In JosiahParry/geniusR: Easily Access Song Lyrics from Genius.com

genius

genius enables quick and easy download of song lyrics. The intent behind the package is to be able to perform text based analyses on songs in a tidy[text] format. Song lyrics come from Genius (formerly Rap Genius), the most widely accessible platform for lyrics.

The functions in this package enable easy access of individual song lyrics, album tracklists, and lyrics to whole albums.

Individual songs genius_lyrics()

Getting lyrics to a single song is pretty easy. Let's get in our ELEMENT. and checkout DNA.. But first, note that the genius_lyrics() function takes two arguments, artist and song. Be sure to spell the name of the artist and the song correctly, but don't worry about capitalization.

First, let's set up our working environment.

# Load needed libraries
library(genius)
library(dplyr)

genius_lyrics() returns only the barebones. Utilizing dplyr we can also create a new variable with the line number to help in future tidytext analysis. This will be covered in a later vignette / post.

DNA <- genius_lyrics(artist = "Kendrick Lamar", song = "DNA.")
DNA

This function also enables you to get verse level information. This tends to me more popular in hip-hop where songs may have multiple feature artists (thanks to \@natebarr64 for the help!). genius_lyrics() has an argument called info. It defaults to "title". If you provide the argument info = "features" two new columns appear, "verse" and "vocalist".

genius_lyrics(artist = "Kendrick Lamar", song = "DNA.", info = "features")

Albums

More often than not you will want to get the lyrics for an entire album. This is done easily with genius_album(). Just provide the artist and album name.

DAMN <- genius_album(artist = "Kendrick Lamar", album = "DAMN.")

head(DAMN)

Bam. Easy peasy. Now you have a sweet data frame ready for a tidy text analysis!

Multiple albums or songs

Being able to create a dataframe with multiple artists and albums is extremely useful for tidytext analysis. Instead of having to iterate over your data, add_genius() is here to assist you.

Pipe a dataframe with a column for the album artists and album/track information. The argument type is used to indicate if the dataframe contains songs or albums

# Example with 2 different artists and albums
artist_albums <- tribble(
 ~artist, ~album,
 "J. Cole", "KOD",
 "Sampha", "Process"
)


artist_albums %>%
 add_genius(artist, album)


# Example with 2 different artists and songs
artist_songs <- tribble(
 ~artist, ~track,
 "J. Cole", "Motiv8",
 "Andrew Bird", "Anonanimal"
)

artist_songs %>%
 add_genius(artist, track, type = "lyrics")

Tracklists

I often only know an album name and none of the track titles or I only know the position in the tracklist. For this reason, I created a tool to provide an album tracklist. This function, genius_tracklist() takes the arguments artist and album. Simple enough, right?

Let's get the tracklist for the original release of DAMN.. However, real Kendrick fans know that the album was intended to be listened to in chronological and reverse order—as is on the collector's release.

damn_tracks <- genius_tracklist(artist = "Kendrick Lamar", album = "DAMN.")

# Collector's reverse order
damn_tracks %>% 
  arrange(-track_n)

JosiahParry/geniusR documentation built on Nov. 5, 2021, 11:09 a.m.