Dat Niggas crazy: How Hip-Hop Negotiates Mental Health.

Hip-Hop culture and rap music are hotly contested spaces in and outside of the Academy. Like most art forms, there is a therapeutic element to the craft, and we suggest that Hip-Hop is no different than other creative outlets. The music serves as a form of therapy for both the artist and the audience rather than just a celebration of sex, crime, and substance abuse. Embedded within the music lies a calculated effort to negotiate the psychological and physiological stresses of racism. In this article, we discuss Hip-Hop’s documentation of black suffering in the music, and we offer that the music is what allows people to cope with a variety of racial and environmental stressors.