Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The tensions brewing among hip-hop’s biggest stars, beginning with Kendrick Lamar’s sideways lyrics about Drake, which have led to a full-scale recalibration of genre alliancesDrake’s leaked response to LamarHow other artists like Future, the Weeknd and Rick Ross have jumped in the fray, all lining up against DrakeHow hip-hop’s recent squabbles are a life raft for late-career artistsWhether the “Big 3” — how people once referred to the grouping of top hip-hop stars Drake, Lamar and J. Cole — was ever really as stable as advertisedSongs of the week from Peso Pluma featuring Arcángel, Sky Ferreira and NLE ChoppaSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickJazmine Sullivan Ponders Love and Materialism on ‘Heaux Tales’The singer and songwriter’s first album in five years is also her bleakest.Spoken-word “tales” from six women are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies on Jazmine Sullivan’s “Heaux Tales.”Credit…Myesha Evon GardnerJan. 7, 2021Updated 12:55 p.m. ETHeaux TalesNYT Critic’s PickJazmine Sullivan has never prettified romance. In her songs, love nearly always leads to pain: rejection, infidelity, heartbreak, violence. She opened her 2008 debut album, “Fearless,” with “Bust Your Windows,” taking revenge on a cheating boyfriend, and a few songs later, the singer ends ongoing domestic abuse with murder. Her narrators don’t spare anyone who wrongs them; they don’t forgive their own failings either.Sullivan’s music carries the churchy, high-stakes emotionality and down-to-earth detail of vintage Southern soul into the everyday situations and electronic soundscapes of hip-hop. And in case no one noticed before, her fourth and bleakest album, “Heaux Tales” — arriving five years after “Reality Show” — makes clear that her stories were never meant to be hers alone.“Heaux Tales” is schematic, a successor to didactic concept albums like “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and the visual version of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Spoken-word “tales” from six women — confessions and hard-earned observations — are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies. (Although the spoken-word tracks get some accompaniment from electronic beats and gospel organ, the songs alone stand up far better to repeated listening.)“Heaux” is a Frenchified version of “ho,” placing a longtime insult at an analytical distance. In the songs on “Heaux Tales,” Sullivan looks behind dismissive stereotypes — party girl, avenger, sex addict, gold digger, cheater, castoff — to show complicated human longings behind them.Sullivan released “Pick Up Your Feelings” in November in two versions: as the album’s audio track and as a live version. It’s a cutting, unforgiving farewell to a cheating lover, by no means the first in her catalog. “I deserve so much more than you gave to me/Now I’m saving me,” she declares to someone she’s caught “double dippin’.”The live version, with Sullivan accompanied only by electric guitar and backup singers, matches virtuosity to vehemence as she switches among long swoops, cascading runs, quick jazzy syllables and wide leaps. The album track, with drums, retro-sounding strings and disorienting studio-reversed piano chords, is more dismissive and colder in its fury; Sullivan flings short phrases like a knife-thrower.But the righteous anger of a breakup is one of the album’s easier stances. Other songs venture into trickier, more ambivalent territory. In “Lost One” the singer is the betrayer; it’s a confession of pure despair, moaned in Sullivan’s low register over a hollowly echoing guitar, as she watches the one she cheated on have rebound affairs and begs, “Try not to love no one.”She also embraces female desire as compulsion and challenge. In “Put It Down,” Sullivan sings in crisp, near-rap cadences about letting lust override all her better judgment, while in “On It,” she and Ari Lennox coo over a slow-swaying groove as they tease a lover to “prove why you deserve it,” adding some hints on technique.And with some spoken-word goading, Sullivan ponders the ways sex can turn into a material transaction — being a “heaux” — in “Pricetags,” “The Other Side” and “Girl Like Me.” In “Pricetags,” the singer’s simple greed is answered by Anderson .Paak with comic, escalating exasperation. “The Other Side” has a more sympathetic narrator. She’s broke and struggling, with her voice yearning and sailing upward as she sings, “I got dreams to buy expensive things”; then, over a brisker beat, she reveals her plan to “move to Atlanta” and “find me a rapper” who can afford all her imagined luxuries.Sullivan ties the album’s themes together in its finale, “Girl Like Me.” Joined by H.E.R., with their voices overlapping over a handful of syncopated, descending guitar chords, the singer is wounded and adrift. Her boyfriend moved on with no explanation, leaving her insecure about her body and wondering what he wanted: “What you asked I would have given.” She’s sure “It ain’t right how these hos be winning,” then reconsiders: “That’s what you wanted, that’s what you get/A ho I’ll be.”It’s not a happy ending, much less a role model’s advice. It’s just a way for one scarred character, on an album full of them, to persevere.Jazmine Sullivan“Heaux Tales”(RCA) AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

