Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Ice Cold’: From Biggie to Lil Yachty, Getting Your Shine On

    Hip-hop jewelry does a lot of heavy lifting in a new exhibition in Manhattan. It signifies elite membership, romantic courtship and ambition for greatness.Of the New York museums that would create an exhibition on jewelry associated with hip-hop culture, I would not have imagined the American Museum of Natural History to be one. Yet, “Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry” did open this May in a tiny gallery of their Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals. With 66 objects, it has an astute premise — that precious stones might attract more attention if regarded through the lens of hip-hop, likely the most widely proliferating music movement that the United States has ever produced.This show might have been organized to absorb the energy around the 50th anniversary of hip-hop’s inception last year or anticipate the Hip Hop Museum’s opening in the Bronx in 2025. More cynically, some might see “Ice Cold” as an act of penance for the museum’s admitted possession and use of the remains of Indigenous and enslaved people, as the museum faces criticism about the legality and the ethics of these acquisitions. Either way, the venture feels successful. I visited the show twice, on a Thursday evening and on a Monday morning, and each time the gallery was filled with visitors.The show is beautifully laid out. It’s installed in a small, dark, semicircular gallery, with jewelry in vitrines spotlighted against a black acetate and Plexiglas. The diamonds glint and coruscate as you move across the displays. One could linger, bedazzled and charmed by the bold inventiveness of pieces like ASAP Rocky’s EXO grenade pendant — its “pin” sets the time — displayed on two disks set inside a locket. However, the exhibition offers more, including the concealed and paradoxical implications of wearing these constellations of bling.In a small, dark, semicircular gallery, jewelry is displayed in vitrines spotlighted against a black acetate and Plexiglas. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe curators, Vikki Tobak, author of “Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History,” Kevin “Coach K” Lee, a founder of the Quality Control music label, and Karam Gill, the director of a documentary on the subject, took the important step of historically situating hip-hop’s ostentatious display of wealth. They refer to an Asante chief in Ghana whose ceremonial dress consisted of copious amounts of gold (though the date of an image referenced turns out to be 2005, which makes the ancestral connection vague).Shrewdly, the curators also name check each jeweler (when they are known), so they are properly recognized as collaborators and makers alongside the musical stars, such as Ghostface Killah’s eagle bracelet by Jason Arasheben — a massive 14 karat gold wrist cuff with an eagle alighting onto it. The Notorious B.I.G.’s Jesus necklace, made by Tito Caicedo of Manny’s New York, is another icon. It features the head and neck of a figure in gold whose beard, locks, clothing and crown are festooned with diamonds. In terms of the meaning they convey, these chains do a lot of heavy lifting.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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    LL Cool J Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. (And Why Would He?)

    At a dusty studio space in an industrial corner of Los Angeles, LL Cool J bounced and vibed in black satin and bulging, size 13 Balenciaga boots.The actor and rap luminary was filming a video for a sexy track, “Proclivities,” from his new album — but he wasn’t in front of the cameras, or rehearsing. He was just cheerfully shooting the you-know-what, with a late night of production ahead of him. Background players in feathered dresses floated by; his security circled. He did a little dance, demonstrating the inspiration for another song. He walks with a swagger and stands with a spring, too much rhythm in his 6-foot-3 frame to keep still. “Making fantasies happen,” he said, grinning, taking all of it in.LL Cool J is 56, and has been a hip-hop eminence for 40 years: His whole life is a stretch into realizing the improbable, including a sneakily successful pivot into network television. Even before adulthood, he strode with a preternatural confidence in his abilities, and a willingness to dig into the work. His rap career is not now — and, to hear him tell it, has never been — about the money, the trappings of celebrity or the cultural prestige.“I do it because I love it,” he said. “I love a fresh beat. A new lyric, a chord, the feeling — and then sharing that. Putting that on the easel of life, so to speak, for people to walk through the sonic gallery and listen to this, these vibes. I love that. I wanted my voice to be heard, and I wanted to share.”Because he started so young, the first to sign to the then-fledgling label Def Jam, when he was just 16 — and when hip-hop itself was only a decade old — he influenced an entire pantheon of artists who followed, including contemporaries his same age. Hits like the bruising, Grammy-winning “Mama Said Knock You Out,” from 1990, and plaintive grooves from his lovelorn Lothario persona (“I Need Love”; “Around the Way Girl”), cemented his legacy as a crossover pop superstar.LL Cool J outside a concert in the late 1980s. He was the label Def Jam’s first signing, when he was just 16 years old.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWe 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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    In a Biopic of Robbie Williams, the Star Is a CGI Monkey.

