RapGenius thread

poetry genius seems cool. i didn't know about it before.

big fan. he manages to follow all of the rap rules i privately judged all music with for a period between 2005 and 2010, and rules that i feel controlled a certain subset of 90s/2000s new york rap. it was music that, to me, was ideal when it covered a set selection of topics and was made under harsh formal constraints. for example, i thought rap lyrics should sound carefully written (i should be able to picture pen on legal pad) and rappers should make a concept or lyric work on the strength of what it would look like on paper, with a limited emphasis on the performance of the lyrics. another factor was a flawed idea of legitimacy, which was gained by following the above rules, and an equally flawed idea of authenticity (the idea that rappers like cormega lived what they wrote about-- this was sometimes taken to extremes, when rappers claimed not to be rappers at all, as if their persona or whatever was not a performance at all). as far as lyrical content, i thought rappers should be focused on a narrow geographical location, hyperlocal neighborhood references--even if they addressed larger issues, those issues should be addressed through the lens of neighborhood/street/block. cormega managed to fulfill all those spurious laws of real rap and my flawed ideas of authenticity and also made dope records.

treeship, i'm going to make you a mix of my favorite rap ever. i want at least 200-300 words per song. can you do that for me?

haha wait tao lin does rapgenius annotations for real

c'mon treeship is not the new l0u1s jagg3r, let's not act like drawing out his opinions about stuff is going to be entertaining at all

i won't write that much per song but i would happily listen to a mix of your favorite rap music and discuss it with you in a less formal context. xp.

xpost 2 al... thing is, i read his legit writing on contemporary literature and i was sort of feeling it, despite his aja-level posting on ilm/not knowing that scarface was a rapper. so, i feel like it would be compelling to read him on pieces of a man or look what you did to me or trenchant joe budden mixtape tracks.

aight fair enough

anyways, the world needs more corny indie rock guys sharing their thoughts on rap. i'll make the mix but give me a few weeks.

until then, let's listen to some more cormega.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmC5x_VPrMI

dude, i am not going to talk to you about rap music if you are going to insult me and say that my posts are similar to those of a fictional 15 year old girl.

nice. that mega track got you hyped up?

I dunno, as a pretty ignorant dude rapgenius can be an invaluable resource, even if the consistent "HAHAHA RAP LYRICS BUT LIKE ALL STODGY AND PROPER ENGLISH AND SHIT THANKS FOR THE EMAIL FORWARD DAD"ness of it is eye-roll inducing.

yeah the annoying thing about rapgenius is they have filled a pretty necessary niche which is "lyrics sites with no popups or malware."

itt people say nice things about Rap Genius

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g-suzna5Rg

http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2013/06/jay-z-unveils-lyrics-to-bbc-ft-nas-beyonce-justin-timberlake-timbaland-swizz-beatz-pharrell/

http://poetry.rapgenius.com/James-joyce-finnegans-wake-chapter-1-lyrics

nice

Make sure to click on all the annotations.

the best part of the wake are the goofy, obvious puns that peek through the total incomprehensibility of the denser passages, which are most of them.

also, i think people mix it up with dubliners. i have met several people who have told me that they read this book and not ulysses and i don't believe them.

hate the fucking rapgenius guys, rapgenius itself is hit or miss, poetrygenius is fucking dire, i guess maybe newsgenius has the potential to be interesting

in most terms songmeanings.net is a vastly vastly better and more interesting website

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dldwebsite-production/black_and_white_avatars/690/large/Tom_Lehman_Quadrat.jpg

the hilarious thing about the rap genius dudes is that somehow the other two guys manage to look 100x douchier than the main douchey guy even is

it's insane that there's not an HBO series based on them yet

an Entourage spinoff about Turtle, or at least a season-long arc on Girls or How To Make It In America

i guess i feel tao lin's annotations are as interesting, or not, as the things they are annotating. is there any other author that you could just go and add more annotations and annotations of annotations and it wouldn't change the character of the work at all?

this website maintained by anonymous dudes on the internet is better/worse than this other website maintained by other anonymous dudes on the internet

says some anonymous dude on the internet

precisely

yeah the annoying thing about rapgenius is they have filled a pretty necessary niche which is "lyrics sites with no popups or malware."

