Not long into Jay-Z's new album Magna Carta Holy Grail, the rapper delivers an emphatic statement: "I don't pop Molly, I rock Tom Ford." The Molly in question is the latest, purportedly purified version of MDMA – aka ecstasy – its new moniker derived from the word "molecule". Tom Ford being a fashion label, the proposition is that one either uses MDMA or wears an expensive black tuxedo. It is a false dichotomy, of course, but it does illustrate American popular music's recent conflict of interest with the drug.

Molly's ascent to the mainstream lexicon has roughly coincided with the ascent of Skrillex and the clumsily named electronic dance music (EDM) to the top of the US dance music charts. It has become ubiquitous not just at clubs and festivals but on television commercials, in sports arenas and anywhere else requiring euphoric builds and monstrous crescendos. Madonna, through her powers of appropriation, named her 2012 album MDNA, and, on stage at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami that same year, asked the crowd: "Has anyone seen Molly?" She was roundly condemned for encouraging drug use and later claimed it was simply a song about a girl named Molly. But the die was cast. EDM was encroaching on hip-hop's two-decade dominance of pop music, dragging club and rave culture and MDMA along with it. In many cases, hip-hop opened the door.

Over the past year, zeitgeisty rappers such as Danny Brown and A$AP Rocky have increasingly made music with EDM artists, actively bridging the sounds and cultures between rap and dance, and Molly has emerged as the lyrical signifier of this relationship. Popular Southern rapper 2 Chainz has referenced it on multiple songs, including chart-topping hits Beez in the Trap by Nicki Minaj and G.O.O.D. Music's Mercy with Kanye West. But it was a newcomer from Atlanta, Trinidad James, whose celebration of Molly's benefits (libidinous behaviour) and downfalls (sweating) seemed to push the drug into the mainstream. His Molly song, All Gold Everything, went from self-produced free mixtape standout all the way to the Billboard top 40 in June 2012, and shortly thereafter led to a multi-million dollar deal with Def Jam Records NBA star LeBron James was caught on camera rapping along to the song's most famous lyric ("popped a Molly, I'm sweatin'") during a warmup. The video went viral. Another video, "Popped a Molly I'm Sweating For 6 Minutes", which is that same lyric looped for that amount of time, has had 2m views on YouTube. (Ironically, if you watch at least 10 seconds of those six minutes, an advertisement for Magna Carta Holy Grail is likely to pop up on your screen.)

Controversially, Rick Ross rapped on the remix of Rocko's U.O.E.N.O: "Put Molly all in her champagne, she ain't even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain't even know it." It was a lyric whose sentiment is not all that uncommon in rap these days, in that it posed the male rapper as the supplier, his anonymous female companion as the vessel, and Molly as the automatic gateway to sexual gratification. Ross was very quickly provoked forced to apologise for his insinuation that it was perfectly acceptable to dose the unknowing and have sex with the unconsenting, all in the name of Molly.

However, all of this molly-popping and subsequent finger-wagging has not been limited to Jay-Z's penthouse recording studio. A recent article in the New York Times, titled "Molly: Pure, but Not So Simple", quotes numerous doctors on the dangers of Molly, its increasing impurity and the horrible A&E cases they have seen because of added impurities such as bath salts and methamphetamine.

Arising from this public embarrassment like a dystopic Disney heroine is Miley Cyrus, who recently released the song We Can't Stop, and it's overstimulated video, in which she sings: again and again, "So la da da di we like to party/Dancing with Molly/Doing whatever we want." A full 15 months after 54-year-old Madonna's Molly-coddling, Cyrus twerks with African American women and sings about the drug, flashing faux gang signs with temporary gold caps on her teeth. She's since been condemned and has, dubiously, claimed that the lyric is actually "dancing with Miley". Though, 15 months after Madonna's onstage antics, Cyrus might be castigated less for the drug reference and more for being terribly late to the appropriation party.