Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 100 Shares159 Views

    in Music

    Popcast (Deluxe): What’s an Aging Rapper to Do?

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThe first segment of this week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes discussion of:Eminem’s new single, “Houdini”Eminem as a dedicated fan of rap musicJ. Cole’s collaboration with Cash Cobain, “Grippy,” and being in on the J. Cole-rapping-about-sex jokeDrake’s appearance on the SoundCloud novelty song “Wah Gwan Delilah”How rappers like Common and Method Man are grappling with hip-hop’s generation gapThe new Will Smith movie, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” and the actor’s extensive, post-Slap press tour, including “Hot Ones”Whether Will Smith need his “Bad Boys” character as a safe place to act outConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

  • 138 Shares179 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Inside Out 2’ Review: A Charming Sequel to the 2015 Hit

    Anxiety meets Joy in Pixar’s eager, predictably charming sequel to its innovative 2015 hit. Sadness is still around, too, as are Fear and Disgust.When a dumpling of an old lady toddles into the animated charmer “Inside Out 2,” she is quickly shooed away by some other characters. Wearing rose-tinted glasses, she has twinkling eyes and a helmet of white hair. Her name is Nostalgia, and those who wave her off — Joy and Sadness included — tell her it’s too soon for her to show up. I guess that they’ve never seen a Pixar movie, much less “Inside Out,” a wistful conceptual dazzler about a girl that is also a testament to one of the pleasures of movies: the engagement of our emotions.If you’ve seen “Inside Out” (2015), your tear ducts will already be primed for the sequel. The original movie centers on the life of Riley, a cute, predictably spunky if otherwise decidedly ordinary 11-year-old. What distinguishes Riley is that her inner workings are represented as an elaborate realm with characters who embody her basic emotions. For much of her life, those emotions have been orchestrated by Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a barefoot, manic pixie. Once Riley’s parents move the family to a new city, though, Sadness (Phyllis Smith) steps up, and our girl spirals into depression. This being the wonderful world of Pixar, the emotions eventually find a new harmonious balance, and Riley again becomes a happy child.When “Inside Out 2” opens, Joy is still running the show with Sadness, Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) inside a bright tower called headquarters. It’s here, in the hub of Riley’s mind — an ingeniously detailed, labyrinthine expanse that’s part carnival, part industrial zone — that they monitor her on an enormous oval screen, as if they were parked behind her eyes. They track, manage and sometimes disrupt her thinking and actions, at times by working a control console, which looks like a sound mixing board and grows more complex as she ages. By the time the first movie ends, a mysterious new button labeled “puberty” has materialized on the console; soon after the sequel opens, that button has turned into a shrieking red alarm.Puberty unleashes trouble for Riley (Kensington Tallman) in “Inside Out 2,” some of it very poignant, most of it unsurprising. It’s been almost a decade since the first movie was released, but film time is magical and shortly after the story opens, Riley is blowing out the candles on her 13th birthday cake with metal braces on her teeth and a stubborn pimple on her chin. New emotions soon enter headed by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), a carrot-colored sprite with jumpy eyebrows and excitable hair. Not long afterward, Anxiety takes command both of the console and of Riley, with help from Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my favorite, the studiously weary, French-accented Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).Directed by Kelsey Mann, this smooth, streamlined sequel largely focuses on Riley’s nerve-jangling (and strictly PG) interlude at a girls’ hockey camp, an episode that separates her from her parents while bringing her new friends, feelings and choices. (Mann came up with the story with Meg LeFauve, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Holstein.) As in the first movie, the story restlessly shifts between what happens inside Riley’s head and what happens as she navigates the world. Her new emotions find her worrying, grousing, blushing and feigning indifference, and while Joy and the rest of the older emotions are humorously waylaid at times, you can always feel the filmmakers leading Riley toward emotional wellness.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

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Listen to 8 Songs From the Bewitching Françoise Hardy

