[ANPPOM-Lista] 15 milhões de dólares para site de letras de rap criado por alunos de yale

[Carlos Palombini]

Yale Graduates Seek a Hip-Hop Degree

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

The creators of Rap Genius, a hip-hop lyrics site, from left, Ilan Zechory,
Tom Lehman and Mahbod Moghadam.
 By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/joshua_brustein/index.html>Published:
November 9, 2012

IT started with confusion over a Cam’ron lyric.

In 2009, Tom Lehman<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/tom_lehman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
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<http://rapgenius.com/>,
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 <http://a16z.com/>, a
well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley with a soft spot for
hip-hop<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/technology/blogger-uses-rap-to-teach-pithy-business-lessons.html?pagewanted=all>,
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.

Mr. Lehman, 28, sports an unkempt Afro of sorts, and seems to wear a
different pair of sunglasses for every conversation. Friends noted a
striking accumulation of skinny jeans in various colors after he received
Mr. Horowitz’s check. Mr. Lehman is also a stickler for punctuation, which
can be torture for someone who runs a crowd-sourced hip-hop Web site.

Mr. Moghadam, 29, favors shirtlessness to show off a muscular upper body,
and speaks in a unique patois that mixes phrases like “we got bottles” and
“pop it for pimp” with graduate-school-level discussions of Orientalism and
religious texts. He can come off as a star-struck fan, bragging about
meeting Gucci Mane or Big Boi one moment, before drifting into hyperbolic
claims about Rap Genius’s future the next.

Mr. Zechory, 28, cuts a more modest figure. He says that his two friends
are playing roles, and marvels at their ability to keep up the act. “I’ve
never seen him break character,” he said of Mr. Moghadam.

Perhaps the site’s biggest claim to fame has been its ability to get
several famous rappers, including Nas and 50 Cent, to explain their own
lyrics on the site. GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan received a tutorial last
month. He came away enthusiastic.

“This is a perfect site for me, because I love talking about hip-hop and
lyrics,” he said. “The way I write is like a puzzle, so most of it can be
broken down and explained in detail.”

But some critics suspect that Rap Genius’s founders are engaged in a sort
of perpetual parody of the music they claim to be rhapsodizing. “There’s a
consciousness about what they’re doing — we call it ‘slumming,’ ” said
Camille Charles, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania
who studies race.

The site has been plagued by other troubles. Many of the song transcripts
are identical — typos and all — to those found on the Original Hip-Hop
Lyrics Archive <http://ohhla.com/>, a Web site that has existed in varying
forms since 1992. And some explanations are cause for eye-rolling.

“It’s frequently incorrect, just straight up wrong, in the transcription
and definitely in the interpretation,” said Adam Mansbach, the author of
“Go the ____ to Sleep,” a profane play on the bedtime storybook.

Mr. Moghadam said that he is aware of how a hip-hop site created by three
Yale graduates might raise suspicions. But he notes that Rap Genius is
designed to weed out wrong answers, using as an example his own faulty
explanation of “Jamaican
clothes<http://rapgenius.com/Camron-family-ties-lyrics>,”
which the site now says refers to “mesh tank tops with a lot of little
holes in them.”

At the same time, Mr. Moghadam’s own actions have given critics plenty to
work with.

When Kool A.D., a rapper from the group Das Racist, referred to Rap Genius
as “white devil sophistry” in a song last year, Mr. Moghadam posted a
response video, in which he raps about the color of Kool A.D.’s skin with a
line that some took as racist. (Mr. Moghadam, who is Persian, insists he
was making a reference to how he thought Kool A.D. looks sickly.)

But the racial questions arose again a few weeks ago when Byron Crawford, a
prominent hip-hop blogger, posted screen grabs from a Rap Genius chat room
that showed users making jokes about slavery.

In response, the founders denounced the jokes as racist, but added that the
site could be not be held accountable for every comment, much like Twitter
can’t be blamed for every offensive tweet. On his own, however, Mr.
Moghadam went further and physically threatened Mr. Crawford in an online
chat and on Twitter.

Mr. Moghadam insists that the beef was largely tongue-in-cheek, and that
the bluster is just part of the pugnacious hip-hop world. “Dissing is their
vocabulary,” he said. “If they’re dissing you, they’re showing you
respect.”

 This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

*Correction: November 13, 2012*

Because of an editing error, a previous version of this article misstated
the first name of a prominent hip-hop blogger. He is Byron Crawford, not
Bryan.
   A version of this article appeared in print on November 11, 2012, on
page ST8 of the New York edition with the headline: Yale Graduates Seek A
Hip-Hop Degree.
 --
carlos palombini
www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011
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