Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Color Purple’ Tips Its Hat to Classic Black Musicals

    The new movie has so many references to Hollywood gems like “Stormy Weather” and early jazz shorts, it can be viewed as a Black film syllabus.Even when Hollywood saw little use for Black performers other than as mammies and butlers, the musical genre, a storytelling mode composed of magical realist fantasy and hoofing artistry, provided space for Cab Calloway, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge to manifest their glamorous glow. Through rapturous songs, sung in resplendent gowns and tailored tuxedos, the promise of Black liberation was heard.The genre’s possibility for emancipation is showcased in the latest film version of “The Color Purple,” whose origin derives from a story of perseverance and sisterhood that first found acclaim in 1983, when its author, Alice Walker, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Within two years of Walker’s success, Steven Spielberg directed an acclaimed big-screen adaptation of her novel. By 2005, a staged musical of “The Color Purple” appeared on Broadway. Now, the Ghanaian filmmaker Blitz Bazawule is shouldering the book’s legacy, directing a cinematic adaptation of the Broadway musical.The director Blitz Bazawule narrates a sequence from the musical, featuring a performance by Taraji P. Henson.Ser Baffo/Warner Bros PicturesBazawule’s “Color Purple” aims to grant Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) the kind of interiority that makes visible her resiliency against abject trauma. Raped during childhood by the man she thought to be her father, then separated from her children — the results of his assault — Celie is forced into marriage with the abusive Mister (Colman Domingo). Her sister, Nettie (Halle Bailey), bids goodbye, departing to Africa. Mister’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins) and his wife, Sofia (Danielle Brooks), become Celie’s only friends. But a chance at real love arrives when the sultry singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), Mister’s old flame, returns to town. Shug and Celie’s developing physical attraction, along with Nettie’s letters, allow Celie to create grand worlds in her head.Celie’s boundless imagination mirrors the continued influence of what Bazawule called “the universal Black cadence,” how an ordinary shuffle or a game of patty cake can become a song. That practice imbues “The Color Purple” with an inventiveness to empower Celie’s story, positioning the arts as an important language for resistance and a necessary tool for Black people to be more than vessels for trauma.“I think music gives Celie the kind of agency we’ve never seen her have before,” Bazawule said during an interview at the Mandarin Oriental in New York.The director Blitz Bazawule, top, with Henson, left, and Burrino.Eli Ade/Warner Bros.Early Black musicals like “Porgy and Bess” and “Swing!” are examined in Arthur Knight’s book “Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film.” His analysis is drawn from W.E.B. DuBois’s belief that music is an essential element of Black identity. The control of that gift, therefore, is crucial, and the musical — as a locus for song, fashion and romance — becomes a strategy against the oppression faced by Black people across America.By visualizing Celie’s inner thoughts and her yearning for independence, Bazawule not only retools the genre’s language of resistance. He also provides audiences with an integral Black film syllabus.Elisabeth Withers-Mendes, center left, as Shug Avery and LaChanze as Celie in the 2005 Broadway musical version of “The Color Purple.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our work is only understood most clearly when it’s part of a continuum that is built. It’s a language,” Bazawule said. “But you have to know the language to understand what we’re doing.”Bazawule’s influences on the film are varied, including more contemporary musicals like “Idlewild” and “Dreamgirls,” the drama “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and studio-era musicals like “Hallelujah” and “Cabin in the Sky.” The 1932 musical short “Pie, Pie Blackbird” is another reference.The larger-than-life sets used in Aubrey Scotto’s jazz short, “A Rhapsody in Black and Blue” (also 1932) come to mind during a moment of romantic whimsy shared by Celie and Shug. When Celie sings “Dear God — Shug,” she imagines her and Shug on a giant, spinning gramophone. Rather than wholly relying on computer-generated effects, the production designer Paul D. Austerberry sought to marry fantasy with reality by constructing an actual 22-foot diameter record and an enormous needle arm.Nina Mae McKinney in the short film “Pie, Pie, Blackbird.”Warner Bros.The tension rises during the film’s lustful juke joint scene. For this sequence, not only does Shug arrive in grand style — on a barge floating across a swamp — but the costume designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck also fashioned Shug’s red dress to mirror the allure of Dorothy Dandridge in “Carmen Jones.”“I wanted Shug to look sexy,” Jamison-Tanchuck said.In a nod to the diverse rhythms in the Black diaspora, the choreographer Fatima Robinson orchestrated the scene’s varied dancers, bedecked in dazzling suits and luscious dresses, to use Daggering, a sizzling Jamaican dance.“I wanted to create moves where we touch each other and we hold each other,” said Robinson. “It’s something I feel, as Black people, we don’t see enough.”Celie’s imaginative bid for freedom peaks when she and Shug abscond to the Capitol Theater in Macon, Ga., where they watch “The Flying Ace” (1926). As they view the film, Celie’s mind conceives of a lavish Art Deco ballroom recalling the 1943 musical “Stormy Weather,” which starred Horne. There’s an orchestra dressed in white tail tuxedos (a reference to Calloway), but instead of the high-flying Nicholas Brothers splitting down the steps, Celie and Shug descend toward each other. While the scene takes place in Celie’s mind, its fantastical setting doesn’t render her feelings or Shug’s reciprocation any less real. The power of the musical genre is in its ability to make any person, no matter her background, the captain of her world.For Bazawule, who remembers selling CDs on the street to afford tickets to art house theaters in New York, Celie’s cinematic escape from oppression has deep personal resonance.“I figured if Shug could bring Celie into that world, it would open her mind,” he said. More

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    Tales of the Black Underworld Fuel Rap. ValTown Recounts Them.

