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      How Do You Tell the Story of 50 Years of Hip-Hop?

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      Hip-hop is a fount of constant innovation woven into nearly every corner of American life. So don’t look for cohesion: Lean into the cacophony.Sean “Puffy” Combs in a celebratory mood. In the mid-1990s, labels like Bad Boy helped bring rap to the center of American culture.Johnny Nunez/GettyHip-hop is a wondrous and centerless tangle, ubiquitous even if not always totally visible.It is a fount of constant innovation, and a historical text ripe for pilfering. It is a continuation of rock, soul and jazz traditions, while also explicitly loosening their cultural grip. It is evolving more rapidly than ever — new styles emerge yearly, or faster, multiplying the genre’s potential. And it has impact far beyond music: Hip-hop is woven into television and film, fashion, advertising, literature, politics and countless other corners of American life. It is lingua franca, impossible to avoid.It is far too vast to be contained under one tent, or limited to one narrative. The genre is gargantuan, nonlinear and unruly. It has its own internal quarrels and misunderstandings, and its stakeholders are sometimes friends and collaborators, and sometimes view each other warily.So when trying to catalog hip-hop in full, it’s only reasonable to lean into the cacophony. The package that accompanies this essay does just that, collecting oral histories from 50 genre titans of the past five-plus decades. The number matters. It’s an acknowledgment that at 50 years old — a mild fiction, but more on that later — hip-hop is broad and fruitful, enthralling and polyglot, the source of an endless fount of narratives. Its fullness cannot be captured without sprawl and ambition. Many voices need to be heard, and they won’t always agree.Side by side, there are stylistic innovators, crossover superstars, regional heroes, micromarket celebrities. There are those who insist on their primacy and see themselves as a center of gravity, and those who are proud students of the game and understand their place in hip-hop’s broader artistic arc. There are those who are universally recognized, and those known mainly by connoisseurs. There are agitators and accommodationists. The revered and the maligned. Some even play with the boundaries of what rapping is ordinarily considered to be.All taken together, these artists form a family tree of the genre, one that highlights bridges between groups that are typically discussed separately, and that underscores the ways in which rappers — no matter the city they hail from, or the era in which they found their success — have been grappling with similar circumstances, creative questions and obstacles.The Cold Crush Brothers in the Bronx, 1979. Joe Conzo, via Easy A.D.These 50 histories detail hip-hop from countless vantage points: the past forward, and vice versa; the underground upward; the less populated regions outward; the big cities out into the suburbs. They tell the story of a makeshift musical movement that laid the foundation for the defining cultural shift of the past few decades.Fifty years ago, though, that outcome seemed fanciful at best. In the 1970s, Bronx block parties gave way to nightclubs, and talking D.J.s laid the foundation for dedicated M.C.s to begin taking over. Soon, the intrusion of capitalism removed and packaged the part of these live events that was the easiest to transmit: rapping.Then it was off to the races. By the mid-1980s, the hip-hop industry was a small club but big business, as audiences around the country were primed by the commercial release of recordings from countless New York artists. A wave of soon-to-be-global stars arrived: Run-DMC, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys. Hip-hop became worldwide counterculture.Run-DMC in 1985, onstage in Providence, R.I.John Nordell/Getty ImagesBy the dawn of the 1990s, it flowered everywhere in this country — the South, the West, the Midwest — and seeped into the global mainstream. In the mid-90s, thanks to the work of Biggie Smalls and Puffy, Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre, Bad Boy and Death Row, it became the center of American pop music, despite resistance from those convinced rock was destined to forever reign supreme.Into the 2000s, the genre’s power center shifted from the coasts to the South, where the genre was flourishing (largely away from the scrutiny of the major labels) in Miami, Houston, Virginia, Atlanta and Memphis. 