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Italian website waxes lyrical over Jay-Z

American rapper Jay-Z may have 99 problems but vocabulary sure ain't one of them.

Published: 24 July 2015 15:46 CEST
Updated: 24 July 2015 17:46 CEST

Italian website waxes lyrical over Jay-Z

Talented wordsmith Jay-Z. Photo:Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Live Nation/AFP

Italian website Musixmatch – calling itself “the world's largest lyrics catalogue” – has hailed rappers Eminem and Jay-Z as the craftiest wordsmiths among music's top sellers.

According to the site, the rappers use the most unique words in their tunes, beating out master lyricists like Bob Dylan.

Researchers Varun Jewalikar and Nash Vail studied the lyrics of 93 chart-topping musicians encompassing 25 different musical genres including hip-hop, hard rock, country and reggae.

The company has access to more than seven million songs in more than 48 languages, so Jewalikar and Vail had a rich musical bank to work from.

Because many of the artists had careers that spanned decades – and the song catalogue to prove it – the two researchers chose the 100 “densest” songs of each artist.

The big winner was Eminem, who used 8,818 unique words in his 100 densest songs, compared to the general average of 2,677.

The Detroit rapper of “Lose Yourself” and “Sing for the Moment” fame also wins for most words used in one song on average — with a staggering 1,018 words.

Behind Eminem was “Empire of State of Mind” writer Jay-Z, using just under 7,000 words in his songs. Late lyrical rapper Tupac Shakur came in third with 6,569 words.

Bob Dylan, with 4,883 words, came in fifth after Kanye West who scored 5,069.

Some top-sellers such as Bruce Springsteen, Chicago and Def Leppard were left out because Musixmatch is not authorised to use their lyrics.

More words doesn't equal more success, though. Artists who sold the most albums, like the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson had some of the lowest scores of unique words.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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