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      My Working Relationship With Diddy in the Music Industry

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      A thing happened between Sean Combs and me. Unlike what he has been accused of over the last eight months, what occurred between us was not sexual. It was professional — demonstrative of the way dynamic and domineering men moved in our heyday. Combs and I worked together a lot. Competed, in our way. So often I thought I came out on top. I was mistaken. I had reason to fear for my life. What happened was insidious. It broke my brain. I forgot the worst of it for 27 years.It was July 1997. In the fading smoke of the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., I was named editor in chief of a music magazine called Vibe. Started by Quincy Jones and Time Inc. in 1992, the magazine chronicled Black music and culture with rigor and beauty, 10 issues a year, for an audience that was relentlessly underserved. When I took over, we thought hip-hop might have died with our heroes, and we were determined not only to keep it alive but also to give it the cultural credit it was due.Hip-hop was both in mourning and in marketing meetings. Combs, Biggie’s creative partner and label boss, was the personification of this dichotomy. His Bad Boy Records was having a $100 million year — much due to the work of Biggie and Mase, as well as Combs’s own debut album, “No Way Out,” which was anchored by the blockbuster Biggie tribute “I’ll Be Missing You” featuring Faith Evans. Other singles, “It’s All About the Benjamins” and “Been Around the World,” functioned as a score for hip-hop’s megawatt moment — its commercial evolution and international expansion. (“No Way Out” would go on to sell over seven million copies.) So I wanted Combs on the cover of Vibe’s December 1997/January 1998 double issue. And I wanted him to wear white feathered wings.Faith Evans and Sean Combs filming the 1997 video for “I’ll Be Missing You,” in memory of the Notorious B.I.G., Evans’s husband. Mychal Watts/Associated PressMy point of reference was the poster for “Heaven Can Wait,” a 1978 film starring Warren Beatty. The movie is about a quarterback who dies before his time and is reincarnated as an idiosyncratic and callous billionaire. Vibe’s working cover line for Sacha Jenkins’s article was “The Good, the Bad and the Puffy.” Not so elegant, but it would work if the fashion director Emil Wilbekin and I got Combs (then known as Puffy, or Puff Daddy) to put on the angel wings. And if we also got a shot that looked even slightly mischievous, we could do a split run of the cover — one with heavenly signifiers and another with hellish ones. Possible cover line: “Bad Boy, Bad Boy, Whatcha Gonna Do?”The photo shoot took place in Manhattan in September 1997. I had probably said hello to Combs at an event, but the shoot was the first time I was around him for an extended period. Either it was a crowded set or I just felt claustrophobic. I wore yoga pants and an oversize T-shirt. I remember wanting to minimize my bust more than my bra was already doing. I remember cajoling. And I remember knowing that as a Black woman, I was in a no-win situation: to fail was to live up to my male bosses’ low expectations, and to succeed was to invite their resentment. That day, Combs was begrudgingly compliant. We finally got him to shrug on the white feathered wings.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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      New York Philharmonic Chief Abruptly Steps Down Amid Tensions

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      Gary Ginstling, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, is leaving after just a year on the job.Gary Ginstling, the New York Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, abruptly resigned on Thursday after just a year on the job, leaving the orchestra in limbo as it grapples with challenges including heated labor talks and an investigation into its workplace culture after two players were accused of misconduct.Behind the scenes, there were rising tensions between Ginstling and the Philharmonic’s board, staff and musicians, according to someone familiar with the situation who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations. The person said Ginstling also had disagreements with the star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who, in a major coup, was tapped to become the Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director.Some Philharmonic employees found Ginstling to be opaque, the individual said, and they complained that he was away from New York during critical moments, including at times when the administration was dealing with an outcry among musicians over the players accused of misconduct. Ginstling, 58, the former executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, maintained a home near the capital, where his family lives, and had been shuttling between there and New York, where he rented an apartment. (A friend said that he only spent weekends away from New York, and worked long hours for the orchestra.)A final flare-up occurred during an orchestra tour in China this summer, the individual said, with some players blaming Ginstling for several logistical problems. The orchestra had trouble fitting all of its musicians onstage at an opera house in Guangzhou. A planned speech from the stage by the American ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, was unexpectedly scrapped. (He later spoke at a reception for the orchestra.) In the end, large swaths of the opera house, which seats more than 1,800 people, were empty, an embarrassment for an ensemble of the Philharmonic’s caliber.In a statement released by the Philharmonic, Ginstling said: “The New York Philharmonic is an extraordinary institution, and it has been an honor to be a part of it. However, it has become clear to me that the institution needs a different type of leadership, and I have tendered my resignation.”He declined to comment further in a message on Thursday.The Philharmonic said that it would convene a “transition leadership team” that includes the chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, and Ginstling’s predecessor, Deborah Borda, who had held the post from 2017 until last year.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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      A ‘Simpsons’ Joke Comes True for Cypress Hill