Hear tracks by Xenia Rubinos, Swedish House Mafia, Soccer Mommy and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Pop Smoke, ‘More Time’“Faith,” the second posthumous album from Pop Smoke, includes collaborations with Kanye West, Dua Lipa, 42 Dugg, Future and others. But this track, early in the album, is jarring and stark. Not simply because it’s still eerie to hear Pop Smoke rapping with a blend of menace and joy, but because of its chilling beat — produced in part by the rapper’s longtime collaborator Rico Beats, but also in part by Nicholas Britell, who has scored “Moonlight” and “Succession.” It is a familiar trick, these reverberating keys that stand stern sentry, but no less effective for it. Here is a splash of theater more visceral than any radio hit, any pop crossover. JON CARAMANICAXenia Rubinos, ‘Working All the Time’Xenia Rubinos’s “Working All the Time” is only two minutes long, but it’s as intricate as an arduous jigsaw puzzle. There are waves of skittish synths, air horns straight out of a Funk Flex set on Hot 97, a bridge that sounds like the glitchy maximalism of hyperpop, and last but not least, an interpolation of the traditional rumba “Ave María Morena.” Somehow, Rubinos makes sense of all these disparate pieces using her brassy, featherlight voice. Blink and you’ll miss that it’s a workers’ anthem, too: In one verse, Rubinos sings, “You better keep me poor and busy or I’d be a danger.” It’s a warning for those who try to crush the power of the people. ISABELIA HERRERASwedish House Mafia, ‘It Gets Better’I suppose you can absorb this song on the internet, where it is currently available. But the slick return of Swedish House Mafia — the Brobdingnagian kings of mainstream EDM, the clout champions of biggest-room house music — cries out for an open field, a dizzying laser show, a loss of sense of time and place. Hug a friend; the soundtrack of shared mayhem is upon us. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Whenever You’re Ready’A brisk, ratcheting, evolving ska-meets-trap beat carries “Whenever You’re Ready” by Mahalia, a British singer whose mother is Jamaican. It’s a semi-breakup song that flaunts confidence instead of pain. The singer is letting him go because he’s angry at her now, but she’s sure he’ll be back: “You won’t be gone for good,” she sings. “No, I’m not worried.” JON PARELESCaroline Polachek, ‘Bunny Is a Rider’Singing about a woman so elusive that a “satellite can’t find her,” Caroline Polachek makes staccato syllables and short phrases bounce all around the beat, working equally as percussion and melody. They’re just a few of the syncopated layers in a playful yet strategic production — by Polachek and her frequent collaborator, Danny L. Harle from the PC Music circle — that juggles whistling, triangle, birdsong and the giggles and gurgles of Harle’s baby daughter. “I’m so nonphysical,” Polachek exults, over the sustained bass tone that cushions the chorus. Nonsense: The song is built for dancing. PARELESSoccer Mommy, ‘Rom Com 2004’“Rom Com 2004” could have been a straightforward indie-rock love song, vowing “Just let me be yours like no one else before” over a march beat, guitar chords and a chorus with a proud leap in the melody. But Soccer Mommy — Sophie Allison — handed over her demo to the producer BJ Burton with instructions, she has said, to “destroy it.” He obliged with glitches, distortion, speed variations and exposed moments — making the song more appealing because it plays hard to get. PARELESTurnstile featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alien Love Call’From the forthcoming Turnstile album, “Glow On,” comes this shoegaze space-soul collaboration with Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). The video compiles mayhem-esque live footage more in keeping with the hardcore band’s usual rhythms, but perhaps this is the meditation before the rage. CARAMANICADave McMurray, ‘Dark Star’Dave McMurray is a longtime Detroit tenor saxophonist with decades of experience in rock, jazz, pop and R&B, mostly as a side musician. But he’s just released his second album for Blue Note as a leader: “Grateful Deadication,” a tribute to the Grateful Dead songbook. His cover of the classic “Dark Star” channels the epically trippy M.O. of a Dead performance: McMurray declares the melody over Wayne Gerard’s twinkling, distorted guitar; eventually, a dug-in backbeat sets in. Then a coolly grooving section opens up, and the saxophonist dishes out a solo that’s laced with greasy Motor City attitude but still takes its time, as if to bask in the California sun. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The songs on “Mythopoetics,” Nandi Rose Plunkett’s new album as Half Waif, suffer and exult in all-consuming love. As “Swimmer” leaps from everyday sensation to all-out devotion and need — “I want to know they can’t take this away from me” — synthesizer arpeggios and vocal harmonies swarm around Plunkett’s ardent voice, like a suddenly racing heartbeat and an uncontainable obsession. PARELESYas, ‘Idea of You’A viscous tar pit of a track — slow, oozing bass tones, sparse drum-machine taps and gaping silences — hints at the difficulty of pulling free from an increasingly destructive relationship. Yas (the songwriter, singer, producer and violinist Yasmeen Al-Mazeedi) sings about being “in love with the idea of you” amid details of mental and physical abuse. The negotiations aren’t quite over; her voice rises to a fragile soprano as she decides, “You think that I want you back — I don’t.” PARELESKoreless, ‘White Picket Fence’Koreless — the Welsh producer Lewis Roberts — swerves between pastorale and rave on “White Picket Fence.” A keening female voice, uncredited and possibly built from samples, floats at first over a stately harpsichord; then fuzzy synthesizers arrive with a pulsing beat under that vocal melody, before it gets stretched and chopped up; then it’s sent back to harpsichord territory. In the video, directed by FKA twigs, club creatures climb out of a futuristic green car alongside a bucolic creek, where fishing ensues; urban artifice meets Nature. PARELESKarol G, ‘200 Copas’To a friend who’s still tearful about her ex, the Colombian songwriter Karol G (Carolina Giraldo Navarro) doesn’t mince words in “200 Copas” (“200 Drinks”); she dismisses the guy with profanities after all the suffering he caused. Yet her 21st-century bluntness gets a traditionalist backing; while the rest of her album, “KG0516,” traverses modern Pan-American pop with all its technological tricks, “200 Copas” is an old-fashioned waltz backed by a few acoustic instruments, nothing more. The lyrics are decidedly impolite, but the predicament she sings about is not new. The new video has her leading a beach-bonfire singalong: solidarity against undeserving men. PARELESTainy and Yandel, ‘El Plan’“Dynasty” is a new collaborative album from Tainy and Yandel, two titans of reggaeton celebrating 16 years of eminence. With its sinister harpsichord, muted marimbas and a piercing dembow riddim, “El Plan” recalls the mid-00s reggaeton that required listeners practice dancing in front of the mirror. It’s all about the thrill of an after-hours dance-floor chase — the electrifying, will-it-or-won’t-it-happen energy of a night at the club. “Estoy esperándote y tú perreando sola,” Yandel says. “I’m waiting for you and you’re dancing alone.” Luckily, he knows he’s at the whim of his partner: “Pero tú dime cuál e’ el plan.” You tell me what the plan is. HERRERAMas Aya, ‘Momento Presente’It is easy to reference folkloric sounds, but have little to offer other than mere nostalgia. The instrumentalist Brandon Valdivia, better known as Mas Aya, escapes this fate masterfully on “Momento Presente.” More than a mere collision of past and present, the track is a study in the power of harnessing ancestral knowledge. Over six and a half minutes, Valdivia braids a skittish footwork beat with a flurry of Andean pan flutes, arpeggiated synths and polyrhythms. Halfway through, the voice of an elder reflects on centuries of protest, a reminder that the work of liberation is part of a continuum. One moment the song is celestial, transporting the listener 40,000 feet into the air. In another it is meditative, urging us into quiet introspection. HERRERAMatt Mitchell and Kate Gentile, ‘Trapezoids | Matching Tickles’In recent years the pianist Matt Mitchell and the drummer Kate Gentile have developed a book of pithy, one-bar-long compositions, which they play with small ensembles under the name Snark Horse. Through intense improvisation, taking equal cues from free jazz and metal, they morph and distend and scramble these little melodic fragments. On Friday, Snark Horse released its first album — a boxed set spanning no fewer than 49 tracks and five-and-a-half hours, mostly recorded at a three-day session in late 2019. “Trapezoids” is a Gentile composition, a crooked and incessant spray of notes, with Jon Irabagon’s saxophone further destabilizing the mix. It’s paired on this