Aurelia Butler

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    Beyoncé Returns to the Stage With a ‘Renaissance’ Spectacle

    The pop superstar opened her first solo tour in seven years in Stockholm and performed tracks from her acclaimed 2022 album, but left most of the choreography to her dancers.They came from Iceland, Portugal, Switzerland, Detroit. Dressed in “alien superstar” chic — rhinestone boots and disco-ready, glittery cowboy hats — a huge crowd gathered on Wednesday at the Friends Arena, their cheers reaching an almost deafening pitch as a woman gradually emerged from below, lights bouncing off the sequins on her outfit.Beyoncé was back onstage.The singer, style icon and heroine of the global BeyHive fan community is on the road solo for the first time in seven years with her Renaissance World Tour, which opened on Wednesday in Sweden with elaborate visuals but with unusual physical restraint from Beyoncé herself.Onstage at the 50,000-capacity arena in Stockholm, she appeared flanked by dancers and backed by a live band, performing for three hours before a giant screen that displayed a constantly morphing tableau that was part retrofuturism and part disco fantasia. At one point, the 41-year-old artist traded dance moves with a pair of giant robot arms; at another, an image of a silvery alien dancer in heels hovered over a disco ball.But for one of pop’s ultimate dancing queens, Beyoncé’s performance was far less physical than on past tours. She often seemed to keep her feet stationary while shaking her upper body, and appeared to favor one leg. She spent much of one song sitting atop a prop.Fans came from around the globe, drawn in part by the more affordable ticket prices in Sweden.Felix Odell for The New York TimesThe star’s eagle-eyed fan community speculated online that the singer was injured. A spokeswoman for Beyoncé did not respond to questions about her performance.Kristin Hulden, a Swedish fashion student who was wearing an embroidered jacket she had made that depicted Beyoncé riding a horse (the image on the cover of her latest album, “Renaissance”), said she had noticed the star’s more limited movement, but it hadn’t bothered her. “The show was so great,” she said. “The dancers, the visual — it never stopped.” Like many fans at the opening-night gig, she will attend several shows on the tour, returning to Friends Arena on Thursday and then heading to Hamburg, Germany, in June. “I’m very excited,” she added.Competition for tickets to pop’s biggest, priciest concerts has been stiff, and many in the crowd had traveled far — even thousands of miles — to guarantee that they would see Beyoncé this time. (Thanks in part to favorable exchange rates, tickets in Sweden ended up being far cheaper than in the United States or Britain, costing between 650 and 1,495 Swedish kronor, or about $63 to $146.)Rhoyle Ivy King, 26, an actor wearing a fluorescent turquoise jumpsuit and shades, said before the show that he had come from Los Angeles for the concert, spending about $2,500. “Anything for mother,” he said. “Seriously.”Beyoncé has not toured on her own since her Formation outing in 2016, following the release of her pop-culture-dominating “Lemonade.” In 2018, she performed at the Coachella festival and hit the road with her husband, Jay-Z, for their joint On the Run II Tour.Because Beyoncé offered few visual cues for her “Renaissance” era beyond her album artwork, fans came decked out in looks inspired by the disco cowboy aesthetic she nodded to there. The new tour is for “Renaissance,” a homage to decades of Black queer dance music. The LP, her seventh solo release, opened at No. 1 last summer, and its single “Break My Soul” became her first solo No. 1 hit since “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” in 2008.It was, notably, the first Beyoncé album in nearly a decade to arrive without a full suite of accompanying videos. Starting with her surprise self-titled LP in 2013, the singer has become synonymous with elaborately choreographed and highly produced visual pieces.On Wednesday, she revealed several futuristic fashion choices: an iridescent-effect minidress; a shimmery gold bodysuit festooned with black opera gloves covering strategic locations; a black-and-silver suit that resembled royal armor. At one point, Beyoncé was dressed in sci-fi bee chic: a yellow-and-black leotard with cutouts and sharp angles, and knee-high black boots. The cyborg theme was fully reflected at the merch stands, with T-shirts, hoodies and totes carrying images of Beyoncé in silvery, “Metropolis”-like robot costumes.The set list featured songs from her debut solo album from 2003 (“Crazy in Love”), her 2008 double album “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (“Diva”), her 2011 LP “4” (including “Love on Top,” which Beyoncé let the crowd finish for her) and her self-titled 2013 release (“Drunk in Love”), alongside a host