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      Sleater-Kinney ‘Little Rope’ Review: 11th Album Born From Tragedy

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      The band’s 11th album, “Little Rope,” was born out of tragedy, but feels curiously restrained.Nearly 20 years ago, when Sleater-Kinney released its towering seventh album, “The Woods,” there was a convincing case to be made that the trio was the most vital, and underrated, working American rock band.Born of the fervent feminist spirit of the riot grrrl movement and the Pacific Northwest’s fertile D.I.Y. scene, the group spent the second half of the ’90s releasing increasingly sophisticated punk albums and eventually, on its righteous 2002 release “One Beat,” maturing into one of the few indie-rock bands making meaningful protest music in the aftermath of 9/11.On “The Woods,” Sleater-Kinney managed to kick things into an even higher gear. The twitchy electricity of Carrie Brownstein’s guitar, the embodied howl of Corin Tucker’s vocals and the earth-quaking force of Janet Weiss’s drums collided in a glorious cacophony, making noise that sounded less like songs than melodic thunderstorms.There are dim echoes of that fury on “Little Rope,” Sleater-Kinney’s 11th album and its second since Weiss’s departure in 2019. The new LP has more oomph and darkness than the band’s self-produced 2021 LP “Path of Wellness” and more emotional resonance than its mechanical 2019 effort “The Center Won’t Hold.” But even in its wildest moments, when compared to the band’s mightiest work, “Little Rope” sounds unfortunately diminished and curiously restrained.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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      Sophie Turner’s Custody Lawsuit Against Joe Jonas is Dismissed

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      The English actress sued the American musician weeks after they announced their split, saying he had prevented their two children from returning to Britain.A judge in New York on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit that the English actress Sophie Turner filed last year against her husband, Joe Jonas, in which she requested that their two young children be returned to England from the United States.The lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was dismissed with both parties’ consent, according to a court filing.Turner, a star on the television show “Game of Thrones,” sued Jonas, an American musician who plays in a boy band with his brothers, in September, weeks after the couple said publicly that they planned to divorce.That summer, the children had traveled to the U.S. with Jonas because he was on tour there and Turner had a busy filming schedule in Britain, according to the lawsuit. The couple agreed that Turner would pick up the children in September and return with them to England, it said.Instead, the lawsuit said, Jonas filed for divorce in September and later refused to give Turner the children’s passports, preventing them from returning to England, their “habitual residence.”A representative for Jonas said at the time that giving Turner the children’s passports would have violated a court order in Florida — where the couple’s divorce proceedings had been initiated — that restricted both parents from relocating the children.In the court filing on Wednesday, known as a consent order, Judge Katherine Polk Failla noted that Turner and Jonas had signed a memorandum of understanding and a “parenting plan” related to their children in October. They also filed a consent order with a court in Britain that was approved on Jan. 11, she wrote.Attorneys and publicists for Turner and Jonas did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Wednesday.The couple’s children, who were born in the United States in 2020 and 2022, have American and British citizenship. They have been identified in court documents by only their initials.Turner and Jonas began dating in 2016, when he was touring in Britain, and married in Las Vegas three years later.After living a “very peripatetic lifestyle” for a few years, Turner’s lawsuit said, they relocated to England in April 2023 and had planned to buy a home there later in the year.But in early September, after a succession of negative news stories about Turner, they said in a joint statement on Instagram that they had “mutually decided to amicably end our marriage.”Seamus Hughes More

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      How Ariana Grande’s ‘Yes, And?’ Relates to Madonna’s ‘Vogue’

