Aurelia Butler

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    Drake Accuses Universal of Boosting Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’

    The Canadian rapper filed legal papers on Monday in New York and Texas accusing his record label of promoting “Not Like Us” ahead of Drake’s tracks.Drake’s war of words with Kendrick Lamar, through a vicious back-and-forth of diss tracks, generated some of the biggest headlines in rap this year.And now it has landed in court.On Monday, lawyers for Drake filed legal papers in New York and Texas accusing the Universal Music Group — the giant record company behind both rappers — of operating an elaborate scheme to to promote Lamar’s “Not Like Us” at the expense of Drake’s music, using bots to drive up clicks on streaming services and payola to influence radio stations.In documents filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan on behalf of one of Drake’s companies, Frozen Moments, the rapper’s lawyers said that Universal “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves with a song, ‘Not Like Us,’ in order to make that song go viral, including by using ‘bots’ and pay-to-play agreements.”In a separate filing in Bexar County, Texas, lawyers for Drake — this time filing under his real name, Aubrey Drake Graham — said they were considering a defamation claim against Universal over Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” the hit song that represented the climax of Drake and Lamar’s rap war.In that song, Lamar took various swipes at Drake — including calling Drake and his crew “certified pedophiles.” Universal, Drake’s filing said, “could have refused to release or distribute the song or required the offending material to be edited and/or removed,” but chose to put it out instead.“UMG knew that the song itself attacked the character of another one of UMG’s most prominent artists, Drake,” the filing said, “by falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, engaging in pedophilic acts, harboring sex offenders, and committing other criminal sexual acts.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    TV on the Radio, Brooklyn Rock Veterans, Return to the Stage

    Some members of an art scene, once it has become the subject of myth, make a habit of downplaying its reputed virtues, usually for reasons of mercy, modesty, or self-preservation. But the turn-of-the-century Brooklyn rockers TV on the Radio won’t sugarcoat it: Things really were better back then.“It was better,” said the multi-instrumentalist Jaleel Bunton, 50, over dinner in Greenpoint last week, without even a moment’s hesitation.“It was way better than this,” the singer and songwriter Tunde Adebimpe, 49, concurred. “Not going to lie.”At the time, starting a scrappy rock band in nearby Williamsburg, where Bunton and the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kyp Malone, 51, have lived since the Bloomberg era, was the practical thing to do. (Adebimpe, a former resident, moved to Los Angeles in 2014.) Hermès and Chanel had not yet set up shop, and artists of all sorts took advantage of the neighborhood’s cheap rent and feckless enforcement of the building code.While the band was making its first album, “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes,” (which was recently rereleased in a special 20th anniversary edition and is the focus of a new run of live shows — the band’s first in five years), neighbors included the fellow indie-rock idols Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Grizzly Bear. It was still possible to go from your apartment to your barista job to your rehearsal space to your gig at one of several thriving D.I.Y. music venues without ever getting on the train.From left: Kyp Malone, Tunde Adebimpe and Jaleel Bunton of TV on the Radio. The goal all along, they said, was to be able to keep making music that excited them. OK McCausland for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Digging Into Kendrick Lamar’s Samples

