Ms. Cyrus (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

Miley Cyrus had a brush with social advocacy last year when she recorded Occupy Wall Street's unofficial theme song, "Liberty Walk."  But since then, she's remained pretty quiet on any issues of equality. In 2012, she's cut her hair several times, most notably when she got rid of her bun, which put popular fan account @Mileys_Bun in an awkward position.

But now Ms. Cyrus is back to the fight with a new issue. Yes, Ms. Cyrus has something that all Americans can get behind -- Emoji equality.

For the uninformed, Emojis are the cute little image characters that iPhone users use like secret code or special embellishes to text messages. And on Tuesday afternoon, the beauty chain Sephora asked its Twitter followers to retweet their message if they wanted more colors for the nail painting Emoji. For the record, there is currently only a pink nail polishing Emoji.

Ms. Cyrus quickly responded with Emoji concerns of her very own:

This woman is right! There is injustice in the Emoji world right now.

This might just be Ms. Cyrus atoning for her past racially insensitive sins, but we're rooting for her cause. After all, it's kind of annoying to have to represent your female Indian friend with some dude rocking a turban.

In response to our questions about the racist chatter, cofounder Mahbod Moghadam dismissed the notion that this was reflective of the Rap Genius community, telling Betabeat that users can gain entry into "Editor Chats," without being vetted by earning Rap IQ points on the site and that users have used voting rings to game the system in the past. He then blamed hackers for the offensive content, before recanting and saying the parties responsible were merely exploiting a loophole in the system that allowed members to impersonate another user’s name in chat, rather than hacking into the company's code.

He was similarly dismissive of Mr. Crawford's concerns after Mr. Moghadam threatened to kill him in another series of "Editor Chat" instant messages, telling Betabeat, "I’m just messing around."

Critics have expressed concerns about Rap Genius' interloper status in the rap world as well as the Ivy League tone of users who contribute analysis of hip-hop lyrics to the site, not to mention an ill-advised diss video aimed at the rap group Das Racist after one of its members called Rap Genius "white devil sophists."

But the braggadocious Mr. Moghadam is apparently undeterred by the negative responses both to his skills as a rapper and to his at times abrasive public persona. In response to "the haters," he has recorded another diss video and posted to the site. Which haters, exactly, is he referring to, we asked? Mr. Crawford and "90s bloggers," Mr. Moghadam explained.

At this point, we find ourselves at a loss for words save for a genuine sense of awe that a $15 million investment does not a muzzle make. Rap Genius members, however, have already begun to annotate his lyrics on the site. Because of course.

Mr. Elmer-DeWitt (Photo: Twitter.com)

This morning's release of the iPad Mini saw crowds completely forgetting about the hurricane and lining up to score themselves a miniaturized version of their favorite fancy tablet. Apple beat reporter Philip Elmer-DeWitt was covering the release for Fortune/CNN Money. His online bio says that he's been covering Apple for the last 30 years. He described the scene as such:

"Judging from the ethnic makeup of the queue in front of the big glass cube of Apple's (AAPL) Fifth Avenue store, however, most of the customers who made the pilgrimage were coming from the environs of Chinatown.

Apple hasn't yet said when the iPad mini will be available in mainland China, so there's likely to be a market there for units shipped from the U.S."

Since Mr. DeWitt didn't cite a source supporting his Chinatown claim, it seemed like an . . . odd assumption.

The paragraph in question was pulled down, but not before we got a screen shot.

We reached out to Mr. Elmer-Dewitt, who said it was taken down because "some readers complained about ethnic profiling."

Gotcha. But why did he say that the Asian customers in line were from Chinatown?

"It's well documented that there's a steady flow of new Apple products from the Fifth Ave store to Chinatown to Hong Kong to the mainland," said Mr. Elmer-Dewitt. "See my old pieces. See the NY Times. My mistake was assuming that all the Asians in line (some of whom brought their children so they could buy 4 iPads, not just the maximum 2) were Chinese and that just because they were Chinese that they were from Chinatown. But I've reported on a lot of these lines, and this one had a higher percentage of Asians than any I've seen before."

Well, alrighty then, no racism to see here, folks.

[via @Joescoscarelli]

Mr. Lehman, Mr. Zechory, and Mr. Moghadam (Photo: Sumner Dilworth, courtesy of Vibe)

Visitors who search for Harlem rapper Azealia Banks’s breakout hit “212,” on Rap Genius, an online platform that crowdsources explanations of hip-hop lyrics, will find nearly every verse annotated by the site’s users, who clocked more than 2 million monthly uniques in August, according to comScore. Click on the line “Now she wanna lick my plum in the evening/ And fit that ton-tongue d-deep in,” and a pop-up immediately appears explaining that Ms. Banks is employing a metaphor for cunnilingus and that “She stutters the words tongue and deep to mimic the stuttering that occurs when one receives such a gift.” That exegesis received 11 upvotes, earning the contributor jamima-j, a female “slam poetry writer,” a healthy bump in “Rap IQ” points on the site.

