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      Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is a Vivid Mission Statement. Let’s Discuss.

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      The pop superstar teased a move to country, then tackled so much more. Three critics and a reporter explore her new album’s inspirations, sounds and stakes.BEN SISARIO I don’t usually say this about news releases, but since Beyoncé says so little about the making of her art, the “Cowboy Carter” announcement was intriguing for noting that “each song is its own version of a reimagined Western film,” and that Beyoncé screened movies while she recorded, including “Urban Cowboy,” “The Hateful Eight,” even “Space Cowboys” (?!).My first reaction to hearing the album was surprised gawking at its range of genre and sound, after she head faked us all into perhaps more limited expectations of “country.” (Of course we should have known better.) Viewed only as a genre-hopping exercise, “Cowboy Carter” might be a confusing jumble. But the film frame puts narrative and character at the center of her message, and with that everything came into clearer focus for me.As a heroine, Beyoncé makes a big, bold statement of her quest in “Ameriican Requiem,” taking on nothing less than American history. She finds villains in Jolene and (ahem) the Grammys. Songs like “II Most Wanted” and “Levii’s Jeans” could be plot-break montages while our conquering cowgirl hangs with some sidekicks she meets along the way. By the final reel she’s recapitulating her complaints and declaring herself the victorious leader of a grand resistance (“We’ll be the ones to purify our fathers’ sins”).SALAMISHAH TILLET I’ve listened to the album so many times now — on a plane, in a spin class, and, as I think she intended, while I drove on the highway (sadly, 280, not the 405). Yes, Ben, she has gone big here! But, instead of longing for some lost past, she is taking on “History” — musical and American — with, as we say in academia, a big “H,” or those big narratives about identity, belonging and discrimination.I almost missed those lyrics, “Whole lotta red in that white and blue, ha/History can’t be erased, oh-oh/You lookin’ for a new America” because I was too busy Proud Marying, jerking and twerking to “Ya Ya.” I think that might be the point — it is as if she saying, “The times are so desperate, I am going to use all the vocal gifts and genres at my disposal to bring the country together and show you how good I am at doing them (again)!”Beyoncé onstage with the Chicks performing “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards.Image Group LA/ABC, 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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      7 Rainy Songs for April Showers

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      Hear tracks by Neil Young, FKA twigs, Love Unlimited and more.Neil Young, on a sunnier day.Ryan Henriksen for The New York TimesDear listeners,It’s finally April, which means it’s time for those proverbial showers. We’re enduring another dreary, drizzly week of gray skies here in New York, but I’ve found a silver lining in all the clouds. Rather than rage against the rain, I’ve decided to make it my muse for today’s playlist.Perhaps because enduring a drizzly day is such a universal experience, popular music is full of rain songs. Some (like a track here from the soul trio Love Unlimited) celebrate it, but most (the Carpenters, Ann Peebles) bemoan it, or at least see it as a metaphor for all kinds of sadness. So get ready to wallow — but know that this playlist ends on an optimistic note.Plus, if all these rain songs get you down, just know that there’s an inevitably floral sequel to this playlist coming in May.I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Neil Young: “See the Sky About to Rain”You know I had to include some Neil Young now that he’s back on Spotify. Clouds gather ominously on this moody tune from his great, uncompromising 1974 album “On the Beach,” which features understated percussion from Levon Helm and foreshadows the downpour to come on the album’s melancholic second side.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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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      Ye Is Sued for Hostile Work Environment at Donda Academy and Yeezy

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      A former employee sued the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, claiming a hostile work environment at Yeezy, his fashion brand, and Donda Academy, his private school.Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, was sued Tuesday by a former employee who accused him of discrimination and creating a hostile work environment by calling Adolf Hitler “great,” disparaging Jews and saying that “gay people are not true Christians.”The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by Trevor Phillips, who says he was hired in November 2022, around the time a series of antisemitic remarks publicly made by Ye lost the artist his major-label record deal and put his businesses in jeopardy.Phillips was initially hired to oversee “projects related to growing cotton” and other plants in an effort to make Yeezy, Ye’s fashion brand, “self-sustainable,” the lawsuit said, and then went on to work for Donda Academy, Ye’s private school in Southern California.Phillips’s lawsuit claims that Ye made antisemitic comments in front of staff members at Donda Academy, including, “the Jews are out to get me” and “the Jews are stealing all my money.” After Adidas ended its decade-long partnership with Ye over his public remarks, the lawsuit claimed, the rapper told Phillips: “The Jews are working with Adidas to freeze up my money to try and make me broke!”The lawsuit claims that Ye treated Black employees at Donda Academy, including Phillips, “considerably worse than white employees.”Representatives for Ye and Donda Academy did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.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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      Klaus Mäkelä to Lead Chicago Symphony Orchestra

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      He will be the youngest music director in the orchestra’s 133-year history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a top American ensemble.The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has been led for decades by conducting titans including Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti, announced Tuesday that its next music director would be Klaus Mäkelä, a 28-year-old Finnish conductor whose charisma and clarity have fueled his rapid rise in classical music.When he begins a five-year contract in 2027 at 31, Mäkelä will be the youngest maestro in the ensemble’s 133-year history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a top orchestra in the United States.Mäkelä, who will become music director designate immediately, said in an interview that he did not think his age was relevant, noting that he had been conducting for more than half his life, beginning when he was 12.“I don’t think about it,” he said. “Music doesn’t really have any age.”Mäkelä, who will also take over as chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 2027, said he was joining the Chicago Symphony because it has “that intensity — that same sound from the past.”“You felt as if anything you would ask, they could actually improve and do more,” he said, recalling his recent guest appearances there. “For a conductor, that is a very, very special feeling because you see that there really are no limits to what you can achieve.”Mäkelä making his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic in December 2022.Chris LeeWe 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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      Jazz at Lincoln Center’s New Season Includes Tribute to Bayard Rustin

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      The civil rights activist’s life and legacy will be honored in a 2024-25 lineup that will also include spotlights on jazz history, and a rising star to warm up November.Jazz at Lincoln Center announced its 2024-25 concert season on Tuesday, which will include performances that celebrate the 20th anniversary of the center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall, a tribute to the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and concerts by Grammy Award-winning artists.The season will run from Sept. 19, 2024, to June 14, 2025, and will begin with Hot Jazz and Swing, in which the music director Loren Schoenberg will guide the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra through revitalized arrangements of 1920s and ’30s tunes.On Oct. 18-19, Bryan Carter, a drummer and composer, will lead the Jazz at Pride Orchestra in honoring the life and legacy of Rustin.Other nods to the past will focus on the history of jazz. Led by Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the center’s orchestra will perform 10 concerts that will each pay homage to a decade of jazz history, from the 1920s to the present.Performances in February will honor the early years of jazz and its many inspirations by incorporating cuts from blues, gospel, country and bluegrass, as well as from recordings by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others. On Nov. 8-9, a pair of concerts will focus on the jazz pioneers Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron and others.From Jan. 16-18, Cool School & Hard Bop concerts will explore midcentury jazz, featuring works from Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Max Roach and others. And May 29-31, the saxophonist Ted Nash will lead the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in performances of new arrangements of music associated with the 1970s.The season will also include more modern performances, including concerts that will feature music from Joanne Brackeen, Charlie Haden, Terence Blanchard and others.Several concerts will also spotlight specific musicians. On Nov. 15-16, Joshua Redman will return to the Rose Theater in a collaboration with Gabrielle Cavassa, a rising star from New Orleans. Later in the season, on Feb. 14-15, Dianne Reeves will perform in a Valentine’s Day celebration filled with songs about romance and heartbreak. The pianist and composer Monty Alexander will celebrate his 80th birthday by performing on Jan. 24-25, while Anat Cohen and her brothers will celebrate her 50th birthday with performances of early swing, post-bop and Brazilian choro on March 14-15.The final performances of the season, June 13-14, will feature music directed by Marsalis and will showcase works by the veteran band members Chris Crenshaw, Vincent Gardner and others. More

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      Puccini’s ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Turandot’: More Than Appropriation

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      The history and curiosity behind these operas, both set in Asia, complicate often simplistic criticisms of borrowing and stereotyping.A key relic of the genesis of Giacomo Puccini’s two operas set in Asia can be found not in Italy, where both works premiered, nor in China or Japan, where they are set, but — of all places — in Morristown, N.J.There, in the Morris Museum’s collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata, is a music box from around 1877. During a visit to the museum in 2012, the musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard happened upon the box and, listening to it, was surprised to find that it contained melodies present in those Puccini operas, “Madama Butterfly” (1904) and “Turandot” (left unfinished at his death in 1924).Sheppard and other scholars came to believe that the box — made in Switzerland, exported to China, returned to Europe and owned in Italy before it was acquired by the brewing heir and prodigious collector Murtogh D. Guinness and donated to the Morris Museum — may have been the exact one that Puccini encountered at a friend’s home and quoted in his classic works.This plain brown music box is therefore central to the ambivalence that lately surrounds Puccini, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot,” and the amorphous label of appropriation that has been applied to both. It reminds us that Puccini, who was always searching to endow his scores with “local color,” didn’t just compose exotic-seeming, faux-Asian tunes for his operas, but also sought out actual Asian examples. These works are tributes to the curiosity about other cultures — the desire to blend your traditions with others’ and tell stories about more than just yourself — that has animated art for as long as humans have been making it.“When the heart speaks, whether in China or Holland,” Puccini wrote to one of his “Turandot” librettists, “it says only one thing, and the outcome is the same for everyone.”A music box, from around 1877, containing Chinese melodies that Puccini quoted.Morris MuseumWe 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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      Future and Metro Boomin’s First Joint Album Opens Big at No. 1

