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The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop (2014)
- dang 8y agoSeems to go at least as far back as 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704183
- RickS 8y agoThe data only goes to 2012 sadly. Drake would likely rise since he's been prolific since then. Logic and Kendrick would also probably see some gains. It's tough to think of new entrants that might debut high on the chart, at least in pop/modern rap. If anything "mumble rap" is the standard these days and it would be pretty funny to see how the kodak/purp/yachty cohort compares to some of the other eras. And nobody is unseating Aesop Rock. The man is one of a kind.
- 4thaccount 8y ago"and nobody is unseating Aesop Rock" I was going to say that. Several years ago I saw either this list or a similar one on Reddit and a lot of comments wanted to know why Aesop Rock was missing. I grew interested and people gave "none shall pass" as a good first song to listen to if you want to get familiar with his work. My only problem with his stuff is that I have zero idea what he is talking about. It's basically just a lot of words jumbled together except for that song about the dog saving a little girl from drowning. I've heard it 50x now and still tear up.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ncphillips 8y agoRuby ‘81 That’s one of my favourite songs of all time. It’s an amazing example of poetry emphasized by music. Highly recommended, even if someone doesn’t like hip hop.
- Vector919 8y agoI think his music has gotten much more accessible and less obscure over time. I think The Impossible Kid (his most recent album) is a much better point of reference for what's interesting about his work, and it deals with topics in ways that are easier to understand and relate to, but equally as interesting and well considered (See: Lotta Years -> reflections on getting older, Blood Sandwich -> Looking back on some family moments, Kirby -> Heartfelt and hilarious ode to his cat)
- neetodavid 8y agoCheck out the album he did with Kimya Dawson (The Uncluded - Hokey Fright). Kimya is pretty matter-of-fact in a lot of the songs and seems to reign Aes in (or at least offer a point of reference for when he starts getting out-there). Its one of my favorite albums. "Earthquake" is beautiful
- RickS 8y agoIt was this list. "Blood Sandwich" is another lyrically accessible song from him that tugs the heartstrings.
- brownbat 8y agoI feel like MC Paul Barman would have a shot, his whole schtick is his inflated vocab. He's kind of a stunt rapper though, and had some dated offensive shock lyrics that are hard to listen to. I'd much rather listen to Aesop. Mac Lethal might be up there too, not sure.
- thecupisblue 8y ago>While Lil Wayne has never been celebrated for the complexity of his word choices, I expected 2pac, Snoop, and Kanye to be well above average. Huh, with 2012 restricted data he didn't include most of these rapper's opus but he expected differently?
- Jach 8y agoHe's keeping things "fair" (at least to dead artists) by only including the first 35k words of any artist. Just because time has passed and artists have a larger corpus it wouldn't make a difference under this method. I've wondered where Eyedea would end up...
- nicoburns 8y agoI'd be interested to see where Akala would fit on this list. His vocabulary is pretty impressive to listen to at least. But it seems they only included US artists.
- dylanz 8y agoI wonder if when they count in Kool Keith they also factor in Dr. Octogon, Black Elvis, Dr. Dooom, etc, etc. If they did I bet he’d be a lot higher.
- isoskeles 8y agoSame comment but for MF Doom, Madvillain, etc. I assume they do this though. When writing about Kool Keith, they reference the album Dr. Octagonecologyst.
- crmd 8y agoSeriously one of the nerdiest hip hop albums ever. It’s one of my favorite double LP’s and never fails as a first record to kick off a party. Can’t believe we’re talking about dr. Octagon on HN :-)
- joecool1029 8y agoJust his rhymes in Ultramagnetic MC's alone would push him way up I think. Looks like the creator tried to collect only solo stuff. Kool Keith gives the best interviews too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQtfeszBgAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQtfeszBgAc
- booleandilemma 8y agoDMX would have scored a little higher had barking sounds been counted as words.
- wavefunction 8y agoKRS-1 barely leading Lil Kim huh
- S_A_P 8y agoCan't take away from KRS, but I largely find the reason I am listening to KRS-one is because DJ Premier, Showbiz or other DITC member produced it. Lil Kim had a really good ghost writer(s) too, so I think she got a bit of a jump...
- posterboy 8y agoKRS is the teacher, not the distinguished professor of fine arts and lexicography.
- skookumchuck 8y agoFor reference, the TV vocabulary is about 3,000 words. The average high school vocabulary is 10,000 words. The average college graduate vocabulary is 30,000 words. The English language has about 1,000,000 words. The good news is that one needs to learn only about 3,000 words to become conversant in English.
