Aurelia Butler

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    Did ‘Demolition Man’ Predict the Millennial?

    A cult classic saw the future — kind of.Now that we live in the future, we no longer seem to make as many films about the future — at least not the way we once did, when we tried our hardest to imagine a future as different from the present as we were from ancient history. Today, with all of human knowledge in our pockets, we prefer to think in terms of alternate timelines, paths not taken, the multiverse of infinite possibilities. We’re looking sideways, not forward. But for most of the existence of cinema, a glorious near-centennial from “Metropolis” (1927) to, let’s say, “WALL-E” (2008), people used celluloid to dream of what lay ahead.Growing up with those movies, I liked to keep a mental scorecard concerning which of their futures seemed most likely. I would have hoped that by now we’d be experiencing the vibrant urban chaos of “The Fifth Element” (1997). But no. What about HAL and the blind faith in technological advancement that connotes progress in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)? Kind of. The computers controlled by constant hand-waving in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” (2002)? Not quite. All of these are classics, but the one that I think got it most right is a 1993 action-comedy whose hallmark is a tremendous recurring poop joke.In “Demolition Man,” a cop named John Spartan (played by Sylvester Stallone) is frozen in 1996, for spurious reasons, and thawed out in the year 2032, when Southern California has been merged into an enormous metroplex called San Angeles. He’s tasked with hunting down a homicidal maniac, played by a blond, mugging Wesley Snipes. The joke is that in this future, everyone is kind and gentle to one another. Lenina Huxley, Spartan’s ’90s-loving partner, explains that alcohol, caffeine, contact sports, meat, bad language and gasoline, among other things, are banned. “It has been deemed that anything not good for you is bad,” goes the tao of “Demolition Man.” “Hence, illegal.” ‘Demolition Man’ imagined a future generation who might view our civilization, at the peak of its powers, as utterly barbaric.The movie’s pleasure doesn’t lie in its plentiful violence (well, some of it does). It’s in the humor that arises from these future San Angeleans’ disgust over Spartan’s primitive ways, like his desire to use guns and to smoke and to have sex “the old-fashioned way,” rather than through a virtual-reality headset. They mock him over the fact that he asks for toilet paper. (Everyone now uses something called the Three Seashells, which is never explained.) Spartan is baffled by new technology like the omnipresent Alexa-like morality boxes that issue instant fines for offensive language, and kiosks that offer words of affirmation on the streets (“You are an incredibly sensitive man who inspires joy-joy feelings in all those around you”). Stallone’s cop has been subliminally rehabilitated while frozen and wakes up knowing how to knit. “I’m a seamstress?” he laments.What separates “Demolition Man” from other sci-fi films of much higher aspiration is that it imagined a future generation who might view our civilization, at the peak of its powers, as utterly barbaric. We’re not quite there, but it feels as if the world that the younger generations loathe is the one I was raised in. And in the process, this has turned the film, at least for me, into an explosive, sometimes vituperative allegory for aging. As Spartan finds out, it hurts to wake up one day and find that the world has moved on without you.Some days I feel like I’ve woken up from cryosleep, and am looking around to discover that I’m the only one who misses our previous era of casual cynicism and dubious morality and brilliant jerks. Back in the ’90s, I sat in the cinema and watched this film like thousands of other people, never imagining that I might one day feel like Spartan. I am living in the future, and I don’t belong. Everyone else has moved on. I’m still wiping myself with toilet paper instead of the Three Seashells.It’s a shame that “Demolition Man” doesn’t have more of a place in popular culture. If it has any presence at all, it’s through unhinged libertarians online. There’s a person on X, for example, who takes inspiration from the film and rants about what he describes as the “deranged parallel universe” we’re in. These types might be more similar to the only people who reject society in the movie. Led by a cholesterol-loving Denis Leary, who longs to “smoke a cigar the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking section,” they live underground eating rat burgers.I’m more ambivalent. Newly unthawed, how would I live? I turn to “Demolition Man” for guidance on how to navigate the future. Most everyone else accepts this timid new world. I can see why — it’s very appealing. Everyone is extremely nice. There’s no crime. There’s the choice of only one restaurant. (It’s Taco Bell.) No conflict is necessary because they’ve banned everything worth fighting over. If this is where we’re heading, it might be better than the past, if not as much fun, infused with a whiff of the dystopian. Everyone else seems to have made their accommodation with this future. Why can’t I?Perhaps I find this film resonant not so much because it turned out to be prophetic, but because it reminds me that I once was certain of what the future would look like and my place in it. I think I’m like Spartan, but I’m actually more like a wistful Lenina Huxley, surrounded by 1990s contraband, unable to let go. “You’re still addicted to the 20th century,” another cop admonishes her. “High from its harshness.” I know how she feels.Kabir Chibber is a writer and filmmaker. Born in Hong Kong, he lives in New York. More

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    Es Devlin Imagines Worlds That Don’t Exist

