Abstract: Building off my writings on British
culture and economics, my incredibly popular previous blogs, and my work as an abstract political cartoonist, I bring my considerable expertise towards tackling
Crossfadermetrics, the application of rigorous statistical analysis to gain a better
understanding of rap music and international finance. My findings support the
notion that the Nichols-Zeckhauser transfer model is inherently flawed and that
the Washington Redskins almost certainly overspent in free agency.
Introduction: A few weeks (make that months, this took me way too long write) ago I
finished my final project in my econometrics course on campaign spending and
elections. Like all of my academic papers, it was pretty convoluted and I
didn’t really comprehend anything I was writing and I still don’t understand
any of the concepts I attempted to explain. I also used outdated data that was
old enough to purchase alcoholic beverages in Canada and the European Union and
a good portion of my data conflicted with the findings of economists who probably
have a better grasp on this whole statistical analysis thing than students at
western Pennsylvanian public colleges. And as you could have probably guessed
from these first few sentences, it was plagued with awkwardly-worded
run-on sentences. I can’t say I am too broken up about these facts, and writing
this post has made it plainly obvious that I have forgotten most of the little
information I learned in that class. Ho-hum. I have undoubtedly forgotten
better and more useful academic concepts over the course my college career. I
truly lament the fact that I will never grasp the Ramsey Optimal Tax model as
well as I did during the peak of the finals epoch at LSE. What does bother me,
however, is the fact that it seems that my copy of Stata, the data analysis and
statistical software that I used for my project and is the bane of many an economist with a quantitative focus,
is no longer necessary. While my current semester includes courses covering the
arcane and abstruse topics of Japanese detective fiction and basic financial
accounting (the latter of which is mercifully geared towards non-business
majors) that will tax my mental faculties to their (admittedly meagre)
capabilities, none of them are likely to require quantitative or statistical
analysis using programs with maddeningly frustrating interfaces. Having paid five
dollars to Pitt for a Stata license, it appears that I have not reaped the full
half a sawbuck of value out of the program. I realize this reasoning violates
the economic concept of a sunk cost (which could be damaging to my credibility
considering this is the introduction to an economic paper) but like any principled
individual, I realize that ignoring sunk costs in practice is completely
foolish. I may not have learned much from my economics coursework, but one
lesson that has not been crowded out by Arrested Development minutia and De La
Soul verses is that applying economic theory to real-world scenarios is a dicey
proposition at best. I will thus stubbornly attempt to derive my full five
dollars of enjoyment out of the statistical package, and I have until August
2012 to do so.
How will I
go about this? Clearly, the only logical answer is to employ the software to
analyze my own personal rap listening habits in order to determine the primary
factors driving such behavior. My interest in rap music has always been
somewhat confusing to me, and I believe that studying its basic causes will
help me better understand my affinity for irrelevant early-nineties urban music
and yield valuable conclusions for policymakers. I think this exercise and
subsequent paper will earn me about five dollars’ worth of enjoyment and thus
make my purchase a wash, which is all you can really ask for when it comes to
purchasing mandatory academic software licenses.
Literature Review: Normally, such papers provide some
basic overview of the current papers on the topic to situate their own
paper within the context of the previously-published academic writings. Figuring this would be a somewhat fertile
field for econometricians, I used the databases generously offered by my two
colleges of higher learning to seek out previously-published statistical analyses of rap music. Like all of my
interactions with the two institutions, I was ultimately let down after several long
instances of extreme frustration. Thanks for nothing Pitt. Gas face goes out to LSE as well.
As long as
we are tenuously on the subject of rap literature, I think now is as good a
time as ever to point out that Ego Trip’s Big Book of Rap Lists is by far the
most superior book on the genre. However, I was unable to find anything in the volume to help me with my current task.
