Smoke It Up: Exploring the Themes and Prevalence of Tobacco Rap Lyrics on Twitter

Background: The urban African American population is surrounded by intense and integrated levels of tobacco marketing and consequently is one of the few markets where tobacco sales are growing despite declines elsewhere in the US. Youth and African Americans use social media at higher rates than the general public and often post lyrics about tobacco.  This study aimed to assess the prevalence and themes of tobacco references in rap lyrics posted on Twitter.

Method: Billboard Magazine year-end charts from 2012–2014 were used to identify the most popular rap songs; www.azlyrics.com was used to obtain the song lyrics. A lyrics dictionary was developed as a basis for keyword rules used to collect tweets related to tobacco from the Twitter Firehose between 01/01/2012 and 12/31/2014. Tweets were coded for product type, brand, celebrity mention, positive/negative/neutral sentiment, dual product use, and urban sub-culture references, using a combination of Naïve Bayes machine learning methods, keyword algorithms, human coding. Twitter account metadata were analyzed.

Results: Keyword filters captured over 200 000 tweets. Preliminary analyses revealed that the sentiment associated with tobacco use mentions was almost uniformly positive or neutral. A substantial proportion of tweets contained a brand mention, marijuana references, urban lifestyle cues (partying, street life).

Conclusions:  Tobacco lyrical references cannot be considered merely culturally salient artistic expression, but amount to explicit promotion as some artists promote their own tobacco brands. New strategies are needed to protect youth and address the transformation of tobacco advertising into transcendental ‘branding,’ where the boundaries between marketing and entertainment are blurred.