Aurelia Butler

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    Readers’ Picks: 12 Motivating Workout Songs

    Listen to Mary J. Blige, Gang of Four, Outkast and one track that was far and away the most frequently suggested.Working out to Mary J. Blige is more than just fine.Kevin Winter/Getty Images For The Recording ADear listeners,Last week, I shared a workout playlist and asked you to submit a song that motivates you to move. I thought I’d publish a few of the responses at the end of a future newsletter. But so many of you suggested such fun and varied selections that I’ve decided to do something completely unprecedented in the whole history of The Amplifier: create a playlist composed entirely of reader recommendations.I know, I know, “the whole history of The Amplifier” is, like, a month and a half at this point. But still — it’s unprecedented!As I wrote last week, for me, a good workout playlist combines familiarity and novelty. I kept that in mind when selecting and sequencing these tracks, so you’ll hear a mix of the new and old, the popular and the obscure. I loved reading about why these songs motivate you and what they inspired you to accomplish, so I’ve included your comments below.I also had fun seeing which tracks recurred in the recommendations; the one song that was far and away the most frequently suggested had to make it onto the list, and it appears here as track 11. (In the interest of suspense, scroll down for the reveal.) Bluegrass, baroque orchestral music, Beyoncé: Your picks truly encompassed a vast musical spectrum. More than one of you admitted to loving Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations,” which, honestly, you do you.I’m so happy we’re creating this musical community together — I think the collaborative nature of today’s playlist really speaks to that.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Fleetwood Mac: “Tusk”I love how the song starts quiet and slow and builds and builds and builds on itself. I’ve seen it performed live and it puts a zing in my blood. I find it ideal for the warm-up that leads right into the workout. — Virginia Moench, N.C. (Listen on YouTube)2. Mary J. Blige: “Just Fine”The lyrics and beat are uplifting and encouraging. It’s great to walk, run, bike or lift to, plus you can take dance breaks! — Alexa, Philadelphia (Listen on YouTube)3. Janet Jackson: “If”This song has it all, and let’s not forget that epic video! If you have soul, “If” is guaranteed to make you break a sweat. Now drop and give me 20! — Paige Getz, Conn. (Listen on YouTube)4. TV on the Radio: “Wolf Like Me”It has the highs, the lows and the perfect crescendo at the end. I had a spin instructor that knew it was my favorite and would drop it in for me pretty regularly. — Shelley, Brooklyn, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)5. Gang of Four: “I Found That Essence Rare”It’s gritty, rhythmic, has great energy and drives me to move the weights in the opposite direction than the pull of gravity. — Rick Gaston, Oakland, Calif. (Listen on YouTube)6. Hot Chip: “Flutes”My best runs help me recall the bodily sensation of losing myself on the dance floor. This song gets me there! — Greta, Chicago (Listen on YouTube)7. Sylvester: “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”Back in the day of aerobic classes, this was one of the songs we used on a regular basis — never got tired of it or the exercise. It’s also a great song to dance to! — Betsy Wendt, Silver Spring, Md. (Listen on YouTube)8. Jamie xx: “Gosh”This song is just what your neurons need when you want to shut the world off and pump through something in hyper-focus. I play it to work or jog and it makes me feel like I’m putting on sunglasses and rocketing into the matrix. Every single time. — Natalia, Manhattan, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)9. Grimes: “Kill v. Maim”If I’ve got to do three minutes on a treadmill to spike my heartbeat in a strength session, it’s Grimes’s “Kill v. Maim.” Pretending you’re a vampire gangster (or whatever it’s about) frothing at the mouth is extremely motivating! — Laura, London (Listen on YouTube)10. Outkast: “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)”I made a mix a few years ago for a half-marathon I was preparing for. The fifth or sixth song I selected was Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad.” On the day of the race, when I got to that song about 30 minutes in, it inspired me to pick up the pace. From there, I hit repeat for the next 90 minutes and felt amazing! “Bombs Over Baghdad” gives me a lift like no other. — Michael Pittman, Durham, N.C. (Listen on YouTube)11. Eminem, “Lose Yourself”It’s a cliché, but it is undeniably one of the greatest workout songs ever created: “Lose Yourself,” by Eminem. The believe-in-yourself lyrics, the dramatic tension heightening throughout the song, and the fact that the b.p.m. perfectly accompanies a cardio workout. — Joe Stracci, Cold Spring, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)12. The Avalanches, “Because I’m Me”It’s like someone took Runner’s High and sonically bottled it into this recording. The initial beat drop! The horns! “Knock it out the ballpark, Frankie!” This song never fails to give me the extra push I need to finish a particularly tough run or workout. — Andre Plaut, Brooklyn, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)Mom’s spaghetti,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Readers’ Picks! 11 Motivating Workout Songs” track listTrack 1: Fleetwood Mac, “Tusk”Track 2: Mary J. Blige, “Just Fine”Track 3: Janet Jackson, “If”Track 4: TV on the Radio, “Wolf Like Me”Track 5: Gang of Four, “I Found That Essence Rare”Track 6: Hot Chip, “Flutes”Track 7: Sylvester, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”Track 8: Jamie xx, “Gosh”Track 9: Grimes, “Kill v. Maim”Track 10: Outkast, “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)”Track 11: Eminem, “Lose Yourself”Track 12: The Avalanches, “Because I’m Me”Bonus TracksTwo weeks ago, the enigmatic underground pop star Jai Paul made his live debut — 12 years after the release of his debut single. Tonight, he plays the first of two shows in New York City. In honor of this occasion, why not revisit the gorgeously glitchy pair of tracks that started it all, the menacing “BTSTU” and the shyly sensual “Jasmine”? And if you want a primer on why so many people care about this guy in the first place, I would humbly suggest this Pitchfork article I wrote about him almost exactly a decade ago (!) which doubles as a time capsule of 2013 internet ephemera. Were we ever so young? More

