Aurelia Butler

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    Beyond Beyoncé: Black Women of Country, Past and Present

    Listen to songs from Rhiannon Giddens, Rissi Palmer, Linda Martell and more.Rhiannon GiddensSerena Brown for The New York TimesDear listeners,Today marks the release of Beyoncé’s eighth solo album, “Cowboy Carter,” a sprawling celebration of country music and a saucy rebuttal to its most close-minded gatekeepers. Its previously released singles, the haunting “16 Carriages” and the rowdy No. 1 hit “Texas Hold ’Em,” reignited conversations about the erasure of Black voices in country music history and the industry-enforced barriers that still make it difficult for nonwhite artists to break through.Although “Cowboy Carter” is quite collaborative, Beyoncé is such a marquee star that all eyes and ears tend to focus on her. So for today’s playlist, I wanted to widen that focus and spotlight some other Black women who have made great country music in their own varied styles.This playlist features early pioneers like the guitarist Elizabeth Cotten and the groundbreaking country star Linda Martell (who makes two appearances on “Cowboy Carter”). It also features Tina Turner and the Pointer Sisters, artists better known for their work in other genres who made impassioned country crossovers that deserve revisiting. Plus, I’ve included younger upstarts like Reyna Roberts, Brittney Spencer and Mickey Guyton, who represent the sonic diversity and genre hybridity of this current generation.This playlist is a sampler rather than a comprehensive tour of Black women’s many contributions to country past and present, and I’m sure it’s missing some names (including Tanner Adell, who appears on “Cowboy Carter” and who Jon Caramanica already recommended to Amplifier readers earlier this month). But I hope it’s a start in expanding your view of country music beyond even the vast scope of “Cowboy Carter.”Let this be a reminder that Beyoncé is not a Lone Ranger. Other Black cowgirls have done the hard work of clearing the path, and there are plenty more riding alongside her, too.Show the world you’re a country girl,LindsayWe 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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    Shakira’s Pop-Up Show: Not Something She Dreamed Up at Breakfast

    Months of preparation precede what can appear to be a sudden decision to entertain fans at a busy time in the heart of Times Square.They may look impromptu. But they are not. Pop-up performances in Times Square aren’t quite the spontaneous events the term suggests.Shakira’s performance on Tuesday evening lasted barely longer than a subway trip from the Port Authority bus terminal to Grand Central and went off without a hitch. But that was largely because of months of behind-the-scenes planning that included securing permits, meeting multiple times with city officials and the police, and carefully calibrating when, exactly, to announce the secretly planned show.Overseeing those preparations was Nick Holmsten, the co-founder and co-chief executive of TSX Entertainment, which operates a large concrete stage on the third and fourth floors of a building at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 47th Street.Nick Holmsten, co-founder and co-chief executive of TSX Entertainment, led logistics planning for the show, which began two months before Shakira was scheduled to take the stage. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesMost days the performance space is hidden behind an 18,000-square-foot electronic billboard. But on Tuesday, two panels, weighing 86,000 pounds, swung open to show Shakira, along with her dancers and musicians, 30 feet above the sidewalk.A reported 40,000 people were there to watch from below as Shakira opened her show with “Hips Don’t Lie.”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 Sean Combs Saga Is Catnip for Pop Culture Podcasts

