Protovis software
New York rappers, it so happens, were
the first to mention champagne in songs.
Tahir Hemphill determined this using
his Hip-Hop Word Count, a searchable
database of the lyrics of more than 40,000 songs from 1979 to the present.
This tool for research and interpretation
illuminates the music’s technical details,
such as metaphors, rhyme style, and
frequency of polysyllabic words. Any
term can be searched, and the results
are an exhaustive list of songs in which
that term appears, along with complete
lyrics, artist, location, syllable count,
average syllables per word, and literary
sophistication (determined by Flesch and
SMOG scores, readability rubrics designed
to measure ease of comprehension).
Hip-Hop Word Count also converts
the data into interactive visualizations
that graph and connect on parallel lines.
Users can select ranges in any category
and see how, for example, Jay-Z’s
shorter songs fare in terms of syllable
count and sophistication. Hemphill notes
that Hip-Hop Word Count, by assigning
time and place to elements such as
cultural and sociopolitical references,
can be used “to chart the migration of
ideas and map a geography of language.”
