because it feels like they are just actors playing a "role" and it's all obviously hyperbole. And that's how I can justify listening to it now as a 42 year old man.

But as a middle school kid back then at that time??? You're absolutely right - me and my friends thought all that stuff was real life. I was never a weed head at all but I definitely had friends who were influenced by what they thought was "cool". Teenage weed use and drinking along with misogyny absolutely got normalized a bit during that period.

Like you mentioned some of that likely correlates to the age we were at the time, but it would be disingenuous to deny the influence of seeing those videos on mainstream MTV.

On a completely separate sidenote - one thing I do miss about that era was the quality of the clean versions of songs. They used to record completely separate vocals with even different rhymes or they'd add sound effects to edit instead of just cutting out on the explicit language. I was CORNY as a kid because my parents were so strict - I wasn't allowed to buy the actual albums so I just knew the clean versions from the radio edits and MTV/BET videos. Wasn't until the mid-90s when I was like a junior in high school that I heard the actual joints from Doggystyle and the Chronic and I remember being shocked lol...