Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): Can Rap Bridge Its Generation Gap?

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Rap music’s generational divide, touching on André 3000’s comments about what older rappers might rap about, and how the stars of the 2000s and 2010s like Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane and Rick Ross are still releasing albums into their 40sThe stagnation on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and streaming platform hip-hop playlists, as seen in the ongoing prevalence of songs by Drake, Rod Wave, Travis Scott and othersPotential breakthrough songs by Sexyy Red, 310babii, and others, plus TikTok-driven hits by Lil Mabu and JIDTravis Scott, Playboi Carti and Yeat setting the table for the noisy, new rap undergroundNew songs from Nettspend and KarrahboooSnack 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 popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Brenda Lee, a Queen of Christmas and So Much More

      by

      “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has been a holiday staple for 65 years. But Lee, who recorded it at 13, has never rested on her laurels.On a balmy day 65 years ago, a 13-year-old girl walked into a Nashville recording studio decorated with colored lights, garlands and a Christmas tree, the air conditioning cranked up to approximate a late-December chill. Members of the A Team, the session musicians who churned out hits for everyone in town, gamely donned Santa hats.As she had many times before, the young singer laid down a raspy rockabilly vocal way beyond her years, then packed up and went home, hardly imagining that the result would outlive most of the people in the room.“I would’ve never thought in my wildest dreams that ‘Rockin’ would be my signature song,” Brenda Lee said on a recent afternoon in her wood-paneled Nashville house, which is filled with gold and platinum record plaques and personalized memorabilia. To Lee, the song is just “Rockin’.” Always. Only a crimson pillow in her living room is embroidered with its full title: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”As if frozen at the precocious age when she became famous, Lee, now 78, still stands at a diminutive 4”9’ — maybe 4”11” with the hair — and wears a size 2½ shoe. (She shops in the children’s footwear section, or brings an empty suitcase to fill when she’s in Thailand, the only place she’s found adult shoes that fit.) Clad in a sequined red pantsuit, her petite frame immersed in an oversized leather chair, Lee sipped a Diet Coke (“I’m addicted”) and reminisced about her Christmas classic that even after her retirement, is still climbing the charts. “I think I’m making more now than I did when I was singing,” she said, and laughed.Johnny Marks — who penned Christmas classics including “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Holly Jolly Christmas” — wrote “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” with Lee in mind. She was a child prodigy whose explosive vocal talent had earned the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite.” When he sent her a demo, she was extra impressed because Marks was Jewish.Lee’s voice was nimble: She could excite teenagers with rockabilly hits like “Sweet Nothin’s” and win over their parents by crooning ballads like “Emotions.” Rob Verhorst“I said, ‘Johnny! You don’t even believe in Christmas! How did you write this song?,’” she recounted. On a recent vacation, he explained, he’d been lying on a beach and was mesmerized by distant trees swaying in the ocean breeze. It almost seemed like they were … rocking. And unto us, a Christmas standard was born.Not that it was an immediate success. “Rockin’” arrived in 1958, but failed to make waves. Then in 1960, after Lee had her first No. 1 hit with the wrenching ballad “I’m Sorry,” her label, Decca Records, attempted to capitalize on her newfound popularity and rerelease her Christmas tune. It worked: The song hit No. 14 that holiday season, and throughout the ’60s it continued to chart in December.Prominent placement in the hit 1990 movie “Home Alone” introduced the song to a new generation. In more recent years, thanks to streaming, back-catalog Christmas music has become more lucrative than ever, and Lee’s tune — along with newer holiday standards like “Last Christmas” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — has made annual appearances on the Billboard Hot 100.“She is living proof of how important you can be and how long you can last if you’re talented and you work hard and you truly love people,” the country singer Tanya Tucker said in an email. Lee inducted Tucker into the Country Music Hall of Fame in October, and people are still talking about the dry delivery and killer comic timing of her speech. Lee has, Tucker added, “the best sense of humor known to man (or woman).”For the past four years, “Rockin’” has peaked at No. 2, but in honor of its 65th anniversary, Lee’s label is giving the song an extra push, including a new music video that features Lee lip-syncing to the tune she recorded as a teen, and even a TikTok account. Only one woman and her whistle register seem to stand in the way of this decades-old song hitting No. 1.“Now I gotta worry about Mariah,” Lee said with a feisty laugh. “Get outta here, girl!” Growing more serious, she added, “Oh, there’s room for everybody. Her song’s good, too. I love her singing.”Lee and Carey have never met, but they would certainly have a lot to talk about — like how it feels to have a groundbreaking, history-making career reduced in the popular imagination to a seasonal novelty. Because while Brenda Lee is a Christmas queen, she’s also so much more.A LOT OF PEOPLE have stories. Brenda Lee has stories. She first met Elvis Presley in 1957 (“He was the pretty Elvis then”) when she was 12, the night she made her Grand Ole Opry debut; he was watching in the wings. “I’m never star-struck by anyone, and I’ve met the biggest,” she said. “But I was tongue-tied when I met him.”Patsy Cline was her early tour mate and mentor (“a good old broad, in the nicest sense of the word”). While still in her teens, Lee shared bills with Little Richard, Chubby Checker, Dusty Springfield — the list is seemingly endless. In 1962, at the peak of her worldwide popularity, while in Hamburg on tour, the Beatles opened for her. “They were raw musically,” she said, “but they were fabulous.” The admiration was mutual: Years later, in a Rolling Stone interview, John Lennon declared that Lee “has the greatest rock ’n’ roll voice of them all.”She’s still not quite sure where that voice came from. “I ask myself that sometimes,” she mused. “It’s just how I sing.” Raised poor (“you spell that ‘p-o-o-o-o-r,’ with four o’s,” she wrote in her 2002 autobiography) in the red clay of east Georgia, Brenda Mae Tarpley was born on Dec. 11, 1944. By age 3 she was standing on the counter at the general store, singing for change, and by 7 performing Hank Williams tunes on Atlanta TV.She was a preternaturally quick study, picking up the hiccuping vocal style she heard Williams use on the radio as well as the growl of a bluesman who played around town, blending them into a unique style made even more remarkable by the fact it was coming out of the mouth of a girl who looked and dressed like Shirley Temple. Lee got her national break at 11, performing “Jambalaya” on the popular “Ozark Jubilee”; a recording contract with Decca soon followed. Her debut single billed her as “Little Brenda Lee (9 years old).” “Apparently,” Lee wrote, “being 11 wasn’t dramatic enough.”