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      Billy Woods Is Scary Good at Rapping

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      His 12th solo album, “Golliwog,” arrives at a peak in his career as a verbally inventive, independent hip-hop artist. It’s also full of horror stories.When Billy Woods was a child, he was afraid of lots of things.Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Zimbabwe, where his father was a member of Robert Mugabe’s revolutionary government, the boy who would grow into one of his generation’s beloved underground rappers was frightened by a storage room under the stairs in his family’s house. At night, he imagined that something was beneath his bed, and if his closet door was ajar, that was cause for alarm too. He was scared of apartheid South Africa, which bordered Zimbabwe to the south, and the soldiers he encountered at roadblocks. Sometimes he was scared of his parents.“I didn’t grow up around reasonable people,” he said in a recent interview, a charged understatement about a childhood tumbled by history.Woods typically plans his solo projects around a particular conceit or theme, and “Golliwog,” his 12th, which was released last week, is a collection of horror stories. Some are darkly comic, others decidedly less so. They draw on his youthful experiences and contemporary geopolitical terrors, as well as more mundane adult concerns, like romance and renting in modern-day New York, where he has lived on and off since 1995.“Golliwog” arrives at a peak in his decades-long career as an independent artist, carrying on a local tradition of proudly trend-resistant, verbally inventive hip-hop that includes acts like MF Doom, the Juggaknots and Company Flow. All of Woods’s solo music is available through Backwoodz Studios, the label he founded in 2002, which also releases the work of like-minded artists including his frequent collaborator, Elucid; together the pair record as Armand Hammer.“Something that my mother always was stressing was that if you wanted to do art, you couldn’t expect to pay your bills with it,” Woods said. He is in his late 40s now, the father of two children, and noted that “for most of my adult life I have been hustling to make ends meet.” He refuses to own a car, and up until 2018, lived with roommates to save money.Woods started releasing solo LPs in 2003. Billy Woods, which he styles in lowercase letters, is not his real name; he avoids showing his face in photographs.Griffin Lotz/Rolling Stone, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Cassie Testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Used Sex Videos as Blackmail

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      Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, said he threatened to use tapes of their sexual encounters, known as “freak-offs,” to control her behavior.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape.During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial, Ms. Ventura recounted how he had stomped on her in the back of his car and how she suffered a gash above her eye when he threw her against a bed frame.She also recounted how, after the pair had dinner in 2018, Mr. Combs raped her in her living room.“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she testified.At the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura said through tears that after she had broken up with Mr. Combs, the trauma remained and she enrolled in treatment for drug abuse. Even so, she said, she contemplated taking her life by walking into traffic. She said her husband stopped her.Ms. Ventura told the court she stayed with Mr. Combs despite beatings and other abuse partly because of the nagging, persistent fear that videos of their sexual encounters with male prostitutes, the hundreds of “freak-offs” that she said Mr. Combs enjoyed watching and recording, would be posted online.Hers was not idle anxiety based on what she viewed Mr. Combs might be capable of, she said, but the consequence of repeated threats he had made to use the material to damage her if she deviated from his wishes. In one case, she described sitting beside him on a flight when he displayed for her videos that she thought had been destroyed.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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      Can Eurovision Avoid Politics in Neutral Switzerland?

