For a minute there, it looked like the fuckeybergs over at Rap Dummy were facing potentially costly legal action. (Although recent events suggest that there may be some light at the end of the tunnel for them.) My question here is – what took so effin’ long? Considering that massive portions of the Rap Dummy lyric database was cut and pasted from OHHLA, mistakes and all, before being “enhanced” with explanations from music fans and various rappers that they bribe with massive bags of weed to explain their own lyrics, the whole thing is clearly a massive scam created to keep a few super-douchey college brats in Prada jeans.

In case you haven’t been keeping score, not long after the site secured some serious investment dollars, a number of troubling incidents led to the rap internets to question the validity of these potential “cultural carpetbaggers” after screenshots of racist jokes in the chatroom turned up. The resultant fallout led to Mahbod Moghadam attacking several first-generation rap blog gawds such as myself and Dallas Penn (not to mention the time they assumed that DP was a rapper there to annotate his work when he first visited the offices on some Polo Profiling shit). After what can only be described as receiving an absolute sonning on the Combat Jack Show, Mahbod, white Becky and the sugar in his Kool-Aid blog editor basically fell back and an uneasy truce was established. When I was out there in June, Dallas even introduced me to some of them at the Rakim show, although it’s fair to say that whatever they’re trying to sell right now, I’m not buying. The CRC don’t forgive shit.

Regardless of the outcome of this legal action, the official response itself is so full of meaningless hyperbole that it beggars belief.

Sez Rap Dummy Co-Founder Ilan Zechory:

“Rap Genius is so much more than a lyrics site! The lyrics sites the NMPA refers to simply display song lyrics, while Rap Genius has crowdsourced annotations that give context to all the lyrics line by line, and tens of thousands of verified annotations directly from writers and performers. These layers of context and meaning transform a static, flat lyric page into an interactive, vibrant art experience created by a community of volunteer scholars. Furthermore, music is only a small part of what we do. Rap Genius is an interactive encyclopedia for annotation of all texts – anyone can upload and annotate texts relating to music, news, literature, religion, science, their personal lives, or anything else they want.”

One word: fuckouttahere. What kind of herb is uploading Dear Diary entries and annotating those shits?

It’s also revealed that they currently don’t run any advertising over at Dummy HQ, so that $15 milli investment was clearly money well spent. Which reminds me – considering that Twitter was valued at $25 billion last week after it began trading publicly, despite still operating at a loss after seven years, the writing’s on the wall for Twitter fiends such as myself: we’ll soon be paying a few bucks a month for the privilege of using the now omnipresent service, since paid ads and the recently abandoned music service haven’t done the trick so far. Won’t someone think of the poor Russian who runs Metrolyrics? This guy might have to start bootlegging vodka and working identity theft scams again if the National Music Publishers Association have their way.

Clearly the only way forward is to boycott these heaux. While a Google search for, say, “Kool G Rap lyrics” will return Rap Dummy links for the first two hits due to some kind of shady SEO fuckery (so that’s where the money went, huh?), out of general principle I refuse to ever click on their fugazi operation, and will always fux with Lyrics Mania or MetroLyrics. Or, even better, support DJ Flash over at the ad-free Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive, which, it’s worth noting, is not named as part of the fifty copyright-infringing sites. Hey, maybe Rock Genius, Poetry Genius and News Genius will work out a little better, because who doesn’t want to read a news article that’s basically one giant hyperlink? Shut ‘em down!