    Es Devlin is a British designer of memories and psychologies, ideas and dreams. She has created environments for operas, dance works and plays (her scenic design for “The Lehman Trilogy” won the Tony); designed concert tours for Beyoncé, U2, Kanye West, Adele and Miley Cyrus; worked on the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games and the closing ceremony of the London Olympic Games; imagined fashion shows for Louis Vuitton; and invented huge installations, centered around endangered species and endangered languages.Her cross-disciplinary work is category-defying, and so is her new monograph, “An Atlas of Es Devlin” (Thames & Hudson) — an exquisitely produced and immersive artwork in itself, containing photographs, texts, foldouts, pullouts, translucent overlays and cutout pages that reflect the intricacy and imaginative extent of Devlin’s processes, from concept to final iteration.Pop concerts, like Beyoncé’s 2016 Formation World Tour, are about achieving the intimacy of television “on a gladiatorial, sports arena scale,” said Es Devlin, the tour’s stage designer.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAn example of Es Devlin’s scenic design, using the box motif, was “The Lehman Trilogy,” shown here at the National Theater in London in 2018.via Es Devlin StudioAn exhibition of the same name, based on “An Atlas,” opens at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on Saturday, Devlin’s first major solo show in the United States. “In many aspects, it’s a three-dimensional manifestation of the book,” Devlin said in a recent interview at her home in south London, where a long refectory table in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows was laden with books on climate change, economics and art.“There is no presumption that you know what my work is,” Devlin, 52, said, describing the exhibition, which will begin in a replica of her studio before a wall opens to reveal a series of apertures, inscribed with the names of everyone she has worked with.Devlin has “reinvented the wheel in every field she has been part of, whether theater, poetry, sculpture, climate or installation,” the art historian Katy Hessel said. She added, “I would define her as a visionary.”Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, said that Devlin’s gift is not just to unite “so many different talents, of design, architecture, writing, drawing, but that she has created an art form of collaboration. She creates a communal space for the rituals of theater, pop concerts or art.”Over several hours and a vegetable curry, Devlin picked favorite works in the book and the exhibition, speaking with characteristic verve about her past, her partnerships and her passions. “For me,” she said, “there is no hierarchy between the value of the opera ‘Carmen’ and Beyoncé.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. A series of teenage sketchesA sequence of drawings by Es Devlin, 1989: Studies of a female figure constrained within a box. She later translated the box into theatrical space.Es DevlinThis sequence shows six drawings of a female figure with a box or a cube, made when I was 18 years old, in 1989. I had just started an English literature degree at University of Bristol, and I would have been reading “Beowulf” and living in the library.I was very attracted to figures of speech that conjure unstable and impossible matter, where matter and language won’t sit together. All the great poets live in this place. As I was reading and writing, I became more and more eager to draw. I resisted going to art school because the people going there knew what they wanted to say, and I didn’t. I wanted to learn.In these drawings, a person is constrained within a box that is too small, or is static within the box, or manipulating it. The person holds on to it like an iceberg, uses it like a lookout post or a climbing frame. Of course the box translates into the theatrical space. I have made several works, like “Don Giovanni,” or “The Lehman Trilogy,” using a box as a structure for design. These sketches are a map or atlas of everything I have made since.2. A hand mapEs Devlin, “Redraw the Edges of Yourself,” 2023. After making observational drawings of endangered species in London, she made a poster that shows the porosity between her hand and their form, her knuckle and the edge of a bird wing.Es DevlinLast year, Hans Ulrich Obrist, who has been a real mentor for me, called to ask me to design a poster for a project at the Serpentine called “Back to Earth.” By the next day.At the time, I was working on a project called “Come Home Again,” for which I drew 243 endangered, nonhuman species living in London. I was inspired by the environmental activist Joanna Macy and other writers who speak to the continuity of the biosphere and the self. In other words, if you saw other species and the rest of the world as a continuation of yourself, you wouldn’t harm it.I was drawing insects, fish, plants, mammals, sometimes 18 hours a day, and in a slightly hallucinatory frame of mind. When Hans Ulrich called, I just put my hand on paper, drew around it, took photos of some of the drawings, and plunked them around the outline. When I did that, I felt that continuity between myself and the species I was drawing — between my knuckle and the edge of a bird wing, the veins on my hand and on a leaf. The species are a sort of tattoo composition on the hand. This drawing, which is a D.I.Y. pop-up, is placed inside the book, as a gift.3. A line of lightEs Devlin, “Morning I,” 2009. Photograph of a line of light between curtains.Es DevlinThis is a photograph I took, around 2016, of a line of sunlight coming in through curtains or blinds. Now, every day, when I wake up, I photograph the line of light and spend about 20 quiet minutes meditating on this. In the exhibition there