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    ‘Biosphere’ Review: It’s the End of the World. Two Men Survived.

    What happens when a petulant, anti-intellectual president destroys the planet and he and his childhood buddy, the brainy one, are the only survivors?Over the decades that Billy (Mark Duplass) and Ray (Sterling K. Brown) have been best buds, the world has gotten worse — and they’re to blame. Honestly. “Biosphere,” a honed yet heartfelt two-person dramedy by the first-time feature director Mel Eslyn, takes place in a geodesic dome under a black sky. A few years back, Billy, then president of the United States, destroyed the planet; luckily, his consigliere, Ray, had already built this bunker. Barring a miracle, it will be humanity’s final tomb.Naturally, there’s blame to spread. “Maybe if you’d done your job, we wouldn’t need to live in a dome,” Ray huffs to his petulant, anti-intellectual roommate. Ray, the brains of the pair, still treats Billy less like a former commander in chief than like the child he’s known since grade school. Their lingering locker-room power struggle factors into why everyone else is dead.At first, we’re steeling ourselves for an extended skit. Duplass, who wrote the script with Esyln, gives Billy the same dopey charm that Will Ferrell awarded George W. Bush, and comes off as so likable in a would-drink-a-beer-with-him-if-beer-still-existed kind of way that it’s hard to hold onto the full horror of the hell he’s unleashed. (It’s possible to interpret Danny Bensi’s and Saunder Jurriaans’s a cappella score as a haunting by the apocalypse’s ghosts, though it’s a hair too chipper.)The film is only glancingly interested in science fiction mechanics. Billy and Ray face a relentless list of threats: the dwindling supply of fresh fish, the fragility of their dome’s filthy glass, the mysterious green light that looms ever closer, and their history of stifled resentments compounded by a lack of privacy (“It’s not like you can put a sock on the door in here”). Yet these aren’t problems to be solved; “Biosphere” uses their survival as a stress test to gauge whether these old friends are capable of change. Can extreme pressures turn two towel-snapping, Earth-murdering lumps of coal into diamonds? Even at the end of everything, is there hope our species can evolve?I can say without hyperbole that there are conversations in this movie that I have never heard before (and refuse to spoil). Better, I can confirm that Brown — the straight man to Duplass’s comic relief — delivers his half with conviction. At one point, his eyes well with tears as he tells a story about a magical bowling ball; later, he works himself into such a tizzy that he interrupts his own patter to lift weights. He and Duplass start off simply keeping pace with the audacious setup. By the end, the actors seem even braver than the script, which hesitates on the final step.There’s an unreconcilable tension in a film that aims to celebrate the unpredictability of life while manicuring every last prop and casual aside for maximum resonance. Still, I’ll allow Eslyn’s heavy hand for a scene in which Billy delivers an ode to his underused phallus while gazing at a nightlight shaped like the Washington Monument. “You made me feel powerful,” he intones — a farewell salute that doubles as a goodbye to bad government.BiosphereNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Joy Ride’ Review: A Raunch-Com Roller Coaster

    Four friends travel to China in a trip that goes entertainingly off the rails in this terrific comedy, starring Ashley Park and Sherry Cola.The new “Joy Ride” offers a modern-comedy bingo card with pretty much all the squares checked: mismatched besties, an oddball crashing a group outing, said outing going wildly off the rails, freewheeling sex, projectile vomiting, unhinged debauchery involving booze and drugs, and a crucial plot point hinging on an intimate body part.This film, directed by the “Crazy Rich Asians” co-writer Adele Lim, may not reinvent the raunch-com wheel (see: “The Hangover,” “Girls Trip,” “Bridesmaids”), but it does change who’s driving the car. And, most importantly, it is really, really funny.“Joy Ride” processes all of its familiar ingredients into a sustained, sometimes near-berserk, barrage of jokes, interspersed with epic set pieces. That is, up until the two-thirds mark, when the movie paints itself into a corner and presses the “earnest sentimentality” eject button before managing a narrow escape. It’s a small price to pay for the inspired pandemonium that precedes.The mismatched friends here are Audrey (the brilliant Ashley Park, from “Emily in Paris”) and Lolo (a deliciously acerbic Sherry Cola), who have been best friends since childhood, when they bonded over being the only two Asian girls in their Pacific Northwest town.Audrey, who was adopted from China by a white couple, grows up to become a prim, career-obsessed lawyer. She is sent to Beijing to close a deal, with a promotion hanging on her success. Since her Mandarin is practically nonexistent, she brings along the irrepressible Lolo. Completing the comic superteam are Lolo’s socially awkward cousin, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), whose superpower is extensive K-pop knowledge, and Audrey’s college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu, from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), now a screen star in China and engaged to her very hunky and very Christian co-star (Desmond Chiam).Eventually, Audrey decides to find her birth mother, and the four women set off on an odyssey that immediately devolves into a series of mishaps. The shenanigans come at breakneck speed, and peak with a repurposing of the Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion hit “WAP” that could become a late-night-karaoke staple in its own right.The film is especially sharp around identity and assimilation, and the screenwriters Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao have fun with the expectations and stereotypes placed on Asians and Asian Americans — including those that are self-imposed. The seams show only toward the end, when the film’s pace slackens, but even then, the cast’s chemistry and flawless timing hold steady.As the straight arrow protagonist, Park expertly pulls off a trick similar to Kristen Wiig in “Bridesmaids”: Her character serves as the narrative engine, while also setting up comedy opportunities for the others.If there is any justice, Park will soon be a marquee name. But this applies to all of the central quartet, who so effectively take advantage of the movie’s many opportunities to shine. With “Joy Ride,” summer has truly arrived.Joy RideRated R for exuberant sexuality, bilingual foul language, brief nudity and liberal use of drugs and booze. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films

