Corpus Description

My corpus was created in April of 2023 and features the top 5 songs from Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop songs every year from 2013 to 2022. There are a few repeats that I didn’t include, "Work" by Rihanna, "Go Crazy" by Chris Brown and Young Thug, and "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. I chose not to include repeats because I felt this would skew the information that I would get from running stylistic and topical analysis. This puts the number of the songs in my corpus at 47.

In order to create the actually files that I would be able to use in R, I copied and pasted the lyrics of each song from azlyrics.com and created .txt files on my computer. 

This information comes from the Billboard charts from https://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2013/hot-r-and-and-b-songs/ starting with 2013 all the way to 2022. I used this website to build my corpus because I believe that Billboard is a decent measure of popular music, as the popularity of songs is decided by how long they stay up on the chart. Unfortunately, the "End-of-the-Year" chart began in 2013 so that limited my corpus to just an 11-year span. Additionally, this is only one measure of popular music, and Billboard has their own methods of keeping track of top songs, which I think is important to keep in mind. However, I believe this is an opportunity for a commentary on whether modern RnB has become repetitive. 

Additionally, I only used the top 5 songs from each year within this span because I felt that more than that would make the dendrogram difficult to read (as it did with prior tests) and I believe that using the top 5 of each year would be enough to make certain judgments about the genre of RnB. My code stripped the text of many popular English words such as “you, whatever, someone, about” and also subsetted the corpus to only use adjectives and adverbs. 

Feel free to take a look at the files and do your own skeptical analysis! Future DCS 2500 classes are free to use these files :)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1u3D5lJ15fRPu-1rZRQKUdjVgU-YdnLUD?usp=share_link

Also, here is a link to the Jupyter Notebook that I used to create all the code for the visualization in R: https://jupyter.bowdoin.edu/hub/user-redirect/lab/tree/home/nsibiryakov/RnBMusicFinalProject

Below is a screengrab of all the songs listed in my corpus.