Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Why Luxury Brands and Performers Like Beyoncé Are Seeking Willo Perron’s Designs

      by

      Perhaps you’ve seen Beyoncé soaring over crowds in a floating horseshoe at her Cowboy Carter tour performances, or riding a metallic mechanical bull. If you’ve wondered who came up with those stunts, the answer involves Willo Perron.“She really is, in my eyes, the last of a type of an entertainer-performer,” Mr. Perron, the tour’s stage designer, said over tea at Corner Bar, a restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in April. “Really, I’ve never seen somebody work so diligently.”He was speaking with the perspective of someone who has also worked with Rihanna (on her Super Bowl LVII halftime show), with Drake (on the Aubrey and the Three Migos tour) and with Florence and the Machine (on the group’s High As Hope tour).“It makes you have to kind of show up at such a high level all the time,” Mr. Perron said of working with Beyoncé. “And it’s good, it’s like playing a sport with somebody who is much better than you. Hopefully, it makes you a little bit better yourself.”Mr. Perron, 51, is one of those people who is hard to put a label on professionally — the type of creative mind whose fluency in various mediums has led some to call him a cultural polymath and others a world builder.“What I do is like planting seeds with no expectations,” he said. “Just constantly planting seeds and planting seeds. And then if something grows, then I give it attention. And then simultaneously, this thing will grow over here and I’ll give that a little bit of attention.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Lil Wayne Gets Earnest With Bono, and 9 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Sabrina Carpenter, Ethel Cain, Sudan Archives and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lil Wayne featuring Bono, ‘The Days’“I ain’t gettin’ younger, but I’m gettin’ better,” Lil Wayne declares in “The Days,” a rock anthem about survival and seizing the moment: “If my days are numbered, treat every day like Day One.” None other than Bono shares the song, starting and ending it and singing about “the days that tell you what life is for,” while the production emulates U2’s grand marches. Elsewhere on his new album, “Tha Carter VI,” Lil Wayne offers his usual punchlines and free associations; here, he’s unabashedly earnest.Water From Your Eyes, ‘Life Signs’The Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes revels in musical jump cuts and not-quite-sequiturs. “I am coming apart / I’m becoming together, true to form,” Rachel Brown sings in “Life Signs” from an album due in August. Nate Amos’s guitars leap from wiry, hopscotching math-rock lines to brute-force distortion and back; Brown deadpans through monotone verses, but offers a wistful melody in the chorus. By the end of the song, somehow it all makes sense.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Manchild’Sabrina Carpenter lightheartedly and brutally dissects what might be called a himbo in “Manchild.” In a track that starts as synth-pop and ends up as country-rock, she mock-appreciates how “your brain just ain’t there” with a guy who can’t charge a phone, much less satisfy her. “I like my men all incompetent,” she claims, barely suppressing a giggle.Addison Rae, ‘Fame Is a Gun’Who could be better than Addison Rae, the TikTok sensation turned pop songwriter, to sing about craving attention, achieving the “glamorous life” and dealing with all the parasocial fallout? “I live for the appeal,” she sings, adding, “It never was enough / I always wanted more.” Yet she also realizes, “I’m your dream girl, but you’re not my type.” The production cycles through its three chords with an insistent pulse that hints at the pressure to keep generating more content.Sudan Archives, ‘Dead’Sudan Archives — the songwriter, violinist and producer Brittney Parks — powers through an identity crisis with the shape-shifting, maximalist, ultimately unstoppable track “Dead.” She asks “Where my old self at?” and “Where my new self at?” and teases “Did you miss me?” and “Do you miss me?” In four minutes, the song morphs among quasi-orchestral string arrangements, spacey electronics and walloping dance beats, then merges them all in a triumphant closing stomp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Ex-Girlfriend Will Continue Testimony About Unwanted Sex

