Music

Are you in need of another Christmas tradition, and a bit of fun? Enter: “Whamageddon.”Last Christmas I gave you my heartListening to Christmas music can bring people together. Not listening to a particular Christmas song, it turns out, can have the same effect.Please allow us to introduce a December tradition you may not know about: “Whamageddon.”The goal: To go as long as possible without hearing the 1984 Wham! song “Last Christmas” before Christmas Day.But the very next day you gave it awayIn Britain this month, a D.J. at a soccer stadium in Northamptonshire played the song during halftime of a match and faced a bit of (lighthearted) backlash.“I never knew people took it so seriously,” Matt Facer, the D.J., told BBC Radio. “I gave it a spin, thinking it would be quite funny to wipe out 7,000 people who couldn’t avoid it, but clearly it isn’t funny.”“I think it’s funny,” said Thomas Mertz, 42, who runs a Whamageddon website. “I sincerely hope that people aren’t too mad at D.J. Matt for playing the song.”This year, to save me from tearsThe game started about 18 years ago when Mertz and some friends in Denmark noticed how ubiquitous the song was and started telling each other when they had been “hit” with it, he said.Whamageddon has a Facebook page with more than 16,000 followers and a website that got more than 500,000 visitors last year, according to Mertz.“It’s just a funny little thing that a couple of idiots from Denmark did to entertain themselves during Christmas,” Mertz said.But the game is also about adding levity to a season that can be stressful or lonely.“It’s just not a good time of year to a lot of people,” Mertz said. “If we can add a little bit of fun to that, I think it’s worthwhile.”Are you ready to lose the game? Click above. I’ll give it to someone specialMertz emphasized that the game is not about disliking the song or its genre.“It’s a common misconception that people think we do this because we somehow hate Christmas music, or Wham!, or pop,” Mertz said.In fact, that could not be further from the truth.“You wouldn’t know it from looking at me. I am a 6-foot-5 bearded bald guy,” Mertz said, “but pop music is my guilty pleasure.” More

Mozart’s opera, tailored to families in this staging, is big on spectacle and let’s-put-on-a-show verve. What shines? Kathryn Lewek as Queen of the Night.The evolution of Julie Taymor’s production of “Die Zauberflöte” from long-running hit to children’s-theater show at the Metropolitan Opera is now complete.Since the premiere of Taymor’s staging in 2004, her diaphanous puppets and George Tsypin’s translucent set pieces have brought a welcome weightlessness to Mozart’s hard-to-stage singspiel, which wraps fairy-tale monsters, young love and a Masonic quest in melodies of direct and abundant charm. This abridged version, in English, followed a few years later as a holiday show for families (though, at nearly two hours without intermission, it doesn’t exactly fly by).When the Met introduced a new production of the work by Simon McBurney last May that sees the world with a brand of childlike wonder that’s really meant for adults, it decided to keep Taymor’s puppets-and-plexiglass version as a separate, family-friendly entertainment that can be trotted out this time of year.This season’s run of the Taymor version, dubbed “The Magic Flute — Holiday Presentation,” opened on Friday with a rough let’s-put-on-a-show energy. The cast played broadly to its young audience. The orchestra, conducted by Patrick Furrer, sounded thin and tinny, lacking the mellow-gold shine that conveys nobility and transcendence in this score.On paper, it made sense to cast the tenor Rolando Villazón in the comic baritone role of Papageno. Now a stage director as well as a singer, he has largely given up the lyric tenor roles that catapulted him to the top of the opera world two decades ago. Still, he has charisma to burn, and Papageno is more or less the main character of this adaptation. Unfortunately, Villazón struggled with the low-for-him tessitura; his voice, tired and frayed, often floated around the center of the pitch when he wasn’t tweaking melodies to suit his range.It was sad to see an artist who was once capable of rare musical insight funnel his considerable creative energy into a frenetic, always-on physicality. Mimicking Woody Woodpecker’s laugh and Road Runner’s “meep meep!” he practically morphed into a cartoon. His improvisations and sprinklings of Spanish into the dialogue won over the audience, and his genuine rapport with the priest portrayed by Scott Scully, perhaps the Met’s funniest comprimario, was a joy.Kathryn Lewek, a scintillating Queen of the Night in McBurney’s production last season, returned to the role for this holiday run.Evan ZimmermanJanai Brugger (Pamina) and Brindley Sherratt (Sarastro) sounded a bit colorless in the first half, but their voices ripened as the show progressed. As the opera’s hero Tamino, the tenor Piotr Buszewski could be sensitive, but too often his singing came across as overcooked.Kathryn Lewek, a scintillating Queen of the Night in McBurney’s production last season, returned to the role for this holiday run. Regardless of what was going on around her, she sang like she was on the stage of one of the world’s foremost lyric theaters. “O zittre nicht,” in particular, was captivating with its soft tone, graceful lyricism and sharply etched coloratura. Putting aside a dry note here and there, “Der Hölle Rache” had impressive point, and the triplets tumbled seamlessly.Chuckles and puppets make for a fun night with the kids, but singing like Lewek’s is what the magic of opera is all about.The Magic FluteThrough Dec. 30 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

