Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Immediate Family’ Review: Unpacking a Musical Kinship

    The session musicians who helped create the soundtrack of 1970s pop step into the spotlight in the director Denny Tedesco’s documentary.“Immediate Family,” Denny Tedesco’s amiable documentary, could use a subtitle, as it’s not an intimate domestic portrait. It focuses on the currently touring rock band that comprises session players who defined the sound of American pop and rock in the 1970s, while for decades playing with the likes of James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and more.Tedesco is the son of the West Coast guitar great Tommy Tedesco, and he clearly has a knack for getting musicians to open up. The band members — the guitarists Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, Steve Postell; the bassist Leland Sklar; and the drummer Russ Kunkel — all relate their individual bios in relaxed, candid fashion. “Immediate Family” takes its time limning their skills and showing how they survived the 1980s, when session gigs became scarce. (Kortchmar’s remedy was to embrace new music technology and use it to boost Don Henley’s solo career after the Eagles disbanded.)Kortchmar’s playing is always in the service of the song and whatever depths that song is trying to plumb. Kunkel’s drumming is metronomically perfect, with powerful fills. Sklar’s sinuous bass playing reminds one of the influential jazz legend Steve Swallow, with a more pop sensibility. And Wachtel is a rhythm master with a bottomless bag of licks and leads. The chord structure of Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is elemental, but Wachtel’s practically nonstop nasty embellishments make lines like “He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim” really sing. Postell, a decade younger than Sklar, the most-senior bandmate, has a varied background that includes time with David Crosby, who appears here singing the praises of all of these musicians.Their stories are often funny, like one in which Wachtel recounts hammering out “Werewolves” all night with guest rhythm players Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, only to conclude that they had nailed the song on Take 2.Immediate FamilyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Godard Cinema’ Review: A Convention-Defying Auteur

    This documentary looks at the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound.Making sense of the career of Jean-Luc Godard is both impossible and contrary to the spirit of his art. More than any other filmmaker, Godard, over six decades of features, sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound. He long ago left behind intelligibility, at least in the conventional sense.But if an overview were your goal, Cyril Leuthy’s documentary “Godard Cinema” — which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022, just eight days before Godard’s death at 91 — acquits itself reasonably well. It refuses to reduce Godard’s output to the relatively accessible French New Wave period and tries to deal with him in all his thorniness.There is Godard the film lover turned film director, who had made a decisive break with his childhood and who, beginning with “Breathless” in 1960, rewrote the rules of cinematic storytelling. His work continued to defy precepts of commercialism, language and politics. Interviewed in the documentary, Marina Vlady, the star of Godard’s “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” (1967), recalls the difficulty of acting the complicated texts that the director would read into her earpiece.Leuthy’s survey doesn’t ignore Godard’s bizarre flirtation with Maoism or the abrasive, often-neglected films he made with the politicized Dziga Vertov Group, in a period that forced him to acknowledge the contradiction of making art collectively in an auteurist medium. (The filmmaker Romain Goupil recalls that holding majority votes during the editing process wasn’t really suited to Godard the poet.)Rebirth came, oddly, in part because of Godard’s interest in video. The 1975 unveiling of “Numéro Deux,” which harnessed and interrogated the technology, was “really a moment when Godard allows himself for the first time in a long time to say ‘I,’” the film historian Antoine de Baecque says. And from there, Godard never stopped.For many, the attraction at Film Forum, where “Godard Cinema” opens this week, is not the documentary but the short that precedes it, a final work from Godard screening under the title “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.” It is essentially storyboards in motion: The cinematographer Fabrice Aragno has described it as an offshoot of Godard’s preparations to adapt a 1937 novel, “False Passports,” that won its author, Charles Plisnier, the Goncourt Prize.The short is filled with cryptic witticisms (“It’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there”), abstract artwork, photographs, film clips (from Godard’s own “Notre Musique”) and even Godard himself in voice-over explaining his ideas about Plisnier (“He was more like a painter than a writer”). That’s after the sound kicks in, which takes a while.Godard CinemaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Greta Gerwig, ‘Barbie’ Director, to Head Cannes Film Festival Jury

