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      8 Crush Songs for Valentine’s Day

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      Hear tracks by Frank Ocean, Alicia Keys and of course, the Jets.Frank Ocean.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, but for today’s playlist I wanted to give you something more specific than a collection of love songs. (For one thing, that mix would be approximately three billion tracks long.) Here, instead, is a playlist of crush songs.How exactly to define a crush? I’m glad you asked, because earlier this week The Times published an entertaining history of the word’s etymological evolution. For all the experts consulted in the piece, I most appreciated the definition offered by one reporter’s 7-year-old daughter: A crush “means you are in love with someone but the other person doesn’t know.” She added, “If you walk past them, all your blood goes up to your head, and it feels so startling.”Naturally, this state of being has provided inspiration for all sorts of notable songwriters, like Bruce Springsteen, Frank Ocean and Alicia Keys. As you’ll hear on this playlist, though, crush songs run the emotional gamut from painfully heart-wrenching to light and flirty, sometimes even with a bit of self-deprecating humor thrown in.Valentine’s Day is too often considered a holiday only for those already lucky and content in love. But if you’ve got your eye on someone special and haven’t let them know yet, or if you’re just trying to ride things out until you catch the ick and are finally liberated, let this playlist be your soundtrack. Consider it a candy heart from me to you. Crank it up and get ready to pine.Got a beach house I could sell you in Idaho,LindsayListen 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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      Listening to Music Is Better When It’s a Conversation Among Friends

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      At group listening sessions, everybody gets a turn to speak by choosing a song.If you are the type of person who bides your time waiting for any conversation to pivot to music, who scrabbles through the dollar-record bins of junk shops or mudlarks around the streaming playlists of your favorite musicians hunting for rarities, you might be a Golden Ear. You almost certainly love music, but odds are, you are listening to it alone. The Golden Ears are devoted to listening to music together.Most weeks we gather in Tivoli, our little hamlet on the Hudson, to share songs. It began about 15 years ago, after a few music-minded friends moved up from the city. We schlepped book bags of precious vinyl and congregated around our hi-fi stereos. There would be casual chitchat, but once the needle descended, we would listen, quietly, to the end of each person’s carefully chosen song. This shared attentiveness — being social without talking, an intimate act usually reserved for married couples and Zen monks — felt precious. A surprising focus replaced the pressure to make conversation, like a shooting star silencing a cookout. At one of our first sessions, someone laid down a 45-r.p.m. record of Doris Troy’s “What’cha Gonna Do About It?”: one minute and 52 seconds of the purest, pulsing promise of American music, a jaunty, saucy, sashaying tiptoe of soul, almost impossible to not do the monkey to. When it ended, cheers erupted. By now we’re used to listening to music for one another, in a way that privileges adventure over taste.Certain norms have materialized. There is no set time limit between songs, and who gets to play what next is an open question (unless a member we call the Proctor is present, when a consistent order must be followed). Tracks are generally short, five minutes or less. No genre is verboten. Themes (“Songs About Songwriting,” “Beatles Adjacency,” “Songs You Want Played at Your Funeral”) emerge or don’t. Bold provocations and special prompts have led to an evolving nomenclature. For example, “the Sanborn” is the spinning of a song by an artist no one has heard of, while everyone pens a one-line review. There is plenty to exhort, and lots of talk between songs. For Golden Ears, talking about music is a sacred chance to kibitz over what we’ve stumbled upon in obtuse liner notes or an out-of-print autobiography. The pandemic was very hard on us. Of all the alonenesses the pandemic spawned, no longer listening with my friends was among the hardest. Once Dr. Fauci said we could, we went outside with Bluetooth speakers. Not wanting to bother anyone, we set up a fire pit deep in the woods and strung up lights. The first song we played there was Count Basie’s “Li’l Darlin’,” a tune so confident and leisurely that it felt as if Basie himself were leaning down from the bandstand, telling us in that dark moment that everything would be all right. We named the clearing after the song, and the music we play there trends toward emotional and contemplative uplift. Sitting by the fire after one of these gorgeous plays, someone will often break the silence with a sly, “Sorry, Officer!” — imagining a state trooper showing up to find a ring of middle-aged adults in Adirondack chairs listening to Jimmy Giuffre. 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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      For Flagboy Giz, Mardi Gras Is More Than ‘Just Some Floats’

