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      Popcast (Deluxe): Lizzo, Travis Scott and the Limits of Persona

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | 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:How a star’s public persona, varnished or unvarnished, can dictate what they can get away with in the eye of their followers. Lizzo, who for years has emphasized personal kindness as her brand, has seen her career derailed by allegations that she mistreated her backup dancers. Cardi B threw a microphone at an audience member in reaction to getting splashed with water, but has emerged unscathedTravis Scott’s No. 1 album “Utopia,” its many guest appearances and its oxygen-swallowing hugenessThe resilience of Playboi Carti, who has built a growing cultlike career while releasing no new musicRemembering the life and work of Sinead O’Connor and Angus CloudNew songs from Cowgirl Clue and B-Lovee featuring Luh TylerSnack 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

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      Salzburg Festival Remains a Crammed Summer Stage

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      No other festival matches the sheer profusion of classical music, opera and theater offerings at the Salzburg Festival.Early in 1779, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sulked back to Salzburg, Austria, having failed to land a permanent job abroad. In a letter to a family friend, he sneered at the city he was returning to.“Salzburg is no place for my talent,” he wrote, adding: “One hears nothing; there’s no theater; no opera! — and even if they wanted to stage one, who is there to sing?”If only Mozart could see his hometown now.I read those words last weekend in a program note at the Salzburg Festival, which, over the past century, has been largely responsible for giving this place perhaps the richest, densest musical offerings in the world for six weeks each summer.Salzburg’s bounty of nearly 200 opera, concert and theater performances, continuing this year through Aug. 31, is so intoxicating that it can lead to some dizzying sprints.Last Tuesday, I left one concert early — squeezing past the confused people in my aisle right after Jean-Guihen Queyras played Kodaly’s Cello Sonata at 7 p.m. — so that I could make it to the baritone Christian Gerhaher’s lieder recital. And had Gerhaher’s haunting Schumann not felt quite so conclusive, I would have run, at 10:15, to try and make the second part of a third program.Salzburg has competition. The Aix-en-Provence Festival in France has more varied spaces and a commitment to new work; in Germany, Bayreuth has a laser focus on Wagner and, as in this year’s augmented reality “Parsifal,” an experimental spirit. Glyndebourne, in England, has pastoral grace; Lucerne and Verbier, in Switzerland, vibrant orchestras and chamber intimacy.But Salzburg is still the annual stage, crammed to bursting.Cecilia Bartoli, standing, starred in “Orfeo ed Euridice,” the annual production at Salzburg programmed as a vehicle for her.Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalAnd currently in some flux. There have been reports of internal tensions as Kristina Hammer, who last year replaced the festival’s longtime president, settles in. A big-budget renovation project looms, as Europe’s economic situation is unsettled by war and inflation. (The cost of paper has risen so high that Salzburg no longer prints opera librettos in its programs.)Heated controversy last summer over the ties to Russia of the conductor Teodor Currentzis, a recent stalwart here, has largely eased. And tickets have been selling briskly.Yet the pressure is always on to justify Salzburg’s reputation and its often sky-high prices, which can reach north of $500. As Jürgen Flimm, an old artistic director here, is said to have put it, “People don’t come to the Salzburg Festival to watch us save money.”The staged operas I saw during my six days here didn’t seem cheap, but they looked and felt too much the same: all gloomily sleek. Best was Martin Kusej’s rueful production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” set in a series of anonymous, sterile, nearly empty spaces populated by the rootless members of a contemporary crime syndicate.The druggy opening promised a too-broad mafioso approach, but Kusej settled in with action that was sly, surreal and sensual, muted without being chilly, full of casual, bloody violence but also melancholy tenderness. The cast was strong, particularly a trio of female leads — Adriana González, Sabine Devieilhe and Lea Desandre — with light, precise voices and a Mozartian blend of wistfulness and energy.And Raphaël Pichon’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic, the festival’s eminent house band, was remarkable. While Pichon often does Mozart with his period-instrument ensemble, Pygmalion, he embraced the Philharmonic’s more traditional warmth. Detailed without being finicky, this was a grand but dashing, controlled but vibrant “Figaro.”Christof Loy’s staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” had one of Loy’s typical airy sets — wood-paneled but otherwise as blank as the rooms in “Figaro” — as well as his wan, sometimes swooping, sometimes sullen venture into choreography.With Gianluca Capuano serenely leading Les Musiciens du Prince, Monaco, this was one of the annual vehicles for the star singer Cecilia Bartoli, who premiered it this spring at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, the sister event she runs. Dressed in a men’s suit with a long ponytail, Bartoli’s Orfeo had impassioned dignity, but her voice was less persuasive and juicy — sounding sharp-edged at the top of its range, colorless at the bottom — than in her other recent appearances here.Both of these works were done in the modest-size Haus für Mozart, while Krzysztof Warlikowski’s dreary take on Verdi’s “Macbeth” — interpreting the action as the internal drama of a couple driven mad by their inability to conceive a child — sprawled across the expanse of the main festival theater’s stage.The soprano Asmik Grigorian was a highlight as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s “Macbeth.”Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg FestivalIn an unfocused production busy with neorealist-style film, movie theater seats and children wearing oversize bobblehead Banquo masks, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, Salzburg’s reigning prima donna of late, alone managed to seize attention with her clear, focused singing and convincing sobriety. Under Philippe Jordan, the Philharmonic sounded vague and limp; this was a performance full of imprecise coordination between pit and stage, in a work that needs to be taut to fully speak.Far tauter, more delicate and more potent was Currentzis’s conducting of Peter Sellars’s wrenching, decade-old completion of Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.” Adding some of that composer’s religious choruses alongside harrowing spoken excerpts from Rosario Aguilar’s novel “The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma,” exploring the impact of Spanish colonization on Central Americans, Sellars created a hypnotically solemn meditation on that corrosive, ambivalent colonial encounter — here semi-staged under somber light.Utopia — the orchestra and choir Currentzis has been touring with since he and his MusicAeterna ensemble came under fire for their partnership with a state-owned Russian bank — performed with exquisite sensitivity. In a superb cast, the soprano Jeanine De Bique stood out with a voice and presence of unaffected directness.Also narcotic and stark, but in a more maximalist mode, was “Nathan the Wise,” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 18th-century parable of religious tolerance, one of the festival’s spoken theater productions and the most exciting directorial work I saw at Salzburg.It was staged in darkly industrial style by Ulrich Rasche on one of his characteristic turntable stages, over which his actors ceaselessly walk — rhythmically swaying into slowly shifting configurations, while hurling out their lines with stylized aggression. The showmanship, the physical virtuosity, the intensity and clarity of the text have all been hard to forget.The soprano Jeanine De Bique stood out in a semi-staged presentation of Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.”Marco Borrelli/Salzburg FestivalIt has not been unusual in recent years to find the fully staged operas — in theory, Salzburg’s glory — uneven, and the drama offerings more adventurous. While the festival’s artistic leader, Markus Hinterhäuser, has excellent taste in musicians, his choices in opera directors can tend iffy.So can some repertory decisions. With just five full stagings, for example, does it make sense for two to be Shakespeare adaptations by Verdi? (After “Macbeth,” “Falstaff” opens on Saturday.)And Hinterhäuser has stubbornly resisted premieres and contemporary work, instead showcasing modernist rarities like Enescu’s “Oedipe,” Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960” and Martinu’s mid-20th-century refugee drama “The Greek Passion,” which opens on Sunday. These are invaluable projects, but surely 21st-century music does not have to be so completely exiled from Salzburg.Hinterhäuser has been a steady, intelligent hand, though, and many would like to see him extend his contract, which runs through 2026. He demurred when asked in an interview if he hoped to stay longer, saying that he and the festival’s board will discuss the matter this fall. But recent tweaks to the administrative hierarchy have led to speculation about friction between him and Hammer, the new president.The festival’s president serves as a kind of global ambassador, networker and fund-raising chief, and Hammer, a German-Swiss marketing executive and consultant, was an unexpected choice from outside the usual Salzburg circles. (Her predecessor, Helga Rabl-Stadler, came from a prominent Austrian family and had been a politician, journalist and businesswoman before her quarter-century as president.)There can be advantages to having someone in the position with deep connections at the highest reaches of government — as in 2020, when the festival leveraged its influence to put on a robust event amid worldwide pandemic closures.But it’s also important to remember that Rabl-Stadler went through her own difficulties early on. In an interview, Hammer presented herself as an underestimated outsider, patiently learning the ropes.“I swallow it if somebody runs me over because they think: ‘Who is the blonde? Certainly not the president,’” she said. “I don’t care. If people need time to get used to me, I understand.”She has been buoyed by the fact that the festival’s corporate sponsors, among the president’s prime responsibilities, have remained stable. And this spring, Hammer secured a 12 million euro ($13.1 million) private gift — unusually large for a festival financed so generously by the government — for a new visitor center.That project will be a prologue to the main renovation, which, organized by the festival’s well-liked business manager, Lukas Crepaz, will cost an estimated 480 million euros ($527.2 million) and last until 2032. It will increase the comfort for audiences, update outdated backstage facilities and add more behind-the-scenes space by pushing further into the adjoining mountain.“It creates a lot of question marks for the festival,” Hinterhäuser said. “But we have to do it.”The construction schedule has been planned to keep all the theaters open each summer. So the fire hose of performances will remain on — with no end to the need to choose, for example, between two memorable 11 a.m. concerts: the sumptuous, detailed Philharmonic under Andris Nelsons, or the Mozarteum Orchestra, exuberantly fresh with its incoming chief conductor, Roberto González-Monjas.Where else but at this festival could you hear “Le Nozze di Figaro” and then, the following morning, Mozart’s “Coronation Mass,” whose Agnus Dei gives the soprano soloist a melody its composer would later crib from himself for the time-stopping “Dove sono” in “Figaro”?At Salzburg, the bounty — the extravagance, the sheer profusion — is the point. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Through the Eyes of a Dance Critic