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      The competition is run by an opaque Swiss organization that wants to sidestep controversies that could spoil the fun.At the Eurovision Song Contest, one rule stands above all others: no politics.That order is enforced by the competition’s organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, an opaque federation of nearly 70 public service broadcasters, based in Geneva. It scrutinizes performers’ lyrics, their outfits and even their stage props in hopes of bringing some Swiss neutrality to the contest and avoiding anything controversial that could spoil the fun.Yet when the Eurovision final takes place this Saturday on the European Broadcasting Union’s home turf in Basel, Switzerland, politics will still be bubbling in the background, even if the organizers manage to keep such topics off the stage. At a time when the effects of Israel’s war in Gaza are still rippling through cultural life, and Russia and Belarus are pariahs because of the invasion of Ukraine, the question of who gets to compete in Eurovision brings politics to the fore. And the question of what is actually political can be slippery, and one for which the European Broadcasting Union sometimes lacks a consistent answer.In recent weeks, broadcasters in Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have called for a debate on Israel’s participation, rehashing a furor that threatened to overshadow last year’s competition. Before the last final, in Malmo, Sweden, some Eurovision performers signed petitions and made statements calling for Israel’s exclusion because of its actions in Gaza. Some crowd members booed Israel’s singer during the final, though others cheered. Yuval Raphael, representing Israel, at a Eurovision rehearsal in Basel. Broadcasters in Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have called for a debate on Israel’s participation.Alma Bengtsson/EBUEurovision officials responded with a line that the competition has clung to at previous moments of tension: Eurovision, it said, is a contest between broadcasters, not nations. That means a government’s actions should have no bearing on the contest.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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      Key Moments in the Third Day of the Sean Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial

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      Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, said that the relentless sexual demands and routine violence she experienced from Sean Combs over the course of their decade-plus relationship left her emotionally devastated and led her to consider suicide. In dramatic testimony on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura spent a full day of Mr. Combs’s federal trial describing physical violence that she said culminated in a rape after she left him in 2018.Ms. Ventura is widely considered the star witness at the trial, where Mr. Combs is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have vehemently denied that any of his sexual arrangements were not consensual.After maintaining her composure for most of her two days on the stand, where she had remained largely dispassionate, Ms. Ventura finally broke down while discussing why she entered drug rehab and trauma therapy in 2023. “I was spinning out,” she said. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore at that point.”Beginning to cry, Ms. Ventura recalled putting their children to bed one night and telling her husband, “You can do this without me. You don’t need me here anymore.” She tried to walk out of the door into traffic, she said, but he stopped her.It was the emotional peak of a day of testimony that saw Ms. Ventura spend lengthy stretches responding to a prosecutor’s questions about individual instances of physical violence delivered by Mr. Combs. Her testimony on Wednesday afternoon began with her recollection of the first time that he physically abused her in 2007 or 2008. It was early in their relationship, she said, and she had caught him flirting with someone else at dinner. Later, in a car, he hit her on the side of her head, in view of the driver and security guard, sending her flying onto the floor.“I was just shocked,” she said.Answering questions about events that did not always follow a linear timeline, Ms. Ventura appeared weary, even resigned at times, as she cataloged her injuries — bruises on her body, a gash on her eyebrow, a busted lip — which were documented in photos that were shown to the jury as evidence.She testified that there were times she initiated violence against Mr. Combs and fought back against his abuse but, Ms. Ventura said, it did not stop his attacks.During one night out early in their romance in 2009, Ms. Ventura testified, she punched him in the face after he insulted her. His demeanor changed. “I remember his eyes went black,” she said, and he beat her in a car, stomping on her face with his foot. She said she was then sneaked into a hotel to heal in secrecy.When she went with some friends to a party in Los Angeles where Prince was to perform — a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” — she was afraid to tell Mr. Combs, she said. According to her account, he appeared at the event and she rushed out, falling into some bushes in out front, and fled to a hotel. He burst into the room, she said, where they fought, and he beat her. “He was throwing luggage at me, just calling me all kinds of names,” she testified.Ms. Ventura also testified about Mr. Combs’s reaction when he learned — by looking through her phone during a freak-off — that she had begun dating the rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi. Mr. Combs, furious, told her he was going to hurt both of them, and that Mescudi’s car would be “blown up.”Later, the three had a meeting to “discuss the relationship that we were no longer in.” According to Ms. Ventura, Mr. Mescudi said, “‘What about my vehicle?’ And Sean said, ‘What vehicle?’” Ms. Ventura recounted. “And that was the end of the meeting.”Mr. Combs was also violent with other people, Ms. Ventura said. She testified that she witnessed him assaulting employees and assistants, punching one man in the head and dragging another, a woman — known at trial as Mia, or Victim-4 — out of bed once during a vacation.During the afternoon testimony, she repeatedly mentioned wanting to hide the abuse from her mother. After a fight led to her recuperating at a hotel, Ms. Ventura said, her mother sent her a blind item from a gossip publication that Ms. Ventura testified had reported the incident accurately. Her mother asked if it was her, and she denied that it was.A couple of years later, in late 2011, she wrote an email to her mother saying that Mr. Combs had threatened to release two sexually explicit tapes of her around Christmas, and that he would arrange to have someone “hurt” her and Mr. Mescudi, while Mr. Combs was out of the country.According to her testimony, Ms. Ventura was visiting her mother’s house in Connecticut at Christmas and showed her the bruises on her backside and thigh that were the result of Mr. Combs’s abuse. She said she lied and told her mother that it had been the first time he physically hurt her.She wasn’t ready to tell her mother about the freak-offs yet.“You can’t justify it to anyone,” she said. “Especially not your mom.”Near the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura described a sort of farewell dinner in 2018 for her and Mr. Combs, seeking closure at the end of their relationship. She said that after a pleasant night, he raped her in her home. “I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she said.After suing Mr. Combs in 2023, Ms. Ventura reached a $20 million settlement in one day, but that did not prevent her from becoming the central witness in the criminal case against him.As the last hour of her testimony reached a tearful climax at its conclusion on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura addressed why she was choosing to testify. “What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong,” Ms. Ventura said on the stand. “I’m here to do the right thing.”When Ms. Ventura finished her direct testimony, Mr. Combs turned to his family members in the spectators’s gallery. He mouthed to them, “I’m OK.”Olivia Bensimon More

