Aurelia Butler

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” as well as her legacy with the Fugees, the singer and rapper reveled in the power of reinvention.“She is having so much fun onstage” was the surprised thought that ran through my mind as Lauryn Hill kicked off her Ms. Lauryn Hill & Fugees: “Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” 25th Anniversary Tour at the Prudential Center in downtown Newark on Tuesday night.Having grown up in nearby South Orange, N.J., her joy was partly because she was at home, and partly because we were all there to celebrate that a quarter of a century ago, she made history with her 10-times-platinum multigenre album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Its 10 Grammy nominations yielded five wins, which was a record for a female artist, and “Miseducation” became the first hip-hop LP to take home album of the year.Perhaps Hill was also amped by the high stakes of the performance. Earlier this year, her Fugees group mate Pras was found guilty for an illegal foreign influence scheme, leading some to predict that this full reconciliation of Pras, Hill and Wyclef Jean would be their final tour as a trio.Or maybe, I was projecting glee back onto her since this was the first of her concerts at which I’ve felt fully at ease since attending her initial solo tour back in 1999. Every time since — including when I bought tickets to her performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 2009, only for her entire European tour abruptly canceled — I’ve been disappointed by her inconsistency.Most of those shows came after Hill settled a suit with four musicians, known collectively as New Ark, who said she hadn’t properly credited them for their contributions to the sound and success of “Miseducation.” With the exception of the taping and release of “MTV Unplugged” in 2001, she had gone into a self-exile. “I had to step away when I realized that for the sake of the machine,” she later told Essence magazine, “I was being way too compromised.”From left: Wyclef Jean, Hill and Pras of the Fugees. The group’s set featured guest stars and beloved songs.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesWhen she returned to the stage a few years later, she had so radically rearranged the songs from the beloved “Miseducation,” they were often unrecognizable.The revisions stung fans hard because the music had spoken so directly to so many — including me. “Miseducation” was released on my 23rd birthday on Aug. 25, 1998, and because of that simple calendar fact, I thought the album was all mine. Back then, I was in transition — between a relationship with my college boyfriend and the young man who would become my life partner. I was obsessed with her B-side cuts “When It Hurts So Bad” and “I Used to Love Him” with Mary J. Blige, since these breakup songs captured my range of emotions: “What you need ironically/Will turn out what you want to be” became my mantra as I moved from heartache to hopefulness.The album was so tied up with a younger version of myself that I understood it only through nostalgia, failing to appreciate who Hill was becoming in the present. A more mature way of experiencing her live was to let go of my expectations and recognize that she was innovating, recreating and disproving past accusations of unoriginality. “There’s no way I could continue to play the same songs over and over as long as I’ve been performing them without some variation and exploration,” she wrote in 2018. “I’m not a robot. If I’d had additional music out, perhaps I would have kept them as they were.”In Newark this week, as Hill appeared onstage in a bright red ruffled corseted gilet, bedazzled sunglasses and a jeweled kufi, she entranced the crowd, reminding us that she was one of our generation’s definitive preachers and now prodigal daughters. She opened each song in its familiar arrangement, and then quickly switched up its tempo, genre or melody.The soulful “Final Hour” was remixed with the beat of “Money, Power & Respect,” the Lox’s collaboration with DMX and Lil’ Kim; the marching band from Hill’s alma mater Columbia High School joined her live band onstage for “Doo Wop (That Thing)”; Latin jazz beats were interspersed throughout the tender “To Zion,” a song for her oldest son that was not merely a tribute, but a complete triumph.The music was set to a backdrop of images that featured quotes from Frantz Fanon and Marcus Garvey, Hill’s personal home videos, and a montage of Black artists and activists including Josephine Baker and Angela Davis. My favorites showed Hill over time, which seemed in direct conversation with the beautiful black-and-white photographs of the musician looking into a mirror from the liner notes of “Miseducation” itself.For those unaccustomed to Hill’s latest style, her musical digressions often sound dissonant. In a way, they are right. The remixes can be disinviting, and many fans near me in the crowd found it hard to keep up with her changes. Whereas Taylor Swift’s note-for-note versions of her old albums are celebrated, I am increasingly intrigued by Hill’s appetite for revolutionizing her older material.Hearing these songs rearranged not only forced me to pay closer attention to her powerfully packed lyrics and melodic rhyme flow, but also reactivated my sense of curiosity, anticipation and admiration for her.Hill is known for rearranging the songs from “Miseducation” onstage.