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      How Directors Are Reimagining Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Shows

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      The closing of “The Phantom of the Opera” last spring left a chandelier-sized hole in New York. And as of this summer, for the first time in 44 years, there is no Andrew Lloyd Webber musical running on Broadway.But now comes an unexpected new chapter in the career of one of musical theater’s most successful, if not always appreciated, composers: Several adventurous contemporary directors are declaring they love his work and want to put their stamp on it.Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director known for his profuse use of video and viscous fluids, is tackling “Jesus Christ Superstar” in Amsterdam, while Jamie Lloyd, the British auteur with a penchant for Pinter and an aversion to scenery, is sharpening “Sunset Boulevard” in London. Meanwhile, in the United States, Sammi Cannold is putting a feminist stamp on “Evita,” while Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston are humanizing “Cats.”The shows, and Lloyd Webber himself, occupy a paradoxical place in the theatrical canon.Critics have sometimes dismissed his work as overwrought. This newspaper’s reviewers, in particular, have often been underwhelmed, initially declaring that “Jesus Christ Superstar” had “minimal artistic value,” and also deriding “Evita” (“like reading endless footnotes from which the text has disappeared”), “Cats” (“if you blink, you’ll miss the plot”) and “Sunset Boulevard” (“lurid”).But “Evita,” “Cats” and “Sunset Boulevard” won best musical Tony Awards, and all four shows are widely staged and enormously popular. These new productions, reflecting contemporary trends, are emphasizing psychology and politics over spectacle and sentiment.Lloyd Webber, 75, said in an interview that there is no grand strategy at work here — that the directors individually sought permission to stage the shows. But he also said he believes that it is healthy to allow others to explore older material in new ways.“When we were approached, we just thought, ‘Well, great! Why not?’” he said. “You can’t just sit on these things.”Even “Starlight Express,” one of his zanier musicals, which involves actors on roller skates pretending to be trains, is getting a reboot: Luke Sheppard, the “& Juliet” director, is reimagining it for a run scheduled to begin next summer in London.The productions come after a rough patch for Lloyd Webber. His latest musical, “Bad Cinderella,” bombed on Broadway last spring, shortly after the “Phantom” closing. But he is undeterred: In August he signed with Creative Artists Agency, the powerhouse talent representatives, and in September he named a new chief executive for Really Useful Group, the company he owns that licenses and manages his shows.“I really must concentrate, in the latter days of my composing life, on creating and writing,” Lloyd Webber said. “It’s exciting to me that there are so many directors now coming forward, who actually are the directors who everybody is going to at the moment. And it’s very interesting to me to hear new minds and see new ideas — some of them I’m going to like and some of them not. But why not? I can’t see any possible reason.”Here is a look at four upcoming reinventions.London‘Sunset Boulevard’Forget the staircase and the turban. Jamie Lloyd is bringing an intense interest in psychological exploration to “Sunset Boulevard” — “putting the emphasis,” he says, “on people and their emotional journey.”With that aim, he asked Lloyd Webber to rework some aspects of the score “to lean into the darkness and peculiarity of certain moments that are dreamlike or nightmarish.” And, to his surprise, Lloyd Webber agreed. “He’s been so open,” Lloyd said, “which is kind of crazy.”The production, which is now running at London’s Savoy Theater, ends with a rush of blood and integrates live camera work in a nod to the Hollywood milieu of “Sunset Boulevard.” Lloyd called it “a hybrid between theater and cinema.”Lloyd, 42, didn’t grow up seeing theater. But his father, a truck driver, liked listening to show tunes, and that’s how Lloyd first encountered Lloyd Webber’s songs.The original Broadway production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which opened in 1994, starred Glenn Close, above with Andrew Lloyd Webber.Associated PressSoon he had his own cassette of the composer’s greatest hits, and he would “force my cousins to do performances in the living room.”“It was kind of the soundtrack of my youth,” he said.Fast forward to the summer of 2019. Lloyd, by then an acclaimed experimental director, had moved on from his Lloyd Webber fixation, or at least so he thought. But when he was invited to stage a musical outdoors, in Regent’s Park, one show came to mind: “Evita.”His sneakers-and-spray-paint production of that show was a hit, and he made a mental note of Lloyd Webber’s openness to “radical reappraisal.” Then, idled at home during the pandemic, he found himself imagining what he could do with “Sunset Boulevard.”