Aurelia Butler

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    The Constant Metamorphosis of Nona Hendryx

    In a purple catsuit and spiky celestial headpiece, Nona Hendryx beckoned, with a wave. “I’m inside the tree!” she called. “In the forest of the ancestors.”It was not the real Hendryx but her digital avatar, giving a tour of a new virtual reality project. Still, there is little distance between the flesh-and-blood Hendryx — the musician, artist and futurist, who has been forging her own way for over a half-century — and the slinky cyborg on winged feet who was scampering through a turquoise and fuchsia dreamscape on a recent Friday. They both inhabit a world of their own creation, signaling urgently for everyone to catch up.The soundtrack for this V.R. journey was Hendryx’s 1983 electro jam “Transformation” — “Change your mind/Change your skin,” the lyrics go — because, she said, “I’ve constantly evolved and transformed over time.”With each metamorphosis, Hendryx has spun into an even more singular cultural presence. She is not just the throaty alto who had an enduring hit with “Lady Marmalade” as part of the 1970s trio Labelle. She is also a teacher, curator, designer and technologist — a vanguard creator. In fact, she blithely told me, she never wanted to be a singer at all.“It happened, and I’m thankful that I’m pretty good at it,” she said, downplaying a career that took her from ’60s girl groups to the pioneering soul and R&B of the ’70s, then to her solo act in the ’80s, an ahead-of-its-time amalgam of art rock, funk, no wave and electronica that put her in league with technology-forward artists like Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.Music still drives her. But now, she said, “I’m much more interested in making that, rather than performing and presenting it.”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

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    Taylor Swift Bests K-Pop Band to Stay No. 1 for Seventh Week

    Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ held off Ateez’s ‘Golden Hour: Part.1.’ The singer-songwriter Shaboozey opened at No. 5.Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” is the No. 1 album once again, leading the Billboard 200 chart for a seventh straight time.Since it came out in April with historic numbers — breaking records for streaming and vinyl sales, and posting the biggest opening week of Swift’s career — “Tortured Poets” has been unstoppable, even as its performance has gradually cooled. In recent weeks it has held off challenges from Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa, and this week it blocks the latest from the K-pop boy band Ateez.In its latest week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 148,000 sales in the United States, including 157 million streams and 27,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release, the album has had the equivalent of about 4.3 million sales and just shy of 2.5 billion streams in the United States alone.Of the 14 albums that Swift has sent to No. 1 in her career — going back to “Fearless,” her second LP, back in 2008 — “Tortured Poets” has now had the longest consecutive stretch at the top, exceeding “Folklore,” which in 2020 spent its first six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s flagship LP chart. (Several of Swift’s albums, including “Folklore,” have had more turns at No. 1 overall, but not in a row.)Also this week, Ateez’s “Golden Hour: Part.1,” a six-track “mini-album,” opens in second place with 131,000 equivalent sales, largely from its popularity on CD and vinyl. “Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going” by Shaboozey, a singer-songwriter who was featured on Beyoncé’s latest album, “Cowboy Carter,” opens at No. 5 with the equivalent of 50,000.Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” falls to No. 3 after spending its first two weeks in second place, and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 in its 67th week on the chart. More

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    Jean-Philippe Allard, Jazz Producer and Musicians’ Advocate, Dies at 67

    He called himself a “professional listener,” and he tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with.Jean-Philippe Allard, a French record executive and producer who helped revive the careers of jazz greats who had been all but forgotten in the United States, and who earned a reputation for uncommonly fierce advocacy on behalf of musicians, died on May 17 in Paris. He was 67.The music producer Brian Bacchus, a close friend and frequent collaborator, said Mr. Allard died in a hospital from cancer, which had returned after a long remission.Artists ranging from Abbey Lincoln to Juliette Gréco to Kenny Barron all said they had never worked with a more musician-friendly producer.“Regarding my work, I would always consider it as co-producing with the artist,” Mr. Allard told the music journalist Willard Jenkins in an interview in March. “Some producers are musicians or arrangers, like Teo Maceo or Larry Klein; others are engineers; some are professional listeners. I would fall in this last category: listening to the artist before the session, listening to the music during the session, and listening to the mixing engineer.”He tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with. “His ear was always open to the artist, and he was always concerned about what was best for the artist,” the vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater said in an interview. “He saw me. He embraced me. He wasn’t afraid of me. He encouraged my independence. He encouraged me speaking out.”Mr. Allard, right, in the studio with the bassist Charlie Haden, one of the many prominent jazz musicians he worked with.Cheung Ching Ming, via PolyGram/UniversalWe 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

