I have listened to mainstream western music since early teens, even though I didn’t have enough of a language grasp to understand the lyrics back then. The skill was building up throughout university years so I was able to rediscover old favorite tracks with full comprehension of author’s poetical idea. It was a fun process and some tracks turned out to be not exactly what I imagined of them earlier: I’ve always heard “Lords of Boars” (instead of Boards) in a chorus of the great single by Guano Apes and thought of it as some convoluted metaphor. So I was quite surprised to find out later that the song was about snowboarding.
A little later I’ve glimpsed into the rap music, which provided a whole new level of challenge. Text is delivered at a machine gun speed in a wide range of unfamiliar accents, topped off with slang and references obscure to outsider. As an example, this is just a quatrain from Aesop’s song about his cat:)
Hobgoblin, shots of hot Strongid
Vaccine queen deem church socks hostage
9 weeks awesome, hides in a slipper
Look in her eye like she might be a wizard
Rather than being turned off by these obstacles I found that I am growing more and more interested in spite of them. I have also discovered a site which provided tremendous help in deciphering the lyrics. The problem was that site seemed redundantly heavy and required tons of clicks just to read through one track. The former is more of a problem for citizen of multi-million city, who does most of their reading in public transport where the internet may trail off so suddenly. The latter is a problem for everyone who would prefer to focus on a reading and refrain from being online all of the time. So it dawned on me that I may try and write converter to turn any song or album on Genius into the pdf-readable ebook. And this is what I got as a result.
The Converter itself was made available for anyone interested. It was a rewarding project in many ways, such as me, who was totally ignorant of how modern web works got to learn JavaScript and put the whole thing together. More in-depth write up of a tech used and insights gained are here.
Also, close to the completion of the project I have learned that there is nothing new under the moon and I am not the first one tempted to rip off content from Genius. Moreover, they even have an API which enables anyone to do some of that without violating EULA. The Lyricist builds their solution exactly on that, while Jack Schultz mixes scraping directly off pages with API access. However, I must state in all humility that both projects seem lack one crucial feature, which geniusbooklet has — possibility to install in several clicks and after couple clicks more get a ready ebook of a song you want.
Then it gets better: the ebooks are optimized for print in A6 format and are awesome to read off the sheet instead of the screen and also work great as gifts!
Future plans are to find a way to integrate arrangements or song scores into the lyrics. If you like the project feel free to put it to use. If something breaks down please file an issue at GitHub. If you want to contribute — be my guest. Last but no least: you probably have realized that the project lies in the gray area of copyright law so please employ this converter of personal information purposes only.
