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The former NSYNC star is currently working on his next studio installment and he would love to collaborate with Kendrick and Travis on the upcoming studio album.

Jan 31, 2021
AceShowbiz – Justin Timberlake is taking his time working on a new album and has a list of dream collaborators in mind – including rapper Kendrick Lamar.
The 39-year-old singer and actor revealed he has been in the studio recently, working on the follow-up to 2018’s “Man of the Woods”.
When asked by chat show host Jimmy Fallon whether it would be correct to say that “a new Justin Timberlake album” in the works, Justin replied, “Yeah, we can say that. There’s a possibility. Let’s go with yes.”
However, Justin insisted he is not in a huge rush to release any new music as he likes to take his time with his material.
He explained, “I sat on Mirrors for like, four or five years. I think I just take my time, maybe that’s my barometer – if I still love them as much when time goes by, hopefully people will after they hear them, when time goes by.”

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And Justin, who recently welcomed son Phineas with wife Jessica Biel, revealed his dream collaborators for the album would include Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott.
Fallon replied, “That would be a good mix.”
Meanwhile, Justin – who also has son Silas with Jessica – previously revealed he left boyband *NSYNC because he felt he was “growing out of it.”
Speaking about the split, he said, “We were on a stadium tour, and I just felt like the whole thing was too big. It started as a fun snowball fight that was becoming an avalanche.”
“And, also, I was growing out of it. I felt like I cared more about the music than some of the other people in the group. And I felt like I had other music I wanted to make and that I needed to follow my heart.”

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In 2021, the global music company BMG was looking for a hit in France’s growing hip-hop market when its executives came up with a strategy: They would sign Freeze Corleone, a rising rapper on the Parisian scene with an aura of mystique, a hit album and more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify.There was one problem. Freeze Corleone had been widely condemned in Europe for antisemitic lyrics. “I arrive determined like Adolf in the 1930s,” he rapped in French in one 2018 song, and, in another, “Everything for the family, so that my children live like Jewish rentiers,” a word often associated with landlords. Other tracks have included conspiracy theories about 9/11 and a shout-out to “the Aryans.”Just a year before BMG’s deal with him, Freeze Corleone had been dropped by his previous label, the French arm of the giant Universal Music, which said that his music “amplified unacceptable racist statements.”“In order to mitigate the risk of possible controversy,” BMG executives wrote in a memo, they had a workaround. The contract with Freeze Corleone stipulated that the label had the right to approve his lyrics and that it would keep BMG’s involvement with his career hidden, according to documents and internal emails reviewed by The New York Times.“No BMG logo anywhere on the release,” Dominique Casimir, one of the company’s most senior executives, emailed to a company lawyer and other executives.She also demanded there would be no announcement heralding the deal. “No signing picture,” Ms. Casimir wrote. “Sorry to be this strict.”A few weeks later, in October 2021, BMG signed a one-album deal with Freeze Corleone worth more than one million euros, or about $1.1 million.In the end, BMG didn’t put out the album. In a recent interview, Ms. Casimir said that she had decided to cancel the deal the day before the release of its first single.But the story of BMG and Freeze Corleone raises questions about why BMG executives had signed him in the first place while going to great lengths to conceal the relationship. And it offers an object lesson in the temptations and risks corporations face when they seek to capitalize on the notoriety of pop-culture figures. That tension played out on a bigger stage last year when, amid a rising tide of antisemitism, Adidas ended its lucrative partnership with Kanye West after he made antisemitic comments.In the interview, Ms. Casimir spoke about the challenges of monitoring a large pipeline of content at a multinational company; said that the decision to omit BMG’s name from the album had been made mutually with the artist; and described BMG’s ultimate decision to scrap its deal with Freeze Corleone as a sign that its content moderation policies had worked.