    Listen to some of the most notable sonic references on “GNX,” from SWV, Luther Vandross and Debbie Deb.Kendrick LamarAJ Mast/The New York TimesDear listeners,On Friday, the rap superstar Kendrick Lamar surprised everyone by releasing his sixth studio album, “GNX,” without warning. It is a fitting finale to a triumphant year for Lamar, who emerged victorious by just about every measure from a high-profile beef with hip-hop’s pre-eminent hitmaker Drake and scored one of the biggest smashes of his career with the caustic diss track, “Not Like Us.” The Compton rapper’s victory lap will continue into new year, too: On Feb. 2, he’s up for seven Grammys. A week later, he is set to headline the Super Bowl halftime show.On his intricately layered 2012 breakthrough “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” and its grand 2015 follow-up, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” Lamar established himself as an artist capable of epic statements and sweeping concept albums. He also proved to be a musician who takes his time between releases, tinkering with his bars and polishing sonic worlds until they are as close to perfect as he can make them. “GNX,” though, is a different kind of Lamar album: It’s lean, mean and immediate. The beef with Drake, as my colleague Jon Caramanica suggests in his sharp review of “GNX,” seems to have made Lamar more reactive and nimble, bringing him into the present tense.Accordingly, “GNX” carries its sense of history more lightly than some of Lamar’s denser releases — though it is still an album in deep conversation with the past and present sounds of West Coast rap. In order to evoke that history, Lamar often turns to one of hip-hop’s signature arts: sampling.Today’s playlist compiles the sources of some of the most notable sonic references on “GNX” — from SWV, Luther Vandross and Debbie Deb — and follows up on them with Lamar’s own tracks, so you can hear the ways he and his producers flip them into something new. It also features a few samples from earlier Lamar hits.This playlist is just a brief introduction to the samples in Lamar’s discography — “GNX” alone is overflowing with them. But I hope it’s an invitation to listen more deeply to all the references, homages and historical conversations happening between the lines of his music.Also, a programming note: I won’t be sending out a new edition of the newsletter this Friday, because of the holiday. If you need a Thanksgiving playlist, might I suggest revisiting this one from last year?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At the Brooklyn Academy, Musical Journeys Through Minefields

    The Silkroad Ensemble’s “American Railroad” and Alarm Will Sound’s “Sun Dogs” used music and images to engage with difficult topics.The completion of the transcontinental railroad was a herculean achievement. In 1850, the United States had 10,000 miles of track; by 1900, trains carried people, goods and ideas from coast to coast over 215,000 miles of track. Recently, historians have begun to tally the human cost of this construction project, especially among the people who performed the dangerous and backbreaking labor and the Native tribes whose lands and livelihoods were slashed through by the tracks.On Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Silkroad Ensemble brought this history to life in “American Railroad,” an evening of multimedia storytelling that probed collective scars while letting musical lineages tangle in beguiling ways. Carried by the joyful collaboration of brilliant improvisers, the performance proved that this ensemble has lost none of its verve since Rhiannon Giddens, a musical polymath and scholar of Appalachian music, became artistic director in 2020. (The ensemble was founded in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma to celebrate the cultures along the ancient Silk Road.)A haunting tune from Appalachia, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” anchored the program. A work song created by incarcerated Black laborers, it describes the deadly cave-in of a railroad tunnel. Giddens sang it with a voice splintering with emotion over a background of harsh percussive thuds.Individual numbers paid tribute to dispossessed Native Americans, Irish famine refugees and Chinese laborers cut off from their families by racist immigration laws. While each time the cultural context was deftly sketched through specific sounds — a Celtic harp, a pentatonic tune — the interplay of instruments native to other regions revealed new affinities. Historical photographs, projected above the stage, added visual poignancy.Rhiannon Giddens, the artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, singing “Swannanoa Tunnel.”Ellen QbertplayaAt times, though, the program had a didactic streak that felt at odds with the polycentric spirit of the music making. The inclusion of an Indian-inspired segment with fiery tabla solos by Sandeep Das was a musical highlight. But the accompanying text slide, drawing links between the transcontinental railroad and industrialization in British-ruled India, brought an unnecessary whiff of the classroom. Silkroad is involved in curriculum design in middle schools in underserved communities across the country, and at moments like these, the desire (stated in its publications) to “reset the narrative” in historiography feels heavy-handed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘GNX’ Review: Kendrick Lamar Heads Back to His Comfort Zone on Surprise Album

