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      Review: An Unexpectedly Relevant Oratorio at the Philharmonic

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      Planned over a year ago, Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” was presented while the Israel-Hamas war unfolds in the Middle East.Handel is not a composer typically associated with controversy, but the New York Philharmonic found itself entering a difficult public discourse with its performances of the oratorio “Israel in Egypt” this week at David Geffen Hall.As thousands have died in the Israel-Hamas war, and as the conflict has inflamed tensions around the world, Cambridge University’s opera society has canceled a performance of Handel’s “Saul,” which depicts the Israelite David’s victory over the Philistine Goliath. That is the oratorio Handel wrote before “Israel in Egypt,” about a powerless people fleeing the subjugation of an oppressive state.“Israel in Egypt” is less dramatic than “Saul,” and for its concerts, the Philharmonic opted for a program note. In it, the organization’s leadership clarified that this week’s performances were planned more than a year ago and added, “What we could not have anticipated is recent world events, making the timing of this program particularly relevant.”The oratorio’s tale could have been a source of empathy and catharsis for audiences, but that’s not exactly the piece Handel wrote. For those familiar with “Messiah,” Handel’s other English-language oratorio that lifts its text from Scripture, “Israel in Egypt” is an oddity. Written almost entirely for choral forces, with few showpieces for the soloists, it narrates the Jewish exodus that Moses led from Egypt. To modern ears, the text painting of the 10 plagues is so lightweight that it verges on silliness: The orchestra leaps to depict frogs, buzzes for flies and thumps for hailstones.Still, the melancholy-saturated lamentation that opens the piece, and the triumphant choruses that close it, adds substance. And on Wednesday, the conductor and Baroque specialist Jeannette Sorrell led a sonorous performance, drawing captivating singing from the choristers of Apollo’s Fire and intermittently inspiring the Philharmonic’s players to embrace fleeter, Handelian style on their modern instruments.The Apollo’s Fire chorus, a gem of an ensemble, anchored the evening with a beguiling sound. In the big, unified moments, the voice parts stacked atop one another in pellucid columns. Tricky double choruses and fugues had a lucent, weightless, nimble quality.Sorrell’s brisk adaptation trims the score to roughly 80 minutes, which offset the orchestra’s occasionally slackened energy. She wisely reinstated the intensely emotional, sometimes cut lamentation (a decision she also made on a recently released recording with Apollo’s Fire). With a theatrical flourish, she cut short the Exodus section so that it concluded with a thrilling depiction of Pharaoh’s army drowning in the Red Sea.Among the vocal soloists, Amanda Forsythe demonstrated a limpid soprano in “Thou didst blow,” and Edward Vogel showed a rather appealing, midweight baritone in his insertion aria, “To God our strength” (aided by Christopher Martin’s dignified trumpet solo). The tenor Jacob Perry and the soprano Sonya Headlam filled their music with character, and the countertenor Cody Bowers sang with a beautifully shaped tone and enthusiasm to spare.Handel devoted much of the final section, “Moses’ Song,” to a triumphant account of the Red Sea’s parting. In “The depths have covered them,” the strings were as broad and far-reaching as the water’s surface. In the score and the story it recounts, the moment is a deus ex machina. Today, though, we do not live in a time of miracles.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Mr Eazi’s Anthem of Gratitude, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Silvana Estrada, Old Dominion, Nadine Shah and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.​​Mr Eazi featuring Soweto Gospel Choir, ‘Exit’Mr Eazi — born in Nigeria and long based in Ghana — has been releasing singles and mixtapes for a decade, becoming one of Africa’s major hitmakers. But he considers his new album, “The Evil Genius,” his official studio debut, tracing a narrative that reaches its finale with “Exit.” The track, produced by the Nigerian studio mastermind Kel-P, merges Nigerian Afrobeats and South African gospel, as Mr Eazi sings about how the paranoia of success — “I’ve seen things go bad/When my family turns to demons around me” — gets overcome by gratitude and faith. The Soweto Gospel Choir harmonizes with worshipful, call-and-response thank yous. JON PARELESNadine Shah, ‘Topless Mother’Loud guitars over a pounding Bo Diddley beat propel Nadine Shah’s vocals through “Topless Mother,” a burst of determined, free-associative, syllabically perfect semi-sequiturs. “I told you all/That I have heard,” she sing-chants. “And do you promise not to breathe a word.” She also blurts out three-syllable rhymes: “Sinatra, Viagra, iguana.” Both words and music are all about brusque momentum and a determination to connect. PARELESFlyte featuring Laura Marling, ‘Tough Love’“This could be real — tough love,” the not-exactly folky duo Flyte sings, in a track from its self-titled new album that starts out with typical folk-rock strumming and harmonies and grows into an avalanche. Will Taylor and Nick Hill sing about self-contradictory behavior — “How do we start healing if we can’t keep out the dark” — while the track swells in a giant crescendo. An intimate conflict becomes an existential struggle. PARELESSilvana Estrada, ‘Qué Problema’The