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      Taylor Swift Bests K-Pop Band to Stay No. 1 for Seventh Week

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      Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ held off Ateez’s ‘Golden Hour: Part.1.’ The singer-songwriter Shaboozey opened at No. 5.Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” is the No. 1 album once again, leading the Billboard 200 chart for a seventh straight time.Since it came out in April with historic numbers — breaking records for streaming and vinyl sales, and posting the biggest opening week of Swift’s career — “Tortured Poets” has been unstoppable, even as its performance has gradually cooled. In recent weeks it has held off challenges from Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa, and this week it blocks the latest from the K-pop boy band Ateez.In its latest week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 148,000 sales in the United States, including 157 million streams and 27,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release, the album has had the equivalent of about 4.3 million sales and just shy of 2.5 billion streams in the United States alone.Of the 14 albums that Swift has sent to No. 1 in her career — going back to “Fearless,” her second LP, back in 2008 — “Tortured Poets” has now had the longest consecutive stretch at the top, exceeding “Folklore,” which in 2020 spent its first six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s flagship LP chart. (Several of Swift’s albums, including “Folklore,” have had more turns at No. 1 overall, but not in a row.)Also this week, Ateez’s “Golden Hour: Part.1,” a six-track “mini-album,” opens in second place with 131,000 equivalent sales, largely from its popularity on CD and vinyl. “Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going” by Shaboozey, a singer-songwriter who was featured on Beyoncé’s latest album, “Cowboy Carter,” opens at No. 5 with the equivalent of 50,000.Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” falls to No. 3 after spending its first two weeks in second place, and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 in its 67th week on the chart. More

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      Jean-Philippe Allard, Jazz Producer and Musicians’ Advocate, Dies at 67

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      He called himself a “professional listener,” and he tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with.Jean-Philippe Allard, a French record executive and producer who helped revive the careers of jazz greats who had been all but forgotten in the United States, and who earned a reputation for uncommonly fierce advocacy on behalf of musicians, died on May 17 in Paris. He was 67.The music producer Brian Bacchus, a close friend and frequent collaborator, said Mr. Allard died in a hospital from cancer, which had returned after a long remission.Artists ranging from Abbey Lincoln to Juliette Gréco to Kenny Barron all said they had never worked with a more musician-friendly producer.“Regarding my work, I would always consider it as co-producing with the artist,” Mr. Allard told the music journalist Willard Jenkins in an interview in March. “Some producers are musicians or arrangers, like Teo Maceo or Larry Klein; others are engineers; some are professional listeners. I would fall in this last category: listening to the artist before the session, listening to the music during the session, and listening to the mixing engineer.”He tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with. “His ear was always open to the artist, and he was always concerned about what was best for the artist,” the vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater said in an interview. “He saw me. He embraced me. He wasn’t afraid of me. He encouraged my independence. He encouraged me speaking out.”Mr. Allard, right, in the studio with the bassist Charlie Haden, one of the many prominent jazz musicians he worked with.Cheung Ching Ming, via PolyGram/UniversalWe 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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      Review: ‘Inside Light’ Gives a Taste of Stockhausen’s Opera Epic

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, a five-hour selection of pieces from the 29-hour “Licht” cycle is best appreciated as a marathon performance.How often can you describe five hours of excerpts from an opera as a drop in the bucket of the whole?But Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic “Licht” — 29 hours of enormous forces, fanciful notions (a camel as candidate for galactic president) and loopy cosmogony — is no ordinary opera. It calls for multiple spaces, and at one point multiple helicopters, dwarfing even Wagner’s mighty “Ring,” a mere dozen or so hours that can fit in a single theater.Presenting bits of “Licht,” as the Park Avenue Armory is doing with the vivid yet meditative, ultimately stirring “Inside Light,” still means presenting quite a lot. For viewers, it’s a six-and-a-half-hour commitment, counting a pair of intermissions and dinner break. But it’s worth it: Written over about 25 years starting in the late 1970s, and never produced — because it’s almost unproduceable — all at once, “Licht” is one of the sui generis works of art from the turn of the 21st century.In Amsterdam in 2019, the stage director and impresario Pierre Audi put on a three-day festival of chunks from the cycle, which is divided into seven operas, each named for a day of the week. As the Armory’s artistic director, Audi has now brought to New York a yet smaller, but still valuable, selection.You can see the program in two parts, half on Wednesday, half on Thursday. But I recommend going on Friday to see it as I did: a back-to-back marathon. With Stockhausen (1928-2007), the experience blossoms, and becomes more oddly moving, the more of his music you take in, ending up greater than the sum of its parts.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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      Howard University Votes to Revoke Sean Combs’s Honorary Degree

