Aurelia Butler

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    21 Savage Holds Off Green Day for a Second Week at No. 1

    The rapper’s latest, “American Dream,” easily outstreamed the veteran pop-punk band’s 14th studio album, “Saviors.”21 Savage, the London-born Atlanta rapper, easily fended off a challenge from Green Day to hold at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a second week.“American Dream,” 21 Savage’s latest album, featuring guest spots by Doja Cat, Travis Scott, Lil Durk, Young Thug and others, remains atop the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 78,000 sales in the United States — down 40 percent from its debut — including 103 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. “American Dream” is the first new title to reach No. 1 on the chart in 2024, after holdovers by Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen.Green Day’s “Saviors,” the veteran pop-punk stars’ 14th studio LP, opens at No. 4 with the equivalent of 49,000 sales; the majority of that, 39,000, came from traditional album sales, while songs from “Saviors” also garnered about 12 million streams. Green Day’s first appearance on the Billboard album chart was almost exactly 30 years ago: “Dookie,” the band’s breakthrough classic, made its chart debut in February 1994, at No. 127, and eventually rose to No. 2.Also this week, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is in second place, Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 3 and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 5. More

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    Joni Mitchell Will Perform at the Grammys

    The Canadian singer-songwriter joins a roster of performers at this Sunday’s awards, including Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Travis Scott, U2 and Billy Joel.Nine years ago, Joni Mitchell fans wondered if they might ever hear her perform again, after Mitchell — the Canadian singer-songwriter and icon of the folk movement — had an aneurysm that initially left her unable to speak.But in recent years she has made a gradual recovery, and in 2022 she surprised the music world with a performance at the Newport Folk Festival. And on Sunday, at age 80, Mitchell is set to perform at the Grammy Awards for the first time. Show organizers offered no details about her appearance, including whether she is expected to play solo or with guests.Mitchell, who was given a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2002 and has won nine competitive Grammys throughout her career — going back to best folk performance in 1970 for “Clouds” — is up this year for best folk album with “Joni Mitchell at Newport,” where she was joined by Brandi Carlile, Wynonna Judd and Marcus Mumford, and sang classics like “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Both Sides Now” and even George Gershwin’s “Summertime.”The Newport appearance — an unannounced set facilitated by Carlile — sparked Mitchell’s first ticketed live performance in more than 20 years. The show, a headlining set at Carlile’s Echoes Through the Canyon festival at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wash., in June 2023, was a nearly three-hour marathon, and “a resurrection,” Lindsay Zoladz wrote in The New York Times. “To hear Mitchell hit certain notes again in that inimitable voice was like glimpsing, in the wild, a magnificent bird long feared to have gone extinct.”Other announced performers at the Grammys this year include Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Travis Scott and Burna Boy, along with U2, in an appearance from the Sphere in Las Vegas, and Billy Joel, who this week is set to release his first new pop single in nearly 20 years, “Turn the Lights Back On.” More

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    Can You Match Up These Short Stories and Their Screen Adaptations?

    This 1950 film, a psychological thriller about four differing eyewitness accounts concerning a pair of crimes, was directed by Akira Kurosawa and is considered a cinematic masterpiece. Most of the script was adapted from “In a Bamboo Grove,” a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, with elements of another Akutagawa story as well. What is the name of the film? More

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    Marlena Shaw, Venerable Nightclub Chanteuse, Dies at 84

    She sang jazz (with Count Basie, among others) and later funk and disco, frequently in intimate venues, where she regaled audiences with tales of old love affairs.Marlena Shaw, who cultivated a sultry stage presence and husky voice from the final echoes of the big-band era, to the go-go Playboy Clubs of the 1960s, to the rise of funk, to disco and finally to the modern cabaret circuit, died on Jan. 19. She was 84.Her daughter MarLa Bradshaw announced her death on social media but did not share any further details.Ms. Shaw first came to public notice in the mid-1960s, when she performed at Playboy Clubs around the country. Describing one of those performances in 1966, The Los Angeles Times labeled her a “pretty girl singer” but also called her “the surprise of the bill.” That same year, Jet magazine reported that “three record companies were waving contracts in her face” after a New York engagement.She signed with Cadet Records, which in 1967 released her recording of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” a vocal version of the Joe Zawinul tune that had been a hit for Cannonball Adderley. It reached No. 58 on the Billboard pop chart and 33 on the R&B chart.It also got the attention of Count Basie, who invited Ms. Shaw to try out for a job singing with his band.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?  More