“The characters he chooses to write about are weird and otherworldly, often with tormented minds, and the scores take these big leaps which are good to explore,” Lloyd said. “They are like fever dreams, and they respond well to a more experimental, less traditional approach.”WASHINGTON‘Evita’Sammi Cannold has long been obsessed with “Evita.” At 29, she is 16 years younger than the musical, but she still remembers hearing the songs as a kid in New York, seeing the revival that starred Ricky Martin, and, as an aspiring director, proclaiming it her “dream project.”She has been nothing if not determined: She directed a production while an undergrad at Stanford; she visited Argentina three times to do research; and then she pitched an “Evita” revival to New York City Center.In 1979, Patti LuPone (above with Bob Gunton) took on the role of Eva Perón for the show’s Broadway premiere.Martha Swope/New York Public LibrarySo in 2019, there was Cannold, directing a 12-day gala run of the Lloyd Webber classic. The production was eye-catching, starting with Evita’s iconic white ball gown hovering like a ghost over a flower-bedecked stage. This year, Cannold was able to develop it fully, staging it first at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and now (through Oct. 15) at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, where the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called the show “gorgeously reinvigorated.”Cannold’s take is informed by feminism — “I think she’s a victim and a survivor who learned to use her sexuality as armor,” she said of Perón — but also by the regime’s authoritarianism. “When I first started working on it, I was head over heels in love with Eva — I was so obsessed with her and her history, and I couldn’t really hear any of the criticism,” she said. “I’ve gone on a whole journey, and land in a different place.”AMSTERDAM‘Jesus Christ Superstar’Even in Belgium, where Ivo van Hove grew up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” was a big deal. The concept album was released in 1970, when van Hove was young, and the music has lived in his head ever since.“At the time that I was an adolescent, this was huge — not the musical, but the album — the album was something that everybody bought,” said van Hove, who at 64 has never seen a stage production of the show. “Nobody could believe that ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ could be a rock thing.”Van Hove, whose production of “Dead Man Walking” is this season’s Metropolitan Opera opener, said he has wanted for years to direct “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “Some projects live in me for a long time,” he said.Jeff Fenholt in the title role of “Jesus Christ Superstar” on Broadway in 1971. Bettmann, via Getty ImagesNow he’s getting his chance, directing an English-language production that is set to begin performances in January at DeLaMar in Amsterdam.“I can tell you what interests me,” he said. “First, it’s a story of a group of friends who became friends because they believed in one mission: to take care of the poor. Second, these friends become a threat to political and religious leaders. And third are the geopolitical tensions, in this case with Rome.”“These things,” he added, “feel like very contemporary themes.”How contemporary? Let’s just say that in van Hove’s production, the cast will begin the show wearing hoodies. And, he said, some members of the audience will be seated onstage, because he wants to create a “pressure-cooker” environment.What is van Hove’s theory about why Lloyd Webber is drawing inventive directors now? “It’s not for nothing that these musicals became so important for so many people for such a long time,” he said. “There’s something very human there, even when it’s about cats.”NEW YORK‘Cats’The production of “Cats” planned for next June at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center is, at least at first blush, the most outlandish of this latest round of Lloyd Webber productions. Whereas the original concerned a group of cats (obviously) and was set in a junkyard, the characters in this production will be human beings, and it will be set in the Ballroom scene, a dance subculture closely associated with Black and Latino drag queens.“We are reimagining ‘Cats’ as a queer ball competition,” said Zhailon Levingston, one of the production’s two directors. Old Deuteronomy, an astute and admired character, will be head judge.The idea was the brainchild of the Perelman Center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, who, by his own description, has been “obsessed with reinventing classics my whole career,” and who had previously directed a “queer ‘Oklahoma’” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. “Over the course of that process, I was thinking a lot about ‘Cats,’ and I just kept thinking about the song ‘Memory’ being done in a queer context,” Rauch said. “And I just found it very moving.”The cast of “Cats” in 1997; the show ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000.Carol RoseggRauch, 61, saw the original Broadway production — albeit late in its long run, when he decided “it felt important to check that off on my cultural bucket list.” Levingston, 29, had a different point of entry: a direct-to-video film from 1998.“I’d be at the day care center, watching ‘Barney,’ and they kept showing the trailer for ‘Cats,’ and I didn’t know what they were doing — people were dressed provocatively, and it seemed like maybe we shouldn’t be watching, and one day my mom and I were at Blockbuster, and I saw the black box with the yellow eyes, and said, ‘We have to get that,’” he recalled. “For two years of my life, I would just watch ‘Cats.’”At one point, Levingston said, he even performed his own one-man (well, one-child) version of the show for his babysitters.Now Rauch and Levingston have hired choreographers with a connection to the Ballroom scene, and a gender consultant to help them navigate the complexities of a gender-nonconforming cast.“The more time we spend with the material,” Rauch said, “the deeper my respect grows for it.” More