problem in “Qué Problema” (“What a Problem”) is a rapturous infatuation, verging on the mystical, that may never be fulfilled. “Your skin has the color of time,” sings the Mexican songwriter Silvana Estrada. “When you smile, the wind stumbles.” A swaying, flickering rhythm, with a six-beat undercurrent that’s sometimes only implied, carries a vocal that radiates affection, no matter how things turn out. PARELESLulu. featuring the Joy, ‘Yesterdays’Lulu. — a Nigerian-British songwriter, Lulu Ayodele, who’s unlikely to be confused with the 1960s Scottish hitmaker Lulu — works her way from self-doubt to cautious optimism in “Yesterdays.” She sings, “I know I’m changing/I know there is beauty where pain is.” Subdued Afrobeats percussion and diffident guitar picking captures her uncertainty, but the Joy — a South African vocal group, singing in English and Zulu — coaxes her to move ahead, insisting, “Now I found a better place.” PARELESSheherazaad, ‘Mashoor’Sheherazaad, an Indian-American songwriter from San Francisco, draws on microtonal South Asian vocal inflections, Minimalism and hints of flamenco in “Mashoor” (“Fame”), which was produced by another South Asian hybridizer, Arooj Aftab. Singing in Hindi, accompanied only by a meditative classical guitar and hand percussion, Sheherazaad interrogates unearned fame, pondering, “Have you climbed too high?/Where is my reflection in the mirror?” PARELESOld Dominion, ‘Beautiful Sky’Smokey Robinson — who co-wrote “The Way You Do the Things You Do” — might appreciate “Beautiful Sky,” which hijacks standard honky-tonk images into self-pitying analogies for a failed romance: “The way you go to my head, you’d make a really good tequila/The way you’re always on, you’d make a damn good neon light.” Fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitars gather behind Old Dominion’s close-harmony vocals, and of course that “Beautiful Sky” feels blue. PARELESThe Third Mind featuring Jesse Sykes, ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’Dave Alvin from the Blasters, Victor Krummenacher and David Immerglück from Camper Van Beethoven and Michael Jerome from Better Than Ezra get together as the Third Mind to enjoy psychedelic jams. They found an ideal vehicle with “Sally Go Round the Roses,” the mysterious one-hit wonder by the Jaynetts, who sang, “The saddest thing in the whole wide world/is to see your baby with another girl.” The song has also been picked up by Grace Slick, Tim Buckley and the English folk-jazz group Pentangle. It’s a modal, Celtic-flavored tune, mostly a drone, and the Third Mind’s guitar colloquies connect it to Appalachia, the Byrds and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jesse Sykes’s vocals sound frayed and knowing; the guitars tease, probe, tangle and palpitate. PARELESHauschka, ‘Altruism’Volker Bertelmann, the composer who performs as Hauschka — and who won an Academy Award for the score of “All Quiet on the Western Front” — plays piano both on the keyboard and inside on the strings directly. He also uses a prepared piano, with damping and resonating objects on the strings, along with other acoustic and electronic sounds. In “Altruism,” from his new album “Philanthropy,” Hauschka layers terse little riffs and plinking, clanking, rattling tones into something like funk, with a marchlike melody emerging briefly before the track calmly disassembles itself. PARELESRoy Nathanson featuring Nick Hakim, ‘All the Bones Had Names’During the pandemic, the saxophonist, poet, educator and activist Roy Nathanson, 72, convened jam sessions in front of his Brooklyn home for 82 straight days with whichever musicians assembled on the sidewalk that evening. He has funneled the experience into “82 Days,” a scruffy and enchanting new record. “All the Bones Had Names” began with a poem, written when he was getting a somber drumbeat of news about death: of family members, close friends and essential workers living in the neighborhood. Over a droning electric bass and splatters from an un-fancy keyboard, Nathanson reads the poem while the vocalist Nick Hakim, his frequent musical partner, adds a smokescreen of ad-libs. “All the bones had names/no one claimed,” the poem begins. But by the end, Nathanson is refusing to see death as an endpoint. “The bones were stars,” he says, “that had yet/to be discovered.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJ.D. Allen, ‘The Knight of Swords’Since 2011, the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen has released an album a year, typically with a trio. But don’t confuse habit with stillness. His most recent LP, “This,” is Allen’s first full-on encounter with electronics, and it is the sound of a burly toned, bop-steeped saxophonist pushing beyond the familiar. On “The Knight of Swords,” two independent histories seem to circle each other, seeking common ground, as Allen’s spiraling, bittersweet blues meets the ghostly swell of Alex Bonney’s electronics. RUSSONELLOKevin Sun, ‘After Depths’The saxophonist Kevin Sun has been making his mark on the New York scene of late by way of studiousness and subtlety. Sun is not shy about his appreciation for Mark Turner, a shadow-dwelling tenor great one generation his senior, and one way to hear his double LP “The Depths of Memory” is as a callback to the sort of bendable postmodernism that Turner was playing with his Fly Trio back in the early 2000s (and that he’s continued making for ECM Records, in other formats). But Sun has something original going on, too: his own feeling of loose coil and terse freedom, and a personal approach to disrupting time. Leading a quintet here, Sun concludes the album with “After Depths,” a slow-motion action painting with a melody that could almost pass for spontaneous — if it weren’t being doubled with such precise imperfection by the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. RUSSONELLO More