    The director and writer behind “Barbie,” “Little Women” and “Lady Bird” will help pick the winner of next year’s Palme d’Or, the festival’s main prize.This year’s Cannes Film Festival didn’t host the biggest movie of the year — “Barbie” — but the film’s director and co-writer, Greta Gerwig, will have a significant role at next year’s event.Cannes’s organizers announced on Thursday that Gerwig will lead the jury at the 77th edition of the glitzy festival, scheduled to run from May 14-25, a role in which she will help decide the winner of the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.Gerwig will be the first-ever female American director to take the role. And at 40, she will be the second youngest person to be jury president, following Sophia Loren, the Italian actress, who was 31 when she chaired the jury in 1966.Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s artistic director, and Iris Knobloch, its president, called Gerwig the “obvious choice” for the role. The director, writer and actress, they added in a joint statement, “audaciously embodies the renewal of world cinema” and “is also the representative of an era that is breaking down barriers and mixing genres, and thereby elevating the values of intelligence and humanism.”Gerwig, who is also known for movies including “Frances Ha” (which she co-wrote and starred in), “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” (which she both wrote and directed) said in the news release announcing her appointment that she was “stunned and thrilled and humbled” to have been named the jury president.“As a cinephile, Cannes has always been the pinnacle of what the universal language of movies can be,” Gerwig added: “I cannot wait to see what journeys are in store for all of us.”The lineup for next year’s festival is scheduled to be announced in April. More

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    36 Hours in Joshua Tree, California: Things to Do and See

    7 a.m.
    Hike to the site of a real-life Western drama
    California’s high-desert scenery often feels like the backdrop of an old western (in Pioneertown, northwest of the park, a set used for many films of the western genre still stands). For the nonfiction version of Wild West-like drama, enter the park via the west entrance and hike to the site of a showdown near the Wall Street Mill, once used to process gold mined in the area. In 1943, two neighbors entered into a fatal duel over a property line disagreement along what’s now the trail. On the path, a sign commemorating the shootout reads, “Here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.F. Keys.” The sign is a replica of the original one that Keys, the mill’s owner, made and installed himself. At the end of the path, you’ll reach the ruins of the mill, flanked by rusted-out antique cars. The relatively easy hourlong round-trip feels like traveling back in time. More

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    A Wedding That’s Also a Rave? More Couples Say ‘I Do.’