      by

      Testifying under a pseudonym, “Jane,” the woman has described “hotel nights” involving drugs and encounters with escorts that she told the mogul she did not want to continue.The 18th day of testimony in the federal trial of Sean Combs will continue on Friday with a woman who described the encounters she had with a succession of men at the music mogul’s direction as a “Pandora’s box” of unwanted sex.The woman, who is testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” is the second witness put forward by prosecutors as a victim of sex trafficking by Mr. Combs, who also faces charges of racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual arrangements were nonconsensual.The first of those witnesses, Casandra Ventura — the singer known as Cassie, who was in an off-and-on relationship with Mr. Combs for 11 years — has played a prominent role in Mr. Combs’s legal troubles over the last year and a half. Her bombshell lawsuit, filed in November 2023, led to the government’s investigation, and a leaked hotel security video showing Mr. Combs brutally assaulting her has been a key piece of evidence, shown to jurors repeatedly since the trial began four weeks ago.Before Jane took the stand on Thursday afternoon — under strict conditions from the court to protect her privacy — little had been known about her. In filings before the trial began, prosecutors referred to her in filings only as “Victim-2,” saying that the “financial losses, dependency and social isolation” she experienced during her relationship with Mr. Combs from 2021 to 2024 “made her more vulnerable to his coercion.”At the start of her testimony, she described herself as a single mother who was earning her living through social media promotions when she met Mr. Combs in 2020 on a trip to Florida. They began flirting, and gave each other nicknames: She was Bert and he was Ernie, after the “Sesame Street” characters. By early 2021, she said, they were in a passionate, intimate relationship (though Mr. Combs was clear that he was seeing other women at the same time).What she says happened next parallels parts of Ms. Ventura’s testimony. Mr. Combs brought Jane to a Miami hotel suite where she said she saw “assistants” setting up with lights and beverages, and draping bedsheets over the furniture. Mr. Combs invited a male escort to the room and gave the two detailed sexual directions, she testified, while the famed music producer watched and masturbated.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Watch Five Highlights From the Met Opera Season

      by

      There were some great shows at the Metropolitan Opera this season. I went three times to a vividly grim new production of Strauss’s “Salome” and to a revival of his sprawling “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” and I would have happily returned to either one.But overall the season, which ends on Saturday with a final performance of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” had considerably more misses than hits.Lately, the company has given more resources to contemporary work. That’s an admirable endeavor — and a risky one, both financially and creatively. This season the Met presented four recent operas, none of them box office home runs or truly satisfying artistically.“Antony and Cleopatra” had passages of Adams’s enigmatic melancholy, but the piece slogged under reams of dense Shakespearean verse. “Grounded,” by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, which opened the season in September, starred a potent Emily D’Angelo as a drone operator, but couldn’t rise above a thin score. Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s “Ainadamar,” its music raucously eclectic, struggled to make its dreamlike account of Federico García Lorca’s death into compelling drama.Best of the bunch was “Moby-Dick,” by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, a bit bland musically but at least clear and convincingly moody. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich’s world-weary Ahab, stalking the stage with a belted-on peg leg, has stayed with me.So too has the pairing of a volatile Julia Bullock and Gerald Finley, the embodiment of weathered authority, as Adams’s Cleopatra and Antony. Among other strong performances, Ben Bliss and Golda Schultz, the two leads in a revival of a scruffy staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” sang with melting poise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Everything Millennial Is Cool Again

      by

      JNCO Jeans, big hair, “Sex and the City” and recession pop: Peak Millennial is back and the era’s trends are taking on a new life.They trolled us for being old when we hit our 30s, old-fashioned for remembering a time before email and for being “cringe” as we kept wearing our skinny jeans and ankle socks.Oh, how the tables have turned.Gen Z and younger generations are picking up where we, their (slightly) older counterparts, left off in the 2000s.The Gen Z girlies are watching “Sex and the City” and living their best Carrie Bradshaw lifestyles. Those Facebook albums of blurry photos of a night out? They’re back, repackaged as an Instagram “photo dump.” Ditto for big hair and wired headphones.“I do like seeing how a younger generation interprets an older trend when it comes back around,” said Erin Miller, 35, a TikTok creator and self-proclaimed 1990s and 2000s historian. She wasn’t surprised that many trends loved by millennials were making a comeback. “Does it remind me of my age? Yes.”But that’s not to say everything is the same. Millennials (typically those born from the early 1980s to the late ’90s) had infomercials and mail-order. Gen Z and Alpha have TikTok makeup tutorials and fast fashion. Bradshaw’s cosmopolitan has been exchanged for an Aperol spritz.Members of generations Z and Alpha are putting their own mark on once-ubiquitous phenomena, and according to Ms. Miller, they’re the winners: “I think they are doing it better.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Jimmy Buffett’s Widow Sues in Battle Over $275 Million Estate

