Aurelia Butler

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    Doechii! NewJeans! Ye! Answering Your Pop Music Questions

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIt’s Popcast mailbag time, in which we field listener and reader questions about all of the most pressing topics in popular music.On this week’s episode, the hosts — including The New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica and the pop reporter Joe Coscarelli, plus the pop music editor Caryn Ganz — address your thoughts and concerns about:The rise of Doechii, the young rap star turning viral fame into pop successOlivia Rodrigo’s role as a spirit guide for the eccentric pop stars of the day, like Chappell Roan and Sabrina CarpenterThe coherence of Lady Gaga’s latest album, “Mayhem”The ongoing legal situation between NewJeans and HybeThe latest provocations and music from Ye, formerly Kanye WestAnd whether great pain is inextricable from great art, per a recent interview with Bon IverConnect 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.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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    At 30, ‘A Goofy Movie’ Has Made a Serious Impact

    The 30-year-old animated Disney film has fans across generations. Now, a documentary looks back at its legacy.“If we listen to each other’s heart / We’ll find we’re never too far apart,” sang the fictional pop star Powerline (voiced by Tevin Campbell) during a 2017 screening of “A Goofy Movie” at El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.The ecstatic reaction from those in attendance confirmed to Kevin Lima that the first movie he ever directed, originally released on April 7, 1995, had indeed amassed an adoring fandom.“I sat amongst an audience who was singing along, repeating back dialogue with the characters onscreen, dancing in their seats,” Lima recalled during a recent video interview from his home in Mill Valley, Calif.“A Goofy Movie” observes the often hilarious, and at times thorny relationship between Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer), the lanky anthropomorphic dog from Disney’s classic cartoons, and his teenage son, Max (Jason Marsden), as they go on a road trip that will bring them closer.A scene from “A Goofy Movie,” which follows a father-son road trip.Buena Vista PicturesUnlike most Disney films made during that time, this heartfelt father-son adventure was a contemporary story entrenched in the 1990s via its upbeat pop music and the characters’ wardrobes. Lima described it as “an animated film that feels like a John Hughes movie.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    6 Songs From ‘Just in Time’ That Capture Bobby Darin’s Legacy

    Before David Bowie, Madonna and Beyoncé made the idea of being a pop star synonymous with constant reinvention, there was Bobby Darin.He “could sound like anybody and sing any style,” Bob Dylan wrote of the singer in his 2022 book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Not only was Darin “more flexible than anyone of his time,” Dylan noted, but “even in repose he just about vibrated with talent.”Neil Young, another rocker known for musical shape-shifting, expressed similar admiration. “I used to be pissed off at Bobby Darin because he changed styles so much,” he told Rolling Stone. “Now I look at him and think he was a [expletive] genius.”It’s that versatility, alongside his complicated life, that the new Broadway show “Just in Time,” in previews at Circle in the Square Theater, aims to explore through Darin’s swinging hits.Developed and directed by Alex Timbers (a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge!”) and starring Jonathan Groff (a Tony winner last year for “Merrily We Roll Along”), “Just in Time” is set in a nightclub, complete with an onstage band. While Darin is remembered for his magnetic performances, his story requires something more than a conventional jukebox bio-musical.Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin, singing his first big hit song, “Splish Splash,” in the musical “Just in Time” at the Circle in the Square Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Last Five Years’ Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Star in a Muddy Revival

    Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.Leave aside its seriousness, its intimacy, its wit. Leave aside, too, its relative obscurity, despite being frequently performed. (Without really trying, I’ve seen it six times, including the 2014 film.) Even apart from any of that, “The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is still the ur-nerdical — nerdical being a term I made up to describe shows, like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” that are too good to stay in the very small theater-geek niche they arose from. Turns out they can speak, and sing, to anyone.What really makes “The Last Five Years,” which debuted Off Broadway in 2002, look like the father of that family of choice, is its baroque structure. Doubling down (and doing a backflip) on reverse-chronology narratives like the ones in “Betrayal” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” it presents the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a suddenly successful young novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a slowly sinking young actor, in two timelines. Jamie’s moves forward, from the day he falls headlong for Cathy to the day, five years later, he resentfully leaves her. Cathy’s moves backward, from despair over Jamie’s betrayal to exhilaration over the first stirrings of his love.The structure is no mere appliqué, decorating the surface of the show like a doodle. It is how “The Last Five Years” expresses its truth. One arc always going up, one down, there’s sadness waiting whenever there’s joy and joy whenever there’s sadness. Seen alternately in separate scenes, the lovers never touch, let alone share Brown’s pyrotechnical songs, except halfway through, on the day they marry. Whether the story has a happy ending thus depends on how you look at it.Instead of staying out of each other’s scenes, the actors in this production are often thrown together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Amadou Bagayoko, Half of Malian Duo Who Went Global, Dies at 70

    As Amadou & Mariam, he and his wife were improbable pop stars on two counts. Their style was venturesome and eclectic, and they were blind virtuosos.Amadou Bagayoko, a Malian guitarist and composer who with his wife, the singer Mariam Doumbia, formed Amadou & Mariam, inventing a broadly accessible sound that made fans of people worldwide who otherwise knew little about music from Africa, died on Friday in Bamako, Mali’s capital. He was 70.His death was announced by the Malian government, which did not provide a cause. He and Ms. Doumbia lived in Bamako.In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Amadou & Mariam was regularly described as the new century’s most successful African musical act.Mr. Bagayoko, who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, called their sound “Afro-rock,” and the group regularly combined his winding guitar solos with, for example, the pounding of a West African djembe drum.Yet the group’s music also consistently evolved. Their breakout hit, the 2005 album “Dimanche à Bamako,” had chatty spoken asides, sirens, the hubbub of crowds — city sounds turned into melodies. Their 2008 album “Welcome to Mali,” conversely, embraced an electronic style of funk, opening with a song, “Sabali,” featuring Damon Albarn of the arty hip-hop group Gorillaz.What was consistent was a sweet, graceful sound that still had the power to build to crescendos, with Ms. Doumbia’s alto achieving clear, pleasant resonance over a rich orchestration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    John Peck, Underground Cartoonist Known as The Mad Peck, Dies at 82