is a voice-over about this, with the image.Lucio Fontana, whose work I saw at the Tate as a teenager, is obviously a huge influence here. The first film I worked on, in 2008, with the composer Nitin Sawhney and the choreographer Dam Van Huynh, was a story about a person entering a line of light; in art you can! I’ve used it in many other pieces — Alastair Marriott’s “Connectome” at the Royal Ballet, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Howie the Rookie” — and I know I’ll continue to do so.4. ‘Miracle Box’Es Devlin, “Miracle Box,” 2016. She built a box covered with projections of her hands trying in various ways to access a light at the heart of the rotating cube. The work was part of a series of revolving box sculptures including Beyoncé’s Formation Tour and “The Lehman Trilogy.”Es DevlinIn 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist invited me to give a talk at the Serpentine. I thought of myself as a set designer, so I was excited to be welcomed in [the art] world, which can frankly be quite exclusive. I talked about the mechanics of the suspension of disbelief, and while I was talking, I built a box onstage — all very basic, Velcro and tape. But when I finished building it, the lights went off, music came on and the box turned, covered with projections of my hands trying in various ways — cutting through clay, paper and mirrored board — to access a light that appeared to be at the heart of the rotating cube.I have made a version of this in lots of different modes. For Beyoncé’s 2016 Formation Tour, I thought about how the art form of the pop concert is an attempt to achieve the intimacy that television, and now films, give to people, but on a gladiatorial, sports arena scale. When I first talked to Beyoncé, she had written a poem that had the line “an electric current humming through me.” I think what she was expressing in the poem was the sensation that she was a medium for her songs.When I was flying over to meet her, I made some sketches on the plane. I hadn’t heard the “Lemonade” album yet, but knew it was about a relationship and a crisis. I wanted to show something between the poster icon and [King Lear’s] “bare, forked” creature, a small figure, constantly in motion, magnified in the revolving cube.5. ‘Carmen’: The suspension of disbeliefDevlin’s opera set for “Carmen” in Bregenz, Austria, in 2017 was based on a scene where Carmen throws cards into the air.Es DevlinHands suspended between sea and sky, magic, illusion, the suspension of disbelief. This is one of my favorite things, the backdrop for the opera “Carmen,” in 2017 in Bregenz, Austria. This is an extraordinary venue for an opera festival. After the Second World War, Maria Wanda Milliore, a young set designer, suggested performances on a barge on the lake because the concert hall had been bombed. My design was the first by a woman in that spot since 1946.I was watching bull fights, wanted a big bull, but the director, Kasper Holten, said no. So we went back to the text and were looking at the scene when Carmen throws the cards into the air. As I imitated that action, Kasper said, “That’s it!”It’s really difficult to make work on a barge in a lake, to make the cards look like they are floating. One of the reasons the set is so beautiful is that there are no visible speakers. Here, whole chunks of the hands are made of gauze and are full of speakers, as are the cards. The whole thing is a big, 25-meter-high sound-emitting device.6. ‘Your Voices’Es Devlin, “Your Voices,” 2022, an installation at Lincoln Center created in collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance.Es DevlinDuring the pandemic, when so much cultural work was extinct, I had an invitation to make a piece from the Champagne house, Moët & Chandon. If this sort of project is not truthfully approached, it can end up as an advert.I wanted to collaborate with the Endangered Language Alliance, which Brian Eno had introduced me to. The anthropologist Wade Davis said, “Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind”: When we lose a language we lose a library of cultural, historical and biological references.I felt the installation should be at Lincoln Center because New York is the city that is home to the most languages — 637 at last count. I used a compass as the basis of the design for an illuminated kinetic sculpture on the plaza, mapping the languages across the city, then stretching the 637 lines across the arc to connect with one another. You could stand inside the object and it was like being inside a musical instrument. At the same time, you heard recordings of the endangered languages all around you, speaking the E.M. Forster text, “Only connect,” and other poems. There were choirs from the Bronx, a Ukrainian and Russian choir, Japanese and African choirs. It was a deeply condensed version of being in New York City.7. The iris“An Atlas of Es Devlin” opens with several layered pages with circular apertures, an iris shape, with the names of collaborators.Es DevlinThis figure turns up a lot in my work, and it is the opening piece in the exhibition. It is based on a series of eight cutout, circular layered apertures at the start of the book. In the exhibition, the room is filled with a replica of these pages with holes through the center, built to the height of the room. The visitor walks through them, and becomes part the structure.In a circle around each hole are the names of all the people who I have worked with; it’s an atlas of participation. Any collaboration is about seeing through the lens of the designer, the composer, the choreographer, the playwright, the director. What I quite like is that the iris shape isn’t stable; there are a lot of currents clashing together and centrifugally holding. This is about trying to develop a muscle to see through the lens of others. More