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      Madonna’s 1990 hit “Vogue” has enjoyed a recent renaissance. Ariana’s Grande’s first solo song in three years leans on its sound, but the similarities end there.There was never a question that Madonna’s 1990 pop-house classic “Vogue” was a tidal wave. But over the past year and a half, the song that helped bring the sounds of underground queer culture to the mainstream has continued to create powerful ripples.Since 2019 — when the track’s release was chronicled on the FX drama “Pose” alongside discussions about authorship and authenticity — the hit has been experiencing a slow, steady resurgence. In 2022, Beyoncé mashed it up with her ballroom-referencing “Break My Soul,” updating Madonna’s rap to pay tribute to Black pop icons, and starting last year, the remix was given prime placement on both Beyoncé’s and Madonna’s tours. Ariana DeBose performed a heavily memed adaptation of “Vogue” at the 2023 BAFTA Awards, and “Vogue” even garnered the ultimate symbol of 2020s relevance: It was sampled by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny on his album “Nadia Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana.”Now “Vogue” is the animating reference on “Yes, And?,” the comeback single by Ariana Grande, who has spent three years out of the pop spotlight filming the movie version of “Wicked.” Like the original, written and produced by Madonna and Shep Pettibone, Grande’s song — credited to Grande, Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh — features snappy synth drums; bright, syncopated stabs of piano; and a spoken-word bridge. But “Yes, And?” isn’t an invitation to the dance floor; it’s a rebuttal to Grande’s critics. So while it sounds superficially like “Vogue,” it doesn’t really feel like it.In the first part of her career, Grande was mainly a classicist with roots in hip-hop soul, ’90s R&B and brassy show tunes. Her fifth album, “Thank U, Next” from 2019, introduced a shift: Adopting the cadences and textures of contemporary rap, Grande provided raw, up-to-the-minute commentary on her personal life.“Yes, And?” attempts to marry the two sides of her music, providing a throwback musical canvas that she embellishes with her responses to those gossiping about her looks and her latest relationship, with her “Wicked” co-star Ethan Slater. While its bones are unmistakably rooted in “Vogue,” the song takes some turns: A pitched-up vocal sample makes the track feel busy, and Grande, a gifted singer, can’t resist the impulse to fill its empty spaces with high trills and flowery runs. When she approaches the final chorus, she belts the song’s title phrase as if she’s the world’s most effusive improv enthusiast.Paying tribute to an iconic song is risky business — just ask the many stars who have interpolated or sampled recent hits, only to come off like craven impersonators — and “Vogue,” in particular, is a masterpiece of elegance and restraint. Unlike many Madonna singles, “Vogue” is a remarkably selfless endeavor; it was inspired by the bold, creative queer pioneers of New York’s ballroom culture, and pays tribute to the scene without laying claim to it or assuming its struggles.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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      Peter Schickele, Composer and Gleeful Sire of P.D.Q. Bach, Dies at 88

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      Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Schickele. His health had declined after a series of infections last fall, she said.Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.His music was performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Lark Quartet, the Minnesota Opera and other notable ensembles, as well as by the folk singers Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom he wrote arrangements.But to his resigned chagrin, it was as a musical parodist in the tradition of Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Spike Jones — Mr. Schickele’s particular idol — that he remained best known.For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.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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      Condé Nast Is Folding Pitchfork Into GQ, With Layoffs

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      Multiple employees at the storied music criticism site “will be leaving the company,” according to a memo from Anna Wintour.Pitchfork, once a cultural bastion for music criticism, will be merged with the men’s magazine GQ, leading to layoffs within the online publication, according to a memo from Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé Nast, their parent company.“This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance, and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company,” Ms. Wintour wrote in her memo, which was issued to the staff on Wednesday.Among the casualties of the merger was Puja Patel, the site’s editor in chief since 2018, who had replaced Pitchfork’s founder, Ryan Schreiber.“Both Pitchfork and GQ have unique and valuable ways that they approach music journalism,” Ms. Wintour said, “and we are excited for the new possibilities together. With these organizational changes, some of our Pitchfork colleagues will be leaving the company today.”A representative for Condé Nast declined to say how many people were laid off.Mr. Schreiber launched Pitchfork as a Minneapolis teenager in 1996. The name was a reference to a tattoo worn by Tony Montana, Al Pacino’s character in the classic film “Scarface.”In the coming years, Pitchfork established itself as a taste-making institution. A prolific publication that could make or break a release from an artist — well-known or otherwise — with scathing put-downs or voluminous praise, it became an alternative to Rolling Stone for an audience hungry for a more indie taste.An example: The outlet gave Sonic Youth’s 2000 album, “NYC Ghosts & Flowers,” a zero out of 10 rating.“Now, finally, my generation has its ‘Metal Machine Music’ — an unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest hell,” Brent DiCrescenzo wrote at the time.Or, in a rave review, the writing could veer to the abstract, as with the opening sentences to a 9.7 review of the Arcade Fire album “Funeral,” which helped the band break through to the mainstream.“Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy,” David Moore wrote. “Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways — we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded ‘threat’ levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians.”The site has had its critics over the years, with complaints that some of its reviews were unnecessarily mean or just wrong.In some cases, Pitchfork has opted for do-overs. Liz Phair’s self-titled album received a zero from the critic Matt LeMay when it came out in 2003. Sixteen years later, Mr. LeMay would refer to his review as “condescending and cringey.”In 2021, Phair’s album was one of several that got another look from Pitchfork — this time getting a 6.Condé Nast acquired Pitchfork in 2015. Fred Santarpia, Condé Nast’s chief digital officer at the time, said then that Pitchfork brought with it “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster.”With the rise of music streaming, social media and podcasts, Pitchfork has lost some of the cultural cachet that it possessed two decades ago. And like many media companies, Condé Nast, whose portfolio includes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, has struggled to remain profitable in the face of advertising cutbacks.In November, Condé Nast announced it would be laying off 5 percent of its work force, about 270 employees. More