    As the popularity of electronic music at weddings grows, it’s out with the hotel ballrooms and in with the raves — grandparents included.When Stephen Le Duc posted on a Reddit forum proposing a meet-up at a music festival, he had no idea he would meet his future wife.In 2019, Mr. Le Duc, a mechanical engineer, was headed solo to the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, an annual dance music festival. He met up with Olivia Le Duc, then Olivia Brents, who had responded to his post, and soon realized they shared not only a love of raves, but also swing dancing and retro culture. At the festival, they fell in love.Two years later, at that same festival, Mr. Le Duc, now 38, traded “kandi” — beaded bracelets typically exchanged at a rave — with Ms. Le Duc, a 28-year-old e-commerce merchandiser. The beads spelled out “marry me.”The couple, who live in Long Beach, Calif., knew from the start that they wanted an unconventional celebration; their families did not. When his wife’s grandmother suggested a church wedding, “I was like, ‘Oh, no, that can’t happen,’” Mr. Le Duc said, with a laugh.In recent years, many couples have swapped out more traditional receptions for raves and all night dance parties, prioritizing the music over (almost) all else. Celebrations can range from rave-themed after parties to million dollar, multiday productions that rival a music festival. On The Knot, a wedding planning site and vendor marketplace, searches for electronic dance music genre D.J.s jumped 156 percent in the first nine months of this year from the same period a year ago.“I think couples are really feeling empowered to reimagine tradition,” said Hannah Nowack, the senior weddings editor at the Knot. “Weddings aren’t one size fits all.” Décor like disco balls, neon lights and LED dance floors — things that make dancing “a focal point” — are popular, she said.At the Le Ducs’ wedding this March at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, Calif., a piano rendition of their favorite EDM song sound tracked the bride’s walk down the aisle. In addition to rings, they traded aquamarine- and garnet-studded kandi bracelets during the ceremony, which included a mention of “PLUR,” a mantra popular in the rave community that stands for “Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.”In addition to rings, the Le Ducs traded “kandi,” or beaded bracelets, that spelled out “PLUR,” a mantra popular in the rave community that stands for “Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.”Jeff ThatcherFor a certain demographic, a massive festival-like wedding has long been popular. “The average wedding I do has a $3 million budget,” said Vikas Sapra, a D.J. who works with 4AM, a management company for D.J.s and producers, in New York. “They are well-traveled, so they’re hitting all the international party spots: Ibiza, Mykonos, St Barts, St Tropez — that whole ecosystem. And obviously Burning Man, Coachella.”Many couples he has worked with host their weddings at estates in Mexico, Israel and Morocco where there are fewer limitations — often in deserts where they can “basically build structures from scratch to hold all the speakers and the lighting and the sound,” Mr. Sapras said. One wedding with more than 400 guests in Mexico that he D.J.’d went until 9:30 a.m. and involved pyrotechnics, a drone show and a replica of the Colosseum. “There’s also generally a lot of substances at some of these weddings — to go until 9 in the morning, to make it like a 15-hour day, it requires a little help,” Mr. Sapra said. “These days, psychedelics are much bigger.”In the United States, cities like Palm Springs are popular for more alternative outdoor weddings. Trish Jones, a wedding planner in Palm Springs, has