Aurelia Butler

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    Future and Metro Boomin’s First Joint Album Opens Big at No. 1

    The Atlanta rapper and star producer topped Ariana Grande’s first-week total for “Eternal Sunshine,” but Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” may beat them all next week.Future and Metro Boomin, two of the biggest stars of Atlanta hip-hop, have scored the best opening of the year so far with their joint album “We Don’t Trust You,” though Beyoncé is on deck for next week’s chart with potentially even bigger numbers.“We Don’t Trust You” opens at No. 1 with the equivalent of 251,000 sales in the United States, a better opening than Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” had two weeks ago (with 227,000). According to the tracking service Luminate, the vast majority of fans’ consumption of “We Don’t Trust You” was through streaming platforms, with 324 million clicks in its opening week — more than any album since Taylor Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which arrived with 375 million in November.“We Don’t Trust You,” featuring guest spots by the Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott, among others, is the first of two announced LPs by the rapper Future and Metro Boomin, a star producer who has been behind dozens of hit songs over the last decade, and who has gone to No. 1 on the album chart three times before in his own right. The next joint album by Future and Metro Boomin is expected April 12.Beyoncé’s 27-track “Cowboy Carter” seized headlines even before its release last Friday, and fans started clicking as soon as they could. Spotify announced that “Cowboy Carter” became the service’s most-streamed album in a single day so far this year. It is expected to arrive with big numbers on next week’s chart, helped by sales on vinyl and CD — though fans complained that a number of tracks on the digital version were absent from the physical editions, including “Ya Ya,” one of the album’s most-streamed songs.Also this week, Olivia Rodrigo’s seven-month-old “Guts” jumps 16 spots to No. 2, thanks to the release of a deluxe version with five added tracks. Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” falls to No. 3 after two weeks at the top, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 5. More

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    In ‘Godzilla x Kong,’ Destruction, But Not Much Concern

    The latest sequel in the Monsterverse has plenty of destruction, but little concern about the death toll.This article contains spoilers for “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”By the end of “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” the latest in the so-called Monsterverse franchise from Warner Bros., multiple cities around the world have been rendered essentially uninhabitable and treasured monuments have been turned to dust. Godzilla, Kong and their adversaries flatten sections of Rio, ripping buildings in half during their climactic brawl, as a monster that can shoot ice from its mouth coats the coastal setting, presumably freezing a bunch of citizens as well.Earlier, the two big guys punch their way through the pyramids in Cairo as tourists and locals scramble away from falling rocks. On top of that, at one point, Godzilla also takes up temporary residence in the Colosseum in Rome after he stomps through that locale. It’s frankly pretty cute the way he curls up to nap in the ancient amphitheater like a puppy, but the fact that he probably killed thousands of people getting to his makeshift bed isn’t really addressed.Directed by Adam Wingard, the film cares more about the beasties than it does anything else. Given the cartoonish tone Wingard is working in — Godzilla turns pink in this one while he and Kong fight a giant evil ape named the Skar King with a bone whip — it makes sense that there isn’t much dwelling on the human toll. Still, the sheer level of destruction is so outsize it’s almost amusing. Sure, you go into a Godzilla flick expecting for some structures to crumble, but this just feels extreme, especially in how casually it shrugs off the fact that monsters have just toppled thousands of years worth of history and countless lives.Over the years, films starring Godzilla and his pals have varied wildly in how they deal with the creatures’ victims — they have been serious and outright silly. While sometimes Godzilla can be a way to explore very human fears, at other times he’s just an outlet to watch things go boom. “Godzilla x Kong” puts him firmly in this noisy camp, which makes the treatment of death just seem careless.Perhaps one of the reasons “Godzilla x Kong” is so striking in how little it seems to think about damage is that the last “Godzilla” movie to hit theaters was entirely concerned with Godzilla as a representation of trauma.A scene from “Godzilla Minus One.”Toho CompanyWe 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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    Pedal Steel Noah’s Covers Charm Fans Online. Up Next: His Own Songs.

