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      Morgan Wallen Returns to No. 1 in a Slow Chart Week

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      With Drake’s “For All the Dogs” and Taylor Swift’s rerecording of “1989” waiting in the wings, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” has its 16th time at the peak.In a relatively slow week of music sales before the arrival of blockbusters by Drake and Taylor Swift, the country star Morgan Wallen returns to the top of the Billboard album chart, notching a 16th time at No. 1 for his newest album, “One Thing at a Time.”Wallen’s album returns with the equivalent of 74,500 sales in the United States, including nearly 98 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“One Thing at a Time,” stuffed with 36 tracks, has been a steady streaming hit since March; only in the last month has it dipped below 100 million streams a week, a benchmark that relatively few albums reach even in their debut week, let alone their 40th. Wallen’s 16 reps at No. 1 are the most for any album since Adele’s “21,” which logged 24 weeks at the top in 2011 and 2012.Still, Wallen’s 74,500 “equivalent album units” — a composite number that represents an album’s popularity on streaming platforms and in purchases of downloads and physical copies — is notably low. That is the least units to top the charts in almost a year and a half, since Pusha T’s “It’s Almost Dry” opened with 55,000 in April 2022.The music industry is bracing for boffo numbers from Drake, whose long-awaited “For All the Dogs” came out Friday and is already a smash online, and for Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which comes out Oct. 27 and is all but certain to be huge on streaming services and in sales of both CDs and vinyl LPs. (“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” her concert film, is set to open on Friday and has already surpassed $100 million in worldwide advance ticket sales.)Ed Sheeran’s surprise “Autumn Variations” opens at No. 4, his second Top 10 new LP this year. His “-” (a.k.a. “Subtract”) opened at No. 2 in May, though it quickly plunged from there, falling out of the Top 20 after two weeks and the Top 100 after nine — a rare flop for Sheeran, one of the giants of pop’s streaming age.Also this week, Rod Wave’s “Nostalgia” falls to No. 2 after two weeks at the top, with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts” at No. 3 and Zach Bryan’s self-titled album No. 5. More

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      Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond? Yes, There’s a Connection.

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      Nicole Scherzinger was exhausted. It was a week since Jamie Lloyd’s new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” had begun performances, and Scherzinger was playing the lead role of Norma Desmond — the forgotten star of the silent screen whose attempt at a comeback doesn’t end well.In Lloyd’s stripped-down, psychologically focused production at the Savoy Theater, Norma’s unraveling psyche is the heart of a story that is less about the loss of stardom than the emotional fallout of being passed over while in possession of all your gifts. At the end of the show the previous night, Scherzinger stood alone onstage, covered in blood and dazed, appearing to hardly register the audience’s wild applause.“It’s grueling,” she said last week while curled up on a chair in the depths of the Savoy. “But for many years I have been saying I am using a fraction of my potential, and now I feel I have really tapped into that.”The glamorous Scherzinger, 45, might initially seem like an odd fit for the role of Norma, immortalized by Gloria Swanson in the 1950 Billy Wilder film on which the musical is based. Scherzinger rose to fame as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, a girl group formed in the early 2000s. And though she played Grizabella in a revival of Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” in the West End in 2014, her post-Dolls career has encompassed two solo albums and long stretches as a judge on “The X Factor” and “The Masked Singer.”When asked to star in “Sunset Boulevard,” Scherzinger said, “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting.” But she soon “fell madly in love” after reading the lines and listening to the music. Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger herself was taken aback when Lloyd, the acclaimed experimental director added, asked to meet and suggested the part some 18 months ago. “There are many roles I wanted to play in musical theater, but this is not one of them!” she said over the course of an hourlong interview. “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting. But Jamie said to me, don’t watch the movie; read the lines, listen to the music. And I fell madly in love with it.”In a telephone conversation, Lloyd said he first thought about directing a revival of “Sunset Boulevard” during the pandemic, and “immediately thought Nicole should be in it.”Norma Desmond, had come to be seen as a role for an older actress. But he wanted a woman “who is in her prime, really brilliant, but has been discarded, just as we talk even now about women over 40 not having the opportunities they should have,” he said. “I felt there was a connection for Nicole, who had extraordinary international fame, but then didn’t have the opportunity to live up to her potential.”Talking about her career, Scherzinger said that although she had been a shy and awkward child, she had “always had a hunger and a drive.” Born in Honolulu to a Filipino father and a Hawaiian Ukrainian mother, she was raised in a religious and sheltered environment in Louisville, Ky., by her mother and a German American stepfather, whose last name she took.Although her parents were blue-collar workers with little money to attend concerts or the theater, she grew up singing and loving music (her mother’s family had a musical group called Sons and Daughters of Hawaii). She attended a performing arts high school, acted professionally in Louisville, and studied theater (“Stanislavski and Shakespeare and all that”) and voice in college.After leaving college early to join an acoustic rock band, Scherzinger auditioned for “Popstars,” a reality series that offered the winning contestants a place in a musical group and a recording contract. Her winning group, Eden’s Crush, was modestly successful, and “it got me out of Louisville,” she said about her move to Los Angeles.Clockwise from top left, Scherzinger with the Pussycat Dolls in 2007, as Grizabella in “Cats” in 2014, rehearsing for “Sunset Boulevard” this year, and judging “The X Factor” with Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell in 2017.MJ Kim/Getty Images; David M. Benett/Getty Images; Summers/Thames/Syco, via Shutterstock; Marc BrennerIn 2003, she auditioned for the Pussycat Dolls, a former burlesque act reimagined as a sexy singing and dancing girl group. Scherzinger became the lead singer and a household name, with the Dolls selling millions of records on the back of hits like “Don’t Cha” and “Buttons.”She was famous, but for a woman who “grew up singing in church,” she struggled with the group’s skimpy clothing and sexualized image, and spent over a decade obsessively exercising and battling bulimia. “I wish I could go back and enjoy it, realize this isn’t going to be forever,” she said. “Maybe that’s what Norma feels: It was her youth, she worked so hard, and she can’t get that back.”The Pussycat Dolls disbanded in 2010, and Scherzinger pursued a solo career with modest success. It was during this time that she performed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (from Lloyd Webber’s “Evita”) as part of a TV special celebrating Lloyd Webber, who, along with the director Trevor Nunn, asked her to join the cast of the 2014 revival of “Cats” on the West End. Scherzinger described the experience as transformative (every night “I got to shed my old self and be reborn again”), even though she didn’t stay with the production when the show moved to Broadway. She decided to join “The X Factor” instead, and Lloyd Webber was open about his annoyance.In a telephone interview, the composer said that he had been disappointed because he believed in her talent and “would have loved to have seen her show Broadway what she could do.” But they remained friends, he added, and was delighted when Lloyd suggested Scherzinger play Norma. “I believe she is one of the most gifted singer-actresses I have seen perform my work,” he said. “It’s a tough role, but Nicole is fearless musically and dramatically. I am a total fan.”“I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation,” Scherzinger said. “I finally have the courage not to worry.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger said that “The X Factor” had given her the time and financial stability to pursue her own music, which she did while also taking on other projects, like voicing the character of Sina in “Moana,” and starring in a television version of “Dirty Dancing.” But she always believed, she said, that she would return to musical theater, particularly after performing in the television special “Annie Live!” in 2021.Now that she’s back onstage, how does it feel? She said that preparing to play Norma had been cathartic: “I felt I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation, validation. Now, there is this epic, iconic score to throw all this into and create art from places of torment.”Lloyd said that Scherzinger was “constantly searching, questioning, finding details, deepening her understanding of the inner world of the character.” Her work ethic (asking questions, taking notes and sometimes working through breaks), he added, has been an inspiration to the entire cast. “You would never know, through this entire process, that she didn’t have an acting background.”Asked about future plans, Scherzinger said her dream was to write her own musical, loosely based on her life.“After all these years, I finally have the courage not to worry about what others think, to know I have something to say,” she said. “As Jamie always says, ‘You are brave, be braver.’” More

