Music

After Sexyy Red released the hit single “SkeeYee” in June, the song quickly spread to practices, locker rooms and stadiums.The rapper Sexyy Red had the best year of her budding career in 2023, earning a spot on Drake’s newest album, concluding a 20-city tour and releasing her popular mixtape, “Hood Hottest Princess.”One of the mixtape’s songs, “SkeeYee,” quickly spread on social media after its release in June. Titled after a phrase the rapper described as a form of catcalling or flirting, the sexually explicit “SkeeYee” ranked No. 1 on the inaugural TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart.Professional and collegiate athletes were among the fans, and the song quickly became a presence in locker rooms, in stadiums and on teams’ official social media channels.Several athletes said they most enjoyed the song’s fast-paced, energetic beat, which was created by the prominent rap producer Tay Keith. But they also pointed to the tone in which Sexyy Redd delivers lyrics like “If you see me and you tryna see what’s up.”“It’s like an anthem at this point,” said Lonnie Walker IV, who plays basketball for the Brooklyn Nets. “It really uplifts people and gets people excited. It gives you a little bit of confidence, a little bit of swagger when she’s talking her stuff.”As the year comes to a close, The New York Times retraced some key moments to show how the song took over the sports world.Securing a Prime Television spot‘It Was Just Good Vibes’Several weeks before heading to the New York Jets’ training camp, linebacker Quincy Williams and running back Michael Carter were driving around Miami when Carter played “SkeeYee” on the vehicle’s stereo.“As I was listening to it, at first I was like, ‘I don’t know,’ but as we kept listening, I was like, ‘OK, that is kind of catchy,’” Williams said.When they returned to New Jersey, the song bubbled in the locker room. Carter said it helped the team bond amid the hot summer days and intense N.F.L. practices.“We were always with each other — there’s no girls around — so it was just good vibes and the guys,” said Carter, who now plays for the Arizona Cardinals. “It was a song that everyone knew the words to.”The fervor among the Jets led to a notable appearance for “SkeeYee” on “Hard Knocks,” the annual series by NFL Films and HBO that follows a team through training camp. The scene shows players and coaches dancing, nodding and voicing their approval on the practice field as the song blares over speakers.New York Jets players reveled in “SkeeYee” on HBO’s “Hard Knocks.”HBOJon Blak, the team’s D.J., said that he had played the song only about twice a week to prevent it from becoming stale, and that camera crews captured the 75-second sequence across several days. But each time the song blasted, the players reacted positively, Blak said.“It was so convincing that obviously the players loved it, and it was like a call to action,” Blak added.Infiltrating Athlete celebrations‘Catching Its Wave’As the scene from “Hard Knocks” hit social media, the song’s reach swelled. Williams said his Miami friends joked that they should receive credit for its increasing popularity.Sexyy Red attended the Jets’ home opener against the Buffalo Bills on Sept. 11 and took pictures with players before the game, a tight contest in which Bills receiver Stefon Diggs used the song’s lyrics during a touchdown celebration.A few weeks later, the rapper made a similar appearance ahead of Penn State football’s annual “White Out” game.As the song’s popularity grew, it appeared in more venues. The Baltimore Orioles played it in the locker room after winning their Major League Baseball division on Sept. 28. Two days later, so did the Ole Miss college football team after an important win.By Oct. 7, the Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter Bobby Green was using “SkeeYee” as his entrance song for a fight in Las Vegas.“It’s in the streets, I felt like it was the newest thing out right now,” said Green, who was introduced to the song by one of his sponsors. “I could see it catching its wave.”Athletes have responded similarly to trending music in the past: In 2016, many professional and college teams completed the “Mannequin Challenge,” standing still for about 30 seconds until the chorus of “Black Beatles” by the rap duo Rae Sremmurd began. In 2013, there was the “Harlem Shake Challenge.”Flourishing on Social Media‘Show Them How We Rock’As athletes embraced “SkeeYee,” so did their teams, which pounced at the opportunity to leverage the trend.Ahead of the N.B.A.’s annual Media Day on Oct. 2, the social team for the Brooklyn Nets discussed ways to market its players as they underwent a daylong gantlet of photo shoots and interviews. It planned to tape a staff member reciting part of a “SkeeYee” lyric and see if each player could finish it.Brooklyn Nets players were asked to finish the lyrics of Sexyy Red’s summer hit.Brooklyn NetsThe video received over two million views on Instagram.