Music

Kanye West deemed to have a bigger vocabulary than Bob Dylan

by Jeremy Mersereau

It’s Thursday, and you know what that means: another Inflammatory Music Study™ is out! “What Outrageous Claims™ is it making this time?” I hear you excitedly asking. That smart people listen to hair metal? That, actually, Corey Feldman is good? That Nicki Minaj could not probabilistically exist in a universe of random chance and that we must be living in a computer simulation? Nope, but close! This time it’s that, get this, different artists use different amounts of unique words in their music! Yikes, controversial! Can we even run this?

The new musixmatch study, and by ‘study’ I mean ‘two tech guys plugged a bunch of songs into an API and made a slick web page’, compared different artists’ 100 lyrically-densest songs in an effort to determine who uses the most and least unique words in their music. Not surprisingly, rappers took four spots in the top 10. Any guesses who came out on top, not only with a lyrical vocabulary of 8,818 separate words but the highest per-song word count, with an average of 1,018? I’ll give you a hint: A popular chocolate candy, in the singular. That’s right: Dancehall artist Smartie! No, I’m just playing, it’s Eminem. Jay Z and Tupac followed at #2 and #3, respectively.

Favourite of articulate dudes everywhere Bob Dylan came in at an impressive #5 overall, just behind Kanye West at #4. Poor Dylan, if only he had thought to sneak a few extra “swagoos” and “apologins” into Blood on the Tracks. Multi-lingual musicians like Julio Iglesias and Gloria Estefan also had a strong showing, since the musixmatch API didn’t differentiate between the same words in different languages, leading to these artists ending up in the upper reaches of the study.

The most surprising inclusion in the top 10? Our national treasure Celine Dion, who came in at #10 with a vocabulary of 3,954 unique words. Like the study’s authors say: “This analysis should not be interpreted as saying that one musician is better than the other, it is just another insight into the work of these amazing artists.” So Celine Dion isn’t better than The Beatles (#76)? Come on, work with me here, you want this to go viral with Outrageous Claims™ or not?