New media runs everything. The New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones is moving over to Rap Genius. The longtime pop music aficionado will become an executive editor, founders Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman announced.
Frere-Jones spoke to The New York Times about his motivation for switching over to the ambitious site now known simply as Genius.
Mr. Frere-Jones, 47, said that he chose to leave The New Yorker after 11 years for a variety of reasons. He originally became a critic, he said, because he was frustrated that so many of those who wrote about music were ignorant of its nuances. Genius’s tool addresses that, he said, but unlike crowd-sourced information on Twitter or Facebook, which is rapidly superseded, Genius’s snippets remain easily visible forever.
“And I’ll be honest,” he said. “I don’t want to stay up until 4 a.m. any more at shows, and you can annotate lyrics during the day.”