2 Live Crew, the Geto Boys, Missy Elliott, Outkast, Three 6 Mafia — each had absorbed what was being imported from the rest of the country and created new lingo and sonic frameworks around it. Hip-hop was becoming a widely shared language with numerous dialects.T.I. onstage in his hometown, Atlanta, in 2005.Ray Tamarra/Getty ImagesAll the while, the genre was expanding, becoming more commercially successful and inescapable with each year. It became centrist pop, which in turn spun off its own dissidents: the New York and Los Angeles undergrounds of the 1990s; the progressive indie scenes of the 2000s; and the SoundCloud rap of the 2010s. In the past 20 years, hip-hop has been responsible not only for some of the biggest pop music of the era — Drake, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Cardi B — but its templates have become open source for performers in other genres to borrow from, which they did, and do, widely. Hip-hop became a crucial touch point for country music, for reggaeton, for hard rock, for K-pop and much more.What’s striking in the histories collected in this package is how no part of that ascent has been taken for granted. In every era, there were stumbling blocks. For each artist, there was a promise of a scene just out of reach. And for all of these rappers, that meant leaning in to a new idea of what their version of hip-hop could be, and hoping ears would meet them in this untested place.Missy Elliott performing in New York in 2012.Jerritt Clark/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesThere is also the matter of untold history — to read these recollections is to be continually reminded of those who are no longer here to share their tales. There is a punishing catalog of before-their-time deaths just below these stories, a reminder that canons can’t include songs that never got to be made.As for the 50th anniversary, well, it is a framing of convenience. The date refers to Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc — in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx — reportedly first mixed two copies of the same album into one seamless breakbeat. That is, of course, one way to think about hip-hop’s big-bang moment, but by no means the only one. If you think of rapping as toasting, or talking over prerecorded music, or speaking in rhythmic form, then hip-hop has been around longer than 50 years. Just ask the Last Poets, or DJ Hollywood, who would improvise rhymes on the microphone as he was spinning disco records. There are also, depending upon whom you ask, others who had previously mixed two of the same record.Kanye West’s Saint Pablo tour opener in Indianapolis in 2016.AJ Mast for The New York TimesBut the canniness and the cynicism of attempting to enshrine a date that everyone can stand behind reflects a darker and more worrisome truth, which is that, for decades, hip-hop was perceived as disposable, a nuisance, an aberration. Commemoration and enshrinement seemed far-fetched. For a long time, hip-hop had to argue for its rightful place in pop music, and pop culture, facing hostilities that were racial, legal, musical and beyond.Insisting that the genre has an origin point, therefore, is really just another way of insisting on its importance, its stability and its future. You can quarrel with the specific details — and many do — but not with the intent, which is to ensure that no one again overlooks the genre’s power and influence.That said, hip-hop was never going anywhere, because no style of pop music has been as adaptive and as sly. Hip-hop directly answers its critics, and it voraciously consumes and reframes its antecedents. It is restless and immediate, sometimes changing so quickly that it doesn’t stop to document itself. So here is a landing place to reflect, and a jumping off point for the next 50 or so years. More

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      Music for (Waiting in) Airports

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      Songs that take flight from Liz Phair, John Denver and more.Liz Phair, not pretending she’s in a Galaxie 500 video.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesDear listeners,If you’re anything like me, you’ve already spent way too much of this summer in airports.