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn a genre like hip-hop, where remixing, sampling and turning older music into the new is a core artistic principle and central practice, Hill’s experimentation is not that surprising. But as a female rapper, she has often been held to a double standard and has had to play by different rules. Onstage, she isn’t merely entertaining us; she’s showing us what it means to have to reclaim this album as fully hers, while pushing her artistry into the future.It is a big ask from an artist with only one full album. And it’s a meaningful challenge to the very notion of the “great” album, which has a timelessness that is as dependent on its spirit of innovation and production value as well as our personal connections to it — how much we loved it, and the vision of ourselves that it projected back onto us when we heard it for the first time. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, is it possible to both champion Hill’s groundbreaking contributions to the genre while also allowing the album itself to grow up as much as we have?An answer of sorts came during another part of the show. When Pras and Wyclef finally joined Hill for the second set, their reunion relied on our familiarity with the Fugees’ catalog — “Vocab,” “Zealots,” “The Mask” — and at one point, there were more than eight people onstage with mics, including guests such as John Forte, Outsidaz and Remy Ma, for a roaring rendition of “Cowboys.” It was a joy to see the three intact and their playful competitiveness and musical chemistry restored. While being flanked by so many of her male peers, Hill still commanded the space as she always did, proving her mettle as one of our greatest M.C.s.But as the Fugees set wore on, I began to long for the “Miseducation” one. Suddenly, I wanted to linger in the unpredictability of Hill’s arrangements, her constant improvising, her seamless movement between singing and rapping.By finally accepting Hill’s ability to change, I realized that I had misread so much before. Here was an artist — once again, and on tour — rewriting the rules of hip-hop, and American popular music at large. She was not just teaching us how to hear “Miseducation” differently, but showing us what it looks like for a musician to truly evolve and redefine what we call a classic as something brand-new. More

Before the pop star releases her memoir next week, here’s a look back at her life since the guardianship controlling her affairs was terminated in 2021.In June 2021, Britney Spears spoke to a Los Angeles courtroom, giving an impassioned 23-minute statement about her struggles under the conservatorship that had controlled her personal and business decisions for 13 years.“I’ve been in denial,” she said. “I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized. I just want my life back.”It was the first time the pop star, who rose to fame in the late 1990s, had provided a window into her realities of the legal arrangement that her father, James P. Spears, had petitioned for in 2008, citing her public mental health struggles and possible substance abuse. During the decade-plus that Spears was restricted by the guardianship, she performed a Las Vegas residency and released four albums; behind the scenes, she said, she lived in terror and shame, unable to make decisions about her work or her own body.Five months after Spears’s speech, Judge Brenda Penny terminated the conservatorship.Spears embraced her sudden freedom to speak freely, unloading about family betrayal and years of isolation on her Instagram, her main outlet for communication with her fans. Now, Spears, 41, is making her biggest statement yet with “The Woman in Me,” a memoir that will be officially released on Tuesday. In it, she says that since the end of the conservatorship she has tried to “rebuild my life day by day.”“I’m trying to learn how to take care of myself,” she writes, “and have some fun, too.”Here’s what’s happened since the end of the conservatorship — in the public sphere, at least.Spears’s personal lifeWhen Spears gave her emotional speech to the Los Angeles judge, she said that two of the conservatorship’s restrictions that pained her the most were limitations on getting married and having another baby.Several months after the arrangement ended, she married her boyfriend, Sam Asghari, whom she met when he was in her music video for the song “Slumber Party.” The marriage lasted just over a year; he filed papers asking for a divorce in August. (The book does not get as far as the split, mentioning their relationship only in positive terms.)In April 2022, Spears announced that she was pregnant, but the next month, the couple said that she had had a miscarriage. It would have been her third child, after two sons with her ex-husband Kevin Federline.“I’d been so thrilled to be pregnant that I’d told the whole world,” she writes in the book, “which meant I had to un-tell them.”In the immediate aftermath of the conservatorship’s end, Spears was outspoken on her Instagram about the ways she felt her family had wronged her, but earlier this year, she signaled in an Instagram post that she may be softening, at least toward her mother. Lynne Spears — who, she writes in the book, supported the creation of the conservatorship — showed up at her doorstep, and her daughter appeared to embrace a reconciliation. “Time heals all wounds !!!” she wrote.Tensions between Spears and Federline over their teenage children spilled into public view last year, when the singer’s ex-husband gave an interview in which he said their sons had been unwilling to see their mother. Spears responded by criticizing Federline’s decision to speak publicly about their children; in her memoir, she writes about the highs and lows of motherhood but does not discuss any estrangement with her sons.Her careerSpears last released an album, “Glory,” in 2016; the final date of a limited tour supporting it was in 2018.In her book, Spears says she’s hesitant to jump into making music again, but one person who did entice her back into the studio was Elton John. She says the 76-year-old rocker sent her a video message asking her to collaborate on “Hold Me Closer,” a duet that remixes some of his hits, including “Tiny Dancer.” The recording session took a few hours in the basement of a producer’s Beverly Hills home, she writes, describing the track, which was released in 2022, as the first new song made on her own terms in a long time.