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      The 37-year-old artist is a Black Masking Indian who sews his own colorful suits. His blending those practices with rap music has made him one of the city’s most in-demand performers.In his cluttered two-room apartment in Gentilly, a small neighborhood just south of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, Flagboy Giz used dental floss to thread brightly colored beads through black gym shoes on a stormy February afternoon. His desk held a humble recording setup — a microphone, laptop and two speakers. An assemblage of neon feathers and phosphorescent beads burst out of drawers and scattered across the floor.Though he was out late at Mardi Gras balls the night before, Flagboy Giz, 37, had awakened early and headed directly to the bead store. “This is a tradition that you have to preserve,” he said, “so you’ve got to make sure you’re out there every year masking. Last year, I caught Covid two weeks before Mardi Gras, and I was still sewing with Covid. The year before that, a spider bit me in the eye, and I was sewing with one eye in the hospital.”Flagboy Giz is a Black Masking Indian — the flag-bearer of the storied Wild Tchoupitoulas tribe — who has risen to prominence in New Orleans by blending traditional Mardi Gras Indian music with hip-hop, with many of his songs assuming characteristics of the city’s bounce subgenre.Since 2021, he has been releasing up-tempo songs that feature stories about his culture and sharp social commentary concerning the shifting demographics in his hometown. On “We Outside” from 2022, he rhymes about marching on Mardi Gras day and talks trash about fellow Black Masking Indians while incorporating a call-and-response chant (“We outside!”) echoing the cadence of songs like “Ho Na Nae” and “Firewater” that have been passed down for generations.Flagboy Giz makes his suits in his two-room apartment in Gentilly, a small neighborhood just south of Lake Pontchartrain.Emily Kask for The New York TimesGiz is a flag-bearer of the storied Wild Tchoupitoulas tribe, and his suits celebrate that affiliation.Emily Kask for The New York TimesThe track became his signature song and led to a 14-minute remix featuring over 25 New Orleans artists including Choppa, 504icygirl and Hotboy Ronald. “‘We Outside’ is gonna be one of them records that never dies,” said Giz’s manager, Raj Smoove, a mainstay New Orleans D.J. whom Lil Wayne called “the greatest D.J. in the world.”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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      Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra on ‘The Past Is Still Alive’

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      Almost a year after the sudden death of Alynda Segarra’s father, the sight of a Bronx-bound subway entrance made the musician cry.“I walked by the 1 train yesterday, and the color of the red and the ‘1’ and the ‘Van Cortlandt Park’ and the ‘Uptown’ — I just burst into tears,” Segarra, who uses they/them pronouns, said. “I was just like, this is so crazy that I don’t really have a reason to go up there.”Segarra, who is 36 and makes folk music with a punky defiance as Hurray for the Riff Raff, wore a distressed white tee under a fitted leather vest, and silver jewelry that matched their painted nails. Sipping a coffee on a zebra-print couch in a quiet nook of Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea, they compared the storied hotel’s décor to the sets of the Yorgos Lanthimos movie “Poor Things.” Staying at the Chelsea was an uncharacteristic extravagance, but since their father’s passing, they have been allowing for treats like these, in his honor.“My dad loved enjoying,” Segarra said. “He just didn’t deny himself pleasure. So now I’m really starting to be like, ‘Why not?’”Segarra, who is of Puerto Rican descent, was raised in the Bronx and left home at 17, first living in a Philadelphia squat and eventually relocating to New Orleans, where they busked in a motley hobo band called the Dead Man Street Orchestra. (“I couldn’t believe that it was real,” they recalled with lingering delight. “I just get to sing Tom Waits songs and people give me money?”) When Louisiana got too hot or Segarra just got too restless, they would ride the rails, getting to know America through blurred glimpses of its vast landscape.Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “The Past Is Still Alive,” Alynda Segarra’s arresting, artfully autobiographical ninth album, is due Feb. 23.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesWe 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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      Toby Keith’s ’35 Biggest Hits’ Tops the Billboard Album Chart