    After a war of words with Drake that yielded one of the biggest hits of Lamar’s career, the Los Angeles rapper is eager to shift back on his sixth album.Every so often, Kendrick Lamar steps into the present.The rapper, 37, is so mindful of hip-hop history, his role in it and the internal logic of the genre that it often seems like he’s performing on a different playing field than his ostensible peers. He’s a man on an island, and contentedly so.That’s part of what made his feud with Drake, which began in March and stretched through the spring and summer, so bracing. Not only did it place Lamar in the immediate present, and with real stakes on the line, but it underscored a streak of apparent disgust and resentfulness that emerges anytime he’s being pulled into the now. What’s happening in the moment is in essence a distraction from Lamar’s larger creative mission.His eventual triumph in the tug of war was led by the mainstream success of “Not Like Us,” one of the most popular songs of his career and, more important, an immediate contribution to the cultural zeitgeist. It was Lamar using Drake’s typical weapons against him — an acknowledgment that even if Lamar prefers not to pay attention to prevailing winds, he can ride them if need be.From a distance, “GNX,” his sixth album, which was released with no announcement on Friday, has some of that same immediacy. On the two opening tracks, “Wacced Out Murals” and “Squabble Up,” Lamar is rapping with the seething indignation he weaponized so effectively during the beef: “I’ll kill ’em all before I let ’em kill my joy”; “Before I take a truce, I’ll take him to hell with me.”But this is only one part of what Lamar is doing on “GNX,” an impressive but slight collection of flag-planting thumpers, puffed-chest posse cuts, conceptual experiments and moments of introspection — though nowhere near the intense internal interrogation of his last album, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” It’s a palate cleanse of a sort, potentially casting off the last dregs of the Drake kerfuffles, and also, given its thematic unevenness, potentially a place holder between more substantive releases. Drake is, at most, a spectral presence on this album — there’s nothing as savagely personal as “Meet the Grahams,” the vicious salvo Lamar released in May. Lamar appears keen to move on.But what that means is that he’s eager to move back — back in time, back into history, back into his comfort zones. Taken literally, that’s Los Angeles, a city with rich musical history that Lamar has been scrupulously updating for over a decade now.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Why the Year’s Best Performances Are From Actresses Who Say Very Little

    Films like “Conclave” and “Bird” provide a stark contrast to the recent succession of films about women finding their voices.IN A TENSE moment midway through Edward Berger’s recent movie “Conclave,” a pulpy thriller about the process of selecting a new pope, Isabella Rossellini, playing a nun named Sister Agnes, enters a room full of cardinals from around the world. A series of uncovered secrets and shifting alliances have turned this initially serene council into a rat’s nest of backstabbing, grandstanding, explaining, interrupting men. After asking permission to speak, Sister Agnes discreetly delivers a piece of information that will upend the papal election and expose some of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church to public, career-ending humiliation. Her short speech concluded, she bobs at the waist ever so slightly, giving a tiny curtsy whose performance of feminine deference is a put-down in itself. For the rest of the film, Sister Agnes never says another word.Her sly protest recalls another time when a quietly rebellious woman confounded a council of would-be holy men: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” long considered one of the towering performances of cinema history. Shot almost entirely in tight close-up, Falconetti’s Joan is doubly mute: first, of course, because the film itself is silent but, more pointedly, because the sparse script, based on records of Joan’s 1431 trial, puts nearly all the words in the mouths of her captors. As her male inquisitors grill her about the angelic visions that she claims have told her to dress in men’s clothing and lead the French army into battle, it’s Joan’s refusal to answer or even acknowledge their questions that most enrages them. When one questioner quizzes her about the length of the Archangel Michael’s hair, Joan’s wry response — “Why would he have cut it?” — is a forerunner of Sister Agnes’s ironic bob: a gesture of malicious compliance that serves to expose the hypocrisy of her inquisitors.For much of film history, women spoke less than men simply because their characters were seldom the story’s focus. The “strong, silent type” of westerns and detective stories was made strong by his silence, while female characters were typically weakened by theirs. When women in classic Hollywood films stepped outside the role of helpmeet, it was to personify the so-called mouthy dame (a type that, at its best, includes Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in 1941’s “Ball of Fire” and Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”). But however sparkling, brash or bitchy their banter, for decades dialogue written for female characters — often by male screenwriters — existed mainly to establish the fact that a woman was, for some reason, talking.“Women Talking,” the 2022 film by the writer-director Sarah Polley, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, a category befitting both its title and its subject: A movie about a Mennonite community of horrifically abused women claiming the right to speak, whose every frame overflows with expressive, persuasive, angry and anguished language, was recognized specifically for its words. That acknowledgment provided some catharsis in the wake of countless #MeToo scandals. But in the years since, along with a spate of acclaimed movies about women finding their voices (2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; last year’s “Poor Things” and “Barbie”), a new space has opened up onscreen for women pointedly not talking. Several films released this year — including Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” — have featured performances by female protagonists whose silence is neither a mark of trauma nor a state of oppression to be overcome but a deliberate strategy, whether for the purposes of introspection, self-preservation or self-discovery.Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Erotos” (1993).© Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Taka Ishii GalleryWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Should I Sit Through the Movie’s Closing Credits?

