Aurelia Butler

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    Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at the Bayreuth Festival Experiments With AR

    Cutting-edge technology has again come to the Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner premiered his final opera with the latest stagecraft in 1882.For Richard Wagner, the latest technology was crucial to staging his operas.In Bayreuth, Germany, where he opened a hilltop theater in 1876 to realize his vision for his works, he promised that “the most up-to-date artistic resources will be used to offer you scenic and theatrical perfection.”That year, the Rhinemaidens at the start of his “Ring” were supported behind the scenes by wheeled machines that made them seem to swim. A projector with prisms tried to create the effect of gods walking across a rainbow. The auditorium was dimmed — unusual at the time — to focus the audience’s attention and enhance the illusions.Nearly 150 years later, cutting-edge technology has come again to Bayreuth: augmented reality, which adds a dense, often impenetrable layer of surreal imagery to Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which opened on Tuesday.Among the many AR images visible through special glasses are motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze.Joshua HiggasonThis medium could hardly be further from the creaky machinery and gas lighting of the 19th century. But the goal is the same as Wagner’s: to create “scenes such as you might imagine had come from an ideal world of dreams.”But there’s a catch.After a squabble within the notoriously squabbling Bayreuth Festival about funding the expensive augmented reality, or AR, glasses, money was allotted for 330 sets in a theater of 1,925 seats.So 83 percent of the audience just experiences the old-fashioned article: Wagner’s operatic mystery play about a young man who ends up redeeming the ailing rituals of a corps of Holy Grail knights, straightforwardly staged and superbly sung, and conducted with muscular solidity by Pablo Heras-Casado. A much smaller group, including critics, gets the glasses, which superimpose on that live staging a crowded AR environment that is constantly in motion.Are the 83 percent missing much?They miss the space between them and the stage seeming to fill with twinkling stars as the soft prelude begins. The bare trees rotating in the ether. The motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze. The asteroids. The fly that seems to land on the outside of the AR lenses.Later, the flocks of birds, blood-red globules and spiky strawberries. The slithering snakes and spinning, silently cackling skulls. The blossoming flowers. The arrows, spears, machetes, axes, grenades and severed arms. The forlornly quivering plastic bags and the bounding fox. The rocky ledge that appears to fill the area beneath the seats in the third act.In AR style, the 3-D images don’t move with you as you move your head. Rather, you seem to be able to pan across an environment that surrounds you: not a realistic landscape but a galaxy of disembodied elements floating in the darkness, a free-association, stream-of-consciousness panoply linked, to varying degrees, to the plot.Some of the images’ textures are photorealistic, but most emphasize their computer-generated unreality, their unnatural angles and fake finishes, their eerie weightlessness. The aesthetic — with its collagelike excess of uncanny juxtapositions and its flat affect — evokes the digital art that has sometimes been winkingly called post-internet.Georg Zeppenfeld on the spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi set for Act I, designed by Mimi Lien.Enrico NawrathBut for those wearing the glasses, the union of the production’s AR and live aspects isn’t generally happy. The lenses are tinted, so the live performance looks considerably dimmed, and the staging’s frequent video projections are almost invisibly faint.The AR elements (designed, along with the video, by Joshua Higgason) often block the onstage action, even as those elements are fragmented enough to suggest they are offering a complement to that action, rather than a self-sufficient alternative.However dreamlike, the resulting visual confusion doesn’t convey the hypermaximalist, proudly absurdist overload of Bayreuth productions like Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 “Parsifal” or Frank Castorf’s 2013 “Ring.” This is because Scheib’s sensibility — in both the virtual and live spheres — is basically plain and direct.When I peeked below the glasses to watch bits of the performance without AR, there was nothing particularly imaginative or illuminating about this “Parsifal.” The first act takes place in a spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi landscape — the sets were designed by Mimi Lien — with a halo of flashing lights that brings to mind the spaceships of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”These Grail knights wear stylish, contemporary clothes — long tunics, yellow skirts, boldly patterned hoodies — designed by Meentje Nielsen. The sorcerer Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors. After Parsifal destroys the garden, the third act is set in a lonely desert encampment, alongside a machine on the blurry line between war and industry: maybe an earthmover, maybe a tank.The tenor Andreas Schager is tirelessly passionate and convincingly boyish as the guileless Parsifal, and the bass-baritone Derek Welton is mournful yet reserved as Amfortas, the wounded king of the Grail. The bass Georg Zeppenfeld is an elegiac Gurnemanz, who oversees the knights; the baritone Jordan Shanahan, a brooding Klingsor.Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is depicted as a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors.Enrico NawrathThe mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca sounds luxurious — lean yet velvety — as the ambiguous, ambivalent Kundry, cursed to shuttle forever between the realms of Klingsor and the Grail and a role too often screamed. Bayreuth’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich, is, as ever, poised and powerful. On Tuesday, the orchestra didn’t quite bring out the exquisite transparency and delicacy of some important passages, but Heras-Casado’s conducting was vibrant, even-keeled and well-paced.There were a few memorable AR moments. At the end of Act I, a boy in jeans seems to walk through the space, slowly flapping wings attached to his arms — perhaps a melancholy nod to the winged children in Stefan Herheim’s celebrated 2008 “Parsifal” here, just as the dam we seem to be at the bottom of at the start of Act II may be a reference to the hydroelectric plant that opened Patrice Chéreau’s centennial “Ring” at Bayreuth in 1976.Yet there is something bland and empty at the production’s core. It’s not clear what Scheib thinks the nature of the sickness is at the root of this Grail cult, so it’s not clear what Parsifal’s climactic redemption offers. If the final AR image of plastic bags, echoed by one onstage, gestures toward a critique of environmental despoliation, it’s a wan gesture.This means the augmented reality has little profound substance to support, just a jittery desire to stimulate — to ornament and impress — which is just what Wagner didn’t want from stage technology. Scheib’s AR decorations rarely inspire emotion or a sustained sense of wonder: the impression, as Gurnemanz says to Parsifal, of time becoming space.The inadvertent result of all the lavish resources is to prove the superiority of the live over the digital — to keep us sneaking back under our glasses from the augmented real to the really real. The closest parallel in the opera to contemporary technical wizardry is Klingsor’s false garden; it feels rather perverse to extend those artificial seductions to the rest of a piece that’s condemning them.We have come a long way from this opera’s premiere at Bayreuth in 1882, when Gurnemanz and Parsifal stepped in place as a painted backdrop scrolled by, turned by hand on rollers, to create the illusion they were walking. “The simplest of means,” one observer wrote, “had brought about an overwhelming effect.”For all its ambitions and expense, Scheib’s “Parsifal” never overwhelms.ParsifalThrough Aug. 27 at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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    Review: At Mostly Mozart, the Sense of an Ending

