As far as the PGP debate goes, it may not hold up very strongly, but I imagined it to mean that noone could steal your lyrics before they had a chance to be attributed to you. I thought maybe you were implying you sent yourself encrypted emails of works in progress, for example. Tenuous, I know.

Keeping it real.

Perhaps we could set up some sort of central lyrics authority that would sign your rhymes with a private key taken from a continuous sequence of randomly generated keys that changed every hour; that way you could use the public key for that timestamp to establish who had written the lyrics first.

I think your “Drama in the PhD” song is hilarious, but I also have to join the ranks of those picking at the tech details of your song. Namely, you say “My lyrics get stolen by sucker MCs, I gotta sign my rhymes with PGP”.

As a PhD student in crypto, I think those lines are particularly funny — seriously, a rapper that puts up with PGP’s poor usability must be quite eager about protecting his rhymes…

However, signing your great lyrics to protect them won’t do much except that you prove your CLAIM of authorship. Any “sucker MC” Eve could just sign them as well! I hate to say it, but it looks like you need some DRM or so. “Gotta rap my rhymes on TCB” might be a replacement.

On the surface, perhaps it gave the song an unintentionally misogynistic tone, but underneath you’ll note that the main theme of the track (the “pimping lemma” itself) is that I choose which women to pursue not because of their appearance, but because of their intellect. I describe how I rejected one woman, who had difficulty with dynamic memory allocation, in favor of another who was comfortable coding in vi. Referring to these women as “bitches” and “hos” is not intended to be derogatory, but is rather a side effect of the fact that it’s a rap song (or perhaps more accurately, a satire thereof).

It’s funny: before I recorded the song I asked my roommate to take a look at the lyrics and suggest some edits, since he’s more knowledgeable about rap than anyone I know. Next to one line, where I referred to one of my girlfriends as a “whore,” he wrote, “ouch!” I asked him what he meant, and he said, “You can’t call your woman a whore! That’s disrespectful!”

“Oh,” I said, confused, “but ‘ho’ and ‘bitch’ are acceptable ways to refer to women?”

“Sure,” he said, “I know it’s strange, but in rap those terms don’t really carry any offense.”

So I suppose the way you interpret the words is partially a matter of perspective. Many rappers also make frequent use of the n-word without intending offense, but I shied away from that one for obvious reasons. So I understand why you would take offense, but it does help to think of it in the context of gangsta rap. Please understand that I’m actually parodying, rather than attempting to perpetuate, rap music’s objectification of women.

I’m glad to see a rap glorifying us geeky gals (I’m a tech writer who does both hardware and software manuals and ref guides) but couldn’t you do it without reducing us to hos like everyone else? I love how clever your wordage is, but listening to this track gives me the creeps.