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Rap Stats: Breaking Down The Words in Rap Lyrics Over Time

178 points| jsomers | 12 years ago |news.rapgenius.com

93 comments

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[+] madsushi|12 years ago|reply
I have always been a big fan of rap vocabulary, and I've already lost an hour poring over different results. What would be amazing would be a cross-reference to the Google Trends results for the same words. You could try to see the difference between cultural events (global) and specific events in the rap community (local) that caused certain words to spike or ebb.
[+] dmix|12 years ago|reply
Regarding the NBA chart: "Jordan, Kobe and Lebron":

> Rap and professional sports have always gone hand in hand, and we can see the evolution of rappers’ favorite basketball players:

"Jordan" keyword for example would more often be used in reference for Nike shoes, so not a direct representation of the sports players popularity.

/pedantic rant

[+] mbrameld|12 years ago|reply
Usually the shoes are referenced with the plural "Jordans", whereas the player is referenced with the singular "Jordan".
[+] golergka|12 years ago|reply
> not a direct representation of the sports players popularity

And how exactly did these shoes got their name?

[+] ChrisNorstrom|12 years ago|reply
I never liked rap and I can finally explain my reason:

http://rapgenius.com/rapstats?q=woman%2C%20women%2C%20girl%2...

And I've heard a lot of rap. My highschool bus driver always played rap on the bus's radio every time we had him as a driver. Honestly, I went to school angry every morning. Similar to how you feel when you try to listen to Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh.

[+] rza|12 years ago|reply
If by rap you mean commercial rap, then I don't blame you. But keep in mind rap is a very diverse genre with many hard-working artists, and a large, passionate subculture. You will not hear that on the radio because it doesn't sell, in the same way you don't hear metal, classical, or experimental music on the radio. I hate to say it, but your school bus driver exposed you to very little "rap".

Source: I was in the breakdance community for several years, where you'll meet all sorts of wonderful hip-hop heads. And yes, such a thing still exists and it is not the tacky stuff you see in commercials and in movies.

[+] CoachRufus87|12 years ago|reply
Don't paint the remaining 99.7% of wrap with the same brush as that 0.3%.
[+] cing|12 years ago|reply
I'd like to see a more thorough analysis of "big words" in rap songs. I started manually compiling examples in a blog a while back, http://rapwords.tumblr.com/
[+] emiljbs|12 years ago|reply
Check out the lyrics of Death Grips.
[+] Jach|12 years ago|reply
Anyone found another word that peaks past 0.53%?

http://rapgenius.com/rapstats?q=nigga%2C%20yo%2C%20bitch

[+] hawkharris|12 years ago|reply
Gangsta rap is like PHP: I enjoy it because I grew up with it, but it's getting hard to defend intellectually.
[+] Larrikin|12 years ago|reply
Rap is extremely diverse, but why do you even need to defend it? Can't a song just be fun to listen to?
[+] muratmutlu|12 years ago|reply
If anyones interested - we made http://www.tuner.io at a hackday in SF last year.

It reorders the Billboard top 100 based on lyrics, so top 5 songs with the most profanity etc.

After the hackday the API access to the services expired, but check it out anyway!

[+] nathancahill|12 years ago|reply
API access expired? What kind of hackday is that?
[+] ZanderEarth32|12 years ago|reply
Love this. I had a similar idea a few months ago except I wanted to map the number of times certain popular phrases were mentioned in different rap songs. For example, how many rap songs have the lyric

"if it don't make dollars it don't make sense (or cents)"

[+] yesbabyyes|12 years ago|reply
This is great! We actually built something very similar to this for the 2011 Node Knockout, we called it Rapminder (as a nod to Gapminder, and serendipity had it that I met Hans Rosling just outside our office the day before the hackathon).

We mined the lyrics from OHHLA [1], matched the metadata from Discogs [2], built a word structure in Redis and drew the graphs with D3. We built it with an eye to Rap Genius, but sadly we haven't kept it online after the Knockout. I'll look into setting it up again.

[1] http://ohhla.com/ [2] http://discogs.com/

[+] beloch|12 years ago|reply
Money and bitches dwarfs pretty much every other thing I've tried, and both are trending upwards. It's nice to see that rap is becoming a deeper, more intelligent genre.
[+] flycaliguy|12 years ago|reply
Don't pretend that other genres of popular music would reveal anything more "intelligent".
[+] kin|12 years ago|reply
I wish the lyrics distinguish between the word la and the abbreviation L.A.

Then I can accurately compare New York vs. L.A. mentions, 'cause no rapper says Los Angeles.

[+] cgdangelo|12 years ago|reply
Very cool. I think an interesting feature would be to plot songs along the graph as nodes you could hover over. You could see the artists' and songs' information, maybe the word frequency in those songs. I suppose you could look for radical changes in slope to figure out where to place each node, too.