Introduction

Afrobeat & Afrobeats?

Afrobeat is a musical genre with roots in West Africa; It was originally created by Nigerian musician Fela Kuti while he was studying music in England. He started a band called Koola Lobitos, who played a blend of Ghanaian highlife and jazz. In the early 1960s, Fela Kuti returned to Nigeria and reformed the Koola Lobitos. In 1969, Kuti traveled to Los Angeles, United States, where he met Sandra Izsadore, who inspired the ideas of African-American civil rights activists such as the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Kwame Toure, and Angela Davis.

Afrobeat brings together funk, jazz, highlife and traditional African music. The songs are long and can be recognized by their complex instrumentation.

Afrobeats is a term that groups several African pop music genres. These music styles initially developed in Nigeria and Ghana in the late 90s to mid-2000s. The term “Afrobeats” (with an s) exists as a catch-all term for all the pop music that was coming out of Nigeria and Ghana.

Hip Hop

In 1970, Hip Hop began to form in the Bronx, New York. It mainly consisted of Emcees and DJs conjuring up rhythmic sounds by spinning vinyl records, and using microphones to speak over records. Original DJs such as: Afrika Bambaataa, Kool here, and Grandmaster Smash, also known as the founding fathers of hip hop, instilled a new movement that pushed for self expression amongst black and brown youth. Record spinning, rapping, graffiti and breaking constituted the “old school” elements of hip hop during its early days. Generally, hip hop gravitated towards politics and created a voice for black and brown individuals.

Q1: What is the average danceability of each song within the different genres?

From this visual, we can observe that Afrobeats has the highest Average Danceability compared to Hip Hop. This confirms my hypothesis - I believed that Afrobeats will have the highest average because it precedes Hip Hop and its origin. As stated in the introduction above, Afrobeats are usually played when it comes to celebrating and being happy.

Q2: Which artist and or album has the highest valence within both genres?

In this observation, I wanted to observe the top 10 valence for artists’ albums in each genres. Valence is a A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry) (The Verge). This graph denotes the valence of albums in Afrobeats. We conclude that throughout the artist known as 9ice the most recurring albums with the highest valence. We also observe that both Burna Boy and Psquare are both also have a high valence within their albums. This makes sense considering P Square and Burna Boy are both known world-wide and have a reputation for a euphoric and cheerful tone throughout the tracklist.

From this observation we can observe Hip hop artists’ highest song valence compared to Afrobeats’ album valence. This is because the dataset that I obtained provided a song list instead of albums; nonetheless, they tell us a meaningful story. We can conclude that the song “4th Chamber” has the lowest valence indicating that it does not carry a positive tone throughout, whereas the song with the highest valence titled “ Ambitionz As a Ridah” does. It appears that the trend here is somewhat linear, and the trend for Afrobeats is what of a right cluster with high valences. I believe this depicts the notion that Afrobeats has overall the highest valences because it’s always cheery and happy mood.

Q3: Popularity/Liveness in both Genres?

This graph observes the top 15 most popular Afrobeats artist that are particularly within this dataset. I am familiar with most of these artists, and also unfamiliar with artists like 9ice. However, the visual demonstrates that 9ice is included amongst one of the top 15 popular artists in Africa. The artist with the highest popularity, in this dataset, is Adekunle Gold, whose latest music such as “Okay”, “Before You Wake Up”, and “Ire” have been topping the charts. The next popular artist is Tiwa Savage. She is an award-winning Nigerian singer-songwriter, whose music consistently tops the charts.

For the Hip Hop observation, I also wanted to examine popularity but unfortunately did not have the variable within this dataset. Rather, I used the variable liveness as an alternative for popularity. This variable detects the presence of an audience in the recording. Higher liveness values represent an increased probability that the track was performed live, which could in return increase its popularity. From this graph we can observe that the song titled “ Boredom” has the highest liveness, followed by “ 911/ Mr. Lonely” and “Backseat Freestyle”.

Q4: Sentiment Analysis

Afrobeats

One of the most positive words that we observe in the Afrobeats data is “feat”, this is because of the number of features that are within this dataset. This is also similar to Hip hop as well. In this summary, “bad” is the most negative word. While it is intersing to have these observations, an important note is that R could not identity ethnic words as either negavtive or postive, hence why we are not able to observe such words in the summary.

Hip Hop

As stated above, “feat” is one of the most positive words in both datasets. In this observation, we can see that the word reappears more than 400 times! Disticintly, words such as " fuck" “rocky” “ghetto” and “bad” represent the most negative words in Hip hop. Hip hop, in general, is known for its vulgar language, which is why such explicit words are seen here.

Drake’s “if you’re reading this it’s too late” vs. Burna Boy “African Giant”

I lastly wanted to compare top artists – artists who are currently known worldwide and are succeeding in the music industry– and their albums to examine which artists creates more meaningful music. I calculated a mean comparison for Danceablity, Loudness, and Speechiness. From the table, we can depit that by a small margin, African Giant by Burna Boy has a higher danceablity mean; however, Drake’s If You’re reading this too late has an astronomically lower loudness mean with -7.80, additionally the album also has a higher speechiness with 0.20 compared to Burna’s .010.

Overall, I would conclude that Burna Boy’s African Giant beats Drake’s album due to its danceability value which, in my opinion, outstandingly makes or break an album for me. Others, however, would argue that Drake’s emotional tones is what excelled his album, but indeed I would disagree!

Datasets

https://towardsdatascience.com/what-makes-a-song-likeable-dbfdb7abe404

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adxpillar/beatssofAfro/master/beatsofafro.csv"

https://www.kaggle.com/mrmorj/dataset-of-songs-in-spotify

https://github.com/erikgregorywebb/datasets/blob/master/drake-final.csv