    A new edit of ‘The French Connection’ removes a racial slur. But nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture.The remarkable thing about the censored scene is how ordinary it feels if you’ve watched a police procedural made before, say, 2010. It’s in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” from 1971. Two narcotics cops — Jimmy (Popeye) Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, and Buddy (Cloudy) Russo, played by Roy Scheider — are at the precinct, following an undercover operation during which a drug dealer ended up slashing Russo with a knife. The injury has left Russo struggling to put on his coat. “Need a little help there?” Doyle chuckles, then adds an ethnic jab: “You dumb guinea.” Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Here Doyle points a slur at the Black dealer: “Never trust a nigger.” Russo: “He could have been white.” Doyle: “Never trust anyone.” Then he invites Russo out for a drink, and they trade masturbation jokes as they head through the door.But perhaps you should forget I mentioned any of this, because you’re now a lot less likely to see it in the film. In June, viewers of the Criterion Channel’s streaming version noticed that much of the scene had been edited out, without announcement or comment; people viewing via Apple TV and Amazon found the same. It was reported that the version available on Disney+ in Britain and Canada remains unedited, suggesting that whoever authorized the cut imagined the moment to be unfit for American audiences in particular. (Disney owns the rights to the film, having acquired Fox, its original distributor, in 2019.) The domestic market now sees a slapdash sequence that has Russo entering the room, clutching his forearm, followed by a jerky jump to the door, where Doyle waits. The disparaging exchange is, of course, omitted. What remains is a glitch, a bit of hesitation, the suggestion of something amiss. “Never trust anyone,” indeed.Bad jump cuts create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play.The conversation that has surrounded this edit — a belated alteration to the winner of an Academy Award for best picture — is just the latest of many such controversies. In 2011, one publisher prepared an edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that replaced instances of that same racial slur with “slave.” In February, Roald Dahl’s British publisher, Puffin Books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company confirmed that new editions of the author’s works, published in 2022, had been tweaked to substitute language that might offend contemporary readers, including descriptors like “fat” and “ugly.” (After a backlash, Puffin said it would keep the original versions for sale, too.) Then, of course, there are the right-wing campaigns to excise passages from instructional texts or simply remove books from public schools and libraries.This particular change to “The French Connection” came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. “The French Connection” was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the “inner city,” dialogue underlining their “good cop, bad cop” dynamic; in certain ways, it’s not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyle’s eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running “alcoholic cop” trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing — another ongoing genre cliché. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, “rough around the edges” — but, of course, we’re ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like “The Shield” and “The Wire”: figures built on the idea that “good cop, bad cop” can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.Attempting to edit out just one of a character’s flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldn’t be using racial epithets. But they’re probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too — like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a film’s legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isn’t to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinema’s great avatar of paranoia — a star in three of this country’s most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, “The French Connection,” “The Conversation” and “Enemy of the State” — then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that. This is a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor.Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into “The French Connection” reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if it’s unclear from which direction it’s reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops’ code names for their French targets: “Frog One” and “Frog Two.” It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the film’s frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works — continually remolding them into a shape that suits today’s market — eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; we’re left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning — and living — in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained. You can, of course, find the unedited precinct scene on YouTube. (Just as you can find altered scenes from other films, from “Fantasia” to “Star Wars.”) It’s just packaged inside an interview with Hackman about his approach to portraying Doyle, whom he disliked. “The character was a bigot and antisemitic and whatever else you want to call him,” the actor says. “That’s who he was. It was difficult for me to say the N-word; I protested somewhat, but there was a part of me that also said, ‘That’s who the guy is.’ I mean, you like him or not, that’s who he was. You couldn’t really whitewash him.” Turns out you can.Opening illustration: Source photographs from 20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesNiela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More

