...n Bronson album drops, maybe you know it as the upstart critical platform that lured Sasha Frere-Jones away from the New Yorker. Or the would-be hip-hop authority ironically run by white Yale grads. (“White devil sophistry” is how Das Racist described Genius in a 2012 song, its lyrics available on Genius.) Maybe you’ve seen the articles unfolding Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam’s bad behavior. He finally stepped down from the company in May, after uploading the Isla Vista Manifesto and encircling it w...
The Genius annotations to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Do they unpack its meaning, or obscure it?
...nnotated, in a never-ending spiral of exegesis that makes your head spin. “We try to avoid NERDSPEAK in most cases,” reads one bit of official embroidery from the FAQ page, expanding on reasons why a “white hat” noob like me might find her contribution in the trash heap. Not that that’s carte blanche to mangle the language: “Please don’t misspell ‘entendre.’ ” At any rate, “You’ll receive some sort of explan...
The Genius annotations to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Do they unpack its meaning, or obscure it?
Segal said she came on board to help Genius show the world “they are so much more than rap.” The expansion and move to be taken more seriously are complex. Genius has been called “the most clownish startup in the tech boom,” catching flack for bizarre and sexist comments from one of the co-f...
At Launch Party, Post-Rap Genius Shows How to Annotate Anything on the Web | Motherboard
...e--the price of speaking their truth—for Heems or Dap, for M.I.A., is much higher than it is for any white musicians with a message, be it Kathleen Hanna or Kim Gordon’s mass appeal white feminism or Bono, whose career is foundationally built on his white savior complex. Heems' work (both solo and with Das Racist) explores racial problems in both American and Asian society with a distinctly satirical slant, but the label of "joke rap" is one that has become difficult...
The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie | The Pitch | Pitchfork
...hard to keep track. The Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, ancient Egypt, H Rider Haggard, The Sword in the Stone, the Ring Cycle, Tolkien, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Mabinogion, Harry Potter, The Jungle Book, Ursula K Le Guin, Hans Christian Andersen, Idylls of the King, Conan the Barbarian – himself the stolen-away downmarket twin of Walt Whitman – and The Wind In the Willows. You may la...
Margaret Atwood on Game of Thrones: ‘Real people, every murderous one’
| Television & radio | The Guardian
...change standing – the pale, deadly-cold Others and their troops of the barrow-wightish, zombie-ish Undead with their LED blue eyes who bring endless winter? Funforall, as James Joyce punned of funerals. And it is fun for all, except for the underage, because this is Ivanhoe with the rape and gutting scenes included. Not to mention the incest, the patricide, and the kiddie murders. Freud goes on the r...
Margaret Atwood on Game of Thrones: ‘Real people, every murderous one’
| Television & radio | The Guardian
...gon standing? Or last metaphor-for-climate-change standing – the pale, deadly-cold Others and their troops of the barrow-wightish, zombie-ish Undead with their LED blue eyes who bring endless winter? Funforall, as James Joyce punned of funerals. And it is fun for all, except for the underage, because this is Ivanhoe with the rape and gutting scenes included. Not to mention the incest, the patricide...
Margaret Atwood on Game of Thrones: ‘Real people, every murderous one’
| Television & radio | The Guardian
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