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    One Question for Taylor Swift’s Eras Concert Film: How Big Will It Be?

    The pop star’s concert film, arriving in theaters on Friday, is expected to break box office records. “The fever and scale is unprecedented,” one analyst said.The world’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift, is about to become the world’s biggest movie star, at least for a weekend. The only question is whether turnout for her concert film will be enormous or truly colossal.Box office analysts keep raising opening-weekend estimates for “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which will arrive in cinemas on Friday evening amid a lightning storm of free publicity. (As you may have heard, Ms. Swift has lately been spending considerable time with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end.) The nearly three-hour film was initially expected to sell about $75 million in tickets this weekend in the United States and Canada, with analysts reaching that estimate by studying presales and moviegoer surveys. As of Tuesday, the domestic number was looking more like $125 million.Could it reach $150 million? “Yes, it could,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “The fever and scale is unprecedented.”“The Eras Tour,” which cost Ms. Swift roughly $15 million to make, is expected to collect an additional $60 million overseas — at a minimum — over the weekend.“We are wonder-struck,” said Wanda Gierhart Fearing, chief marketing and content officer for the Cinemark theater chain, which has a large presence in the southern United States and Latin America. In addition to standard screenings, Cinemark and other multiplex operators have been offering private viewing parties. (That’s $800 for 40 people. Dancing encouraged, but not on seats.)The domestic box office record for a concert film debut is held by “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” which Paramount Pictures released in 2011. It collected $41 million over its first three days in North American theaters, adjusted for inflation, and ultimately $101 million in the United States and Canada and $138 million worldwide.“Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” released by Sony Pictures in 2009, holds the record for total ticket sales. It generated $105 million over its entire North American run, and $380 million worldwide, adjusted for inflation.Box office analysts aren’t quite sure what to expect from “The Eras Tour,” in part because it comes only nine weeks after Ms. Swift concluded the six-month, 53-show initial leg of her sold-out North American tour. The trade publication Pollstar estimated that she had sold about $14 million in tickets each night.The initial leg of Ms. Swift’s tour wrapped up a few weeks ago after six months and 53 shows.Grace Smith/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesHas the thirst for Ms. Swift among casual fans been satisfied for the time being? To what degree did the cultural frenzy surrounding her Eras concerts pique the curiosity of a broader audience — people who would never pay hundreds of dollars to see her perform in a stadium but might shell out for movie tickets? (Most seats for the film cost $19.89, a nod to the name of Ms. Swift’s fifth album and her birth year.)Complicating predictions, Ms. Swift broke Hollywood norms in getting her film to theaters.Under the customary model, studios book movies into theaters and spend anywhere from $20 million to $100 million on marketing to turn out an audience. Theaters play movies and sell concessions. In return, studios collect as much as 70 percent of opening-weekend tickets sales, with theaters keeping the balance.Since she produced and financed “The Eras Tour” herself, Ms. Swift cut out the middle company (a studio) and made a distribution deal directly with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator. One reason involved marketing: Ms. Swift, with 369 million social media followers at her beck and call, barely needs to spend anything to advertise the film.Ms. Swift will keep about 57 percent of ticket revenue, with theater chains pocketing the rest, as first reported by a Puck newsletter. AMC will also receive a modest distribution fee.Box office forecasting, however, is based on moviegoer surveys that are designed to track the effectiveness of studio marketing campaigns — older women are not being persuaded by your ads, for example, but teenage boys are in the bag. “The Eras Tour” has had some paid advertising, including a commercial during a Chiefs prime-time game this month. But most movies arrive amid an advertising bombardment.“One of the questions involves staying power,” said Bruce Nash, founder of the Numbers, a box office tracking and analytics site. “Is ‘The Eras Tour’ going to do most of its business on opening weekend and then fall off a cliff? Or will people come back six times over the course of weeks? We have no idea.”Ms. Swift’s distribution choice made Hollywood gnash its teeth. Studio executives had to explain to their bosses why they missed a prime moneymaking opportunity and a chance to form a relationship with Ms. Swift, who has feature film directing ambitions. (She has also tinkered with acting, including in “Cats.”) Universal Pictures, fearing competition from “The Eras Tour,” scrambled to move “The Exorcist: Believer” to an earlier date; ticket sales were soft.Studios have also had to contend with an existential question: Does distribution for “The Eras Tour” mark the start of a paradigm shift? Are more movies going to bypass studios? Already, Beyoncé has followed Ms. Swift in making a deal with AMC to distribute her concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which will arrive in theaters on Dec. 1.Anything is possible. Mr. Nash noted that Fathom Events, an independent distributor that specializes in short-run screenings and simulcast opera performances, has found increasing success in taking faith-based projects (“The Chosen”) directly to theaters. Trafalgar Releasing found a studio-skipping hit in February with a concert film focused on BTS, the South Korean boy band.But most studio executives and entertainment industry analysts dismiss “The Eras Tour” as a one-off. When it comes to mobilizing a fan base, Ms. Swift, they say, is in a class by herself. Even Beyoncé has not shown the same selling power. First-day presales for “The Eras Tour” totaled an estimated $37 million, while “Renaissance” generated about $7 million.At the moment, theater chains aren’t thinking much beyond the weekend. The last two months have been quiet for theaters, with hits like “The Nun II” (Warner Bros.) offset by a string of duds, including “Dumb Money,” “Blue Beetle,” “The Creator” and “Expend4bles.”Two major movies originally expected this fall, “Kraven the Hunter” and “Dune: Part Two,” were pushed into next year because of the actors’ strike. (Until the strike is resolved, SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ union in known, has barred its members from engaging in any publicity efforts for films and TV shows that have already been completed.)Theater companies, of course, make most of their money at the concession counter, and AMC, for one, is counting on Ms. Swift’s fans to come hungry. Among other items, the chain plans to sell popcorn in collectible tubs for $20.Marketing line: “Swifties always snack in style.” More

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    ‘Stereophonic’ Finds Drama in a ’70s Rock Recording Booth

    The playwright David Adjmi explores the in-studio creation process in a play with new songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler.A decade ago, the playwright David Adjmi was listening to music on a flight to Boston when Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” came on. The tune was familiar — he used to overhear his brother play it in his room — but he really listened to it that day, and became mesmerized by Robert Plant’s scorching vocals.“I was like, ‘God, this must have been so crazy in the studio because it’s so electric and so Dionysian and all over the map, emotionally, and raw,’” Adjmi said. “I saw the studio, I saw the whole thing in my head. Then I started thinking about the theatrical opportunities for setting a play in a studio, and how to play with sound.”That seed of an idea turned into “Stereophonic,” which is now in previews at Playwrights Horizons and is his first New York production since “Marie Antoinette” in 2013.The play’s action takes place in a recording studio, and the actors play their own instruments and sing.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAs Adjmi (“Elective Affinities,” “3C”) envisioned on that plane, the action unfolds in a recording studio, where a rock band’s protracted work on an album straddles a year from 1976-77. “It really is like the process and the play are blurring because these people are in a studio forever,” Adjmi, 50, said. “And we’ve been doing this — we almost talk about it like it’s a cult, because we just kept doing this over and over for years.” (In a 2020 interview, he mentioned talks for a Broadway run; they did not pan out.)Adjmi was taking a lunch break between rehearsals at the theater, sitting with the director Daniel Aukin (“Fool for Love”) and the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, who wrote several songs for the play’s fictional quintet. The idea was enough for them to sign on, and Butler, who now leads Will Butler + Sister Squares, had to wait years for the script to be completed before he could begin the songs. “The music is all reverse-engineered,” he said. “It was like, ‘Here’s a space that people are arguing about — how do you fill it so that the details of what they’re arguing about is accurate?’ It’s a very puzzle-piece way to compose the music.”Since the band is meant to be entering stardom (its previous album is hitting a belated stride in the play), its material has to sound as if it could top the Billboard charts, which put extra pressure on Butler, 41. “What a stupid idea to have them play the song,” he said, as his collaborators cracked up. “You’re not supposed to have them play the song, you idiot!”At this point it should be emphasized that “Stereophonic” is a play with music rather than a musical, making it somewhat of an oddity in an American theatrical landscape that has not much milked the rock scene’s dramatic potential. Adjmi said he thinks that’s “because we are the originator of the Broadway musical and there’s a very kind of calcified idea of what musicals are and how music should feel in the theater.” He added, “And I have an allergy to a lot of it. Not all of it, but a lot of it, because I can’t relate.”Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka as one of the band’s couples, partners and rivals in love and songwriting.