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    Harry Belafonte on His Artistic Values and His Activism

    In interviews and articles in The New York Times, Mr. Belafonte, who died on Tuesday, spoke about the civil rights movement and his frustration with how Black life was depicted onscreen.Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.A child of Harlem, Mr. Belafonte used his platform at the height of the entertainment world to speak out frequently on his music, how Black life was depicted onscreen and, most important to him, the civil rights movement. Here are some of the insights Mr. Belafonte provided to The New York Times during his many decades in the public spotlight, as they appeared at the time:His musicMr. Belafonte’s string of hits, including “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” helped create an American obsession with Caribbean music that led his record company to promote him as the “King of Calypso.”But Mr. Belafonte never embraced that sort of monarchical title, rejecting “purism” as a “cover-up for mediocrity” and explaining that he saw his work as a mash-up of musical styles.He told The New York Times Magazine in 1959 that folk music had “hidden within it a great dramatic sense, and a powerful lyrical sense.” He also plainly conceded: “I don’t have a great voice.”In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some insights into what may be going on globally, from what I’ve experienced.”He said that “Day-O,” for instance, was a way of life.“It’s a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said. “It’s a classic work song.”His views on film and televisionMr. Belafonte’s success in music helped him become a Hollywood leading man. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier landed more substantive and nuanced roles than Black actors had previously received.Nonetheless, Mr. Belafonte was left largely unsatisfied.Writing for The Times in 1968, he complained that “the real beauty, the soul, the integrity of the black community is rarely reflected” on television.“The medium is dominated by white-supremacy concepts and racist attitudes,” he wrote. “TV excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither networks nor sponsors want that.”Mr. Belafonte emphasized that his 10-year-old son saw few Black heroes on television.“The nobility in his heritage and the values that could complement his positive growth and sense of manhood are denied him,” he wrote. “Instead, there is everything to tear him down and give him an inferiority complex. He will see the Negro only as a rioter and a social problem, never as a whole human being.”Roughly 25 years later, Mr. Belafonte was circumspect, suggesting in an interview with The Times that little had changed.“Even today, on the big screen, the pictures that are always successful are pictures where blacks appear in the way white America buys it,” he said in 1993. “And we’re told that what we really want to express is not profitable and is not commercially viable.”His politics and activismEven as Mr. Belafonte was in the prime of his entertainment career, he was intently focused on activism and civil rights.“Back in 1959,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in 1981, “I fully believed in the civil-rights movement. I had a personal commitment to it, and I had my personal breakthroughs — I produced the first black TV special; I was the first black to perform at the Waldorf Astoria. I felt if we could just turn the nation around, things would fall into place.”But Mr. Belafonte lamented that by the middle of the 1970s, the movement had ended.“When the doors of Hollywood shut on minorities and blacks at the end of the 70’s,” he said, “a lot of black artists had been enjoying the exploitation for 10 years. But one day they found the shop had closed down.”Mr. Belafonte remained outspoken about politics in his later years. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master”; he called President George W. Bush a “terrorist” in 2006, and lamented in 2012 that modern celebrities had “turned their back on social responsibility.”“There’s no evidence that artists are of the same passion and of the same kind of commitment of the artists of my time,” he told The Times in 2016. “The absence of black artists is felt very strongly because the most visible oppression is in the black community.”In 2016 and again in 2020, he visited the opinion pages of The Times to urge voters to reject Donald J. Trump.“The vote is perhaps the single most important weapon in our arsenal,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in the 2016 article. “The same things needed now are the same things needed before,” he added. “Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die. ” More

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    Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry.

