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

Seg Nov 19 16:12:56 BRST 2012

Enquanto isso, na Ilha, não temos nem 100 reais pra copiar nossos próprios CDs de funk carioca...

Daniel Cerqueira
http://musica.ufma.br

--- Em seg, 19/11/12, Carlos Palombini <cpalombini em gmail.com> escreveu:

De: Carlos Palombini <cpalombini em gmail.com>
Assunto: [ANPPOM-Lista] 15 milhões de dólares para site de letras de rap criado por alunos de yale
Para: "Pesquisadores em Sonologia (Música)" <sonologia-l em listas.unicamp.br>, anppom-l em iar.unicamp.br
Data: Segunda-feira, 19 de Novembro de 2012, 14:14

Yale Graduates Seek a Hip-Hop DegreeDanny 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 BRUSTEINPublished: November 9, 2012    

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.        
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, 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,” 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, 2012Because
 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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