Did ICP Influence Eminem Influence Tyler, The Creator?

Eminem has been in a heated battle for years with the rap group ICP, fellow Detroit natives that are credited with inventing ‘Horrorcore’, a sub-genre of rap that differs from regular rap because the violence documented in horrorcore isn’t for monetary gains.  Music that is used as an escape from reality by poor kids who get bullied.  Eminem took ICP’s horrorcore style and re-purposed it to appeal to middle class sensibilities.  To prove this, I created a “Horrorcore Calculator” that calculates how horrorcore a song is.

I took the corpus of ICP lyrics (about 300 songs) and used it as the baseline.  That is, the more similar lyrics are to ICP, the more horrorcore an artist is.  Let’s take a look at some data:

Goblin	9.83
Illmatic	5.39
Reasonable Doubt	4.12
Infinite	6.48
Slim Shady	11.03
Marshall Mathers	10.26
God Loves Ugly	6.42

You’ll see that Eminem, after Infinite, his horrorscore went way up.  The rappity-rap guys hover in the 4.0-6.0 range and it seems that stuff over the 9.0 range is very horrorcore-y.  Jay-Z/Atmosphere/Nas are used as “controls”.

Tyler, The Creator is the logical progression to Eminem.  Because being attached to horrorcore is awful for his brand that appeals to middle-class tweens, it’s important for Tyler to stress that he’s NOT a horrorcore artist in interviews and “think pieces”.  But he’s a lot closer to horrorcore than not.  And one of the best song of the past few years imo, EARL, has a horrorscore of 15.58.

I put the horrorscore calculator here if you want to play around and find data.

Is The Wu-Tang Responsible for the Majority of New Bad Rap?

Out of all the groups that backpackers love, Wu-Tang is probably the most universally popular one.  They have a message board where a bunch of bots scrape the internet for anything related to the Wu-Tang Clan and post it for pointless discussion.  It’s a slightly more accessible version of Canibus’ old conspiracy theory/fan message board.  The kind of rap they ended up inspiring for the most part is high syllable-per-word raps by dummies that believe in conspiracy theories.

The Wu-Tang Clan had a very popular album many decades ago that remains one of the top 50 or so top selling rap albums.  It’s very different from the rest of the albums on that list, statistically.

Album	SPW
Wu-Tang Forever	1.36
Don Killuminati	1.31
All Eyez On Me	1.30
Stankonia	1.29
The Art of War	1.29
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill	1.28
The Eminem Show	1.28
MP Da Last Don	1.28
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below	1.28
Hello Nasty	1.28
*************************	*******
Black Sunday	1.23
Raising Hell	1.23
Get Rich or Die Tryin’	1.22
To the Extreme	1.22
Nellyville	1.22
Hard Knock Life	1.21
It’s Dark and Hell is Hot	1.20
…And Then There Was X	1.20
Flesh of My Flesh	1.19
Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em	1.14

Wu-Tang Forever hovers closely to the hypothesized syllable-per-word limit where the fan’s brain shuts down and stop listening or caring.  Most of the  top selling albums of all-time hover in a much lower syllable per word range.  MC Hammer, who is a rapper from the 80′s, had the lowest SPW album score ever recorded.

The lasting legacy of this album will be for ushering in a generation of losers who were inspired to complicate their rap writing and say nothing.

 I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies
and hypothesis can’t define how I be droppin these
mockeries, lyrically perform armed robbery
Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me

This sequence clocks in at 1.96 syllables per word.  I guess the lasting appeal is to prove to people who hate rap (racists) that rappers can say big words and shoutout the names of philosophers.

Are Most White Rappers Upper Middle Class Citizens?

Back in the day, the Oakland school system had an idea to incorporate ‘Ebonics’ into their school system to ‘enrich’ studies for  students.  The reaction from the mainstream media was that this would encourage a lazy form of language.  Criticism that carried with it heavy racial undertones.  Linguists, the least racist professionals in the world, fired back.  ’Ebonics’ isn’t objectively any ‘lazier’, they argued:

“The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘defective,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning” “There is evidence from Sweden, the U.S., and other countries that speakers of other varieties can be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective, the Oakland School Board’s decision to recognize the vernacular of African American students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound”
—the Linguistic Society of America

Most academics who’ve spent their lives studying language saw this ruling as a positive step forward but the mainstream backlash remained negative.  One systematic feature that distinguishes ‘Ebonics’ from ‘regular’ English is something called ‘g-dropping’.  That is, words with the suffix -ing end up being pronounced -in: {‘speaking’} -> {‘speakin’}.  This isn’t something limited to ‘Ebonics’, obviously.  G-dropping occurs in many English dialects and is heavily influenced by economic class.

