How Rap Genius Intends To Profit From Elliot Rodger’s Day Of Retribution
If Rodger himself possessed this level of evil genius he’d be off somewhere scoring.
Rap Genius takes things other people wrote, posts them to their site and then uses SEO to dominate search engine results. They've already received $15 million from David Horowitz’s son and a guy who donated boatloads of money to Mitt Romney in the last presidential election. Every time you click on Rap Genius you’re helping sell black people back into slavery.
Before Elliot Rodger stabbed and shot all those people this past weekend, he typed up a 141-page page memoir, My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger, and had a guy from a bodybuilding website deliver it to the press. It sounds positively disgusting. It’s got stuff about how he’s jealous of his sister — who, as a half-Asian woman, can’t possibly not be attractive — for banging guys while he’s there in the house, probably in the next room furiously masturbating, and the one time in his life he saw a girl naked, despite the fact that at 22 he was old enough to get some glitter on his face, and perhaps most importantly, he had enough money that he didn't just have to sit in a corner somewhere until one of the dancers complained.
I’m assuming that’s what would happen.
As you may have imagined, Rap Genius posted My Twisted World in its entirety, so rap music experts could explain what Rodger really meant when he said that he couldn't get a hot white chick to score with him, so he’s gonna go out and kill people, and also so people would have to click on Rap Genius when they consulted The Google re: Rodger’s manifesto. There was a similar mad rush to post the text from George Sodini’s blog back when he shot up that LA Fitness. Rap Genius either wasn't around back then, or they didn't have the resources to get ahead of that story. That’s why they needed that $15 million: there’s only but so much you can copy and paste from OHHLA.
It used to be, Rap Genius could ensure a high ranking in Google by getting bloggers to post links to, say, the lyrics to new Justin Bieber album, in exchange for a shoutout on Twitter, but Google put the kibosh on that this past Christmas, destroying Rap Genius’ search engine ranking for a period of time, as I personally requested of Jesus. Rap Genius may have actually benefited from the shedload of negative press it received, and that’s their plan now to replace the benefit they received from sketchy SEO — to get their names in the paper, and thus a lot of MSM sites linking back to them, by doing something evil. It might go against Google’s supposed mantra (“Don’t be evil”), but if it worked that time they got caught paying for backlinks it’ll probably work with Elliot Rodger’s Day of Retribution.
And so Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod (pronounced “macabre”) Moghadam spent all day yesterday going through My Twisted World with a fine-tooth comb, annotating all of the creepy, sexual parts. For example, we learn that the one girl Rodger ever saw naked turned into “a spoiled hottie” and attended USC. And Moghadam suspects that Rodger’s sister Georgia is “smokin hot,” probably because she’s half-white and half-Asian and it would be kinda weird if she wasn't. At any rate, she got that guy to have sex with her, as Elliot overheard, which may have been the thing that set him off. Do girls with Asperger’s have a hard time getting guys to have sex with them, and if so where can they be contacted? That might be one of the “sort” features it costs extra to use on OkCupid.
Moghadam also seems to be subtly mocking Elliot Rodger’s prose, in the same way that Rap Genius is used by white kids to mock rappers like Gucci Mane, who don’t have a very strong command of the English language. Some would say that’s the site’s primary purpose. He remarks that the line, “I can recall the first time I said the name on my lips,” which doesn't make any sense (Rodger seems to have mixed his cliches, perhaps in a rush to pop caps in coeds’ shapely asses), is “beautifully written.” Roffle.
Moghadam’s inappropriate My Twisted World annotations seem to be having their intended effect. Rap Genius doesn't turn up on the first page of results of a Google search for Elliot Rodger, but Gawker’s post on Moghadam’s annotations does, which means the annotations themselves are only within one extra keystroke of being on the first page of results for the top story in the news right now. That’s a lot of search engine traffic, albeit indirectly. But Rap Genius’ real bread and butter has always been individual lines within the text. Huffington Post or someone might rank #1 for the document in its entirety, but Rap Genius will dominate results for all of the weird, gross parts about Rodger crying while masturbating to thoughts of his Hollywood director daddy’s girlfriends and his own sister. That’s part of the reason he spent so much time going through the document in the first place.
With this being perhaps the most sensational mass killing to date, if not the most tragic in terms of sheer number of casualties, people will be discussing it on the Internets for a while, and Rap Genius will benefit from many of those search engine queries. This will drive pageviews, which they can then use to demand even more money from their venture capitalist benefactors. I would also show them the part where Moghadam mocks the kid for not being able to speak good English. That’s the kind of thing Mitt Romney jokes about when he thinks he’s not being recorded. Elliot Rodger was in the 47% of prose stylists.