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      Terry Kirkman, Whose Band Was a Late-1960s Hit Machine, Dies at 83

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      A singer, songwriter and virtuoso musician, he was a founder of the clean-cut group the Association and wrote one of its biggest hits, “Cherish.”Terry Kirkman, a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter who was a founder of the 1960s pop group the Association, whose lush vocal harmonies and sugary melodic hooks propelled a string of indelible hits, including “Cherish” (which he wrote) and “Along Comes Mary,” died on Saturday at his home in Montclair, Calif. He was 83.His wife, Heidi Kirkman, said the cause was congestive heart failure.A gifted musician who could play up to two dozen instruments, Mr. Kirkman and Jules Alexander, a guitarist and songwriter, formed the six-member Association in 1965. With a folk-inflected sound that was both sunny and sophisticated, the Association proved a veritable AM radio hit factory in its late-1960s heyday.The band’s debut album, “And Then … Along Comes the Association,” released in 1966, spawned two signature hits of the era: “Along Comes Mary,” which hit No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 that June, and “Cherish,” which reached No. 1 in August. The group’s third album, “Insight Out,” released the next year, included two more Top 10 hits: “Never My Love” and “Windy,” the group’s second No. 1 record.Along the way, the Association made dozens of appearances on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and other television variety shows. It also made a mark on the big screen, recording four songs, including the title track for the 1969 film “Goodbye, Columbus,” starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw and based on a Philip Roth novella.The Association’s debut album, released in 1966, spawned two signature hits of the era, “Along Comes Mary” and “Cherish.”ValiantDespite the Association’s chart-topping success, the group was dismissed by some critics, in part because of its blazer-and-tie image and parent-friendly sound, which seemed dramatically out of step in a Los Angeles rock scene dominated by hard-edged, psychedelia-tinged bands like the Byrds and the Doors.In a fitting symbol of the Association’s curious place in the 1960s pop pantheon, the band opened the first night of the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 but stood out as an odd fit at a boundary-pushing musical showcase in which Jimi Hendrix famously ignited his Fender Stratocaster onstage after a mind-warping set.The three-day explosion of rock and paisley, held at the height of the so-called Summer of Love, is still celebrated as an apotheosis of the hippie era, thanks in part to “Monterey Pop,” the landmark 1968 documentary directed by D.A. Pennebaker.“It was an honor, it was historical, and it was really bad,” Mr. Kirkman said of the band’s Monterey performance in a 2015 interview with the music blogger Bo White. “We were the soundtrack and lighting check for the Monterey Pop Festival.”Their performance included a high-school-level comedy skit that they had used on television, in which the band members pretended to be robots booting up one by one. It was, Mr. Kirkman added, “one of the worst mistakes that we ever, ever, ever, ever did,” Mr. Kirkman added.He said that John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who was one of the festival’s organizers, “just said to me bluntly a couple of years later, ‘So sorry you weren’t in the film. You didn’t fit the image.’”But the Association’s relatively square public profile also helped broaden its audience to multiple generations. Mr. Kirkman’s intricate compositions like “Cherish” and “Everything That Touches You” called to mind Burt Bacharach.Mr. Kirkman laid down the basis of “Cherish” in less than seven minutes, he said in a 2015 interview with the music website The College Crowd Digs Me, while sitting down with his first wife, Judith, who had just turned the television dial to “The Tonight Show.” “When I finished it, I was just barely into Johnny Carson’s monologue,” he said.A delicate, intricately crafted love song, “Cherish” became ever-present on oldies radio over the decades, and wove its way into countless movies and television shows.But, Mr. Kirkman told the site, “It’s not always a compliment,” adding, “‘Cherish’ has been used as a gag for being a kind of conservative, old-fashioned song in an otherwise hip movie.”This was particularly galling to Mr. Kirkman, a staunch liberal who included an antiwar song, “Requiem for the Masses,” as the B-side of the “Never My Love” single.“I am a natural-born civil rights activist from Kansas, and I was on the road with three guys who were really conservative, reactionary people,” he told Mr. White. “I stood back thinking, ‘That’s cool. That’s completely fair.’ You know, walk and talk, live your life. But it’s not the art that I want to make. I want the art to be about something besides jumping in the back seat, kiss me, doo-wop, doo-wop.”Terry Robert Kirkman was born on Dec. 12, 1939, in Salina, Kan., the youngest of two sons of Millard and Lois (Murphy) Kirkman. When he was a child his family moved to Chino, Calif., near Los Angeles, where his father managed an auto-parts store and his mother taught music.After receiving an associate degree in music at nearby Chaffey College, he became enmeshed in the flourishing scene at the Troubadour, the famed West Hollywood nightclub that served as a launching pad to stardom.Before long, Mr. Kirkman and Mr. Alexander — whom he had met at a party in Hawaii in 1962, when Mr. Alexander was in the Navy — formed a loose-knit folk ensemble called the Inner Tubes, featuring some 20 members, to perform at open-mic hootenanny nights at the club, with guest appearances by the likes of David Crosby and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. The Inner Tubes eventually evolved into a 13-member band called the Men, which after a year winnowed down to the Association.In addition to his wife of 30 years, Mr. Kirkman is survived by his daughter, Alexandra Sasha Kirkman, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and two grandchildren.Mr. Kirkman left the Association in 1972, although he would later rejoin the band for tours in the 1980s and ’90s. He eventually retired from the music business and worked for decades as an addiction counselor.But he could never escape his most famous creation.“My whole name for 45 years was, ‘I would like you to meet Terry, he wrote “Cherish,”’” he told Mr. White. “That was my whole name.”He added, “I’m just going to shorten my name to Cherish.” More

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      9 Songs That Will Make You Say ‘Yeah!’

