Aurelia Butler

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    in Music

    Cash Cobain Is Changing the Sound of Drill

    Drill music hasn’t always been this fun. The subgenre’s ominous beats and menacing lyrics infiltrated mainstream hip-hop over a decade ago, but its ascendant stars have been stalled by violence, police surveillance and the flattening effect of at-home copycats. Cash Cobain, the 26-year-old breakout rapper and producer from the Bronx, is helping to raise its trajectory. With lusty rhymes and unorthodox samples, he’s become a central figure of “sexy drill,” a more lascivious offshoot, and one that has tilted the sound of rap nationally.En route to a Coney Island performance in early August, sitting in the passenger seat of a new Mercedes sedan, Cobain rapped along to “Rump Punch,” a song from his upcoming album, as it oozed through the speakers. In between doo-wop-esque lines of flattery for a paramour (“When it comes to pretty, you the pinnacle”), the track sandwiches a hilariously profane offer of oral sex between dreamy keys and a simple repeated drumstick clack.When people hear his music, he explained, “everyone should feel that, feel like they can’t control their body. Their body just gotta dance because the music is so sexy.”It’s a sound that has caught the ears of the melodically inclined hornballs that constitute rap’s upper reaches, perhaps best defined by the 2022 moment when Frank Ocean debuted a gold and diamond-studded sex toy for his jewelry line and used a Cobain track to soundtrack the introductory Instagram post. But the lusty stamp that counts most came when Lil Yachty passed along several Cobain beats to Drake, who barely tweaked one for “Calling for You,” a single that reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. In the past year, Cobain has rapped on tracks he produced for PinkPantheress and Central Cee, Don Toliver and J. Cole.The 26-year-old Cash Cobain has released six projects since 2021, including his breakthrough mixtape, “2 Slizzy 2 Sexy.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesBy the time Cobain was set for a New York City victory lap, a show in April called Slizzy Fest, demand was such that police preemptively shut it down for overcrowding. (Fans got wind that Drake might attend.) Cobain led fans to Union Square and held an open-air show, rapping along to music boosted by a Bluetooth speaker. Born Cashmere Small (yes, his stage name nods to the late Nirvana frontman), Cobain is now on a national tour supporting Ice Spice, the reigning queen of “pop drill” and his collaborator on the remix of “Fisherrr,” a single that has steadily crept East to West across airwaves since its release in February. The song and the tour are a conjoining of drill’s sonic offspring, each taking the sound past its hyperlocal roots. His new album, “Play Cash Cobain,” is set to arrive Friday with cover art by Drake, and it both trades in Cobain’s usual tropes and offers a bunch of groovable swerves.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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    Sarajevo Film Festival, Born in War, Turns 30

    The Sarajevo Film Festival, now 30 years old, grew out of underground screenings during the siege of the city. Those roots still define the event’s character.From 1992 to 1996, Serbian forces laid siege to the city of Sarajevo, relentlessly bombarding it and cutting off electricity, heat, running water and regular food supplies. Because of snipers perched on hillsides and constant shelling, going outside was a life-threatening act.Yet these were the conditions under which the Sarajevo Film Festival came to life. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the festival, which runs through Friday, has grown to become the premier movie industry event for the Balkan region. But its roots still define its character.After the breakup of Yugoslavia, ethnic tensions in Bosnia deepened, resulting in a violent nationalistic campaign led by Bosnian Serbs targeting Bosniaks and Croats. When war broke out in Sarajevo, Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s founder, was living in a cellar with other members of what he called a “punk” collective — artist types who worked in theater, music and film, many of whom were involved with the University of Sarajevo’s Academy of Performing Arts.“After a few months, we figured out how to survive physically, but then we asked ourselves: ‘How are we going to survive mentally?’” Purivatra said over coffee in a downtown square. Purivatra and his collaborators began staging performances in the cellar and inviting artists to create installations in the underground passages that Sarajevans used to move around the city.The first office for the Sarajevo Film Festival, in 1995.Obala Art CentarEventually, word of these efforts got around to the international press, which inspired writers and artists from outside of Bosnia to visit Sarajevo and raise awareness of the city’s plight through acts of cultural solidarity. Susan Sontag, for instance, brought a candlelight production of “Waiting for Godot” to life with Bosnian actors and theater experts.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 Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat’ Review: Hungry for Drama