“I think the opportunity to reach potential new fans really comes through cultural crossover,” said Alessandro Gasparro, the senior director of content for BSE Global, the Nets’ parent company. “Getting stuff like this really helps humanize our players.”A week after, a fan edited a video of the World Wrestling Entertainment star Joshua Fatu, known as Jey Uso, conducting the crowd at an event. The fan had superimposed “SkeeYee” over the video’s original audio.Sexyy Red noticed and posted on social media that she would like to be invited to a W.W.E. event. Fatu responded: “Hell yea u invited!! Special guest!!”The invitation still stands.“If she’s making noise, good or bad, I’m all for it — she’s more than welcome,” Fatu said. “If we can bring the outside people in and show them how we rock, why not bring the music business here?” More

Born before the outbreak of World War I, she began making albums in the 1990s. She released her latest, “109 Ans de Piano,” this year.When the French composer Claude Debussy died at his home in Paris in 1918, he probably had no idea that one of his youngest fans lived just a few blocks away. Colette Saulnier, not yet 4, was already learning the rudiments of music, and even at that age she was drawn to the work of her famous neighbor.“I love these climates where you have to create an atmosphere, a daydream,” Colette Maze, as she later became known, said in a 2021 interview with the website Pianote. “I’m connected with Debussy because he corresponds to my deepest sensibility.”Mrs. Maze would go on to become an accomplished pianist and teacher. But it was only in the late 1990s, when she was over 80, that her son persuaded her to begin recording commercially.What followed was one of the most surprising second acts in classical music history: seven albums, largely but not exclusively the music of Debussy, and a fan base drawn as much to Mrs. Maze’s exquisite finger work as to her sheer, irrepressible joy, which shone through in interviews with French television and in videos posted to her Facebook page.“As soon as I get up, I start playing the piano to connect with the forces of life,” she told Pianote. “It’s a habit. It’s always been that way. I don’t need to motivate myself, it’s natural. It’s like an automatic function.”Mrs. Maze, who was widely considered the world’s oldest recording pianist, died on Nov. 19 in the same Paris apartment where she had lived since she was 18, with views of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine River. She was 109. Her son, Fabrice Maze, confirmed the death.Mrs. Maze at age 18. She studied under Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger.via Maze familyColette Claire Saulnier was born in Paris on June 16, 1914, a month before the beginning of World War I. Her father, Léon Saulnier, managed a fertilizer factory, and her mother, Denise (Piollet) Saulnier, was a homemaker.She grew up surrounded by music. Her mother, who played violin, and her maternal grandmother, who played piano, gave concerts in the Saulnier home, and chords wafted in from a piano-playing neighbor. By 4 she was learning to play.She aspired to be a concert pianist, but her parents — who were strict and, according to her, miserly with their love — disapproved. When she applied to the performance track at the École Normale de Musique, a new conservatory founded by Alfred Cortot, her parents refused to let her stay home alone to practice for her audition.Her score wasn’t quite high enough, but she still qualified for the teaching track. She studied under Mr. Cortot and Nadia Boulanger, who tutored some of the 20th century’s greatest musicians, including Daniel Barenboim, Virgil Thomson and Philip Glass.Mrs. Maze later credited the Cortot method of playing, with its emphasis on relaxation, for her ability to continue at the piano without suffering the sort of joint stiffening that can strike older pianists.“If I still play at my age, it is because the teaching of Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger was very flexible and based on improvisation,” she said in a 2018 interview with the newspaper Le Parisien. “He told us that our hand was a diamond at the end of a silk stocking.”After graduating in 1934, she stayed at the conservatory to teach. When the Germans invaded in 1940, she and a friend fled on bicycles to the deep south of France, where they remained until the end of World War II.Back in Paris, she had a relationship with a married man, Hubert Dumas, with whom she had a son, Fabrice. But Mr. Dumas left her in 1952.She married Emile Maze, another musician, in 1958. He died in 1974. Along with her son, she is survived by two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.Even after