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      Twice’s ‘With You-th’ Tops the Billboard Chart

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      The act’s six-song EP “With You-th” debuts at No. 1, while Morgan Wallen celebrates a year of “One Thing at a Time” by hitting the No. 2 spot.The nine-woman K-pop group Twice leads the Billboard album chart for the first time this week with its latest mini-LP, thanks to collectible CD and vinyl sales, while Morgan Wallen marks a full year of blockbuster streaming numbers.Twice’s “With You-th,” a six-song EP, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 95,000 sales in the United States. The vast majority of its consumption — 90,000 copies — was through purchases of physical copies, which included 14 collectible variations on CD and three vinyl LP versions, according to the tracking service Luminate.“With You-th” also garnered 6.3 million streams, the lowest streaming total for a No. 1 album in almost five years, since Celine Dion’s “Courage” opened with 3.9 million in 2019 — a period when sales “bundles” helped albums top the charts by including the music with purchases of concert tickets or merchandise. (After an industry uproar, Billboard tweaked its rules to rein in the practice.)Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” rises one spot to No. 2 in its 52nd week on the chart, with the equivalent of 67,000 sales. Since it came out a year ago, Wallen’s album has remained remarkably popular, holding at No. 1 for a total of 18 weeks and never dipping below No. 6 on the all-genre album chart — and even then, only hitting that low point two times.Week after week, “One Thing” has been a streaming champion, logging a total of 8.3 billion streams since it came out. Even after a full year, each of the album’s 36 tracks is clicked an average of more than two million times on streaming services weekly — by comparison, the six songs on the brand-new Twice album had an average of a little over one million streams apiece.Also this week, “Vultures 1,” by Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Ty Dolla Sign falls to No. 3 after two weeks at the top, while Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 4 and SZA’s “SOS” is in fifth place. More

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      Composer, Uninterrupted: Christian Wolff at 90

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      Wolff, the last representative of the New York School that included John Cage and Morton Feldman, will celebrate his birthday with a concert at Judson Memorial Church.If artistic stature worked by osmosis, Christian Wolff could claim greatness based on that alone. “My father met Brahms,” he said, easing into conversation at a sturdy wooden table in the dining room of his Hanover, N.H., home. That meeting was in 1896, when Brahms was in Bonn, Germany, for Clara Schumann’s funeral. Wolff’s father was 6 or 7.Wolff’s grandfather, a violinist, conductor and professor, knew Brahms personally and professionally, he said. His great-grandfather, also a conductor, was a supporter of Robert Schumann. “And my great-great-grandfather was a champion of Beethoven’s, so there is something back there” he added, laughing at the implications of such a heritage.Wolff, who turns 90 on Friday, is associated with a different pantheon. He is the last living representative of what’s known as the New York School of composition, a group that included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor. Their tight-knit circle shifted midcentury American music away from classic European models. And it radiated out, intersecting with other arts and artists who were making New York a leading center of modernism: the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the poet John Ashbery, the painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and many others.New York School days: Christian Wolff, the dancer Viola Farber and John Cage at the marathon performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations” at the Pocket Theater in the East Village in 1963.Larry Morris/The New York TimesWolff only lived in New York City for just under 20 years. Even so, he retains historical and aesthetic ties to it. Accordingly, he’ll be in town this weekend for a series of events celebrating his birthday at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. On Saturday, a multigenerational group of friends and acolytes will present works spanning his career, including a new piece Wolff composed for the occasion.The location is auspicious. Judson Memorial Church, a hotbed of experimental art and dance in the 1950s and ’60s, is just blocks away from the site of the Washington Square tenement where Wolff’s family settled after fleeing wartime Europe. It was there that his parents, Kurt and Helen Wolff, established Pantheon Books, which published Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Paul Valéry, as well as the first English translation of the “I Ching.”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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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis in Close-Up at Jazz Concerts

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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis, recent pioneers at the Metropolitan Opera, returned to earlier works in a pair of performances over the weekend.In the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which just had an acclaimed revival in the New York City Center Encores! series, Jelly Roll Morton, a pianist and composer who claims he invented jazz, pays for his hubris. But while the show occasionally excoriates him, its fictionalized tale revels in his real-world achievements.On Saturday, during the final weekend of the run, Nicholas Christopher summoned wave after wave of electricity as Morton — not only during the song and dance numbers, but also during scenes in which he managed to create an affecting portrait of a figure who needed to hustle to receive his due credit.Morton’s biography resonated in two other concerts presented in New York on Friday and Saturday. These performances likewise featured the music of composers who have cut significant profiles in jazz, but with a privilege never afforded to Morton: Their works have made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Met, where it will be revived in April. At Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday, he began a two-night retrospective with a program that delved into his early experiences playing with Art Blakey as well as his later work scoring films for Spike Lee.Then, at the NYU Skirball on Saturday, some early, sizzling early chamber music by Anthony Davis — whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” arrived at the Met last fall — received a rare airing from the International Contemporary Ensemble in a performance that also featured Davis playing some ferociously elegant solo piano.With their Met premieres, Blanchard and Davis have attained a status for Black jazz artists that would have made Morton, an opera lover, envious. But as these concerts demonstrated, there is much more in each composer’s catalog for audiences to mine.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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      Disgraced but Embraced: Pop Culture Pariahs Are Making Big Comebacks

