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It comes across inappropriate and immature. Regardless of the content, a VC in his mid forties shouldn't be quoting rap lyrics at the head of business articles. I can't imagine having a conversation with this guy about business where he casually offers a quote about douchebags and assholes from Kanye West to explain something.

Kanye belongs on your iPod, not in your Forbes opinion piece.

What about rap music do you have an objection to?

(I ask, very specifically, because you said "rap lyrics" and not, e.g., "music with immature lyrics".)

The latter is pointlessly verbose. This is discussion, not ad copy that has to be PC.

Seriously? You're turning this into a juvenile 'my music is better than yours' argument? This is no reason to assume the OP has a specific beef with rap, just that it doesn't belong in a business article, which is true. Reading comprehension also means deriving assumptions from the context and looking for interpretations of what is said that fit within that context.

What is it about rap music that makes it unsuitable for a business article? How many other areas of society do you wall off as inappropriate to learn from when it comes to business?

OK fine, if you're going to push it...

The point is that in order to be credible to a wide audience, as this article was intended, you need to convey the correct 'tone' so to say. This a part of what is called in classical dialectic the 'ethos' of an argument. (to pre-empt, no, just 'logos' is not enough, and neither should it be - but that's a different argument).

So, in order to build up 'ethos', one needs to present oneself as a mature, mainstream person in the context of the subject under discussion. (yes, some people make a career out of breaking out of this, in order to appeal to a niche audience; see e.g. that ruby webserver blogger guy that gets linked here quite a lot, but that's not what the author in the article does or should be try to do, as far as I can tell).

Like it or not, rap and hip hop music are not mainstream to the traditional Forbes crowd. Partly because (most) rap artists build their careers on their anti-mainstream views, violent and promiscuous images, and cater specifically to an audience who finds one of the draws to the music in that anti-mainstream aspect of it.

So that's what makes it inappropriate in this context. For this author, in this context, to convey his message to as large an audience as possible, he should stick to 'accepted' style figures. And rap lyrics aren't part of that. It was a gamble I guess, and he lost, imo.

(Just to pre-empt another 'hey look at this country boy hating black music!', I bought hip hop LP's (yes, LP's) before Cypress Hill had put out 'Black Sunday' and mixed them on my sl 1200's when many of the readers here were still in diapers. I bought The Chronic a few days after it came out and once hitch hiked 400 kilometers to go to a concert of what was at the time the only crew rapping in Dutch. I'm no stranger to hip hop and rap, and yes I realize that people like Jay-Z have build big businesses on it. Still doesn't make the quote in this article appropriate.)

Oh please. Do you really believe this?

The quote is directly relevant to the piece. It fits completely within the context of the article (personality vs. success).

I don't think something should be disallowed, just because it falls out of your narrow sphere of what's directly permissible.

I wouldn't say it is not allowed, just that it is distracting and takes away from the article. I didn't find it relevant or poignant enough to overcome the initial shock. I skimmed the article afterward but the only thing I took away from it was how jarring the intro was. I'm not just being prude, in a different context the lyrics wouldn't bother me.

Of course, I'm not the arbiter of social conventions but many times you ignore them at your own peril.

As an aside, if you are well known for breaking certain social conventions or are influential enough you can usually get away with it without much criticism. Nobody is going to scold Steve Jobs because he wears a black turtleneck to a board meeting instead of a suit.

Shock?

> Kanye belongs on your iPod

Certainly not mine. ;-)

> not in your Forbes opinion piece

It's an opinion. His opinion. And he's free to use whatever quotes he wants. The worst that can happen is that it shoos away those who cannot deal with something they don't like and cannot read the article past the part they don't like.

The rest of the article is pretty interesting (and I have met people who fit in all 3 examples).

In the lyrics, the hard-worker is the person singing the lyrics. He's saying he's a jerk for not taking time off to spend time with the girl.

So really he is the smart jerk who is trying to tell someone to stay away because he is a jerk and will just criticize her, although he really doesn't like who he becomes, but that's his gift.

He ends it with toasts to himself (and people like him). While he's toasting them, he clearly doesn't like himself.

"In the lyrics, the hard-worker is the person singing the lyrics."

I just don't get that at all from the snippet quoted, but I can imagine how the larger context of the song might flip the meaning of things around - but I don't know the rest of the song and was going only based on the words in the article with no way of knowing how those words were performed. :)

I suppose the use of "toast" could be a clue that he actually means some kind of respect, but then why respect "douchebags" and "assholes" etc? So my reading put large quotes around "toast" in the way you might "toast" someone sarcastically who just made a giant mistake or something.

If the greater context of the song established that the voice was being sort of facetious here, then I can see how my interpretation could be almost exactly backward - but again, without some grander context, I really feel I had no way to know that if that is indeed the case.

Side note: Over the years I've noticed that either, A) I just suck at interpreting song lyrics, or B) song lyrics are often purposely designed to be ambiguous. I suspect some of both is at work here. :)

The grander context is that this song was performed by Kanye at last year's VMAs. Both he and Taylor Swift did a song in response to the event that happened two years ago, where Kanye took Taylor's award.

The basic concept of the song is I'm a jerk, don't know why, but stay away from me because I'll be a jerk to you. The title of the song is Runaway -- the girl should be a runaway from Kanye.

Well, I've not heard the song - but I think main voice is making a comparison between being an anally-retentive, controlling jerk and being a successful achiever.

The main point being; if you like the latter - you put up with (or celebrate) the former.

I can't see any reference to underachieving in the lyrics - I think you might be projecting some personal assumptions.

The main speaker is most definitely talking about being a high-achiever.

"I can't see any reference to underachieving in the lyrics"

This is what I see as a kind of reference to under-achieving by calling out and insulting people who work harder: "Let’s have a toast for the jerkoffs / That’ll never take work off." It seems to me that the voice is therefore showing contempt for over-achievers and, by taking the rest of the lyrics into account and the fact that I've met a lot of people who despise fellow employees that work harder than they do, I leap to the assumption that the voice himself must be like one of those under achieving dicks.

"The main speaker is most definitely talking about being a high-achiever."

Others have said similar. I think the voice thinks he's "all that," but in my opinion someone who feels a need to say things like this are decidedly not and therefore I don't agree that the voice is actually a high-achiever. It seems more like the speaker in the song is trying to justify his bad attitude by just declaring that he's the smartest/best person in the room and everyone else are idiots (as if by virtue of him saying that, it makes it true - because after all, he's so damn much better than everyone else!) - but that is not the mark of a truly intelligent person, IMO, and that's probably why I interpret the speaker as just being a dick. If he tried harder, tried to teach and support and didn't attempt to chase the girl away, he could be the smartest guy in the room. Instead, he just chases people away to make room for his ego.

Anyway, you could be totally right. I'm just trying to clarify where I was coming from. I would posit that in the case of interpreting art, there's no one truly "right" answer anyway, so it doesn't really matter - and maybe that's the point. :)

Ignoring the larger article, I got the impression that he was just listing the sort of people that a woman wouldn't want to be in a relationship with in general: Assholes, douchebags, scumbags, people that always put work ahead of their loved ones, and the sort of person who constantly finds fault with you and belittles you.

Considering that West himself has a reputation for endless work on his projects, I stand by that interpretation.

Really now? NO ONE is going to comment on the irony of Kanye West singing about douchebags?