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    Sundance Documentaries: ‘Eternal You,’ ‘Ibelin’ and More

    Festival documentaries ranged across the genre map, but several explored the lengths we’ll go to communicate with lost loved ones.Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new indescribable genres, too. But American audiences still tend to be fed documentaries of only a few types: true crime stories, cult exposés, hagiographies, and educational disquisitions full of talking heads.There’s more than that to nonfiction. And though plenty of star-driven, lightweight biographies show up at Sundance — famous folk on the carpet create much-needed social-media attention — there’s a lot of other nonfiction on offer, some of which will make its way to theaters and streaming services over the next year or two. A couple of lucky films may even eventually make their way into Oscar contention.Documentaries at this year’s Sundance, which concluded Sunday, ranged across the genre map, often playfully mixing up conventions. But it was striking how often a particular thread kept popping up: the human longing to communicate with the dead, and the lengths — technological and otherwise — to which we’ll go to make it happen.That was the theme of “Love Machina” and “Eternal You,” which feel picked by the programmers to complement one another. “Love Machina” (directed by Peter Sillen) is a romance looking at the efforts of the married couple Martine and Bina Rothblatt to create a robotic replica of Bina, powered by artificial intelligence and an extensive database of her thoughts, speech and emotions, that can communicate with her descendants when she is gone. “Eternal You” (directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck) takes a broader, more analytical look at the burgeoning market for “afterlife technology” designed to do what the Rothblatts hope to accomplish: let people communicate with their loved ones after death using A.I. If that sounds like a “Black Mirror” episode, you’re right — and some “Eternal You” participants note the humanity-altering danger in this quest.In “Love Machina,” the robotic likeness of a woman is part of an effect to communicate with her descendants after she’s gone.Peter Sillen, via Sundance InstituteYet, as the eminent sociologist Sherry Turkle points out onscreen, what we see in these efforts is A.I. offering what religion once did: a sense of an afterlife, a quest for meaning, the feeling of connecting to transcendence. One of the festival’s best documentaries, the sociological portrait “Look Into My Eyes,” taps into this same longing from a more mystical direction. Directed by Lana Wilson, the film drops audiences into the lives of several New York City psychics. The clients are hoping to communicate with the beloved dead through a literal rather than technological medium. (One participant helps people communicate with their pets, some of whom are still living.) But the focus is on the psychics themselves, the reasons they’ve come to their work, and what they believe they’re actually doing in their sessions — and the film is marvelously nuanced and fascinating in its examination. Is this performance? Is it “real”? And if it brings peace to the living, does it matter?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?  More

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    Jake Johnson Likes to Play the Hollywood Game, Especially When It Changes

    “When you get on this roller coaster, you don’t know how long you’re going to be allowed to play while you’re here,” the “New Girl” actor said about his filmmaking debut, “Self Reliance.”If you were bored enough — a stultifying job, living with Mom after a bad breakup — you, too, might climb into a mysterious limo carrying Andy Samberg. You might even consider the offer: outwit assassins for 30 days and win $1 million.It’s a risk that Tommy, played by Jake Johnson, is willing to take in “Self Reliance,” the dark comedy on Hulu that he also wrote and directed.Johnson, 45, was antsy during the pandemic when he decided the time for this project was now.“When you get on this roller coaster, you don’t know how long you’re going to be allowed to play while you’re here,” he said in a video interview from the studio he built for podcasts and Zoom calls in his Pasadena, Calif., home. “You should take chances and experiment. And if you have a relationship with an audience, you should be presenting new options.”Johnson is best known as an actor in movies and television, particularly the sitcom “New Girl,” which ran for seven seasons and is one of the reasons Anna Kendrick and Samberg agreed to come aboard “Self Reliance.”“Having somebody as funny as him start the movie, it sets the tone in the way that I want this movie to be viewed,” Johnson said before talking about losing at chess, carpentry mishaps and out-of-this-world restaurants. “And that is: sit back, have a glass of wine or smoke a joint or whatever you like to do and enjoy it. It’s a ride.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1My Twin DaughtersWhen I had kids, they become such a dominant part of my life. They transform every day, every thought. So the idea of living without them — I don’t even know what living is.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?  More