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      Harry Smith, a Culture-Altering Shaman, at the Whitney

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      A solo show takes on the legacy of the painter, folk musicologist, filmmaker, obsessive collector and underground legend. It also hints at what has been lost.“Far-out” is an accurate, but inadequate, descriptor for the high-flying (and often plain high) cultural magus named Harry Smith (1923-91). And the label “polymath,” too, while true, falls short for this innovative painter-filmmaker-collagist-musicologist-designer-scholar-curator-collector/hoarder, whose very first and very strange (it could not be otherwise) institutional solo is at the Whitney Museum of American Art.When speaking of Smith, it’s hard to know where to begin, or end. To the degree that he is familiar at all in the art world (never mind in the real world) it’s as an experimental filmmaker. His chief reputation, however, lies in a different field, music, notably as the compiler of the six-disc 1952 LP -collection called the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” an ethnological document that had a subtle but palpable role in moving the nation’s sociopolitical needle in a revolutionary direction during the civil rights and Vietnam era.Booklet for “Anthology of American Folk Music” (Folkways Records, 1952). Smith divided the work into three sets of two LPs, “Ballads,” “Social Music” and “Songs,” and accompanied each with an illustrated booklet of notes.Smithsonian Folkways, Washington, D.C.How to present such a figure, whose work is so grounded in sound and visual motion, in a traditional museum setting naturally presents a problem, which the Whitney has handily solved by bringing in an object-based artist, the sculptor Carol Bove, as installation designer.Bove has created a big, film-friendly, black-box-style container for the show. And she has placed down at its center a zigzagging walled corridor for the display of little-known objects — paintings, drawings, prints, photographs — that Smith produced almost nonstop throughout his life and that he sometimes claimed to regard more highly than his films.That life began in the Pacific Northwest. Smith was born in Portland, Ore., and grew up in Washington State. He was lucky in his family. They didn’t have money: His father worked in the fish-canning industry; his mother was a teacher. But they encouraged his early interest in reading and art and folk music. And as practicing Theosophists, they made him comfortable with esoteric spiritualities and instilled in him their own pantheistic love of the natural world.Because his mother taught school on the local Lummi Indian reservation, Smith became fascinated with Indigenous culture. By age 15, he was already a committed ethnologist, participating in Lummi dances and religious rituals, absorbing Native music, photographing objects, sacred and secular — a handful of foggy slide photographs of masks, drums and weavings are the show’s earliest entries — while taking copious field notes on everything.Harry Smith, left, recording a Lummi ceremony around 1942. He documented songs, ceremonies and artistic traditions of the Lummi people through photography, painting, sound recording, and took copious notes of everything.Getty Research Institute, Los AngelesAnd a unitary concept of “Everything” was already the axis around which his worldview turned. He was intensely focused — a classic geek — but the focus was panoramic and panoptic, taking in many seemingly unalike things — dance, color, language — at once, all of which he perceived as interrelated. He would speak of illuminating such connection as the primary value of his work, the one he cared most about.In 1945, he moved to San Francisco with the intention of studying anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. But classroom learning wasn’t his thing. (He attended some lectures but never registered.) He spent most of his time doing what amounted to field research in the city’s burgeoning Beat poetry cafes and in jazz clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker regularly played.He lived in a minute apartment in the Fillmore neighborhood, then predominantly African American, and indulged what would be two insatiable lifelong appetites: one, for mood-altering substances (alcohol and a rainbow of perception-changing drugs), and the other for the bulk collecting of objects — books, music recordings, artworks (for him a spacious, nonhierarchical category), antique tools, tarot cards, textiles, toys, used bandages found at tattoo shops, and a Himalaya of newspaper and magazine clippings.Installation view of “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Ron AmstutzIn San Francisco he was doing a lot of painting: smoothly geometric Kandinsky-ish, mandalalike compositions, as well as looser, brushier work in which the individual strokes were synced to the notes and chords in jazz recordings. And he used this gestural mode to create his first animated abstractions, painted directly on film stock, which was then edited and projected.The earliest surviving example of this “action painting,” “Film No. 1: A Strange Dream” (circa 1946-48), is in the show — it’s an eyepopper — as are a few more abstractions from the San Francisco years. They’re tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of the riches Smith was producing at the time. But they also hint at what’s been lost.Chronically indigent and often high, Smith was careless with his art and collections. When he couldn’t pay rent he’d be out on the street, his possessions with him, up for grabs. He’d sometimes destroy things in a rage. So, materially speaking, there’s now relatively little output to see. Three beautiful “jazz paintings” in the show exist only as lightbox transparencies made from slides of originals lost who knows when. As a result, a show of big ideas — organized by Dan Byers of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard; Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives; and Elisabeth Sussman, Kelly