Rap Genius: White Yale Graduates Seek a Hip-Hop Degree
/IT started with confusion over a Cam’ron lyric.
In 2009, Tom Lehman, a computer programmer, was puzzled by the line, “80 holes in your shirt: there, your own Jamaican clothes” in the rap song “Family Ties.” What were “Jamaican clothes,” he wondered?
A friend from Yale, Mahbod Moghadam, guessed that the lyric referred to the tattered clothing worn by impoverished Jamaicans. That turned out not to be true, but it was enough to inspire Mr. Lehman to build Rap Genius, a Web site that seeks to decipher every lyric in hip-hop.
While rap lyric sites are not new, Rap Genius distinguished itself by adding a Wikipedia-esque twist, allowing anyone to annotate lyrics with words, photos and videos. More than 250,000 people have submitted explanations to date, with contributions vetted by 500 editors, many of them high school or college students.
The result is a mélange of decoded slang, interpretations of varying plausibility and dorky jokes that has struck a chord. The site draws two million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, an independent analytics firm, and last month Ben Horowitz, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley with a soft spot for hip-hop, announced he was investing $15 million in the site.
But the project has also been dogged by awkward questions about race and authenticity, including a recent dispute over conversations in a chat room that some call racist. Not helping matters is the sometimes-outlandish behavior of its three founders, Mr. Lehman, Mr. Moghadam and a third buddy from Yale, Ilan Zechory.
Rap Genius is run out of two penthouse apartments in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the founders seem to fancy themselves as hip-hop personalities in their own right. NYTimes