    ValTown, an account on X and other social media platforms, spotlights gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and 1990s — and how crime and celebrity often intersect.Beginning in the late 2010s, Brian Valmond started shining a light on stories that are often shaded by secrecy, exaggeration, self-protection and self-aggrandizing.His subject matter is, by and large, the world of Black gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and ’90s — topics that have also long driven the aesthetics and narratives of hip-hop. Since 2017, Valmond, 25, has been using his @_ValTown_ account on Twitter, now known as X, to unravel these tales bit by bit in threads that become mini events. His stories are tantalizing and sometimes surprising, especially when he highlights the links between the criminal underworld and the realm of celebrity, underscoring the blurred lines between those two milieus.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said in an October interview at a Brooklyn park. “So, I wanted to show, not to glorify it, but say, we have our underworld legends as well.”On his accounts — he’s accumulated more than 180,000 followers on X, and over 100,000 on Instagram — Valmond has examined drug lords and gangsters from all over the country: well-known figures like Harlem’s Rich Porter and Azie Faison (whose stories shaped the film “Paid in Full,” starring Cam’ron); or Atlanta’s Black Mafia Family, crucial in the early career of Jeezy; or the original 50 Cent, from whom the rapper got his name. After he wrote about Freeway Rick Ross, the Los Angeles cocaine kingpin, Ross invited Valmond to spend time with him in California.Valmond also probes the places where crime and music have collided, detailing the sometimes unsavory pasts of well-known hip-hop executives like Suge Knight and Big U, or the story of Peter Shue, the club promoter, drug dealer and reported paramour of Madonna. He’s posted a detailed history of Sean Combs’s father, Melvin Combs, a purported associate of the 1970s Harlem crime boss Nicky Barnes. And sometimes, he simply unearths unexpected behind-the-scenes factoids, like a recent thread about the tough-guy exploits of the pioneering pop rapper MC Hammer.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSome of Valmond’s work, particularly about the intersection of hip-hop stars and street life, involves “the kind of things people talked about in hushed tones but never made it into print journalism, because they weren’t stories that could be sourced in a credible way, but they were common knowledge to people in the scene,” said the journalist Noah Callahan-Bever. Valmond’s threads, he said, “gave these stories the folklore, the grandeur they deserved.”Crucial to Valmond’s approach are old photographs, which he tracks down from various online sources, and sometimes from family members or associates of the figures he’s spotlighting. The photos are not simply nostalgia — they are also historical references of style and attitude presentations that have trickled out into the mainstream via hip-hop, which took those street reference points and made them into culture. The photos, which capture fleeting poses of chest-puffing celebration (think fresh-off-the-lot sports cars, ostentatiously large gold chains, ritzy nightclubs, spotless designer clothes) are often the most solid documentation of a moment that only tenuously documented itself.“That era is almost extinct, right?” said Shawn Hartwell, who served two decades on racketeering charges for crimes committed when he was a teenager. “And he’s keeping it alive so people could say, Yo, remember one time it was like this? Other than that, you gonna wipe a whole culture or a generation away.”But the excess on display, those photos reflect a complex and tragic reality. “When you see them old pictures, you barely see life. You see survival mode,” Hartwell said. “That’s survival, that’s not glamour. And some people don’t know that because they not in that mode.“Most of the people in those pictures have life sentences,” he added, “or died.”For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. “Somebody might watch a show like ‘Snowfall’ and be like, Oh wow, I want to be a drug dealer,” he said. “But it’s like, that’s not the story. Yeah, it might be glorious now, but it’s going to end up pretty bad.”Valmond is a humble and unassuming chronicler of a deeply chaotic time. Dressed quietly, in a black tracksuit, he asked as many questions as he answered, his demeanor bookish and focused.He was raised by strict Caribbean parents — his mother is from Haiti and his father is from Dominica — and spent his early years in Far Rockaway, Queens, then moved with his family to Delaware, where he still resides. He returned to New York during summers, and stayed close with friends who were being drawn into street life.At the suggestion of a high school English teacher, Valmond began to explore writing screenplays, but also took notice of the stories unfolding right before him.“In my neighborhood growing up, if you weren’t playing basketball or if you weren’t like a artsy type of kid, you sold drugs,” he said.For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIn 2017, he spent a fruitless summer in between his first two years of college calling Hollywood studio phone numbers he found online to pitch a script, to no avail.“I tried to put it in this fictional world, but then those things started to actually happen in my real life,” he explained. “Like, my friends started to die, my friends started to go to jail and things started to get very real around the time that I started writing. So I was like, maybe it’s a bigger purpose. Maybe let me start telling the stories of people that actually been through this in real life.”Later that year, he saw a Twitter thread that spoke to him, and decided to make his own. Before long, he was posting prolifically.