Because Genius relies on crowd-sourced annotations, there is always a variable degree of annotations on the site. This variability means a constant push and shove between annotations that merely paraphrase or repeat lyrics, and annotations that actually analyze a text. The two main tools one the side of analysis and aesthetically pleasing annotations are Editors and Clean-up Projects.
Editors are in charge of accepting, rejecting, and editing annotations, and generally maintaining the quality of annotations on the site. Clean-up projects are a more focused version of this. A user takes a page, generally one with a large number of pageviews, and makes it better. This means editing annotations so that all are fully proofread, quality annotations, and in some cases changing the verse structure to avoid redundant lines.
Last week I cleaned up My Chemical Romance’s Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na). This meant rejecting or accepting the 20 or so unreviewed annotations on the page, then writing new ones to take their place. I also edited the already reviewed annotations for spelling, grammar, and analysis of the song. Then I did a variety of aesthetic edits. These included making sure that links had uniform formatting, adding pictures to annotations, and duplicating annotations so that they covered repeated lines in the chorus.
This week I’m cleaning up the song “Cigarette Daydreams” by Cage the Elephant. This page, while better annotated, presents its own challenges. Where Na Na Na was part of a concept album with an entire narrative and world associated with it, Cigarette Daydreams is more straightforward. The challenge here will be deepening the annotations, and tying relatively straightforward lyrics to the creation of the song, or the band’s work as a whole.
For example, every page on genius has a description. When I started, the description of Cigarette Daydreams looked like this:
This song is a reflection on someone the singer loves but has lost. He’s smoking a cigarette and daydreaming about her.
The entire song is a collection of things he is mulling over, and features several clear images of her combined with the knowledge that she is gone.
Brad Shultz says, “This is a song that Matt had written and had played to me on his phone. He was talking about maybe using it for something other than Cage, but I was an instant fan of the song. This was a moment of realization like, ‘Why do we have to write Cage The Elephant songs? We can just write songs, regardless of what style of music they might be.’
“I like the idea of doing things that people might not expect from us. So we decided to take a whole new approach to writing, and this song is a good example of that. It’s just about being honest.
“I’m really happy about how we came through the process and opened ourselves up to new ways of accepting any kind of song. This one almost fell through the cracks, but here it is.”
Matt said that this a song about his wife and how he met her.
(Followed by a picture of Matt and his wife looking happy.)
My first edit is to find a source for the quote. By googling a few sentences, I can find the site which the quote was taken from. Then I reformat the quotes. The three paragraph quote is introduced by “Brad Shultz says,” which works but doesn’t tell us who Brad Shultz is. I replace that with “In the words of Brad Shultz, the band’s rhythm guitarist,” and place this on a separate line from the quote. Annotation formatting allows us to make the three quotes blockquotes, making them easier to distinguish. I then make changes to the introduction, editing it so that it does more than just summarize the lyrics. In addition, I delete the final sentence, “Matt said that this a song about his wife and how he met her.” because I cannot find any sources or interviews with the lead singer verifying this. This means that the photo of the two together is no longer relevant, so I replace it with a link to the music video for the song that features both of them. The final annotation would look something like this:
This is the final track of Cage the Elephant’s 2013 album, Melophobia. It presents the pain of one’s search for identity through the musings of a parted lover. The song itself has a softer, more brooding sound than most of Cage the Elephant’s work.
In the words of Brad Shultz, the band’s rhythm guitarist,
“ Why do we have to write Cage The Elephant songs? We can just write songs, regardless of what style of music they might be.
I like the idea of doing things that people might not expect from us. So we decided to take a whole new approach to writing, and this song is a good example of that. It’s just about being honest.
Matt Shultz, the lead singer, adds
“ I also think we censor how honest we are because we’re afraid to hurt people or perhaps give too much or ourselves away. With “Cigarette Dreams” and the whole record, I really struggled to be transparent and speak from naked honesty.
These themes are visualized in the song’s music video, a video presented in nostalgic black and white and disappointing only for its notable lack of rain.
(Video.)
As always, view the annotated version of this post at http://genius.com/elizabethposs.blogspot.com.
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