    You’ll want to pass the ketchup, and the hankies, for this buffet of tear-jerking deep-fried decadence.“The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” is a melodrama sampler platter of adultery, alcoholism, cancer, teen pregnancy, derailed careers, heckled memorial services and accidental electrocution, plus a phony psychic, a heartbroken ornithologist and a double helping of murder. This wisecracking, tear-jerking, deep-fried decadence is plenty satisfying if you’re in the mood to indulge.Directed by Tina Mabry and set between 1950 and 1999, it’s the rousing saga of three friends. Clarice (Uzo Aduba) is the image-conscious pushover; Barbara Jean, (Sanaa Lathan) the fragile beauty; and Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) the bigmouth who narrates the film and ignites most of the confrontations. As girls, they’re played by Abigail Achiri, Tati Gabrielle and Kyanna Simone, who do a fine job establishing the tone. In a movie crowded with faces (including Mekhi Phifer, Russell Hornsby and Vondie Curtis-Hall) and more plot twists than a plate of curly fries, Simone and Ellis-Taylor make a feast of the flashiest role. Young Odette impulsively strips off her dress to throw a punch at a slimeball. Later, when her adult incarnation announces she’s going to finally speak her mind, both the audience and her fellow characters are agape. What else has she been doing for two hours?The script, adapted by Mabry and Cee Marcellus from Edward Kelsey Moore’s novel of the same name, takes a few liberties, tweaking the titular hangout into a retro-chic diner, blurring the location to Anytown, America and scrapping a cameo from Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost. No one seems to believe this is Michelin star cuisine — the score is clatteringly whimsical, the scene transitions teeter toward the absurd — but it’s a treat to watch these believable pals hoist each other back up, taking the occasional breather to clink milkshakes in slow motion.The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-EatRated PG-13 for adult themes, as well as strong language including racial slurs. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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    ‘Strange Darling’ Review: Assume Nothing

    In this cheeky, cunningly assembled thriller, a serial killer gets a satisfying and surprising comeuppance.A movie that’s best experienced stone cold, “Strange Darling” is so dependent on its surprises — one head-snapping twist, with several judiciously spaced lesser shocks — that to reveal any one of them would be critical malpractice.A crawling onscreen text, read by Jason Patric, informs us that what we are about to see is the dramatization of a spree killer’s final, vicious acts. Thus primed, we’re thrown into the middle of a frantic car chase as a terrified young woman in scarlet scrubs races to escape a shotgun-wielding man in a pickup truck. She is known only as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), and she is bleeding from a head wound; he is The Demon (Kyle Gallner), his sleazy mustache and snorts of cocaine familiar bad-guy signifiers. We’ve got this, we think, settling in for some serial-killer comfort viewing. We could not be more wrong.Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions. Flexing back and forth in time, the writer and director, JT Mollner, bets the house on a mechanism that repeatedly asks us to reassess what has gone before. Cunning as it is, structure is not the movie’s sole strength. Both Z Berg’s haunting, otherworldly pop songs and Giovanni Ribisi’s eloquent photography (it’s the actor’s first stint as a feature cinematographer) bathe the film’s violence in an unexpected dreaminess. In one pivotal scene, shot with shadowy intensity, flirtation and threat alternate so frequently that the flickering power dynamics are completely destabilizing.Less complicated by far are Ed Begley, Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a pair of doomsday preppers who think the bleeding woman at their door has been attacked by a Sasquatch. They will soon learn that there are some problems even bear spray can’t solve.Strange DarlingRated R for cutting, ketamine and lots of killing. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ Review: A Mourning Journey

