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      Chubby Checker, Phish and Outkast Among Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nominees

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      Billy Idol, the Black Crowes and Maná will also appear on the ballot for the first time, alongside Oasis, Joe Cocker, Mariah Carey and others.Outkast, Phish, Chubby Checker, Billy Idol, the Black Crowes and the Mexican band Maná are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.This year’s ballot, announced by the hall on Wednesday, will also include Oasis, Joe Cocker, Mariah Carey, Cyndi Lauper, the White Stripes, Bad Company and Soundgarden, as well as Joy Division and New Order, the band that members of Joy Division formed after the death of its lead singer, Ian Curtis.As in recent years, the latest nominees represent a mix of eras and subgenres. Those include boldface rock ’n’ roll names from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s (Cocker, Idol), punk and alternative heroes (Joy Division, Soundgarden, the White Stripes), arena-filling giants (Oasis, Phish), a hip-hop act (Outkast) and a nod to the world outside mainstream Anglo-American pop (Maná).Given the intense pressure the Rock Hall has faced in recent years to correct its poor record of admitting women to the pantheon, the inclusion of just two female performers — Carey and Lauper, neither of them new to the ballot — may bring yet more scrutiny to the institution despite its promises to reform.For longtime Rock Hall watchers, the biggest news this year may be Checker. His song “The Twist” — a cover of a B-side originally released by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters — was a global phenomenon in the early 1960s, and it stands as one of the biggest hits in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. But until now, Checker, 83, has been ignored by the Rock Hall, despite years — decades, even — of complaints from his fans and protests by Checker himself. (Ballard, who died in 2003, was inducted into the hall in 1990.)In 2001, Checker took out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine calling on the Rock Hall — along with nominators of the Nobel Prizes — to recognize him for the song that, he said, became “the biggest dance of the century.”“I want my flowers while I’m alive,” he wrote. “I can’t smell them when I’m dead.”In 2018, the Rock Hall included “The Twist” in a new honor, a list of singles that shaped rock ’n’ roll.Artists become eligible for nomination 25 years after the release of their first recording. The nominations are voted on by more than 1,000 music historians, industry professionals and inducted artists.The winning nominees are to be announced in April, and this year’s induction ceremony will be held in Los Angeles in the fall. More

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      Jesse Welles, a Folk Musician Who Sings the News, Is Turning the Page

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      In a small home recording studio on a Monday afternoon in January, Jesse Welles sat with a guitar on his lap, dressed head-to-toe in black.Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and a sandpapery voice, has risen to recent prominence posting videos to social media of himself alone in the woods near his home in northwest Arkansas, performing wryly funny, politically engaged folk songs. He’s managed to turn subjects like the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms. But the song he was recording in that basement in East Nashville, “Simple Gifts,” is a different beast.As he delicately plucked his acoustic guitar, he sang its earnest opening lines — “Slouching towards the sky’s extent from the edges of a waste / Was something darker than a hope, something brighter still than fate” — sketching out an imagistic tableau untouched by current events. Welles’s new album, “Middle,” due Feb. 21, is similarly minded.“The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” he said. “These are ones that are self-indulgent, or at least I feel like they are at times. I like to do both. They’re two different mediums.”Jesse Welles’s protest songs deftly blend the whimsical with the serious, turning topics like Walmart and the war in Gaza into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesThe producer, Eddie Spear, rose from behind a mixing board and adjusted the microphone in front of Welles. Most of the songs on “Middle” are recorded with a full band, but for “Simple Gifts” and the album’s title track, the setup was pared down to a solitary microphone. “I’m trying to honor what people are enjoying about Jesse,” said Spear, who has also worked with Zach Bryan and Sierra Ferrell. “We thought getting a really simple capture in this way might tie in where he’s come from and honor this particular period of his career.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ye’s Website Selling T-Shirts With Swastikas Is Taken Down

