What do People Sing?
Linguistic Findings and Interpretations in R&B,Metal and Rap music Lyrics
Music is a universal language that transcends cultural barriers and speaks to the human experience in myriad ways. While the melodies and rhythms may vary across genres, the lyrics remain a core component that artists leverage to convey their messages, emotions, and perspectives. This post delves into the nuanced world of lyrical content, exploring how different genres like metal, R&B, and rap favor certain words and themes over others.
Through a meticulous analysis of a diverse selection of songs, we’ll uncover the linguistic patterns that define each genre’s lyrical landscape. Metal, with its raw intensity and rebellious spirit, may lean towards words that evoke power, aggression, and societal commentary. R&B, known for its soulful melodies and emotive storytelling, could embrace vocabulary that touches on matters of the heart, relationships, and personal growth. Rap, a genre rooted in urban culture and self-expression, may gravitate towards words that reflect struggle, resilience, and the gritty realities of life.
By dissecting the lyrical choices made by artists across these vastly different genres, we aim to gain a deeper appreciation for the artistry and intentionality behind their wordsmithing. This exploration promises to shed light on the unique perspectives and experiences that shape the musical narratives we connect with on a profound level.
A word cloud is a visual representation of text data, where the size of each word reflects its frequency or importance in the source content. Commonly used to highlight key themes in articles, speeches, or surveys, word clouds make it easy to spot dominant terms at a glance. They're often used in design, education, and data analysis for quick visual summaries.
Here I choose 100 random pieces in metal, R&B and Rap musics separately with lyrics as lexical sources, and use statistical tool to generate a word cloud for each genre of music. This helps to see what key words are most commonly used in each music genre, and helps to see what kind of emotions and ideas a specific music genre trying to convey.
Themes & Emotions:
Metal lyrics often express intense inner emotions—ranging from passion and heartbreak to rage and existential reflection. There's a strong sense of duality, seen in words like day vs. night and heaven vs. hell.
Key Vocabulary:
Prominent terms include “burning,” “time,” “heart,” “tell,” “breaking,” “know,” “night,” and “eyes”, suggesting emotional volatility and dramatic storytelling.
Narrative & Atmosphere:
With words like “queen,” “space,” “evil,” “ride,” and “law”, the lyrics evoke epic, cosmic, or even mythological scenarios, often involving conflict, power, and transformation.
Themes & Emotions:
R&B focuses on love, beauty, longing, and emotional intimacy. There’s often a spiritual or sensual tone, especially with words like halo suggesting protection and grace.
Key Vocabulary:
Frequently used words include “beautiful,” “love,” “feel,” “just,” “make,” and “wanna”, emphasizing emotional vulnerability and romantic expression.
Narrative & Atmosphere:
Words like “slow,” “beat,” and “smack” hint at the genre’s musical smoothness and rhythmic flow, often paired with narratives around relationships and desire.
Themes & Emotions:
Rap lyrics emphasize authenticity, loyalty, and survival in the face of adversity. There's a bold use of controversial language to assert identity, power, and critique societal norms.
Key Vocabulary:
Common words like “bitch,” “got,” “loyalty,” “nigga,” “wanna,” “feel,” “know,” and “baby” reflect themes of power dynamics, ethnical recognition, personal struggle, relationships, and self-expression.
Narrative & Atmosphere:
Slangs such as “lil,” “gon,” “bounce,” “mama,” and “OG” highlight rap’s cultural roots, rhythm, and storytelling style, often grounded in real-life experiences and street identity.
Emotional Expression: All three genres of music use lyrics to express strong emotions, whether it’s the passion and anger of Metal, the love and longing of R&B, or the realism and social commentary of Rap.
Personal and Social: All three genres explore personal experiences and social phenomena to some degree, reflecting broader themes through a personal lens.
Thematic Focus
Metal: deeper themes such as inner struggles, confrontation, and the supernatural.
R&B: love, emotional depth and relationships.
Rap: street culture, personal struggles and social challenges, also exploration of power and identity.
Language Style
Metal: abstract and symbolic, with wording that is sometimes darker and more philosophical.
R&B: tender and romantic, sometimes containing sexual innuendo, with subtle, rhythmic phrasing.
Rap: direct and raw, often including slang and street slang, with blunt and sometimes provocative wording.
From the result, we can see both metal and Rap lyrics favor cities in the US. Cities are used as symbols of power, money and memories.
Cities showed in the metal song lyrics are mostly on the East and West Coast of United States, while rap songs have more cities in the Central and Eastern United States.
Rap songs tends to use more geographical locations than metal songs. This might indicate that rap songs features more on explicit and concrete expressions.
This might indicate that R&B songs do not consider geographical locations as a major way to express emotions or relate to themes like “love” and “relationships”.