How Rap Music Compares to Shakespeare

Mainstream and contemporary music is often bashed for being too shallow, idiotic, overly sexualized, filled with (to put it polite words) very promiscuous women and drugs, and written with a 10 year old's vocabulary - especially rap and hip-hop genres. If you have any interest in rap/chart-topping music, for example, you probably know Nicki Minaj's song "U a stupid h**", whose chorus consists of that one sentence. YouTube comments of new music videos are often filled with "i wish i wasn't born in 90s/this generation's music sucks" (you can see a myriad of these reddit.com/r/lewronggeneration if you're inclined to look).

A researcher has created a website comparing famous rappers and hip-hop artists' vocabulary to Shakespeare, considered the pinnacle of English literature by many people, which you can see here: http://poly-graph.co/vocabulary.html Some rappers, including Kendrick Lamar (who is known to be very verbose) are not on the list as they do not have enough songs.

Shakespeare has used roughly 29,000 words in his work (his estimated vocabulary is around 100,000 words) and has 5,170 unique words in an assortment of his 7 works: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, and Troilus and Cressida. The research takes the first 35,000 words of song lyrics from each artist and compares their uniqueness. Each word is counted once and there is a Shakespeare "good vocabulary" benchmark (5,170) which quite a few artists have passed - Aesop Rock beats Shakespeare's vocabulary by more than 2,000 words (which is so above any other artist that the chart actually needs re-adjustment), whereas Wu-Tang Clan have him beat by nearly 1,000. RZA, GZA and Ghostface Killah are all members of Wu-Tang Clan and in the top 5 (very well above Shakespeare) for their solo albums, so I'm not sure if they should count in the first place. OutKast, Busta Rhymes, and Xzibit (some people may remember him from his Internet famous car show on MTV, "Pimp My Ride") are nearly equal to Shakespeare. Shakespeare beats Eminem and Jay-Z by about 1,000 words. Nicki Minaj is three hundred words below Eminem. Some of the most famous names of the genre, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne and 2pac are nearly 2,000 words below Shakespeare (Minaj has all of them beat in terms of vocabulary, interestingly enough, scoring just short of 4,200 words). Drake, who seems to be really popular recently, is in the last 3.

Of course, the number of words they used do not equal to their actual poetic talent. But it is also important to mention that a lot of these hip-hop artists have contributed to everyday vocabulary and slang terms - much like Shakespeare, actually. Artists also make up their own words if needed - much like Shakespeare. "U a stupid h**" will perhaps be as thoroughly analyzed as Macbeth in a couple of centuries. Another interesting bit about hip-hop slang is that it is being monitored by ProjectKnow, a US-based substance abuse and treatment research center, which uses it to follow drug trends.