Samsung’s rap video about corporate diversity is bad…but it could be worse

As a tech reporter, I don’t get to write about rap music very often. But today, thankfully, Samsung has given me this:

UPDATE: The spoilsports at Samsung appear to have made this video private! We’ll replace it with a mirror if we can find one. But we did find another Samsung rap video, from earlier this month, which is below:

If you didn’t catch the original video before they took it down, or just passed out from the laughter before it concluded, it’s a Samsung rap about its corporate diversity (40 percent women!) and and its family-friendly programs. It features Korean rapper Mad Clown. It is terrible.

Amazingly, though, that’s not the worst Asian tech industry rap video I’ve seen today. After showing me the Samsung one, my colleague Terence pointed me in the direction of this video, made by Singapore’s Media Development Authority in 2007, which is even worse:

Now look, it’s easy to make fun of corporate rap efforts like this. But instead of making fun, I want to help! Readers may not be aware that in my high school and college days, your humble author actually wrote and produced quite a lot of rap music. It can be hard to find now because there’s another guy who took the same stage name as me, but just by way of demonstrating my credentials, here’s a song from my second album (I made the video with found footage from some weird 1960s PSA).

OK, so would-be corporate rappers, listen up: the number one problem in every video like the Samsung and MDA efforts is that they lack multi-syllable rhymes. The Samsung video doesn’t contain much rhyming at all, actually, but what it does contain is all single syllable stuff like this:

So many good employments waiting for you

Finding people with great skills and talents too

If you’re wondering why that sounds like a nursery rhyme, the simplistic single syllable rhyme is the main reason (though of course delivery and lyrical content are factors too). Now compare that to the opening lines from Mos Def’s “Hip Hop,” an actually-good rap song (which I chose pretty much randomly, you can find examples like this in almost any decent rap song):

My restlessness is my nemesis, it’s hard to really chill and sit still,
Committed to page, I write a rhyme, sometimes won’t finish for days

Now, these aren’t perfect rhymes the same way that “you” and “too” are, they’re what’s called slant rhymes. But in the context of a rap song, they sound similar enough that the effect of a rhyme is achieved, and as you can see, there’s a lot more rhyming going on here than there is in the Samsung video. Restlessness and nemesis, for example, have multiple syllables with rhyming sounds, and it just sounds better.

After watching the Samsung video I did some research on Korean rapper Mad Clown, and he appears to be aware of this in his own Korean songs, so I’m guessing that either Samsung provided the lyrics here or he’s just not as comfortable writing in English. Either way though, the end result is… not good.

So, tech companies out there, the next time you’re considering making a rap video, remember: multi-syllable rhymes! That’s the difference between sounding like a rapper and sounding like a kindergarten teacher. Or just call me for help. Trust me, I’d much rather ghostwrite your video than have to sit through another one of these cringe-inducing things.

(h/t to The Verge)

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Samsung’s rap video about corporate diversity is bad…but it could be worse