“I would’ve never thought in my wildest dreams that ‘Rockin’ would be my signature song,” Lee said.Gabriel McCurdy for The New York TimesBy then, though, Lee was already the family’s sole breadwinner. When she was 8, her construction-worker father died after a hammer dropped on his head. To support her mother and two siblings, she developed a tireless work ethic, booking countless studio sessions and touring relentlessly. “We went by car and I slept up in the back window, that’s how little I was,” she said. “I just loved it so much that I didn’t mind the hardship. And I was young.”Lee’s voice was nimble: She could excite teenagers with rockabilly hits like “Sweet Nothin’s” — Presley’s favorite Lee song, which was many years later sampled by Kanye West — and win over their parents by crooning ballads like “Emotions.” Her ability to straddle the worlds of pop, rock and country made her a constant fixture on the hit parade. Lee had the fourth most chart hits in the 1960s (47), surpassed only by Elvis, the Beatles and Ray Charles. She was the first woman to be inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Lee was also one of the first American pop stars to find an international audience. At the time, she said, most artists didn’t want to give up domestic tour dates. Lee realized how shortsighted that approach was the first time she went to Japan and was greeted by a crowd holding “BLFC” signs: “Brenda Lee Fan Club.” She returned 31 more times. “They love you if you’ll come,” she said, sitting beside a sepia-toned globe several times larger than her head. “All they ask is that you come, and I loved to go.”Lee’s house is cluttered with souvenirs from her travels and mementos from her peers. A sketch by Elton John sits on the piano, alongside a close-up photograph of Keith Richards’s hand, skull rings and all (“because it’s so distinct,” Lee said, adding, “He loves me. He’s a fun guy, too.”). Cyndi Lauper — an acolyte Lee particularly admires — once visited and left her lipstick in the bathroom. “And I’ve still got it,” Lee said, and giggled mischievously. “I’m Hector the Collector. Like the Shel Silverstein book. That’s just me.”IN 1961, LEE booked a three-week stint headlining Las Vegas’s Sahara Hotel. The previous headliner had been her idol, Judy Garland, and when Lee arrived, she approached Garland as she was lounging by the pool. Lee still remembers the encounter vividly: “I said, ‘Miss Garland?’ And she looked up and I said, ‘Uh, my name is Brenda Lee and I’m an artist and I love you.’” Lee asked Garland if she had any showbiz advice. “She took those sunglasses off and she looked at me and she never faltered. And she said, ‘Don’t let anyone take your childhood.’”Lee credits the support of those around her for helping her avoid the tragic fate of so many child stars. “I had people that cared about me,” she said, like her longtime manager Dub Allbritten. “He respected my wishes.” She continued to attend high school in Nashville when she could, and if something came up on her social calendar — “so-and-so’s graduation party” — Allbritten would let her prioritize that over the road. That autonomy was important to her. “I didn’t do that very often,” Lee said. “But I knew I could.”And then there’s Ronnie Shackett, the impossibly tall guy she once spied across the aisle at a Jackie Wilson concert. Lee passed him a note: “Hi, my name’s Brenda, here’s my number. But I’m going to be gone for three months in Europe, working.” When she got back, he called. “Sometimes it works,” she said. They married in 1963.Midway through our conversation, Shackett walked through the living room. “Fifty-seven years,” Lee marveled.“It’s more than that, Brenda,” Shackett said. “We had a daughter in ’64.”Lee is the first woman inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Gabriel McCurdy for The New York Times“I guess it is more than that,” Lee said. She paused for a moment to do the math and then clapped her hands in delight. “Sixty years! Lord. And he’s a good man. I lucked out.”When Lee thinks back on her days recording with Bradley and the A Team, she mourns a version of the industry that doesn’t exist anymore. “I miss all of them that are gone tremendously because they were my friends,” she said. She can’t believe what often passes for a session in the digital age. “It just seems like now, you don’t even see the musicians,” she said. “You go in and sing to a track. The musicians always gave me my energy.”“There’s no standards being written today,” Lee added. “And that hurts me, ’cause I go back to the ’60s all the time and listen to those songs. They’re still played all the time, ’cause they were good. They were done with people that loved what they did.”Still, she added, there’s plenty of talent in Nashville today — “it’s oozing” — and she’s just glad she doesn’t have to compete with it. Despite the renewed attention to “Rockin,’” Lee retired from singing publicly in 2020. “God has blessed me that I don’t miss it,” she said. “I love to sing, but I can get that out of my system right here. I can go in the shower and sing. Good acoustics.”She admitted that there’s nothing like the thrill of singing before a crowd, trying to win over the skeptics. But she’s traded that in for something else. “I can finally put my kids and my grandkids and my friends first,” she said. “For once, I’m here to see them.”After 65 years of traveling the world, Lee has earned her rest. That’s not to say she won’t break out into an impromptu tune now and then; she recently went viral for surprising passengers by singing “Rockin’” on a plane intercom. Just don’t expect to see her on the road. “If somebody said, ‘Brenda, we’re coming to get you in the bus,’” she said in no uncertain terms, “I’d say, ‘Oh, no you’re not.’” More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Maria Callas Was Opera’s Defining Diva. She Still Is.