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      Celine Dion ‘Siren Battles’ Prompt Complaints in New Zealand City

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      A subculture has developed among Pacific Islander communities based on who can blast music — often Ms. Dion’s songs — the loudest. Some call it too disruptive.Imagine it’s the middle of the night and you’re jolted awake by the crescendo of a Celine Dion song that is blasting out of loudspeakers affixed to moving cars or bicycles.For residents of Porirua, New Zealand, the scenario is not hypothetical. About a year ago, people there began gathering for so-called siren battles — a homegrown subculture in which members of Pacific Islander, or Pasifika, communities in New Zealand compete to see who can play music the loudest.Members of the “siren clubs” who organize the battles have described them as expressions of identity and community. But some residents say the events, which can run into the early morning hours and feature piercing frequencies, should be scaled back because they are far too loud and disruptive.The mayor and the City Council are under pressure to act; police officers are exploring alternative venues for the contests; and the controversy has caught the international news media’s attention. But there are no quick solutions or compromises in sight.Porirua, New Zealand, where people host noise competitions using mainly Celine Dion songs. The city’s valley topography carries the blaring music into communities uphill.Jill Ferry/Getty Images“At the moment, there’s no answer on how we’ll fix it,” Anita Baker, the mayor of Porirua, said in a telephone interview.She added that while some organized siren clubs have agreed to stop blasting music by 10 p.m., other “breakaway groups” have not.“We’re in a catch-22 at the moment, trying to work out who’s responsible — and each person blames the next person,” she added. “But the residents just want an answer, and they want some sleep.”Multiple efforts to reach siren club organizers were unsuccessful.The subculture was born about a decade ago in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and is often practiced by young men from the country’s Samoan, Tongan and other communities. During the pandemic, a so-called siren jam by a young South Auckland artist, Jawsh 685, became an international smash hit on TikTok.In Porirua, siren battles are usually held on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes people gather in a train station parking lot near the harbor to blare music from their cars or bicycles. Sometimes they cruise through the city.Practitioners say part of the pleasure of a siren battle is hand-wiring audio equipment to make the sound as loud and clear as possible, and that the gatherings are a positive social outlet.“That’s what we do to stay out of trouble,” Soni Taufa, the team leader of a siren club in Auckland called Noizy Boys, told an Auckland radio station last year.Ms. Baker said siren battles began in Porirua last year and were led by residents cheering on teams in the Rugby League World Cup. She said Celine Dion songs are a particular favorite, apparently because they are so high-pitched. (A publicist for Ms. Dion, a French Canadian vocalist who is best known for singing “My Heart Will Go On” and other ballads, did not respond to a request for comment.)Siren battles continued in Porirua after the rugby tournament ended in November, and they have prompted complaints ever since. Ms. Baker said that from October 2022 to March 2023, the City Council fielded 106 complaints.But Ms. Baker said there was nowhere in the city of about 61,000 people where the events could be held in a non-disruptive way. That is partly because Porirua lies north of Wellington, the capital, in a valley where the sound from siren battles carries easily up the hills into residential areas.The police have also received dozens of reports related to noise control violations — 40 since February, according to data provided by the national police headquarters in Wellington. The police said in an emailed statement that while siren battles are not illegal per se, some can be a public nuisance or a road policing offense.A representative for the City Council declined to comment, referring a reporter to a statement saying in part that the council “understands and sympathizes with the frustration” caused by the battles, and that it is “doing what it can to address the issue.”The police said that among other measures, sound testing was being completed at various locations around the city, and that the authorities were working with siren clubs to explore alternative venues for their sonic battles.Some residents are growing impatient, saying that the battles are keeping young children and seniors up at night — and destroying the quality of life in otherwise peaceful communities. A petition demanding that the City Council and the mayor take action against siren clubs had more than 300 signatures as of Friday evening.“Many, many people are being held to ransom because of their hobby,” said Gerie Harvey, 75, who now makes a point of wearing earplugs so she can sleep and closes her windows at night. “People are getting really fed up with it.” More

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      Kanye West and Adidas: How Misconduct Broke a Lucrative Partnership