“I was going to school,” he recalled, “but I wasn’t going to class. I was checking into the library and I would stay there all day researching, getting pictures, putting threads together.”His first two threads tackled the Queens drug kingpin Lorenzo (Fat Cat) Nichols and the Los Angeles gangster Freeway Rick Ross. He soon posted about Robert Sandifer, who was murdered at 11 years old by members of his own gang, a gruesome and vivid crime that led to a Time magazine cover story in 1994.There are some precedents for Valmond’s coverage. In the 2000s, street magazines like F.E.D.S. and Don Diva emerged to document underworld figures, sometimes in their own words. Some YouTube channels trade in old street-life war stories. And in earlier phases of the internet, message boards and blogs touched on these subjects as well.Though Valmond begins with news reports and other published information, some facts are impossible to independently verify. Memories can be hazy, and reputations are sometimes built on bluster. His threads can sometimes land closer to apocrypha than unassailable truth. (There are a handful of other Twitter and Instagram accounts that stake out similar content, but Valmond’s have been the most in-depth and consistent.)The internet is both infinite and shortsighted — stories can be forever archived, and also forever forgotten. Many of these tales were known in their time, but lost to history. Valmond thrills in resurfacing them, and in the connectivity that social media allows: Not only researching and relaying these stories, but sometimes using them to connect with people involved, and unearthing even more information.Luc (Spoon) Stephen, a film producer and onetime associate of Fat Cat Nichols, took notice of Valmond’s 2017 thread on the drug dealer. Like Valmond, Stephen is from Queens, and of Haitian descent. He admired Valmond’s curiosity and dedication to the truth, and began sharing stories with him and making introductions.“A lot of the younger people don’t listen, but he soaks it up and he has to evaluate from there, he has to check it again,” Stephen said in an interview. “I could take a key and I can turn it in the lock and open the lock and then walk away, but now he has to open the door and explore.”In 2018, when Callahan-Bever was working as the executive vice president of brand strategy and content at Def Jam Records, he hired Valmond as an intern, once he found out how young he was: “I sort of assumed he was an older guy based on the topics and depth of knowledge, but he was still in college.”Valmond said the experience was eye-opening. “That was the first time for me that I’d seen that my skill set could put me in an environment beyond the neighborhood,” he said.Valmond’s ongoing work reflects shifting norms around public discussion of street tales. In recent years, a smattering of films and television programs have tackled these eras, including the documentary series “Hip Hop Uncovered” and “American Gangster,” the film “Paid in Full” and the TV dramas “BMF” and “Power,” both executive produced in part by 50 Cent.Today, many online hip-hop media sites and personalities focus heavily on criminal affiliations of musicians, or those close to them — a near unthinkable turn from a couple of decades ago when criminal records weren’t as available or easily disseminated, and when performers may have woven street tales into their songs but otherwise largely aimed to keep their nonmusical life private. Some outlets are also preoccupied with whether musicians involved in criminal cases cooperated with the authorities, aiming to make distinctions between artists with varying levels of street credibility.To Valmond, those are moot questions: “I post everybody, whether they cooperated, whether they were, quote-unquote, stand-up. That just puts everything on a level playing field. So people know, like, he’s not picking and choosing sides.”In recent months, Valmond has also expanded into longer video content, including “Rich in the Hood,” a podcast interview series and a six-part documentary series on YouTube more extensively covering some of the subjects of Valmond’s threads — “making it cinematic,” Valmond said — and “Blood Currency,” a show on his Patreon that looks at criminal enterprises from around the globe.“I still get pushback from my community where people would be like, ‘You’re glorifying drug dealers.’ Or, ‘How could you post these people that poison the neighborhood?’” Valmond said. “That’s because they’re so used to seeing it glamorized on television and in movies. It’s like, no, I’m not doing that. Just take the time, read it and you’ll see for yourself what it is I’m trying to convey.” More

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    ‘Ferrari’ and ‘The Killer’: 1 Cinematographer, 2 Very Different Looks