Methodology: In order to properly write a paper on
rap listening habits (ignoring the fact that my ineptitude with Stata and poor understanding of econometrics already disqualify me for such a task)
we need to establish a definition of what exactly constitutes rap/hip-hop
music. Many definitions of the genre discuss the nebulous four/five elements
of hip-hop, consisting of graffiti writing, MCing, belly rings (according to Das Racist), street culture (see previous parenthetical statement), and other
components that are incredibly unhelpful when it comes to determining the
musical aspects of a song that would classify it in the rap genre. Even by
genre definition standards, this is clearly unacceptable for the purposes of my
paper. To save you even more long-winded analysis deprived of any insight or actual
knowledge, rap music will basically be determined on a call-them-as-I-see-them
basis. Rest easy, as you are in somewhat capable hands, given that I have read the
aforementioned Ego Trip’s Big Book of Rap Lists twice and own 80 percent of the tome’s ten best albums of 1992, though I would like to state for the record
that Mecca and the Soul Brother is
criminally under-ranked at #8.
In Re: rap
definitions, this project does raise the question of whether a song or artist
is inherently more hip-hop than another. Since I am measuring total rap plays,
is it realistic and accurate to assume that each rap song is equally rap-py? Is
rap best defined in terms of thresholds (where after a song reaches a certain
level of melodic devolution or lyrical simplicity it becomes hip-hop) or in
terms of a hip-hop spectrum (where songs are classified as being varying levels
of hip-hop-yness based on their respective levels of melodic devolution and
lyrical simplicity)? Bands these days are increasingly likely to employ hip-hop elements in their songs and should these works count as partial plays as a result? Of course not, simply because
that would complicate things even further and I don’t have the patience for
such trifling annoyances.
I will allow
for two exceptions to this rule. Any plays of Queensbridge-based artist Cormega
will count as 1.025 rap plays as opposed to the usual one plays, which will be
denoted as Cormega Bonus Listens (CBLs). Why is Cormega the only rapper to
warrant above a listen? This.QED. Also, any plays by the Natives Tongues-affiliated Jungle Brothers will only count as 0.99 rap plays, as punishment for their role in introducing the abhorrent genre of hip house to the musical
community. And it goes without saying that
Belle and Sebastian plays will count as -0.0025 rap plays compared to the
customary 0 given to all other non-rap listens.
The Model:
Dependent Variable
The
dependent variable will be percentage of total plays that are in the rap genre,
as defined previously in the paper. Listening statistics are derived from my
incredibly unreliable last.fm account powered by the considerably wonky
Audioscrobbler software. Interestingly enough, this is not the first study to utilize last.fm data, though it is almost certainly the
worst. Again, I have already described what constitutes a rap song, and CBLs,
Jungle Brothers, and Belle and Sebastian aside, each rap song listening will
count as one rap play, with all non-rap plays counting as 0. This rap total
will be divided into the total numbers of song plays for a given week to
calculate rap percentage (Rappctg), measured in percentage points.
Independent Variables
Miles Run: At first glance, it may seem like
the distance traveled on my runs (measured in total weekly miles) has no
bearing on my propensity to listen to rap music. I can’t really offer any
reasonable hypothesis to explain any causal relationship between running and
rap. Maybe thinking about running or actually engaging in such foot-powered
exercise primes me toward other activities starting with that particular
consonant? Perhaps longer runs leave me so physically and mentally exhausted
that I am incapable of enjoying any musical works more complex than the lyrical
stylings of Gucci Mane (quite a frightening scenario, though I don’t know of anything
I could listen to under such restrictions (also no song hyperlink here because I value your eardrums)). I will be the first to admit (and
it should be painfully obvious to the few who have slogged this far (stay
strong, only a few more variables, some results tables and explanations, and a
conclusion to go) that I did not learn much of anything about econometrics in
my class, but I did learn that including variables that are likely to be
irrelevant in regression models is generally a poor idea. But I have been
diligently tracking every single run on my expensive GPS watch for many months
now and I need to justify the countless hours I spent slogging through the
GarminConnect interface and synching my watch with my computer. I don’t expect
to completely validate these efforts by including them in an uninspired and
confusing blog post, but I suppose it is a start, and thus MilesRun is included in the regression model.
