Aurelia Butler

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    Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’s Throwback Duet, and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by the Linda Lindas featuring Weird Al Yankovic, Chlöe and Anderson .Paak, Lou Reed’s early band and others.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.Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, ‘Die With a Smile’Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars — two superstars who have been relatively quiet on the music front in recent years — team up for the first time on “Die With a Smile,” a romantic, lightly apocalyptic slow-dance that offers both the opportunity to belt to the rafters. Despite the music video’s George & Tammy cosplay, there’s not much of that ever-so-trendy twang to be heard on the actual track. Instead, “Die With a Smile” is a lush, soft-rock torch song accentuated by weightless, trebly guitar. “If the world was ending, I’d wanna be next to you,” they sing together on an anthemic chorus, striking the right balance between grit and polish — just two consummate professionals doing their thing. LINDSAY ZOLADZPost Malone featuring Chris Stapleton, ‘California Sober’Post Malone and Chris Stapleton sound like they’re having a blast on the rollicking “California Sober,” one of many country duets featured on Posty’s new album “F-1 Trillion.” The twangy foot-stomper spins a classic country yarn: picking up a good-looking hitchhiker who drinks all your whiskey, picks your pockets and leaves you with a lingering kiss goodbye. “Damn bottle was dry,” Post Malone croons in a voice that blends well with Stapleton’s gravely drawl. “Kinda wanted to cry.” ZOLADZThe Primitives, ‘The Ostrich’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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    7 Hot Tracks From a New Generation of Female Rappers

    Listen to recent songs from Megan Thee Stallion, Ice Spice, Latto and more.Megan Thee StallionCharles Sykes/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,In April 2018, the same week that the Bronx superstar Cardi B released her debut album, “Invasion of Privacy,” Complex magazine published an essay by the writer Kiana Fitzgerald that explored a longstanding question: “Why can there only be one dominant woman in rap?”The answer, naturally, was sexism. It was the same old story: The rivalry between Cardi and Nicki Minaj just felt like a new generation’s Foxy Brown vs. Lil’ Kim. Male rappers, Fitzgerald argued, “have free rein in the genre and — consciously or subconsciously — want to keep it that way.” She added, “when women are pitted against each other, they’re occupied and out of the way, ensuring they take up as little space as possible.”It’s remarkable how much has changed since then. In the six years since that essay was published, an entire vanguard of female rappers has come to the fore, proving that more is more. Megan Thee Stallion and Ice Spice have become household names — and done so with markedly different styles that rep their respective hometowns of Houston and New York City. The St. Louis rapper Sexyy Red has transcended her initial co-sign from Drake to become a solo star on her own. Latto, from Atlanta, has commanded airplay with catchy hooks and lively bars; the Memphis-born GloRilla has found success with a harder-edged approach, leaning into the gravelly grit of her signature drawl.Today’s playlist celebrates the many female voices in the current rap game. And I do mean current: It’s composed entirely of songs released in the past few months, a testament to the fact that one of the most notable trends in music right now is the steady plurality of female rappers on the charts.It’s 7 p.m. Friday, it’s 95 degrees,LindsayListen along while you read.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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    Jerry Fuller, Writer of ‘Young Girl’ and Other Hit Songs, Dies at 85

    He located a musical sweet spot between the romantic and the risqué for Ricky Nelson, Johnny Mathis and most famously Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.Jerry Fuller, a songwriter who helped give the sexual revolution a Top 40 soundtrack, died on July 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.The cause was complications of lung cancer, his wife, Annette Fuller, said.Mr. Fuller had a brief solo career as a crooner, starting in the late 1950s. Though he would become well known as a songwriter a decade later, his compositions retained some of the earnestness of this earlier period.Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had a hit with Mr. Fuller’s song “Young Girl” in 1968. In later decades the song would draw scorn for its upbeat treatment of an older man’s flirtation with an underage girl.Columbia RecordsHe specialized in love songs, and in songs about lustful desire that sounded like love songs. His first major hit was “Travelin’ Man,” about a globe-trotter who sings, “In every port I own the heart/Of at least one lovely girl.” Ricky Nelson took it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.The song — which boasts of “a pretty señorita waiting for me down in old Mexico,” “my sweet fräulein down in Berlin town” and “my cute little eskimo” in Alaska — emphasizes the yearning behind each affair rather than conquest.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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    Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and the ‘It Ends With Us’ Drama, Explained

