Authorial intent isn't privileged in a critical reading of a text, except when you use phrases like "perhaps inspired by the Talmud", at which point you're maki

Authorial intent isn't privileged in a critical reading of a text, except when you use phrases like "perhaps inspired by the Talmud", at which point you're making comments about authorial intent. I'm going to have to go with the GP on this (though the article itself isn't very good). A very large percentage of Rap Genius annotations are just useless, and that's just out of the ones that are trying to be helpful instead of making a joke or providing information that's plain wrong. Even forgiving for direct appeal to what the lyricist supposedly meant, annotations seem to jump to the very first connection the annotator thought of, and the number of annotations for the same line (and the number of votes weighing the alternative annotations) is so low that a signal isn't rising out of the noise. Maybe that's just for the entries I end up looking at on there, but they aren't exactly obscure songs.