In summary, it appears that Drake's music has become more positive with his last two albums, but only after a stretch of consistent negative sentiment in Take Care and Nothing Was The Same.
I would recommend not scrolling down if you are younger than 18 years old or are easily offended by profanity. The larger the word, the more times it is said. The size of the words in each cloud represent its frequency in tracks featured on the album. Wordclouds are a fun way to visualize word frequency in large bodies of text.
To get a broad overview of the most common words in Drake's albums, I made some wordclouds. Only one song from Nothing Was The Same, the hit "Started From the Bottom", broke a 0.5 valence rating. I can barely get through some of the songs on that album without shedding a tear.
The Nothing Was The Same graph made a lot of sense. I think that fans of Drake will agree that valence is a more accurate representation of the sentiment. Also, many of the songs on If You're Reading This it's Too Late are much more positive in musical valence than lyrical sentiement. "Crew Love" and "Buried Alive" both have inversely related valences and lyrical sentiments. Many of the songs that are considered to be negative according to the Bing lexicon are actually classified as positive in terms of valence. It appears that lyrical sentiment and musical valence do not have a strong correlation on a song-to-song basis. It is also important to note that Spotify does not own the streaming rights to a few of the songs on Drake's discography, which is why there are fewer songs on certain albums.īelow are the graphs of the valence across all of Drake's individual studio albums. According to Spotify's records, the average valence of popular music over the past fifty years hovers around 0.5. The metric is measured on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0. Spotify uses the word “valence” to measure whether a song is likely to make someone feel happy (higher valence) or sad (lower valence). I wanted to see how valence may have changed over time in Drake's music and how similar it is with lyrical sentiment. When a song fits a certain amount of criteria based on user feedback, a new song will appear on a customer's "discover weekly" playlist.įor this study, I chose to examine the "valence" in each of Drake's songs as a representation of sentiment. Categories include: danceability, energy, key, valence, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness and tempo. The company does this by classifying songs into different categories. One of Spotify's most effective tools is its ability to recommend songs to its users based on previous choices. In the past decade, Spotify has grown into the premiere online destination for streaming music. A song like "Portland" on More Life has a sentiment rate of -0.5 because of all of the profanity, but a human would most likely not think it has a negative connotation. It is important to note that the Bing lexicon can’t pick up on negation or irony. Views is Drake's only album where half of the songs are neutral or positive. Take Care and Nothing Was The Same are infamously melancholy albums, but I did not expect that none of his albums would have a majority of tracks with positive lyrical sentiment.
I was surprised to find that most of Drake's lyrics have a negative sentiment attributed to them. Songs closer to -1 in sentiment are seen as more negative and songs closer to 1 are perceived as more positive. I plotted the results for each song separated by album below. I normalized the number by dividing it by the total number of Bing lexicon words present in the song. I joined the lyrics with the Bing lexicon, a list of words which are deemed by humans as either positive or negative, and subtracted the negative words from the positive ones to get a general measure of lyrical sentiment. In order to extract the lyrics from all of Drake's individual albums, I scraped his tracklists from the Genius API. Did his lyrics become more positive or more negative as he became more successful? How does sentiment compare to Drake's record sales? How common is profanity in his music as his career progresses? I think that his music overall will prove to be more positive now than when he dropped his first album in 2008. He is one of the few rappers that has been able to bridge the gap between underground hype and mainstream commercial success.įor this project, I wanted to examine Drake's lyrical and musical evolution throughout the years. He is currently ranked number one on Spotify's monthly listeners list and his latest album, "More Life", reached number one on the Billboard top 200 with ease. Aubrey Graham, aka Drake, is arguably one of the greatest rappers of all time.
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