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      That Spotify Daylist That Really ‘Gets’ You? It Was Written by A.I.

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      The music-streaming platform’s new “daylist” feature serves users three personalized playlists a day, with titles ranging from quirky to bewildering.Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”?Those odd strings of words are titles of “daylists,” a newish offering from the music-streaming giant Spotify. The feature provides users three new algorithmically generated playlists a day, each with an ultra-specific title that practically begs to be screencapped and posted.The often baffling titles have recently captured the attention of social media, propelling the service to fresh popularity about four months after its September debut. In post after post, users seem amused by the feature’s ability to see right through them.“Spotify called me out a little bit with this daylist,” one X user wrote of her own playlist. Its title: “Midwest Emo Flannel Tuesday Early Morning.”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?  More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): Playboi Carti, Waxahatchee and 12 More to Watch

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Will-they-or-won’t-they releases from Playboi Carti, Rihanna and Cardi BNew music from WaxahatcheeThe Atlanta rapper 2Sdxrt3allThe post-rage rappers Nettspend and XaviersobasedThe teenage SoundCloud rap elder Matt OxThe ambitious punk band Sheer MagThe sibling harmony group Infinity SongThe Mexican American singer-songwriter XaviThe Brooklyn drill trio 41The rustic roots-folk singers Sam Barber and Dylan GossettSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Sarah Jarosz Tests the Mainstream

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      With her new album, “Polaroid Lovers,” a luminary of Americana broadens her sound.In modern Nashville, songwriting is often a matter of professionalized co-writing: planned, mix-and-match collaborations by appointment, musicians sharing a room to come up with sturdy material.It’s a method that Sarah Jarosz had largely shied away from until she made her seventh studio album, “Polaroid Lovers.” The LP, arriving Friday, includes songs she wrote with behind-the-scenes Nashville stalwarts including Jon Randall, Natalie Hemby and the album’s producer, Daniel Tashian, who worked on the country-psychedelia fusion of Kacey Musgraves’s “Golden Hour.”On “Polaroid Lovers,” Jarosz reaches toward a broader audience while still maintaining her individuality. The songs are more plugged in, muscular and reverberant than her past albums, which were intimate and largely acoustic. But her particular perspective — at once clearheaded, thoughtful, vulnerable and open to desire — comes through.The first song Jarosz wrote with Tashian was “Take the High Road,” with a chiming chorus that declares, “It won’t be the easy way/Saying what you want to say.” In a video interview from her home in Nashville, with string instruments hanging on the wall behind her, Jarosz said that the song’s lyrics “are almost a thesis for the whole album. You know, ‘I’m tired of being quiet — time to face up to the fear.’”Jarosz, 32, is a luminary in acoustic Americana, where bluegrass, folk, jazz and chamber music mingle with pop and rock. Born in Austin, Texas, and raised in Wimberley, a small town nearby, Jarosz emerged as a teenage bluegrass prodigy, playing mandolin, guitar, banjo and the instrument she considers her “soul mate”: the octave mandolin, pitched an octave below the standard mandolin, which she often uses for solos or countermelodies. The instrument sounds a little darker and twangier than acoustic guitar in the same range — a hand-played lower voice that answers Jarosz’s own hovering mezzo-soprano.She made her first four albums in Nashville, and she was urged to write songs with more seasoned musicians; she chose not to release any of them. “The quote-unquote ‘Nashville co-writing’ thing had been pushed on me when I was like 18, 17, making my first record,” she said. “I was really closed off to it back in that time, because I felt like I was still finding my voice. And I was worried that if I went into those co-writing rooms prematurely, that I would get lost at sea.”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?  More

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      Review: The Philadelphia Orchestra Revels, and Struggles, in Jazz

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      At Carnegie Hall, a program of Stravinsky, Weill and freely improvised Gershwin highlighted a dialogue between jazz and classical music.Much of 20th-century classical music owes a deep thanks to jazz. And while on paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night was organized for a festival at the hall, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, the subtext was American jazz.All three of the composers on the program (Stravinsky, Weill and Gershwin) loved and, to one extent or another, made references to the style in their music. Although Stravinsky was based in Europe when he premiered “Petrushka” in 1911, he was already a U.S. citizen when he revised this piece in 1947, and had long experimented with incorporating jazz into some of his pieces — and jazz musicians loved him right back. Weill, who left Europe for the United States after the fall of the Weimar Republic, was also steeped in jazz. And Gershwin, of course, wouldn’t be Gershwin without it.The Philadelphians opened with a magical performance of “Petrushka,” led off by a piquant solo from Patrick Williams, the associate principal flutist. The orchestra staked out rhythmic details with crystalline precision and saw each phrase through with patience and a rich sound. Stravinsky relays the spirit of Petrushka, the folkloric Russian trickster puppet, and the ballet’s tale of a deeply twisted puppet love triangle, with equal parts humor and darkness; the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the musicians captured the piece’s flickers of light and its swirls of despair.Weill’s Symphony No. 2, from 1934, is an oddity: structurally and harmonically a mash-up of plush, Mahlerian harmonies, Weill’s acidic stage works, and jazz-inflected plain-spokenness. In its best moments, such as in the dreamy, lonely slow movement — with a trombone solo played gracefully by Nitzan Haroz — this music feels like being inside an Edward Hopper painting.The giddiest part of the evening was a literally jazzed-up version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” featuring the jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and the members of his trio: the bassist Martin Jaffe and the drummer Jason Marsalis.Roberts has made a specialty of reworking Gershwin; along with the “Rhapsody,” which he recorded nearly three decades ago, he has toured his version of the Concerto in F. In Tuesday’s account of the “Rhapsody,” the orchestra played its traditional score, but Roberts used the piano solos to introduce extended improvisations for himself, sometimes in flights of Romantic, Rachmaninoff-esque fancy, and occasionally nodding instead to the blues and stride piano. By the jazz standards of 2024, Roberts is conservative, and while he didn’t cast any new light on a cherished standard, his performance was still charming.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?  More

