The Data Rich Rapper
This project draws on Franco Moretti’s concept of “distant reading” or the process of “understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.” Where close reading relies on analysis about the apparent inner workings of a literary text, distant reading compiles data about many, many works.
Copyright laws and access to digitized sources, however, are a big hurdle to overcome when trying to conduct text mining experiments on traditional literary texts. In terms of hip hop, though, there is a large online community of people using technology to compile and organize rap lyrics, in far more advanced ways than in African American and American literature. Ultimately, Jay-Z also presented me with data collecting opportunities in ways that those formal literary artists did not.
The “Jay-Z dataset” raises the possibility of looking at a dozen works by a single artist. In short, metadata provides an added context to my exploration of Jay-Z’s body of work.
One of the main implications of the “Jay-Z dataset” concerns approaches to major authors in African American literary studies. Literary scholars regularly concentrate on major authors, and they tend to do so one major work at a time. Richard Wright’s Native Son or Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Or a few canonical poems by Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. The dataset raises the possibility of moving beyond the so-called masterpieces of major authors and instead concentrating on their productivity and output over an extended time period.
Take these findings that we pulled from our dataset:
- Between 1996 and 2013, Jay Z produced 12 solo albums
- Across his 12 solo albums, Jay and his producers use 276 samples.
- At 39%, Jay Z’s most frequent samples come from hip hop music.
- Soul music, at 30%, constitutes his next most frequent source of samples
- Jay Z deploys over 500 similes across his 12 album
