Against RapGenius
How the Internet's most cringeworthy site turned music into QAnon
A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all nearly pop became bland and uninspiring. The once-radical instinct to identify, uplift, and take seriously strains of the outré or the transcendent in pop culture has morphed into a sort of widespread knee-bend of the critical class at the sword of PR firms. If you can’t ignore event albums, at least you can gawk at them. Where “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a fundamentally true insight that has also enabled hedonistic solipsism, so too has poptimism’s mantra: “let people enjoy things.”
There is spiritual and critical value in hating. Haters are often tarred as misanthropes, philistines, snobs; there is some truth in every smear. But haters also provide a certain public service: they are friction, cynical or not, in a world dedicated to becoming frictionless. Still, a toxicity and stigma overpowers hating in the moment. Criticism, whether serious or reflexive, threatens to be interpreted as close-mindedness or contrarianism. It’s safer to hold on to your hate. To let it mature, ferment. AGAINST (formerly PATIENTLY HATING) is a space dedicated to this kind of hate: the hate that, with time, has taken on a life of its own.
There’s an ongoing rap beef between two over-the-hill pop titans; you’ve probably heard about it. It likely started as the equivalent of a record label psy-op, a way for the boys to gin up public interest and inflate streaming numbers after UMG saw how much attention the Megan Thee Stallion-Nicki Minaj feud garnered earlier in the year. It also, as the good folks at No Bells noted, has attracted a great deal of attention insofar as it resembles the “supernova of an era”—two of the few remaining monocultural stars from that hybrid old-media/new-media apparatus of the 2010s that could actually transform blog darlings into stadium tourers. More than anything else, the beef has made itself newsworthy for its feverish pace and its devolution into sincere nastiness, transforming itself overnight from two egos spatting about fake abs and short statures to allegations of ritualized sexual abuse, more hidden children, and domestic violence. All of this is true, and all of it has been covered. What remains unspoken—and what haunts this entire saga with a certain je ne sais cringe—is just how RapGenius-core the Drake-Kendrick flame-out has been.
RapGenius, now just “Genius” (one imagines Mark Andreessen as Justin Timberlake in The Social Network instructing the Yale-graduate founders to “drop the rap”), is perhaps the perfect millennial artifact, meaning it should inspire deep shame in everybody involved. The site emerged as a perfect cultural accident, capitalizing both on the early 2010s proliferation of Internet music content and the mid-2010s freewheeling venture capital money available for anybody who wore a suit and appeared to know slang. Its premise, for the unacquainted, is a sort of Wikipedia for lyrics, predominantly rap lyrics, whereby users can annotate, explain, and interpret lyrical content. In effect, it exists to deputize white suburban teenagers into becoming, say, documentarians of and imagined participants in Chicago gang violence.
Genius has been roundly mocked and critiqued for its express function, as well it should be. Its proof of concept rests upon both the absolutely true claim that there exist rap listeners who aren’t fluent in the form’s history or culture and the entitled and absurd notion that these listeners can, and should, be initiated at the click of a mouse. Whatever its current user demographic may be, the site was created to explain Black culture to white kids. But no matter how damning its original sin—or how thorny its legal problems along the way—Genius has become a cultural behemoth on the same timeline and under many of the same conditions of the two warring megastars.
We live in a Genius moment, a truth clarified by the fact that the biggest cultural story of the moment is a Genius-ass beef. It’s no coincidence that, during the foray of barbs and not-so-thinly-veiled allegations, Genius experienced so much traffic that the VC-backed site crashed. For many, the site’s SEO-gaming dominance has fundamentally reshaped the way that music is encountered. Genius operates from the presumption that music is but a puzzle of referents: hidden lyrical meanings, songs as fronts for salacious gossip, samples as Easter eggs. The notion is not universally incorrect, especially in something as overtly literal as a rap beef, but it has the overriding effect of turning the act of listening to music into a game in which music can be processed, perfectly understood, and discarded. It turns the act of creative expression into something like an escape room or a sudoku—a seemingly thorny but perfectly solvable diversion to be slogged through and then immediately forgotten.
As the New York Times’ Joe Coscarelli observes, the Geniusification of music, operating in tandem with the rise of parasocial standom as the dominant mode of artistic engagement, has turned a generation of music listeners into something like crypto-QAnon. On Genius, songs no longer function as songs; rather, they are cryptic transmissions from a pop-star overlord, instructions awaiting their decoding. At its best, music transports its listener, unlocking a dimension of the human experience not previously identifiable. On Genius, music is but lyrical content to be tacked onto a corkboard. It’s a mode of listening that has facilitated, more than anything else, the en masse transformation of fans into fanatics, the precondition for a culture in which Swifties feel the divine duty to find Matty Healy’s home address and Twitter blue checks perform amateur numerology to uncover the hidden meanings of “6:16 in LA.”
In a recent Dirt roundtable on the question of “music vs. lyrics,” FADER columnist Vivian Medithi offered a succinct and insightful rebuke of the Genius-inspired urge to trawl lyrics for meaning: “Lyrics are icing, music is everything; babies love to dance. Turn on some non-English tunes and free yourself from the need to understand everything about the art that touches you.” It’s not, in other words, that lyrics are unimportant, but that the urge to understand everything is undignified and spiritually corrosive. Music, to paraphrase Kamala Harris, did not fall out of a coconut tree, and engaging with lyrical content on one’s own terms can be a tremendously rewarding act. But lyrics, even at their most referential or entendre-filled, do not exist for the sheer purpose of taxonomy. There is a power in the interpretive act that is lost both when someone else does the explaining for you and when you perceive perfect understanding as a necessary step on the way to engagement. I’m reminded of an interview that billy woods & Preservation did with The FADER’s Raphael Helfand, in which the artists discuss the way that the act of interpretation prolongs the life of an artwork. In the interview, woods describes going to Las Vegas and learning, sitting at a roulette wheel, that MF Doom’s describing himself as “feeling like number 26 on the roulette wheel” meant “next to nothing;” how a favorite song of his had been rediscovered and recontextualized not on a crowd-sourced website, but amidst the thick of real life.
Where the Drake-Kendrick beef has been its most embarrassing (aside, of course, from its rote dismissal of potential female victims as anything other than gotchas and punchlines) is in the mass fervor to pore every line’s possible meaning that it has inspired in listeners. The medium is the message, and the 21st-century subliminal diss belongs to Genius. It’s within this context that “Not Like Us,” Kendrick’s as-of-now final swipe, is all the more astonishing for being, first and foremost, a song that people can actually have fun with. A war fought with annotations and rabbit-holes was won by making people dance outside.