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    Coco Lee, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and ‘Mulan’ Singer, Dies at 48

    A pop star across Asia by her early 20s, Ms. Lee reached international recognition with an Oscar-nominated song in 2001.Coco Lee, a Chinese American singer and songwriter best known for performing an Oscar-nominated song in the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” died on Wednesday. She was 48.The cause was suicide, according to a statement from her sisters, Carol and Nancy Lee, who did not say where she died. Ms. Lee was taken to a hospital on Sunday after she attempted suicide at her home, they said.“Coco had been suffering from depression for a few years but her condition deteriorated drastically over the last few months,” her sisters wrote. “Although Coco sought professional help and did her best to fight depression, sadly that demon inside of her took the better of her.”Ms. Lee had built a successful career as a pop singer in Asia, but she was best known to American audiences for singing the song “A Love Before Time” in the 2000 film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” The song was nominated for an Oscar in the best new original song category, and she performed it in front of a television audience of millions at the Academy Awards ceremony in March 2001.“Combining the flavor and texture of Eastern music with the orchestral color and sensitive lyrics of Western culture, the magic of this stunningly beautiful film is truly realized in this evocative love ballad,” the actress Julia Stiles said as she introduced Ms. Lee’s performance.Her career as a recording artist began after she finished as the runner-up in a singing competition hosted by the television broadcaster TVB in Hong Kong in 1993, shortly after she graduated from high school. Ms. Lee entered the competition on a whim, she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, and stumbled upon success.“I was timid as a kid,” she said. “I would hide in the bathroom and sing in the shower. I always predicted my older sister Nancy would be the singer. She’s beautiful, talented and she’s got nice legs. I had no idea it would be me.”But being selected as runner-up in the TVB contest led to the release of her debut album with a Taiwanese record label in 1994. “My goal in the singing business is not to stay in one place,” she told a reporter for The South China Morning Post in 1997, saying that she wanted to work in Asia and the U.S.In 1999, Ms. Lee released her first full English language album, “Just No Other Way,” which featured pop and R&B songs. One track, “Before I Fall In Love,” was included on the soundtrack for the Julia Roberts film “Runaway Bride.”Ms. Lee’s career also expanded beyond music. She voiced the lead character in the Mandarin version of Disney’s 1998 animated film “Mulan,” in addition to singing the movie’s theme song, “Reflection.”Ms. Lee, who was born on Jan. 17, 1975, in Hong Kong, moved to the United States and attended middle and high school in San Francisco, where she was crowned Miss Teen Chinatown in 1991. She briefly attended the University of California at Irvine, intending to study biology and become a doctor, but dropped out after her freshman year, she told The Chronicle.In their statement, Ms. Lee’s sisters noted that this year marked the 30th anniversary of the launch of her accomplished singing career. Ms. Lee was “known to have worked tirelessly to open up a new world for Chinese singers in the international music scene,” they wrote, highlighting her “excellent live performances.”In addition to her sisters, Ms. Lee’s survivors include her husband, Bruce Rockowitz, and two stepdaughters. A complete list was not immediately available.Her last single, called “Tragic,” was released in February. In a post to her social media at the end of 2022, Ms. Lee acknowledged having had an “incredibly difficult year” but encouraged her followers to spread positivity and “be an influential figure to inspire people.”If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources. More

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    Popcast (Deluxe): Olivia Rodrigo Returns, Fall Out Boy Denies History

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The new single by Olivia Rodrigo, “Vampire,” and a discussion of the directions her career may be takingThe Grimace Shake memes dominating TikTok and Instagram, and the “Barbie”/”Oppenheimer” corporate meme face-offA question about the legacy of “The Hills”Fall Out Boy’s updating of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”New songs from Sampha and VeezeAnd trying the Grimace Shake for snack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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    Blackbraid, a Black Metal Musician With Native American Roots

    Sgah’gahsowáh, the artist behind the one-man band, combines the genre’s traditional heavy sounds with a focus on nature. His new album, “Blackbraid II,” is out Friday.Black metal has long been associated with the gray skies, snowy landscapes and Norse mythology of Scandinavia. Most people know it, if at all, as the musical genre associated with church burnings and gory homicides in early 1990s Norway. (Those events were documented in the book “Lords of Chaos,” which was adapted into a 2019 feature starring Rory Culkin as the misanthropic, occultist musician Euronymous.)But black metal has expanded and diversified, so much so that the genre’s latest success story, the one-man band Blackbraid, hails from the Adirondacks and draws on its founder’s Native American roots rather than Vikings and medieval weapons.