I certainly count as one. And I also agree that Rae and Ghost are by far the best hip hop duo.

It'd be really cool if you made this an interactive page.

I'd love to improve the UI. My frontend skills need work, but any suggestions on javascript for interactive graphing? I played with sigma.js for about 15 minutes.

http://d3js.org/ is your best bet

Hey Nikhil. I've been wanting to do some similar link analysis (including PageRank style calculations) as well as clustering. I'm trying to decide between learning Python and R, not much free time for playing with both. What do you recommend and why? Obviously your product uses Python, but please try to be objective.

Since your blog posts are clearly marketing (not a criticism), it would be very useful to also show how much it would have cost to run each step in this and other posts using Zillabyte's per hour rate.

Do you realize your first name would make a great rapper handle?

Working on a mixtape right now actually.

I can't really speak to R, having barely used it, but Python is definitely better to know in general, given that it is heavily used for scientific computing/data science and many other domains. Zillabyte's original API is actually for Ruby, and we just started supporting Python recently.

Ultimately, R vs Python comes down to a preference in tools. R has a large community and is specifically designed for statistical analysis, so a lot of statisticians. I would feel weird recommending a tool I don't actually use, but that's not a knock on R, just a lack of need on my end to learn it.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I need to do a lot of data and algorythm R&D on a tight budget (my savings, no income). I wonder whether it would be more cost effective for me to use Zillabyte's platform or code and deploy my own using free toolkits and run it myself on AWS, that is if I can't just run it on my MacBook.

I'm a big one...so are many of my engineer friends. Awesome work!

How is it that you've got so many Sucka MC's on this list?

I've always wondered what about rap music makes people do these things with it.

Rap musicians collaborate way more than any other genre except Jazz. I've always been interested in building a map of rap references to other songs. Rap lyrics are highly referential.

It's a more collaborative genre. It seems like when a rap artist releases an album nowadays, you'll see 12 tracks... with 15 different rappers on the project hehe.

Not many MCs can hold down an entire track by themselves.

Also, the internet has enabled a lot of collaboration between MCs.

Spoken word poetry goes back a long way. Verse interacts with our brain in interesting ways.

Huge hip hop head here . Great article btw

+1: snoop n' dre. all day.

Mixtape Weezy is my jam