      by

      Her voice is the shadow that remains after shock, after anger: the sound of a woman realizing she has nothing left to live for.It is the second act of Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.” Violetta and Alfredo, a prostitute and a wealthy young man, have fallen madly in love. But his father confronts her, demanding she drop the disreputable affair to salvage the marriage prospects of Alfredo’s sister.For Violetta, it is an unbearable sacrifice, but she’ll do it. “Dite alla giovine,” she sings, in a broken murmur: Tell your daughter that I will abandon the one good thing I have, for her sake.Singing that passage on May 28, 1955, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the soprano Maria Callas reached the phrase about how “bella e pura” Alfredo’s sister is — how beautiful and pure — and inserted the tiniest breath before “pura.” It’s a barely noticeable silence, but within it is a black hole of resignation. Callas’s split-second pause achingly suggests Violetta knows that if she, too, were pure, her happiness would not be expendable.Tiny details like this are how Callas — who would have turned 100 on Dec. 2 — gave opera’s over-the-top melodramas a startling sense of reality, and her characters the psychological depth and nuance of actual people. Tiny details like this, captured on hundreds of recordings, are how this most mythical of singers has stubbornly resisted drifting entirely into myth.Maria Callas rehearsing “Medea” in 1953 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla ScalaThe defining diva of the 20th century, Callas is not so far from us in some ways; a normal life span would have brought her well into the 21st. Those many recordings — endlessly remastered, repackaged and rereleased — have kept her in our ears, the benchmark of what is possible in opera, musically and emotionally. Her dramatic art and dramatic life, often intertwined, have made her an enduring cultural touchstone: a coolly glamorous stare in Apple ads and the inspiration for plays (including a Tony Award winner), performances by Marina Abramovic (bad) and Monica Bellucci (worse), a coming film starring Angelina Jolie (we’ll see), even a hologram tour (sigh).Yet Callas can also seem like a figure of faraway history. Her lonely death was back in 1977, when she was just 53 — and by then, her days of true performing glory were almost 20 years behind her. The number of people who saw her live, particularly in staged opera, is dwindling, and her short career was just early enough that precious little of it was filmed.So she has been for decades, for most of us, a creation of still images and audio. We have to use those tools to conjure what her performances were like, to complete them.But when you hear her, this is surprisingly easy. You listen to that “Dite alla giovine” and immediately see, in her voice, the blankness of her face, the mouth barely moving and the rest a mask of surrender, the shoulders collapsed. At the end of her classic 1953 “Tosca” recording, you can again “see” that indelible face, this time shifting in a couple of seconds from hushed excitement to catastrophic loss. (Listen to the sudden fear in that second cry of “Mario!”) With Callas, the aural always presses toward the visual; the voice, with its specificity and pungency, its weirdly death-haunted vitality, makes you imagine her body, moving in space.In her performances, there was never a sense of opera as mere entertainment, a night out with pretty music. She took every note seriously, where others fudged and coasted; she was refined where others were vulgar. In her powerfully expressive voice and magnetic presence, opera really, truly mattered.Watch her perform “Tu che le vanità” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo” in concert in 1962, near the end of her career. You are aware even before she opens her mouth of opera’s founding paradoxes. She is grand, and honest; epic, and intimate.Opera in the modern era is at its core an exhumation of the past, a literal revival. Callas is the essential singer — she is opera — not because of her instrument or her acting, but because, with a combination of born intuition and carefully acquired skill, she imagined and reconstructed a vanished world.She took on a whole repertory — the bel canto of the early 19th century, notably operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini — that had been ignored or distorted for generations. And she approached pieces that had never left the public, like “La Traviata,” Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma,” as if they were being done for the first time. The title character of “Lucia,” then widely assumed to be a chirpy cipher, was in Callas’s throat a morbid, ecstatic gothic heroine — more intense, and more believable. In the wake of World War II, she showed that Europe’s patrimony could emerge from the rubble.Born in New York to Greek immigrants, Callas grew up listening to Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and, at 13, returned with her mother to Greece. Just a year later, she was singing Carmen’s “Habanera” and Norma’s “Casta diva” as a conservatory student in Athens.She had no real apprenticeship. There were no supporting parts, no young-artist programs. By her early 20s, she was singing some of the most challenging roles in the repertory; by her early 30s, she was singing them all over the world.She made her name with outlandish feats like doing Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Die Walküre” and Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” — which few sopranos paired in the same lifetime — in the same week. And once she became an object of worship, scratchy pirated recordings of a passionate “Traviata” from Lisbon were passed around like religious relics; ditto a Mexico City “Aida,” in which Callas stretched an old but rare interpolated high E flat to gleaming length at the end of the Triumphal Scene.Her voice, matchlessly articulate and often quite beautiful but also idiosyncratic and fragile, didn’t hold out too long, and her career was brief; there was maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, it was essentially over.Brief — and unbelievably dense and tumultuous. Who knows the root of Callas’s restlessness, her insane commitment, her ferocity, her rivalries? There was clearly a deeply ingrained sense of unworthiness that you could trace back to her difficult childhood, with a mother who openly preferred her prettier sister. Self-buttressing, self-hating, self-defeating, Callas needed the stage desperately, and yet she always needed to be pushed onto it.Her loss of some five or six dozen pounds in the early ’50s, slimming into one of the century’s most stylish women, made news, as did her dropping out midway through a “Norma” in Rome in 1958. The year before, she had pleaded illness before missing a performance of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” in Edinburgh, then was photographed at a swank party in Venice. A lifetime later, it all seems so petty, but the venom that greeted these cancellations — hard to imagine today — helped usher in the end of Callas’s career.Callas in 1958 on a train in Rome. She had maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, her career was essentially over.Alfredo Miccoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe left her husband for the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, largely giving up performing in the process. When Onassis eventually married Jackie Kennedy instead, Callas was alone and bereft, without either the vocation that had given her purpose or the man who had replaced it. Living mostly in seclusion, though always harboring hopes of returning to the stage, she became for many a kind of saint or martyr, an embodiment of the hopelessly loving, direly abandoned characters she had played.“Until the end,” a friend said, “she continued her vocal exercises.”As Callas’s life fades ever further into the distance, her voice is more and more what we are left with. “Generally, I upset people the first time they hear me,” she told a biographer, “but I am usually able to convince them of what I am doing.”Francesco Siciliani, an impresario who engaged Callas as she rose in the late 1940s, was right when he said, “Parts of the voice were beautiful, others empty.” But the flaws that grew more prominent over time — the thinnesses and wobbles, the metallic harshness and questionable intonation — were, as she knew, usually convincing, not least because her sound, for all its troubles, was so instantly recognizable, and such a perfect vessel for extreme emotion. There was always that sense of every phrase being considered, without feeling studied — of a voice with a purpose.We can see from photos the amazing ability of her face — and, perhaps just as important, her hands — to capture anguish, authority and charm. But among the most pernicious stereotypes about Callas is that she was an actress who could barely sing, who got by on charisma alone.The records disprove this. Listen to her tender “O mio babbino caro.” Listen to her delicate yet commanding “D’amor sull’ali rosee.” She was always a bel canto singer at heart. In the early 1970s, when she led a series of master classes at the Juilliard School, a student defended herself after a bad high note by saying it was meant as a cry of despair.“It’s not a cry of despair,” Callas shot back. “It’s a B flat.”Callas in “Norma” in Paris, in 1964. She approached operas that had never left the repertory as if they were being done for the first time.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s appropriate that this is the lasting image of her final years, and the theme of Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning play “Master Class”: Callas as a wise but overbearing, even fearsome teacher. She and those hundreds of recordings continue to teach, continue to loom over opera. Singers are still compared to her, especially those with compelling presences and voices on the acidic side.Sixty years after Callas sang “Medea,” the star of a new production at the Met in 2021 said Callas’s legacy hadn’t stopped being the “elephant in the room.” Opera is still asking the question that the writer Ethan Mordden recalled being posed by a friend back in 1969: “Is there life after Callas?”Should there be? She and her flash of a career remain a beacon of artistic integrity and profundity — of the cultivation of tradition and craft, of a desire to bring the past to bear on the present — in a culture that values those qualities less and less.The costume designer Piero Tosi was there for her great “Traviata” at La Scala in 1955. “She scarcely seemed to be singing,” he said of her “Dite alla giovine.” “Yet everyone heard.”Impossibly distant, yet immensely present: At her centennial, Callas still occupies a position in opera something like the sun.Audio and video courtesy of Warner ClassicsProduced by More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      New York City Ballet and Its Orchestra Reach Contract Deal

