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      Ye Spends a Second Week at No. 1 With ‘Vultures 1’

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      The rapper once known as Kanye West’s collaborative album with Ty Dolla Sign repeats at the top of the Billboard 200, narrowly defeating an LP from Yeat.Ye, the rapper and provocateur formerly known as Kanye West, has the No. 1 album for a second week with “Vultures 1,” narrowly beating out a new release from the Oregon rapper Yeat.“Vultures 1,” a joint LP with the singer Ty Dolla Sign, holds the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 75,000 sales in the United States, including 95 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.A year and a half ago, the always-controversial Ye became radioactive in the music industry after a series of antisemitic remarks that left him without a major-label record deal or a booking agent. (Late last year, he apologized in a social media post — written in Hebrew — just days after giving a rambling rant that included accusations against Zionists and “the Rothschilds.”)Now Ye is trying to make a comeback, and it may be working. He released “Vultures 1” independently and promoted the album with a pair of well-attended listening events at arenas in Chicago and Long Island. It is Ye’s first album to spend more than a single week at No. 1 since “Watch the Throne,” a joint LP with Jay-Z, which logged two straight weeks in the summer of 2011. According to an estimate computed by Billboard, “Vultures 1” earned about $1 million in its first week from sales and streams in the United States alone.Yeat opens at No. 2 with “2093,” his fourth studio album, which had the equivalent of 70,000 sales, including 79 million streams and 12,000 traditional sales. The album, which features guest appearances by Future and Lil Wayne, was helped by the release of two deluxe versions, one of them adding a track featuring Drake.Also this week, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 3, Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 4 and SZA’s “SOS” is in fifth place. More

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      ‘Peetah’ Morgan of Reggae Band Morgan Heritage Dies at 46

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      Known as “Peetah,” he and other children of the singer Denroy Morgan formed the group Morgan Heritage in the 1990s.Peter Anthony Morgan, the lead singer of the reggae band Morgan Heritage, a Grammy Award-winning group that was formed by children of the singer Denroy Morgan and came to be known for its varied influences and tight vocal harmonies, died on Sunday.He was 46, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Morgan’s family confirmed his death in a statement on the band’s social media platforms. The statement did not mention his age or provide a cause of death.Mr. Morgan, known as “Peetah,” started Morgan Heritage with seven of his siblings in the 1994. The band later became a quintet.For some early albums, including “Protect Us Jah” (1997) and “Don’t Haffi Dread” (1999), Morgan Heritage worked with Bobby Digital, one of Jamaica’s most influential producers. Before a show at New York City’s Irving Plaza in 1999, a New York Times music critic wrote that the band “holds on to the 1970s reggae traditions of harmony singing and thoughtful messages.”But Morgan Heritage was more than a throwback to an older era of reggae. AllMusic.com described its sound as a blend of “elements of roots reggae, lovers rock, soul, R&B, calypso, gospel, dub, and on occasion, funk and dancehall.”Several Morgan Heritage albums had deep runs on the Billboard reggae charts. One of them, “Strictly Roots” won for best reggae album of the year at the 2015 Grammy Awards. The band’s album “Avrakedabra” was up for the same award two years later, but lost out to “Stony Hill” by Damian Marley, a son of Bob Marley.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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      Lee Hoyang, Prolific K-Pop Producer and Songwriter, Dies at 40

