Analyzing Drake’s and Other Rappers’ Lyrics

By: Melina Diaz (Project Lead), Tracy Charles, Daniel Fang, and Deana Moghaddas

Image Source: Official Charts

Introduction:

Whether it be through catchy tunes, meaningful lyrics, or complex styles, music has captured the attention of many. Since 2001, the global recorded music industry revenue has been consistently over 10 billion dollars annually, with recent growth in streaming revenue in the last decade. In this competitive industry with vast numbers of music artists and different genres, some artists stand out by producing more popular songs than others. With their creativity and distinctive styles, these artists go on to become household names. One of these artists is Drake, the 35-year-old Toronto-born rapper, who has found great success according to the music charts. But what is it about his or any other popular artists’ music that catches people’s attention? Is it the emotions expressed through the lyrics? Or is it the genres their music falls into? Or is it all just “God’s Plan”? In short, what factors contribute to a music artist’s popularity? We hope to deep dive into discovering the factors that have aided Drake’s global popularity.

The Data:

For our project, we used 3 Kaggle datasets:

1. The lyrics of over 6000 songs across 21 popular artists. https://www.kaggle.com/deepshah16/song-lyrics-dataset
2. A collection of Billboard’s weekly “The Hot 100” songs from 1958 to 2021. https://www.kaggle.com/dhruvildave/billboard-the-hot-100-songs
3. Spotify data from different genres. https://www.kaggle.com/siropo/spotify-multigenre-playlists-data

Who are the Top Artists?:

The Billboard Hot 100 is the standard music popularity chart for songs in the United States. Rankings are based on physical and digital sales, radio play, and online streaming in the country. As the chart is often used to measure a song’s popularity, looking at artists with the highest numbers of charted songs can help us see which artists have been popular since the start of the 21st century.

The graph shows the top 10 artists with the most songs charting on the Billboard Hot 100 from January 1, 2001 to July 17, 2021. Drake, the prominent rapper who is thought to popularize the Toronto sound in American music charts, takes the first spot at a total of 235 charted songs. Interestingly, Glee Cast, referring to performances from the TV show Glee, is second. It has high placement on this graph because Glee Cast largely performs covers of songs that were already popular and rotates their singers from the many actors on Glee. Going down the list, we see familiar names, such as singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, rapper Nicki Minaj, and Justin Bieber. These top 10 artists span a variety of genres, but they largely fall into rap and pop.

Excluding Glee Cast, Drake has more than 70 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 than any other artist. That’s impressive! To better illustrate the extent of Drake’s success, we thought it would be helpful to compare his number of charted songs to that of other artists with household names over the last 21 years.

From the graph above, we can see the cumulative number of charting songs throughout the years. In 2008, we can see that Drake “Started From the Bottom”, and there’s been a steady increase ever since then. Taylor Swift’s songs have a similar steep increase from 2018 to 2020. Even Eminem, who started his music career earlier than the others and has accomplished a steady increase in popularity, hasn’t reached Drake’s overall level of success defined by the Billboard Hot 100.

What Makes Drake Different? Why Do His Songs Consistently Become Popular?

We will attempt to analyze Drake’s genres, lyrics, and sentiment analysis to determine what makes Drake popular amongst the general audience.

Drake is an artist who delves into a variety of genres, namely hip hop, pop, and their subgenres and fusions. He is said to use elements from R&B and trap as well, and his ability to adapt to different styles, and therefore different audiences, may fuel his popularity. As a top rapper hailing from Canada, his music is also influenced by Canadian hip hop, which in addition to American hip hop, incorporates styles from Caribbean music and Jamaican music. This uniqueness in music elements may help Drake stand out from his American peers.

Above, we have the sentiment analysis for all the lyrics in songs on Drake’s released studio albums. We can see the most common emotion his songs evoke is positivity, followed by negativity. The positivity score is about 20% larger than the negativity score. While positive emotions are somewhat equal, anger stands out as the main negative emotion. We can further investigate what contributes to these sentiment scores by looking at his frequent words and phrases.

In the word cloud above, we can see that Drake’s most common words are “know”, “got”, “yeah”, “girl”, “love”, etc. “Love” and “girl” indicate that some of his songs are about romantic relationships. It’s important to note that this word cloud only accounts for the clean versions of the songs, so we don’t see any profanity even though some is present. In fact, Drake uses 2 expletives, each more frequently than his use of “love” and this could contribute to his negative sentiment score. Other observations include that many words convey intensity or urgency, such as “really”, “now”, “never”, “love”, “hate”, etc, and there’s a wide distribution between these frequent words.

In the graph above, we are looking at the most frequent catchphrases and how many songs they appear in. “I need” is a common phrase used in rap music, commonly in the context of the rapper’s desires, so it is no surprise that this is a frequent saying within Drake’s music. “OVO” is also a popular phrase given that it is Drake’s own record label with an exclusive, underground, and Drake-curated reputation. “Views” is a recurring phrase as well. Overall, it is interesting to see how Drake continues to fortify his brand as an artist and purveyor of culture as he frequents catchy sayings within his music that resonate with people, whether it is relatable or simply just cool.

Drake’s brand is fueled by his sleek aesthetics, catchy flow, and painfully relatable lyrics with addictive proverbs. His culture-shifting sayings make their mark as they are smoothly weaved throughout his songs, showing up frequently as they continue gaining notoriety. In turn, as he becomes more popular, he gets featured and features other popular artists on his songs, which widens his audience and gives him more recognition.