    Erik Messerschmidt worked with the directors Michael Mann and David Fincher to create cohesive worlds that feel nothing alike.Michael Mann’s new drama “Ferrari,” about several important weeks in the life of the racecar driver and manufacturer Enzo Ferrari, is many things: biographical drama, thriller, period costume film, and also a story about business rivalries, domestic disputes and personal grief. Adam Driver plays the automotive magnate as a man divided between his obsessive pursuit of professional glory and his straining responsibilities as a husband and father. Accordingly Mann approaches these two worlds with different, even diametrically opposed styles. There are intense, breakneck racing sequences and dark, elegiac domestic scenes, and little in between.“There’s really two distinct aesthetic sensibilities in the film,” Erik Messerschmidt, the film’s director of photography, said in a recent interview. “Michael wanted the interpersonal drama parts of the film to be more classically made than the racing.”Messerschmidt said that for the heavier moments Mann “wanted to reference Italian Renaissance paintings,” with their pronounced shadows and dense compositions; the racing scenes, by contrast, made use of cutting-edge technology and contemporary techniques.Messerschmidt also served as the cinematographer on “The Killer,” David Fincher’s recent thriller about a hit man dealing with the fallout of a job gone wrong, now streaming on Netflix. Looking at the two films side by side reveals the marked contrasts in the directors’ approach.“Their use of the camera, in particular, is very different,” Messerschmidt said. “Michael is often looking for those spontaneous moments, and I think he’s a little more shoot-from-the-hip than David is. Whereas David is a very precise, methodical filmmaker — he’s one of a kind that way.”Here, Messerschmidt explains how the look of “Ferrari” was achieved on and off the track and how it compared with his work on “The Killer.”Vintage SpeedThe look of the opening montage was based on archival images of auto racing from when Ferrari was young.Neon“Ferrari” opens with a brisk montage of grainy black-and-white newsreel footage that shows Enzo in his youth racing for Alfa Romeo. Mann, who had been trying to make “Ferrari” since the early 2000s, spent a lot of time poring over archival footage of motor racing from this era, and he and the crew watched it often to help faithfully capture the look. While shooting an early racing sequence, Mann had the idea to open with Enzo himself on the track, to remind the audience that he used to be a racer.The scene is “a combination of actual archival footage and visual-effects compositions of Adam driving a period-correct racecar from the ’20s,” Messerschmidt explained. Driver had to actually get on the track: it’s not a sound stage or a green screen but footage of him that’s been rotoscoped, which accounts for why this shot looks so realistic.Paris was depicted with cool shadows and warm highlights in “The Killer.”NetflixBy contrast, Messerschmidt and Fincher spent a lot of time adjusting images for “The Killer” in postproduction to hone the look of key locations in Paris, the Dominican Republic and Chicago, which they wanted to differentiate aesthetically. “All of those places have a unique look, in terms of architecture, design and how the light falls,” the cinematographer said. Paris, for instance, was depicted with “this kind of split-tone color palette of cool shadows and warm highlights.”While each location had its own visual identity, Messerschmidt said he was conscious of “still keeping them within one cohesive world.”“I didn’t want it to feel like a ransom note of color palettes,” he joked.Racing AlongTo get close to the racers, the “Ferrari” camera team followed at actual speed.NeonThe second half of “Ferrari” focuses on his efforts to win the 1957 Mille Miglia, a wildly competitive race that covers almost 1,000 miles on public roads. To capture its blistering intensity, Mann got extremely close to the vehicles, as in this shot of two cars speeding neck and neck on a winding mountain overpass. The camera team, Messerschmidt said, was following just behind in a Porsche Cayenne. “We were driving these cars at the actual speeds,” Messerschmidt said. “Michael was not interested in faking it or undercranking the camera.”As in this shot, many of the driving scenes have a rawness that emphasizes just how fast and dangerous the racing is. The style, Messerschmidt said, “has a very vérité feel to it,” which adds to the sensation of raw power. “These cars are visceral, they are loud, and the engines shake, and the suspension is stiff. That was something we wanted to show from very beginning.”Night DriveThe headlights were the only source of light for this scene.NeonPart of the Mille Miglia race takes place on an open stretch of road in the dead of night. The only sources of light are the cars’ headlights, which illuminate the rain-slick road and reflect off one another. Shooting this sequence without conventional movie lighting, Messerschmidt said, was a matter of necessity, because there was no obvious place to put up lights. “I had a lot of anxiety about that scene,” he said. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do.”Eventually, he said, he “decided to roll the dice and just do it with the headlights.”Nighttime lighting was also a factor for Messerschmidt in “The Killer.”Netflix“The Killer” makes striking use of nighttime as well, in part because the movie is about a man who “lives and lurks in the shadows,” Messerschmidt said. “We wanted to work in this murky world. It felt like an appropriate thing to lean into that in the film.”Up Close and PersonalThe cinematographer used a “skater scope” to get extremely close to Driver.NeonWhen “Ferrari” is not on the track, the camera has a tendency to probe the characters closely, sometimes getting right up in their faces. In this sequence on the factory grounds, the lens gets so near Enzo that his features become almost a blur. “When Michael really wants to get the audience into a character and bring you close, he will put you literally close to the actor,” Messerschmidt said.To achieve this “very odd point of view,” Messerschmidt employed a “skater scope,” which