final-BrentAPearson
Final Project Website
Final Project - Mac Miller Analysis
Brent Pearson
Background
This project will include an analysis of two Mac Miller albums, Faces and Circles, two albums that are sentimentally similar and entirely different. For an in depth explanation of of why I chose to analyze Mac Miller albums, refer to the Meta-Document. To look at my entire R code for this project, refer to the README RMD Document
A final version of my website can be accessed by clicking here
Data
My data was obtained from LyricsOnDemand.com. I was unable to find an api that could scrape this website, so I copied and pasted the words into two separate .txt files, one for each album. The text file for Faces can be found here. The text file for Circles
Data cleaning
For data cleaning, I needed to replace all line breaks with spaces, convert the text to lowercase, remove stop words, punctuation and other words that were skewing my results. One thing that caused problems was removing all punctuation because there was punctuation in most of the curse words to censor them. This produced an abbreviated version of each of the curse words and caused them to not show up in the
Top 10 word frequency
One of the first things you will notice is what i mentioned above, that most of the curse words are abbreviated to fck, sht, or btch. This occurred because each of the curse words included a “*” to sensor the word and it was removed after taking away the punctuation from each sentence. Just based on the most frequent words, you can tell that Faces is more aggressive and Circles is more tamed, which will be a common narrative throughout this project.
FACES
## word freq
## mac mac 76
## feel feel 70
## miller miller 67
## sht sht 47
## life life 43
## tell tell 42
## btch btch 41
## fck fck 40
## know know 36
## faces faces 33
## see see 33
## okay okay 32
## said said 30
## man man 29
## never never 29
## now now 28
## day day 27
## time time 27
## last last 25
## soul soul 25
CIRCLES
## word freq
## know know 38
## hey hey 36
## gotta gotta 21
## time time 19
## good good 17
## keep keep 16
## well well 15
## always always 14
## need need 14
## something something 14
## live live 13
## see see 13
## day day 12
## never never 12
## say say 12
## going going 11
## trip trip 11
## around around 10
## everybody everybody 10
## everybodys everybodys 10
Visualizing the top 10
In order to observe the difference between Mac Millers early and late works, I wanted to look at ten most frequently used words (non-stopwords) in two of his albums. For Millers Faces album, the top ten words included three curse words, his stage name, and other filler words. I think that this shows how he was young, reckless, and was trying to work his way into rap. For Millers Circles album, many of the most frequent words don’t give you a sense of what the album is about, but words like good and well make you think that it is a positive album. However, most of Millers later work was depressing after a few rough relationships and falling into bad drug habits. One examples of this is shown when he says, “Outside it’s cloudy but I like that better (better, better). Behind the wheel, but still ain’t on my way. Some people say they want to live forever. That’s way too long, I’ll just get through today.” (Complicated, Miller). This was shown more in the sentiment analysis of this project.
Word clouds for both albums
FACES 
CIRCLES
Sentiment Analysis
The sentiment analysis included some different words from the word counts, but the top ten words in faces were 50% positive, while the top ten words in circles were 45% positive.
## Joining, by = "word"
## Joining, by = "word"
## [1] "FACES"
## word freq sentiment
## 1 shallow 23 negative
## 2 love 22 positive
## 3 woo 20 positive
## 4 good 19 positive
## 5 dead 18 negative
## 6 top 18 positive
## 7 whoa 16 positive
## 8 die 15 negative
## 9 happy 15 positive
## 10 dust 14 negative
## 11 angel 13 positive
## 12 free 12 positive
## 13 hang 12 negative
## 14 merry 11 positive
## 15 right 11 positive
## 16 fall 10 negative
## 17 hate 10 negative
## 18 weed 10 negative
## 19 damn 9 negative
## 20 lose 9 negative
## [1] "CIRCLES"
## word freq sentiment
## 1 good 17 positive
## 2 well 15 positive
## 3 bad 8 negative
## 4 better 8 positive
## 5 fall 8 negative
## 6 love 8 positive
## 7 shit 7 negative
## 8 break 6 negative
## 9 crazy 5 negative
## 10 die 5 negative
## 11 enough 5 positive
## 12 safe 5 positive
## 13 afraid 4 negative
## 14 complicated 4 negative
## 15 devil 4 negative
## 16 fault 4 negative
## 17 fine 4 positive
## 18 pretty 4 positive
## 19 right 4 positive
## 20 bullshit 3 negative
Discussion/Analysis
It is interesting to see how both albums can have a nearly equal amount of positive and negative words while evoking different feelings. Faces contains words with negative connotation that are used out anger. I mentioned earlier why the curse words weren’t included in the sentiment analysis and could change the results. However, Circles was a sad and depressing album as Mac’s mental condition was declining, which gave some of the words a different negative connotation than Faces. Mac Miller has one of the most unique progressions as an artist, in my opinion. Going from fun loving teenage boy trying to make a name for himself in a tough market to passing away young due to drug overdose. His music group released circles after he had passed and it immediately became one of the saddest albums i have listened to. His remaining discography, not included in this analysis, shows unbelievable progression and these two albums are the most opposite of each other. To summarize, both albums produce negative sentiment values, but they are negative for different reasons, showing the growth/change in Millers writing.