    Louis Langrée, in his last season with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted a classic Langrée program: Mozart and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar.Change is coming for the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and for its longtime music director, Louis Langrée — this month is the beginning of the end of his tenure with the orchestra. When the ensemble appears at Lincoln Center next year it will be with a freshly conceived name, and with the conductor Jonathon Heyward at the helm. (Heyward also leads the orchestra in concerts on Aug. 4 and 5.)So there is a sense of finality hovering over this summer’s offerings, which began last weekend with a free outdoor concert in Damrosch Park. On Tuesday night, Langrée and his players resumed their more typical places in the recently refurbished David Geffen Hall — renovations that kept the festival orchestra out of that theater last year.In remarks before the concert, Langrée warmly recalled his two-decade relationship with the orchestra and with New York audiences. The program was classic Langrée: a substantial world premiere from Amir ElSaffar, a prominent jazz trumpeter and composer, nestled next to the Mass in C minor by Mozart, who, Langrée noted, sometimes looked eastward (as in the “Turkish March” movement of Piano Sonata No. 11).ElSaffar also spoke, telling the audience how his “Dhikra” (“Remembrance”) — inspired by the 20th anniversary of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq — incorporated Western classical instruments from the festival orchestra’s ranks, alongside the players in his Two Rivers ensemble. (Among other instruments, that group features oud, a steel-string lute and an Iraqi hammered dulcimer, as well as ElSaffar’s trumpet, which channels the melodic style of Iraq’s maqam tradition.)The composer Amir ElSaffar, performing in “Dhikra,” his world premiere, on Tuesday.Lawrence SumulongAll cogent and stylistically broad minded as a précis. But “Dhikra” is not on the same exalted level as ElSaffar’s past work for larger groups, particularly as heard on the album “Not Two” (2017). While “Dhikra” contained some passages of wondrous blended sonority, the amplification of ElSaffar’s musicians had the unfortunate effect of making the Mostly Mozart players inaudible, and for long stretches.It began promisingly enough, with Two Rivers players positioned on the stage near Langrée, and with 10 festival orchestra musicians — the only ones participating in this piece — strewn among the audience, one level up from the orchestra. (The conductor often faced the audience, in order to conduct his far-flung orchestral partners.)A convening salvo from ElSaffar’s trumpet — mellow yet mournful — seemed to inspire droning notes in the strings that gradually flowered into plucked passages that ricocheted across the hall. And when fervid motifs for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn — all positioned at the back of the house — mingled with gentle notes from the Two Rivers bassist onstage, there was a glorious sense of collective blooming.But this was not to last. The orchestral players soon left their stations in the audience, gradually reappearing onstage. And it was there that the amplified nature of Two Rivers tended to swamp ElSaffar’s writing for his Mostly Mozart collaborators. (It was sad to see the violinist Ruggero Allifranchini sawing away with abandon, at a climactic moment, and not be able to hear his contributions over the Two Rivers rhythm section.)Some of this might be improved with slight tweaks to the levels on the Geffen Hall mixer. But some of the balance problems may be baked into the piece as written; 10 musicians is not a significant enough portion of an orchestra to graft onto a group as potent as Two Rivers.After intermission, audiences got to feel the full force of the festival orchestra in Mozart’s Mass in C minor. Also on hand were a quartet of vocal soloists — including the soprano Erin Morley — and a double chorus (well drilled by the director Malcolm J. Merriweather).Following his own edition of Mozart’s unfinished score, Langrée managed to inject an airy, delicate sense of bounce into the gravity of the Kyrie. Taken too sternly, the Mass sounds overindebted to Bach. Taken too lightly, you skate around the profundity of the work. Langrée found the right balance throughout. And he had a star turn from Morley, when it came to a showstopping “Et Incarnatus Est” aria, in the Credo.Change, for this festival and for classical music on the whole, is inevitable. But this Mass was a reminder of the wonders that should be carefully shepherded going forward. After Langrée departs, it will be important for the leaders of this orchestra — whatever it’s called — to continue to balance interpretations of this high order and taking big swings with artists on the level of ElSaffar.Mostly MozartProgram repeats Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org. More

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    In Rare Move, Japanese Pop Star Comes Out Publicly as Gay

    “I don’t want people to struggle like me,” said Shinjiro Atae, making an announcement that is extremely unusual in conservative Japan.At first, there was total silence. Then, there were shrieks, wild applause, weeping and shouts of “I love you!”Fans of Shinjiro Atae, a J-pop idol who has been on a nearly two-year performance hiatus, had come to hear him talk about “the challenge of my life.” Standing onstage in a dark auditorium in front of 2,000 fans in central Tokyo on Wednesday night, he revealed something he has kept hidden for most of his life: He is gay.“I respect you and believe you deserve to hear this directly from me,” he said, reading from a letter he had prepared. “For years, I struggled to accept a part of myself. But now, after all I have been through, I finally have the courage to open up to you about something. I am a gay man.”Such an announcement is extremely unusual in conservative Japan, the only G7 country that has not legalized same-sex unions. Earlier this summer, the Japanese Parliament passed an L.G.B.T.Q rights bill but it had been watered down by the political right, stating that there “should be no unfair discrimination” against gay and transgender people.In making a public declaration, Mr. Atae, who spent two decades performing with AAA, a hit Japanese pop group, before embarking on a solo career, said he wanted his fans to know his true self. He also hopes to comfort those who might be grappling with anxieties about their sexuality.“I don’t want people to struggle like me,” he said.Activists said they could not recall an instance when a Japanese pop star of his stature had publicly declared they were gay, because of anxieties about losing fans or sponsors.“I think he has decided to come out in order to change Japan,” said Gon Matsunaka, a director and adviser to Pride House Tokyo, a support center for the gay and transgender community.Mr. Atae, who began dancing with AAA when he was just 14, said he has been preparing for — and fearing — this public coming-out for years.For most of his performing life, “I thought if I was found out it would end my career, and so I couldn’t tell anyone,” said Mr. Atae during an hour-and-a-half interview the day before his announcement at the apartment of his elder sister in western Tokyo, where he sat on a lime green straw mat in a gray T-shirt and baggy black faux leather shorts.Mr. Atae with his stylist and makeup artist during an interview in Tokyo on Tuesday.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesThe decision to open up about his sexuality, he said, evolved over seven years of living in Los Angeles, where he saw how freely gay couples could show affection in public and built an extensive support network.“Everyone was so open,” he said. “People would talk about their vulnerabilities. In Japan, people think it’s best not to talk about those things.”Gay and transgender performers who regularly appear on television do not talk explicitly about their sexuality.“Japanese society is not a place where people strictly state their sexuality,” said Satoshi Masuda, a researcher specializing in Japanese popular music at Osaka Metropolitan University. “Rather, it naturally comes to be known.”Mr. Atae, the youngest of three children, grew up in a town between Kyoto and Osaka.His mother insisted that he play baseball until the end of elementary school. Sticking with it, she told him, would teach him “gaman” — the Japanese word for endurance.When he discovered a local hip-hop dance studio, the discipline became an instant passion. “I just thought: ‘This is it,’” he said.His instructors encouraged him to try out for a new pop group. On a lark, he sent in a résumé and auditioned by video though he was still in middle school. After two weeks of training in dance, singing and acting in Tokyo, Mr. Atae was selected by the management company, Avex, as one of eight initial band members.AAA debuted in 2005, with Mr. Atae, the youngest member, forgoing high school. He performed mostly as a dancer, and began appearing in TV series and movies.His sexuality perplexed him. “It was a time when on TV, comedians would say two men kissing was gross,” he said. If anyone asked if he had a girlfriend, he just said he was too busy working.AAA rapidly scored with fans, eventually recording eight top 10 hits on Billboard Japan’s Top 100 chart. But as Mr. Atae wrote in a memoir, “Every Life Is Correct, But Incorrect,” published last year, “my mental state was in shambles.” He said he spent a period with AAA “stuck in a marsh of negative thinking,” frustrated that he was not as well known as other band members.What he left out was that he was terrified that a gossip magazine or fans would discover he was gay.Mr. Atae in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, where he used to perform at the beginning of his career.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesIn 2016, as some of the members of AAA embarked on solo acts, Mr. Atae moved to Los Angeles, where he attended entertainment business classes and studied English on his own.But when he visited neighborhoods popular with the L.G.B.T.Q. community, he ran into Japanese tourists and expats, and feared someone might leak a photo of him at a gay club or out with a male date.“I thought, everything is over,” he said. Then the long-ago baseball lessons from his mother kicked in. “I thought there had to be a way,” he said.Gradually, Mr. Atae made friends he could trust with his secret. He began to plan his public revelation.He would have to tell his family, his mother first. “It was the most nervous I have ever been in coming out,” he said.“I was super surprised, and I had never imagined it,” said his mother, Suzuko, 66, who asked to keep her surname private to avoid harassment.Although she supported her son personally, she balked when he said he wanted to go public. She was anxious about Mr. Atae facing online attacks or discrimination. Now, she said, “I am 200 percent supportive.”On Wednesday night, his mother sat in the back row of the auditorium, across the aisle from her two other children and their families, crying as he broke down sobbing as he told the audience that he once “thought my feelings were wrong.”Even as Mr. Atae started recording solo songs with lyrics like “Pretty girl, I still adore you,” he had started telling more people about his sexuality. His solo career has been modest, with no chart-topping hits.To his friends, the news was often a surprise. But many, including fellow band members from AAA, showed up on Wednesday to cheer him on. “The word ‘diversity’ started becoming more common, but how to take in that word is still a very difficult issue in Japan,” said Misako Uno, 37, a AAA member, in a backstage interview. “I want to be a good cushion” for him.Writing his memoir, Mr. Atae said, was a way to soft-pedal his eventual announcement to fans.“I figured it was not a good idea to just suddenly say ‘I am gay,’” he said.Mr. Atae’s decision, he said, was not political. All he wanted, he said, was to “normalize” being gay.On the day before his announcement, a stylist, a makeup artist, a publicist and several assistants trailed Mr. Atae during a photo shoot where he wore a Céline shirt and John Lawrence Sullivan trousers. He seemed relaxed, despite repeating how nervous he felt.Coming out, he knew, would likely draw criticism. “Whatever you do, there will be haters,” he said. “I can only focus on the people I might be helping.”After the announcement on Wednesday night, Miku Tada, 23, an art student in Tokyo, said her heart broke to think of how Mr. Atae had “struggled on his own.” But now, she said, “I think that he can have a lot of influence on other kids who may be feeling the same way.”Reiko Uchida, 43, a housewife from Saitama, a suburb outside Tokyo, said that normally, she would be taken aback if someone told her they were gay or lesbian. But with Mr. Atae, she said, “I see him as someone whose personality I like and a person that I respect.”The evening closed with a music video broadcast of Mr. Atae’s single, “Into the Light”:“I spent so long being these versions of myself/I forgot who I was, I was somebody else/You give me something I’ve been missing my whole life/I’m coming into the light.” More

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    ‘Annihilation,’ ‘Support the Girls’ and More Streaming Gems

    This month’s rundown of off-the-radar picks on your subscription streaming services includes indies of all stripes, plus three documentary explorations of our changing media landscape.‘Annihilation’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.You’d think that a science-fiction adventure featuring the “Star Wars” alums Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, as well as Portman’s “Thor” co-star Tessa Thompson, would have been a giant hit. But Paramount Pictures seemed baffled by how to market a sci-fi picture about ideas and creeping dread (rather then lasers and intergalactic dogfights), dumping it onto Netflix overseas and into theaters with a shrug in the United States. They fear what they don’t understand; the writer and director Alex Garland, adapting the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, crafts a thrilling yet thoughtful combination of head trip and hero’s journey that owes more to Tarkovsky than Lucas.‘On the Count of Three’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.The feature directorial debut of the stand-up comic and sitcom star Jerrod Carmichael was one of many films all but disappeared by the pandemic; it premiered at the 2021, online-only edition of the Sundance Film Festival before quietly landing on Hulu more than a year later. But there’s much to recommend in “On the Count of Three,” the story of two longtime friends (played by Carmichael and Christopher Abbott) who vow to aid each other in ending their lives after a long day of cleaning up unfinished business. Its chief virtue is its leading actors — Abbott has been doing modest but devastating work on the indie scene for years, and Carmichael matches his co-star’s intensity and anguish — while Carmichael shows a sure hand for navigating the tonal shifts of Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s tricky screenplay.‘White Bird in a Blizzard’ (2014)Stream it on Max.The films of the director Gregg Araki have been so (rightly) celebrated in recent years for their wild stylistic choices and unapologetic queer themes that it’s tempting to overlook his more tempered, mainstream affairs. But this combination of sun-baked noir, coming-of-age drama and Sirkian melodrama remains one of his most fascinating concoctions. Shailene Woodley turns in one of her finest performances to date as young Kat, whose mother, Eve (Eva Green, vamping marvelously), disappears under mysterious circumstances. Kat tries to figure out what happened, but “White Bird” is less a detective story than an exploration of the tricky landscape of young adulthood, dramatized with a weary verisimilitude.