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      Casandra Ventura ends an emotional day of testimony with dramatic revelations.

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      Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, said that the relentless sexual demands and routine violence she experienced from Sean Combs over the course of their decade-plus relationship left her emotionally devastated and led her to consider suicide. In dramatic testimony on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura spent a full day of Mr. Combs’s federal trial describing physical violence that she said culminated in a rape after she left him in 2018.Ms. Ventura is widely considered the star witness at the trial, where Mr. Combs is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have vehemently denied that any of his sexual arrangements were not consensual.After maintaining her composure for most of her two days on the stand, where she had remained largely dispassionate, Ms. Ventura finally broke down while discussing why she entered drug rehab and trauma therapy in 2023. “I was spinning out,” she said. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore at that point.”Beginning to cry, Ms. Ventura recalled putting their children to bed one night and telling her husband, “You can do this without me. You don’t need me here anymore.” She tried to walk out of the door into traffic, she said, but he stopped her.It was the emotional peak of a day of testimony that saw Ms. Ventura spend lengthy stretches responding to a prosecutor’s questions about individual instances of physical violence delivered by Mr. Combs. Her testimony on Wednesday afternoon began with her recollection of the first time that he physically abused her in 2007 or 2008. It was early in their relationship, she said, and she had caught him flirting with someone else at dinner. Later, in a car, he hit her on the side of her head, in view of the driver and security guard, sending her flying onto the floor.“I was just shocked,” she said.Answering questions about events that did not always follow a linear timeline, Ms. Ventura appeared weary, even resigned at times, as she cataloged her injuries — bruises on her body, a gash on her eyebrow, a busted lip — which were documented in photos that were shown to the jury as evidence.She testified that there were times she initiated violence against Mr. Combs and fought back against his abuse but, Ms. Ventura said, it did not stop his attacks.During one night out early in their romance in 2009, Ms. Ventura testified, she punched him in the face after he insulted her. His demeanor changed. “I remember his eyes went black,” she said, and he beat her in a car, stomping on her face with his foot. She said she was then sneaked into a hotel to heal in secrecy.When she went with some friends to a party in Los Angeles where Prince was to perform — a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” — she was afraid to tell Mr. Combs, she said. According to her account, he appeared at the event and she rushed out, falling into some bushes in out front, and fled to a hotel. He burst into the room, she said, where they fought, and he beat her. “He was throwing luggage at me, just calling me all kinds of names,” she testified.Ms. Ventura also testified about Mr. Combs’s reaction when he learned — by looking through her phone during a freak-off — that she had begun dating the rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi. Mr. Combs, furious, told her he was going to hurt both of them, and that Mescudi’s car would be “blown up.”Later, the three had a meeting to “discuss the relationship that we were no longer in.” According to Ms. Ventura, Mr. Mescudi said, “‘What about my vehicle?’ And Sean said, ‘What vehicle?’” Ms. Ventura recounted. “And that was the end of the meeting.”Mr. Combs was also violent with other people, Ms. Ventura said. She testified that she witnessed him assaulting employees and assistants, punching one man in the head and dragging another, a woman — known at trial as Mia, or Victim-4 — out of bed once during a vacation.During the afternoon testimony, she repeatedly mentioned wanting to hide the abuse from her mother. After a fight led to her recuperating at a hotel, Ms. Ventura said, her mother sent her a blind item from a gossip publication that Ms. Ventura testified had reported the incident accurately. Her mother asked if it was her, and she denied that it was.A couple of years later, in late 2011, she wrote an email to her mother saying that Mr. Combs had threatened to release two sexually explicit tapes of her around Christmas, and that he would arrange to have someone “hurt” her and Mr. Mescudi, while Mr. Combs was out of the country.According to her testimony, Ms. Ventura was visiting her mother’s house in Connecticut at Christmas and showed her the bruises on her backside and thigh that were the result of Mr. Combs’s abuse. She said she lied and told her mother that it had been the first time he physically hurt her.She wasn’t ready to tell her mother about the freak-offs yet.“You can’t justify it to anyone,” she said. “Especially not your mom.”Near the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura described a sort of farewell dinner in 2018 for her and Mr. Combs, seeking closure at the end of their relationship. She said that after a pleasant night, he raped her in her home. “I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she said.After suing Mr. Combs in 2023, Ms. Ventura reached a $20 million settlement in one day, but that did not prevent her from becoming the central witness in the criminal case against him.As the last hour of her testimony reached a tearful climax at its conclusion on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura addressed why she was choosing to testify. “What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong,” Ms. Ventura said on the stand. “I’m here to do the right thing.”When Ms. Ventura finished her direct testimony, Mr. Combs turned to his family members in the spectators’s gallery. He mouthed to them, “I’m OK.”Olivia Bensimon More

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      Cassie Settled Lawsuit Against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs for $20 Million

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      Casandra Ventura testified in federal court about her 2023 lawsuit against Mr. Combs, whom she had accused of years of physical abuse and sexual coercion.In her final moments of direct testimony at the federal trial of Sean Combs on Wednesday, Casandra Ventura revealed the amount of a civil settlement that Mr. Combs and his businesses paid her after she filed a bombshell lawsuit in November 2023.Mr. Combs’s lawyers had previously disclosed that the payment was a “substantial eight-figure settlement.” Ms. Ventura clarified in court that she had received $20 million.The lawsuit, which accused Mr. Combs of years of physical abuse and sexual coercion, was settled one day after it was filed. But it precipitated a deluge of lawsuits and the federal criminal investigation that resulted in the music mogul’s arrest on racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges.Mr. Combs has vehemently denied that he coerced Ms. Ventura — or anyone — into sex and has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him.On the witness stand in Federal District Court in Lower Manhattan, Ms. Ventura testified for hours on Wednesday about injuries she said she received from physical abuse by Mr. Combs, and detailed the drug-dazed sex marathons with male escorts that she said occurred “hundreds” of times throughout their decade-long relationship.The defense first disclosed months ago that before Ms. Ventura filed her lawsuit, a lawyer representing her approached counsel for Mr. Combs and offered to sell the rights to a book she had written that detailed her account of their relationship. The suggested price: $30 million.On the stand, Ms. Ventura confirmed that proposal.“I wanted to be compensated for the time, the pain,” Ms. Ventura testified, as well as for the “many, many years” trying to “fix” her life.Ms. Ventura said she wrote the book during and after she went to rehab in 2023, which she described as involving “trauma therapy” and coming off Valium. She said her mother helped her get the materials organized. She decided to send chapters to Mr. Combs.“I really wanted Sean to read the information,” Ms. Ventura testified. “I wanted him to understand what I had to learn to understand over that period.”Ms. Ventura said she checked with one of his top employees, Kristina Khorram, to check if he read it, but she was told that people did not believe she was the author.Mr. Combs’s lawyers have described Ms. Ventura’s attempt to sell the book rights as “extortion” in court papers. Ms. Ventura decided to ask for $30 million without having done research about book payments, she testified, but she thought that number would get his attention.Olivia Bensimon More