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      A year ago, after producing hundreds of shoe styles and billions of dollars together, Adidas broke with Kanye West as he made antisemitic and other offensive public comments. But Adidas had been tolerating his misconduct behind the scenes for nearly a decade. B35309 2015 AQ4832 AQ2659 AQ4830 AQ4831 AQ4829 AQ4828 AQ4836 AQ2660 BB1839 AQ2661 BB5350 […] More

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      Inside Kanye West’s Fraught Relationship With Adidas: 7 Takeaways

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      The runaway success of the Yeezy collaboration between Kanye West and Adidas came at a price as the company tolerated misconduct by him for nearly a decade.When Adidas cut ties with Kanye West a year ago, ending their wildly lucrative shoe deal, the breakup appeared to be the culmination of weeks of his inflammatory remarks about Jews and Black Lives Matter. But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the partnership was fraught from the start.Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, subjected employees to antisemitic and crude sexual comments and routine verbal abuse. As Adidas executives doubled down on a partnership that boosted company profits and made Mr. West a billionaire, they scrambled for ways to cope with the star’s demands and provocations.Interviews with current and former employees of Adidas and of Mr. West, along with hundreds of previously undisclosed internal records, including contracts, text messages and financial documents, provide the fullest accounting yet of the relationship. Here are seven takeaways.For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past Mr. West’s misconduct as profits soared.Mr. West’s first contract with Adidas, in 2013, had the most generous terms it had ever offered to a non-athlete. In the next one, three years later, Mr. West got more money, and Adidas got a morals clause — allowing it to end the partnership if he did anything that led to “disrepute, contempt, scandal,” according to a copy obtained by The Times.As the partnership earned billions of dollars, Mr. West’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. But it is not clear whether the brand ever considered invoking the morals clause before terminating the deal last year.Both Adidas and Mr. West declined interview requests and did not comment on The Times’s findings.Mr. West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler in the partnership.Shortly after signing with Adidas, he met with designers at company headquarters in Germany to discuss ideas. He was so offended by their sketches, he drew a swastika on one, shocking employees.He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. He informed a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a seven-figure settlement to one of his own employees who accused him of repeatedly praising Hitler.Mr. West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda. He also expressed a belief that Jews had special powers allowing them to amass money and influence.He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace.Weeks before the swastika incident in 2013, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. He continued showing pornography to Adidas employees at work. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film.Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.Big demands and mood swings weighed on the relationship.Mr. West contended repeatedly that Adidas was exploiting him. He sought more money and power, even suggesting that he should become chief executive.His complaints were often delivered amid severe mood swings, creating whiplash for employees. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury. In 2019, he abruptly moved his Yeezy operation to remote Cody, Wyo., ordering the Adidas team to relocate. He used “terms like ‘believer’ and ‘pilgrimage’” to describe those who would follow him there, an Adidas executive told colleagues in a group text chain. In a meeting with Adidas’s leaders that year to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.Adidas adapted to Mr. West’s behavior: ‘We are in a code red.’Managers and top executives started the group text chain, the “Yzy hotline,” to address issues involving Mr. West.The Adidas team working on Yeezys adopted a strategy they likened to firefighting, rotating members on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist. “We are in a code red,” the team’s general manager texted colleagues in 2019. “The first line is completely exhausted and don’t feel supported.”The company assigned a human resources official to the unit and gave new hires a subscription to a meditation app. The staff regularly gathered for something akin to group therapy.Mr. West on tour in 2016, the year he and Adidas renegotiated their deal.A J Mast for The New York TimesAs the brand grew more reliant on Yeezys, it sweetened the deal for Mr. West.Under the 2016 contract, he received a 15 percent royalty on net sales, with $15 million upfront along with millions of dollars in company stock each year.The “biggest issue,” an Adidas document from contract negotiations noted, was “putting CASH in Kanye’s pocket to show him we VALUE him.” The partnership would propel him to Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people.And in 2019, Adidas agreed to another enticement: $100 million annually, officially for Yeezy marketing but, in practice, a fund that Mr. West could spend with little oversight.He still stands to make money from the Adidas deal.After the relationship ruptured a year ago and Yeezy sales came to a halt, both Adidas and Mr. West were hit hard. The company projected its first annual loss in decades. Mr. West’s net worth plummeted.But they had at least one more chance to keep making money together. In May, the company began releasing the remaining $1.3 billion worth of Yeezys. A cut of the proceeds would go to charity. But most of the revenue would go to Adidas, and Mr. West was entitled to royalties. More