    The artist’s phosphorescent electronic albums helped make way for the recent bloom of lifestyle playlists and background music. He’s turned on that trend to take on real life.Tim Hecker could not name his most streamed song on Spotify, even after several guesses.Was it “Chimeras,” the electronic musician guessed by phone before a recent Berlin performance, selecting a 2006 piece where prickles of electric guitar scatter like a galaxy around a lulling beat? (Not in the Top 10.) He tried “Sketch 3,” an 80-second piano reverie he considered “an oddball.” Closer, in second place.Informed that “Boreal Kiss, Pt. 1” — a deep cut from his obscure 2001 debut that sounds like a glass harp routed through a dial-up modem — had six million streams, far more than everything else in the Top 10 combined, he chuckled. “That is crazy, crazy,” he said slowly.He was an Ottawa civil servant then who had just finished a master’s in political philosophy and was making music on the weekends from his basement home. His ideas were inchoate, his approach innocent. “I was so optimistic about the tools I had,” Hecker, 48, said. “Those were first passes at chord progressions you’ve been playing your whole teenage life.”In the decades since, Hecker has become one of the most pre-eminent and nuanced electronic producers of his generation, his phosphorescent pieces constantly tunneling among bliss and terror, depression and wonder. His albums, including “Harmony in Ultraviolet” (2006), “Virgins” (2013) and “No Highs,” which arrived earlier this month, revel in ambiguity, conjuring dream states that make you wonder if you like dreaming at all.These meticulous instrumentals also helped reopen the gates for the tide of ambient music that has seeped into life’s quiet corners, whether soundtracking yoga classes, co-working spaces or meditation apps. The impressive stats of “Boreal Kiss, Part 1” stem from a popular playlist called “Ambient Essentials.” Hecker wants no part of it.“Ambient music is the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence,” he said in a sudden rush weeks earlier, in a call from his Montreal studio. “It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms, shortcuts for the stress of our world. They serve a simple function: to ‘chill out.’ How does it differ from Muzak 2.0, from elevator music?”Hecker described his early life outside of Vancouver as the “classic Canadian suburban experience.” He played trumpet and ran cross-country, occasionally went camping. When he was a dishwasher at a Canadian steakhouse chain called The Keg, a co-worker passed him cassettes of British post-punk and American folk. The long-running CBC radio show Brave New Waves became his “voice in the night,” he said, its experimental music fascinating him as he drifted to sleep. He began borrowing guitars and drum kits, exploring for himself.“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThere was a latent sadness, too: When Hecker was 12, his mother died. He suppressed the turmoil until after he became a father himself, going to years of intensive therapy recently, well into his 40s. Still, he admitted, the loss was “bound up in the melancholy of youth.”This multivalence seemed to follow Hecker. He would spend his collegiate summers in the British Columbia wilderness, planting as many as 4,000 trees each day in clear-cut forests. (Each sapling, strung to a hip belt, took five seconds to get into the ground.) As he worked, he dieted on psychedelics and early British electronica. Grizzly bears prowled near the planters’ camp at night. Danger, beauty and intrigue commingled, a fertile landscape for Hecker’s imagination.Later, frustrated by the exigencies of starting a band, like remembering what they’d played the day before, Hecker began experimenting with drum machines and samplers. He needed no one else. “The original impulse was this awe-struck excitement,” Hecker said, recalling his titanic computer tower, gargantuan monitor and pirated software. “Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal. Computers had this utopian promise.”Hecker first made techno under the alias Jetone, then slid into the sort of ambient music that is now a streaming commodity because it felt less dependent on being young or sticking to a scene. His sonics and sentiments quickly deepened, suggesting a constant and often very loud tug of war between anxiety and enlightenment. This reflected, he said, “the rainbow of possibility for people — extreme joys, incredible suffering.”To achieve that balance, Hecker has long relied on an iterative, labor-intensive process. When he’s found a motif he likes, maybe a delirious rhythm or entrancing melody, he repeatedly improvises over it, letting as many as 200 pieces pile up like strata of handbills amassed on a light pole. He excises bits that don’t fit, editing that mass of sound until all the layers interact.