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Comment by loso | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed reading this chart but I hope it doesn't reinforce the bias that some fans have that word complexity is the only way to tell if a rapper is good or not. There are several ways to judge the strength and weaknesses of a rapper. Complexity is one of them, flow is another. Story telling ability is also another very strong in indicator. The best rappers are able to bring a mix while some are just so strong in one area that they explode no matter if they are really weak in other areas.

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To fully understand rap, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the song been rendered, and two, how important is that objective. Question one rates the song's perfection, question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining a song's greatest becomes a relatively simple matter.

If the song's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the song yields the measure of its greatness.

god. fucking. damn.

rips page out of book

I completely agree.

It's kind of like putting book authors in this kind of a list. Using more words and more complex ones doesn't really say anything about the quality of the writing. Pretty interesting data-set for fun though.

William Faulkner once criticised Ernest Hemingway by saying that he "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary."

Hemingway responded by saying, "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

"Give a dog a bone, leave a dog alone..."

There's too much hate for DMX in these comments. Dude has some tracks that just ooze energy.

I never made the claim that complexity is better/worse. I just wanted to communicate the data point, not imply 2pac>DMX.

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