Long and McClain Groff of the Whitney — feels small.Still from Smith’s “Film No. 1: A Strange Dream,” circa 1946–48, the earliest surviving example of his “action painting” from the San Francisco years. via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkSmith’s “Algo Bueno [Jazz Painting], circa 1948–49,” a lightbox projection from a 35-millimeter slide of lost original painting. The individual strokes were synced to the notes and chords in jazz recordings.Estate of Jordan BelsonSmith was blessed with protective friends — the poet Allen Ginsberg and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas were two — and sporadically with supportive patrons, including, briefly, Hilla Rebay, the first director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum).On a visit to San Francisco in 1948 she saw Smith’s extraordinary animated abstractions and offered him a stipend to do more. With the money he moved to New York City, settling first on the Lower East Side, and later and longer, in the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street. Here he worked on some of his most ambitious projects.In 1952, the Manhattan-based Folkway Records released his “Anthology of American Folk Music,” the long-time-coming end product of Smith’s childhood passion for preserving materials from sources he perceived as marginalized. And although the LP set had a low-key landing — it was niche marketed, primarily to libraries — it gained a passionate and eclectic audience that included Bob Dylan, Philip Glass and the Grateful Dead.(The full “Anthology” set, which Smith regarded as an art object in itself — he even signed it as if it were a painting — can be sampled in a section of the show set aside as a listening station, as can the fabulously erudite and poetic commentary that Smith wrote for all 84 cuts.)Harry Smith, “Untitled,” circa 1950–51, casein and paint on board,Harry Smith Archives, Los AngelesIn New York, he also created his most complex and inventive films, none of them, strictly speaking, abstract. “Film No. 11: Mirror Animations,” made around 1957, adheres to the “jazz painting” model of aligning music and visuals. The music in this case is Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso,” but the images now include Buddhist figures and Kabbalistic emblems.For “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature,” also in the show, Smith supplied his own score of everyday noises: dogs barking, babies crying, wind blowing, glass breaking. He also proposed a story line — a woman with a toothache goes to a dentist, gets injected with some kind of drug and ascends to heaven — which is enacted by figures clipped from Victorian-era print sources.The ingenious animation feels delightfully witty at first, but over the span of its hour length, makes for creepy watching. There’s wild, violent stuff going on. If this is heaven, we want to stay clear. Smith has a reputation for being an occultist, but he was never a religionist. Like Joseph Cornell, he was an uninnocent mystic. However spacey his art, the world is very much in it.Still from “Film No. 11: Mirror Animations,” circa 1957. Using cutup animation and collage technique, he synchronized the work to Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso.”via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkStill from “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature,” circa 1957–62. It depicts a woman with a toothache who goes to a dentist, gets injected with some kind of drug and ascends to heaven, a story line enacted by figures clipped from Victorian-era print sources.via Anthology Film Archives, New YorkIt’s certainly there in the magnum opus “Film No. 18: Mahagonny,” (1970-80). The score is a full two-hours-plus recording of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” And the visuals, projected on four square contiguous screens, are a collage of color films Smith shot in Manhattan in the 1970s: on its streets, in the Chelsea Hotel and in Central Park.A mathematically calculated visual puzzle, it’s also a record of a time and place, filtered through Smith’s favored themes: outsider-insider culture, embodied in figures from the city’s avant-garde (Ginsberg and Patti Smith make appearances); material accumulation (tabletop arrangements of food, liquor bottles and drugs); and some promise of transcendence, in this case through Nature (childhood: he keeps going back there).In the 1970s, New York was in trouble, and so was Smith. Years of alcohol and drug intake were catching up. “A stoned, drunken, hunched-over demonically creative gnome” is how his New York psychiatrist described him. Penniless and in failing health, he was crashing with friends who passed him on to other friends. At one point he ended up in a Bowery flophouse. (This phase of his life — indeed his entire life — is empathetically chronicled in John Szwed’s indispensable new biography, “Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith.”)Andy Warhol, “Screen Test: Harry Smith,” 1964, a four-minute 16-millimeter film transferred to digital video, black and white, silent.The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PABut he never stopped working, which meant collecting: He carried a tape recorder, always turned on. And there were late upbeat moments. In 1988 he was invited to teach at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colo., a Buddhist-inspired college, where he was treasured and cosseted.In 1991, he was awarded a special Grammy for the “Anthology” and flew to New York, five kittens in tow, to accept it. He wore a rented tuxedo. No one would have guessed that by this point he was surviving entirely on instant mashed potatoes, NyQuil and cigarettes and would soon be lost in hallucinations of who he would meet in the afterlife. He died, at the Chelsea Hotel, that year, “unique, devious, saintly,” as Ginsberg eulogized, and far-out right to the end.Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry SmithThrough Jan. 28, 2024, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600, whitney.org. More