Comparing Drake to Other Artists:

What might help us understand how Drake’s music resonates with his audience is to analyze the music of other popular rappers. Eminem, a well-known rapper from Detroit, entered the music industry and reached success in the late 90s. While Eminem’s charting songs in the last two decades are not as many as Drake, both of them are notable figures in the rap industry. To see what elements help Drake stand out, we will analyze Eminem’s genres and lyrics and compare them with Drake’s music.

Eminem’s songs only fall into the genres of hip hop and rap. He doesn’t explore pop and its fusions like Drake. Arguably, many consider Eminem the best rapper of all time. However, when we view Eminem and Drake as artists rather than rappers, Drake excels because of his ability to adapt to genres to make high-energy danceable hits like “Nice For What” or in-the-feels vocally-focused songs like “Marvin’s Room”.

Unlike Drake, Eminem’s highest sentiment score is negativity, which is then followed by positivity. His negativity score is about 50% greater than his positivity score. It’s interesting to see that his negative emotions are somewhat equal between fear, sadness, and anger. Although there’s skill in conveying this vulnerable emotion through lyrics, it seems that the general audience might prefer Drake’s overall positive sentiment. We can look at what words contribute to this.

Eminem’s most common words are “cause”, “know”, “got”, “back”, “now”, “say”, etc. Again, this is the clean version of the word cloud, so it doesn’t show the fact that Eminem uses more profanity than Drake, including 1 expletive he uses as frequently as “cause”, and another expletive he uses as frequently as “know”.

To further pinpoint Drake’s unique traits, it would be helpful to compare him to someone who explores a similar variety of genres, and doesn’t have a strong negative emotion like Eminem.

Nicki Minaj delves into the genres that Drake does.

Nicki Minaj’s highest sentiment score is in negativity, but it’s only greater than positivity by about 10%.

Similar to Drake, “love”, “girl”, “got”, and “know” are among Nicki’s most common words. Again, the profanity isn’t present in the word cloud, but she uses 3 expletives as frequently as “now”, which shows she uses profanity more than Drake.

Looking back at our bar graph from earlier in our analysis, Nicki Minaj is the artist with the 5th most number of songs charted on the Billboard Hot 100, excluding Glee Cast. It seems popularity is correlated with an artist’s ability to fit their music into a variety of genres. Although Nicki (compared to Eminem) has a positive and negative sentiment score ratio that is closer to Drake, and shares some frequently used words like “love” and “girl”, it might be more helpful to observe a rapper that evokes more positivity like Post Malone.

It’s alright that Post Malone doesn’t share all of the genres with Drake because we are focusing on sentiment.

This graph provides the simplest analytical visualizations of the sentiment of all his songs. From the sign of the polarity score, we can categorize sentiment as positive, neutral or negative. The subjectivity can range from a value of 0.0 to 1.0, where 0.0 means very objective and 1.0 means very subjective. From the graph, we can see that the center of the spread is roughly around (0.0, 0.5), indicating that Post Malone songs are generally right in the middle of objective and subjective, and in the middle of negative and positive. But does Post Malone maintain this neutral tone throughout all his albums? We know his albums explore different themes, and therefore vary in their lyrics and vibe, but it would be interesting to observe the sentiment for each of Post Malone’s big projects, from Stoney to Beerbongs & Bentleys to Hollywood’s Bleeding.

Above is the sentiment analysis from Stoney Deluxe, and we can see it is somewhat subjective and neutral with some outliers.

Next, the sentiment analysis for Beerbongs & Bentleys is also somewhat subjective and neutral with some outliers.

Lastly, Hollywood’s Bleeding’s sentiment is also somewhat subjective and neutral with some outliers. This shows that within each album, all songs are somewhat subjective, but have some variation in polarity. Most don’t stray from being neutral in subjectivity and polarity, but perhaps, this variation in polarity/sentiment helps songs that revolve around the same topics and themes sound distinct by having different tones.

In the word cloud, we can see Post Malone’s most frequent words are “know”, “yeah”, “got”, and “want”. Aside from these words, the remaining words have an even distribution. In addition, he uses 3 expletives at about the same frequency as “want”. He does use repetitive phrases like “yeah yeah” and “ooh ooh”, but there aren’t as many indicators of intensity or urgency as Drake had. Earlier, we saw that Drake’s songs are positive-leaning and subjective (from his repeated phrases of “I need”, “I want”, and his branding like “OVO”), but Post Malone differs in that his songs are more neutral. This might show that listeners prefer songs that are extreme, or are closer to the ends of a scale rather than in the middle. In other words, it might be more entertaining to have a song that’s clearly joyful or angry rather than indifferent because the intensity of the emotion has a bigger impact on the audience.

Conclusion:

According to the Billboard Hot 100, Drake is the most popular artist in the long run. By comparing him to Eminem, who’s been in the rap game for at least 20 years and has yet to reach the mainstream popularity Drake has, we noticed that Drake benefits from branching out from rap and exploring more sounds in pop and R&B. When compared to Nicki Minaj, a female rapper who also ventures into the subgenres of pop, we learned that Drake’s strength is being able to keep an overall positive sentiment, which isn’t common for rappers. In fact, most rappers’ highest sentiment score is negativity because of the amount of profanity used. When compared to Post Malone, who is one of the few rappers that maintains a neutral sentiment rather than a negative one, we notice that there is an advantage when songs convey powerful emotion. Overall, there are many factors contributing to Drake’s popularity including his adaptability to a variety of genres, his overall positive sentiment as opposed to negative or neutral sentiment, his strong branding with his catchphrases and unique Toronto-identity amongst his mostly American peers, his features, and the abundant amount of songs he releases.

Sources:

Global Record Music Industry Revenues 2001–2020 (US$ Billions) https://gmr2021.ifpi.org/report

Drake (musician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_%28musician%29#Musical_style