    The film has ended, but the names of the many people who worked on it are rolling across the screen. Do you stick around?Do you have a question for our culture writers and editors? Ask us here.Q: Is it morally correct to stay seated until the end of the credits in a cinema?I’ve thought about this question my entire adult life! I think a lot of other people have, too. But to answer it, we have to think about what movie credits do, and why they’re there at all.The stayers and the leaversThere are two schools of thought here, both of which, I think, are pretty reasonable.On the one hand are the “stayers.” I used to be one. When my partner and I began seeing movies together, I was often writing about them, and he was working in film production, so we had two good reasons to stick around. We felt it was a way of honoring and celebrating all the people who pitch in to make a movie. Filmmaking is inherently collaborative, more than most arts, and even the office assistants toward the end of the credits sequences (especially the office assistants) deserve acknowledgment for doing a stressful, surprisingly difficult job.And let’s be honest — we also stayed to the end because it was fun to spot our friends’ names in the credits.Over time, though, I’ve become more of a “leaver,” for a few practical reasons. I often see several movies in a day, and I’ve got to get across town for the next one. Sometimes I really need to use the bathroom. And in this era of ultra-budget productions and mega-effects-driven movies, those credits can go on for 10 or 15 minutes, especially when you add in post-credits scenes.This was not always the case. “End credits” weren’t really a common thing in American film until the late 1960s, when a much larger number of people involved in the production began getting credit for their work in the movie itself. Before then, there were usually a few title cards that announced major cast and crew credits. Adding the monkey wranglers and location scouts and drivers and production interns results in longer credits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Charles Dumont, Who Wrote Enduring Melodies for Édith Piaf, Dies at 95

    His dozens of songs included “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” a powerful anthem of redemptive love that became one of Piaf’s signature songs.Charles Dumont, who wrote the music for “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” the soaring song about sweeping away the past to find love anew that the hallowed but troubled singer Édith Piaf turned into an anthem of French culture, died on Nov. 18 at his home in Paris. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter Sherkane Dumont.Mr. Dumont had a prolific career, writing melodies for the likes of Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco and Barbra Streisand and music for French television and film. In the 1970s, he embarked on an award-winning career as romantic crooner.Still, it was the roughly 30 songs that he, with the lyricist Michel Vaucaire, wrote for Piaf — the diminutive and radiant chanteuse known as the Little Sparrow — that, by his own admission, defined his career. “My mother gave birth to me, but Édith Piaf brought me into the world,” Mr. Dumont said in a 2015 interview with Agence France-Presse.“Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (“No, I Regret Nothing”), introduced in 1960, became a definitive song for a definitive French singer, a woman who became not just a global star but also a cultural ambassador for her country.With its martial solemnity, the song had the feel of a patriotic anthem, which gave power and drama to lyrics that express, in blunt and defiant terms, a rejection of past memories, both good and bad, while moving toward a new future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More