she retired from teaching in 1984, Mrs. Maze continued to play four hours or more a day. Her son later began encouraging her to record an album, to capture both her talents and the influence of Mr. Cortot’s unique methods.Her first album, a recording of Debussy’s preludes, was released in 2004, the year she turned 90. Three more albums of Debussy followed, as well as three others featuring music from different composers: “104 Years of Piano” (2018), “105 Years of Piano” (2019) and “109 Years of Piano” (2023).As her discography grew, so did public curiosity, which turned into acclaim as critics praised her technique and her supple interpretations of not just Debussy but also Robert Schumann and Erik Satie, as well as more modern composers like Astor Piazzolla and Ryuichi Sakamoto.She found even more fame in 2020, when she took to Facebook to share daily comments of good cheer during the darkest days of the pandemic. As restrictions eased, fans streamed to her home, coming from as far as Japan to ask for a brief lesson.“I always preferred composers who gave me tenderness,” she told NPR in 2021. “Music is an affective language, a poetic language. In music there is everything — nature, emotion, love, revolt, dreams; it’s like a spiritual food.” More

In an evening built to entertain, there was also depth in Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s conducting and the cellist Edgar Moreau’s playing.There’s often a bias against the idea of flashiness, especially in classical music circles, as if it must always be preceded by the word “empty.”But not on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, where the conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the cellist Edgar Moreau were making their New York Philharmonic debuts. If anything, the word that accompanied their kind of flashiness was “fun.”By offering plenty of buoyancy — and largely skirting grave weight — the programming communicated this conductor’s zealous pursuit of entertainment. It ran from a rousing take on Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy to a graceful (and yes, occasionally flashy) Haydn Cello Concerto No. 1, then, after intermission, a truly aggressive reading of Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” Suite and a boisterous finale in Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1.That’s an evening built to dazzle and entertain. But there was substance as well. From the outset of Tchaikovsky’s crowd-pleaser, Orozco-Estrada had the Philharmonic players in fine balance: Plucked strings had presence; entrances of flute or harp came across clearly; a roll of percussion heightened tension without calling too much early attention to itself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

He wrote “Mull of Kintyre” with Paul McCartney and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Moody Blues.Denny Laine, a singer, songwriter and guitarist who co-founded two of the biggest British rock bands of the 1960s and ’70s, the Moody Blues and Wings, before embarking on a long solo career, died in Naples, Fla., on Tuesday — 50 years to the day after Wings released its most successful album, “Band on the Run,” in the U.S. He was 79.His wife, Elizabeth Mele-Hines, said the cause of death, at a hospital, was interstitial lung disease.Mr. Laine was part of the efflorescence of British rock music in the early 1960s, when many young musicians were still soaking up the influence of American blues. Performers like Eric Clapton, Spencer Davis and the Beatles became not just friends with Mr. Laine but also frequent collaborators with him.A native of Birmingham, England, he moved to London after his first band, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, broke up. In 1964, he joined four other Birmingham-area transplants, Graeme Edge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Clint Warwick, to form the M&B 5, a rhythm-and-blues band named after a Birmingham brewery. They soon changed their name to the Moody Blues.Mr. Laine was with the band for only two albums, but in 1964 he sang lead on its first No. 1 hit, “Go Now!” The success of that song, a cover of an R&B song recorded that same year by Bessie Banks, won the Moody Blues slots on a series of high-profile tours, opening for acts like Chuck Berry and the Beatles.Mr. Laine, right, with his fellow members of the Moody Blues in an undated photo. From left were Ray Thomas, Clint Warwick, Graeme Edge and Mike Pinder.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesMr. Laine left the Moody Blues in 1966 over artistic differences and spent the next five years working on solo projects and with, among other bands, the short-lived jazz-rock ensemble Ginger Baker’s Air Force. It was while singing and playing guitar with that band that he caught the attention of Paul McCartney.By 1971, Mr. McCartney was more than a year out of the Beatles and looking to form a new band. One day, from his rural home west of Glasgow, he cold-called Mr. Laine.