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      In a unanimous decision, the university’s board of trustees also moved to disband a scholarship in Mr. Combs’s name amid investigations into abuse allegations.Howard University announced on Friday that it would revoke an honorary degree that was awarded to the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in 2014. The decision comes in the wake of Mr. Combs’s admission that he physically abused a former girlfriend, in addition to a slew of other allegations of abuse that have surfaced in recent months.At the conclusion of a meeting of the Howard University board of trustees, the body voted unanimously “to accept the return by Mr. Sean Combs of the honorary degree,” according to a statement released by the university. Howard also said that it would revoke all honors and privileges associated with the degree.Mr. Combs, 54, also known as “Puff” and “Diddy,” attended the university from 1987 to 1989 but left before graduating. In 2016, he pledged $1 million to establish the Sean Combs Scholarship Fund, which went to students in need of financial aid.Video footage surfaced last month of Mr. Combs striking, kicking and dragging his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, known professionally as Cassie, in 2016.“Mr. Combs’s behavior as captured in a recently released video is so fundamentally incompatible with Howard University’s core values and beliefs that he is deemed no longer worthy to hold the institution’s highest honor,” the statement said.Howard University did not immediately respond to additional requests for comment.In November 2023, Ms. Ventura filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Combs of rape and physical abuse; they reached a settlement the next day. Then, in May, CNN published surveillance footage it had acquired from a Los Angeles hotel that showed Mr. Combs attacking Ms. Ventura near the building’s elevators.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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      Gone in a Six-Year Flash: Farewell to the New York Phil’s Maestro

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      The pandemic-derailed tenure of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was too short to give us a full sense of him, as man or maestro.Jaap, we hardly knew ye.On Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, conducted a lean, driven rendition of Mahler’s sprawling Second Symphony. After two more performances through Saturday, he will leave his Lincoln Center podium, a mere six years after stepping onto it.No Philharmonic artistic leader has been less present in front of its players and audience since Mahler himself, who died two years into his tenure, in 1911. There was barely enough time to meet van Zweden, let alone get a full sense of him, as man or maestro.He had no signature initiatives, and his choice of works revealed little personal stamp. His interpretations of the classics only occasionally relaxed from a tense punchiness. And though I wasn’t always displeased after hearing him lead a program, I was never inspired to return and hear it again.The period of van Zweden’s tenure has been hugely consequential for the Philharmonic. There was the orchestra’s survival through the extended pandemic lockdown, the renovation of its home at Geffen Hall and a flood of music by composers beyond the usual roster of white men of the distant past.But van Zweden, 63, has seemed more a participant in all this than a leader. When he was preparing to start in New York, he expressed enthusiasm about bringing back Deborah Borda, an industry legend, as chief executive. Having such a strong, visionary administrative partner, though, ended up making this feel more like Borda’s era than van Zweden’s.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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      My Starting Five Songs From Boston and Dallas