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      The choreography on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour doesn’t ask her to do too much, but she knows how to use her simple moves to her advantage.Since it’s an understatement to call Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour the dominant pop concert of the year, it isn’t surprising that snippets of the show, captured by fans on their phones, have been flooding social media sites for months. Watch a few of these clips, and it might strike you that the dance moves, in contrast to the designer costumes and visual effects, are rather simple and unoriginal, the sort of thing anyone might be able to pull off.At least that’s what I thought before seeing the Eras Tour live. Experiencing it in Los Angeles, at the end of its first United States leg, I changed my mind. As dance, the show is simple and unoriginal — yet exceptionally effective.Swift is a pop superstar who dances but is not known for her dancing. Even many of her admirers will admit that in this respect she’s no Beyoncé, no Britney Spears — that as hard as she tries, she’s a little stiff and awkward. Be that as it may, body language is crucial to how the three-hour-plus performance works.Swift’s Eras Tour is wrapping up its initial U.S. leg with a run of shows in Los Angeles.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Friday, at the second of six Los Angeles concerts, the most significant gesture came early, between songs. Basking in the deafening roar of 70,000 fans, Swift struck a coy “Who, me?” pose and said she wanted to try something. She pointed at a section of SoFi Stadium, and the cheering from that section somehow got louder.“I feel so powerful,” she said, kissing a bicep. But the power she was flexing wasn’t muscular. It was her ability — with the magnification of giant video screens — to connect with every member of the crowd. The choreography helped keep that connection a live wire.I don’t just mean the dance numbers, though there are plenty of those, choreographed by Mandy Moore (“La La Land,” “So You Think You Can Dance?”). The backup dancers sometimes contributed to the spectacle. They handled the billowing floral parachutes that concealed and revealed Swift at the start. They wielded glowing orbs during “Willow,” clouds on ladders during “Lavender Haze,” umbrellas during “Midnight Rain.” Not especially imaginative, this was all just something big enough to see.Elsewhere, the dancers helped suggest the situations of the songs. The bicep kiss was a segue to “The Man,” a complaint about gender double standards that was staged as an ascent up the stairs and levels of an office set populated by chest-thumping workers. In other songs, a few dancers played roles: the boyfriend that Swift berates for emotional neglect across (and atop) a long dinner table in “Tolerate It,” or the scandalizing socialite protagonist of “The Last Great American Dynasty.”Backup dancers help suggest the situations of some Swift songs, but mostly serve as a friend group or party guests.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut really, the concert has only one character, Swift. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” the dancers were costumed as earlier versions of her, trapped in transparent boxes like dolls. Mostly, though, they served as a friend group or party guests. A happy, diverse bunch, they did a little ballroom dancing to evoke the romantic fantasy of “Lover,” a little vogueing to give “Bejeweled” some shimmer.And then they left. Which is to say, they left the audience alone with Swift, again and again, re-establishing the thrill of mass intimacy. Other pop stars use this effect, but it’s especially potent with Swift because she’s also a singer-songwriter, who can sit at a piano or tap into the iconography of a guitar-slinging truth teller.The most intense moments of the show were in this mode: the 10-minute extended version of “All Too Well” and the acoustic mini-set of “secret songs” that differ from night to night. This is almost pointedly not dancing, but it requires a particular physicality at which Swift excels. She has the wide stance, both confident and confiding. She looks grounded, comfortable, at home.The tour will begin its international leg later this month in Mexico.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat’s generally true when she isn’t dancing. She can strut or skip around the huge catwalk and stage that extend across the stadium floor without looking small. She can strike over-the-shoulder poses for the camera. She can inhabit her many sparkly costumes — rolling her hips in fringe dresses and Louboutin boots, using the flowy sleeves on her “Folklore” dress the way Stevie Nicks uses scarves.So does it matter that in the cafe chair burlesque routine for “Vigilante ___,” a homage to louche Bob Fosse dances, she’s imprecise and physically uncommitted to the pleasures and dangers of sex? (She caresses her body like she’s afraid to.) It doesn’t, because her fans love her anyway. And it does, because this imperfect dancing is, I think, part of her nonthreatening Everywoman image. It makes her easier to identify with.And that is what the whole concert is about, the identification between Swift and the fans she continually thanks and flatters, the fans who know every word to every song. Swift told the L.A. crowd that when those fans sing her lyrics along with her, she takes that as a sign that they too have felt what she felt.It makes sense, then, that she moves the way anyone might move. So that anyone might imagine being her — just pointing and feeling powerful. More

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      Too Short’s Long (and Very Raunchy) Life in Rap

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      When Too Short walks onstage, before he says anything else, he asks: “What’s my favorite word?” And audiences of thousands shout: “Biiiiiitch!”When Too Short says “biiiiiitch,” it’s less of a word and more of an incantation. He stretches it out, savors its taste. He always sounds unflappable on record, but when he belts out that particular word, it lands with a slight electric charge. It sounds playful, arrogant, angry, disgusted, maybe even amazed; you hear a vast spectrum of human emotions in it. He knows the word is rude and offensive. Since the mid-80s, he has been pushing hip-hop’s coarser edges to their logical conclusion, rapping legends of his own sexual prowess: phantasmagorical erotic adventures, set in a blaxploitation-inspired East Oakland full of pimps and prostitutes, delivered in the lingo of X-rated ’70s comedians like Richard Pryor and Rudy Ray Moore. “Biiiiiitch!” isn’t the only thing that he says, but it’s his signature. On “Rappers’ Ball,” a 1996 track from his longtime friend E-40, he explained his relationship with the word in one economical punchline: “They always said I couldn’t rap, I just say ‘bitch’/I guess the bitch made me rich.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      Jon Batiste Has Got the Whole Wide Music World in His Hands

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      Nothing is simple when it comes to Jon Batiste, the pianist, television personality, New Orleans musical scion and jazz-R&B-classical savant.He spent seven years as the smiling, melodica-toting TV bandleader on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” yet found some of his widest acclaim for solemn protest performances in Brooklyn after the murder of George Floyd.He beat Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish for album of the year at the Grammys in 2022, despite his “We Are” having just a fraction of their sales — and then presented “American Symphony,” a Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums at Carnegie Hall.Now comes Batiste’s most commercial project yet: “World Music Radio,” an album with guest appearances by Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne and the K-pop girl group NewJeans, made with a team of producers behind hits for artists like Justin Bieber and Drake, with tightly woven hooks that were engineered to fit on any Top 40-style streaming playlist.But of course “World Music Radio,” which comes out Aug. 18, is no standard pop release. It’s also a fantastical concept album that challenges music’s provincial genre borders, with a message of open-armed inclusivity for a fractured political era. The album’s central character, a timeless interstellar being named Billy Bob Bo Bob, curates a potpourri of the far-flung musical languages of Earth and transmits it to the cosmos with chuckling, Daddy-O commentary, like Doctor Who crossed with Wolfman Jack.“He’s a D.J., he’s a griot, he’s a storyteller, he’s a unifier, he’s a rebel,” Batiste told me, describing the character of Billy Bob Bo Bob. “He’s a disrupter.”That’s also as good an encapsulation as any of the 36-year-old Batiste himself, who can’t easily be pinned down to any single role, or genre, or corner of the music market.Batiste wrote most of the album in Rick Rubin’s beachside studio in Malibu, Calif., generating kernels of upward of 125 songs.Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesIn his own eccentric way, “World Music Radio” is Batiste’s interpretation of what mainstream pop is or should be, in which high-energy electronic dance beats coexist with reggae, Afropop and old-fashioned piano torch ballads. “Be Who You Are,” the first single, has lyrics in English, Spanish and Korean, and its high-tech, partially animated music video, produced through a brand deal with Coke, features Batiste, the Latin pop star Camilo, the rapper JID and the members of NewJeans all vibing alongside each other.Yet in discussing the album, Batiste was almost totally cerebral, speaking in long, eloquent, practically unsummarizable paragraphs about his mental and creative processes. The album’s origin, he said, was partly philosophical, as he mused on the connections and divergences between “the horrendous idea of what we call ‘world music’” — local traditions viewed through a condescending Western lens — “and the narrow diameter of what’s considered popular music.”“So then, world music,” Batiste added, shifting professorially on the living room sofa of his airy and immaculate Brooklyn brownstone. “What if we could reimagine that term? What if we could reinvent? What if we could use it as a prompt to expand the diameter of popular music?”In conversation, he mentioned influences that included some of the most popular cultural productions of modern times, like Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” and the “Godfather” films. Jamie Krents, the president of his label, Verve, said that Batiste had cited Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as another reference point.“He wanted to make music that was approachable to the largest possible audience without compromising,” Krents said.Still, it is hard to imagine Jackson summarizing his goals for “Billie Jean” or “Beat It” in quite the same way that Batiste does for “World Music Radio”: “By listening to it and experiencing it,” he explained, “you have a realization about self, about community, about humanism, that leaves you in a state of bliss and a hyper-consciousness.”AS BATISTE SEES IT, “World Music Radio” is the culmination of a career that has long snaked through supposedly disparate traditions and audiences.Batiste grew up in Kenner, La., part of a family with deep musical roots in New Orleans, and he spent his teenage years playing late-night gigs in the French Quarter with his friend Trombone Shorty, then rushing to high school classes in the morning. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard and became a fixture around New York with his band Stay Human, especially for what he called “love riots”: spontaneous, Pied Piper-like performances of “You Are My Sunshine” or Lady Gaga songs that took place on the street or in the subway, interrupting the daily grind with flashes of joy.At the same time, with his 2013 album “Social Music,” he began to develop a brand of activism that emphasized music’s power to find common ground amid ever-widening political polarization.