Music

In our 2023 Greats issue, out Oct. 22, T celebrates four talents across music, film, art and fashion whose careers are a master class in curiosity, composure and defiance. Whenever I read the profiles for this, our annual Greats issue, I’m always struck by the same thing: how many of our subjects say that their […] More

The group, famed for its rich vitality, easy power and a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly, is saying farewell.Five years ago, Eugene Drucker, a violinist in the Emerson String Quartet, got a call from a financial adviser. To sketch out a plan for Drucker, the adviser needed his target retirement age.“When he asked me, it seemed like a fairly academic question,” Drucker, now 71, recalled recently. “The quartet had not at all discussed an endgame.”He told the group the anecdote as something of a joke. (This is a foursome that laughs — a lot.) To his surprise, it spurred a more serious discussion about the future of the Emerson Quartet, one of the most celebrated ensembles in classical music for almost half a century.The conversation eventually led to a decision, and on Saturday and Sunday at Alice Tully Hall — next to the Juilliard School, where the quartet formed — the quartet will play its final concerts. With three members near or over 70, and little desire to keep the name alive without its founders, it’s quitting while it’s ahead.Setzer and Drucker, the violinists at left, were original members of the quartet, which was founded in 1976 when they were students at Juilliard.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“There’s a feeling I think we all had: We were afraid of going on too long,” said Philip Setzer, the other violinist. “People have memories of what it was like to go to an Emerson Quartet concert, and we didn’t want to start having them hear a lesser version of that. I’m a big sports fan, and you see people play past when they should stop.”Lawrence Dutton, the group’s violist, added: “We saw it with teachers and mentors and players we had incredible respect for. It’s not pretty when it happens.”And from its formation in 1976, the Emerson Quartet sounded pretty. It became famous for its rich vitality and easy power in a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly.“Particularly in the U.S., the Emerson was maybe the only reference a lot of people had for a string quartet,” said the violinist Ryan Meehan of the Calidore Quartet, one of many younger groups the Emerson has mentored. “It speaks to their incredible artistry and their recording and performing: how far their reach was, even for people who weren’t really classical concertgoers.”Setzer and Drucker met as students of Oscar Shumsky at Juilliard and were original members. In the country’s bicentennial year, it seemed right to name the group after the great idealist American writer.Signing CDs at Watkins’s home. The group recorded profusely for Deutsche Grammophon.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really. I’ve never seen any tension between them. I’ve seen discussion and critical thinking, but there’s no ‘this side’ and ‘that side.’”From the Juilliard Quartet, long illustrious by the 1970s, the group learned the lessons of raw vigor and commitment to a broad repertory, including new commissions. Listening to the Guarneri Quartet, younger but already august, the Emerson took on a polished, burnished, sheerly beautiful tone. (For certain listeners, on certain nights, that beauty could tip into blandness.)“There wasn’t really a long-term plan, because we were young,” Drucker said. “But there was the greatness of the repertoire for string quartet. And as a proto-Emerson student group, we had elicited a fairly strong positive reaction, which made an impression on us that this was something to pour energy and time and resources into.”By the end of the ’70s, Dutton and the cellist David Finckel had joined, and the roster was set for more than three decades. It didn’t change until 2013, when Finckel stepped aside to focus on other endeavors, including the leadership of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which is presenting the finale. He was replaced by Paul Watkins, the baby of the group at 53.Watkins said he prepared for his first session with the others, a kind of audition, by listening to Emerson recordings.The group’s final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“But I didn’t want to imitate what David had done,” he added. “I wanted to show that I could be sympathetic to them, and bring my own personality and sound into it as well. It needed to happen instinctively, and quickly: love at first sound. And thank god, it did.”A quartet is an intimate, intense unit — “a benevolent four-headed monster,” Hannigan said. Peter Mennin, then the president of Juilliard, went to an early Emerson concert and told its members that if they could survive five years, they might be able to go the distance.Five years later, in 1981, came a milestone: a marathon performance of Bartok’s six string quartets at Tully Hall for the composer’s centennial, two and a half hours of demanding, opulently bristling music. Many groups were playing the works that year, but not like that.