extends the lens about 10 inches from the body of the camera. That extension “means we can get very close to the actor without the Steadicam itself hitting the actor’s knees,” he explained.Fincher also wants to use the camera to understand his characters in “The Killer,” but “the camera has no personality in the way that Michael’s camera does,” Messerschmidt explained. “Ferrari” has “a very subjective camera,” while Fincher “is working with a conversation between subjectivity and objectivity.” The camera “reinforces” the unnamed executioner played by Michael Fassbender.The camera is far less subjective in “The Killer,” with meticulously composed shots.NetflixThis is clear in the many precise frames and symmetrical compositions — an aesthetic that mirrors the hit man’s meticulousness. “When the killer is in control and confident, the camera is extremely confident, in terms of how we operate it and how the shots cut together,” Messerschmidt said. “When the killer loses control and starts to fall apart, the camera falls apart as well.”Memories at SunsetThe flashbacks called to mind a Terrence Malick film.NeonA centerpiece of “Ferrari” takes place at an opera, where Enzo has an intense emotional reaction. Mourning the loss of his son, he thinks back to their time together, as the film cuts to brief, gauzy flashbacks, including this one, in which the two are playing in a field. The camera is very low to the ground, and the sun is just setting over the horizon; the delicate style is reminiscent of the work of Terrence Malick.“I think I get now maybe how Malick works,” Messerschmidt said. For this flashback, he and Mann started “working with the actors and the camera, improvising a bit,” he said, adding that they just happened to catch this interaction. “It was very spur of the moment. It wasn’t previsualized.”Small and AgileA camera the size of a Rubik’s Cube was affixed to the car.NeonAt times during the racing sequences in “Ferrari,” the camera is fixed to the body of the car itself, stuck alongside as the vehicle zooms at extraordinary speeds. In this shot, we see the bold Ferrari logo against a whooshing blur of grass and road. Because they were sticking a camera onto a car that was pushing its technical limits, “we had to be very conscious of weight distribution and aerodynamics,” Messerschmidt said. Their choice for these shots was a Red Komodo camera, “which is about the size of a Rubik’s Cube.” As Messerschmidt noted, “This would have been a very challenging film to make with a large, cumbersome motion picture camera.” More

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    9 Inspiring Songs for the New Year

    Get inspiration in songs from the Zombies, Solange, Jenny Hval and more.The Zombies always know how to kick off a fresh year.Stanley Bielecki/ASP and Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,Happy New Year! I’m going to keep things relatively brief today, because I’m kicking off 2024 with the head cold that every other person in New York seems to have right now. But isn’t that always how it goes when we’ve set high expectations and lofty resolutions for the new year? Life promptly steps in to throw some annoyingly timed obstacles our way.That’s kind of what the playlist I’ve created for today is about: Welcoming these next 12 months with optimism, grace and even a little humility.First, though, here’s a story about 2023.Each year, most of the goals I set for myself — the word “resolution” makes me clam up — have to do with cultural consumption. For the past few years, I’ve intended to read my age in books (a number that stubbornly keeps rising!), and last year I also attempted to watch 200 movies. Though certain social media sites were probably distractions, logging my books on Goodreads and the films I watched on Letterboxd helped keep me on track as the months went on.But December got frantically busy, as it always seems to, and I found myself obsessively planning my holiday downtime in service of hitting those noble but ultimately meaningless numbers: If I spend all of the 26th reading a novella and watch a movie every evening between now and New Year’s Eve …During that last week of the year, though, something clicked, and I loosened my grip. I started the longer and more challenging book I actually wanted to read instead of the more easy-to-finish novel that felt like an obligation. On one of the nights I’d planned to watch a movie, I accepted a spontaneous invitation to catch up with some old friends instead. My year was that much richer for both of these small decisions.What I’m saying is this: Set your objectives high, and also be kind to yourself. I am weirdly proud to report that I fell just short of my 2023 goals: In the end, I logged 198 movies and read one fewer book than I’d intended. So what? My decision not to kick it into overdrive at the end of the year does not negate all the films I discovered in 2023, nor the 30-*ahem* books I finished. It just meant that I’d added a smidgen of perspective to my annual acquisitions, too.Plus, ironically, it looks like I’m about to spend a few days on the couch with ample opportunity to catch up on some movies. Be careful what you wish for.I hope today’s playlist — which features tracks by the Zombies, Solange and Fiona Apple, among others — inspires you to ring in the new year with the appropriate amount of optimism, rumination and self-forgiveness. Who knows? Maybe it will even give you your own personal theme song for 2024.