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      Usher is headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, inspiring a playlist of fantastic “yeah” tracks.Usher said “Yeah!” to the Super Bowl halftime show.Scott Roth/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,On Sunday, the N.F.L., Roc Nation and Apple Music announced that Usher will headline the 2024 Super Bowl halftime show. Only one reaction will suffice: “Yeah!”Such was the refrain heard everywhere in 2004, when the singer’s enthusiastically titled club banger “Yeah!” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a whopping 12 weeks (only to be dethroned by “Burn,” the next single from his blockbuster album “Confessions”). Slick, strobe-lit and infectious, the smash featured a dexterous guest verse from Ludacris and production and assorted yeah!s and OK!s from Lil Jon. “Yeah!” remains irresistible — and among the most successful homages to one of pop music’s trustiest syllables.The word “yeah” — or, even more emphatically, “yeah!” — is so entwined with the history of modern pop that when the critic Bob Stanley published a 2014 book charting “the story of pop music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé,” he titled it “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Stanley was probably referencing the specific yeah!s that punctuate the iconic chorus of the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” but the phrase also captures something quintessential about the exuberance of popular music.“Yeah” is slangier, more irreverent and often more musical than “yes,” and it bypasses that pesky hissing sound, for one thing. “Yeah” is also younger than its stuffier counterpart “yea” (as in the opposite of “nay”); its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1905 — not too long before the popularization of recorded music, incidentally. “Yeah” is both question (“yeah?”) and answer (“yeah!”). “Yeah!” can be used in a song as a vehicle for both percussion and melody, an easy call for audience participation or an ecstatic place holder for those moments when more complex language just won’t suffice.Am I suggesting that this glorious word is worthy of its own playlist? Oh, yeah!With Usher, Lil Jon and Ludacris as my inspiration (and with all due respect to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), I have chosen to limit today’s playlist to songs with “yeah” in the title, and specifically songs that revolve in some way around that particular lyric. This still left me with an eclectic collection to pull from, including songs from Daft Punk, Blackpink, LCD Soundsystem and the Pogues.Does this playlist also include a certain zany theme song from a certain 1980s teen comedy about playing hooky and hanging out with Connor from “Succession”? I think you know the word I’d use to answer that question.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris: “Yeah!”What van Gogh is to sunflowers, Lil Jon is to yeah!s. I cannot imagine — and do not even want to imagine — this song if he had not produced it and blessed it with his gravelly, prodigious exclamations. (Listen on YouTube)2. Daft Punk: “Oh Yeah”Perhaps the greatest musical qualifier of “yeah”: “Oh.” Gently ups the ante but doesn’t take too much attention from our prized word. (That attention-seeking “ooooh” is another story.) Daft Punk certainly knows how to spin that titular refrain into mind-numbing bliss on this hypnotic, bassy track from the duo’s 1997 debut, “Homework.” (Listen on YouTube)3. The Pogues: “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”Five yeahs in a song title? These guys mean business. This 1989 single finds the English rockers the Pogues at their most jubilant, leading the way toward a fist-pumping, shout-along chorus. It also features a midsong saxophone solo, which is basically the nonverbal sonic equivalent of “yeah!” (Listen on YouTube)4. Pavement: “Baby Yeah (Live)”The phrase “baby, yeaaaaahhhhh” comes to hold an almost talismanic power in this Pavement B-side (a personal favorite), released only as a live cut on the deluxe reissue of the band’s 1992 debut album, “Slanted and Enchanted.” (Listen on YouTube)5. The Magnetic Fields: “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”A (very) darkly funny duet between the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt and Claudia Gonson that relies upon the tension created by their contrasting vocal styles, “Yeah! Oh Yeah!” appeared on the group’s 1999 epic, “69 Love Songs.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Yolanda Adams: “Yeah”“Yeah” becomes a spiritual affirmation on this uplifting song from the gospel singer Yolanda Adams’s 1999 album, “Mountain High … Valley Low.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Blackpink: “Yeah Yeah Yeah”“Yeah” also transcends language barriers, as the K-pop girl group Blackpink remind us on this track from the 2022 album “Born Pink.” Most of the lyrics are sung in Korean, but the quartet deliver that catchy chorus in the universal language of “yeah.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Yello: “Oh Yeah”An early exploration of pitch-shifted vocals, the Swiss electronic group Yello’s absurdist “Oh Yeah” was used heavily, and memorably, in the 1986 comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Yello’s Boris Blank once recalled that the group’s vocalist Dieter Meier initially came up with more lyrics, but Blank told him that would make the song “too complicated.” Said Blank, “I had the idea of just this guy, a fat little monster sits there very relaxed and says, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah.’” Sure! (Listen on YouTube)9. LCD Soundsystem: “Yeah (Crass Version)”Our grand finale is a nine-minute extravaganza of yeah (extravaganz-yeah?) from LCD Soundsystem. By the end of this mesmerizing 2004 single, on which James Murphy and company chant the titular word ad infinitum, “yeah” has transcended language, and maybe even music itself, to become a state of mind. (Listen on YouTube)Yeah, yeah,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“9 Songs That Will Make You Say ‘Yeah!’” track listTrack 1: Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris, “Yeah!”Track 2: Daft Punk, “Oh Yeah”Track 3: The Pogues, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”Track 4: Pavement, “Baby Yeah (Live)”Track 5: The Magnetic Fields, “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”Track 6: Yolanda Adams, “Yeah”Track 7: Blackpink, “Yeah Yeah Yeah”Track 8: Yello, “Oh Yeah”Track 9: LCD Soundsystem, “Yeah (Crass Version)”Bonus Tracks“Baby yeah: a seductive and sentimental call for human connection.” I thought I was alone in my obsession with that live recording of Pavement’s “Baby Yeah” until I read this beautiful, heart-wrenching n+1 essay by Anthony Veasna So.And, on a much lighter note: Watch the “CSI: Miami” star David Caruso, compelled by the power of Roger Daltrey’s “Yeah!” to deliver an endless string of mic-dropping one-liners. This video has 7.5 million views, and I believe that over the past decade or so I have been responsible for at least two million of them. More

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      In Mountain View, Ark., Preserving the Ozark Way of Life

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      .cls-1 { fill: url(#linear-gradient); } .cls-2 { mask: url(#mask); } The Town With a Song in Its Heart Jamming on the porch of the Wildflower Bed & Breakfast in Mountain View, Ark. Houston Cofield The Town With a Song in Its Heart Follow the winding roads to Mountain View, Ark., home of the Ozark Folk […] More

