Have you ever wondered what it meant to do like a toaster put your bread down, or what Bone ThugsnHarmony is even saying half the time? Have you then questioned why a serious scholar such as yourself would waste time Googling hiphop lyrics instead of reviewing your conference notes? A visit to RapGenius.com might just convince you that its okay to pursue a love of gangsta rap along with an advanced degree at a prestigious institution. In fact, the two interests may even go together like models and bottles Dont tell Harold Bloom, but the lyrical feats of rappers like Raekwon have proven eminently worthy of literary analysis. A successful career in hiphop requires more than an affinity for girls, cash, and cars. Rappers must employ a sharp wit, an acute sense of rhythm, and a highly developed allusive structure. Lil Waynes enigmatic Who dat one dat do dat boy? has left many a listener rhythmically entranced but utterly unsure of the question, much less the answer. And Camrons But la de da de We like to party sounds achingly familiarbut is that elusive allusion just an illusion? RapGenius.com formerly, with a nominal nod to biblical hermeneutics, RapExegesis.com delves into the most opaque of raps lyrical mysteries. The extensive index of annotated songs, while not quite comprising a critical edition to the complete works of rap, is likely to alleviate any itching textual anxieties youll need no longer fret about the origins of that Cam reference. And unlike an unwieldy multivolume Pliade, the site isnt just for devotees nor will it cost you half your stipend. Offering everything from the iconic JayZ to the more obscure Southern group The Clipse, RapGenius invites curious converts without preaching to the choir, guiding neophyte and initiate alike through the semiotic labyrinth of rap. Just click on the hyperlinked text to reveal instant enlightenment behind Beef I hammer mine When I get my hands on nines lies A double entendre a butcher hammers ground beef Camron settles beef disagreements with his hammer his in this case nine millimeter gun. If only reading Milton worked like this Sites like RapGenius have, however, sparked some controversy. If rap lyrics need to be somehow translated, the contributors to these sites often white and highly educated can be seen as amateur ethnographers without their expertise in the language of the natives, rap would be unintelligible gibberish. Such criticism, recalling the notorious Ebonics debates of the 90s, has surely not escaped the RapGenius scribes. But the assiduousness of the sites annotations suggests that they take the language of rap, and all its aesthetic, ethical, and political implications, seriously. The genre may in some respects deserve its bad rap as a promoter of violence and misogyny, but RapGenius often succeeds in showing how good rap problematizes the power relations between blacks and whites, men and women, rich and poor. Feminist rap fans and anyone in Gender Womens Studies will appreciate, if not endorse, an analysis of a Lil Kim track in which she exhorts a male listener to perform a sexual act anatomically impossible within the prevailing gender paradigm. And if one aspect of the oftoffrhymed connection between the rap game and the crack game is that both rappers and drug dealers get rich selling powerful substances with little concern for how their customers inevitably abuse their overvalued products, we can conclude that Nas doesnt care if you are effectively Otherizing his language he drives a much, much nicer car than you Yet RapGenius will likely remain deeply problematic for graduate students, even those who can in good faith suspend sociological skepticism not only does it provide yet another internet distraction from coursework and research, it does so while posing as a quasiintellectual exercise. So what if you spent the last hour trying to achieve a grasp on par with Lil Waynes of the exact relationship between a goon and a goblin at least you werent looking at LOLcats. Come to think of it, those pidgin captions would make for a compelling case study of the internets impact on languageLOLcatechism.com, anyone?
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