“I didn’t want to do something ingenuine or be some Indigenous guy who’s writing about Thor and Odin, stuff I have no personal connection to — I want to make a traditional-sounding black metal album, but write something that I can actually identify with,” Blackbraid’s creator, who goes by Sgah’gahsowáh (Mohawk for the witch hawk), said in a video conversation a couple of weeks before the release of his new album, “Blackbraid II,” on Friday.That record does sound fairly traditional, and relies on black metal’s classic building blocks: shrieked vocals, barrages of ferocious blast beats, guitars buzzing like angry bees.Yet there is also elbow room within those parameters, and on “Blackbraid II” you can hear a delicately strummed acoustic guitar here, a traditional flute there. Catchy riffs, most notably on the single “The Spirit Returns,” coexist with ambitious tracks like the 13-plus-minute “Moss Covered Bones on the Altar of the Moon,” which waxes and wanes like an epic saga.Pretty impressive for a one-man band: Sgah’gahsowáh (mononymic aliases are very black metal) composes the material and plays all the instruments except for the drums, which are programmed by his friend Neil Schneider. (Schneider also recorded, mixed and mastered the new album. Blackbraid expands to a five-piece live.)Sgah’gahsowáh grew up not too far from where he lives now, and started both playing guitar and listening to metal in the late 1990s and early 2000, when he was, as he put it, “barely in middle school.” He did not go for the styles that are popular in the United States, however, like thrash, which is exemplified by Metallica and Megadeth, or death, a brutal assault that came of age in Florida swamps.“A lot of black metal is just about being depressed or sadness, and a lot of it is based in the solitude and somberness of nature,” he said, adding that growing up in the woods “and also being a moody teenager,” that resonated for him. “And I just liked the music better,” he said.After a few fruitless efforts on his local scene, he created Blackbraid as a solo endeavor and released his first single, “Barefoot Ghost Dance on Blood Soaked Soil,” in February 2022. Fast-forward 18 months, and Sgah’gahsowáh, an album under his bullet belt and another about to come out, was speaking a few days after playing at the prestigious European festivals Hellfest and Copenhell. Next up is Midgardsblot, a fest held at a former Viking settlement in Norway in August.“I left my job last year, in April or May, so it’s just about a year of me doing Blackbraid for a career,” he said. (He worked as a carpenter.) “It’s kind of crazy.”Black metal’s longstanding interest in history, myths and paganism made it a good fit for Sgah’gahsowáh.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesNaturally, any rapid rise brings out the doubters, particularly in a genre as passionately niche as black metal, where ultra-limited releases are a badge of authenticity.“I read that someone thought he was an industry plant and I was like, ‘Dude, black metal isn’t even big enough to have industry,’” Schneider said, laughing, in a video chat. Blackbraid is not signed to a label and the music is self-released.While it is not remotely mainstream-adjacent, over the past two decades black metal has expanded in the U. S., where the domestic strain is referred to as USBM. Within that, a Native American scene has been percolating with such projects as the California label Night of the Palemoon and bands like Pan-Amerikan Native Front, Ends Embrace and Ixachitlan.“Black metal has definitely become much more diverse in the last 10, 15 years,” Daniel Lukes, co-editor of the recent collection “Black Metal Rainbows,” said in a video interview. “It has become a place where people feel comfortable expressing their identity, whether it’s gender identity or ethnicity. A band like Blackbraid is certainly part of this opening up. On the other hand,” he continued, “a relationship to ethnicity or Indigenous identity or tradition or heritage has been in black metal from the start.”Black metal’s longstanding interest in history, myths and paganism made it a good fit for Sgah’gahsowáh — who picked his stage name to honor the land where he lives rather than a specific ancestry, as he was adopted. (His friends call him Jon, but he is cagey about revealing his last name, allowing that it’s easy to find online; he also is discreet about his town’s location, to protect his family’s privacy.)“There are so many displaced Native Americans all over this continent and it’s a very common misconception that all of us grew up in a reservation and had access to tribal communities,” he said. “That’s kind of how I look at it with Blackbraid — I want to empower those people as well as all the people that are enrolled and living on reservations.”“Almost everything I write is a product of nature,” Sgah’gahsowáh said.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesSgah’gahsowáh also connects black metal with Indigenous traditions via his early use of the highly stylized black-and-white facial makeup known as corpse paint; his current look draws less from Scandinavian designs.“When you look at traditional war paint across the Americas, there’s no difference between that and corpse paint,” he said. “I’ve always thought of it as war paint for Blackbraid anyway. It’s so perfectly intertwined in the black metal aesthetic already.”One of the reasons Blackbraid’s audience is expanding is that he taps into a big source of inspiration for black metal that happens to be very much on many people’s minds: our connection with the natural world and our ecosystems.This has long been a part of the Northern European scene (cue countless songs about winter and videos of men traipsing through snowy vistas) and it has thrived within a segment of USBM, led by eco-minded bands like the precursor Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room and Panopticon. “Sacandaga,” from the first Blackbraid album, has lyrics like “The passage of time, it slows to a soft whisper/Like wind in the pines as the creek flows softly by,” and the accompanying video is filled with shots of majestic forests and mountains.“Almost everything I write is a product of nature,” said Sgah’gahsowáh, who describes himself as “a woodsman who likes fishing and stuff,” as well as an avid hiker. “I want to empower Indigenous people, that’s another huge thing, but when it comes down to it, it’s really about nature.”He added: “I want to take that relationship and somehow translate it into my music, let people feel that as well — especially people that may not really get to spend much time in nature, or live somewhere where it’s not as accessible. I really want that to shine through in my music the most.” More

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    Andrew Ridgeley on George Michael and Life After Wham!