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      Russell Batiste Jr., the Drumming Heartbeat of New Orleans, Dies at 57

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      A pyrotechnic funk and R&B mainstay, he was a vital figure in his home city as a member of one of its celebrated musical dynasties.Russell Batiste Jr., a pyrotechnic drummer and scion of one of New Orleans’s most celebrated musical dynasties, whose furious style and genre-busting approach provided the rhythmic pulse for bands like the Meters and Vida Blue and musical artists like Harry Connick Jr., died on Sept. 30 at his home in LaPlace, La., outside New Orleans. He was 57.The cause was a heart attack, said his brother Damon Batiste, a former percussionist with the Batiste Brothers Band and a former producer for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.As a member of a family that has put its stamp on New Orleans music for generations, Russell Batiste was a mainstay of the city’s funk and R&B scene, performing with a long string of prominent local bands like George Porter Jr. & Runnin’ Pardners, the Wild Magnolias and Dumpstaphunk.A multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, he pushed boundaries with the trio Vida Blue, named after the Cy Young Award-winning pitcher of the 1970s and ’80s. He formed the group in the early 2000s with Page McConnell, the keyboardist for Phish, and Oteil Burbridge, a bassist with the Allman Brothers Band. With its atmospheric blend of jazz, funk and electronica, the trio recorded three albums, starting with its debut release in 2002, and toured extensively in that decade.Even so, New Orleans was where Mr. Batiste’s music seemed to belong. His bands Russell Batiste & Friends and Russell Batiste and the Orchestra (sometimes spelled Orkestra) From Da Hood packed local clubs like the Maple Leaf Bar and Le Bon Temps Roule for years, channeling the city’s rich, diverse musical heritage.“He captured the spirit of Congo Square,” Damon Batiste said in a phone interview, referring to the New Orleans site where enslaved people were allowed to gather for music and dance in the early 19th century. “Everything he played was funk, but he blended in marching band, second line, Haitian, Cuban and African rhythms. He was playing to the spirits of our ancestors.”Playing with a ferocity that would sometimes shatter his foot pedals, he added, Mr. Batiste “was like lightning and thunder, all at the same time.”Even as a sought-after sideman on albums like Mr. Connick’s “She” (1994), Mr. Batiste said he was more interested in finding musical transcendence through collaboration than in gaining individual glory.Mr. Batiste in July at the Essence Festival in New Orleans. He was a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.Erika Goldring/Essence, via Getty Images“Anybody can solo,” he said in a 2005 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “Anybody can sit behind the drums and go nuts. Anybody can play riffs on the bass, and anybody can play songs on the piano. But playing music is when two or more people get together from out of nowhere and turn it into something.”David Russell Batiste Jr. was born on Dec. 12, 1965, in New Orleans, the oldest of three children of David and Patricia (Cummings) Batiste. His parents divorced in the early 1970s.Born into a family of musicians, young Russell seemed to have his course mapped out for him from an early age. His father played with soul luminaries like Jackie Wilson and Isaac Hayes in the 1960s and ’70s and was a member of the Meters, the seminal New Orleans funk band, before starting his own influential funk band, David Batiste and the Gladiators. It later merged into the noted family ensemble the Batiste Brothers Band, led by his brother Paul.Russell’s younger cousin Jon Batiste is the Grammy Award-winning pianist, singer and songwriter and former bandleader for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”“When I was growing up, I’d see Russell at the Maple Leaf and his band the Orchestra From Da Hood,” Jon Batiste said in a recent television news interview. “He was our kind of blueprint.”Mr. Batiste earlier this year performing with his cousin Jon Batiste at the Maple Leaf, one of several New Orleans clubs that his bands packed over the years.Josh Brasted/WireImage, via Getty ImagesRussell did not take long to establish his identity within the family. He started gigging with the Batiste Brothers Band at local clubs when he was 6. “When I was 8 years old, I opened up for the O’Jays and the Drells and the Chi-Lites at City Park Stadium,” he said in a recent interview on the podcast “The Jake Feinberg Show.”At St. Augustine High School, Mr. Batiste played drums in the school’s nationally famous Marching 100 band.After graduating in 1983, he enrolled at Southern University at New Orleans, where he studied under the jazz saxophonist Kidd Jordan (who died in April). But he left college after two years to become the drummer for the singer Charmaine Neville (who comes from another New Orleans music family). He joined the Meters, which evolved into the Funky Meters, in 1989.By that time, however, Mr. Batiste was battling substance abuse, which impeded his career for a time, Damon Batiste recalled. “Imagine being a rock ’n’ roll star, and people loved to be around you and you’re naïve,” his brother said. “He didn’t have his family around him.” Russell found sobriety in the 1990s.In addition to his brother Damon, Mr. Batiste’s immediate survivors include his father; his mother, Patricia Johnson; his stepfather, Newman Johnson; his sisters, Tasha Batiste, Lakisha Johnson, Monique Santiago, Merinda Bell, Tish Allen, Eboni Batiste and Chanell Batiste; four other brothers, David Guys, Aaron Duncan, Jamal Batiste and Ryan Batiste; his sons, Christopher and Darryl; and a daughter, Nareal.Considering the family he came from, Mr. Batiste could never have imagined another career, he said late in life. “I was born with a pair of sticks in my hand,” he told Mr. Feinberg.Recalling an old family 8-millimeter home movie, he added: “I’m not even 1 yet, and I’m sitting on a lady’s lap behind a set of drums with a pair of sticks hitting the drums. That’s the way I was born, man. It was just in me.” More