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      Catch the N.B.A. Finals spirit with Erykah Badu, Pixies, Kelly Clarkson and more.Erykah Badu, repping for DallasErik Carter for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last night marked the start of the 2023-2024 N.B.A. Finals, a best-of-seven matchup between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks. As a long-suffering and perpetually annoying fan of the Philadelphia 76ers, I do not really have a horse in this race*, but I also have an excess of energy I would normally reserve for rooting for one of these two teams. I have decided to put that energy to productive use by making a playlist of music by artists from both Boston and Dallas.Consider these musicians my starting five from each city. Both Boston and Dallas have rich and varied musical histories, as you’ll hear in this playlist’s blend of rock, pop, country, R&B, blues and hip-hop. It features bona fide superstars (the Texan Kelly Clarkson; the Dorchesterite Donna Summer) and influential legends (Dallas’s own Stevie Ray Vaughan; the Beantown art-rockers the Pixies). Sure, there are some omissions, but these are just my personal starting fives — and given how many times the ABC broadcast played “Sweet Emotion” when throwing to commercial last night, you’ve probably already hit your Aerosmith quota for the week.Game 1 was quite anticlimactic, with Boston blowing out Dallas 107-89, so hopefully the human Golden Retriever that is Luka Dončić will be able to galvanize his Mavericks into giving us a more competitive series. And if not, well, there’s always this playlist.She knows the highest stakes,Lindsay*Beyond an inborn and semi-irrational distaste for all Boston sports teams, of course.Listen along while you read.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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      Plant and Krauss Cover a Led Zeppelin Classic, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Soccer Mommy, Tems, Floating Points 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.Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘When the Levee Breaks’No one is more entitled to cover Led Zeppelin than its singer, Robert Plant. His close-harmony duo with the singer and fiddler Alison Krauss excels at making songs sound far older than they are, and even in 1971, “When the Levee Breaks” harked back to a vintage blues by Memphis Minnie. This live recording is stark, resonant and rumbling, with a fiddle solo by Stuart Duncan that looks toward both Ireland and Morocco and a cranked-up guitar stomp that builds toward — alas! — a frustrating fade-out. JON PARELESCarly Pearce, ‘Truck on Fire’The spoiler is in the title of “Truck on Fire,” a swinging country revenge song from Carly Pearce’s new album, “Hummingbird.” Her voice seethes as she recalls “the way that you laughed it off when I was catching on/Said it was in my head,” and there’s a dark glee (and a product placement) while she watches the “flames rolling off of your Goodyear tires.” PARELESSabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’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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      What’s the Best Way to Honor Sophie in Song?

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      Recent tracks from Charli XCX, A.G. Cook, Caroline Polachek and St. Vincent capture the producer’s philosophy and humanity, but not necessarily her signature sound.When the producer Sophie died at 34 in 2021 after an accidental fall, it felt like a singular loss, as well as the end of a nascent era in electronic music. The innovative Scottish artist, who worked with Charli XCX, Vince Staples and Madonna, was a linchpin of the U.K.’s experimental scene in the 2010s and advocated for a radical reframing of the way creators and listeners think about music. “The language of electronic music shouldn’t still be referencing obsolete instruments like kick drum or clap. No one’s kicking or clapping,” she said in 2014. “It makes more sense in my mind to discard those ideas of polyphony and traditional roles of instrumentation.”Sophie provided a new vernacular, as well as great inspiration, for a generation of acolytes, but her own body of work was relatively small and she rarely spoke to the press, making it hard to imagine where one of pop futurism’s leading lights may have gone next. While many artists, such as the avant-garde pop duo 100 gecs and the German experimental musician Lyra Pramuk, have drawn clear inspiration from Sophie, few have captured the perilous, cutting-edge newness of her work, which reinterpreted pop music codes in disorienting, physical, textural ways.On “Lemonade,” an early calling card, she seemed to craft melody out of the sounds of popping bubbles and hissing gas canisters; “Faceshopping” turns ideas of constructed digital identity into what sounds like a construction site, whirring with the sounds of tearing metal and heavy machinery. Sophie felt that music should be a tactile, unpredictable experience — she memorably said a song should feel like a roller-coaster ride, ending with the listener buying a key ring — but a lot of attempts to reference the “Sophie sound,” like Kim Petras’s 2023 track “Brrr,” reduce the producer’s philosophy to an aesthetic of bulbous bass and scraping synths while still fitting conventional pop forms.“So I,” a song from Charli XCX’s new album, “Brat,” pays tribute to her longtime collaborator Sophie, who died in 2021.Bianca De Marchi/EPA, via ShutterstockFour recent songs by Charli XCX, A.G. Cook, Caroline Polachek and St. Vincent seem to suggest that the best way to pay tribute to a modern titan is not to emulate her at all, but to reinterpret strands of her DNA in hope of alluding to a bigger picture. These tracks reckon with Sophie’s legacy in emotional, rather than technical, ways, acknowledging the humanity within a figure who is often remembered in flattening, counterintuitively rigid portraits.The most trenchant of these songs is “So I,” the wounded core of Charli’s volatile, clubby new record, “Brat.” Over shuddering laser-beam synths — a nod to her past work with Sophie on records like “Vroom Vroom” and “Number 1 Angel” — Charli sings about regretting putting distance between herself and Sophie, whose talent awed her, while she was alive. The song is nakedly vulnerable, almost power ballad-esque in the way it builds, resembling one of Sophie’s best-known tracks: “It’s OK to Cry,” the song with which she came out as transgender and revealed her face to the public for the first time. Charli makes the link explicit on the track’s chorus: “I know you always said ‘It’s OK to cry’/So I know I can cry.”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