In our project, we wanted to determine if rap music has changed over the last few decades. We gathered data from Billboard's Hot Weekly charts containing 28000+ songs and trimmed it down to approximately 3800 rap songs. From our analysis, we found that the overarching themes of rap vary from decade to decade and that this may have to do with global events occurring at that time. The data suggests, however, that love was consistently talked about and that rap post-2000s deviated from social good to self-gratification.
In the past 60 years, has rap become less lyric-centric and/or disconnected from societal issues as a result of consistently poor lyric choices? Can we form the conclusion that the main topics in rap have changed after performing an analysis of the Billboard's number-one rap singles for each decade ranging from the 1960s to the 2010s?