Like many of you, I learned much about the English language and male/female anatomy from hip-hop records. Like the c-words. And other stuff. Rap is nothing if not educational—it’s even arguably inspired dictionaries.
In that spirit, Best Tickets Blog, the blog dedicated to nothing but the finest tickets, yesterday uncovered which rappers (and rap groups) are the profaniest of the profane, releasing a study on the most vulgar artists, albums, and songs from the five most “important” records each year from 1985-2013. They combed each track to find curse words and your standard misogynistic (whaddaup Luda!) and homophobic (what up, every rapper from 1985-1999!) slurs, ultimately finding an incredible 31,564 curse words on the 145 albums.
That’s 217.7 curse words per album. Which seems like a lot. They couldn’t have analyzed a Will Smith album?
Overall, Best Tickets examined 2,295 songs, finding an average of 13.76 instances of profanity. Here are your leaders:
Tupac at Nos. 1 and 2! With UGK and the NWA right behind. Is there a correlation between awesomeness and a free use of language? Maybe?
Ah the Geto Boys. They’re famed to the public for Office Space, but much of their deeper stuff (“Size Ain’t Shit,” “Let a Ho Be a Ho,” and of course “Fuck Em”) is far from the mainstream. Naturally, they rout the competition here.
Finally, here are the dirtiest songs of the last 28 years.
(A theme? The dirrrrty south.)
Check out the rest of the charts here.