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      Professionally known as Shinsadong Tiger, he created the upbeat, catchy and danceable musical style that defined K-pop in the early 2010s.Lee Hoyang, a prolific producer and songwriter of South Korean pop music who was professionally known as Shinsadong Tiger and who helped create some of the biggest K-pop hits of the 2010s, died in Seoul on Friday. He was 40.His management agency confirmed his death in a statement. It did not mention the cause of death, but said that a private funeral was being held in Seoul. The agency, TR Entertainment, did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A police detective in Seoul also confirmed Mr. Lee’s death, but would not disclose further details. Mr. Lee was often credited with shaping the musical style that defined K-pop in the early 2010s: catchy, upbeat and repetitive with a strong hook. He produced many commercially successful songs throughout the decade, mostly for young female artists. Among the hits were “Roly-Poly” and “Bo Peep Bo Peep,” both by T-ara; “NoNoNo” by Apink; and “Bubble Pop!” by HyunA.“He created an exciting, funky, beat-driven K-pop style that continues to be repeated over and over again,” said Do Heon Kim, a pop music critic in South Korea. “There is no place where his influence hasn’t been felt.”Mr. Lee was born on June 3, 1983, in Pohang, a city on South Korea’s southeastern coast. With no formal music education, he immersed himself in music starting in middle school, when he played in a band and remixed songs with his friends, he said in an interview in 2011.He debuted as a songwriter in 2004, when he produced a song called “Man and Woman” for the South Korean pop band the Jadu, he said. The song, which had a pulse of Brazilian bossa nova, was released in 2005.Mr. Lee’s career took a downturn in the late 2010s as his music came to be increasingly regarded as repetitive and he was faced with plagiarism accusations, which he denied, Mr. Kim said. The songwriter focused more of his energy on producing and helped form the girl groups EXID, which debuted in 2012, and Tri.be, which debuted in 2021.Jin Yu Young More

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      Lise Davidsen Stars in ‘Forza’ at the Met Opera

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      The singer, best known in the works of Wagner and Strauss, is starring in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.”Lise Davidsen, who grew up in Norway playing sports and considering a future in songwriting, didn’t see Italian opera onstage until she was working on her master’s degree as a budding soprano in Copenhagen.During her studies at the Royal Opera Academy a decade ago, she took in the classics: Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca,” Verdi’s “Macbeth.” But she watched them without any thought that she would one day sing their famous roles.They were still not on her mind when, after skyrocketing to stardom with a lightning-bright sound and power perfectly suited for the works of Wagner and Strauss, she debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2019, in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.”On Monday, though, Davidsen, 37, will star in the Met’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.” And next season, she will sing the title role in “Tosca.” Suddenly, she has entered the world of Italian opera, taking on vastly different roles by two of its greatest composers.“I had to work harder to convince the houses that I could even do Verdi and the Italian repertoire,” Davidsen said in an interview. “But vocally, I am quite ready.”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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      Olivia Rodrigo Guts World Tour: Testing Out Life After Girlhood

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      The opening night of the pop star’s Guts World Tour had sparkle and abandon, but making her songs feel big didn’t require much besides the songs themselves.As a pop star, Olivia Rodrigo wields a rather unusual arsenal of weapons. She is an acute writer and an un-self-conscious singer. She largely abhors artifice. She is modest, not salacious. In just three years, she has achieved something approaching stratospheric fame — a four-times platinum debut album and a Grammy for best new artist — while somehow remaining an underdog.But the weapon she returns to again and again is a very pointed and versatile curse word, one that she used to vivid effect on both her 2020 breakout hit, “Drivers License,” the first single from her debut album, “Sour,” and also on “Vampire,” the Grammy-nominated single from her second album, “Guts,” released last year. It’s in plenty of other places, too, giving her anguished entreaties an extra splash of zest. She wants to make it clear that underneath her composed exterior, she’s boiling over.On Friday night at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif., during the opening performance of the Guts World Tour, Rodrigo couldn’t get enough of that word. She used it for emphasis, to connote dismissiveness and to demonstrate exasperation. But mostly she used it casually, in between-song banter, not because she needed to, but because using it felt like getting away with something.Much of Rodrigo’s music — especially “Guts,” with its detailed and delirious ruminations about new fame and its discontents — is about how it feels to act bad after being told how important it is to be good. It’s situated at the juncture where freedom is just about to give way to misbehavior.Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed.OK McCausland for The New York TimesThis was true of her performance as well, which brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between. Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed. She led a reverent 11,000-person crowd — a sizable leap from the theaters she played on her first tour — in singalongs that were churchlike and raucous, but never rowdy.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: A Musician’s Portrait, as Both Composer and Pianist