“He said, ‘Do you want to do something? Get on a plane, we’re in Scotland,’” Mr. Laine recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe in 2019. The two added Mr. McCartney’s wife, Linda McCartney, and the three — with a rotating cast of other bandmates — became Wings.Though Wings is often remembered as a McCartney vehicle — at times it went by the name Paul McCartney and Wings — Mr. Laine was an equal member.He appeared on all seven of the group’s studio albums, sang lead and played lead guitar on several prominent tracks and wrote or co-wrote a number of the band’s songs, including “Mull of Kintyre,” which reached No. 1 on the British charts and sold more than two million copies. (He also claimed to have had a hand in writing another No. 1 Wings hit, “Band on the Run,” although Paul and Linda McCartney are the only credited writers.)Mr. Laine received four Grammy nominations with Wings and won two: best pop vocal performance by a duo, group or chorus in 1975, for “Band on the Run,” and best rock instrumental performance in 1980, for “Rockestra Theme.”“Me and him had this kind of feel together musically,” Mr. Laine said about working with Mr. McCartney in an interview with Guitar World this year. “We slotted in well together. We could read each other, and that came from growing up on the same musical influences. Paul’s got a good sense of rhythm, and he doesn’t overplay, which I like.”Mr. Laine was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 as a founding member of the Moody Blues. In what many critics and fans consider one of the bigger snubs in the Hall of Fame’s history, Wings has yet to follow.Mr. Laine in 1972, a year after Paul McCartney cold-called him asking him to join a new band, Wings.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesBrian Frederick Hines was born on Oct. 29, 1944, in Birmingham. His parents, Herbert and Eva (Basset) Hines, worked in factories.Denny was a childhood nickname, and he later added the surname Laine as a nod to one of his sister’s favorite singers, Frankie Laine.He grew up listening to the so-called Gypsy jazz of musicians like Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, as well as to Spanish guitar — a love he explored in between his time with the Moody Blues and Wings, when he lived in Spain and studied flamenco.After returning to Britain, he formed two bands, the Electric String Band and Balls, both of which fizzled — though the first, which featured a string section and lush orchestration, would greatly influence a similarly named band, the Electric Light Orchestra.He counted the McCartneys among his closest friends, but he left Wings in 1981 after Mr. McCartney was arrested in Japan for marijuana possession. Mr. Laine’s departure ended the band and put a strain on their relationship, though he later played on several of Mr. McCartney’s solo projects.Mr. Laine performing this March at the City Winery in Manhattan. He continued to record and tour regularly in the four decades after Wings split up.Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Laine married Joanne Patrie in 1978; they divorced in 1981. He married Rosha Kasravi in 2003; they later separated and divorced in 2021. He married Elizabeth Mele this year. Along with her, his survivors include two children from his first marriage, Heidi and Laine Hines; three other children, Damian James, Ainsley Adams and Lucy Grant; his sister, Doreen; and several grandchildren.Even while he was with Wings, Mr. Laine kept up a spirited solo career, releasing two albums in the 1970s: “Ahh … Laine” (1973) and “Holly Days” (1977), a tribute to Buddy Holly.He continued to work and tour regularly in the four decades after the band split up, playing a mix of his own compositions and material from the Moody Blues and Wings. Often he would perform what he called “Songs and Stories,” a combination of music and tales from his rock life.“I can’t live without live work,” he told Guitar World. “There’s no substitute for playing live and getting the feeling of connecting with an audience.” More