Location and the Ecological
Determinism Hypothesis: This variable aims to test whether hip-hop listening habits are
determined by the listener’s environment. Is the genre particularly popular in
urban areas based on the inherent demographics of those residing in such geographical
zones or is it the result of some kind of ecological determinism? I initially
raised this question while walking to class during my year as an undergraduate
in London. In order to avoid any pedestrian interaction, I would always keep my
eyes to the sidewalk and covered my ears with bulky headphones that didn’t have
great fidelity, consistently messed up my hair, but effectively communicated
that I did not have any spare pence or any knowledge concerning the direction of
Picadilly Circus from my current location. And while I usually carried cash
wherever I went, I never did really get my geographical bearings set in Britain and I
probably would point the wrong way if prompted to direct anyone to any landmark
besides the Tate Modern. And that knowledge isn’t all that impressive giving my
dorm was right behind said gallery. Most of the time, these headphones were
connected to my iPod and playing some kind of music, many of which could be
classified as rap songs. My daily school commute took me past an endless
strip of frou-frou sushi bars and boxed-sandwich peddlers, historical
architecture, and other related ornate buildings, and after a few days I realized the
jarring contrasts between the grimy conditions being described by Cormega (who else?
(a question which is obviously rhetorical given that it’s not like he is the
only rapper specializing in gritty crime narratives)) playing on my unwieldy,
hair-crushing headphones and my immediate wealthy, worldly, European
surroundings, and quickly switched to listen to The Kinks. I then began to wonder
whether a significant portion of my rap listening results from my environmental
conditions, and that the disparate relationship of rap listening habits across
rural and urban spaces is a matter of context rather than actual individual musical
tastes. It certainly would make sense given the neighbourhood effect posited by
Kevin Cox in “The Voting Decision in a Spatial Context,” which basically states
that an individual’s voting characteristics can be determined by their spatial
location due to a variety of factors such as social relations among nearby
contemporaries. While this study is unable to pinpoint the exact mechanisms of
such a hypothesis, it will help determine whether such a phenomenon exists at
all. Simply put, can someone’s listening environment affect their inclination
to listen to hip-hop music and their enjoyment from said genre? It may explain why rap music is so popular in inner-cities and why country music is so big in the flyover states.
In order to better illustrate the concept, consider a hypothetical pedestrian listening scenario. Imagine that someone is listening to "The Session" by the Roots, which is subtitled the longest posse cut in history and clocks in at a little less than thirteen minutes (the youtube link cuts off after ten, but you can get a pretty good idea about the track), which is really long by rap standards (In the time it takes you to read this blog post/academic article you could have probably listened to an entire rap album (though this may be more of a condemnation of the superfluous nature of my writing (and its numerous and wholly unnecessary parenthetical statements) than a meaningful statement on the length of rap songs and albums vis-à-vis other genres). Holding all other variables constant, enjoyment of this particular song can be expressed in the following utility graph:
Essentially,
the MC quality is a little top-heavy (Black Thought and Malik B’s verses are
too close together near the beginning), and the beat doesn’t really change much
at all over the course of the track, thus demonstrating diminishing returns
(though it isn’t a bad beat by any means), and these two factors ultimately cause
track enjoyment levels in utils to decline as the track progresses and a negatively-sloped function. As a
result, if this hypothesis holds based on the regression analysis, we can
further posit a rap-utility-smoothing hypothesis. Drawing from Milton
Friedman’s permanent income theory, which stated that individuals normally
desire stable consumption patterns throughout the course of their lifetime, rap
listeners may optimize their utility by “smoothing” their enjoyment of a
particular rap album or song by adjusting their surroundings over the course of
their listening to keep utility from listening constant. For instance,
listeners to a top-heavy album that stacks its best songs near the beginning
(i.e. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic) would be
advised to gradually walk into areas of lower socioeconomic status and more
blight as the album progresses in order to derive maximum enjoyment from the
disc. Meanwhile, listeners to albums with stronger second halves such as Buhloone Mindstate (I really like the
entire album, but it gets particularly excellent once you get to “Ego Trippin’Part 2”) can smooth their utility by walking closer to SIPB establishments (which
I shall explain soon) and schools wholly devoted to economics and investment
banking as the album progresses.
