"If I was gay I would think Hip-hop hates me", a line from Macklemore's landmark songSame Love, gives a sense of the relationship Rap has had with the LGBTQ community. Meanwhile, marriage equality has gained increasing acceptance from the general public culminating in the recent Supreme court's historic decision legalizing same sex marriage across US. So how has Rap evolved? To answer this Rapalytics searches for homophobic words in rap lyrics over the past 25 years!

"If I was gay I would think Hip-hop hates me" - Same Love, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis

Introducing Profanity Explorer from Rapalytics

Rapalytics has currently processed lyrical content of over 10,000 songs from over 150 artists. To quantify profanity, Rapalytics simply counts the number of profane words using this list and computes its percentage of the total words. There are 8 categories of profane words: N-word, Misogynistic, Homophobic, F*ck, A*s, Sh*t, Sexual and miscellaneous. This is available as a browsable visualization that lets users compare rappers and look at profanity usage over time.

Update : Readers of the article have expressed concerns about the shallowness of keyword search and ignoring context. While looking at emotionally "charged" words in isolation is not 100% accurate, it is still a strong indicator for most of the cases. The site is in its infancy and this will be refined in the upcoming versions as distributional representations (context) will replace keywords.

Homophobia over time

So lets take a look at how homophobia has changed over time. From the graph below it can be seen that homophobia rose during the Gangster-rap era, peaked during the 2000's and is on a decline since then.