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    Prosecutors in Nashville Drop Charges Against Country Singer Chris Young

    The country singer had been charged with disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest after an altercation at a downtown bar.Prosecutors on Friday dropped all charges that had been brought against the country music singer Chris Young in connection with an altercation with an Alcoholic Beverage Commission agent at a Nashville bar.“After a review of all the evidence in this case, the Office of the District Attorney has determined that these charges will be dismissed,” Glenn R. Funk, the Nashville district attorney, said in a statement.Mr. Young, 38, had been charged with disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest following the episode on Monday night.“Mr. Young and I are gratified with the D.A.’s decision clearing him of the charges and any wrongdoing,” Bill Ramsey, the musician’s lawyer, said in a statement.The episode that led to the charges occurred as Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents were checking IDs at the DawgHouse Saloon, a downtown bar. Mr. Young was accused of hitting one of the agents, according to an arrest affidavit filed with a criminal court in Nashville. Agents handcuffed Mr. Young after he did not comply with their orders, the affidavit says.Mr. Young’s representatives previously shared surveillance footage showing that the singer was standing by the bar when agents walked past him.In the video, as one of the agents walks by, Mr. Young places a hand on him, walks backward with the agent and apparently says something. The agent pushes Mr. Young with two hands, and Mr. Young staggers backward and hits his back on a corner of the bar table, causing him to briefly fall, the video shows.He then gets up, raises both of his hands in the air and walks backward away from the agents.Mr. Young rose to stardom after winning the country-music reality TV competition “Nashville Star” in 2006, and his second album, “The Man I Want to Be,” released in 2009, reached the platinum sales mark in the United States. He has been a familiar presence on the Billboard country charts since.John Yoon More

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    Jo-El Sonnier, Who Sparked a Revival of Cajun Music, Dies at 77

    An accordion virtuoso and a gifted vocalist, he scored country hits in the 1980s by putting a Cajun spin on songs like Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter.”Jo-El Sonnier, a singer and accordionist who revived Cajun music in popular culture with hit versions of Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter” and Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and with appearances on recordings by Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello, died on Jan. 13 after a performance in Llano, Texas. He was 77.The cause was a heart attack, the music promoter Tracy Pitcox wrote on social media. He said Mr. Sonnier had been airlifted to a hospital in Austin, where he was pronounced dead.Recordings by Cajun singers and players of stringed instruments like Rusty and Doug Kershaw and Jimmy C. Newman often reached the country Top 40 in the 1950s and ’60s. But it wasn’t until Mr. Sonnier’s arrival three decades later that Cajun accordion music became more than a regional phenomenon.Mr. Sonnier in 1966, when he was 20 years old. A versatile multi-instrumentalist, he first picked up the accordion when he was 3.via Sonnier familyHis album “Come On Joe,” released by RCA in 1987, contained four Top 40 country singles, including “No More One More Time,” a lovelorn ballad, and the rollicking “Tear-Stained Letter,” both of which reached the country Top 10 in 1988. A two-stepping tour de force, Mr. Sonnier’s version of “Tear-Stained Letter” reimagined Mr. Thompson’s hurtling Anglo-Celtic original as a Cajun romp.“Back then, country music was steel, fiddles, drums and lead guitars, so it was a challenge to put the accordion up front,” Mr. Sonnier said of the making of the single in a 2009 interview with the blog 88 Miles West. “We used everything on that record that people thought you couldn’t get away with, and we did.”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?  More