In today's music industry, lyrical content is usually overshadowed by the instrumentals of the song or the lyrical content is so downplayed that songs only consist of a few words. Tahir Hemphill is a designer, photographer, and an entrepreneur who is hosting a special project entitled "Hip Hop Word Count."

"The Hip-Hop Word Count is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day.The Hip-Hop Word Count describes the technical details of most of your favorite hip-hop songs. This data can then be used to not only figure out interesting stats about the songs themselves, but also describe the culture behind the music. The Hip-Hop Word Count locks in a time and geographic location for every metaphor, simile, cultural reference, phrase, rhyme style, meme and socio-political idea used in the corpus of Hip-Hop."

His goal is to convert his findings into visuals to help us comprehend different cultures; to map a geography of language. For a visual, look at his video. Its interesting to find out what educational level the song you're listenting to is in. Are you songs smarter than a 5th grader?

The Hip-Hop Word Count x Keyword Search from Staple Crops on Vimeo.