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    Review: ‘Inside Light’ Gives a Taste of Stockhausen’s Opera Epic

    At the Park Avenue Armory, a five-hour selection of pieces from the 29-hour “Licht” cycle is best appreciated as a marathon performance.How often can you describe five hours of excerpts from an opera as a drop in the bucket of the whole?But Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic “Licht” — 29 hours of enormous forces, fanciful notions (a camel as candidate for galactic president) and loopy cosmogony — is no ordinary opera. It calls for multiple spaces, and at one point multiple helicopters, dwarfing even Wagner’s mighty “Ring,” a mere dozen or so hours that can fit in a single theater.Presenting bits of “Licht,” as the Park Avenue Armory is doing with the vivid yet meditative, ultimately stirring “Inside Light,” still means presenting quite a lot. For viewers, it’s a six-and-a-half-hour commitment, counting a pair of intermissions and dinner break. But it’s worth it: Written over about 25 years starting in the late 1970s, and never produced — because it’s almost unproduceable — all at once, “Licht” is one of the sui generis works of art from the turn of the 21st century.In Amsterdam in 2019, the stage director and impresario Pierre Audi put on a three-day festival of chunks from the cycle, which is divided into seven operas, each named for a day of the week. As the Armory’s artistic director, Audi has now brought to New York a yet smaller, but still valuable, selection.You can see the program in two parts, half on Wednesday, half on Thursday. But I recommend going on Friday to see it as I did: a back-to-back marathon. With Stockhausen (1928-2007), the experience blossoms, and becomes more oddly moving, the more of his music you take in, ending up greater than the sum of its parts.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

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    ‘Bad Boys’ Ticket Buyers Toss Will Smith a Career Lifeline

    Mr. Smith’s first wide-release film since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars two years ago arrived to a hefty $56 million at the North American box office.Moviegoers sent Will Smith a clear message over the weekend: We forgive you.“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the fourth entry in the Sony Pictures franchise — and Mr. Smith’s first wide release since he slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards in 2022 — arrived to roughly $56 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada, according to Sony. That No. 1 result was a career milestone for Mr. Smith: He now has 15 first-place debuts as a leading man on his résumé.“Ride or Die,” which returned Mr. Smith to one of his signature roles, cost an estimated $100 million to make, not including marketing. It received positive reviews, with many critics noting a comedic moment that seemed to refer to Mr. Smith’s behavior at the 2022 Oscars: Mr. Smith is slapped by his co-star, Martin Lawrence, and called a “bad boy.”Ticket buyers gave the R-rated “Ride or Die” an A-minus grade in CinemaScore exit polls. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score stood at 97 percent positive on Saturday.Prerelease surveys that track audience interest had indicated that “Ride or Die” would arrive to about $45 million in North American ticket sales. Sony was hoping for at least $30 million.Mr. Smith’s popularity, as measured by the Q Scores Company, plummeted after his behavior at the 2022 Oscars.Frank Masi/Columbia PicturesHollywood as a whole was unsure what to expect. For a variety of reasons — too few movies, movies that didn’t appeal to wide audiences, changing consumer habits — the summer box office has been in a deep freeze.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

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    The Animosity Tour and Other Promotional Movie Campaigns We Love

