Kanye West, Lil Wayne And Drake Among Artists With “Largest Vocabulary In Hip Hop” Chart
"Spaceship"
Artist: Kanye West featuring Consequence and GLCProducers: Kanye West
Release Year: 2004
Song Sampled: "Distant Lover"
Sample Release Year: 1973
Sample Effect: The vocal kicks Kanye straight into his own hook, while the crooning provides the backbone for one of his most memorable early hooks.
Why The Song Is Dope: One of Kanye's very first iconic tracks lifts some of its most memorable lines—"Heaven knows" being chief among them—from Marvin's original, pushing them up a couple octaves to mask them and allowing Kanye to make them his own. There are so many quotable lines on this track that we probably ruined your entire day by including this one, didn't we? —DR
Fans love when rappers have an extensive vocabulary. Having verbose wordplay is what sculpts rappers into being profound lyricists. Scientist and New York resident, Matt Daniels, ran a study examining the most unique words used by rappers. Rappers like Kanye West, Drake, Lil' Wayne, Tupac, and Eminem were on the list. Surprisingly, according to his study, New York rapper, Aesop Rock ranked number one with the most unique words.
Daniels found that Rock had the highest number of unique words used within the first 35,000 lyrics. WU Tang Clan's group-mates including RZA, Method Man, Raekwon, GhostFace, and GZA were all in the top 25, with GZA coming in at number two. Kool Keith was three. OutKast was 14.
The top tier rappers including Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and Snoop Dogg didn't fair too well. They were ranked respectively at 67,71,72. Tupac finished a 68. DMX finished at 85.
“While Lil Wayne has never been celebrated for the complexity of his word choices, I expected 2pac, Snoop, and Kanye to be well above average,” he said. “It's also worth noting that Drake, one of the most popular artists of late, is #83 on this list.”
The chart didn't include newer artists like Kendrick Lamar because of a "lack of recent data". The chart used data current to 2012.