🎤 Earlier this year, BBC Music published a list of the best hip-hop songs of all time. For Datawrapper’s weekly chart series I took a closer look at the data behind it. Here are a couple of things I learned. https://blog.datawrapper.de/best-hip-hop-songs-of-all-time-visualized/
The golden era was big: Most high-ranking songs are from the mid-80s to mid-90s. Little surprise here, I guess. In the top 25, there are only two songs from past decade (by Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar).
Very few women made it onto the best-of list. The top 25 has only two songs by female MC’s (Queen Latifah and Lauryn Hill). That's less than it has songs featuring OutKast.
To celebrate female voices in hip-hop, I used the BBC Music poll data to create an alternative best-of: The best hip-hop songs of all time, but featuring women. It’s also on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7oJVkoKAbErjIRvKiu0tV6?si=XFt_VphPQeKTyo8c38kYfQ
To learn more about the data analysis, and about how I made these charts, read my post on the Datawrapper blog. https://blog.datawrapper.de/best-hip-hop-songs-of-all-time-visualized/
And if you are into #rstats content, have a look at the repo on GitHub. https://github.com/sjockers/bbc-best-rapmusic
On the whole list of 311 songs named by more than 100 critics, there are only 23 songs by individual women rappers or all-female bands. For comparison: Even though JAY-Z did not make it into the top 25, he alone has 20 songs on the list.