As half of the duo Sly and Robbie, he performed or recorded with everyone from Peter Tosh and Grace Jones to Bob Dylan and Serge Gainsbourg.Robbie Shakespeare, a Jamaican bassist who, as half of the rhythm duo Sly and Robbie, played with and produced some of the biggest names in music while transforming reggae with bold infusions of rock, blues and jazz, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Miami. He was 68.Guillaume Bougard, a close friend and frequent collaborator, said the cause was complications of kidney and liver transplants.Starting in the mid-1970s, Sly and Robbie were among the most prolific musicians in the business, reggae or otherwise. Mr. Shakespeare once estimated that they had taken part in 200,000 recordings, either their own or as backup musicians or producers for other artists.Both men came up from the creative cauldron of 1970s Kingston, working as session musicians at the famed Channel One recording studio and playing with reggae superstars like Peter Tosh, including on his 1978 tour as an opening act for the Rolling Stones. That tour gave the duo their first international exposure.Their sound differed from the melody-rich music of Bob Marley, Jamaica’s biggest star, with a heavier emphasis on the beat and overt influences from rock and blues, qualities that prefigured new reggae styles, like dancehall, that emerged in the late 1970s and early ’80s.Their willingness to push reggae’s boundaries soon caught the attention of Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records, who saw the possibility of marrying their sound with North American and European pop acts.They provided the driving beats on Grace Jones’s hit 1981 album “Nightclubbing.” They were soon working with acts far from the Kingston sound of their youth, like Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker, and producing singers like Marianne Faithfull, Madonna and Sinead O’Connor.The duo were both hard-core reggae aesthetes and radical innovators, never afraid to break with tradition. Their work with rock musicians led them to fuse rock’s syncopation with reggae’s one-drop beat. And they were among the first musicians to make regular use of electronic drum machines.From left, Mr. Dunbar, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and Mr. Shakespeare. Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Dunbar got their first international exposure with Peter Tosh when he was as an opening act for the Stones in 1978.Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images“Their whole career has been geared toward creating new stuff, what no one else had done before,” said Mr. Bougard, who also licensed some of their work for release in Europe through his label, Tabou1.They were nominated for 13 Grammy Awards and won two: in 1985 for their production of the Black Uhuru album “Anthem,” and in 1999 for their own album “Friends.”That was an apt title, because beyond their musical talents, Mr. Dunbar and Mr. Shakespeare were known for their close personal bond. They were very different people — Mr. Dunbar relaxed and outgoing, Mr. Shakespeare quiet and cerebral — but their talents complemented each other’s, and they could often seem like two halves of a single person.“The longest we’ve been apart in the last 25 years is about three weeks,” Mr. Shakespeare told the British newspaper The Independent in 1997. “It’s very difficult to be apart for that amount of time. I’ll go on holiday with my family, and as soon as I reach the place I’m going to, I want to be back with Sly, playing music.”Robert Warren Dale Shakespeare was born on Sept. 27, 1953, in East Kingston, Jamaica. He grew up in a musical family, but his parents were strict and he left home at 13. He drifted at first, getting into trouble but also spending time around his older brother, Lloyd, who sang in a local band.It was during Lloyd’s practice sessions that Robbie began to learn the guitar — a homemade acoustic one at first. But a chance encounter with the bassist Aston Barrett, known as Family Man, led him to switch instruments.He begged Mr. Barrett to teach him to play bass. Mr. Barrett, who would later join Marley’s band, the Wailers, said yes, but only if he stayed out of trouble. Robbie did more than that; he went home and practiced all night, and the days and nights after, until his fingers bled. Decades later, he showed Mr. Bougard how the strings had worn down his fingerprints until they were practically illegible.Soon he was playing in a series of Kingston bands, often several at once. He would play as a session musician in studios during the day, then perform in clubs at night. It was while working in the clubs that he met Lowell Dunbar, known as Sly, already regarded as one of the best drummers in the city.“He was playing the drums just like how I would always tell the drummers I would play with to play,” Mr. Shakespeare told the website United Reggae in 2012. “He was just doing it and doing it easy and good.”After working for several years at Channel One, Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Dunbar went off on their own, working for Mr. Dunbar’s Taxi label. They had immediate success producing “Showcase,” a 1979 album by the singer Gregory Isaacs, who at the time was one of the best-selling artists in Jamaica.That same year they played with the French singer Serge Gainsbourg on “Aux Armes et Cætera,” a reggae version of the French national anthem, which became one of Mr. Gainsbourg’s biggest hits. They released their first album, “Sly and Robbie Present Taxi,” in 1981.Mr. Shakespeare is survived by his wife, Marian, and a son, Mikiel. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.In 2020 Rolling Stone ranked Mr. Shakespeare 17th on its list of the greatest bassists of all time.The pair continued to make music into the 21st century, even as complications of diabetes left Mr. Shakespeare less able to get around. Their last album, “Rock Hills Road,” was released early this year.“If you’re chosen by music, I don’t think you get to say it’s time to retire,” Mr. Shakespeare told The Scotsman newspaper in 2009. “It’s a very gentle gift, and we’ve been trusted with it.” More

Pink Floyd’s enduring blockbuster merged grandeur and malaise. Very much a product of its era, it became one of the best-selling albums of all time.Glum, ponderous songs about madness, mortality and greed, punctuated with tense instrumentals. Was that a blueprint for a blockbuster? It hardly sounds like the makings of one of the best-selling albums of all time.But there’s no denying the popularity and tenacity of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the indelible album that Pink Floyd released 50 years ago, on March 1, 1973. Looming like an inscrutable monolith, “Dark Side” spent nearly all of the next 14 years — through punk, disco, early hip-hop and the pop heyday of MTV — lodged in Billboard’s Top 200 album chart. It arrived during the analog, material days of record stores and vinyl LPs, when an album purchase was a commitment. And no matter how familiar “Dark Side” went on to become as an FM radio staple, people still wanted their own copy, or perhaps a new copy to replace a scratched-up one. In the digital era, “The Dark Side of the Moon” album returned to the charts on CD, selling and then streaming more millions.The success of “Dark Side” stoked the ambitions of Pink Floyd and its leader, Roger Waters, who has toured arenas and stadiums ever since; Waters, 79, is playing his “first ever farewell” dates this year. He conceived the “The Wall,” a narrative rock opera released in 1979, that would foreground his anti-authority reflexes, from schoolmasters to heads of state; he has performed it against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall. Decades later, Waters would go on to spout cranky, conspiracy-theory-minded, pro-Russia political statements that many former fans abhorred. When “Dark Side” appeared, all that was far in the future.There will, of course, be another deluxe edition for the latest “Dark Side” anniversary. Arriving March 24, the new boxed set has high-resolution and surround-sound remixes and other extras, though it’s largely redundant after the exhaustive “Immersion Edition” reissue in 2011. Both “Immersion” and the new set include a worthy 1974 concert performance of “Dark Side,” with brawny live sound and extended onstage jams.Waters has also announced his own full-length remake of “Dark Side,” that will have his own lead vocals — not the husky, doleful voice of Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour — with Waters’s spoken words over the album’s instrumentals, along with “no rock ’n’ roll guitar solos.”Uh-oh.In 1973, “Dark Side” was an album that worked equally well to show off a new stereo — or, for a few early adopters, a quadraphonic system — or to be contemplated in private communion with headphones and a joint. The ticking clocks, alarms and chimes that open “Time” are startlingly realistic even when they’re no longer a surprise, and the perpetual-motion synthesizers and desperate footfalls of “On the Run” are eternally dizzying.Stately tempos, cavernous tones and solemn framing announce the high seriousness of “Dark Side,” which begins and ends with the sound of a heartbeat. The album juxtaposes overarching sonics and grand pronouncements with human-scale experience. Its tracks are punctuated with voices from Pink Floyd’s road crew and friends, dispensing loop-ready tidbits like “I’ve always been mad” in working-class accents.Like other overwhelming best sellers of the 1970s and 1980s — Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” — “Dark Side” deals with disillusionment, fear and resentment despite the polish of its production. It’s troubled and obsessive at heart, not tidy. Countless bands and producers would learn from Pink Floyd how to fuse grandeur and malaise, how a few well-placed sounds can say far more than a showy display of virtuosity.