Ben Horowitz Explained
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The best class I ever took was Race, Rhetoric, and Poetry, which stitched together early African-American poetry and hiphop. The central thesis of the class was that self-expression is proof of humanity, especially for African-Americans: one of the most iconic parts of being a slave (and thus being subhuman) was illiteracy; just as Wheatley, Hammond, et al argued their humanity through their works (explicitly and implicitly), generations of hip hop artists escaped their fates by recording their life and finding success in the written and spoken word.
There's a lot of depth and lineage in hiphop, lurking barely under the surface: whether it's Drake sampling Gil Scott-Heron who references Nat Turner, or Kanye cribbing Nina Simone's cover of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit (which of course was written by Abel Meeropol). There's a reason that self-glorification and bildungsromans are such pervasive motifs; it's not just self-aggrandizement, its self-affirmation.
If hip-hop was a codebase, it would be a massive lump of spaghetti, spiraling into itself with migraine-inducing dependencies. It would be impossible to refactor or decouple, and I mean this in an incredibly positive way.
They are completely correct. You can't just create separate clubs for new cultures entering the system, you have to help them to connect into the dominant networks and that means legitimising their own culture in the dominant one. This is one of the reasons I've found it so disgusting how the tech community reacts around the site RapGenius: there's this undercurrent of hatred for baller/rap/black (so-called "douchebag") culture which seems to aggravate every single PR problem they have.
I remember a couple of weeks ago seeing a few people turn their noses up at poetry.rapgenius.com (and other networks on the same platform) but I can't think of a better way to let both cultures cross-pollinate.
>> Networks equal access to jobs, funds, and deal flow, and the networks that run silicon valley are Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Google, HP, Ebay, Facebook, Apple, and PayPal.
Is anybody else genuinely annoyed that sites such as angel.co use these as legitimising signals of worthiness?
Douchebag culture and black culture are radically different. First, there are several different black cultures: everything from upper-middle-class to working-class to poor African-American, plus several Afro-Caribbean cultures, plus a huge number of distinct African cultures.
Douchebag culture (which is in vogue among the VC darlings, especially in the elite networks OP described) is a historically white phenomenon: popped collars, brogramming, saying shit like YOLO and WHPH ("work hard play hard"). Douchebag culture is a dominant culture in the Valley (not the only one) and we need outlets like Valleywag to remind everyone how ridiculous it is.
You're talking about a bunch of white guys creating a rap site and telling me that they're not trying to channel black culture. If the stylings and bravado at RapGenius weren't related to culture from rap/hip-hop I'd be very surprised.
In the past in the UK we used to have "Wigger" culture [0] and it actually was fairly similar... I don't think this anger has anything to do with being a douchebag. I've met people that dressed and spoke weirdly that have been perfectly nice people. I think that people recognise the style as douchebag because it's uncomfortable for them to see white people "acting black".
>> You're talking about a bunch of white guys creating a rap site and telling me that they're not trying to channel black culture.
Oh, they're trying alright.
Said douchebags are roughly as representative of black culture as Ali G was. Though it would seem they're not in on the joke.
There is no "channelling" going on. You can be a person of any color who appreciates and celebrates hip hop culture without reducing its participants to cardboard cut-outs.
If you believe that how people dress and speak defines their worthiness as a human being (and it seems you do) then go along your own way.
I do not.
There's a difference between identity and affectation. When your affectation conflates "acting black" (as if that's even a thing one can do) with "acting moronic", your affectation is intrinsically racist. And when you willfully adopt a racist affectation because despite being a Yale/Stanford Law grad you're apparently incapable of understanding how fucking offensive that is, I am not obligated to show you one single iota of respect.
These guys don't represent anyone but themselves, and—of late—they're doing a poor job of it.
(btw — I think Rap Genius is a great product. I hope its founders don't ruin it.)
Stop insinuating that I don't understand you. I understand you, I just disagree with you.
>> There's a difference between identity and affectation. When your affectation conflates "acting black" (as if that's even a thing one can do) with "acting moronic", your affectation is intrinsically racist.
Do you think that they believe they are acting moronically?