of tracks from “Renaissance,” including “Move,” “America Has a Problem” and “Cozy.” For the closer, “Summer Renaissance,” the singer sat atop a silver horse that was hoisted from the rafters and then ascended above the crowd by herself, sporting a grand, sparkling cape.Beyoncé has not toured on her own since her Formation outing in 2016, following the release of her album “Lemonade.”Felix Odell for The New York TimesIn February, Beyoncé announced the Renaissance tour by simply posting an image to social media. Three months earlier, the demand for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour had led to a Ticketmaster meltdown, leaving many fans frustrated and calling for Washington to examine the outsize market power of Ticketmaster and its corporate parent, Live Nation.To handle the ticketing for Beyoncé’s tour — which is being promoted by Beyoncé’s company, Parkwood Entertainment, and produced by Live Nation — Ticketmaster had an elaborate plan that included rolling out sales in batches, rather than all at once, and the process went far more smoothly.Still, Beyoncé drew controversy this year when she performed a private show at a luxury hotel in Dubai, in United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is illegal. “Renaissance” draws heavily on dance music of the 1990s and L.G.B.T.Q. culture; at the Friends Arena, signs denoted some “gender neutral restrooms” in the official tour font.Oless Mauigoa, 35, had traveled from Salt Lake City and said that “Renaissance” had made him desperate to see the show. “I feel like it’s dedicated to a lot of gay styles,” he said. “I’m connected to it more than anything she’s done.”Beyoncé played into those connections throughout the show, nodding to the ballroom and vogueing culture that inspired “Renaissance” at the end of the night by giving the stage over to her dancers, who tried to outperform each other to rousing cheers.Beyoncé’s tour continues in Stockholm on Thursday and then arrives in London for five shows at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, starting May 29. Its North American leg will open in Toronto on July 9, will head to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 29 and 30 and will close in New Orleans at the Caesars Superdome on Sept. 27. More

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    ‘It Ain’t Over’ Review: When Yogi Berra Saw a Strike, He Hit It

    The baseball player, known for his quirky malapropisms, was perpetually underestimated. But a new documentary proves he was a phenomenal talent.The main brief of “It Ain’t Over,” a lively, engaging and moving documentary is more or less stated upfront by a friendly but mildly indignant Lindsay Berra, the granddaughter of its subject, the baseball player Yogi Berra.She recollects watching the 2015 All Star Game with her granddad. That day at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati were four special guests deemed the greatest living players: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays. All legends, to be sure. But Berra, in crucial respects a humble man, felt snubbed, as did Lindsay. Because the movie makes a very credible case that Berra was as great a player as any of them.The reason he didn’t make this cut, Lindsay believes, is that Yogi’s boyish, generous personality had come to overshadow his prodigious skill. As Sean Mullin’s documentary points out: As a catcher for the New York Yankees, Berra was awarded Most Valuable Player three times during that team’s remarkable dominance of the game in the 1950s. He was an All-Star for 15 consecutive seasons, and he collected 10 World Series rings.But Berra cut a different figure from baseball heroes of the day. He had an easy grin and read comic books in the locker room. Only five foot seven, he wasn’t big and strapping like Joe DiMaggio. “Everything about him was round,” Roger Angell, one of several sportswriters interviewed here, says of Berra. (Plenty of players chime in, including Derek Jeter, who reflects on Berra’s deceptively simple advice: “When you see a strike, hit it.”)And for all that, he was a phenomenal player. While he didn’t become a catcher until he joined the Yankees, his mental acuity, discipline and intense training from the coach Bill Dickey, plus his own relatively low center of gravity, made him ideal in the position. Yes, you read “mental acuity” correctly. A good catcher has to carry the whole equation of the game in his head. The movie’s account of Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, in which Berra caught the pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game — the only no-hitter in World Series history until last year, and the more recent accomplishment took three different pitchers — is a thrilling demonstration of Berra’s baseball genius.He was also a devoted family man, married for 65 years to Carmen Berra; his extravagantly affectionate and charmingly repetitive love letters to her are read aloud here. And he was a war hero — he was on a rocket boat off Normandy on D-Day in World War II, and while he was wounded, he didn’t apply for a Purple Heart because he didn’t want to worry his mother.Berra’s exemplary life is animated by the inevitable trotting out of his folksy malapropisms known as Yogi-isms. The movie’s title comes from one, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” which nobody, apparently, is sure Berra ever uttered. But the best of them, when you really turn them over, are as profound as Zen koans: “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” Only an original like Berra could come up with that.It Ain’t OverRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ Review: Hiding in Plain Sight

    The “Back to the Future” star time-travels through his career in this documentary, charting his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease.With apologies to Dr. Emmett Brown, you don’t need a flux capacitor to build a time machine. All you need to do is make a film. “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” a new biographical documentary from Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), zips through the “Back to the Future” actor’s career with humor and style; it gives the impression that its subject is willing to answer any question. Fox appears, head-on, in contemporary interviews with an off-camera Guggenheim. None of the charisma and charm that made him a star have diminished.But much of what distinguishes “Still” — as it’s simply titled onscreen, sans marketing hook — is how cleverly it has been edited. While this documentary draws on a standard tool kit of re-enactments and archival material, its best device is to use clips of Fox’s own movies as a counterpoint to his words, as if Fox weren’t playing fictional characters, but himself.In a way, he was. “Still” charts his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he kept private for years before going public in 1998. One montage — tackily but irresistibly set to INXS’s “New Sensation” — illustrates how he managed to hide his illness in plain sight. Movies like “For Love or Money” (1993) and “Life With Mikey” (1993) reveal his practice of putting an object in his left hand to mask its trembling. What looked like nimble character work was, even then, documentary evidence.Guggenheim presents this sequence as if it were depicting an illicit drug binge, in part because Fox discusses his habit of popping Sinemet pills to keep up his level of dopamine, which is deficient in Parkinson’s patients. The segment ends by cutting to the present-day Fox, who says he needs more pills and asks Guggenheim for a couple of minutes so that the meds can kick in, to make him less “mumble-mouthed.”“Still” certainly doesn’t sugarcoat Fox’s life with Parkinson’s. An early scene shows him taking a spill across the street from Central Park. At another point, a makeup artist gives him a touch-up because a fall has broken bones in his face. But such moments are reminders of just how much any movie would necessarily leave unseen.The film establishes a brisk, appealing pace early on, as Fox, the only formal talking head (although we see him with his family), recalls how he came to acting. The title comes from one of Guggenheim’s queries: “Before Parkinson’s, what would it mean to be still?” Fox answers, “I wouldn’t know.”After moving from his native Canada to Hollywood, he says, he lived in an apartment so cramped that he washed his hair with Palmolive and his dishes with Head & Shoulders. Marty McFly emerges as an almost autobiographical creation, because the making of “Back to the Future” (1985) required Fox to engage in a bit of temporal dislocation himself. To fulfill his obligations to the sitcom “Family Ties” while making the movie, he had to shuttle between sets, with little sleep in between. In another toe-tapping montage — this time scored to Alan Silvestri’s “Back to the Future” theme — “Still” conveys the sheer whirlwind of what Fox’s life was like as drivers chauffeured him from one place to another and he could barely keep straight which role he was playing.Fox’s wife, Tracy Pollan, who appeared with him as a love interest in “Family Ties” and as a possible salvation for the cocaine-addled magazine employee he played in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), is held up as a rare person who could stand up to his arrogance during his peak period of stardom. “Still” becomes something of a love story, of how Pollan stayed with Fox not just through his sickness but during long gig-related absences and what he characterizes as a period of alcoholism.But the documentary is, perhaps improbably, not a downer in the least. It isn’t oriented primarily around illness, even as it shows Fox working with doctors and aides throughout. It’s a character study in which Fox reflects on his life with quick wit and self-deprecation. “If I’m here 20 years from now, I’ll either be cured or like a pickle,” he says. The real-life Marty McFly may not have a time machine. But he now has this crowd-pleaser of a movie.Still: A Michael J. Fox MovieRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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    ‘Unfinished Business’ Review: Skimming the Surface of Women’s Basketball

