range of questions you can ask. Here’s a few:

1. What Drugs Are Rappers Using?

See all the drug keywords here

Cocaine is technically number one, but most references seems to be selling it (keys, crack), so we’ll leave that out. That leaves the following as the top drugs in hip-hop:

1. Marijuana
2. Codeine
3. MDMA
4. Pharmaceuticals

Marijuna is somewhat obvious, but what’s surprising is the rise of codeine, which is commonly abused in cough syrup form. This is a somewhat obscure drug, prescribed 4 million times in the US with legal sales of only $15 million in 2016 (Bloomberg). Pints easily sell for upwards of $600 on the street, but that hasn’t stopped it from being the most trending drug…