* Flight delays are up, and the recent spate of severe weather hasn’t exactly helped. This means you’re going to need something to listen to while killing time in the terminal.Brian Eno understood. In the mid-1970s, he got the idea for one of his most enduring works during a long, stressful flight delay at an airport in Cologne, Germany. Wouldn’t the whole experience be a bit more tolerable, he wondered, if the airport piped serene, unobtrusive sounds throughout the terminals? He began experimenting with this concept, and it eventually led to the gorgeous and indefatigably useful “Music for Airports” (1978), his first declared work of what he called “ambient” music. The album and his subsequent installments in the ambient series spawned a fruitful, still thriving genre, and in a 2016 list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time, Pitchfork ranked “Music for Airports” at No. 1.I’m not saying your flight delay needs to be as productive as Eno’s; I won’t judge if you fail to conceive an entirely new genre of music before boarding ends. All I’m saying is that you could use some music to soothe your nerves and put your plight into a larger context. That’s where today’s playlist comes in. A few of its songs — from Liz Phair, John Denver and the Byrds — are explicitly about flight, inspired by the fresh perspective that changes in scenery and altitude can bring. Others aren’t quite as direct but still have a kind of weightless expansiveness. One of them is, at least ostensibly, about a hot-air balloon, but I think that still counts.Hopefully this playlist is longer than your flight delay. But if you still need something to listen to when it’s done, there’s always “Music for Airports.” (And Jon Pareles’s playlist of Eno’s 15 best ambient tracks.)Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Caroline Polachek: “The Gate”Hopefully you won’t spend too much time “standing at the gate,” to quote this ethereal, tone-setting opener from Caroline Polachek’s 2019 album, “Pang.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: “Learning to Fly”As on many of the songs here, flight serves as a kind of emotional metaphor on “Learning to Fly,” the 1991 hit from Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Jeff-Lynne-produced album “Into the Great Wide Open.” (In October 2017, shortly after Petty’s death, Bob Dylan played a beautiful cover of this song live, as a tribute to his fellow Wilbury.) (Listen on YouTube)3. Neko Case: “Lady Pilot”“We’ve got a lady pilot, she’s not afraid to die,” Neko Case sings on this impressionistic adventure from her great 2002 album, “Blacklisted.” (According to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots, only 5.8 percent of the world’s airline pilots are female. Not even close to enough!) (Listen on YouTube)4. The Byrds: “Eight Miles High”Commercial planes don’t actually fly eight miles high, but the Byrds apparently thought “Six Miles High” didn’t sound as cool. What does sound unequivocally cool, still, is Roger McGuinn’s 12-string guitar; his playing on this pioneering psych-rock song was influenced by both Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane. (Listen on YouTube)5. Liz Phair: “Stratford-on-Guy”The perspective-shifting experience of flight makes poets of us all — especially when you have a window seat. Liz Phair perfectly captures the view from 27D on this track from “Exile in Guyville”: “As we moved out of the farmlands and into the grid, the plan of a city was all that you saw.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Howlin’ Wolf: “Mr. Airplane Man”On this song from the compilation “Change My Way,” the blues great Howlin’ Wolf implores Mr. Airplane Man to fly down to Jackson and deliver an urgent message to his baby: “Aahhhheeeeeee, ahhhehehehe!” (Listen on YouTube)7. John Denver: “Leaving on a Jet Plane”Next time you’re not sure what to do with yourself while waiting for a connecting flight, remember that John Denver wrote this song during a layover. Pretty good use of his time, I’d say. (Listen on YouTube)8. The 5th Dimension: “Up, Up and Away”Hopefully by the end of this playlist, you’ll be taking flight, like this exuberant, comfortingly retro 1967 tune by the Fifth Dimension. Preferably in an airplane and not a hot-air balloon, but at this point I don’t blame you for looking into alternate forms of transportation. (Listen on YouTube)Aahhhheeeeeee,Lindsay*Remember Friday’s Amplifier, when I told you about my experience seeing the North American opening date of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour? I almost didn’t make it to the show at all because my flight to Toronto was canceled — and then my flight out of Toronto was canceled as well. I was stranded there for two extra days, which I mostly spent on hold with various airlines. Now I know how Drake felt when he was runnin’ through the 6 with his woes.The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Music for (Waiting in) Airports” track listTrack 1: Caroline