    Among many other accomplishments, he illustrated a scholarly work on the history of comic books and wrote record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.John Peck, a cultural omnivore known as The Mad Peck whose dryly humorous style as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey and record collector was accompanied by an ornate eccentricity, died on March 15 in Providence, R.I. He was 82.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a ruptured aneurysm in his aorta, said his sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber.Mr. Peck was not as well known or acclaimed as underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman. That was perhaps in part because his interests were so broad, Gary Kenton, who edited him at Fusion and Creem magazines from the late 1960s into the ’70s, said in an interview.“To me, he would be a Top 10 cartoonist, a Top 10 D.J., a Top 10 rock critic,” Mr. Kenton said.Mr. Peck illustrated one of the first scholarly works on the importance of comic books. And he was perhaps the first cartoonist to write record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.He also wrote an academic paper in 1983 with the literary commentator Michael Macrone about the evolution of television; its title, “How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,” playfully referenced phallic symbolism in the oil-soaked prime-time soap opera “Dallas.” Mr. Peck once called it his “crowning achievement.”His comic-strip music critiques appeared in Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone and other music publications, and in The Village Voice. He worked in a retro style repurposed from the 1940s and ’50s and wrote with sardonic humor (“Is There Life After Meatloaf?”), while offering trustworthy criticism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Upper West Side Theater Is Sold After Governor Allocates $3.5 Million

    A nonprofit bought the landmark Metro Theater after receiving financial support from Gov. Kathy Hochul, the State Senate and Steven Spielberg’s foundation.A landmark Art Deco movie theater that closed 20 years ago on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was sold to a nonprofit after it received $3.5 million in discretionary grants from Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York.The nonprofit, the Upper West Side Cinema Center, used those funds and $500,000 in grants from the State Senate to complete its $6.9 million purchase of the Metro Theater on Friday. It plans to revitalize the building, on Broadway near West 99th Street, with a five-screen theater, a lobby lounge and a public cafe.Additional fund-raising of $15 million to $25 million is required to construct a new interior, replace the marquee and clean graffiti from the facade, the nonprofit says.“The Upper West Side community deserves another world-class venue for cinema and art, and that’s why I was proud to step in,” Hochul said in a news release.Assemblyman Micah Lasher, a Democrat who took office in January, grew up going to the Metro Theater and fondly remembers seeing “Ali” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus” there with his family.“Its loss for the last 20 years has been not just an eyesore, but a deeply felt scar for the neighborhood,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Interview’: Bill Murray Says He’s Not the Man He Used to Be

    In Bill Murray’s new movie, “The Friend,” currently in theaters and based on the beautifully bittersweet novel by Sigrid Nunez, he plays Walter, a writer and professor who is best friends with Iris, played by Naomi Watts. Through an upsetting course of events, Iris, who lives in a modest apartment in Manhattan, winds up having to take in Walter’s Great Dane. Not exactly ideal for her or the dog, and not exactly thoughtful of Walter.Witty and charismatic but also self-centered and responsible for real damage, Walter shares much in common with many of Murray’s late-career roles. I often think of the dramatic parts that he has specialized in since the late ’90s (consider the melancholy men of a certain age in “Rushmore,” “Lost in Translation,” “On the Rocks,” “St. Vincent” and so on) as being akin to alternate-world versions of the comedy characters that made him a star. Because Peter Venkman in “Ghostbusters” or Phil Connors in “Groundhog Day,” to pick just two of his most memorable comedic creations, could also be selfish and mean but, in the end, got away with it. Not so with Walter and his ilk. It’s as if Murray’s latter-day characters are suffering the karmic payback owed to his earlier ones.A similar balancing act — between charm and callousness, buoyancy and bad moods — has surfaced in Murray’s offscreen life too. Yes, he is a globe-trotting avatar of joyful surprise, known for his party crashing and playful high jinks, but directors and co-stars like Geena Davis, Lucy Liu, Richard Dreyfuss and Harold Ramis have said Murray was, to put it very mildly, not easy to work with. And in 2022, a female staff member working on the film “Being Mortal” claimed that Murray, who is 74, behaved inappropriately with her on set. She said that he straddled her and kissed her through masks, which they were wearing as part of Covid-19 protocols. The production was shut down, and eventually they reached a settlement.Given all this, Murray, enigmatic and mercurial, is a hard one to figure out. But on a rainy day in late March, at a hotel in downtown Manhattan, I had a chance to try.Listen to the Conversation With Bill MurrayThe actor talks about his new film “The Friend,” his jerky past and what he doesn’t get about himself.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou know, at The Times earlier today, your co-star in “The Friend,” the dog, was having his photo taken. He is a striking dog: 150 pounds, a Great Dane. His name is Bing. Bing! He lives in Iowa, and after a nationwide search he was chosen as the dog of the moment. He wasn’t wearing a tight sweater or anything. He was just the most capable dog. More