    This 16-year-old from Austin, Texas, plays New Wave and post-punk hits with his brother and dog beside him. This week, his first EP, “Texas Madness,” comes out.Like many American teenagers, Noah Faulkner, 16, is obsessed with music. He’ll spend hours going down rabbit holes, listening to every note played by his favorite artists and studying new discoveries. He recently came out of a monthslong deep dive on Clarence Ashley, a banjo player who recorded during the Great Depression and “makes me feel like I’m an old man,” Faulkner said. Ashley’s music “feels very spooky, and I imagine it’s like an abandoned place somewhere.”Unlike most teenagers, Faulkner is translating these influences into a dedicated music career. Using the handle Pedal Steel Noah, he posts daily covers of ’80s New Wave and post-punk hits on Instagram and TikTok, interpreting the work of acts like the Smiths and Tears for Fears on one of the hardest instruments to master. Along the way, he’s made fans of Neko Case, Big Thief, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and scores of others drawn to his emotive playing and charming setup: a big Texas flag in the background, his brother, Nate, 13, on bass and a shaggy Aussiedoodle panting along.Faulkner’s interest in pedal steel stems from an early plunge into country music. “I was listening to George Strait when I wanted to listen to something that’s cheerful and faithful,” he said. Eli Durst for The New York TimesIn March, the brothers and their father, Jay, played several showcases during the South by Southwest festival in their hometown and opened for the Black Keys’ keynote address. Dressed in a Western shirt, black cowboy hat and the colorful Crocs that have become his signature footwear, Pedal Steel Noah put a Texas stamp on songs by Duran Duran and the Cocteau Twins.“It was amazing,” he said via video call from the dinner table, his family gathered around him, “but it was exhausting. Hopefully, I can give myself a reward of a party for my friends.” On Monday, he’s taking the next step in his young career, releasing “Texas Madness,” an EP that includes three covers and two original tracks.

    View this post on Instagram A post shared by Noah Faulkner (@pedalsteelnoah) 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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    Peter Brown, One of the Beatles’ Closest Confidants, Tells All (Again)

    At 87, the dapper insider is releasing a new book of interviews conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people nearest to it.Peter Brown stood in his spacious Central Park West apartment, pointing first at the dining table and then through the window to the park outside, with Strawberry Fields just to the right.“John sat at that table looking through here,” Brown said, “and he couldn’t take his eyes off the park.”That’s John as in Lennon. And the story of the former Beatle coveting this living-room view in 1971 — and how Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, eventually got their own place one block down, at the Dakota — is just one of Brown’s countless nuggets of Fab Four lore. In the 1960s he was an assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and then an officer at Apple Corps, the band’s company. A key figure in the Beatles’ secretive inner circle, Brown kept a red telephone on his desk whose number was known only to the four members.And it was Brown who, in 1969, informed Lennon that he and Ono could quickly and quietly wed in a small British territory on the edge of the Mediterranean, a piece of advice immortalized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “Peter Brown called to say, ‘You can make it OK/You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.’”Next week, Brown and the writer Steven Gaines are releasing a book, “All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words,” made up of interviews they conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people close to it, including business representatives, lawyers, wives and ex-wives — the raw material that Brown and Gaines used for their earlier narrative biography of the band, “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles,” published in 1983.Now 87, Brown is a polarizing figure in Beatles history. He was a witness to some of the band’s most important moments and was a trusted keeper of its secrets. “The only people left are Paul and Ringo and me,” he said.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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    Lorraine Graves, Pioneering Harlem Ballerina, Dies at 66

    Tall and commanding, she dazzled audiences as a principal dancer for the groundbreaking Dance Theater of Harlem for nearly two decades.Lorraine Graves, a ballerina known for her willowy frame and majestic grace who starred as a principal dancer for the groundbreaking Dance Theater of Harlem for nearly two decades, died on March 21 in Norfolk, Va. She was 66.Her nephew Jason Graves said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was yet to be determined.Ms. Graves broke barriers — not only as a celebrated dancer for a multiracial company that showcased African American excellence in a traditionally European art form, but also, at a towering 5-foot-10 ½, as an exceptionally tall one.For a female dancer, “five foot four, five foot six is considered tall,” Virginia Johnson, a former principal dancer and artistic director for the Dance Theater of Harlem, said in an interview. “Because once you get on pointe, you’re adding another six inches to your height, and so having a partner who’s tall enough to partner you is an issue.”Fortunately, the company had plenty of tall male dancers. That allowed Ms. Graves an opportunity to leverage her unique physicality, which over the course of her career she showed off in performances around the world, including before world leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela.“She was commanding,” Ms. Johnson said. “She had a lot of power as a dancer, and had a magnificent jump.”Dance Theater of Harlem was formed in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell, an international star who was the first African American principal dancer at New York City Ballet, with Karel Shook, a renowned ballet master who had trained Mr. Mitchell.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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    ‘Cowboy Carter’ Review: Beyoncé’s Country Is America. Every Bit of It.