A dope dude by the name of Bill Labov ran scientific experiments on participants to see if there were socio-economic factors that affected how often people ‘dropped’ the ‘g’.  He found that, yes, there is a definite correlation between how often you ‘drop’ the ‘g’ and what social class you belong to:

Lower Class	80%
Working Class	49%
Lower Middle Class	32%
Upper Middle Class	5%

Okay.  Why does this matter?  Well, it occurred to me looking at some of the numbers that are the basis for my new ‘race’ classification tool that most of the high-probability ‘black’ words seem to have g-dropping.  I gathered most of my data from OHHLA so mistakes are only natural.  However, a high g-dropping rate for ‘black’ words assumes either:

1. The people who input the lyrics did so in an agenda-driven manner.
2. G-dropping is a characteristic inherent in black raps.

Assuming that the lyric writers didn’t have an agenda and were doing their best to match the transcription to what they heard, g-dropping as a statistical phenomenon in the actual transcribed lyrics would be very interesting.  What do the numbers say?  Well, ‘black’ words in the lyrics dataset are much more likely to display g-dropping than ‘white’ words.

G-dropping in ‘black’ words	91%
G-dropping in ‘white’ words	9%

So, definitely, yes.  Words that display g-dropping are much, much more likely to be found in rap songs by ‘black’ artists.  Interestingly enough, the super low rate of g-dropping in ‘white’ rapper lyrics’ points to either a systematic effort by lyric transcribers to give the lyrics of ‘white’ rappers a less ‘Ebonic’ texture or that white rappers display the sociolinguistic characteristics consistent with a middle-class upbringing.

Essential Readings:

Linguistics Society of America (LSA) Resolution on the Oakland “Ebonics” Issue

The Internet Pilgrim’s Guide To G-dropping 

Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the Internet

 

 

White Guys Rap Like This. Black Guys Rap Like This.

You guys ever notice how white guys rap like this.  But black guys rap like this?  I’ve noticed this.  But am I noticing sonic aspects of the raps or qualities based on the actual lexical content?  Well, I’m not sure.  There have to be certain trends in word usage that can be measured, right?  For example, I’m sure the word {‘nigger‘} is almost exclusively limited to songs by black guys.  Not sure if there are any exclusive ‘white’ words, since white artists probably don’t own any kind of similar exclusivity to lexical items.  (They just own the labels making the records amiright?)

Anyways, no reason we can’t look at this scientifically.  All you really have to do is get good enough datasets for ‘white’ raps and ‘black’ raps.  Mathematically, of course, {Black} ∩  {White} = ∅ ⇔ One-drop Rule.  So, once we have these two datasets we can run some cool machine learning algorithms to train a computer to identify specific ‘white’ and ‘black’ characteristics.

So, what are some words that display dominant ‘black’ characteristics?  Here are 20 random distinctly ‘black’ words:

mane
beginnin
mink
houston
flav
plaques
hustlers
shorty
witchu
impala
youse
doh
cooler
tee
coupe
nigger
hatas
olde
reppin
moet

Awesome, and slightly offensive, I think.  What about 20 random distinctly ‘white’ words:

ninja
blang
rotting
planting
goals
serpents
nuggets
magnet
reckon
eyeball
fixture
puppet
obnoxious
derelict
barge
evident
doubled
closing
decapitated
intestines

One obvious observation is that these ‘white’ words don’t seem to have the same common spelling mistakes (I pulled this data straight off lyrics websites) that the ‘black’ list has.  Also, the ‘white’ words are about 30% longer on a syllable basis, on average.  But those observations are pretty inert.  Make whatever inferences you will from these stats but there’s no denying that there is a noticeable difference between the two lists.

Certain common words like {‘the‘,’i‘,’and‘} are just as likely to appear in either texts and the farther the deviation from 50% we get, the more ‘likely’ a word is to be ‘black’ or ‘white’.  For example, the most ‘black’ word is, obviously, {‘nigger‘} and the most ‘white’ word is {‘morbid‘} (not including words that are counted as artist names).

So, once we train the dataset, we can start inputting new lyrics and finding the overall score of some new songs.  Using Kanye’s rapping verses from Gold Digger we find that it is undoubtedly classified as ‘black’.  Kanye’s the poster-boy for lots of post-black sensibilities; the fetish for high fashion comes at the expense of perceived aggression, in my opinion.  So, what are some words from Kanye’s first verse that classifies his style as distinctly ‘black’?

baby
louis
vuitton
roc
lopez
busta
none
yo
crib
money
18th
shorty
holla
benz

Outside of the word {‘none‘}, this list seems to flow logically.  Gold Digger is a cool case study because Kanye is making observations of the community in a detached manner (4th wall?) but manages to keep his word usage precise and reflective of a history before him.

