Due to the growing interest in battle rap and the entire hip-hop industry in general, we present you with a detailed conceptual apparatus (rap dictionary) on Rap so that you can understand what MCs are talking about in their battles.
Autotune– A program for processing and correcting the voice, used to correct the singer's singing from notes. In rap, it has become a household name and identifies all voice correction programs.
underground(underground - underground, underground) - a number of artistic trends in contemporary art(in music, literature, cinema, fine arts etc.), which oppose themselves popular culture, mainstream.
Acapella- The text recorded on the microphone, separately from the minus.
Battle- Competition between rap artists is usually accompanied by humiliation of the opponent. A battle track is often nothing more than a diss on an opponent. Battles are divided into online battles (take place on the Internet) and live battles (everything takes place live).
Beat (Beat)- Drum-bass part minus. Previously, they read to a percussion part created by beat-boxing or tapping objects. Initially, this word was used as a beat in rap music. On the this moment Any music that is rapped to is called a beat.
beatbox- A beat created solely with the help of the mouth, without the use of musical instruments.
Beatmaker- A person who creates beats in specialized programs such as Cubase, FL Studio and others. good level Beat creation is the use of instruments recorded live and not the use of samples.
beef(Beef) - A feud between rap artists, hangouts or labels, accompanied by diss and frequent live showdowns.
bootleg(bootleg) - a pirated compilation of tracks, which the artist may never even know about.
Becky- An additionally recorded audio track, where the performer usually pronounces only the second part of the line or highlights rhymes and phrases.
Backing vocalist- A person who helps the performer on stage. As a rule, he pronounces the second part of the line, so that the performer has the opportunity to draw air at this time.
Versus() - One of the two most popular live battles in Russia. Based in St. Petersburg.
ghostwriter- A specialist who writes texts for money.
Double time- Reading twice as fast as the rhythm of the music. Outstanding representatives of this style are Ceza, Tech N9ne, FIKE, Dom1no and other artists.
double rhymes(Double-rhyme) - The end of the line has two words at once, on which the rhyme will be selected in the next line, also in two words. That is, if the first line ends with “brain and heart”, then it will be necessary to choose a consonance for the word “brain” and a separate consonance for the word “heart”. For example - “poster on the door” (brain - poster, heart - door).
Diss(diss, disrespect) - A track aimed at another artist or someone or something with the intent to "lower him". In such tracks, obscene speech is practiced, abuse towards the opponent and his relatives, threats, jokes below the belt, and so on. Dises are often used in beefs.
EP (EP)- A small album, usually up to 7 songs.
sound engineer- Specialist who mixes and masters tracks.
indabattle(Utkonos) - Battle taking place on the portal indarnb.ru. The second largest battle in Russia. It bears the slang name "Utkonos", because the father of the main organizer of the battle (Snake), is the owner of the Utkonos chain of stores.
instrumental- Synonym general meaning word bit
Cover(cover) - A new version track recorded (re-read) by another artist.
mouth guard- Slang name for the word "acapella".
square rhymes- Rhymes in the text are added at the end of the line, and rhyming words have the same endings. An example of "hand-flour", "mountain-time". It is believed that this is the easiest way to rhyme.
Concert Director– A specialist responsible for organizing the performer's concerts.
crunk(Crunk) is a style of southern rap music, with repetitive phrases and fast dance rhythms.
Live(live) - Audio or video recording from the performer's concert. As a rule, the mark live is put in the title of the track, so that it would be clear that this is not a studio version, but a recording from a concert.
label(label) - 1) Abroad, a label is a record company that has the rights to release and distribute artists' albums. 2) In Russia, a rap group is called a label. Often this group is primarily united by the studio.
Mike– Microphone
Mastering- the final stage of work on the song, which is designed to make a well-mixed mix louder, brighter, clearer, more transparent and put it on the same level with popular commercial tracks in terms of volume. Also at this stage, you can correct minor errors made during mixing.
Mix(mix) - several musical works(tracks) arranged in a continuous sequence. As a rule, mixes are compiled by DJs for various purposes (for example, for inclusion on the radio in thematic programs). Usually mixes consist of tracks that are similar in genre, mood and other features. On average, the duration of the mix ranges from 25 to 74 minutes.
