RapMETRICS. is a site that analyzes the lyrics of rap music. They focus on statistical analysis in hip-hop.
Fragments of the article:
Eminem in the mid 90’s was the prototype backpack rapper both in style and in stats, according to RapMETRICS. His debut album Infinite displayed both the good and the bad of where he was at the time. The good: He rhymed very efficiently and was just simple enough in his approach that he was an easy listen. The bad: The words he was using were still relatively long and he was making boring music. The Eminem of 1996 was at his best (and worst) on Infinite:
Ayo, my pen and paper cause a chain reaction
To get your brain relaxin, a zany actin maniac in action
A brainiac in fact son, you mainly lack attraction
You look insanely wack when just a fraction of my tracks run
His rhyme density on the opening bars of Infinite here is 0.83 (The average rapper being 0.25-0.3 and anything over 0.4 being considered exceptional). Now, he doesn’t maintain this kind of rhyming efficiency on the album of course. He averages 0.40 rhyme density over the album mostly because of the amount of multi-syllabic rhymes he uses: 58% of rhymes being longer than 1-syllable in length WHICH IS AMAZING (average of 38% for other rappers).
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The Slim Shady LP was vastly different in style and structure and that can be attributed to Dre’s ability to control Eminem and build him into a marketable, interesting artist.
The most important thing that happened on this album lyrically was that Eminem stopped focusing on rhyming so much, he stopped using so many goddamn big words and stopped rapping to rap. The first two points are simple to prove:
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Rhyme Density™ = (Total number of syllables that are a part of a rhyme) ÷ (Total syllables)
So in a song with a rhyme density of .30, 30% of the syllables are part of rhymes, and 70% are not.
At one point the author made a mistake, he says Eminem's NWP (Average percentage of words in the second line in a pair not appearing in the first) of 0.88 is low, while it's high. The 0.88 means that 88% of words that appear in consecutive lines are unique.
Read it, it's a good read. Check the comments too.
http://rapmetrics.wordpress.com/2010/09 ... re-xavier/
