A Data Story
By: Alex Y Luo
Tags: Timeline, Brockhampton, Data Visualization, Data Science, Word Cloud

A Data Story

Brockhampton, from Saturation to Ginger

Exposition

HEAT is the opening track on Brockhampton’s debut studio album, Saturation. It starts with a backdrop of strangely tranquil droning screams, hits five disgusting industrial drumbeats, then drops into a immensely dense bass synth under the first Brockhampton lyrics I ever heard, in Ameer Vann’s grungy timbre: “I got pipe dreams of crack rocks and stripper poles.”

By the end of the song I was fully aware that I had never quite heard anything like Brockhampton, and by the end of Saturation I was a full convert. As a snooty “album person,” I was incredibly appreciative of the cohesion and consistent quality of every track. Brockhampton manages to strike an intoxicating balance of catchy and experimental sounds, and all members, both the vocalists and the producers, bring diverse charisma and energy to the scene.

Within just 2 months of their debut album release, Brockhampton dropped Saturation II, and I found it just as insanely good. By the time Saturation III, the final installment of the trilogy is announced, less than 6 months after the first Saturation was released, I was in deep — pre-ordering the album and raving to everyone I knew about this fantastic boyband without a single bad song and a truly unique sound. I wasn’t the only one, because Saturation III peaked at #11 on the Billboard charts, and Brockhampton quickly became a household name (at least within Gen Z), their meteoric indie uprising an underdog story for the ages. Brockhampton literally saturated the music market in an unprecedented way to accumulate the success and momentum that they did. It really seemed like it could only go up for them, and it all started with Ameer’s opening lines.

I got pipe dreams of crack rocks and stripper poles —Ameer Vann, “HEAT”

However, in a devastating reversal, serious allegations were raised against Ameer regarding a past of sexual misconduct. Brockhampton ended their victory tour midway through, cancelled their upcoming album, and announced Ameer’s departure from the group.

Abuse is serious, and this is no exception. I haven’t even gotten to the part of this post where it’s a data story, but I want to acknowledge the severity and complexity of these circumstances. There is nothing that can be done to fully rectify the harm Ameer leveled against the women in question, and removing him from the group wasn’t just unavoidable but honestly just the right thing to do. He is in no way a victim for being kicked out, other than perhaps a victim to the ramifications of his own actions.

Without diminishing the severity of abuse, we can still acknowledge that Brockhampton is a group of best friends, and it was certainly impossibly difficult for them to go through with removing Ameer. On the last performance before they cut their tour short, the only performance without Ameer, they left the gaps where his verse would have been and sorta just mulled around and cried. So with Ameer’s ejection at the peak of their success, the boys found themselves disoriented not just emotionally, but also musically.

not everyone is here, but Ameer was standing so conveniently off to the side I thought it would be the perfect photo to display a metaphorical rift via photo tearage

I’ve obviously focused a lot on Ameer so far, but I don’t want it to sound like he was the sole star of the group. This is an ensemble cast of 7 vocalists, 3 producers, and 4 more members operating in a purely managerial fashion. Most people understand Kevin Abstract to be the leader of the group, with his catchy hooks and rhymes and his authoritative social media presence. Merlyn has an infectious energy and unique voice, Matt Champion is stupidly suave with his words, and who could forget bearface, who takes over tracks with his heartfelt ballads. My personal favorites are Dom McLennon, with his poetic and personal flows, and Joba, with his ability to sing a gorgeous falsetto bridge and then turn around to rip a rap verse to shreds. And producers always always always need more credit, so for Romil, Jabari, and Kiko: chef’s kiss. This part wasn’t originally gonna be so long but I feel wrong not giving everyone credit because they are all so very lovely.

But with all this diversity in Brockhampton, it definitely was Ameer who charismatically grounded their sound in familiar touchstones of gangster rap and grime. It was his particular brand of energy and lyricism that set the tone for the series— every cover of the Saturation albums is a picture of Ameer. Without Ameer, Brockhampton was forced to completely recalibrate their sonic aesthetic, and they did so while thematically exploring what Ameer’s departure meant to them emotionally.

Popularity, tone, style, content; Sharmi, my Data Science partner, and I wanted to see if we could more numerically quantify the dramatic shift that took place following Ameer’s scandal. The following visualizations paint a portrait of the differences every Brockhampton fan certainly felt through following their journey and music, but with a data-driven perspective we hoped to provide as Data Science majors. It ended up being a great excuse for us to explore various data visualization methods and listen to great music while doing so. We used a variety of tools, from interactive Javascript Highcharts to online word clouds, python plotting to Watson’s Sentiment Analysis API, words scrapers and trend data, all tied together through Figma storyboarding.

Brockhampton Data Story

For the purposes of this analysis, we divided Brockhampton’s lifespan thus far into two eras: Saturation Era and Recovery Era. The former spans their first 3 albums, all entitled Saturation, and the latter is a term we conjured to represent their recent two albums, Iridescence and Ginger, that chronicle their recovery in the aftermath of Ameer’s departure. The data story we endeavor to tell primarily compares Brockhampton during Saturation with Brockhampton through Recovery, using a combination of trend data, lyrical breakdowns, and sentiment analysis.