Mixtape(Mixtape) - 1) In foreign rap, this word means a release made from remixes or mixed tracks. 2) In Russian rap, a mixtape is a collection of tracks recorded on backing tracks, illegally taken from other people's tracks. As a rule, mixtapes in Russia violate the copyrights of performers. A mixtape is also called a collection of tracks recorded for minus, laid out by beatmakers for general use.
Minus- A synonym for the general meaning of the word bit.
Independent battle- A battle taking place on the site hip-hop.ru, which is organized not by the forum administration, but by the forum members themselves.
Noname(Noname) - Not popular enough or unknown artist who does not have a "name". A relatively objective indicator in this aspect can be the number of audio in vk and the number of concerts, as well as the number of visitors who came to the concert.
HP(New Rap) - The largest news rap public vk.
Newschool – New style hip hop, hallmarks which are the use of fast flow, dashes and various plugins and effects, such as melodyne and autotune.
Old school(Oldschool) – An early style of hip-hop, also referred to as old school. Prominent representatives of this style are 2Pac, Wu-TangClan and Onyx. Often this is a measured flow without the use of many effects and fast flows.
Official battle - Battle, held on the site hip-hop.ru, organized by the administration of the forum. The biggest battle in Russia.
Punch, punchline(Punch) - This is a concise phrase / line designed to hook an opponent. It can be both a vivid metaphor and a joke below the belt. “The presence of an opponent is optional. It's like a punch line to a joke. Just a catchy phrase or line"
Parts– The written part of one artist per joint track.
Jumps, acceleration- The fundamental part of fast flow. Increase the speed of reading text.
PR– Distribution of the artist's creativity or any information and offer of services.
Innings- Emotions embedded in the reading, placed intonations, the way of pronouncing words, the use of vocals, dashes, accelerations and other specific rap techniques.
Producer– A specialist who is fully engaged in the promotion of the performer, dealing with all legal and financial matters. Often, the name of the performer (nickname) is registered by the producers to themselves, and when the performer changes the producer, he is forced to change the nickname as well, since all rights to the old nickname will belong to the old producer. For this reason, Loc-Dog was forced to change his nickname to Loc Dog.
promo(promo) - release to get acquainted with the work of a particular artist.
Release- Premiere of an album, track, video or collection
Remix(Remix) - A new arrangement of an already released track.
rapcore- a subgenre of rock music, characterized by the use of rap as vocals. Rapcore combines the instrumental and vocal properties of styles such as punk, alternative rock, and hip-hop.
Mixing- the stage of work on the song, during which the combination of recorded audio tracks(instruments, main vocals, takes, etc.) into one sound file using various devices and techniques such as equalization, compression, volume manipulation, placement in space, adding sound effects. Note: vocal correction, synchronization of duplicates and backings - this is not a mixing process, this is a previous one
Note the installation phase.
swag(swag) - An expression of coolness and personality.
skils(Skills) - Submission and different kinds building rhymes.
SlovoSpb() - One of the two most popular live battles in Russia. Based in Krasnodar.
Compound rhymes- The end of the line in the next line rhymes with several words at once. Example: "Apocalypse - In the meantime, get well"
Storytelling- a track that tells a story, while sequentially describing the events, actions and deeds of real or fictional characters.
Sample– A relatively small fragment of a melody (music), taken as the basis for creating a minus. Beats are applied to the samples.
take- recorded fragment, attempt. Usage example: I recorded it all in one take, i.e. with one try.
Track(Track) - A synonym for the word "song" in rap.
Triplets is the musical scale. In rap, it is now customary to call a reading with broken chips, like a tanguist, accelerations, etc.
True(True) - A performer who reads the truth, that is, what he really thinks, does and what happened in his life.
Platypus- Slang name for Indabattla.
fast flow(FastFlow) - A serving style based on dashes and accelerations.
Fit(ft. or feat) - Means that this is a joint track of two or more artists
Flava(flave) - Hangout, company, group or label.
flow(Flow) - Speed of execution.
Freestyle(Freestyle) - Improvisation in rap. Reading the text composed by the performer on the go.
fake(Fake) - Performers whose lyrics are based on lies. Their characteristic feature is not the ability to "responsible for the words."
