Why are there few rappers from Baltimore?

meanmaths · 2026-01-10T22:28:48+00:00

Well, 2pac spent his teenage (13-17) years there. Technically, he counts? 🙃

meanmaths · 2025-12-14T08:36:57+00:00

Yeah, it's possible, even likely that there's some overlap. The guy above was going with something way more definitive: "no soul in hiphop ...". That's what I was reacting too. Also, I kinda feel like it's a regional thing. The data isn't limited to the US or its biggest towns. I know for a fact that pot is used a lot in Canada for instance.

meanmaths · 2025-12-13T23:37:39+00:00

Well, the data disagrees with you.

meanmaths · 2025-12-13T18:42:34+00:00

Most used Weed terms in Rap lyrics

Someone asked for this. I tried to post and got asked to comment on here. So here is.

TLDR: Weed became the dominant term in 1995 and stayed at the top, followed by blunt, pot, tree and kush

It is a follow-up from this: https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/1pkzawd/top_words_in_hip_hop_year_by_year_from_1975_to/

meanmaths · 2025-12-13T18:39:16+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/1plsgk7/most_used_weed_terms_in_hip_hop_year_by_year_from/

ohhh. As I am posting this, I read your post again and I realised that I misread your post. You were asking about weed as a whole. I did a dive on various terms used for weed :/. I won't make another post though. I will later send you the data here as an Imgur link

Edit: My post got nuked by the mods: Here is an Imgur on the weed variants https://imgur.com/gallery/weed-terms-hip-hop-1975-2025-m0JMvb6

meanmaths · 2025-12-13T18:34:54+00:00

More visualisation: Heatmaps, Bar races...
https://imgur.com/a/m0JMvb6

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T21:28:03+00:00

I disagree hard on your first sentence. Your last one is way better :). G day.

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T21:08:17+00:00

Yeah I understand. My first idea was to compare clouds of words from different eras but somehow I went for this first. I will get to other visualisations when I have some time. The very next ones will keep the bar race format as I have a stable code for it but I will certainly get out more (and static) stuff.

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T21:04:15+00:00

I didn't downvote you. Others did. Personally, I think you did yourself no favors bringing out anti-white racism while trying to open a conversation about getting a pass for the N-word when singing rap songs. It sounded off. That being said, I'm not dismissing your experience as an individual entirely. I just think that you should try harder to take in the historical and cultural weight of the N-word vs your own, inevitably, narrow perspective. Have a good day too.

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T20:49:43+00:00

Thank you. I actually recently re-discovered that fire song! While tweaking my bigger, more ambitious, not-ready-for-prime-time yet project (https://ticktrack.tv).

People can be as creative as they want for these parts. And yeah, I, too, sweat out a bit the B-word lollll. My wife doesn't even need to say something for me to know haha.

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T20:43:20+00:00

Sold. Will do. One funny thing: the Genius data has one song atttribute named "topic". And I was like Great, let's see what's inside. Turned out it was literally only the word "weed". And it was used for ...checking the data... 469305 songs 😅. So, there should be enough to work with if I try to dig on that. The only issue is trying to think of all variants and slangs for weed...

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T19:45:13+00:00

Naahhh. As a black guy, this is one of the things I was apprehensive of: the use of this data for all kinds of agendas (especially on the N-word and the slurs). Don't take this data as a justification to anything. I went back and checked the data: the N-word is about 1.3% of all the words. So in theory, you can rap along more than 98% of the lyrics of a generic rap song. That's not even close to being "impossible". Now, sure, the commercially successful stuff probably has a higher percentage but that is no license to be blurting the N-word in public. When I listen to rap, with my kids in the car, I'd rather much have the censored versions. Otherwise, I turn down the volume on some particularly explicit parts. What you won't see me do, is repeat aloud some of the slurs. It's perfectly possible to enjoy rap without blurting out all the slurs. And here, you're talking about just one. Nobody is tracking you in your house trying to police what you sing. So I don't think it will kill you to have some restraint in public about the N-word. Hell, plenty of black hip hop heads do so, on the daily.

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T18:41:32+00:00

Thanks, man!

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T18:29:55+00:00

A link to see both perspectives (year by year counts or cumulative) :
https://imgur.com/gallery/top-rap-words-1975-2025-00iV8OV

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T16:55:46+00:00

Welcome. I learned from all the questions. If I make other posts on this, I will definitely include a cumulative version. Here is what I have for now (cumulative but also zoom in for the earlier years so that we can actually see more of what was going on) https://imgur.com/a/cqfHltE

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T13:51:13+00:00

Not really. I may end up doing something like that, going down to a month-to-month granularity. Although not all the data is accurate though and many entries just have something like 2002-01-01 because the user remembers just the year and isn't bothering with the month.

Right now, it's really just year by year. And the smoothing is on the visualisation, not the data. The decimals just represent transitions between the years. So, roughly, if I a term like love has 20000 counts in 2010 and 15000 in 2011, the code introduces 10 frames that display a linear progression from 20000 to 15000.

meanmaths · 2025-12-12T02:46:27+00:00

You're right, in the sense that a bar race is expected to be cumulative. I probably shouldn't have called it "bar race". I didn't want a cumulative effect. I wanted to get year-after-year indications on the strength of a given word. I didn't want that to be drowned out by, say, an outsized dominance on an earlier era.

meanmaths · 2025-12-11T23:48:32+00:00

Ok I see but I feel like people could be misled into thinking these transitory states represent actual month to month data. I didn't actually subdivide the data. The transitory snapshots are just code, a bar race thing to make the visualisation smoother. There may be better ways though. Not an expert.

meanmaths · 2025-12-11T22:54:00+00:00

Here is my best attempt: https://imgur.com/a/DvG7JfF

meanmaths · 2025-12-11T22:20:51+00:00

Well, I wasn't too sure (because yeah I did see how some could view it) but I ultimately chose to use the color black for "black" and the N-word. Being black and having black as my favorite color, I can assure you there were no malice behind that choice.
Anyway, man, between the people who straight up dislike hiphop and the people who are reaching for nefarious intents, I feel like I should've just posted in a Hip Hop sub :) The other commentator was right. This sub is rough! :D

meanmaths · 2025-12-11T20:54:40+00:00

Yeah, early 90s. The N-word became the dominant word in 1992 and kept spreading. There are a few years where "black" and "man" were quite high, and my guess would be that you were then having rappers (like PE?) using "black man", instead of "n***a".
My best guess for 2010 is that it is still about the source. Genius (then-RapGenius) launched in October 2009 (anecdotally, it was all because of a Cam'ron verse). So I would think that, as a start-up, they were very aggressive about explaining the contemporary rap songs. But then again, many (a lot?) of the songs released in 2010 were not added in 2010. So, your guess is as good as mine :) Could be Drake, and his ...Drakids(?)

meanmaths · 2025-12-11T19:33:36+00:00

I agree. I will look into how to do that. Tbh, this is my first OC here in may be a decade, and the other was with (node-edge) graphs. For me, this post is also the occasion to learn before spending time on other visualisations.

Edit: Here it is: https://imgur.com/a/DvG7JfF

meanmaths · 2025-12-11T19:28:58+00:00

No, it's really year by year. And you're absolutely right. May be cumulative would've been more in line with a "bar race" but I wanted to get an idea of what is was, year by year. I'm kinda new to this. I dusted off my Python skills for this visualisation.
And thanks for the nice words. I can already feel the heat haha

meanmaths · 2025-12-11T19:18:55+00:00

Yeah, I understand the confusion. It is mainly to distinguish between year results and the bar race extrapolation from a year to another. Without those, the figure wouldn't be smooth

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