    From her start in the yé-yé 1960s to the depths she plumbed as a singer-songwriter, Hardy, who died Tuesday, continued to entrance new generations of listeners.When she first broke through in the early 1960s, the bewitching French pop star Françoise Hardy, who died on Tuesday at 80, was initially lumped in with the yé-yés, the commercially minded rocking and twisting French singers of the era.She later came to see many of her early recordings, including her first hit, “Tous les Garçons et les Filles,” as sappy and lightweight. Hardy went on to forge her own path, becoming one of the rare singer-songwriters of her generation (and even rarer women in that category) — an immediately identifiable performer who unleashed emotion by, counterintuitively, refusing to over-emote.Her brand of cool has continued to beguile new listeners. A new generation of arty-minded Americans was introduced to her when the Wes Anderson film “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012) prominently featured her hit “Le Temps de l’Amour,” with its catchy, sinewy bass line.Here is a selection of songs — some of them famous, others less so — that provide entry points into Hardy’s extensive career.“Et Même” (1964)It bears repeating that Hardy was an anomaly in the 1960s as a female pop star writing and performing her own material. Starting in the 1970s she tended to stick to lyrics, but in the previous decade she often also composed the music, as on this gem from her 1964 album, on which she wrote or co-wrote almost all the tracks.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

  • 75 Shares129 Views

    in Music

    Who Am I Without My Voice?

    The serious trouble started on Christmas Eve, upstate with family. The Puerto Rican side does not alternate talking and listening — each is done in spirited unison. I was speaking too loudly over other stories and my own glass of wine, fighting a head cold and getting gravelly. My boyfriend, Benjamin, caught my eye across the room, touched his hand to his throat and made his face into a question mark, What’s wrong with your voice? But we’d brought a homemade cake — he baked, I decorated — that people were freaking out about, and I didn’t want to leave before the compliments were over. I’m a professional touring musician, so I miss a fair share of the holiday gatherings, and this was the first meeting between the boyfriend and most of the assembled relatives. He’s 10 years older but boyish — tousled hair, slender, animated, a mess of bad tattoos — and I wanted to spin him around for all to see how clever and how kind.Listen to this article, read by DessaMy voice degraded in the couple of hours between family goodbyes and bedtime. Usually, I’m an expressive, flexible alto. But the pitch started sinking, the volume dimmed and syllables began to drop out like a radio not quite tuned to frequency.I had bouts of laryngitis in the past: a few days when I sounded like one of Marge Simpson’s sisters and pantomimed smoking cigarettes with both hands to entertain friends. But my voice had been uncharacteristically unreliable in recent months. Before a gig in Seattle last October, it got so raspy that I had trouble holding a tune. For a singer and rapper performing her own material, there is no understudy. (If you live in the continental United States, I’ve probably played a city near you, and you probably didn’t hear about it. Lots of independent musicians operate under the mainstream radar — itinerant bards sharing rooms at the Ramada.) Hoping to save the show, I found a service online that dispatched a nurse to my hotel room to administer an IV drip marketed as a restorative cocktail of B vitamins. I felt pretty sure this was nonsense, but panic dissolves your commitment to empiricism. I also got a prescription for prednisone, a steroid that tamps down inflammation quickly, sometimes within hours, allowing irritated throat tissue to function smoothly. Neither the prednisone nor the infusion saved the day, and I had to call off the performance, a decision that sent shock waves of disappointment in all directions. Band members, bartenders, sound techs, openers and the merch seller had all been expecting a night of work. Fans already had tickets and babysitters. The venue had already spent promotional dollars. I’ve only canceled a handful of times in nearly two decades onstage. It feels awful.Christmas morning my voice was worse than at any time I could remember — as if it had been lit on fire and left to burn down to powder-fine ash. My next tour was scheduled to begin in three weeks: an important run along the West Coast to support my most recent record, “Bury the Lede.” Scrapping a whole tour would mean losing tens of thousands of dollars in earnings, much of which was already spent on flights and hotel rooms or promised to other people. At my level, a serious hit.I committed to strict vocal rest: no talking, no singing, no whispering (which is hard on the voice), no vocalization at all. I was eager to observe it dutifully — desperate to recover and perform — and would have been hard-pressed not to: I could generate very little sound at all. I communicated with Benjamin chiefly via charades, a little American Sign Language that I learned as a kid and an app called BuzzCards that I saw a deaf Lyft driver use to type his side of conversation. I drank lakes of tea and swallowed a few tablets of leftover prednisone, hoping every morning to wake up healed. More

