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      5 Highlights From the 2025 Ojai Music Festival

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      A crowd had gathered at the Ojai Meadows Preserve early Saturday morning. The nearby mountains were still shrouded in mist, and the cool, gray quiet was interrupted only by the sound of birds.Then a throaty quivering of flute emerged from behind the audience — and a stab of clarinet from another spot, a distant burr of saxophone, pips from a second flute. An almost avian quartet gradually coalesced from specks of song and chatter among the instruments, in conversation with the animals in the trees. This was Susie Ibarra’s “Sunbird.”That a couple of hundred people showed up at 8 a.m. for an experimental performance in the middle of a field speaks volumes about the Ojai Music Festival. Since the 1940s, this annual event, nestled in an idyllic valley in Southern California, has catered to audiences eager to be challenged.Each year, a different music director is invited to guide the programming. For this installment, which took place Thursday through Sunday, morning to night, the festival looked to the flutist Claire Chase, one of the most important nodes of creation and collaboration in contemporary music.Chase, a founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the instigator of “Density 2036,” an ongoing 24-year commissioning project to create a new repertoire for her instrument, has an aesthetic well matched to Ojai. Her approach is rigorous yet relaxed, with an improvisatory, cooperative, nature-loving, even hippie bent — meditative, sunny and smiling, encouraging open minds and open ears. Two dozen musicians performed in shifting combinations throughout the weekend, so you had the feeling of being dropped in the middle of a joyfully bustling commune.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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      Doechii Criticizes Trump’s Response to L.A. Protests at BET Awards

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      The rapper drew attention to the president deploying the military against protesters in Los Angeles and said it was her responsibility as an artist to speak up for all oppressed people.The rapper Doechii accepted the BET award for best female hip-hop artist on Monday night, but instead of using her acceptance speech as a victory lap, she criticized President Trump for deploying the military against protesters in Los Angeles.“There are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order,” Doechii said, pointing to ongoing protests over Mr. Trump’s immigration policies. “Trump is using military forces to stop a protest.” The 25th Annual BET Awards were held downtown at the Peacock Theater.The protests began on Friday when federal agents searched the city’s garment district for workers whom they suspected were undocumented immigrants. The action was part of the Trump administration’s new focus on raiding workplaces.Demonstrations continued over the weekend. Though mostly peaceful, there have been scattered protests that became violent, prompting the authorities to make about 150 arrests and in some cases to use tear gas and crowd-control munitions against protesters. Mr. Trump, calling the protesters “insurrectionists,” mobilized the National Guard, a step Gov. Gavin Newsom has said was “purposefully inflammatory” and intended to create a spectacle.By Monday, the protests had turned calmer, but Mr. Trump doubled the number of deployed California Guard troops to 4,000 and ordered a battalion of 700 Marines to the city.Several hours before the awards ceremony began, a spokesman for BET said the network was working with the Los Angeles Police Department and monitoring the situation for safety reasons, CNN reported. The show went on despite the administration’s escalation of the federal response to the demonstrations.Doechii, who beat out Cardi B, Doja Cat, GloRilla, Latto, Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, Rapsody and Sexyy Red, continued her acceptance speech by asking the audience to consider why the government would deploy the military against its people who exercise their constitutional right to protest. She also criticized the Trump administration’s raids on workplaces and aggressive deportation policies.“People are being swept up and torn from their families, and I feel it’s my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people, for Black people, for Latino people, for trans people, for the people in Gaza,” she said. “We all deserve to live in hope and not in fear, and I hope we stand together, my brothers and my sisters, against hate, and we protest against it.”Her speech drew applause from the audience and was in stark contrast to the Tony Awards on Sunday night, where Mr. Trump was barely mentioned — an unexpected turn for a ceremony that often features more political commentary from its winners and presenters.Doechii, who over the last year has experienced a meteoric rise to the top of hip-hop, in February became the third woman to win a Grammy for best rap album, for “Alligator Bites Never Heal.” More

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      The Best Songs of 2025, So Far

