This is my friend Tahir Hemphill’s project.  He is now a resident at Eyebeam in NYC developing the project further.  Here’s the description of the project:

The Hip-Hop Word Count (HHWC) is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day. The database is the heart of an online analysis tool that generates textual and quantified reports on searched phrases, syntax, memes and socio-political ideas.

The database is now being built and visualizations of the data are beginning to emerge, the first ones shown last week at Eyebeam Open Studios.  It’s an exciting prospect to imagine what will crystallize from so many songs and artists creating within hip-hop.  Below are some early releases from the project:

A gallery of results from a “rubric that estimates the education level needed to understand each rhyme as well as, rates the artistic sophistication employed through the metaphors, similes, cultural references, consonantal/vocalic alliteration and overall pattern of each rhyme.”:

From Jay Z’s body of work:

Here is the link to the first Rap Data Pack™ we have released. It includes the raw data from Hov’s complete body of work: word count, readability, release dates, Geo Codes, etc..

Keep checking in at Tahir’s Staple Crops site to stay abreast as the project develops.

Author’s Note: This is a republished historical post after the Feb2008 relaunch of Soulincode:

The Revolutionary Voices panel held February 26, 2005 @ NYU:

The panel included:

Chuck D, Hank Shocklee, Daddy O, Fab Five Freddy, Vernon Reid and Will Calhoun (Living Colour), two S1W body guards

Some rough notes (these are not direct quotes):

Play your lane.
-Daddy O

He was outlining that the key to making our way in life is to make sure you are focused on doing what you are naturally here to do. Surround yourself with people who will call on you when you’re swaying out of that lane. This is not to say you do the same thing for your whole life, only that in any given moment of time, there is a natural lane in which to travel, both for the individual and groups that individual works within.

How do you sell your soul to a soul-less nation? Give it away.
-Chuck D

When everything is commodified before it can mature, where the soul is sucked out in consumption economy, how can you sell without selling out?

Smart people figure out how to survive in everyday society, they become silent…but you have to reveal everything that comes your way.
-Chuck D

Survival and profit instincts of an intelligent but less activist human being will suggest silence in the face of wrongful actions. Bystander apathy. Speak out, cuz the next one taken away might be you.

Once we move beyond thinking of ourselves first, a higher plane of consciousness is possible.
-Hank Shocklee

This quote may seem self-evident, but a few notes…first, a major percentage of humans never truly come face to face and attempt to address this idea in true sense of action and thought. Second, how many hip-hop artists speak or create songs in these terms today?

The real estate of the millenium is minds. The real estate is in you.
-Chuck D

Protect your dome.
-S1W bodyguard

Commenting that back in the 80s, it was about forming your own dome around you in terms of your friends and society, to fight against encroaching powers taking over culture. Now those forces are moving into the last frontier, your own mind. One has to learn how to protect the dome of our mind and senses from the onslaught.