Ye-Spirations

Background

I love hip hop.

There's something about the headnodic beats and melodic exercise of word-smithing that furrows the brow and contorts the face in an expression of anguish that can only be acheived through a harmony of beats, rhymes, and life.

You don't need to be a fan of hip-hop to experience the power of music. Stevie Wonder himself reminds us that it's, "... a language that we all understand." I happen to just have particular affinity for hip-hop, and an idea to channel these artist's lyrical genius in the form of inspirational posters.

All that is definitely true, but honestly, I just thought that shit would be hilarious. I don't know if this is the exact time I thought of it, but one of the lines I always go back is one of Weezy's, "... real G's move in silence like lasagna."

What...?

So let's just say that was the origin. If so, that song came out in....2011? Over the years there's been countless lines that have hit all the extremes of being

Hilarious - "I love you like a fat kid love cake"

Inspirational - "Damn right I like the life I live, because I went from negative to positive"

Motivating - "Make a business for yourself, boy, set some goals. Make a fat diamond out of dusty coals.

Classic - "Mom's Spaghetti"

Implementation

There's counltess more lines that I've remembered and forgotten over the years, but I've decided to go ahead and turn this idea into reality. It's a small project, but with it, I'm learning some useful skills such as -

• Web Scraping
• API's
• Database's
• Image processing
• Dash
• Flask
• Sentiment Analysis (plan on integrating)

Samples

I decided to start with Kanye because I found myself revisiting The College Dropout and ended up in another Ye phase for a time. I know Ye is tends to garner a polarizing opinion from people, but I'm a fan of most of his work, and it can't be denied that he's one of the key players in the evolution of hip-hop. With that I'll leave you with a few samples I've already generated.

Plans

Soon I'll have a simple web app open to the public that will generate random Kanye lines on backdrops of the user's choosing. As you can see from the samples, there're some issues with this as it stands. Here's a few things I'm looking to add after this is generally functional.

• Add a color highlight for text clarity.
• "Keep a line" feature to keep the line that was randomly picked while shuffling through images.
• "Keep an image" feature to keep the image that was randomly picked while shuffling through lines.
• Add option to select picture keyword.
• Add an option to select text color.
• Add a "Hits" filter to only select lines from the most popular songs.
• Add lyrics from other artists.
• Add a "filter by artist" feature.
• Add a "source" option to include artist and or album to the end of the line.
• Collect and store pictures in a database vs calling an API for every request to prevent hitting a rate limit.
• Add a "Mood" feature to filter line by mood using sentiment analysis

I'm currently working on this project when I find the time in between work and my Data Science program at Flatiron. Sure, it's a slow process -

But hey, like Rakim said -

I'm thinkin of a master plan