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      Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot Marries John Caldwell

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      Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founding member of Pussy Riot, and John Caldwell have always prioritized being “helpful,” he said, over being happy.When Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the founding members of the anti-establishment punk collective Pussy Riot, reached out to John Caldwell on Discord, an encrypted messaging app, he asked if she was a bot.“She just said ‘haha,’” said Mr. Caldwell, who was already familiar with her work. “I was very suspicious.”Ms. Tolokonnikova had developed an interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain and had heard about Mr. Caldwell, a partner at a financial services company who specialized in crypto, from a friend. “I was jumping on Zooms with random people with no romantic intentions, just learning about crypto,” she said.They met for dinner a few days later, in mid-September 2021. “It ended horribly,” Mr. Caldwell said. “She faked a call to Europe and left.”Ms. Tolokonnikova, an activist, musician and artist, described herself as a “super introverted person,” and said she normally spaces out meetings with new people. But at the time, she was in the process of crash educating herself on a new topic, and had therefore scheduled several meetings in one day, and the dinner with Mr. Caldwell was last.“I was overwhelmed,” she said. So she left abruptly. But, she said, “it was not a reflection on John at all.” In fact, she had been intrigued by their conversation about reproductive rights and religion, and by Mr. Caldwell’s suggestion that she tap into the deep pockets of the crypto world to raise funds for causes she was interested in.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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      Lil Nas X, Ariana Grande and 21 Savage Kick Off 2024

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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:Lil Nas X’s comeback single “J Christ,” a continuation of his trollcore pop narrative, with its ostentatious video and punchline-heavy media rolloutThe new 21 Savage album “American Dream,” the first blockbuster hip-hop album of the year, with many high-profile features and some reckoning with the immigration case that nearly derailed his careerThe sonic shift in Ariana Grande’s new song, “Yes, And?,” her first solo single in three yearsNew tracks from Bizarrap featuring Young Miko, and Jastin MartinSnack 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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      Ana Tijoux’s ‘Vida’ Fights Sorrows With Joy