      by

      The agreement, which includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, ends months of tense negotiations.After months of wrangling, New York City Ballet and the union representing its musicians announced on Tuesday they had reached a deal for a new contract.The three-year contract, which is expected to be ratified by members of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, includes an increase in compensation of about 22 percent over three years, a central demand of the musicians, who had argued that they were underpaid because of salary cuts made during the pandemic.City Ballet and the musicians’ union praised the agreement, which came just after the company began its holiday run of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” typically the most lucrative production of the season.“The marriage of music and dance is a hallmark of N.Y.C.B.,” the company and the orchestra said in a joint statement. “We are thrilled that this agreement has been finalized and we look forward to a successful season featuring our wonderful musicians and dancers who are among the greatest performers in the world.”The contract was the first that City Ballet and the orchestra have negotiated since the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the cancellation of hundreds of performances and the loss of about $55 million in ticket sales. City Ballet, like other cultural institutions, reduced the salaries of dancers and musicians as it worked to weather the crisis.Under the deal, the company will restore a salary cut of about 9 percent made during the pandemic, as well as offer a raise of 13 percent over three years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Jean Knight, Who Struck Platinum With ‘Mr. Big Stuff,’ Dies at 80

      by

      Her anthem of female strength topped the Billboard R&B chart and reached No. 2 on the pop chart in 1971. Its appeal has endured.Jean Knight, a soul singer whose memorable single “Mr. Big Stuff,” a brassy anthem of female strength, rose to No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart in 1971, died on Wednesday in Tampa, Fla. She was 80.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Mona Giamanco, a publicist for Ms. Knight’s family. She did not specify the cause.The gutsy narrator of “Mr. Big Stuff,” which was released on the Memphis-based Stax label, tells a wealthy ladies’ man — with his “fancy clothes” and “a big fine car” — that she will never love him:Mr. Big StuffWho do you think you are?Mr. Big StuffYou’re never gonna get my love.When she sang “Mr. Big Stuff” on the television show “Soul Train,” Ms. Knight exhibited the narrator’s disdain for the wealthy man in her facial gestures and in the way she defiantly planted her hand on her right hip and wagged her right index finger. But her strong voice softened when she sang that she would rather have a “poor guy that has a love that’s true.”Ms. Knight received a Grammy Award nomination for best female R&B vocal performance (Aretha Franklin won for “Bridge Over Troubled Water”), and “Mr. Big Stuff” was nominated for best R&B song (Bill Withers won for “Ain’t No Sunshine”).“Mr. Big Stuff,” written by Carrol Washington, Ralph Williams and Joseph Broussard, topped Billboard’s R&B chart and rose to No. 2 on the magazine’s Hot 100. It was also certified double platinum for selling at least two million units.The music historian John Broven, the author of “Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans” (1978), said in an email that “Mr. Big Stuff” “marked the end of the Golden Age of New Orleans R&B and helped to kick-start the city’s funky soul era.”He added, “It was also remarkable for being recorded on the same day as an earlier No. 1 R&B hit, ‘Groove Me,’ by another New Orleans artist, King Floyd, by talented producer Wardell Quezergue” at a time when “New Orleans was suffering from a dearth of big hits.”In 2002, before singing “Mr. Big Stuff” at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Ms. Knight told the audience that the royalties she received from it had helped sustain her financially.“‘Mr. Big Stuff’ is better for me now than 31 years ago,” she said. “All I have to do is sit at home and wait for the mailman.”It would be her only major hit, but it had a long afterlife. It can be heard on the soundtracks of numerous movies and TV shows. It has been sampled by Heavy D, Eazy-E and John Legend.Ms. Knight at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2003. She was a regular at the festival and last appeared there in 2016.David Redfern/Getty ImagesMs. Knight was born Jean Audrey Caliste on Jan. 26, 1943, in New Orleans. Her father, Louis, was a storekeeper, and her mother, Florence (Edwards) Caliste, was a homemaker.After graduating from high school, Ms. Knight sang at a cousin’s New Orleans bar. In 1965, she recorded a version of Jackie Wilson’s hit 1960 song “Doggin’ Around” as a demo. That led to a contract with the Jet Star/Tribe record label. Around that time, she changed her surname to Knight, because she believed that Caliste was difficult to pronounce.She earned money in the 1960s as a baker’s assistant at two New Orleans universities.After she recorded “Mr. Big Stuff,” according to a tribute to Ms. Knight on the Stax Museum website, the song was shopped to national labels, but each entreaty was rejected — until “Groove Me” became a hit and “a producer at Stax Records remembered Knight’s recording of ‘Mr. Big Stuff’ and released it.”Ms. Knight had another hit single in 1971, “You Think You’re Hot Stuff,” which rose to No. 19 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 57 on the Hot 100. Fourteen years later, her cover of the zydeco musician Rockin’ Sidney’s novelty song “My Toot Toot,” recorded for the Mirage label, peaked at No. 50 on the Hot 100 and No. 59 on the R&B chart.Ms. Knight graduated from nursing school in the 1980s and was a licensed practical nurse for about 15 years. She also continued to perform around New Orleans, but she was displaced from her home by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and lived in a FEMA trailer for about six months.She was a board member of the Louisiana Music Commission and was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2007.Ms. Knight was a regular at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, last appearing there in 2016. Its producer and director, Quint Davis, said she had been integral to the event.“Jean Knight is a core artist in R&B, certainly in New Orleans and Gulf Coast R&B,” Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t only a singer and artist; she was a performer who knew how to reach the crowd and work it.”She is survived by her son, Emile Commedore; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her marriages to Thomas Commedore and Earl Harris ended in divorce.During her performance at the 2007 festival, Ms. Knight told the story behind “Mr. Big Stuff.” First she sang its melody as originally written; then she demonstrated how she had changed it.“That ain’t got no bite to it,” she recalled telling one of the songwriters, in response to which he said, “Jean, everybody knows how sassy you are” and encouraged her to alter it.“It worked — in one take, she insisted,” The New York Times quoted her as saying. And when the song is played, she added, “The checks come to me.” More