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      At the Miller Theater at Columbia University, the composer Amy Williams joined the JACK Quartet in playing her chamber music.Whether as a composer or as a pianist, Amy Williams is first and foremost, in her heart of hearts, a chamber musician.“Chamber music is my love when it comes to music, as a listener and performer,” she said in an onstage interview during a Composer Portraits concert devoted to her work at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday evening.Miller’s composer portraits tend to focus on pieces for small groups, and therefore represent some artists more fully than others. Williams, born in 1969 and now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, has, in her relatively tight body of work, written little but small-group pieces. Many of them involve the piano, which brought her to Thursday’s concert as a performer, too, and gave the audience another crucial facet of her musical life. (She is the longtime half, with Helena Bugallo, of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo.)The four pieces on the program at Miller were for combinations of piano and strings, and featured the JACK Quartet, which performed on its own, as part of a piano quintet and with two of its members joining Williams in a trio.Williams and JACK — the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, the violist John Pickford Richards and the cellist Jay Campbell — have collaborated for over a decade and form a happy partnership. The quartet has the pristine clarity to execute all the challenges Williams calls for: the supersoft passages and tight coordination; the complex, exposed unison rhythms; the variety of touch among the four players; and a mood both easygoing and changeable.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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      The Ultimate Hurray for the Riff Raff Primer

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      Listen to Alynda Segarra’s catalog as their latest album, “The Past Is Still Alive,” arrives.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last week, I published a profile of the 36-year-old singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, who makes spirited and defiant music under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff.* Their ninth LP, “The Past Is Still Alive,” comes out today, and though 2024 is still young, it’s an early contender for my favorite album of the year.Yes, I did say ninth album, which means that Segarra has quite the back catalog. Today’s playlist can serve either as an introduction to Hurray for the Riff Raff or, if you’re already familiar with them, a mix that places their new songs in rich conversation with what’s come before.Segarra grew up in the Bronx and left home just after turning 17, eventually ending up busking in a street band in New Orleans and riding freight trains during the hottest Louisiana months. Playing in communal spaces and collaborating with other musicians, they developed a repertoire of Appalachian folk, Delta blues and classic country, with the requisite Tom Waits song thrown in.By 2014, on the breakout album “Small Town Heroes,” Segarra had found their own unique voice as a songwriter who was able to adapt traditional forms to speak to present concerns. This playlist’s leadoff track, “The Body Electric,” is a perfect example: Sparsely arranged and sung with conviction, it is a kind of revisionist murder ballad that questions that genre’s history of violence against marginalized people. “He shot her down, he put her body in the river,” Segarra sings of the doomed Delia Green, before offering a line that would come to define the political motivation of subsequent HFRR albums: “He covered her up, but I went to get her.”Over the past decade, Segarra has released a consistently strong run of albums that update traditional folk music to consider modern scourges like gentrification (on the epic 2017 album “The Navigator”) and climate change (on the elegiac 2022 release “Life on Earth”).But “The Past Is Still Alive” is something else: a memoir, a travelogue, a loose campfire singalong. These songs have the sort of direct, plain-spoken confidence that comes with age. On “The Navigator,” Segarra created a protagonist named Navina and built a whole alternate universe in order to tell a story that had parallels to their own. Here, Segarra is narrating their own experiences, etching their own story into the American songbook, and asserting that they belong there.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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      SZA’s ‘Saturn,’ and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Rhiannon Giddens, Norah Jones, Les Amazones d’Afrique 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 sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.SZA, ‘Saturn’The song SZA introduced in a commercial during the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and released to streaming services in multiple versions; one, the sped-up version, brings out its clear pop structure. But the real-time version is better. The song is about a longing for the better place that her karma has earned: “Stuck in this paradigm/Don’t believe in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer around her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal lines argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, looking beyond Earth and insisting, “There’s got to be more.” JON PARELESLes Amazones d’Afrique, ‘Musow Danse’“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title track of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to dance floors. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and traditional drumming; it features Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the chorus, “Rise up African woman!” PARELESA.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’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