Or is this perception of moronic behaviour your own? If it's the latter - which I expect it is - then you are projecting racism onto them. It's not something which is intrinsic - it requires the perceiver to have your value system.
(My perception is that they are not acting like morons. And that it's all just good fun.)
The problem I have with this whole argument is that even if a guy had a popped collar, was wearing dark sunglasses inside and kept saying everything was "baller", I'd prefer him infinitely over the guy that looked at him and declared him to be "moronic" and a "douchebag" because of his style. One is harmless but the other is something which to me signifies a close-minded asshole.
Your assertions are objectively false.
You also suggested that the negative reaction to the objectionable behavior of the Rap Genius founders is in fact not a reaction to specific behavior by specific individuals, but part of an "undercurrent of hatred for baller/rap/black (so-called 'douchebag') culture". I don't even know what to do with that.
>>The problem I have with this whole argument is that even if a guy had a popped collar, was wearing dark sunglasses inside and kept saying everything was "baller", I'd prefer him infinitely over the guy that looked at him and declared him to be "moronic" and a "douchebag"
Good for you. I know plenty of black folks who wouldn't.
I didn't say anything about people saying stupid shit. A negative statement like that would be inconsistent with the rest of my argument.
I also didn't say that they were douchebags. I said "(so-called "douchebag")" which is a british word to show that you believe a term is unsuitable and not correct [0] also I said: "I think that people recognise the style as douchebag because it's uncomfortable for them to see white people "acting black"." I was implying that it was just a term which people use to describe a behaviour that they do not like for classist/racist reasons but which allows them to dodge allegations as such.
>> You further asserted that the primary objection to "'wigger' culture" (wow) is that white people "acting black" makes other white people uncomfortable.
Yes. I believe there is a heck of a lot of underlying racism there - and that we're seeing the same thing here.
>> Good for you. I know plenty of black folks who wouldn't.
Who am I to take away somebody's right to be a dick or offended?
I don't want to continue arguing anyway - my core point was that we shouldn't judge books by their covers: there are plenty of people that speak differently and wear very different clothes from both you and me and we should allow them to be and (in the case of the OP, instead of RapGenius) actively include them in our own culture.
[0] http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/so-called
People are saying that second one out loud? How?
My mental image of what SV is like gets sillier by the day. I should draw a comic or something.
We should start the same thing in the UK. I'm gonna put "RIP Esco" at the end of every presentation from now on. Showerman mode.
I don't work with anyone who sounds IN ANY WAY like what you're describing. I won't go so far as to say I think you're making it up, but if this is real, it's doing a very good job of hiding from us at least.
My take on the this is that tremendous amount of access politics in the Bay Area seem to revolve around where you went to school and what your pedigree is, and that since those are very highly correlated with the class you were born into, it ends up being emergently classist.
Poor people mostly don't go to the schools that matriculate the players who participate in the traditional valley power scene. I don't buy that this scene is any more racist than the rest of the US, and probably would argue that it is less so. But in terms of class bias, I think considerably greater. And the low incidence of black and latino folks can be attributed significantly to their statistically-lower class distribution.
As an anecdotal data point, I haven't met a lot of white people from lower-class backgrounds who are players in the Bay Area technology scene. Actually haven't met a lot of technology workers that are.
This is in contrast to the environment when I worked in finance in NYC and London. I found that scene to be transparently racist and sexist, but there are very many powerful white dudes who started off poor and lower-class.
Hi!
College admissions' focus on social justice has only increased over the past few decades (% of low-income students at the very top universities has only gone up). The proliferation of angel money means that it is actually easier for you to get the connections necessary for VC. In the past, VC was an even tighter and more exclusive circle than it is today.
This does not mean that it is easy, nor common. The measurement is against a low base.
The fact of the matter is that being born lower-class means that it is very likely that you will not move out of that class during your lifetime.
Lots of interesting data here: http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-...
WRT the ease of breaking into Silicon Valley, I don't have any basis for comparison. As you may have inferred, I'm a person from a lower class background who broke in during the early-mid-90s and had my life forever changed as a result. Including class mobility.
My anecdotal point above was just that, an anecdotal point.