In the complaint, an unnamed woman says she was flown from the Detroit area to New York on a private plane and gang-raped in a recording studio. Mr. Combs denied the allegations.Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul who has been named in three recent lawsuits accusing him of rape, now faces a fourth complaint, by a woman who says that Mr. Combs and two other men gang-raped her in a New York recording studio 20 years ago, when she was 17 years old.In the latest lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the woman, who is not named in the court papers, described a nightmarish scene on a night in 2003, when she was in the 11th grade. The woman says in the complaint that she met two associates of Mr. Combs at a lounge in the Detroit area, and they took her on a private plane to New York. There, the suit says, the three men gave the woman copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, and took turns raping her in the studio’s bathroom as she drifted in and out of consciousness.When they were done, the suit says, the woman fell into a fetal position in a bathroom, lying on the floor in pain, and she was soon driven to an airport and put on a plane back to Michigan.In a statement, Mr. Combs said: “Enough is enough. For the last couple of weeks, I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy. Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”Through his lawyers, Mr. Combs has denied the allegations in the three earlier suits.Douglas H. Wigdor, a lawyer for the unidentified woman, released his own statement that said: “As alleged in the complaint, defendants preyed on a vulnerable high school teenager as part of a sex trafficking scheme that involved plying her with alcohol and transporting her by private jet to New York City where she was gang-raped by the three individual defendants at Mr. Combs’s studio.”“The depravity of these abhorrent acts,” he added, “scarred” the woman “for life.”The first of the recent lawsuits against Mr. Combs, who has been known as Puff Daddy or Diddy, was filed on Nov. 16 by Casandra Ventura, a singer once signed to Mr. Combs’s label, Bad Boy, who was also his longtime girlfriend. In a graphic 35-page complaint, Ms. Ventura, who performs as Cassie, accused him of rape and forcing her to have sex with a series of male prostitutes, as well as subjecting her to violent beatings that took place over nearly a decade. The case was settled in just one day. Mr. Combs denied the accusations and Ms. Ventura said in a statement that the case had been resolved “amicably.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

In a complaint, Terri McIntyre, who worked at the Recording Academy in the mid-1990s, says the organization’s then leader, Michael Greene, subjected her to ongoing misconduct.A woman who worked at the Grammys organization in the 1990s has accused its former chief executive, Michael Greene, of drugging and sexually abusing her nearly 30 years ago and of making sex a condition of her employment, according to a lawsuit filed in California on Wednesday.Terri McIntyre, a former executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Recording Academy, the nonprofit group behind the Grammy Awards, sued Mr. Greene in Los Angeles Superior Court, in the latest of a wave of lawsuits accusing powerful men in the music industry of past misconduct.In her suit, which also names the Recording Academy as a defendant, Ms. McIntyre says that from 1994 to 1996, Mr. Greene caught her in a “trap” in which he regularly pressured her into sexual contact, and forced sex on her against her will.Mr. Greene could not be immediately reached for comment but has previously denied allegations that he sexually harassed employees while an executive with the Grammys.In a statement, the Recording Academy said: “In light of pending litigation, the academy declines to comment on these allegations, which occurred nearly 30 years ago. Today’s Recording Academy has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sexual misconduct and we will remain steadfast in that commitment.”In her lawsuit, Ms McIntyre says that while attending a Grammy board meeting in Hawaii in May 1994, soon after she got the job, Mr. Greene gave her Champagne in his hotel room. She “quickly began to feel unwell and began to lose control of her physical movements,” she says in the court papers. She later woke up nude in Mr. Greene’s bed and realized she had been “violated,” according to the suit.On another occasion, she says in the complaint, she was driving with Mr. Greene to a business meeting when he unexpectedly took her to his home near Malibu, Calif., and forced her to perform oral sex in his kitchen.Throughout her time at the Recording Academy, Ms. McIntyre says, Mr. Greene made it clear that enduring his harassment was part of a “quid pro quo proposition” in which she could succeed at the organization, and in the music industry, only if she had a sexual relationship with him. In her complaint, the woman said she was a single mother and needed the job to care for her young daughter.The suit was filed a month after another case in New York against Neil Portnow, Mr. Greene’s successor as the Grammys’ chief. In that suit, an unnamed woman accused Mr. Portnow of drugging and raping her in a New York hotel room in 2018. Mr. Portnow denied the accusations.Ms. McIntyre’s suit offers a new perspective on a tumultuous period in Grammys history. In 2002, Mr. Greene was forced out of the academy after 14 