But it has never been clear whether there is something uniquely insidious about hip-hop or whether the problem is simply that most people over 40 just don’t understand it. After all, nearly every generation seems troubled by the musical preferences of the next; remember, Elvis’s gyrating hips were once viewed as a corrupting influence on the nation’s youth.

To solve that riddle, public health researchers are deconstructing hip-hop culture, venturing onto club dance floors and dissecting rap lyrics. The hope is that by understanding hip-hop, experts can design more effective health messages — and maybe even give parents insight into the often confounding music embraced by their children. “There’s definitely a popular opinion that hip-hop is music that is bad for you and makes people do crazy things,” said Miguel A.

Muсoz-Laboy, an assistant professor in the department of sociomedical sciences at Columbia. “We need to try to see how youth understand their own culture without imposing our own adult judgments.” Dr. Muсoz-Laboy spent three years studying the hip-hop club scene, talking to dozens of teenagers and watching them dance.

While hip-hop music has been widely assailed as misogynistic, the researchers found that young women were the “gatekeepers” of boundaries on the dance floor, according to research published this month in the journal Culture, Health and Sexuality. Even during the highly sexualized form of dance known as grinding, in which bodies rub against each other, the girls in the study “were consistently vigilant about maintaining control over their bodies and space,” the study noted.