RapGenius thread

Itt post hilariously RONG unverified explanations of lyrics from the RapGenius site, or share your own contribs

why?

Aint you due back from yer smoke break

rapgenius is often the only place to find near-accurate transcriptions of rap lyrics. a lot of it is people enthusiastically overexplaining common rap tropes/slang but it's valuable for deeper allusions, and the disagreements about more opaque references are interesting. i dunno... casual corny rap dudes on ilm clowning rapgenius sounds like a weak idea for a thread.

RG has definitely become about as useful as a go-to as OHHLA was back in the day, but it is embarrassing to give these rich lames the traffic so i don't mind making fun of them while i'm there.

"fuck it i'm on one" in j. cole's "power trip":

Clever little double meaning here, too. There’s the traditional sense (fucked up), which in itself can be from two things: the fact that he’s been up all night drinking or that he can’t have her, but he’s also stuck on one girl.

Also possibly referring to how he previously called love a drug, one that he’s on.

"also *possibly* referring to" the extremely obvious connotation of the phrase smh

i feel like most of the annotations on j cole lyrics on rapgenius were likely done by j cole himself

lol

the weirdest shit is when rappers give 'verified' explanations of other rappers' lyrics. they actually let Trinidad James explain Eminem lyrics, no lie: http://rapgenius.com/Eminem-marshall-mathers-lyrics

more like crapgenius amirite

You guys there's an understandrap.com now :(

omg

Rapgenius is helpful sometimes

yeah, it's pretty good sometimes. like using songmeanings... they have better than average lyric transcriptions, but the comments are youtube-level dire.

I agree with that, although songmeanings seems to have worse comments

yeah, totally, but i would say that songmeanings' comments aren't that great.

* Dylannn is using "repetition" to mock or disparage Treeship's contribution to the thread which was just repeating The Girl From Spirea X's comment.

There is also double meaning because Dylannn noted that the "comments" are not as good and was talking about a comment by Treeship so possibly clowning Treeship for not bringing high quality comments to the message.

There is a triple meaning in the fact that Dylannn was also repeating the comment for a third time and possibly talking about the quality of his own comments on this message board thread.

This explanation hasn't yet been reviewed by the Rap Genius editors

Spot on parody of rapgenius's house style. Good work.

I typed rapgenius into my browser and it turns out the last time I visited their site was to read up on Hot Cheetos and Takis.

thanks, trees.

this exists http://poetry.rapgenius.com/

at what point will there be freeessays.rapgenius.com

visiting ohhla, it's kind of sad or heartening, i dunno, that it still looks like it did in 2005-- so it's kind of weird to see 2 chains on the list of artists--and when i went to check for lyrics to a cormega song i still got a directory menu and txt files.

rapgenius is cool for allusionheavy ny rap but so much of it is still poorly transcribed and wrong and the things i want annotated aren't. sometimes by tracking down references to the same people or events in a really well annotated song, you can figure things out. like, the rg entry on 'ghetto quran' will explain almost every preme team ref in new york rap songs: http://rapgenius.com/50-cent-ghetto-quran-forgive-me-lyrics (featuring video annotation by curtis jackson himself breaking down the most obscure reference in the whole thing)

you just boosted your ilx IQ™

OR -- OH GOD

http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Tao-lin-february-lyrics

the mega track i was checking out was "glory days" which is another encyclopedic neighborhood saga, perfect for annotation by internet rap forum guys with a few back issues of f.e.d.s. laying around... but the version on rapgenius is almost untouched and contains the same errors as the ohhla .txt that's been since the realness was rereleased.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4pf1DpmY3I

treeship, how do you feel about cormega?

don't know much about him. i finished listening to that song and i like it. the subject matter fits well with the nostalgic style of the rapping and production, which sounds like it could have been released in the 80s almost. i don't know if it made a strong enough impression to cause me to seek out more cormega music in the future. what do you think of cormega?

I like tao lin's annotations. they're straightforward, like footnotes.

teju cole's on the other hand i find obnoxious: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Teju-cole-open-city-excerpt-lyrics

like those are obviously not allusions that we're supposed to get. they're part of the inscrutable intertextual mess in your head from which you're drawing ideas. put them all out there for us like that and its like finding out how the magic trick works and now you think that magician is just some balding cornball who doesn't have a real job

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

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

but no upper limit to the # of people interesting in clicking on lyrics pages and producing ad impressions

also anyone saying wikipedia artist pages are highly policed publicist-bolstered things has never looked at one lately. (PRs do edit like you wouldn't believe but generally it's, like, copying and pasting the press release for your podunk startup and passing it off as an article that lasts either 5 days if it's caught early or forever otherwise)

the fucked up thing is that rap lyrics are written in pretty transparent idiomatic modern american english. if you're a native english speaker under the age of 45, unless you've intentionally avoided popular music made after 1995, it should be pretty easy to figure out the basics of rap lyrics.

i might not catch every take it back to 88 the year crack ruled naming names on a cormega track and from time to time, i gotta play a yo gotti track a few times to figure out some deep newspaper on the floor crack rap allusions or memphis accented phrases but shit like that never even gets accurately transcribed or accurately annotated.

i just looked for the lyrics to a new styles track... http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/stylesp/takeitback.html and i know a few days from now, the same error-ridden transcription will show up on rapgenius with like nothing annotated except for like "2pac" annotated with a picture of spongebob with a thuglife tattoo.

fix it then. be the change you want to see in the world.

is it wrong if the change i want to see in the world is properly transcribed styles p lyrics?

that's up to you. i would say it's a fine thing to want, as a world with properly transcribed styles p lyrics is better than a world with improperly transcribed styles p lyrics, if only 0.00000000000000000000001% better.

lol at how chill things have been lately literally right up until whiney starts making threads again

Haha n/m I thought he started this thread sorry

Styles P should be one of the easiest MCs to transcribe wtf

Haha n/m I thought he started this thread sorry

― some dude, Sunday, June 30, 2013 3:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

i mean whatever there are some lines in that might take a few listens but

I used to keep money in the shoebox
Knockin if I die,
The night from two Pac.
Or into the stage from buckshot
Dream of the Europeans standing at the bus stop
Headed to a fuck ass stop job
Never seen a fuck boy I would not rob

i used to keep money in the shoebox
knockin 'if i die 2nite' from tupac
or 'enta da stage' from buckshot
dreamin of europeans, standin at the bus stop
headed to a fuck-ass stock job
never seen a fuck boy i would not rob

pretty hard to fuck up if you stop and think for a second, "does this even make sense? is he dreaming about austrian tourists waiting for a bus?"

I used to keep honey in a shoe, box
Knocking, if I die,
Tonight by two Pacs
Or into the stage by buck
Shot dream of Europeans standing at the bus stop
Headed to a fuck ass, stop-- job
Never seen a fuck, boy I would not rob

well yeah. I just mean Styles P, especially the last few releases (like World's Most Hardest MC Project), has predicated himself on being simple and effective, and he enunciates pretty well. Middle section suggest to me more that the transcriber hasn't heard Me Against the World or the Black Moon album (or at least not enough to quickly pick up on the references).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53qSLP2A8zQ

rap genius annotations just followed me on twitter. they seem to tweet the "best" rap genius annotations, but i am not sure if this means they tweet inept annotations in order to make fun of them. in any case, is this one of y'all?

where do you stand on haze vs. sour?

i had a bad time on what someone said was sour once. always been biased against it since then.

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/