“At first people said, ‘That’s ridiculous; you’re just doing it for show,’” Setzer said. But the concert was an unlikely sensation, establishing the Emerson as an ensemble to be reckoned with.The group was also notable (and, initially, somewhat polarizing) for having Drucker and Setzer switch between the first and second violin parts for different pieces. This is common in student ensembles, but professional quartets usually have set first and second violinists.At Alice Tully Hall, the musicians will play Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which David Finckel, a former member, will join them.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“It’s close to 300 pieces we’ve done, which is a lot,” Setzer said. “And part of that was because of the switching. I can’t imagine doing that amount if I’d had to do first violin in all of it.”With a smooth, vigorous, cleanly modern sound that also nodded to the golden glow of an earlier era, the Emerson was, Dutton said, “at the right place at the right time, blossoming just as the CD boom was happening.” The ensemble scored a contract with the eminent label Deutsche Grammophon, which wanted new digital versions of as much music as the group could set down.The explosion of albums made the Emerson omnipresent, and included benchmark recordings of the complete Beethoven, Shostakovich and Bartok quartets. And there is also — among some three days’ worth of recorded sound — warmly lucid Bach, Haydn and Mozart; nostalgic yet energetic Dvorak and Tchaikovsky; and contemporary music by composers as different as Gunther Schuller and Ned Rorem.All this was toured indefatigably, with over 140 concerts one year. “The sheer volume, playing this incredible repertory, it takes its toll,” Dutton said. (“If you do it right,” Setzer added.) The group tapered its schedule, but was still regularly playing almost 100 performances a year until the pandemic.“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe end of the Emerson Quartet doesn’t mean full retirement for its members, who will maintain a variety of solo performing, arts administration and teaching duties. For more than 20 years the group has been in residence at Stony Brook University, where last Saturday they gave a preview of their magisterial Tully program: Beethoven’s Opus 130, rendingly fragile and vulnerable, and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which Finckel poignantly joined.Their final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with bracing yet seductive works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month, featuring Hannigan.“We were rehearsing onstage,” she said, recalling her farewell appearance with the group on Oct. 10 in Milan, in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. “And they were still playing it over slowly, tuning every note, discussing, ‘Is this really the right tempo?’ It was the last rehearsal before a piece they will never play again, and they were still saying: ‘What do you think he meant here?’”“We’re lucky because our very different personalities fit together,” Dutton said. “We respected each other. We knew we were different, but we had one purpose: to make great music. And we achieved that.” More

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Browse Scandi home goods and woolly Scottish knitwear
Glaswegians have an appetite for sustainable shopping and for secondhand goods of all stripes. Hoos, next to the Botanic Gardens, stocks chic Scandi home goods, while the Glasgow Vintage Co., farther along Great Western Road from Papercup, has a thoughtful selection of second-hand Scottish knitwear alongside show-stopping coats and dresses from the 1970s. Up the hill on Otago Street, above Perch & Rest Coffee, Kelvin Apothecary sells a nice range of gifts including handmade Scottish soaps and wooden laundry and cleaning tools. In the cobbled Otago Lane is the chaotic Voltaire and Rousseau secondhand bookshop, with teetering, vertical book piles. Unlike many Glasgow shops, this store isn’t the most dog-friendly, because of the resident cat, BB, who supervises from his perch at the till. More