Every year is probably an interesting one for an artist as restless and inquisitive as David Byrne, but I’m willing to bet that 2023 was especially so. In September, a newly restored edition of “Stop Making Sense,” the landmark 1984 concert film by Byrne’s former band, Talking Heads, returned to theaters to much (richly deserved) […] More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe albums that made The New York Times pop music critics’ year-end lists cover a wide range of music: hip-hop, industrial rock, amapiano, country, pop-punk, R&B, corridos tumbados. Hyper-polished and spare; chaotic and highly composed.There was some overlap — enthusiasm for the second albums from artists as diverse as Olivia Rodrigo, SZA and 100 gecs. But what’s more fascinating are the points of divergence, the albums that spoke loudly to one critic while passing the others by.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the multiplicity of great styles of albums released this year (as well as EPs, which are having a renaissance in the streaming era), and how much longer artists will continue to make albums their signature statements.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticLindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York Times who also writes The Amplifier newsletterConnect 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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

A playlist of 124 songs from our three critics’ lists to experience however you wish.Olivia Rodrigo was one of only a handful of artists our three critics could agree on!Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesDear listeners,In the spirit of holiday excess and end-of-the-year summation, we’re about to make Amplifier history. Because today’s newsletter features — can I get a drumroll? And maybe an effect on my voice that makes me sound like one of those announcers at a monster truck rally? — our longest playlist everrrrr.It’s 124 songs. Eight hours and 15 minutes of music! That’s longer than watching “Killers of the Flower Moon” twice in a row! (Do not recommend, that sounds emotionally exhausting.)For the past few weeks, Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and I have been putting together our lists of the best songs and albums of the year. As usual, we’ve agreed on some things — the pop-punk princess Olivia Rodrigo’s punchy “Guts” and the rock absurdists 100 gecs’ outrageous “10,000 gecs” were the only two albums that appeared on all three of our lists — and diverged on a lot of things. For example, my esteemed colleague Caramanica believes that the second best song of the year is “World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak,” the vacant-eyed comeback hit from Jocelyn, a fictitious pop star from the doomed HBO series “The Idol.” To quote Adam Sandler in “Uncut Gems,” I disagree.But that variety — even those diverging opinions — is precisely what makes today’s playlist so fun. There’s truly something here for everybody, whether it’s the kaleidoscopic sound of the K-pop It Girls NewJeans, the incendiary folk of Allison Russell, the xx singer Romy’s emotionally charged dance music, the British rapper Central Cee’s smooth cadences, the Nigerian star Asake’s optimistic Afrobeats, Bailey Zimmerman’s arena-sized country, the vivid, prickly indie-rock of Speedy Ortiz … I could go on and on (and on), but I’ll let the music speak for itself.I won’t be providing commentary on each song, because there are 124 of them, but luckily we’ve already written about all of this music on our lists of best albums and best songs. (Non-Spotify listeners can find YouTube links there, too; and remember, Spotify offers an ad-sponsored tier, so you can always listen there for free, too.)There are two ways to experience this enormous playlist. You can just press play and go through it in order, getting a sense of each critic’s individual tastes and sensibilities. Or — and I think this is the best way — you can put it on shuffle and allow yourself to be surprised. I won’t promise you’ll like everything you hear; in fact, I guarantee there will be at least a few songs on here that will make you wonder if the New York Times pop music critics should get our ears examined. But that’s part of the fun of year-end lists, too. If we all agreed on everything (like, say, Jocelyn), there wouldn’t be any point in making them!What I will guarantee is that if you make it through this entire playlist, you will feel caught up on the music released in 2023. And, who knows, you just may discover your favorite song of the year.Listen along on Spotify.Drag racing through the canyon, singing “Boys Don’t Cry,”LindsayBonus TracksIs this music not new enough for you? We’ve got even more recently released tracks on today’s Playlist. Listen to new music from Adrianne Lenker, Nicki Minaj, Idles and more, here.Also, these lists focused on pop — in the widest sense of the word — but if you’re looking for even more variety, check out Giovanni Russonello’s list of the year’s best jazz albums. More