“Dark Side” was very much a product of its era. The early 1970s were prog-rock’s heyday, particularly in Britain, where bands like Genesis, King Crimson and Yes were constructing suite-length songs and unveiling elaborate conceits. But the early 1970s were also a time when the utopian promises of the hippie era were fading, pushed back by entrenched interests and corporate co-optation. “Dark Side” captures naïve hopes falling away.It was Pink Floyd’s eighth album, the continuation of a cult career that had been synonymous with psychedelia and progressive rock: with extended structures and open-ended jams, with verbal conundrums and with an oh-wow appreciation of reverberant textures and spatial effects.Pink Floyd’s founding songwriter, Syd Barrett, left the band in 1968 with mental health problems, taking its sense of whimsy with him. Waters emerged as its new, more saturnine leader. But it took a string of uneven albums, full of amorphous studio jams, before the relative concision and clarity of “Dark Side” came into focus. While the album unfolds as a 42-minute prog-rock suite — despite the necessity, in 1973, of flipping over an LP — it also features clearly delineated verse-chorus-verse songs that radio stations could play. Waters deliberately made his lyrics blunter and more down-to-earth than he had before: “Money, it’s a gas/Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”Waters tackled big topics: “Time,” “Money,” war, the inevitability of death, the triviality of daily life, the importance of seizing the moment. His perspective is dour. In “Breathe (in the Air),” he describes life as a “race towards an early grave”; in “Time, he observes that every sunrise brings you “One day closer to death.” But the reason “Dark Side” became a blockbuster is that Pink Floyd’s music — the full band, with Richard Wright’s self-effacing but fundamental keyboards, Waters on bass, Nick Mason’s steadfast drumming and Gilmour’s probing, slashing, keening guitar — defies all that miserabilism.The album builds dramatically and inexorably toward the songs that close each side of the LP. “The Great Gig in the Sky,” which ends Side 1, is a progression of tolling, processional keyboard chords from Wright, topped by spoken words denying fear of death — “You’ve got to go sometime” — followed by Clare Torry’s leaping, soaring, riveting vocal improvisation. She’s a pure life force, with pain and freedom and determination in her voice, refusing to accept oblivion. (Torry only received composer credit for her top line in 2005, along with an undisclosed settlement, after suing the band.)The album’s conclusion — “Brain Damage” seguing into “Eclipse,” both written by Waters — reads as bleak but feels like transcendence. In “Brain Damage,” the singer feels himself succumbing to mental illness. “The lunatic is in my head,” he warns, answered by a snippet of maniacal laughter; in the chorus, he sings, “If your head explodes with dark forebodings too/I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”Then, in “Eclipse,” he makes his way toward a revelatory oneness — “All that is now and all that is gone/And all that’s to come and everything under the sun is in tune” — only to see it swallowed by darkness as “the sun is eclipsed by the moon.” But in both songs, the music swells behind him, with churchy organ and robust major chords, pealing guitar and gospelly choir harmonies. As the album ends, tidings of catastrophe sound like triumph; it’s a fist-pumping arena-rock finale.In recent interviews, Waters has described the message of the album more positively. “What is really important is the connection between us as human beings, the whole human community,” he told Berliner Zeitung in February. That’s revisionist; “Dark Side” luxuriates in alienation, futility and desperation. Its persistence reveals just how many listeners feel the same. More

She became a star as a percussionist and bandleader in the swing era. But her call for the big bands to hire women instrumentalists during World War II had little impact. More

In 2022, stars including Harry Styles, Jack Harlow and Bad Bunny offered liberated takes on gender, but also risked pandering. Are men OK?In April, during his headlining set at Coachella, the reigning pop prince Harry Styles invited a surprise guest, Shania Twain, to the stage to sing a provocatively chosen duet: “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”Clad in a low-cut, silver sequined jumpsuit, Styles strutted, twirled and belted out the cheeky anthem’s lyrics. “This lady taught me how to sing,” he told the raucous crowd of over 100,000 when the song was over. “She also taught me that men are trash.”The performance was fun, headline-generating and relatively radical: It is difficult to imagine Styles’s generational predecessor, Justin Timberlake — or even Timberlake’s successor, Justin Bieber — playing so fast and loose with gender roles. That is partially because the Justins embraced hip-hop and R&B — genres where such experimentation is often less welcome — more directly than Styles ever has. But it’s also because the cultural forces that shape the norms and expectations of what a male pop star can and should be are evolving.While the year in music was dominated by a handful of female powerhouses (critically, by Beyoncé’s widely praised dance-floor odyssey “Renaissance” and commercially, by Taylor Swift’s moody synth-pop juggernaut “Midnights”), the top male pop stars — Styles, Bad Bunny and Jack Harlow — all found success while offering refreshingly subversive challenges to old-school masculinity.Styles and Harlow seem cannily aware of how to position themselves as heartthrobs in a cultural moment when being a man — especially one that scans straight and white — can seem like a minefield of potential missteps, offenses and overextended privilege. Bad Bunny, even more subversively, ripped up the English-language pop star’s rule book and offered a more expansive vision of gender and sexuality.Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose summery smash “Un Verano Sin Ti” spent more weeks atop the Billboard chart than any other album this year, has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo. Instead, he has embraced gender-fluid fashion, called out male aggression in his songs and videos and even made out with one of his male backup dancers during a performance at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards — decisions that carry extra weight considering his aesthetic-hopping pop is rooted in reggaeton, a genre that has leaned on heteronormativity.Bad Bunny has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo.Isaac Esquivel/EPA, via ShutterstockStyles, too, has won fans and admirers by treating his gender presentation as something of a playground, whether that means wearing a dress on the cover of “Vogue,” refusing to label his sexuality or flipping the familiar script of the older male auteur/younger female muse in his much publicized relationship with his “Don’t Worry Darling” director Olivia Wilde, who is 10 years his senior. None of it has been bad for business: Styles’s “As It Was” was the year’s longest-reigning Billboard No. 1 and, globally, Spotify’s most-streamed song of 2022.But there’s also an increasingly fine line between allyship and pandering, one that fans aren’t shy about calling out online. Styles and Bad Bunny have been accused of the very contemporary crime of “queerbaiting,” or cultivating a faux mystique around one’s sexuality to appeal to an L.G.B.T.Q. fan base. To overemphasize straightness and alpha-male stereotypes, though, presents its own risks, especially in a post-MeToo moment. What’s a man to do?Harlow, the 24-year-old Kentucky-born rapper, spent 2022 trying to figure it out. A technically dexterous rapper with an easy charisma and a head of Shirley Temple ringlets, Harlow is known for making artistic choices that spotlight his skills and convey his seriousness as an MC. He’s also cultivated a persona as an irrepressible flirt with a particular attraction to Black women. He famously shot his shot with Saweetie on the BET Awards red carpet, repeatedly popped into Doja Cat’s Instagram live broadcasts and even parodied his reputation during a star-turning “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig, when he played himself in a skit that imagined him seducing Whoopi Goldberg on the set of “The View.”Harlow’s music, too, actively cultivates the female listener. As he explained in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, “I always think about if I was in the car and the girl I had a crush on was in the shotgun and I had to play the song, would I be proud to play the song?”Jack Harlow’s music focuses on a kind of glorification of the female listener.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThroughout his second album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” Harlow paints himself as stylish and sensitive, a man who keeps his nails clean and discusses his romantic encounters in therapy. In the grand tradition of his elder Drake, Harlow often uses the pronoun “you” to directly and intimately address women in his songs. His biggest solo hit to date, “First Class,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 this spring, turned “Glamorous,” Fergie’s blingy 2007 hit about luxury and hard-earned success, into a chivalric invitation for a lady to come enjoy the good life on Harlow’s dime: “I could put you in first class,” he clarified.Stylistically, Harlow’s music is worlds away from Styles’s, but both share a kind of glorification of the female listener, a lyrical attentiveness to her pleasure and a subtle insistence that they are more caring partners than all those other men who, in Styles’s parlance (and on superhumanly empathetic ballads like “Boyfriends” and “Matilda”), are “trash.”In some sense, this is certainly progress. Consider that Timberlake’s early aughts success involved the excessive vilification of his ex Britney Spears, or that a performance that pantomimed a kind of hyper-heterosexual dominance over Janet Jackson had virtually no effect on his career, but nearly ended hers. Harlow’s collaboration with and public support for the gay pop star Lil Nas X and even his fawning over his female peers are worlds away from his predecessor Eminem, who negotiated his complex stance as a white man in a predominantly Black genre by punching down at women and queer people. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t exactly good for business anymore — and thank goodness.It’s hard to imagine these men making the same mistakes as their forebears, and overcorrection is in some sense welcome, given the alternative. (Bad Bunny, again, has taken even bolder risks, like vehemently criticizing the Puerto Rican government in response to island-wide blackouts.)But even responsibly wielded privilege is still, at the end of the day, privilege. And Styles’s and Harlow’s music often betrays that by its relative weightlessness, its sense of existence in a space free of any great existential cares. Styles’s songs in particular seem hollowed out of any introspection; most of the ones on “Harry’s House” pass by like cumulus clouds. The focus of Harlow’s music vacillates between girls and ego, with few gestures toward the riskier political statements he’s made on red carpets (decrying homophobia) and on social media (attending protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor). That failure to see oneself as part of a larger problem is a symptom of privilege, too. Even if he’s wearing sequins, a man declaring that “men are trash” is just a very subtle way of saying “not all men.” What about the guy saying it?On “Part of the Band,” a moody, verbose single released this year by the British band the 1975, the frontman Matty Healy imagines overhearing a snippet of chitchat between two young women: “I like my men like I like my coffee/Full of soy milk and so sweet it won’t offend anybody.” The implication is that Healy is decidedly not one of those men, and it’s indeed hard to imagine a listener — particularly a non-male one — making it through all 11 tracks of the 1975’s soft-focused “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” without cringing at something Healy says. (Just one example: “I thought we were fighting, but it seems I was ‘gaslighting’ you.” Yeesh.)But in Healy’s musings, there’s something often lacking in Harlow’s or Styles’s music: a genuine sense of self-scrutiny, and an active internal monologue about what it means to be a man at this moment in the 21st century. Healy’s songs are, as the critic Ann Powers put it in an astute essay tracing the cultural lineage of “the dirtbag,” excavations of “the curses and blessings of his gendered existence.” Under his relentless microscope, straight(ish) white masculinity is, blessedly, freed from its status as the default human condition and instead becomes a curiosity to poke and prod at, exposing its internal contradictions and latent anxieties.“Am I ironically woke?” Healy wonders later in “Part of the Band.” “The butt of my joke? Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke calling his ego imagination?” Cringe if you want. He’s man enough to let the question hang there in the air. More

An incisive new book, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” examines the extraordinary career of the master of the musical.HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, by Richard SchochIn the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming essay collection, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “not, then, a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”The Sondheim perspective is the subject of 11 essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one on “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “How (Not) to Deal With Injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” and so on through the Sondheim playlist. This conceit of art as self-help is common enough — Jane Austen has come in for a lot of it, as have Shakespeare and the 19th-century Russian novelists — as to practically be a subgenre at this point, in which publishers take a subject they are nervous may be too nerdy or niche for a general audience and try to reframe it in more popular terms. It rarely works, trying to turn apples into bananas — there are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto “life lessons” in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside out, that is, as someone who has wrestled with how to perform and direct him. And what a joy the author’s take on it all is. I was happy simply to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, close reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send In the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a bit in range” that required “short phrases firmly closed off with consonants.” This is why Judi Dench — not a singer, either — performed the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s 1995 revival of “A Little Night Music,” and why Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Trevor Nunn’s 2009 Broadway revival, did not. (On hearing the opening bars, I recall, Zeta-Jones assumed a stricken Torch Song expression as if something terrible was about to happen — which, of course, it was.)Laurence Guittard and Judi Dench in the 1995 London production of “A Little Night Music.”Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock PhotoStritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home, abject, self-loathing, from the cast recording of “Company” after her ninth flubbed take of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” reminding us that Sondheim favored cranky, brilliant leading ladies who drove everyone mad until they hit their mark. He takes us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, writing in relation to Gypsy Rose Lee, “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme of Sondheim’s, raising questions of where in his characters the composer resides. That Sondheim, a gay man who by his own account didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of straight marriage remains curious. But while Schoch uses the example of the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly of his own coming out in his 30s, he doesn’t get into Sondheim’s life.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