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      Shane Gillis hosted “S.N.L.,” the show that rebuffed him. Ye topped the Billboard chart after making antisemitic remarks. Has the mainstream given up on banishing bad actors?Last weekend, the comedian Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live,” five years after he was fired from the show before ever appearing on it, when old podcast appearances in which he’d used slurs were brought to light. During his opening monologue, Gillis showed how he had evolved since then, which is to say, only slightly. In a tame bit about his parents, he fondly recalled spending time with his mother when he was younger, noting sweetly, “Every little boy is just their mom’s gay best friend.”For the past two weeks, Ye — formerly Kanye West — has sat at the top of the Billboard albums chart with “Vultures 1,” his collaborative album with the singer Ty Dolla Sign. In late 2022, Ye began a public stream of antisemitic invective that, for a while, effectively imploded his career, leading to the dissolution of his partnerships with Adidas and the Gap. He seemed, for a time, persona non grata. But he, too, has returned to something approaching old form, with a single, “Carnival,” that went to No. 3 on the Hot 100, and a series of arena listening sessions that have been the hallmark of his album rollouts in recent years.Ye debuted his latest album, a collaboration with Ty Dolla Sign, at a series of arena listening events.The New York TimesCancellation was always an incomplete concept, more a way of talking about artists with contentious and offensive personal histories than an actual fact of the marketplace. Except in the most extreme cases, moral failure has never been an automatic disqualifier when it comes to artistic work.What changed in the years since the beginning of the #MeToo movement is the presumption that strong enough discursive pushback might indeed lead to actual banishment. That proved to be true in the wake of #MeToo, in which powerful men like Charlie Rose, Bryan Singer and Matt Lauer were effectively cast out of public life after allegations of sexual misconduct. (And it should be noted: Most of those facing banishment, or the threat thereof, have been men. Roseanne Barr is perhaps the most high-profile woman to meet that fate, following racist and antisemitic public statements.)The sense that bad actors could be weeded out at the root was satisfying liberal fantasy, though. What’s happened instead is the emergence of a class of artists across disciplines — call them the disgraced — who have found ways to thrive despite pockets of public pushback. Their success suggests several possibilities about cultural consumption: Audiences that don’t care about an artist’s indiscretions can be more sizable than the ones that do; those who publicly agitate on these matters might be privately relenting; or that perhaps some audiences may have a tolerance — or maybe even an appetite — for offense.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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      11 Essential Kim Gordon Songs

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      Hear her latest work and enduring classics from Sonic Youth and beyond.Molly Matalon for The New York TimesDear listeners,Recently, I had the honor of interviewing Kim Gordon, the legendary co-founder of the now-defunct alt-rock pioneers Sonic Youth, who has lately become a formidable and fearless solo artist. As I prepared to write this profile, I revisited her great 2015 memoir “Girl in a Band”* and listened repeatedly to a playlist featuring some of my favorite Gordon songs, which I’m going to share with you today.Gordon is at heart a California girl — “too young to be a hippie but brushed by whatever rebellion and amped-up freedom there was in the air,” as she put it in her book. Art school brought her east, and the allure of late-1970s New York eventually introduced her to a downtown scene in which anyone, even non-musicians, could pick up an instrument and start a band. Intoxicated by that D.I.Y. ethos, Sonic Youth formed in 1981 and, improbably, kept putting out great, challenging and singularly influential records for the next 30 years.The band broke up in 2011, shortly after Gordon announced that she and her bandmate Thurston Moore were divorcing after 27 years of marriage. Gordon has been admirably candid about her anger and sadness in the wake of that split, but the woman I encountered in our series of interviews was long past all of that now, deep in a new chapter of life and art.Today’s playlist highlights some of Gordon’s recent work — especially the brash, wild singles from her second solo album, “The Collective,” which comes out March 8 — and contrasts it with some of her enduring classics.I try to keep Amplifier playlists relatively short, but this one proved quite a challenge: Given Sonic Youth’s three-decade run and remarkably dense discography (not to mention Gordon’s work in other bands like the improvisational duo Body/Head) this mix easily could have been 50 or 60 songs long. So consider this not a completist collection of Gordon’s music, but merely a tantalizing and deliciously distorted sampler.Bettin’ on the bullllll in the heather,Lindsay*Though I read “Girl in a Band” when it first came out, this time around I listened to the audiobook — an experience I highly recommend since Gordon reads it herself, in her inimitable deadpan. As her friend Kathleen Hanna marveled when I interviewed her for the profile, “She has that voice when she talks to you, in normal.”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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      St. Vincent Channels Nine Inch Nails, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Cardi B, Mdou Moctar, T Bone Burnett 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.St. Vincent, ‘Broken Man’“I can hold my arms wide open/but I need you to drive the nail,” St. Vincent — the songwriter and guitarist Annie Clark — sings in “Broken Man.” It’s a volcanic buildup of a song, from the sparsest ticking electronics to a hard-rock stomp to a full-scale pileup of guitars, drums and horns. Clark sings about power, defiance, abject need and imminent breakdown, riding an onslaught of a song that lives up to the title of her album due in April: “All Born Screaming.” JON PARELESMdou Moctar, ‘Funeral for Justice’Over a hurtling beat and a chain of frantic, trilling, overdriven guitar riffs, the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar insists that African leaders should work together and push back against foreign interests, to “Retake control of your resource-rich countries.” The band couldn’t sound more urgent. PARELESPharrell Williams and Miley Cyrus, ‘Doctor (Work It Out)’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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      Review: Jews Flee to China in New York Philharmonic’s ‘Émigré’

