For my final project, I am interested in looking at lyrics in today's rap/hip-hop music. I want to do a comparison of female and male artists and what each commonly raps about. I believe I will get my music selection from iTunes top tracks, or maybe from the top 100 of the week or something similar. I want to pick several words and look to see how often each are used. I will analyze the overall song themes with the title itself and the lyrics. I want to see how women and men portray the opposite sex - do women rap about men having lots of money and do men rap about women having big booties? Or is there more to just those characteristics? I suppose I'm also looking at the misogyny in rap music. I think it will be important to look at a brief history of this music as well as short biographies of these artists in order to fully understand the song's context. I will have to see if any similar research has been done on this topic, which it probably has.
This topic interests me because the rap/hip-hop community have a big influence on its listeners. Women rappers especially seem to be gaining popularity. I want to see if there are underlying themes in most of the songs that are more....positive?....than sex, drugs, and money.
I don't know if you would call Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke hip hop, but there are definitely some themes you are looking for in that one. Are you going to narrow this down to a particular year(s) or just really recent stuff or particular artists? Otherwise, you are going to have a lot of songs to go through, and that will take awhile and will probably be hard to narrow down for our presentations. All in all, this is super interesting, and I can't wait to hear your presentation.
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