“Sitting on the world, I got life in my hand. So these days I try to think twice when I can.” So begins the first verse of
President Carter, a rap track from Lil Wayne’s leaked
Tha Carter IV album.
If you’re anything like you me, you may have missed the rapper’s allusion to the gospel song He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, or skipped over the reference to his prison time. Never fear. Forty thousand rap fans have got you covered.
Rap Genius, a startup from co-founders Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory and Mahbod Moghadam (who also created the Rap Map), is akin to a hipper, rap song-focused Wikipedia. Members build up “RapIQ” as they add meanings to lines, editors review additions for accuracy and anyone can feel like a rap lyric-deciphering prodigy.
The site made a quiet debut back in 2009. Rap Genius was never intended to be the intelligent and elegant answer to the vapid and hideous sites most people happen upon when scouring the web for the lyrics to their favorite tracks. Instead, the site — then called Rap Exegesis — was just intended as a way for the guys to share rap lyric meanings with friends.
Friends told friends, visitors started leaving comments and the founders started opening the site to allow for community contribution. The name was wisely changed and the site began to take on a life of its own.
Two years later, Rap Genius is a lyrics community where more than 40,000 users compete for street cred and onsite glory by most-accurately unpacking the lyrics in more than 250,000 songs. The site has snowballed in popularity, amassing more than 3 million unique visitors in June. Now, the founders are looking to turn Rap Genius into a business — without resorting to ads.
“How do we turn this thing into a cultural phenomena — as the go-to place when you’re looking up a song?,” says Zechory. “We want to be the center for songs.”
Rappers have been known to participate via artist pages, others choose to use aliases instead. The founders see Rap Genius’ future potential as a platform for artists, where they can sell concert tickets, interact with fans and give freebies to those who have become the biggest disciples of their lyrics.
“People are obsessed with music and with lyrics,” Lehman says of the site’s potential. “Lyrics are how people like to interact with music.”
Image courtesy of Flickr, Carnoodles
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