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      Drake Releases ‘For All the Dogs’ Album, With Assists From Bad Bunny and Kevin Durant

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      The album features appearances by SZA, 21 Savage and J. Cole, plus a surprise role for an NBA star. After its release, the rapper said he would consider a temporary break from music.After a summer of teasing, various delays, dozens of arena concerts and eventually another No. 1 single, the rapper Drake released his fourth album in barely two years on Friday morning, ahead of a tour-ending, two-night run of shows in his hometown, Toronto.“For All the Dogs,” Drake’s eighth solo studio album, not counting those he considers mixtapes, includes 23 tracks and features past collaborators like J. Cole, 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, SZA and the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny, plus artists from the hip-hop vanguard like Chief Keef, Yeat, Teezo Touchdown and Sexyy Red.The credits also list a role for Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns basketball player, who is given the title of A&R on “For All the Dogs,” a role that, in the modern music business, refers to a collaborator who helps to organize an album. Tracks include “Bahamas Promises,” “What Would Pluto Do,” “7969 Santa” and “Virginia Beach,” a song that immediately raised eyebrows because it is named for the hometown of Drake’s longtime rap rival, Pusha-T.The album was released at the unorthodox hour of 6 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, breaking from the industry standard. “Sorry to all my streamers,” Drake wrote on Instagram in his announcement, a reference to the fact that new albums are typically released to services like Spotify and Apple Music at midnight.It was the latest — and shortest — delay for a long-expected album. Drake, a perpetual chart-topper who prides himself on relentless productivity, began promising a new release even before the opening of his “It’s All A Blur” arena tour, which debuted in July, and he provided updates on his recording progress most nights onstage.“For All the Dogs” had previously been scheduled for release on Sept. 22, but fan anticipation stretched back further, to the beginning of summer.Drake first teased the album in June, with the surprise announcement of a book of poetry via full page newspaper advertisements in major publications. The ads and the book, “Titles Ruin Everything,” written with Kenza Samir, contained a QR code atop an image of two puppies that linked to a website revealing the existence of new music.It did not include a release date, but did come with a cheeky Drake lyric from “Headlines,” a song released in 2011: “They say they miss the old Drake, girl, don’t tempt me.”On Thursday, he called the new album “one of my best ever,” marking the release of the video for “8am in Charlotte,” the latest in his long-running time stamp series, which co-stars his young son, Adonis. The child also contributed the scrawled rendering of a goat — not a dog, according to the artist — that serves as the “For All the Dogs” album cover.The album was preceded earlier by the release of the singles “Search & Rescue,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April (but is not included on “For All the Dogs”), and “Slime You Out,” featuring SZA, which debuted at No. 1 last month, marking Drake’s 12th chart-topping song. That achievement tied him with Madonna and the Supremes for the fifth-most No. 1s of all time, Billboard said.This year, Drake has also appeared on tracks by the rappers J Hus, Central Cee, Young Thug and Travis Scott.Drake has 12 Billboard No. 1 albums in all, including two from last year — the dance music-inspired “Honestly, Nevermind,” released in June, and the more rap-focused “Her Loss,” with 21 Savage, from November.The “It’s All a Blur” tour, which also features 21 Savage, concludes on Friday and Saturday, at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. With more than 50 arena dates, Drake’s tour was one of many by music’s biggest stars this summer in which intense post-pandemic demand and ticket competition led to high prices, jarring some fans.Drake said on Friday that he would likely take a break following the tour and album, citing a persistent stomach problem. “I probably won’t make music for a little bit,” the rapper told listeners of his Sirius XM radio show, Table for One. “I need to focus on my health.”“I don’t even know what a little bit is,” he added. “Maybe a year or so, maybe a little longer.” More

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      On Europe’s Dance Floors, Music Too Fast for Feet

