Yo, Paste Magazine just released a very interesting infographic, taking a look at how many times each major American city has been repped in the rap game.
Unsurprisingly, New York and Los Angeles take the top spots. But our own hip-hop haven comes in at a paltry sixth, behind Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit.
Really, Detroit? We're calling total shenanigans on this ultra-scientific survey. We did our own snooping on rapgenius.com, and we have to say, we find the results to be unfavorably skewed.
After all, this is Miami. We da best.
So let's get the initial facts straight. By turning to rapgenius.com's handy lyrical search, we're doing exactly what the Paste people admittedly did.
"From the Bay area to Atlanta to every borough in New York, we found the most-mentioned cities in the country," the mag explains. "We didn't count mentions that came in an artists' name or album titles, and we also didn't count city mentions in songs not by rappers."
However, the first red flag comes with a simple lyric search for "Miami."
Paste's official count totals us at 473, but Rap Genius immediately gives us a better score of 485. Hey, what happened to those other 12 songs? You just don't like them?
But we can go even deeper. 'Cause Paste admits to searching for New York City's boroughs in particular, because we all know "Where Brooklyn at" should stand and be counted. But by those rules, we need to do a bit of city searching of our own.
Plug Carol City into that bad boy, and you get 17 songs.
Liberty City - 36
305 - 33
Magic City - 61
Opalocka - 3
Ocean Drive - 17
Collins Avenue - 3
And the big whopper of the bunch is our famous South Beach, coming in with 151 explained mentions alone. Unfortunately, we can't count mentions of the "M-I-A," because the Sri-Lankan/British singer steals all the results.
Tally up the numbers for Miami's above aliases and we get a strong, sexy 806. That alone brings us above Chi's 592, Philly's 627, Detroit's 766. Although, we're still left in fourth, behind Atlanta's crazy 946. Which, by the way, Paste is based in Georgia. Seems they had no trouble searching every pseudonym for the A.
Our true victory comes in the end, when you add up all the "unexplained" song mentions, for all those Miami nicknames, famous boulevards and hollerable hoods. The unfiltered, true reach of our bright and shining city in the sun: 1,599.
Yeah, that puts us right past LA's 1,252, and puts us right in at second place behind NYC, the birthplace of the art form.
Take that you shitty bullshitters! Miami! We da best!
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