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      The Return of Pulp, a Serious Band That Doesn’t Take Itself Seriously

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      The Britpop group led by Jarvis Cocker reunited for “More,” its first album since 2001. The stakes are different, the band more mature and the songs still thoughtful.Jarvis Cocker can opine. The mop-topped, bespectacled frontman of Pulp, the beloved Britpop act, is in demand as a conversationalist for the canny turns of phrase and pungent references that also animate his lyrics.Get him into a room with his bandmates — he and the three longest-running members had gathered last month at the Barbican Center in central London to talk about their newest album — and he will gladly unspool about what undergirds pop (“repressed feelings”) and the unexpected strife of band life: “You can’t get insurance! It’s loads more expensive for a musician.”Then there’s the threat posed by streaming. “We’re in a situation now where you could live your whole life without ever listening to a piece of music more than once; you can just let it all just go past you, in a kind of scented candle vibe,” he said with horror.Pulp, as the name suggests, is more visceral than that, with wryly observed dance-floor anthems that explore the social pecking order, like the enduring 1995 track “Common People.” What “made Pulp songs interesting,” Cocker said he realized lately, is that “they’re often quite frantic, trying to get some idea across or to work something out in your mind. Hysterical, sometimes, almost.”That propelled them through their ’90s heyday, anyway. But “More,” Pulp’s first record in nearly a quarter-century, out June 6, has a different thrust: more introspective, more room to breathe. When he played it in the offices of Rough Trade, Pulp’s label, “Someone said, oh, that’s very age appropriate,” Cocker, 61, recalled. “I took it as a compliment.”Sitting around a long conference table at the Barbican, the cultural center where they had gigged over the years, his bandmates — Candida Doyle, the keyboardist; Mark Webber, the guitarist; and Nick Banks, the drummer — mostly jibed with their songwriter and semi-democratic leader. But they did sometimes laugh (affectionately) at him.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

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial Draws Long Lines and Limited Seating

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      Without any livestreaming of the often graphic testimony, securing space inside the federal courtroom has meant long lines and long waits.Hours before sunset, the line begins to form outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. By the time the sun has risen again, some 13 hours later, the sidewalk is quite full.Queue psychologists, who study things like how to keep the hordes happy in lines at Disney World, would have a field day at the trial of Sean Combs.Since the trial started two weeks ago, folks have been showing up at ungodly hours to wait for a seat in the room where the music mogul is facing racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.News reporters assigned to cover the trial are joined in equal numbers by vloggers who have made the case their subject of the moment and members of the public who are simply interested in hearing the courtroom testimony.During the first two days of the trial, when the crowds were bigger, one YouTuber, Mel Smith, said he would leave his house in Beacon, N.Y., at about 3:30 p.m. to get a seat for the next morning’s testimony. When he arrived at about 5 p.m., he said, there were already a half-dozen people waiting in front of him.“Everybody knows P. Diddy — he’s a household brand — and everybody’s clicking all day to see what’s the latest updates,” he said.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

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      If You Want a Seat at the Trial of Sean Combs, Leave Yesterday

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      Without any livestreaming of the often graphic testimony, securing space inside the federal courtroom has meant long lines and long waits.Hours before sunset, the line begins to form outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. By the time the sun has risen again, some 13 hours later, the sidewalk is quite full.Queue psychologists, who study things like how to keep the hordes happy in lines at Disney World, would have a field day at the trial of Sean Combs.Since the trial started two weeks ago, folks have been showing up at ungodly hours to wait for a seat in the room where the music mogul is facing racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.News reporters assigned to cover the trial are joined in equal numbers by vloggers who have made the case their subject of the moment and members of the public who are simply interested in hearing the courtroom testimony.During the first two days of the trial, when the crowds were bigger, one YouTuber, Mel Smith, said he would leave his house in Beacon, N.Y., at about 3:30 p.m. to get a seat for the next morning’s testimony. When he arrived at about 5 p.m., he said, there were already a half-dozen people waiting in front of him.“Everybody knows P. Diddy — he’s a household brand — and everybody’s clicking all day to see what’s the latest updates,” he said.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

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      Ute Lemper Still Sings Songs of Rebellion. The Stakes Are Still High.