organized parties with CO2 guns, cold sparklers and many neon lights. “I have friends that are planners in L.A. and Pasadena and Orange County and their weddings are all really basic,” she said. “They’re a lot of times in hotels, ballrooms — you can’t really modify those very much. You’re kind of working with the template. Out here, we have a lot more freedom.”For Michelle Phu, a wedding planner in Dallas with a primarily Asian American clientele, couples have requested EDM music for their receptions for years. “But lately it’s been like, hey, let’s just forget about the father-daughter dance, forget about all this stuff — it’s just a full-time rager from the beginning to the end,” she said.“I’m Asian myself, and I feel like we value our parents’ opinions a lot,” Ms. Phu said. “With that, you just want to make sure your parents are happy with it, listening to their guidance on how to plan your wedding. Lately, a lot of my clients are like, let’s just do what’s best for us versus what’s best for our parents — that’s the biggest shift I think so far.”“If you put on Pitbull, your laptop is being thrown into the Hudson,” said Alison Kalinowski.Rachel Rosenstein“For at least a few minutes,” she wanted her wedding to William Arendt, in suspenders, “to feel like a nightclub in Berlin,” she said.Rachel RosensteinAlison Kalinowski, 29, bought her first Tiësto CD when she was 10 — her brother and Polish parents exposed her to dance music early on. So when it was time for Ms. Kalinowski, who works in health tech, to plan her wedding to William Arendt, a 29-year-old engineer, music was the priority. She knew what she didn’t want: “If you put on Pitbull, your laptop is being thrown into the Hudson.”Ms. Kalinowski, however, acknowledged that “if I did four hours of straight rave music, no one will have fun except me.” So, for their April 15 wedding at Maritime Parc in Jersey City, N.J., she told the D.J. that “for at least a few minutes, I want my wedding to feel like a nightclub in Berlin.”Some couples go straight to the source by simply getting married at a dance music festival. Adrian Rudow, a 29-year-old accountant, and her husband, Adam Rudow, a 30-year-old games programmer, have attended E.D.C. in Las Vegas nine times together. In May, the couple, who also live in Long Beach, married at a chapel on the festival grounds in a ceremony that took 15 minutes.Ms. Rudow wore a custom sparkling outfit with platform heels and fluffy earrings, while her husband wore a white sequin suit. Her two younger sisters, who acted as her maids of honor, were each clad in rainbow print. “I feel like there’s no rule book anymore,” she said. When they held a larger reception in October, the music turned to “everything that we really like — trance, progressive house,” Ms. Rudow said. “Seeing my grandma dance to that was the funniest thing.”Adam and Adrian Rudow have attended the Electric Daisy Festival in Las Vegas nine times together. In May, they married on the festival grounds. “I feel like there’s no rule book anymore,” Ms. Rudow said. Cozza MediaAnd that is often the couples’ intention: to expose their broader communities to their passions. At the Le Ducs’ wedding reception in Palm Springs, Moses Samuel — a friend they had met at a rave who acted as officiant — performed a 30-minute fire spinning set. Ms. Le Duc danced with her LED hula hoop and Mr. Le Duc took out his light-up baton. They also handed out light-up crowns, mini-fiber optic whips and light sticks — party favors that even their parents’ friends enjoyed.“I was concerned about my mom because she’s in her 70s and this is not quite her cup of tea,” Mr. Le Duc said. But “she pulled me aside and she goes, ‘I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had.’” More