years at its helm, during which he was widely credited with expanding the organization and transforming its annual ceremony into a lucrative, must-see television event. At the same time, Mr. Greene was dogged by a series of scandals, including multiple accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination, and allegations that MusiCares, a Grammy charity founded under his watch, had spent less than 10 percent of its donations on its stated purpose of helping suffering and indigent musicians.The tipping point for Mr. Greene’s ouster was an accusation by the academy’s human resources officer that he had sexually abused her in a parking lot; he denied the accusation, and the academy said that an investigation had cleared Mr. Greene of wrongdoing. According to news accounts at the time, that woman was paid $650,000 to settle her allegation, a reported payment that Ms. McIntyre cited in her suit.According to reports in The Los Angeles Times in 2001 and 2002, the academy’s human resources department was created because of an earlier accusation against Mr. Greene. A spokesman for the Recording Academy did not answer a question about when the human resources department was created.In 1996, Ms. McIntyre says in her complaint, she left the academy and the music business overall because Mr. Greene had blackballed her in the industry. Ms. McIntyre’s lawyers gave The New York Times a copy of her resignation letter, which reads: “I am compelled to leave due to what I perceive to be serious problems in my work environment.”In her suit, Ms. McIntyre also says that years later, she became an anonymous source for Chuck Philips, then a reporter at The Los Angeles Times, whose articles investigating Mr. Greene’s conduct precipitated the executive’s ouster. In 1999, Mr. Philips and another Los Angeles Times journalist, Michael A. Hiltzik, shared a Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting for a series of articles about the music industry. The articles included discussions of Mr. Greene’s power and compensation at the Grammys; the problems at MusiCares; and complaints from Grammy insiders about the organization’s accounting practices.Mr. Philips could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.After leaving the Grammys, Mr. Greene — who began his career as a saxophonist — founded a company called Artist Tribe, which he has described as a “creative production, technology, education, database and philanthropic enterprise” that serves “creative and cultural communities.”A call on Wednesday to a number associated with Mr. Greene was answered by a man who said that Mr. Greene was on a plane and was not available to comment on the lawsuit.In her suit, Ms. McIntyre says that after her resignation, Mr. Greene and the Recording Academy offered to pay her severance money in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement, but she refused.Ms. McIntyre’s suit is the latest in a series that have accused powerful men in the music industry of sexual harassment and abuse. In addition to Mr. Portnow, those men have included the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and the producer L.A. Reid; Mr. Combs and Mr. Rose denied the allegations, while Mr. Tyler denied one accusation and did not respond to a second, and Mr. Reid did not respond.Many of the suits were filed under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that gave a one-year window for people who say they were the victims of sexual abuse to bring a civil suit even if the original statute of limitations for their case had expired. That window expired last month. But a similar law in California, under which Ms. McIntyre brought her case, allows cases to be brought until the end of the year.Julia Jacobs contributed reporting. More

Overlooked at its release, the Killers’ signature hit has become one of the most inescapable rock songs of its time.The Killers released “Mr. Brightside” 20 years ago and hardly anybody cared.The dominant hits of the day were hip-shakers and party bangers whose titles doubled as bodily imperatives: “Shake Ya Tailfeather,” “Get Low,” “Stand Up” — odes to the delirious, thrilling movements that keep the party going. “Mr. Brightside” is … not that.It’s an intense, dramatic song about the shattering experience of getting cheated on by someone you love. The lead single off the Las Vegas band’s debut studio album, “Hot Fuss,” consists of exactly one verse, pre-chorus and chorus, which simply repeat; the singer Brandon Flowers’s voice is the sardonic wail of a jilted lover who is physically ill at the thought of his girlfriend being with someone else (“Now they’re going to bed, and my stomach is sick”), and pretends that he is totally OK (“Comin’ out of my cage, and I’ve been doing just fine”) when he is obviously an absolute wreck (“I just can’t look, it’s killing meeeee”).Yet