Polachek, “The Gate”Track 2: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Learning to Fly”Track 3: Neko Case, “Lady Pilot”Track 4: The Byrds, “Eight Miles High”Track 5: Liz Phair, “Stratford-on-Guy”Track 6: Howlin’ Wolf, “Mr. Airplane Man”Track 7: John Denver, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”Track 8: The 5th Dimension, “Up, Up and Away”Bonus tracksFor more practical air travel advice, some of my colleagues at the Travel desk put together this handy guide that I really should have read before my trip to Toronto.And, RIP Jane Birkin, so much more than the namesake of a bag! Among many other things, Birkin was also a catalyzing collaborator with both the incomparable Serge Gainsbourg and the great filmmaker Agnès Varda, and of course a singular vocalist and songwriter in her own right. Spin “Jane B.” and “Di Doo Dah” today in her honor. More

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      Taylor Swift Now Has More No. 1 Albums Than Any Woman in History

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      The pop superstar’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” debuts at No. 1 this week as the year’s biggest new album, and three of her other titles also made the Top 10.When Taylor Swift released “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” this month, there was no doubt it would debut at No. 1. The only questions were how forcefully it would smash records, how many mountains of vinyl it would sell and how far down the chart Swift’s catalog would push everybody else.“Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” the third installment in Swift’s series of rerecorded albums — this one recreating “Speak Now” from 2010, with a thick appendix of tracks revisited from the cutting-room floor — is the year’s biggest new LP, notching the equivalent of 716,000 sales in the United States. It easily topped Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” which opened with 501,000 in March.But that is not all. It is Swift’s 12th No. 1 album, beating Barbra Streisand for the most chart-toppers by a woman. Drake also has 12 No. 1 albums, but the only acts with more are Jay-Z (14) and the Beatles (19).The popularity of Swift’s Eras Tour has lifted her entire catalog, and this week, in addition to the new “Speak Now,” she has three other titles in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart: “Midnights” (No. 5), “Lover” (No. 7) and “Folklore” (No. 10). Swift is the first living act to have four albums in the Top 10 since Herb Alpert in 1966. (Prince had five after his death in 2016, and for many years Billboard barred older “catalog” albums from reappearing on its main chart — a rule that was changed after Michael Jackson’s death, in 2009.)Swift’s effort to remake her first six albums began after her old record label was sold without her participation, as a way for Swift to reclaim and control her earlier work. But the project has turned into its own phenomenon, with fans using the opportunity to revisit their own relationship with the music, and critics scouring the new recordings for rare — but notable — edits, like a change to a lyric on the track “Better Than Revenge” from “Speak Now” that had come to be seen as outdated or worse.The new version of “Speak Now” had a bigger opening than her two previous rerecordings, “Red” (605,000) and “Fearless” (291,000).The 716,000 “equivalent” sales for the new “Speak Now” — a measurement by Billboard and the data service Luminate that reconciles the various ways fans consume music now — incorporates 269 million streams and 507,000 copies sold as a complete package. It also includes 268,500 copies on vinyl, the second-biggest week for any vinyl album since the predecessors of Luminate began keeping reliable sales records in 1991 — the biggest was Swift’s own “Midnights,” which opened with 575,000 copies sold on LP back in October.“Speak Now” continues an astonishingly productive run for Swift. It is her sixth studio album in three years, and according to Billboard she is the only artist to notch new No. 1 albums in each of the last five calendar years: “Lover” (2019); “Folklore” and “Evermore” (2020); “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version)” (2021); “Midnights” (2022); and now “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).”Also this week, Wallen’s “One Thing” holds at No. 2; Lil Uzi Vert’s “Pink Tape,” last week’s top album, falls to No. 3; and Peso Pluma’s “Génesis” is No. 4. More

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      The Jazzy Tune You Heard on Hold? This Part-Time Musician Made It.

