Couldn't find Aceyalone - I thought he'd be in the top 10, I guess he wasn't included.
Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
111–120 of 276 posts
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you looking at a different link than us? The intro reads "I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake." and the title of the infographic (if that's all you looked at) reads "# of Unique words used within artist’s first 35,000 lyrics" This seems…
Yes, I missed that, even though it is very clearly spelled out (oops!). It makes the ordinal comparison valid (modulo noise), but it does not completely address the concern. If you have two artists, and artist 1 uses 5,000 unique words in 35,000 lyrics while artist 2 uses 10,000 unique words in 35,000 lyrics, artist 2's vocabulary may be substantially more than twice as large as artist 1's. It is unlikely that a lyri…
Repetition also seems like an huge issue given a 35,000 lyric limit. If someone repeats the same line 5-7 times it's hardly reasonable to count that when estimating vocabulary.
Edit: A quick check found 7 repetitions of the same 8 word phrase in a DMX song. Which I chose becase he was at the bottom of the list. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/dmx/whatthesebitcheswant.html
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#113OP: Did your analysis of MF DOOM include his work alongside Madlib as Madvillian or his various other pseudonyms (King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn, etc.)?
I find it a little hard to believe he's not at least in the Wu Tang/Canibus/KK cluster, if not #1 overall.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#114where is KRS-ONE?
4585 unique words.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#115Incredibly, a list about rapper vocabulary is missing anyone associated with nerdcore. I'm interested to see where the likes of MC Frontalot, Wordburglar, YTCracker, etc. rank on that scale...
I don't see why novelty acts would be relevant.
Why do you dismiss nerdcore as "novelty"?
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#116This infographic doesn't take into account other rappers possibly copying earlier really influential artists, making the earlier influential artists rank lower. More generally, it would be cool to see this chart ranked by the amount of original words present in the first 35,000 lyrics that were not present yet at the albums' time of publication.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#117Gotta wonder about the garbage-in factor of Rap Genius. From one randomly selected Aesop Rock cut: "Please I want to donate my brain to the monstrous Panasonic profit" I guess it could be. I always heard it as "monstrous Panasonic prophet." It would be in keeping with the previous lyric "Television, all hail grand pixelated god of fantasy."
In that instance my guess is that he probably used a homonym on purpose. Perhaps another interesting breakdown would account (and give extra points) for homonyms since it's sort of 2 words.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#118How many words in "fo shizzle ma nizzle" ? 4 or 0 ?
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#119Why Jedi Mind Tricks is not counted? He'd be the first in this list; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlZgiK6FiO0
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#120I've been wanting to do some NLP on rap genius's corpus for ages. This is a great analysis. What I had thought of is write a program to detect ghostwriting. Rappers probably have some sort of lyrical 'DNA' in the construction of their verses. How often they use certain words, number of words per line, number of unique words per song, ratio of adjectives to nouns, that kind of thing. You could probably unmask some ghost-writing secrets.
Looking at the analysis here, it's interesting to see some clustering in the results. IMO the second cluster is the sweet spot: Wu Tang's excessive invention of vocabulary is cool but probably detracts from the poetic effect. Meanwhile rappers like 2Pac are just kind of boring IMO, at least going by their lyrics alone.