    The director Michael Gracey hopes Americans will finally get the British hitmaker, who’s depicted warts, fur and all in “Better Man,” debuting at the Telluride Film Festival.Dance, monkey, dance. Sing, monkey, sing. The British pop star Robbie Williams has always felt like a performing monkey. He has described himself that way when remembering eras of his life: his days as a young boy, trying to prove to his father that he had the “It factor” required to become a star; when he was a teenager and landed his dream job as the fifth member of the boy band Take That; and finally as an adult trying to start a solo career.Recent biopics of the band Queen and Elton John have proved that audiences are willing to taking a fantastical ride through pop-stars’ common trajectories of rise and fall and rise again. But will they be so amenable when the protagonist is played by a computer-generated monkey?Yes, you read that correctly. In the coming musical biopic “Better Man,” the character of Robbie Williams is a chimp, though everyone else around him is human. It’s a leap that the director Michael Gracey, best known for the smash “The Greatest Showman,” is betting moviegoers will take, even those in the United States where Williams is hardly a name despite his international stardom.The monkey, said Gracey, “was the thing for me that clicked, and it was also the thing that made the film near impossible to finance.”His plan was to rely on the magicians at Weta FX (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) in New Zealand to design a computer-generated monkey, something similar to the process that turned Andy Serkis into Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. For “Better Man,” the stage actor Jonno Davies wore the gray motion-capture suit for the entire production and was then rendered into simian form. For the chimp’s face, the eyes of the actual pop star were used.This approach not only doubled the budget of the movie, but also seemed just too far afield for most backers. Multiple times, Gracey said, “I would sit down with financiers. They would say, ‘Director of “The Greatest Showman,” Robbie Williams. I couldn’t be more excited about this. How much do you think?’ And I would say, ‘Well, there’s just one thing: Robbie in the film is being portrayed by a monkey.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, yes, in some dream sequence, or he looks at his reflection and he sees himself as a monkey.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, the entire film.’ Their faces would just drop and they would say, ‘OK, well, this is the end of the meeting.’”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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    Trump Biopic ‘The Apprentice’ Gets U.S. Release Date

    “The Apprentice,” a biopic about the rise of a young Donald J. Trump that has been in search for a distributor in the United States since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is set to hit theaters this fall.The movie is scheduled to be released on Oct. 11 — ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election — by Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor founded by Tom Ortenberg, who was a producer on “Spotlight” and “W.” The news was confirmed by two people familiar with the negotiations.“The Apprentice,” which is directed by the Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi and written by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, received mostly positive reviews at Cannes. But challenges began almost immediately when the former president threatened to sue, with a spokesman for his campaign slamming the movie as “malicious defamation.”One of the original financiers of the film, Kinematics, eventually tried to sell its stake in “The Apprentice,” which is named after the television program Mr. Trump long hosted. (Daniel Snyder, a backer of that company and the former owner of the Washington Commanders, is a friend of Mr. Trump’s.)Several studios in Hollywood — including Focus Features, Sony, Searchlight, Netflix, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Amazon’s Prime Video and A24 — declined to pick up the film, with some worrying that audiences on both sides of the political spectrum might find reasons to avoid it. Then Mr. Ortenberg, who has a history of championing polarizing fare — including Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” — stepped into the fray.The Hollywood Reporter earlier reported the Briarcliff deal.“The Apprentice” features Sebastian Stan (“Avengers: Endgame”) as Mr. Trump, and the “Succession” star Jeremy Strong as his former mentor Roy Cohn. Briarcliff is expected to mount an awards season campaign for both. More

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    What Was Your Personal Song of the Summer?