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe musicals he did praise are backstage classics — “A Chorus Line,” “Dreamgirls,” “42nd Street” — and, perhaps not coincidentally, “Stereophonic” is a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creation. Its unnamed band includes two couples. The steady, no-nonsense keyboard player and singer, Holly (Juliana Canfield, who played Kendall Roy’s assistant Jess on “Succession”), and the substance-abusing bassist, Reg (Will Brill), both British expats, are separated at the start of the show. The singer Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and the guitarist-producer, Peter (Tom Pecinka), both Americans, are partners and rivals in love and songwriting. As for the British drummer, Simon (Chris Stack), he makes the most of his wife’s absence.All of this and a mid-70s California setting might evoke the rather popular band famous for “Rhiannon” and “Go Your Own Way,” but “Stereophonic” is not a play à clef about Fleetwood Mac. “There’s something about the mythos behind various bands that is in the culture,” Aukin said. “It’s almost using snippets from various bands’ histories and the histories of making some of these famous albums and using it as a sort of distant echo. We talked about many bands but we never talked about one.”In a phone interview, Canfield, 31, recalled that when she asked Adjmi for reference material, he recommended Keith Richards’s memoir, “Life,” and “Original Cast Album: Company,” the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the fraught, stressful recording that preserved Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 musical for posterity.That film closely tracked the “Company” actors as they painstakingly performed take after take or made tiny pronunciation changes, while members of the producing team and Sondheim himself watched, gave notes and rolled their eyes. “Stereophonic” also plunges us into the middle of the action as David Zinn’s set features the mixing table in the foreground and the recording booth in the back. A pair of engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, no relation to Will) take in both the personal clashes and the mix of inspiration and drudgery involved in art-making — all of which, of course, constantly feed off one another.In real life, arguments about adjusting levels or when to use a click track might make even a Steely Dan fan’s eyes glaze over. But the show does not sweep the grind of creation under the rug, especially as Peter evolves into an obsessive taskmaster. “God is in the details, but the details are boring in themselves,” Adjmi said. “So I took that as a challenge, like, ‘OK, let me see if I can turn this into something dramatically exciting.’ So much of it, the banality of the process, is part of what’s so beautiful about it, the granularity of it.”Adjmi said he sought to “reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles.” The play opens on Oct. 29.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the technical elements, Adjmi and Aukin consulted experts like their show’s sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the longtime Steve Reich collaborator John Kilgore. Butler himself proved to be a ready source about interpersonal relationships among musicians. “My last band was with my brother and his wife and my new band is with my wife and her sister,” he said. “I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real.’”That naturalism is different stylistic territory for Adjmi, whose previous plays tended to be arch in a manner he described as “expressionist.” The new show has more of a fly-on-the-wall quality. “That was an experiment for me: Can I reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles,” Adjmi said. “ I wanted to do something that would be more fun for them.”Perhaps, but his writing remains dense, with challenging, precisely timed overlaps in the dialogue. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the play is about music and about the cooperation of a group of people making it together, because the play itself, excluding the music, feels very scored,” Canfield said.As if that weren’t enough, the cast members who are in the band also have to play their own instruments and sing as well as convey the excesses that the 1970s were famous for. “I have a couple of scenes where I go from being really emotionally devastated and quite inebriated to walking into the music room and playing something very precise on the bass,” said Brill, whose credits include Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” and Jack Serio’s “Uncle Vanya” in a loft. “To keep the emotional and interpersonal dynamics running, and keep the verisimilitude of a drunk person, while executing something technically perfectly is a real challenge. It’s a delightful challenge, too,” he continued.“I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real,’” Butler said.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the production to work, the actors must feel like a believably tight unit. “We’re trying to make a band here — it’s not like, ‘Open your score to Page 6,’” Butler said. “We’re trying to figure out people’s strengths and weaknesses, because that’s what a band is. When they start playing music together, there is some connection.”Fortunately, the actors said, they all clicked. “When all of us get in the room together, the sounds of the voices blend incredibly well and there’s a real sense of camaraderie amongst us,” said Brill, 37, who played guitar in another fictional band a decade ago, in the David Chase film “Not Fade Away.” Canfield recalls that one day the show’s music director, Justin Craig, overheard her, Pecinka and Pidgeon bickering about their harmonies, and joked that they were now a real band because they were arguing about the music.As realistic as that episode must have felt, it pales when compared to the toughest credibility test the would-be rockers have had so far. Last month, Butler asked the “Stereophonic” band to open for him at his record-release gig in Brooklyn. Canfield, dreading what she called “an ego death” fiasco, balked, and Brill had to joke-taunt her into it.“He said ‘Yeah, Juliana, it’s going to be such a good story in 20 years, when we tell people that we almost opened for Will Butler’s band but we didn’t because we were scared that we would be bad,’” she said. “And I was like, OK, screw you, I guess we’re doing it.” Now that’s rock ’n’ roll. More

