Sasha Frere-Jones signs on with Rap Genius
fishmongerfunk
4,154 Posts
he is one of my favourite music writers but rap genius seems like a super odd site for him to be working for. i have a bad feeling about this:
Pop Music Critic Leaves The New Yorker to Annotate Lyrics for a Start-Up
Donald Bowers / Getty Images for The New Yorker
By RAVI SOMAIYA and BEN SISARIO
January 11, 2015
Sasha Frere-Jones, the longtime pop music critic for The New Yorker, has left the magazine to join Genius, a website mounting an ambitious expansion after starting as a forum for annotated rap lyrics online.
Mr. Frere-Jones will be an executive editor at Genius, two of its founders, Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman, said in an interview, with a focus on annotations of music lyrics. He will start this week.
Genius, which was originally called Rap Genius before changing its name last summer, has received $55 million of venture capital funding and broadened its mission beyond music to include restaurant menus and Shakespeare, among other texts.
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 Genius’s tool addresses that, he said, but unlike crowd-sourced information on Twitter or Facebook, which is rapidly superseded, Genius’s snippets remain easily visible forever.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.”
The magazine will be hiring a new critic, its editor, David Remnick, said in an email Sunday, though Mr. Frere-Jones may contribute occasional articles.
Genius has also hired another journalist, Christopher Glazek, to focus on politics and culture annotations, Mr. Zechory, 30, and Mr. Lehman, 31, said. The site will continue to hire people with expertise in particular subject areas, aiming to bring in more users from online communities obsessed with particular topics.
Genius’s expansion marks the latest merger of the tech and media worlds, and helps to fulfill a prediction made by one of the company’s funders, Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, that the definition of journalism might broaden to include jobs outside of traditional writing and editing.
“My remit is going into the lyrics site and building a team,” Mr. Frere-Jones said. He added that he planned to initially add three or four people, and that their precise role was hard to describe, though the skills were rooted in journalism. Mr. Frere-Jones will use his contacts in the music industry to bring artists and writers into Genius, seeking a critical mass of influential names for “that Twitter moment when suddenly the smart kids stop holding their noses up in the air and they take part, and it just improves.”
He said he would also be “going on the site and sort of writing some exemplary posts, or saying here’s how you might think about annotating, or encouraging other posters.”
Rap Genius was started in 2009 by Mr. Zechory, Mr. Lehman and a friend from Yale University, Mahbod Moghadam, as a Wikipedia-like resource for annotating hip-hop lyrics. The site grew steadily until 2012, when a $15 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, seen as kingmakers in the tech world, made it an instant media curiosity.
The site’s exegeses even attracted the attention of rappers — like Nas, now an investor in the company — who added comments on their own songs. Rap Genius’s founders, who said they hoped their site and its thousands of users would eventually annotate the world, noted the uploading and dissection of nonrap material like the Declaration of Independence.
Last year, Genius attracted a further $40 million in investment, and it now has over 40 million unique users a month. “The site started as rap, expanded beyond rap, and now wherever anyone is experiencing text, the goal is going to be to have it annotated,” Mr. Lehman said.
But Genius has been mired in several controversies. It has been criticized for impolitic postings Mr. Moghadam made on social media, and as implicitly mocking rap culture by translating it into pseudo-academic language. In late 2013, it was slammed by music publishers for using copyrighted lyrics without permission, and eventually signed licensing deals with publishers.
Then, last May, Mr. Moghadam wrote a snide annotation of a manifesto left by Elliot O. Rodger, who killed seven people, including himself, near the University of California, Santa Barbara. Swift condemnation led to Mr. Moghadam’s resignation.
“I didn’t meet those people. I didn’t see those people,” Mr. Frere-Jones said of the site’s past controversies. “Their plan was just” — he used an expletive perhaps appropriate for his new role at the iconoclastic start-up — “really impressive.”
Comments
Think about how much mainstream luv Jiggaman's Decoded thing got. You would produce that content for like, every rap song ever. And then start applying that to every other form of artistic expression out there.
F*ck, when I was this age, who was willing to give me $55M for transcribing t3h rappse?
And for everything else, there should be Soulstrut.