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How Hip-HopConqueredthe World A crowd in Harlem watching Doug E. Fresh, 1995.David Corio The Great Read How Hip-Hop Conquered the World Fifty years ago, a party in the Bronx jumpstarted an essential American artform. For decades the genre has thrived by explaining the country to itself. Aug. 10, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET We’ve gathered here […] More
The mogul Barry Diller, who paid for the park, will finance a summer season of music, dance, theater and more, shaped in part by the Broadway producer Scott Rudin.Little Island, the $260 million park on the Hudson River that opened in 2021, was imagined as a haven for innovation in the performing arts. But the park’s cultural offerings — mostly sporadic, one-off works — have so far fallen short of those ambitions.Now Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul who paid for the park, is setting out to deliver on the original vision, financing a robust, four-month annual performing arts festival on Little Island, the park announced on Monday. He is doing so with the guidance of Scott Rudin, the film, television and theater producer who retreated from public view in 2021 amid accusations of bullying by workers in his office.Diller said in an interview that he and his family foundation were prepared to spend more than $100 million over the next two decades on programming. The festival, one of the most ambitious artistic undertakings in New York City in recent years, will promote new work in music, dance, theater and opera. Nine premieres are planned this year for June through September, including a full-length work by the choreographer Twyla Tharp, and an adaptation of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” in which the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will sing all of the leading roles.“I want people to enjoy the originality and adventure of Little Island,” Diller said. “I want it to produce a smile.”Rudin, a friend of Diller’s and a longtime adviser to Little Island, was not mentioned in a news release on Monday announcing the creation of the festival, but Diller said he was intimately involved in its planning.“He’s engaged in almost every discussion we have about the programming,” Diller said. “It started with him. It was his project.”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
WENN
The ‘Blinding Lights’ hitmaker leads the nominees for the upcoming Billboard Music Awards by grabbing a total of 16 nods including the coveted title of Top Artist.
Apr 30, 2021
AceShowbiz –
R&B star The Weeknd will be the artist to beat at the 2021 Billboard Music Awards after landing a total of 16 nominations.
The singer will compete for prizes including Top Artist and Top Male Artist, with both categories featuring The Weeknd pitted against Drake, Juice WRLD, and Pop Smoke.
Rapper DaBaby is the second most-nominated with 11 nods, ahead of the late Pop Smoke with 10.
Leading the female artists are Gabby Barrett and Megan Thee Stallion with nine and seven mentions, respectively.
Drake is on course to make Billboard history at the ceremony if he emerges triumphant in any of the seven categories he is shortlisted for, as he is already the artist with the most wins of all time with 27 gongs to his name.
Meanwhile, disgraced country star Morgan Wallen is in the running for six categories thanks to the huge success of his recent release, “Dangerous: The Double Album”, but he won’t be invited to participate in the ceremony due to the N-word controversy which derailed his rising career in late January (21).
“Morgan Wallen is a finalist this year based on charting,” reads a statement issued by producers at dick clark productions. “As his recent conduct does not align with our core values, we will not be including him on the show in any capacity (performing, presenting, accepting).”
“It is heartening and encouraging to hear that Morgan is taking steps in his anti-racist journey and starting to do some meaningful work. We plan to evaluate his progress and will consider his participation in future shows.”
The winners, based on U.S. chart data, will be unveiled at a televised event in Los Angeles on 23 May (21).