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      Since Europe’s clubs reopened after pandemic lockdowns, young partygoers have been drawn to a hard, driving style of techno. It’s changing the way people dance.It was Friday night, and the clubgoers at the Sputnikhalle nightclub in Münster, Germany, were primed to go hard. Decked out in black clothes and sunglasses, despite the dim light, the young crowd chanted the name of Héctor Oaks, a Spanish D.J., as he began playing his signature muscular, fast techno. Standing on top of the club’s risers, the crowd barely tried to keep up with the beat. Instead of moving their legs, many just oscillated their hips.Neele Hoyer, 21, a college student attending the event, explained that most other German techno fans of her age had developed affinity for such breathless music. “It’s gone totally mainstream,” she said. Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be strenuous, she added, but “this is what’s normal to us.”In recent years, Oaks, 32, has become a prominent figure in a broader trend in electronic music. While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, Oaks and other D.J.s often play at 145 or above. The resulting hard-charging, breakneck sound has become the defining sound of Europe’s dance floors since the lockdown phase of the pandemic.Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be challenging, said Neele Hoyer, a college student. However, she added, “This is what’s normal to us.”Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesAlthough fast electronic music is not new, its broader dominance is. A data analysis by the German public broadcaster RBB this summer found that the top electronic music tracks of 2022 had much faster tempos than similar songs in 2016. Specialist dance music publications like Mixmag and Beatportal have noted the trend, and many of the buzzy D.J.s of the moment, like Ukraine’s Daria Kolosova and the Polish D.J. VTSS, are known for cranking up the speed.“I see it everywhere,” said Casper Tielrooij, the founder of Dekmantel, a label and annual electronic music festival in Amsterdam. “It’s not only techno, but jungle and trance and drum and bass.” He argued that although the zeitgeist had started to change before Covid, the faster, harder genre of techno had “exploded during the pandemic” and tastes were partly being shaped by young people who had spent their late teens or early twenties in lockdown.Luigi Di Venere, a techno and house D.J. who often plays at Berghain, the Berlin techno club, said that “there’s this idea that they need to speed things up to make up for it, and in case it happens again.” He added that the less “organic” and more “robotic” fast music suited a generation of clubgoers more connected to online culture.While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, many D.J.s in Europe are playing at 145 or above.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesHe argued that the brisk sound is partly sustained by a kind of feedback loop: As some D.J.s play faster, their co-headliners imitate their style to keep up the energy in the club. “You can’t just be a grandma and go, ‘Tra-la-la, 120 B.P.M.,’” he said, adding that he believed the trend still hasn’t reached its peak.In an interview, Oaks said that he began developing his sound in 2013, by melding traditional techno sets with other genres, including trance. Music played at a higher speed, he said, causes dancers’ hips, rather than their feet, to resonate, fostering a movement more akin to hovering than dancing. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he added.He recalled that the music he played was an outlier on the European club scene a decade ago. But he partly grew a following at Herrensauna, a Berlin-based queer party known for its harder sound. The Herrensauna D.J.s’ 2018 appearance on the influential Boiler Room platform, which hosts livestreamed sets, was a “turning point” for his kind of music, he said. “After that, you could see everything switched.”Héctor Oaks said an appearance on the streaming platform Boiler Room was a “turning point” for his kind of music.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesThe style’s success was likely fueled by other developments, including the proliferation of online D.J. streams, like Hör, during the pandemic’s lockdowns. According to Di Venere, because these streams were often shorter than normal club sets, D.J.s were pushed to squeeze in as much energy as possible, and the high-octane results became a staple at Europe’s illegal pandemic-era raves.Since coronavirus-prevention measures were relaxed last year, the sound has now transitioned to the continent’s clubs, including in smaller cities like Münster, which has a population of around 300,000. Oaks is now regularly booked at venues in Ibiza, for instance, which were previously known for their softer, warmer sound.Tahliah Simumba, 25, a Scottish musician who D.J.s as TAAHLIAH, grew her following during the pandemic with pop-inflected sets that often culminated at 170 B.P.M. In a recent phone interview, she said that TikTok, the video app, has been crucial in shaping post-pandemic club culture. The app, which focuses on snappy clips, has a large user base of techno fans, and its short videos favor fast-paced music.She added that, as a younger D.J. raised in an online environment, her sound was largely developed in isolation from the dance floor. “I try not to be held back by hierarchical idea of what D.J.ing is,” she said. “I want to be having as much fun as possible, and what is D.J.ing, after all, other than playing music you like?”Instead of moving their legs, many dancers at the Sputnikhalle just oscillated their hips.Valentin Goppel for The New York Times More

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      Peso Pluma, Mexico’s Breakout Music Star, Finds New Spotlights