    On the bold, sprawling “Cowboy Carter,” the superstar plays fast and loose — and twangy — with genre.The first song on “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé’s not-exactly-country album, makes a pre-emptive strike. “It’s a lot of talking going on while I sing my song,” she observes in “Ameriican Requiem” over guitar strums and electric sitar, adding, “It’s a lot of chatter in here.”That’s an acknowledgment that a pop superstar’s job now extends well beyond creating and performing songs. In the era of streaming and social media, Beyoncé knows that her every public appearance and utterance will be scrutinized, commented on, cross-referenced, circulated as clickbait and hot-taked in both good faith and bad. Every phrase and image are potential memes and hyperlinks.It’s a challenge she has engaged head-on since she released her visual album “Beyoncé” in 2013. For the last decade, even as her tours have filled stadiums, she has set herself goals outside of generating hits. Beyoncé has deliberately made each of her recent albums not only a musical performance but also an argument: about power, style, history, family, ambition, sexuality, bending rules. They’re albums meant to be discussed and footnoted, not just listened to.“Cowboy Carter” is an overstuffed album, 27 tracks maxing out the 79-minute capacity of a CD and stretching across two LPs. It flaunts spoken-word co-signs from Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton that interrupt its flow; it includes some fragmentary, minute-long songs. Its sprawl is its own statement of confidence: that even half-finished experiments are worth attention.The “Cowboy Carter” album cover is an opening salvo, brandishing western and American symbols: Beyoncé holding an American flag while riding a white horse sidesaddle, with platinum-blond hair proudly streaming. In a red-white-and-blue outfit, high-heeled boots and a pageant sash that reads “Cowboy Carter,” she’s a beauty queen and a white-hatted heroine claiming her nation — her country, in both senses. The politics of her new songs are vague and glancing, but the music insists that every style is her American birthright. As a pop star it is: Pop has always breached stylistic boundaries, constantly exploiting subcultures to annex whatever might make a song catchier.Beyoncé grew up in Texas, where country music has long mingled with styles from jazz to blues to hip-hop — and where, in fact, early cowboys were enslaved Black men. Beyoncé met a racial backlash when she performed “Daddy Lessons,” a country song from her 2016 album “Lemonade” about gun-toting self-defense, with the (then-Dixie) Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards. Presumably that’s what she alluded to when she wrote on Instagram that there was “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed.”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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    Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

    I don’t want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?I guess probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.When I did stumble on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, I called.It’s possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” After one ring, a male voice answered.I said: “This is Brett Martin. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”The man had no idea who I was. More

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    ‘Punjabi Wave’ Music Hits the Juno Awards Stage

    Karan Aujla, 27, became the first Punjabi artist to win an award at the Junos as the genre expands its fan base in Canada.Karan Aujla accepting the Fan’s Choice Award at the Juno Awards on Sunday in Halifax, Nova Scotia.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressFor many watching the Juno Awards on Sunday, the first few lines of Karan Aujla’s upbeat love ballad were probably their first introduction to Punjabi music.But Mr. Aujla’s energetic performance at the show in Halifax, a marquee event in the Canadian music industry, inspired even the timid sections of the crowd — for whom the sound and lyrics were something entirely new — to boisterous enthusiasm, said Baldeep Randhawa, a talent buyer and promoter at the entertainment company Live Nation.“He won everybody over by the end,” Mr. Randhawa, who was in the Juno audience, told me. “The cheers after his set were one of the loudest of the night.”Mr. Aujla, 27, immigrated to Canada 10 years ago to live with his sisters after his parents had died, and he worked odd jobs before committing to a career in music. His music has bubbled to the top of what some industry watchers are calling the “Punjabi wave,” a cohort of artists who are blending South Asian sounds with influences from rap and hip-hop, and collaborating with Western stars to reach new audiences.On Sunday, he became the first Punjabi artist to win at the Junos, taking home the Fan Choice Award.[Video: Karan Aujla performs at the Juno Awards with Ikky, a 23-year-old Punjabi music producer from Toronto.]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