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      A Britney Spears Book Tour: No TV, No Podcasts, Lots of Instagram

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      The singer, who has not given a face-to-face interview since 2018, has avoided traditional public appearances for “The Woman in Me,” which is still finding audiences.In the run-up to the release of his blockbuster autobiography earlier this year, Prince Harry sat down with “60 Minutes” — and “CBS Mornings,” “ABC News Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and others. Paris Hilton did “The View” and spoke with the BBC. Kerry Washington appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “Good Morning America.” Arnold Schwarzenegger opted for Kelly Clarkson and Howard Stern.But for Britney Spears, the endlessly sought after and speculated about pop star who released her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” this week, there was mostly Instagram.To gin up excitement about one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the year, there were prerelease excerpts in People magazine, but no face-to-face interviews, which Spears has avoided since 2018, when she was still in the conservatorship that strictly controlled her life and career. (In the book, Spears writes of mentioning the arrangement in a 2016 interview, only to have it edited out.)Now legally cleared to do and say what she pleases, however, Spears has held back, essentially throwing out the playbook for promoting a celebrity tell-all. The singer and her team are instead letting the book do the talking, with its gossipy nuggets and condemnations of the 13-year conservatorship feeding a steady churn of press coverage and social media chatter.Her reluctance to be interviewed, stemming in part from a distrust sowed by decades of insensitive coverage, does not seem to have affected early sales: The book reached No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list; complete sales data will not be available until next week. But the lack of any significant promotional or public appearances by Spears, 41, has been obvious to professionals in the worlds of publishing and public relations.In seeking a less public life, Spears has spoken about the constant attention of the paparazzi. Bauer-Griffin/GC Images, via Getty Images“This is completely out of the ordinary,” said Eleanor McManus, a former booking producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live” who now works as a crisis manager. McManus said she was watching TV on Monday morning to find out which shows would be teasing a conversation with Spears. “I was thinking, ‘Who got the first interview?’” she said, before realizing that the answer was “no one.”“The only time you recommend not doing interviews is if you can’t control what the subject would say, or if what he or she would say would damage their brand,” she added.But some experts suggest Spears’s robust social media following may be all she needs for a successful book launch. At a time when celebrity memoirs are booming, subjects may not need to engage with traditional media as they once did if they have a substantial audience of their own, said Madeleine Morel, an independent literary agent who represents ghostwriters.“The whole thing is about the size of your platform,” Morel said. “Can you bring an audience to a book?”Spears is indeed known for communicating these days almost exclusively through her free-associative and often cryptic social media posts. Her most significant commentary on “The Woman in Me” has come not in Vogue, with Oprah or even a cheeky appearance on “Saturday Night Live” but via social media, where she has shared messages about the book that were alternately grateful, scarred and conflicted to her more than 100 million followers across platforms.It’s not like the traditional media was not interested. Spears said in a since-deleted voice message posted to Instagram last year that after her conservatorship was terminated in late 2021, she had been approached by all manner of outlets.“I have offers to interviews with Oprah and so many people, lots and lots of money, but it’s insane,” she said. “I don’t want any of it.”A representative for Spears declined to comment and the memoir’s publisher, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, did not respond to requests for comment about their nontraditional strategy to secure promotion.So far, Spears’s traditional media engagement has been limited to the excerpts in People magazine — including the bombshell that Spears had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake — accompanied by emailed quotes attributed to the singer and a cover photo, which captured Spears smiling on a beach in Tahiti, sourced to “Britney Brands” rather than a photographer for the magazine.The publisher also helped to organize an international rerelease of the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears. That rollout has featured interviews by its director, Tamra Davis, who has generated her own wave of news tidbits about Spears.A scene from the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears.In Spears’s own recent comments on the book, she has chided the media for focusing on her past, though the memoir is essentially a retelling of her life story.