  • 50 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Diplo’s Port Antonio, Jamaica

    Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, fell in love with Jamaica, particularly its Portland parish on the northeast coast, nearly 20 years ago. “I was D. J.ing on a cruise ship, got off in Ocho Rios, and drove through Port Antonio to get to Kingston,” said the 13-time Grammy nominee who has collaborated with Dua Lipa, Sturgil Simpson, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Bad Bunny and countless other musicians. “Portland is sort of like Costa Rica, all jungly and waterfalls. And Port Antonio is this quaint little town where I’d go on a sort of retreat, “Mr. Pentz added. About eight years ago he bought some farmland and built a house there.Mr. Pentz thinks Port Antonio is a calmer option than Ocho Rios or other popular tourist spots on Jamaica for people who enjoy nature, hiking, waterfalls and, of course, beaches. It’s also for those who seek a more authentic experience. “It’s the sort of city where you’re mixing with the locals, and I think that’s what special about it,” he said.Diplo, the Grammy-nominated D.J. born Thomas Wesley Pentz, fell in love with Jamaica nearly 20 years ago and built a house there about eight years ago. Cambron LylesBorn in Mississippi and raised in Florida, Mr. Pentz has traveled extensively and D.J.ed on every continent, including Antarctica. A livestream of his D.J. set there, which took place on the helipad of Atlas Ocean Voyages’ World Voyager, was posted on YouTube in January.Recently, Mr. Pentz has become a runner. He ran the Los Angeles marathon and competed in the Malibu Triathlon, but found that something was missing from the experience: a post-run celebration. So, he launched Diplo’s Run Club, a series of 5K runs — the inaugural events take place this fall in Seattle and San Francisco — culminating in afterparties, with D.J. sets from Diplo and friends, at the finish line. When he’s not running or traveling for work, he spends time at his home in Jamaica.Here are five of his favorite places in and around Port Antonio.1. Geejam HotelGeejam Hotel has private villas, cabins and a main building with rooms that are often occupied by working musicians.Alfonso Duran for The New York TimesOne of the hotel’s cabins, which are tucked into the garden.Alfonso Duran for The New York TimesWe 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

  • 75 Shares159 Views

    in Music

    Julius Rodriguez Fuses Styles on ‘Evergreen’

    The multi-instrumentalist Julius Rodriguez hones a bigger, more audacious sound on his second album, “Evergreen.”Sitting outside a bar in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn one recent Sunday afternoon, Julius Rodriguez spoke with characteristic straightforwardness describing music that is anything but. The composer and bandleader, who has played with the rapper ASAP Rocky and style-bending artists like Kassa Overall and Meshell Ndegeocello, articulated the central challenge of his work, an amorphous blend of jazz, funk, gospel and R&B he simply calls “the music.”It’s not about the notes, he explained, it’s about the emotions behind them.“How do you describe the color orange to someone?” Rodriguez said, his tone warm yet flat. “How do you describe the taste of salt to someone who’s never tasted salt? You don’t know that you’re there until you’re there. You don’t know what it feels like until you feel it.”Rodriguez, 25, has been lauded for his tremendous sense of harmony and virtuosity across piano, drums, bass and whatever else he feels like playing any given week. He can hold his own at a psychedelic free jazz show in Brooklyn, a stadium-size rap concert in Los Angeles, a stately supper-club gig on the Upper West Side. “He’s what we call auxiliary,” Ndegeocello said in a phone interview. “He plays everything.”On “Evergreen,” out Friday on Verve Records, Rodriguez funnels sounds into a 40-minute collage of electric-acoustic arrangements steeped equally in tradition and disruption, convention and audacity coming through in big, clean sound seemingly inspired by 1970s jazz fusion. It’s a sharp detour from “Let Sound Tell All,” Rodriguez’s 2022 debut album, which was indebted to the jazz and gospel he grew up playing in churches and small clubs.Rodriguez calls his blend of jazz, funk, gospel and R&B “the music.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesLong before Rodriguez burst onto the New York jazz scene, he was a precocious kid in Westchester. When he was 3 or 4, he took piano lessons from a family friend, Audrey McCallum, the first Black student to attend the Peabody Preparatory, who gave Rodriguez his first keyboard and encouraged his parents to buy a piano. “At the same time, I’m learning about tempo and time signatures, how to read music on a staff, and where the notes are on a piano,” he said. “All that while learning how to read and write English.”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

