Generate lyrics like they're from Drake or Rihanna – all magic done by a Markov Chain

With her first album in eight years, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple reached into the past to confront her rapist, middle-school bullies, and herself.

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.

"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."

"I wrote the words 'a grain of sand' upon a grain of rice/She baked a pie of very shy laboratory mice."

Like The Bejar Family Circus without The Family Circus.

Just like it says. "If you don't believe in recompense, who will fix the fence for you?"

Great interview, including some song meanings.

"get your head out from those mags / and websites who try to shape your style / take a risk just for yourself / and wade into the deep end of the ocean"

Finally understandable.

"This is an attempt to annotate Destroyer lyrics. However, no attempt is made at describing what a song is about. I don't know what any of them are about. Nobody does."