With the jazz combo Sexmob, this enduring avant-gardist revisited vintage and recent songs with a grooving spirit.Laurie Anderson sounds like she’s ready to have fun again.That much was clear after the first minute or so of her thrilling multimedia show on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This one-night-only, 100-minute set, titled “Let X = X,” featured new arrangements of several 1980s-era Anderson songs. It also featured a fun backing band in the jazz combo Sexmob, reliable purveyors of a good time.Hasn’t Anderson earned a romping concert? So far in this century, she has kept her eye on grave matters. She mourned a changing, vulnerable New York City after Hurricane Sandy in “Landfall,” with the Kronos Quartet. She has likewise mourned the death of her longtime partner, Lou Reed, across multiple projects — including in her graceful, meditative film “Heart of a Dog.” And she detailed human rights violations in “Habeas Corpus,” a 2015 collaboration with a former Guantánamo prisoner, Mohammed el-Gharani, at the Park Avenue Armory.I attended and admired all those. But I have never witnessed her really enjoying a groove — at least not in the same way that I’ve enjoyed on some of her first recordings, such as “Home of the Brave” or “United States Live.” On Tuesday, though, at the tail end of one spoken interlude that detailed a variety of her heroes — such as Gandhi and Philip Glass — she concluded by mentioning James Brown. When Anderson named the tune “Get on the Good Foot,” the Sexmob slide-trumpeter Steven Bernstein and the drummer Kenny Wollesen indulged her with a musical quotation. Then Anderson whooped a funk-accurate exultation and danced a bit in front of her array of electronics.It wasn’t the only time she behaved like that. From the moment she strode onstage and triggered the synth samples of “From the Air,” she seemed to be enjoying herself, and reveled in the droll lyrics of that number: “Good evening. This is your captain. We are about to attempt a crash landing.”Tuesday’s concert wasn’t a historical recreation of past recordings; Sexmob’s sound is a beefier one than on Anderson’s albums. With musicians who can double on electric guitar and bass clarinet, its members offered a rich range of textural variation throughout the evening. “Walk the Dog” was no longer spare, but galvanic. This new backing-band energy seemed to make Anderson’s high, digitally pitch-shifted vocals avoid rote, greatest-hits-show style. Similarly, a medley of “Born, Never Asked” and “It Tango” had fresh, more syncopated force.Recitations of childhood memories that appeared in “Heart of a Dog” were also part of the set, along with some basso profundo observations from Fenway Bergamot, Anderson’s male alter-ego (as heard on the 2010 album “Homeland”).And when Anderson and Sexmob played “Only an Expert” — perhaps her only banger from this century — she also took the opportunity to address the gravity of breaking news from the current Israel-Hamas war. (She avoided assigning blame for a hospital bombing in Gaza that day, while acknowledging the undeniable fact that it happened.) Originally, the song’s litany of state-sponsored crimes was a gloss on America’s invasion of Iraq, ironically noting:Even though a country can invade another countryAnd flatten it and ruin it and create havoc and civil war in that other countryIf the experts say it’s not a problem and everyone agrees they’re expertsAnd good at seeing problems then invading those countriesIs simply not a problem.But on Tuesday, she slipped in a new travesty: “and bomb hospitals.” (At another point, she invited the audience to scream — cathartically, Yoko Ono-style — against “genocides happing everywhere” and the holding of “hostages in Gaza.”)In a concert that otherwise offered breezy, rocking, swinging fun, such invocations of unsettling current events rode a fine line. But to my eyes and ears, Anderson pulled off that tricky task. In this moment, all sophisticated, adult-coded entertainment is obligated to compete with our awareness of sobering topics, the ones that Anderson has focused on in recent years, like increasingly dangerous waves of water and lethal tides of government-sponsored dehumanization.There was a great deal else in the show: her electronically modified solo violin playing; a performance of her Massenet-inspired pop hit, “O Superman”; aperçus from her friend Sharon Olds, the pathbreaking confessional poet; video art of Anderson’s design that embraced concepts of artificial intelligence. But it was her willingness to keep tragic contemporary material in view — even when enjoying the breadth of a half-century’s catalog — that amounted to its own form of spiritual advice or moral instruction.When Anderson appeared for an encore, she led the audience in tai chi movements. This risked objections of blasé appropriation, but her creative practice has always made space for genuine gestures of cultural synthesis. And on Tuesday, it was good to see these aspects of her art operating in counterpoint once again.Laurie Anderson and SexmobPerformed on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More