“People make mistakes,” she said. “We caught the mistake. And whatever the outcome of that mistake is, we have to deal with that.”A Fraught HistoryThis was not the first time that BMG, and Ms. Casimir, had to scramble to minimize damage over antisemitic lyrics.In 2018, the company was at the center of a media firestorm over an album it had released the year before, “Jung Brutal Gutaussehend 3” (“Young Brutal Good-Looking 3”), by a pair of German rappers, Kollegah and Farid Bang. Despite lyrics like “My body is more defined than Auschwitz prisoners” and “make another Holocaust, show up with a Molotov,” the LP had become a monster hit.When that record (which BMG executives now refer to as “JBG”) won best hip-hop/urban album at the Echo awards, Germany’s equivalent of the Grammys, other artists revolted. Some, like the classical conductor Daniel Barenboim and Klaus Voormann, the musician and artist who worked with the Beatles, returned their prizes in protest. The media and politicians in Germany — where there are strict laws against hate speech and Nazi propaganda — zeroed in on the uproar. The Echo awards were discontinued permanently.The rebuke was felt particularly strongly at BMG, which is part of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. In 2002, Bertelsmann had apologized for its past ties to the Nazi regime.In response to the uproar, BMG said it would give 100,000 euros to a campaign against antisemitism. It sponsored a series of songwriting workshops centered on opposing hate speech through music.Ms. Casimir, who had overseen the deal for “JBG” as the managing director of BMG’s German market, became a public face of the company’s campaign. “Given Germany’s history, it is everyone’s responsibility to take a stand against antisemitism and hate,” she said in a news release.The company enlisted the help of Ben Lesser, a Holocaust survivor who speaks to groups around the world through his Zachor Holocaust Remembrance Foundation. Soon after the awards, Mr. Lesser spent about three hours at a theater in Berlin, sharing his wrenching personal story with BMG employees and local schoolchildren, he and his daughter Gail Lesser-Gerber said in an interview.BMG asked Mr. Lesser, now 94, to take part in a songwriting workshop in Los Angeles in early 2019. At the five-day event, he consulted with musicians as they wrote and recorded tracks with uplifting messages, including “Letter to the World,” sung by Emily Vaughn.The label let Mr. Lesser know that to support his efforts to eradicate antisemitism, it would give the foundation the revenue generated by the songs.“Altogether, it’s been less than $100,” Ms. Lesser-Gerber said. But she said that money was not the incentive. “The motivation was to get the message out.”Lyrics About Hitler and JewsFreeze Corleone rarely speaks to the news media. His real name is Issa Lorenzo Diakhaté, and he was born in a suburb of Paris in 1992. His father is Senegalese and his mother Italian. The rapper did not respond to numerous messages sent by email and social media requesting comment for this article. A business associate who helped him arrange his deal with BMG declined to comment.Yet he speaks through his music. Rapping in a low voice, over minor-key piano figures, he performs a variation of drill, a hip-hop style often filled with dark tones and violent imagery.Many of his lyrics feature standard hip-hop tropes, like allusions to sports and pop culture. On one track he rhymes the name of Larry Bird, the Boston Celtics legend, with that of Marty Byrde, the money launderer played by Jason Bateman on Netflix’s “Ozark.” But a thread of antisemitism runs throughout his work, manifested in Nazi references, dismissals of the Holocaust, and slurs and stereotypes about Jews.He has boasted of having “the propaganda techniques of Goebbels” and “big ambitions” like “the young Adolf.” In one song, “Le Chen,” from 2016, he rapped: “I’ve got to get the khaliss moving in my community like a Jew.” In Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, where he spent time growing up, khaliss means money.Olivier Lamm, a music critic for the French newspaper Libération, said that “the thematic substance of Freeze Corleone’s rap is obsessively antisemitic.” He cited an example from one of the rapper’s early tracks in which he used a profanity in dismissing the Shoah — a term for the Holocaust — and pointed to lines on his latest album, “Riyad Sadio,” that seem to refer to Israel and Jews, with key words bleeped out.In 2020, Universal Music France released “La Menace Fantôme” (“The Phantom Menace”), which went double platinum in France, selling the equivalent of 200,000 copies there. Lyrics highlighted “Aryans,” though did not explicitly address Jews.But the album’s popularity drew attention to Freeze Corleone’s earlier lyrics about Hitler and Jewish landlords, and in the resulting controversy, he was dropped by Universal.