Hopefully the quality of the annotations will be better than on rap genius. It's mostly bad attempts at humor and unnecessary slang translations. I don't see the value in it.
When was the last time you visited? Ignoring our other channels (many of which, including News and Lit (née Poetry), have been in place for a long time), we've been working very hard to decrease the "geekspeak" and unfunny humor annotations. Guidelines have been in place against these types of annotations since I've joined over 12 months ago, and we're still trying to work through the 3 year backlog of bad annotations, while keeping up with the new stuff. Try looking at some of our more popular pages, or some of the stuff on other channels, such as news.genius.com. There's a lot of value possible in annotating, analyzing and contextualizing primary sources!
One thing that would be a very natural extension and really useful, would be annotations to scientific papers and books. I can't count the times I had to laborously fill in the arguments deemed trivial or obvious by the author, but were not terribly obvious at all. arxiv.org hosts a lot of them in source form, so modulo licensing issues and a good latex to html compiler, one could easily make them available for annotation. Other than that there are probably lots of interesting works that are in the public domain.
Obviously using "genius" and "iq-points" are just marketing and the number of rap fans are probably greater than the number of academics. So I don't know, if that is a viable thing to add.
In all fairness, most pop music is pretty vacuous. The Wall annotations are pretty good, a nice mix of references from the movie and personal anecdotes of the band members, e.g. http://rock.genius.com/Pink-floyd-nobody-home-lyrics
The annotations for "Nobody Home" are weak, pseudo-intellectual warblings with very little added value.
"So far, the majority of the discussion of the song has focused on the discord created by the alternating ideas of artistic yearning and mundane if not altogether oppressive reality. But what of the chorus and its reiterations of nobody home? Just who is Pink trying to reach when I pick up the phone?"
Who indeed. There may be other sectors where the annotations work better, but that kind of "insight" doesn't make me want to go back.
i agree with both this and OP - while the format and function of the site is great for reading, i am usually underwhelmed by the annotations. in fairness to the annotators, the content they are annotating is often pretty inane - "he's bragging about his sexual prowess" etc etc.
perhaps we should rename is "genious". let's at least have a sense of humor about what we're doing here.
Maybe I'm just too white but I use rap genius primarily for slang translations. I listen to a lot of UK grime and rap genius is like a translate.google.com for grime. There's no way I'd be able to decode most of the stuff Skepta says otherwise.
