Popularity of "Rap" and "Hip Hop" as Words

Goolge has created a new tool that allows researchers and law people alike to chart the frequency of word usage in books. (Here is a NYT article describing it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html?hp)

Goofing around with it (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=hip+hop&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=0), I did searches for "rap" and "hip hop"


Here is some of what I learned about "Hip Hop"

• Hip Hop begins to enter books with a spike in 1984 (probably because of Run DMC).
• Hip Hop trails off as a term until 1987 (probably because of the birth of the Golden Age with PE, A Tribe Called Quest, Dr. Dre, etc).
• It trails off again until 1990 and then spikes higher than ever before in 1991 (when sampling and obscenity cases hit)
• Hip Hop slowly rises until 1994, plateaus through 1996.
• It dips in 1998, then rises to new heights in 1999.
• Dips in 2000-2004 and then shoots back up in 2005 and shoots higher in 2007.

Here is what I learned about "rap"

• Unlike Hip Hop, rap has regularly been employed in the English language
• The term increases in popularity (although at modest levels) between 1970 and 1975
• It slides in popularity until 1991 but with peaks in 1981, 1984
• It increases in popularity between 1991 and 1997, dips for a year and then plateaus until 2003.
• Rap spikes in popularity in 2004 and has been decreasing ever since.
• Rap, as a term, is much more popular than hip hop. The only problem with this comparision is that rap can be used in ways that don't reference the music or hip hop culture.

I am not sure what this all teaches us but I found it interesting. Can't wait to see what people do with it!