Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake Beef, Explained

      by

      The two rappers had circled one another for more than a decade, but their attacks turned relentless and very personal in a slew of tracks released over the weekend.The long-building and increasingly testy rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake exploded into full-bore acrimony and unverifiable accusations over the weekend with the rapid-fire release of multiple songs littered with attacks regarding race, appropriation, sexual and physical abuse, body image, misogyny, hypocrisy, generational trauma and more.Most relentless was Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize winner from Compton who tends toward the isolated and considered but has now released four verbose and conceptual diss tracks — totaling more than 20 minutes of new music — targeting Drake in the last week, including three since Friday.Each racked up millions of streams and the three that were made available commercially — “Euphoria,” “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” — are expected to land near the top of next week’s Billboard singles chart, while seeming to, at least momentarily, shift the public perception of Drake, long a maestro of the online public arena and meme ecosystem.In between, on Friday night, Drake released his own broadside against Lamar — plus a smattering of other recent challengers — in a teasing Instagram interlude plus a three-part track and elaborate music video titled “Family Matters,” in which he referred to his rival as a fake activist and attempted to expose friction and alleged abuse in Lamar’s romantic relationship.But that song was followed within half an hour by Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams,” an ominous extended address to the parents and young son of Drake, born Aubrey Graham, in which Lamar refers to his rival rapper as a liar and “pervert” who “should die” in order to make the world safer for women.Lamar also seemed to assert that Drake had more than a decade ago fathered a secret daughter — echoing the big reveal of his son from Drake’s last headline rap beef — a claim Drake quickly denied on Instagram before hitting back in another song on Sunday. (Neither man has addressed the full array of rapped allegations directly.)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

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Conchita Wurst, a Eurovision Star, on the Past 10 Years

      by

      Since winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014, the bearded drag queen has been celebrated and condemned. For her creator, Tom Neuwirth, it has been a journey.Looking back at the last decade, Tom Neuwirth is amazed by how far his 2014 Eurovision win as the drag queen Conchita Wurst has reverberated.“I think this moment, the win, happened to all of us,” Neuwirth said in a recent interview at his team’s offices in Vienna. Dressed in pink corduroys, a black hoodie and white sneakers, he was charming and sweet, jokey one second and quietly reflective the next. “People will tell me where they were and how their life took a turn from then on,” he said. “There are always big stories and emotions.”That May, 10 years ago, 195 million people watched Conchita Wurst belt out the power ballad “Rise Like a Phoenix,” representing Austria in the finale of the Eurovision Song Contest. The annual show is Europe’s longest-running talent competition, in which singers representing their countries perform for a huge TV audience that votes for its favorite act.This year’s Eurovision final takes place in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday. The event, which has been referred to “the queer Olympics” or “gay Christmas,” has long been popular with L.G.B.T.Q. people. By 2014, the competition had already seen a number of gay, lesbian and bisexual participants, as well as several drag acts, and a trans winner as early as 1998.Yet none of those performers received as explosive a reception as Conchita Wurst, whose victory arrived amid widespread advancements in L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Western Europe that included a wave of legalization for same-sex marriage. The singer became a worldwide symbol of the divisions between liberals and conservatives, with some calling her performance a high-profile victory for queer representation, and others seeing it as a sign of the degradation of traditional Western values.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

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Can Marin Alsop Shatter Another Glass Ceiling?

      by

      Alsop has had enviable success, and was the first female conductor to lead a top American orchestra. She wants to take another step up.Marin Alsop’s conducting students were taking turns on the podium recently in a rehearsal room at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore. They waved their batons in front of an imaginary orchestra, practicing Stravinsky’s notoriously complex “The Rite of Spring.”Some conductors teach in poetry: what a piece means, how a certain sound should feel. Alsop, who spent untold hours at Meyerhoff Hall during her 14 years as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a tenure that ended in 2021, teaches in technical, tangible details.In a measure with 11 beats, she suggested using the last as a pickup to the following bar, to give the players an extra bit of clarity. She flagged trouble spots: a transition that was “usually too loud, too fast, too soon,” and a moment when the winds tend to come in just after the strings, rather than in unison.“You’re not accompanying,” she told a rising maestro who seemed to be giving an invisible musician too much leeway. “You’re in charge.”At 67, Alsop is, in many ways, in charge. Last month, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting a new production of John Adams’s “El Niño.” Next season, she will lead the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the world’s pre-eminent orchestra, for the first time.She recently recorded Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with her ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra at the storied Musikverein, an experience that brought Leonard Bernstein, one of her mentors, to mind.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