This above
graphic explains what I am talking about with utility smoothing. Using “The
Session,” it is most efficient from a welfare economics perspective to balance
out the declining quality of the song by adjusting one’s surroundings. The
utility function u1 represents an listener’s utility holding all other factors constant while listening to the song.
Meanwhile, u2 shows a constant utility curve which results from gradually
moving from the wealthy confines of Buckingham Palace to the gang-infested
streets of Baltimore populated by Bubbles and friends as the track develops.
The worsening socioeconomic surroundings counteract the effects of the
diminishing track quality to yield constant utility. The triangle labeled "A" can be considered a “frou-frou
quality discount” that decreases track enjoyment while "B" measures the “decrepitude
bonus” which has the opposite effect. It kind of works like the Keynesian
concept of automatic stabilizers when you think about it.
Basically,
if this hypothesis holds, London should have a negative slope coefficient while
Pittsburgh should have a positive slope coefficient. I will be using dummy
variables to represent each city. London
will have a value of 1 if I spent that week in 2011 in London while Pittsburgh will have a value of 1 if I
spent the week in “Hell with the Lid Off.” I unfortunately spent January
through May in London and was in Pittsburgh for most of the remainder of the
year. There were like 2 weeks which I spent at my home in New Jersey, where
both dummy variables will equal zero.
Tesco Sandwiches Consumed:
A few weeks (make that months) ago the government of India, widely regarded as
the messiest democracy in the world, managed to overcome its byzantine
political system to achieve true progress in improving the welfare of its
citizens. Indian officials were able to renege on their decision to allow international retailers and supermarket chains such as Wal-Mart to enter their country. Now if anyone was still reading this post you may be asking yourself
how Indian citizens can benefit from such a development, given that it seems
that Indians will be doomed to patronize disorganized and corrupt small-scale
retailers through the immediate future. That is true. But this restriction
means that Indian society has also managed to temporarily stave off the
invasion of the Tesco supermarket chain, whose sandwiches are a menace
to British society and foreigners studying abroad. Because British citizens are apparently incapable of
independently purchasing bread, meat, and other foodstuffs and assembling such
materials in a fashion that satisfies hunger and avoids indigestion, the
sandwiches-in-plastic boxes (SIPBs) industry is a huge one on the island. In
general SIPBs are adequate at fulfilling sandwich criteria number one and poor
at satisfying the second and perhaps most important condition. However, due to
limited funds and an unfavorable exchange rate, I had to often consume Tesco
sandwiches during my stay in London, much to my chagrin. I predict that this
variable will be positively correlated with rap listens, as Tesco sandwich
consumption is likely to be strongly associated with my personal anger levels,
and I am probably much more likely to listen to rap in such an emotional state. For the
purposes of convenience and scientific accuracy, the variable representing
weekly Tesco sandwiches consumed will be denoted in the regression as ScourgesUponHumanity and will be
expressed in individual sandwich units. Interestingly enough, Tesco’s corporate
performance began to nosedive right around the time I finally decided to
boycott their stores for the rest of my tenure in London. Some analysts claim
that this is primarily due to stretching themselves too far abroad while neglecting the quality of their British stores (no kidding) but I still take
completely responsibility for them not meeting their earnings forecasts.