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      Ten tracks that push boundaries, uncork emotions and can get the block party started.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs. After six months of listening, here’s what they have on repeat. (Note: It’s not a ranking, it’s a playlist.) Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.Bad Bunny, ‘Baile Inolvidable’Heartache and heritage mingle in “Baile Inolvidable” (“Unforgettable Dance”) from Bad Bunny’s album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”). The song bridges current and vintage sounds, underscoring the multigenerational continuity of Puerto Rican music. It begins as a blurred dirge of synthesizer lines and Bad Bunny’s vocals, mourning a lost romance; “I thought we’d grow old together,” he sings in Spanish, then admits, “It’s my fault.” But the track switches to an old-school salsa jam, with organic percussion, horns and a jazzy piano. The lessons of the girlfriend who taught him “how to love” and “how to dance” have stayed with him. — Jon Pareles▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeDrake, ‘Nokia’After making headlines for a war of words with Kendrick Lamar, Drake returned with one of his loosest projects.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter the conclusion (?) of his war of words with Kendrick Lamar, Drake briefly hibernated, then re-emerged with one of his loosest projects, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” with longtime collaborator PartyNextDoor. Its charming center is “Nokia,” a saucy and cheeky electro-rap track that calls back to the sweet woe-is-me plaint of “Hotline Bling,” perhaps the peak of universal-approval-era Drake. — Jon Caramanica▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeB Jacks featuring Zeddy Will, ‘Get Jiggy’A post-drill hip-house throwback that restores lightness to contemporary rap. These two young rappers — B Jacks from New Jersey, Zeddy Will from Queens — find a middle ground between the dance floor and the comedic internet, making a song that works as a party anthem, a meme soundtrack or a savvy entry in the long lineage of club-focused hip-hop. It’s summer block party manna. — Caramanica▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeObongjayar, ‘Not in Surrender’Obongjayar’s “Not in Surrender” finds its way to euphoria.Diego Donamaria/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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      Defense to Question Woman About ‘Hotel Nights’ With Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

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      One of the music mogul’s ex-girlfriends, who is going by the pseudonym Jane, has spent days testifying that he pressured her to have sex with other men.For more than 13 hours over three days, jurors in the federal trial of Sean Combs have heard gripping testimony from one of his former girlfriends, a witness for the prosecution called Jane. Now it is time for her cross-examination.Mr. Combs, the producer and impresario also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. The government has accused the music mogul of running a “criminal enterprise” whose objectives included coercing women into sex and covering it up; after Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, who testified over four days last month, Jane is the second woman put forward by prosecutors as a victim of sex trafficking.Mr. Combs, who faces life in prison if he is convicted, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and has strongly denied that any of his sexual relations were not consensual.Appearing under a pseudonym to protect her privacy, Jane first took the stand on Thursday afternoon and will continue on Tuesday. She has recounted vivid details of a troubled relationship with Mr. Combs, which began in 2021 and lasted until shortly before his arrest in September 2024.Jane said she was pressured to have sex with a succession of male escorts without condoms, and developed painful infections as a result. She once threw up in the bathroom of a luxury hotel after having sex with two men, she testified; after Mr. Combs told her “let’s go” because a third man was waiting to have sex with her, she complied.Jane was also part of Mr. Combs’s life during the critical period after Ms. Ventura filed her bombshell lawsuit in November 2023, in which she described being coerced into drug-fueled sex marathons she called “freak-offs.” Recognizing a similar pattern to what she called “hotel nights” or “debauchery,” Jane texted Mr. Combs three days after that suit was filed: “I feel like I’m reading my own sexual trauma. It makes me sick how three solid pages, word for word, is exactly my experiences and my anguish.”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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      Sly Stone and the Sound of an America That Couldn’t Last

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      The influential musician, who died on Monday at 82, forged harmony — musical and otherwise — that he wasn’t able to hold together on his own.“Landscape” is just one of those words. It’s lost all mouthfeel. It implies a sort of vastness — “the landscape of history,” “the landscape of man,” “the commercial baking landscape.” As craft, it connotes comeliness: “landscape painting.” In action, it exacts beauty through order: a city’s landscaper.Sly Stone died on Monday, at 82, and there it was again. He “redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” declared an official news release. It’s more like landscapes. But who’d deny the gist? I’m sitting here studying a photo of Stone and his band, the Family Stone, five dudes, two chicks, two white, five black. For a racially traumatized America, here was a landscape that redefined “landscape,” too.The band was his idea, as were their songs. What they redefined was how much sound and rhythm you could pack into three minutes — often, into less. The opening 15 seconds of their first hit, “Dance to the Music,” are a blast, like from a launchpad: Greg Errico beats the skins off his drums while Cynthia Robinson screams for you to get up. The horns sound drunk; Freddie Stone’s guitar sounds like it’s responding to a 9-1-1 call.Then at about the 16th second — mid-flight — the ascending party halts and a doo-wop parachute opens. Harmony and tambourine lilt to earth, whereupon we’re exhorted to … dance to the music. Lyrically, all that’s happening here is instruction, pronouncement. “I’m gonna add some bottom,” bellows Larry Graham, “so that the dancers just won’t hide,” before his motorific bass lick starts peeling wallflowers off the wall.This, to paraphrase another Sly gemstone, is a simple song that, musically, teems with, to quote a different gemstone, a vital songwriting and performance philosophy: fun. What else is happening here? Well, the landscapers are celebrating the landscape of themselves. They’re warming up, warming us up, banging out their promise of redefinition. Motown, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, marching band, jazz, lullaby. For about three years, every one their hits was most of all of those: America’s sounds pressed together into radical newness by seven people who dared to embody a utopia that, come 1968, when the band was reaching it apogee, seemed otherwise despoiled. For three years, this band was disillusionment’s oasis.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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      Book Review: ‘Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly,’ by Jeff Weiss

