A couple of years ago, the three of them, Mahbod Moghadam '04, Ilan Zechory '06, and Tom Lehman '06, were sprawled out in an East Village living room, gabbing. Moghadam, on leave from his law firm gig, ostensibly writing a law review article, was explaining lyrics by the rapper Cam'ron to Lehman, a rap newbie. Zechory chimed in. Bit by bit, Moghadam, a lifelong rap enthusiast, broke down the meaning of each lyric, explaining how you can't take a line at face value, waxing eloquent about metaphor and meaning, until Lehman stopped him

That, he told his friends, would make a great website. Then Lehman, a computer programmer working for a hedge fund, ran to his room and started coding. That night, he emerged with a prototype for a site he said would be the ?Wikipedia of rap?: the ultimate resource for hip-hop fans seeking illumination of obscure references in their favorite songs


Everyone proclaimed the idea genius. Moghadam thought he had the perfect name for it, a name that was clear and at the same time very Yale (?Decoding rap is a very Yale thing to do,? he says): Rap Exegesis


?No one is going to tell you immediately that it's a horrible name,? Lehman says now, laughing

Horrible name, perhaps, but as it turns out, a great idea


That was in August 2009. They changed the name to Rap Genius six months later, after one of their editors, Ariel Schellner '06, staged a one-day strike to lobby for rechristening. And the site began to jell. First, the trio put up a few of their favorite songs, with accompanying explanations, and then their friends put up their favorite songs, and so on, until they'd formed a community of like-minded rapophiles. Within a year, they had some 75 editors contributing, about half of them Yalies


Today, Rap Genius has 450 editors, including a number of rappers who comment on their own lyrics. And fans have definitely found the site. From April 2011, when the site first started tracking numbers, it grew sixfold in six months, according to Andrew Lipsman, an !@#^yst at the digital media research firm comScore: it logged 6 million US page views and 1.2 million unique US visitors in October of last year. ?For a start-up, that's nice,? says Lipsman. ?It's a landmark anytime you can break a million unique visitors.? By February of this year, the numbers had increased to 9 million page views and 1.6 million unique visitors

Quitting secure day jobs, following your passion, building the next big thing on the web: the Rap Genius trio's hubris and entrepreneurial zeal may sound like Silicon Valley, but it's also part of hip-hop tradition. Rap spawned a generation of savvy businessfolk, young men and women who took to heart the name and philosophy of the rap clothing line FUBU (For Us, By Us). You didn't have to have great flow and a gift for wordplay to make it in rap. You could produce. Or direct. Or become a star-maker. Or launch a clothing line, or start a record label. Making money became a revolutionary act. As rap producer Damon Dash once said in an interview, ?We've made it cool to be the CEO in the 'hood. We made it cool to be smart.?


Rap Genius takes ?smart cool? to a new level, combining Ivy League textual !@#^ysis, the obsessiveness of hip-hop fans, and Internet crowdsourcing. Let's say you've been dying to show off a little and demonstrate your skills at !@#^yzing Childish Gambino's reference to e.e.###mings in his song ?Freaks and Geeks.? You'd log onto the site, find the transcription of the lyrics, highlight the line in question, and start elucidating. Your words would appear in a text box that pops up when anyone clicks on that lyric. Others can join the conversation, challenging or seconding your $$#ertions. Conversely, if you thought you heard Gambino rapping about e. e.###mings, but you weren't sure, you can go to the site and read the line?along with a contributor's speculation about whether or not the poet would have appreciated having his name used in a crude pun about ejaculation. (Childish Gambino, also known as Donald Glover, one of the stars of NBC's Community, is listed as a Rap Genius editor, though he's yet to contribute anything to the site.)


Still don't understand a lyric? Tweet the artist for clarification. (Many are happy to Tweet back.) The more you contribute to the site, the more you !@#^yze lyrics, the more ?Rap IQ? points you get on the site

The discourse can be mundane and profane, like this note on a line from Nicki Minaj's ?Right By My Side?: ?She saying her [##&*%$] is so good that it's always bringing him back.? Or it can be fairly profound, like this !@#^ysis of Kanye West and Jay-Z's ?^!$$%s in Paris?: ?This song gains some thematic weight from the very real history of African Americans in Paris and the rest of France, dating back to the early nineteenth century. Paris has historically been a place where black artists could go to get the appreciation denied them in their homeland, and escape vicious racism.?


Those looking for further illumination can check out the site's newly added ?Verified Accounts,? where rappers explain their own lyrics in writing or on video. Click on a highlighted passage and an explanation appears in a pop-up, either text or filmed


The rapper Nas, for example, contributed a video to explain a line from his 1994 song ?Represent?: ?Gods I don't believe in/none of that %#@!/your facts are backwards.? When he wrote the song, the Five Percent Nation, a mystical offshoot of the Nation of Islam, was having a moment in the black community?influencing a few major rappers?and some Five Percenters thought Nas was talking about them and their gods. But they had nothing to do with it, Nas explains in the video. The line was about atheism, pure and simple

Questioning and second-guessing a lyric's meaning is part of the fun of rap. ?When it's done well, [rap is] an intellectually stimulating genre,? says editor Schellner, who is now in law school at Harvard. ?No other music form lends itself to such textual !@#^ysis. Once you get into it, you realize how much of a barrier there is to understanding the genre. There's all this complexity going on; you have to be able to understand the words to be able to appreciate it.?