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    Debussy and Final Fantasy Are Peers on This Radio Stream

    Arcade, a new project by Classical California, aims to dispel preconceptions about classical music and video game soundtracks.A treacherous puzzle that lies near the end of Myst, the 1993 point-and-click video game, involves a pipe organ and a spaceship.But Jennifer Miller Hammel, a pianist who got the game as a child for Christmas that year, did not have much trouble finding the solution. The experience even showed her that video games could deeply incorporate music.Hammel, 44, is now a trained opera singer and a host at Classical California, a classical musical radio network that is a collaboration between KUSC in Los Angeles and KDFC in San Francisco. But she still loves video games, gravitating toward action-adventure and role-playing series like Fallout and Mass Effect. After nearly 150 hours of space exploration, she recently completed Starfield.The musical themes to Fallout 3 or Skyrim would occasionally be played at Classical California, Hammel said. But whenever she pitched an hourly show or a podcast that would dig deeper into video game music, she was told that the genre was polarizing. More

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    Book Review: ‘Living the Beatles Legend,’ by Kenneth Womack

    A new biography resuscitates the colorful, tragic life of Mal Evans: roadie, confidant, procurer, cowbell player.LIVING THE BEATLES LEGEND: The Untold Story of Mal Evans, by Kenneth WomackHe was a “gentle giant.” A “teddy bear” who once posed with a koala. A “lovable, cuddly guy.” Of all the people in the Beatles’ entourage, Mal Evans was indisputably the most Muppet-like.You may have seen the 6-foot-3 Evans looming over shoulders in “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s blockbuster 2021 documentary. That was him in a green, suede, fringed jacket, helping Paul McCartney puzzle out “The Long and Winding Road,” and banging an anvil on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with boyish joy in his bespectacled eyes.He was with the band almost from the beginning — first as a bouncer at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, and then as their driver, roadie and general guy Friday — and all the way to the very bitter end. He was rarely called the fifth Beatle, as was his comrade in factotum-dom, Neil Aspinall, but certainly could have qualified as the sixth or seventh.Unlike Aspinall and so many other Beatles associates, however, Evans did not receive an obituary in The New York Times when he died at 40 on Jan. 5, 1976. Nor was there a news story about the sensational cause: a fusillade of bullets from the police, summoned after he, who idolized cowboys as well as rock stars, brandished a loaded Winchester rifle in his girlfriend’s Los Angeles apartment.At the time, Evans was under contract from Grosset & Dunlap to write a long-planned (and Beatles-authorized) memoir about his time with the group, originally called “200 Miles to Go” after the night he punched out a dangerously cracked windscreen and chauffeured his charges for hours through the freezing cold. Almost 50 years later, after the manuscript and other materials were discovered languishing in a storage basement by a publishing temp and returned to Evans’s family with Yoko Ono’s help, Kenneth Womack has finished the job, with rigor and care if not a sparkling prose style. (In his pages, emotions are always reaching a “fever pitch” and the “winds of change” can actually be glimpsed.) A practiced Beatlesologist, he cleans the floors nicely, but doesn’t dance with the mop.“Living the Beatles Legend,” its wan title taken with perhaps too much respect from a later iteration of the Evans project, is an interesting case study of two matters: the collateral damage of fame and the difficult process of life writing. Reprinted journal entries and previously unseen (at least by me) snapshots, like of McCartney sunning himself on a car in the Rocky Mountains, offer the voyeuristic excitement of leafing through a private scrapbook, though many of the stories are standards.Born in 1935, Evans was a little older and posher than the Fab Four. His family waited out the Blitz in Wales; he was issued a Mickey Mouse gas mask. Nicknamed “Hippo” during a shyness-plagued school career — “I didn’t mind,” he wrote, “because it always seemed to be a fairly amiable, vegetarian type of animal, not doing anybody any harm” — he already had a wife, toddler and respectable position as a telecommunications engineer for the General Post Office when he began visiting the Cavern.There, he’d request Elvis covers that the Beatles would dedicate teasingly — and cruelly, in retrospect — to “Malcontent,” “Malfunctioning” or “Malodorous,” before hiring him for 25 pounds per week, not all expenses paid.Evans would both revel in and chafe at his subordinate role, devoting himself completely to the whims of these infantilized musicians; John Lennon need only yell “Apples, Mal” at 3 a.m., for example, and a box of Golden Delicious would materialize from Covent Garden.George Harrison, who also gets a new biography this season, once recalled Evans — a determined athlete who was chased by a stingray and risked hypothermia playing Channel Swimmer in “Help!” — leaping from a boat to buy a “groovy-looking cloak” off the back of a fan. He’d go to spectacular lengths to recover Harrison’s treasured red guitar, “Lucy,” from a thief.Evans’s reward, and ultimate punishment, for loyal service to the Beatles was sharing in their sybaritic habits. In their orbit he met scores of celebrities: Marlene Dietrich, exposing her pubic hair; Burt Lancaster, whose swim trunks he borrowed; a trouserless Keith Moon. His responsibilities included occasionally spraying overzealous fans with a garden hose and tossing them over his shoulder before ejection and — more consistently — procuring women and drugs, of which he also partook.Like a Mary Poppins of vice, Evans came to carry around a doctor’s bag filled with plectra, cigarettes, condoms, snacks and aspirin. The gentle giant was also, Womack makes plain, a clumsy compartmentalizer. His long-suffering wife, Lily, would find notes (and sometimes knickers) from groupies in his suitcases. Their children once overheard him being fellated by his girlfriend after he sent a birthday message to one of them on recycled cassette tape. An illegitimate son he sired with a fan was given up for adoption. More than the other underlings, and irritatingly to some, he insinuated himself into public photographs. He became a fan favorite. “Everybody knew Mal,” Heart’s Ann Wilson, one of Womack’s many supplemental interviewees, observed of the roar when he came onstage to set up at a Seattle concert.Increasingly, he angled for recognition and promotion. Sometimes, he was cheated of credit, as in his contributions to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; sometimes, he overreached, claiming that he helped arrange songs on the debut album of the Iveys, later Badfinger. One of the great sadnesses of Evans — along with his oft-abandoned family — is that he longed to perform himself. “Road manager for the Beatles was, for me, the next best thing,” he wrote. Like the Will Ferrell character in the deservedly famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch about Blue Öyster Cult, he did get the chance to play cowbell, on “With a Little Help From My Friends.”There’s a poignant stiffness to the diaries Evans kept, possibly for posterity, and the poetry he attempted. An ordinary man who took an extraordinary ride that ended with a terrible crash — aspiring toward honor but submitting to appetites — he is here dusted off and given a proper salute, a place on the groaning shelf of Beatles books.Though tellingly, even if by accident, his name is left off the spine.LIVING THE BEATLES LEGEND: The Untold Story of Mal Evans | More

