HIP HOP RAP CHARTS FULL

Unique words by decadeīut let’s get a little more complex. Hip-hop has been siloed as a “street thing” for much of its existence, but this shows that it’s simply a human thing. After filtering out curse words, stop words, and meaningless terms like “yo” and “hey,” these are the results: tidy_lyrics %>%įor a genre that gets accused of encouraging violence, this is a pretty positive list! Romance is the most popular topic of discussion, and universal worries like wealth and time are reflected, too. The first analysis we did was simple: What words have been used the most in popular hip-hop? This isn’t perfect, but it should at least let us know what themes have dominated songs.

HIP HOP RAP CHARTS FULL

You can find the full code on Github, but we’ll also include some of it here for important steps. This guide from its creators, Julia Silge and David Robinson, is immensely helpful in learning the basics. But what about the actual content? To get into the lyrical side of things, we booted up R and dove into the “tidytext” package, essentially a method that breaks down chunks of text into individual “tokens” that serve as data points for analysis. Now we know how popular hip-hop has spread geographically. There’s a notable gap in the middle of the map, though: Between the Mississippi River and the West Coast, there are nearly no Billboard-charting rappers outside of Texas. By the time we hit the 2010’s, mainstream rap is coming from nearly every corner of the country. As the 1990’s bled into the 2000’s, rappers like Nelly and Kanye West helped put Midwestern cities like Chicago and St. Contemporary epicenters like southern California, south Florida, and Houston emerge early on as well. New York City is the historic home of rap going back to the days of Bronx block parties, and the map shows not only how many popular artists are from the Big Apple, but also how the genre began to creep up and down the East Coast from there. To figure out how the genre’s grown geographically, we popped our data into Carto and plotted where each chart-topping rapper was from. Many of the most well-known artists in rap’s early days of popularity hailed from a few select areas. Hip-hop is now obviously a national entity, but it certainly wasn’t always that way. Off we go! How did hip-hop spread geographically? But given that rap mostly entered the mainstream in the 1990’s, it should still give us a good sense of how the genre has changed – or stayed the same – over time. Even though rap was starting to assert itself in the 1980’s, Billboard only established the “Hot Rap Songs” category in 1989, so we’re missing a good decade. (For a detailed look at how we did, check out this tutorial). We used Billboard’s “Hot Rap Songs” category to create our dataset, and scraped Genius’s API to get all the lyrics for each entry. So we looked at the past 30 years of popular hip-hop and broke it down quantitatively. But as you know, we here at Storybench are all about the data. Of course, that’s natural for coverage of any art form. Discussions of its themes and content are mostly relegated to think pieces and opinion-heavy feature stories. When Kanye West makes a controversial statement, it’s covered by CNN and Complex alike.īut for all the increased attention paid to hip-hop, most analysis of the genre is done qualitatively. When Childish Gambino dropped “This is America” this past May, for instance, outlets like The Atlantic and The Washington Post dedicated a significant amount of coverage to the song, dissecting every possible metaphor and hidden meaning. Hip-hop has simply become a centerpiece of American culture. These artists have appeared the most on Billboard’s “Hot Rap Songs” list since 1989.

Hip hop rap charts