“Finally free,” the rapper tweeted.Freeze Corleone’s name on a marquee continues to draw protests. A concert planned for late last year in Montreal was canceled after it drew condemnation from some leaders in the local Jewish community. Local officials in Rennes, France, have asked organizers to remove him from a festival next month.The Fine PrintBMG executives knew that signing Freeze Corleone could result in blowback, according to internal documents, but they were attracted to his market potential. “This signing will strengthen BMG France’s position on the strategic market of urban music and hopefully bring our first platinum local record, a key milestone to sign bigger urban acts later,” read an internal investment request memo.The memo, sent in September 2021 by two executives in the company’s French office, weighed the risks of hate speech against the financial upside of working with him.Pro: “Freeze Corleone is France’s fastest growing artist in the last 2 years,” the executives, Sylvain Gazaignes and Ronan Fiacre, wrote in the memo. “Riyad Sadio,” his album with Ashe 22, another French rapper, was ready to go and “would really help us meet our revenue target,” another document read, and it projected revenue of 1.2 million euros from the project and profit of 155,000 euros.Con: “Freeze Corleone faced controversy when releasing his first album in 2020,” the BMG memo noted, with understatement. An investigation, the memo added, had been opened by French authorities “on the grounds of incitement to racial hatred,” but had concluded “there was no ground for prosecution.”In fact, that investigation was closed with no charges brought because the statute of limitations had passed, a spokesman for the Paris prosecutor’s office told The Times.According to BMG documents, no money would be paid until executives had listened to and approved the lyrics. There would be none of the usual publicity at the time of signing the deal and “the release will be white-labelled” — meaning that no BMG logo would appear on the music or marketing materials.The contract was executed a few weeks later, with BMG stipulating that the new album had been listened to and approved. Under the terms of the contract, that should have guaranteed Freeze Corleone at least his initial payment of 500,000 euros. BMG declined to comment about whether it had paid him the money.When the two BMG employees in France approached her about the deal, Ms. Casimir, who by then had been given oversight of most of the European market, said she told them that it can be difficult to draw the proper line between artistic freedom and language that crosses lines of propriety.“You have to check the back story,” she said she told them. “You have to understand you work for a German company. You have to understand the history, because ‘JBG’ is a history. I mean, I lived in that moment.”The French employees assured her that the lyrics would be “clean,” she said, and that they would vet them before paying Freeze Corleone. Neither Mr. Gazaignes nor Mr. Fiacre responded to text messages seeking comment.BMG executives cleared the lyrics of Freeze Corleone’s album, “Riyad Sadio,” and prepared to release its first single, “Scellé Part. 4,” in late October.At the last minute, the label abruptly pulled back. Ms. Casimir said that days before the song’s scheduled release, she decided to have her team in Germany review Freeze Corleone’s past lyrics.“I must say, that was a very fast decision, the moment we translated some of those lyrics,” Ms. Casimir said. “We called the French team, said, ‘You have to end this relationship.’”She said she had alerted Hartwig Masuch, the BMG chief executive, about the termination, and that “he agreed with the next steps.” BMG did not make Mr. Masuch available for comment.After BMG canceled the deal, Freeze Corleone released the album independently. It has had modest success, drawing more than 40 million streams on Spotify.Ms. Casimir said that two of her employees in France no longer work for BMG as a result of the episode. “It has consequences,” she said. BMG executives declined to name which employees left the company; Mr. Gazaignes remains a top executive in the French division.In 2022, Ms. Casimir was promoted to chief content officer, and was given a seat on BMG’s board. More

Piano technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity.Lars Vogt, a sensitive, communicative pianist whose warmth as a collaborator made him an outstanding chamber musician and a conductor of growing stature, died on Monday at a clinic in Erlangen, Germany. He was 51.His manager, Celia Willis, said the cause was esophageal cancer, which Mr. Vogt had learned he had in March 2021. He had spoken frankly about his prospects while continuing to perform, up until a few weeks before his death.“Music is just such an amazing thing. I find that even more in these times, when I spend a lot of time in hospitals and with doctors, and of course wondering how things are going to go,” Mr. Vogt said in an online interview with the pianist Zsolt Bognar in July, “and yet in music you get transported into this world where you forget everything.”Mr. Vogt created and shared those worlds in sublimely free, quite personal detail, and he had little interest in show for the sake of show. His was a “loving” approach to the piano, he told Pianist magazine in 2016, one that tried “to get the sound out of the keyboard, rather than into it.”If the results could sometimes seem idiosyncratic, at his best he played with “a sense of perfect equilibrium, a balance of lines that sounded simple and natural, but could only have been the result of thoughtful calibration,” as Allan Kozinn of The New York Times wrote in a review of a recital in 2006.Technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity — he once recorded an album of pieces written for children — and he eventually unburdened himself