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    André 3000 Announces Debut Solo Album, ‘New Blue Sun’

    The artist, best known as one-half of Outkast, will release “New Blue Sun,” an instrumental album of ambient woodwind compositions, on Friday.André 3000, the unpredictable rapper, producer and songwriter best known as one-half of Outkast, is finally releasing a solo album. In a twist, it has no words.Instead, “New Blue Sun,” due out Friday, “is an entirely instrumental album centered around woodwinds,” according to an announcement on Tuesday. Citing Laraaji, Brian Eno, Alice Coltrane, Steve Reich and Pharoah Sanders as influences, the musician has traded beats and raps for flutes and clarinets — a swerve he began some two decades ago as Outkast was winding down.“I’ve been interested in winds for a long time, so it was just a natural progression for me to go into flutes,” André, 48, said in the announcement. “I just like messing with instruments and I gravitated mostly toward wind.”The artist, born André Benjamin, last released an album with Outkast in 2006: “Idlewild,” the soundtrack to the duo’s movie musical. “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” the group’s Grammy-winning double album, arrived three years earlier.In the time since, André has surfaced as a featured rapper on songs by Kesha, Beyoncé, Future, Kanye West and others, appearing most recently on Killer Mike’s “Scientists & Engineers,” which was nominated last week for two Grammy Awards (best rap performance and best rap song). In 2014, André and Big Boi reunited as Outkast for a run of festival concerts.“I remember, at like 25, saying, ‘I don’t want to be a 40-year-old rapper,’” André told The New York Times in 2014, when he was 39. “I’m still standing by that. I’m such a fan that I don’t want to infiltrate it with old blood.” He added, “I don’t sit around and write raps, I just don’t. Now the only time I’m really inspired to write raps is if an artist that I enjoy invites me to their party.”The first track of “New Blue Sun” is 12 minutes long and titled, “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” (Other tracks on the eight-song ambient album include “Ninety Three ’Til Infinity and Beyoncé” and “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy.”)The album was co-produced by André and Carlos Niño, and includes contributions from the guitarist Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina on keyboards and synthesizers. André’s playing encompasses a digital wind instrument, a Maya flute and others of wood and bamboo, the announcement said.For years, he has hinted at his new, preferred musical direction. On Mother’s Day in 2018, André released two songs on SoundCloud, “Me&My (To Bury Your Parents)” and “Look Ma No Hands,” centered around bass clarinet. And spotting the musician around the world with his woodwinds, from the Los Angeles airport to the streets of Japan, has become something of a game for fans.In a new interview with NPR, André cited positive feedback for his ambient music from younger artists like Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean. “I don’t want to troll people,” André said. “I don’t want people to think, Oh, this André 3000 album is coming! And you play it and like, Oh man, no verses. So even actually on the packaging, you’ll see it says, ‘Warning: no bars.’”“In my mind, I really would like to make a rap album,” he added in the announcement. “So maybe that happens one day, but I got to find a way to say what I want to say in an interesting way that’s appealing to me at this age.” More

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    Meet the Next Generation of Black Folk Singers