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Madonna Performs Massive Free Concert in Rio

      by

      The pop superstar performed a final date on her global trek marking four decades of hits: a set on Copacabana Beach before the largest live crowd of her career.When Madonna stepped out onto the mammoth stage constructed on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach on Saturday night in a gleaming halo headpiece and black kimono, she was greeted by the largest live crowd of her four-decade career.The free show, announced in late March, was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 performances since last October. Without ticket data, concert crowd sizes can be difficult to gauge; Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded onto the 2.4-mile stretch of sand on Saturday that had been turned into a roughly $12 million playground surrounding the 8,700-square-foot stage.It was the culmination of days of Madonna-mania in the city, where talk of the singer, 65, was inescapable. Her songs spilled out of stores and car stereos. Fans assembled outside her hotel and shouted her name. Updates about the concert, which was broadcast on the network Globo TV, dominated local media reports.Fans traveled from across South America for Madonna’s Rio concert, her only Celebration Tour date on the continent. Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York TimesFans packed the shores of Copacabana Beach to watch Madonna’s free concert on Saturday.Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe spectacle in Rio was a milestone in Madonna’s career: the victory lap for her first stage retrospective, called the Celebration Tour, in which she chronicled her rise to stardom, performing hits like “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer” and “Ray of Light” with a cadre of dancers, four of her six children, and a wardrobe of elaborate costuming that recalled some of her most memorable looks.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

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      F1: Organizers Hope Music Puts the Miami in the Miami Grand Prix

      by

      The entertainment lineup for this weekend’s Formula 1 race has been infused with Latin music and nightclub-like electronic beats.Organizers at Hard Rock Stadium near Miami have hosted some of the biggest spectacles in American sports in the past five years, including the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.Now they want to turn the Miami Grand Prix, the Formula 1 race being held on a serpentine racetrack around the stadium on Sunday, into appointment viewing like the Kentucky Derby and the Masters are.Tom Garfinkel, the race’s managing partner, said that the city’s tropical locale and reputation as a party center were important facets, and that organizers were intentionally infusing the entertainment lineup with regional music, including Latin heritage and nightclub-like electronic beats.“We’re trying to make this a destination that people mark on their calendar in the United States and around the world and say, ‘That’s something I need to attend,’” said Garfinkel, who is also the president of the N.F.L.’s Miami Dolphins.At the third annual Miami Grand Prix, Marc Anthony, the four-time Grammy-winning Latin singer, will perform the national anthem; Kaytranada, an EDM producer born in Haiti, will play at the end of the race. Weekend performances at a festival-like venue near the racetrack included the Puerto Rican rapper Don Omar and the Miami-born D.J. Steve Aoki.The attempt to distinguish the race also includes visual artists. The Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra, whose work has been featured at Art Basel, painted a mural near the 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

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Luca Guadagnino’s Key Musical Moments in “Challengers” and More Films

      by

      Hear songs from “Challengers,” “Call Me by Your Name” and more.From left: Mike Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in “Challengers.”Metro Goldwyn Mayer PicturesDear listeners,This week I saw Luca Guadagnino’s much-hyped tennis love-triangle movie “Challengers” — like a lot of people, it seems. And also like a lot of people, including The Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, I had a good time at the movies. This film “isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief,” Dargis writes in her astute review. “It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.” She also characterizes Guadagnino, correctly I think, as a filmmaker adept at “blissfully gliding along the surfaces of life.”Throughout his career, Guadagnino has used music as a crucial tool in creating those slick surfaces. His first film to charm me was the lush 2015 drama “A Bigger Splash,” which features Tilda Swinton playing a rock star and Ralph Fiennes doing an ecstatic and very memorable dance to the Rolling Stones’ “Emotional Rescue.”Dance sequences recur throughout Guadagnino’s filmography, often as opportunities for bodies and desires to collide, and whether it’s a bunch of young people bopping to the Psychedelic Furs in his great 2017 romance, “Call Me by Your Name,” or Zendaya and her friends getting down to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” during a flashback scene in “Challengers,” the accompanying song choices feel authentic. In both of those scenes, Guadagnino isn’t looking for the most obscure needle drop, but a song that would convincingly get those characters on the dance floor in the particular cultural moment he is creating.“Challengers” got me thinking back to all the great musical moments in Guadagnino’s films, and before I knew it, I was compiling this playlist. It features a few of the aforementioned moments, along with original songs composed for his movies from the likes of Thom Yorke and Sufjan Stevens, and a selection from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping and prismatic “Challengers” score, which I have been listening to all week. I highly recommend it if you would like every moment of your life — washing the dishes, dashing for the subway, writing a newsletter — to feel like a high-stakes tennis match.Also! I’m out next week but will be leaving you in the capable hands of two special guest playlisters. Till then!Not like the other girls,LindsayWe 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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Kendrick Lamar Gets Inspired (by Drake), and 9 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Miranda Lambert, Illuminati Hotties, Mabe Fratti 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.Kendrick Lamar, ‘Euphoria’Beefs make rappers productive. Earlier this week, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new salvo in his recently rekindled feud with Drake: a six-minute, multipart rejoinder to Drake’s recent “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle.” It starts with Lamar rapping quickly but calmly over a smooth-jazz backdrop, taunting, “I make music that electrify ’em, you make music that pacify ’em.” But after he warns, “Don’t tell no lie about me/And I won’t tell truths about you,” the track changes to a tolling, droning trap dirge and Lamar’s delivery becomes biting, nasal and percussive. He switches from flow to flow with an accelerating barrage of attacks, professional and personal, from recording deals to parenting skills: “cringe-worthy” is a milder one. This track is unlikely to be the last round. Lamar posted a follow-up, “6:16 in LA,” on his Instagram Friday morning. JON PARELESMiranda Lambert, ‘Wranglers’The country queen Miranda Lambert commands an atmosphere of smoky guitar licks and smoldering defiance on her new song “Wranglers,” her first solo single since her 2022 album “Palomino.” Lambert spins a third-person yarn of heartbreak and revenge at something of an emotional remove during the verses, but there’s a welcome grit in her voice when she gets to the irreverent hook: “She set it all on fire, and if there’s one thing that she learned/Wranglers take forever to burn.” LINDSAY ZOLADZIlluminati Hotties, ‘Can’t Be Still’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