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    Victor Jara Killing: Ex-Chilean Soldier Arrested in Florida

    Pedro Barrientos, 74, is accused of killing the popular Chilean singer in 1973. In a civil case, Mr. Barrientos was accused of bragging about shooting Mr. Jara twice in the head.A former Chilean Army officer accused of torturing and killing the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara and others during the bloody aftermath of a 1973 military coup was arrested in Florida, officials announced Tuesday.The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 74, who moved to Florida in 1990, is wanted in Chile for the extrajudicial murder of Mr. Jara at a Chilean sports stadium. There, Mr. Jara and other dissidents had been detained after the coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled the country’s president, Salvador Allende, and thrust Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power.Federal immigration officials and local law enforcement officers arrested Mr. Barrientos on Oct. 5 during a traffic stop in Deltona, Fla., about 30 miles southwest of Daytona Beach, according to a news release published on Tuesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Mr. Barrientos is in ICE custody, officials said.“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” John Condon, a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division in Tampa, said in the news release.Mr. Jara, who has been described as the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a popular singer who hailed from the Chilean countryside and sang tales of poverty and injustice.He had supported the Allende government and was a member of Chile’s Communist Party when he was arrested at the State Technical University alongside hundreds of students and faculty members.Three days after his arrest, Mr. Jara’s bullet-riddled body was found outside a cemetery alongside those of four other victims. Before he was killed, soldiers smashed his fingers with their rifle butts and mockingly told him that he would never play guitar again.Mr. Barrientos’s arrest comes more than seven years after a federal jury in a civil case found him liable for Mr. Jara’s death and awarded $28 million in damages to the singer’s family, which had brought the case under a federal law that allows the victims of overseas human rights violations to seek redress.A former Chilean soldier testified in court that Mr. Barrientos had bragged about having shot Mr. Jara twice in the head.“He used to show his pistol and say, ‘I killed Víctor Jara with this,’” the soldier, José Navarrete, testified.A federal court revoked Mr. Barrientos’s U.S. citizenship in July based on a sealed complaint brought by the Department of Justice’s immigration litigation office.“The court found that Mr. Barrientos willfully concealed material facts related to his military service in his immigration applications,” the ICE news release said.It was unclear whether extradition proceedings for Mr. Barrientos were underway. The federal authorities could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday night, and it was unclear if Mr. Barrientos had retained a lawyer.Mr. Barrientos was the latest former Chilean official to be arrested in Mr. Jara’s killing. In 2018, eight retired military officers were each sentenced to more than 15 years in prison by a Chilean judge over Mr. Jara’s death. More

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    ‘For All the Dogs’ and Drake’s Latest Season of Discontent

    The rapper’s new album, “For All the Dogs,” comes after a summer of live-show triumph and extra-musical boredom.The dominant preoccupation of the hip-hop internet in recent days has been the matter of what Drake — who remains, at 36, the most popular English-speaking rapper on the planet — should rap about.It is a curious preoccupation but not a new one: Since the beginning of his career a decade and a half ago, Drake has been confounding conventional expectations for rap success. What’s different now is that he is positioned resolutely at the center of the genre, not outside it, and the collective distress about his modes feels like a referendum on an elected leader no one can quite figure out how to unseat.On “For All the Dogs,” his eighth solo studio album, Drake shows that, in some ways, he, too, is wondering what remains of life at the top. So much so, in fact, that he revisits some of his oldest and most familiar tactics. “For All the Dogs” is an album full of caustic songs about heartbreak, which have added tension now that Drake is a world-beating pop star — there is incredulity cutting through the sadness. These 23 songs are less generally wounded than the early ones that marked him as a signature figure in hip-hop, as fluent in vulnerability as bombast, but they’re scarred nonetheless.At the Brooklyn stop of his tour, in July, Drake entered the arena by walking through the crowd like a boxer preparing for a championship fight.