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      At the Serge Gainsbourg’s Paris House, Time Stands Still

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      The long-contested, now beloved French singer’s home is open to the public, with everything exactly as it was on the day he died in 1991.Jester, troubadour, agent provocateur, Serge Gainsbourg rhymed his way through life in a fog of Gitanes smoke, making music of every genre. Jane Birkin, his great love, was a “baby alone in Babylon.” Asked once on a TV show how he would like to die, Gainsbourg shot back: “I would like to die alive.”Now, 32 years after his death in Paris at age 62, Gainsbourg feels very much alive at the Maison Gainsbourg, his Left Bank home that opened to the public last week, along with a museum nearby. Nothing has moved — not the Steinway piano, the Gitanes pack, the Zippo lighter, the empty bottle of Château Pétrus, the typewriter or the framed spiders.All the walls are draped in black fabric. Gainsbourg preferred black, he once said, “because in psychiatric hospitals the walls are all white.”This eerie exercise in preservation — giving the impression that Gainsbourg has sidled out moments earlier — is the act of love of his daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, now a renowned actress, singer and movie director. “To stop time on March 2, 1991, was a way to refuse the fact that my father was dead,” she said in an interview. “I would go to the house from time to time, and mope and hurt and brood from terrible loss.”The Maison Gainsbourg is sold out to visitors through the end of the year, although occasional sales of newly-released tickets are promised before then.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesThe contents of Gainsbourg’s apartment are left as they were on the day he died in 1991.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesSerge Gainsbourg was the son of Russian Jews who fled their homeland after the 1917 revolution and settled in Paris. As a teenager he wore the Yellow Star that the Nazis and the collaborationist French Vichy government imposed on Jews. He and his family survived World War II in hiding.If, as he followed his pianist father into a postwar life of Paris cabarets, Gainsbourg quickly showed contempt for pieties, moralizing and conformism, he had good reason: He knew well, having been marked for death as a Jew, the limits of the French Republic’s motto of liberty, equality and fraternity.His house, which is already sold out to visitors through the end of the year, although occasional sales of newly-released tickets are promised before then, is dark and cluttered, a lair. In a whisper, Ms. Gainsbourg, 52, accompanies visitors through an intimate audio guide delivered via headphones. We learn that she was not allowed to play the Steinway, only an upright piano. The large collection of police badges arrayed on a table were coaxed from cops her father invited in. Antique dolls on a bed upstairs terrified her. When her head first brushed the crystal ball hanging from the chandelier in her father’s bedroom, she knew she had grown.“To stop time on March 2, 1991, was a way to refuse the fact that my father was dead,” said Charlotte Gainsbourg. Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis, until they split in 1980, was the home of Gainsbourg and Birkin, Charlotte’s parents, whose erotic lovemaking duet “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus” was a groundbreaking hit in 1969. It was banned in Britain and Italy, and Gainsbourg attributed its success to the Vatican, which called the song “obscene.” An earlier recording with another of Gainsbourg’s loves, Brigitte Bardot, was played once on French radio before Bardot’s then husband, Gunter Sachs, threatened a law suit. It was finally released in 1986.If the song was explicit, it also bore the imprint of Gainsbourg’s lyricism. “You are the wave, me the naked island,” Birkin murmurs.Gainsbourg was a bard who never shied away from the Eros and violence that, through melancholy eyes, he saw at the heart of life, and serenaded with what the French newspaper Le Monde once called “an imperious languor.” A haunted troublemaker who drank and smoked his way to an early death, he trod a fine line between provocation and outright taboo, offering a relentless invitation to confront hypocrisies.“To be an artist you need a lot of sincerity, which comes at a very high price,” Gainsbourg said toward the end of his life.“I can’t imagine my father surviving our current times,” Ms. Gainsbourg said. “Perhaps he would have adapted. But our culture is scary. Everything is calculated, pondered, and you run the risk of being canceled at any moment and no long being able to express yourself. That is what is frightening for an artist.”Gainsbourg was hated by French conservatives for daring, in 1979, to turn La Marseillaise, the national anthem, into a reggae hit, “Aux Armes Et Caetera.