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      The famed California hip-hop group played with the London Symphony Orchestra — 28 years after “The Simpsons” dreamed up the collaboration.There is now an answer to at least one chicken-or-egg “Simpsons” prophesy: The episode did come first.But then, 28 years later, came the concert.“Simpsons” fans mixed with Cypress Hill fans on Wednesday at the Royal Albert Hall, a stately concert venue in the English capital, for a one-night-only collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and the American hip-hop group. Some were there for beats. Others had come to see a joke become a reality.“We came for the meme,” said Nick Brady, 30, who was with his brother. “We stayed for the music.”The evening had been foretold by a 1996 episode of “The Simpsons,” called “Homerpalooza,” in which Homer Simpson takes his family to a festival and then falls in with the stars.In the TV show, a festival employee arrives in a backstage area flanked by tuxedo-clad musicians. “Who is playing with the London Symphony Orchestra?” he calls out. “Somebody ordered the London Symphony Orchestra … possibly while high? Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction.”The hip-hop group huddles, whispering. Then, thinking fast, one says: “Uh, yeah, yeah, we think we did. Uh, do you know ‘Insane In The Brain’?”“We mostly know classical,” one orchestra member says, in a posh British accent. “But we could give it a shot.”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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      At 75, the Aldeburgh Festival Is Bigger Than Benjamin Britten

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      When the composer Benjamin Britten died in 1976, it wasn’t clear how the public would remember him.There was Britten the rooted composer, firmly set in his native Suffolk, England, and the Aldeburgh Festival with his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears; Britten the establishment composer, friendly with the “Queen Mum,” the creator of “Gloriana” and the first composer to receive a peerage; and Britten the immediate composer, whose belief in art’s purposefulness meant he consciously avoided what he called writing for posterity.Others, however, were committed to the posterity of Britten’s work on his behalf. Rosamund Strode, a Britten assistant since 1964, became the founding archivist of the Britten Pears Foundation, and set the guidelines for one of the most comprehensive composer archives in existence.What, though, of his festival?The Aldeburgh Festival program from 1948.via Aldeburgh FestivalPeter Pears, left, and Britten.George Roger, via Aldeburgh Festival“Understandably, particularly after Britten’s death, and later after Pears’s death, there were people who wanted to properly protect what they felt were the sacred flames, because they were nervous of whether this thing was going to carry on after the two founders of this organization,” Roger Wright, the departing chief executive of Britten Pears Arts, said in an interview. Those people “needn’t have worried,” he added, “but there were bumpy times, and it’s very easy to forget that.”In the end, the Aldeburgh Festival, which recently celebrated its 75th edition, has produced many more editions without Britten than with him.The festival has gained a reputation for consistency, with well-attended, well-reviewed and richly programmed seasons. This year was no exception, including a new production of the church parable “Curlew River” alongside “Sumidigawa,” the Noh play that inspired it. (The show was filmed for a future BBC broadcast.)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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      Cigarettes After Sex and Gen Z’s Passion for Dream-Pop

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      The buzzy band that makes woozy, sensual music is releasing its third LP and starting an arena tour. It’s part of a wave reviving the fuzzed-out aesthetic of shoegaze.In 2016, a four-year-old track by a struggling Brooklyn band called Cigarettes After Sex blew up on YouTube, and soon the group’s brand of crisp, lovesick minimalism was selling out clubs all over Europe. At a tour stop in Prague, Greg Gonzalez, its leader, saw unticketed fans weeping in the street.“OK, this is bizarre,” Gonzalez remembered thinking. “But that showed me that this is doing what it’s supposed to do. This is music that’s meant for emotional people that are in love. That’s what music did for me. So I thought, that’s what I want my music to do for somebody else.”Eight years later, that pattern has repeated for Cigarettes After Sex, on a far grander scale. Although largely ignored by the mainstream media, the band’s spare, crystalline ballads have again caught fire online — this time on TikTok — racking up almost 10 billion streams around the world. Its third album, “X’s,” will be released on July 12 via the indie label Partisan, and an exhaustive global tour includes sold-out stops at Madison Square Garden as well as the Kia Forum near Los Angeles, and arenas throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and Australia. By stealth, Cigarettes After Sex has become one of the biggest cult bands in the world.Its success is also a high-water mark in rock’s latest retro revival, for shoegaze and dream-pop — appropriately nebulous terms for a range of music from the 1980s and early ’90s, when groups like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins and Lush cloaked melodies in waves of shimmering guitar or synthesizers, along a sonic scale from gauzy reverie to caustic noise. Long a recurrent strain in indie-pop, the sound has been catapulted by TikTok to a new level of popularity among Gen Z acts like Wisp, Sign Crushes Motorist and Quannnic that are posting millions of streams and dotting festival lineups.Cigarettes After Sex represents one end of this spectrum, with a carefully calibrated, almost cinematic approach: a hushed, dark landscape punctuated by splashes of color from Gonzalez’s guitar, topped by his whisper-soft, almost feminine singing voice. But in an interview in an East Village hotel bar, Gonzalez — who in person speaks in an easy, rapid-fire baritone — said he sees Cigarettes After Sex as fitting more in a tradition of classic, moody love songs, referencing Marvin Gaye, Françoise Hardy and Al Green.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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      Mary Martin, Who Gave Many Music Stars Their Start, Dies at 85

