disRESPECT: Rap Genius Mocks Chief Keef

[ED. NOTE:] Rap Genius has since retitled this video “CHIEF KEEF rolls through RAP GENIUS.” Which was the right thing to do. C-section trolls, remember, this issue ain’t about Rap Genius’s legitimacy so much as its foray into the world of PR, where buzz and hits are dollars and cents. Maybe that point wasn’t expressed so clearly. But making fun of Chief Keef (read: beating a dead horse) was a low stoop.

Rap Genius‘s sophistry has reached unprecedented levels. Though the site’s mission to explain rap lyrics is ostensibly admirable and simple, the site has repeatedly disrespected hip-hop culture by offering unequivocal explanations of poetry. These “final” (read: pretentious) explanations limit the meanings of songs and support the fiction that all rap lyrics actually have a meaning in the first place.

Attempting to crack The Meaning of some Chief Keef songs, Rap Genius brought the precocious Chicago native into their offices and asked him to give them some explanations of some of his songs. Rap Genius uploaded a video of the interaction, in which Keith is clearly not comprehending how the site works, taking a page from Media Takeout’s playbook by titling it “Chief Keef Gets TOO HIGH to Explain his Lyrics on Rap Genius.” In the video, surrounded by Rap Genius employees and filmed by the shakiest camera of all time, Chief Keef is presented as an idiot.

The real idiots are the folks at Rap Genius. Being high had nothing to do with Chief Keef’s lack of explanation. Let’s be real: Chief Keef doesn’t give a damn about wordplay. Even if he did, wordplay is only one aspect of hip-hop. Tone, mood, rhythm, cadence, flow and a million other things are just as important as the actual ABCs. By posting this video, Rap Genius tried to cover up the underlying silliness of its mission, but ended up exposing it even further. Rap is more than lyrics and it’s definitely more than ~~geniuses~~ fools attempting to explain it. Chief Keef smokes a lot (a lot of rappers do), but at least he can still function. Whatever the people at Rap Genius are smoking, it’s definitely interfering with their understanding of rap. Sober up, motherfuckers.