So – a while back I did a tidy text analysis on Faith No More lyrics. I had thought about doing this with Metallica album lyrics, as they have had a long career, spanning thier late teens/twenties to their 50’s.
However, I found the process of obtaining lyrics and getting them into shape for analysis too painful, so I chose a band with slightly less output.
Good news though – things have changed with the release of the geniusr package from Josiah Parry (@JosiahParry).
This makes getting song /album lyrics a piece of cake.
With my FNM analysis, I obtained individual tracks, organised them into folders by album, and then went through a lot of manual processing ( the site I obtained the lyrics from concatenated each line into a single string).
This package does away with all that.
Want to get all the lyrics for an album? Use the genius_album function
MOP <- genius_album(artist = "Metallica",
album = "master of puppets",
nested = FALSE)
This returns a 4 column dataframe with the tracknumber, title and lyrics. Each line of the song lyric is one one row of the dataframe, in the perfect format for manipulating further with the tidytext package.
Please continue reading at the source.