Word-up! Vocabulary dispersion of hip hop songs

First Hip-hop song

1980, first hiphop music came out using 763 different vocabularies. The word count of the music is 1,231 words total.

I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie To the hip hip hop-a you don't stop the rock It to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
Now what you hear is not a test: I'm rappin' to the beat And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet See, I am Wonder Mike, and I'd like to say hello To the black, to the white, the red And the brown, the purple and yellow But first I gotta bang bang the boogie to the boogie Say up jump the boogie to the bang bang boogie Let's rock, you don't stop Rock the riddle that will make your body rock Well, so far you've heard my voice, but I brought two friends along And next on the mike is my man Hank, come on Hank, sing that song
Check it out, I'm the C-A-S-AN, the O-V-A and the rest is F-L-Y You see, I go by the code of the doctor of the mix and these reasons I'll tell you why You see I'm six foot one and I'm tons of fun and I dress to a D You see I got more clothes than Muhammad Ali and I dress so viciously I got bodyguards, I got two big cars, that definitely ain't the whack I got a Lincoln continental and a sunroof Cadillac So after school, I take a dip in the pool, which is really on the wall I got a color TV so I can see the Knicks play basketball Hear me talking 'bout checkbooks, credit cards, more money than a sucker could ever spend But I wouldn't give a sucker or a bum from the Rucker, not a dime 'til I made it again
Everybody go: Hotel, motel, whatcha gonna do today (Say what?) 'Cause I'ma get a fly girl, gonna get some spank and drive off in a def OJ Everybody go: Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn You see, if your girl starts acting up, then you take her friend
Uh Master Gee, my mellow? It's on you so what you gonna do?
Well it's on and on and on, on and on The beat don't stop until the break of dawn I said a M-A-S, a T-E-R, a G with a double E I said I go by the unforgettable name of the man they call the Master Gee
Well, my name is known all over the world By all the foxy ladies and the pretty girls I'm going down in history As the baddest rapper there ever could be

Vocabulary Size

Unique word count (counting unique vocabulary) over time shows vocabulary usage pattern among hip hop songs. Larger count tells that more diverse vocabulary was adopted for each song. The data plotted shows that overtime, rap has changed to have smaller vocabulary.

How Unique* words set was made

Word Count:

Over the last 40 years, raps have used maximum 2,400 unique words in one song and minimum 3 unique words in one song.

Take the outliers, top and bottom 20% of the distribution, to get the overall tendency of unique words counts within songs.

Out of entire lyrics from a song, remove any duplicates of words used more than twice

After leaving the word duplicates, what's left are counted as Unique-word*

Top 100 vocabulary of 80's

After getting all lyrics from the representing songs of the decade, the frequency of each word is presented as below. Out of the hundred most used words, each ten vocabulary is group into ten sub groups and the frequency of each word is scaled within its group.

Choose decade to explore

You can explore the frequency of the top 100 vocabulary each decade with the frequency of instances of the words.

80's

90's

00's

10's