Is DJ Khaled the center of rap?

A question I feared as I was looking through this data was: Is the man who can’t pronounce the word jewelry the secret sauce holding rap together as he so often implies?

A simple way to answer this question would be to see if Khaled has more connections than anyone else in the graph. We can check both how many unique people to whom they were connected and how many total connections they had to other people (for cases where artists repeatedly collaborate). Here are the top 10 artists for both of those metrics:

Khaled’s near the bottom of the list for unique collaborators with only about half those of The Game and he doesn’t even show up on the list for total collaborations, implying that he values quantity over frequency when it comes to artistic partnerships.

The rest of the list is comprised of artists known for collaborating prolifically but who I’d dispute are “the center of rap” such as A$AP Rocky, YG and Juicy J. Members of the cast of Hamilton also slip by virtue of the fact that they sing most of their songs together.

The most well connected man in rap.

Just counting the number of direct connections can be misleading though. It disproportionately rewards the Hamilton cast for singing most of their songs together and The Game for being the most generic rapper in “the game”.

Fortunately, we have some better tools for graph analysis which are actually called “centrality”. Here’s the top 10 lists for our different measures of centrality: (1) betweenness, the number of shortest paths between all pairs of artists that travels through the given artist, and (2) closeness, the average of the shortest paths between the given artist and all other artists.

These numbers show us that the contenders for the center of the 2016 rap universe are E-40, Ty Dolla $ign, and The Game. Based on my own perspective I’d guess that it’s Ty Dolla $ign but two things are for sure: