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      Morgan Wallen Retreats Into Sadness, While His Protégés Party On

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      The country superstar’s “I’m the Problem” is a despondent self-portrait. But a generation of singers blending Southern rap and Nashville songwriting are thriving.It seems like the more melancholy Morgan Wallen becomes, the more successful he gets. In just a few short but smash-filled years, he has become the most prominent and committed miserablist in pop — the contemporary star most preoccupied with failure, and the most adept at turning it into something like beauty.Unlike Drake, who is perhaps his closest analogue, Wallen almost never dwells on his successes. He forever lives in the space just beyond loving himself, and allowing himself to be loved. As a result, even his best and most engaging songs have a somber pallor hovering just over them.On “I’m the Problem,” his moody and melodramatic fourth album, Wallen is almost unrelentingly despondent. Women are ruining him, and whiskey is rescuing him (by ruining him even further). Some representative moods: “I just wanna love somebody that don’t want me falling apart”; “Every square inch of this house is as messy as you left me”; “Too young to feel this old.”It’s tragic, concerning and pointedly effective stuff: “I’m the Problem” is already on track to become one of the most commercially successful releases of the year. At 37 songs and almost two hours long, it’s a structural beast, a chart-clogging data dump. But rather than use that grand scale to explore different sonic approaches, Wallen largely digs in to several microtones of weariness.“Kick Myself” laments the one thing an addict can’t ever escape: himself. “Just in Case” tells a story of never letting anyone get too close. “Jack and Jill,” a morbid song about a broken couple, recalls “Whiskey Lullaby,” the unbearably tragic Brad Paisley-Alison Krauss duet from 2004.After Morgan Wallen, Lil Nas X and Shaboozey, Nashville is going hip-hop yet again. “Oil Money” by Graham Barham is the latest example of a long lineage, our critic explains from the driver’s seat.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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      Chris Brown Released on $6 Million Bail by London Court

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      The R&B singer was charged last week with grievous bodily harm over a 2023 incident in England. His release from custody means he can proceed with a world tour.Chris Brown, the R&B singer, has been freed from custody by a London judge as he awaits a court case over accusations of an assault in a nightclub.Mr. Brown, 36, was arrested last week at a hotel in Manchester, England, and charged with grievous bodily harm.The singer is accused of attacking a music producer with a tequila bottle at Tape London, a nightclub in the Mayfair district, on Feb. 19, 2023.Lawyers representing Mr. Brown applied for him to be bailed at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court in South London on Wednesday, and London’s Metropolitan Police said the application had been granted.The judge’s decision means that Mr. Brown will be able to perform on an international tour that is scheduled to begin in Amsterdam on June 8. He is then set to visit European countries including Germany, Britain, Ireland, France and Portugal before traveling to the United States.The BBC reported that the judge, Tony Baumgartner, imposed a series of conditions on Mr. Brown, including that he must surrender his passport when not on tour and stay away from Tape London.Mr. Brown’s representatives agreed to pay into the court a security fee of five million pounds ($6.7 million), which can be forfeited if any of the conditions are breached.He has not yet been asked to enter a plea in the case, and British law bans the reporting of any details that could prejudice a jury at a future trial.Omololu Akinlolu, 38, an American rapper who performs under the name HoodyBaby, was charged with grievous bodily harm two days after Mr. Brown, in relation to the same incident.Mr. Brown and Mr. Akinlolu are scheduled to appear at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court on June 20. More

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      Kid Cudi Will Soon Take Center Stage at the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial

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      Casandra Ventura had testified that the mogul threatened to have the entertainer’s car blown up after learning about their relationship.Prosecutors confirmed this week that Kid Cudi, the rapper whose romance with Casandra Ventura is said to have sent Sean Combs into a jealous, threat-filled rage, will be testifying in the music mogul’s sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, could take the witness stand as soon as Wednesday, but the precise timing of his testimony is uncertain.Ms. Ventura, who is known as the singer Cassie, testified last week that after Mr. Combs discovered her relationship with Mr. Mescudi in 2011, Mr. Combs made a series of threats to her, including that Mr. Mescudi’s car would be “blown up” in his driveway.In 2023, after Ms. Ventura filed the lawsuit that kicked of Mr. Combs’s legal troubles, Mr. Mescudi confirmed that his car had exploded. But he has yet to speak publicly about the details of his role in the case.As part of the racketeering conspiracy charge against Mr. Combs, the government has accused him of running a criminal enterprise that helped him commit a series of crimes dating back to 2004. Among the list of allegations is that Mr. Combs’s associates set fire to a rival’s car with a Molotov cocktail.A lawyer for Mr. Combs, Teny Geragos, said in the defense’s opening statement that Mr. Combs was “simply not involved” in the allegations of arson put forward by prosecutors.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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      A 7-Song, 130-Minute Jam Band Primer

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      Listen to noodling tracks by Dave Matthews Band, Grateful Dead, Goose and more.Dave MatthewsAmy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,It has become a joke among a few friends and colleagues that I am the newspaper’s jam band correspondent. I have written (and Popcasted!) about the Grateful Dead, Phish’s wizard-like lighting director and, last month, Goose. I do these stories because I like this music, and in some cases love it. Now, it is time for me to make my case. If you’ve ever found yourself even a little jam-band curious, then this one is for you.A jam band borrows the grammar the Grateful Dead set more than a half-century ago: concerts with ever-shifting set lists; songs with ample room for extensive improvisation; eclectic musical roots encompassing bluegrass, gospel, jazz and rock (Southern, prog, classic, indie); fans who treasure live recordings over studio albums; and an ethos that is laid-back and, though sometimes serious, rarely self-serious.Roll your eyes if you must. But jam bands aren’t going anywhere. Goose and the virtuosic guitarist Billy Strings are on the cusp of mainstream moments. Suddenly, somehow, the Dead became a little bit cool. Jam bands might be perfectly suited to our era, in which an artist’s best bet is developing intimate relationships with core groups of passionate fans who will pay for tickets, merch and subscriptions.What follows is a 101-level syllabus. Live tracks only, of course. If you get confused, listen to the music play.We play bebop in the band,MarcListen 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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      On TikTok, ‘Propaganda’ Lists Go Viral

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      TikTok users are building eye-catching lists of their dislikes and are labeling them as propaganda that they’re “not falling for.”Lip filler, people who aren’t cat people, the societal expectation for women to shave their legs, working a 9-to-5 job. On TikTok, users have recently begun lining up their dislikes and branding them with an eye-catching term: propaganda.In thousands of videos, many of which are set to a snippet of Charli XCX’s “I think about it all the time featuring bon iver,” users present a list of things they have deemed “propaganda I’m not falling for.” With the context of only a few words of text on a screen, the topics span across genres, with common examples including milk (both plant-based and from cows), Labubus, artificial intelligence, politics, run clubs and the male loneliness epidemic.Delaney Denton, 22, said when she first saw one of the videos she thought it was “kind of iconic” and was inspired to make her own, which now has nearly a million views.“I think it’s putting a spin on things that just feel a little off in our society but aren’t necessarily propaganda,” Ms. Denton said of the trend.

      @delaneydenton #fyp ♬ I think about it all the time featuring bon iver – Charli xcx & Bon Iver The concept isn’t exactly new. Social media aficionados will probably remember the “in” and “out” lists that were an inescapable start to 2024. And people are often looking for new ways to classify their opinions, as is the case with the recent rise of “coded” language online.

      @maya81802 I could make so many of these I have 10,000 opinions (they’re all right) #fyp #propoganda ♬ I think about it all the time featuring bon iver – Charli xcx & Bon Iver 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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      Shane Doyle, Founder of a Storied East Village Venue, Dies at 73

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      An Irish expatriate, he created Sin-é, a bare-bones cafe that became an unlikely magnet for stars like Sinead O’Connor, Bono of U2 and Iggy Pop.Shane Doyle, the Irish expatriate who founded Sin-é, a matchbox of a cafe and music venue in New York City that in the 1990s became a retreat for the likes of Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan of the Pogues and a springboard for the shooting-star career of Jeff Buckley, died on April 22 in Manhattan. He was 73.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was septic shock after a series of unsuccessful lung surgeries, his wife, Mimi Fisher, said.Mr. Doyle opened Sin-é (pronounced shih-NAY) in 1989 at 122 St. Marks Place in the East Village, in an era when that neighborhood was still known for beer-soaked punk clubs, outsider art galleries and squatters in abandoned tenements who would soon be immortalized by the hit Broadway musical “Rent.”“Sin-é” means “that’s it” in the Irish language, and that pretty well summed it up. With sparse décor and secondhand wood furniture, the venue (a cafe by day) was about the size of an East Village living room, as Ms. Fisher put it. There was no stage and, in the early days, no P.A. system, which forced guitar-based solo acts to stand against a wall and strum behind a microphone stand, looking more like indoor buskers than marquee toppers.“I remember people coming in from other countries and going, ‘Where’s the rest of it?,’” Tom Clark, a singer-songwriter who had a weekly gig there, said in an interview.Nor did Sin-é have a liquor license, although it did sell beer on the sly, and food options were limited. Mr. Doyle would occasionally whip up a pot of Irish stew in his apartment on East Seventh Street and lug it over for patrons. (He also owned a nearby bar called Anseo — Irish for “here.”)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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      How Grace Potter Lost (and Found) a Solo Album, and a New Life