    Hear songs by Amythyst Kiah, Kara Jackson, Tray Wellington and more.Amythyst Kiah.Liam Woods for The New York TimesDear listeners,“Today Black folk performers have reached a critical mass and level of exposure not seen since the early decades of the 20th century,” writes the author Adam Bradley in a fascinating article published last week in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Bradley’s piece is densely populated with a number of modern musicians who are pushing the limits of folk and reclaiming a style of music that has come to be associated — ahistorically, Bradley points out — with whiteness.What is folk music, though? It’s a slippery term that seems to mean something different to every generation. Is it strictly music rooted in the past and played with acoustic instruments, or can it include more forward-thinking artists like the Americana experimentalist Jake Blount and the blues rocker Amythyst Kiah? I like the expansive non-definition proposed by the singer-songwriter and guitarist Big Bill Broonzy, as quoted by Bradley: “Some people call these ‘folk songs,’” he said onstage once. “Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!”Today’s playlist provides an introduction to some of the musicians Bradley mentions in his article, like the folk-poet Kara Jackson and the lightning-fingered banjo player Tray Wellington. It also features some Black folk pioneers who inspired future generations, like Odetta and Tracy Chapman. May it open your ears and expand your conception of what folk is, and what it can be.Also: A very special thank you to Jon Pareles for filling in for me for Friday’s newsletter while I was on vacation! It was the first time someone else has taken the reins of The Amplifier, but I knew it was in the best of hands.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Our Native Daughters: “Black Myself”Named in reference to James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” Our Native Daughters is a formidable collective featuring four artists at the heart of the Black folk revival: Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell. Kiah wrote the powerful opening track of the group’s 2019 debut “Songs of Our Native Daughters,” and later rerecorded it on her 2021 solo album “Wary + Strange.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Kara Jackson: “Pawnshop”In April, Kara Jackson — the former National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States — released her debut album “Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?” The slinky “Pawnshop” shows off the 23-year-old’s lyricism, as she asserts in a sly voice, “I’m not a liquidated asset, I’m sharper than a jewel/What kind of miner does that make you?” (Listen on YouTube)3. Odetta: “Hit or Miss”A central figure in the 1960s folk revival, the Alabama-born singer and guitarist Odetta inspired Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and countless others with her impassioned take on traditional Americana and her unmistakable voice. “Hit or Miss,” from her 1970 album “Odetta Sings,” is one of her greatest originals. “Ain’t nobody just like this,” she sings on this soulful song of self. “I gotta be me, baby, hit or miss.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Tray Wellington: “Crooked Mind”“Tray Wellington knows that many will take the title of his 2022 album, ‘Black Banjo,’ as an oxymoron,” Bradley writes in his article. But on that album — and its lively, dexterously picked opening track — Wellington reclaims the instrument’s African origins while adding his own modern flair. (Listen on YouTube)5. Rhiannon Giddens: “You’re the One”Earlier this year, Giddens — a founding member of both the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters, as well as a prolific and ever-evolving solo artist — won a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing her first opera, “Omar,” which tells the true story of a Muslim African man enslaved in America in the early 19th century. This August, Giddens also released her third solo album (and first full LP of her own tracks), the eclectic “You’re the One,” which features this sunny, banjo-driven track. (Listen on YouTube)6. Amythyst Kiah: “Hangover Blues”“Woke up this morning, feeling bad,” the mighty Kiah wails on “Hangover Blues,” accompanied by a beat that stomps like a throbbing headache. That’s not to say, on this standout from her 2021 album “Wary + Strange,” that she regrets anything: “And if I did it all over again,” she sings, “you know I’d do the same damn thing anyhow.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Tracy Chapman: “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution”This year, the country musician Luke Combs’s hit cover of “Fast Car” has brought some much-deserved attention to Tracy Chapman and the heartfelt brand of bluesy folk for which she first became known in the late 1980s. This galvanizing opening track from her 1988 self-titled album is just as deserving of a revival. (Listen on YouTube)8. Jake Blount: “Didn’t It Rain”The 28-year-old singer, songwriter and banjo player Jake Blount — who has described his music as “genrequeer” — has one ear oriented to the past, the other to the future. His 2020 album “Spider Tales” established him as a thrilling new voice, and his 2022 follow-up “The New Faith” (which features the portentous “Didn’t It Rain”) took his ambitious vision even further. (Listen on YouTube)9. Carolina Chocolate Drops: “Hit ‘Em Up Style”In 2005, the young folk revivalists Giddens, Dom Flemons and Súle Greg Wilson formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an influential, all-Black string band with a 21st century style. As on this playful cover of Blu Cantrell’s 2001 R&B hit “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!),” the Chocolate Drops connected the dots between Black music past and present, inspiring others to do the same. (Listen on YouTube)It sounds like a whisper,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Meet the Next Generation of Black Folk Singers” track listTrack 1: Our Native Daughters, “Black Myself”Track 2: Kara Jackson, “Pawnshop”Track 3: Odetta, “Hit or Miss”Track 4: Tray Wellington, “Crooked Mind”Track 5: Rhiannon Giddens, “You’re the One”Track 6: Amythyst Kiah, “Hangover Blues”Track 7: Tracy Chapman, “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution”Track 8: Jake Blount, “Didn’t It Rain”Track 9: Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Hit ‘Em Up Style”Bonus TracksI do not think I fully understood the bluesy pathos of Green Day’s 1997 single “Hitchin’ a Ride” until I heard Amythyst Kiah’s smoldering cover, from her imaginative 2022 EP “Pensive Pop.” Highly recommended. More

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    An Opera’s Riverboat Journey Brings the Rainforest Onboard