 So far, I’ve attacked this problem from a purely statistical point of view.  Using a corpus of ‘white’ lyrics and a corpus of ‘black’ lyrics, we can do a pretty good job of ‘race’ classification without much work.

The good thing about a ‘black’/'white’ approach is that it’s a binary observation; we don’t have to decide what category to put a song in.  Whereas to go a few steps down the line in this same mode of thinking, we could start to classify along multiple, intersecting dimensions like ‘Gangster’ or ‘Love’ songs.  The problem is, obviously, that we can’t definitively say that these are binary distinctions since it’s really not difficult to find examples of songs that cross these ‘lines’ all the time.

I put a user-friendly version online here if anyone wants to input verses and make little inferences*.  Please feel free to use the comments section to talk about any verses or to email me at liban.aliyusuf@gmail.com to talk about any of these.

Twitter.com/LibanAli

* For instances where both the ‘Black’ and ‘White’ scores are below a certain threshold (~5.0), there might be mistakes.

An Observation from All Eyes On Me

I don’t think it’s a big stretch to say that Tupac is Tupac mostly for his ability to connect with fans and not necessarily for his technical rapping abilities or anything like that.  He had a energy and commitment to his ideas that probably won’t be matched for a long time.  The interesting question is that, why do his ideas and philosophies came through so clearly in his raps?  Most kids could pick up on it at a young age, and academics with shallow interests in rap as a whole were able to squeeze out every last idea out of his career.

On a Syllable Per Word basis, he was slightly higher at 1.30 SPW but still far from the hypothesized threshold value*.

In my opinion, Tupac’s accessibility is fascinating as a case study because some of the most impactful things he did (does?) on songs weren’t even rap related.  If he was a pure rapper in the sense that he was rapping verses separated by hooks, and that was ALL he did on songs, his personality and energy would have been squandered by the orthodoxy of a rap song.

The ability to “talk to” an audience is important of course, and great if you can do it while rhyming, but still, Tupac’s ethos was rebellion.  How rebellious are you if you’re constraining yourself to rules in a genre less than 30 years of age?  There are no rules, really.

So, if you look at All Eyes On Me, Pac’s most successful album, he does some interesting things.

1. On the first disk, Tupac has about 1800 words of him talking, which averages out to about 128 words per song, which is about a couple of paragraphs each song of Tupac just talking.
2. 11 of the 14 songs on the first disk had instances of Tupac talking.
3. One of the songs without any sort of shit talking from Tupac is Got My Mind Made Up.  This is interesting because the song features Kurupt, Methodman and Redman, a track that was more rappity rap than any other song on the album and one that was pretty orthodox in structure
4. The talking served two general purposes it seems; one is to prime the listener for a song’s themes and another as a ‘wrap-up’ of what just occurred.  Both seem like great techniques, especially when it’s done loosely and spontaneously.

I think that, generally, this is a great addition to whatever is happening in a song.  I don’t know about how it was actually recorded, but it seems like a form of ad-libbing.  A natural born shit talker, Tupac was (is?).

- @LibanAli

Yo, I wrote about Gucci on rapmetrics.com

Cause this wordpress blog is pretty shitty for adding interactive content, I wrote about Gucci here.

 

Please use FireFox.  It’s the realest browser.

 

MGK Stealing Flocka’s Cadence

Good song but a blatant lift off of Flocka’s Gun Sounds hook cadence.   The repetition of [I'm a] fits perfectly with the [Luv Dat].  I doubt it’s a coincidence since the stress he puts on each word is exactly like Flocka.

Might be easier to visualize the two hook’s on top of each other:

Exact same amount of syllables, words and stress placement.  Gun Sounds is one of the greatest songs of the past couple of years cause of that beautiful cadence.  I’d find myself shaking my imaginary dreads all the time to this because of how perfectly catchy and intense it was.  Perhaps Flocka was inspired by someone else (in which case this post is silly) but Flocka’s whole style is so unorthodox and oddly structured that I doubt it whereas someone like Machine Gun Kelly is indebted to various rapping styles and is a true school rap child.

Minority Report Drag-Drop Rhyming Like the Greats

Some of the coolest rhymes of all-time are built in pieces. For example, on Figaro, one of MF Doom’s most lyrically lyrical songs, he busts the song open with one of the best couplets ever:

The rest is empty with no brain but the clever nerd
The best emcee with no chain ya ever heard

There’s three rhymes here: [rest is empty] and [best emcee],[no brain] and [no chain],[clever nerd] and [ever heard]. Or visually:

Putting this kind of rhyming together right now is hard, algorithmically or naturally. But, imagine of having the option to drag and drop this to build dense bars. So, I did just that. Click here.