“There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem,” he said. “I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion — the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel.”“Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal,” Hecker said of his early forays into electronic music. “Computers had this utopian promise.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn the early days of lockdown, Hecker, like so many, felt only confused and anxious, home-schooling kids and managing bills. He worried there would be no music industry on the pandemic’s other side, and he wondered what he was supposed to make. He turned down an offer to produce sounds for an upstart meditation app and instead focused on film and TV scores, including Brandon Cronenberg’s subversive thriller, “Infinity Pool.”He was grateful to respond to someone else’s cues rather than make decisions himself. “I had no music in the tank,” he admitted. “I was out of ideas.”Finally, in the winter of 2022, he fled Montreal for 10 days, taking suitcases crammed with keyboards, cords and small speakers to Oaxaca. He set up a makeshift studio in an apartment there, kneeling on pillows for hours on end as he built and broke rhythms, searching for moments that felt new, even hallucinatory. They became the core of “No Highs.”Soon after Hecker returned to cold Montreal, he asked his longtime friend, the powerhouse saxophonist Colin Stetson, to improvise alongside those still-nebulous pieces. “We didn’t discuss concept, theme — the tracks were just scaffolding,” Stetson recalled in an interview. “But one was madly exultant. Another was innocent, searching. A couple were relentlessly tense. He was not running down a single alleyway.”“No Highs” is a sly and discomfiting record, elements of unease lurking beneath a cool exterior and tongue-in-cheek titles like “Monotony” and “Living Spa Water.” Almost half the tracks circle the eight-minute mark, Hecker’s attempt to undermine streaming algorithms he believes prefer clarity and concision. “No Highs” is an attempt to give himself a playlist pink slip.“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesHecker doesn’t doubt the salubrious value of pleasant instrumentals, whether called ambient, New Age or easy listening. And he understands the need to break from hectic social rhythms; “No Highs,” after all, stemmed from his own paradisiacal escape from new lockdowns back home.A long-lapsed Catholic, Hecker began studying Buddhism early during the pandemic and meditating in his studio nearly every morning. When touring for “No Highs” ends, he plans to return to the San Diego monastery of the Thai Forest monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu for a week, making breakfast for the monks and doing chores. That work reminds him of planting those trees after college. He’s started camping again and is interested in extended backpacking trips, inspired by Bhikku and Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail chronicle, “A Walk in the Woods.”“It’s not a panacea for living in the world,” he said of such resets. “But the frequency of the mind is slowed, less prone to flailing.”And many mornings, he looks at Apple Music to see if there’s something new from Michiru Aoyama, a beyond-prolific Japanese musician who sometimes releases an eight-track album of placid music every day. (By mid-April, he’d issued 93 in 2023.) Hecker called Aoyama the “ambient genre, par excellence.” These are calming but pointed reminders of what his own music isn’t, even if they sometimes share stylistic descriptors.“It is totally opposite from my own work — arguably overwrought, taking too long,” he said, laughing. “There’s something reassuring about waking up to a new Michiru album, like coffee being served. I want my spa music, too.” More