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Dolly Parton (Really) Rocks

      by

      “Rockstar,” the country icon’s new double album of rock songs, is now the highest charting LP of her career. But her history with the genre runs deep.Rick Diamond/Getty ImagesDear listeners,At age 77, and with nearly 50 (!) solo studio releases to her name, Dolly Parton just scored the highest charting album of her career, the mammoth double LP “Rockstar,” which debuted on this week’s Billboard 200 at No. 3. (Darn those young whippersnappers Drake and Taylor Swift for standing in the way of Parton’s first No. 1!)“Rockstar” is not an album so much as a referendum on how incredibly well-liked Parton is at this moment. She seems to have drafted up a long scroll of dream collaborators, and — anything for Dolly! — each one of them picked up the phone: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Joan Jett, Miley Cyrus, Lizzo, Elton John, Rob Halford from Judas Priest … I could go on. And “Rockstar” does go on, for an indefatigable 30 tracks, clocking in at 2 hours and 22 minutes. When I finally finished listening to it, I expected someone to hand me one of those foil blankets you get after you run a marathon.While “Rockstar” might end up one of Parton’s most commercially successful albums, it’s not one of her best. (And isn’t that how it always goes?) My main quibble is the premise itself. Last year, when Parton was nominated for inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she initially tried to take her name off the ballot because she didn’t consider herself a rock artist. “This has, however, inspired me to put out a hopefully great rock ’n’ roll album at some point in the future,” she wrote in a statement. (She ended up changing course and accepted her induction.)I disagree with the notion that Dolly Parton wasn’t a rock star until she released an album called “Rockstar” — it feels like too narrow and literal an understanding of genre. Sure, Parton is a country artist at heart, but she’s also a dynamic, take-no-bull cultural icon with a powerful voice and a flair for spectacle. And, as I argue with today’s playlist, she’s been reshaping rock ’n’ roll in her own style for her entire career.The songs I’ve chosen put some of the best moments of “Rockstar” (featuring duet partners like Stevie Nicks and John Fogerty) in conversation with older songs in Parton’s vast catalog. They also highlight her history of covering — and completely transforming — rock songs from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Collective Soul and Neil Young.Parton is a living legend, and it’s wonderful that she’s continuing to reach fresh milestones and new audiences seven decades (!) into her career. But we certainly didn’t need approval from the notoriously suspect Rock Hall to confirm that Dolly Parton rocks. She’s been telling us that, in her own way, all along.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Dolly Parton: “Shine”One of Parton’s great stylistic pivots came in the late ’90s, when she revisited her bluegrass roots for the appropriately titled album “The Grass Is Blue.” This imaginative rework of Collective Soul’s 1993 alternative-rock hit “Shine” — which earned Parton a very deserved Grammy for best female country vocal performance — comes from her second return-to-bluegrass album, “Little Sparrow,” released in 2001. Say it with her now: “Yeah.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Dolly Parton featuring John Fogerty: “Long as I Can See the Light”One of the best tracks on “Rockstar” is this soulful duet on a Creedence Clearwater Revival classic. Parton and Fogerty’s voices mesh well together, and both sound at home emphasizing the original song’s gospel influence. (Listen on YouTube)3. Kesha featuring Dolly Parton: “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You)”There’s a special reason that Kesha included a cover of this 1980 Parton hit on her 2017 album “Rainbow”: It was co-written by her mother, the singer-songwriter Pebe Sebert. The original is a delicate ballad, but this later version features more of a rock arrangement, with chugging electric guitars and smoldering vocals from Kesha and Parton. (Listen on YouTube)4. Dolly Parton: “Dumb Blonde”“Just because I’m blonde don’t mean I’m dumb,” Parton sings on her first charting single, “and this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” Released in 1966, “Dumb Blonde” is technically a country tune, but it also proves she had a saucy rock-star attitude from the start. (Listen on YouTube)5. Dolly Parton featuring Stevie Nicks: “What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”For her contribution to “Rockstar,” Nicks offered Parton a previously unreleased track she’d written for Fleetwood Mac. It’s fun to hear it get a second life here — and to hear Parton and Nicks’s chummy chemistry on the spoken-word parts. (Listen on YouTube)6. Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris: “After the Gold Rush”Man, what a cover. Parton famously teamed up with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris for the hit 1987 album “Trio,” and this chill-inducing interpretation of a Neil Young classic appeared on the sequel, “Trio II,” from 1999. Their harmonies are otherworldly. (Listen on YouTube)7. Dolly Parton: “Stairway to Heaven”Though on “Rockstar” Parton includes a more traditionally “rock” cover of “Stairway to Heaven” (featuring Lizzo and … her flute, “Sasha Flute”), I prefer this one, from her 2002 bluegrass album, “Halos & Horns.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Dolly Parton featuring Linda Perry: “What’s Up?”Parton seems to find something personally resonant in her “Rockstar” take on this ’90s anthem, as she transforms a song about a quarter-life crisis into a deeper meditation on time passing. Bonus points for the way she enunciates the word “peculiar.” (Listen on YouTube)9. Dolly Parton: “Baby I’m Burnin’”Though many purists decried Parton’s pivot to pop in the 1980s, in the rearview it’s easier to appreciate it as a demonstration of her range, and an occasional foray into more rock-oriented sounds. Gotta love those laser sound effects, too. (Listen on YouTube)10. Dolly Parton featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Free Bird”Dolly Parton covering “Free Bird.” Backed by members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. This is now something that exists, and the world is better for it. (Listen on YouTube)If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Dolly Parton (Really) Rocks” track listTrack 1: Dolly Parton, “Shine”Track 2: Dolly Parton featuring John Fogerty, “Long as I Can See the Light”Track 3: Kesha featuring Dolly Parton, “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You)”Track 4: Dolly Parton, “Dumb Blonde”Track 5: Dolly Parton featuring Stevie Nicks, “What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”Track 6: Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, “After the Gold Rush”Track 7: Dolly Parton, “Stairway to Heaven”Track 8: Dolly Parton featuring Linda Perry, “What’s Up?”Track 9: Dolly Parton, “Baby I’m Burnin’”Track 10: Dolly Parton featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird”Bonus TracksIf you’re looking for even more Dolly reading, might I suggest this essay I wrote in 2019 on Parton’s uncommonly high approval rating? It has a special place in my heart, since it’s the first thing I ever wrote for The Times. And yes, all these years later, I’m still wondering about those tattoos. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      ‘Amid Falling Walls’ Review: Songs of Resilience From the Holocaust Era