track with “Matching Tickles,” a Mitchell piece, which he plays more softly and abstractedly, as if it were the echo of another idea. RUSSONELLO More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarbara Dane’s Life of Defiance and SongThe 93-year-old musician and co-founder of the political label Paredon Records looks back on a history of resistance.Barbara Dane’s Paredon Records turned 50 last year, and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021Barbara Dane keeps a copy of her four-inch-thick F.B.I. file in a binder in the living room of her Oakland home. One night in late December, the 93-year-old singer and activist’s daughter, Nina Menendez, was leafing through it and noticed a page she hadn’t spotted before: a Los Angeles Times clipping from a 1972 concert at the Ash Grove. Dane was the headliner that evening, where she first encountered the soulful folk band Yellow Pearl, whose music she would go on to release through her then-nascent record label, Paredon Records.The file doubles as a testament to Dane’s work as an opposition artist for the better part of a century. The earliest entries are from when she was 18, spearheading a chapter of Pete Seeger’s labor-music organization People’s Songs in her native Detroit, and singing on picket lines to protest racial inequality and to support unions.“I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Speaking with the eloquent conviction and blunt resolve of a woman who never compromised, Dane called the F.B.I. file a waste of tax dollars. Bundled in a winter coat and beret during a recent video interview, she was more eager to show off the wood-carved Cubadisco statuette (the Cuban equivalent of a Grammy) she was awarded in 2017 to honor her early efforts disseminating the political music known as nueva trova in the United States through her label.A supercut of Dane’s audacious career as a musician — which, since the late 1950s and 1960s has encompassed jazz, folk and the blues — would include the mother of three appearing on a televised bandstand alongside Louis Armstrong and singing “Solidarity Forever,” her favorite song, onstage with Seeger supporting striking coal miners. Her ethos was anticapitalist and adaptable: She wove progressive politics into her sole album for Capitol, “On My Way” from 1961, and later brought raw rock ’n’ roll verve to the protest doo-wop of her 1966 Folkways album with the Chambers Brothers. She performed in Mississippi church basements during Freedom Summer and with antiwar G. I.s in coffee houses.Dane learned early on that her outspokenness and politics meant commercial success would evade her. (Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman told her to call him when she “got her priorities straight.”) She started Paredon for the explicit purpose of providing a platform to music born of freedom struggles around the world that wasn’t beholden to the whims of the marketplace.Paredon has often been considered an aside in Dane’s story, but is receiving more attention now: The label turned 50 last year, and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, where it has been housed for three decades. Co-founded by Dane and her husband Irwin Silber, a founder and longtime editor of Sing Out! magazine who died in 2010, Paredon was a people’s label through and through, releasing music produced by liberation movements in Vietnam, Palestine, Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greece, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States and beyond.“I saw that whenever the movement in a particular country was strong, there was an emerging music to go with it,” Dane said. “It struck me that this stuff needed to be heard in the voices of the people who wrote the songs.”Taken together, the 50 albums that Paredon released from 1970 to 1985 form a staggering archive of art and dissent, of resilience and sung histories within histories. The music reflects civil rights, women’s rights and anticolonial movements, and illustrates the interconnectedness of these revolutions. Dane had been a venue owner, concert booker, radio D.J., television host and writer. With Paredon, she became a folklorist of resistance.