Rap music clearly has a serious misogyny problem. Admitting that won't lead to the elimination of the music altogether and it doesn't mean that all other social issues have to take a backseat. But once the problem has been acknowledged, let's don't just leave the self-evident truth sitting there. Actually continue to think about this stuff. Too often, rap's misogyny has been treated as a given. And that's just as dangerous.

81 years later, Lomax’s quandary is a different issue. Rap Genius aims for a comprehensive archive of rap meanings, while redefining the idea of “genius” altogether. The intelligence of a single person is replaced by a self-correcting form of knowledge derived from the crowd, which often leads to populist rhetoric that papers over very real power differentials and well-established hierarchies. The site’s investors invest their venture with bold religious significance, but practically speaking, perhaps the real genius is in transsubstantiation, via a technological capacity to turn pleasurable activities into value-producing labor. It’s the same logic that fuels Wikipedia and Google search results: a free market of anonymous contributors is a vastly better information aggregator and processor than an individual human brain, and a killer app is all that’s needed to derive stable meaning from the messiness of culture.

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

‘A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track.’ That was ‘Hard in da Paint’.

“The highest points and most infuriating moments on ‘Goblin’ come from the fact that it’s a vérité depiction of the worst aspects of American boy culture. You know, hating girls because they don’t like you because you’re a weirdo, hating any and all authority figures because they try to tell you how not to be such a weirdo. But most importantly (and scarily), there’s the part that involves lashing out about being viewed as a weirdo, and being summarily rewarded—i.e. seen as normal—for doing so. (It probably goes without saying that girls don’t have the same luxury.) Nobody cares about Tyler the Creator being someone’s role model in 2011. Which in a way, is the scariest thing about ‘Goblin’—too much of his scary fantasizing, for too many boys, is all too normal.”

"Overall, there seems to be a critical disconnect between the way the predominantly white, male critical establishment writes about violence and misogyny—especially as it’s primarily exhibited in hip-hop, i.e., music made predominantly by black artists. Critics such as these seem uncommonly drawn to violent, misogynistic music simply because it is shocking. This thrill of novelty seems to be nothing more than a fetishization of an alien culture."

"Have you ever started rapping along with some song on the radio and then realized that you don't know the lyrics? Now you don't have to worry about that embarrassing moment when it happens in front of your friends. OHHLA.com is your one stop shop for rap and hip-hop lyrics."

On the difficulty of preserving and reissuing classical hip-hop records. "The job that falls to those seeking to preserve hip-hop's past remains complex. Those doing the work need to know as much about copyright and contract law as they do about old Pete Rock B-sides, while a grounding in clinical psychology might help in dealing with the artists. It's a combination of specialisms few individuals possess, and it raises the question: just whose responsibility is it to curate the history of a culture?"