    Mary Zimmerman, known for a dreamy approach to theater, stages the Metropolitan Opera’s company premiere of “Florencia en el Amazonas.”There really was no reason for Mary Zimmerman to get stuck while directing her new production of “Florencia en el Amazonas,” which premieres on Thursday at the Metropolitan Opera.The staging is her sixth for the Met, and at first glance, the work looked to be square in her wheelhouse. Her storytelling often has a dreamlike quality, and here was an opera suffused with poetic oneirism and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez: the tale of a diva traveling incognito on an Amazonian riverboat ostensibly to perform in Manaus, a city nestled deep in the rainforest, but really to try to reunite with her missing lover and muse, the butterfly hunter Cristóbal.Yet when time came to start conceptualizing her production, Zimmerman found herself stalling. The fit was maybe too perfect.“I’m quite a bit overidentified with Florencia,” Zimmerman said after a recent rehearsal. “I am single, and I kind of lost the great love of my life because I couldn’t stop doing theater, and I couldn’t be smaller than I was. A lot of us performers and artists with broken hearts, partly everything we put on is for that person, whether they’re going to see it or not.”Zimmerman eventually got over her bout of director’s block, to mount a milestone for the Met: Daniel Catán’s work, with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, is the company’s first by a Mexican composer. A vehicle for the soprano Ailyn Pérez, the production will also be conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.“Florencia” is almost entirely set on the boat, and most productions, starting with Francesca Zambello’s premiere staging at Houston Grand Opera in 1996, have made the ship a scenic centerpiece. But Zimmerman turned her gaze outward. “I wanted to emphasize the natural world and the outdoors,” she said. At the Met, the focus will be on what the passengers see during their journey rather than on their mode of transportation.Gabriella Reyes, center, in rehearsal for the production, in which the costumes are inspired by the Amazon River and the surrounding rainforest.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat shift of emphasis is in accordance with Catán’s score, Nézet-Séguin said. “I’ve never been in the Amazon, but any forest you first go in, it just looks like a bunch of trees and leaves the same color, then you spend a few minutes, open your eyes and there’s a million details,” he added. “I feel like this piece is this way.”Amazonian flora and fauna were a fruitful source of inspiration for the creative team, especially the costume designer Ana Kuzmanic: Even the striking outfits and headpieces that symbolize the spread of cholera were drawn from the opera’s setting. “We discovered there’s this type of bird in the Amazon called the harpy eagle, so that’s what they’re based on,” Zimmerman said. “Originally, they were just like straight-up Venetian masks, but then we made them more like the animal.”The costumes also represent physical elements like the ever-present water, at one point with the summoning of figures representing waves. “I honestly feel the blue waves are the best water costuming I’ve ever seen,” Zimmerman said. “Because representing water onstage, other than using water, is hard. It’s changeable, it’s moving all the time.” (She should know: Her breakthrough came in 2001 with a Tony Award-winning staging of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” that involved an actual pool. She also tackled opera’s most famous pond with “Rusalka” at the Met in 2017.)To Zimmerman’s delight, Catán’s score even includes musical interludes in which she could let her imagination run free. “My favorite is the three-and-a-half-minute one, which I call ‘night into day,’ or we sometimes call it ‘the creature ballet,’” she said of a scene that involves a bottle containing wedding rings. “We just love watching it and working on it.”For Nézet-Séguin, the playfulness and fluidity of Zimmerman’s staging feel like an answer to Catán’s score. “The orchestration is very inventive,” he said. “It’s, of course, evoking the nature with the birds and the noise of the forest, but it’s also very well developed in terms of adopting the general flow of the piece, which is never static. I feel like he’s so good at suggesting a constant wave, like a river or like the ocean, or any body of water, that’s never stopping.” (Catán, who died in 2011, embraced a neo-Romantic style and often has been compared to Puccini.)“Florencia sort of finds her true identity by shedding her famous identity,” Zimmerman said, “and there’s a kind of dissolution into the natural world.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJust as the landscapes change over the course of Florencia’s trip, so do the travelers — the discoveries are as emotional as they are visual. “So much is transforming and changing throughout the opera,” Zimmerman said. “Florencia sort of finds her true identity by shedding her famous identity, and there’s a kind of dissolution into the natural world, I think.”Pérez also described the opera’s journey as more than physical. “It almost becomes a subplot of a much more spiritual and community story, with a sense of humor and a sense that the destination is about enjoying the journey,” she said, “reflecting on choices and choosing love and viewing death as a rebirth into another life.”In a sense, working on “Florencia” has also meant a trip back to Pérez’s own roots. The Met hasn’t presented a Spanish-language opera in nearly a century, and Pérez, born in Chicago to Mexican immigrants, is thrilled to finally sing in the language she spoke at home as a child. “It’s not even the Castilian Spanish of Spain but Mexican Spanish, Latin American Spanish,” she said, “so I don’t have to be corrected over how I say my words for the first time in my life.”That feeling of connection, both to one’s self and to the surrounding world, makes “Florencia” a fitting addition to the Met’s efforts at greater inclusivity in recent years. For Nézet-Séguin, it’s important “to have alternative possibilities on our stage, alternating moods or ways of thinking about life,” he said. “And clearly this opera has a lot of humor, sometimes a little dry humor, sometimes more playful, and I see the production is adapting to this very much.”Zimmerman is definitely on board, so to speak, with that view. “You want to support and lift and entertain the audience,” she said. “My motto is: Never a dull moment, and always be blossoming.” More

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    ‘Harmony’ Review: Barry Manilow Writes the (Broadway) Songs

