The lead singer of rap-rock group Fun Lovin’ Criminals has blamed the rise of trap music on people taking drugs like cannabis and Xanax.
Huey Morgan, who plays guitar and sings in the band, said depressants were “propelling” the style of southern American hip hop to the mainstream.
The 50-year-old said it was “difficult” for him to listen to trap music because he did not use those drugs.
He told the Press Association: “I’m listening to [The Notorious B.I.G]. I’m listening to Ice Cube. I’m not listening to trap music so much but I get why trap music is happening.
“It’s all that lean (prescription cough syrup) and weed and [Xanax], and all that drug shit that’s propelling this music to be really dopey.
“It’s difficult for me to like that stuff because I’m not on those drugs.”
Artists like Drake, Cardi B and Future helped popularise the genre, which originated in Atlanta.
Morgan said he thought young people were being driven to use drugs to escape the “hopeless loop” of peer pressure from social media.
He said: “I understand why people do [take drugs], and why young people are getting into it.
“It’s because we live in this really hopeless loop right now where it’s dangerous to have an opinion, it’s dangerous to be different.
“For a lot of young people – and I’ve seen this time and time again – they feel the peer pressure a lot more than I did in my day.”
This week, Fun Lovin’ Criminals released Another Mimosa, their first album of new material since 2010’s Classic Fantastic.
Morgan, who lives in Bath in Somerset, said that despite hopes social media would open up debate, it had in fact done the opposite.
He said: “If you go on the social networks, whatever that may be, Twitter or Facebook, and you have an opinion that’s not with everyone else’s opinion, that tends to be more like a liberal left-leaning opinion, you get f****** hammered.
“If you’re a kid and you do something like that you get hammered so hard you don’t even want to go to school the next day.”
He added: “That’s a generational thing because there are a lot of young people, and not so young people, who believe social media is the wave of the future and we are doing some great things on that, and I happen to disagree, you know.”
Fun Lovin’ Criminals are best known for their 1996 song Scooby Snacks, which features samples from Quentin Tarantino’s movies Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and is about the drug diazepam, known as Valium.