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      Backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards last month, at the Prudential Center in Newark, the out-of-nowhere Mexican superstar Peso Pluma gathered his band for an inspirational talk. That night, he was to become the first Mexican artist to ever perform on the show, but before the dress rehearsal of his song “Lady Gaga,” he set aside around 10 minutes to reminisce with the musicians who have been with him for years, telling them how none of his success would have been possible without them. At the end, almost the whole band walked out of the room in tears.Peso was in a reflective mood because of the milestone he was about to achieve. But some somberness was in the air, too. That morning, there were news reports from Mexico about banners posted in Tijuana, signed with the initials of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a powerful rival to the Sinaloa Cartel. They demanded Peso cancel an upcoming concert in the city, threatening his safety if he were to perform.A handful of personal security guards were milling about, but at the moment, there wasn’t much to do besides press on. Before Peso hit the red carpet, he and his manager, George Prajin, huddled quickly, to talk about how to handle any questions about something other than music. Then, he stepped out in front of the paparazzi phalanx, playfully jabbing out his tongue, Jagger-style, and sidled into cheerful interviews with “Entertainment Tonight” and “El Gordo y La Flaca.”The following day, at the Hard Rock Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Peso woke up late after a long night at his V.M.A.s after-party. But he was alert, and pointed in underscoring the importance of the prior night’s performance.“I took it as an opportunity to show the world what I had,” he said. “I just wanted all these artists to get to know me. To get to know what I do, and to get to know better the genre that I do.”More than a dozen weeks after the release of Peso’s third album, “Génesis,” it remains in the top 10 of Billboard’s all-genre album chart.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesPeso, 24, is the reigning king of corridos tumbados, a modern version of traditional Mexican music, which has found great success over the last couple of years. Peso sings and raps in a fashion indebted to contemporary hip-hop and reggaeton over production that holds close to traditional forms. (Peso Pluma — which translates to featherweight — is both his stage name and how he refers to the musical project and band as a whole.)In July, “Génesis” — Peso’s third studio album, but his first since refining his sound and growing his ambitions — made its debut on the Billboard all-genre album chart at No. 3, the highest position ever for an album of regional Mexican music. And it’s had staying power — more than a dozen weeks later, it remains in the Top 10. On Spotify alone, his songs have been streamed several billion times.There have been occasional moments of Mexican American musical crossover in this country — the gangster rap of Kid Frost, the emotional ballads of Selena, the lite R&B and hip-hop of Frankie J and Baby Bash. But Mexican performers have largely been relegated to, and musically remained faithful to, the traditions of what is termed regional Mexican music, an umbrella term that encompasses varying styles from different parts of the country and the southwestern United States. Peso has reframed this music from regional to global. He has collaborated with artists from across the Spanish-speaking world — the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión, the Dominican dembow star El Alfa, the superstar Argentine producer Bizarrap. And his song “Ella Baila Sola” — a collaboration with Eslabon Armado — was the first Mexican song to hit the Top 5 on the Billboard all-genre Hot 100Peso — whose real name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija — was born in Guadalajara, and sometimes spent time in Sinaloa with family as a child. He found inspiration in the work of Chalino Sánchez, a seminal singer of narcocorridos, which tell stories about the Mexican drug trade. Peso fell for “his raspy voice, his very unique way to sing corridos, his very unique way to sing romantic songs,” he said. “When this type of music was playing in the car, I literally took my earphones out to hear what he was saying.”Peso also gravitated to Ariel Camacho, a rising young star of the 2010s known for impressive guitar playing. (Sanchez was murdered in 1992; Camacho died in a car accident in 2015.)But even though Peso enjoyed that music, he didn’t feel particularly connected to its aesthetics, which tend toward crisp Western wear, embroidered suits and cowboy boots.“Since I was a kid, my favorite genres have always been reggaeton and hip-hop,” he said. (He spent some of his teenage years in San Antonio and New York, where he found himself gravitating to the likes of Kanye West and Drake.) “That’s why I don’t wear the sombreros. I don’t wear the boots. I’m not that.”Instead, he dresses like a rapper — loud designer clothes, expensive jewelry and watches that a member of his entourage is tasked with carrying around in soft blue cases from the Atlanta celebrity jeweler Icebox.On the V.M.A.s stage, he was dressed in all black, like a luxury spider — wide and angular puffy vest, shamelessly wide and crinkly pants, short leather gloves and boxy sunglasses. Backstage, he gamely stood for a signature antic TikTok interrogation about his outfit from the social media personality Christoosmoove, a clip that was viewed over 10 million times.Peso was also the first Mexican musician to film an episode of “Sneaker Shopping,” a YouTube series that’s a favorite of rappers and social media celebrities; he spent over $32,000, including sneakers for all his bandmates, putting him in the show’s top 10 all-time spenders. The day after the V.M.A.s, the show’s host, Joe La Puma, sent him a gift: a rare pair of 2005 Cinco de Mayo Nike SB Dunks in the colors of the Mexican flag.Peso’s path to the MTV stage was nonlinear, and also improbably fast. He released a pair of albums in the early 2020s, just as the corridos tumbados scene was being established. And he began working extensively with other artists — the majority of his earliest songs to chart were collaborations, including with Natanael Cano and Fuerza Regida, some of the young performers who established the movement just a few years ago. (Cano’s 2019 collaboration with Bad Bunny on the remix of “Soy El Diablo” was one of the first crossover moments for corridos tumbados.)Some of Peso’s songs tend to the romantic, some are boastful, and some are in the vein of narcocorridos. (These are the songs that have led to the reported threats against him.)The young stars of corridos tumbados initially received a cold welcome from the older, more established traditionalists of Mexican music. “I know it’s not envy, I know it’s not any of that,” Peso said graciously. “It’s just they weren’t sure about how to react.”But while he has been able to befriend and continue to collaborate with Cano, there has been rumored tension with Jesus Ortiz Paz of Fuerza Regida, one of the scene’s most prominent acts. (Peso largely declined to discuss any friction he’s faced: “I feel everything that people say, but I try to focus on the positive things, not the negative.”)Peso plans to release a reggaeton EP soon, and following that, strategic collaborations with American rappers.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesIt has provided a story line for the media outlets that document the scene, including the Agushto Papa podcast, which has been enthusiastically covering the rise of Mexican music for the past two years.“I think that he has pushed how these artists do concerts a lot,” said Angel Lopez, one of the show’s hosts. “I don’t think they’ll ever admit it. But after seeing how Peso Pluma performs, everybody had to step their game up. They can’t just stand there in front of a microphone, play their instrument, or sing. They need to add more.”Onstage, Peso is loose and a little eccentric, always shimmying; his band also moves with controlled jubilation. Jason Nunez, one of the other hosts, added, “Another thing too is the dances — no one danced like that. And even if people thought it was weird, they would hate on it and it would just make him bigger. And also, I feel like it’s like a small thing, but it still matters — the hair.” (The hair does matter. Peso has a rangy mullet that’s become a style marker, and is in perhaps unconscious dialogue with the mullets of Morgan Wallen and various K-pop stars.)The speed of Peso’s ascent has been dizzying and disorienting. “A lot of people don’t know that I have anxiety breakouts,” Peso said. “It is very important for people who have mental issues to be treated and to talk about it.”The Tijuana show was eventually canceled out of safety concerns, even though the police had yet to publicly confirm the authenticity of the handwritten banners. “There’s a lot of things that is fake and a lot of things that is not,” Peso said.Prajin, his manager, said the team had to take every threat seriously. “I want to make sure that not only is he secured financially, but that also we take care of his mental health and his physical health,” he said. “And of course, his security. He can’t go anywhere without having a bunch of security — I won’t let him.”A couple of weeks after the cancellation, Peso announced shows in three other Mexican cities. “I do feel safe,” he said. “Being close to God is the most important thing. And I think that’s why I feel safe. It’s more of a spiritual thing for me.”Prajin suggested that Peso’s subject matter might evolve as he became better known, and his musical footprint widened. “He’s never going to stop singing those songs because that’s what he grew up with, the culture that he grew up around,” he said. “But I do see that he’s definitely going in a different direction in terms of the music that he’s singing. There’s a lot of love songs, a lot of different fusions.”Given Peso’s popularity, the collaboration requests are coming in fast. “You have no idea of how many rappers, how many country singers, R&B singers are connecting with us,” Peso said.He plans to release a reggaeton EP soon, and following that, strategic collaborations with American rappers. Prajin said conversations had already begun with Cardi B, ASAP Rocky and Post Malone.These new pathways, he hopes, will be available not just to him, but to Mexican artists who might follow in his footsteps. And thanks to his success, more new doors are open to Mexican performers beyond just the V.M.A.s.“I saw Taylor Swift moving her head, dancing to my song yesterday.,” he said, marveling at the unlikeliness of it all. “That, we couldn’t even imagine.” More

