Whenever toasting seeds or nuts, I like to have a beer open–it’s like bar snacks at home!

Aw shucks.

Can’t argue with this point, though a lyrical annotation can of course contain a reference to an underlying beat. Still there is a definite loss in the inability to note and discuss the sonic on (Rap) Genius. But sonic annotation has proven tricky online. I’m personally not compelled by Soundcloud’s annotation feature. No doubt it would be dope if we could come up with a way to annotate sound alongside text (and images and video!), but you gotta start somewhere.

Harsh dis on the crowd there, especially since we are all the crowd–readers/writers listeners/musicians alike. But perhaps what this comes down to preserving the rarified perspective of the critic as exceptional rather than opening the conversation to everyday people as critics and scholars themselves.

Can’t all this also be done, perhaps more powerfully, in community, through crowd-sourcing the possibilities of meaning and personal experiences that a work of art evokes?

Again, Genius is all about multiple meanings, gathered from multiple sources, mashed together to present the inquirer with a range of options in interpreting a text. Annotations often present multiple possible analyses and the process of crowd-sourcing such knowledge is obviously discursive and is easily visible on the site for anyone engaging in the project.

I disagree that this is a presumption of Genius’s approach to art. We are not New Critics, though we aren’t against such an approach to the natural content of a work of art. We value context and, above all, we value the social construction of art and its interpretation. We are a crowd-sourced knowledge project after all. Traditional cultural criticism to me more closely approaches the rarified or innate relationship between artist, art, and art critic.

Again, fair point, and I agree on an intellectual level. This is the work of cultural journalists (and academics–I’m a rogue one myself). But what do people really want? Maybe they want art to be manageable, approachable, appreciable. Maybe Genius helps them achieve this relationship to what they love.

Fair point. I’m reminded of Billy Collins making the same argument in his “Introduction to Poetry.” Speaking of student urge to “crack the code” of a poem, he writes:

But I’d like to think that the code cracking is just the beginning of a Genius annotation. There is room for discussion of even personal response to a lyric.