    “The only thing I ever wanted to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band,” but he is content with the duo’s short career, which is chronicled in a new documentary.If you weren’t a teenager in 1984, it might be hard to understand this, but here goes: There are Gen X-ers who remember where they were the first time they saw the video for the Wham! clap-along pop anthem “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”In it, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, the heartthrob frontmen of Wham!, wear big smiles and beachy short shorts as they perform their infectious bop — titled after a note Ridgeley had once left on his family’s refrigerator — for a small crowd of adoring fans. There were fingerless gloves, neon face paint, white “Choose Life” T-shirts that had nothing to do with abortion: It was a new-wave dance party for cool kids who thought Mötley Crüe sucked.Ridgeley, who turned 60 in January, remembers making it as great fun.“It was our first video with an audience,” he said during a recent video interview from his home in London. “The atmosphere was really quite excitable and exciting.”Ridgeley and his bandmate are the subject of “Wham!,” a new documentary that premieres on Wednesday on Netflix. Directed by Chris Smith, it charts the British group’s climb to pop stardom, beginning with its ferocious appearance on the music show “Top of the Pops” in 1982, through the global success that followed the albums “Fantastic” (1983) and “Make It Big” (1984), and finishing with the 1986 farewell concert in London.The film, which is itself directed like a power-pop video, explains how the duo’s modern mix of disco, funk, pop and soul, in songs like “Young Guns (Go for It),” “Careless Whisper” and “Freedom,” helped make Wham! one of the biggest pop groups of the late 20th century, even though it lasted just four years. Unlike bands that split over artistic or personal disagreements, Wham! didn’t have a rise and fall. “It was just a rise and they called it a day,” Smith said.They didn’t break up either, said Ridgeley, but rather “brought Wham! to a close in a manner of our own choosing.”Michael and Ridgeley at the height of their early popularity.NetflixFans might be disappointed to learn that in the documentary Ridgeley is heard but not seen as he appears today: debonair and patrician, with silver hair and a still-cheeky smile. Smith said it would have thrown the film’s mythic aspirations off balance if Ridgeley were on camera but not Michael, who died seven years ago at 53.After Wham!, Ridgeley told me, he and Michael were “no longer living in each other’s pockets” as they had done since they were kids. But their bond was fixed.If Ridgeley is tired of being known mostly for his friendship with Michael, he didn’t show it. He brightened when chatting about Michael, whose loss left Ridgeley feeling “like the sky had fallen in,” as he said in 2017. But he didn’t seem into talking much about his life now, other than to say he enjoyed cycling.The documentary includes archival media coverage and tons of concert footage, including scenes of groundbreaking shows in 1985, when Wham! became the first Western pop group to perform in China.But it’s Ridgeley’s mother who supplied the most personal treasures. Since her son’s grade-school days making music with Michael, she kept about 50 meticulously organized scrapbooks stuffed with photos, reviews and other ephemera. They include snapshots from the mid-1970s when Ridgeley first got to know Michael as Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, the son of a Cypriot father and a British mother.Ridgeley was also the son of an immigrant father — his dad was Egyptian — and a British mother, and he hit it off immediately with the boy he called Yog, a nickname he used often in our interview. The scrapbooks paint a vivid portrait of boys who loved Queen and “Saturday Night Fever” and desired to make music a career.“The only thing I ever wanted to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band, write songs and perform,” Ridgeley said with a 14-year-old’s enthusiasm in his voice, adding that fame and celebrity “were never a motivating factor for either of us.”Ridgeley said he and Michael knew Wham! would have a finite life span because Michael’s songwriting began “developing and evolving in a way and at a speed” that Wham! couldn’t accommodate. In November, Michael will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Since Wham!’s heyday, Ridgeley has battled the perception that he’s famous only because he was in a duo with a more talented artist. The documentary makes a case in his favor though, tracing how Ridgeley, a guitarist, collaborated with the composer and performer Michael.Still, Ridgeley acknowledged that his musicianship wasn’t in the same league as Michael’s, “one of the finest, if not the finest, singing voices of his generation,” he said, sounding like a proud brother.Ridgeley said his bond with Michael endured even after Wham! ended.NetflixWhen Michael came out to him after they filmed the video for “Club Tropicana” (1983), 15 years before he did so publicly, Ridgeley said he supported him with love and a shrug. Michael was more freaked out by how his father might react than how the public would, Ridgeley said; had Michael come out during the Wham! years, Ridgeley said he and fans would have had his back.“I didn’t think it was going to affect our success, and in the long term it probably wouldn’t,” he said. “It would have been difficult for a while for him, there’s no doubt about that. It would have required management by us all. But after the initial sensationalism, it’s on the table isn’t it?”After Wham!, Ridgeley released a 1990 solo album that flatlined and he did a short stint as a Formula 3 driver, but he has otherwise stayed out of the limelight. The British tabloids have kept breathless tabs on his love life — including his 25-year relationship with Keren Woodward, a former member of another ’80s pop group, Bananarama — much as they did when they gave him the Wham!-era nickname Randy Andy.Ridgeley didn’t pursue fame further because being in Wham! gave him “everything he wanted,” said Shirlie Kemp, a friend from school and a Wham! backup singer. Not just professionally.“I don’t think I ever met anyone else who was on par with George the way Andrew was, intellectually and with a sense of humor,” said Kemp, whose husband is Martin Kemp of the ’80s band Spandau Ballet. “It was the best relationship I’d ever seen George have with anyone.”Ridgeley said “few stones remain unturned” as he’s worked the past five years on projects that are all-things-Wham! In 2019, he published a memoir, “Wham! George Michael & Me,” and had a cameo that year in the romantic-comedy “Last Christmas,” which was inspired by the group’s eponymous chart-topping holiday single. Later this month comes “Echoes From the Edge of Heaven,” a Wham! singles collection.He still seems to be in awe of what he and his best friend made together.“I could never quite really get that we had achieved the same kind of success as the artists that we revered like gods when we were growing up,” he said. “We were playing Wembley Stadium, the same place Elton John played. You can say, ‘I am the same.’ But in your own mind, you’re never the same.” More

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    Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Avant-Garde Jazz

    This challenging subgenre, including the subset of free jazz, is driven by the fire of spontaneity, and its rules are still being written. Eleven writers, critics and musicians share their favorites.Lately The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with Herbie Hancock, New Orleans jazz, Sun Ra or Mary Lou Williams.Now we’re putting the spotlight on avant-garde jazz, a challenging subgenre born out of the desire to do something that wasn’t as prescribed as bebop or post-bop, a sound carried by the fire of spontaneity by players who weren’t considered to be in the upper echelon of jazz. The definition of avant-garde jazz has been a point of contention since its inception. While the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians often played avant-garde that didn’t feel like jazz at all, others, like Amiri Baraka — on his 1972 album “It’s Nation Time” — fused poetry and polyrhythms to express a different side of the subgenre. Perhaps its biggest public advocate was the saxophonist and bandleader John Coltrane, who took an interest in free jazz — a subset of avant-garde jazz — in the mid-1960s and pushed for the saxophonists Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders to release their music on the mainstream label Impulse! Records.Today, the rules for what is and what isn’t avant-garde are still being written. The list below doesn’t aim to be comprehensive, but it represents a broad cross-section of avant-garde then and now, discussed by some of the foremost experimental musicians today. Enjoy listening to these songs chosen by a range of musicians, authors and critics. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Ana Roxanne, musician“Longview” by Barre Phillips and John SurmanA friend of mine shared this piece with me recently and I’ve been enamored with this album by Barre Phillips, a Bay Area native who has resided in France for most of his life. In “Longview,” save for some flourishes and a couple of brief passages, the piece stays in the same key pretty much the whole time. I appreciate that a bassist who assigned himself to such few notes can keep such dynamicism. This piece has elements of a drone without sounding like one at all. Also, within avant jazz I tend to prefer vocals that lean more toward consonance, and so I admire the singers’ experimentation with sound, syllable and melody all while keeping a steady structure and never sounding stale, creating a soothing element to a lilting frenetic undercurrent of horns and percussion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Julia Holter, musician and composer“Yeh Come T’ Be” by Jeanne LeeIn this loud and hyper-edited era, our ears can be moved most powerfully by the rare work that coordinates thoughtfully with space and breath. The composer, vocalist, improviser and poet Jeanne Lee’s music has been inspiring to me in this way, and one of my favorite pieces of hers is the minimalistic and incantatory rumination on four words, “Yeh Come T’ Be,” from the singular 1975 record “Conspiracy.” As I listen, I lose sense of time in the wild contrapuntal interplay between breathy tones, yelps, sighs, whispers, chants. “Come to be/to become” — a litany of words teases away literal meaning, in preference for a felt sonic meaning. The performance came about decades ago, yet it feels alive, born and bold in each heard instant. Every listen is new and a revelation.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Laura Warrell, author“Peanut” by Sonny SharrockTell me a work of art “isn’t for everybody” and I want to see it. I admire artists who not only push the envelope but also tear it to shreds, and the jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock was that kind of musician. “Peanut,” off 1969’s “Black Woman,” weaves a surreal patchwork of sounds that offers a transcendent musical experience. The opening melody, gently plucked on Sharrock’s guitar against a tumble of drums, promises a conventional, even folksy, tunefulness. Just before the two-minute mark, all sense of harmony disjoints: Sharrock’s warbling, squealing guitar abandons the established melody; rhythmless percussion bashes against a tumult of discordant notes played on an upright bass; piano keys sound like they’re being pounded by an unruly child. Each instrument could be playing a different song.It’s the vocals, performed by Sharrock’s then-wife Linda, that assemble the other instruments into an awkwardly cohesive, slightly unnerving whole. At first, her vocals are operatic and pretty, but soon she shrieks and moans like a woman suffering labor pains or nightmares. I wonder what was in this woman’s scream. Pain? Rage? Ecstasy? Whatever the origin, Sharrock’s voice performs the kind of internal reconfiguration listeners might get from good art or good therapy. Those who make it to the end may wonder whether they truly like “Peanut” or are simply under its spell.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Zoh Amba, musician and composer“Unity, Part I” by Frank WrightI first heard Reverend Frank Wright’s music when I was a child back in Tennessee. The music deeply filled my heart with flowers of gratitude. This record, “Unity,” really makes me go inside myself and search. What I feel is a sacred journey together and great endless love. This record makes me feel grateful to be here and feel the sunshine. The quartet is Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Alan Silva and Muhammad Ali, recorded in 1974 at the Moers Festival in Germany.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elucid, rapper and producer“Science Fiction” by Ornette ColemanI couldn’t help but fall in. Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction” still feels like everything I was looking for and nothing I had experienced before. An electric organism of Don Cherry horn squeals, double drummer cymbal crashes by Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell, and Charlie Haden’s bass line wanderings. Surging. On its toes. Pulsing and gnashing. Melodious and chaotic. Swinging real loose. David Henderson came through with base elemental declarations sounding like a ghost of an old spooky religion: “How. Many. Enemies. Make. A. Soul?” Cue crying baby. For lovers of hyper-aural freak-outs.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Chad Clark, musician and producer“Max Brown” by Jeff ParkerIf I tell you I’m going to play some “avant-garde jazz,” I think I know what you are expecting.You’re expecting to hear something challenging. And we both know “challenging” is a euphemism for “difficult.” And “difficult” sometimes means “unpleasant.” But I’m gonna throw on the guitarist/composer Jeff Parker’s dulcet, winning “Max Brown.” You are met with a soothing electronic soundscape enfolding Parker’s understated, post-Grant Green guitar. The genre will remain indeterminate. But the music feels good. Horns enter and the song begins to feel like a futuristic take on the crepuscular, narcotic blues of Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”So why do I call this calming music “avant-garde jazz” and not the smarmy candy known as “smooth jazz”? Simply: smooth jazz is a category. But this music resolutely defies categorization. Since the 1990s we’ve grown accustomed to hip-hop importing and metabolizing the sonorities and techniques of jazz. But “Max Brown” is jazz that has imported and metabolized the sonorities and techniques of hip-hop. It may not be the first track to ever attempt this, but it is the first track to do it this stylishly and charismatically. Feels like a bellwether. It’s not Parker’s intent to announce this provocation. His innovation works better if you just … enjoy the ride.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Melanie Charles, musician and producer“The Inflated Tear/Haitian Fight Song” by Rahsaan Roland Kirk“True Black music will be heard tonight!” is Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s setup for one of the greatest moments in TV history: when Kirk and his group of artists, playwrights, provocateurs, composers and Eulipions defiantly played on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1971. At first glance, Kirk is a funny-looking blind man whose gimmick is playing three horns at the same time. But the goal of Kirk and his Jazz and People’s Movement was to diversify television and amplify Black voices. Known for hiding in audiences and breaking out into a cacophony of bells and whistles, they forced people to see the value of jazz or, as Kirk preferred, “Black Classical Music.”With a fiery rhythm section of Charles Mingus, Sonelius Smith and Roy Haynes slated to play Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” on the “Ed Sullivan” broadcast, Kirk instead starts by quoting his theme from “The Inflated Tear.” Sounding like a woodwind section all by himself, Kirk displays his idiosyncratic multi-horn technique. He introduces the band members and gives them an opportunity to blow.Finally, Kirk sets up Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song,” written in the 1950s in the midst of the civil rights movement. The climate of social change echoed the success of the Haitian revolution 100 years prior. The players transition