Cyrus Langhorne
Moving Monday. It's all about moving forward, so why not get things going with Miley Cyrus twerking herself back to good health? Speaking of good things, could the Wu-Tang Clan have an edge on Shakespeare? With intriguing thoughts still running through your head, are we going to see the mightly cassette tape's comeback? All this coming up in SOHH Whatcha Think.
[Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect those of SOHH]
1. Miley’s Return
She might not be the one who really started the twerking movement but just like auto-tune and T-Pain, Miley Cyrus is always going to be known as the captain of twerking. So it’s no surprise after feeling ill as of late, she would resort to the one remedy sure to get everyone going. Twerking. RumorFix is on it:
Let’s face it you have to be fit and healthy to be a great twerker.
And Miley Cyrus, 21, proved that she is well on the road to recovery when she posted some images and video on her Instagram Sunday of her doing the infamous dance.
The star, who cancelled several dates on her Bangerz Tour, was hospitalized recently after an allergic reaction to flu medication, but she seems to have made a full recovery.
The “We Can’t Stop” singer bust her moves with a brunette pal and seemed to be in great spirits.
She wrote to her fans: “#imbackmaf***a”She also posted some artsy-looking selfies as Miley smoked from what looked like a rolled up cigarette.
The young star cryptically wrote: “What is the light? That you have shining all around you? Is it chemically derived? Looking into to space, it surrounds you. Love is the place that you’re drawn to.”
The “Wrecking Ball” performer will take the stage in London Tuesday night for the first time since she went to hospital. (RumorFix)
Can you knock Miley for going to the one thing she’s known how to do for a while? #SOHHWhatchaThink?
2. Protect Ya Words
Do the Wu-Tang Clan and William Shakespeare have a lot more in common than we think? That appears to be the case, at least to one person who decided to come up with the “Largest Vocabulary In Hip Hop” and it’s a pretty serious read. Matt Daniels has the rundown:
Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.
I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
35,000 words covers 3-5 studio albums and EPs. I included mixtapes if the artist was just short of the 35,000 words. Quite a few rappers don’t have enough official material to be included (e.g., Biggie, Kendrick Lamar). As a benchmark, I included data points for Shakespeare and Herman Melville, using the same approach (35,000 words across several plays for Shakespeare, first 35,000 of Moby Dick).
I used a research methodology called token analysis to determine each artist’s vocabulary. Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words. To avoid issues with apostrophes (e.g., pimpin’ vs. pimpin), they’re removed from the dataset. It still isn’t perfect. Hip hop is full of slang that is hard to transcribe (e.g., shorty vs. shawty), compound words (e.g., king shit), featured vocalists, and repetitive choruses.
…
Wu-Tang Clan at #6 is fucking impressive given that 10 members, with vastly different styles, are equally contributing lyrics. Add the fact that GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, and Method Man’s solo works are also in the top 20 – notably, GZA at #2. Perhaps their countless hours of studio time together (and RZA’s mentorship) exposed each rapper’s vocabulary to one another. (Mat Daniels)
This isn’t really doing Daniels much justice, so make sure to go and take a look at his page. He has a ton of pretty cool data including a breakdown of each Wu-Tang Clan member’s words over their first five albums. Great stuff. #SOHHWhatchaThink?
3. Tape It Up
Just when you thought cassette tapes were over and done with, there’s buzz about them making a pretty serious comeback? How? Via storage? Pretty crazy stuff. Forbes has the rundown:
Vinyl is making a comeback, but for all intents and purposes the reign of cassette tapes is long since over, right? Perhaps not, if Sony has anything to say about it. At today’s International Magnetics Conference (Intermag) in Europe, the company is presenting a method of data storage utilizing magnetic tape which is capable of holding a whopping 148GB per inch.
I have fond memories of walking to my local Wherehouse, stocking up on Maxell XLII-S blank cassette tapes (back me up 80′s kids, these were vastly superior to Memorex), and settling in for a weekend of crafting the most glorious mixtapes imaginable. Sony’s new breakthrough in storage capacity would mean one insanely comprehensive mixtape.
Back in 2012, a collaboration between FujiFilm and IBM IBM -0.06% resulted in prototype cassettes which could hold 35TB of data, and at the time that was considered a monumental accomplishment. Sony’s new method means you could cram 185TB onto a single cassette tape. The average Blu-Ray disc holds 50GB and a standard PC hard drive 1TB. (Forbes)
So the thoughts of cassette tapes and music might be long gone, but the idea of using them for storage is pretty amazing. Could the magnetic tape make cassette tapes have another life? #SOHHWhatchaThink?
That about wraps it up for today. This is SOHH On The Spot giving you the morning scoop from your favorite gossip sites.
This young Ellen is making money hand over fist.