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesMs. Gainsbourg said she wasn’t allowed to play her father’s piano; she had to play an upright model.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesAs it happened, I moved to the Rue de Verneuil, where Gainsbourg lived, in the summer of 1991, a few months after his death, for my first tour as a Paris correspondent. I watched in some wonder as adoring declarations (interspersed here and there with antisemitic bile) formed a canvas of graffiti across the length of his home.Soon the Gainsbourg spell had me. I listened to the songs, filled with dark irony and fatalism, that had made him such a disruptive force in French society over the preceding decades.He was the haggard minstrel of shameless lovemaking attuned to the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s. He was the subversive with a permanent stubble, hated by French conservatives for daring, in 1979, to turn La Marseillaise, the national anthem, into a reggae hit, “Aux Armes Et Caetera.” Paramilitary veterans forced Gainsbourg to cancel a concert in Strasbourg in 1980, a foretaste of the rise of the French extreme right.He was the Jew who in “Yellow Star,” from the 1975 album “Rock Around the Bunker,” mocks his executioner-inflicted badge as a prize (“I’ve won the Yellow Star”), or perhaps a sheriff’s emblem, before concluding: “Difficult for a Jew, the law of struggle for life.” He was the outsider with an uncanny eye and level gravelly delivery; as another outsider, I had much to learn.A single song, “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas” (or the ticket-puncher at the Porte des Lilas Metro station), released in 1958, propelled Gainsbourg to fame. Described by the writer Boris Vian as “the essence itself of musical and lyrical art,” it evokes the desperate life of the “man you meet but don’t look at” in a place where there is no sun. He makes “holes, little holes, always little holes, holes for second class, holes for first class,” and dreams at last of holding a gun to “make myself a little hole” that will land him forever in a big one.A life of struggle, and sometimes a fight for survival itself, was the world that Gainsbourg first knew with his immigrant parents. He would never forget it. In myriad genres — rock, reggae, Afro-Cuban, pop, funk — he went on to explore themes of love and loss, often with deadpan humor. He in turn influenced countless musicians, from hip-hop to indie.Ms. Gainsbourg told me she was long overwhelmed by her father’s legacy and the question of what to do with his house. She thought about enlarging it in 2008 with the help of the architect Jean Nouvel, but the project was expensive and she retreated. In some ways doing anything was still “unbearable.” Then, in 2013, her half sister, Kate Barry, Birkin’s daughter from an earlier relationship, died in a fall from her 4th-floor Paris apartment. Ms. Gainsbourg fled to New York.Only now has Ms. Gainsbourg felt ready to open the house and the museum, which contains letters, school reports and a wide range of mementos from her father’s life — even if she is still in mourning for her mother, who died in July.“I know that she is very happy I did this, even if perhaps she no longer felt at home here,” Ms. Gainsbourg said of Birkin, who continued to work closely with her father even after their separation.Gainsbourg near the end of his life in his apartment on the Rue de Verneuil.Jerome Prebois/Sygma, via Getty ImagesHer mother always pushed her to become an artist, Ms. Gainsbourg said. When she was 12, she recorded “Lemon Incest” with her father at a studio in New York. “The love we will never make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest, the most dizzying,” she sings in a high-pitched, tremulous whisper.A video accompanying the song, a melody from Chopin with a disco beat, showed father and daughter on a wide bed, he shirtless in jeans, she in a shirt and underwear.“It took me 20 minutes to record and I sang as well as I could because I knew it was his declaration of love,” she told me. “The most important thing is that I say this is the love we will never make together.”I asked if it would be possible to record today. “Probably not: It would be seen as shameful disrespect to people who have suffered incest. Certainly, but that does not change the fact I am very proud the song exists, and that I sang it. I was always respected by my father. Are we going to condemn Nabokov, or any art that shocks?”In the cluttered house, cigarette butts are piled in an ashtray. They made me think of Gainsbourg’s “God Smokes Havanas,” recorded in 1980 with Catherine Deneuve.In it, Gainsbourg sings (in an inadequate translation of the beautiful French):God is a smoker of HavanasHe told me himselfSmoke carries you to paradiseI know it, my love. More