― katherine, Saturday, June 29, 2013 9:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I assumed this was because lyrics are copyrighted so lyric sites were always gonna be skeezy regardless

anyone know the details bout this / why rapgenius gets away with it?

rapgenius is just a slightly better azlyrics or sing365 or whatever random lyrics site to me. lyrics sites are useful. the explanations are corny because all explanations are corny but it's not like i have to click on them. if you know or care about whoever runs it or, worse, individual annotators, you're in no position to be mocking them imo.

heh

like does anyone know (or care) who runs azlyrics? is it just because rapgenius focuses on rap and there is absolutely nothing that internet rap fans are unable to talk to death forever?

it's because the site got bought for like a billion dollars last year iirc

also they said some racist shit

like who cares about the undergraduate embarrassingness of rapgenius? maybe sites like this are a necessary intermediate on the road to the communist future we all hope for where everyone posts like ilxors

i'm sure they're not the first or last web developers to stumble upon financial success to be not-very-nice people (and also, like the facebook and twitter dudes, not very interesting either)

what's the word on these guys? they just seem like average gen y millionaire internet kids in love with the hype.

yeah i mean they're dumb and embarrassing duh, but like whatever imo

do critics of rapgenius also hate annotated editions of things like chaucer or shakespeare? it seems like the same principle: the point of the notes isn't to make any groundbreaking critical insight, but just to make sure the reader isn't missing obvious references. idk much about the founders of the site, but the concept isn't that ridiculous. i enjoyed reading some wallace stevens notes last night on poetrygenius.

just a reminder of what kind of community is fostered by rap genius:

a little background: i made this post on tumblr about lyrics sites. http://jordansargent.tumblr.com/post/29136913129/nina-skys-what-makes-you-beautiful-the-next-step-in

at the bottom i said that, "The people that run Rap Genius seem to be pretty terrible humans" which i think is probably true.

so today i got an email from a dude at rap genius (t0mi f1scher). he told me that he read my post, and he wanted to know what my specific issues were with the site. i told him that, in general, the site is more a small annoyance than anything to really get worked up about (and that i visit often, for various reasons), but i outlined some stuff they've done that is pretty gross. namely, their awful chief keef "interview" and their freestyle disses at das racist and the NYT. in those freestyles, the rap genius dude says that one of the das racist dudes (who is indian) looks like a "dirty cigarette" and in the NYT one, the same guy briefly laments the fact that he can't say the "n-word"

so, here is the response from t0mi f1scher, as it pertains to that last point specifically:

"Can you explain what offends you about the n-word though?"

LADIES AND GERMS, RAP GENIUS!!!

― tauheed & cambria (J0rdan S.), Monday, August 13, 2012 4:17 PM (10 months ago) Bookmark

trees, i don't think anyone is hating on the idea of annotating lyrics or unpacking the meaning of rap lyrics in particular.

let me sum up what the problems might be:

-- a lot of the lyrics are transcribed poorly and contain errors.
-- many of the annotations are corny jokes
-- many of the annotations reveal a misunderstanding of the lyrics or the point of annotating lyrics
-- the business model of getting internet people to generate content for free leads to mostly bullshit content and some goofy kids from yale got rich off it

sometimes when i google for rap lyrics and find some bunk misheard bullshit i wonder why someone would 1) be feeling a track that they can't even understand the lyrics to, 2) bother putting their bullshit transcription online

rap genius is often useful but it was also founded by a bunch of dopes who built up the site using shitty tactics and now fosters a user base of white kids who want to be able to say the n word

let the first person to stop bitching about these kind of internet creatures cast the first stone. kevin and lex, you are not those people.

that all makes sense, but i think it's hard to say what the quality of the site will look like in a few years, as the community grows and becomes more vigilantly self-policing. wikipedia is a lot less amateurish now, i think, than it was when it started, and a similar thing might happen with rapgenius.