in the intervening decades, “Mr. Brightside” — which eventually reached the Billboard Hot 100 over a year after its initial release, peaking at No. 10 in June 2005 — has become something more than a hit. It has grown into an all-purpose, inescapable rallying cry: a karaoke staple, a football tradition, a party playlist must-have, a meme. It’s a straight shot of nostalgia that, having survived that awkward interval when a song feels dated and falls out of favor, now belongs to a pantheon of modern classics that are both extremely of their time and transcend it.If boomers gave the masses “Don’t Stop Believin’,” millennials can claim “Mr. Brightside” as the generation’s official entry into that canon: a song that gets everybody at the bar shout-singing along.The track is the centerpiece of the Killers’ oeuvre and the star of their new greatest hits album, “Rebel Diamonds,” which is full of hits with lyrics that are basically tattooed onto the hippocampuses of even the most casual fans — “All These Things That I’ve Done” (“I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier”), the synthy-sad “Smile Like You Mean It” and gender-bendy “Somebody Told Me” (“you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had…”). But none of those singles comes close to matching the ongoing ubiquity of “Mr. Brightside.”“We’ve never not played that song live, because it’s stood the test of time and I’m proud of it,” Flowers told Spin in 2015. “I never get bored of singing it.” (A representative for Flowers said he was unable to speak for this article because he was in the studio.)“You drop this on a Friday night at midnight and the whole club just goes bananas,” said William Reed, a D.J. and founder of Club Decades, a dance party at Boardner’s in Hollywood. “Literally everybody in there is dancing and singing and dancing on top of the platforms and shouting with their eyes closed and screaming. It’s beautiful.”Though it was first released in 2003, “Mr. Brightside” didn’t reach the Billboard Hot 100 until June 2005.Frank Mullen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesTony Twillie, entertainment director of the New Orleans Bourbon Street karaoke hot spot the Cat’s Meow, called it “one of our most popular songs.” He can cite its code for the D.J. — R203 — off the top of his head. “Everyone knows that code.”Unlike “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Mr. Brightside” is almost comically easy to sing — or at least, it is a song that can withstand being sung very badly.Josh Fontenot, a bartender and former karaoke host at Louie’s Pub in Chicago, always pitches “Mr. Brightside” when rookies need a recommendation. “You can put the song on and not sing it and people will be excited that the song is on,” he said. “The room will sing it for you.”If you have been to Nashville recently and felt like you heard this song everywhere, you’re probably right: Jer Gregg who oversees entertainment for TC Restaurant Group venues that cater to country music purists and bachelorette parties alike, estimates that “Mr. Brightside” is getting played “somewhere around 300 times a week” at the company’s various locations.Why does the track slip so seamlessly into so many different settings? Genre-wise, it’s fluid: The Killers are a rock band, but their energy is a little bit glam, a little bit dance pop, a little bit emo. “Mr. Brightside” covers a cornucopia of emotional bases, too. You can sing it when you’re ecstatic, on a celebratory night out; you can sing it when you’re miserable, on a “forget about that ex” night out. There’s even a football angle.At a 2017 University of Michigan game against its rival Michigan State, in the midst of a torrential downpour, the song came over the loudspeakers at the end of the third quarter and everybody in the sold-out stands (capacity: 109,901) kept singing a cappella after the D.J. cut the music. Belting “Mr. Brightside” has been a third-quarter ritual ever since. You can even buy “Mr. Brightside” Michigan-themed merch.“It’s a weird song to have be a college football anthem,” acknowledged Alejandro Zúñiga, a Michigan alum who covers his alma mater for 24/7 Sports. “The subject of the song is not related to sports, and it’s not a fight song,” he added. “But it just had so much momentum that it became what it is.”