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      In May 2009, Hollywood Records announced that T Bone Burnett — the producer of the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss LP “Raising Sand,” which dominated the Grammys earlier that year — had recently entered the studio with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to produce the band’s new album. The LP, which would be the Vermont-based bluesy roots-rock group’s third, was slated to come out that fall.The label didn’t mention that the album was in fact a solo vehicle for Potter, then 25, that she recorded with a team of renowned session musicians: the drummer Jim Keltner, the guitarist Marc Ribot, the bassist Dennis Crouch and the keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. “She was like a ball of fire,” Keltner recalled of Potter in a phone call, “and she was really fun to follow.”During an interview in March at her eclectically decorated villa in Topanga, Calif., Potter — a multi-instrumentalist whose soulful voice has earned her comparisons to Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin and “a grittier Patty Griffin” — recounted her sense of anticipation over the release of the LP, “Medicine.”“It really felt like something exciting on the horizon,” Potter said, sitting on the couch in her living room dressed in a stylish forest-green jumpsuit. “It was like the secret that we got to keep until it all came out.” Sixteen years earlier, she had described the record as “more of a storyteller, kind of tribal, Motown, voodoo thing” than her earlier output.Then Hollywood shelved the album. The label wanted Potter and the Nocturnals to rerecord the songs with the producer Mark Batson, known for his work with Alicia Keys, the Dave Matthews Band and Dr. Dre. Potter blamed an A&R executive, whom she declined to name, for the decision.She also said that Bob Cavallo, then the chair of the Disney Music Group, which distributes the Hollywood label, was “concerned that the record would age me.” She added, “I’m a young, hot thing. He was like, ‘We don’t want her to seem like she’s 46.’” (In a phone interview, Cavallo, now 85 and retired, couldn’t recall the particulars of the label’s move, but expressed regret that he couldn’t help Potter “get a giant career, because I thought she deserved one.”)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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      At the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial, Cassie’s Mother and Others to Testify About Abuse

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      Prosecutors are aiming to fill in the picture of the mogul’s relationship with Casandra Ventura by questioning his former assistant and Ms. Ventura’s mother.As Sean Combs’s trial moves into its seventh day of testimony, investigators pursuing him on racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges are trying to sketch a wider picture of his time with the singer Casandra Ventura, who was his off-and-on girlfriend for more than a decade.Ms. Ventura, who performs music as Cassie, testified for four days last week; now witnesses including another artist signed to Mr. Combs’s label, Ms. Ventura’s estranged best friend and a former personal assistant to Mr. Combs have been asked by prosecutors to corroborate, and in some cases amplify, aspects of Ms. Ventura’s account. Her mother is also expected to testify this week.The first witness on Tuesday is scheduled to be David James, the assistant who took the stand late in the day on Monday. Mr. James described his duties as an aide to Mr. Combs in terms that resembled those of many high-profile, high-pressure corporate jack-of-all-trades. He rose early, arranged Mr. Combs’s calendar and kept detailed spreadsheets of his boss’s travel preferences. At his job interview, he told Mr. Combs, “I can’t stop, I won’t stop” — an expression of his work ethic wrapped in a nod to a hit song by the Lox, one of the signature rap acts for Bad Boy, Mr. Combs’s company. But even in the few minutes Mr. James was on the stand, he testified of hearing Ms. Ventura express frustration at her situation. On a cigarette break with her on a dock near Mr. Combs’s Miami mansion, soon after he started the job in 2007, he said she remarked to him, “Man, this lifestyle is crazy.” Mr. James said he agreed, and that Ms. Ventura added, “I can’t get out,” and that Mr. Combs “oversees so much of my life.”Prosecutors have worked to establish that Mr. Combs had coercive power over Ms. Ventura, in part because she loved him, but also because he held the reins on her career and physically beat her.Mr. Combs has acknowledged the violence, but he has denied the sex trafficking and other accusations of criminal conduct that have been lodged against him. His lawyers say Mr. Combs engaged in perhaps unconventional marathon sex sessions with Ms. Ventura, but they say it was fully consensual and he has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.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