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      Meet Harriet Goldberg, a late bloomer who went from a career in social work to the queen of hold music with her 2011 song “My Time to Fly.”Harriet Goldberg is the composer of what may be one of the most heard songs in the world today.This 74-year-old New Jersey native is, in her own words, a “late blooming, part-time musician,” who has never played a live gig and is unknown to the music industry at large.But every day since 2017, Goldberg’s jazzy instrumental, “My Time to Fly,” has been served up to countless callers who are put on hold by the customer service lines of businesses large and small. These include Capital One, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, Costco, Nasdaq, the Kansas Unemployment Office, Sagami Railway in Japan, Dartmoor Prison in England, scores of hotels and restaurants and, yes, The New York Times.Goldberg’s journey from a career in social work to the queen of hold music is an unlikely one. It’s the product of a passion that wasn’t acted on until she was in her late 40s.“When I was a kid, my family got a free piano,” Goldberg said in a phone interview from her home in Boston. “My dad wrote songs and played jazz as a hobby. I studied a little classical but mainly played folk, rock and the Beatles — the usual stuff for a child of the ’60s.”She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English from Boston University and a master’s in social work, and in her late 30s became a stay-at-home mother.“In my late 40s, my interest in jazz deepened, mainly standards and cabaret music,” she said. “I started composing songs based on the songs I loved. I knew my limitations and wanted to find someone who could help me with my writing.”Looking for a mentor, Goldberg turned to an old friend, the saxophonist Billy Novick, a onetime Berklee College of Music student who has appeared on more than 250 recordings, film and television scores and performed with artists including David Bromberg, Maria Muldaur, Willie Dixon and J. Geils.“Harriet and I knew each other for years and our collaboration started very organically,” Novick said in a phone interview from his home in Lexington, Mass. “She would show me her compositions and I would make suggestions to modify chord structure, melody and the like.”After a few years, Goldberg had enough songs to record an album. The result was “Bring Back the Moonlight,” from 2002, a 14-track collection of vocal tunes modeled on the lush classics she loved. Novick created arrangements, booked the studio and engineer, and found the musicians who played and sang on this and four more albums Goldberg self-released through 2021.“In my late 40s, my interest in jazz deepened, mainly standards and cabaret music,” Goldberg said.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesGoldberg didn’t know anything about her place atop the on-hold hit parade until 2019, when her collaborator told her.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesAware there were better opportunities for Goldberg’s compositions to be licensed as incidental music in film and television if they were instrumentals, Novick suggested she record wordless versions of her songs, most crucially, the title track to her 2011 album, “My Time to Fly.” But before this tune took off on phones, Goldberg gained a foothold by entering a song from her debut disc, “Suddenly You Walked By,” into a songwriting contest sponsored by Billboard magazine. Though she didn’t win the top prize, she earned a membership with Taxi, a firm that helps composers place music in film and television. By 2008, Goldberg was working with another catalog service, Crucial Music, and began having her music featured in shows, including “Californication,” “Hawaii 5-0” and “New Amsterdam.”In 2017, the time came for “My Time to Fly.”“We were working with Amazon, placing music in their films and television shows, when they asked us for music for Amazon Connect, a service that manages the call centers for tens of thousands of businesses worldwide, handling 10 million calls in a day,” Tanvi Patel, the chief executive of Crucial Music, said in an interview, noting that jazz is one of the top genres for hold music.Goldberg’s instrumental is “very upbeat and it really swings,” Patel added. “It sets a relaxed mood for what can be one of life’s more trying situations.”Goldberg, however, didn’t know anything about her place atop the on-hold hit parade until 2019, when she heard from her collaborator.“I was on hold with Capital One Bank and heard something familiar,” Novick said. “My first impression was I liked the sax player, but I honestly couldn’t pin it down. I listened again, opened my Shazam app and found out it was one of the songs I recorded with Harriet.”While Goldberg’s tune may be spinning more than any other at the moment, it isn’t earning her untold riches. The licensing agreement with Amazon was a buyout, earning Harriet a “four-figure flat fee” for its use in perpetuity.