      by

      A new musical from National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene stitches together music written and performed in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.With the war between Israel and Hamas keeping much of the world on tenterhooks, and the tide of antisemitism evidently rising, now is either a perfect time, or far too painful a time, for “Amid Falling Walls,” a new Yiddish-language musical set during the Holocaust.Onstage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, it is a theatrical act of remembrance and defiance stitched together from Yiddish songs written and performed in the ghettos, cabarets and concentration camps of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.Directed by Motl Didner for the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, “Amid Falling Walls” deftly acclimates the audience before the performance even starts. On banks of monitors hanging on either side of Edmond J. Safra Hall, and on two other screens built into the set, we see black-and-white films and photos of ordinary Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the war.It isn’t idyllic, just placidly quotidian — parents, children, babies, friends, in the city and the countryside. A gaggle of girls hold hands and dance in a circle; a group of men throw their arms around one another, smiling. Families, so many families, pose for the camera; so do little kids, milling around outside. Then, menacingly, the presence of Nazis intrudes.Underscored by music, the montage of images has a visceral impact; we don’t need language to understand it, or to think and feel in response. (Projections are by Brad Peterson, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier.) “Amid Falling Walls,” though, relies heavily on lyrics and spoken text, almost all of it in Yiddish; non-Yiddish speakers, like me, will spend the performance reading supertitles, which are in English and Russian.The placement of those titles, far above the actors’ heads on a set by Jessica Alexandra Cancino, fundamentally thwarts this fast-paced pageant, whose arc takes it from the Vilna Ghetto, in what is now Lithuania, to a displaced persons camp in Germany. It becomes a fragmented experience: Take our eyes off the titles and we’re lost for meaning, but read only the titles and we miss the show. Either way, the fullness of the production’s emotion and artistry remains out of reach.Curated by Avram Mlotek, who wrote the libretto, and his father, Zalmen Mlotek, who is the show’s music director and arranger as well as the company’s artistic director, “Amid Falling Walls” sounds gorgeous. Its 28 musical numbers — folk music and cabaret, elegies and anthems — are played by a nine-piece orchestra tucked away upstage. And the show has an ace in its fine eight-person ensemble: Steven Skybell, who starred as Tevye in the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene’s excellent Yiddish-language production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”One of Skybell’s songs here, Reuven Lipshitz’s “Motele From the Warsaw Ghetto,” is the rare number in the show with a tempo slow enough to allow both reading the titles and watching the performance, which in its restraint is absolutely searing: the story of a boy, not yet 13, doing his part to resist the Nazis — sneaking in and out of the ghetto — and dying for it.“Humanity’s most true history is written only in blood,” Skybell says in English near the top of the show, and it is an arresting line. But before bloodshed comes the process of dehumanization that features in all ethnic hatred, and “Amid Falling Walls” delineates that vividly.The stripping away of rights, one by one. Global passivity in the face of mass suffering and slaughter.It’s an old story. Timeless, too.Amid Falling Walls (Tsvishn Falndike Vent)Through Dec. 10 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan; nytf.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

