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We might all be self-confessed hackers , but we'll never explicitly confess our adoration for the gloriousness of the genre that is gangster rap .
> Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words Why does that suggest he knew over 100k words? Maybe it means he knew 28,829 and used all of them? Would he really know over 70,000 words he never used in his works? What would those 70,000 words be? Probably very obscure ones. How can you know that many obscure ones?
Humour me for a moment.
When an artist writes a song, he (or she) has constraints. Most rappers would like to rhyme the ends of their sentences. I know sometimes they don't (like poetry), but it's certainly pleasing to the ear to have that constraint. Artists endeavour to make their songs catchy, that's highly correlated with the gross sales of the product.
When an artist writes a novel, this constraint is not weighted quite as highly. I know Shakespeare wrote poetry, too, and to call me out on this comparison is entirely fair. That said, there's also an argument to be made for eye rhymes. Shakespeare used these a lot. Eye rhymes are words that don't rhyme aurally, but do rhyme visually. It's the story that pleases the reader, not necessarily its aural 'catchiness'. I probably made that word up. But Shakespeare made words up too. The point is, you knew what I meant.
At the end of the day these comparisons, while certainly interesting, should be taken with a pinch of salt. While I'm at it, this advice can easily be extrapolated to any dataset. Always understand there may be unknown correlations.
For those who aren't familiar with Aesop Rock, I'd invite you to give him a listen sometime. His earlier albums, in particular, have been very influential to me in many ways. Both in my artistic and professional careers. From comments on the conditions of the working man and the condition of feeling trapped in a "j-o-b"[1]: "Now we the American working population Hate the fact that eight hours a day Is wasted on chas…
I don't know man, I listened to a couple of the tracks and he definitely has lyrical skills, and I like some of the tracks, but the quotes you selected aren't very good at all, at best obvious topics with all the insight of a million college freshmen. Having said that I like "None Shall Pass" that has a really great sound. To be entirely honest, I love rap, but not for any insight rappers have in world affairs, but f…
Art is weird like that.
We have to remember that it isn't all about needing to learn something new from the experience. Sometimes it's just about getting something out of it.
Looking over the lists of the best songs of all time[1], we can see that there aren't a lot of incredibly insightful songs. Quite frankly, most speak of your "obvious topics" and probably don't talk about them with any sort of magnificent linguistic grandeur.
But that doesn't mean they aren't great songs and don't offer their listener an experience worth sharing and repeating for generations.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_considered_the_be...
I wonder where Weird Al Yankovic would come in on this ranking.
Weird Al's songs are not articulate masterpieces, but cheap parodies of other rap songs and rappers. He's probably somewhere around the 5,000 mark with the other artists. A cursory google on the size of the average vocabulary [1] yields an interesting fact. I'm not sure how watertight it is. I realise it's probably unfair to compare the size of the average vocabulary to that of a series of songs. Songs being shorter…
Incredibly, 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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As well as the old Shakespeare who was ranked according to the same rules.
I haven't read all his work, but I guess Shakespeare didn't use "hangn" and "hangin" as an alternative to "hanging". The author could validate the words against a dictionary, but it would still be flawed due to conjugations being counted as different words.
http://pyvideo.org/video/2658/analyzing-rap-lyrics-with-pyth...
The author was trying to see if rappers are considered more hateful towards women by their usage of "bitch per song". The results are quite interesting.
Looked for Canibus near the top and wasn't surprised to find him 4th. If anyone hasn't heard of him, highly suggest listening to his older stuff such as his first Can-I-Bus, 2000 BC and Mic Club. He raps about science and space all the time which is cool. Here's an example of his ridiculous lyrics: http://rapgenius.com/Canibus-poet-laureate-infinity-lyrics
Just a note, those artists don't necessarily use all their vocabulary. Eminem for example clearly holds back on his vocabulary. Rap is as much an art as anything can be so there are all sorts of factors. Be careful what you might want to draw here other than curiousity.
What makes you say this?