‘Violet & Daisy’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.This tale of two teenage girl assassins (Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan) from the writer and director Geoffrey Fletcher (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Precious”) suffers a bit from post-Tarantino preciousness. The M.V.P. here is James Gandolfini, who co-stars as their would-be target, and plays the character with the weary melancholy of a man who knows his days are numbered, and has accepted it. He plays it as dry comedy, with just a touch of doomed inevitability, and that’s the right choice; the genuine tenderness and trust in his scenes with Ronan are a nice plus. “Violet & Daisy” hit theaters just 12 days before Gandolfini’s untimely death, and it serves as a poignant reminder of the wide range of roles he had yet to play.‘Slow West’ (2015)Stream it on Max.Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Oscar-nominated turn in “The Power of the Dog” was not the actor’s first go-round in the Wild West; six years earlier, he co-starred with Michael Fassbender in this eccentric and affecting oater from the writer and director John Maclean. Smit-McPhee plays Jay, a teenage Scottish immigrant traveling the West in search of his sweetheart from back home, with Fassbender as Silas, a frontiersman who takes the innocent and clueless Jay under his wing. MacLean creates a credibly dangerous world of threats both natural and seemingly supernatural (Ben Mendelsohn, stealing the show as a menacing bounty hunter).‘Support the Girls’ (2018)Stream it on Hulu.A preview of the film.The writer and director Andrew Bujalski (“Funny Ha Ha,” “Computer Chess”) creates what looks, on its shiny surface, like a sunny workplace comedy along the lines of “Working …” or the Chotchkie’s scenes in “Office Space.” But he’s up to something much slyer, a smart examination of class and gender politics in one of their most pointed playgrounds: a Hooters-style sports bar and grill, where customers leer at scantily clad waitresses while the manager, Lisa (Regina Hall), tries to keep temperatures cool (and maintain her own sanity). It’s a wise, winning comedy, with a particularly sparkling supporting turn by Haley Lu Richardson, a “White Lotus” favorite.‘Voyeur’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.The strange, twisted tale of the motel owner Gerald Foos (who claimed to have spied on his customers for decades) and the superstar journalist Gay Talese (who wrote about Foos in a controversial “New Yorker” article and book) is detailed by the directors Myles Kane and Josh Koury in this riveting documentary. Voyeurism aside, the most compelling passages are less about what Foos did than how Talese’s seemingly sturdy news judgment failed him so spectacularly. Ultimately, “Voyeur” is less a character study than a prescient examination of a faltering media landscape, where a story that’s too good to be true is too often told anyway.‘VHS Massacre’ (2016) / ‘VHS Massacre Too’ (2020)Stream part one and part two on Amazon Prime Video.Kenneth Powell and Thomas Edward Seymour’s first documentary on, per the secondary title, “Cult Films and the Decline of Physical Media” is a bit too ambitious for its slender 72-minute running time, attempting to follow too many strands and chase too many gimmicks. But the most direct material, on the logistics of the video business — from its golden age to this waning period — is invaluable, as Seymour seemed to realize when solo-directing the more successful follow-up, a straight-ahead history of exploitation films, their exhibition and the kind of oddities we’ve lost in this all-streaming, all-the-time era. The sequel is the better film, but both are informative and enlightening, with copious commentary from the people who make these movies, and those who love them. More

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    Britpop’s Back. But What Happened to Cool Britannia?

    Some of the biggest ’90s bands are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals abroad. Yet Britpop’s swaggering sense of national self-belief feels like a distant memory.In 1994, Luis Chuva was 14 and on summer vacation at his grandparents’ home in Costa Nova, Portugal, when, one Saturday, he glimpsed something on TV that changed his life: a music video for “Girls and Boys,” by the British band Blur.Onscreen, Blur’s singer, Damon Albarn, dressed in a track jacket and wearing a hint of eyeliner, glanced seductively at the camera, and then launched into an upbeat song about British tourists on promiscuous, beer-fueled Mediterranean holidays.The swaggering track couldn’t have been further from Chuva’s simple teenage life: It featured Albarn singing in a regional British accent about “Girls who want boys / Who like boys to be girls.” But Chuva recalled in a recent interview that he “was hypnotized.”Damon Albarn in the 1994 music video for Blur’s “Girls and Boys.”Soon, the teenager was scouring Portuguese music magazines to find out everything he could about Blur and the other so-called Britpop bands, which included Pulp, Suede (known as the London Suede in the United States) and Oasis. He taped their songs off the radio. He got hold of bootleg tapes of their concerts, which he dreamed of attending.And Chuva made a decision: At the first opportunity, he would move to London. Viewed from sleepy ’90s Portugal, Britain looked optimistic, exciting, colorful. “It just felt like the place to be,” he said.Now 44, Chuva has lived in London for almost two decades, and, this summer, he’s busy — because Britpop is back. Some 30 years after the genre emerged, paving the way for the wider phenomenon known as Cool Britannia, some of its biggest acts are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals from Mexico to Japan.This month, Blur released “The Ballad of Darren,” the group’s first album in eight years, and played two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium, a London soccer venue that can seat 90,000 people. Chuva went to both concerts.Pulp, another Britpop mainstay, has also re-formed for a major tour. (Chuva saw them, too.) There was even chatter about a potential Oasis reunion — although Noel and Liam Gallagher, the brothers at the heart of that boisterous rock group, quickly knocked the idea back, pointing out on separate radio shows that they don’t talk to each other.Wembley Stadium, where Blur performed their London shows, holds 90,000 people.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe comebacks have received euphoric reviews, but they are occurring at a starkly different moment for British pop music, compared with the ’90s. Although Britpop never reached the same heights of popularity in the United States that it did in Australia, Canada, Japan and continental Europe, it coincided with a high point for British soft power. In 1996 Newsweek declared London the world’s coolest city. In 1997, Vanity Fair devoted 25 pages to the bands, artists, chefs and designers making Britain “the place we must all look to.” The same year, The New Yorker called Britain’s music scene “a scary paradise.”Today, however, neither British nor global news media are portraying Britain as the musical place to be — despite it giving the world current stars like Ed Sheeran, Adele and Harry Styles. Instead, news articles about the country’s music scene are more likely to touch on venues shuttering — at a rate of one a week this year, according to the nonprofit Music Venue Trust — or the country’s bands, DJs and rappers struggling to tour abroad after Brexit brought in a tangle of red tape. Local news outlets have also lamented the British government’s cuts to arts funding, and warned about the decline of music teaching in schools.Sitting in his West London recording studio recently, Albarn said some things hadn’t changed since Britpop’s heyday. He was still “completely obsessed with this country,” he said, and writing songs with lyrics that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.”But there were also big differences, he added. He was now 55, and wore knee supports onstage. And the challenges facing the country’s pipeline of musical stars were clear: “The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” he said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Chuva, the Portuguese music fan, said he felt a change, too — not just in Britain’s music, but in the national mood. “The weather here’s always been gray,” he said. “Now everything is.”Damon Albarn said he was still “completely obsessed” with Britain, and still wrote songs that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.” Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBut there were challenges to the country’s pipeline of musical stars, Albarn said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” Albarn said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe emergence in the early 1990s of Britpop — a catchall term for almost any guitar music that came out of Britain at the time — was, in many ways, a reaction to America. At the end of 1992, Blur traveled to the United States for a 44-date tour, only to find a country gripped by grunge music and indifferent to the band’s danceable indie charms.Not long after British journalists labeled the style “Britpop,” and highlighted its rejection of American tastes, it became a pop juggernaut in Britain, with bands vying to top the country’s pop charts.Blur’s music seemed to typify the genre, with cheeky singles about life in modern England. But it quickly expanded to include a variety of acts, including Elastica — a sneeringly cool punk-influenced band — and the anthemic Oasis. Each had different ideas about Britishness, but they all seemed united in a swaggering sense of self-belief.The crowd at a Blur gig, in London, in July. The audience included new and old fans.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesSeveral of the bands were depicted with the Union Jack flag on magazine covers, and happy to deploy it in their visuals. Among them was Sonya Madan, the lead singer of Echobelly, who was born in India and moved to Britain as a child. She once appeared in a music video wearing a Union Jack T-shirt with the phrase “My Country Too” scrawled on it. “It was such a positive explosion,” she said in a recent interview, “with people exploring their self-identity and having this positivity about being British.”And it didn’t take long for Britain’s politicians to see an opportunity. In 1995, Tony Blair, then the leader of the opposition Labour Party, invited Albarn for a meeting in the Houses of Parliament. Over gin and tonics, Blair and a spin doctor peppered the singer with queries. They included, Albarn said: “What do you think young people are looking for in their governance?”“I didn’t understand,” Albarn recalled. “I’d just thought he wanted to meet me.”Two years later, when Blair became prime minister, Albarn turned down an invitation to a drinks reception for British cultural figures at 10 Downing Street, having decided that the new government was just using musicians for a photo opportunity.Some fans wore throwback British fashions including bucket hats. A handful even draped themselves in the Union Jack.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesLuis Chuva, a Portuguese Blur fan who relocated to London in the ’90s and still lives there. He attended both Blur gigs.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBlur’s latest album, “The Ballad of Darren,” is named for their former bodyguard. At a Wembley show this month, fans wore masks bearing Darren “Smoggy” Evans’s face.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIf Britpop made Britain feel good about itself, it also made people abroad feel positive about Britain.Derek Miller, a 46-year-old American actor, said in an interview that he became “immediately smitten” with Blur when he heard them as a teenager in Chicago. The music didn’t have the machismo of American rock, he said. “There was something about it that was just fun.”While studying at Indiana University Bloomington, he met other Britpop obsessives. (The college radio station had a Britpop show, and the presenter was prone to speaking in a fake British accent, Miller said.) After graduation he moved to Britain. He now lives in Yorkshire, in northern England, and has a son named Jarvis, after the Pulp lead singer.In recent interviews, a dozen other non-British Britpop fans offered similar tales. Jess Mo said that, at age 18, she moved to London from a village of “literally five houses” on an island off the coast of Sweden, because of her love of Blur. Anne-Sophie Marsh, a Frenchwoman, said she wrote to Pulp’s fan club for advice on what British college to study at, and then moved to the city of Brighton.Blur played hits including “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesMost expert interviewees for this article — musicians, academics and journalists — said they felt that Britain’s music scene was today less likely to draw fans to the country. Their reasons didn’t involve the quality of British music. Albarn said some of Britain’s younger, ever-online music stars were writing songs filled with such “universal references” that fans may not even realize they were British. That applied to his own group Gorillaz, too, he said. “I don’t think there’s any sense of it being English,” he said. “They think it’s American in America,” he added. “I think in England they think it’s American, too.”The only interviewee who didn’t seem downbeat about the prospects of Britain’s musical influence was an American, but one who knows a lot about soft power. Joseph Nye is a political scientist and a former Pentagon official, who in the late 1980s pioneered the idea that countries don’t need to use force to get what they want, but can achieve influence by building popular affinity. By phone, Nye said that, at first glance, it did seem Britain’s musical star was waning. “I hear a lot about K-pop,” he said of Korean artists like BTS. “I don’t hear much about Britpop.”But, he added, people would still be listening to touchstone British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles for decades to come. It almost doesn’t matter what Britpop’s legacy was; the country remains a cultural powerhouse by virtue of its earlier history. “I’m not saying Britain can rest on its laurels forever,” Nye said. “But laurels don’t wither.”A Times reporter at the show spoke to fans from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesAt one of Blur’s recent homecoming shows at Wembley Stadium, fans had begun lining up outside long before the scheduled showtime. Nye seemed to have a point. Many wore Blur T-shirts. Others were dressed in throwback British fashions, including bucket hats and Fred Perry polo shirts. Few of those die-hard supporters were British. Instead, they said, they were from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France, and many had flown over especially for the concert. Chuva, the Portuguese fan, was among them in the line.A few hours later, Chuva was at the front as Blur played hits like “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain — and his teenage favorite, “Girls and Boys.” As the band finished with “The Universal” — a euphoric song from 1995 — Albarn put his hands on his knees, emotionally and physically spent.It was a “truly special” evening, Chuva said. He just hoped the band’s aging members hadn’t exhausted themselves. He had tickets for the next day’s gig, too.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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    How ‘Barbie’ Set Designers Brought Those Dreamhouses to Life

    To make their Barbieland sets a reality, the movie’s production team embraced the surreal, going big on bright pinks and shrunken proportions.While working on films like “Atonement,” “Anna Karenina” and “Darkest Hour,” the production designer Sarah Greenwood and the set decorator Katie Spencer, both Oscar nominees many times over, had to turn soundstages into period-accurate sets, using their extraordinary attention to detail to embroider these spaces with texture and soul.And while those jobs were demanding — if even one thing looked wrong, it could dispel the film’s period illusion — they proved to be no match for the bright-pink studio comedy that is Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.”“It was one of the most difficult philosophical, intellectual, cerebral pieces of work we’ve ever done,” Greenwood told me last week during a video call with Spencer. “How can that be? It’s ‘Barbie.’ But it really was.”Then again, since the film works on several levels, many things about “Barbie” are headier than you might expect: Though it’s a big-budget film based on a Mattel toy, Gerwig and her co-writer, Noah Baumbach, pose plenty of significant questions about life and womanhood throughout. And in the visually dazzling Barbie Dreamhouses that Greenwood and Spencer designed — where Margot Robbie, as Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, as Ken, performed — even the smallest details in the background required many months of existential pondering.