Kate Lindsey, accompanied by the pianist Justina Lee, programmed cycles of life, love and creation by Schumann and Fauré.At her recital at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday night, the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey told the stories of two women, each in her own way an originator.There was Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -leben,” one of the first song cycles written from a woman’s point of view, a worthwhile artifact of a time when the genre was only a few decades old, and one that persists on concert programs despite its hidebound social mores. And there was “La Chanson d’Ève,” a spare, late-career work from Fauré that excises the first man from the Creation story and wraps its heroine in music of sensual mysticism.For an artist with a daring, theatrical sensibility, it was a retrograde pairing, as though Lindsey were achieving an element of surprise by playing against expectations. Her inventive portrayals at the Metropolitan Opera have included a slick, untrustworthy Nicklausse in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and a wired Nerone bursting with nervous energy in Handel’s “Agrippina.”In the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, though, Lindsey was serene, her voice sheathed in obsidian, as she enlivened women created as companions for men who were nowhere to be found. “I don’t know where Adam is; he’s never mentioned,” she said of the Fauré, to much audience laughter.“Frauenliebe und -leben” is the opposite. The lover is mentioned constantly, everywhere, shaping practically every utterance. The piece sees a woman through the milestones she creates with a man: falling in love, getting married, having a baby, mourning his death. Lindsey tinged the narrator’s first blush of love with russet colors and a penetrating glint. A luscious line wove through “Du Ring an meinem Finger,” an almost sacred intimacy through “Süsser Freund, du blickest.” But the gushiness of “Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben” felt forced.The intimate Board of Officers Room can make some vocal instruments sound big and overwhelming, but in Lindsey’s case, it allowed the audience a luxurious communion with her voice that isn’t possible in the Met’s cavernous auditorium. Her timbre, dark and occluded, is at once compelling and withholding; in vulnerable moments, she uses a threadlike straight tone.In the 10 Fauré songs, Lindsey was often enchanting: the profound whispers of “Paradis,” the conversational warmth of “Prima verba,” the gorgeous exaltations of “Comme Dieu rayonne.” The poetry’s endless talk of sighs, sun, flowers and fruits, though, took on a certain sameness; in Lindsey’s interpretation, Eve is more demigod than human. Justina Lee’s piano, at times plodding, made Eden feel earthbound rather than exquisite, the hardiness that made her Schumann comfortingly solid rendered the Fauré stolid.The concert ended with a brief set of Stephen Sondheim songs that introduced an imbalance to the evening. But only a pill could argue against hearing these wonderful pieces. Lindsey’s gentle, honest vibrato was disarming in the most poignant lines of “Losing My Mind,” but she struggled a bit with fitting her operatic technique to “Take Me to the World” and performed an abbreviated, less powerful version of “Being Alive.”The Schumann and Fauré cycles both end with meditations on death, which is where Lindsey summoned her stagecraft. In the long postlude for piano that closes “Frauenliebe,” a motif from the first song emerges as a sad, mournful echo, a memory of happier times. Lindsey’s protagonist, with no words left to sing and no man left to love, seemed to age a lifetime in a moment. There was a sense that now her life, and the person she was to be, would begin.Kate Lindsey and Justina LeePerformed on Monday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan. More

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:“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” the concert film, in theaters now, that documents Swift’s summer stadium sojournThe new album by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny, Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana”How Drake is setting up a creative life for his son, Adonis Graham, and other celebrity children who join in on their parents’ workNew songs from Ivan Cornejo and Ken CarsonSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

Fans are buying up seats for Taylor Swift’s international concerts, often finding that tickets, airfare and lodging combined cost less than just the tickets in the United States.Even with traffic on the 405, it probably would have taken at most three hours for Victoria Pardo Uzitas to drive from her home in San Diego to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles to see a performance of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Instead, she and her teenage daughter crossed the border to Tijuana, flew to Mexico City, enjoyed classic tacos al pastor and churros, saw a Frida Kahlo masterpiece at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and yes, saw Taylor Swift.