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      “Émigré,” a bland oratorio about brothers who flee to China to escape Nazi persecution, was given its American premiere by the New York Philharmonic.In Handel’s oratorio “Israel in Egypt,” which the New York Philharmonic performed in October, Jews are living in captivity across the Red Sea from their ancient homeland. In “Émigré,” a new oratorio that was given its American premiere by the Philharmonic on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, they’ve gone a lot farther: to Shanghai, where thousands fled Nazi persecution.Few milieus could be as seductively dramatic as that Chinese city in the 1930s, with its cosmopolitan glamour and wartime danger. But “Émigré” evokes none of this theatrical allure, failing to grab the ear or the heart.With music by Aaron Zigman (known primarily for films like “The Notebook” and “Sex and the City”) and a libretto by Mark Campbell with contributions by Brock Walsh, the piece sketches the historical situation through the story of two German Jewish brothers who settle in Shanghai, which was appealing for its open immigration policies. One of the brothers falls in love with a Chinese woman; her father and the other brother object to the match; amid the violence of the Japanese occupation, tragedy ensues.It’s a promisingly sturdy plot. But the 95-minute score is so blandly cloying, the rhymed-couplets text so stiff and the characters so cardboard, that not a moment ends up surprising or moving.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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      Review: The Met Opera’s ‘Turandot’ Returns With a Strong Debut

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      In a revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s lavish production, the conductor Oksana Lyniv led a performance that transcended the gilded stage dressing.Puccini’s “Turandot,” a verismo opera set in a fabled version of ancient China, makes for an odd love story. Its unlikable romantic leads go largely unfazed by the death and dismemberment they instigate; when they finally share true love’s kiss, they’re standing atop a figurative pile of corpses.On Wednesday at the Metropolitan Opera, the conductor Oksana Lyniv made a strong debut, emphasizing the murderous, life-or-death stakes instead of the fairy-tale Orientalism that has made it a cultural lightning rod in recent years.“Turandot” has been on the receiving end of calls for revision and more for the stereotypes it perpetuates about Chinese people — such as its “dragon lady” title princess — recalling an imperialistic era of European chauvinism.The reckoning around “Turandot” creates a problem for the Met, because the company’s long-running production, a lavish spectacle introduced by the director Franco Zeffirelli in 1987, is a hit. The gold-and-ecru throne room of Act II still dazzles, and eye-popping exoticism runs rampant, with acrobats, ribbon dancers, curled-roof pavilions and a dragon puppet.But that stage dressing was not present in Lyniv’s exciting conducting. The brass stabs that open Act I had an almost expressionistic quality — severe, vital, grim — and the ones that closed it were cold, powerful and withholding. Taut strings and slinky woodwinds moved with dramatic, serpentine efficiency. Lyniv seized opportunities to foreground astringent harmonies.Turandot’s motif, which Puccini based on a Chinese folk song, was splendid without being decorative in Act I, and warmly earthy in Act III after the princess had been humbled. Lyniv’s sense of rubato created just enough elasticity for the singers to phrase naturally, as in the ministers’ dreamily nostalgic “Ho una casa nell’Honan.”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