Gucci Mane’s Lemonade is a super interesting case study because of how atypical it is to the kind of statistics you’d expect Gucci to produce. When I think of Gucci I think low syllable per word count and below average rhyming. Instead, he kills this verse with a rhyme density of 0.36, only 9% perfect rhymes, and a high syllable per word count of 1.46. A syllable per word count of 1.46 is something you’d expect Aesop Rock, not Gucci (although he does make up for it with an NWP score of 0.88) to have.
No, what’s interesting is how amazing of a listen this song is EVEN THOUGH he’s using large words on average and his bars are long as heck (14.1 syllables per line). How does he do it? Take a look at the first verse:
My Phantom sittin on sixes, no 20′s in my denims
Your cutlass motor knockin, because it is a lemon
I like dem Georgia-peaches, but you look more like a lemon
These sour apple bitter bitches, im not fuckin with em
Im truly stupid paid thats just how I feel today,
Im movin slow cause codeine syrup’s in my lemonade
Im standing in the shade and im sellin lemonade
600 a pint da going rate off in the “A”
Lemonade diamond bracelet, put it in ur face
Lemonhead diamond earrings I wore yesterday
Im pimpin wearin linon, thats just how im chillon
Im smokin grits and sellin chickens, corvette painted lemons
There’s real structure to how the verses were written here. The End Pairs Even score (amount of rhyming lines within 15% of each other in length) is 1. Which means, that ALL rhyming bars are within 15% of each other in length. That’s not a coincidence; Gucci knew what he was doing. Gucci stepped into a different domain and totally killed it.
shut up bitch
Fuck you, sir.
diamon earrings would be the best thing that you could give a girl, they love it’.;
My Phantom sittin on sixes, no 20′s in my denims
Why would he have 20′s in a gun? What kind of 20 goes in a gun?
He has now 20′s in his denims because he’s paid and rocks benjamins all day.
Wow I’m flabbergasted by how fucking retarded this post is. Have you heard of jeans? Jesus christ I want to kill myself now.
Yea I posted that shit back when he still had the first line as “My Phantom sittin on sixes, no 20′s in my guns”.
I corrected him, and he edited it.
I hope you didn’t kill yourself over a lack of context though,
I.LOVE.YOUR.WEBSITE.
I find myself agreeing with you way too much,
Cam’ron has been my favorite rappers due his ridiculous use of multisyllables and rhyme schemes.
But this post caught my attention, because recently I’ve been listening to Gucci Mane and I think I might be crazy, but dude might be a master of internal rhymes, slant rhymes, and other things that show dude must have some dedication to his craft.
[...] 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 [...]
[...] certain rappers considered ‘simple’ or ‘garbage’ for their lyrical content are in fact empirically complex. The perception of the fans in this way is just as important as the lyrical [...]