Criminalization of Youth Culture: Content Analysis of Music Videos of Youth Idols

Abstract

The article concentrates on the influence of musical art pieces on the dissemination and approval in youth environment values that are criminal in their orientation and content. Intrinsic to this problem is the destruction of the system of moral and legal norms that ensure the safety of a person, his property, and the possibility of self-realization and self-affirmation in activities aimed at ensuring public welfare. Criminal culture creates a threat to the security of citizens, stability and integrity of the state, hindering its planned development. The paper shows that music and watching videos are now an integral part of the leisure of a significant number of young people. At the same time, viewers do not always realize how often the video clips they watch affect the subconscious, the desire to satisfy egoistic interests by any means. A sociological study conducted in 2019 with the use of content analysis revealed that many popular musical works openly promote a disdain for the law, the right to assert power over people by force. The units to analyze were: demonstration in a video of the state of actors under the influence of alcohol, drugs, manifestations of various forms of violence, committing crimes by groups of antisocial orientation, freedom to use weapons, obscene language. The authors have also determined the frequency of representation of the elements of antisocial and criminal culture in the video clips popular among young people. 60 % of them demonstrate foul language and ready-to-use weapons, 50 % present examples of aggressive behaviour, most often under the influence of alcohol, and 20 % — actions of a criminal nature. The findings have confirmed the hypothesis: the visual content of video clips widely distributed on the Web is distinguished by a large number of elements of deviant behaviour borrowed from the criminal subculture, and modern society actively adopts them as a behaviour pattern. An urgent problem is to organize the counteraction of different publics, art workers to the spread of the criminal culture’ values exploiting music popular among the youth.