    The raids of Combs’s homes have been a primary topic on podcasts and radio shows that cover the Black entertainment world.In the sprawling world of Black pop culture podcasts, its own media ecosystem covering the story lines and people central to the hip-hop genre, the one topic that dominated conversation this week was, unsurprisingly, the latest in the saga of Sean Combs.On Monday, federal agents raided the Los Angeles and Miami homes of Combs, the hip-hop mogul who has been accused in several civil lawsuits of sexual assault. He has vehemently denied all the claims. The news spurred days of freewheeling and varied reactions from radio personalities and podcast hosts whose discourse veered toward humor, speculation and denial, far from the tone struck by traditional news outlets.The rapper Mase, who topped charts as an artist signed to Combs’s Bad Boy record label in the late ’90s before their relationship soured, avoided addressing him by name on the sports-centric “It Is What It Is” podcast a day after the raids, but laughed and said that “reparations is getting closer and closer.”The same day, hosts of the popular morning radio show “The Breakfast Club” criticized the actions of the authorities — which Combs’s lawyer called an “unprecedented ambush, paired with an advanced, coordinated media presence” — as unnecessary: Charlamagne Tha God said he was curious about what information they had to justify the raids. Jessica Moore, known as “Jess Hilarious,” implied that the federal action was reminiscent of a television show. The third host, DJ Envy, agreed, and said the authorities acted like “they were going for the mob.”The former N.B.A. player Gilbert Arenas, who hosts the “No Chill” podcast, posted a 10-minute special episode on YouTube on Thursday that discussed the raids.“It’s over, no, it’s done, they got you,” he said, while laughing.To provide context for his listeners, Arenas said he had been at the scene of more than a dozen raids while he was in “the weed game, the poker game.” He noted that those raids happened between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.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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    Beyoncé Takes on Italian Opera for ‘Cowboy Carter’ Track ‘Daughter’

    On the star’s new album, the track “Daughter” includes her take on an 18th-century Italian song most often heard in classical music recitals.You don’t need opera glasses to see that Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” takes on more than just country music.Nearly two minutes into “Daughter,” a track of ballad-like storytelling, she inserts a famous operatic song from the 18th century: “Caro Mio Ben.” And, in Beyoncé fashion, she makes it her own.Singers of all vocal types have performed “Caro Mio Ben”; most of them have been from the opera world, including it on recital programs. But as the song has been adapted for high and low ranges, its sound has stayed more or less the same.It was written in the early 1780s by a member of the Giordano family. At different points it has been attributed to Giuseppe or his likely older brother Tommaso. (This history is all a bit hazy.) And, like many Italian arias and songs, its lyric is brief. The singer expresses heartache in the absence of a loved one, and begs for the end of a conflict with them before returning to the sentiment of the pain caused by loss.Like much music of longing and sorrow from this time — such as the sadly beautiful arias of Mozart’s operas — “Caro Mio Ben” is in a major key, and has endured as such for more than two centuries as a concert and recording staple. But that’s also where Beyoncé comes in.“Daughter” excerpts “Caro Mio Ben” as a bridge and distorts its major-key atmosphere into a minor one to fit with the rest of the song. After opening with a moody guitar ostinato, Beyoncé enters with the dark, melodramatic storytelling of a murder ballad, with a refrain like something out of “Carmen” in its bravado and rustic flavor. In Beyoncé’s “If you cross me, I’m just like my father/I am colder than Titanic water,” you can hear a spiritual descendant of Carmen’s warning to “be on your guard” from another opera classic, the Habanera.Beyoncé keeps “Caro Mio Ben” in its original Italian, but its melancholy and yearning get across the feeling of the text, which complicates the rest of the song, introducing to her toughness a vulnerability and desire for peace — most ardent in the wailing and ghostly vocalise, or wordless singing, that follows.She doesn’t have the voice of an opera singer, but that doesn’t really matter. “Caro Mio Ben” is not an aria from opera; it is a song, and was most likely performed in its time in intimate settings, with the comparatively direct, human-scale sound you hear in “Daughter.” What’s more significant is that Beyoncé finds in this old tune a quality shared by the finest music from any century: something to say. More

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    A Georgia Town Basks in Bountiful Filming. The State Pays.