    Unfortunately, this documentary about the W.N.B.A. and the New York Liberty hits the rim and then bounces out — it’s only close to good.This documentary about professional women’s basketball keeps toggling between two subjects so big, each could easily fill an entire series: the W.N.B.A. and one of its founding teams, the New York Liberty. The title refers both to the league’s constant battle for recognition since its creation in 1996 and the Liberty’s fruitless (so far) quest for a title. But “unfinished business” also describes this scattershot film, which is directed by Alison Klayman (“The Brink,” “Jagged”).The biggest asset here, as with the W.N.B.A., is the roster of formidable women. Most of the talking heads are effortlessly charismatic, especially the guard Teresa Weatherspoon, who led the Liberty’s early years, and the 2021 rookie DiDi Richards. The first anchors reminiscences about the 1990s and the second is part of the effort to recover from an abysmal 2-20 season in 2020. (The Liberty’s governor and co-owner Clara Wu Tsai is one of the documentary’s executive producers.)Aside from nail-biters from classic games, the film is hampered by elusions and little sense of drama — Klayman could have mined the Liberty’s rivalry with the Houston Comets much more effectively, for example. And for all the talk about the obstacles women face in professional sports, including sexism and homophobia, there is no mention of the contentious appointment of Isiah Thomas, who had been sued for sexual harassment when he worked for the Knicks, as Liberty team president in 2015.It’s hard to begrudge “Unfinished Business” for emphasizing empowerment and sisterhood, but these women deserved more. They can take it.Unfinished BusinessNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available on Amazon Prime Video. More

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    ‘Monica’ Review: Mother and Daughter, Both Alike in Dignity

    Trace Lysette and Patricia Clarkson star in this subtle chamber drama.The characters in the family drama “Monica” are not a talkative bunch, at least not with each other. Monica (Trace Lysette) is a transgender woman who has learned, at great cost, what it means to be alone. She was expelled from her home by her mother, Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson), at a young age. Now she works as a massage therapist by day, and collects extra tips by doing video sex work. She endures with panache the indignities of other people’s interest, brushing off harassers with confident ease. Yet her most intimate moments consist of one-sided conversations. Monica makes calls to her absentee lover. She begs for a response, but her pleas go to voice mail.Monica’s unhappy solitude is disrupted when she receives a call from her sister-in-law, Laura (Emily Browning). Laura informs Monica that Eugenia is very ill, and she invites Monica to the family home to reunite with her mother. Monica returns, but no one has told Eugenia that Monica is her abandoned child.Monica allows herself to be introduced as a stranger, and she moves into Eugenia’s home. For most of the film, Monica acts as her mother’s caretaker. Eugenia is perplexed by her presence — she did not intend to get a hospice nurse. But despite Eugenia’s ignorance, the characters are drawn to each other. They are both women who carry themselves with a great deal of dignity, as well as pain.The director Andrea Pallaoro doesn’t burden this delicate tale of reconciliation with long monologues or extensive back stories, and the performances are compelling in their restraint. Both Lysette and Clarkson are naturally magnetic actors, and they don’t waste the attention they’re given on excess sentimentality. They bear their characters’ burdens with little more than a furrow of an eyebrow. Monica and Eugenia face each other’s scrutiny, and both performers respond to the challenge by protecting their characters’ mysteries.Pallaoro devises ways for his camera to amplify this feeling of examination. He shoots in a square aspect ratio, and this subtle technique gives the frame an entrapped quality. Monica and Eugenia are filmed in close-ups so tight that the image doesn’t seem to leave them room to breathe. Late in the film, Eugenia writhes in apparent agony over a pillow that is too hot. It’s to the credit of Pallaoro and his cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi that the air has seemed oppressively hot for hours before Eugenia’s complaint is made aloud.As the ailing Eugenia gasps for air, Monica adjusts her bedding and holds her hand. Eugenia slips into silence. With assured performances and an equally assured camera, no one needs to speak to understand when the aches are soothed.MonicaRated R for nudity, sexual content and language. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘BlackBerry’ Review: Big Dreams, Little Keyboards

