The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop (2014)
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
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)
Wonder where Immortal Technique would fit within that chart.
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 :)
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
Maybe it happened that way and maybe not, funny story though.
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.
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.
Newspaper vocabulary is dumbed down, and TV even more so, because that's their market.
I'd say it's debatable, but in the right ball park.
English is probably the language with most words, though I've seen estimates around 300k, though even that might be high depending on the definition.
Here's Steve Pinker on it (from his 1994 book “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”):
> The most sophisticated estimate comes from the psychologists William Nagy and Richard Anderson. They began with a list of 227,553 different words. Of these, 45,453 were simple roots and stems. Of the remaining 182,100 derivatives and compounds, they estimated that all but 42,080 could be understood in context by someone who knew their components. Thus there were a total of 44,453 + 42,080 = 88,533 listeme words. By sampling from this list and testing the sample, Nagy and Anderson estimated that an average American high school graduate knows 45,000 words—three times as many as Shakespeare managed to use! Actually, this is an underestimate, because proper names, numbers, foreign words, acronyms, and many common undecomposable compounds were excluded. There is no need to follow the rules of Scrabble in estimating vocabulary size; these forms are all listemes, and a person should be given credit for them. If they had been included, the average high school graduate would probably be credited with something like 60,000 words (a tetrabard?), and superior students, because they read more, would probably merit a figure twice as high, an octobard.
> Is 60,000 words a lot or a little? It helps to think of how quickly they must have been learned. Word learning generally begins around the age of twelve months. Therefore, high school graduates, who have been at it for about seventeen years, must have been learning an average of ten new words a day continuously since their first birthdays, or about a new word every ninety waking minutes. Using similar techniques, we can estimate that an average six-year-old commands about 13,000 words (notwithstanding those dull, dull Dick and Jane reading primers, which were based on ridiculously lowball estimates).
http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html
Specific counts vary widely, as it is hard to measure such things, and what counts as a word is also slippery. But the trend is pretty clear.
-ss
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.
According to 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).
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.
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!
Kool Keith gives the best interviews too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQtfeszBgAc
I assume they do this though. When writing about Kool Keith, they reference the album Dr. Octagonecologyst.
Earth people...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/a4urje/rap...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Huh, with 2012 restricted data he didn't include most of these rapper's opus but he expected differently?
I've wondered where Eyedea would end up...