Temperature: If Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do The Right Thing taught me anything, it was that summer heat levels are highly correlated with instances of property damage to pizzerias from aerial trash can assaults. Additionally, I learned that Public Enemy songs can become very grating when constantly played for two hours. Regardless, the film raises the question that perhaps the high temperatures experienced by Radio Raheem and his chums were a causal factor in not just their launching of rubbish bins but also their propensity to play “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy through (unfortunately) the whole movie. To test this hypothesis, I will add Temperature variable will test whether there is any credence to the notion that rap listening habits are positively correlated with temperature. Temperature will be expressed in degrees Fahrenheit and be the average temperature over a week. From what I remember, London weather was consistently 45 degrees and cloudy from September through May but I know that there was actual temperature variations once I returned to America, meaning this variable might contribute something to the model.
Fun P.E. Fact: Flavor Flav actually tapped in the snares on the legendary cut “Rebel Without a Pause.” While this is an interesting fact by
itself, it raises the possibility that Flav may have actually not have had a
negative net effect on the quality of It
Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, as this feat of drum programming may have been sufficient to counteract horrendous contributions such as "Cold Lampin' with Flavor." However, it is worth
considering the hype man’s S.P.A.R. (snare-programming-above-replacement) score when examining his net contributions to the album. If Flav was unable to perform the
snare tapping then the task would have probably been performed by Hank or Keith
Shocklee, who probably wouldn’t do that bad a job. It is perhaps more likely
that this factual tidbit basically qualifies Flav for a rarely-seen induction
into rap’s equivalent of Club Trillion, for musical contributors who have no net
effect on the quality of the album and would not affect any enjoyment of an
album if they were to have never worked on the disc in the first place. To my knowledge, the only
other artist qualifying for the rap Club Trillion is 5 Ft. Accelerator on Enta Da Stage. One future avenue for
Crossfadermetrics research is surely likely to examine other potential rappers
and producers who qualify for the hallowed Club Trillion pantheon.
Due to a
mixture of laziness, lack of data, and ignorance, these are all the variables I
will incorporate into the model. Thus, we can write the equation for the
regression as follows:
Rappctg= Temperature+London+Pittsburgh+Temperature+ScourgesUponHumanity+MilesRun
And here is
a summary of all the variables I am using:
So now that
we have designed this model and I have collected all of the data, all I have to
do is run the actual regression with Stata. The results are below:
Results: Good gravy. I really forgot a lot
about interpreting regression analysis over the course of writing this paper.
After consulting with some old course materials I had lying around I will try
to do my best.
We can write
the final regression results as follows:
Rappctg= 54.79 + 7.09(Pittsburgh)
–13.76(London) + 0.25(MilesRun) –2.39(ScourgesUponHumanity) - 0.24(Temperature)
The constant
of 54.79 is pretty uninteresting. Basically if I ran 0 miles, currently resided
in somewhere besides London or Pittsburgh, ate 0 Tesco sandwiches, and the
temperature was 0 degrees Fahrenheit, 54.79% of my songs listened to that week
would have been of the rap variety. Given that I don’t really plan on moving to
Siberia anytime soon this doesn’t mean all that much by itself, and actually
Tesco may have already opened some establishments in Russia.
According to
the model, every additional mile I run during the week increases my weekly rap
plays by 0.25 percentage points. I really don’t have any idea of how to
interpret this, as again I only included the variable in the model to serve as
some kind of justification for my diligent mile tally-age over 2011. I guess
this supports my “things that begin with ‘R’” hypothesis. I guess we can't rule out the Gucci Mane theory either, but I think my knees would destroy themselves before I run long enough to find his raps too mentally rigorous.
The
ScourgesUponHumanity variable suggests that for every additional Tesco sandwich
I eat over a given week my rap play percentage decreases by 2.39 percentage
points, which is kind of big I suppose. This conflicts with my prediction that
Tesco-induced anger led me to listen to more rap than normal. The thought of
consuming one extra Tesco sandwich a week is such an abhorrent thought that I
will stop discussing this variable for the sake of my sanity and stomach.
