Washington Post music critic/liberal essayist Philip Kennicott on the “Pimp” rap:

By 9:17 a.m. yesterday, Kathryn Jean Lopez, a poster on the National Review’s conservative The Corner Web site, said it best: “The worst part about the Oscars last night, of course, is that I can’t get ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp’ out of my head this morning.” Not surprisingly, by midafternoon, http://technorati.com, a Web site that tracks mentions of anything and everything in Web logs, posted an explosion of hits.

And later:

The musical setting of the line, a deliciously catchy and melodic tag, confirms the scandal. The line that the conservative Kathryn Jean Lopez and a zillion other people can’t get out of their heads is essentially a melodic ending, a sequence of notes that seems to conclude a musical thought.