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      The German-born cabaret performer’s latest album celebrates the 125th anniversary of Kurt Weill’s birth, yoking classics to the language of today’s music.“Welcome to Weimar — to the year 2025,” Ute Lemper announced.The German-born singer and actress was greeting friends and colleagues who had squeezed into the Birdsong Society’s small headquarters by Gramercy Park to hear her perform songs from her latest album, which celebrates Kurt Weill, a composer Lemper has championed for four decades.Sliding into the album’s title number, “Pirate Jenny,” Lemper got even closer to a listener who had been standing just a few feet away, fixing him with a snarling grin. Featured in “The Threepenny Opera,” the most celebrated of Weill’s noted collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the tune has been covered by artists from Nina Simone to Judy Collins. It’s also the only standard written from the perspective of a hotel maid waiting for a ship of pirates to arrive and, at her behest, murder all the guests.“It’s a song about revolution and rebellion,” Lemper explained in an interview before the event. The singer is less intimidating in conversation than she is when channeling bloodlust. She’ll turn 62 in July, and with her long, lean frame and impossibly high cheekbones, she still projects the cool beauty of a runway model.Lemper was perceived as something of a rebel herself, at least in her native country, when Decca Records released “Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill” in 1988. The album, which evolved from “a little fringe record I made in Berlin” a couple of years earlier, earned Lemper an international fan base — with one notable exception.“The Germans hated it,” Lemper recalled. “They weren’t interested in speaking about the past.” Decca’s chief executive at the time, Roland Kommerell, German himself, had started a project dedicated to bringing back music that had been banned under the Nazis, including classical symphonies and Weimar-era cabaret songs — music composed by Jews who were persecuted or, like Weill, forced into exile.“It was a huge chapter to rip open; it was still bleeding at the time,” Lemper said. “And suddenly, I was in the position to have to respond to hundreds of journalists about this music. I became almost the representative of my generation, the Cold War generation, in Germany.”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

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      ‘Queen of Spades’ Review: A Fiery Soprano Breaks Through

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      At the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s production, it was the women who led, while a strong cast carried the patchwork plot.Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” tells the story of an addict, Hermann, whose obsession with cards leaves a trail of destruction. Along the way, some of the opera’s female characters become collateral damage. But at the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s stenciled historical-dress production on Friday, it was the women who came into focus.In large part this was because of the fiery performance of the soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who made her role debut as the aristocratic Lisa who breaks off an illustrious engagement to throw in her lot with the wild-eyed Hermann, clinging to him even after he uses deadly force to extract a supernatural gambling secret from her grandmother.“Young women often fall in love with” bad guys, Yoncheva noted in an earlier interview with The New York Times. On Friday, she drew on a wide range of vocal shadings to evoke flickers of girlish curiosity, fatalism and raw erotic longing that lent uncommon depth and agency to her character.Her commitment helped make sense of an opera that, with its collage of pastiche, quotations and narrative devices, can feel like a Frankenstein creation. Here, amid the cold glitter of a rococo-obsessed imperial court with people rigidly gliding about under towering wigs, Hermann and Lisa’s search for intense emotions seemed both nihilistic and perfectly plausible.Yoncheva might not have dominated the proceedings quite as much if she had appeared alongside a Hermann of equal stature. But the tenor Arsen Soghomonyan was dramatically stiff and vocally uneven in his house debut. Much of those jitters must be because he stepped into the role at short notice after the successive withdrawals of the tenors Brian Jagde and Brandon Jovanovich this month.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

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      Israel’s Campaign to Win Eurovision Went All the Way to the Top

