I was browsing somethingawful.com the other day and came across a thread talking about a site called “Rap Stats.” The site catalogs the lyrics of rap songs down through the ages, and lets you do awesome stats-based analysis like comparing the relative popularity of different words over time. Naturally, the first thing I did was throw three calibers into their search engine and wait patiently for the results . . .
It looks to me that 9mm is the most popular caliber according to rap lyrics, but something interesting happened in the early 1990’s. For a few short years, .380 surged and was actually more popular than .45 ACP for a while. In fact, throughout most of the last 20 years 9mm and .380 popularity seems to be tied to one another — when 9mm becomes more popular, .380 is right there behind it.
But that all stopped in 2010 when .380 tailed off despite while the popularity of 9mm took off. And yet, .45 ACP seems to be holding steady.
My conclusion: rappers prefer capacity over “stopping power” — 9mm rules.