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. The Zombies: “This Will Be Our Year”A perennial classic, for good reason. (Listen on YouTube)2. Fiona Apple: “Better Version of Me”Fiona Apple approaches self-improvement with gusto — and a bit of a wink — on this spirited, piano-pounding track from her 2005 album “Extraordinary Machine”: “I’ve got a plan, a demand, and it just began/And if you’re right, you’ll agree/Here’s coming a better version of me.” (Listen on YouTube)3. A Sunny Day in Glasgow: “Failure”“Ashes Grammar,” the ambitious dream-pop opus by the Philadelphia band A Sunny Day in Glasgow, is an album I first fell in love with when it was released in 2009, and ever since then, I’ve carried around the comforting wisdom of this song’s refrain: “Fall forward, feel failure.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Kathleen Edwards: “Change the Sheets”“Change this feeling under my feet,” a restless Kathleen Edwards sings on this standout from the Canadian singer-songwriter’s great 2011 album, “Voyageur.” “Change the sheets and then change me.” Who among us hasn’t been there? (Listen on YouTube)5. Solange: “Cranes in the Sky”I’ve recently been revisiting Solange’s 2016 triumph “A Seat at the Table,” and this song — about getting to the deep root of why we’re so hungry for superficial changes — sounds as profound as ever. Also, if you ever need four and a half minutes of Zen, you know you can always watch the music video. (Listen on YouTube)6. Paul Simon: “Run That Body Down”The new year is often a time for taking a hard look at mortality, reassessing bad habits and perhaps addressing ourselves in the voice of Paul Simon’s doctor as she appears in this 1972 tune: “How many nights you think that you can do what you’ve been doing?” (Listen on YouTube)7. Nico: “Sixty Forty”“Will there be another time? Another year, another wish to stay?” Nico drones on this moody dirge, sounding as omniscient and steady as the march of the seasons. Though it first appeared on her 1981 solo album “Drama of Exile,” “Sixty Forty” was also used to memorable effect in Joanna Hogg’s 2021 movie “The Souvenir, Part II.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Jenny Hval: “That Battle Is Over”On this candid, freewheeling reflection from her 2015 album “Apocalypse, Girl,” the Norwegian musician Jenny Hval considers the passage of time, the nebulous definition of “self care” and the pressures of personal improvement, ultimately arriving at her own wry conclusions. (Listen on YouTube)9. John Lennon: “(Just Like) Starting Over”Though it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at all the “new year, new me” exhortations that surround us in early January, there’s also something to be said for earnestly embraced fresh starts — as John Lennon enthused on the buoyant leadoff track from “Double Fantasy.” (Listen on YouTube)Here it comes — a better version of me,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“This Will Be Our Year” track listTrack 1: The Zombies, “This Will Be Our Year”Track 2: Fiona Apple, “Better Version of Me”Track 3: A Sunny Day in Glasgow, “Failure”Track 4: Kathleen Edwards, “Change the Sheets”Track 5: Solange, “Cranes in the Sky”Track 6: Paul Simon, “Run That Body Down”Track 7: Nico, “Sixty Forty”Track 8: Jenny Hval, “That Battle Is Over”Track 9: John Lennon, “(Just Like) Starting Over” More

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    As Mikaela Shiffrin Considers How to Top Herself, She Studies Taylor Swift

    Shiffrin, the champion American ski racer, is an unabashed Swiftie, and has long seen the pop culture force as a textbook guide for navigating fame, adversity and unprecedented success.As Mikaela Shiffrin plans the next phase of her record-setting career as a skier, she is looking, as she always has, to the example of another female megastar who has experienced kindred highs and lows and highs in her career: Taylor Swift.The American skier Shiffrin is the most successful, and precocious, Alpine racer in history, having smashed the mark for World Cup victories, by women and men, while still in her prime skiing years. The American singer-songwriter Swift is the world’s biggest pop star, smashing music industry records one after another.When Shiffrin made her debut on the World Cup circuit, she was just shy of turning 16, the same age Swift was when she began recording her debut album five years earlier. They have both been teenage sensations lavished with praise and profit. While Swift, named Time magazine’s person of the year for 2023, might right now be the most famous human on the planet, Shiffrin, celebrated at home, has bona fide rock star status in Europe, where ski racing is the national sport of several countries. They are both at the top of their respective mountains.They have been innovators, history-makers and leading figures in their high-wire professions. But like many caught in the pop culture maelstrom, they’ve experienced intense, barbed criticism after any failure, real or perceived. Each has openly dealt with a parent’s death or serious illness and each has taken lengthy breaks from performing.A Swiftie since she was 13, Shiffrin, like legions of other girls and women, sees herself in Swift and has come to recognize elemental parallels in their careers and lives. For perspective, Shiffrin, 28, turns to her idol.Shiffrin at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Denver in July.Mike DawsonSwift onstage at Empower Field at Mile High, where Shiffrin watched from a luxury box and sang along.Tom Cooper/TAS23, via Getty ImagesIn July, Shiffrin rented a suite for Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Denver, an event Shiffrin described as “three hours of jumping up and down while singing every song at the top of my lungs.” Within that experience, Shiffrin pondered if there was a lesson that would help shape the next “era” of her own luminous career.Had Swift, the teen prodigy who is now 34, helped point the way from one stage to another?