“I don’t like the headlines I am reading … that’s exactly why I quit the business 4 years ago !!!,” she wrote on Instagram. “My motive for this book was not to harp on my past experiences which is what the press is doing and it’s dumb and silly !!! I have moved on since then !!!”She went on to briefly deactivate her account, only to return soon after with a picture of a cake that said “See you in hell.” On the book’s release day, she shared a single promotional post reading: “My story. On my terms. At last.” (She later deleted the post from Instagram.)Most celebrities with books to sell still combine more old-fashioned media appearances, like the “Today” show and the late-night circuit, with a dedicated social media strategy and newer, friendly outlets like the podcasts Armchair Expert and On Purpose With Jay Shetty, the lifecoach and influencer.The actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who released a memoir this month, did all of the above, plus more. Her deluge of media appearances even became the subject of a joke on “S.N.L.”“Sorry if I seem a little tired,” said the comedian Ego Nwodim, who played Pinkett Smith. “I’ve been on the ‘Today’ show 14 times in three days.”The writer Neil Strauss, who has worked on books with Mötley Crüe, Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson, said that celebrities could run the risk of making themselves bigger than the book with overexposure. “Sometimes by talking about it, you can only hurt it,” he said, adding that Spears “seems like she has a lot of trauma around the media.”In her memoir, Spears describes the press as having been unfairly focused on her body as a rising pop sensation and on her fitness as a mother during a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008 that ultimately led to her father, James P. Spears, being granted control of her personal life and finances.She wrote that she felt exploited in 2003, when her father and her management organized an interview with Diane Sawyer following her breakup with Timberlake. “It was completely humiliating,” Spears writes. “I wasn’t told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100 percent embarrassing.”Spears, left, in an interview with Diane Sawyer. The singer writes in her memoir that the conversation, which focused on her breakup with Justin Timberlake, was “humiliating.”ABCStrauss, the celebrity collaborator, said, “She’s just analyzed and scrutinized beyond the level that any human should have to be.” Still, he acknowledged, echoing others in the industry, it was “highly unusual” for someone of Spears’s stature to do no interviews. Even Bob Dylan, a notorious media antagonist for most of his career, promoted his memoir in 2004.Paul Bogaards, a veteran book publicist who has led campaigns for best-selling memoirs by Bill Clinton and Andre Agassi, said that the power of a celebrity speaking publicly about their book tends to be greater than the media mining it for a news story.“Once they’re out there in the world talking about their book, it becomes a 24-7 coverage-palooza,” Bogaards said, adding that most publishers required contractual agreements about promotion. “You want them to be visible in a significant way,” he added. “It’s hard to defend taking on a multimillion dollar advance in the absence of those kinds of agreements.” (Published figures put the price tag for Spears’s memoir, which was announced last year, between $12.5 million and $15 million.)Another major selling point for celebrity memoirs tends to be the subject’s own voice on the audiobook edition, but in this case, Spears has largely opted out as well. In a short introduction to the audiobook version of “The Woman in Me,” Spears said she had chosen to read only a short snippet of her 275-page book because the process of reliving its contents had been “heart-wrenching.” Apart from a minute and a half, the rest of the book’s five-plus hours is read by the actress Michelle Williams.Spears’s most loyal fans see no issue in her letting the work speak for itself. For years, the mantra for many supporters has been “leave Britney alone,” especially after the singer upbraided fans earlier this year for calling the police with concerns about her well-being when she temporarily deactivated her Instagram account. She voiced her objections again last month when another emergency call was made in response to a video of her dancing with what appeared to be kitchen knives. (Spears said they were props.)“A lot of the sentiment in the book are these instances where she was forced to do things against her will,” said Jordan Miller, the founder of the Spears fan site BreatheHeavy.com, which helped start the “Free Britney” campaign that brought more public attention to conservatorship.“It’s cool that she’s going in the opposite direction of what the status quo is in terms of conventional promotion,” he added. “It’s like, ‘Here are my words, you can read these. Here are the photos that I want you to see. I’m going to have approval of all of this.’ In the context of everything that’s gone on, that is super refreshing.”But a celebrity memoir with an eye-popping purchase price may need to reach more than just superfans in order to be seen as a phenomenon worth its investment, experts said.“It’s going to be a major release, but I think that they could be doing more to make it a real moment that sticks around,” said Anthony Bozza, an author who has written books with Slash, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.If not, he added, “You’re just going to be a blip in the cycle.” More

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      Hipgnosis Made Mega Deals for Song Catalogs. Its Future Is Unclear.