- senozhatsky 8y agoSomewhat related, I learned a new word today - conversant :) Thanks. -ss
- posterboy 8y agoThe OED is not the english language.
- fiblye 8y agoI'd like to see a source on this info. But it's definitely wrong. 4 years in college isn't enough to triple your vocabulary. And the average fluent speaker uses far more than 10000 words. In my second language, I'm slightly over 10,000 words (I keep track of everything I encounter in Anki) and I'm still nowhere near as fluent as a typical high schooler. I encounter several new words daily.
- kolbe 8y agoIt'd guess the vocabulary of an average college graduate at the time they graduated from high school is considerably higher than 10,000 words.
- gjm11 8y agoI'm also skeptical, but note that "average college graduate = 3x average high schooler" doesn't mean "college triples your vocabulary" because there are two things potentially going on here: the effect of 4 years at college, and the difference between people who graduate college and and people who don't.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
- kgwxd 8y agoAt first glance, I thought higher on the Y-axis (even though there isn't one) was more words. I was frantically hovering looking for Aesop Rock until I realized how the grid worked. Sure enough. That's what I put on when I want to listen. It's like watching a movie, I don't want to work or exercise to it, it demands all my attention. On the other hand, nothing hypes me up like a DMX track.
- stdplaceholder 8y agoI knew it would be Aesop Rock before I even clicked through. Definitely not the kind of thing you listen to at work to block out the noise. It’s interesting but I guess not surprising that people in the same circle, like El-P, have similarly huge vocabularies. But now El-P is practically the biggest name in hip hop. Maybe wordiness is catching on.
- MaxLeiter 8y agoEl-P is not nearly the biggest name in hip hop. Maybe in the online world him and RTJ are big, but amongst the general population of hip hop listeners I don’t think he’s very big.
- stdplaceholder 8y agoTheir last album was the #1 best-selling album on the Billboard R&B/Hip Hop chart and they sold out every venue on their tour. I think they're reasonably well-known.
- MaxLeiter 8y agoIt may have been best selling when initially released, but that relies on a lot of factors (other albums released at the time being a major one). According to https://www.billboard.com/music/run-the-jewels https://www.billboard.com/music/run-the-jewels, RTJ 3 peaked at #13 on Billboard 200. That's good, but it isn't being 'practically the biggest name in hip hop' good. Plus, most people probably wouldn't recognize Killer Mike or El-P (although more people may recognize Mike over El-P from his time supporting Sanders).
- nwhatt 8y agoAmazing how many wu-tang solo members are up there, along with the group as a whole.
- jghn 8y agoI remember seeing this a number of years ago and the sentiment then was that it's an effect of them all coming together, and because they got to bounce rhymes off of each other they started to learn each other's words and incorporate them into their own material.
- adamsea 8y agoIt’s not how many words you know, it’s how you use them.
- kgwxd 8y agoI'd put Aesop Rock at the top of that axis too.
- poisonarena 8y agoI actually like most of the lower tier guys way more than all of the upper tier ones.. I saw Bone Thugs and Harmony live in 2014 when they did their tour and it was pretty amazing Bizzy Bone was really singing!
- user2426679 8y agoWould like to see a similar analysis that instead looks at the number of syllables, specifically vocabulary that has greater than 2 syllables. In addition to being of personal interest (I think it's much more difficult and impressive to create rhymes with 3+ syllables due to the natural constraint of a smaller basket of words), it would also, presumably, avoid the issue that the author highlights: > I used a research methodology called token analysis to determine each artist’s vocabulary. Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words. To avoid issues with apostrophes (e.g., pimpin’ vs. pimpin), they’re removed from the dataset. It still isn’t perfect. Hip hop is full of slang that is hard to transcribe (e.g., shorty vs. shawty), compound words (e.g., king shit)
- post_meridiem 8y agoI'd also be interested in something like a WordNet similarity comparison score; i.e., how semantically different are words that are used together. To me, that's a better measure of linguistic creativity than unique words or rhyming words.
- waltertan12 8y agoYou might like this read https://genius.com/posts/1921-Rapper-s-flow-encyclopedia-earl-sweatshirt https://genius.com/posts/1921-Rapper-s-flow-encyclopedia-ear...
- user2426679 8y agoThanks for the link... enjoyable and educational :) Wonder where Immortal Technique would fit within that chart.
- dnautics 8y agoDefinitely curious about some of the 90s Oakland rap like del, heiroglyphics, alt-hip-hop like binary star, and maybe some old school like young mc.