The Fans First Act would require disclosures about fees and the location of tickets, strengthen a law banning bots and set stiff penalties for violations.The United States Senate introduced a long-awaited bill on Friday promising consumer protections for tickets to live entertainment events, after more than a year of complaints about high fees, out-of-control prices and deceptive selling practices in the entertainment world.The bill, called the Fans First Act, would require sellers to disclose the full price of a ticket, including all fees; indicate what seat or section a customer is gaining access to; and say whether a ticket is being offered by its original or “primary” seller, as opposed to a reseller or broker.The bill, introduced by John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, along with four others, would also strengthen an existing law banning the use of computer bots, a tactic frequently used by scalpers; require ticket sellers to offer full refunds when an event is canceled; set thousands of dollars in penalties for abuse; and require the Government Accountability Office to study the ticketing market and make recommendations.The proposed law comes as ticketing has become a hot-button issue for voters and lawmakers, with prices at record highs and the selling practices of both primary ticketing companies — like Ticketmaster, which tends to represent artists and venue box offices — and resale marketplaces like StubHub and Vivid Seats having come under fire.At a Judiciary Committee hearing in January, two months after Ticketmaster’s system crashed during a Taylor Swift presale, senators from both parties pilloried an executive from Live Nation — which owns Ticketmaster — and called the company a monopoly that harms consumers. Separately, the Justice Department has been conducting an antitrust investigation of Live Nation.At his State of the Union address in February, President Biden said, “We can stop service fees on tickets to concerts and sporting events and make companies disclose all the fees upfront.” And in June, under pressure from the White House, ticket sellers including Ticketmaster and SeatGeek agreed to introduce “all-in pricing” for tickets.That scrutiny has developed as the concert industry had its biggest year ever, with the trade publication Pollstar saying that gross ticket sales for the Top 100 worldwide tours were $9.17 billion in 2023, up 46 percent from the year before, and 65 percent from 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the industry.The new Senate bill proposes steep civil penalties for violations, to be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. According to the bill, those penalties could include $15,000 per day during which a violation occurs, along with $1,000 per event ticket advertised or sold; those fines could amount to as much as five times the listed cost of a ticket.“The current ticketing system is riddled with problems and doesn’t serve the needs of fans, teams, artists or venues,” Mr. Cornyn said in a statement. “This legislation would rebuild trust in the ticketing system by cracking down on bots and others who take advantage of consumers through price gouging and other predatory practices and increase price transparency for ticket purchasers.”Ms. Klobuchar added, “From ensuring fans get refunds for canceled shows to banning speculative ticket sales, this bipartisan legislation will improve the ticketing experience.”In addition to Mr. Cornyn and Ms. Klobuchar, the cosponsors of the bill include two additional Republicans (Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Roger Wicker of Mississippi) and two Democrats (Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Peter Welch of Vermont).The new bill joins a number of other proposed laws in both houses of Congress, which would need to be reconciled for any to become law. In July, the Ticket Act, requiring the upfront disclosure of the full price of a ticket, passed the Commerce Committee. In the House of Representatives this week, another bill calling for transparency in ticket prices passed the Energy and Commerce Committee.The new Senate bill has been in negotiations for months, and some activists have privately complained about its compromises. The bill bans “speculative” selling, in which resale brokers list tickets for sale without actually having them in hand, betting that they can fulfill the order later. But it still allows “concierge” services in which brokers charge fans to wait in a digital line for them, a process that consumer advocates say puts ordinary customers at a disadvantage.Still, the bill has broad support throughout the music industry, including from venue and artist groups; the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards; and Fix the Tix, a coalition of many talent and industry groups.Live Nation, which has called for government action to reform the ticket market, also said it supports the bill, saying, “We believe it’s critical Congress acts to protect fans and artists from predatory resale practices, and have long supported a federal all-in pricing mandate, banning speculative ticketing and deceptive websites, as well as other measures.” More