The full list of nominees is:
Top Artist:
Top New Artist:
Top Male Artist:
Top Female Artist:
Top Duo/Group:
Top Billboard 200 Artist:
Top Hot 100 Artist:
Top Streaming Songs Artist:
Top Song Sales Artist:
Top Radio Songs Artist:
Top Social Artist (Fan Voted):
Top R&B Artist:
Top R&B Male Artist:
Top R&B Female Artist:
Top Rap Artist:
Top Rap Male Artist:
Top Rap Female Artist:
Top Country Artist:
Top Country Male Artist:
Top Country Female Artist:
Top Country Duo/Group:
Top Rock Artist:
Top Latin Artist:
See also…
Top Latin Male Artist:
Top Latin Female Artist:
Top Latin Duo/Group:
Banda MS de Sergio Lizarraga
Eslabon Armado
Los Dos Carnales
Top Dance/Electronic Artist:
Top Christian Artist:
Top Gospel Artist:
Top Billboard 200 Album:
Top R&B Album:
Top Rap Album:
Top Country Album:
Top Rock Album:
Top Latin Album:
Top Dance/Electronic Album:
Top Christian Album:
Bethel Music – “Peace”
Elevation Worship – “Grave Into Gardens”
Carrie Underwood – “My Gift”
We the Kingdom – “Holy Water”
Zach Williams – “Rescue Story”
Top Gospel Album:
Koryn Hawthorne – “I AM”
Tasha Cobbs Leonard – “Royalty: Live at the Ryman”
Maverick City Music – “Maverick City Vol. 3 Part 1”
Maverick City Music – “Maverick City Vol. 3 Part 2”
Kierra Sheard – “Kierra”
Top Hot 100 Song Presented by Rockstar:
Top Streaming Song:
Top Selling Song:
Top Radio Song:
Top Collaboration (Fan Voted):
Top R&B Song:
Top Rap Song:
Top Country Song:
Top Rock Song:
Top Latin Song:
Top Dance/Electronic Song:
Top Christian Song:
Elevation Worship ft. Brandon Lake – “Graves Into Gardens”
for KING & COUNTRY, Kirk Franklin & Tori Kelly – “TOGETHER”
Kari Jobe, Cody Carnes, & Elevation Worship – “The Blessing (Live)”
Tauren Wells ft. Jenn Johnson – “Famous For (I Believe)”
Zach Williams & Dolly Parton – “There Was Jesus”
Top Gospel Song:
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A musical battle, the hit webcast suggests, is really just a pretext for a party and an occasion to appreciate something.Steve Harvey, the comedian and game-show host, is not prone to understatement, least of all when it comes to bespoke men’s wear. This past Easter Sunday, he appeared on a studio stage wearing a custom satin suit in a violet hue previously unknown to science. Harvey was there to host an episode of the popular webcast Verzuz, a musical competition in which famous artists face off to determine who has the better catalog. The episode was a big one, a showdown of soul legends pitting the Isley Brothers against Earth, Wind & Fire, and Harvey’s words were as loud as his suit: This would be, he announced, “the most epic Verzuz of all time.”Onstage, Ron and Ernie Isley sat facing their counterparts, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, Verdine White and Ralph Johnson. It was indeed an unusual matchup. Verzuz battles typically feature artists — rappers, R&B singers, influential producers — who have made their name in the past few decades. But Earth, Wind & Fire’s debut album arrived in stores 50 years ago; the Isley Brothers’ first hit, “Shout,” was released in 1959, when Steve Harvey was a toddler. Now 64, he faced the camera to address younger music fans. “Ask your mama about this here music,” he said. “If you don’t know their music, it’s ’cause you don’t know nothing about music. So sit down and learn.”Pop music has always gone hand in hand with strong opinions and heated debates — including the kinds of generational cleavages that inspire finger-wagging lectures. There are times when fans stake personal identities on their favorite records or genres, or sustain fierce debates over rival artists: Beatles or Stones, Michael Jackson or Prince, Nicki or Cardi. Arguing about music may well be as primal a human endeavor as making it. Verzuz is based on this principle. The title evokes a heavyweight bout, and the episodes unfold like a boxing match: Each round presents a track from each artist, with viewers encouraged to pick the victor on a song-by-song basis.The format has links to feisty musical blood sports: jazz’s cutting contests, Jamaican sound clashes, rap battles. But Verzuz has emerged as the warmest and fuzziest musical phenomenon of the past year, one of the internet’s most reliable suppliers of good vibes. Verzuz began on Instagram Live during the early weeks of the pandemic, with a battle between its co-founders, the hip-hop producers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz. That first webcast, which stretched for five hours, was a novelty: an odd combination of a Zoom conference call, a D.J. set and a languid late-night hang. Timbaland played one of his hits (Aaliyah’s “One in a Million”), Swizz Beatz answered with one of his (DMX’s “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem”). The scrolling comments filled with emojis and exclamations (“Timbo range too much for swizz”). The interface was wonky and the sound muddy, but the spectacle — musicians glimpsed through laptop cameras, grooving to their own records — was strange and thrilling, a more intimate encounter than showbiz normally permits. In a world that had ground to a halt, the two producers had hit upon a whole new way to stage a concert.Today, pop fandom marinates in online swamps similar to those that breed conspiracy theories and political extremism, with almost comically toxic results.A year later, Verzuz is somewhat spiffed up. It was recently acquired by TrillerNet, the parent company to a TikTok competitor, and has a sponsorship deal with Cîroc vodka and a partnership with Peloton. Competitors no longer stream in from remote locations on jittery Wi-Fi. But the show retains a gonzo charm, and a sense that unscripted weirdness may erupt at any moment. A battle between the dance-hall titans Beenie Man and Bounty Killer, livestreamed from Jamaica, was interrupted by the local police. (“There are 500,000 people watching us right now from all over the world,” Beenie Man told them. “Do you want to be that guy?”) The R&B star Ashanti was forced to stall when her adversary, Keyshia Cole, ran an hour late. The Wu-Tang Clan rappers Ghostface Killah and Raekwon finished off their battle singing and dancing to old disco hits.This shagginess extends to the competition itself. There’s no formal means of determining a Verzuz winner; victory is in the ear of the beholder. Viewers weigh in on social media, and journalists write recaps. But their judgments are, of course, subjective, maybe even beside the point. A musical battle, Verzuz suggests, is really a pretext for a party and an occasion for art appreciation. This has always been true: From the primeval pop hothouse of Tin Pan Alley, where songwriters vied to churn out hits, to today’s pop charts, dominated by hip-hop producers chasing novel sounds, one-upsmanship is often the motor of innovation, an engine of both musical art and commerce. Great songs, beloved albums, groundbreaking styles — all have resulted from musicians’ drive to outshine their colleagues.Competition is also a driving force in music fandom — for better or, often these days, for worse. Today, pop fandom marinates in online swamps similar to those that breed conspiracy theories and political extremism, with almost comically toxic results: Some super fans organize themselves into “armies” that devote disturbing amounts of energy to the coordinated harassment of anyone seen as speaking ill of their favorite stars.Arguing about music may well be as primal a human endeavor as making it.One of the subtler values of Verzuz is that it models a saner, more joyful, more pleasurable kind of musical advocacy and competition — in which trash is talked lovingly, both doled out and received in good humor. Here, too, there are politics of a different kind. Last summer, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, Verzuz held two “special editions”: a gospel episode titled “The Healing,” featuring the singers Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond, and a Juneteenth celebration, with Alicia Keys and John Legend. Nearly every artist to appear on Verzuz is Black, and the show makes no concessions to any other audience; non-Black viewers enter its virtual spaces as eavesdroppers on an in-group conversation. The point of these battles is not to choose winners, but to luxuriate in the glories of the Black pop canon, and the community forged by that body of music. The critic Craig Jenkins, writing about a matchup between Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, rendered a pithy verdict that could be applied to the whole Verzuz enterprise: “Blackness won.”That was true again on Easter Sunday. Despite Steve Harvey’s best efforts to stir up intergenerational beef, the webcast was a showcase of musical continuity across the decades. (In the unlikely event that there were viewers unfamiliar with Earth, Wind & Fire or the Isleys, they would surely have recognized many of the songs, which have been copiously sampled and interpolated by hip-hop artists.) The episode ended in the only way it could have: with members of both groups gathered at the front of the stage, dancing and singing along to Earth, Wind & Fire’s celestial anthem “September,” abandoning all pretense that they were adversaries in musical battle. “Celebrate! Love!” shouted Philip Bailey. “Enjoy! Appreciate!”Source photographs by Raymond Boyd/Getty Images; Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images; Michael Putland/Getty Images.Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Two Wheels Good: The Bicycle on Planet Earth and Elsewhere,” to be published next year. He last wrote about the musical prodigy Jacob Collier. More