    • 13 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Institutionalized

      by

      Fat Mike likes to be on time — to “put the punk in punctual,” as he says. So he was mildly distressed to be a few minutes late meeting me at the new Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, of which he is a founder and the public face. I had pleasantly cooled my heels at the museum’s bar, the Triple Down. At the Triple Down, you can order a Fletcher, a double rum and Coke served in an emptied Pringles can, named for Fletcher Dragge, guitarist for the band Pennywise and a member of the museum’s governing “Punk Collective.” (You get the chips on the side.) Or you might choose a Double Fatty, honoring Fat Mike himself: a double shot of Tito’s vodka, served with lime-flavored Liquid Death sparkling water and also a shot of Jameson. Fat Mike, as he told me within five minutes of his arrival, was a first-round investor in Liquid Death.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Fat Mike, né Mike Burkett, is, among other things, the frontman and bassist for the band NOFX. He was wearing a black T-shirt and blue plaid shorts that reached almost to the tops of his black socks. At 56, Fat Mike has thick white hair and sideburns, except where they’ve been dyed the blue of plastic sharks or cotton candy. He wore a padlock on a chain around his neck. He looked like what network executives may have imagined punks looked like when they were a staple category of bad guy on 1980s cop shows, the punk of a Spirit Halloween “punk” costume. To be fair, he had a hand in shaping that image. NOFX formed in Southern California in 1983, long before punk was a viable career path or, by their own admission, the band’s members knew how to play their instruments. By the mid-1990s, they had migrated to the Bay Area and improved enough to be part of a wave of groups — most famously Green Day, the Offspring and Blink-182 — that found improbable fame and commercial success. The pop-punk sound of the ensuing era remains so pervasive that, listening to an episode of Slate’s “Hit Parade” podcast about it, I could not quite tell where the Fall Out Boy ended and a bank commercial began.At the Triple Down, the bartender had a shot of vodka already poured. Fat Mike drank it and began what appeared to be a familiar ritual of haggling over whether the bartender wanted his tip in cash or in ownership shares in the museum. Fat Mike has $3 million in shares, he told me later, and he is giving a portion of them out to museum employees — “At least the good ones.” “If you believe in the museum and think we’re going to kill it — which we are — maybe you take the shares,” Fat Mike said. “I don’t really understand the shares thing, Mike,” the bartender said, shaking his head. “I’ve never worked in a museum before.” He poured another shot. Fat Mike downed it, pulled a roll of cash from his pocket and plunked down a $100 bill. At the Triple Down bar, double rum and Cokes are served in emptied Pringles cans, with the chips on the side.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAbout three years ago, Fat Mike came to Vegas with the idea of opening a punk rock store. He asked for help from Lisa Brownlee, a longtime veteran of the Warped Tour, the skate- and pop-punk juggernaut; she suggested filling the store with punk memorabilia. From there, it was a small step to a museum. The Punk Rock Museum opened on April Fools’ Day, in a 12,000-square-foot onetime antiques market decidedly off the Strip. Its closest neighbor is an enormous pink gentlemen’s club that advertises “1000’s of Beautiful Girls and 3 Ugly Ones.” All around the country, there are institutions devoted to commemorating and celebrating what was once fringe, rebellious or underground. Rock has its hall of fame and museum in Cleveland; hip-hop’s long-gestating counterpart is supposedly nearing an opening date in Harlem. The pipeline from pop-culture transgression to academic enshrinement has been wide open at least since the 1990s, when Madonna studies made news. If the Who survived “hope I die before I get old” to become elder statesmen, you might think the matter of how binding such promises are would be settled. Still, punk, born specifically in reaction to rock’s decadent self-regard, presents a uniquely hard case. There is something self-evidently absurd about an institution devoted to a movement which, to the extent that anybody can agree on a definition, is specifically about resisting institutions. Nostalgia, hierarchy, hero worship, the establishment of a canon, the separation between audience and artist — all of these are both the natural tendencies of museums and the things that punk was invented to smash. A few years ago, some aging members of a long-running utopian punk scene in Pensacola, Fla., set out to preserve the house in which the scene had flourished by establishing something called the 309 Punk Museum. That last word caused such consternation that it was dropped, in favor of “project.”To Fat Mike, this resistance looks like a hole in the market. “There’s no Billboard chart for punk, although there’s one for bluegrass,” he says. “There’s no Grammy for punks. There’s no award show anywhere for punk. We needed a place where any punk rocker can go and celebrate our heritage.” Fat Mike leading a special midnight tour group in October during the When We Were Young festival.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAn exhibit of paraphernalia from the horror-punk band the Misfits, including a bass broken by Jerry Only. (He breaks a lot of basses.)Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThere is a culturewide urge to catalog, commemorate and nostalgify punk as it enters its fifth decade. Museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert have hosted punk-related exhibitions. Universities across the country offer courses with titles like “Punk Culture: The Aesthetics and Politics of Refusal.” The nonprofit label Trust Records, founded by the longtime music publisher Matt Pincus and the band merchandiser Joe Nelson, has been rereleasing classic out-of-print records — starting with Circle Jerks’ “Group Sex” — digitally and in deluxe vinyl editions. Pincus believes that punk’s D.I.Y. ethic has made it a folk tradition as fragile and vulnerable to disappearing as, say, early-20th-century blues once was. Fliers get pulped; storage units filled with self-released E.P.s get liquidated; parents die with their children’s hardcore masters moldering in their attics; independent labels disappear. What you might call the dissenting view was offered in 2016 by Joe Corré, son of the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood: He loaded his personal collection of memorabilia — worth, he said, five million pounds — into a boat on the Thames and set it aflame. It was, he said, a protest against Punk London, an officially sanctioned series of exhibitions and events commemorating the 40 years of British punk. To Corré, this was an unacceptable act of appropriation. “Do not tolerate hypocrisy,” he told the assembled crowd. “Investigate the truth for yourself.” One truth is that Punk London added Corré’s event to its own official website as soon as it was announced. Agatha Slagatha, an employee of the Punk Rock Museum, assisting a customer in the museum’s gift shop.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe museum’s artifacts, like these customized jackets, are generally allowed to speak for themselves, without much text or explanation.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAt the Punk Rock Museum, you both enter and exit through the gift shop, where you can buy T-shirts, patches, shot glasses, coffee table books and padlocks. Passing through on our way to tour the collection, Fat Mike and I ran into a father and son visiting from Ohio. The man was wearing a Descendents T-shirt, the teenager a NOFX one; Mom was in the tattoo parlor upstairs, getting her leg inked with an image of a Doc Marten and an anarchy symbol. “I’m famous,” Fat Mike blurted out. They did not need to be told. This was like spotting Mickey Mouse at Disney World. Like many things in Las Vegas, the elements of the Punk Rock Museum that are vulgar, cynical and/or tasteless are fairly easy to spot. So let me say quickly that a lot of the museum is also very cool. It is, to a large extent, a photography museum — filled with beautifully reproduced images from chroniclers of the scene both famous and obscure. One room is a recreation of a wood-paneled suburban basement, iconic breeding ground for frustrated middle-class punk energy; another contains Pennywise’s carpet-and-graffiti-covered rehearsal studio, airlifted wholesale from Hermosa Beach, Calif. There’s also the Jam Room, where you can actually play instruments like Joan Jett’s guitar and Fat Mike’s bass in a soundproof space like something at Guitar Center. One challenge to any project like the museum is how many different things punk has come to mean to different people. “Punk has many houses,” Vivien Goldman, an adjunct professor of punk and reggae at N.Y.U., told me, ticking off a few of them: the political, the artistic, the bacchanalian. Of course, some houses have more pee in them than others. It is hard to overstate the role of urine in “NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories,” a group memoir by the band, which is light on situationist theory and heavy on bodily fluids being expelled onto, or into, whatever happens to be nearby, including cats, vans, silverware drawers, ice trays and strangers passed out on the floor. Fat Mike has brought this preoccupation with him to the Punk Rock Museum. The reconstruction of Pennywise’s garage, he told me, was made all the more exact by Fletcher Dragge relieving himself on the floor, a kind of benediction before the museum opened its doors. The top tier of patronage during pre-opening fund-raising was a $25,000 package of perks that included having your name on a plaque over one of the museum’s urinals or toilet stalls. Fat Mike performing with Sum 41 in Pennywise’s rehearsal studio, which was relocated to the museum.