    The pop star of the 1970s and ’80s crosses over to musical theater with a dark story about pop stars of the 1920s and ’30s.How strange and, in the end, how ironic that a German singing group, founded in the chaotic last years of the Weimar Republic and forcibly disbanded less than 10 years later, should call itself the Comedian Harmonists.Yet on the evidence of the Barry Manilow musical “Harmony” — for which, yes, he wrote the songs (along with his longtime lyricist, Bruce Sussman) — the internationally famous all-male group had the “harmonist” part of their name just right. As rendered by Manilow in an often skillful, surprisingly theatrical score, the men’s tightly spaced six-part singing, sometimes reminiscent of barbershop, sometimes jazz, sometimes operetta on LSD, is so dense as to seem geological, its pitches heaving and twisting toward some new stratum of sound.But comedians? No. Neither the guys nor the grim and eventually bludgeoning show have a gift for levity.You might wonder why the show, at least, should. Though its title makes it sound as if “Harmony” would be calm and golden, its story isn’t an uplifting one. The group, consisting by chance of three Jews (one of whom marries a gentile) and three gentiles (one of whom marries a Jew), inevitably falls victim to the antisemitic restrictions of National Socialism. Soon the brotherhood, symbolized in sound by their questing choral closeness, goes sour — a story that, to be effective, needs vivid contrast so we know what’s been lost.But the version of “Harmony” that opened on Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, after a potholed, decades-long trek to Broadway, makes a beeline for the bleakest parts of the tale and then bleakens them further. Sussman’s script, relentlessly focused on historical trauma, takes reasonable dramatic license with the group’s actual history, but only in one direction: darker. And though Warren Carlyle’s production is smart and slick, it traps the tale in a figurative and literal glassy black box (by Beowulf Boritt) from which only pathos escapes.Even the opening scenes, which might have been upbeat, feel booby-trapped by the invention of a narrator looking back from 1988. He is Rabbi (Chip Zien), the last surviving Harmonist, who now lives in California, plagued by guilt. The attempt to lighten him by making him talk like a latter-day Tevye, with Yiddish inflections (“A cockamamie name, no?”) and cute codger phrases (“We were hot as horseradish”), feels both distracting and patronizing. As his twinkliness turns to anguish — and despite Zien’s forceful performance — the prominence of the character turns “Harmony” into a passive show about memory at the expense of the actual action.From left: Sierra Boggess, Zal Owen, Julie Benko and Danny Kornfeld in the musical at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe time could be better spent individuating the six-headed protagonist. As it is, each Harmonist gets just one or two traits. The younger version of Rabbi (Danny Kornfeld) is indecisive. Harry (Zal Owen) is a musical genius. Chopin (Blake Roman) is a hothead. Erich (Eric Peters) has secrets and a saying for every occasion. Bobby (Sean Bell) is all about business. And Lesh (Steven Telsey) — well, the authors seem to have run out of traits. He’s just Bulgarian.When working with the music, that’s sufficient; blending, not standing out, is the hallmark of the style. (Manilow’s vocal arrangements, written with John O’Neill, the show’s music director, are marvelous.) But as the story spreads from unison group mechanics to separate life conflicts, the texture thins to the point of flimsiness.Given that Young Rabbi is so prominent in the back story, it’s a problem, for instance, that his courtship of the gentile Mary (Sierra Boggess) is mostly a mixtape of banalities. (“This is our time!”) Only Mary, in choosing a life that may include persecution and exile, carries enough conflict to be meaningfully characterized in song. Manilow, and Boggess, come through, with the gorgeous “And What Do You See?”The other semi-fleshed-out story has an even bigger problem than lopsidedness. Chopin, whose real name was Erwin Bootz, marries Ruth, a Jew (and a firebrand Bolshevik to boot). That we never really understand the strife between them may be the result of conflation: Ruth (Julie Benko) is a composite of three of Bootz’s actual wives. No wonder she’s blurry — and worse, sacrificial. I feel I must spoil a plot point by revealing that, despite the overwhelming atmosphere of tragedy throughout, this invented Ruth is the only character who does not survive the war, a tensioning convenience that is also a red herring.Wherever it can — in the plot, in the characterizations and in the sometimes bombastic orchestrations for a heavily synthed and amped orchestra of nine — “Harmony” wields a truncheon instead of the needle it needs. It might have helped if the supposedly comic numbers were actually funny, but neither Manilow and Sussman nor Carlyle excel at that here. The lighthearted charm song (“Your Son Is Becoming a Singer”), the slapstick centerpiece (“How Can I Serve You, Madame?”) and the second-act opener (“We’re Goin’ Loco!” — which features the Harmonists and Josephine Baker in a “Copacabana”-like samba) are all manic duds.Only when the story offers a song hook that is also a dramatic one does the attempt at humor pay off, in part by offering Sussman opportunities for sharp lyrics. The title number introduces the musical style of the show but also the characters’ ideals. (“In this joint/All encounters with counterpoint/End in harmony.”) And an anti-Nazi satire called “Come to the Fatherland,” perfectly staged by Carlyle as a human marionette show, has the two-sided stickiness of real wit: “The Führer has decreed:/If you’re Anglo-Saxon/And your hair is flaxen/We want you to breed!”The group dressed as human marionettes while performing the anti-Nazi satire “Come to the Fatherland.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, “Harmony” is no “Cabaret.” It doesn’t take the risk of letting you think for yourself; everything is a billboard. The Nazis — including some who scream “Save Germany from the Jews” in the aisles of the theater, an unnecessary touch — are generic slimeballs. The Harmonists are over-animated, smiling for all they’re worth, except when they’re furious or harrowed. (Having missed a chance to alter history in 1935, Rabbi sings the bathetic “Threnody” 53 years later.) The wives are uniformly noble, facing deprivation and worse.None of this is as interesting as what actually occurred. The lives of the Harmonists were mostly full and long. (Roman Cycowski, the real “Rabbi,” made it to 97.) Instead of miring the show in horrified memory, what “Harmony” might have considered with less contortion is the accommodation we make to history as it happens. I wish it had followed through on the question Mary asks while deciding whether to marry Rabbi: “Tell me how do we live/In a world that is crumbling away/And be happy, as we are today?” But we never see that happiness.Instead, like a lot of current theater that hitches a ride on the Holocaust for dramatic propulsion, “Harmony” makes guilt and anguish its through line, unintentionally suggesting that survival and the solace of music are somehow undeserved. Luckily, after a rough ride of an evening, the finale — an intensely chromatic song called “Stars in the Night” — offers exquisite evidence to the contrary.HarmonyAt the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; harmonyanewmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More