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      Her loyalty to artists and her eye for talent made her a force in a male-dominated business. Among her accomplishments: introducing Bob Dylan to the Band.Mary Martin, a Grammy-winning talent scout, manager and record executive who helped start the careers of a long list of future legends, including Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell — and who introduced Bob Dylan to the Band — died on July 4 in Nashville. She was 85.Mikayla Lewis, a documentary filmmaker and close friend, said she died in a hospice from complications of cancer.Among the musicians whose work exists somewhere between rock, country, folk and Americana, Ms. Martin was a legend in her own right, widely respected for her fierce loyalty to artists and her keen eye for budding talent.“She saw the bumpkin in me, and she also saw something that was going to develop,” Mr. Crowell said in an interview. “She was one of those people who just said, ‘Shut up and let me show you something of the world that you may not have seen.’”Ms. Martin and Rodney Crowell in a scene from “Mary Martin: Music Maven,” a forthcoming documentary. Ms. Martin helped Mr. Crowell get his start. “She saw the bumpkin in me,” he said, “and she also saw something that was gonna develop.”Mikayla Lewis/ “Mary Martin: Music Maven”A chain smoker with a keen love of football, she seemed to know everyone, and she had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.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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      Joe Bonsall, Tenor Voice of the Oak Ridge Boys, Dies at 76

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      His vocals on songs like “Elvira” were a key to the evolution of the group, originally a Southern gospel quartet, into perennial country hitmakers.Joe Bonsall, who for more than 50 years was the tenor voice of the Oak Ridge Boys, one of the most popular and enduring vocal groups in the history of country music, died on Tuesday at his home in Hendersonville, Tenn. He was 76.His publicist, Jeremy Westby, said the cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neuromuscular disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. (Mr. Bonsall issued a statement in January saying that he was retiring from touring with the Oak Ridge Boys but would remain a member of the group.)Originally a Southern gospel quartet, the Oak Ridge Boys had 17 Billboard No. 1 country singles, as well as 17 more that made the country Top 10, after reinventing themselves as a country act in the early 1970s. The group, which has sold more than 41 million records worldwide, was formed in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the early 1940s, and disbanded and reformed twice before its lineup stabilized with Mr. Bonsall’s arrival in 1973.“Elvira” (1981) and “Bobbie Sue” (1982), two of the group’s best-known No. 1 hits, featured Mr. Bonsall on lead vocals in place of the regular lead singer, Duane Allen. William Lee Golden and Richard Sterban, who sang baritone and bass, rounded out the four-part harmony quartet during its heyday in the 1970s and ’80s.The Oak Ridge Boys in 1982 with the Grammy Award they won for “Elvira,” one of their 17 songs to reach No. 1 on the Billboard country chart. From left: Mr. Bonsall, Duane Allen, William Lee Golden and Richard Sterban.Reed Saxon/Associated PressAmong the group’s other No. 1 hits were “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” (1979), an early Rodney Crowell composition, and “American Made” (1983), a wry topical number that showcased Mr. Bonsall’s clean, resounding tenor. (“American Made” was later used in a television commercial for Miller Beer.)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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      Carol Bongiovi, Jon Bon Jovi’s Mother, Dies at 83

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      Nicknamed Mom Jovi, she founded the Jon Bon Jovi fan club, and earlier was a Marine and a Playboy bunny.Carol Bongiovi, the mother of the pop star Jon Bon Jovi, died at a hospital in Long Branch, N.J., on July 9. She was 83.Her family confirmed the death in a statement on Wednesday.Ms. Bongiovi, a former Playboy bunny and U.S. Marine, according to her family, was also the founder of her son’s fan club, which she ran from a flower shop in suburban New Jersey, and came to be known to some fans as Mom Jovi.“Our mother was a force to be reckoned with,” Bon Jovi said in the statement. “Her spirit and can-do attitude shaped this family.”Carol A. Sharkey was born on July 12, 1940, in Erie, Pa. In 1959, she joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where she met her future husband, John Bongiovi Sr.After they were discharged from the military, the couple married and raised three sons in Sayreville, N.J., starting with Jon, born in 1962.Ms. Bongiovi worked as a bunny at the Playboy Club in New York City when Jon was growing up, the singer told Larry King in 2006.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