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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.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 Wildly Subversive Music of Soviet Ukraine

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      An archival label in the United States was going to release a huge compilation of records from the U.S.S.R. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.Eugene Hutz still owns his copy of “Slayed?,” a 1972 album released the year he was born by the British bad boys Slade that his father purchased on the Ukrainian black market. Its spine is now lined with tape, its cover deeply ringed by the record inside. But for Hutz, 52, it remains a powerful talisman of rock ’n’ roll’s transformative potential, even amid oppressive regimes.“Enthusiasts knew their way to the black market, and my dad was an extreme enthusiast — a translator of Western culture, a spiritual seeker,” Hutz said of his father, the musician Sasha Nikolaev, during a recent phone interview. “My dad played it endlessly. I was born and raised to the sound.”Hutz emigrated to the United States in 1990, and played in various groups before the raucous band Gogol Bordello made him a rare stateside emissary of Ukrainian rock. The scene in his homeland is getting a bigger spotlight on Friday with “Even the Forest Hums,” an 18-track compendium of wildly diverse Ukrainian sounds (including Hutz’s minimalist teenage band, Uksusnik) that pulls back the curtain on a quarter-century of pop, post-punk, disco and experimental music largely made under Soviet control.The set is part of an ongoing rediscovery of Ukraine’s musical heritage, catalyzed in part by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its western neighbor.“When the war started, I had phone calls from international journalists: ‘Who are you, Ukrainians? What is your music?’ Nobody was interested before,” the journalist, filmmaker and record store owner Vitalii Bardetskyi said in a video interview from Kyiv. “Ukrainians were asking themselves the same questions. In the past two and a half years, Ukrainians found out more about ourselves than in the previous 30.”Cukor Bila Smert sounds like the band David Lynch might have tapped for an especially sinister “Twin Peaks.”via Cukor Bila Smert’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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      Tim Heidecker, Glendale Dad

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      From the moment he showed up at Tim Heidecker’s house, the Chihuahua in the dragon costume seemed a little freaked out.Mr. Heidecker — an actor, comedian and singer-songwriter — lives on a low-key, tree-shaded street in Glendale, Calif. On a recent morning, he was in his converted garage, getting ready for another episode of his talk show, “Office Hours Live With Tim Heidecker.”As crew members hurried around the room, Mr. Heidecker, 48, installed himself at an old white piano and started banging out the opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” A few feet away, the “Office Hours” co-hosts Vic Berger and Doug Lussenhop started blasting random pop-culture sound bites over the speakers, including Jim Carrey yelling “Alllll right-y then!” on repeat.The noise was too much for Mr. Piffles 2.0, who is billed as “the world’s only magic-performing Chihuahua.” Dressed head to tail in a green get-up, he trembled in the arms of his handler, the Las Vegas entertainer known as Piff the Magic Dragon.Mr. Heidecker headed to a standing desk in the middle of the garage. It was time to start planning the episode.“We’re getting close here, guys,” he said. “Do we need Piff at the top of the show? Are we going to talk first?”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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      Charli XCX’s Starry ‘Brat’ Remixes, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Victoria Monét, Samara Joy, the Linda Lindas and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Charli XCX featuring Ariana Grande, ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’Now that her “Brat” album has given Charli XCX her long-deserved mass pop audience, she has recharged it with a follow-up album of remixes: “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” On the first version of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” she sang about personal insecurities and a rivalry she couldn’t help feeling, “’Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” The remix has the same two-note synthesizer riff but a new lyric about the vicious precarity of 21st-century stardom: “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top/’cause magically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom.” Ariana Grande, who has been through her own fame roller coaster, makes a natural ally.Obongjayar, ‘Tomorrow Man’Obongjayar, a songwriter from Nigeria who’s now based in London, connects the call-and-response and social exhortations of Fela Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat to the samples, loops and layering of contemporary computerized African pop in “Tomorrow Man.” Over a deep, thumping beat, he denounces laziness: “If you no work you suffer,” he rasps. Meanwhile, percussion clatters around him and other sounds go whizzing by — flutes, piano, distorted guitar — like career obstacles to be batted away.Victoria Monét, ‘The Greatest’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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      Stevie Wonder Live: A Night of Love and Mischief