      by

      Jane Buffett wants a court to replace her co-trustee, claiming that he mistreated her and neglected to provide key financial information.A vicious legal battle has erupted over Jimmy Buffett’s $275 million estate, with his widow and his accountant filing lawsuits this week seeking to remove each other as co-trustees of a trust containing the “Margaritaville” singer’s sprawling holdings.The widow, Jane Buffett, is angry with the way her husband’s estate has been managed since his death nearly two years ago and has filed a petition seeking to oust her co-trustee, the accountant Richard Mozenter. She complains that the marital trust set up by the singer — who built a musical empire off his laid-back, beach-bum persona and infectious, often self-deprecating country-rock and calypso-inflected songs — is producing far too little income.Mrs. Buffett asked a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday to appoint an independent third party to replace Mr. Mozenter. Her petition accused Mr. Mozenter of failing to provide her with basic information about the trust’s assets and finances, keeping her “in the dark with regard to the state of her own finances.” The complaint also said that Mr. Mozenter had “belittled, disrespected and condescended to Mrs. Buffett.”“As a result, the majority of Mrs. Buffett’s net worth is controlled by someone she does not trust, and to whom the trust for her benefit must pay enormous fees — more than $1.7 million in 2024 to him and his firm — no matter how badly he treats her,” the petition said.Mr. Mozenter filed his own lawsuit in Palm Beach County, Fla., this week, asking the court to remove Ms. Buffett as co-trustee. His suit said that he was a “trusted financial adviser” to Mr. Buffett for more than 30 years and that he was also the singer’s business manager.He claimed that during their partnership, Mr. Buffett expressed concerns about his wife’s ability to manage and control his assets after his death. The singer was careful to set up the trust “in a manner that precluded Jane from having actual control” over it, the lawsuit said. “Other than serving as a noncontrolling trustee, Jane has no ability to manage the trust,” the filing said. “This fact has made Jane very angry.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      At Combs Trial, ‘Jane,’ an Ex-Girlfriend, to Testify About Sex Abuse

      by

      Prosecutors say the woman, who will take the stand under a pseudonym, endured coerced sex marathons called “freak-offs.” The defense contends they were consensual.A second woman who prosecutors say was sex trafficked by Sean Combs is set to take the stand on Thursday at his federal trial in what is expected to be several days of testimony about drug-fueled sex marathons with male prostitutes known as “freak-offs.”A judge has allowed the woman to testify anonymously, and she is being referred to in court by the pseudonym “Jane.” She is the most significant witness since Casandra Ventura, Mr. Combs’s on-and-off girlfriend of 11 years, whose allegations of physical and sexual abuse gave rise to the criminal case.Prosecutors have said that Jane’s relationship with Mr. Combs mirrored the one he had with Ms. Ventura in many ways. Like Ms. Ventura, they have said, Jane was coerced into freak-offs through violence, financial control and threats related to videos of the sexual encounters, which they said Mr. Combs directed step by step.Unlike Ms. Ventura, who is a singer known as Cassie and a public celebrity, Jane’s identity has not been revealed.The government has described Jane as a single mother who started spending time with Mr. Combs in 2020 and quickly fell in love with the music mogul, agreeing to participate in an initial freak-off to please him.“Jane thought the first freak-off was a one-time, wild night,” Emily Johnson, one of the prosecutors, said at the start of the case. “Jane was wrong.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More