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe peak of that approach, “Tried Our Best,” is a surprisingly gentle and soothing catalog of frustration: “I swear that there’s a list of places that I been with you, I want to go without you/Just so I can know what it’s like to be there without having to argue.” Time and again on this album, Drake describes offering trust, only to have it violated (“Bahamas Promises,” “7969 Santa”) — it is, in that way, a return to classic form.Every so often, he delivers a line so packed with unexpected syllables — “Chinchilla ushanka, we skiin’ out in Courchevel” — that he reinforces the fact that he’s a devilishly nimble rapper when he chooses to be. He doesn’t choose that often on this album, though. “For All the Dogs” includes some of his least ambitious rapping, and whereas on prior albums, he sometimes balances out his complexity with melody, that’s rarely the case here.In places he’s being deliberate about these choices — where most rappers aim for the gasp, Drake sometimes pointedly goes for the groan: “Feel like I’m bi ’cause you’re one of the guys, girl” (“Members Only”);“Whipped and chained you like American slaves” (“Slime You Out”).On prior albums, Drake has sometimes balanced out his complexity with melody.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd as is Drake’s wont, there are also a handful of deeply modern, innovative and unexpected production choices — few rappers are as sonically flexible. “Rich Baby Daddy,” which features Sexyy Red and SZA, recalls the Atlanta bass music of INOJ and Ghost Town DJs. “Another Late Night,” a collaboration with Lil Yachty, is full of off-kilter bleeps that feel wobbly, while on “8 a.m. in Charlotte,” he raps over the smoky, soul-drenched minimalism of Conductor Williams, known for his work with the boom-bap revivalist Griselda collective.This is also standard Drake technique — taking in the whole of hip-hop, from oddballs to traditionalists, and hearing himself in it. Last year he released two albums: the dance-music quasi-experiment “Honestly, Nevermind,” and the 21 Savage collaboration album, “Her Loss.” Implicit in those vastly differing releases was a proposition — perhaps no Drake album had to be an omnibus anymore; instead, he could pursue genre or style experiments to their creative conclusions, pick up a few months later and do so again.“For All the Dogs” is less focused than either of those albums. It is not an essential Drake album, but it is also possible that the essential Drake cultural contributions are no longer albums, or at least albums of this length and variance.Onstage during the It’s All a Blur Tour, Drake was as energized as at any point in his career.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOr perhaps, the signature Drake innovations may no longer be musical at all — they may be delineating what a musician, a rapper, a pop star does with his scale of success.Much of what Drake has been engaged in this summer suggests the malaise of boredom, musical or otherwise. He released a book of poetry, or perhaps “poetry” — “Titles Ruin Everything,” written with Kenza Samir — really just an inventory of Instagram captions, some funny. Much funnier, if far stranger, was the interview he conducted with Bobbi Althoff, a kind of method actress/comedian who deploys her ignorance of her subjects (feigned or otherwise) as a weapon. Drake treated the interview like a chess match, seemingly gleeful at the opportunity for a new kind of banter.There is some of that exuberance in his recent takedown of the social media personality Joe Budden, too. Budden is a onetime rapper who has remade himself as a wildly popular, often acidic commentator. After some unkind comments about the new album, Drake wrote a strikingly long and strikingly mean response online, largely noting how unsuccessful Budden had been as a rapper. But the lengths to which Drake went in order to, in essence, punch down were notable, perhaps the mark of someone who has run out of worthwhile nemeses.There are enemies on this album, too — he seemingly taunts YoungBoy Never Broke Again, the rare time he takes aim at a younger star. But he also pointedly puts women in his cross hairs: “Fear of Heights,” a song that appears to reference Rihanna, a rumored ex; and offhand and silly shots at the jazz star Esperanza Spalding, who bested Drake for the best new artist Grammy Award in 2011. (Yes, 2011.)The 23 songs that make up “For All the Dogs” are less generally wounded than Drake’s early tracks, which marked him as a signature figure in hip-hop, as fluent in vulnerability as bombast.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Drake, as ever, the top is a fraught place. But there is plenty of joy there, too. That much was clear during Drake’s It’s All a Blur Tour this summer, his first since the pandemic. At its Brooklyn stop, in July, he entered the arena walking through the crowd like a boxer preparing for a championship fight, creating a corridor of adulation.Onstage, he was as energized as he’s been at any point in his career, whether performing early-career lo-fi classics or pop-peak thumpers. He wasn’t a salesman hawking his wares, but an orchestra conductor — the show had the feeling of a fait accompli.In between songs, he recalled some New York-specific stories from early in his career — an eventful night at the Spotted Pig, a since closed gastro pub, and the 2010 show at the South Street Seaport that turned into a riot before he ever took the stage. Even back then, 13 years ago, the loyalists were shouting down the doubters. More

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    9 New Songs You Should Hear Now