“Everything is considered,” Spencer said. “Absolutely everything.”Though Gerwig came on board the project as a bona fide Barbie aficionado, Greenwood and Spencer had no personal history with the doll. “Neither of us had Barbie growing up,” Spencer said. “I suppose we were like a lot of the population, quite judgmental about Barbie in a way.”The film’s primary color was a vivid fuchsia. The production cleaned its paint supplier out of every pail they had.Warner Bros.Still, captivated by Gerwig’s enthusiasm, the two women threw themselves into intense research. Their directive was to preserve a sense of play, which is why Barbie’s home has no stairs: Why would a doll deign to descend a flight of steps when she could take a circular pink slide or, even better, float gracefully down from the roof as if guided by the invisible hand of a child?“We all had to believe in it as much as if it was a space movie or period movie,” Spencer said. “We had to research it as though it was set in 1780.”First, the designers studied a vintage Barbie Dreamhouse, finding it to be much more cramped than they anticipated: A classically proportioned Barbie could graze the ceiling of each room with a simple upward swivel of her arm.To simulate that feel, “the Dreamhouses in the film are 23 percent smaller than they would be, as are the cars and roads,” Greenwood said. “When you scale the house down, you make the actors like Margot and Ryan seem bigger, which makes the whole thing seem ‘toy.’”Instead of adapting the Dreamhouses to feel more real, Greenwood and Spencer played up their surreality. When Barbie opens her refrigerator, most of the foods are simply flat cartoon decals. Her oversize cup contains no liquid — why should it, when Barbies don’t drink? — and the size of her toothbrush is even more exaggerated, since it’s the kind of prop a child might find included in a dollhouse.“Once you’ve done that once or twice, those moments of dollness, it makes the whole thing believable,” Spencer said.With few walls to speak of, Barbie Dreamhouses are the definition of “open plan,” which presented its own logistical problems. “You’re designing something that isn’t there, in effect,” said Greenwood, who drew inspiration from museum dioramas to conjure layers of background that would help fill each shot. Since our main Barbies live in a cul-de-sac — in fact, it’s the dot of the “i” in the cursive roads that spell “Barbieland” — each Dreamhouse looks out into several other Dreamhouses, while the blue sky and mauve mountains that surround them were hand-painted onto an 800-foot-long backdrop meant to recall old-fashioned soundstage musicals.If it feels artificial, that’s the point: Why preserve the fourth wall for homes that barely have any walls to begin with? “It’s fake-fake, which is perfect,” Greenwood said. “It was almost Brechtian, the way Greta approached it.”Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie. Her home stands in contrast to the style of the film’s Barbie Dreamhouses.Warner Bros.There is no actual fire in Barbie’s fireplace, nor water in her pool, since Barbieland is devoid of all elements and is as hermetically sealed as a toy box. There aren’t even whites, blacks or browns: Anything in a Dreamhouse that would typically be those colors is just a different shade of pink, with a primary fuchsia so vivid that the production cleaned its paint supplier out of every pail they had.“All the other colors, like the blues, had to up the ante,” Greenwood said, referring to their intensity.The cul-de-sac Dreamhouses were designed in a midcentury-modern style that evokes the time period when Barbie was invented. “We kept coming back to the aesthetic of Palm Springs,” Spencer said. In contrast to those homes, distinguished by clean and simple lines, was the postmodern house on a hill owned by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) — a riot of weird angles and clashing colors, as if Pee-wee’s Playhouse emerged in the middle of a carefully constructed pop-up book.“It was once a Dreamhouse, and it all went a little bit cockeyed, like her,” Greenwood said. “Nothing there was straight, in any sense of the word.”Like its owner, whose face is covered in scribble marks, the walls of Weird Barbie’s house are adorned in doodle patterns and swirls, and there are plenty of other colors on display besides pink. (The primary color on one wall is even, gasp, green.) The other Barbies treat her domicile as if it were a witch’s house, but you can’t deny that Weird Barbie has an eye. Greenwood and Spencer singled out her irregular rainbow rug as a favorite that everyone hoped to take home.“We all wanted her rug, but it’s gone into the Warner Bros. vault of goods,” Spencer said. “But I love the fact that in this vault where you have to go through so much security, you have the Batmobile and then you have Barbie’s car.”Weird Barbie’s house isn’t the movie’s only deviation: Later in the story, after a trip to the real world tips off Ken to the power of the patriarchy, he returns home and exhorts the other Kens to turn the pink and girlie Barbieland into their own personal “Ken-dom.” Soon enough, they’ve staged a hostile takeover of the Dreamhouses — rechristened the “Mojo Dojo Casa Houses” — and given those buildings a man-cave makeover replete with La-Z-Boys, mini fridges and appalling equestrian lampshades.From left, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ryan Gosling and Ncuti Gatwa, three of the film’s Kens.Warner Bros. “We had to keep going back to Greta and saying, really? Really ugly?” Greenwood said. “But there’s a purity to the ugliness as well, because it’s a limited palate.”That’s because these himbos aren’t sure where all of their purloined swag ought to go, or even what most of it does. Barbecues have been placed haphazardly onto ovens, the juicers are filled with Doritos, and flat-screen TVs in every Mojo Dojo Casa House are tuned to the same hypnotically banal clip of a horse in eternal gallop.”He’s no interior designer, Ken,” Spencer said, chuckling. “But can I just say, a lot of the crew wanted to buy things from the Ken-dom. I’m not saying who, but a lot of them did.”The film was shot last year at Warner Bros.’s Leavesden Studios, about 20 miles northwest of London, and as word of the colorful sets spread, the production quickly attracted its fair share of visitors. “We were filming in an English winter, gray and black with snow,” Greenwood said. “So everybody would just come in there for an injection of light and summer.”Added Spencer: “It made people happy. You couldn’t help but smile.”And what of its makers? Did all that time spent on these “Barbie” sets affect their personal palette? Yes, confessed Greenwood.“I’ve painted my bedroom pink, literally,” she said. “I’d never painted anything pink before. I love pink now!” More

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    Hollywood Strike Leaves Influencers Sidelined and Confused

    Despite not being in the actors’ union, many content creators are passing up deals to promote films or TV shows because they don’t want to be barred from the guild or face online vitriol.Deanna Giulietti is not in the actors’ union, but she turned down $28,000 last week because of its strike.Ms. Giulietti, a 29-year-old content creator with 1.8 million TikTok followers, had received an offer to promote the new season of Hulu’s hit show “Only Murders in the Building.”But SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, recently issued rules stating that any influencer who engages in promotion for one of the Hollywood studios the actors are striking against will be ineligible for membership. (Disney is the majority owner of Hulu.) That gave Ms. Giulietti, who also acts and aspires to one day join the union, reason enough to decline the offer from Influential, a marketing agency working with Hulu.The union’s rule is part of a variety of aggressive tactics that hit at a pivotal moment for Hollywood labor and shows its desire to assert itself in a new era and with a different, mostly younger wave of creative talent. “I want to be in these Netflix shows, I want to be in the Hulu shows, but we’re standing by the writers, we’re