    What’s happening onscreen has become secondary to the conversation about differences between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, her co-star and director.The Blake Lively romantic drama “It Ends With Us” revolves around a florist, and the film’s marketing campaign, including the red carpet and the posters, has been entirely floral-themed. But the press tour has hardly come up roses.The movie itself is a box office hit, earning $50 million after its release last weekend. The plot centers on Lily Bloom (Lively), who escapes a rough childhood, opens her dream flower store and soon meets her seemingly dream guy, Ryle Kincaid, played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni.Based on a best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, “It Ends With Us” is ultimately about breaking the cycle of domestic violence that entraps one generation after another. But the film has been at the center of a surprisingly varied number of controversies that have raised a number of questions:Has there been a rift between Baldoni and the cast?Hints that things were off first surfaced at the New York and European premieres. Though Baldoni was in attendance, he wasn’t posing for the cameras with anyone else involved in the movie and wasn’t participating in joint interviews. Fans speculated that this was a marketing tactic, given that he plays an abusive husband. The theory seemed to be that the distance was a statement about not romanticizing the relationship between the Lively and Baldoni characters.But that conjecture was quickly discarded when it emerged that Lively, her husband, Ryan Reynolds, other cast members and even Hoover had unfollowed Baldoni on social media. The interpersonal drama was fueled by reports of conflict during the making of the film — all of it related by anonymous sources, of course.Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, at the New York premiere. Cindy Ord/Getty ImagesDoes the rift involve Ryan Reynolds?Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios, secured the rights to the book in 2019, and in 2023 it was announced that Lively had signed on to star. Crucially, both had executive producer roles.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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    One of Classical Music’s Great Builders Prepares for the Next Step

    Over 25 years, through crises and a changing world, Michael Haefliger has made the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland as we know it.Michael Haefliger has made a life out of building music festivals.A Juilliard-trained violinist, he came up with the idea not long after finishing school to create the Davos Festival in Switzerland for young artists. Then, a quarter century ago, he took over the established, expansive Lucerne Festival, which opens on Friday with a performance by the orchestra he founded.Now 63, Haefliger has enjoyed rare success in classical music: His long tenure at Lucerne has been defined not only by sustainability and survival through crises like the coronavirus pandemic, but also by enormous growth.He started the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with the eminent conductor Claudio Abbado; with the iconoclast Pierre Boulez, he created the festival’s academy; when Japan was hit by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in 2011, he spearheaded Ark Nova, an inflatable, portable concert hall that brought the festival to Matsushima.Over time, Haeflinger has lost major collaborators. Abbado died in 2014; Boulez, two years later. Wolfgang Rihm, Boulez’s successor, died last month. (Riccardo Chailly, who took over the Festival Orchestra after Abbado, will lead Rihm’s “Ernster Gesang” at the opening concert.)“He was quite a strong figure,” Haefliger said of Rihm in a recent phone interview. “The way he saw things and programming was very open. He didn’t remain in his own school and tradition, which is important today in contemporary music.”Rihm’s contributions to the 2025 festival were already settled before his death. That year will also be Haefliger’s farewell; he steps down as artistic and executive director next summer. What comes after that for the academy, and Lucerne in general, will be up to the next leader, Sebastian Nordmann, from the Konzerthaus in Berlin.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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    Beyond ‘Shaft’: 5 Blaxploitation Movies You Should Know

    A Film Forum series pays tribute to the 1970s genre that birthed “Superfly” and “Foxy Brown,” but also features lesser-known films that show the genre’s range.John Shaft emerges from a New York City subway to the rat-tat-tatting of the film’s empowering theme song. A drug dealer named Super Fly leaps over a fence in his brown leisure suit. A cool Foxy Brown pulls a gun from her luminous Afro.The heroes of blaxploitation, a genre that dominated the 1970s, radically altered the representation of Black Americans in cinema away from the roles of domestics, comic relief, and buttoned-down freedom fighters. In this genre, Black people wore fashion that was as colorful as their personalities, had Afros as large as their ambitions, and grasped sexual, political and economic freedom. These heroes were not chanting “we shall overcome.” The system would have to overcome them.The genre’s treasures can be witnessed at Film Forum in Manhattan, where, over the course of a week, 16 movies will screen as part of a series called Blaxploitation, Baby! While the program features plenty of well-known titles, it also includes under-the-radar gems that add greater context, depth and variety to the genre. Below is a selection of some of the rarer highlights in the series, and, for those unable to attend, information on where to stream them.‘Sheba, Baby’ (1975)Stream it on Tubi.Of Pam Grier’s butt-kicking heroines (Foxy Brown, Coffy, Friday Foster), Sheba Shayne, a private investigator returning to her hometown to defend her father against a gentrifying syndicate, might be her most commanding. Her fashion is fly: blue denim ensembles and trim white suits topped by a white fedora. She is also respected. While Sheba is certainly the center of every man’s attention, Grier is not just playing a dangerous sexpot, as in previous roles. This is a professional, diligent woman adept both in the boardroom and against an enforcer like Pilot (D’Urville Martin) or his conniving boss, a white man named Shark (Dick Merrifield). “Sheba, Baby” demonstrates that Grier could vary her persona, tinkering with it to fit the political requirements of the film.‘Slaughter’ (1972)Stream it on Pluto TV.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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    An Undersung and Unruly Woodstock in Pictures, 30 Years On