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    ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Review: Bringing a Classic Record to Life

    A new Off Broadway musical adds the thrill of intimacy and the weight of history to the Cuban songs popularized on a 1997 album.The boleros, sons, danzóns and other popular Cuban song forms captured on the hit 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club” — and in a 1999 Wim Wenders documentary about the musicians who made it — are a marvel: diabolically catchy, lively yet poetic, mesmerizingly complex beneath their seeming simplicity.Those are qualities that few jukebox musicals have going for them. Usually, if the borrowed tunes are catchy, they’re prosaic. Or if poetic then dreary. Or if complex then irrelevant.But the full-of-riches jukebox musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater, avoids all those problems. Particularly in its rendition of the “Buena Vista” songbook — including eight numbers from the original album and seven from later iterations — the production, directed by Saheem Ali, enhances (instead of merely exploiting) the music with the thrill of its liveness. The social dancing that accompanies some songs is often just as exciting. And if the narrative draped over those high points is a bit droopy, and the staging a bit choppy, they also give contour and context to what would otherwise be just a concert, albeit a joyous one.Like the documentary, the musical’s book, by Marco Ramirez, uses the “Buena Vista” recording sessions, at a Havana studio in 1996, as its framework. There we efficiently meet the veteran musicians who have gathered under the direction of a young Cuban producer, Juan De Marcos (Luis Vega), to make an album of “songs from the old days.” These musicians include the singer-guitarist Compay Segundo (Julio Monge), the pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling), the tres player Eliades Ochoas (Renesito Avich) and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé). Together they will prove, as De Marcos puts it, that “Mozart’s got nothing on us.”So far, so semi-true. But Ramirez soon begins his departure from the facts by establishing the singer Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon) as the star of the sessions and thus of the show. (In reality, though she was already a Cuban national treasure, she sang just one track on the original album.)Accurate to life or not — and perhaps it’s better to think of the musical as an adjacent story in the Buena Vista universe — she’s a fine theatrical creation: a musician of great emotion (Compay calls her “the Queen of Feeling”) and a woman of commensurate hauteur. When Juan tries to introduce an unexpected woodwind riff to her “scorching rendition” of the song “Candela,” she cuts him right down — and you don’t want to get cut down by the regal Belcon. “No one ever recorded a ‘scorching rendition’ of anything with a flute,” she says.Omara is the musical’s portal to the past, which Ramirez, best known for another quasi-historical work — “The Royale,” inspired by the prizefighter Jack Johnson — traverses at liberty. We thus meet Omara not only in 1996 but also 40 years earlier, as a young woman on the edge of stardom in a double act with her sister, Haydee (Danaya Esperanza).But while the Portuondo Sisters perform kitschy numbers for American tourists at the Tropicana nightclub, musical and political changes are brewing beyond its palmy grounds. Both can be found at the namesake Buena Vista Social Club, “a space where smoke and sweat fill the air,” according to a stage direction, and “where beer bottles keep clave rhythm.”The musical’s fizzy club dances, choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, are a delight, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRamirez overburdens this past tense with heavy subplots: gunrunning, colorism, revolution, betrayal. The more contemporary scenes are correspondingly haunted by regrets and ghosts. (The main characters are all represented by younger versions of themselves; Omara and Haydee get dance doubles as well.) It’s too much story for a two-hour show, especially in the second act, when the weight of Cuba’s painful history threatens to smother the songs. They don’t need help to bare the sadness in their souls.Still, even if you don’t understand their Spanish lyrics, the songs prevail. Never forced into literal service as signboards for the plot but instead performed atmospherically by characters who would actually sing them, they lend coherence and depth to the story with their exquisite harmonies, delirious polyrhythms and raw brass. The exceptional music production — the work of a team led by Dean Sharenow and Marco Paguia — enhances that effect with arrangements appropriate to the new contexts and the intimate space of the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. The blessedly live-sounding sound design is by Jonathan Deans.And though I was less impressed by a series of balletic duets for the young sisters, which feel labored, the fizzy club dances are a delight. As choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, they match and heighten the music with intricate close partnering as limbs find ever more intricate ways of closing the space between bodies.Ali’s staging, on a unit set by Arnulfo Maldonado that aptly suggests some of the cramped spaces in which the story transpires, does not yet reach that level. It is too often difficult, with 17 cast members and nine core musicians on the small and flatly lighted stage, to tell which location we’re in: studio, club, hotel, esplanade. Sometimes which era, too, though Dede Ayite’s taxonomy of caps and fedoras, high-waisted pants, flowy tunics and sock-hop skirts (not to mention showgirl kitsch) offers delightful clues.Cramped, too, is much of the action between the songs, lending a hectic feeling to material that wants more thoughtfulness or less bulk. Seeming to acknowledge that, the show ends weirdly and abruptly, as if cut off in mid-thought by a proctor’s stopwatch.But when the staging, singing and playing come together, whether in exuberance or sorrow, I was happily reminded of another musical about music that originated at the Atlantic: “The Band’s Visit.” (David Yazbek, that show’s songwriter, is credited here as a creative consultant.) In such moments — the hypnotic “Chan Chan,” the ear-wormy “El Cuarto de Tula,” the heartbroken “Veinte Años,” the gorgeous “Drume Negrita” — you really do feel the past harmonizing with the present. What Compay says is true: “Old songs kick up old feelings.” Even, as in the showstopping and, yes, scorching “Candela,” with a flute.Buena Vista Social ClubThrough Jan. 21 at the Atlantic Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    Nicki Minaj, a Role Model for Herself, and Others on ‘Pink Friday 2’

