Genius: a website full of annotations of just about everything

Anyone heard of this site? It's a site where not only can you read the lyrics of all sorts of songs and the transcripts of all sorts of other things, but you can also annotate them and add interpretations of those lyrics/transcripts line-by-line.

At first, I was content with just reading the song lyrics and what people wrote about them. Then I realized many of the songs that I liked from bands like Dream Theater don't have any annotations at all, so I decided to make a few. Since then, I pretty much got hooked into annotating a bunch of songs and reading what others have done, eventually becoming an Editor.

Dunno if this is the right forum for it, but considering its focus is on everything under the sun, I figured it should be here.

I think most people know about this site by now. It's useful, but the site's userbase can get waaaay too overanalytical for songs that don't merit that deep of analysis. I remember something happening a while ago that kinda outed the site's founder as a pretty terrible person, so there's that. And the site also has Kurt Cobain's suicide note listed up for analysis as if it were just any old song, which is kinda tacky and tasteless if you ask me.

I wouldn't see how that'd be tacky and tasteless, it's just people offering explanations and interpretations of what Kurt wrote. Genius isn't limited to just song lyrics anymore, dude.

It's someone's suicide note. Pardon me for feeling that that's incredibly disrespectful.

Regardless, I have been putting a surprising amount of effort into annotating a bunch of stuff there. In fact, I must confess that I think I've been spending more time there lately than in the Tropes section of TV Tropes, which I must apologize for.

A good feature talking about David Bowie and how his album Blackstar deals with death.

Remember when I said Genius annotates everything? Well I really do mean "everything," because now The White House has used the Genius Web Annotator to annotate the budget message of the President. You'll need to install the Genius Web Annotator extension (or add it to your bookmarks if you don't use Google Chrome) to view them.

A News Genius editor has written an article saying that N.W.A. is more rock-and-roll than Kiss ever was. This is in response to recent articles where he said that he "looking forward to the death of rap," among other things. And Ice Cube said in N.W.A's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech that they are indeed rock and roll, while Gene shot back with a tweet saying something like "let me know when Jimi Hendrix gets inducted in the hip hop hall of fame."

Here's an excerpt of the Genius article:

Rock and roll is about rebellion, storytelling, defying authority and creating something original from a limited palette. NWA does all of those things superbly; KISS doesn’t do them at all. The Complex / Yahoo Music coverage of the story doesn’t grasp this and instead argues that NWA should be included, because, hey, diversity. It cites Robert Johnson as an example of a Hall of Famer who isn’t a “purely ‘rock’ act” despite the fact that he invented rock as we know it:

Insert embedded annotation about Robert Johnson being a rock-and-roll act here

NWA’s inclusion is not part of a charitable outreach of the Hall of Fame to other genres: they embody the spirit of rock and roll. The proof is in the lyrics. Let’s take one of the most famous NWA verses, and the chorus from KISS' biggest hit:

Screencap of some lines from N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton"◊

Screencap of some lines from KISS's "Rock and Roll All Nite"◊

What do you guys think? Agree or disagree with Ice Cube and/or Gene Simmons?