Hype- enthusiastic rumors, often deliberately inflated for marketing purposes.
hasl- Any kind of income related to rap or breaking the law (selling drugs, etc.)
hater- A listener who condemns any creativity and has an acute dislike for it.
Homey(Homie) - A friend or loved one.
H.x.ru(persimmon) - One of the most popular forums dedicated to hip-hop culture, hip-hop.ru.
If anyone needs full text- welcome to the site. I don’t give a link, they’ll wipe it, but with main addition The site is easy to find if you dig through the fonts.
So, specially for the site, arrays of texts were analyzed famous figures culture, where there should have been exactly 25,000 words. The number of unique words was counted by a special program.
Interesting conclusion #1
Other interesting findings (subjective opinion)
the most miserable vocabulary in songs Dima Malikov(well, this is not a complaint against Malikov, many people write to him there - Shaganov, etc.). And the most extensive - the writer Vladimir Sorokin.
At Rosenbaum and Lermontov approximately the same indicators, both are almost in the middle of the ranking.
In prose, Sorokin leads the way, Lermontov is an outsider. But the rating itself starts from 4000+ thousand (this is a lot). Akunin scored a little more than Gogol. Dovlatov and Chekhov are almost equal. Pelevin is second only to Sorokin. Lev Nikolaevich teaching us from the picture - towards the end))
AT poetry the leader of Our All is Pushkin (predictably, right?), the outsider is Mayakovsky. The lower bar is about 2000, but Vladimir Vladimirovich is slightly lower than it. In general, there are not enough participants. Here Lermontov went around many, not like in prose. However, he is in third place, much behind second place - and this is V.S. Vysotsky.
Rap presented quite broadly. The outsider is Dolphin (but still starts from position 2475), the leader is a certain Noggano (6584). Timati is third from the end.
Pop music naturally starts with an indicator of less than 1000 - Malikov and Na-na, Rosenbaum is in the lead (what is he doing here? I didn’t know where to determine, I think). And in second place - we do not fall - Mikhail Krug (!!! 3741, I think the vocabulary there is specific). Mumiy-Troll with a little more than 3000 - third place. Zemfira looks like an average peasant - a little less than 2000.
Finally, rock musicians. They are also scarce. Outsider - Viktor Tsoi (1861), leader - Andrei Makarevich (5874, here I was surprised). Right behind him are Yegor Letov and Grebenshchikov (I wasn't surprised by these two). In the middle is Sasha Vasiliev (almost 4000, I thought more). For some reason, the auction did not even get 2500, I thought it would be more.
That's about it. It is clear that the vocabulary of the writer and artistic value works are not the same. But it was still interesting for me to look at the calculations.
Inspired by the idea of the biggest vocabulary in hip-hop, research engineer Varun Jewalikar wanted to make a similar analysis but more wide range artists of different genres. I went through the list of the best-selling musicians, and decided to dig deeper. It turned out that Eminem has the largest variety of words in his lyrics.
The list is quite large (99 musicians and 25 genres), and in order to make the analysis interesting and small enough, I decided not to tell how it was carried out. After collecting data from the Musicmatch website, I came up with the following analysis.
Here are the 93 musicians from the same list, sorted by genre. (93 because Bruce Springsteen, Chicago, Def Leppard, Journey, The Beach Boys and The Doors from the main list 99
artists did not give permission to Musixmatch to use the lyrics of their songs. Therefore, they cannot be included in the analysis).
The goal is to compare the size of musicians' vocabulary. Some of them have released a lot more songs than others because of longer careers on stage or because of their musical
directions.
To ensure that the analysis is not incorrect due to different quantity songs, I only included the 100 most word dense songs by each artist. Only 6 of all musicians have less than 100 songs, so that's a pretty good limit. Also 100 songs include 8-10 albums, which cover from 5 to 10 years of work. This gives a true representation of the general vocabulary of musicians.
Here are a few values we'll get to know:
Vocabulary: The number of unique words (in any language) used by a musician in 100 (or fewer) songs with the most large quantity words for my career.
Text content: The total number of words (in any language) used by the musician in the 100 (or fewer) songs with the most words in their career.
New word interval (NWI): On average, the number of words after which a new word is used by the musician. This is the coefficient (Text content / Vocabulary). NWI of n means that each n-word is a new word in the artist's lyrics that he/she has never used before in their songs.