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      Riccardo Muti Takes a Victory Lap With the Chicago Symphony

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      The orchestra’s former conductor — now its music director emeritus for life — opened Carnegie Hall’s season with a two-night engagement.When Riccardo Muti stepped down from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last season, after 13 years as its conductor, the ensemble promptly turned around and named him music director emeritus for life.In a two-part season opener at Carnegie Hall this week, it was easy to hear why.Under Muti, the Chicago Symphony is all power and finesse with no unsightly edges. On Wednesday, in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” the orchestra’s playing, strong yet nimble, drew on reserves of unforced power and charm. The following night, in an Italian-themed collection of programmatic works by Mendelssohn, Strauss and Philip Glass, a certain politesse crept into an otherwise classy performance.There’s no better illustration of the orchestra’s might than the final movement of the Mussorgsky, “The Great Gate of Kyiv.” Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s delightful piano suite reaches its apotheosis here, and on Wednesday, Muti built a magnificent edifice out of it, with crashing cymbals, all-out brasses and majestic strings. Using an extreme economy of gesture, he barely had to move for the players to unleash torrents of stupendous, beautifully balanced sound.At the risk of cliché, the ensemble’s remarkable cohesion feels like a kind of Midwestern humility, focusing attention on the music instead of individual players. Tasteful instrumental solos, like that of the concertmaster Robert Chen in Strauss’s “Aus Italien,” didn’t disturb the musical fabric. Technical mastery emerged in what wasn’t there: The heavenly woodwinds were airborne without being breathy, and the guest principal harp, Julia Coronelli, conveyed beauty without pluck in the Strauss and in Glass’s “The Triumph of the Octagon.” Muti’s dynamic mapping avoided jolts or spikes; ardor and neatness coexisted.His “Pictures at an Exhibition” balanced theatricality and unity in the vividly drawn scenarios of Ravel’s orchestration. The first “Promenade,” in which Mussorgsky depicts himself wandering through the art show of his dearly departed friend, the painter Viktor Hartmann, had a gracious, wide-footed gait. Timothy McAllister’s satiny alto saxophone wafted like a mist through the wide stone halls of “The Old Castle.” “Tuileries” traded the unseemly lilt of whining children for a singsong quality. “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” lurched with delicious, brutal violence. Muti interpreted the score’s attacca markings (indicating that the movements should be played without pause) as seamless transitions instead of opportunities for surprise.Leonidas Kavakos, left, was the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on Wednesday night.Todd RosenbergThe orchestra’s plush power in the Tchaikovsky evoked the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, so it’s a shame that the evening’s soloist, Leonidas Kavakos, derailed the performance with curdled tone, sloppy passagework, cracked high notes and tuning issues. There were pretty turns of phrase in the second movement, and Kavakos could hide his unpolished sound in the guttural character of the third. For a performer of a normally high caliber, though, it was a shabby showing.Glass’s “The Triumph of the Octagon,” dedicated to Muti, opened the second night. It’s a 10-minute piece inspired by a photo of a 13th-century Italian castle that Glass saw hanging in the maestro’s studio at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, a memory from Muti’s childhood. The music gradually accumulated a mysterious timelessness with the shifting emphases of its time signatures and the delicate deployment of woodwind timbres.Muti avoided any inkling of stridency in the dashing opening of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, which rushed forward with grace and buoyancy. Melodies intertwined delicately in the Andante. The perpetual motion of the third movement felt unobstructed but also unhurried; the strings played all the way through phrases and left them hanging in the air, and the brasses were unafraid to assume a blanched color to maintain the movement’s particular tint.The elegant passion on display in the Mendelssohn hampered the players in the Strauss, his first tone poem, a piece that wraps together images of Italy with the swooning ecstasies they arouse. Still, some passages are recognizably pictorial, such as the third movement’s suggestion of the shores of Sorrento, with the dappling of the sun on the surface of the sea rendered in shimmery chromaticism. There, the orchestra was quite enchanting, but in the second movement, it lacked punch. Too often, Strauss’s impetuous reveries were flattened into a predictable sameness.A truer sense of romance and spontaneity could be found in the encores on both evenings. They were drawn from Italian opera, a specialty of Muti, who was the longtime music director of Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Following the adrenaline rush of “The Great Gate of Kyiv,” Muti struck up the intermezzo from Giordano’s “Fedora” with seductive vulnerability.On the second night, the overture to Verdi’s “Giovanna d’Arco” had everything the Strauss didn’t: crackling energy and a sense of reveling — not just in the music, but also in the ensemble itself. It provided a handsome, though still subtle, showcase for the winds to take a victory lap — and for Muti to do so too. More