    The struggle to sell a revolutionary gizmo fractures a friendship in this lively, bittersweet comedy.In Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” — a wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy — the emergence of the smartphone isn’t greeted with fizzing fireworks and popping champagne corks. Instead, Johnson and his co-writer, Matthew Miller (adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry”), have fashioned a tale of scrabbling toward success that tempers its humor with an oddly moving wistfulness.That blend of patter and pathos was also evident in Johnson’s previous feature, “Operation Avalanche” (2016), as was an intrepid filming style that effortlessly conjures the rush of innovation. This time, we’re in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1996, where Mike Lazaridis (a perfect Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) — best friends and co-founders of a small tech company called Research in Motion (RIM) — are trying to sell a product they call PocketLink, a revolutionary combination of cellphone, email device and pager. While waiting to pitch a roomful of suits, Mike is distracted by an annoyingly buzzing intercom. Grabbing a paper clip, he quickly fixes it, noting that it was made in China. Disgust flits across his face, an expression we will remember when, much later, mounting problems force him to embrace a manufacturing option he despises.Clever callbacks like this allow “BlackBerry” to hauntingly connect the story’s downward slide with the innocence and optimism of its early scenes. The corporate types don’t understand Mike and Doug’s invention, but a predatory salesman named Jim Balsillie (a fantastic Glenn Howerton), gets it. Recently fired and fired up, Jim sees the device’s potential, making a deal to acquire part of RIM in exchange for cash and expertise. Doug, a man-child invariably accessorized with a headband and a bewildered look, is doubtful; Mike, assisted by a shock of prematurely gray hair, is wiser. He knows that they’ll need an intermediary to succeed.Reveling in a vibe — hopeful, testy, undisciplined — that’s an ideal match for its subject, “BlackBerry” finds much of its humor in Jim’s resolve to fashion productive employees from RIM’s ebulliently geeky staff, who look and act like middle schoolers and converse in a hybrid of tech-speak and movie quotes. It’s all Vogon poetry to Jim; but as Jared Raab’s restless camera careens around the chaotic work space, the excitement of disruption and the thrill of creation become tangible. It helps that the director is more than familiar with the feel of a friend-filled workplace: It’s how he’s been making movies since his first feature, “The Dirties,” in 2013.Fortified with strong actors in small roles — Michael Ironside as a pit bull C.O.O., Martin Donovan as the boss who sees the peril in Jim’s ruthlessness — “BlackBerry” remains grounded when the money rolls in and übergeeks from Google are enticed by multimillion-dollar offers. Some of the financial machinations, like Jim’s frantic attempts to fend off a hostile takeover by Palm Pilot, are less than clear; but “BlackBerry” isn’t just the story of a life-altering gadget. Long before that gadget’s death knell sounds in the unveiling of the iPhone, Jim has so thoroughly insinuated himself between the two friends that an image of a forgotten Doug, gazing down from a window as Jim and Mike head off to a meeting, is almost heartbreaking.More than anything, perhaps, “BlackBerry” highlights the vulnerability and exploitability of creatives in a cutthroat marketplace. The push-pull between genius and business, and their mutual dependence (brilliantly articulated during Jim and Mike’s sales pitch to a wireless provider), is the movie’s real subject and the wellspring of its persistent yearning tone. “When you grow up, your heart dies,” Doug says at one point, quoting “The Breakfast Club.” The sad sweetness of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” played over the end credits, is just the cherry on top.“The person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world,” a shop teacher once told Mike. He was right; and if “BlackBerry” has a flaw, it’s perhaps in neglecting to trumpet the momentousness of that change, one that has made it seem we will all be typing with our thumbs forever.BlackBerryRated R for “Glengarry Glen Ross” language and “Silicon Valley” fashion. Running time: 2 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Fool’s Paradise’ Review: No Talent? No Problem!

    A hapless man who barely speaks becomes a movie star in Charlie Day’s scattershot Hollywood satire.Charlie Day casts himself as a passive, nearly silent actor, Latte Pronto, in his feature directing debut, “Fool’s Paradise.” There’s something grudgingly admirable about the voluble star essentially spending an entire film doing reactions. But it’s a disastrous move in a Hollywood satire that already needs to be more than a grab bag of jokes.In Day’s strained, shapeless story, a desperate publicist, Lenny (Ken Jeong), attaches himself to Latte. Freshly released from a psychiatric ward, Latte is hired as the look-alike replacement for a big star (Day again) who dies while shooting a western.Day, a sitcom warrior pushing 16 seasons on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” throws everything at the wall to see what sticks. That means a series of stale bits about showbiz shallowness, opportunistic agents (Edie Falco plays Latte’s) and producers, and everyone who puts up with them.At least the supporting cast members freely fly their freak flags. Adrien Brody nails a clueless, hey-bro cool as Latte’s reckless, friendly co-star. Ray Liotta bulldogs along amusingly as the western’s producer, while John Malkovich goes apoplectic as some kind of éminence grise. Kate Beckinsale vamps as Latte’s glam new wife, and Common plays a paranoid ex-star of superhero movies.Turning off one’s brain for the film would be easier without witnessing the weak attempt at a tragic arc for Lenny — it’s more of a squiggle. You’d need to be Blake Edwards to pull this off. One wishes Day had looked further afield than Hollywood for inspiration.Fool’s ParadiseRated R for language, some drug use and sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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    How Bailey Zimmerman Charmed Nashville

    NASHVILLE — The spoils of fame are coming fast for the emerging country star Bailey Zimmerman. The Texas singer-songwriter Cody Johnson gave him a standing offer to come ride horses at his ranch. The Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger flew him on a private plane to his home in Canada to spend some time writing songs. The guitar whiz Gary Clark Jr. and the singing ex-rapper Jelly Roll partied with him backstage at the CMT Awards.Recently, Kid Rock had him over for dinner at his ranch outside Nashville.“He freestyled for us at dinner and we went in and he showed us his pool and his bowling alley and all his guns,” Zimmerman said last month, still a little awe-struck, enthusiastically sipping a Bacardi and Coke at the bar at Topgolf. “He let me do a TikTok in one of the bars!”Zimmerman, 23, is boisterous and amiable, openhearted and still a little stupefied by it all. Only two and a half years have passed since he first posted a clip of himself singing one verse of an original song — his first ever — to TikTok, went to bed, and woke up to a million views. Now, he’s got the No. 1 song at country radio, “Rock and a Hard Place”; is the first opening act on the current Morgan Wallen stadium tour; and is on the cusp of releasing his debut album on Friday, the comfortably bruising and appealingly bruised “Religiously. The Album.”But this is how Nashville works now, at least sometimes. Social media is increasingly dictating how country music is evolving, and sometimes that’s in unexpected, lightly chaotic directions.“I never wanted to be, like, ‘country,’” Zimmerman said earlier that day, at the East Nashville home belonging to his producer Austin Shawn, where he records all of his music, cutting vocals in a closet. “Whatever I want to make that day, that’s what I want to be. Some days you’ll see me in penny loafers and then sometimes you’ll see me in Air Force 1s.”He was indeed wearing Air Force 1s, gray ones. (He started sporting them — he tries not to wear the same pair twice — when his manager suggested he needed to step up from the Vans he used to favor.) He’d paired them with a lightly distressed denim jacket and jeans. His longish, tousled hair was swept back under a black cap with a BZ logo (which he’d later sign and give to the Topgolf staff for a charity auction) and a BZ diamond pendant on a chain around his neck.