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      Pitchfork, the Early Years

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicLast week, Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork, the taste-making music news and criticism website it had acquired in 2015 — which had entranced and sometimes infuriated fans for more than two decades — would be brought under the editorial umbrella of GQ. Many staffers were laid off.The announcement felt like a death knell for a certain kind of critical posture — progressive but not inaccessible, knowledgeable but also curious — that feels increasingly remote in the current media landscape. Some version of the site will continue, but online, the news was received with dismay and frustration.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation with two of the people responsible for building the site’s editorial and business operations about what it took to develop the company from a one-person organization to a cross-platform publication and festival business, and the challenges that led to its sale to Condé Nast.Guests:Ryan Schreiber, the founder of Pitchfork and its editor in chief for approximately two decadesChris Kaskie, Pitchfork’s first employee and first CEOConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Female Rappers in the Spotlight Make Room for Motherhood

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      As their influence and success continue to grow, artists including Sexyy Red and Cardi B are destigmatizing motherhood for hip-hop performers.When the rapper Sexyy Red realized she was pregnant with her second child this summer, just after her singles “Pound Town” and “SkeeYee” broke through on the charts and dominated TikTok, her excitement was met with hesitancy by some members of her team.She said some people in her camp were supportive. Others advised her to have an abortion, counsel she rejected. “I’m not never going to let nobody tell me what to do with my body,” she said during a video call in December.Sexyy, born Janae Wherry, publicly announced her pregnancy via an Instagram post on the heels of the release of “Rich Baby Daddy,” a hit collaboration with Drake and SZA. Now in her final trimester, she often performs in belly-hugging unitards as she twerks and raps her hits, taking her 3-year-old son, Chuckyy, on the road with help from her mother.Women in music, and particularly in the male-dominated battle zone of hip-hop, have long been advised to terminate pregnancies, or at least to recede from the spotlight until their babies were delivered, told that showcasing pregnancy and motherhood would make them seem weak, unappealing or unfocused on their highly competitive careers. Male-led rap crews and record labels have traditionally put their might behind one female M.C. at a time, creating pressure for women to not cede their moment for anything, including starting a family.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?  More

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      Country Singer Chris Young Is Arrested at a Nashville Bar

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      The musician was released on bond for charges of disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.Chris Young, the country music singer, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest after an altercation at a bar in Nashville on Monday night, the authorities said.While Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents were looking at IDs in a downtown Nashville bar, Mr. Young, 38, struck one of the agents, according to an arrest affidavit filed with a criminal court in Nashville. Agents handcuffed Mr. Young after he did not comply with their orders, it said.Mr. Young had his breakthrough when he won the country-music reality TV competition “Nashville Star” in 2006. His second album, “The Man I Want to Be,” released in 2009, hit platinum in the United States. He has since been a fixture on the Billboard country charts.A representative for Mr. Young declined to comment.The Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents arrived at a bar called Tin Roof at about 8:30 p.m. to check the IDs of the patrons, including Mr. Young, the arrest affidavit said. After the check, Mr. Young began asking the agents questions, which they said they answered, and he began video recording them.The agents left and continued onto a bar next door, called DawgHouse Saloon. The arrest affidavit said that Mr. Young and his friends had followed them and began talking to the people there. When the agents finished their compliance checks, Mr. Young tried to block one of the agents from leaving and hit him on the shoulder, it said.The agent who was struck, Joseph Phillips, pushed Mr. Young to create distance, then other patrons got up to intervene, the affidavit said. Another agent tried speaking to Mr. Young, who did not comply with the orders. Then the agents detained him.The affidavit described Mr. Young as having had “slurred speech” and his eyes as “blood shot and watery.” It also said the people who were with Mr. Young were “making the incident hostile.”Mr. Young was later taken into custody and released on bonds of $250 for the disorderly conduct charge, $1,000 for the resisting arrest charge and $1,250 for the assault charge, according to reports by Nashville’s criminal court clerk. He is expected to appear in court on Feb. 16.Aimee Ortiz More

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      Frank Farian, the Man Behind Milli Vanilli, Is Dead at 82

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      He had worldwide success with the disco group Boney M. He was better known for a duo that had hit records but, it turned out, only pretended to sing.Frank Farian, the hit-making German record producer who masterminded the model-handsome dance-pop duo Milli Vanilli and propelled them to Grammy-winning heights — until it was revealed that they were little more than lip-syncing marionettes — died on Tuesday at his home in Miami. He was 82.His death was announced by Philip Kallrath of Allendorf Media, a spokesman for Mr. Farian’s family.Mr. Farian was no stranger to the pop charts in the late 1980s, when he brought together Rob Pilatus, the son of an American serviceman and a German dancer, and Fab Morvan, a French singer and dancer, to create one of pop music’s most sugary bonbons.He was born Franz Reuther on July 18, 1941, in Kirn, Germany. His father, a furrier turned soldier, was killed during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, leaving Franz and his older siblings, Hertha and Heinz, to be raised by their mother, a schoolteacher.Coming of age on a steady diet of American rock ’n’ roll records, Mr. Farian eventually became a performer himself. He rose to the top of the West German charts in 1976 with “Rocky,” a bouncy, German-language interpretation of a hit by the American country artist Dickey Lee.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?  More