Visualizing Similarities between American Rap-Artists based on Text Reuse

Rap music is one of the biggest music genres in the world today. Since the early days of rap music, references not only to pop culture but also to other rap artists have been an integral part of the lyrics’ artistry. Rappers may use them to introduce their shared personal backgrounds such as where they grew up. In addition, rap musicians reference each other by adopting fragments of lyrics, for example, to give credit. This kind of text reuse can be used to create connections between individual artists. Due to the large amount of lyrics, only automated detection methods can efficiently detect text reuse. In addition, automated methods can also be used to identify similar artists based on their lyrical content. Here, we present a visualization system for analyzing text reuse in rap music lyrics. The system supports the user of detecting text reuse and allusions between songs and exploring connections between artists. For this purpose, we crawled song lyrics and their metadata of selected American rap artists from Genius.com. We also trained a network tailored specifically for rap lyrics, which we named “rapBERTa”, to compute similarities in lyrics