Socrates famously said that he didn’t write his teachings down, because words on a page can’t answer back. Now they can.
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Before the first term of my degree (English), we got the standard pile of reading to do. Over the summer, I struggled through Ulysses with the help of an excellent guide book, but that took a month. Next up: Bleak House. Then Middlemarch. You get the idea. We then moved on to poetry, and the starting point was, as I imagine it is for many, T. S. Eliot. I’d come across The Waste Land before but didn’t really understand what he was trying to do, but looking at the slim Collected Poems, I thought: I can do this in a week. No bother.
I was wrong. Obviously. Eliot is a densely allusive writer, but the allusions are the plasma of his poetry; he wants to send the reader on wild-goose paper trails. I had the humble ‘Student’s Guide’ to the poems, but this would only give me the reference itself, not its context, nor any clue to its significance. Again, I struggled through.
That week, if we had finished with Eliot (something we wouldn’t be), we were given some poems by Ezra Pound as optional reading. I looked at one of them, just out of curiosity. ‘Near Perigord’ was the title. I was immediately intrigued that a poem would be titled as just being ‘near’ a place, so I read on. What on earth was this epigraph, in a language that looked kind of like French and kind of like Latin, but was clearly neither? Who was ‘Cino’? Where the hell was this poem set, with all of these freely adapted place names? I gave up.
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I came to Rap Genius as I was looking for some explanations of Wu-Tang lyrics. Explanations, not lyrics-- I already knew those. I was bowled over by the power of delivery, the different flows and styles employed by nine emcees, the darkness of the beats, etc., but I knew there were references and meanings flying over my head. With each song’s Rap Genius page in my browser, I could sit and click on every reference I didn’t get, or piece of slang I couldn’t deduce. It was a revelation in the way I listened to music.
Of course, now, Rap Genius has expanded its parameters beyond rap music-- it’s now on a mission to annotate all text. An overreaching claim, maybe, but it’s resulted in such diverse sites as Rock Genius, News Genius and Poetry Genius. The reader can now look at ‘Near Perigord’ and have all of that mental stuff explained in a click. The epigraph’s language and translation? Done. Possible identities for Cino? Done. The poem’s context/setting? Explained.
With this website, information is proliferated. Proliferated big time. Rap Genius, like rap music, takes power away from the establishment and gives it to the people. In the bad old days, if you wanted any kind of serious knowledge, you had to pay for it: buying a book, enrolling in higher education, whatever. The internet dropped a bomb on all of that, but the content and information there is sprawling and incoherent. The architecture of the Rap Genius website, the beauty of its coding, its accessibility and reach, finally look like solving this problem. Rap Genius focusses the dizzying amount of information on the internet into a laser of truth.
This is what, I think, gives some weight to the plan to be the biggest site on the web. A search gives you a website that’s been, okay, extremely well chosen according to what you’ve typed into the search bar. Rap Genius gives you annotations on the precise text you’re looking at, to the freakin’ word. No other internet service, or ‘service’ full stop, can provide that.
BUT.
There’s something even bigger than this. Yup, bigger than bigger than the internet. Rap Genius allows you to almost instantly absorb the context and references of any text. There is no paper trail of dictionaries, concordances, internet searches, which take precious time. You understand the text near-instantaneously. Imagine the implications of this-- the connexions we can make unburdened by the librarian-work of trudging through secondary material. We can leap, from, say, a passage in Virgil’s Aeneid, to golden-era hip hop, to contemporary performance poetry. And that’s just my non-Geniusified mind freestyling. Imagine what connexions newer, younger minds who have Genius-level knowledge as standard can make. We’re talking the cross-pollination of all creative expression and hard knowledge. That’s a genuine possibility with a site like Rap Genius. That’s what makes the project so thrilling to be a part of. If you wanna join in, just annotate a line.