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      The company’s shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining its current structure.The future of Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the British company that helped kick off the music industry’s trend of top-dollar deals for artists’ song catalogs, is in question after its shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining the company’s current structure.Hipgnosis, founded by Merck Mercuriadis, a former manager of stars like Beyoncé and Elton John, was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 and pitched investors on music rights as a special kind of financial asset that is “more valuable than gold or oil.” Since then Hipgnosis, along with a sister fund backed by the private equity giant Blackstone, have spent more than $2 billion to acquire music catalogs from Neil Young, Shakira, Justin Bieber, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blondie and other artists and songwriters.But in recent months Hipgnosis has come under increasing pressure from dissatisfied investors who have seen the company’s share price drop in comparison to its so-called net asset value, an estimate of its catalogs’ worth prepared by an independent firm. Its share price closed at 74.20 pounds on Thursday, down about 43 percent from a high of 129.20 in November 2021. Its market capitalization is about $1.2 billion.The company also shocked investors last week by suspending its quarterly dividend, after saying that Citrin Cooperman, the independent firm that values its assets, had reduced the amount the company was expected to receive as a result of an industrywide royalty rate adjustment in the United States. Citrin Cooperman, the company said, had calculated that Hipgnosis would receive $21.7 million in retroactive payments, but recently reduced that to $9.9 million, and Hipgnosis said it had suspended the dividend payment — which had been announced at 1.3125 pence, or about 1.6 cents, per ordinary share — to remain compliant with its debt covenants.The global rise in interest rates has altered the calculus of many top-dollar catalog deals, but the investors in Hipgnosis have also grown concerned about the company’s management.“No investor ever knew that the fund was being managed so close to the edge that they were very close to tripping the debt covenant,” Sachin Saggar, a research analyst at Stifel, said in an interview.Hipgnosis recently proposed selling 29 catalogs for $440 million to the Blackstone-backed fund, which is managed by a company led by Mercuriadis. The proceeds were to help pay off Hipgnosis’ debt and buy back shares. But many investors balked, calling the price too low.At the company’s general meeting on Thursday, shareholders rejected the catalog sale and voted against maintaining the company’s structure as an investment trust, a decision that must be renewed every five years. According to an announcement by Hipgnosis, the company’s board now has six months to introduce proposals for future plans, which “may or may not involve winding-up the company or liquidating all or part of the company’s existing portfolio of investments.”The chairman, Andrew Sutch, and two other directors will leave the board.One possibility is that the assets could be sold to Hipgnosis Song Management, the advisory firm led by Mercuriadis, who has that right through an agreement known as a call option.In a statement on Thursday, Mercuriadis said: “Our conversations with shareholders have revealed a consensus that they are enthusiastic about the quality of the company’s iconic portfolio of songs, however it is also clear that they are asking for change and we respect that feedback.” More

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      Taylor Swift’s Rerecording of ’1989’ May Be Her Biggest Yet. Here’s Why.