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      In a scrappy new memoir, Jeff Weiss blurs fact and fancy as he recounts his stint as a bit player in the celebrity-industrial complex.WAITING FOR BRITNEY SPEARS: A True Story, Allegedly, by Jeff WeissIn 2023, the pop princess Britney Spears published her autobiography, “The Woman in Me.” In its pages, Spears had choice words for the paparazzi who pursued her at the heights and depths of her fame. She described them as enemy combatants, the ghosts in a Pac-Man game, sharks who sensed blood in the water. They were, she wrote, “an army of zombies” who treated her with “disregard” and “disgust.”She hated them. She feared them. Jeff Weiss, by his own account, was one of them.In the 2000s, Weiss worked as an occasional reporter for a couple of tabloids. (He was also cited for trespassing on Brad Pitt’s property, ostensibly at the bidding of People magazine.) He details these exploits — with grandiosity and rue — in “Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly.” It is not a novel, not yet a memoir. A roman à clef? Probably. Autofiction? Sure. It is also, in its most engaging moments, a bedazzled biography of Spears herself, as glimpsed across the dance floor, or through a long lens.Weiss, if you believe him, first met Spears when he sneaked into the “ … Baby One More Time” video shoot, which was held at his Venice, Calif., high school. The first glimpse of a pigtailed Spears ensorcelled him. A few years later, sprung from college and lightly adrift, Weiss found himself flung into her orbit again. Zhuzhing his résumé and shushing his qualms, Weiss persuaded a tabloid to hire him as a Hollywood party and celebrity reporter. (Context clues suggest that the tabloid was Star; in the book, Weiss calls it Nova.)This is a book that wears its antecedents on its sleeve, or perhaps low on the brow, like a Von Dutch hat. There’s new journalism here and gonzo journalism, as well as more literary stabs at the mournfulness of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the contempt of Nathanael West. Parts of the book read like a retread of “Miss Lonelyhearts,” doused in apple martinis. Other sections suggest link-rotted LiveJournal entries. In broad strokes, it is a story of a young man’s disillusionment, a West Coast “Sweet Smell of Success,” if success smelled like Victoria’s Secret body mist.These strokes are indifferently compelling. Weiss falters in building stakes or sympathy for the self he describes. A 22-year-old college grad distracted from working on his novel? Oh no! And there is a cloying quality to his repeated insistence that he is too pure, too talented to do the work of a tabloid reporter. Many of us who make a life in journalism have done as bad or worse, without ever expensing our drinks.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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      Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted, Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82

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      Sly Stone, the influential, eccentric and preternaturally rhythmic singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose run of hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s with his band the Family Stone could be dance anthems, political documents or both, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 82. The cause was “a prolonged battle with C.O.P.D.,” or lung disease, “and other underlying health issues,” according to a statement from his representatives.“Sly was a monumental figure, a groundbreaking innovator, and a true pioneer who redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” the statement said.As the colorful maestro and mastermind of a multiracial, mixed-gender band, Mr. Stone experimented with the R&B, soul and gospel music he was raised on in the San Francisco area, mixing classic ingredients of Black music with progressive funk and the burgeoning freedoms of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll.The band’s most recognizable songs, many of which would be sampled by hip-hop artists, include “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Family Affair,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”Mr. Stone, second from left, with the other members of Sly and the Family Stone in 1970.GAB Archive/RedfernsWe 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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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Ex-Girlfriend to Resume Testimony About Sex Under Duress

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      The woman, known in court as Jane, has testified that she felt obligated to participate in sex marathons with male escorts because the mogul was paying her rent.A former girlfriend of Sean Combs is set to retake the stand on Monday at his federal trial to continue her testimony about a series of sex marathons with male prostitutes, which she said she felt pressured to continue because Mr. Combs was funding her livelihood.As the trial enters its fifth week, prosecutors are expected to drill down on a key part of their sex-trafficking case: allegations of financial coercion.The former girlfriend, who is known in court by the pseudonym Jane, spent more than seven hours last week testifying about her tumultuous relationship with the music mogul, which started in 2021 and continued until his arrest in 2024. Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, and his lawyers have denied that the sex at the center of the case was ever coercive.Jane testified last week that in an effort to fulfill her boyfriend’s fantasies, she began to participate in drug-fueled sexual encounters with a succession of hired men that the couple called “debauchery” or “hotel nights.” Her account of the sex marathons — which could last for days and typically involved Mr. Combs watching and masturbating — aligned with the “freak-offs” described by Casandra Ventura, another former girlfriend who testified at the start of the case.The pattern of “hotel nights” left Jane feeling used, exhausted and at times sick, she testified. But Mr. Combs was dismissive when she voiced her reluctance, she said, and she continued out of a desire to please him. At times, she arranged to hire certain “entertainers” herself so she could choose the men involved, she testified.The dynamic shifted in 2023, when Mr. Combs began paying her $10,000-a-month rent. Jane said she feared losing her home if she did not comply.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