Hip Hop InfoGraphic

Since Hip Hop’s first appearance in the music industry, the music was about the quality of the rhymes and how the verses in songs were formed. In recent years the verse to chorus ratio has tipped in the favor of chorus, making Hip Hop music repetitive and poor in lyrical content. The intention is to present this theory into an aesthetic visual. The research consisted of analysing Hip Hop’s most popular music from 1980 to 2011. The popular tracks which were released each year were then broken up into Verse, Chorus, Bridge and Solo Beat. This study shows the changing patterns of hip hop in the 21st century. The tracks seem to have a growing percentage of chorus and beat solo time each year. The beats also have a higher tempo that transforms the music, turning the genre of Hip Hop into Dance Music. The graph visually shows the evolution on how music has decreased the length of the verse and increased the length of solo beat and chorus. With the purple color representing chorus length and green representing verse length, a pattern shows how hip hop’s lyrical structure has changed. This change has occurred because of different global events that have molded everyday Western culture. Hip Hop music during its early stages talked about the racism towards ethnic groups, poverty and drug dealing. These are situations that still exist but have socially improved to the present day. As Hip Hop’s foundation was based on aggressive and problematic subject matter the lack of these problems causes the songs to lose content and discussion, which then shortens the verses replacing it with longer choruses. Another source for the shortening of verses is also evident with new artists rapping onto dance music beats. This combination of dance music with lyrics creates bridges within the songs that consist of having the beat playing without any rapping, therefore shortening the verse. The study also shows that the use of a longer chorus allows the listener lyrical simplicity. As it is sometimes hard to understand what the Hip Hop artist is saying when performing the verses, a catchy chorus