    We want to know your seasonal anthem, for a future Amplifier playlist.In a recent edition of The Amplifier newsletter, Lindsay Zoladz shared her picks for this year’s Song of the Summer, including seasonal smashes like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”But the song that defined your summer doesn’t have to be a contemporary hit. Maybe it was an old song you discovered — or rediscovered — that captured an experience you were going through. Maybe it was a newer song that didn’t crack the Top 40. Or maybe it was a familiar classic that provided a perfect soundtrack for a vacation, a sunny stroll or a day at the beach when the summer, briefly, felt endless.If you’d like to share your song and your story with us, fill out the form below. We may publish your response in an upcoming newsletter. We won’t publish any part of your submission without reaching out and hearing back from you first.What was your personal song of the summer?We want to know your seasonal anthem, for a future Amplifier playlist. More

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    10 Unforgettable Songs From 1999 Movies

    Listen to tracks by the Chicks, Aimee Mann, Blink-182 and more linked to moments in a monumentally interesting — and busy — year of cinema.Julia Roberts offering a hint of what happens in “Runaway Bride.”Paramount PicturesDear listeners,For the past few weeks, my colleagues in The Times’s movies section have been running a highly entertaining series called “Class of 1999,” celebrating the 25th anniversary of a monumentally interesting — and busy — year of cinema.At the box office, the final year of the millennium truly had it all: era-defining horror (“The Sixth Sense,” “The Blair Witch Project”), boundary-pushing comedy (“Being John Malkovich,” “Election”), enduring art-house favorites (“Eyes Wide Shut,” “Magnolia”) and fodder for future dorm-room posters (“Fight Club,” “The Matrix”). It was, as Wesley Morris puts it in a delightful new essay summing up what some have called the “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.,” a time of “range, volume, abundance, deluge.” It was the year of both “The Phantom Menace” and “The Spy Who Shagged Me.” Of Americans “Pie” and “Beauty.” But, most importantly for our purposes, it had a killer soundtrack.Today’s playlist is a sonic tribute to the movies of 1999, culled entirely from soundtracks released that year. It’s got some names you’ll still recognize (Madonna, Blink-182, the Chicks) and some (Imperial Teen, Harvey Danger) that remain time-stamped in the late ’90s.I wanted to limit myself to songs released in 1999, which means that a few of the year’s most memorable musical moments (the Pixies song forever linked with the end of “Fight Club,” the Eurodance anthem that plays during the startling conclusion of Claire Denis’s masterpiece “Beau Travail”) must go unmentioned, except for the mentioning I just did there. I’ve also omitted a few of the most obvious and overplayed choices: I do not think I need to remind you of Sixpence None the Richer’s swoony “She’s All That” theme “Kiss Me,” or of that end-of-the-Willennium indulgence “Wild Wild West.”Still, I hope this playlist makes you feel like Austin Powers in reverse, aurally transported back to the brink of Y2K. Naturally, it’s oozing with nostalgia, but I think you may actually be surprised at how many of these tracks still hold up 25 years later.Also! Since we already determined last week what the song(s) of the summer are, I want to hear what your personal song of the summer was. Maybe it was an old song that you discovered (or rediscovered), or a newer song that provided the perfect soundtrack to your season. Here is a submission form where you can share your pick with me. We may use your response in an upcoming edition of The Amplifier.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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    Nicole Kidman Bares Everything in the Sexy Drama ‘Babygirl’

