Lyrical Inspiration Across Musical Generations

Bob Dylan’s line “they all expect you to cut a check to tax deductible charitable organizations” pops up again in We Used to Vacation by the Cold War Kids. The Notorious B.I.G.’s song Juicy would inspire many other rappers in the years after. The verse

“Now I'm in the limelight 'cause I rhyme tight
Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade
Born sinner, the opposite of a winner
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner”

deserves some discussion here because I’ve been reading a small bit about it. There was a car bombing in a parking garage at the World Trade Center in 1993, that has since been forgotten about in the wake of 9/11. This verse was released in 1994 and the line about the world trade center appears in rap songs throughout the 21st century. Additionally, the third line about being a born sinner is the title of one of J. Cole’s more popular albums.

If you could visually map repeated phrases or inspirations across artists through their quotes of each other, it would be cool to discover who may have inspired whom. The last time I worked on this I had downloaded a dataset from Kaggle that was ~5GB and had split the data into smaller files by decade. Cleaning this and parsing phrases is going to be most of the work, if I can fully wrap my head around what I want for the end product. There’s a couple directions I can see this going…