“It’s especially funny,” Goldberg said, “when I call my bank and get put on hold and it’s my own music that I have to listen to.”Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesBut the song has earned this late bloomer unexpected fandom — and some money. Through its release on her own label, Goldberg is making a modest income from streams, downloads and occasional CD sales. She is also garnering positive messages from fans via email and her SoundCloud page. The song’s popularity in Japan was even subject of a skit on “Tamori Club,” a sort of Japanese “Saturday Night Live.”“I’ve gotten many wonderful emails from around the world about the song,” she said. “The notoriety is very sweet, especially for a song that is thrust upon people as they are in what can turn into an unpleasant situation if it’s too long a wait.“It’s especially funny,” Goldberg added, “when I call my bank and get put on hold and it’s my own music that I have to listen to.”Dane Vannatter, the cabaret singer featured on the vocal version of “My Time to Fly,” sometimes performs it at club gigs.“Before he sings it, he holds up his phone and plays the instrumental version,” Goldberg said. “Then, he asks how many people have heard the tune. It’s usually most of the audience though they never can quite place exactly where they heard it.” More

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      Jane Birkin: Made in England, Forged in France

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      Birkin had a thriving career as a singer and an actress, in both communicating a seemingly nonchalant demeanor that camouflaged a melancholy core.For most of her life, Jane Birkin, who died Sunday at 76, acted as a bridge — an elegant one, with an affectless grace that never betrayed the strains of load bearing. She connected her native Britain and her adopted France, two countries physically close but often at odds. She never lost her English accent when she spoke, somehow joining the two languages into her own Birkin-ese, “the improbable French that added to her charm,” as Le Monde put it. She floated among song, cinema and theater, and she could reach large, varied audiences while also connecting with France’s auteur culture.Her career did not go in a straight line. She made the most of her unassuming, breathy voice in her recordings, and while her unconventional glamour stood out onscreen, she was never afraid to veer off in unexpected directions when choosing roles. She let herself be guided by adventurousness.After a small role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ode to Swinging London, “Blow-Up,” Birkin left England in 1968 to make a French movie, Pierre Grimblat’s “Slogan.” On the set, she met Serge Gainsbourg, the brilliant, tortured musician, who was in the cast and wrote the film’s score.They fell in love and soon became an It couple, impossibly stylish and cool. Crucially, she also became one of the leading interpreters of his songs, starting with their erotically charged duet “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” and continuing through six solo Birkin albums, released from 1973 to 1990. The poppiest and catchiest is “Ex fan des sixties” (1978); the poignant “Baby Alone in Babylone” (1983) largely deals with the couple’s separation.Birkin left Gainsbourg in 1980, fed up with his drinking and temper, but their personal and professional partnership outlasted the breakup. And despite a reductive media habit of describing Birkin merely as Gainsbourg’s muse, it enriched both of them.Birkin remained loyal to the Gainsbourg songbook throughout her life. Five years after his death, she released an album of Gainsbourg covers, “Versions Jane” (1996); followed by “Arabesque” (2002), an album of Gainsbourg songs arranged by the Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles; and “Birkin/Gainsbourg: Le Symphonique” (2017), backed by a symphony orchestra.But she also escaped Gainsbourg’s shadow, working with younger musicians and producers, and eventually writing or co-writing the lyrics on her albums “Enfants d’hiver” (2008) and “Oh! Pardon tu dormais …” (2020), both largely drawing from her life.That last record is a good illustration of the way Birkin hopscotched among artistic fields, one feeding into another: “Oh! Pardon tu dormais …” has the same title as, and was inspired by, a made-for-TV movie Birkin directed in 1992 and a 1999 play she wrote and appeared in.Birkin performing in 2001. As a singer, she made the most of her unassuming, breathy voice.Jean-Loup Gautreau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeyond her success as a singer — not blockbuster by any means, but attracting a loyal fan base around the world — Birkin