Readers might find her analysis either amusing or unnecessary. But the reigning kings of Sand Hill Road, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, view Rap Genius as “one of the most important things we’ve ever funded,” co-founder Ben Horowitz told Betabeat last week. The prominent VC firm, which clawed its way into the Silicon Valley firmament in just three years by aggressively plowing millions into fast-growth tech startups like Facebook, Pinterest, foursquare and Airbnb, often at towering valuations, were the sole investors behind the site’s $15 million Series A.

Mr. Horowitz (Photo: C Flanigan/Getty Images)

“When I first brought it up, [Marc Andreessen] kind of laughed at it,” admitted Mr. Horowitz, the rare VC who can quote the appropriate Rick Ross rhyme for every occasion.“He was like, ‘Really? Rap Genius?’”

The site’s potential finally clicked for Mr. Andreessen after he used it to try to understand the Kanye West and Jay-Z song “No Church in the Wild.” Click on the lyric “Is pious pious because god loves pious?” and the site walks you through Plato’s Euthyphro, Pope Pius and Immanuel Kant. “It’s a big philosophical question just, like, dropped in the middle of a Jay verse,” Mr. Horowitz said with admiration.

Despite the platform’s name, contributors have already used Rap Genius to annotate a number of texts outside the world of hip-hop, including the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, the Mayflower Compact and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Last week, author and NYU professor Clay Shirky added the iTunes terms of service for dissection. Users obliged by appending a cartoon of the Human Centipede.

After the Jay-Z song, Mr. Andreessen went on to read annotations of The Great Gatsby contributed by high schoolers whose teacher added chapters to the site. His favorite part, Mr. Horowitz said, was a reference to old money versus new money that read, “In the days of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ it was better to have old money, unlike today, when it’s better to have new money.”

No doubt the investor and Netscape co-founder, who was photographed on a gold throne for Time’s “Golden Geeks” cover in 1996 and recently named No. 2 on Forbes’s “Midas Touch” list of tech investors, appreciated that reading.

Mr. Horowitz’s abiding obsession with rap has been well-documented. He notoriously starts every post on his business blog with a couple of expletive-laden lines from his favorite MCs, and has nicknamed his partner, Mr. Andreessen, “Big Tunechi,” in reference to Lil Wayne’s childhood nickname (just ask @LilTunechi’s 8.7 million Twitter followers), because he thinks the two moguls are similarly prolific. It ultimately fell to “Big Tune” to articulate the site’s grander vision: turning Rap Genius into an “Internet Talmud” that, Mr. Andreessen said, will drop the same “knowledge on knowledge” in other arenas, like law, the Bible, poetry and even country music—to eventually “annotate the world.”

The site’s three 20-something co-founders are currently beta-testing the idea of rolling out those content areas into separate verticals: Stereo IQ (for indie rock), Poetry Brain, Country Brain, Law Genius and Bible Genius.

“The criticism is: ‘Ben, I can’t believe you’d invest in something so frivolous as rap,’” Mr. Horowitz acknowledged, but he pointed out that Andreessen Horowitz engendered the same eye-rolls when the firm was part of a $2.75 billion deal to buy Skype from eBay. Two years later, Skype was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. “People who kind of understood the basics [of that deal] were like, ‘Oh, that’s stupid. Those guys are idiots.’ But if you looked a little deeper and saw what was really going on, you would say, well, this is a magical opportunity.”

Rap Genius’s co-founders, who met as undergraduates, have been expounding on the idea for some time now—that the Internet needed this kind of pop-technology, a Rosetta Stone by way of Urban Dictionary, to decode the Western canon—but it wasn’t until Andreessen Horowitz came along that anyone believed them.

If you spend any time with the trio, you can understand the skepticism.

As their origin story goes, the co-founders were treading lucrative career paths when they started the site, first called Rap Exegesis, as a side project. Tom Lehman was an engineer at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw. Ilan Zechory was a project manager at Google and a former writer for Deadwood, and Mahbod Moghadam, a Stanford law school grad, was on deferral from the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf.

In 2009, deferral was code for a recession-related year off for a fraction of the salary. With his free time, Mr. Moghadam was slated to start a free internship with Warren Buffett when Berkshire Hathaway found his blog, Beneficent Allah, in which he had drafted a satirical billable memo referencing the “Ballstate Insurance Company” (Allstate was a client) on “the probabilities of Inheriting the Earth.” Mr. Buffett's conglomerate didn’t appreciate the irony and neither did Dewey. The same day he was fired, Mr. Lehman built the site.