    The star is taking chances again in this look at a woman reconciling her sexual fantasies. The movie was the talk of the Venice Film Festival.Though Nicole Kidman used to be one of cinema’s greatest risk-takers, in recent years, she’s become streaming TV’s safest bet. The 57-year-old star is now a fixture of beach-read limited series like “Big Little Lies” and “Nine Perfect Strangers,” “The Undoing” and “The Perfect Couple.” They’re widely watched and keep Kidman bankable, even if you might miss the actress who used to give her all to the auteurist likes of Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos and Lars von Trier.That’s what makes “Babygirl” so bracing. This A24 film, which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, is exactly what Kidman has shied away from in recent years, a daring indie that re-establishes her as one of our most fearless actresses. Everyone who’s watched this spiky, sexy film in Venice wants to talk about it, and it should start no end of delicious debate when A24 releases it in theaters this Christmas.Written and directed by Halina Reijn, “Babygirl” opens on Kidman faking an orgasm. She’s playing Romy, a hard-charging chief executive who seems to have it all: success, two spirited daughters, and a handsome husband (Antonio Banderas) who dotes on her by day and makes tender love to her at night. But is that the kind of sex she really wants? As soon as her husband finishes and falls asleep, Romy darts into another room, pulls up some S&M porn on her laptop and brings herself to a real climax.Though her tech company innovates in the field of automation, Romy yearns to break free of her own smoothly running routine. That’s why she’s so intrigued by the office intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who often makes demands of her — some vaguely flirtatious — when their power differential is supposed to be the other way around. They first meet outside their office building when a rapt Romy watches him soothe a wild dog just by talking to it, though he’ll later claim that he simply fed the mutt a cookie.“Do you always have cookies on you?” she asks him.They lock eyes and he teases her: “Yeah, you want one?”It isn’t long before Romy is stuffing Samuel’s tie in her mouth and lapping milk off a saucer when he orders her to, though the abandon that ought to distinguish their S&M affair is only offered in fits and starts. Romy is too wracked with guilt to fully commit to their wild acts, not simply because she’s stepping out on her husband but because she can’t reconcile the power dynamic of her fantasies with the bows-to-no-one role model she’s publicly considered to be.Though Kidman has made sexually explicit films like “Eyes Wide Shut,” she still considered the intimate scenes in “Babygirl” a step further than what she’s used to, telling Vanity Fair, “This is something you do and hide in your home videos.” At the Venice news conference for the film on Friday afternoon, she said the thought of presenting it to audiences terrified her.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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    Eminem and LL Cool J Duel in Speedy Raps, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Sophie featuring Bibi Bourelly, Kim Deal, Tommy Richman and more.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.LL Cool J featuring Eminem, ‘Murdergram Deux’LL Cool J, 56, and Eminem, 51, show off old-school, high-speed, crisply articulated rhyme technique in “Murdergram Deux,” nominally a sequel to “Murdergram” from LL Cool J’s 1990 album “Mama Said Knock You Out.” It’s all boasts, threats, wordplay and similes — “’bout to finish you like polyurethane,” Eminem raps — set to a jaunty, changeable track produced by Eminem and none other than Q-Tip. Eminem has the slightly higher syllable count, while LL Cool J gets the last word, a cheerful callback to his commercial peak. JON PARELESSophie featuring Bibi Bourelly, ‘Exhilarate’The hyperpop visionary Sophie had mapped out a full album before she died in an accident in 2021; “Sophie,” completed by her brother and other collaborators, is due in September. “Exhilarate” takes the conventions of a big-room trance anthem — four chords, sumptuously reverberating synthesizer tones, a stately underlying beat — and warps them from the bottom up. Bibi Bourelly sings euphoric layered harmonies, proclaiming, “Got my foot on the gas/And I won’t stop for no one.” But the drumbeat leaves spaces instead of thumping four on the floor, while bass tones wriggle and melt and the midrange gets zapped with buzzy tones. The track’s entire last minute is a slow-motion collapse into entropy and silence. PARELESKim Deal, ‘Crystal Breath’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