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      On Dua Lipa’s ‘Radical Optimism,’ Romance Is Everything

      by

      The English singer and songwriter’s third album, featuring production from Danny L Harle and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, is nonstop ear candy.Romance is a blast on Dua Lipa’s third album, “Radical Optimism.” It’s a thumping, reverberating, woofer-rattling, arena-scale sensation, something to exult in even when it doesn’t always go right.On Lipa’s first two albums, she juxtaposed flirtations and breakups with thoughts about power and gender. “I know you ain’t used to a female alpha,” she sang in the title track of “Future Nostalgia” in 2020, and she denounced male entitlement in “Boys Will Be Boys.” But on “Radical Optimism,” all that’s at stake is coupledom: sizing up each other, testing the possibilities, envisioning permanence or — surprisingly graciously — letting go. Her new songs treat single life as an adventure game full of ups and downs, but not as cataclysmic or tragic.Lipa, 28, has never bothered with subtlety. She aims for — and usually achieves — full-fledged bangers. There’s always an underlying confidence in her firm alto voice, and she has a gift for big, blunt, instantly legible pop hooks, the kind that sum up a situation in a terse chorus. “I’m not here for long/Catch me or I go Houdini,” she demands in “Houdini,” one of the album’s prerelease singles, creating an open-voweled, singable shorthand for making her escape.With “Future Nostalgia,” Lipa was an early mover in what grew into a pandemic-era disco revival. That album and others (from Jessie Ware, Doja Cat, Kylie Minogue, Roisin Murphy and Lady Gaga) would summon a communal clubland experience that had been shut down in 2020 and was sorely missed.Four-on-the-floor beats and snappy funk bass lines continue to drive Lipa’s tracks on “Radical Optimism,” which opens with “End of an Era,” a song about a club meet-up that might just be the right one. “Is this my happy ending?,” Lipa wonders amid cooing backup vocals, and she goes on to rap, “Another girl falls in love/Another girl leaves the club.”Lipa’s collaborators on “Radical Optimism” include Danny L Harle — who has easily moved from the self-conscious hyperpop of PC Music to making glossy, up-to-the-minute mainstream pop — and Kevin Parker, who creates era-melding grooves as Tame Impala. The productions reach back to the larger-than-life sounds of the 1980s, when hitmakers like Madonna and Michael Jackson commanded a pop monoculture with superhuman performances: singing, dancing, acting in videos, forever poised and strategic.Lipa shares that level of ambition. She has made it her business to be at once technical and physical, choreographed and carnal. Even in a much more fragmented pop landscape, her songs are built for a mass audience. The tracks on “Radical Optimism” are lavishly maximalist. They mingle sleek programmed sounds and luxurious live ones; bass, percussion and acoustic guitars bring a human touch, even as they’re surrounded by sci-fi synthesizers and metronomic beats.It’s an album of nonstop ear candy. “Training Season,” her demand for a partner who already knows “how to love me right,” has tickling guitar syncopations and girl-group harmonies popping out of nowhere. “French Exit,” in which Lipa decides to disappear instead of going through a laborious breakup — “Goodbye doesn’t hurt if I don’t say it” — laces a sputtering beat with playful, elusive instrumental cameos: finger cymbals, flute, handclaps, string-section swoops.“Falling Forever” harks back to disco-era dramas like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” but flips the tone to positive thinking. It summons thundering drums as Lipa savors a blissful connection, belting “How long can it just keep getting better?”And “Happy for You” is a post-breakup song that radiates absolution for all involved. The singer sees her ex with a new girlfriend — “I think she’s a model” — and instead of jealousy or regret, she’s overjoyed that everything worked out. “Even the hard parts were all for the best,” she decides, and her voice leaps up — above double-time drums, swirling backup vocals and cavernous bass tones — as she realizes, “I must have loved you more than I ever knew,” at once self-congratulatory and unburdened.There’s immense discipline and effort behind the songs on “Radical Optimism,” and Lipa flaunts her work in the studio and in her effortful onstage dance routines. But she also brings a determined lightheartedness to her new songs, somehow managing not to take them too seriously. Romance can be all-encompassing and all-important in the moment. But if it doesn’t work out, she knows she can move on.Dua Lipa“Radical Optimism”(Warner Records) More