“Mind Your Business,” a song with a former collaborator, Will.i.am, was also released this past summer. And a long-gestating Broadway musical about fairy tale princesses fighting for their emancipation that featured her music opened in June, closing a little over two months later. (The singer offered some support to the show in an Instagram post, but she did not attend, and some fans remained leery of a project instigated amid the conservatorship.)In courtSince the termination of the conservatorship, there has been an ongoing legal battle around wrapping up the arrangement that long managed the fortune that Spears had made as an international pop sensation.A judge rejected a request from Spears’s father, known as Jamie, that she be deposed, but he was ordered to sit for a deposition; its details have not been made public. There has been ongoing legal wrangling over some of the accounting from the conservatorship years, as well as over who will pay Jamie Spears’s legal fees.One specific area of dispute involves Jamie Spears’s attempts to secure documents from an investigative firm that accused him in court papers of directing a surveillance apparatus over his daughter’s activities, including placing a “secret recording device” in her bedroom. The singer’s father denied authorizing such a device in a court filing, and he has said for years that his intentions in the conservatorship were always to protect his daughter.Still, the biggest issue at the heart of the case — whether Spears should be in charge of her personal life and estate — remains resolved.“Her civil liberties were stripped away and now they are back, and I think that’s what anyone would want,” Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, said in a statement this week.Moments in the spotlightPerhaps Spears’s most widely discussed public debacle in the past two years involved a rising N.B.A. rookie named Victor Wembanyama.In July, according to Spears’s account, the singer tried to greet Wembanyama outside of a hotel in Las Vegas when a member of the player’s security team backhanded her in the face. She demanded an apology, but the security team denied that she had been hit directly, saying that a guard had pushed her hand off Wembanyama. No charges were filed.The most consistent magnet for attention in Spears’s life, however, has been the singer’s unfiltered and often eccentric Instagram account. Tabloids regularly seize on photos and videos of Spears dancing in her home and posing in various outfits, at times in the nude.In her memoir, she seeks to explain her instinct toward revealing her inner life to fans.“I know that a lot of people don’t understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or in new dresses,” she writes. “But I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture.”Since the end of the conservatorship, the posts have regularly stirred up debate among fans and observers about whether she has the support she needs post-conservatorship. Earlier this year, fans called the police to check on Spears after her Instagram account disappeared, and last month, another call was put in to the police after she posted a video of herself dancing with a pair of what appeared to be kitchen knives. She clarified on Instagram that the knives were, in fact, props.“So unacceptable for cops to listen to random fans and come in to my home unwarranted,” she wrote on Instagram. “I’ve been bullied in my home for so long now…ITS ENOUGH!”In her book, she writes, “Freedom means taking a break from Instagram without people calling 911.”As some fans fret on social media about how the pop star is handling the effects of being suddenly released from intense, long-term oversight, others insist that this is exactly what the #FreeBritney movement had been working toward: uninhibited free expression.“We always said that we wanted Britney to live her life on her own terms, whatever that may look like,” said Kevin Wu, who started organizing within the #FreeBritney movement in 2019, when fans began to coalesce in opposition to the conservatorship. “I’m trying to live by that and leave Britney alone because I think that’s what she would want.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe new Drake album, “For All the Dogs,” isn’t an innovation in the Drake oeuvre. It’s not a home for stylistic experimentation, or a collection of forward-looking lyrics. Instead, it’s an extension and distillation of what he’s been doing for a decade and a half: tell personal stories cut with boasting, providing a view into the broken heart of a superstar.And yet the album has led to some of the most divisive discourse of Drake’s career, leading to conversations about maturity and misogyny. It also sets the table for debates about what a post-Drake era in hip-hop might look and sound like.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Drake’s creative boundaries, how he’s managed to ward off stylistic shifts in hip-hop, and how he might approach the middle and later years of his recording career.Guests:Justin Charity, senior staff writer at The RingerDylan Green, contributing writer at PitchforkConnect 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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

