The music industry has been rocked by the revelation that 92% of hip-hop songs in the last five years have used the exact same lyrics — or what has passed for lyrics.
The discovery was made by Byron Pflugerblatt, a high-school senior in Chillicothe, Ohio. Frustrated by his inability to understand his favorite rappers, Byron developed a software program to play music up to 10 times slower than normal, with a custom spell-check algorithm to transcribe the words. He was shocked by the results. “They’re all the same!” he said. “Kanye, Jay-Z, Snoop Dog, Dr. Dre, Eminem. It doesn’t even make sense. Some are not even real words. I’m crushed!” His transcription reads:
“Nigga wappa doomop run out of hip-hop, mangle the angle, dangle the bangle, the homeys gotta tangle, I’m Ali tokin’ a hookah, I’m Mandela flyin’ a Stuka, splittin’ the bitch wid ma bazooka, blink on the brink and I’ll bamboozle ya, YAAAIIH-Oh! Now I run outta lyric, my number-one gonna be pyrrhic, somebody throw me a rope, it ain’t cheatin’, it’s dope, I’m mopin’ and copin’ without hope. Wanna trigga a nigga? Hippo-widcha-shoe-shop, stoop in da poop in endless loop of nonstop hoopla, digga-bigga-nigga-wappa da hoobop.” Repeat.
Critics say the “need for speed” has led to the scandal — the race to rap ever faster, like an auctioneer on meth, has created an impossible demand for lyrics, and the supply just couldn’t keep up. The lightning pace masked the plagiarism until Pflugerblatt outed them.
Most rap stars have responded with “No comment,” but Subzero G spoke unofficially for them: “We busted. Might as well ‘fess up. Ain’t nobody can remember that many lyrics for a whole concert, man. Our fuckin’ heads would explode. So we do what we gotta do.”