Her music, which ranged from chamber miniatures to blaring fanfares, was suffused with a slyly subversive attitude.Carla Bley, an irrepressibly original composer, arranger and pianist responsible for more than 60 years of wily provocations in and around jazz, died on Tuesday at her home in Willow, a hamlet in upstate New York. She was 87.Her longtime partner in life and music, the bassist Steve Swallow, said the cause was complications of brain cancer.Ms. Bley’s influential body of work included delicate chamber miniatures and rugged, blaring fanfares, with a lot of varied terrain in between. She was branded an avant-gardist early in her career, but that term applied more to her slyly subversive attitude than to the formal character of her music, which always maintained a place for tonal harmony and standard rhythm.Within that given frame, Ms. Bley found plenty of room to confound expectations and harbor contradictions. In the 2011 biography “Carla Bley,” Amy C. Beal described her music as “vernacular yet sophisticated, appealing yet cryptic, joyous and mournful, silly and serious at the same time.”Certainly, few composers in Ms. Bley’s generation were as prolific or polymorphic in their output while projecting an identifiable point of view. She wrote elegant, drifting songs that became jazz standards, like “Ida Lupino” and “Lawns”; yearning, cinematic big-band pieces, like “Fleur Carnivore”; iconoclastic rearrangements of national anthems and classical fare; and unwieldy, uncategorizable projects like her jazz-rock opera “Escalator Over the Hill.”Originally issued on three LPs, “Escalator Over the Hill” was named album of the year by the weekly British publication Melody Maker in 1973, the same year it won a Grand Prix du Disque, France’s most prestigious award for musical recordings. With a surrealistic libretto by the poet Paul Haines, a cast including some of the era’s leading jazz renegades and vocals by Linda Ronstadt and Jack Bruce of the rock band Cream, it captured the woolly, insubordinate spirit of the age, just as it consolidated the elements of Ms. Bley’s style.That style could be a lot to take in, as John S. Wilson noted a decade later in The New York Times: “She made strong and dramatic use of darkly colored ensembles, of the tuba as a solo instrument or the core of a passage, of trombone solos that could be wildly broad and flatulent or warm and snuggling, of brass-band ensembles with a wry, ragged sound, of saxophones that came squirming up out of stolid fundamentalist ground to a shrill avant-garde ecstasy.”Ms. Bley’s portfolio as a leader included a big band stocked with some of the leading musicians in New York; a fusionesque sextet, whose ranks included Larry Willis on acoustic and electric piano and Hiram Bullock on guitar; and a chamberlike trio featuring Mr. Swallow and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard. She was the original conductor and arranger of the Liberation Music Orchestra, the revolutionary-minded ensemble formed by the bassist Charlie Haden in 1969, and continued to lead it in tribute after Mr. Haden’s death in 2014.When she was recognized as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2015, Ms. Bley expressed wonderment, still convinced of her fringe existence. “When I first toured Europe with my own band, the audience threw things at me — and I mean fruit mostly, but bottles too,” she said in 2016. “I loved it. Nobody else got fruit thrown at them. That’s so wonderful! Anything that happened that was out of the ordinary, I appreciated.”Ms. Bley at her home in Willow, N.Y., in 2016. “I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she once said, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesBorn Lovella May Borg in Oakland, Calif., on May 11, 1936, Ms. Bley came to music largely through the ministrations of her father, Emil Carl Borg, a church organist, choirmaster and piano teacher. She was 8 when her mother, Arline (Anderson) Borg, died of heart failure.Ms. Bley’s childhood was dominated by church meetings rather than movies or pop culture. “I was doused in religion, soaked in it, terrified of going to hell,” she recalled in 1974. But she was also an instinctual