Okay, so let’s break down the scheme in steps with visual examples from my new Drag-Drop rhymer.

Step 1: Rhyme [rest is empty].

Step2: Drag first two rhymes into the frame.

Step 3: Rhyme [no brain].

Step 4: Drag middle two rhymes into the frame.

Step 5: Rhyme [never heard]:

Step 6: Drag last two rhymes into the frame.

Done!  Using the DOOM template from Figaro, we’ve built a dense rhyming couplet in a few minutes with almost no hard work.

A fun way to build nonsensical dense bars.  In my opinion, these bars are weirder and more interesting (filled out) than most rap about rap by skilled rap rhymers.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE DRAG-DROP RHYMER

Riff Raff’s Internal Rhymes

At his best, Riff Raff is easily one of the more interesting and fun rap writers right now.  One of the ways he does this is by forcing rhymes within a bar.  So, a regular rap line might go like:

 

~~~~~~~~A

~~~~~~~~A

 

Where the ~ are the words before a rhyme.  So, a rapper might rap a bunch of shit and hit an end rhyme.  Usually,  Line 1 and Line 2 are dependant on each other for meaning.  The writer has lots of space to fully get through whatever idea it is that connects those lines.  Riff Raff (and Gucci before him) sometimes break a bar into halves and build meaning within a line.  This causes individual lines to be longer on average but cuts the amount of space needed to communicate something in half.  So, a generic Riff Raff line might look like:

 

~~~~~A, ~~~~~~A

~~~~~A, ~~~~~~A

 

The song above, WorldStar (the title is an ode to WSHH and a reference to himself as a globetrotter I think) displays this technique.  And it’s fun to listen to:

 

#1.

Tasers, house full of Lasers
Mouth full of Glaciers, outskirts of Asia
Medication, deep thoughts Meditation
Pay me for a Favor, rap game Joe Frazier

#2.

Ain’t nothin to it, dip a stick of embalming fluid
Cuttin coke in a Buick, rap game Martha Stewart

#3.

Now imma be a nice nerd, the Benz look like a iceberg
I was a day, vice verse, two time, twice words

#4

Swung through east Swizterland in a dope fiend rental
crushing instrumental even without the pen and pencil

#5

Ya whole squad garbage, I see why you lethargic
swung through the olive garden, gimme egyptian massages

#6

Now you can go and hate me, but you can’t navigate me
a 10 is what they rate me, ya sister wanna rape me

 

All of these are 2-syllable rhymes (2 rhyming syllables, not 2-syllable long rhyming words) and I suppose it’s because anything longer would cause:

 

1. Loss of flow.
2. Uninteresting forcing of ideas.

 

Riff Raff has a real buttery flow that comes directly from how he writes his lines.  He gets as many ideas into a line as possible (“I done shook dice with Larry Bird in Barcelona”) which to me is a sign of great writing (brevity and all that).  Creatively, there aren’t many guys that can rap like this and enjoy it.  To reverse engineer something like this requires learning what kind of internal techniques he uses.  There’s a finite amount of really good ways to do this.  One of them seems to be:

 

 

So, assuming those are all rhymes, now I can program a little thing to give all rhyming words from these categories.  The idea being, putting together some rhymes from different categories can mechanize the cognitive process of making absurd rhymes.  Check it out here:

 

 

Click on the picture to get other results for the same rhyme scheme following the same ideas.

It’s a Stoner’s Night

Such a beautiful song.  Juicy J is incredible at consistently hitting the listener with bars that fit perfectly in the space provided by the beat.  What I mean by this is that, on a bar-by-bar basis, his lines are consistent in length.  It’s one of the things that made Lemonade such an awesome track.  So I decided to calculate the variance of bar length.  Variance is defined as:

a measure of how far a set of numbers are spread out from each other.

The smaller the number, the more consistent the track.  Here’s some numbers from random songs:

Notice Juicy J and Gucci, bother hovering around 1.40 in syllable variance, are the lowest by quite a lot.  I think this is a trend we’d see over a big sample size.  Gucci and Juicy J’s sound is largely characterized by their writing styles.  There’s a rhythm built by this repetition and structure that’s very fun to listen to.

50′s number surprised me but it makes sense.  Unlike Gucci, 50 operates between a singy-songy voice and a rap voice in his rapping bars.  So, while a rapping couplet might be on average about 15 syllables long, he’ll have a few rhyming bars that are 8 to 10 syllables long.  He maintains rhythm by switching to a singy song voice.  In If I Can’t: