Born in New York City in the 1970s, hip hop music has spread across the United States and around the world. Along the way as the music spread and evolved, regional subgenres emerged, most prominently in the East Coast, West Coast, Midwestern, and Southern regions of the United States. The question is, other than being by an artist from a city that falls into one of the regions, what makes an East Coast track East Coast vs what makes a West Coast track West Coast. More specifically, what are the common words used in rap music across the different regions, and what are their similarites and differences?
Using data from Wikipedia and Rap Genius over 2500 songs were analyzed to determine the most common words for each region, as well as to find words that commonly appear together. You can hover over the areas of the map to get details of each region, as well as scroll down for more results.
Shout out to my homies who helped along the way Jane M, DJ Debrief, DJ J-Rock and Highspeed
The bar charts represent how common the word is in a given region. The higher the bar, the more common the word. Click a bar chart to view words that frequently appear with the selected word, as well as use the checkboxes to filter out specific regions. Finally, scroll down to view the rankings of each word, for each region. Here you can hover over the words to see it across all regions.