Michael Chabon, the Bay Area-living, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Telegraph Avenue just became a verified genius. The above account on the lyrics and text annotation site Genius will serve as proof.

Perhaps you heard of the website formerly known as Rap Genius when it recently hired Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker. What would make one of America's best-read, best-employed, and just plain best music critics jump a particularly nice ship, wondered many? But maybe you were already aware of Genius for its $40 million dollar funding round or its Yale-bro founders. Or you could have heard from Genius when they admitted to SEO cheating and tweeted "I'mma rape you in your mouth" out of context (it was a lyric!).

Regardless, more folks will be learning about or buzzing about Genius today, especially fans of works like Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city. That's because Chabon has just released his third annotation on the site, this one for "The Blacker the Berry," a Kendrick Lamar track that dropped yesterday. Chabon is on his new releases game, it would seem. By way of Genius, here's the newest Chabon work, released under the handle "Vanzorn" in a likely allusion to a 1914 comedic play about New York artistic life called Van Zorn. First, the Lamar couplet:

"So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street? When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!" Kendrick Lamar - The Blacker The Berry

Next, the Chabon analysis:

In this final couplet, Kendrick Lamar employs a rhetorical move akin to—and in its way even more devastating than—Common’s move in the last line of “I Used to Love H.E.R.”: snapping an entire lyric into place with a surprise revelation of something hitherto left unspoken. In “H.E.R.”, Common reveals the identity of the song’s “her”—hip hop itself—forcing the listener to re-evaluate the entire meaning and intent of the song. Here, Kendrick Lamar reveals the nature of the enigmatic hypocrisy that the speaker has previously confessed to three times in the song without elaborating: that he grieved over the murder of Trayvon Martin when he himself has been responsible for the death of a young black man. Common’s “her” is not a woman but hip hop itself; Lamar’s “I” is not (or not only) Kendrick Lamar but his community as a whole. This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song’s “you”, and to consider the possibility that “hypocrisy” is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one.

And here's the track in question:

Thee people from the Bay Area, two from Berkeley and one from San Francisco, were named MacArthur fellows last night. The "genius award," one that allows its members to work on their craft full-time, comes with heaps prestige and a whopping $500,000 booty. San Francisco artist Camille Utterback, Berkeley computer nerd Maneesh Agrawala, and Berkeley molecular biologist Lin He were among this year's 24 recipients.

Utterback, as described in her bio, is a "pioneering artist and programmer in the field of interactive installation." She also "develops long term and permanent installations for commercial and museum settings via her company Creative Nerve, Inc." A recent installation, Abundance (at right) is a temporary public installation that was commissioned for San Jose, CA.

Congratulations to all three recipients. Drinks are on you!