“You know, I can go to a farm and put boots on and take care of 500 head of cattle and do all that,” he said. “But I just don’t, like, act ‘country’ I guess. You know what I’m saying?”Zimmerman is a modern country star in a hybrid mold. He has a rigorously raspy voice, and sings with power he’s mainlined from his primary influences, many of which are rock acts: Nickelback, Three Days Grace, Foo Fighters and, most crucially, the Southern-rock bruisers Hinder — bands that specialize in puffed-chest emoting. Zimmerman’s favorite band is the melodic hard rock outfit Tesla. (He recently enthusiastically posted a video online of the frontman Jeff Keith singing the hook of “Rock and a Hard Place.”)“The TikTok and the Instagram, me doing that every day, that is the brand, of course,” Zimmerman said. Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesAt Topgolf, the music was blasting loudly and the songs Zimmerman had the most electrified reaction to were the pop-punk anthem “My Own Worst Enemy” by the sleaze-rock band Lit, and the unruly glam plosion “Time to Pretend” by MGMT.But he is also clearly an inheritor of Nashville’s recent crop of shaggy-at-the-edges superstars — singers like the powerhouse Luke Combs, or the genre’s reigning titan, Wallen, who have collectively iterated beyond the boyfriend and gentleman country of the mid-2010s, and whose songwriting and commitment to genre mark them as somewhat more traditional than the bro-country breakouts of the early 2010s.Shawn said that “the door has been opened” by artists like Combs and Wallen, “even people like Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers.” Shawn, who produced or co-produced every song on the album, added, “Is he a country singer? Or a rock singer? Or a folk/Americana singer with a little bit of a gritty edge?”Those lines are blurry in Nashville’s contemporary mainstream. Given that pre-existing context, Zimmerman has floated to the top of Nashville’s rising class with remarkable ease and speed. The ascent has been even more remarkable given his starting point. Zimmerman is from Louisville, Ill., a town in the Southern part of the state with a population of just over 1,000 and proximate to not much. (“A two-hour drive to get to a mall to go school shopping.”) His father owned a trucking business and repossessed vehicles; his mother owned the family car dealership with Zimmerman’s grandfather and uncle.When Zimmerman struck out on his own, he took on some of the hardest physical labor available: working on natural gas pipelines in West Virginia. “The gnarliest most chaotic work,” he said. “Screaming, yelling, breaking stuff. Hard hats, walkie talkies, whatever they had in their hands, they’d chuck it at you. Like, you’d walk home with black eyes, bruises from people chucking drinks on you and just belittling you.” On one particularly unpleasant assignment, he was fired in a series of events that included a coffee thrown in his face, a broken shovel wielded as a weapon and a brawl in the living room of his abode that smashed the coffee table.Even still, he maintains a soft spot for the work. “I was so into pipeline, man. Like, I loved working hard. I’ve always loved working hard. Like, I loved getting my hands dirty and coming home and having oil on my face,” he said. “I just felt like, man, there’s no possible way I’m going to ever make it out of this. I’m going to be 65, 70 years old, hips broken, back broken, still have nothing to show for it.”He moved home and began custom building lifted trucks — pickup trucks with super tall wheels — and posted videos about them on TikTok, eventually amassing a respectable 60,000 followers. In his earliest TikToks, his hair is prim and short, and he has braces on his teeth.One day in late 2020 Gavin Lucas, a high school acquaintance who wrote songs, heard Zimmerman singing on Snapchat and was impressed. For a couple of weeks, they fiddled around and eventually, on Christmas night, wrote a verse for a new song. The resulting TikTok changed both of