Metal Bands - Analysis I

Metal Bands - Analysis I: What's in a metal band's name?

Metal bands, since forever, have appeared to follow particularly homogenous themes, esp. when it comes to naming themselves. Metal band names - to my mind - have a tendency to be excessively gory, stark and graphic like Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel or even just Gojira (my favourite, BTW). So what are the most commonly (mis?)used words by metal bands? Do different kinds of metal bands such as death, black etc. elect to follow different motifs in naming themselves? The Encyclopaedia Metallum is a good place to find out. I had previously heard plenty of good things about this site, but it was only when I started to analyse the data within that I realized really how comprehensive this site was. Seriously, if you are a metal fan you absolutely must check this site out.

I start the analysis by attempting to read the genre pages pertaining to heavy, black and death metal. Grabbing the HTML from the webpages using the XML package proved to be of no use as the data was displayed using javascript. I mulled using RSelenium or phantomjs but eventually opted to take the lazy way out by getting the JSON version of the data from this URL. I particularly liked this method because it let me right at the data, without having to deal with the accompanying cruft that comes with scraping the HTML from a website. However if you ever need to scrape data from pages that utilize Javascript, any of the aforementioned packages would be a good way to go.

Once I was done reading the data, I saved these into three separate dataframes - one each for heavy, black and death metal and loaded the required packages. The data comprises of 14,932 heavy metal bands, 26,368 black metal bands, and 36,017 death metal bands.

library(reshape2)
library(ggplot2)
library(gridExtra)

## Loading required package: grid

df1 = read.csv("heavy.csv", header = TRUE)
df2 = read.csv("black.csv", header = TRUE)
df3 = read.csv("death.csv", header = TRUE)

I would obviously want to ignore such words as the, in and so on, so I make a list of stopwords to eliminate before proceeding with the analysis.

myStopwords<-c("a","is", "to", "by", "i", "the", "in", "of", "for", "de", "from", "my", "no", "and", "metal")
pattern <- paste0("\\b(", paste0(myStopwords, collapse="|"), ")\\b")

Next, I take all the heavy metal band names, collapse them into a single row, convert them to lowercase and remove all the stopwords. Then I split them again into rows, each containing a single word, so it becomes easy for me to find the word frequency. Some of these rows contain empty strings so I remove all such rows as shown below. Finally, I use the sort function to get the top 15 commonly used words sorted in the descending order. I repeat the same for black and death metal separately. You can have a look at the words in the output below.

#heavy metal
heavydat<-tolower(paste(df1$Band,collapse=" "))
heavydat1<-gsub(pattern, "", heavydat)
words_heavy <- strsplit(heavydat1, " ")

final.list.heavy <- unlist(words_heavy)
not.blanks <- which(final.list.heavy != "")
final.list.heavy <- final.list.heavy[not.blanks]

dat.heavy<-sort(table(final.list.heavy),decreasing=TRUE)[1:15]
dat.heavy<-melt(dat.heavy)
dat.heavy1 <- transform(dat.heavy, final.list.heavy = reorder(final.list.heavy, value))
p1<-ggplot(dat.heavy1, aes(x = final.list.heavy, y = value,)) + geom_bar(stat="identity", color="cornsilk4", fill="cornsilk4")+coord_flip()

#Now do the same for black metal and death metal.

It almost makes me smile to look at the words thrown up. There also seem to be slight differences in the nomenclature of the bands of the three genres. Heavy Metal bands use somewhat reasonable words like "black", "steel", "fire", "angel", etc.; words that describe typical metal themes. Black Metal bands names have a more ominous tinge - words like "death", "funeral", "winter", "infernal" etc. make an appearance. Death Metal bands clearly take things to an extreme with words like "blood", "hate", "flesh", "decay", "corpse" etc. featuring prominently in their names.

dat.heavy$final.list.heavy

##  [1] black   steel   dark    fire    angel   force   death   iron   
##  [9] hell    wild    project x       evil    white   cross  
## 15 Levels: black steel dark fire angel force death iron hell ... cross

dat.black$final.list.black

##  [1] black     dark      death     blood     darkness  funeral   forest   
##  [8] eternal   infernal  winter    nocturnal lord      throne    moon     
## [15] goat     
## 15 Levels: black dark death blood darkness funeral forest ... goat

dat.death$final.list.death

##  [1] death   dead    blood   dark    hate    black   flesh   dawn   
##  [9] human   decay   chaos   corpse  eternal terror  pain   
## 15 Levels: death dead blood dark hate black flesh dawn human ... pain

grid.arrange(p1,p2,p3, ncol=1)

Many interesting words like "cross", "goat", "terror" etc. show up in the above lists; I would be interested in delving into the bands that named themselves so, if I ever have the time. Most names are in keeping with the spirit of the typical metal scene - despondent and dreary. Indeed I wonder if any metal band ever named themselves after something cheery.. if you know, I would love to hear about it.

Resources:
1. Encyclopaedia Metallum: http://www.metal-archives.com/
2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9249940/scraping-javascript-with-r