there is an upper limit to the # of people interested in annotating rap lyrics

in fact most of those people are probably already familiar with the site

if its readership grows large enough, i am thinking that the artists' publicists might get involved, which is what happens with wikipedia entries. this would make the annotations drier, but perhaps it would clear up some of the more glaring errors.

that all makes sense, but i think it's hard to say what the quality of the site will look like in a few years, as the community grows and becomes more vigilantly self-policing. wikipedia is a lot less amateurish now, i think, than it was when it started, and a similar thing might happen with rapgenius.

― Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the (Treeship), Sunday, June 30, 2013 2:22 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

academics recognized the value in wikipedia, whereas the analogues in the rap community dgaf

sometimes when i google for rap lyrics and find some bunk misheard bullshit i wonder why someone would 1) be feeling a track that they can't even understand the lyrics to

Wait, isn't this why people google for rap lyrics?

nah i mean dudes that are sitting there listening to a styles p song and are feeling it enough to type out the lyrics. "'knockin everyday, struggle with BI / malcolm rake one ghost-face purple tape' man styles got bars. i gotta get this on the internet."

Very tempted to start a site called crapgenius.com, a WebMD/rapgenius hybrid where users can submit stool samples for others to examine for their medical significance.

i wonder why someone would 1) be feeling a track that they can't even understand the lyrics to

pretty much my entire relationship to pop music for pretty much my entire life has been feeling tracks i don't understand the lyrics to,

BUT WHY WOULD YOU BE FEELING A STYLES TRACK THAT YOU CAN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND
IT'S NOT KESHA OKAY IT'S SERIOUS RAP MUSIC

this is like a perfect storm of bad internet: rapper that Rap Genius editors don't care about has lots of sloppy inaccurate RG lyric transcriptions, Buzzfeed does listicle of cuh-razy lyrics by that rapper that are mostly completely wrong RG transcriptions

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/14-bizarre-lyrics-that-prove-flo-rida-knows-no-one-can-under

yeezus wept ;_;

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/fashion/anger-management-why-the-genius-founders-turned-to-couples-therapy.html

music streaming services like spotify integrate their own lyrics into the programs now, like spotify with musicmatch, taking a huge chunk of hits away. the annotations thing is very good when done well though, obviously.

lol the mogador. mess

I guess we can put this here (disclaimer: the review in question was written by me) http://themuse.jezebel.com/genius-annotates-a-pitchfork-review-and-every-music-cri-1755277152

wow

When you come under a microscope that assholish, you must be doing something right. Keep up the good work, Katherine!

that all makes sense, but i think it's hard to say what the quality of the site will look like in a few years, as the community grows and becomes more vigilantly self-policing. wikipedia is a lot less amateurish now, i think, than it was when it started, and a similar thing might happen with rapgenius.

― Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the (Treeship), Sunday, June 30, 2013 8:22 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is it just me or in the 2 and a half years since this comment has rap genius actually gotten much much worse?

It seems like with unpopular artists the annotations are super thin (same with pop music that doesn't even need annotating but is on the site for some reason anyways) , and with popular artists its all a race to fill up the song as fast as possible so that many things get overlooked, hooks that change throughout a song now all get the same annotation, entire verses are lumped together under a singer annotation that only explains a single line, etc etc

And then nobody bothers to go back and flesh out annotations because the song is now "done"

I think I made a similar comment recently in another Genius thread. Yes, it seems worse.

def seems like there was a time when it was relatively useful, like you could actually use it to help do a good close reading of lyrics, and now it's just this ridiculous free-for-all.

http://genius.com/Twaimz-llama-song-annotated

yes, I am that llama, that llama you despise, with those big ass eyes, and them luscious thighs.

Jesus motherfucking christ

I see they are now doing bizarre videos too
https://youtu.be/g3c_AXMR5CE

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a22709637/sacha-baron-cohen-genius-founder-mahbod-moghadam/