David Robertson returned to the podium to lead the orchestra’s first in a series of performances to celebrate the centennial of Gyorgy Ligeti’s birth.It’s always a good sign when an orchestra’s players light up with smiles at a conductor.And on Thursday night at David Geffen Hall, that happened over and over, with grins passing between the musicians of the New York Philharmonic and its podium guest, David Robertson, throughout a beguiling, smart program.The concert began the Philharmonic’s festivities to celebrate the centennial of the Hungarian-Austrian composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s birth. Robertson led the U.S. premiere of “Mifiso la Sodo,” a short work for chamber orchestra that Ligeti wrote as a student in Budapest in 1948. He began revisions three years later, but never finished the job; the piece lay dormant until last year.With its punchy, fake Italian title, “Mifiso” is crammed full of little musical jokes, show-off brilliance and jovial accents. Ligeti gave it the subtitle “Cheerful Music,” which is both an ironic riposte to the Stalinesque dictums that ruled the Hungarian arts in the 1940s and ’50s and a true description of this piece.Robertson also resurrected a Ligeti work that the Philharmonic hadn’t played since 2004 (conducted by him back then, too): “Concert Romanesc,” or “Romanian Concerto,” a hurricane of color and exuberant virtuosity from 1951 that draws upon Romanian folk music. In this concerto for orchestra, there’s a particularly charming portion in which the basses pluck away, in gritty gutbucket style, while the violins whirl overhead in a zippy dance.Another concerto — the Russian-born, London-based composer Elena Firsova’s Piano Concerto — provided a marked contrast in a delicate work that inverts the genre’s traditional fast-slow-fast structure. Firsova wrote it in 2020 for Yefim Bronfman, who gave its New York premiere on Thursday. (The performance was also the Philharmonic’s first of Firsova’s music.)Firsova’s concerto diverged from the energy of Ligeti by ushering in a meditative pause with a solitudinous, brief introduction. One of her main themes is a wistful, upward-spiraling scale that darts through the piano and the various instruments of the orchestra. Near the end, she retreats into evanescent, gossamer textures from which a haunting, music box-like set of patterns emerges from the glockenspiel, vibraphone, tubular bells and the piano, which is played near the top of its range. Bronfman, an assiduous supporter of Firsova’s work, played with commanding surety.The evening’s second half was devoted to Brahms’s Serenade No. 1, which originally was envisioned as a small chamber piece, but then Brahms kept expanding it. In its final version, the piece’s instrumentation is still lithe — just two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, French horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings — but the winds and brasses in particular brought in a welcome plushness. The phrasing, under Robertson’s baton, was shapely and intentional, while tracing a persuasive through line back from Ligeti at the start of the program.Robertson’s name has been raised from time to time over the years as a potential music director of the Philharmonic. While that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, those big grins from players across the stage — not to mention their committed, warm performances — made the musicians’ feelings clear.New York PhilharmonicThrough Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

Captain Force was part of the pomp and ceremony at 10 presidential inaugurations, and for 45 years he taught midshipmen to revere traditional military music.Kenneth Force, who as the leader of the Merchant Marine Academy Regimental Band from 1971 to 2016 was one of the nation’s foremost experts in the art of military pomp, died on Oct. 7 in Rye, N.Y. He was 83.A former student of his, Marianne Lepre, said the death, at a long-term nursing facility, was caused by respiratory failure brought on by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Military music arose historically as a means of communicating orders to troops, but it has long since become a ceremonial custom, with trumpet-tooting and drum-rolling tunes like “Hail to the Chief” and “The Red, White and Blue.”A military man might say that Captain Force exerted full-spectrum dominance over this territory.At one time or another, he conducted the U.S. Marine Corps Band, which performs for the president; the band of the Black Watch, a Scottish infantry battalion; the bands, in Britain, of Her Majesty’s Grenadier Guards, Welsh Guards and Royal Marines; and the Dutch Royal Military Band.He performed at 10 presidential inaugurations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s.“It’s not likely anyone is keeping score,” Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote in an Our Towns column in 2009, “but there can’t be too many people who have participated in more inaugurations than Captain Force, now 68 and something of a Toscanini of military marching bands.”Captain Force at the Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island in 2009. He lived on its grounds for decades.