    Get caught up on new music from Maren Morris, Earl Sweatshirt and Remi Wolf’s bold Paramore remake.Maren Morris conjures the glorious grit of a fed-up woman on “The Tree.”Natasha Moustache/Getty ImagesDear listeners,It’s good to be back! Last week, I took a little staycation and spent most of my time reading, dog-sitting a very good boy, and seeing a bunch of movies at the New York Film Festival.* But now I’m recharged, caught up on all the new music I missed — and, of course, ready to share it with you.Today’s offering is a compilation of highlights from our last few new music Playlists (from the likes of the Rolling Stones and Maren Morris), plus a few songs I would have put on last week’s Playlist were I not on vacation (one of Earl Sweatshirt’s collaborations with the Alchemist; Remi Wolf’s bold remake of a Paramore song). And while it includes some familiar names, I hope it also opens your ears to some new ones, too.Also! You still have a few more days to send me suggestions for the ultimate fall playlist. What’s a song that feels like autumn to you? Tell me here. We may use your response in an upcoming Amplifier.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Atka: “Lenny”If haven’t yet heard of the German-born, London-based musician Atka (also known as Sarah Neumann), that’s perfectly understandable: This propulsive single is only the second she’s ever released. But “Lenny,” which will appear on her forthcoming debut EP “Eye Against the Ashen Sky,” is quite a calling card. Industrial noises clang and suddenly cohere into a driving melody as Neumann deadpans a series of striking lyrics, beginning with a particularly vivid image: “Men like gods throwing rocks around the room.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Maren Morris: “The Tree”“The rot at the roots is the root of the problem,” Maren Morris sings on her smoldering new song, “The Tree.” “But you wanna blame it on me.” She has long been an outspoken critic of the country music establishment — see: her recent appearance on The New York Times’s Popcast (Deluxe) — and in one sense “The Tree” could be read as her breakup song with Nashville. But the song works just as well as a defiant end-of-a-relationship anthem, as Morris’s impressive vocal performance conjures the glorious grit of a fed-up woman. (Listen on YouTube)3. PinkPantheress: “Mosquito”The English pop singer PinkPantheress makes sugary sweet tunes cut through with sudden pangs of sour. Her latest single, “Mosquito,” is a fluttery reverie interrupted by a nightmarish admission: “I just had a dream I was dead, and I only cared ’cause I was taken from you.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Earl Sweatshirt & the Alchemist: “Vin Skully”When the rapper Earl Sweatshirt locks into his signature flow, he has a way of making language sound viscous, as though the words are just dribbling out of his mouth. On this track from “Voir Dire,” a collaborative album made with the producer the Alchemist, he’s effortlessly dexterous; and yes, it features a sample from the late, great Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully. (The M.L.B. team could perhaps use his blessing right about now.) (Listen on YouTube)5. Becky G featuring Chiquis: “Cuidadito”The stylistically nimble pop artist Becky G leans into regional Mexican sounds on her latest album, “Esquinas,” and especially on this playful duet with the singer Chiquis (daughter of the venerable Jenni Rivera). The pair trade fiery verses, letting their respective men know exactly what to expect if they dare cheat. (Listen on YouTube)6. Holly Humberstone: “Into Your Room”This one’s been stuck in my head for days. From the British singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone’s debut album, “Paint My Bedroom Black,” which comes out this Friday, “Into Your Room” is a moody, pulsating synth-pop number personalized with Humberstone’s endearingly chatty lyricism. “You’re the center of this universe,” she sings pleadingly to the object of her obsession. “My sorry [expletive] revolves around you.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Paramore & Remi Wolf: “You First (Re: Remi Wolf)”Earlier this year, the rock band Paramore put out its angsty, knotty sixth album, “This Is Why.” On the recently released remix album, “Re: This Is Why,” Paramore asked an eclectic group of artists — including Wet Leg, Julien Baker and Panda Bear — to rework the album, track by track. For the most part, it’s a compelling and successful experiment, though this galvanizing reimagining of “You First,” helmed by the avant-pop provocateur Remi Wolf, is a clear highlight. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga: “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”In 2012, Lady Gaga appeared onstage with the Rolling Stones to lend her vocals to a live rendition of “Gimme Shelter.” “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” the bluesy, fireworks-display climax of the Stones’ upcoming album, “Hackney Diamonds,” seems to pick up right where that performance left off. A soulful and unhurried Mick Jagger leads his band — which on this track includes Stevie Wonder (!) on keyboards — from the ground right to the great beyond, while Gaga accompanies him in an airy, angelic voice, showing off yet another facet of her impressive register. (Listen on YouTube)9. Jenn Champion: “Jessica”A tough listen, but also a cathartic one. Jenn Champion — a former member of the indie band Carissa’s Wierd, who used to record under the name S — pours all the feelings that sprang up in the wake of an old friend’s overdose into this sparse, haunting piano ballad. “I still love you,” she sings in a trembling voice. “But it hurts now.” This song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it, and I still can’t shake its unsettling power. (Listen on YouTube)I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom,Lindsay* The best thing I saw so far at the N.Y.F.F.? “Poor Things,” the latest wild ride from the cinematic Greek Freak, Yorgos Lanthimos. Emma Stone is on another level.The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“9 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Atka, “Lenny”Track 2: Maren Morris, “The Tree”Track 3: PinkPantheress, “Mosquito”Track 4: Earl Sweatshirt & the Alchemist, “Vin Skully”Track 5: Becky G featuring Chiquis, “Cuidadito”Track 6: Holly Humberstone, “Into Your Room”Track 7: Paramore & Remi Wolf, “You First (Re: Remi Wolf)”Track 8: The Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”Track 9: Jenn Champion, “Jessica” More