I only commented on relative difficulty.
There are a number of technologies now that remind me a lot of what the web was in 1993. BitCoin. 3D printing. Common Crawl. And there are enabling technologies like smartphones and cloud computing that aren't being used to their fullest potential. I suspect that the same conditions that led to Marc's rise still exist in other areas, we just won't know what those areas are until a whole new ecosystem has risen.
(Technology diffuses over punctuated equilibria. And the ability to which an individual can innovate, the amount of upside leverage they retain to financial performance, and the speed at which innovations diffuse have all increased since the mid-90s.)
Sorry, but the hatred for RapGenius doesn't come from programmers hating black culture. It's from the founders being fake, and as you said, douchebags. They're three white Yale graduates trying way too hard and ultimately being inauthentic. That's what's off-putting -- saying things like "baller-sourced" [1] just is an obvious ploy, appropriating words to give themselves fake credentials and personalities as rap aficionados.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo (~1:30)
If you dislike hiphop and its message, say so. If you have something stronger than a disapproval of white guys imbibing black culture, say so.
Hiphop is art but the culture it promotes is far from healthy. Kids who can get into Yale are unlikely to be harmed by it but for the working class it's a negative; People would do better with boring bourgeois values.
That is how I found it. I started reading it because of a catchy title, then go into it and learned a bit more about the Valley culture. Personally I don't know much and am not usually interested in start-ups, but after being here for years, feels like I should know more so once in a while I would read stuff about it.
Also this kind of reminded me of an older satirical post about the Valley and start-up culture -- "We'll Be Circling Back" by Harj Taggar http://paulgraham.com/circling.html
I love rap. Heck, I even do it myself (badly and in German though, so no links). I still can't stand baller "culture", and before you think that's just a while middle-class dude not checking his privilege, read this:
> What really hurts me sometimes is that there’s not a lot of consciousness in their music. There could be a whole lot more. Rapping is communicating-it should be an instrument for our liberation. We don’t have time to talk about being players and hustlers and gangsters. We didn’t come off of the slave ships that way. We need to become proud Africans again and stop running around in Shirley Temple curls talkin’ ‘bout how we’re pimps and players. A lot of the symbols that are in rap records and videos are indications of decadent consumerism and in a very real sense, those gold chains, hundred-dollar sneakers and T-shirts with a designer’s name on it underline how much they’ve become enslaved by the consumer mentality in the United States-consumer slaves.
-- Assata Shakur
It's not respectful to support self-harm because "that's just how the culture is", it's simply not knowing any decent rap and having no comparison. Rap is infected with bullshit, IMHO exactly because it could and should be such a powerful thing. Conscious rap is potentially dangerous; talking about bling and bitches is not.
As for rapgenius, compare the obsession with it on HN with the "who? stop spamming us with ads" reactions on slashdot: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=rapgenius - Hilarious.
Absolutely. AngelList is all about institutional brands, and that's kind of sad. Teams are summarized by where they studied and worked, not what they accomplished, or what people think of them.
It always struck me as a lazy 'old boys club' method of filtering people and ideas.
"The fact is that we don’t have enough black and latino founders"
I'm not sure why, but South and East Asians are often ignored in discussions of Silicon Valley's diversity. If you expect that Silicon Valley's "lack of diversity" means that tech workers are immersed in white American culture all day, you are greatly mistaken. It's the kind of place where it is easy to hear 5 languages sitting at a coffee shop.
On the ground, there are few social barriers between whites and Asians. The exception is that I seldom saw an Asian man dating a white woman, as a commenter mentions below.
In the tech blogs, the large contributions of Asian people and culture to the Valley are just ignored. It is easier to find a noodle shop than a breakfast place. I think Cupertino had the first majority-Asian city council in the US.
[1] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2013/05/Screen-Sh...
This is problematic and untrue. There is a great deal of sophistication and cultural consciousness in hip hop and it certainly has its share of successful businesspeople. Sean Combs (formerly Puff Daddy), Jay-Z and Dr. Dre come to mind immediately.
This is not in contradiction with your quote.