    A new photography show celebrates the 30th anniversary of Woodstock 1994, middle child to the festivals of 1969 and 1999.Nestled between the instantly legendary festival in 1969 and the violence of the 1999 incarnation, Woodstock 1994 — a 25th anniversary celebration of the original — can be easy to overlook.That installment, in Saugerties, N.Y., was supposed to be a slightly more grown-up (or, depending who you ask, commercial) version. But, as in 1969, attendees saw severe traffic jams, fences that could not contain the crowd and rainy weather that turned the festival grounds into a muddy slog.Then, five years later, fires, rioting and reports of sexual assault at the 1999 festival made national headlines, and gave “Woodstock” a whole new meaning.Members of the band Green Day, at Woodstock 1994, in a photo by Danny Clinch.Danny ClinchNow, for the 30th anniversary of ’94, a photography exhibition places the middle child of the festivals at center stage. The show, at the Opus 40 gallery in Saugerties, opens on Friday and runs for three weeks. It features work from Albert Watson, Henry Diltz, Cheryl Dunn and Danny Clinch, who remember the festival as messy yet rewarding.That the show is taking place at all is thanks to Watson, who is known for black-and-white portraits of luminaries including Steve Jobs. The show was put together by Tyler Harte, a Manhattan property manager who moonlights as an organizer of concerts and skateboard events — and manages the building where Watson’s photography studio is. Harte realized that the anniversary was coming up and contacted Watson about potentially doing something with his 1994 photography.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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    Netflix Documentary ‘Daughters’ Shows Reality of Girls Separated From Imprisoned Fathers

    The Netflix documentary doesn’t gloss over hard truths as it follows participants in the Date With Dad program.It’s not unusual for a documentary to be a tear-jerker. Stories of unusual connection or unusual bravery tend to make for good cinema, so when the film features real people, it’s even more affecting. But even by those standards, “Daughters” (on Netflix), directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, is extraordinarily moving.The film focuses on the Date With Dad program, which Patton has led for more than 12 years as part of her community work with Black girls. The children are brought to the prisons where their fathers are incarcerated for a party with dancing, refreshments and opportunities to take photos and talk. Socials like these might be run of the mill for many Americans, but for these families they’re extraordinary: Prisons have increasingly stopped in-person visits (known as “touch visits”) between family members, resorting instead to video and phone calls. Furthermore, incarcerated people can be moved from institution to institution, sometimes far from their families. For some fathers, these events may be the only time during their sentences that they can interact with their daughters in person.The film focuses on several girls, ages 5 to 13, as well as on their imprisoned fathers. The men who are eligible to participate in Date With Dad are required to first attend a 10-week coaching program led by a mentor. These sessions are captured in the documentary, and feel a lot like group therapy. Rae and Patton spend equal time with the girls and the men, letting us listen as they talk about their hopes, their fears, their relationships with their own parents, their regrets and a lot more. Women, too, are part of the story: For many who have been pushed into operating as both mother and father, it’s a fraught decision to even allow their daughters this contact. Their strength is remarkable.There are a lot of tears in this documentary, for the subjects and the audience, too. But “Daughters” is a remarkable study in how to tell this kind of story without twisting into sentimentality. I had assumed “Daughters” would conclude with the dance, with the glad reunions, tears, joy and the promise of closer relationships, but Rae and Patton are more invested in candor than in a happy ending. They’ve constructed the film to show the range of emotions that the girls have toward their fathers, even at the dance, where some are overjoyed and weeping and others are clearly struggling with their feelings.After the dance, the film continues to check in with some of the subjects for several years, exploring how the program affected their futures but also how their fathers’ continued imprisonment profoundly shaped the girls’ lives. Plenty of it is good. But rebuilding a family torn apart by the often unpredictable prison system is hard work, and it doesn’t always go the way we want. When hope does exist, it’s hard-won. And “Daughters” lets us feel all of that, too. More