    When movies are made in Thomasville, Ga., it welcomes celebrities and an infusion of cash. But the financial incentives that attract studios have cost the state billions.It is no wonder that moviemakers saw potential in Thomasville, Ga., as a stand-in for Main Street U.S.A. Cobblestone streets and mom-and-pop stores speckle the downtown of this city of 18,000 that is caked in red clay soil and nestled among rolling hills.Just as attractive to some of those producers are Georgia’s lavish filming incentives, which have made Thomasville a cost-effective place to make modest pictures with major stars. Dustin Hoffman came for the rom-com “Sam & Kate.” A children’s book adaptation, “The Tiger Rising,” brought Dennis Quaid and Queen Latifah to town.But what is good on the ground for local economies — Thomasville says each of the six movies filmed there has provided an economic boost of about $1 million — can simultaneously be a drain on state coffers.Some Georgia lawmakers wondered whether it might be wise to put some limits on an uncapped tax incentive program that has given billions of dollars to Hollywood studios, scrambling this week in hopes of passing a bill that would modify the program. More

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    Stream These 12 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in April

    A Ryan Gosling detective comedy, a Formula One racing drama and the romantic musical “Mamma Mia!” are among the movies exiting the streaming service.Fast cars, jazz drummers, time travelers, bounty hunters — you’ll find everything but the kitchen sink in this month’s roundup of noteworthy titles leaving Netflix in the United States. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘The Nice Guys’ (April 8)Stream it here.Ryan Gosling is having a bit of a moment — he may not have won the Oscar for best supporting actor, but he won the Oscars telecast for his performance of “I’m Just Ken” — and those who prefer the intense actor in his loosey-goosey comic mode would be wise to check out this 2016 comedy-mystery. Gosling stars as a bumbling private detective who teams up with a bone-breaker-for-hire (an uproariously gregarious Russell Crowe) to solve a convoluted missing person case. The co-writer and director is Shane Black, who helped popularize the buddy-action comedy with his “Lethal Weapon” screenplay, and subsequently perfected it here and in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Keep an eye out for the up-and-comers Angourie Rice (“Mean Girls”) and Margaret Qualley (“Drive Away Dolls”) in supporting roles.‘Rush’ (April 15)Stream it here.Ron Howard spent a fair amount of his youth appearing in vroom-vroom car movies like “American Graffiti,” “Eat My Dust” and “Grand Theft Auto” — the latter marking his feature directorial debut — so it’s not surprising that he was drawn to this thrilling dramatization of the mid-70s glory days of Formula One racing. He tells the story of a rivalry between two of the sport’s stars: James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), a study in contrasts, the matinee idol and the ugly duckling, the party boy and the teetotaler. The nuanced screenplay by Peter Morgan (who penned Howard’s earlier “Frost/Nixon,” and would go on to create “The Crown”) mines the complexities of their relationship, while the thrilling race sequences effectively place us in the driver’s seat through the hairiest moments of trading paint.‘Synchronic’ (April 15)Stream it here.Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead make brainy sci-fi pictures, small-scale indie movies like “The Endless” and “Something in the Dirt” that traffic in ideas over special effects. This 2019 effort was the closest they’ve come to a play for the cinematic mainstream, casting Marvel mainstay Anthony Mackie and “Fifty Shades” star Jamie Dornan in the leading roles. But their signature style and thematic occupations remain thankfully intact in this tale of two New Orleans paramedics who discover the mind-bending effects of a new designer drug. The central conceit is ingenious, but the filmmakers don’t just rely on its cleverness; there are genuine, human stakes, and the payoff is refreshingly poignant.‘The Hateful Eight’ (April 24)Stream it here.Quentin Tarantino followed “Django Unchained” by again riffing on the venerable Western genre, this time by crossing it with the Agatha Christie-style “locked room” mystery. He populates his story, of a poisoning in a tucked-away haberdashery during a deadly blizzard in the post-Civil War West, with faces familiar from his previous films, including Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen; they’re joined by an Oscar-nominated Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a particularly foul-mouthed and ill-tempered mood. Tempers flare, blood is shed and vulgarities fly in typical Tarantino fashion, but in its unflinching portraiture of the racial hostilities of a splintered country, the work is by no means exclusive to its period setting. (Also leaving on April 24: the Netflix-exclusive “The Hateful Eight Extended Version,” which adds footage and breaks the film up into four one-hour episodes.)‘Malignant’ (April 26)Stream it here.James Wan started out directing bone-crunching horror pictures like “Saw,” “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” before going mainstream with “Furious 7,” “Aquaman” and its sequel. Between those two superhero flicks, he directed this gloriously unhinged, go-for-broke horror thriller, in which a young woman (Annabelle Wallis) is haunted by visions of grisly murders — visions that prove to be true, and suggest some sort of a psychic link to the brutal killer. If that sounds slightly peculiar, boy, just you wait. The screenplay by “M3GAN” writer Akela Cooper (with story assists from Wan and Ingrid Bisu) is an admirably unrestrained trip into the genre’s wilder corners, full of inventive kills, bananas story turns and cuckoo supporting characters, all rendered in a baroque, hurdy-gurdy visual style.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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    How Many Easters Remain for This Century-Old Boys’ Choir School?