into a Dixieland feel as the collective falls into chaos, challenging listeners to wake up. Kirk and company deliver here an electrifying demonstration of public rebellion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Amirtha Kidambi, composer and vocalist“Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” by Max Roach and Abbey LincolnVocalists are woefully underrated in the “avant-garde” or “free jazz” idiom, which tends to favor instrumental shredders in a not-so-subtly patriarchal way. The extremely powerful voice and artistry of Abbey Lincoln is ultra-marginalized, seldom mentioned unless in tandem with Max Roach per their romantic entanglement. Lincoln, who passed in 2010, is to me the definition of avant-garde, light years ahead of her time in her abstract, expressive and wordless vocalizations on the seminal civil rights-era suite “We Insist! Freedom Now” (1964), with Roach, Coleman Hawkins and Olatunji, among other proto-free jazz instrumentalists.What I love about Lincoln is that she is not afraid to get dirty and ugly, to make the listener uncomfortable in a visceral way. She utilizes what is academically referred to as “extended technique” in her growls, screams and harsh vocalizations, a term I detest for its normative Eurocentric bias. Rather than “extending” the vocal instrument, I see Lincoln as mining its absolute essential and maximal emotional range, something only approximated in mimicry by horns and other instruments. She is especially potent and effective on “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace,” in conversation with Roach’s drums, yelping, hollering and screaming in pain, in a real-time response to those turbulent years of American racial violence and struggle. Lincoln was no supper-club singer, uninterested in light entertainment, and more concerned with shaking an audience into consciousness. We could use Lincoln’s voice and message now, too.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer“Steps” by Cecil TaylorWhen we talk about the beginnings of free- and avant-garde jazz, we often go to Ornette Coleman and start there. It makes sense, given the courage it took to title his 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz To Come,” then pepper it with challenging structures that were tough to wrangle. For me, though, I’ve always looked to Cecil Taylor as the foremost purveyor of the avant-garde, his rolling piano chords tucked between tidal waves of unrelenting drums and saxophone. Perhaps no song typifies this better than “Steps,” the opening song of his 1966 album, “Unit Structures.” I’ve always loved how precarious it feels, organized and chaotic at the same time. A complex tune with bright colors and vigorous sonic arrangements, “Steps” also confronts my sensibilities, making me a bit uneasy. But that’s why I appreciate it the most. It’s a reminder that jazz can soothe and agitate, that just because something is easy and relaxed doesn’t mean it’s better.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆V.C.R, recording artist, violinist and composer“The Creator Has a Master Plan” by Pharoah SandersGrowing up as a preacher’s kid in Memphis, my world was filled with cognitive dissonance. In home-school, my father taught me the basics of music theory and songwriting. During this time I was solely allowed to study two genres: gospel and classical. Even though this felt like a daunting disadvantage, I now see how that rigid upbringing served as the foundation for my music career today.Fast forward to 2016 and I’m sitting in my bedroom in Dallas. At the time, I was only experimenting with writing my own songs. I wanted to make music that was audiovisual and edifying to the soul. My art would be healing and palpable. In my search, I stumbled upon Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” From the first second, I was captured by the roaring trumpet. Very different from my classical background; you could feel the musicians breathing together and freely channeling the “holy ghost,” as they say. Suddenly, the song transitions into a trancelike chant but no words are uttered. The melody is repetitive, like the prayer services I grew up in. Then a subtle solo vocalization splits the sea of sound, with “The Creator has a working plan …”Warm tears rolled down my face, and I knew my search was over. This was the blueprint, and Pharoah was my guru. I knew from that moment on, my music would have to flow from the same channel and carry his message. I’m eternally grateful to Pharoah Sanders for my personal paradigm shift and pray everyone gets to experience that level of bliss.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Carlos Niño, producer and musician“Water Music” by Albert AylerAvant Garde?Albert Ayler is/as GodMary Maria Parks his Wife“Water Music” is LifeThey’re open heartsBobby Few and Stafford JamesPlease say their blessed names,Impulse! Fire Music, yes!but labels aside, (1969)Here’s a yearning Lullabyso Beautiful and Alive!Jazz? Because of the Saxophone?I hear a totally unique Gospel …Thank You Ed Michel,this Magic from the same Sessionsthat rang: “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe”Wellness, wholeness, ESP,“Water Music” waves courage,the first time I heard this word,was from Poet Kamau Daáood,Spirits, Bells, Love Cry, Rejoice,that Eternal, Radiant, Inspired Soul VoiceNew Grass, so vibrantly Green, Spiritual Unity,Deeply, inner, Tenor tone, feeling,Flowing, gleaming,Sparkling, infinite,I am so grateful for it.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More