“We’re more into writing than underwriting, you feel me?” Mr. Moghadam told Betabeat last week, sitting in the startup’s new headquarters: a penthouse apartment in Williamsburg overlooking the East River.

Mr. Lehman, whose actual apartment is four floors down, had returned moments earlier with three trays of sushi for the team’s dinner. A handful of the company’s fresh-faced 20 to 30 employees were unwinding in the back bedrooms.

Mr. Moghadam was sporting a striped button-down and walnut-colored dress shoes that came to a masochistic point. He introduced Mr. Lehman as a “swagged-out Mark Zuckerberg,” but between Mr. Lehman’s upswept column of curls, electric blue T-shirt, neon Nikes and sweatshirt from A Bathing Ape, he looked more like a dubstep deejay just in from Tel Aviv. Mr. Zechory, in emerald green Nikes and a pastel button-down, fit somewhere in between.

Months before they raised that Series A, another New York startup entrepreneur described the braggadocious trio of Yale graduates, who sometimes borrow the vernacular of the rappers they admire, as “total characters and a pile of contradictions”—a representation that speaks to their awkward, if so far potent, positioning at the nexus of the tech and hip-hop worlds.

Sitting in the living room, amiable and unguarded, the co-founders seemed to suffer from the interloper’s dilemma: they’re one “swag” too cocky for the tech scene and a “tight” too Ivy League for the rap game.

Up until last month, outside of verified accounts from artists like Nas, 50 Cent, and 2Chainz, the startup was best known for two things. The first was an essay in The New York Times magazine that devoted considerable column inches to critiquing Rap Genius’s “wrongheaded conclusion” that every hip-hop rhyme had or was in need of an academic annotation.

The second was a misguided late-night video of a shirtless Mr. Moghadam mocking the rap group Das Racist, who met at Weselyan, after one of the MCs equated Rap Genius with “white devil sophistry.” The closing line? “I’m trying to diss you, but you ain’t even famous. You’re like a slim anus.”

“I’m embarrassed of my freestyle dis,” Mr. Moghadam admitted of the video. “I want to take it down, but these guys say, ‘Hey, it’s a meme now!’” He added, “My body looks all right, but I can do much better raps than that.”

Mr. Horowitz acknowledged the trio’s bluster. “They have a real personae-slash-performance art to them,” he said. “They play the part. It took me a little bit to get past the surface pretense, just because it is so unusual. At least in my world—in the tech world.”

“We used to want to be writers and artists and stuff like that,” Mr. Zechory said, when asked about the team's self-presentation. “Then we got really busy working on Rap Genius and we realized it’s all folding in on itself and we have to never break character.”

That routine has gotten them this far. In fact, Andreessen Horowitz wasn't the only firm eager to fund their vision.

“There were definitely other investors who gave them term sheets and there were other investors who thought that it could be important, but in their minds nobody else quite understood it or quite understood them, you know what I mean?” said Mr. Horowitz.

Rap Genius was the fastest-growing startup in its class at Y Combinator, the archetypal Mountain View incubator. (Mr. Zechory says their Quantcast numbers show 10 million uniques, but that account has been made private.) During their three months in the Valley, "The elders were kind of wary of it," said Mr. Moghadam. "They’re starting to come around now that they realize we’re gonna make a shit ton of money."

That last claim remains to be seen. After all, despite its ubiquity in search engine results, Urban Dictionary is still primarily a website that sells ads.

Rap Genius' business plan also calls for selling advertising, but according to the latest numbers from comScore, the site members occupy an industry sweet spot. Sixty-three percent of users are 18 to 34, 66 percent of them are male, and 29 percent boast a household income of $100,000 or more.

“We are gonna do the dopest ads of all time,” Mr. Moghadam declared, but they have other potential revenue streams in mind as well. “Law firms will pay 100K a year for Law Genius Premium,” he insisted over email. “Lexis and Westlaw are jank—you go from one case to another and it’s sloppy and wack ... Law Genius will be legal footnotes on crack! Also it can include ANYTHING ... video, audio ... instead of simply citing a Supreme Court case, you can embed the oral arguments!”

And then there’s the merchandising. “Girl, we finna have an entire STORE of gear for each site,” he wrote in an email that could benefit from some decoding itself, “not just shirts, you can get a Rap Genius onesie, a Poetry Brain parka ...” The possibilities were endless.

Rap Genius has been remarkably successful in getting rappers to sign up to explain their own double entendres, regionalisms, and allusions, partly by hosting the artists at Rap Genius headquarters both in Williamsburg and a villa they rent in “far Malibu,” where Mr. Moghadam said RZA and Black Cobain have both stayed.

