It’s fairly easy, and indeed tempting, to write M.I.A. off as a faux-radical who relies on the borrowed aesthetics of revolution to sell records. But that superficial reading belies her truest political work: her commitment to self and the exploration of identity in a world and industry that is more comfortable with easily digestible predetermined narratives, particularly when it comes to racialized people.

this isnt just about Kimmel and Kanye it's about who gets to be a creative genius in America and who we'd rather see as a clown

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.