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    Richard Lewis, Diagnosed With Parkinson’s, Will Retire From Stand-Up Comedy

    Mr. Lewis, whose roles include a long-running appearance on the HBO hit “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” said that he was diagnosed two years ago, and that he would continue to write and act.The comedian Richard Lewis is retiring from stand-up after having privately dealt with Parkinson’s disease, which he was diagnosed with two years ago, he said in a video posted on Twitter.Mr. Lewis, 75, said that he was diagnosed after he noticed stiffness in his walking and that he was shuffling his feet. Parkinson’s disease is an incurable disorder that affects the part of the brain that controls movement.“The last three and a half years, I’ve had sort of a rocky time, and people say, ‘You know, I haven’t heard from you, are you still touring?’” he said in a video post Sunday night to his nearly 240,000 Twitter followers. He described his diagnosis and said: “I’m finished with stand-up. I’m just focused on writing and acting.”pic.twitter.com/ngqm6TmC3x— Richard Lewis (@TheRichardLewis) April 24, 2023
    Mr. Lewis, who recently finished filming Season 12 of the HBO hit show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” with the comedian Larry David, said that he was lucky he did not get Parkinson’s disease until late in life and that the disease had progressed slowly, if at all.In addition to the Parkinson’s diagnosis, he has had four surgeries on his shoulder, back and hip in the past few years. “It was bad luck, but it’s life,” he said.Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Mr. Lewis started performing his own stand-up routines in 1971 at New York’s Improvisation and Pips, according to IMDB, the entertainment website. After appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in 1974, he had a four-year run on the hit ABC series “Anything but Love,” co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Comedy Central included Mr. Lewis in the top 50 of its list of the top 100 comedians of all time.Mr. Lewis has also had a number of film roles, including as Prince John in the 1993 adventure comedy film “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.” In his memoir, “The Other Great Depression,” he described his recovery from addiction and finding spirituality.Mr. Lewis, who has performed on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” since its debut in 2000, has known Mr. David since they met at summer camp at age 12, Mr. Lewis said in a 2010 interview with Howard Stern.“Hated him, never saw him again until I became a comic, became best friends,” he said. “When I became a comic, he loved my work, and I loved his work.” More

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    A New Show Celebrates the Guitar and Its Symbolism

    Opening in May at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, the exhibition will delve into the instrument’s myriad representations and stars who have played it.This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.Guitarists and their music — from folk singers to rock ’n’ roll stars and protest songs — figure prominently in American history and culture, but the instrument has a notable heritage of its own.“The guitar itself can have meaning, other than simply being beautiful or making music,” said Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, where “Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art,” on view from May 26 to Aug. 13, will explore the guitar’s symbolism in American art, from late 18th-century parlor rooms to today’s concert halls.On display will be more than 165 works: paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, illustrations, videos, music in multimedia presentations and musical instruments, including a rare cittern, a popular string instrument in the 18th and 19th centuries, and seminal guitars by Fender, Gibson and C.F. Martin & Company.Twelve thematic sections, with names like “Cowboy Guitars,” “Iconic Women of Early Country Music” and “Hispanicization,” will weave in how artists and photographers have used the guitar as a visual motif to express the American experience and attitudes, from thorny issues like race and identity to the aesthetics of guitars themselves.The guitar was seen as a symbol of cultivation and sophistication, as used in Thomas Cantwell Healy’s portrait of Charlotte Davis Wylie (1853). Estate of Mary Swords BoehmerArtworks in “Leisure, Culture, and Comfort: 18th and 19th Century America,” including a painting by Charles Willson Peale from 1771, the earliest image in the exhibition, will show old-fashioned scenes of women playing for pleasure or holding guitars passively.“The guitar was seen as a symbol of cultivation and sophistication, a sign of domestic achievement, like needlework or writing poetry,” Mr. Scala said. But throughout the show, many images of guitar-playing women counter this gender stereotype, he said, by signaling self-confidence, independence, creativity and even sexual liberation.“Guitars are kind of equal-opportunity story facilitators,” said Leo Mazow, curator of American art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, who organized “Storied Strings, where it recently closed. (The exhibition will be adapted for the Frist, mainly to reflect Tennessee culture.)He attributes the instrument’s popularity to its portability, affordability, easy to learn repertoire and ability to host many different genres: “One of the reasons guitars appear frequently in American art is they fit neatly within the picture plane, especially on the diagonal and one’s lap.”William H. Johnson’s “Blind Musician” was painted around 1940.Smithsonian American Art MuseumThe section “Blues and Folk” will focus on the role of both idioms “in the formation of a voice that comes up from the people, music that has often been conflated to express identity or to encourage change,” Mr. Scala said. Works featuring figures like Lead Belly, Odetta, and Josh White appear here. Romare Bearden’s 1967 collage, “Three Folk Musicians,” a nod to Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” Dr. Mazow said, “is a powerful work because it contrasts the guitar with its Western European origins to the banjo with its West African origins, but carries little to none of the racially vexed baggage that the banjo does.”Dr. Mazow said that one of his favorite works was Thomas Hart Benton’s “Jessie with Guitar,” of the artist’s daughter, from 1957. “Every birthday he would make a drawing or a painting of her,” he explained, “and this painting is based on sketches completed the morning of her 18th birthday.” Based on conversations with Jessie, who died in February, he said, “this guitar provided a way for the older dad to bond with his young, hip daughter, who was something of a folk sensation.”This photograph of the folk and protest singer Woody Guthrie was taken in 1943. Jessie Benton Collection. T.H. and R.P. Benton Trusts / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York“A Change is Coming” will highlight the guitar as a vehicle of political change, with images and videos of musicians — like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez — who “protest the hypocrisy of America’s social and political systems,” Mr. Scala said. Dorothea Lange’s 1935 photograph “Coachella Valley” details a Mexican laborer playing a guitar at a camp in California, and Annie Leibovitz’s 1984 photo of Bruce Springsteen used to promote his “Born in the U.S.A.” tour will be on view.“Making a Living” will look at the role of money in music, “from historic paintings of blind street buskers to the ultrarich stars of today,” Mr. Scala said. Highlights include a 1912 oil painting by Robert Henri “Blind Singers,” a 1941 photograph by Walker Evans “Blind Man with Guitar,” and more recent images of Chet Atkins and the Carter Sisters performing at the Grand Ole Opry, and Dolly Parton on her tour bus.“Personification” will explore how the guitar is often associated with the human body, through words to describe it like “neck” and “waist” and at times, phallic connotations. A photograph of B.B. King hugging his guitar named Lucille reflects how the guitar can also be a kind of extension of, or an avatar for the human body, Mr. Scala said.“The Visual Culture of Early Rock and Roll” will feature electric guitars from the 1950s and ‘60s, including a 1959 Les Paul, instruments played by Eric Clapton, by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and footage of Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing electric guitar, a musician who is credited with transforming Black church music. “Most of the guitars in this section were played by male rock ’n’ roll stars,” Mr. Scala said. “I wanted to show her influence on the early development of rock ’n’ roll, puncturing the gender-specific notion of the ‘guitar god.’”This Gibson Explorer guitar was played by Eric Clapton and dates back to 1958.Private collection, TexasSeveral design milestones have contributed to the guitar’s appeal as a visual icon. “The first American guitar manufacturer, C.F. Martin,” right after he arrived from Germany in 1833, Dr. Mazow said, “is very concerned with aesthetics. There are several parts of early Martins, like the ornate deck decorations around the sound hole, that are not structural at all.” More than a century later, a 1954 Fender Stratocaster, which will be on view, is believed to be the first custom-painted model, he said. “It takes us back to a moment when one of the premier electric guitar makers decided that aesthetics count.”Paul Polycarpou, a guitar collector, whose rare pink Stratocaster appears in the show, said, “It’s art you can play.” Mr. Polycarpou, former editor and publisher of Nashville Arts Magazine, arrived in Nashville in the 1980s from England to play guitar on tour with Tammy Wynette. “It really is ground zero for guitar players,” he said of Nashville. “Not just in country music, but in all genres, whether it’s jazz, rockabilly, rock ’n’ roll or bluegrass.”The Frist recently opened a companion exhibition, “Guitar Town: Picturing Performance Today,” on view through Aug. 20, featuring works by 10 local photographers who celebrate Nashville’s music scene, with images of guitar players performing in venues across the city. “Anywhere in America, if you’ve got a story to tell, the guitar will help you tell it,” Mr. Polycarpou said. “That’s what makes it such a powerful symbol. Who can forget Elvis Presley, rocking with that guitar? You can’t forget that image of a young Bob Dylan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on a black-and-white television. You can’t forget that once you see it. It’s that powerful.” More