their lives — Zimmerman resigned from his union the following day. Within a couple of weeks, they had finished the song — the rowdy country-rock number “Never Comin’ Home” — Googled information on how to record songs, and driven to Nashville to cut it in a real studio, splitting the $3,000 cost. (Zimmerman borrowed his half from his mother.)Attention came at a disorienting speed. When Zimmerman first met Chief Zaruk, an industry insider who would become one of his managers, “I thought he was the mayor of Nashville, ’cause that’s how everybody introduced him on the Zoom call,” Zimmerman said. “I’m just like, man, why is the mayor of Nashville trying to sign me? This makes no sense.”But the kismet continued. “Morgan was one of the first artists I ever met. He was walking up to Big Loud just randomly,” Zimmerman said, referring to offices for the label and management company. “And he was like, ‘Hey man, I’m a big fan of your song ‘Fall in Love.’ And I’m like, holy crap!” He continued, “Morgan has just been such a big part of my life since 2015, since 16, ‘Up Down,’ ‘Chain Smokin’’ and ‘Spin You Around.’ All that stuff has just been my life.”Zimmerman currently has the No. 1 song at country radio, “Rock and a Hard Place.”Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesLast October, he released his debut EP, “Leave the Light On,” which remains in the Top 50 of the all-genre Billboard album chart. This is owing to his success at radio, but also to Zimmerman’s relentless presence on TikTok and Instagram. He is his own best promoter, and his success underscores how even Nashville, the most hidebound of music industry towns, is increasingly powerless against the tide of social media.Lucas said that Zimmerman’s attitude has been crucial to the speed of his success. “I love how excited he gets and how much he jumps the gun,” he said of Zimmerman’s no-brakes ascent. “I don’t think we’d be where we are today if Bailey wasn’t that enthusiastic. I know we wouldn’t.”“The TikTok and the Instagram, me doing that every day, that is the brand, of course,” Zimmerman said. “That is the company. And now it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, label, hold on. I now have an avenue of my own to make me successful by myself.” That said, TikTok provides, and TikTok takes away, as seen in Zimmerman’s first true public fumble — a viral video of him singing woefully off-pitch at a recent concert. But rather than duck it, Zimmerman posted through the embarrassment, apologizing for his misstep and taking his lumps with a sense of humor and as much enthusiasm as when he posts about a new song.“I heard a saying the other day, and I’m living by that now,” he said. “Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.”And so he’ll keep speeding. Sometimes literally, in the white 2023 Corvette with a red interior that he bought in cash after “Fall in Love” went to No. 1 at country radio, his first splurge. (He also has an even taller truck than his old one that’s in the shop being built to spec.)“I try to keep my sins to a limit, of course, always,” he said. “But of course, dude, I cuss every day. I drink, I smoke, I harm my temple.” And so he’s also taken to the trappings of being a star who needs to perform at a high level — vitamin IV drips, injections of the anti-inflammatory treatment N.A.D.+ and cryotherapy. He’s put both of his parents on his payroll, and is trying to encourage his uncle Brent, whose guitar Zimmerman used to practice on as a child, to become a full-time songwriter.Unexpected things keep happening to him — most recently, it’s the chaotic cross-genre collaboration on the soundtrack of the upcoming “Fast X” film “Won’t Back Down,” with the Irish crooner Dermot Kennedy and the prolific rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, making for a trio of blood-letter vocalists — but Zimmerman still prefers to operate as if there are no guarantees.He recalled playing one of his first songs for his father. “You need to chase this,” he said his father told him.“He’s like, ‘I wasted my whole life not chasing nothing, man. You need to chase something.’” More