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe museum is not big on written text or other forms of contextualization, content instead to let its cases filled with artifacts and memorabilia speak for themselves. Many of these are of a morbid cast, relics in the saintly sense. Fat Mike pointed out “Joe Strummer’s last bag of weed,” a stash supposedly found with the co-founder of the Clash when he died, and the key to the New Orleans hotel room where Johnny Thunders was found dead under mysterious circumstances in 1991. He showed me a black leather couch that once sat in Razor’s Edge Recording, a studio in San Francisco, beneath a photo of Kurt Cobain lying on it unconscious. Fat Mike sat on the couch and posed for a photo, slumped in the same position.A foyer outside the bathrooms attempts a partial answer to the question of why a punk rock museum should be located in Las Vegas, which has never had a punk scene of any significant repute. The walls are covered in fliers from a brief period of exception, when a scene sprung up around shows played at a water-retention basin off a desert highway called Losee Road. Generally, though, the museum is upfront about the fact that it is in Las Vegas because it’s a place millions of people visit every year. It also makes sense because the Punk Rock Museum’s definition of museum falls somewhere on the spectrum occupied by neighbors like the Mob Museum, the Neon Museum and the Harry Mohney Erotic Heritage Museum (current home of the 1990s sensation “Puppetry of the Penis”). A consultant from the Smithsonian visited before opening, Fat Mike told me, but his ideas for multimedia displays and other pedagogical this and that didn’t make the cut. Fat Mike’s record label, Fat Wreck Chords, is one example of a capitalist streak that might cause consternation for punk purists. “Just because something is capitalist doesn’t mean it’s bad,” he says.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesInevitably, the museum is heavy on varieties of white, male, very often shirtless aggression. But care has been taken to be inclusive, and Fat Mike took care to point this out. The first gallery you encounter contains 10 portraits of canonical punk acts. Fat Mike told me that it is one of the rooms he insisted on curating himself, and he directed my attention to portraits of Alice Bag, the Latina lead singer of the seminal Los Angeles punk band the Bags; Poly Styrene, the mixed-race frontwoman of X-Ray Spex; and Laura Jane Grace, the transgender singer of the band Against Me! That month, there was a temporary exhibit devoted to the photographer Angela Boatwright’s work chronicling the largely Latino backyard punk scene that flourished in East and South Central Los Angeles in the 2010s; it was followed, in October, by one titled “Black Punk Now.” There is also an exhibit case simply marked “Diverse,” which highlights queer bands like Pansy Division and Toilet Böys. For all that, it’s the pop, skate and emo punk of NOFX’s generation that predominates. This is a function of Fat Mike’s sensibility (there are few scholars who would grant Pennywise such a central place in the music’s history) but also of which artists have chosen to contribute and which have declined. As Fat Mike will be the first to tell you, not everybody in the punk community loves him. Fairly or not, NOFX and its Warped Tour compatriots are easily written off as empty-headed, obnoxious, adolescent bros. Fat Mike’s capitalist streak rubs many purists the wrong way. Among other ventures, he has created the label Fat Wreck Chords, the punk rock/craft beer festival Punk in Drublic and a line of panties for men. The zine writer Aaron Cometbus once wrote that he was “Trump in a mohawk.” And Fat Mike is consistently, gleefully offensive in a way that suggests both a compulsion and a sense of professional obligation. The wedding chapel at the Punk Rock Museum is decorated with photos of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. One of the few disagreements he has had with the rest of the museum’s management, he told me in all seeming earnestness, was over his idea of playing “Yakety Sax” whenever the wheelchair lift to the second floor made its ascent.The newlyweds Nadia Pérez and Pablo Cabutti kissing in the museum’s wedding chapel, which is decorated with pictures of one of punk’s most famous couples, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesStill, Fat Mike believes his reputation is unfair. “It destroys me,” he says. NOFX, he pointed out, remains the one band of its cohort to never sign to a major label. In a world of independent labels with lofty rhetoric and a bad habit of not paying their musicians, Fat Wreck Chords has an honorable reputation. In the early 2000s, Fat Mike spearheaded Rock Against Bush — two compilations and a tour — which he says raised over $1 million to campaign against George W. Bush, and PunkVoter.com, which he says registered over 200,000 young voters. He identifies as queer and has spoken emotionally about the difficulty of coming out publicly as a cross-dresser and a devotee of B.D.S.M., but he says the L.G.B.T.Q. community has failed to embrace him.“I’m always just the California bro,” he lamented. Ultimately, Fat Mike says he knows why he’s not better liked: “Why do people hate Tom Brady? Why do people hate the Dallas Cowboys? Why do they hate Machine Gun Kelly? Because they hate success. And they hate when that successful person is stoked. I do what the [expletive] I want. I don’t follow society’s rules, and people hate that: How come he gets to do everything he wants to?” he says, before answering the question himself, not inaccurately. “Because I’m punk.”While you can explore the Punk Rock Museum by yourself, one of its unique selling points is that, for an extra fee, you can get a tour given by a punk celebrity. Among the musicians who have given tours are members of the Germs, Circle Jerks, Fishbone and Suicidal Tendencies, as well as Fat Mike himself, who pointed out that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame “doesn’t have B.B. King giving tours.” (King died in 2015.) The day after my visit with Fat Mike, I returned and ran into Marko DeSantis waiting for his afternoon tour group in the gift shop. DeSantis was the lead guitarist for a Santa Barbara band named Sugarcult, which had a couple of pop-punk hits in the 2000s. The museum had flown him in and put him up at a hotel for a three-day stint giving two tours a day. He received a cheat sheet of highlights to make sure to hit but otherwise was free to tell his own story. That afternoon, his tour turned out to be a group of one: a 42-year-old in the LED industry named Tristan who lives in Los Angeles and had been excitedly following the museum’s opening since it was announced. Tristan had blown off the day at a lighting convention to attend because, as it happens, he is a huge fan of Sugarcult.“Dude, I am very excited!” he told DeSantis. “So, am I!” DeSantis said. They beamed at each other and repaired to the Triple Down for a quick beer before beginning. Their joy trailed after me as I drifted through the museum alone. Goldman, the professor of punk, had given me an assignment of what to look for: “Let’s be real, I’d want to know if there’s anything political, really,” she said. There wasn’t much that explicitly qualified, unless you counted the simple weight of the compounded evidence: generation after generation of youth and energy and creativity and community. Which, to be honest, I was more and more inclined to do. Watching a video of Indonesian teenagers whirling and clashing in an enormous mosh pit, I found myself a little choked up. The museum’s recreation of a suburban basement, the iconic wellspring of middle-class punk energy.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesJeff Gross, who came from Miami to attend the When We Were Young punk music festival, was eager to visit the museum, where he got a tattoo of the Blink-182 logo.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times“It looks like they get it,” came a heavy English accent behind me. I turned to see Morat, the museum’s mononymous, tattoo-covered, maroon-mohawked talent coordinator. Morat runs the visiting-tour-guide program, a battlefield promotion he received after working in the gift shop for a few weeks. He told me that he heard the Sex Pistols’ “Did You No Wrong” in a London schoolyard, not long after it came out in 1977, and thought, “Right, that’s my life, messed up.” He formed a band, Soldiers of Destruction, but they were too busy being soldiers of destruction to get around to recording their own album until 2021. He has stayed in the scene ever since.“This is not just about fun,” he said. “It’s about staying alive.” As far as the museum was concerned, there were some exhibits and some featured bands that he could do without, but that was life. Morat has little time for arguments about what punk is and isn’t. “That’s the thing. Nobody knows,” he said. “I’ve been at it since 1977, and I don’t know.” He looked around, as if to be sure we were alone, then leaned in. “I mean, it was all just made up to begin with.”Brett Martin is a writer in New Orleans and the author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.” Jamie Lee Taete is a British photographer who is currently based in Los Angeles. His work mainly focuses on reality and perceived realities in the United States. More