“Absolutely, because I’ve spent 15 years studying Taylor Swift and she has been guiding me a little bit every step of the way,” Shiffrin said in a recent interview in Vermont, where she claimed the 90th of her 93 career World Cup victories. “It’s why most Swifties become Swifties. It feels like her music is speaking directly to you. Her experiences resonate; I’ve always tried to learn from them.”Shiffrin’s mother, Eileen, a former ski racer who is also one of her coaches, insisted that Swift had provided guidance that is more multifaceted and sophisticated than it might seem.“Miki’s sport and career thrives on creativity,” Eileen wrote in an email last month, using Mikaela’s family nickname. She added that “every new Taylor Swift song, concert and video,” is an inspiration and motivation to her daughter.Eileen Shiffrin, right, celebrates with her daughter on the podium after Mikaela’s victory in a World Cup Slalom race in Semmering, Austria, in 2018.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockEileen Shiffrin, who praised Swift’s “street smarts” and business acumen, continued: “She keeps Miki ticking like she does the whole world. And she stands her ground, as she should, and that’s a great role model.”As Mikaela Shiffrin, who has never met Swift, recalled various chapters of her public journey — stunning racing successes, ill-timed flops, the perils of fame, the accidental death of her father in 2020 — Shiffrin readily identified ways Swift had influenced her responses to each situation.That long-distance tutelage began when the preternaturally gifted Shiffrin, nurtured in the Colorado mountains and at a venerable Vermont ski academy, won three World Cup races and a world championship gold medal as a high school senior. A year later, in 2014, she became the youngest slalom champion in Olympic history, at 18, and was thrust into an international sporting spotlight that has only seemed to magnify with each season.But since her days as a 13-year-old listening to Swift’s 2008 album “Fearless” on repeat, she said, she has looked for clues on how to live as a celebrity.“Granted, Taylor is a big fish in a big pond and I’m more of a big fish in a small pond,” Shiffrin said. “But you can see how she’s handled the attention, because she was a teenager too. She was able to hold up and work on her music. And while she’s very comfortable sharing a lot of her life, she builds a layer of protection when she needs it. She can disappear. That does seem to give her energy.“I took all that in and kind of assimilated it. Although it was hard for me because I had to go from being an extreme introvert to being comfortable around a lot of cameras and microphones. It’s a bit funny having to go through life quantifying yourself as an introvert but having to live it in an extroverted way.”Shiffrin during her downhill run at the Beijing Olympics, where she did not win a medal, in 2022.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAfter winning gold and silver medals at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, Shiffrin won an unprecedented 17 races in the following season. At the time, a five- or six-win Alpine season would have been considered prosperous. But at the start of the next season, Shiffrin did not match the astonishing pace she had set a year earlier.“People started to say that I’d lost my touch, that maybe I had peaked and my career was fading,” Shiffrin said with a look of exasperation as she slumped backward into a lounge chair. “I was like, ‘Oh, gosh, everybody’s saying all this stuff about me like I’m never going to be a good skier again.’ ”Shiffrin was reminded of Swift’s “Reputation” album from a few years earlier, and again saw parallels.“That album was built of basically having her reputation go incredibly downhill, or at least that’s how she perceived it with all the feuds that were going on at the time,” Shiffrin said. “But she came back in a big, big way. I related to the album because it made me feel like life is full of ebbs and flows. And that everything is probably going to be OK.”Shiffrin rallied in January 2020, with successive victories. But roughly a week after the second of those restorative triumphs, on Feb. 1, her older brother, Taylor, reached her by phone in Europe to say that their father, Jeff Shiffrin, had been seriously hurt at home in Colorado. Returning to Denver, Mikaela climbed onto Jeff’s hospital bed for several hours, a vigil that ended with his death on Feb. 2.The family has declined to reveal details of what happened; a coroner ruled the death an accident and listed the cause as a head injury.Shiffrin did not race for the next nine months.Shiffrin looks down at pictures of her late father Jeff Shiffrin in a locket on her necklace after winning a World Cup Giant Slalom race in Meribel, France, in February.Aleksandra Szmigiel/ReutersIn last month’s interview, without prompting, Shiffrin recalled that Swift’s 2020 album “Folklore” came out five months after her father’s death and that it included “Epiphany.” Swift has said the song explores the emotional distress of health care workers at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and of soldiers at war, a correlation that pays homage to one of Swift’s grandfathers, who was a battle-hardened U.S. Marine in World War II.Shiffrin played “Epiphany” over and over.“She literally addressed the most unforeseeable and horrific experience I ever have gone through,” Shiffrin said of Swift, whose parents have each dealt with cancer. “It speaks directly to the experiences I had in the hospital with my dad.