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I know a lot of the songs up there don't have much in the way of annotations, but wouldn't an album review heavy with lyrical analysis be more appropriate in this case?

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A better comparison would be reviewing a song by uploading it to Soundcloud and then using the 'annotate at this timestamp' feature to review it. If you didn't have permission to do so (as far as I know, Soundcloud has no licences in place) then you would be infringing copyright, and a takedown could be fairly issued. This is functionally the same due to the dual-licence nature of music copyrights.

In the case of a heavily annotated song, I agree that's a decent comparison.

In a weird way, it would seem that every song on RapGenius starts off nearly naked of annotation, and — it would seem — essentially illegal, but may end up heavily annotated and “transformative.”

You can’t start at the end, though.

One is reminded of mathematical induction. Somehow, though, I don’t expect the law to agree that because lyrics-prime is a legal, transformative work, that lesser-annotated copies are therefore also legal. IANAL

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