“Tickets in Los Angeles were $1,900 each,” Ms. Uzitas said of the marked-up prices. “That’s more than we spent on our flights, our hotel and all our food. Our entire trip was less than $1,900.”Ms. Uzitas is not the only Swiftie turning a concert by her favorite artist into an international getaway. And Mexico is certainly not alone in reaping the economic benefits. According to the U.S. Travel Association, the likely economic impact of the 20 domestic stops of Ms. Swift’s tour has already exceeded $10 billion. In Los Angeles alone, Ms. Swift’s six nights of concerts added 3,300 jobs and earned the city $29 million in sales and hotel room taxes, according to U.S. Travel.Now with the tour — which began in March and concludes in November of next year — going on to 26 international destinations, the overseas tourism market is cashing in.Hotel prices across Europe are surging on the nights Ms. Swift comes to town. Contiki, a youth-focused travel agency, is offering five different trips that nod to the singer, including a tour of Paris “for your European love story.” The agency also offers a discount of 13 percent — a reference to Ms. Swift’s self-proclaimed lucky number — on any European trip longer than 14 days. Air New Zealand has already added 2,000 seats to accommodate what it calls the Swift Surge, fans flying to Australia for February dates. (A tip of the hat to whichever executive thought of the flight code NZ1989.)Traveling to see a beloved performer is nothing new. Fan have flown to see U2, parked R.V.s outside Phish and Grateful Dead shows, and spent top dollar to see Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour. Now for Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour, there is no incentive needed for many fans other than being able to score a more affordable ticket in a vacation-worthy destination.“I’m so excited to see the differences in another country,” said Lois Alter Mark, a writer who is parlaying her $400 Edinburgh concert ticket into a Scottish sojourn. “I want to see how you translate all that emotion, though I think Taylor Swift is a universal language at this point.”Evan Chodos, the New York-based vice president for luxury at Condé Nast, is going to Paris to see Ms. Swift less for anthropological reasons and more to right a wrong. He had purchased two resale tickets on StubHub, a total cost of $1,500, for one of Ms. Swift’s Nashville concerts in May, only to be notified 48 hours before showtime that the company could not deliver the tickets. (StubHub guarantees it will try to find a buyer comparably priced tickets, but at that point most tickets were long gone.)Mr. Chodos and his husband considered shelling out $2,000 per ticket for one of the concerts at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey later that month, but opted against paying the exorbitant markup. When tickets to Ms. Swift’s European concerts went on sale, though, they didn’t think twice about purchasing them for Paris, which then determined spring travel plans. “This is our revenge tour,” Mr. Chodos said.Compared with what could have been $4,000 or more to attend a New York-area show, Mr. Chodos spent $1,400 for two V.I.P. seats, which included, as he joked, “a lanyard, a book bag and a lock of her hair.” The money they saved on tickets will go toward a French vacation with friends, who will also attend the show. “There’s nothing wrong with going to Paris in the spring,” Mr. Chodos said of this Swift-centric vacation. “We’ll have some wine, have some bread and have some concert.”Julie Cochran, a marketer in Raleigh, N.C., also let her tickets determine her destination. After three weeks of waking up in the middle of the night to join the ticket-purchasing queue in another time zone, she was able to secure four seats in Milan next summer for $1,700.The plan is an eight-day trip for her family of four to Milan, Florence and, for the sake of her marriage, Rome.“We need to go to the Holy City while we are there. That was the only way to convince my husband to get in on it,” she said. “It’s the worst time possible to be in Italy because it’s the tourist season and it’s so hot, but this is a historic tour.”It’s also presenting a parenting opportunity for Ms. Cochran to talk to her 12- and 16-year-old daughters (who don’t know yet they’re getting these tickets — sorry!) about privilege.“We try to teach our children about excess,” Ms. Cochran said. “Do you know how many families we can feed with that money?”“It’s going to be our summer vacation for the next couple of years, and the girls are going to be very surprised by the lack of boxes under the tree at Christmas,” she continued. “We have a year to save up, and we would have spent twice the amount if we had gone in the United States.”Crystal Orraca from Brooklyn may have been wise enough to take herself to the Eras Tour in Houston in April, but has spent every day since then scouring online ticket resale groups so she can bring her 13-year-old to another show.“She’s extremely angry and tells everyone I chose to go without her, but you know, put your mask on before you put it on someone else,” Ms. Orraca said. She is holding out for affordable tickets to London or Amsterdam, two cities she has always wanted to visit with her daughter. Then again, even if the tickets come through, it’s not easy to plan a summer vacation around a fickle teenager.“I’m spending thousands to appease my mom guilt,” Ms. Orraca said. “Come next summer, will she even care about Taylor Swift?”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

