Lyrical Inspiration Across Musical Generations

The inspiration for this project came from listening to The Notorious B.I.G., J. Cole, Bob Dylan, and the Cold War Kids. Lyrics have always stuck in my head and been the piece of a song I remember best. I found a 9GB dataset on Kaggle containing song lyrics scraped from the song lyric website, Genius, that contained songs from 641,000+ unique artists. Each row is a song with a few variables including lyrics stored in a single string. I used R to search through these lyric strings for recognizable phrases to identify which artists pull inspiration from each other and if the meaning of the lyric changes over time.

The 1965 Bob Dylan lyric, written in the Ballad of a Thin Man, resurfaces in We Used to Vacation by the Cold War Kids in 2006. The repeated phrase here is “give a check to tax-deductible charity organizations”. However, the verses have little else in common.

Ballad of a Thin Man (1965) - Bob Dylan

“You have many contacts
Among the lumberjacks
To get you facts
When someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect
Anyway they already expect you
To just give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations”

We Used to Vacation (2006) - Cold War Kids

[Chorus 1]
I promised to my wife and children
I'd never touch another drink as long as I live
But even then, it sounds so soothing
This will blow over in time
This will all blow over in time

[Verse 2]
I'm just an honest man
Provide for me and mine
I give a check to tax-deductible charity organizations
Two weeks paid vacation
Won't heal the damage done
I need another one

The second prepared example is a much more popular and recognizable line. The lyric “blow up like the world trade” was written by The Notorious B.I.G. in 1994 on the song Juicy and reappears throughout hip-hop and rap songs in the decades that have followed. I first wondered whether this project could be accomplished while listening to J. Cole’s album Born Sinner, released in 2013. The album title is a direct reference to the song Juicy by The Notorious B.I.G. and the lyric about the World Trade Center, also from Juicy, appears in the first track on the album, Villuminati.

The dataset search produced 31 rows with 27 different artist names. Twice the song was reposted to an individual’s Genius account and scraped into this dataset. Several songs sampled lines or entire verses from Juicy. After 2013, artists would mix The Notorious B.I.G. and J. Cole in the same song. Each new song either borrowed the whole lyric or rewrote the intro “time to get paid” to change the meaning of the line.

The below timeline shows a few other events and artists that occurred in the 19 years between the 1994 Biggie song and the 2013 J. Cole album.

When I have the time, I’d like to expand on this project to use a thematic analysis package for inspiration discovery as well as tracking. To identify uniquely meaningful phrases within maybe a 2-year period of songs and then find all of the artists in the following years using each phrase. This approach will expand the scope of the above work past just the phrases that stick out in my head and allow for data-driven discovery of connections.