of the pressure placed on pianists to memorize the works they learn, so he could perform without the nervousness he had long felt onstage.He took the time to involve himself deeply in the works he played solo, which came mostly from the high Germanic tradition — ranging from Bach, whose “Goldberg” Variations he recorded to acclaim, to contemporary composers like Thomas Larcher. It was the music of Brahms, however, that was always closest to Mr. Vogt, for the solace of its melancholy.Mr. Vogt’s last public appearances, in which he played Brahms, were in June at Spannungen, a chamber music festival that he founded in 1998 that takes place in an Art Nouveau hydroelectric power plant in Heimbach, Germany. (Its name translates to “Voltages” as well as “Tensions.”) And it was in chamber music that he excelled, especially with the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his sister, the cellist Tanya Tetzlaff.Mr. Vogt recorded Brahms and Dvorak with the Tetzlaffs as a trio and, with Mr. Tetzlaff, set down fervently expressive accounts of violin sonatas by Mozart, Schumann and Brahms. Those exquisite recordings, made for the Ondine label, were widely judged worthy of reference status not because they aimed to be a final word on the works involved, or even appeared to be, but because the audible generosity of their partnership made for a unique focus and intensity.“This is chamber-playing at its most humane,” the critic Richard Bratby wrote of their recording of Beethoven’s Opus 30 sonatas in Gramophone last year, “impossible to hear without feeling a renewed love and admiration for music and performers alike.”It was also as an avowed collaborator, rather than as a more forceful leader, that Mr. Vogt took on conducting, which he decided to explore after stepping in at short notice to lead Beethoven from the keyboard with the Camerata Salzburg early in the 2010s.“There was no conductor, just a very good concertmaster, and it was so much fun, so easy,” he recalled of that concert in an interview with Gramophone magazine in 2017. “I rang my agent afterwards from the taxi to the airport and said, ‘I need to know how far I can go with this. It doesn’t matter which orchestra it’s with, I just love it so much.’”Hired after a single concert, Mr. Vogt became the music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, based in Newcastle, England, in 2015; together, they recorded the Beethoven concertos with a sparkling pliancy and the Brahms with an unusual tenderness of touch. He took the same post with the Chamber Orchestra of Paris in 2020 and remained there until his death.Conducting is “like chamber music,” Mr. Vogt told Gramophone. “I want to encourage the character of the music, encourage people to go to their limits of expression, and ideally get them to the state that they want to do that, enjoy searching to the depths.”Mr. Vogt performing a program of Mozart, Schubert and Brahms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLars Vogt was born on Sept. 8, 1970, in Düren, near Cologne, the third child of Marie-Luise Vogt, a secretary, and Paul Vogt, an engineer who also played soccer to a high standard. He and his siblings learned music as just one of many youthful activities, soccer included.But Mr. Vogt’s first piano teacher saw promise soon after he had started at age 6. He won a national competition for young musicians at 14, and at the same time began studying with the renowned pedagogue Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Hanover University of Music and Drama (now the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media). Their lessons continued informally until Mr. Kämmerling died in 2012, when Mr. Vogt succeeded his teacher as professor of piano at that university.Suitably firmed up technically under Mr. Kämmerling’s demanding tutelage, Mr. Vogt took second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1990. That experience proved as important for the personal relationships it brought as for the international tours that followed.On the podium during the Leeds final for Mr. Vogt’s intelligent if introverted reading of the Schumann Piano Concerto was the English maestro Simon Rattle; their partnership became one of the many friendships through which the pianist thrived musically, not least during a stint in the 2003-4 season as the pianist in residence at the Berlin Philharmonic, which Mr. Rattle then led.Mr. Rattle also planted the seeds that bloomed into Mr. Vogt’s podium career. He told him after a joint appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 1991 — an American debut in which the pianist “exercised his command with personality and poise” in Beethoven, John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times — that he would be a conductor within a decade.That comment “hit me like a lightning bolt, because I’d never thought of it,” Mr. Vogt told The Scotsman in 2015. “I guess he noticed how curiously I observed what he was doing. I was fascinated at what miracles can be achieved by something that doesn’t — ideally — produce any sound.”Mr. Vogt’s first marriage, to the composer Tatjana Komarova, ended in divorce. He married the violinist Anna Reszniak, the concertmaster of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, in 2017. She survives him, as do his parents; his siblings, Karsten Vogt and Ilka Fischboeck; and his daughters, Emma Vogt, Charlotte Kuehn and Isabelle Vogt, an actress with whom he recorded melodramas by Schumann and Strauss.“He was at once the wildest and most sensitive musician I know,” Mr. Tetzlaff, who performed with Mr. Vogt for 26 years and considered him his “closest comrade,” said of the pianist in an interview with Van magazine shortly after Mr. Vogt’s death.“I’ve met a lot of musicians who have become very successful by talking about themselves, presenting themselves well, and who seem to have no experience with doubt,” Mr. Tetzlaff went on. “But I learned that music can only speak fully in freedom and love. It’s a thing you only experience with very few musicians, artists like Lars.” More

En una jugada maestra, la venerable compañía ha contratado como su próximo director musical al excepcional artista clásico que también ha conquistado la fama en la cultura popular.En un golpe maestro de la venerable Ópera de París, fundada en 1669 por Luis XIV, la compañía anunció el viernes que el conductor superestrella Gustavo Dudamel será su próximo director musical.Dudamel, líder musical de la Filarmónica de Los Ángeles desde 2009 e inusual artista clásico que ha cosechado un estatus de celebridad de la cultura pop, solo ha dirigido una única producción en París: La Bohème en 2017. Y, aunque en Los Ángeles ha jugueteado con el repertorio operístico, tanto en la Ópera Metropolitana como en otros escenarios, es más conocido como conductor sinfónico.Pero para quienes han seguido de cerca el ascenso constante de Dudamel en los últimos 15 años, no será sorpresa otro gran nombramiento. El nuevo puesto es un hito en la magnífica carrera de un artista que se hizo renombre como niño prodigio con las orquestas en Norte y Sudamérica y que ahora, a los 40 años, tomará las riendas de una de las compañías de ópera más antiguas de Europa. Ocupará el cargo a partir de agosto, en principio por seis años, superpuestos en gran parte con su trabajo en Los Ángeles, donde su contrato actual llega hasta la temporada 2025-26.Dudamel —nacido en Venezuela en 1981 y formado ahí por El Sistema, el programa gratuito subsidiado por el gobierno que enseña música a los niños en las zonas más pobres— ocupa una posición única en el mundo de la música. Lo asedian las principales orquestas, entre ellas la Filarmónica de Berlín y la Filarmónica de Viena.Pero también ha actuado en un espectáculo de medio tiempo del Súper Bowl, apareció como Trollzart en el filme animado Trolls Gira Mundial, dirige la música en la próxima versión fílmica de Steven Spielberg de West Side Story e inspiró un personaje desmelenado en la serie de Amazon Mozart en la Jungla. En 2019 recibió una estrella en el Paseo de la Fama de Hollywood.Sin duda, su renombre será una inyección de energía para la Ópera de París que, como otras organizaciones artísticas, contempla cautelosamente volver a presentarse ante su audiencia tradicional tras el largo cierre pandémico al tiempo que busca captar nuevos asistentes. Con un generoso subsidio del gobierno francés, la compañía —cuyo director Alexander Neef, asumió el cargo el otoño pasado— ha expandido su audiencia en los últimos años, pero aún enfrenta la presión de los agitados debates sobre la representación racial y la relevancia de las costosas formas artísticas clásicas.Ya no se acostumbra —especialmente fuera de los países germanohablantes— que los directores musicales de ópera inicien como pianistas y entrenadores de voz y asciendan el escalafón de la compañía, tal como hizo el antecesor de Dudamel en París, Philippe Jordan, de 46 años. Aunque Dudamel no cuenta con esa preparación, no es un desconocido para las principales casas operísticas. Debutó en la Scala en Milán en 2006, cuando tenía veintitantos años y al año siguiente se presentó en la Ópera Estatal de Berlín. Su primera actuación en la Ópera del Estado de Viena fue en 2016 y en la Met en 2018 con Otello de Verdi. El miércoles concluyó una temporada con Otello en Barcelona.Durante su trabajo en Los Ángeles, ha contribuido al sólido programa educativo de compromiso con la comunidad, en especial con la Orquesta Juvenil de Los Ángeles, un programa inspirado en El Sistema que se fundó en 2007. También sigue ocupando el cargo de director musical de la Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, pero después de criticar al gobierno de Venezuela en 2017, el gobierno canceló la gira internacional que estaba programada. A pesar de que no ha podido actuar con la Simón Bolívar desde entonces, aún trabaja de forma remota con la agrupación y, en ocasiones, se ha reunido fuera de Venezuela con grupos de sus integrantes.El nombramiento de Dudamel sucede dos meses después de que se dio a conocer un reporte sobre la discriminación y la diversidad en la Ópera de París, enfocado en los cambios al repertorio, el proceso de admisión de la escuela y la composición racial y étnica de su compañía interna de ballet.Pero alrededor del mundo, las compañías de ópera también han sido llamadas a diversificar su personal, elenco artístico y repertorios. Junto con Ching-Lien Wu, la recién nombrada maestra del coro de la Ópera de París, la contratación de Dudamel forma parte de un esfuerzo por cambiar el rostro de las filas ejecutivas de la compañía y su enfoque hacia la diversidad y la igualdad.Zachary Woolfe ha sido el editor de música clásica desde 2015. Antes fue crítico de la ópera en The New York Observer. @zwoolfe More

After more than 27 hours of deliberation, a Florida jury found three men guilty of killing the rising rapper during a robbery in the parking lot of a motorcycle shop.Nearly five years after the killing of the rising rap star XXXTentacion, who was fatally shot in broad daylight during a 2018 robbery just as his polarizing career was exploding, a jury in Florida on Monday ended more than a week of deliberations when it found three men guilty of first-degree murder in the case.Prosecutors said that Michael Boatwright, 28, and Trayvon Newsome, 24, were the gunmen that June afternoon, with Boatwright firing the fatal shot during a struggle over money. The third man convicted, Dedrick Williams, 26, was said to be the getaway driver and mastermind behind the robbery.All three face mandatory life sentences; prosecutors did not seek the death penalty in the case, which was tried at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.Surveillance video played in court showed the rapper’s BMW being blocked by an S.U.V. as he tried to leave a motor sports store in Deerfield Beach, Fla., leading to a confrontation with two masked assailants, who escaped with $50,000 in cash.The trial turned largely on the jury’s interpretation of testimony from a fourth man present that day, Robert Allen, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last year and testified against his alleged co-conspirators. The Broward County prosecutors also relied on surveillance video from the store that showed two of the men inside, seemingly observing XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy), as well as cellphone and Bluetooth data tying the men to the location and the S.U.V.XXXTentacion onstage in 2017. The rising rapper was shot and killed during a robbery in 2018.Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service and Getty ImagesThe evidence also included videos that prosecutors said showed the defendants dancing and posing with cash hours after the killing.During more than 27 hours of deliberations across eight days, jurors had asked to review more than 1,000 text messages, along with photos and videos, seized from the cellphones of two of the defendants, including a picture of a news story about the shooting.Defense lawyers for Boatwright, Newsome and Williams, who were tried together, argued that DNA evidence failed to link them to the shooting. (The jury was asked to decide separately on each man’s guilt or innocence, and could have convicted just one or two of those accused.)The defense pointed vaguely to other theories of the crime — including behind-the-scenes wrangling that attempted to include information about XXXTentacion’s online beef with the megastar Drake, who fought successfully to avoid being deposed in the case. They also said that Allen, who had previous felony convictions, was an unreliable witness.“Plans hatched in hell do not have angels for witnesses,” Pascale Achille, the lead prosecutor, said in her rebuttal after closing arguments.The foursome had been planning to commit robberies that day, prosecutors argued, when they happened upon XXXTentacion at the motorcycle shop, where they had hoped to buy a mask. After confirming the musician’s identity inside, the men then waited for him in the parking lot and pulled in front of his car, allowing the two gunmen to attack, their faces covered. A passenger riding with XXXTentacion fled, and a scuffle over the rapper’s Louis Vuitton bag containing the $50,000 ended when Boatwright shot the rapper, prosecutors said.XXXTentacion, 20, a singer, songwriter and rapper who blended genres and first took off on the streaming platform SoundCloud, was high up on the roller coaster of viral fame when he was killed.In the 18 months before the shooting, he had gone from a little-known, troubled teenager making music in his bedroom to the top of the Billboard chart thanks to the success of his anarchic breakout single, “Look at Me!,” and a follow-up album, “?,” which debuted at No. 1.At the same time, he was awaiting trial on charges of battery, false imprisonment and witness tampering stemming from the alleged violent assault of a former girlfriend.“If I’m going to die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy, or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life, regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me,” the rapper said in a video posted to social media before his death.Since his killing, XXXTentacion — whose striking visage has been absorbed into modern hip-hop’s iconography — has been the subject of a documentary, “Look at Me,” and been featured on albums by Kanye West and Lil Wayne, in addition to the posthumous music released in his name. More