author here: hit me up with questions you've got.
Awesome work. Did you build a scraper to grab lyrics from Rap Genius?
Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
261–270 of 276 posts
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#262I'd really like to see this broken down by established vocabulary and made up vocabulary. I think that would really start to show who were the best lyricists on both ends. Rappers with a lot of made up words might be on the far left, and rappers with a lot of unique words that aren't made up would be on the far right. Both sides of the scale would show rapping talent on different dimensions. Influential rappers like…
>Rappers with a lot of made up words might be on the far left It's interesting that you think that. I'd recommend you look at this: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.ht... At what point do 'made up' words become 'established'. After they've been published? If so, every made up word in a song should be considered 'established'.
Somebody was listening to "To the Best of Our Knowledge" this weekend, methinks.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aesop is an excellent lyricist. In fact all the MCs on the Rhymesayers label are very talented: Brother Ali, Slug (of Atmosphere) etc. One MC whose vocabulary always leaves me taken aback is RA Scion, who has been part of the group Common Market. Their song, "My Pathology" [0] is a shining example: "Below the terra ferma's the murmur of many men Resonatin' the predication of RA's eponym It requires a higher degree of…
Thanks for mentioning Slug. It'd be interesting to see where he (and Bus-Driver) came in on the vocab scale.
Slug, unsurprisingly, wouldn't be very high [0]. I've always felt like nearly every rapper he's associated with is great, but he's kind of mediocre.
I don't see any data on Busdriver, but I imagine he'd fare better.
0 - http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/24nw9p/rapp...
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#264Couldn't find Aceyalone - I thought he'd be in the top 10, I guess he wasn't included.
Aceyalone would be a great addition. I'd also like to see Chali 2na and the whole Jurassic5 crew.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Rappers with a lot of made up words might be on the far left It's interesting that you think that. I'd recommend you look at this: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.ht... At what point do 'made up' words become 'established'. After they've been published? If so, every made up word in a song should be considered 'established'.
Somebody was listening to "To the Best of Our Knowledge" this weekend, methinks.
I don't know what that is, but I'll check it out.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
To fully understand rap, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the song been rendered, and two, how important is that objective. Question one rates the song's perfection, question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining a song's greatest becomes a relatively simple matter. If the s…
god. fucking. damn. rips page out of book
I completely agree.
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somebody was listening to "To the Best of Our Knowledge" this weekend, methinks.
I don't know what that is, but I'll check it out.
They happened to have a bit on Shakespeare's word invention: http://www.ttbook.org/book/shakespeares-inflence-stephen-mar...
Claim is that some 1700 or so of his 30,000 word vocabulary was invented by him. Including terms such as "assasination" and "gnarled".
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Top 10? I would put money on him being at least #2 and giving Aesop Rock a run for his money for #1 (depending on which albums his 35,000 words fall on - he's got a solid discography). I just put on A Book of Human Language( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwVNp42l3Xo - full album or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnsCO0Fxw3A - solid song selection). Along with that, Wu Tang as the only crew analyzed? how about Free…
Mos def is in there
thanks, must have missed him
Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#269To put some perspective on this:
ryan@3G08:~/Desktop/bleh$ pdftotext David-Foster-Wallace-Infinite-Jest-v2.0.pdf
ryan@3G08:~/Desktop/bleh$ python dfw.py
size of vocabulary: 30725
The man passed Shakespeare by 1,896 words with that book.
code:
import nltk
from nltk.stem import *
import string
raw = open("/home/ryan/Desktop/bleh/David-Foster-Wallace-Infinite-Jest-v2.0.txt",'rU').read()
exclude = set(string.punctuation)
raw = ''.join(ch for ch in raw if ch not in exclude)
raw = raw.lower()
tokens=nltk.word_tokenize(raw)
stemmer = PorterStemmer()
stemmed_tokens = set()
for token in tokens:
stemmed_tokens.add(stemmer.stem(token))
print "size of vocabulary:", len(set(stemmed_tokens))Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jedi Mind Tricks is not one person. It's two rappers (Vinnie Paz and Jus Allah).
It doesn't matter, they are still rappers and I bet they'd be one of the top
You're right. And I agree, they most likely would.
Army of the Pharaohs would be up there as well.