- Implicated 8y agoDel is pretty well represented (#7) in the print version (https://popchart.co/products/the-hip-hop-flow-chart https://popchart.co/products/the-hip-hop-flow-chart)
- WrathOfJay 8y agoI was wondering the same thing. Casual is missing, I didn't catch that Del was in the list, not surprised he's up there. Aceyalone was another one I wonder about.
- brownbat 8y agoThe bars at the end of the article are some of my favorite in hip hop. Jay Z is tackling the claims that the most skilled rappers don't sell head on... He's taking our assumption that good art isn't the most popular art, or that pop isn't skill, and deconstructing it while making a platinum record, his best selling of the decade. Chapelle talks about listening to that line on the Black Album with Common, Kanye, and Talib Kweli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4SYIfhzMmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4SYIfhzMmU Maybe it happened that way and maybe not, funny story though.
- sudofail 8y agoThe creator of the site said they're working on updating it. Should be up in a couple weeks. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/a4urje/rappers_sorted_by_the_size_of_their_vocabulary/ebhybox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/a4urje/rap...
- djaychela 8y agoQuestion to the OP of this link - were you listening to 6 Music yesterday (UK digital/online BBC Radio station) - purely mention this because there was a running thread on Radcliffe/Maconie about unique words in songs, and someone had mentioned a rapper's vocabulary being much greater than most others.
- tzury 8y agoNo wonder the second one on the left named "Too Short".
- tomcam 8y agoWonder if Nicki Minaj gets credit for her made-up wordsounds
- deltron3030 8y agoSuprised that Company Flow, Lootpack, Souls of Mischief and rappers from these collectives don‘t appear in that list. or somebody like Ras Kass.
- posterboy 8y agoThe measure is meaningless, because more doesn't equal better. Music works well with repetition. Just look at graffiti for comparison, little one word poems repeated over and over. The measure also doesn't account for ambiguity used to good effect--who makes the most sense? I'm not sure why you put Lootpack in there, anyhow. Madlib for example talks a ton about weed, known to inhibit speech production. And the sound is blunted, too, literally. I just wonder how they can be as productive as they are, at all. I still like it, sure. Nice Nick by the way.
- deltron3030 8y ago>The measure is meaningless, because more doesn't equal better. Absolutely. >Music works well with repetition. Just look at graffiti for comparison, little one word poems repeated over and over. Yeah but it‘s a bit like writing texts, where you might substitute words in longer ones that you have used a sentenced before. In Graffiti you have tags and throwups, muscle memory that is usually repeated, but also more complicated pieces where freshness and coming up with new stuff has more value. >I'm not sure why you put Lootpack in there A shameful confusion of Lootpack with Swollen Members (Wildchild != Madchild). > Nice Nick by the way. Thanks!
- time-domain0 8y agoI would expect Eric B. & Rakim to be on the list for Microphone Fiend and Don't Sweat the Technique. Seems like this list should include more artists rather than just a random selection of popular artists.
- Allower 8y ago> Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words. Congrats you just discredited your entire analysis before we even got to you including various slang and misspelled words. What a joke, but not really surprising if you consider rap to be anything other than the painfully tuneless stupefying noise.
- WrathOfJay 8y agoI am legitimately intrigued by this analysis. I've always wondered why I found certain rap so much better than others. I stopped liking the kind of rap that was becoming popular around the time of Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Tupac, etc. Looking at this data, it pretty obvious to me that the stuff on the right I tend to like a lot more than the stuff on the left. Sure enough, I just listened to Aesop Rock for the first time and it is exactly the kind of rap I enjoy.
- glitcher 8y agoSimilarly, I was happy to see Blackalicious and MF Doom place fairly high in the list too. Aesop Rock is a legend and I have a couple old favorites by him ("Daylight", and that same song's antithesis "Night Light"), but I also find him to be mentally over-taxing at times. Since you enjoyed your first listen of Aesop Rock so much, for something newer I highly recommend Milo's 2018 album "budding ornithologists are weary of tired analogies". Enjoy :)
- dsnuh 8y agoDon't miss out on Hail Mary Mallon, which is Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic. I would highly recommend their album Bestiary if you like Aesop's solo stuff.
- wufufufu 8y agoI think track time matters more than word count. You could have two songs that are the same length and have the same lyrics except one song has the N-word at the end of every line, and this analysis would prefer the censored version as having more vocabulary.
- wodenokoto 8y agoCount of unique words tend to be a function of the length of a document or corpus. So the comparison won't make sense either, if you take every artists complete works and did a unique count.
- hulton 8y agoMakes sense to see Aesop Rock at #1.