Like many prominent journalists before him, New Yorker pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones is taking his talents to a website most people haven’t heard of (so far, at least). The New York Times reports that after 11 years at the magazine, Frere-Jones is heading to Genius to serve as its executive editor. After launching in 2009 as Rap Genius, a site devoted to annotating rap lyrics, the company expanded beyond music last summer to include all types of text, from literature to legal documents. Frere-Jones may still contribute to the magazine, and he said he’s leaving for a variety of reasons. He’s excited about Genius’s ambitious project, naturally, but he admitted he was also thinking about his bedtime. “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.”