“Inclusive is not even the right word,” Batiste said of his approach. “It’s more, OK, we’re coexisting as human beings on Earth. We’re not a monolith. But underneath it all, we’re the same. That’s not something that can be interpreted in the binary climate that we’re in now.”In 2015, Batiste and Stay Human became the house band on Colbert’s new CBS show, where Batiste performed comedic musical skits but had little outlet to express his broader political or social views. And, with over 200 shows a year, he also couldn’t tour — something that, incredibly, Batiste has never done as a headlining act.“We Are,” which was begun in late 2019 and completed the following year at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, became Batiste’s vehicle for protest and for communicating the wider social ambitions of his music. Although the album had barely registered in the marketplace, Batiste became the surprise top nominee for the 64th annual Grammy Awards, getting eight nods for “We Are” and three more for the movie soundtrack “Soul.” (The score for “Soul” also won Batiste, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross an Oscar.)At the same time, Batiste’s longtime partner, Suleika Jaouad, had spent years struggling with cancer and writing about it in The New York Times. The day the Grammy nominations were announced, Jaouad began a round of chemotherapy. “At certain points of her treatment,” Batiste said, “her immune system was so compromised that we couldn’t be in the same room.”Batiste onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in July. Because of other obligations, he has not yet toured as a headlining act.Douglas Mason/Getty ImagesThey married last year, and after a bone-marrow transplant, Jaouad’s health has improved enough that they recently took a vacation in Europe. “A major, major milestone,” Batiste said.When “We Are” took album of the year, Batiste became the latest piñata for critics of the entire Grammy system, who pointed to his victory as a sign of an insider-controlled process out of touch with music’s dominant trends. Yet it also represented a necessary tension between artistic excellence, as judged by fellow musicians, and the pressure to reward commercial success. For another example, just look at the last Black man before Batiste to take the top prize: Herbie Hancock, back in 2008.After his Grammy and Oscar wins, Batiste decided to leave Colbert’s show. Freed of that work, he now describes “World Music Radio” as his return to the concepts he explored a decade ago on “Social Music” — and imagined himself as Odysseus from Homer’s “Odyssey.”“It’s the hero’s journey we always talk about,” Batiste said. “It feels kind of like, wow, I came back to where I was 10 years before, but now everything’s different, even though I’m in the same place that I was. I’m home, so to speak. But everything’s different.”Colbert, in an interview, said that when Batiste approached him about leaving, “he didn’t have to tell me why.”“But I did say I can understand why you would want to take this opportunity at this moment and go full-bore,” Colbert added. “I know that feeling very well: Give me the ball and see how fast I can run.”THE MUSIC ON “World Music Radio” had its genesis, Batiste said, when he crossed paths with the producer Rick Rubin in Italy a few months after the Grammys. Rubin offered him use of Shangri-La, his beachside studio in Malibu, Calif., and Batiste headed there in August 2022 for a month of immersive work with a crew of producers and artists who came and went, generating what Batiste said were the kernels of upward of 125 songs.Among Batiste’s collaborators there was Del Rey, who worked with Batiste on “Candy Necklace,” from her latest album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” and she joins him on “Life Lesson,” a melancholy duet on “World Music Radio.”The producer Rogét Chahayed, who has worked with Doja Cat, Drake and others, said he headed to Shangri-La after getting a surprise invitation from Batiste via Instagram. The sessions, he said, were spontaneous and fruitful, with Batiste sometimes kicking off hours of improvisatory jams after simply being inspired by a synthesizer tone.“It was just like magic in the room,” Chahayed recalled. “It was right around evening time, the sun was setting over the ocean. I was like, this doesn’t happen often, in the kind of sessions that we usually have in these freezing cold studios with no windows.”After those sessions, Jon Bellion, a pop performer and producer who has worked with Maroon 5 and the Jonas Brothers, collaborated with Batiste on a process he dubs “Batistifying” the material — combing through piles of half-finished material and whittling it down to a finished, coherent product.With a deadline from his label looming, Batiste said, he felt that the album was not coming together until he sat in his basement studio in Brooklyn and listened to a vocal track sent by a Spanish singer, Rita Payés. She contributes to “My Heart,” a sepia-toned Latin ballad in waltz time on which Batiste channels Ibrahim Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club. Hearing Payés’s voice transmitted over a speaker, Batiste said, instantly suggested the album’s concept.The album’s origin, Batiste said, was partly philosophical, as he mused on the connections and divergences between pop music and “the horrendous idea of what we call ‘world music’.” Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times“It sounds like it’s coming out of a radio that’s sitting on top of the bar at a cafe in Catalonia, Spain,” Batiste said. “The working title up until that point was ‘World Music.’ And it was like, ohhh, ‘World Music Radio.’” He worked through the night to put together a rough version of the album, dreaming up Billy Bob Bo Bob as a narrator who segues between tracks and sometimes chirps in with an approving voice-over.Another collaborator that Batiste pursued was the smooth-jazz saxman Kenny G. Batiste described him with a certain detached curiosity as a fellow artist who has one foot in jazz and another in pop, who has carved out a hugely successful niche but faced unending waves of critical vitriol.“Anybody who’s talked about with that kind of extreme disdain,” Batiste said, “I always want to study.”On the track “Clair de Lune,” which opens with an obscure sample from an old French folk album, Kenny G contributes a minute-long solo that is busier and more harmonically dense than his usual hooks, but with a singing tone that is instantly recognizable.In an interview, Kenny G said that Batiste had asked him about the polarized reactions to his work.“You’ve got to play what sounds good to you, and feels good to you,” Kenny G recalled telling him. “Lucky for you, there’s a big audience that seems to like what you do. Then you really don’t have to apologize for that.”WHEN ASKED ABOUT his commercial hopes for “World Music Radio,” Batiste was typically circuitous and nuanced, saying that on one hand, he wants to compete with stars like Taylor Swift for top chart positions, but he also recognizes that his take on popular culture is more conceptual and abstract. He was most straightforward in saying he couldn’t wait to head out on tour.He seems most prepared for any reaction to his social commentary on the album. “Love Black folks and white folks,” Batiste sings on “Be Who You Are.” “My Asians, my Africans, my Afro-Eurasian, Republican or Democrat.”Even that simple message of openness and acceptance is relatively rare in an era when many pop stars shrink away from any social commentary at all, out of fear of alienating part of their audience and sacrificing clicks. It’s a risk Batiste is determined to take.“To say I love everybody, including Republicans — as a Black guy, I don’t know how that could go,” he said. “That shouldn’t be something that’s frowned upon or looked at in a way that probably to some seems like, ‘Oh, he’s not really clear on what’s important.’”“It’s radical today to love everybody,” he added. “We are in a time that there’s more of a pressure to make people into the other, and to dehumanize them in the process. But the act of removing a certain baseline of humanity in how we approach living amongst each other, that should be radical. That should be the thing that is disruptive.” More

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      The Future of Rap Is Female

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      The Future of Rap Is Female As their male counterparts turn depressive and paranoid, it’s the women who are having all the fun. Aug. 9, 2023 Like American men in general, our top male rappers appear to be in crisis: overwhelmed, confused, struggling to embody so many contradictory ideals. As a result, the art is […] More

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      Back in Black and White: It’s the Hives

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      Onstage at the cozy Chelsea club Racket in May, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist had an important announcement.“Ladies and gentlemen!” the frontman shouted to the mess of bopping heads and airborne limbs gathered before him. “Due to an unfortunate rift in the time-space continuum, it has been 11 years since the Hives played New York.” He tossed his arms triumphantly in the air, as if landing a triple axel. “We are back!” The crowd gleefully erupted.The Hives, a five-piece punk band from Sweden, released five studio albums from 1997 to 2012, making their biggest splash with the single “Hate to Say I Told You So” — a garage-rock gem that spent 11 weeks on the Hot 100 when the group’s second LP, “Veni Vidi Vicious,” arrived in the United States in 2002.The band got swept into the “rock revival” of the moment alongside the White Stripes and the Vines. But they had already made their name onstage, where their arsenal includes matching black-and-white suits and instruments, Almqvist’s high kicks and charming provocations, roadies dressed like ninjas and a guitarist called Nicholaus Arson who sneers, crowd surfs and dramatically blows on his curled fingers as he flicks picks into the crowd.“They’re probably the best live band I’ve ever seen,” said Max Kuehn, the drummer of the California surf-punk band Fidlar, who was honored when the Hives took his group on the road for its first national tour. “If you go to a lot of shows,” he added, “you can really tell the difference of just how tight their songs are and how rehearsed everything is.”Though the Hives continued to play concerts every year since the arrival of “Lex Hives” in 2012, they had no fresh music to offer — until now. On Friday they will unleash “The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons,” 12 new tracks filled with head-snapping riffs and shout-along choruses led by the explosive single “Bogus Operandi.”“There was a lot of time where we didn’t have songs,” Almqvist said as the quintet gathered at a rooftop restaurant in Manhattan two days after the Racket show, dressed ­­— you guessed it — in matching Hives daywear, white denim jackets with black shirts and jeans. “It was like a slow, 10-year-long panic,” he joked with a slight accent, adding a dose of classic Hives bravado: “It was never an outright panic because we continued to be so immensely popular worldwide.”“But,” he added, “it sucks being in a good band that doesn’t make new music.”The Hives, from left: The Johan and Only, Vigilante Carlstroem, Pelle Almqvist, Chris Dangerous and Nicholaus Arson.