Anthology of Computers and the Humanities · Volume 3

Latent topic and tempo differences between East and West Coast Hip-Hop

Ábel Boros1 and Arthur Flexer1 ORCID

  • 1 Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Download PDF Download Citation

Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.63744/XvZKQm15UbPN

Published: 21 November 2025

Keywords: music, topic modeling, lyrics, tempo, Hip-Hop, text analysis, audio analysis

Abstract

Our work presents a computational approach to exploring differences between Hip-Hop music from the US East and West Coast during the so-called "rap wars". This period in time was characterized by an intense rivalry prevalent especially in the lyrics of the music. We built a representative dataset of music from respective eminent artists and used topic modeling to analyze song lyrics. The resulting topic of "Vulgarity and Violence" is more attributed to West Coast artists and "Street Life and Rhythm" more to the East Coast. In addition we show that tempo of the music is slower for the West Coast and in general slowing down over the observation period. Our quantitative results align with existing theories concerning spatiality of Hip-Hop culture.