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      Government social media accounts and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined a campaign to encourage people to vote for Israel’s entrant.Just minutes before Yuval Raphael went onstage to represent Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest final last weekend, the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, posted an appeal to his 1.5 million Instagram followers.“Vote #04 — New Day Will Rise” the prime minister’s post urged followers. “Vote 20 Times!” it added, a nod to the maximum number that viewers are allowed to cast under the contest’s rules.On a day when Israel’s military began mobilizing to advance farther into Gaza, and Israeli and Hamas negotiators were engaged in cease-fire talks, it was perhaps surprising that Netanyahu was weighing in on a spectacular, high-camp pop contest.Yet at a time when Israeli singers and artists are often shunned on the world’s stages over their country’s actions in Gaza, Eurovision appears to have grown in importance for Israel’s government.Eurovision fans vote for a variety of reasons, but Netanyahu’s direct plea was part of a wider effort by the government and pro-Israel groups to generate support for the Israeli contestant, via social media posts, email campaigns and YouTube ads.Israel secured the largest public vote at the final in Basel, Switzerland, which led to a nail-biting end to the show. Israel seemed poised to win right until the last minute of the vote count, when Austria, which had performed better in points from expert juries, leaped ahead.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

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      Two Decades After Her Death, Celia Cruz Lives On for Her Fans

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      Celia Cruz reigned for decades as the “Queen of Salsa,” with her signature shout of “¡Azúúúcar!” expressing in Spanish her music’s brand of joy and optimism. Twenty-two years after her death, the Cuban powerhouse singer still captivates her fans.The petite woman with a raspy voice wore tight, glittering dresses and colorful wigs and danced in high heels while singing her hit Spanish-language songs such as “La negra tiene tumbao” and “Ríe y llora.”Born Oct. 21, 1925, Ms. Cruz began her career in Cuba in 1940 and continued it in exile, producing more than 70 international albums and winning multiple Grammy Awards and Latin Grammys.She moved to New York in 1961, and brought her musical Cuban roots and mixed them with Puerto Rican and later Dominican rhythms, helping to usher the birth of salsa as a popular Latino genre in the United States.“When people hear me sing,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1985, “I want them to be happy, happy, happy. I don’t want them thinking about when there’s not any money, or when there’s fighting at home. My message is always ‘felicidad’ — happiness.”Ms. Cruz died in 2003 at her longtime home in Fort Lee, N.J., from complications after a surgery for a brain tumor. She was 77. Following a tour of her coffin in Miami, masses of fans honored her at a public viewing in New York City.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

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      Drummer and Music Agent Among 6 Killed in San Diego Plane Crash

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      Friends paid tribute to Daniel Williams, a former drummer for the metalcore band The Devil Wears Prada, and Dave Shapiro, a music agent who worked with Sum 41, Hanson and other bands.They were two rock music veterans who were excited to fly together from New Jersey to San Diego.One was Daniel Williams, a former drummer for the metalcore band The Devil Wears Prada. The other was Dave Shapiro, a music agent who worked with Sum 41, Hanson, Jefferson Starship and other artists, and was also a pilot who ran his own aviation business.In an Instagram story posted on Wednesday night, Mr. Williams shared a photo of their plane, a Cessna Citation, on a tarmac and two more photos of himself in the co-pilot’s seat.“Here we goooooo,” he wrote.But after crossing the country, the jet hit power lines and crashed in a residential neighborhood as it prepared to land in dense fog in San Diego early on Thursday morning.All six people aboard were killed, eight people on the ground were injured and 10 homes were damaged, the authorities said. It was not clear if Mr. Shapiro was piloting the Cessna when it crashed or if Mr. Willians was a co-pilot.Daniel Williams of The Devil Wears Prada at the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival in 2012 in San Bernardino.Chelsea Lauren/Getty ImagesThe music executive Dave Shapiro last year in Nashville.Stephanie Siau/Sound Talent Group, via Associated PressOfficials on Friday did not release all of the names of the victims, but Mr. Shapiro, 42, was killed as were Emma Lynn Huke, 25, and Kendall Fortner, 24, two employees at Sound Talent Group, the company Mr. Shapiro co-founded, the company said.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