Introduction

Ed Sheeran and 21 Savage are both famous musicians, but their music sounds very different. Ed Sheeran is known for his catchy pop songs that often talk about love and positive feelings. On the other hand, 21 Savage is a rapper who often chooses to discuss things like sex, drugs, and murder. This project looks at the lyrics from both artists to see what emotions are most common in their music.

Research Questions

  1. What emotions are most prevalent in the lyrics of Ed Sheeran compared to those of 21 Savage?

  2. How have sentiments in their lyrics evolved from their earlier albums to their more recent releases?

  3. Which artist exhibits a wider range of emotional expression in their lyrics?

Collecting the Data

To conduct this sentiment analysis, lyrics from both artists were collected using the Genius API, spanning their entire discography to ensure a comprehensive view of their lyrical content over time. Specific data points include song titles and lyrics, with additional data processing to classify lyrics by album and release year.

Question 1

To find out which emotions are most common in the songs of Ed Sheeran and 21 Savage, I used sentiment analysis with the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon to identify different emotions in the words of the lyrics. I then counted how many times each emotion appeared in their songs. This process helped me see which emotions are expressed more frequently by each artist.

Question 1 Analysis

From the analysis, the results are pretty much what you might expect. Ed Sheeran’s songs often talk about love and positive feelings, which shows up in the lyrics analysis as lots of positive words. On the other hand, 21 Savage’s songs frequently deal with tougher subjects like struggles and conflicts, which is reflected in his lyrics having more words that express anger and negativity. This difference in their music can clearly be seen in the charts, where Ed Sheeran’s graph has higher counts of joyful and trusting words, while 21 Savage’s chart is filled with words that show sadness and anger. This contrast helps us understand not just their music styles, but also the emotions they choose to express through their songs.

Question 2

For this question, I looked at how the feelings in the songs of Ed Sheeran and 21 Savage changed over time. After fetching their song lyrics from different years, I analyzed the sentiments of each song by year using the same NRC lexicon as before. I organized the lyrics by the year they were released and calculated the frequency of each sentiment for each year. This allowed me to track changes in the emotional content of their music from their earlier albums to their more recent ones, showing me trends in how their music’s emotional messages have evolved.

Question 2 Analysis

While I think my approach to tackling this question was the right idea, I don’t think this chart accurately portrays what it is trying to. Since most of Ed Sheeran’s songs in this small data frame were written in 2017, the “joy” words measured around this year are much higher. I tried to do a calculation that measures the sentiment relative to how many songs were written in that year, but I was unable to do so. This failure of a chart will have to do for now.

Question 3

To determine which artist shows a greater variety of emotions in their lyrics, I calculated a measure called “entropy” for the lyrics of both Ed Sheeran and 21 Savage. Entropy is a way of measuring how spread out the emotional expressions are across different emotions. I analyzed all the words in their lyrics to see how many different emotions each word could be linked to and then used these counts to compute the entropy. A higher entropy value means that the artist’s lyrics display a wider range of emotions. This calculation gave me a clear comparison of the emotional diversity in the lyrics of both artists.

Question 3 Analysis

In the entropy chart, both Ed Sheeran and 21 Savage scored around 2.0, which tells us something interesting about their music. Even though their styles and themes are quite different, this score indicates that they both use a similar range of emotions in their lyrics. A score of 2.0 in entropy suggests that neither artist sticks to just one or two emotions; instead, they both express a variety of feelings through their songs.

This result might be surprising given their different musical genres. Ed Sheeran’s pop and acoustic ballads often focus on love and personal stories, while 21 Savage’s rap songs frequently tackle themes of things like street life. Despite these differences, the entropy value shows that both artists explore a broad emotional spectrum, from joy to sadness, from trust to fear. This analysis shows that diversity in emotional expression is not limited to the type of music an artist produces but is also a sign of their versatility and depth as a songwriter.