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    ‘Baby J’ Review: John Mulaney Punctures His Persona

    In his highly anticipated new Netflix special, the comic changes his pace to deliver bristlingly funny material about addiction, rehab and what it means to be likable.In his new special, “Baby J,” we hear John Mulaney before we see him.“In the past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” says one of the most distinctive voices in comedy, as a black screen transitions into an empty backdrop of a stage. “And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”Then in a glamorous, swirling shot orchestrated by the theater director Alex Timbers, the camera gives the comic what he needs. It retreats to reveal Mulaney, 40, in a maroon suit, before circling to give us a picture of the commanding power of stardom. Shot from behind, we see his perspective: a hazy mass of people underneath chandeliers in between an ominous series of statues inside the Symphony Hall in Boston.It’s a striking image setting up a series of bristling comic vignettes that dig into Mulaney’s drug addiction, intervention by friends and stint in rehab. One is tempted to say this is his most personal work, but that isn’t quite right. That first shot tips us off to a theme: You can be invisible in front of a crowd. Mulaney’s comedy, however, has become spikier, pricklier, sometimes slower while remaining as funny as ever, like he’s a pitcher who learned to mix up speeds. He has performed versions of this material throughout the last two years, and this special arrives on Netflix so meticulously honed that the polish doesn’t even show.At some point in the last decade, John Mulaney stopped being merely a very successful comedian and transformed into something larger in the culture: the boyish sweetheart in a scene full of creeps, the wife guy who doesn’t need children to be happy, the aspirational theater kid. I didn’t grasp this shift until, in a short period of time, he checked into rehab, got a very public divorce, and had a child with the actress Olivia Munn. Judging by the reaction online, not to mention the texts on my phone, people had feelings about this — lots of them. Mulaney made the word “parasocial” go mainstream.For comics, being in the news like this can be tricky terrain, both a problem and an opportunity. “Likability is a jail,” Mulaney says at one point in “Baby J,” and his self-deprecating punch lines about his own vanity could be viewed as a prison break. He recalls that when he was young, he would feel jealousy toward the kid who had suddenly become the focus of his classmates’ sympathies when his grandfather died. “Did you ever, like me, hope …” he says, abruptly pausing his cadence to let the audience anticipate his embarrassing thoughts about the possible benefits of the death of grandparents.Mulaney has always spoken at a rapid if precise clip, heavily influenced by Spalding Gray, the pioneering confessional monologuist. (“If story rhythms were legally protected like song hooks, I would be in prison,” Mulaney once tweeted about Gray.) Mulaney’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery demanded you keep up with his thought process. It still does, but his cadence has become more intricate, and the biggest laughs in this new special come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.This tactic requires patience and deft timing but can produce an intense response, the comedy equivalent of letting you hear the scratching under the bed while postponing the reveal of the monster long enough to let your imagination run amok.Some of Mulaney’s biggest laughs in “Baby J” come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.Marcus Russell Price/NetflixThe stories he tells here present a desperate man, including one about a very sketchy doctor who gives him prescription drugs in exchange for some low-level deception and the removal of his shirt. Mulaney has such a chipper affect that he can put across grim material without weighing the show down, a superpower these days when ambitious comics are often expected to do more than tell jokes.His description of his intervention is a comic highlight, with act-outs of Nick Kroll and Fred Armisen. He’s hilariously flattered by the intervention’s star-studded attendance, “a ‘We Are the World’ of alternative comedians over the age of 40.” And when the woman running it says that she heard he was nice, he corrects her: “Don’t trust the persona.”The funniest part of the special, which at over an hour and 20 minutes is longer than most released by Netflix these days, is an elaborate description of a text he got in rehab from Pete Davidson that a nurse woke up him to read. “Some people suggested we did drugs together because he has tattoos and I am plain,” Mulaney says, a gentle poke at the shallowness of the media and public.This story takes off when we learn that Mulaney had put Davidson’s number in his phone under the name Al Pacino, which gives Mulaney a chance to perform the scene a second time from the nurse’s perspective, including an amazing impersonation of late-era Pacino. I can’t do this justice, except to say that the phrase “daddy khaki pants” made me laugh out loud.Silliness has long been central to Mulaney’s humor, and part of it comes from the incongruity of his seeming either younger than his age or much older (he favors archaic words like “nay” instead of “no”). The titles of his specials tell a Benjamin Button story: “New in Town,” followed by “The Comeback Kid” and “Kid Gorgeous,” followed by “Baby J.” The way it’s going, “Fetal Position” could be next.This is a highly anticipated special, and the modern stand-up event tends to be about something more messy than jokes. When Jerrod Carmichael came out of the closet, he ended his special abruptly, with loose ends; Chris Rock flashed raw emotion in his vengeful response to being slapped by Will Smith. Mulaney remains a tightly controlled performer. His special mostly avoids his divorce and new child, focusing instead on his drug addiction.That story has a happy ending, with him going to rehab and emerging not only sober, but also no longer needing the approval of others. It’s a dramatic, abrupt evolution. “What is someone going to do to me that’s worse than what I would do to myself?” he asks, hinting at his own self-destructive tendencies. “What, are you going to cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him.”That’s not the Mulaney his fans thought they knew. But it’s worth noting that if you revisit his first special from 2012, you’ll find a story about lying to a doctor to get drugs (Xanax in that case) as well as a confession that he had a drinking problem that started when he was 13 that he had since kicked.How much has changed with him is something we can never truly know. But we, the audience, can be naïve about our entertainers. We assume we understand them, and when they do something at odds with their persona, we feel betrayed, even angry. Yet no one ever asks us to take accountability for getting it wrong. You would think by now we would approach show business with a little more skepticism. But the truth is that we don’t want to, and great performers intuitively understand that. They’re gifted at creating intimacy with the viewer, at making us believe.John Mulaney appears to have become, as many veteran comics do, more cynical about this relationship, and speaks to it after relating an anecdote that makes him look bad. “As you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful and unlikable that story is, just remember,” he says, eyes glassy, “that’s one I’m willing to tell you.”This suggests he has done even more unlikable things, but also that whatever you might think, you don’t really know him. An artist who respects his audience less would state this directly. John Mulaney lets the mind wander. More