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    Morgan Wallen Returns to No. 1 in a Slow Chart Week

    With Drake’s “For All the Dogs” and Taylor Swift’s rerecording of “1989” waiting in the wings, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” has its 16th time at the peak.In a relatively slow week of music sales before the arrival of blockbusters by Drake and Taylor Swift, the country star Morgan Wallen returns to the top of the Billboard album chart, notching a 16th time at No. 1 for his newest album, “One Thing at a Time.”Wallen’s album returns with the equivalent of 74,500 sales in the United States, including nearly 98 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“One Thing at a Time,” stuffed with 36 tracks, has been a steady streaming hit since March; only in the last month has it dipped below 100 million streams a week, a benchmark that relatively few albums reach even in their debut week, let alone their 40th. Wallen’s 16 reps at No. 1 are the most for any album since Adele’s “21,” which logged 24 weeks at the top in 2011 and 2012.Still, Wallen’s 74,500 “equivalent album units” — a composite number that represents an album’s popularity on streaming platforms and in purchases of downloads and physical copies — is notably low. That is the least units to top the charts in almost a year and a half, since Pusha T’s “It’s Almost Dry” opened with 55,000 in April 2022.The music industry is bracing for boffo numbers from Drake, whose long-awaited “For All the Dogs” came out Friday and is already a smash online, and for Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which comes out Oct. 27 and is all but certain to be huge on streaming services and in sales of both CDs and vinyl LPs. (“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” her concert film, is set to open on Friday and has already surpassed $100 million in worldwide advance ticket sales.)Ed Sheeran’s surprise “Autumn Variations” opens at No. 4, his second Top 10 new LP this year. His “-” (a.k.a. “Subtract”) opened at No. 2 in May, though it quickly plunged from there, falling out of the Top 20 after two weeks and the Top 100 after nine — a rare flop for Sheeran, one of the giants of pop’s streaming age.Also this week, Rod Wave’s “Nostalgia” falls to No. 2 after two weeks at the top, with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts” at No. 3 and Zach Bryan’s self-titled album No. 5. More

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    ‘No Accident’ Review: Putting White Supremacists on Trial

    A documentary chronicles the lawsuit filed against the leaders of the violent 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.Kristi Jacobson’s legal documentary “No Accident” opens with footage of the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va.: White supremacists march with tiki torches and shout slurs such as “Jews will not replace us.” The grotesque gathering remains unsettling and infuriating to watch, but plunging us into the proceedings has a way of stating the ugly facts upfront.Some participants in the two-day rally faced criminal charges, but Jacobson documents the steps in a civil case filed that October in an attempt to hold rally leaders responsible for conspiring to commit violence. Tracking the litigation led by the attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, Jacobson’s civil rights procedural delves into both the legal work and the emotional strain involved in a case like this one.Kaplan and Dunn’s team draws on damning excerpts from Discord, the social media site used by rally planners, and evasive, insulting depositions by conspirators such as Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell, who represented themselves in court. Jacobson shows the toll on some of the lawsuit’s nine plaintiffs, who recall the rally and the peaceful counterprotests on Aug. 12, when James Fields Jr. murdered Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others by driving his car into a crowd of protesters.The movie, which feels constrained by the trial’s pandemic-related restrictions, maintains a civilized tone throughout. But it’s hard to keep calm at the spectacle of white nationalists preaching hatred and violence one moment, then attempting to squirm out of responsibility and court the jury’s sympathy. Jacobson’s account does the necessary work of restating the facts and showing that people can be held accountable for fomenting this kind of terror and harm.No AccidentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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    Book Review: ‘MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,’ by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards

    “The Reign of Marvel Studios” captures how movies based on comic-book properties came to dominate pop culture. At least until now.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin EdwardsHollywood doesn’t believe in immortals. From Mary Pickford to the MGM musical, Golden Age cowboys to teenage wizards, the city worships its gods only until their box-office power dims. So it feels audacious — if not foolhardy — to open “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” and find its authors, Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards, declaring that it’s difficult to imagine a future where the Disney-owned superhero industrial complex “didn’t run forever.” Even Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, has yet to engineer a perpetual motion machine.Yet the three veteran pop culture journalists behind this detailed accounting of the company’s ascendancy have the numbers to support it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a constellation of solo superhero tales mixed with all-star team-ups, including four installments of “The Avengers,” is Hollywood’s most successful movie franchise of all time — 32 films that have grossed a combined $29.5 billion. By comparison, the book points out that the “Star Wars” series, Marvel’s nearest rival, has notched only 12 films and $10.3 billion.Turning the pages — which are devoid of the usual, and unnecessary, glossy photo spreads — one realizes that superheroes are an X-ray lens into the last decade and a half of Hollywood disruption. Every upheaval gets a mention: corporate mergers; profit-losing streaming services; Chinese censorship; digitally scanned actors; social media cancellations; #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite; the resurgence of a production-to-distribution vertical pipeline that hadn’t been legal since the 1948 Paramount Decree. Pity there’s no room to examine each in depth.First, the origin story. In the ’90s, the former overseer of Marvel Enterprises, Ike Perlmutter (let’s give him the comic book nickname “The Pennypincher”), empowered his entertainment division to license its biggest stars for cheap, scattering Spider-Man, Hulk and the X-Men across other studios in service of selling more toys. (“MCU” familiarizes us with the marketing term “toyetic.”)The saga of who and what changed the company’s direction involves chancy gambles, pivotal lunches at Mar-a-Lago, rivalrous committees and the waning of Perlmutter’s influence, amid the waxing of Kevin Feige, the book’s hero, a five-time U.S.C. Film School reject who started his production career teaching Meg Ryan to log in to AOL for the romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.” To establish their independence, the writers mention at the top that Disney, now Marvel’s parent company, asked people not to give them an interview. Many already had, or chose to anyway, although most shy away from on-the-record quotes about the really salacious stuff. No one will say that the rumored $400-million-plus Robert Downey Jr. earned across nine films factored into the decision to kill off Tony Stark, but the innuendo is thicker than Iron Man’s armored exoskeleton.Signs that the Marvel era is nearing the end of its cultural dominance are everywhere, including in this book. Despite the authors’ rah-rah intro (there are no bad Marvel films, they claim, only “a mix of entertaining diversions and inarguable masterpieces”), they wisely sense that the library’s cinema history section will eventually file Feige next to John Ford as filmmakers who defined the spirit of a moment.“MCU” concedes that three of Marvel’s worst-reviewed films were all made in the last three years, just as one of the studio’s cornerstone creatives, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn, decamped to run DC Studios, the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.Meanwhile, the churn of faster, cheaper superhero content for Disney+ has led the studio’s weary visual-effects workers (whose exhaustion is well documented here) to vote to unionize. Fandom has become a Sisyphean labor as never-ending spinoff series force a once-rapt audience to pick and choose which story lines they’ll bother to follow.To those seismic grumbles, I’ll add another: Today’s teenagers were toddlers when Marvel first seized the zeitgeist. What generation wants to dig the same stuff as their parents?Marvel’s inescapable obsolescence is the best argument for “MCU”; the genre should be studied with the same rigor as film noir. The book’s admiration for Marvel movies works in its favor, freeing the writers to skip straight to the gossip, like the relative who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving to whisper about your cousin’s divorce. If you didn’t understand the plot of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” before, they’re not wasting space explaining it here.Instead, the book will satisfy your appetite for Marvel’s endless contract negotiations with Sony over the character rights for Spider-Man, which is easy when one encounter climaxes with the former Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal hurling a sandwich — and an expletive — at Feige. Battles over screenplay credits are even juicier. That’s where you’ll find the most inventive insults.Elsewhere, one has to read several paragraphs past a doctor willing to estimate that “50 to 75 percent” of Marvel’s stars are Hulked-out on performance-enhancing drugs to learn that he has not, in fact, treated any of the studio’s actors. While the hustle to wrap things up before the tome turns into “Captain America: Civil War and Peace” means racing through the most recent projects in a blur, earlier chapters are able to dish the dirt, like whose script notes triggered the collapse of Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” and why Feige refused to continue collaborating with the original Bruce Banner, Edward Norton.After all, the authors know a saga is only as exciting as its villain.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios | By Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards | 528 pp. | Liveright | $35 More