Boy, Genius…: An Incursion through the Realm of Lyrics Annotations
Have you noticed that nowadays, insults on the internet are more… distinguished? Of course, people still go behind finstas to spout the most egregious stuff online, but on your main, they know better than that. That’s why there’s less expletives and more things like you’re a failure of the education system or you seem to lack reading comprehension or where’s your media literacy?
You clearly don’t want to be the kind of person to ever be accused of that. So what other way to show people you know stuff about media than to overinterpret it? That’s what you’ve been told to do in lit classes throughout school, and now it’s finally time to put that to work! Of course, you might shoot for the moon and surprisingly fail, saying that something reminds you of “Boss Baby,” but even then, you’ll land among the stars. You have formed A ThoughtTM which you can point to whenever someone even attempts to distrust your abilities.
Genius is a class example of the aforementioned attitude. A bastard child of the ever-forgotten, fairly-American, songmeanings.net, Genius is a website that posts song lyrics to which anyone with an account could add their own interpretation in the form of an annotation. Annotations are “localised,” in that you can select which specific parts of the lyrics to comment on. In a Reddit-like way, people’s upvotes and downvotes decide an annotation’s reputation. However, unlike on Reddit, downvotes haven’t really stopped people from continuing to (meaningfully) contribute to the community.
Some opine that Genius wrecks people’s media literacy, as it provides an easy way to understand something fairly inaccessible. Others think that the website is feeding people slop. But these are discussions we are not delving into today, I’m afraid. Today, we are here to admire some of what the rawest and most cooked minds of this generation have to say about the words or their favourite (or not) artists. We are taking a random journey through the offerings of Genius, stopping to behold everything that comes our way and adjunctly nod. In other words, we read, and we do not judge.
We begin our promenade at a very frequented spot, the one I dare argue is the pinnacle of Internet culture behaviour, and that is the page for Finnish DJ Darude’s instrumental song, “Sandstorm”. Known across the realms of the Web as the tune of Twitch gameplays, the song is elegantly transcribed on Genius as closely as possible, offering a reading experience that is either awe-inspiring or frightening, depending on which side of quirky you live on. (If you don’t live on either, then it is just painfully cringe.) The annotations for this song would make one think of the exquisite corpse technique, where someone left faux-astute comments on life, another person has added erotic images of potato chips, and then someone else contributed with the actual definition of the letter D. Somehow, you’d know that it’s people from the same collective who put this together, some of whom still wear their fedoras. But this is so far along the disruptive-to-establishment pipeline that the only people who are studying it curiously are Hawaiian shirt-clad tourists pawing large cameras; everyone else just keeps circulating.
A few steps away from the sandstorm is the apple, which, as we have been taught, does not fall far from the tree. Charli XCX’s song “Apple” sparked a dance craze on TikTok strong enough to bring flashmobs back from the status of recession indicators to the realm of coolness. What it has also sparked is a discussion about feminism, which takes an Ari Aster-like turn. A former annotation on a lyric about throwing an apple Pepe Silvias itself into a melange of traumas, the gendering of science and the state of hyperpop in today’s world, in which “Charli, a woman” – yeah, I really had to pull a direct quote from that – travels so hecticly across the political compass that all colours start to lose their boundaries and end up blending into a non-descript Genius grey. In its place, a more anodyne explanation was pasted on the song’s page. Is it vandalism? Is it restitution? Sigh, I’ll say it; is it… brat?
Charli XCX has been studied quite a lot lately, but so has her pop colleague Ethel Cain. And there’s good reason for that – Cain’s lyrics tell interwoven, layered stories of great emotional hardship happening in the United States’ Bible Belt, references upon references inside her songs. But what strikes curious is how her lyrics are annotated – by Cain herself mostly, that is. Many of her songs are half-highlighted in yellow, a colour designated to show an official contribution. And she does not hold back; even hovering upon the tiniest stanza reveals an essay on how life is a race and how that really needs to be stated to understand the rest of the song. Cain’s musings go to show that simply creating a world is not enough. Sometimes, you have to make a map of it, too. The involvement is commendable and guaranteed to inspire awe in people who cannot believe their annotations have a seat at the same table as the artist’s. If you happen upon it in passing, though, you might think that the artist is a bit too present.