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    ‘Good Night, Oscar’ Review: Sean Hayes With Demerol and Cadenzas

    The “Will & Grace” star is unrecognizable in a Broadway biography of Oscar Levant: wit, pianist and “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.”He says it again, or a version of it, in “Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.Certainly the play, by Doug Wright, fails to make much of a case for the genius part of the joke. Instead, it offers a spray of Levant’s most famous quips, like the one about Elizabeth Taylor: “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” And instead of dramatizing how marvelous Levant was, it just says so repeatedly. “America’s greatest wit.” “A goddamn lion.” A Horowitz at the piano “with a grace and an ease that even Chopin might envy.”Fulsome praise, but what we see in the director Lisa Peterson’s production is a far cry from any of it. Mostly it’s just a cry; Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill.Pathos not being much of a dramatic engine, Wright works very hard, if fictionally, to crank up the stakes. It’s 1958, on the day during sweeps week when “The Tonight Show,” with its host, Jack Paar, will make its West Coast debut. Paar’s marquee guest, leading a lineup that also includes the sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and the ventriloquist Señor Wences, is Levant, who two hours before showtime hasn’t arrived. NBC’s president, Robert Sarnoff, threatens to replace him with the popular bandleader Xavier Cugat.But where Sarnoff (Peter Grosz) sees Levant as unreliably neurotic, and thus unappealing to the network and the audience, Paar (Ben Rappaport) sees him as an artist whose unreliability and neurosis are exactly his strengths. He’s the national id: the man Americans hope they’ll catch “saying something on television they know damn well that you can’t say on television.” He’s good for ratings; no wonder Paar calls him his favorite mental patient.That line is no joke. It is only thanks to the machinations of Levant’s wife, June (Emily Bergl, excellent), that Oscar has been sprung on a four-hour pass from the institution he currently calls home. When he finally arrives at the studio, with a miffed orderly (Marchánt Davis) in tow, he’s strung out, rumpled and morose. June calls him “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Hayes and Emily Bergl as Levant’s wife, June.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHayes, no longer the adorable sprite from “Will and Grace,” has clearly made a careful study of Levant’s mannerisms, many of them the result of a longtime addiction to painkillers. The work is startling, but the performance is less an inhabitation of character than a nonstop loop of perfectly rendered facial tics, trembling hands and compulsive gestures. His speech is pressured, his mood explosive, his target anything that crosses his path — including himself. Past this stockade of behavior, little of an inner life can get out.To address the built-in problem of revealing such a locked-down soul, and in the manner of period psychiatric melodramas like “Now Voyager” and “Bigger Than Life,” Wright gives Levant occasional reality breaks and hallucinations. Most involve George Gershwin: Levant’s friend, benefactor and bête noire, dead 20 years yet still a kind of Oedipal rival. “I’m scared to death of failure,” Gershwin’s glamorous ghost (John Zdrojeski) says. “But you? You don’t mind it.”Whether or not Levant minded it, it’s true that by Gershwin standards he failed; few people today remember him. Huge swathes of dramaturgically suspicious exposition must thus be rolled out to cover the gaps. “I know the critics all say your greatest performance was in ‘An American in Paris,’” a young production assistant (Alex Wyse) tells Levant, and us. “That musical sequence — the Concerto in F — it’s a showstopper!”When characters start informing other characters of what they would obviously already know, and (as often happens here as well) braying madly at mild jokes, something is wrong.What that is becomes clearer when, in the second half of the 100-minute play, Levant finally sits down for the live broadcast, after proving himself merely tiresome for the first half. The music starts, the curtain rises, the lights come up, and he’s still tiresome. Firing off one-liners, especially nasty ones, is no mark of special genius; thousands of comedians do it. Nor does the fact that the one-liners come from a man who is obviously deeply troubled make them especially funny. For me, watching Hayes as Levant — like watching kinescopes of Levant himself — is excruciatingly sad.The weight of shoring up the point of the play thus falls heavily on Levant’s pianism — and Hayes’s. Peterson, the director, has been building up to it from the beginning. The nested shoeboxes of Rachel Hauck’s handsome set, representing Paar’s office and, when that breaks away, Levant’s dressing room, now disappear entirely to reveal a fully padded television studio with a Steinway center stage. Hayes steps up to it and, after a last, mortifying fight with Gershwin’s ghost, proceeds to play a seven-minute excerpt from “Rhapsody in Blue.”The playwright illuminates Levant’s inner world with occasional hallucinations, most involving Levant’s long-dead friend and rival George Gershwin (John Zdrojeski).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s fine.Even if it had been mind-blowing, I don’t see how it would have given “Good Night, Oscar” a satisfying shape; issues raised in theatrical terms want to be resolved in them, too. Wright has followed that principle in “I Am My Own Wife,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, and in his book for the unconventional musical version of “Grey Gardens,” each of which uses the raw materials it was built from to fashion an organic conclusion.“Good Night, Oscar” can’t get there, but it understands the problem. A coda following the concerto may not tie up the larger themes of genius and insanity but does resolve some relationships in the way you would expect from a melodrama set in 1958. Selflessness and renunciation are involved. Jokes that were formerly just origami with words now become ways of slipping painful truths past the interpersonal censors.In those last few minutes only, you see into Levant’s soul. It is not a soul made for television, though that’s how most people of his time would have known him. Somehow they accepted him as he was, which may not have been a blessing. When asked, on a 1965 episode of “What’s My Line,” “Have you ever managed to make a great deal of use out of various illnesses that you’ve had?” he answered, “My health is the concern of the nation.” The blindfolded panel knew immediately who he was.I only wish after “Good Night, Oscar” we did.Good Night, OscarThrough Aug. 27 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; goodnightoscar.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    How Fred again.. Jolted Dance Music

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe most rapid ascent in dance music over the past three years belongs to the British producer and songwriter Fred again.., a protégé of Brian Eno and a onetime songwriter for Ed Sheeran and others who has built a formidable catalog using found vocals — from YouTube, Instagram or regular conversation — as the skeleton for high-energy club-pop.Fred’s main innovations aren’t necessarily musical, though. They’re his open-eared and arms-outstretched approach to production, which has made room for a wide range of collaborators, and his sense of live whimsy — whether announcing a last-minute rave with Skrillex and Four Tet at Madison Square Garden, or playing a peculiarly intimate set on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about dance music’s new wave of big-tent ambition, how Fred again.. turns unlikely source material into catchy pop, and how far interpersonal good will can go as a music-making tool.Guest:Foster Kamer, the editor in chief of Futurism, who writes for New York magazine, The New York Times and othersConnect 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. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More