Diggin' Into Hip Hop Suckage (Part 4)

If you haven't read part one, go here.  And then part two, diving into the beats behind the eight number one songs from 4 different points in hip hop history, is available here.  The third part was an admittedly difficult dive into the lyrics of those same eight songs.  

Here was my plan: to finish out this study with a look at popularity and longevity.  However, as you'll see below, I haven't found a good way to measure either metric.  I need to come up with another angle for this project.  But since I already went through all of the process, I'll still provide you with the results I found.

Each of the songs we are talking about made it to number one on Billboard's Hot Hip Hop chart, so we aren't talking about the longevity of just any hip hop track.  However, I'll readily admit that choosing random songs like I did leaves a bunch of room for the small sample size to ruin everything. 

Spotify streams:

• Fight the Power: 6,257,725 (72,764)
• Me, Myself & I (De la Soul): 7,678,875 (89,289)
• Hot Boyz: 1,823,942 (21,208)
• Wobble Wobble: 966,233 (11,235)
• Best I Ever Had: 40,696,520 (502,426)
• Run this Town: 81,319,627 (1,056,099)
• Summer Sixteen: 18,041,422 (18,041,422+, all those listens are in less than a month)
• Me, Myself & I (G-Eazy):  154,970,772 (30,994,154) (!!!!!)

Spotify launched on October 7, 2008, but I can't tell exactly when they got old songs, but if we use that date and assume that the older songs were available that day, then the number in bold above is the monthly play rate for those songs.  From looking at that stat, I think this measure is probably garbage.  Other than showing that the two 1999 songs are forgettable, this just shows that streaming activity has gone up over time.  30 freaking million streams a month for that crap G-Eazy song!!!

How about YouTube views limited to just 2015?  That could show some longevity - if people are still hitting up YouTube to watch old tracks in a modern year?  YouTube Artist Analytics show the following for 2015:

• Fight the Power: 2,858,231
• Me, Myself & I (DLS): 2,826,979
• Hot Boyz: Unknown.  You can tell it is less than 2 million, but because it doesn't make Missy's top 20 songs for 2015, I can't see the exact number.  7,132,080 views all time, so it must have really fallen off during the 2015 year if it can't crack her top twenty tracks that year.
• Wobble Wobble: 1,166,326
• Best I Ever Had: Unknown.  Less than 1,836,489, as that is the all-time plays for this video, but it doesn't make his top 20 so I can't track exact plays in 2015.  
• Run this Town: Unknown.  The main video for this song only has 978k all time views, but because this track doesn't make the top twenty for 2015, I can't see an exact number for that year.  I can't aggregate video plays the way the Artist Insights thing can for the top twenty, so I can't tell if other videos for this same song would combine to a much higher number.
• The other two tracks didn't exist in 2015.

Sadly, also not a very useful measure.  Maybe it shows that the 1989 songs got more play in 2015 than the others, but the information is just too limited.

Genius is a good resource for looking up rap lyrics, so I thought I might be able to see popularity through that portal, but like these others, it is incomplete and shows a bias toward the recent tunes with over a million hits for the two 2016 songs and no data for the 1999 songs.

I figured that I might also try Billboard data from the Hot Hip Hop chart to see stuff like length of time on the chart and current popularity, but their data is jacked.  Despite the chart tool that I used at the start of this thing, the Billboard site claims that "Fight the Power" only made it to #20 on the Hot Hip Hop chart and "Hot Boyz" isn't even listed as being on that chart?  That is weird. But they also show "Fight the Power" and De la Soul's "Me Myself & I" as ranking in the top 100 hot hip hop songs for "last week," which is even weirder.  That can't be, right?

So my last resort is awards and honors.  But, of course, this one will skew in favor of the old songs that have had the time to receive plaudits and prizes over the decades, and lessen the potential future impact of G-Eazy (which is a hilarious sentence to write).  These facts come from Wikipedia:

• Fight the Power: 
• Number 288 in the "Songs of the Century" list compiled by the RIAA.
• Number 322 in Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time
• Number one on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop
• Included on Time's All-TIME 100 Songs
• Included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
• Me, Myself & I (De la Soul): 
• Number 46 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop
• Included in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
• Used in NBA Street V3, NCAA Football 06, and the fifth season of Entourage.
• Hot Boyz:
• Nothing other than chart position information.
• Wobble Wobble:
• Same.  Well, also a mention that there were two videos shot for this song, one of which includes nudity.
• Best I Ever Had:
• Billboard's "Hot Rap Song" of 2009.
• nominated for Grammy awards but lost.  Lost a Juno award contest to a Michael Buble song.  :)
• Run this Town: 
• Won Grammys for  Best Rap Song and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration 
• Three times platinum
• Summer Sixteen: 
• Nothing of note.
• Me, Myself & I (G-Eazy):
• Nothing of note.

Again, not especially illuminating.  Although I'd expect that no one is ever going to rank the four most recent tracks as "songs that shaped rock and roll" or top 100 rap songs of all time. But the small sample size definitely comes into play here.  I'm sure other number 1 tracks from 1989 didn't have this same lasting impact, I just happened to pick two that are beloved over time.  Dammit.  I feel like my premise is true, but I just don't know that I have the data to prove it.

And maybe that is the answer.  Millions of people think Drake is the best rapper out there. I'm entirely lukewarm about the guy.  There isn't really data that can help you determine why a certain beat sounds better to me.  I'm going to think more about how I might be able to quantify the suckage of hip hop, and please feel free to speak up if you come up with another angle.