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      On “Vida,” the Chilean songwriter celebrates the life force.The finale of “Vida,” the new album by the Chilean songwriter Ana Tijoux, is “Fin del Mundo” (“The End of the World”). She sings and raps, in Spanish, about dire expectations: war, pollution, drought, a collision with a comet. But as a techno-tinged disco beat rises around her, she cheerfully declares, “If the end of the world is coming, let’s dance naked together.”“Vida” (“Life”) is Tijoux’s fifth studio album and her first since 2014. She chose its title pointedly.“I have a very good friend who talks to me about how life is the best vengeance against death,” she said in a video interview from her apartment in Barcelona, where she relocated during the pandemic and recorded the album. “That makes so much sense, to have vitality and energy. I insist that it doesn’t mean that we live in a superficial place. It doesn’t mean that it’s not political. We are living in a bizarre moment. And there is nothing more political than defending life and defending humanity.”In the album’s first single, “Niñx” (“Little Girlx”), Tijoux urges her daughter, and all young women, to find strength in joy: “Life scares them,” she sings. “Do not lose the laughter.”Tijoux, 46, found an international audience with her second solo album, “1977,” which was released in 2010. It was named after the year she was born, in France, to Chilean parents who had gone into exile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Living in Paris, Tijoux was drawn to the hip-hop she heard while visiting immigrant families from Africa with her mother, a social worker; she, too, felt like an outsider.“Even if I couldn’t understand the lyrics,” she said, “that kind of music, that culture, changed our life.”On “Vida,” Tijoux salutes 50 years of hip-hop in “Tú Sae’” (“Y’know”), joined by Plug 1 from De La Soul and Talib Kweli, who observes, “The root of community is unity.”Soon after the Pinochet regime ended in 1990, Tijoux returned to Chile with her parents. In the late 1990s, she established herself as a performer, rapping with the Chilean hip-hop group Makiza before going solo.The single “1977” multiplied her audience worldwide. It’s a quick-tongued, matter-of-factly autobiographical rap, backed by a vintage-sounding bolero, about growing up and finding her voice in hip-hop; it has been streamed tens of millions of times. In the United States, it was boosted by prominent placement in a 2011 episode of “Breaking Bad.”On “1977” and the albums that followed, Tijoux glided easily between rapping and singing. With her 2011 album, “La Bala” (“The Bullet”), she began collaborating with the producer and multi-instrumentalist Andrés Celis. He helped broaden her music across eras and regions, drawing on R&B, reggae, rock, electronica and multiple folk traditions along with far-reaching hip-hop samples.“We’re not super experts on any style of music,” Celis said in a video interview from his studio in Santiago, Chile. “So we’re used to blending everything in a genuine, almost naïve way.”They build all of her songs together. “She’s a very intuitive artist,” Celis said. “The style of working that we have is like, I bring something very simple — some chords, maybe a little melody, sometimes a bass line, whatever goes with the vibe, you know? And then she’ll say, ‘Yes, that’s what we have to talk about.’”Tijoux has often written about politics, feminism, resistance, solidarity and the predations of capitalism: songs like “Somos Sur” (“We Are the South”), a modal stomp about the silencing, strength and fearlessness of Africa and Latin America, which features the Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour; and “Antipatriarca” (“Anti-Patriarch”), a feminist manifesto set to Andean flutes, guitars and drums.But after the release of her 2014 album, “Vengo,” Tijoux’s songwriting slowed. While she continued touring, she was also raising two children — Luciano, now 18, and Emiliana, 10 — and working on assorted collaborations. One was “Lightning Over Mexico” with Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and the Bloody Beetroots, which had Tijoux rapping angrily about murdered Mexican student activists. Another was “Almacén de Datos” (“Data Warehouse”), a reggaeton song with the Argentine songwriter Sara Hebe that pushes back on treating music as a commodity in the attention economy: “For a businessman, everything is a market,” Tijoux taunts.Between albums, events spurred Tijoux to write singles. They included “Pa’ Qué” (“Why”), a brisk salsa song, with the Puerto Rican rapper PJ Sin Suela, that mocked politicians downplaying Covid-19; “Rebelión de Octubre” (“October Rebellion”), a ballad that crescendos into an anthem praising protests in Chile and worldwide; and the hard-nosed rap “Antifa Dance.”In a statement with “Antifa Dance,” Tijoux wrote: “In the face of authoritarianism, imposition, discrimination, the implacable hatred of the other, we return to the word Art with all its force. That art onslaught with music, colors, that art that dances in response, as an organized movement of beautiful rebellion.”Some of the songs on “Vida” directly extend Tijoux’s sociopolitical concerns. “Oyeme” (“Hear Me”) is a stark, percussive rap and chanted melody that Tijoux wrote after seeing reports that Britain was housing migrant asylum seekers on a barge. “I always have news on in the morning,” Tijoux said. “And it was terrible and absurd once again. I was thinking about the parallel between that and the slave ships.”Another song, the somber “Busco Mi Nombre” (“I Search for My Name”), is about people who were arrested and “disappeared” by dictatorships in Argentina and Chile; it’s prefaced by spoken words from the grandmother of one Argentine victim. Tijoux wrote and sings it with iLe, the Puerto Rican songwriter who got her start with the activist hip-hop group Calle 13. They met more than a decade ago, sharing the stage at a concert in Brooklyn.“Years ago there weren’t so many female political figures,” iLe said via video from Puerto Rico. “It’s a difficult challenge to speak through songs, about things that you might be afraid to say. And it’s nice to feel that there are women who are transcending their own fears and just writing and making songs about what they feel they need to talk about. It’s risky, but it comes from an honest place. And I think Ana has done that from the beginning.”Much of “Vida” is purposefully upbeat — recognizing struggles and losses but looking beyond them. Tijoux wrote “Tania” in memory of her sister, who died of cancer in 2019; it starts as an elegy but turns into a celebration. “She was super funny, she had a lot of vitality,” Tijoux said. “So to make just a sad song would not be fair.”And in “Bailando Sola Aquí” (“Dancing Alone Here”), an Afrobeats track topped with Latin percussion, Tijoux sings, “I’m tired of this sadness, crying a river for you,” then declares, “I decided to be happy.”The album is filled with dance beats: funk, trap, cumbia, disco. “I’m a terrible dancer, but I love to dance,” Tijoux said with a smile. “I think the terrible dancers are the best dancers because everyone’s laughing at us on the dance floor. Professional dancers are not funny — you need a bad dancer to make the party interesting.“We can dance and fight at the same time,” she added. “They’re not opposites.” More