Introduction

Content Warning: Contains Swear Words

Much like video games, the language in rap is always under constant media scrutiny. With people often blaming rap artists for influencing young people to take drugs and swearing. In this we are going to actually look at the use of profanity in rap to analyse the truth of the situation. There is much structure in how swearing in rap has been used in time and this article will have some surprising information about swearing in Rap. Also in the area of language I wanted to look at how some rappers have a varied vocabulary length with it being extremely surprising how large some rap artists vocabularies can actually be we will therefore use some data from the pudding to explore trends around how language is being used and how large different rappers vocabularies actually are.

Song Titles

To Start with there doesn’t appear to be a large number of swear words in rap with titles but almost none in singles. This is primarily due to the fact that a lot of promotion for rap has traditionally happened on radio stations. While after the watershed dj’s can play explicit music, they can’t actually say the names of the explicit songs. This combined with the popularity of rush-hour music often leads to so-called “clean” versions of songs or just clean singles. These practical considerations are what probably lead to the lack of swear words in the titles of songs.

Average Swear Words Per Song

Swear Words skyrocket in the early 1990’s. This can be seen to be congruent to rap becoming a mainstream genre. This also happens during the rise of gangsta rap with groups like N.W.A literally having swear words in their name and their songs like “f_ck the police” released in the late 80’s showing that you could be very popular with extremely controversial. Furthermore, with songs like M.C. Hammers “U Can’t Touch This” coming out in the summer of 1990, rap changed from it’s more underground roots to one in which partying and foul language could lead to immense financial and musical success.

Commonility of Swear Words

The Words that can be counted as swear words in my dataset could be viewed as being both strong and weak swear words which may initially be why some people may have the view that there are such high volumes of swear words. However, 5 Words dominate the swear words used in hip-hop (the N-word, F-word, Sh_t and B_tch and A_s), where by far the most common of the 7 swear words with the N and F words alone being more than half of the swear words being used. Hip-hop has primarily been an art form that has been dominated by the african american community and this may explain the use of the N-word which has often not seen as swear word when used in reclamation. On the other hand with Sh_t is seen by some in the black community as not even being seen as a swear word. This is also a perfect display of the statistical idea known as benford’s law where there is exponentially decreasing commonness of the swear words.

Final Model

This Section Looks at the final model for predicting the number of times used. From the data we are able to glean that the number of times a Given Swear word Is dependent on Year, If there is swearing in the title and if the song charted. This model predicts 80% of the variance in the model. This is shocking as these are very few factors and so that time is extremely important in predicting the amount of swear words people do. It is also interesting how much there being swearing in the title affects the ability to predict as this is not obvious in the individual graphs we produced. It is also interesting because the individual parts have strong statistical significance.

Mysognistic Languange Use

Another interesting area to look at was the use of Misogynistic language use in swear words. There have been a large assumption that there is a large number of swear words used in rap music. The words we listed as misogynistic where (B_tch, H_e, A_s, P_ssy, T_ts), all of these terms have something to do with demeaning women. One nice thing that we learn from these graphs is that the vast majority of years, most swear words are non misogynistic and those where this is not true, swear words are not misogynistic. This suggests that Rap may not be as misogynistic as popular media would have you believe.

Vocabulary Size

These graphs show a very interesting thing about language use. The Dataset Contained 149 Common Rappers and there seems to be a strong link between being a rapper with a very large Vocabulary and being a member of the Wu Tang Clan. On the other hand, the single solely christian Rapper in the Dataset, NF is the individual with the smallest value. NF, Strongly believes in not using Swear Words so it is interesting that most morale rappers may have the smallest Vocabulary.

There also shows that there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between, Vocabulary size and Era, showing that as swearing increased and decreased, the Vocabulary size didn’t change. It’s also notable to show that almost all the rappers at the beginning are from the east coast and the rappers with the smallest vocabularies started to come out in the 2000’s suggesting that the language may be dumbed down in rap.

Conclusions

Like many other things the language used in rap music can not be simplified in a single sentence. There is deep richness used in much rap music and sometimes the very people who use the most swear words are often the same people who used Shakespearean level vocabulary. There is still much profanity used in rap but the words used are not necessarily the ones with the most valence but there can definitely be more investigation into the conclusions of this paper.

I believe that the final grade I deserve for this piece of work should be excellent as I have used outside data from 2 different data sources. I think I communicated well to a subject area audience.

Data Sources: Sarah Bartlett and The Pudding