My inspiration for this project was the Old School and Gangsta Rap unit in class. ​I had been struggling to come up with a topic I was genuinely interested in and passionate about that had a decent amount of available information. I was really excited to talk about this because the impact the war on drugs had and continues to have on the Black community is an extremely important issue to me, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about it in the context of music.​

In the initial stages of research, I intended to focus solely on how the effects of the war on drugs were reflected in rap and hip hop, and I wanted to see if there was a significant difference between the lyrical topics of rap and hip hop in the 70s (before Reagan's war on drugs), 80s (during the height of Reagan's WoD), and 90s onwards. While I found some expected information and analyses, I also found further discussion about the WoD's impact on other genres and music-centered communities, as well as analyses on the evolution of lyrical content involving drugs throughout the twentieth century. I decided to broaden the scope of my project and talk not only about hip hop and rap, but changes in how drugs are discussed in music using the War on Drugs as societal context.

The first thing I did was identify the time periods I wanted to focus on. Since my original idea was about the war on drugs, I decided to do the two decades before, the two decades after, and the two decades during the height of the WoD. Then I identified one or two main topics for each set of two decades, and researched those bigger themes. Then, I found all of the pictures I needed because finding appropriate pictures that I could use took longer than I expected, so I did it after the research and writing. Finally, I did my lyrical analysis. For the lyrical analysis, I searched for lists of songs related to drugs, and used some songs that I had prior knowledge of, and determined which drugs were being talked about and in what ways they were being talked about. After putting my data into the chart with the lyrics to back up my decisions, I used the numerical data (# of songs in each category) to make the graph.