  • 150 Shares119 Views

    in Music

    Norman Carol, Violinist in Historic Concert in China, Is Dead at 95

    The concertmaster and first-chair violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra for decades, he took part in a diplomatic breakthrough in 1973 with concerts in Mao Zedong’s Beijing.Norman Carol, a former violin prodigy who was first chair and concertmaster for the acclaimed Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly three decades, accompanying it on a history-making trip to China under Mao Zedong in 1973, died on April 28. He was 95.His death, at an assisted living center in Bala Cynwyd, a community on Philadelphia’s Main Line, was announced in a statement posted on social media by the orchestra. It was not widely reported outside the classical music world at the time.As concertmaster, tuning the orchestra and overseeing the string section, Mr. Carol served under the celebrated conductors Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch.“He was dashing, comfortable, even swashbuckling as a leader,” Paul Arnold, a violinist with the orchestra, said in the statement. “His playing was bold, expressive and hall-filling.” Mr. Carol “went on to personally embody the ‘Philadelphia Sound,’” he added.That fabled sound, which emerged under Leopold Stokowski and took shape under Ormandy, the orchestra’s longtime music director starting in the 1930s, is built on “distinctive honeyed timbre” emanating from its strings, as the journal Classical Voice North America noted in 2015, along with softer attacks from the brass section and a more blended percussion approach.The orchestra’s sound became known around the world in tours of Europe and Asia during Mr. Carol’s tenure.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

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Young Thug Lawyer Clashes With Judge in Chaotic Gang Case

    Brian Steel, a lawyer for the Atlanta rapper, was ordered to serve 10 weekends in jail after a dispute with the judge, further complicating a messy gang conspiracy trial.A star witness jailed for refusing to testify. A change of heart after a weekend spent behind bars. And then, a lead defense lawyer taken into custody for implying that an improper secret meeting led to the witness’s about-face.Welcome to another week in the gang and racketeering trial of the chart-topping rapper Young Thug, a courtroom epic in Atlanta that continues to surprise as it approaches 18 months since jury selection began.On Monday, Judge Ural Glanville took the extraordinary step of holding Brian Steel, the rapper’s primary lawyer, in contempt for refusing to disclose who told him about a closed-door meeting between the judge, prosecutors, the uncooperative witness and his lawyer.Mr. Steel had argued in court that the conversation was unconstitutional and that the defense should have been present, or at least notified. But in a heated exchange, Judge Glanville took issue instead with how Mr. Steel had learned of the meeting, and later sentenced the lawyer to a maximum of 20 days in jail for failing to reveal his source.“Listen, if you don’t tell me how you got this information then you and I are going to have some problems,” the judge said in court, to which Mr. Steel responded, “I have problems right now.”Judge Glanville, who has overseen the case since Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, was indicted alongside 27 others in May 2022, appeared increasingly frustrated when he continued: “How did you get that information supposedly from my chambers? Did somebody tell you?”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