"The same qualities that made her music radical in the fifties also make her work sound antiquated now: a Black woman animated the horror..."

"... and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer.... Odetta was the secret-agent contralto, amplifying a history of pain others were using for sing-alongs.... If 'Blade Runner' and 'Seinfeld' were early manifestations of the twenty-first century, Odetta was the last glowing ember of the nineteenth century, a performer who made her name on the stage with a voice that could reach the cheap seats and the town square, too. Bob Dylan’s early records are omnipresent, whereas Odetta’s are not. Certainly a matrix of biases helped bring about this outcome, most of them unfair. But at least one deals with the character of her singing itself. Her 1957 album 'At the Gate of Horn' is recorded well, and Odetta’s vocal quality is as heavy and shiny as gold. She did not let go of her opera willingly. Until the seventies, when she began to loosen her vocals, Odetta rarely missed a chance to use her chest voice, extend a note, and twist it with vibrato."

From "How Odetta Revolutionized Folk Music/She animated the horror and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer" by Sasha Frere-Jones (The New Yorker).

Leaving The New Yorker to join a lyrics-annotating website?!

"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."

Signs of the apocalypse for old media? Or just another data point in the very old process of taking a job that offers much better pay?

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.

The reason Frere-Jones gives is "I don’t want to stay up until 4 a.m. any more at shows, and you can annotate lyrics during the day." He's 47. I get it. Sometimes I think, I'd love to live in New York again, because there are all those things you can only do in New York. But then the question becomes: Yes, but would you do them? And the truth is, even when I was in my 20s, when I lived in New York, I found it a struggle to listen to music that went on after midnight. I believe Frere-Jones that the work fits a non-young person's life more comfortably. Good for him for getting the money. And give the New Yorker gig to somebody new, who's up for that sort of thing. We'll all survive.

And Genius is a nice format for annotating lyrics, a writing format that's very similar to blogging, and quite delightful, really. A big distinction from blogging, however, is that your writings remain stuck on the lyrics you've attached them to. They don't continually sink down as new stuff is put on top. Not that a blog's archive can't be searched, but in blogging, you do have this sense of layers of time, with the top layer fresh and soon to be pushed down by the next new thing. The tyranny of the timeline is most notable on Twitter and Facebook. If you're a serious writer, it can really get to you.

Not that annotating lyrics on Genius seems serious, but the hiring of Sasha Frere-Jones makes it a little more serious than it was before.

ADDED: Hey, Genius has a law section. (They should give me a million dollars!) Here's Marbury v. Madison. [AND: The cases are too long to annotate in the spiffy way that works for songs. The Marbury annotations alternate between boring explanations of technical terms and smart-ass observations, for example, pointing out over-broad/unsupported assertions. And most of the lines are just there — in hard-to-read white text on black — without annotation.]

"The idea that a New York teen-ager in 1981 would turn to Bob Dylan — after Dylan had turned to Jesus — rather than to rap or hardcore punk, was illogical."

"The only Dylan song I liked was Jimi Hendrix’s version of 'All Along the Watchtower,' and even that was stuffed with clunky Biblical references to princes and thieves. Dylan seemed like a square or a failed hippie, and I found both equally hard to take. During the next two decades, playing in bands and obsessing over records, I felt my ignorance of Dylan moving up to the front of my brain. I had, most likely, been put off by the idea of absorbing an enormous catalogue and interacting with an enormous fan base, any member of which would happily fill me in if I didn’t immediately offer up that, yes, he was born with the last name of Zimmerman and grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota. I suspect that this is how gaps in taste often work: even when we are old enough to know better, we dodge certain artists because we sense that engaging with them will be like signing up for a crash course. Where to start with Milton? Is this the year for Henry James?"

From a Sasha Frere-Jones piece about The Basement Tapes in The New Yorker. Frere-Jones was 14 in 1981.

The Most Pretentious Thing Ever Written About George Zimmerman.

This is Sasha Frere-Jones, writing about Jay Z’s new album (which is pretentiously titled "Magna Carta Holy Grail") in the (pretentious but traditionally a bit subtle in its pretentiousness) New Yorker: