After a week of bitter diss tracks, a conversation about how the rap battle played out for the chart-topping rappers and how their personas and careers might be affected.It’s gotten ugly between Kendrick Lamar and Drake.Over the weekend, the two generation-defining rappers turned a decade of competitive tension into increasingly personal attacks delivered on a barrage of diss tracks filled with taunts, insults, accusations of abuse, alleged inside information and threats.With Lamar’s songs, including “Euphoria” and “Not Like Us,” dominating the online conversation and streaming charts, the battle seemed to cool on Sunday evening, after a resigned-sounding second response this weekend from Drake, who denied some of the most serious claims against him, including pedophilia, even as he doubled down on his allegations against Lamar. Then, on Tuesday, a security guard was shot and hospitalized in serious condition outside Drake’s Toronto home; the authorities said they did not yet have a motive and the investigation was ongoing.As the musical volleys paused, at least for now, the New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica and the Times music reporter Joe Coscarelli surveyed the songs, the strategy, the reputational wreckage and where each rapper stands now for an episode of the video podcast Popcast (Deluxe). These are edited excerpts from the conversation.JOE COSCARELLI I don’t think we need to jump in right away to definitively say who we think won this beef, because the fight seems to have been decided by popular vote. Nobody’s really calling this for Drake, right?JON CARAMANICA I think even Drake is not calling this for Drake, because of the tone of what he put out last, “The Heart Part 6.” In the big picture, though, everyone won and nobody won. Thinking about fandom in the stan era, you’re either on one side or the other. But what I’ve realized in the wake of these songs is that Drake fandom comes with different levels of fickleness. His fans are willing to entertain, “Maybe he’s not the person that I thought he was.” Whereas most Kendrick fans are not willing to entertain that idea, despite Drake’s allegations in “Family Matters” that Kendrick at some point hired a crisis management team to cover up that he abused his fiancée, which are quite serious.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

Instagram/Rory Kramer

According to his music director, the ‘Yummy’ singer scrapped leftover songs from his previous album and ‘started from scratch’ with his new studio installment.

Mar 27, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Justin Bieber “started from scratch” with “Justice”.

The “Yummy” singer released his new album last week, just seven months after he brought out LP “Changes”. And though he’d always planned to make two records “back-to-back,” he was keen for them to be entirely separate projects and scrapped a number of songs leftover from the sessions for the earlier album.

His music director, Bernard ‘Harv’ Harvey – who also co-wrote and co-produced “Somebody” and “Peaches” for “Justice” – told Vulture, “The original plan was to do two albums back-to-back (but keep them separate). We literally started from scratch. We wanted Justice to have its own sound, its own identity, so we put those old songs back on the shelf.”

And to better establish the divide, Justin brought in a number of new writers, including Gregory ‘Aldae’ Hein.

“People know Justin as a pop star,” Aldae said of the shift. “I think he crushes the R&B, but I personally love this style of music more with him.”

And a high standard was set for the album early on in the process.

  See also…

“It’s about making sure that this album is going to be the best album of the year,” Harv said. “Every producer and writer, we all had that same idea.”

Back in December (20), the 27-year-old singer held a meeting with his collaborators to talk about how “important” the record was to him.

“He talked about how important this album was to us, and how his name actually was translated to justice (from Latin_, and how important it was for him to make an impact, and how he was in this high position,” Aldae recalled. “He was calling on us to help be the vessel for what he wanted to channel into the world. He was very vulnerable with us about wanting to put that goodness into the songs.”

Once the recording was complete, it was a careful process to choose the 16 tracks that make up the album.

“It’s a format, how we track-list the album. We kind of let the album grow as you listen to it,” Harv said. “We literally sat down and listened to every song and made sure that they all sounded like they were on the same project.”

“For me, it was kind of hard, ’cause I had way more songs that were supposed to be on the album, but it just didn’t (fit together with the sound). That was a moment for me to be like, OK, it’s about the full body of work.”

You can share this post!

Next article

Ed Sheeran Gets Matching Tattoos With Michael Gudinski’s Son as Tribute

Related Posts More

Two pure pop songs, “Espresso” and “Good Luck, Babe!,” may give the aspiring stars behind them a boost from music’s middle class to the big time.The caffeinated drink of the summer isn’t cold brew or iced matcha — it’s “me espresso,” a weird and strangely brilliant neologism coined by the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter in her ascendant hit “Espresso.” The track — sugary sweet, fiendishly catchy and meme-ready — has been out for only a month and change, but it is already one of the defining songs of 2024.It’s also one of the defining songs of Carpenter’s career so far. Last year, I described her as a member of “pop’s middle class”: a group of internet-beloved artists creating music that makes winking reference to pop history, whose celebrity vastly outmatches their commercial success. Although she is a new star in the minds of many, Carpenter, 25, is by no means a fresh arrival: “Espresso” was released almost 10 years to the day after her debut EP, “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Carpenter was 14 years old then; four more full-length albums have followed.Her career has been unusually slow-burning in the context of the well-oiled pop machine, and “Espresso” is a bullish breakthrough after a string of songs, including the Billboard-charting “Nonsense” and “Feather,” that had some radio and TikTok success but failed to permeate pop’s center. (“Espresso” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is still in the Top 10.)She’s not the only middle-class pop star having a brush with more tangible success. Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” has quickly become her first hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Roan, 26, loosely fits a similar mold: Her music is funny and oftentimes covertly acerbic, and on her 2023 debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” as Carpenter did with her 2022 breakthrough “Emails I Can’t Send,” Roan tried on a variety of styles that each seemed to pay tribute to a different era of pop, sometimes even a specific diva.Chappell Roan leveraged the spectacle of her live shows to make herself omnipresent on short-form video platforms over the past year. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS, via Getty ImagesRoan first signed to a major label at 17 and was dropped five years later, a setback that compelled her to move back to her Missouri hometown and work as a barista to fund her career. She has since signed to Amusement, an imprint of Universal Music Group started by the producer Daniel Nigro specifically to release Roan’s music. “Good Luck, Babe!,” a kiss-off to an ex with a queer twist, has been streamed over 106 million times on Spotify since its early April release; for context, that’s far more than any song on Beyoncé’s splashy “Cowboy Carter,” which arrived a week earlier, with the exception of its lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em.”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

Instagram

Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music, the ‘Thank You, Next’ hitmaker talks about working together with the ‘Born This Way’ singer on their new single ‘Rain on Me’.
May 23, 2020
AceShowbiz – Ariana Grande had a great time working with Lady GaGa on their new single “Rain on Me”, revealing the “Poker Face” singer was hands-on when it came to all aspects of the collaboration.
The “thank u, next” singer had no idea what to expect when she signed on to work with GaGa and now reveals it was one of the most fulfilling collaborations.
Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music on Friday (May 22), Ariana said, “She does do a really fantastic job riding that line of being like, ‘Hey, it is what it is’, but also, like, ‘I’m going to give you a f**king show, and I’m going to pick every color that’s on the screen – every lighting, every shot, every wig that every dancer is wearing. Every, everything. I’m going to pick, I’m going to help Ari with picking her make-up and her hair…’ ”
“It’s awesome. I really love seeing her have the point of view, and such gentleness at the same time. And respect for another artist at the same time.”
Grande also admitted she loved enjoying pure pop moments with her new pal, “It feels so fun to be a part of something so upbeat and, like, straight pop again, because I do feel like it’s been a minute since I’ve done something that poppy, and that’s funny because I am a pop person, but it’s just, everyone knows that my heart is kind of rooted in the R&B influence music that I make, and that’s where my heart is, but it just felt so good and fun and happy to dip a toe into her world a little bit, and to try this on for size.”
“The video is so GaGa and so fun. I had so much fun. I was like, ‘I’ve never dressed like this in my life. I’m just having the best time.’ ”

You can share this post!

Next article
Princess Love Seeks Full Custody of Her and Ray J’s 2 Children

Related Posts More

His sixth album, “Justice,” tries out several production styles, but never nails a mood.It is with some awkwardness — confusion? — that I must inform you that the first voice you hear on the new Justin Bieber album, “Justice,” is Martin Luther King Jr.’s.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” King returns mid-album, on an interlude that samples a speech about how a life without conviction and passion is no life at all, which is absolutely true.King’s calls to action are, indisputably, powerful — they should be heard widely. And yet, as a framing device for an album by the 27-year-old pop star, they feel unanchored: a Big Gesture in search of equivalently ambitious commitment — political, spiritual, emotional, even musical — to bolster it.It only calls attention to the persistent underlying conundrum with all things Bieber, which is that despite some indelible hits, his fame vastly outpaces his catalog, and that throughout his career — in ways overt or reluctant, destructive or self-protective — he has never rested in one place for very long, nor sought to make a case for his own particularity.That’s why his last album, “Changes,” full of medium-stakes R&B well-suited to his lightly silky voice, was one of his most successful. It wasn’t a runaway triumph, but it was coherent and soothing, and notably free of baggage. It was also a reminder that perhaps Justin Bieber the musician and performer isn’t actively interested in — or an especially good fit for — the scale of song ordinarily mandated for someone as popular as Justin Bieber the celebrity.The disorganized, only sporadically strong “Justice,” though, feels like a slap on the wrist to “Changes,” or the version of Bieber it nurtured. Rather than settle for one groove, this album shuttles between several: quasi new wave, Christian pop, acoustic soul, and many more. Bieber’s sixth studio album, “Justice” is full of songs that feel like production exercises lightly spritzed with some Eau de Bieber, the musical equivalent of merchandise.A host of guest features serve as opportunities to try on different guises, with varying levels of success. The production of “Love You Different,” with the dancehall rapper Beam, nods wanly to the Caribbean, but nowhere near as effectively as Bieber’s 2015 smash “Sorry.” The Nigerian star Burna Boy appears on “Loved by You,” but Bieber doesn’t match his guest’s casual gravitas.“Die for You” is perhaps the most ambitious stylistic collision here. An up-tempo, synthetic duet with the upstart pop slacker Dominic Fike, it harks back to the mid-1980s, but Bieber isn’t the sort of power singer who can outperform the flamboyance of the production. The same is true on “Unstable,” with the Kid Laroi, the Australian singer-rapper who’s adept at a post-Juice WRLD whine — Bieber sings earnestly and plainly, while his partner leans into the anguish.Of the collaborations, by far the most successful is “Peaches,” a sun-dappled and slinky R&B number — featuring the rising stars Daniel Caesar and Giveon — that finds Bieber at his most vocally flexible (though he was in even better form when he debuted this song, solo, on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert).More often, though, “Justice” attempts to impose big-tent pop onto Bieber — the John Hughes movie chords on “Hold On,” or the runway-walk bop of “Somebody.” In places, like on “Ghost,” those impulses are at least leavened with acoustic guitar, and the shift in his singing is notable — he goes from accent piece to main character.Lyrically, “Justice” focuses on songs about triumph over regrettable behavior, about preaching devotion to a more powerful entity — a wife, a God — who didn’t abandon you in a time of need. “You prayed for me when I was out of faith/You believed in me when ain’t nobody else did/It’s a miracle you didn’t run away,” he sings, pointedly, on “As I Am.”At the end of the album is “Lonely,” the moving piano ballad he released last October that felt like the cleanest break with his former self that he’d ever committed to song. These songs are Bieber at his most self-referential, his least cluttered and also his strongest — they book end a steady, intimate sentiment running through an album that does everything it can to distract from it.Justin Bieber“Justice”(Def Jam) More