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      A week after his death at 62, the country musician’s 16-year-old hits collection is No. 1.Toby Keith, the boisterous, unapologetically patriotic country star who died last week at 62, has a posthumous No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, as a 16-year-old hits collection narrowly edged out Morgan Wallen’s latest — and easily topped releases by the rapper 21 Savage and the Grammy winners Taylor Swift and SZA — to reach the top of the chart.Keith’s “35 Biggest Hits,” with tracks like “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” “Who’s Your Daddy?,” “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” and the Willie Nelson duet “Beer for My Horses” — all of them No. 1 country smashes — re-entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1. It had the equivalent of 66,000 sales in the United States, including 64 million streams and 11,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.“35 Biggest Hits,” which came out in 2008 on two CDs and previously reached as high as No. 2, becomes Keith’s fifth album to go to No. 1, and the first since “Bullets in the Gun” in 2010.“35 Biggest Hits” is the first posthumous No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since “Faith” by Pop Smoke, in early 2021, about a year after the Brooklyn rapper was killed in a shooting at age 20. Billboard notes that Keith’s collection is also the first retrospective album to hit No. 1 since “The Very Best of Prince,” shortly after Prince’s death in 2016.The 66,000 equivalent sales for “35 Biggest Hits” barely beat out Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” a streaming blockbuster for much of the last year that has logged a total of 18 weeks at No. 1 and had the equivalent of 65,000 sales in its most recent week, landing at No. 2.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” is No. 3, 21 Savage’s “American Dream” is No. 4 and Swift’s “Midnights” — the album of the year winner at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 4 — rises four spots to No. 5. More

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      Kali Malone Studied Farming. Fate Brought Her to Avant-Garde Music.

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      The 29-year-old musician grew up in Colorado and ended up in Sweden, where she fell in love with the organ. Her latest album, “All Life Long,” is out now.At the close of an organ concert in early February, Kali Malone, performing at Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, did something unusual: She turned off the instrument’s motor while she and Stephen O’Malley of the doom-metal group Sunn 0))) held down the keys. For nearly three minutes, as the air drained from the organ’s 5,000-odd pipes, the pair’s rich chords turned spectral as they faded to silence, wheezing and wavering, like a chorus of sleepy ghosts.The finale was a striking example of the way that Malone, 29, is rethinking the pipe organ for a contemporary context. Born in Colorado but based for more than a decade in Stockholm and Paris, she has emerged as an unusually versatile star of the avant-garde.In a video interview last month, Malone reflected on the path that led to her new album, “All Life Long,” a contemplative 78-minute suite for organ, brass quintet and chamber choir. She thinks of her early work — microtonal software creations that could run for hours — “as my cave man music,” she said. “It’s still exactly what I’m doing now, just my tools have become more sophisticated.”Malone’s fondness for drones hardly makes her a one-note composer. Before her 2019 breakout album, “The Sacrificial Code” — nearly two hours of minimalist, minutely textured organ studies — she was part of a shoegaze trio, conducted an ensemble playing the work of the “deep listening” pioneer Pauline Oliveros, and recorded strings and gongs in a decommissioned nuclear reactor. She flexed her compositional muscles on “Living Torch,” an electroacoustic work created for the Acousmonium, a multichannel setup developed in the 1970s at Groupe de Recherche Musicales, or GRM, in Paris.“There is something both spiritual and almost tactile in the way that she creates music,” François J. Bonnet, director of GRM, said in an email. “She charts her own personal and inspired path — a path influenced by almost nothing, and not the product of cultural trends or zeitgeist.”Malone began blazing her own trail early. Her parents split when she was a child; her father lived in the High Rockies, while Malone moved with her mother to Denver, where she was shuttled to and from choir practice by her grandparents. “I became a teenager when I was 10,” she said. “I grew up so fast, and didn’t have a lot of supervision.”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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      Usher Super Bowl Halftime Review: A Focus on Details With Alicia Keys, Lil Jon and More