Hear tracks by Tems, Idles, Adrianne Lenker and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Nicki Minaj featuring Drake, ‘Needle’Thirteen years ago, on her debut studio album “Pink Friday,” Nicki Minaj recruited her Young Money labelmate and fellow rising star Drake for the galvanizing hit “Moment 4 Life.” They join forces once again on “Needle,” a noticeably more laid-back and atmospheric track from Minaj’s long-teased “Pink Friday 2,” which demonstrates how both of these rappers — and the sound of rap music itself — have changed in the intervening years. Drake calls back to the island cadences of his “Views” era, lilting a somewhat strained metaphor: “You’re like a needle, life’s a haystack.” Minaj raps as if on cruise control, characteristically dexterous (“Poppin’ out like a cork/duckin’ ’em like Björk”) if zoologically confused; Nicki, it was a swan dress! LINDSAY ZOLADZTems, ‘Not an Angel’Afrobeats turns inward in the Nigerian songwriter Tems’s “Not an Angel” — an emphatic good-riddance song with lines like, “I was alone when I was with you,” “All you did was give me nothing” and “Right now it’s going nowhere but the graveyard.” Programmed percussion and a moody guitar lick carry her rising resentment and self-realization: “I’m not an angel — I’m just a girl that knows the truth,” she sings, moving into sync with the beat as she pulls away from her ex. JON PARELESWishy, ‘Spinning’Can a band be classified as shoegaze if its head is in the clouds? Such is the delightful paradox posed by Wishy, a promising new group from Indiana releasing its debut EP “Paradise” next Friday. Echoing the spirit of millennial dream-pop acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Wishy’s latest single “Spinning” layers textured guitar, a driving breakbeat and Nina Pitchkites’s airy vocals to create a sumptuous sound. “Spinning around on the kitchen floor,” she sings. “I don’t know what I’m dancing for.” Prepare to do the same. ZOLADZIdles, ‘Grace’The British band Idles generally play sinewy, irascible post-punk songs, but every so often the singer Joe Talbot confesses to vulnerability, as he does in “Grace.” It’s a secular prayer: “No God, no king/I said love is the thing,” Talbot sings. He both longs for and offers refuge and compassion; behind him, the band gnashes and clatters and eventually erupts, but his determined humility lingers. PARELESElephant Gym featuring Yile Lin, ‘Happy Prince’Elephant Gym, a bass-guitar-drums trio from Taiwan, plays a nimble, jazzy kind of math-rock, paced by the hopscotching bass lines of KT Chang and the guitar counterpoint of her brother Tell Chang. “Happy Prince” is loosely based on a children’s story by Oscar Wilde. With bright-eyed guest vocals by Yile Lin, from the band Freckles, “Happy Prince” breezes along, shifting meters and taking chromatic turns; every so often, it explodes. PARELESNnamdi, ‘Going Crazy’A snippet of children singing “We’re all going crazy” led the Chicago pop experimentalist Nnamdi to come up with “Going Crazy.” It appears at assorted speeds, over assorted chords and drum-machine beats, as he croons in falsetto about how “I been up working harder every night” and “I just want to have a little fun” — a workaholic’s jovial complaints. PARELESUsher and H.E.R., ‘Risk It All’It hardly gets more old-school than “Risk It All,” a duet from Usher and H.E.R. — from the soundtrack to “The Color Purple” — that’s happy to risk vocal close-ups: call-and-response, tag-teaming, overlapping, sharing. Little more than piano chords accompany the duo, who sound like they were singing to each other in real time throughout the song, though they couldn’t resist overdubbing some extra harmony vocals. Even so, there’s an unadorned, intimate physicality to the romantic sentiments. PARELESAdrianne Lenker, ‘Ruined’This sparse, movingly fragile song from the Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker is a dispatch from the most devastating kind of obsession: “Can’t get enough of you,” Lenker sings in a warbled falsetto. “You come around, I’m ruined.” Accompanied by just a haunting piano and eerie, echoing effects, Lenker’s plain-spoken vulnerability becomes, by the end of the song, a kind of strength. ZOLADZEliza McLamb, ‘16’Eliza McLamb, a songwriter who’s also a podcaster, revisits a period of severe teenage trauma — her mother’s mental illness, her own self-destructive compulsions — in “16”; it’s from her album due in January, “Going Through It.” Deep, sustained synthesizer tones accompany her breathy voice, offering the stability — or numbness — she longs for. PARELESKaren Vogt, ‘We Coalesce’Layers of wordless, echoey vocal loops, with hints of modal melody, are the makings of “We Coalesce,” one of the eerie, undulating pieces Karen Vogt recorded while mourning her cat. PARELESVijay Iyer Trio, ‘Prelude: Orison’If Vijay Iyer’s music was big for you this year, it was probably thanks to “Love in Exile,” the much-beloved album he released with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. Though cool-blooded and almost ambient, that LP was swept by an undercurrent of disquiet — a feeling the pianist embraces even further in his other working trio, with the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Their 2021 debut, “Uneasy,” was an itchy and stimulating affair inspired, as Iyer said ahead of its release, by the awareness “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be.” Well, wait. Is there some paradox lurking here? How is instrumental music that sounds so elevated and indirect supposed to upend our most basic assumptions? To which another question might provide the response: Processing the news these days, have you felt angry, frustrated or helpless? If that resonates, this trio’s music would like to help you make some sense of that sensation — and maybe even sidestep it, pushing toward some kind of confrontation. (“Uneasy” includes “Combat Breathing,” a rhythmic call-to-action inspired by Black Lives Matter organizers.) The new, tempo-slurring “Prelude: Orison,” is languid, diaphanous, harmonically canted. Whenever it briefly resolves, it starts the cycle over again. It’s as if this band wants to both seduce you and discomfit you, stripping you of everything but the ability to think and see for yourself. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