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      Joe Louis Walker, Free-Ranging Blues Explorer, Is Dead at 75

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      A product of the San Francisco rock crucible of the 1960s, he fashioned his own brand of the blues, blending gospel, soul, rock and other genres.Joe Louis Walker, a blues master and musical omnivore whose snarling guitar work, gritty vocals and introspective songwriting earned him the praise of Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger and many others over a six-decade career, died on April 30 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 75.His wife, Robin Poritzky-Walker, said his death, in a hospital, was from a cardiac-related illness.Mr. Walker recorded more than 30 albums for a variety of labels, starting with “Cold Is the Night” in 1986. He toured extensively and was a staple of blues festivals around the world. He won the Blues Music Award (formerly the W.C. Handy Award) multiple times and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.” He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013.Mr. Walker was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.”ProvogueAlong the way he traded riffs with blues powerhouses like B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.The keyboard innovator Herbie Hancock deemed him “a singular force” with a “remarkable gift for instantly electrifying a room.” Mick Jagger called him “a magnificent guitar player and singer.” The jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea playfully anointed him “the Chick Corea of blues.”Critics, too, felt Mr. Walker’s power. “His voice is weather-beaten but ready for more; his guitar solos are fast, wiry and incisive,” Jon Pareles wrote in a 1989 review in The New York Times, “often starting out with impetuous squiggles before moaning with bluesy despair.”Mr. Walker in performance in 1995. One reviewer called him “a fluttering blues guitarist” whose “lines seem blown by the wind.”Simon Ritter/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Cassie Says of Sean Combs Abuse: ‘You Treat Me Like You’re Ike Turner’

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      Casandra Ventura’s second day of testimony included her blunt response to the mogul about his pattern of physical abuse and details of her fear of blackmail.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, testified on Wednesday in the federal trial of Sean Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss, about living with the fear of going against his wishes — and especially his sexual desires.In her second day of testimony, Ms. Ventura said she went along with the increasingly extreme and frequent “freak-offs” demanded by Mr. Combs because she worried that he would respond with anger or physical violence and follow through on his threats to leak explicit videos of her in degrading sexual encounters.Mr. Combs is accused of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution, and the government contends that Ms. Ventura and others had been coerced into participating in freak-offs and other sexual encounters with Mr. Combs. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his lawyers have argued that Ms. Ventura, and other women who are part of the case, were willing participants and that his sexual arrangements were all consensual.Ms. Ventura testified that Mr. Combs would take videos of the freak-offs — marathon sex sessions — that she participated in and that he later threatened to release what she called “blackmail material.”During a 2013 flight from Cannes, France, she testified, Mr. Combs pulled up videos on his laptop of her in freak-offs, which she thought had been deleted. He threatened to release the videos to embarrass her.“I just felt trapped,” she said.During freak-offs, she said, Mr. Combs would grab her, push her down, kick her and hit her on the side of her head. At one point, she texted him, “You treat me like you’re Ike Turner,” referring to Tina Turner’s abusive husband and bandleader.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