Hip Hop / Basic facts

Degree distribution linear axis

Degree distribution log log scale

Above is two plots of the degree distribution. The degree distribution in this case describes the amount of unique people an artist have collaborated with. As it can be seen on the graph the degree distribution follows a power law distribution. This means that if an artist in the network is popular, then he or she is more likely to make new collaborations that others. This can be easily translated to the graph as more artist would have a desire to collaborate with more well known artists either to boost their own success through their followers, or simply because they would be more likely to have heard of a popular artist that matched a certain music style. This results in a distribution where a lot of the artist only have one or two connections, whilst popular artists can have up to 250 collaborations with.

Strength distribution

Strength distribution log log

Above is two plots of the strength distribution. The difference between the degree distribution and the strength distribution, is that where the degree distribution focuses on how many artists an artist have collaborated with. The strength focuses on how many songs an artist has collaborated on.
As seen above the strength distribution also follows a power law distribution.

A closer look at Snoop Dogg

Snoop Dogg is by far one of the most developing artists we have today. A simple look at how his name has changed during his career is enough to confirm this. We wanted to investigate if his language showed any sign of these transformations.
On the figure below we see a colomn of words and a list of years. The orange dots indicate wether or not Snoop Dogg has said any of these things in his lyrics during those years.

As it can be seen on the figure above, the word "snoop" is said every single year since his career started, which really is not a surprise . However the word lion almost also appear each year, showing that he might have considered the idea of changing his name to Snoop Lion before he actually did it in 2012.
The words "gangsta" is said in all years but one, and bitch is said in every year. This supports the stereotype that hip hop artists doesn't favor the nicest words. Even during 2012 when he declared that he was Bob Marley reincarnated, and wanted to turn his back on guns and violence, did he not stop using these words in his lyrics. However the plot doesn't mention how the words were mentioned.
The last word that is linked to Snoop Dogg as a person is, "international” His use of this word loosely follows his transition to becoming an international star in the late 90’s.

We have included some names that could be interesting to look at based on Snoop Doggs bio on Wikipedia. In the top, one can see Trump, who Snoop Dogg mentioned in various years and latest in 2017 when Trump became president. One can see as well that he has relations with fellow rappers Pharrell and Wiz Khalifa. The relation with Pharrell is an older relation, as Snoop released an album in 2002 featuring Pharrell. Snoop Dogg’s relationship with Wiz Khalifa is a very close, but does not go that far back in time, since Wiz Khalifa is newer on the stage and simply younger than Snoop Dogg (meaning that he would not have known him before later in his career).

The conclusion here is that the changes in his own demeanor and personality cannot be linked to these words at least, since Snoop Dogg tends to be using these words mostly through all the years.

Overall sentiment

The overall sentiment of the hip hop artist is actually slightly above average. With a mean value of 5.38 on a scale that goes from 1 to 9, this seems like a good indication that the bad reputation hip hop artists have when it comes to a negative influence is highly overrated.

Negative wordcloud

To investigate this further we decided to look at some of the distinctive words for artists with both the most negative and the most positive sentiment values.
This wordcloud contains the top tf-idf words for the artists with the lowest sentiment values. This means that we here have the most distincitive words for the negative artists in our graph.
This wordcloud shows what we suspected, hip hop aim to provoke, with the profanities, the racial slurs and the mentions of violence the negative hip hop artists really try to grab the attention of the listeners using the obvious words to offend.

Positive wordcloud

This wordcloud contains the top tf-idf words for the artists with the highest sentiment values. This means that we here have the most distincitive words for the happiest artists in our graph.
It is clear that this wordcloud is far more positive than the one for the negative words, however with words like "stripper", "bunnies" and "kitty" it is clear that rappers will be rappers.

It is worth mentioning that only 36 out of 1062 artists was in either the positive or negative spectrum based on the low and high cutoff in the sentiment distribution. These cutoffs are made by taking the mean sentiment value and adding/subtracting two times the standard deviation.
This means that most artists have a fairly neutral mean vocabulary, including the top 10 artist listed in the previous section, meaning that going for extremes won't necessarily conclude in popularity.