The year’s most thrilling albums were made by artists pushing beyond borders, teaming with new collaborators and making bold statements of their own.That thing we keep calling “jazz” refuses to stop overrunning its borders, reworking itself, showing up in new forms identifiable only by the most basic strands of their DNA. All of its subcultures churned out inspired work this year; many show up below.

1. Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, ‘Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning’It’s fitting, in this moment, that the hardest-hitting album on this list would be a celebration of Indigenous identity, resilience and resistance. For Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning” is also his first hard break from jazz, a category he has been trying to slip his entire career. Here he sits with the other tradition that raised him: the “maroon” community of New Orleans’s Black masking Indians, commonly known as Mardi Gras Indians. This is Adjuah’s first LP without any trumpet. Instead he circles up with a group of family and longtime collaborators, revisiting classics from the call-and-response Black Indian repertoire and adding his own, newfangled rallying cries over plucked kora strings and charging drums.2. Jaimie Branch, ‘Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War))’Jaimie Branch had nearly finished mixing this album — the third studio record from her trumpet-cello-bass-drums quartet, Fly or Die — when she died suddenly in 2022. It would be hard to imagine a more rousing and generous parting gift. Branch (like Adjuah) was a declarative trumpeter who had only recently embraced her unrefined-but-rewarding singing voice. With it she entreats us to love, to agitate and to put ourselves on the line.

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