“It was hard to listen to and heart-wrenching but also uplifting at the same time, which is something I really needed at that time.”Shiffrin’s return to competition in the 2021-22 season included a string of triumphant results, as well as a shocking, demoralizing outing at the Beijing Olympics, where she did not win a medal. Since then she has won 20 races, which puts her on pace for roughly 130 career victories if she were to race five more years. The previous World Cup wins record, which stood for 34 years, was 86. She has won 14 world championship medals, one shy of the most in a career.But whatever Shiffrin’s future holds, she is sure of two things. The first is that given her level of sporting fame, Shiffrin could likely arrange to meet Taylor Swift, but she is afraid to do so.“I’d probably trip over myself and be so tongue-tied,” Shiffrin said, laughing. “And then it’d be memorable to her because it’s the first time she’s experienced, like, a goofball.”The second certainty is that she will use Swift as a model to help define the next era of her career, regardless of how many Alpine skiing records she accumulates.“Taylor Swift has reset so many records and held so many titles in the music industry that they have had to create new ways to measure her success,” Shiffrin said. “And I’ve noticed that she just keeps going.”Does that help solve Shiffrin’s central dilemma: What to do next?“Well, there’s an entire universe inside Taylor Swift’s mind that we haven’t tapped into yet — maybe we’ve tapped into 1 percent of what she can accomplish because of her music,” Shiffrin said. “And I think about my skiing in a similar way. I’m closer now to reaching my potential, but it’s not about a record or another title.“I’ve noticed Taylor just keeps going. In a way, you never finish doing that work.” More

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    Watch Taraji P. Henson Sing in ‘The Color Purple’

    The director Blitz Bazawule narrates a scene from the musical, featuring the star performing as the dynamo Shug Avery.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Shug Avery knows how to make an entrance.The sultry nightclub singer lights up a room, and a swamp, in this scene from “The Color Purple,” the film musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel. At the beginning of the sequence, a performance of the song “Push Da Button,” Shug (Taraji P. Henson), wearing a shimmering red dress and a feathered headdress, arrives at a juke joint on a barge.The director Blitz Bazawule, narrating the sequence, said that his production designer, Paul D. Austerberry, suggested shooting it on location, rather than on a soundstage. They found a swamp in Georgia that they drained and refilled, to build the juke joint in which Shug performs.Bazawule said that it took two weeks of rehearsal to figure out the blocking, with choreography by Fatima Robinson. It was “very important that we gave Taraji an opportunity to shine,” he explained. Henson does all of her own singing in the scene, having taken vocal lessons to prepare for the role.An idea for a dance break while the lights are shut off came to Bazawule when he was on set early one day, before shooting, and saw the environmental lights on. “The blue light started to bleed through,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘I think that’s it. If we can go from light to darkness this way, I think we could have something special.’”Read the “Color Purple” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Taylor Swift Has the Most Weeks at No. 1 on the Album Chart

    The latest success of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” gives Swift 68 weeks atop the Billboard 200, surpassing Elvis Presley’s record.Given how much Taylor Swift dominated music and pop culture in 2023, it’s only appropriate that the year’s album chart ended with Swift on top.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the star’s remake of her pop crossover hit from 2014, led the Billboard 200 for the last two weeks of the year, notching the album’s fourth and fifth times at the top and helping Swift break yet another record.With the latest chart, Swift has now earned a total of 68 times at No. 1, over 13 of her LPs, which surpasses Elvis Presley for the most appearances in the top slot for a solo artist. Of all acts, only the Beatles have been at No. 1 more times — 132 — in the history of Billboard’s flagship album chart, which dates to 1956.In its latest week out, “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” had the equivalent of 98,000 sales in the United States, including 48.5 million streams and 61,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. In the nine weeks since the new “1989” was released in late October, it has had the equivalent of 2.8 million sales and just over one billion streams in the United States alone.Half of the latest Top 10 is occupied by seasonal albums, led by Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” at No. 2. The others are Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” (No. 4), “A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector” (No. 7), Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas” (No. 8) and Pentatonix’s “The Greatest Christmas Hits” (No. 10). Those titles are likely to plunge down next week’s chart, if not vanish from it entirely, as listeners tend to pack up their holiday streaming playlists with the ornaments and wrapping paper on Dec. 26.Also this week, Nicki Minaj’s “Pink Friday 2” is No. 3 and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 5. More