“MR. BRIGHTSIDE” IS what the chart analyst and “Hit Parade” podcast host Chris Molanphy calls “a second-chance hit”: a song that fizzled and nearly flopped until something in the culture jolted it back to life. (Like Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” from 2017, which didn’t really catch on until 2019, when it was released as a radio single after getting a bump from TikTok and Netflix.) “Sometimes certain songs need to marinate before they find their moment,” Molanphy said in an interview.If artists hoping for a smash in 2020 are praying their song blows up on TikTok, in the early 2000s, the ultimate signal-boost for an indie band was getting on the soundtrack for the soapy teen drama “The O.C.” The Killers did one better: They appeared on a second-season episode of the show, performing a three-song set at the Bait Shop which included, of course, “Mr. Brightside.” Two months later, “Mr. Brightside” debuted on the Billboard charts.The following year, when Nancy Meyers needed a specific song for her house-swap rom-com “The Holiday,” she felt like “Mr. Brightside” had been written with her movie in mind. In the scene, Cameron Diaz’s Amanda, drunk and alone — having fled to England after catching her boyfriend in bed with someone else — pops “Hot Fuss” into a CD player. With a glass of red wine in one hand and her other fist pumping the air, she drunkenly shouts along to the chorus.“I knew I liked the song,” Meyers said in an interview. “The lyrics worked for the scene. What’s that line about? ‘Choking on your alibis.’ I don’t know if they wrote it from a woman’s point of view, but it fit what I needed.”“It’s strangely upbeat, for an angry song,” she added, noting that the track has aged well: “Cheating on people, that’s not going out of style.”CHANCES ARE YOU’VE heard “Mr. Brightside” at a wedding — maybe you played it at your wedding. According to DJ Intelligence, one of the top software platforms D.J.s use to let their clients build event playlists, “Mr. Brightside” is the third most-requested song, behind only Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”Evan Reitmeyer, owner of the D.C.-area D.J. company MyDeejay, said “Mr. Brightside” is on more than half the playlists of his upcoming weddings — and its numbers have only been growing: “I would say in the last five to seven years especially, it’s just become a perennial hit that’s getting requested at every wedding.”Despite its not-very-matrimonial theme, “Nobody seems to care about the lyrics,” he said. “They just care about how it feels. And I don’t mind; it kills on the dance floor so I’m going to keep playing it.”For brides and grooms in their 30s, “Mr. Brightside” would have been a bop of their formative years — a time when late nights were spent chugging Four Loko, sweating through skintight American Apparel disco pants and making out with the wrong person (or knowing that, actually, you were the wrong person).“I think it’s one of those songs, like ‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ that people belatedly realize: ‘It’s an anthem. Why don’t we play this at every party we’ll ever have?’” Molanphy said. “And now you can’t escape it.”But does Journey, a band that also got a boost when its song featured prominently on TV, think that “Mr. Brightside” is the new “Don’t Stop Believin’”?“Sure, it is!” said Jonathan Cain, the band’s keyboardist and rhythm guitarist. He remembered liking it right away. “It was quirky and catchy. It bounced. When I heard it, it was kind of like the first time you heard Talking Heads. Very similar to David Byrne,” he said in an interview. “And what an opening line!” he added. “That immediately captures everybody’s imagination. It’s original. It’s got teeth. It’s got all that poignant sarcasm to it.”While the two songs have very different emotional trajectories — “Don’t Stop Believin’” begins in loneliness and ends in a call for faith, while “Mr. Brightside” tracks the narrator’s spiral from coupledom into exile — both, Cain said, are about “the idea that stuff is going to come at you in life and you’re going to have to be able to walk through it, no matter what.”For Kyle Tekiela, whose band Starry Eyes does some Killers cover gigs, “Mr. Brightside” is always the closer. “When it finally happens, everyone goes out of control and screams it. It’s like a religious experience,” he said. “‘Mr. Brightside’ comes on and it’s like: OK, all our energy is spent, and now it’s time to go. Call the Uber.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:“Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” the new concert film that intersperses footage from the whole of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour with behind-the-scenes documentation of how it came to be. Sprinkled throughout the scenes of Beyoncé, the performer, and Beyoncé, the manager, are a few moments of vulnerability and visibility into the making of Beyoncé, the person.The new album from country superstar Garth Brooks, “Time Traveler,” which is available only as part of a boxed set sold at Bass Pro Shops, and what it means for a legacy artist to have minimal meaningful presence on streaming platforms.The finale of “The Golden Bachelor”New songs: XXL’s All-Women Cypher Featuring Latto, Flo Milli, Monaleo, Maiya The Don and Mello Buckzz; plus Sexyy Red featuring Chief KeefSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More