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      The pop superstar’s new version of her 2014 blockbuster is due Friday, following a summer of media saturation and her 10th No. 1 hit.Taylor Swift’s “1989” has been a fixture in the Top 20 of Billboard’s album chart for months. Stuffed with some of the singer’s biggest pop hits, like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space,” the LP was a gargantuan hit when it was released in 2014, and this year Swift has been performing its songs on her record-breaking Eras Tour.But “1989” is about to make an all-but-certain plunge down the chart.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.That’s because on Friday, Swift will release “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the latest installment in her ambitious and wildly successful project to rerecord her first six studio albums. What began a few years ago as an attempt to reclaim her music — and, perhaps, have a taste of revenge — after the sale of her former record label has become a blockbuster enterprise all its own, with punishing consequences for the original recordings.“1989” will be the fourth of Swift’s remakes, and each one so far has opened at No. 1 with successively bigger numbers. In early 2021, “Fearless” started with the equivalent of 291,000 sales in the United States. “Red,” anchored by a smoldering, 10-minute extended version of the song “All Too Well,” had 605,000 later that year. “Speak Now” came out in July and started with 716,000 sales, including a remarkable 268,500 copies sold on vinyl LP.Each one has arrived with deluxe packaging, a rainbow of colored vinyl variants and a thick appendix of “vault” bonus tracks that have given fans abundant material to discuss and decode — not to mention well-timed batches of themed merchandise. Among the items Swift is selling at her online store are a sweater decorated with sea gulls (à la the new album cover), for $74.89, and a device like an old-fashioned View-Master, for $19.89.How big “1989” could be is anyone’s guess, and her label, Republic Records, declined to offer any projections. But given the trajectory of the previous remakes, the enduring popularity of the songs on the original album and Swift’s near-total saturation of popular culture this year — in just the past few weeks, she released a hit concert film, reached No. 1 with a four-year-old song and has nearly upstaged the N.F.L. through her relationship with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — the music industry is bracing for a monster debut, even in a year that has had major albums by Morgan Wallen, Drake, Olivia Rodrigo and Travis Scott.Swift has been stoking demand for “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” since announcing it in August, partnering with Google for an online puzzle to reveal clues about the album’s “vault” tracks; naturally, it crashed within hours.When Swift first spoke about her intention to rerecord her albums, in summer 2019 — shortly after the music manager Scooter Braun bought Big Machine, Swift’s original label, for a bit over $300 million — the music world scratched its collective head; most previous attempts at rerecordings had had little success. But when the new version of “Fearless” came out — by which time Braun had sold Swift’s recording rights to the investment firm Shamrock Capital — it became another lesson in Swift’s mastery in rallying her fan base.“When the rerecord process started with her, it was this curiosity, where no one really knew what it could do,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s managing director of charts and data operations. “But they have turned into a phenomenon unto themselves.”Swift’s world tour, which has played to packed stadiums since March and is in line to sell well over $1 billion in tickets by the time it ends next year, has generally lifted her entire catalog. At various times this year, at least 10 of her albums, including the originals, have been in the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship albums chart.But each time Swift has released a rerecorded album, its corresponding original version has suffered. In the year after she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” sales of the original fell 20 percent in the United States, according to Luminate, the tracking service that supplies the data for Billboard’s charts; the original “Red” dropped by about 45 percent. Neither has been on the Billboard 200 since 2021.Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s senior director of music insights and industry relations, noted how stark that impact can be on a week-to-week basis. In May, Swift said she would release a new “Speak Now” in eight weeks. “That announcement,” Marconette said, “immediately drove a 75.7 percent increase in total consumption for the original version.” But as soon as “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” came out, the original sank. Comparing a window of 14 weeks before and after the new version, the original fell 59 percent.On the latest chart, the new “Speak Now” is No. 18. The old version, which was most recently No. 191, had fallen off the chart entirely.Statistics like that call into question the value of Shamrock’s investment, which has been estimated at more than $300 million. In the short term, at least, there is no doubt that Swift’s rerecordings have severely dimmed the originals. But it may take years before it is clear whether there is a lasting impact. A spokeswoman for Shamrock said that no one at the firm was available to discuss the matter.Swift also stands to earn more money from her new recordings than her old ones, thanks to a deal she negotiated with Universal Music, Republic’s parent company, that gave her ownership rights to her recordings.As Swift’s new “1989” nears release, the singer has been promoting it steadily on social media, this week sharing an image of handwritten lyrics that fans have interpreted as being from an unreleased track. And truckloads of vinyl and CD copies of the new album have been making their way to brick-and-mortar stores.Even indie record shops are primed to do huge business with the new “1989,” as they have with all of Swift’s recent releases. Carl Mello of Newbury Comics, a music and collectibles chain that has 30 stores throughout the Northeast, said that for some of Swift’s previous albums, problems in the supply chain have meant that stores did not always have her records on release day. But those issues have been resolved, and the chain expects to have about 1,600 copies ready for sale on Friday.“I’ve been at Newbury Comics for just over 30 years, and I’ve never seen somebody who has occupied so many spots in our Top 40 vinyl records list at the same time, consistently for months and months,” Mello said.“It wouldn’t surprise me if Taylor Swift is 15 percent of our vinyl sales,” he added. “It’s extraordinary.”Audio produced by More