The most
surprising result is the sign of the slope coefficient for temperature. The
coefficient of -0.24 means that I
actually listened to less rap music as the temperature increased, ceteris
paribus. Given that my rubbish bin tosses stayed constant at zero through the
entire year, I suppose we can say that Do
The Right Thing features
more Hollywood embellishments and fantasies than we may have originally
thought.
The
Pittsburgh dummy variable has a positive slope coefficient of 7.09, which
basically means that holding all other factors in the model constant, I listen
to 7.09 percentage points more rap music than in other locations. This offers
support to my environmental determinism hypothesis. While London and Pittsburgh
are both cities (a bit of a stretch for the latter if you include “decent
public transportation” and “free from Kenny Chesney concerts” as criterion for
city status) the environmental determinism hypothesis predicts that I will
listen to more rap music in the rough-and-tough rust belt environs of
Pittsburgh rather than the SIPB-infested streets of Central London.
The next
step after running the regression is clearly to test the correlation between
the variables to make sure there isn’t any multicollinearity. I have forgotten
the exact mechanisms that drive its negative effects, but I do remember
learning that multicollinearity screws up the model in some way and that it
occurs when two variables are highly correlated. The correlation test results
are as follows:
Nothing too glaring here. Pittsburgh and London are apparently pretty strongly negatively correlated, which I suppose is a rather strong vote of confidence for the laws of physics. But it looks like we are safe from the multicollinearity menace.
The
R-squared value of my model is 0.23, which essentially states that my model
explains a little less than a quarter of the observed variation in rap
listening habits over 2011. Not terrible I guess. The R-squared value of my
election model was around 0.52, but that included variables like campaign
spending and party strength which were actually relevant to the dependent
variable.
Looking over
the report for my final project on voting outcomes, I evidently ran some kind
of test for heteroskedasticity at the end. Not being someone who likes to upend
tradition, here are the results from the Breusch-Pagan/Cook-Weisberg test for
heteroskedasticity. I didn’t explain the test or my rationale for running it at
all in my paper, which suggests that I didn’t really have any idea why I ran it
in the first place or what it actually did. I can’t say that any of my classes
this semester taught me about it either (Gas face goes out to you too, Japanese
Detective Fiction professor) but maybe some reader will figure out what it
means.
Conclusion and Policy Prescriptions: So now you are probably saying to
yourself, “Great article,” (well maybe not) “but what was the point of all
this?” (that seems more realistic). Well, these results allow us to draw the
following conclusions and predictions:
Evidently
rap music is more appealing the colder it gets and the worse one’s
socioeconomic surroundings become. Tesco sandwiches appear to decrease the
propensity to listen to rap music, though it should be noted that these results
may not hold for other, more palatable sandwich types, especially non-SIPBs. Running seems to have a slightly positive effect on rap listening habits.
Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul will both continue campaigning for the Republican nomination until the convention in August and Mitt Romney will fall short of the 1,144 delegates required to clinch the nomination. There will be a rancorous brokered convention in Tampa where Buddy Roemer will finally emerge as victorious. This development will not prevent Gail Collins from incessantly referencing Mitt Romney’s trip to Canada with his dog on the roof of the car.The Bank of Japan will pursue expansionary monetary policy in hopes of reinvigorating the yen and their economy.
Tony does
indeed get shot by the guy in the Members Only jacket, but the bullet only
grazes his arm and he lives out the rest of his life in a rather uneventful
fashion. Tragically, he never sees Eric Mangini again.
The model
suggests that Low End Theory is the
superior album to Midnight Marauders,
though both are some of the best rap offerings from the early 90s. The decision
is based on the former’s topical diversity and Busta Rhymes’ verse on “Scenario.”
Unsurprisingly, the field of Crossfadermetrics is still incapable of answering
the age-old question of 3 Feet High and
Rising vs. De La Soul is Dead.
I feel
that this scholarly paper/blog post lays the foundation for future research
into the nascent field of Crossfadermetrics. I invite economics scholars (you
know you want to, Krugman) to further take an analytical and regression-based
approach to hip-hop. .