The pop star included the detail in her upcoming memoir “The Woman in Me”; Timberlake did not immediately respond.Britney Spears wrote in her much-awaited memoir that she had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake, according to excerpts released Tuesday by People Magazine.“Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy,” the excerpt reads, according to People. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”Representatives for Timberlake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Spears and Timberlake dated for a few years starting when she was 17 and he was 18, generating a tabloid frenzy as they made their ascents as two of the defining pop stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s.Their relationship became subject to public scrutiny again in 2021, after a New York Times documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” included a re-examination of the world’s reaction to their breakup, which was framed in the media as being Spears’s fault — partly because a music video by Timberlake implied that Spears had cheated on him. Without going into detail, Timberlake apologized to Spears in an Instagram post, saying that he had “failed” her.The memoir, called “The Woman in Me” and slated for release next week, is Spears’ first in-depth account of her life and career and is being published in the aftermath of her release from a legal conservatorship that governed her life for more than 13 years.The collection of excerpts released so far recall the heady days leading up to her getting a record deal at 15, her inner monologue as she held a live snake in the famous moment at the 2001 Video Music Awards, and her loss of passion for performing while under the strictures of the conservatorship, which was instituted amid a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008.“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore,” the excerpt read. “As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.”The end of the conservatorship nearly two years ago was preceded by waves of outrage from fans who called themselves the #FreeBritney movement and held rallies in Los Angeles for the end of the legal arrangement, which was largely overseen by her father, James P. Spears.Since it ended, Spears, 41, has gotten married, separated from her husband and released two singles; she has shared bits of her rage about the conservatorship in Instagram posts, but her memoir will include the most significant — and organized — insights yet into her thoughts on the ways in which the minutiae of her life were under others’ control even as she worked as an international pop star.In the excerpts released so far, Spears rewinds back to her days as a preteen in “The Mickey Mouse Club” — recalling a truth-or-dare kiss with Timberlake, a fellow cast member — and to coming close to being cast as the lead opposite Ryan Gosling in “The Notebook,” a role that ultimately went to Rachel McAdams.She recalls her childhood growing up with parents that she would later blame for exerting too much control over her life, telling a story about how her mother, Lynne Spears, would let her drink cocktails as an eighth grader. And she discusses the constant pressures surrounding her body, writing how, during the conservatorship years, her father “repeatedly” told her that she “looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”“I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” one excerpt said. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back. But under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”Spears had privately pushed for years to end the conservatorship, but she left no doubts about her position in 2021, when she told a judge in Los Angeles that the arrangement was “abusive,” saying that she was forced to work when she didn’t want to and prevented from removing her birth control device when she wanted to have more children. Her father has long maintained that the conservatorship had always been intended to protect his daughter from exploitation.The memoir pushes back fiercely on the idea of that the conservatorship was for her own good: She writes, according to an excerpt, that the arrangement made her into a kind of “child-robot,” a shadow of her former self, asserting that male artists had mismanaged their money and dealt with substance abuse problems without being treated as she had.“There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl,” one of the excerpts said, “but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.” More