🎤 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.
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.
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