There are only 4 rappers on the list and they are all at the top of the top in terms of vocabulary size. Among them, Eminem followed by Jay-z, 2Pac, Kanye West and The Black Eyed Peas by a wide margin. Eminem also has the most
a large ratio of the number of words in the song 1018.5.
With how clear and descriptive his songs are, it's no surprise that Bob Dylan is ranked so high. He is also quite high on New Word Interval (#11), averaging a new word after every 9 words.
These superstars released songs on the set popular languages. Their vocabularies were summed up, which led to a fairly high value in the overall top. I did not expect this result when I started the analysis.
I didn't expect a pop sensation like her to rank so high as they rely on simplicity in their songs. She is also the only one to make it into the top 15 artists in terms of vocabulary size and also in terms of total certified albums sold.
And who said that songs cannot be sold without lyrics.
The average vocabulary size among all musicians is 2677 words. About 40 musicians have a vocabulary of 400 words on average. Achieve the vocabulary in your lyrics of this range and you will become one of the best-selling artists.
The three best-selling artists of all time rank fairly low in terms of vocabulary size. Not surprisingly, the simplicity of their songs breaks down geographical, age and language barriers and they are revered all over the world. On the contrary, Mariah Carey is quite high in both charts (9th in sales and 20th in vocabulary size).
The following table shows the average vocabulary of artists across genres. The number of artists who represent this genre is given in brackets. Since our list contains only 93 musicians, this is not the best generalization.
You can see some patterns. Hip-hop is head and shoulders above all other genres. Faulk is in second place, but since there is only one representative on the list (Bob Dylan), this is not an indicator at all. Pop genre with the largest number musicians and his average vocabulary (2464 words) is close to the average vocabulary of all artists (2677 words). The same applies to the Rock genre.
There is a large variation in vocabulary sizes within the top 93 best-selling artists, and in fact, there is no relationship between an artist's commercial success and their vocabulary size.
It should not be understood that this analysis says that one performer is better than another, this is just another look at the work of these wonderful artists. We're just getting a glimpse into the minds of various songwriters, some can break your heart with a couple of lines, while others paint complex intricate images with a thousand words. A torn-out quote from a John Lennon song explains the whole dilemma quite well: "Half of what I say doesn't make sense, but I say it to reach your minds."
All lyrics data and other data (pictures, albums, tracklists) are taken from Musixmatch API. Python was used for data processing and lyrics analysis. The analysis can be improved by removing all sounds like (oh, aah, etc.) and other words that are not in the dictionary. Data and codes can be published if anyone is interested in it.
The largest vocabulary in hip-hop compares the vocabulary of various musicians to the first 35,000 words they wrote. Instead of comparing word counts, we took the 100 songs with the most words. Just out of curiosity (well, for the sake of completeness) we used the same method to calculate the first 10,000 words written by each artist. The results of the two studies are not very different, the top five musicians have not changed. The top ten is the same, with a slight change. Andrea Bocelli moved from #8 to #6, while the Black Eyed Peas moved from #6 to #7 and Julio Iglesias from #7 to #8. There are no noticeable changes overall. So we used 100 songs as a limit because it's more musical.
The Yandex.Music service has drawn a map of the most popular words in Russian rap. View it and read the study of the service.
How was it done?"For each word, we calculated how often it occurs in the texts of rappers and all other performers (only texts available on Yandex.Music were taken - approx. The Flow). In order not to overestimate the frequency of words that are repeated a lot in one song (for example, in the chorus), the word was taken into account only once for each track. The first frequency was divided into the second - the higher the resulting indicator, the more characteristic the word was considered for rap. Only verbs, nouns and adjectives that occur in both corpora were taken into account.
Which are the most popular e words from rappers?"The most characteristic words for rap and hip-hop turned out to be, in fact, rap and hip-hop. Rappers generally talk a lot about their music and the production process. The words track, microphone, beat, rhyme or for example album are as characteristic of the genre as obscene vocabulary or jargon - wheelbarrow, hut And so on. The least characteristic of rap words moon, spring, bird, rain, river, wing, silence, heart and so on". How have popular words changed from the early 90s to the present day?
In addition, the service can show the most popular words in the work of an individual artist - for this you need to substitute his name in the appropriate column.
Which is what we did.