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      The Atlanta rapper and star producer topped Ariana Grande’s first-week total for “Eternal Sunshine,” but Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” may beat them all next week.Future and Metro Boomin, two of the biggest stars of Atlanta hip-hop, have scored the best opening of the year so far with their joint album “We Don’t Trust You,” though Beyoncé is on deck for next week’s chart with potentially even bigger numbers.“We Don’t Trust You” opens at No. 1 with the equivalent of 251,000 sales in the United States, a better opening than Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” had two weeks ago (with 227,000). According to the tracking service Luminate, the vast majority of fans’ consumption of “We Don’t Trust You” was through streaming platforms, with 324 million clicks in its opening week — more than any album since Taylor Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which arrived with 375 million in November.“We Don’t Trust You,” featuring guest spots by the Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott, among others, is the first of two announced LPs by the rapper Future and Metro Boomin, a star producer who has been behind dozens of hit songs over the last decade, and who has gone to No. 1 on the album chart three times before in his own right. The next joint album by Future and Metro Boomin is expected April 12.Beyoncé’s 27-track “Cowboy Carter” seized headlines even before its release last Friday, and fans started clicking as soon as they could. Spotify announced that “Cowboy Carter” became the service’s most-streamed album in a single day so far this year. It is expected to arrive with big numbers on next week’s chart, helped by sales on vinyl and CD — though fans complained that a number of tracks on the digital version were absent from the physical editions, including “Ya Ya,” one of the album’s most-streamed songs.Also this week, Olivia Rodrigo’s seven-month-old “Guts” jumps 16 spots to No. 2, thanks to the release of a deluxe version with five added tracks. Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” falls to No. 3 after two weeks at the top, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 5. More

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      Pedal Steel Noah’s Covers Charm Fans Online. Up Next: His Own Songs.

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      This 16-year-old from Austin, Texas, plays New Wave and post-punk hits with his brother and dog beside him. This week, his first EP, “Texas Madness,” comes out.Like many American teenagers, Noah Faulkner, 16, is obsessed with music. He’ll spend hours going down rabbit holes, listening to every note played by his favorite artists and studying new discoveries. He recently came out of a monthslong deep dive on Clarence Ashley, a banjo player who recorded during the Great Depression and “makes me feel like I’m an old man,” Faulkner said. Ashley’s music “feels very spooky, and I imagine it’s like an abandoned place somewhere.”Unlike most teenagers, Faulkner is translating these influences into a dedicated music career. Using the handle Pedal Steel Noah, he posts daily covers of ’80s New Wave and post-punk hits on Instagram and TikTok, interpreting the work of acts like the Smiths and Tears for Fears on one of the hardest instruments to master. Along the way, he’s made fans of Neko Case, Big Thief, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and scores of others drawn to his emotive playing and charming setup: a big Texas flag in the background, his brother, Nate, 13, on bass and a shaggy Aussiedoodle panting along.Faulkner’s interest in pedal steel stems from an early plunge into country music. “I was listening to George Strait when I wanted to listen to something that’s cheerful and faithful,” he said. Eli Durst for The New York TimesIn March, the brothers and their father, Jay, played several showcases during the South by Southwest festival in their hometown and opened for the Black Keys’ keynote address. Dressed in a Western shirt, black cowboy hat and the colorful Crocs that have become his signature footwear, Pedal Steel Noah put a Texas stamp on songs by Duran Duran and the Cocteau Twins.“It was amazing,” he said via video call from the dinner table, his family gathered around him, “but it was exhausting. Hopefully, I can give myself a reward of a party for my friends.” On Monday, he’s taking the next step in his young career, releasing “Texas Madness,” an EP that includes three covers and two original tracks.

      View this post on Instagram A post shared by Noah Faulkner (@pedalsteelnoah) 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