“Paredon didn’t put out music about politics. They put out music of politics,” said Josh MacPhee, the author of “An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels” and a founder of the Brooklyn-based Interference Archive, which chronicles the cultural production of social movements. “These are not artists commenting on political issues. These were sounds that were produced by people in motion trying to transform their lives.”Dane, center, at an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco in 1964.Credit…Erik WeberWith leftist politics at their core and deep roots in activism, Dane and Silber built trust among like-minded artists. “Anything I was going to issue was from somebody who had been on the front lines somewhere,” Dane said. Each Paredon release included an extensive booklet with contextualizing essays, photographs, translations of lyrics, and information about how to connect with or help the movement.The catalog included musicians steeped in social movements at home, like Bernice Johnson Reagon — a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers, and later of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock — whose solo album, “Give Your Hands to Struggle” from 1975, was filled with rhapsodic self-harmonizing. It also included the Covered Wagon Musicians, a group of subversive active-duty Air Force men who sang out from their Idaho base, “We say no to your war!”“I was nervous — I had no experience recording,” said the Argentine musician and educator Suni Paz, who had been living in the U.S. for about eight years when Dane asked her to record for Paredon. “Brotando del Silencio — Breaking Out of the Silence,” in 1973, became Paz’s first album, before which, “I was not heard at all. Barbara Dane gave me complete and total freedom. She said, sing whatever you want. I was going to sing anything political that I had in my brain, in my heart, in my soul.”Nobuko Miyamoto of Yellow Pearl, the group of Asian-American activists Dane discovered when they shared a bill in 1972, said her band was unlikely to have recorded for another label. “Barbara had just done an album called ‘I Hate the Capitalist System,’ and that convinced us this was the right record company,” Miyamoto said, referring to Dane’s 1973 collection with bold cover art.The album Yellow Pearl released on Paredon was the poetic and groundbreaking “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America,” which included anthems like “We Are the Children” and “Free the Land,” featuring backing vocals from Mutulu Shakur (his stepson, Tupac Shakur, sang along to “A Grain of Sand” as a child, according to Smithsonian Folkways Magazine). It was recorded in two and a half days at a small New York studio and that no-frills spontaneity brings the music alive still.“Barbara was a pretty brave soul to offer to do this,” Miyamoto said. “And because of that, our music was preserved. So I was very grateful. If it weren’t for her, that music really would have been lost.”“I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said of her early days performing alongside Pete Seeger for workers’ rights. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDANE GREW UP in Detroit during the Great Depression, the daughter of Arkansas natives. Her father owned a drugstore, where she and her mother worked, and as a child she bore witness to racism and poverty that she immediately identified as wrong. “You saw it all around you: how bad the system was treating its citizens,” she said. At 11, sitting under a tree, a neighborhood friend explained to her that there were three ways of organizing society: capitalism, socialism and communism. “From then on, I started looking around for the socialists — anyone who could tell me more,” she said, noting, too, her teenage affiliation with communism. “That search went on and on.” (And led to that F.B.I. file.)It wasn’t long before she was leading protests with songs like “Roll the Union On” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” using techniques she had learned from an opera teacher. An early lesson in the power of saying “no” occurred when she was offered a tour with the bandleader Alvino Rey and turned it down: “Why would I want to stand in front of a band with a low-cut dress singing stupid words when I could be singing for workers who are on strike?,” she said. “It didn’t seem like a good bargain to me.”Dane with the Chambers Brothers at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.Credit…Mark RothDefying a government ban, Dane’s travels in Cuba initially inspired her to found Paredon. In 1966, she was one of the first artists to tour post-revolutionary Cuba, and she returned to Havana a year later as part of an international meeting of artists called Encuentro Internacional de la Canción Protesta, where she met musicians from around the globe who were writing social-justice songs, like Cuba’s Carlos Puebla and Uruguay’s Daniel Viglietti.Back home, Dane told everyone, “I’m going to start a record label,’” she recalled. “I just kept saying that and saying that. ‘But I’m looking for the funding.’” A friend came through, connecting Dane with a “wayward millionaire” who sent her one check for $17,000 and said to not report back.The first release was “Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America,” which opened with a field recording of Fidel Castro invoking the power of art to “win people