nonconformist, and by her teens she had broken free of those religious moorings, initially to pursue an interest in competitive roller-skating.She first encountered jazz at age 12, via a concert by the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. At 17, she hitchhiked across the country to New York City, epicenter of the jazz scene. She worked as a cigarette girl at Birdland, where the Count Basie Orchestra was often in residence. “I was just this girl from Oakland in a green dress I made myself, looking totally out of place, un-New Yorkerly, holding cigarettes,” she recalled. “I think I was noticeable.”One musician who took notice was the pianist Paul Bley. They married in 1957, and he encouraged her to write; most of her earliest compositions appeared on his albums. The noted composer George Russell provided further validation when he commissioned her to write for his sextet. Some of her other pieces, like “Ictus” and “Jesus Maria,” were recorded by the clarinetist and saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre’s trio, with Mr. Swallow and Mr. Bley.Jazz was undergoing a creative revolution in the 1960s — and, partly by association, Ms. Bley found herself at the turbulent center of an emerging avant-garde. She was a founder of the Jazz Composers Guild, which sought better working conditions for musicians. Though short-lived, it yielded a productive institution: the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, which Ms. Bley formed with the Austrian trumpeter Michael Mantler. After she divorced Mr. Bley in 1967, she and Mr. Mantler married.Ms. Bley is survived by a daughter from that marriage, the vocalist, pianist and composer Karen Mantler, and by Mr. Swallow, her partner of more than 30 years.Ms. Bley in concert in Amsterdam in 1989.Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty ImagesBy the late 1960s, Ms. Bley was widely recognized as a composer full of fresh ideas: The prominent vibraphonist Gary Burton featured her music exclusively on “A Genuine Tong Funeral,” an RCA release on which he led an ensemble that included Mr. Mantler, the saxophonist Gato Barbieri and the tuba and baritone saxophone player Howard Johnson, among others.Those and other musicians from the ranks of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra formed the core personnel on “Escalator Over the Hill.” Though it was intended for release on a major label, Ms. Bley and Mr. Mantler grew disillusioned with label negotiations and formed JCOA Records to release it — along with the New Music Distribution Service, a pioneering nonprofit distributor for independent releases.After Ms. Bley received a Guggenheim fellowship for composition in 1972, she and Mr. Mantler formed another label, Watt. It released more than two dozen of her albums over the next 35 years, with distribution through ECM Records.Ms. Bley had more than fleeting contact with rock: In 1975 she joined a band with Mr. Bruce on bass and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones on guitar. And she wrote all the songs for “Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports,” a 1981 album credited to Mr. Mason, the drummer in Pink Floyd, with lead vocals by Robert Wyatt, formerly of Soft Machine.During the 2010s, Ms. Bley focused a good deal of her energies on the Liberation Music Orchestra, preserving Charlie Haden’s musical vision as well as his commitment to left-leaning social activism: She included a new version of her late-’60s composition “Silent Spring” on the orchestra’s fifth album, “Time/Life,” released in 2016. As a performer she worked mainly with Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Swallow, touring internationally and releasing several albums for ECM.Ms. Bley outside her home in 2016.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesFeaturing some of Ms. Bley’s sparest and most beguilingly lyrical compositions, these albums — the most recent of which, “Life Goes On,” was released in 2020 — also naturally put a spotlight on her piano playing, which had long been a source of mixed feelings for her.“I’m a composer who also plays piano,” she told the German journalist Thomas Venker in 2019, “and I sometimes feel I should wear a sign onstage saying ‘She Wrote the Music.’”But speaking with The Times in 2016, Ms. Bley noted with satisfaction that the idiosyncrasies in her playing were her own:“There’s nobody that plays like me — why would they? So if I’ve had an influence, maybe it would be if they decided to play like themselves. In other words, the whole idea of not playing like anybody is a way of playing.” More