    For Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown, Dakota Johnson and others, the standard publicity push isn’t so standard anymore.In the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill,” the sheepish bookseller played by Hugh Grant goes to a hotel expecting a date with the megawatt star played by Julia Roberts. He is surprised to find he has arrived at a press junket and looks adorably flustered as he’s shuffled from room to room, pretending to be a reporter from Horse & Hound to interview the stars of her space movie.The sequence is a handy introduction to this strange custom of film publicity: actors sitting in sterile suites for a parade of brief interviews. But these days that almost seems quaint. The press tour has taken on a life of its own, with stars like Dakota Johnson, Jennifer Lopez and Zendaya making news for the tour itself with quippy sound bites, inscrutable looks and fashion moments.It can be grueling for celebrities. Lupita Nyong’o recently described junkets as a “torture technique” in an interview with Glamour. But these cycles can be more entertaining than the movies themselves. Grant’s bookseller would be baffled to learn that you can categorize the tours as follows:The Animosity TourFlorence Pugh was pointedly not at the Venice Film Festival news conference for “Don’t Worry Darling” in 2022.Jacopo Raule/Getty ImagesThe promotion stops for nothing, not even cast members who appear to hate being in one another’s company. This seemed to be the case during the cycle for “Atlas,” Netflix’s new sci-fi flick starring Jennifer Lopez and Sterling K. Brown.During joint interviews, Brown seemed unable to help himself from making fun of Lopez. In one viral moment, he feigned surprise when she said she was Puerto Rican, before repeating her comfort meal of “rice and beans and like, you know, chicken” in overemphasized Spanish. In another moment, he jumped in and helped her out when her own Spanish failed her. After supplying the right word, he did a little dance. That clip prompted social-media users to wonder what J. Lo did to Brown. During these interactions Lopez looked perturbed, leaving plenty of room for observers to jump to conclusions.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

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    Adria Arjona on ‘Hit Man’ and How the Production Surprised Her

    The actress, who stars with Glen Powell, said that with the contract-killer movie, her ideas were finally valued in a writer’s room.Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead.Adria Arjona doesn’t like doing what she’s told.The co-star of the new Netflix romantic action comedy “Hit Man,” Arjona accompanied her father, the Guatemalan Mexican singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona, on tour from the time she was young. It was a musical mentorship opportunity, so she ended up deciding early on: Music was out.He also made her read the poems of Pablo Neruda and the work of Gabriel García Márquez, so naturally, she said, all she wanted to do was listen to ’N Sync.“I do everything backwards,” Arjona, 32, said on a recent weekday morning over sparkling water at the Whitby Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “That’s just my personality — I just listen to my intuition. It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose or trying to be rebellious.”In “Hit Man,” directed by Richard Linklater, Arjona is Madison Masters, a desperate housewife who tries to hire a hit man, played by Glen Powell, unaware he’s a police operative. The rapturously reviewed movie is the latest entry in a 12-year-long acting career that has suddenly become white hot.She broke out in 2022 as the mechanic Bix Caleen in the streaming “Star Wars” series “Andor,” playing Cassian Andor’s fearless friend. (Season 2 of the Disney+ series, which she’s finished filming, is expected next year.) She also appeared as the betrothed daughter in the 2022 reboot of “Father of the Bride,” after roles in “Pacific Rim: Uprising” and Season 2 of “True Detective.”Arjona with Glen Powell in “Hit Man,” the Netflix action romantic comedy.Brian Roedel/NetflixWe 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

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    Howard University Votes to Revoke Sean Combs’s Honorary Degree

    In a unanimous decision, the university’s board of trustees also moved to disband a scholarship in Mr. Combs’s name amid investigations into abuse allegations.Howard University announced on Friday that it would revoke an honorary degree that was awarded to the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in 2014. The decision comes in the wake of Mr. Combs’s admission that he physically abused a former girlfriend, in addition to a slew of other allegations of abuse that have surfaced in recent months.At the conclusion of a meeting of the Howard University board of trustees, the body voted unanimously “to accept the return by Mr. Sean Combs of the honorary degree,” according to a statement released by the university. Howard also said that it would revoke all honors and privileges associated with the degree.Mr. Combs, 54, also known as “Puff” and “Diddy,” attended the university from 1987 to 1989 but left before graduating. In 2016, he pledged $1 million to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund, which went to students in need of financial aid.Video footage surfaced last month of Mr. Combs striking, kicking and dragging his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, known professionally as Cassie, in 2016.“Mr. Combs’s behavior as captured in a recently released video is so fundamentally incompatible with Howard University’s core values and beliefs that he is deemed no longer worthy to hold the institution’s highest honor,” the statement said.Howard University did not immediately respond to additional requests for comment.In November 2023, Ms. Ventura filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Combs of rape and physical abuse; they reached a settlement the next day. Then, in May, CNN published surveillance footage it had acquired from a Los Angeles hotel that showed Mr. Combs attacking Ms. Ventura near the building’s elevators.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