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      A commercial for the shirts aired in some local markets during the Super Bowl, days after the rapper and designer called himself a Nazi on social media. The website was taken down Tuesday.Ye, the rapper and designer formerly known as Kanye West, aired a commercial in some markets during the Super Bowl that promoted a website selling a single product: T-shirts with swastikas.In the 30-second commercial, Ye appears to be filming a close-up of his face while lying in a dentist’s chair. “I spent, like, all the money for the commercial on these new teeth,” he said, smiling into the camera. “So, once again, I had to shoot it on the iPhone.”Ye then directs people to his online store, Yeezy.com, which was selling only one item as of early Tuesday: a $20 white T-shirt with a black swastika. According to Variety, when the commercial aired Sunday night, the website was selling a range of non-branded clothing, but shortly after it was selling only the shirt with the swastika.On Tuesday morning, the website for his store appeared to have gone offline, replaced by a message that said, “This store is unavailable.” A spokesperson for Shopify, the online platform that processes the website’s orders, said that Ye’s online store “did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify.”The ad aired days after Ye unleashed a rant on social media in which he called himself a Nazi and professed his love for Adolf Hitler. He later deactivated his X account.On Monday, the Anti-Defamation League condemned the commercial, writing on X that “there’s no excuse for this kind of behavior.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      10 Songs That Celebrate the Sound of Philadelphia

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      Explore the city’s rich musical history with songs from Patti LaBelle, Alex G, the Roots and more.Patti LaBelleMichael Reynolds/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,Over the weekend, I made a solemn vow to the football gods: If the Eagles won the Super Bowl, then the next Amplifier playlist would be made up entirely of songs by artists from Philadelphia. The football gods upheld their end of this bargain — in case you haven’t heard, the Eagles absolutely trounced the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs, 40-22 — so today I will uphold mine with 10 tracks from the City of Brotherly Love (and the brotherly shove).Across all sorts of genres, Philadelphia has a rich musical history and a vibrant musical present. The sound of Philadelphia soul defined the early 1970s (even David Bowie wanted a piece of the action), and its heirs adapted its influence into a neo-soul boom that took off in the late 1990s. Philly has long had a thriving underground music scene, too, as evidenced by its tight-knit indie-rock community and its reputation for eclectic, innovative hip-hop.This playlist is certainly not meant to be definitive. Since I limited myself to just 10 tracks, I tried to avoid the obvious, which is to say you will hear neither “Motownphilly” nor the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme song. Today’s playlist does, however, feature some familiar local luminaries (Patti LaBelle, the Roots) alongside some younger artists (Jazmine Sullivan, Tierra Whack, Alex G) who are updating the sounds of the city for a new generation.I restrained myself from including the Eagles Victory Song, though, so I suppose you will be able to enjoy this playlist even if you are not a fan of the new N.F.L. champs. It definitely hits different if you’re wearing your Kelly green, though. So fix yourself a cheese steak (wit or witout), pour yourself a tall glass of wooder and press play.My style fortified by all of Philadel-phi,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Hospitals and Hospices, ‘Music as Care’ Offers a New Kind of Comfort

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      A violinist plays for her father. A singer takes requests. In hospitals and hospices, bedside performers offer a new kind of care.In the five years my father was languishing in a nursing home in Hamburg, I often brought my violin to play by his bedside. I would prop up my copy of Bach with the help of a water bottle and read through sonatas and partitas I had learned as a teenager, when I was considering a career in music.My father’s reaction was hard to read. His gaze was unchangingly stoic during that final stage of his struggle with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Sometimes my mother saw him attempt to clap. After a halting reading of Bach’s majestic “Chaconne” that would have drawn scorn from the critic in me, we both clearly heard him say “thank you.”One day, a caregiver buttonholed me in the corridor and requested that I play in the day room where they wheeled residents for a change of scenery. As it was, she said, they could all hear me through the walls. She might have picked up on my hesitation: Playing in front of any kind of audience always triggered my anxiety.I agreed, mostly for my father’s sake. But on the appointed day, with my audience fanned out in their beds in various states of consciousness, I found myself playing freely. Nurses glided by on soundless sneakers, a lunch cart clattered in the distance; one woman let out sighs. Afterward, I realized that I had never entered into such a state of flow while playing in public. What had been intended as an act of care for the residents had also healed a tiny bit of the rift in my relationship with the violin.Vocke, Okundaye, Sean Brennan, Lara Bruckmann and Tamara Wellons practice before making their rounds at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesI shared this story on a brisk January morning in Baltimore in the old boardroom at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I sat in on a peer supervision session of professional bedside artists. These musicians, all faculty members at the Peabody Institute, are part of a nationwide trend to bring the arts into health care settings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Names Richard Grenell Interim Leader of Kennedy Center