As Jay-Z posited in his memoir Decoded, rap is indeed a coded language. It's an insider's genre, filled with obscure references, region-specific slang, and double entendres. ?Rap comes from young black people,? says Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. ?Because it is a code language and adults don't always understand it, hip-hop is very vulnerable to this very superficial look at it.? Both liberals and conservatives, he says, frequently misunderstand it, sometimes with disastrous results. Witness a correction the Washington Post ran in 2009: ?A Nov. 26 article ? incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.?


?Here's what's brilliant about Rap Genius,? Charnas says. ?It realizes that music is more than just text; it realizes that there's context and subtext. And it puts that context and subtext in hypertext.?

Other high-traffic sites do some of what Rap Genius does. Several sites provide lyrics to popular songs, the largest being MetroLyrics, with 10 million unique visitors a month in the United States. And SongMeanings.net and similar sites provide a way for users to interpret lyrics. But with its focus on interactive community-building, its pop-up videos and its ?Rap Map? outlining rap's historical spots, Rap Genius is unique. Says Charnas, ?I'm not sure there is any competition for these guys, at least on the meta-lyric !@#^ysis level.?


Not everyone is a Rap Genius fan. Last September, the rap group Das Racist released a song called ?Middle of the Cake,? which included a line calling the site ?white devil sophistry,? a dis that delighted Moghadam: if you're part of a feud (or ?beef?) in the rap community, you've arrived. Moghadam, who is Iranian-American, and therefore, as he sees it, incapable of being a white devil sophist, made the most of it on the site, annotating Das Racist's line with the note, ?In fact, the editors of Rap Genius are quite swarthy.? He then uploaded his own video dis of Das Racist. Rapping freestyle?and shirtless?he said, ?You got into Wesleyan / That's in the second-tier club / You're rollin' with your US News thug / My boys at Rap Genius group, we went to Yale / And we ball on y'all.? (Moghadam now admits that he really loves Das Racist and adds that Wesleyan, the alma mater of Das Racist cofounder Himanshu Suri, is a very good school.)


About the shirtless part: Moghadam, Zechory, and Lehman are all avid gym rats. It's part of the Rap Genius shtick. For a while this past summer, the trio were living hunkered down in a three-bedroom apartment in Menlo Park, California, where it was all Rap Genius, all the time. The gym was a regular part of their routine, and they'd go together, because inspiration strikes on the treadmill, too. ?We live together, go to the gym together, everything,? Moghadam says. ?Our girlfriends are getting jealous. We are truly a Rap Genius family.?

?It's just way better and easier to work with people in person,? Lehman says. ?When you're trying to start your own website, it's a pretty messy process. Whether it's putting out fires or brainstorming, you need that face time.?


To facilitate that time, the three founders quit their jobs, having banked enough cash to carry them through for a while. The site doesn't have ads yet, and the trio is vague when asked about business plans. Says Moghadam, ?Facebook didn't start ads for five years; we've been around for less than three years, and I think we'll eventually get bigger than Facebook. So we just chillin' for now!?


Still, they're clearly positioning themselves for the non-chillin' times, and when they do start taking advertising, they'll be able to offer the kind of demographics that advertisers love. Like most music sites, Rap Genius skews young and heavily male. Some 63 percent of its readers are male, the vast majority of the audience is between 12 and 34, and the household income is $75,000 and up, according to comScore

Zechory left a secure job as a Google project manager (he's also a part-time hypnotist) to move to New York with Lehman, and he does concede that one of the reasons was to have access to the big media companies. (Moghadam is commuting between Los Angeles and New York.) ?If you want to sell ads,? he says, ?New York is the place to be. There's all sorts of media action, all sorts of hip-hop activity in New York.?


For its founders, Rap Genius is just one step in their quest for domination of the wiki-space. They want to be the wiki-masters of all text, and have added to their site dissections of Beatles lyrics, the Bill of Rights, and the Bible (seriously). Already, there's a Rap Genius in French, a Rap Genius in German, and a Reggae Genius. In the works: Rap Genius offshoots in Nigeria, Russia, and Kenya, as well as a Spanish and a UK version


?Eventually,? says Moghadam, ?we'll be the biggest site on the Internet. Our goal is to explain text. Text is going the way of the dinosaur?everyone's into video now. I think that's a shame. We marry video and text. This is a way for the video generation to get a close relationship with text.?

Adds Zechory, ?I think [the site] is going to be another pillar of the Internet, like Google, YouTube, Facebook.? So Rap Genius will stay around? Oh yeah, he says. ?This isn't going anywhere."