    St. Thomas Church in New York is considering closing its renowned boarding school for choristers, one of only a few in the world, because of financial woes.At the St. Thomas Choir School in Manhattan the other morning, more than two dozen boys, dressed in matching white polo shirts and gray pants, gathered in a gymnasium to rehearse hymns for Holy Week services, as their predecessors have for more than a century.When Jeremy Filsell, the church’s organist and director of music, asked the boys for more precision when they sang the line about “the voice of an angel calling out” from “Sive Vigilem” by the Renaissance composer William Mundy, the boys tried again, their high, clear voices ringing out in Latin.“Lovely!” he said. “That’s it!”For 105 years, the St. Thomas Choir School has been something of an anomaly: a residential school that steeps boys in centuries-old choral traditions that are more generally associated with the great English cathedral towns than they are with Midtown Manhattan. The boys, between the ages of 8 and 14, live at the school and sing five services a week at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue.Now St. Thomas, an Episcopal church that is venerated for its music program, is considering closing the choir school, one of only a few remaining boarding schools for young choristers in the world. The church said that its endowment, annual fund-raising and tuition fees were no longer sufficient to cover the roughly $4 million a year it costs to operate the school — which accounts for about 29 percent of the church’s $14 million budget.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe Rev. Canon Carl F. Turner, the church’s rector, said that St. Thomas had run into trouble in part because of the misperception that it had ample resources, which has hurt fund-raising. The church, built from limestone in the French High Gothic style, stands 95 feet tall in the shadow of skyscrapers along Fifth Avenue, in one of New York’s most elegant neighborhoods.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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    Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is Here, and It’s Much More Than Country

    The superstar’s new LP is a 27-track tour of popular music with a Beatles cover, cameos by Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and features from Miley Cyrus and Post Malone.Beyoncé has gone country, sure … but it turns out that’s only the half of it.For months, the superstar, who made her name in R&B and pop, has been telegraphing her version of country music and style. There was the “disco” cowboy hat at her Renaissance World Tour last year, and her “western” look at the Grammys in February, complete with a white Stetson and black studded jacket. Then, on the night of the Super Bowl, she released two new songs, and sent one of them, “Texas Hold ’Em” — with plucked banjos and lines about Texas and hoedowns — to country radio stations, sparking an industrywide debate about the defensive moat that has long surrounded Nashville’s musical institutions.At midnight on Friday, Beyoncé finally released her new album, “Cowboy Carter,” and the country bona fides were certainly there. Dolly Parton provides a cameo introduction to Beyoncé’s version of “Jolene,” Parton’s 1972 classic about a woman confronting a romantic rival. Willie Nelson pops in twice as a grizzled D.J., who says he “turns you on to some real good [expletive],” including snippets of Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the blues singer Son House.Yet “Cowboy Carter” is far broader than simply a country album. Beyoncé does a version of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and, on the track “Ya Ya,” draws from Nancy Sinatra and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” “Desert Eagle” is glistening funk, and the upbeat “Bodyguard” would not be out of place on a modern rock radio station. The album’s range suggests a broad essay on contemporary pop music, and on the nature of genre itself.That theory is made clear on the partly spoken track “Spaghettii,” featuring the pioneering but long absent Black country singer Linda Martell, who in 1970 released an album called “Color Me Country.”“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are,” Martell, 82, says. “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”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