standing by SAG,” Ms. Giulietti said. “People write me off whenever I say I’m an influencer, and I’m like, ‘No, I really feel I could be making the difference here.’”That difference comes at a cost. In addition to the Hulu deal, Ms. Giulietti recently declined a $5,000 offer from the app TodayTix to promote the Searchlight Pictures movie “Theater Camp.” (Disney also owns Searchlight.) She said she was living at home with her parents in Cheshire, Conn., and putting off renting an apartment in New York City while she saw how the strike — which, along with a writers’ strike, could go on for months — would affect her income.Representatives for Searchlight and TodayTix did not respond to requests for comment. Hulu and Influential declined to comment.The last time Hollywood’s screen actors and writers went on strike, social media platforms and the $5 billion influencer industry didn’t exist. The actors’ union began admitting content creators in 2021 and still has only a small number of them, but questions have quickly emerged around how the union’s dispute with the major Hollywood studios will affect popular internet personalities.The union’s message that content creators will be blocked from membership if they provide work or services for struck companies has sent many scrambling. A number of creators have pledged support for writers and actors and circulated “scab” lists of influencers who promote new releases or appear at related events. Others have been frustrated or confused by instructions from a union that doesn’t protect them, and that some had never heard of.SAG-AFTRA, which represents some 160,000 movie and television actors, approved a strike on July 13. The division with the studios is driven largely by concerns about compensation in the streaming era and artificial intelligence. They joined screenwriters, who walked off the job in May, the first dual shutdown since 1960. During the strike, actors are not able to engage in publicity efforts for their projects or appear at film festivals or events like Comic-Con.Influencers have become crucial to the entertainment industry in recent years, especially during the pandemic, building buzz and promoting products. They post videos to hype new TV shows and movies, appear on red carpets and at events like the MTV Video Music Awards, and unbox products tied to film and television characters. Typically, as in the case with Ms. Giulietti, outside agencies hire creators on behalf of the studios.“If I were to help the big studios amid this, I’m just hurting myself in the future,” said Mario Mirante, a comedian with 3.6 million followers on TikTok.Marshall Scheuttle for The New York TimesNow those activities, besides limiting their career ambitions, could lead to internet backlash, with one nonunion influencer already posting an apology video for appearing at a recent Disney movie premiere. Others have posted promotional videos anyway, without backtracking or pulling the content. At least one creator posting from a recent premiere opted to turn off their TikTok comments, possibly to avoid potential criticism. On the flip side, videos from creators about jobs and events that they rejected in solidarity with actors have racked up praise and views on TikTok.“We don’t have power to make decisions for the talent, but we will in this moment recommend not engaging with struck work or struck companies on paid or organic projects,” said Victoria Bachan, president of Whalar Talent, a unit of a creator commerce company that works with more than 200 content creators. She added that young creators were also more apt to be supportive of unions and organized labor.Still, Whitney Singleton, a 27-year-old with 1.2 million TikTok followers, has been frustrated by what is being asked of her. She had never heard of SAG-AFTRA until the past couple of weeks. Ms. Singleton, using the moniker @KeepUpRadio, has attracted fans by singing and rapping about her favorite video games like Fortnite and streaming herself playing video games. It has been her full-time job for three years. She has collaborated with struck companies like Amazon in the past.“I really do value creators, and I want them to get what they deserve,” Ms. Singleton said. “But it’s really hard for me to just be finding out about an organization and being expected to fall in line with their initiative when I feel like it’s new to me and the influencer space.”She said some influencers were being asked to turn down five-figure deals, and that “the majority of creators I’ve talked to about it feel it’s unfair that as nonunion members, they’re being included in this conversation.”Ms. Singleton was invited to an early screening of the “Barbie” movie and said that while it wasn’t a paid promotion, the union’s guidelines for promoting the movie were “what I would deem murky.” Ultimately, she decided to post about the event, for which she dyed her hair pink.“I actually got no negative feedback, it was all positive,” she said. “For a moment, I felt a bit scared and put in a corner with these requirements because I respect creators in all industries, but I wouldn’t be being true to my heart if I had let those things stop me from living my life and sharing the content.”The union did not respond to questions about the criticism or about how many influencers are included in its membership. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the biggest studios, has said its offers to the writers and the actors were “historic” improvements on their previous contracts.The reality for many creators is that they dream of someday achieving a level of fame beyond the smartphone screen, making the threat of blacklisting by Hollywood’s most powerful union an ominous one.Mario Mirante, a 28-year-old comedian on TikTok with 3.6 million followers, recently posted a popular video about turning down a deal to promote a show based on his support for actors and writers and his long-term ambitions. Mr. Mirante has hoped to work in Hollywood since childhood, and even has a tattoo of Jim Carrey as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” on his arm.“That’s a lot of influencers’ goal and aspiration and why they do it,” said Mr. Mirante, who lives in Las Vegas. “We love to entertain and express ourselves, and that’s the Super Bowl, that’s the ultimate, being in a movie or a TV show.”Mr. Mirante has previously been paid to promote the movie “Champions” starring Woody Harrelson and a product tied to the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise. “If I were to help the big studios amid this, I’m just hurting myself in the future, if that makes any sense,” he said. “Of course I’m not a part of it right now, but they’re fighting for basic rights, livable wages, not to have their A.I. likeness taken.”Krishna Subramanian, a founder of the influencer marketing firm Captiv8, said studios might need to pivot away from creators during the strike and get agencies to make more traditional display ads to place on Facebook and other sites.Simone Umba is a TikTok creator with more than 300,000 followers who primarily posts about TV shows and movies but has paused making such videos. She said that many influencers felt that they were “stuck in the middle,” but that most were opting to side with the union even as invitations and deals piled up.“We knew we were going to get approached, and it’s like we’re in a really messy family feud,” Ms. Umba, 26, said.She added, “Regardless of if you want to join the union or not, you don’t want to be one of those people that was willing to take a check instead of standing in support of people fighting for actual livable wages.”Ms. Umba said that it had been painful to miss out on posting about the star-studded “Barbie” movie after this summer’s marketing bonanza and that she had declined to attend an early screening of the film in Atlanta. She and a friend were messaging recently after trailers for “The Marvels” dropped, agonizing over their inability to post.“We were texting each other back and forth, like, this is so hard,” she said. She said she was prepared to hold out for months but was already thinking of holiday releases. She crossed her fingers, held them up and said, “Please, please, don’t let it get to Christmas.” More

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    An Exclamatory Playlist!

