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.
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 Genius’s tool addresses that, he said, but unlike crowd-sourced information on Twitter or Facebook, which is rapidly superseded, Genius’s snippets remain easily visible forever.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.”