over” and “awaken emotions” recorded by Dane herself. Paredon also released spoken word albums featuring speeches and statements of Huey Newton, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Mostly, Dane continued to discover music “on the fly,” she said, as she traveled the world singing out against the Vietnam War. Material from Chile and Northern Ireland came to her in a clandestine fashion, by some artists who remained anonymous.The history of vernacular music in America is filled with mythic men — the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, the eccentric Folkways founder Moe Asch, the folk hero Seeger — and Dane evokes each of their restless, visionary spirits to some degree. “They’re all puzzle pieces to this very large story,” said Jeff Place, curator and senior archivist at Smithsonian Folkways, noting that Paredon’s releases were “mostly too political” for Asch at Folkways.“One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” Dane said.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDane certainly never held her tongue. If you see your country “making horrible mistakes, you have to speak up,” she said. “You’re colluding with it if you don’t speak up.”Dane and Silber didn’t profit off Paredon. They ran the label out of their apartment in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood and had no interest in turning it into a business. Silber had previously worked for Folkways, equipping him with the knowledge of how to keep the operation small, pressing a few hundred records at a time, and often using the same graphic designer, Ronald Clyne, known for his earthy minimalism.When Paredon became too unwieldy to remain an at-home endeavor, Dane and Silber soon ended it and moved back to California, where Dane refocused on her singing. “When I was 89, I made the record that I would liked to have made years earlier,” she said of her 2016 LP “Throw It Away,” a collaboration with the jazz pianist Tammy Hall. Dane is currently writing her memoir, and a film about her life, with the working title “The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane,” is in production.Place recalled his 1991 trip to Oakland to interview Dane and Silber and physically acquire the Paredon collection: “I got a rented van, put the entire Paredon collection in the back of it, and drove communist records across the whole country to D.C. and put them in the Smithsonian.”Reflecting on the label’s legacy now, Dane is hopeful it holds lessons for the era of Black Lives Matter and surging conversation about democratic socialism. “One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” she said.“If you’re an artist, you’ve already got tools. If you don’t know what to write about, remember that truth and reality is what we’re after. You have to know reality to tell the truth about it. You got to get out and be a part of it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

His death has been particularly profound in Britain, where Payne, a member of the boy band One Direction, first achieved fame. “We don’t know loss like this,” one fan said.Hundreds of fans gathered in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon to mourn Liam Payne, 31, a member of the British group One Direction, who died after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires last week.Somber adults and teenagers waited — some, for hours — to lay flowers and handmade signs at the base of the bronze Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens to honor Payne. It was one of several memorials held around the world in the days after his death.“We don’t know loss like this,” said Brooke Kurzeja, 18, who traveled three hours to attend the vigil. “This is what it was like when Prince died, my mom said.”The loss is profound in Britain, where fans watched Payne, from Wolverhampton, a town in central England, twice on the British talent show “The X Factor”: first in 2008, at 14, when he was eliminated after a few rounds, and then two years later, when he showed up with more confidence. The show’s judges shuffled Payne into a group with four other British boys who had auditioned as solo artists — Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan — and the group, One Direction, quickly captured the hearts of teenagers around the nation — before taking on the world.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesEllie Smith for The New York TimesAlicia Sinclair, 22, posted to X the day after Payne’s death expressing her desire to gather with other devastated fans. “If I need something, probably so many other people need something,” Sinclair said. As the weekend approached, she and a few other fans started a group on WhatsApp, which quickly grew to nearly 1,000 members.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More