Timeline

We decided to quantify Brockhampton’s “popularity”—or perhaps more aptly their presence in the zeitgeist—using google trend data. The following chart is a timeline of their album releases relative to the Ameer incident, tracked with how often “brockhampton” comes up as a Google search term.

a gif of the interactive timeline painstakingly made in highcharts, not realizing that medium does not support highcharts interactivity

Lining up these milestones with the trend data, we can see how seminal Brockhampton moments pair temporally with substantial upticks in their search quantity. With each Saturation album they generated more hype, culminating in a devastating trend spike that can only be attributed to Ameer’s scandal. While their following album releases did not command that level of mainstream attention, they both approximated the success of Saturation III.

Lyrical Distribution

Brockhampton is a group with 7 (8 with Ameer) vocalists, so it’s natural that some voices would be more at the forefront. In the Saturation Era, Ameer was highly impactful, with the second most among lyrical contributions. He was tied with Dom McLennon at 18%, only trailing behind Kevin at 30%, whose frequent presence on the hooks explains why he took such a sizable lead. Brockhampton relied heavily on Ameer’s anecdotes and bars to fill out verses of most of the songs, placing him pretty clearly as one of the frontmen of the group in the Saturation albums.

Without Ameer, the other members naturally stepped up. Besides Kevin and Dom, who both already had the most lyrics during Saturation, every member took a more involved role. Merlyn had a 5% jump, and Matt Champion especially delivered plenty more bars, going from 13% to 21% and filling a decent amount of the void left behind. Bearface, whose presence during the Saturation Trilogy was characterized only by the occasional (heart-wrenchingly beautiful) ballad, jumped up to a whole 12%, a leap facilitated by his decision to start rapping during Recovery. As it happens, Brockhampton ended up with much more evenly distributed mic sharing in their recent albums, perhaps a combination of Ameer’s absence and their increased collective comfort.

Lyrical Content

How would we characterize the stylistic shift that occurred between the two eras? By examining the word choice and its associated frequency, it becomes surprisingly clear how sharply the tone changed when Ameer left. Ameer’s aesthetic contribution to Brockhampton could be characterized as being descended from a more traditional gangster rap sound, rooted in real life experience spent trapping. His stylish charisma quite influentially informed how the rest of the group sounded alongside him, pulling their diverse lineup towards a grimier vibe. One indicator of this phenomenon can be seen below in the notably higher prevalence of profanity during Saturation.

For “love” to so aggressively be the dominant word in Recovery almost seems too perfect, and that is because it sort of is. In the refrain from “Love Me For Life” off of Ginger, bearface says “love” 21 times, heavily contributing towards the strong weight of love in the post-Ameer era. But this is not to diminish the content shift that certainly took place, as evidence of Brockhampton’s remaining members grappling with more sensitive subject matter in the wake of the schism is still clear.

In times like these, I just need to believe it’s all part of a plan — Joba, “NO HALO”

A common thematic thread was turning toward religion, as evidenced by the appearance of “God” as a relevant term in during the Recovery Era. On “No Halo”, Joba admits that the recent turbulent experiences make him both challenge and seek solace in religion. Other terms that were not prevalent in the Saturation albums include “Know” and “Thank”. which may not seem like all that much even taken together, but anyone who has followed the developments in their discography would not be surprised at the stark contrast in word choice between the two phases.

Emotional Breakdown

Brockhampton certainly did not keep to themselves how emotionally taxing the decision to remove Ameer from the group was, and much of the Recovery Era is spent navigating the emotional turmoil of their literal recovery. With lyrical proportions and content already independently analyzed, we wanted to see if IBM’s Watson AI could key in on any emotional shift that took place. We plotted the lyrics of each album on the API’s sentiment analysis of 5 different emotions, as well as an overall sentiment score. Ultimately, each album was generally grouped in the same place, except for the features joy and fear.

To cover fear quickly, Saturation III was a high outlier, which is not something we expected and made us reconsider the themes and word choice presented in the album. There is a degree to which the members are catching a stride and sharing more personal anecdotes and insecurities, but they do so on every album, so it’s not completely clear why Watson so clearly discerned fear in Saturation III. The API is very much a black box in function, but we have enough faith in its efficacy to believe that the album is not being singled out for no reason. Perhaps a relistening is in order?

More notable is the clear divide in the Joy metric between the Saturation and Recovery Eras, with the latter being characterized as distinctly more joyful. Now anyone who has listened to the Iridescence and Ginger, especially Ginger, might see it as mournful given the circumstances of Ameer’s departure, frequently aggressive—but joy probably wouldn’t be the primary vocab word. However, those negative emotions aren’t specific to those two albums, since the Saturation albums are densely saturated with angst as well.

But joy is where the differential is occurring, and Sharmi and I go as far as theorizing that the Watson API may loosely be picking up on a much more specific emotion: hope. Brockhampton has been operating on an approximately equivalent sadness/negative emotion level through their entire discography, but the key narrative in the Recovery era is that they go on to describe their desire to move past their struggles and grow together.

Dirt on me, I’m finna blossom — Merlyn Wood, “LOVE ME FOR LIFE”

Ameer’s scandal devastated Brockhampton, even as far as being characterized as a betrayal. But even with this many albums out, their releases have been incredibly dense, and they are still very early in their career. These are growing pains, and it is clear that between their continued popularity, stylistic reinvention, and burgeoning Watson-recognized joy, Brockhampton is going to be alright.