On our way to the next spot, I can’t not mention the many obvious annotations scattered all throughout the website, utter exercises in rephrasing, among other things. There’s stating out the dimensions of a California King Bed. There’s the one about heaven coming only after death. There’s also the comparison of girls’ wetness to the 2005 world-shattering event that was hurricane Katrina. All of these recall my time in one of my classes at university, where we were taught the basics of how to be a therapist. One of the techniques mentioned was recasting the client’s feelings, in other words, in order to show them that what they said was understood. This technique is called echoing, and I think it accurately fits the attempt of the annotation writers – to show that those words got somewhere and made an impact. Make of that what you will.
And although annotations appear as a device for facilitating comprehension, sometimes they have more to state about the author than they do about the words they’re supposedly deciphering. Some words carry a personal impact so salient that, as a result, one cannot do anything but integrate them into one's personal mythology. And who amongst us is not guilty of that? Certainly not me, with four framed posters of lyrics within eyesight. A Death Grips couplet seemingly about post-coital affection reveals an absolute Daria-worthy deadpan - “If it wasn’t for sex, many couples might prefer to be alone.” Below that, we find a diagram titled “the chemical basis of love” presenting a man harbouring, well… un certain regard, among hormone names and arrows. I would hasten to assume that it’s not unlike the look of the author when talking about their romantic history. Similarly, the annotation for the plain Bladee lyric “can’t end on a loss” opens up to a cascade of ideas about the nature of celebrity and how it impacts the appreciation of popular art. The essay is peppered with the words “we” and “us,” but while reading it, I can’t help but hear “me” and “I” instead. And that’s not a bad thing; at least it doesn’t insist upon itself.
What insists upon itself, however, is obscurity. It possesses a certain kind of dark appeal that we either like to associate ourselves with or go into the trenches to discover ourselves. It seems like the average Genius user likes to do both; making references to utterly unknown things is widespread on the website, so much so that one would consider it the currency of the place. This provides the author with not one, not two, but three pats on the back; you have the satisfaction of knowing something undiscovered by others, the ability to make a connection to the song in question, and the parasocial high of knowing what’s happening in the songwriter’s mind. (Kind of a serenity prayer, if I may.) It doesn’t even matter if everybody knows the referent; if it’s “underrated” for the author, it does the job. One such example appears in an annotation for the 1975 song “Oh Caroline,” where the author links the track to another track just because both of them have the same name in the title. Similarly, Lorde mentioning planes in a song must mean she is drawing a parallel to something from her back catalogue where the word “planes” appears. I have also talked about flying multiple times in my life; I have only now realised I’m a living NYT Connections.
In the same vein, “Dead Women” is Mitski discussing the societally wide tendency of owning women and consuming them with an aggression that siphons the life out of them. Yes, she talks about all the ways in which she would end her own life; however, she’s not talking about a literal suicide, but more so an ending of her public persona’s suffering. One zealous annotator, though, thought it necessary to provide references to Women Who Suicided.
As we take a turn towards the hilltop which overlooks all we have seen today, I would like to highlight some annotations that have made me stop in my tracks and reconsider what the artists would have to say. One of my favourites explains the chorus of the Snail Mail track “Full Control” using the phrase “the calculus of falling in love,” which I am sure is a crime in at least five distinct jurisdictions, but I happen to return to it again and again. Another one eloquently explains semantic satiation in the middle of Tori Amos’ “Tear in Your Hand” and provides me with a needed break from bawling every time I even read the lyrics to this song. What can I say, I guess Justin Bieber was right.
Our journey started with seeing lyrics annotations as just people musing so they could prove to themselves and others that They Know. Only after careful examination have I discovered that that was an arrogant assumption and nothing else. Of course, there’s also snobbism and nose-upturning on there; that represents but a small part in the grand scheme of things, though. Genius itself is both a city and a collaborative art project, where people buzz around, either past each other or into each other, recording the impact pop music had on them. Sometimes it lacks the emotion of endeavours like Queering the Map or the skill of the Internet Archive, but it shows people trying to understand each other and maybe make it easier, funnier or more absurd for others. And when you get to that realisation, it becomes a pretty neat place to visit. I, for one, would have that as opposed to silence. Or azlyrics.com.