Sean Combs (formerly Puff Daddy), Jay-Z and Dr. Dre come to mind immediately.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your point, but all three artists reached business success through hiphop. Jay-Z was selling mixtapes out of his car to get enough recognition to release Reasonable Doubt.
Jay-Z is fairly well known to have reached considerable wealth prior to Reasonable Doubt. The 'Classic Albums: Reasonable Doubt' doc covers this quite well. The route of selling 'In My Lifetime' out of his car was one in turn that he escaped.
I agree that hip hop is packed with sophistication and cultural consciousness, but hordes of young wealthy teens listen to rap music almost exclusively as entertainment. They often don't parse the emotional and powerful context of the lyrics - as they are often tied to racial, social, and financial issues they have never had to deal with. They often listen to it as outsiders in that regard.
By prefacing his posts with lyrics, Ben is focusing on the good parts of rap music - hustle and determination - as opposed traditional media which very rarely does that. In that regard he is "legitimizing" rap in the eyes of many people, or at least opening up their eyes and mind in a positive manner.
Excluding entertainers - if you look at CEOs, executives, tech startups - I think what he's saying is extremely evident. It's also especially strange how few there are considering how influential hip hop culture is in current youth culture, and how influential African American culture has been in the history of America.
Are investors rational decision makers? or gate keepers? It's hard to say in a system he so eloquently and accurately described in the first few paragraphs, and where so few companies actually get funded.
Read carefully.
It's funny because people think Ben's cultural/rap thing is a shtick. I've worked around Ben a long time. It most definitely is not a shtick. It's like his love of bbq and the raiders....just part of who he is.
More specifically, hip hop is a cultural phenomenon that developed as an interplay between Jamaican immigrants and the Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s, and includes MCs, DJs, B-Boys and graffiti artists as primary drivers. Rap is a specific element of hip hop, practiced by MCs, in the same way that turntablism (e.g., scratching, mixing, cutting and juggling) is an element practiced by DJs.
To answer your question, Jay-Z's MCHG is probably more Hip Hop than Rap, while old school Kanye is mos(t) def(initely) Rap. However, unless you plan on getting into conversations like this in the future I really wouldn't worry about the difference.
- Teebs
- Flying Lotus
- Onra
- Dabrye
- Prefuse 73
- Clams Casino
- Phaseone
- TNGHT
- ARAABMUZIK
Even though rap isn't a genre, you can still say "rap music" just like you can say "guitar music". "Hip-hop music", then, is like saying "rock music". Similarly, "Electronic music" (rap) and "Techno" (hip-hop).
hip hop is the wider genre of music, much of which has rapping in it, but not all of it. there are instrumental hip hop songs, and hip hop songs with only non-rap singing.
kool keith, beastie boys and jurassic 5 come to mind for instrumental tracks, out of the stuff i've heard. that is, hip hop tracks with no rapping.
DJs like z-trip also produce hip-hop backing tracks suitable for rapping over but wouldn't be called rap music by itself.
PS I think I noticed Beastie Boys lyrics in one of the crypto challenges. Did you put those in?
The above statement is completely false. Two examples of many - Dave McClure at 500 Startups and Mitch Kapor at Kapor Capital, among others, are deeply dedicated to building highly diverse networks of talent and capital that encompass diversity in every respect you mentioned and more.
Is it related to http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/12/addre... ?
These days, having a traditional professional demeanor and not knowing a thing about Drake seems far more likely to get you ostracized.
This is precisely why Silicon Valley is past peak. When it was becoming great, Silicon Valley technologists were the network. You like computers and technology? So do I, let's see what we can do for each other. Or just hang out. Often the best "networking" isn't called that; it's just people with shared interests getting together.
The fact that there's such a thing as a "Paypal Mafia" is a fucking disgrace. Same with the influence of Stanford or MIT connections; nothing against these schools, but after 5 years the signal is gone and it shouldn't matter.
What made Silicon Valley great is that there was an era when common interests were enough to get you in. That's what gave it its initial power: a lot of smart people who wanted each other to succeed.
Now it's dominated by a bunch of horrid little good-ole-boy clubs that don't even respect technology.