I stopped fucking with Eminem when he couldn’t stop making rape jokes in his rhymes as he approached 40 years old. There is a time when all of us have to re-evaluate the distance we actually have from dangerous moments. Eminem has a distance that never runs out. A distance that only grows wider. And there are those who would call him edgy for not realising this, while ignoring those who realise that their proximity to danger is a lot slimmer, and yet they’ve still found a way to stay alive. No one finds this funny. [...] What Macklemore didn’t embrace was the thing that Eminem embraced before him: if you are in a system that will propel you to the top off of the backs of black artists who might be better than you are, no one black is going to be interested in your guilt. It has played out in every genre since the inception of genre, or since the first song was pulled by white hands from wherever a black person sang it into the air. No one knows what to make of the guilt. [...] Macklemore did what I would have hoped he would have done, even if he did it painfully and with a tone of self-congratulation. What no other white rapper was able to do before him. He stopped just apologising for what he imagined as undeserved fame and instead weaponised it, losing fans in the process. The major function of privilege is that it allows us who hold it in masses to sacrifice something for the greater good of pulling up someone else. Macklemore, whether intentionally or not, decided to use his privilege to cannibalise whiteness, tearing at his own mythology in the process. When I saw him last year at a festival, he performed White Privilege II to a captivated white audience. Halfway through the song, he left the stage entirely empty, walking off and making room for two black poets and a black drummer to read poems about police violence and gentrification. It was a stunning image, an artist holding the mouth of his audience open and forcing the slick red spoonful of medicine down their throats.

“Anyone perusing the list of past winners cannot help noticing that many if not most of the country’s greatest musical minds are conspicuously missing,” composer John Adams told the New York Times in 2003, the year he won the prize for “On the Transmigration of Souls,” a commissioned reflection on the 9/11 attacks. Adams listed off many of the notable musicians who never earned a Pulitzer, from “Monk (Meredith or Thelonious)” to Philip Glass to Laurie Anderson. “Most if not all of these genuinely creative spirits have been passed over year after year, often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.” The sentiment was clear: prize jurors prefer the safe and scholarly to the unpredictable and world-shifting.

One minute he was a hip-hop sensation starting a viral dance craze, the Shmoney Dance, and rhyming about guns and drugs and murder. The next he was locked up, indicted on a slew of charges involving… guns and drugs and murder. The government’s case against Bobby Shmurda, now heading to trial, raises all kinds of nagging questions, but none more troubling than this: Does the justice system fundamentally misunderstand the world of rap?

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.

Well, some snotty kids got $15 million. At least the people who founded the culture that made them rich are also living on the high hog, right? Not quite. A lot of the originators of rap music — many of whose lyrics provide part of the content that RapGenius' business model is based on — are far from rich. Kool Herc, who maybe more than any one person can be said to have invented hip-hop, can't afford required surgery, and when these kids are parading around in suits and fresh kicks it leaves a bad taste in a lot peoples' mouths.