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      Electronic Pioneers Tangerine Dream Shape-Shift Once Again

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      The group founded in 1967 has carried on after the death of its longtime leader, Edgar Froese, but his impact on its music is still resonating.Before this spring, the last time Tangerine Dream performed live in the United States was on Sept. 30, 2013. The occasion was “Live From Los Santos: The Music of Grand Theft Auto V,” a showcase presented during the 51st New York Film Festival.Surrounded by fellow composers and a phalanx of session musicians, the pioneering electronic-music band was hard to pick out of the crowd. But you couldn’t miss the group’s leader, Edgar Froese, front and center in his signature black hat.It was the final New York performance by Froese, who died of a pulmonary embolism in 2015. He had founded Tangerine Dream in Berlin in 1967, and kept the trailblazing group alive through myriad lineups and stylistic shifts: from eerie soundscapes and hypnotic sequencers in the 1970s, through anthemic synth-pop suites and successful film scores in the ’80s, and guitar-stoked E.D.M. during the ’90s, to the splashy, stage-friendly sextet of his final years.Now, a new Tangerine Dream is touring the U.S. and Canada, arriving at the Knockdown Center in Queens on Saturday — precisely a decade after its last New York appearance. Huddled together for a video call backstage in Tucson, Ariz., before a recent show, the current members — the keyboardists Thorsten Quaeschning and Paul Frick, and the violinist Hoshiko Yamane — delighted in the tour’s progress so far.“Absolutely brilliant,” said Quaeschning, 46, a member of the group since 2005 and its musical director since 2013. “It’s getting better from concert to concert.”“A lot of people talk to us after the show, who share their memories of old Tangerine Dream shows and albums from before I was born,” Frick, 44, said.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesApart from a one-off South by Southwest festival show in March, this is the first time Tangerine Dream has performed in the states without Froese. But the former leader is uncannily present: not only in back-catalog selections like “Phaedra,” “Stratosfear” and “Love on a Real Train” (the haunting theme from the film “Risky Business”), but also in new music fashioned with musical sketches and digital recordings from a 60-hour archive Froese bequeathed to his second wife, the German artist Bianca Froese-Acquaye, who now supervises the band and its legacy.“For him, Tangerine Dream was always a kind of project which could be developed,” Froese-Acquaye said in a recent interview in a Times Square hotel cafe. “The individual musicians never were that important; he always said the music was the star.”It wasn’t the first time Froese had proposed a Tangerine Dream without him. “I had previously had the slightly strange idea of placing the group’s musical future into other hands in 1990, and to perhaps work on as a provisional director from behind the scenes,” he wrote in “Force Majeure,” an autobiography completed and published in 2017 by Froese-Acquaye.The line of succession now pointed toward Quaeschning. “There was always this sort of teacher-pupil situation between us,” Quaeschning said. “He had very set and crystallized views about scales and sound design, and the ideas behind the music.”“I feel like Edgar watches us at every concert,” Yamane said. “Or maybe I want him to.”Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesYamane, 42, enlisted in 2011, adding violin and cello to a lineup already augmented with guitar, saxophone and percussion. When Froese stripped the band back down to its electronic core in late 2014, Yamane — who uses a five-string electric violin to control keyboards — opted to carry on with the group, which added another keyboardist, Ulrich Schnauss.“I add the sound of my violin not as a solo melodic instrument,” Yamane said in an email interview, “but as one of all the sounds that can be played from the synthesizer.”After Froese died, the trio worked briefly with Peter Baumann, who had played with Froese and Christopher Franke in the foundational early ’70s lineup, and signed a later version of the band to Private Music, his upstart record label, in 1988. Baumann’s renewed presence might have allayed concerns about a Tangerine Dream without Froese. But the combination failed to gel.“For them, it was hard with me coming in from the outside and obviously having a history with the band,” Baumann said by telephone from his home in Northern California. “I didn’t want to fight, saying, ‘I’m the senior person here and will do what I want.’ It just was not fun, let’s put it that way.”“There was always this sort of teacher-pupil situation between us,” Quaeschning said of the group’s former leader.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesForging ahead, the nascent trio was met with skepticism from concert promoters and industry executives. “It was really a tough time,” Froese-Acquaye said. “They called us a cover band and things like that.”Former band members have also challenged the group’s legitimacy. Among the first to protest was Froese’s son, Jerome Froese, who played in Tangerine Dream from 1996 to 2005. “Tangerine Dream was my Dad and my Dad is dead and so is Tangerine Dream,” he wrote on Facebook in 2015.By email, Jerome confirmed that his position hasn’t changed. “What has happened here,” he wrote, “is classic legacy hunting by people who would not have had a career without the name Tangerine Dream.” The idea that his father left behind surplus musical material, he asserts, is a “fairy tale.”Johannes Schmoelling, who played in Tangerine Dream 1979 to 1985, says the current group lacks the technological tools and musical capability to match the historical band’s innovations. “It is much easier and commercially more successful to adorn oneself with this once world-famous name instead of having to earn one’s own laurels,” he wrote in an email.The crowd taking in Tangerine Dream at Mohawk Austin.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesEven Baumann is skeptical. The original band’s success, in his view, was less about genius than serendipitous timing. “You can’t really recreate what happened in the ’70s,” he said. “You don’t have the same kind of instruments, you don’t have the audience, you don’t have the atmosphere, you don’t have the cultural environment.“There’s nothing wrong with a cover,” Baumann added. “But it’s not the original, you know?”Quaeschning has heard it all before, even in response to projects led by Froese, like a cantata trilogy based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” In the 2000s, Froese himself recorded new versions of several Tangerine Dream albums, including “Phaedra,” “Tangram” and “Hyperborea.”“I’m used to people saying, ‘This is not Tangerine Dream,’” he said, laughing. “But what is Tangerine Dream?” Anyone hearing “Electronic Meditation,” the group’s clangorous 1970 debut, then “Phaedra,” its sequencer-driven 1974 landmark, and “Optical Race,” a slick digital release from 1988, would find it hard to reconcile the differences, he said.“It’s hard to spot the Tangerine Dream sound from a distance,” Quaeschning said, “but the feeling and the concept were always there. And it feels quite right at this moment.”“Quantum Gate,” released in 2017, and “Raum,” its 2022 follow-up, sound very much like Tangerine Dream, and not just because material by Froese was used. “The idea was going back to everything Edgar had done with Tangerine Dream in the ’70s and ’80s,” Quaeschning said, “with contemporary sound design and the idea that everyone has a role in the band, like an orchestra.”Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesOn tour, the upstart group won fans over with a mix of its new music and back-catalog staples. Harking back to the wholly improvised concerts of the earliest era, each show would end with a spontaneous collaboration lasting 20 minutes or more. Rather than improvisations, Quaeschning terms these performances “sessions.”“I don’t like the idea of improvisation, because sometimes it feels like people doing the muscle-memory thing,” he said. Here, just enough information is shared in advance — often just a key signature and tempo — to harmonize collaboration, sometimes accommodating guests.Schnauss departed in 2020, and Frick, 44, signed on. “A lot of people talk to us after the show, who share their memories of old Tangerine Dream shows and albums from before I was born,” he said. But new listeners are showing up, too, including some surely attracted by his work in the heady German techno trio Brandt Brauer Frick.Frick is the first Tangerine Dream member who never met the group’s founder. But for his bandmates, Froese remains vividly present.“I feel like Edgar watches us at every concert,” Yamane said. “Or maybe I want him to. I’m sure he will give me some advice, like, ‘You were good today,’ or ‘You should do this better.’” More

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      Doja Cat Looks to the Past to Make Her Own Moment on ‘Scarlet’