    Wham! Neu! “Oh! Darling” and more artists and songs that make a statement.George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in “Wham!”NetflixDear listeners,If you’re looking for something light, fun and full of ridiculous ’80s fashion, I can’t recommend the new Netflix documentary about the pop group Wham! enough — it’s basically the documentary equivalent of a beach read.As someone who wasn’t around for Wham!’s heyday, the movie allowed me to live vicariously through its rise and appreciate things about Wham! I’d never considered before. Like how confident a producer and songwriter George Michael was from a young age. And also that Michael and his immaculately coifed bandmate Andrew Ridgeley really knew how and when to break up a band. They announced their imminent demise in 1986, and then played one epic final show at Wembley Stadium. “Wham! was never going to be middle-aged,” Ridgeley says in the movie, “or be anything other than an essential and pure representation of us as youths.”That sentiment made me realize how uncommonly perfect a band name Wham! was for this group. Goofy, youthful, monosyllabic, here-for-a-good-time-but-not-a-long-time and above all things — exclamatory! Adults, “serious musicians,” newspaper style guidelines: All of them tell you that exclamation points should be used sparingly. Wham! was having none of that. The duo said, “We’re going to make you write or speak an exclamation mark every time you use our name.”It got me thinking about the art of using exclamation marks in band names and song titles. Which, of course, calls for a playlist.Sometimes the musical exclamation point almost mimics percussion: “Turn! Turn! Turn!” or “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” Sometimes it helps you hear the voice of a particularly emotive singer, as I can only hear the phrase “Everybody Wants Some!!” in David Lee Roth’s wail. But more often than not, the musical exclamation point is simply a way to raise the stakes, to indicate (at the risk of overcompensating) that there is something ecstatic about the sound that accompanies it.Like Wham!, I’ll now make my graceful exit. All that’s left to say: Listen up!Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Wham!: “Everything She Wants”This is one of my favorite Wham! songs, perhaps because it sounds, uncharacteristically, a little sinister. As my colleague Wesley Morris put it in his great review of “Wham!,” “there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Abba: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Famously sampled in Madonna’s 2005 dance-floor reinvention “Hung Up,” this lusty 1979 Abba classic also boasts some excellent parentheses use. (Listen on YouTube)3. Van Halen: “Everybody Wants Some!!”A double exclamation point? That’s bold. Then again, Eddie Van Halen’s solo in the middle of this 1980 track is, like any Eddie Van Halen solo, basically the sonic equivalent of a double exclamation mark. When Richard Linklater paid homage to this song by naming his (hilarious) 2016 movie “Everybody Wants Some!!,” he knew enough to honor the band’s punctuation. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Beatles: “Oh! Darling”The Beatles certainly knew how to employ the exclamation point: “Help!,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” and, if you expand the framework to their solo careers, John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” I love the first-syllable exclamation in “Oh! Darling,” though: Its clipped agony contrasts with the way Paul McCartney stretches out that “daaaarling” and effectively captures the raw-throated desperation of his vocal. (Listen on YouTube)5. The Byrds: “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”I confess that this song — and the Byrds’ lush, fluid delivery of that titular phrase — never really screamed “exclamation” to me. But given that it was written by Pete Seeger and known as a quiet folk ballad before the Byrds made it a No. 1 hit in 1965, those three typographical lightning strikes, though present in Seeger’s original title, now convey the excitement of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” gone electric. (Listen on YouTube)6. Sly and the Family Stone: “Stand!”Also the name of Sly and the Family Stone’s great 1969 album, “Stand!” is a command, an invitation and a call to action, bringing the listener right into the reality of the song. Its punctuation also effectively communicates the energy of the track’s ever-ascending chorus and frenzied, gospel-influenced final section. (Listen on YouTube)7. Los Campesinos!: “You! Me! Dancing!”There was a coy, sometimes run-on exuberance about many indie bands in the aughts, though few encapsulated that as expressively as the Welsh group Los Campesinos! Bonus points, of course, for exclamation points in the band name and song title! (Listen on YouTube)8. Neu!: “Hero”The name of the legendary krautrock group Neu! — German for “New!” — was, in a sense, a sendup of the consumer culture pervading the band’s Düsseldorf home in the early 1970s. As the wildly influential drummer Klaus Dinger said in a 2001 interview with The Wire, “‘Neu!’ at that time was the strongest word in advertising.” (Listen on YouTube)9. George Michael: “Freedom! (‘90)”In 1984, Wham! released a bright, buoyant single called “Freedom.” Michael chose to revisit that title — though now with a time-stamp, and an exclamation! — for this hit from his second solo album, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.” The lyrics revisit the image he cultivated back in those Wham! days, and reject it in favor of something truer to Michael’s authentic self: “Today the way I play the game is not the same, no way,” he sang. “Think I’m gonna get myself happy.” The exclamation mark sells it: This song was Michael’s liberation. (Listen on YouTube)Gotta have some faith in the sound,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“An Exclamatory Playlist!” track listTrack 1: Wham!, “Everything She Wants”Track 2: Abba, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Track 3: Van Halen, “Everybody Wants Some!!”Track 4: The Beatles, “Oh! Darling”Track 5: The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”Track 6: Sly and the Family Stone, “Stand!”Track 7: Los Campesinos!, “You! Me! Dancing!”Track 8: Neu!, “Hero”Track 9: George Michael, “Freedom! (’90)”Bonus tracksRIP Tony Bennett, who was such a musical institution that part of me thought he might actually live forever. Rob Tanenbaum put together a playlist of 10 of his best-known songs, and Jon Pareles wrote a lovely appraisal that begins with quite a musical brainteaser: “Has there ever been a more purely likable pop figure than Tony Bennett?” I’m still mulling it over. More