[INTRO]
No Hennessy on the bartender bill
Just a good wine and a good place to chill
Not that long ago, while listening to Moscato by Ab-Soul — featuring Kendrick Lamar before he was world famous — those lines came to my attention. Not only because “good wine and a good place to chill” is to me the most perfect combination. But also, because it was not the first time the famous French cognac brand was mentioned in a rap song.
Other lines came to my mind: I need a one dance / Got a Hennessy in my hand (Drake, One Dance) or Thugs be sipping Hennessey and bubbly / To my comrades that keep it flaming hot (Rakim, When I B On That Mic). And I was already pretty sure at the time that those weren’t the only examples.
I was curious. If rappers seem to frequently mention Hennessy in their songs, then… who are the rappers who like Hennessy the most?
Hold my Henny. Let’s count.
[VERSE I] — THE PLAN
Finding the answer became a new side project. I already knew the action plan:
- Scrape the information (artist, song title and lyrics) on the web
- Store the information in a dataframe
- Establish a ranking based on the number of times the word Hennessy appeared in the lyrics
All of the above using the same programming language: Python.
As a Data Analyst, I was already familiar with web scraping — a method that allows one to automatically extract relevant information from any website. But in this case, which website? That’s right:
For those who don’t understand this lame joke: genius.com, formerly called rap genius, is a US website launched in 2009, allowing members of the community to discuss and comment song’s lyrics.
In order to make our life easier, the Genius team did two things:
- They developed their own API so people could get information more easily
- They created their own Python library: lyricsgenius, that simplifies the process of downloading song lyrics using Python
I tested lyricsgenius with a couple of artists, and with only 5 songs for each artist: it took some time to download (~2 seconds per song). Thus, I decided to settle for 52 artists (I’ll explain the 52 a little bit later), instead of ALL hip hop artists I could think of — I didn’t want to spend the following 3 weeks downloading rap songs.
[CHORUS] — THE RESULT
After downloading all the lyrics from the 52 artists, I had precisely 12,818 lyrics with 452 mentions of “Hennessy” in total. I decided to perform simple data analytics in order to establish a ranking.
I won’t wait any longer, the heaviest Hennessy drinker is…
2Pac!!!
2Pac mentioned Hennessy 95 times throughout his entire discography — 21% of all the mentions combined! He loved this cognac so much that he dedicated a full song to it, that he decided to call… Hennessey.
2Pac is followed by Biggie (36 mentions). As you might know, 2Pac and Biggie embody one of the biggest rivalry in music history. The fact that 2Pac repeated 95 times “Hennessy” just to beat Biggie in this ranking is still not confirmed.
The top 5 is completed by Nas (31 mentions), Kanye (27 mentions) and Kendrick Lamar (25 mentions). Top 10 below:
As a cautious data analyst, I also decided to compare the number of mentions with the number of songs the artist recorded. In other terms, I calculated a frequency of Hennessy mentions per song: basically, if each song is a cocktail, how much Hennessy does the average song contain? The top 10 ranking changes a bit, as shown below:
Biggie is the clear winner, as he mentioned Hennessy 0.24 times per song! And in case you wonder what are the songs that mention the cognac brand the most, you also have the answer in the table below. No surprise for the first one…
But why Hennessy, and cognac in general, is so popular among US rappers?
[VERSE II] — THE EXPLANATION
This interesting (though old) article from Slate gives an explanation.
- First, this love story between the US and French cognac is not new. Exports between the two countries started in the 19th century, as cognac was a drink of choice among the upper class in the US. It reached the Afro American consumers much later, during the 20th century, when black Amercian soldiers discovered it in France during both world wars… and apparently, they loved it!
- Second, today, 90% of the production of French cognac is exported — the US being the first destination.
- Third, why Hennessy in particular? Well, Hennessy was the first Cognac brand to launch its advertisements in magazines aimed at a Black readership such as “Ebony” or “Jet”.
Fun fact: cognac sales in the US experienced a decline in the 90s but were boosted by the song “Pass the Courvoisier” by Busta Rhymes. After that, the cognac Courvoisier’s shares jumped by 30%.
[OUTRO] — THE METHOD
Here is some explanation regarding how I analyzed this data. If you’re interested, you can also find the code on my GitHub.
This was basically a glimpse of what a Data Analyst can do: collect public or private data, organize and analyze it, and establish business conclusions or recommendations out of it. If you’re interested in web scraping, check out my webinar on the subject (French speakers only). And don’t hesitate to comment the article if you would like to know more about any other data analytics concept mentioned here.
APPENDIX: Step by step
Step 1: SELECT. To select the 52 rappers, I took this top 50 rappers of all time list on reddit.
In order to exploit it, I needed to create a Python list out of it. I wrote a little script meant to scrape the web page and make a list out of the ranking displayed. I added two names: Kanye and Drake, as I had the feeling they were also passionate about Hennessy.
Step 2: CLEAN. The list showed “Biggie”, but I had to change to “The Notorious B.I.G.” so the Genius API would find it. Also, in second position stood André 3000, but I decided to replace with “OutKast”, his rap band with Big Boi — André 3000 is an amazing rapper, but didn’t pursue a solo career. Finally, while running the program, I discovered that Rakim was automatically replaced with… A$AP Rocky. And I couldn’t do anything about it. Joke or mistake from the Genius team? I still haven’t found out…
Step 3: PROCESS. Once I had my clean list of rappers, I downloaded all their lyrics from Genius. From there I counted in those lyrics the presence of three different words: Hennessy, Hennessey and Henny — as rappers use all three.
Step 4: ANALYZE and interpret. I then created a table with the ranking, and graphs in order to visualize the results.