    This visually elegant indie follows a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan.A visually elegant drama by the writer-director Bradley Rust Gray, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” spins a gossamer-fine story about grief — about the struggle to live fully again when the tragedies of the past still exist in your bones.Chloe (Carla Juri) is a soft-spoken Swiss widow visiting Japan for work, though we first learn about her husband’s passing indirectly. She can’t speak Japanese, which gives her an excuse to keep her feelings private and remain trapped in her own head. In the beginning of the film, against a breezy pastoral backdrop, a Japanese friend, Toshi (Takashi Ueno), discusses Chloe’s misfortune in front of her with his grandmother. Chloe smiles, unaware.The moment encapsulates the film’s delicate dynamics, shifting between Chloe’s unspoken hurt (there are occasional flashbacks to her husband that bleed into the main narrative) and the concerned friends orbiting around her, both wary of upsetting her but also, because of the language barrier, naturally at a remove.The static camerawork by the cinematographer Eric Lin gives Chloe’s stilted but openly vulnerable encounters a fluttering poignancy; particularly lovely is a ferry-ride conversation with an older man, Yatsuro (Issey Ogata).The meandering nature of the film creates a special kind of intimacy with Chloe, one that relies almost entirely on Juri’s subtly heartbreaking performance. Chloe’s mourning isn’t always legible, and we often see her engaging in banal activities like shopping, eating and playing with Toshi’s young daughter, Futaba (Futaba Okazaki); her awkward banter with friends is endearing though it also grows rather dull, and the constant obliqueness draws some power and believability away from the developing romance with Toshi. There’s an implication that repressed emotions are simmering beneath the mundane, but that doesn’t always come across.I’ll Be Your MirrorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Mountains’ Review: Razing Houses, Building a Future

    This feature debut from Monica Sorelle observes the tensions in an immigrant family in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami.“Mountains,” the feature debut from Monica Sorelle, opens by observing the demolition of a house. In one sense, Sorelle is simply setting the scene. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), the father in the central family in the film, has a job razing buildings, a role he fulfills without much complaint (although at a crucial moment he sticks up for a co-worker).Xavier is not overtly bothered by how his work might contribute to gentrification. “They give me an address, I come to demolish it,” he says, when confronted with the fact that he is slated to clear a 50-year-old church. But the tension at the movie’s heart involves the difficulty of leaving homes and finding new ones, as experienced by immigrants and their children in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.Xavier, who worked as a cabdriver after arriving from Haiti, can’t stop looking to advance; he has his eye on a house he and his wife, Esperance (Sheila Anozier), a school crossing guard who moonlights as a dressmaker, may not be able to afford. Their son, Junior (Chris Renois), is a college dropout who still lives with them. He wants to make it as a standup comedian and weighs how much of his upbringing to incorporate in his routine. To Xavier, Junior isn’t living up to his potential.As a drama, “Mountains,” whose characters move fluidly between English and Haitian Creole, is too low-key to leave much of an impression. But as a portrait of intergenerational tensions in an immigrant family, it is poignant, and it captures an area of Miami that is rarely seen onscreen.MountainsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    1999 Was a Great Year for Movies. It Was the Best Year to Write About Them.

    At the box office 25 years ago, hits like “Runaway Bride,” “The Sixth Sense” and “Bowfinger” hint at the abundance that overwhelmed a young critic.One thing to love about time is how liberating it can be. I, for instance, am at liberty to look at the Top 10 movies for the weekend of Aug. 20, 1999 — when “The Sixth Sense,” in its third week out, began its monopoly of the chart — and declare “The Thomas Crown Affair” the best of the lot.What could be going on here? Am I actually saying that a Pierce Brosnan-Rene Russo remake of the old Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway love heist, from 1968, was always superior to M. Night Shyamalan’s where’d-that-come-from supernatural smash? Or have 25 years ripened one and grayed the other? Hadn’t “The Blair Witch Project” opened in July yet was still very much a thing? (It had, yet it was, down at No. 5.) Only one of the 10 movies was a sequel. In the mix were Julia Roberts, at her commercial peak, in “Runaway Bride” (No. 4, after opening in July) and Steve Martin and a gonzo Eddie Murphy, holding at second, in “Bowfinger.” More