    On “Pink Friday 2,” the rapper remains a star navigating hip-hop on sometimes untested terms. But even as she’s receded from the center of the genre, her lessons remain.Before the arrival of Nicki Minaj in the late 2000s, only a handful of female rappers had ever released platinum solo albums: Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Da Brat, Eve. Despite their innovations and artistry — or maybe because of them — the genre had narrow expectations and accommodations for the expression of women, and often pitted them against each other, as if the space for anyone but men was zero-sum.If hip-hop wouldn’t make room, Minaj would, though. Minaj — a theater kid with a vicious tongue, a fierce freestyler, a polyvalent character actor — definitively broke that stalemate, becoming a pop superstar without having to strictly follow in the footsteps of any of those women. Instead, she expressed multitudes in her variety of song styles, her outfits, her accents and ultimately, the arc of her career. At times the latter has been in strict alignment with hip-hop’s center; sometimes it has taken her to pop excess; at other moments, it has found her pursuing a path of rap idiosyncrasy.More than a decade and a half after her first mixtape, Minaj, 41, is an elder stateswoman: still a cantankerous figure in the genre, and still a sometime hitmaker. This year, her two collaborations with Ice Spice — “Princess Diana” and “Barbie World” — cracked the Top 10, and last year, the Rick James-sampling “Super Freaky Girl” became her first solo No. 1.Last week, she released “Pink Friday 2,” her fifth studio album (coming five years after her last, “Queen”), an up-and-down collection that showcases spurts of impressive rapping, some baffling melodies and production that runs all the way from innovative to afterthought. But what’s most striking is that Minaj, more or less, is as she always has been: a star navigating hip-hop on sometimes untested terms.One of the best songs here is the shortest: “Beep Beep,” with a twinkling beat and a lyrical snarl. The cheeky “Cowgirl,” which features a saccharine hook by Lourdiz, nods back to Minaj’s 2011 hit “Super Bass.” On both tracks, Minaj, one of the most rhythmically flexible rappers of all time, plays with syllables in an unfettered way.But there are multiple Minajes on “Pink Friday 2.” It is a prototypical modern pop album, heavily — perhaps overly — reliant on big-tent samples that spark immediate familiarity (including her recent hit singles “Red Ruby da Sleeze” and “Super Freaky Girl”). In the last couple of years, instantly recognizable references have become cheat codes for pop and rap stars, but obvious sampling has also been a staple in emergent drill and club music scenes.On “Everybody” — which features Lil Uzi Vert and plays with the exuberant hook of Junior Senior’s “Move Your Feet” — Minaj is toying with the way those two approaches aren’t so dissimilar. It’s one of the most invigorating performances she gives here, because she is an elastic enough rapper to both rough up pop sheen and smooth out underground rowdiness at once.Understanding the genre as an identity playground has always been one of Minaj’s strengths, and often she’s showed off new versions of herself when collaborating. But the team-ups here with Drake (“Needle”) and Future (“Nicki Hendrix”) are surprisingly listless, though the pugnacious “RNB,” with Lil Wayne and Tate Kobang, is a standout.Minaj got married in 2019 and had her first child the following year, and perhaps unavoidably, there is also a streak of intense sentimentality on this album, a mode that Minaj, whose best verses are imagistic and eccentric, has struggled with. She raps softly and distantly on “Are You Gone Already?” which samples Billie Eilish; “Let Me Calm Down,” a duet with J. Cole about a troubled relationship; and “Last Time I Saw You,” about the death of her father in 2021. The best song in this mode is “Blessings,” which includes some deeply invested singing from the gospel star Tasha Cobbs Leonard.Songs like these tend to mark someone in a transition toward reflection and maturity. The Minaj of old still feels more present. In the five years since her last solo album, the scale of the playing field claimed by female rappers has grown exponentially. TikTok has created a springboard for a cornucopia of rising stars with breakout hits (or at minimum, breakout catchphrases). And because young performers often emerge on visual-driven social media, the next generation of stars tend to default toward more visually vibrant presentations. The territory that Minaj worked hard to carve out 15 years ago is now the default starting point.Even as Minaj has receded from the center of the genre, her lessons remain. She sometimes spars with Cardi B, but the two have much in common. Ice Spice, who channels Minaj’s cartoon-esque visual exaggeration, is on an arena tour with Doja Cat, a mainstream pop star with boom-bap bona fides who feels like Minaj’s clearest inheritor. Younger performers like Lola Brooke, Scar Lip and Sexyy Red seem like they’ve arrived fully formed.Just last week, XXL magazine released a special edition of its signature cipher series, this one including only women: Latto, Flo Milli, Monaleo, Maiya the Don and Mello Buckzz. All are under 25, and all have had some success, whether viral or on the pop chart. But their approaches vary widely.Mello Buckzz, from Chicago, served up brash, right-angled rhymes; Maiya the Don, from Brooklyn, rapped with ease, sometimes sauntering in just after the beat, unbothered; Flo Milli, from Alabama, deployed a whimsical tone while casually playing with flow patterns; Monaleo, from Houston, had a verse that was ferocious and punchline-heavy. Latto, from Atlanta, is the elder of this group, and she closed out the affair with a tart, wry and slick verse about the dueling powers of independence and alliance.It’s a snapshot, and a telling one — a reminder that there is no one way to be a woman in rap now, and that teamwork is preferable to turf war. These artists are aware of history but not beholden to it. They’re not doing Minaj cosplay, but she’s in them all.Nicki Minaj“Pink Friday 2”(Young Money/Republic) More

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    Jelly Roll: The Popcast (Deluxe) Interview

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, features an interview with the rising country star Jelly Roll, the winner of the Country Music Association award for new artist of the year and Grammy nominee for best new artist, discussing:His early career as a rapper in Tennessee and hip-hop’s influence on his music-makingTurning to selling drugs as a teenagerGreat rap from Nashville and the power of independence in the music businessWhat it took to be accepted in country music with the hits “Save Me” and “Need a Favor”How his awards show speeches and social media posts have gone as viral as his music in recent monthsLearning to be comfortable crying in his mid-30sHis guest turn as a wrestler in the WWEFeeling a responsibility to leverage the power of the country music industry to help the less fortunate in NashvilleWhite rappers making rock musicSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More