A Stanford professor rapping about genes on, you guessed it, Youtube

For a long time, rap was a profession. Only those who were really good at it could even hope to have others (besides their friends, really) hear their music. Sure, there were ordinary people that would practice rapping as much as they could to try to “make it” in the rap game, one of the most exclusive industries in the world. But not any more.

Once, the only jobs that competed with the exclusivity of with rap-music career in exclusiveness are those of the pro athletes. So, for a better part of the 90s and 2000s, that left people like Dr. Dre, Eminem, and Jay-Z on the radio, and us normal people stuck with our “8 Mile” fantasies (without the whole trailer park deal).

Now, that’s all changed. With the inventions of Garage Band, iMovie, and Youtube, any Joe Schmoe with a computer, camcorder, and the slightest amount of rhythmic sense can make a beat, record a rap, make a video to go along with it, and display it for the world to see. Anybody can play Dr. Dre or Ludacris for a day. Rap has become a hobby, an activity for the everyday person. It’s no longer stuck in the hands of the giants of the rap industry.

If you search the word “rap” on Youtube, it can’t even tell you how many results there are, it simply tells you that you are looking at “results 1-20 of millions” (Check it out for yourself). Now, I’m no expert, but I’d guess that probably less than 5 percent of those rap videos were made by professionals, probably a lot less. Instead, us average Joes are just churning out random rap videos like it’s nobody’s business.

Now I’ll admit, I’ve made two rap videos myself for different school projects (click here to see me rap about some books we read for an English class, and click here to see me rap about philosophy while dressed like Aristotle). I mean for people like us, it’s empowering to have your 5 minutes 47 seconds of fame. So what if your rap video only has 398 views? (Note: You might notice I’m pulling these numbers from my own video) That’s your video up there, with your face, and your mediocre oratorical skills! What more could you ask for in life?

I really think that this whole rapping on Youtube deal helps satisfy that attention-craving little child in all of us. Hey, if balloon boy’s parents had made a couple raps and put them online instead of pretending their kid was airborne, they wouldn’t be facing criminal charges right now.

I also think it’s really interesting to see what rap videos become famous on Youtube, and for me it seems like they always fall into one of two categories. There’s the ones that are good/funny, and there are the ones that are funny because they are awful. When it comes to the legit good raps, I don’t think anybody beats Bo Burnham in homegrown talent. I mean, the man has landed a career with Comedy Central because of his Youtube raps. And on the other hand, there’s the Scrapper Bike rap.  When I watched this video the first time, I was rolling on the floor. But at the same time, I knew that these guys were completely serious so I felt kinda bad for them. But hey, I guess that’s the risk you take when you put yourself out there like that. Sometimes you make it big for the right reasons, sometimes it’s for the wrong reasons, and then the rest of us with 398 views on our rap videos just fade into obscurity.