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      At 74, the singer and songwriter returns to arenas with a message of healing and understanding. He’s using trademark exuberance and joy to deliver it.It was a little after 9 p.m. Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, and Stevie Wonder was finally getting loose. He’d begun “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” one of his defining anthems, with a hopped-up-hootenanny version of the country standard “You Are My Sunshine.” He almost giggled — it was light work.Then, with fullness and verve, he jerked hard into his song, and the music went from 2-D to 3-D. He wasn’t denigrating the other one, so much as he had a point to make.“I. Feel. Like. This. Is. The. Beginning.”Each word arrived like a rocket whizzing past your ear — propulsive, powerful, so potent you almost tilted your head away ever so slightly to let it zip by. He was singing a love song, a declaration of emotional commitment, but when he really got going, it felt much more like a convocation. This love, we’re all in it together.Much of Wonder’s set list was drawn from the stretch from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s during which he released some of the most indelible entries in the history of American song.The New York TimesSo it went during this performance — part of a brief tour with the extremely chewy title, Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart — which was much of the time a display of unparalleled singing, some of the time a kaffeeklatsch of feel-good utopianism, and in more places than you’d think a showcase for a very serious artist to be very silly.First, the voice: Wonder can do things with it that no popular singer in the five decades since his commercial prime has truly been able to match. It can sound like it’s falling apart while it’s in fact landing with strength and precision. With Wonder, a song is a suggestion, a framework to set up pyrotechnic runs and novel alternate melodic approaches. The song (usually) has a fixed starting and concluding point — everything else is a negotiation.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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      Gustavo Dudamel Visits New York With Promise, and a Warning

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      The superstar conductor will take over the New York Philharmonic in 2026. Is his tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic a preview?Home is a slippery concept in classical music, a global art form of constant travel and jobs that require relocating for months or years at a time.The superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will become the New York Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director in 2026, is based in Madrid with his family. You could call that home. In a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, though, he said that he would always think of his native Venezuela as home. And, after 15 years of leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Southern California is home, too.“I am going to New York, of course,” Dudamel said, “but L.A. is home.”Comments like this are a reminder that, for now, New York has little claim on Dudamel. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is still very much his home orchestra: where he has led the premieres of some 300 pieces, founded an immense youth orchestra program and achieved celebrity status in a city of celebrities.There are, perhaps, clues to Dudamel’s New York future in his Los Angeles present, which was on exhilarating display over three evenings at Carnegie Hall this week. He led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in concerts that reflected his gift for must-hear programming and his open-minded disregard for genre, his welcome belief that at a high enough level, all music can be art.But Dudamel is not without his weaknesses. While he can be brilliant off the beaten path, he is less distinct and perceptive in the classics. In that sense, his visit to Carnegie is both a sign of promise and a warning.He has always been a bit uneven. His early Beethoven recordings, with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, hardly rise in a crowded field. Two years ago, he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Carnegie in a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that lacked vision and precision.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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      It’s Touring Season: Chappell, Sabrina and Mk.gee Hit the Stage

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicGrand-sized tours are everywhere you look right now. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, young pop stars who’ve experienced sudden jolts of attention that reshaped their careers this year, are playing arenas and amphitheaters. In rooms slightly smaller, you can see the rising guitar hero Mk.gee, who’s become one of this year’s most unlikely breakout successes. Vampire Weekend, Cash Cobain, Bleachers and more are all on the road.On this week’s Popcast, a roundup of some of the bigger tours making their way around the country at the moment, and a discussion of what it takes, creatively, to fill up a very large room, and how some musicians demonstrate parts of their personalities onstage that their albums can’t fully capture.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect 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.Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts. More

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Sex Trafficking Trial Is Set for May 5

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      The music mogul, wearing tan jail clothes at a court hearing, waved and smiled at six of his children and his mother in the gallery.Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul, is scheduled to stand trial next May in New York, a federal judge said at a hearing on Thursday.Judge Arun Subramanian of Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, who was recently assigned to the case, set May 5 as the start of Mr. Combs’s trial on charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.Mr. Combs, 54, has been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn for the past three weeks after being arrested at a New York hotel and then twice denied bail. He will remain in jail until the trial, pending another appeal that his lawyers filed this week.Mr. Combs was present at the hearing on Thursday. Wearing tan jail clothes, he walked into the courtroom waving and smiling at his family assembled in the gallery, including his mother and six of his children, and he embraced some of his lawyers.The hearing had been set as a routine scheduling matter. But it came one day after Mr. Combs’s lawyers filed a motion in which they accused government agents of leaking footage of Mr. Combs assaulting his former girlfriend Cassie to CNN. Without citing direct evidence, the lawyers theorized in court papers that the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that raided Mr. Combs’s homes in March, had been behind the leak. They said they might ask for the video to be barred as evidence at the trial.Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, commented briefly at the hearing about the defense’s accusation of leaks, saying, “The government believes the motion is baseless and it is simply a means to exclude a damning piece of evidence.” She said the government would be filing a response to the defense’s motion.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