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      On her new LP, the rapper turns out tracks about her musical prowess and lust that show she’s not interested in making music the way today’s biggest stars do.It is an age of true flourishing for women in rap. A pair of peak-personality superstars, Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, are tussling for primacy. A second wave of rising stars is firmly established, including Megan Thee Stallion, Latto and Ice Spice. A seemingly endless supply of future fixtures is emerging from TikTok, which has done for women in hip-hop something that record labels and radio stations simply haven’t: allow them to be themselves, and allow them to be found.Too often, though, Doja Cat is left out of this conversation — perhaps because she’s too nimble. A frisky performer comfortable with both rapping and singing, she’s broken through most prominently on songs that show but don’t emphasize just how detailed a rapper she can be. Her two best-known hits, “Say So” and “Kiss Me More,” have been quasi-disco-revival pop, and even though her rhymes are pointed and tart, they’re almost suffocated by the gloss of the production.So it’s notable that “Paint the Town Red,” the lead single from her fourth album, “Scarlet” — and the second No. 1 song of her career — is something different: a light, airy, almost disarmingly casual hip-hop song, woven through with a mottled sample of Dionne Warwick’s version of “Walk on By.” Doja Cat raps slickly and dexterously, while peppy horns interject politely and austerely.But even as a hip-hop song, it’s an outlier in the current climate. All throughout the cheeky, idiosyncratic and sometimes great “Scarlet,” Doja Cat has a disarmingly precise ear for hip-hop, showing she’s far less interested in making songs in the manner of today’s biggest stars than looking back to earlier eras, whether the early 1990s or the early 2010s.She does so not in an especially nostalgic or imitative fashion, but more as a decoration. “Can’t Wait” is both the umpteenth hip-hop song to sample the signature drums from the Honey Drippers’ “Impeach the President,” and the first one to be about intense romantic affection, with clever imagery like “I wanna be the stubborn crust of barnacles upon you.” There’s a wooziness to the production that marks the song as contemporary, but most of the component parts would have been at home three decades ago.This recurs on the snappy “____ the Girls (FTG),” which sounds like it could have been produced by a ’90s New York rap stalwart like Diamond D or Lord Finesse; and on “Ouchies,” which has the chaotic, quick-tempo energy of the late 1980s.Doja Cat also varies her rapping technique in ways that recall these bygone eras. “Love Life” nods to the mid-90s proto neo-soul of Groove Theory, and Doja Cat matches it with a percussive flow that recalls Ladybug Mecca of Digable Planets. And “Balut,” a muscular, boom-bap track near the album’s end, full of swaggering punchlines — “Glass houses I don’t really like to keep my stones there/Oh well, I’ll buy another property for $4 mil” — sounds like it could have appeared on Rawkus’s “Soundbombing” series.Lyrically, “Scarlet” has two primary topics: Doja Cat’s dominance and her lust. On “Skull and Bones,” she encapsulates the former:Looking like I got some things you hate I haveAnd trust me baby, God don’t play with hate like thatSo you gon’ be real upset when he pick CatTo be the one up on them charts all over the mapIt’s archetypical Doja Cat: She’s not generally a teller of extended stories, but a rapper who thrills to returning to a rhyme again and again, from different angles, working over a specific sound until it becomes almost tantric. Sometimes she raps about tussles with fans, or observers (“That’s a ratin’, that’s some hating/that’s engagement I could use”), and sometimes about tussles with peers (“Who dare ride my new Versace coattails?”). And her songs about sex, like “Agora Hills” and “Often,” are bawdy and lighthearted.“Scarlet” is lumpier than Doja Cat’s last two albums, both more inventive and more unsteady. But it is also her most promising and encouraging album yet. There are now countless templates for women in hip-hop, and she’s not interested in sticking to any of them. Her path to, and through, the genre is without contemporary peer. If she’s overlooked in the current hip-hop conversation, that may be just how she wants it.Doja Cat“Scarlet”(Kemosabe Records/RCA) More

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      Rod Wave Has a Third No. 1 Album in Three Years

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      The Florida rapper’s latest hit LP bumps Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts” to No. 2 in its second week of release.For many music fans, the name Rod Wave may not immediately come to mind as one of today’s hip-hop superstars. But over the past few years, this 25-year-old from St. Petersburg, Fla., has quietly become one of the most successful artists in the genre with a distinctive style that combines rapping and singing and has helped him score his third No. 1 album in a row.“Nostalgia,” Rod Wave’s new album, opens with the equivalent of 137,000 sales in the United States, beating Olivia Rodrigo’s hit LP “Guts” by a few thousand, bumping it to second place after one week at the top. “Nostalgia” was a big streaming hit, particularly on Apple Music, garnering 188 million clicks, according to Luminate, which tracks music data.“Nostalgia” is Rod Wave’s third straight No. 1, after “Beautiful Mind” last year and “SoulFly” in 2021; before that, his album “Pray 4 Love” peaked at No. 2. According to Luminate, Rod Wave, who began releasing mixtapes in 2017, has logged more than 15 billion career streams in the United States alone.Rodrigo’s “Guts” is No. 2 with the equivalent of 134,000 sales. Zach Bryan’s self-titled album holds at No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is also stationary at No. 4, and SZA’s “SOS” — which recorded 10 weeks at No. 1 from late 2022 into February — rose one spot to No. 5 in its 41st week of release. More