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      In a halftime set that touched on more than a dozen songs, the R&B star delivered a raucous Atlanta party and a lesson in intimate showmanship.A few minutes into Usher’s dynamic and sly Super Bowl LVIII halftime show performance Sunday night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas came a moment of uncommon, almost startling calm.Alicia Keys had just appeared, in a sequined red jumpsuit and matching encrusted gown, and rather gratuitously flubbed the opening note of her hit piano ballad “If I Ain’t Got You.”She recovered, and as she approached the end of the chorus, you could hear Usher singing in quiet harmony as the camera panned back, settling on the two of them at opposite ends of Keys’s piano. Usher picked up the final line of the chorus — alone, smooth and confident, almost whispered — before Keys returned to share the last note.Allegiant Stadium holds approximately 65,000 people, but in that instant, there were only two. It was one of the quietest sequences in halftime history, a remarkable testament to the gifts of Usher, a performer of precise detail who is enjoyed best with rapt attention.Usher was joined by Alicia Keys on Sunday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesAnd H.E.R. played guitar during his halftime set.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMost of the rest of the performance — which touched on more than a dozen songs — was grander in scale, designed to fill a football field: A small-bore, granular-gestured showcase gave way to an explosive party. But what this set did so well was make plain that Usher’s commitment to minutiae and his capacity for grandeur are fired in the same cauldron. He can control the stage when it is packed to the gills, and he can do it alone. More

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      Beyoncé Announces New Country Album, ‘Act II,’ After Super Bowl Commercial

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      The pop superstar used a Verizon ad to tell fans fresh music is on the way. A country-themed follow-up to “Renaissance,” which she referred to as “Act II,” will arrive on March 29.After days of speculation and online sleuthing by fans — just another week, in other words — Beyoncé used her appearance in a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday to announce that she would soon be releasing new music.In a Verizon ad that ran shortly after halftime, Beyoncé joked with the comedian Tony Hale about doing something that would “break the internet” (i.e. Verizon’s 5G network). She ran through a few riffs, like “Beyonc-A.I.,” a Barbie-like “Bar-bey” and a presidential “BOTUS.”Then she said, “Drop the new music,” before the commercial ended. Soon after, Beyoncé’s website updated with the announcement that a new album, identified as “Act II,” would be released on March 29.It appeared to be the second part of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” album project, and perhaps one with a country-rock theme, given the sound and look of two new songs, “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” that quickly appeared online.“Texas Hold ’Em” begins with rapid-plucked guitar and moves into a stomping beat, with Beyoncé rhyming “Texas” and “Lexus” and singing lines like, “It’s a real live boogie and a real live hoedown.” On “16 Carriages,” an epic ballad, the guitars swell with organ-loud percussion as Beyoncé sings about looking back at a life after losing innocence “at an early age.”The visuals for both picture Beyoncé in cowboy hats — a feature of last year’s Renaissance World Tour and Beyoncé’s continued style signature, as seen last week at the Grammy Awards.As with the first “Renaissance,” the new album announcement represents a kind of shift in communication for Beyoncé. She released her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” with no warning — instantly grabbing global attention and setting off a music industry craze for surprise “drops.” Its follow-up, “Lemonade,” in 2016, was teased by a Super Bowl appearance but still made an instantaneous splash. In the “Renaissance” era, Beyoncé’s revelations have been more like conventional advertisements.When Beyoncé unveiled “Renaissance” in July 2022, she posted a statement on Instagram that explained it was merely part one of a “three act project” that she recorded during the pandemic. She referred to that album as “Act I,” and described it as “a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world.” That album, with a 1990s retro dance theme, went to No. 1 and was the centerpiece of her tour last year, which sold $580 million in tickets, according to the trade publication Pollstar — second only to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.Beyoncé dabbled in country music on “Daddy Lessons” on her 2016 album “Lemonade,” and a remix featured the Chicks. She teamed with the Nashville group for a performance on the Country Music Association Awards that November, which received a mixed reception from country fans online but was vigorously defended by the singer’s loyal fans. More