Genius | Song Lyrics & Knowledge

But who, with Wright's inventory of pain and sorrows, could describe the indescribable that befell him? How do you convey being a strapping young man with a job and a little boy and a lazy Sunday watching football when two cops barge into your life and drag you off to hell? Is there any way to summon a sense of what it was like in that box in the Police Administration Building, where, as you would later tell the court, they chained you to a chair, pressed their hands on... Page 13 of Why Is This Man Still in Jail? | Rolling Stone

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The story opened with second person narrative in which the reader was placed in the position of the writer. Now we are placed in the position of the subject just two paragraphs later. Maybe this links us all in a web injustice? Not sure it works.

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...—or word, on occasion—into a test question. I’ve written previously about the implications of and historical parallels to treating rap lyrics as streetlife Rosetta Stones, but I nonetheless marvel at Genius’ capacity to transform musical texts into micro-commodities and circulate them through an online economy that converts intellectual and/or pleasurable activity into a competition with ephemeral rewards. Genius uses song lyrics—and increasingly, the digitized text of any document—as the foundation of what Ethan Zuckerman has called the "investor storytime" phase of a web platform’s capitalistic life-c...

Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork

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This sounds pretty great honestly, like some kind of sci-fi utopia. “Intellect,” “pleasure,” “reward”? I’m in!

There is a great deal of free labor in any crowd-sourced, social network product, but that everyday people can be acknowledged for their intelligence in ways they might not be through formal educational systems, seems a decent public good, or at least, indeed, a good time.

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...e the shopworn maxim "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" succinctly clarifies a political position on musical exegesis—translating music to text is fundamentally illogical—the rub (other than the fact that "dancing about architecture" sounds like a lot of fun) is that most pop music is already text-based to begin with.

Apart from its promotional and legal affordances, pop music’s textual layer has instigated countless debates over the rightful place of pop ...

Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork

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Rap Genius, however, shears lyrics from any larger context. Rap Genius is built on a long-standing notion that lyrics are the primary bearer of musical meaning. Simon Frith explains, “in everyday terms a song—its basic melodic and rhythmic structure—is graspe... Footnote Records – The New Inquiry

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This is a technological limit more than a critical choice. Genius focuses on the lyrical texts of songs. Other sites, like soundcloud and whosampled focus on the sonic. Sonic annotation is in fact a very tricky problem. Soundcloud’s native annotation platform is hard to follow and doesn’t produce substantial intellectual dialogue. And of course, one could say the limit of these platforms for experiencing the sonic of song is the absence of the text.

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Definitely cosign what @Lucky_Desperado says above.

To explain why I think there is a lack of intellectual dialogue is uploading a text-based annotation in a sonic-based platform is like planting a tomato seed in an apple orchard: yes, it’s there, and it’s noticeable when it pops up, but there is nothing that really binds the text itself with the sound… which therefore hinders intellectual dialogue.

Genius, on the other hand, provides a platform where people provide context (via text) and merge it with text that has already on the page.

Imagine if Producer Genius imitated Soundcloud and Whosampled. It’d be very difficult to annotate the way Genius does right now. (See example)

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The urge to translate came with rap when it moved to southern California in the 1990s and began to fully infiltrate mainstream conversations. A 1990 Newsweek feature titled “Decoding Rap Music” is emblematic of journalist... Footnote Records – The New Inquiry

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Is it not more the urge to analyze? The original mission of Rap Genius was to “critique rap as poetry.”

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... smart, the content of Rap Genius’s lyrical interpretations matters far less than how it circulates. Decoding Rap Genius means recontextualizing rap lyrics not just as signifiers of artistic meaning, but as cogs in a new, troubling online economy. Footnote Records – The New Inquiry

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Sigh, aren’t we all? But seriously who exists outside of this commodification of the Internet of Things. If you’re on Facebook or Gmail you certainly aren’t.

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..., verses, even rappers’ single words. For the site’s visitors, clicking on a lyric brings up the associated annotation, like a virtual Alan Lomax guiding you through the tough thicket of rap meaning. Unsurprisingly, Rap Genius is beloved by lots of rap fans, tech nerds, and rappers themselves— RZA, Nas, and others have participated. This reflects the site’s usefulness as a just-in-time reference source for new ... Footnote Records – The New Inquiry

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This is actually surprising given the extremely negative connotation given to any attempt to translate it explain lyrics above.

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...op songs, I think I argued, aren’t literature any more than screenplays are; they’re more accurately described in the words of pop sociologist Simon Frith, as "structures of sound," meant to be heard.

Nonetheless, (Rap) Genius has thrived for over a half-decade now by isolating lyrics from their musical contexts and turning each line—or word, on occasion—into a test question. I’ve written previously about the implications of and historical parallels to treating rap lyrics as streetlife Rosetta Stones, but I nonetheless marvel at Genius’ capacity to transform musical texts...

Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork

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This seems a little unfair, (Rap) Genius is actually a pretty great way to experience the sonic alongside its lyrical counterpart. You can listen to the song, even watch the video, while you are checking out the words and their meanings.

Also, the critique of Rap Genius that irks me the most–more than even the the brogrammer one–is that somehow analyzing lyrics–turning them into “test questions”–is against the whole point of musical appreciation. We don’t say the same of Shakespeare’s words, do we?

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