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      President Trump announced in a post on social media Monday that he was appointing Richard Grenell as the “interim executive director” of the Kennedy Center in Washington. Mr. Grenell, who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany during the first Trump administration, is one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks.The president wrote that Mr. Grenell “shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture” and would be overseeing “daily operations” to ensure there was no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”The appointment was just the latest in a series of moves designed to strengthen Mr. Trump’s grip on the performing arts center in Washington.He kicked off a purge Friday night, when Mr. Trump announced his intent to gut the Kennedy Center’s board and install himself as chairman. He had denounced the center’s programming choices.On Monday, 18 board members and the board chairman were removed from an official roster on the center’s website. The excised members were appointees of Mr. Trump’s predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr. The board’s chairman, David M. Rubenstein, was also removed.Mr. Rubenstein, a financier who was initially appointed to the board by former President George W. Bush, has given $111 million to the center over the years, making him the biggest donor in its history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Weeknd Hits No. 1 for a Fifth Time With ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’

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      Boosted by physical sales and a Grammy performance, the album had the biggest week since Taylor Swift’s huge opening last year.The Weeknd has scored his fifth No. 1 album with “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” posting the biggest overall numbers on the Billboard chart since Taylor Swift nearly a year ago.The release of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which the poppy-yet-creepy Canadian star announced at a livestreamed concert in São Paulo in September, was delayed by a week to Jan. 31 because of the Los Angeles wildfires. But then it got a prominent boost when the Weeknd performed a two-song medley on the Grammy Awards broadcast last week, revealing that he had quashed his four-year boycott over the show’s voting process.“Hurry Up Tomorrow,” the Weeknd’s sixth studio album, had the equivalent of 490,500 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. Although the Weeknd is a streaming heavyweight — more than 20 of his tracks have garnered at least a billion clicks on Spotify — the album’s opening-week numbers were driven by unit sales. It sold 183,000 digital downloads, 99,000 CDs and 77,000 copies on vinyl, the Weeknd’s best week in that format. (There were even 1,000 on cassette.) Its 22 tracks were streamed 172 million times.The album’s total number of 490,500 — a composite derived from a formula used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various music formats — was the biggest weekly take since last April, when Swift’s “Tortured Poets” burst out of the gate with 2.6 million.Also this week, Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”) fell to second place after three weeks at the top and SZA’s “SOS” dropped one spot to No. 3.The Grammys offered a modest boost to some of the night’s big winners and nominees. Kendrick Lamar, who took record and song of the year (“Not Like Us”), fell one spot to No. 4 with “GNX,” though its numbers were slightly up. Billie Eilish, who performed but went home empty-handed, saw her LP “Hit Me Hard and Soft” rise five spots to No. 5. And Chappell Roan, who performed and won best new artist, jumped eight spots to No. 6 with “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.” More

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      Breaking Down Kendrick Lamar’s Drake-centric Super Bowl Halftime Show

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeOn Sunday in New Orleans, Kendrick Lamar became the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show, performing a medley of hits, deep cuts and Drake disses.Writing in The New York Times, the critic Jon Caramanica called it both “curiously low-key” and, in the case of the climactic use “Not Like Us,” complete with a Serena Williams cameo, “quite a spectacle — perhaps the peak of any rap battle, ever.”Immediately after the game, on an emergency episode of Popcast, we discussed the way Lamar’s beef with Drake provided the momentum of the performance; the cameos from SZA, Samuel L. Jackson and Williams; the rest of the set list, including an unreleased, fan-favorite track (and no “Alright”); the surprise leak of the show a few days early; the protester who unveiled a flag for Gaza and Sudan; and whether this is finally the end of the biggest beef in hip-hop history.Connect 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.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More