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe earned that distinction principally as director of music at the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., on Long Island. His band members were not aspiring musicians; they were midshipmen training to receive Bachelor of Science degrees, U.S. Coast Guard licenses and officers’ commissions. At inaugurations, the student musicians got to play while marching past a presidential reviewing stand.“I always tell the midshipmen that you will never forget the memory of passing the president of the United States,” ” Captain Force told The Times.At each inauguration, his band blared the classic 19th-century song of the marines, “A Life on the Ocean Wave.”“What we do doesn’t change,” he said. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age.”Captain Force kept tradition alive in several ways. He rearranged old band tunes for modern instruments — work he compared to repairing antiques — and he composed new political homages, including “First Lady March” and “Presidential Pets March” (which includes barks and meows).Captain Force composed marches of his own, including the “Presidential Pets March,” complete with barks and meows.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe and his band were sought after by organizers of great American events. They played at Miss America pageant parades, atop the Brooklyn Bridge for its 100th anniversary, on the field during World Series, on the courts of the U.S. Open after 9/11, and aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 when it carried World War II veterans to Normandy in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.In 1989, The Times credited Captain Force with making his band sound like “a giant walking organ.”Kenneth Richard Force was born on March 24, 1940, in Queens, where he grew up, to Alvina and George Force. His father was a banker.Ken got his musical training playing trumpet in the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, in Broadway pit bands and in the band of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus.His fascination with military music dated to one night in 1959, when he was in the First Army Band, headquartered on Governors Island in New York. His bandmaster instructed the group to play louder than usual, since three British bands were coming to visit. They began blasting away on “Colonel Bogey on Parade.”Over the din, Captain Force clearly heard a British drum major shout, “By the cen-terr! Quick march!”Then a band of Royal Marines appeared in pith helmets, each stomp of their marching feet clearly audible.Captain Force was in awe, he later told The Times. He asked a British band director if he had a manual.“Manual?” the man responded. “It’s 300 years of tradition!”Captain Force received a bandsman’s diploma from the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington in 1958, a bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1964, and a master’s degree from the same institution the next year. He wrote his master’s thesis on British military bands.Captain Force in an undated photo. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age,” he said. United States Merchant Marine AcademyOn one occasion, in the late 1990s, he waged a battle that united his passions for military music history, preservation and teaching.He had long considered “Over There,” George M. Cohan’s ode to the American doughboys of World War I, the second-best patriotic song of the 20th century, behind only Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” As it happened, Cohan’s former home, where he had written “Over There,” lay just a few minutes away from the Merchant Marine Academy — but the old mansion was about to be demolished.Captain Force began what Newsday in 1999 called a “zealous campaign” to have Cohan’s home designated a landmark.“If you tear down the house, you’d be tearing down part of the soul of America,” he told The Times the same year.He had the midshipmen play “Over There” in view of people filing into a local landmarks commission hearing, and he inspired his students to show up at meetings to espouse his cause.They saved the property.“Now I can take my kids here someday when I come back for homecoming,” Lester J. Snyder, a senior from Illinois and a midshipman trumpeter, told The Associated Press shortly afterward. “I’ll be able to share this with the next generation, and maybe they will get to know something about the feeling of duty and honor to your country.”Captain Force’s three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a stepson, John Uribe, and two step-grandchildren. He lived on the grounds of the Merchant Marine Academy for decades and in recent years lived in an apartment across Long Island Sound in Port Chester, N.Y.Captain Force generally did not criticize United States leaders in public. But he did make an exception for Jimmy Carter’s decision in 1977 to abjure the traditional pomp of an inauguration parade by walking along Pennsylvania Avenue rather than riding in a limousine.“I know he didn’t want ruffles and flourishes and ‘Hail to the Chief,’” Captain Force told The Times in 2009. “He said it was too pompous. And the country didn’t like that. People think the president deserves special music.“People like ceremony,” he continued, “and no one does it better than a band. When you lose your ceremony, you lose a lot.” More