The company is planning on moving closer to Los Angeles’s city center. “So with the Hollywood house, we’re always going to have rappers living with us,” he wrote. They even offer visitors use of a studio. “Our recording is decent it’s not wowzers, but it’s pretty dope,” he added, explaining that it was more of a “chill vibe type situation.”

Earning the trust of the rap world wasn’t easy. A breakthrough was provided by 50 Cent’s former manager, the late Chris Lighty—“RIP,” said Mr. Moghadam, tapping his heart twice. Over lunch a couple months ago, Mr. Zechory recalled, Lighty “was like, look, if you want 50 Cent to gamble on Rap Genius, just get Nas to do it. Because 50 Cent will see Nas doing it and be like, ‘Okay, cool.’”

In a similar vein, it was Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager and a startup investor, who encouraged the founders to come up with their “verified artists” section.

It remains to be seen whether Rap Genius will have the same luck with indie rockers. Mr. Moghadam said that he tried talking to Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, into explaining her lyrics when he ran into her in L.A. “She was like, ‘I don’t want anyone to know what these mean! It’s so deep to me! Get away from me,’” he said, his voice dropping to a stage whisper.

Had he tried Fiona Apple? we asked. “She’s my queen,” Mr. Moghadam responded, wistfully. “Fiona Apple, if I could, I would just want to take her to sushi. I know what [her lyrics] mean!”

If Rap Genius succeeds, it will be because its founders have no other choice, a dynamic that happens to be of the VC firm’s investment criteria, said Mr. Horowitz. “Their whole lives are dependent on them making this work, right? They are all-in,” he said with a laugh. “It’s not like they’ll go work at Facebook! Nuh-uh. This is it. They have to make this work. And we love that.”

ntiku@observer.com

A version of this story appeared in the October 17, 2012 issue of the New York Observer. 

Update: Forbes reports that Pop Chips ran this same campaign in the UK before launching in that market. The British reaction to it was exactly the same and the spot was pulled after public outcry. "The reasoning seems to come straight from Oscar Wilde and P.T. Barnum (if he actually said “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”)," says Forbes. Wonder if that's the advice Ashton is giving his startups. 

Correction: Just kidding, Pop Chips PR representatives just confirmed to Betabeat that the Forbes report was wrong. The ad went was only released in the U.S. market. The Forbes blogger read the dates wrong, as well as the country. And yes, as you suspected, no one is going to come out of this looking good. Including bloggers!

Yesterday, Pop Chips unveiled its latest advertising campaign. It involved having spokesman Ashton Kutcher play a variety of characters, including an Indian immigrant named "Raj," for which Mr. Kutcher painted his face brown and affected an over-the-top accent. Last night, shortly after Anil Dash pointed out that using brownface to hawk bags of potato chips in 2012 was a sign of ingrained racism--and criminally cheeseball--Pop Chips founder and CEO Keith Belling issued an apology on the company blog.

"our team worked hard to create a light-hearted parody featuring a variety of characters that was meant to provide a few laughs," Mr. Belling wrote in all-lower case. "we did not intend to offend anyone. i take full responsibility and apologize to anyone we offended."

Mr. Dash thoughtfully provided some helpful guidelines for fixing the bonehead move, including not taking the video down and offering an explanation of how the creative process failed so others could learn from their missteps. Mr. Belling apparently thought it would safer to make all the videos related to the campaign private.

The controversy made its way to TMZ this morning, but despite all the fervor, Mr. Kutcher has yet to respond. We reached out to Mr. Kutcher's publicist earlier today and will update this post as soon as we hear back. As we reported last night, Mr. Kutcher's carefree links to YouTube videos of the commercials are still up on his Twitter page.

Mr. Belling elaborated a little in his response to TMZ:

"The new Popchips worldwide dating video and ad campaign featuring four characters was created to provoke a few laughs and was never intended to stereotype or offend anyone. At Popchips we embrace all types of shapes, flavors and colors, and appreciate all snackers, no matter their race or ethnicity. We hope people can enjoy this in the spirit it was intended."

The rap group Das Racist also had some choice words for Mr. Kutcher yesterday, along with the New York Times coverage of the campaign:

Both Mr. Dash and Das Racist continue to deal with negative response to their criticism on Twitter, including a death threat to Mr. Dash. The other cone of silence in the aftermath of the campaign comes from the scads of startups Mr. Kutcher has invested in:

Hey, startups that are helping @aplusk get richer, can you tell him that racist brownface ads aren't cool? Thanks! 2.dashes.com/IUMYZM

— Anil Dash (@anildash) May 2, 2012

Something tells us not to hold our breath.