Seriously? You're turning this into a juvenile 'my music is better than yours' argument? This is no reason to assume the OP has a specific beef with rap, just that it doesn't belong in a business article, which is true. Reading comprehension also means deriving assumptions from the context and looking for interpretations of what is said that fit within that context.
What is it about rap music that makes it unsuitable for a business article? How many other areas of society do you wall off as inappropriate to learn from when it comes to business?
The point is that in order to be credible to a wide audience, as this article was intended, you need to convey the correct 'tone' so to say. This a part of what is called in classical dialectic the 'ethos' of an argument. (to pre-empt, no, just 'logos' is not enough, and neither should it be - but that's a different argument).
So, in order to build up 'ethos', one needs to present oneself as a mature, mainstream person in the context of the subject under discussion. (yes, some people make a career out of breaking out of this, in order to appeal to a niche audience; see e.g. that ruby webserver blogger guy that gets linked here quite a lot, but that's not what the author in the article does or should be try to do, as far as I can tell).
Like it or not, rap and hip hop music are not mainstream to the traditional Forbes crowd. Partly because (most) rap artists build their careers on their anti-mainstream views, violent and promiscuous images, and cater specifically to an audience who finds one of the draws to the music in that anti-mainstream aspect of it.
So that's what makes it inappropriate in this context. For this author, in this context, to convey his message to as large an audience as possible, he should stick to 'accepted' style figures. And rap lyrics aren't part of that. It was a gamble I guess, and he lost, imo.
(Just to pre-empt another 'hey look at this country boy hating black music!', I bought hip hop LP's (yes, LP's) before Cypress Hill had put out 'Black Sunday' and mixed them on my sl 1200's when many of the readers here were still in diapers. I bought The Chronic a few days after it came out and once hitch hiked 400 kilometers to go to a concert of what was at the time the only crew rapping in Dutch. I'm no stranger to hip hop and rap, and yes I realize that people like Jay-Z have build big businesses on it. Still doesn't make the quote in this article appropriate.)