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesThe Hives have never seemed at risk of running out of steam. Almqvist and Arson, brothers born a year apart, grew up in Fagersta, a small city a two-hour drive from Stockholm, where they soaked up every punk record they could get their hands on ­— trading tapes, scraping together money for imports, taking in pals’ rejects. “That’s how we found the Sonics,” Arson said. A friend handed the LP over, “and it kind of blew our minds.” The guitarist rattled off a list of acts that had made an impact on them: the New Bomb Turks, the Oblivians, the Remains, the Misfits, the Dead Kennedys, “a lot of ’60s music.”The original band — the brothers plus the guitarist Vigilante Carlstroem, the drummer Chris Dangerous and the bassist Dr. Matt Destruction — came together in the ’90s when the members were in their teens, and “the mosh pit thing was big for us,” Almqvist said. “Going nuts and falling over each other was for us always a part of the concert experience. If the crowd wasn’t doing that, it didn’t feel interesting.”Showmanship was a priority from day one. “I think before we were good, we were entertaining,” added Almqvist, who is known for his strutting and agitating. (In June, he split his head open with a swinging mic.) “People who didn’t like us would still watch us doing whatever we were doing, because no one kind of knew what was going to happen.”The music was fast; Almqvist’s wit matched it. “We grew up on 50 percent punk and 50 percent stand-up comedy,” Arson said, including “Saturday Night Live” reruns on MTV and VHS tapes of Eddie Murphy specials.Before they could afford props, the Hives thrifted black and white clothes, painted a guitar and made their own light-up sign that blazed onstage, giving them heat rash. Almqvist estimates they played 500 shows in their first suits. “They smelled so bad,” Dangerous said, “when we walked onstage at the end of the tour, the audience stepped back.”But the efforts paid off. The Scottish music business icon Alan McGee became an early supporter, putting out a greatest hits of sorts called “Your New Favourite Band” in 2001, which brought the Hives wider attention from listeners and U.S. record labels.Interscope reportedly paid millions to secure the band (the Hives still won’t confirm the amount) and gave them creative control. “They created a buzz on their own, a subculture,” Jimmy Iovine, then the label’s chairman, told Spin for a 2004 cover story. “I respect that. I will pay for that. I will let them drive.”The group stuck to its formula on “Tyrannosaurus Hives” from 2004 — 12 songs, less than 30 minutes — and stretched out on “The Black and White Album” three years later, which featured production from hitmakers including Pharrell Williams and Jacknife Lee. “We were probably the last rock band to have a big budget,” Almqvist quipped. “We almost owe it to rock ’n’ roll to use it,” he recalled thinking. (They went independent and self-produced “Lex Hives” in 2012.)The Hives were continually presented with unlikely opportunities, which they wholeheartedly embraced: recording a Christmas song with Cyndi Lauper, licensing “Tick Tick Boom” for a Nike commercial, taking on challenging assignments opening for both Maroon 5 and Pink in arenas across the U.S.“We have to go and find people who hadn’t heard us before. And you want to be able to turn over a crowd,” Arson said. “It’s a way of keeping your tools sharp.”Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist among an enthusiastic crowd in Sweden.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesBut new songs — at least, new songs up to Hives standards — weren’t flowing. When the pandemic hit, the band ruled out remote recording and turned to a fellow Swede: the producer Patrik Berger, whose credits include Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” and hits by Charli XCX. Berger had started out in a punk band called Snuffed by the Yakuza and is “a proper music nerd,” Arson said; the Hives trusted his judgment.“They played me some demos just to hear like, which of these, like, hundred songs do you think would fit on a record?” Berger said in a phone interview. “My role,” he explained, was “getting them in the room and start having fun with these songs again and not overthink it so much.”The result is a classic Hives album filled with boasts, powder-keg energy and punk angst. (“They say that life’s for living/But life as we know it’s a stick up,” Almqvist croons on “Stick Up.”) “Countdown to Shutdown” is built on a bouncing bass line by The Johan and Only, who replaced Destruction in 2013. “What Did I Ever Do to You?” originated on a hybrid instrument — an organ, guitar, drum machine and microphone — that Almqvist picked up on Swedish Craigslist for $400, which included the patent.The album’s title is a nod to some Hives mythology — that they are the creation of a Svengali named Randy Fitzsimmons, who writes all their songs. In truth, the band labors over every track. “They turn every stone,” Berger said, “a little bit like working a Rubik’s cube, trying to figure out how can we make this as good as possible?”The band’s absence from recording coincided with a drop-off in rock’s cultural and commercial might, a fact that provided Almqvist with an easy layup: “I’m just saying that the Hives don’t release a record for 10 years, rock becomes completely unpopular,” he said. “Coincidence? We think not.”Onstage at Racket, Almqvist assured everyone that the new songs would soon be their favorites, and presided over the controlled chaos like an exacting but lovable school master.“Everybody shut up for one second,” he ordered as the crowd clapped slightly offbeat to the breakdown of “Hate to Say I Told You So.” The room went silent. “And now,” he said, “we restart.” The audience laughed, obeyed and joyfully threw themselves in the air. More

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      At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams

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      This year’s Bard Music Festival explores the work and context of a composer who strove to make art “an expression of the whole life of the community.”Perhaps more music festivals should open with a singalong.At the start of the first concert of the Bard Music Festival on Friday, at the Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a thronging audience was, shall we say, encouraged to join the Bard Festival Chorale in a rendition of “Come Down, O Love Divine,” one of the hymns that Ralph Vaughan Williams set as part of his efforts to enliven the music of Anglican worship. The tune, named “Down Ampney” after the Gloucestershire village in which this English composer was born in 1872, is simple, elegant and, as it turns out, satisfying to warble your way through.That was, largely, the point. Vaughan Williams and His World, the 33rd Bard festival, argued during its first weekend that he was a composer who intended his art to be of use, who saw his search for beauty through music as a collective and communal act, who wrote not only for himself, but also for his time, his place, his countrymen.“The composer must not shut himself up and think about art,” he wrote in 1912. “He must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.”But does this music have anything to say now? After all, even some of Vaughan Williams’s staunchest advocates feared for the future of his music while he was still alive. “The human as well as esthetic aspects of Vaughan Williams’ art, and its nearer relation to contemporaneous society” than that of Sibelius, might age it more quickly, the New York Times critic Olin Downes critic predicted four years before the composer’s death in 1958.Some of Vaughan Williams’s works do still speak today, above all the remarkable triptych of symphonies through which he seemed, despite his protests to the contrary, to encase the carnage of his era in sound: the biting, terrifying Fourth, a sour reminder of the Great War that had its premiere in 1935; the uneasy, bleak Sixth, finished in 1948 and an immediate sensation; the desperate yearning of the wartime Fifth, his insistent declaration that a better world was still possible. While others may think of the Fifth as naïve, I find it almost Brahmsian in its consolation and sincerity.But as Vaughan Williams’s supporters often point out, he composed in such a range of forms and styles that even if one of his scores falters at the ear, there is a decent chance that another will break through. Don’t like the Vaughan Williams of “The Lark Ascending”? Try Vaughan Williams the urbane Neo-Classicist, or Vaughan Williams the mordant modernist — or so the argument goes.Danny Driver, left, and Piers Lane were the soloists in Vaughan Williams’s two-piano revision of his Piano Concerto in C.Matt DineFor the conductor Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and one of the festival’s leaders, sustaining eclectic listening is practically a reason for living. And the Bard Music Festival excels at that. Not only does this year’s iteration argue for Vaughan Williams himself, but with the assistance of a phalanx of academics led by two scholars in residence, Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, it laudably brings to life a musical culture that normally receives no attention outside Britain, and precious little even there.It was particularly heartening to see programmed alongside Vaughan Williams the music of, among others, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Clarinet Quintet astonished in a fine performance by Todd Palmer and the Ariel Quartet. These composers, long excluded in the name of prejudice, are featured matter-of-factly, as if they had always appeared on concert bills.If anything, Vaughan Williams got a little lost in the bravura breadth of the programming on the first weekend, though he is less likely to after the second, which will feature an exceedingly rare production of his Falstaff opera, “Sir John in Love,” the “Sinfonia Antartica” and the Symphony No. 8, as well as a smattering of works for smaller ensembles. Of the six concerts I heard, one surveyed the popular music of Vaughan Williams’s time, with which he appeared to have barely a tenuous connection, while two were dedicated to his scores alone.Three other performances roamed the contexts in which he worked, and they were outstanding, an ideal fusion of intellectual insight and musical integrity. The first, introduced by the musicologist Eric Saylor, sketched out the dominance of Brahms in turn-of-the-century British composition, through Parry, Stanford, Bruch and the like; another, with winking commentary from Adams, looked at art songs. The third investigated the fraught relationship between Britain and France at either side of World War I, focusing on the influence of Ravel on Vaughan Williams during their lessons in 1907 and ’08. As the tenor Nicholas Phan, the pianist Piers Lane and the Ariel Quartet showed with a cutting “On Wenlock Edge,” a cycle of Housman poems that Vaughan Williams completed in 1909, the Englishman was no copycat, but he learned much from Ravel about how to refine a mood.Young artists excelled in all these concerts, not least the pianist Michael Stephen Brown, whose poised refinement made an early student piece by Smyth, her Sarabande in D minor, sound like a mature masterpiece. The players of The Orchestra Now, a training ensemble at Bard, played creditably in the two concerts that they contributed to as well.But in those, alas, the old Botstein dilemma came to the fore. The conductor bows to nobody in his zeal for neglected art, nor in the taste for intellectual provocation that was amply on show in remarks here, but he can lack the insight and technique that would allow the overlooked truly to shine.Such was most detrimentally the case in a program that tried to present Vaughan Williams as an experimentalist, through three works from the late 1920s and early 1930s: “Job,” the terse “masque for dancing” (that is, ballet) that was inspired by the illustrations of William Blake; the unwieldy, postwar revision for two pianos of the awkward Piano Concerto in C, valiantly tackled by Lane and Danny Driver; and the Fourth Symphony. The readings were competent, to be sure, but not specific enough in their details, especially in the Fourth, which plodded along rather than piercing the air. The edge that makes these works so bold was blunted, the intellectual argument softened.But Vaughan Williams, at least, still had something to say. More