had a thriving career as an actress, communicating a similar vibe onscreen as she did in music: a natural, unadorned beauty; a seemingly nonchalant demeanor, camouflaging a melancholy core.In 1969, the year that “Slogan” came out, Birkin had a supporting role in Jacques Deray’s scorching, now cult thriller “La Piscine” alongside Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. With “La Piscine,” and popular comedies like “La Moutarde Me Monte au Nez!” (1974) and “La Course à l’Échalote” (1975), she could have continued to mine her gamine charm and cute accent for a comfortable if predictable acting career. But in typical Birkin fashion, she made an abrupt stylistic U-turn by starring in Gainsbourg’s provocative debut feature “Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus” (1976), in which she portrayed an androgynous waitress who has a rather complicated relationship with a gay man played by Joe Dallesandro, the Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey regular.For much of the 1970s and early ’80s, Birkin alternated between making Gainsbourg records and appearing in mainstream movies, including “Death on the Nile” (1978), which featured the kind of international star buffet that blockbuster movies of the time ate up: Her co-stars included Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, David Niven, Mia Farrow and Angela Lansbury.Throwing yet another twist into her career is that after Gainsbourg, Birkin was in a relationship with the uncompromising filmmaker Jacques Doillon. In 1984, she starred in his brutally intense, fever-pitch movie “La Pirate” as Alma, who is torn between her husband (played by Birkin’s own brother, Andrew) and a woman (Maruschka Detmers). It felt like a new Jane Birkin, inhabiting her physicality in a way that was almost dangerously unrestrained — and it earned her the first of three César Award nominations.The next year, she appeared in a Marivaux play directed by the influential Patrice Chéreau at his Nanterre theater. Despite her trepidation, her performance was a success, and Birkin continued to appear onstage, alternating, as was her wont, between boulevard fare and Euripides.Another consequential encounter in the 1980s was with the director Agnès Varda, who made the gloriously unconventional film “Jane B. par Agnès V.” (1988), in which, as Glenn Kenny noted in The New York Times, Birkin “retains a slightly breathy girlishness that complements her largely cheery, open personality and her intrepid intelligence” — words that neatly capture Birkin’s enduring appeal. Varda encouraged Birkin to write, and the two collaborated on the script of Varda’s “Kung-Fu Master!” (1988). Birkin went on to direct an autobiographical film, “Boxes” (2007).For Birkin boundaries were porous: between public and private, high and low, art and life. In his tribute to her, President Emmanuel Macron called Birkin “a French icon.” Of that there is no doubt. More

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      Jane Birkin, Singer, Actress and Fashion Inspiration, Dies at 76

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      She was a lithe beauty of 1960s European film, a famous musical collaborator and lover of Serge Gainsbourg, and the namesake of elegant Hermès handbags.Jane Birkin, who helped define chic female sexuality of the 1970s as an actress in arty and erotic European movies and in her relationship — equal parts romantic and artistic — with the singer Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday in Paris. Ms. Birkin, who later became known for inspiring one of the best known lines of luxury handbags, was 76.Her death was confirmed by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who called her “a French icon” in a message on Twitter. The French news media reported that Ms. Birkin had been found dead at her home but that the cause was not immediately known.The child of a famously beautiful actress and a socially connected British naval officer, Ms. Birkin led a life guided by many happy accidents.While she was on a flight in 1984, a plastic bag in which she was keeping her possessions broke, leading her to complain aloud that Hermès did not make a bag that could fit all her things. The man sitting next to her happened to be Jean-Louis Dumas, then the head designer of Hermès (and later its chief executive). The company released the Birkin bag line the same year — in just the large size she had requested.Standard Birkin bags now sell for $10,000, and the difficulties of obtaining one — given a complex manufacturing process and a deliberately rationed supply to boutiques — have given the bag the cachet of exclusivity.Her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg began just as fortuitously, in 1968. She was in her early 20s, her first marriage having fallen apart, when, without particular renown as an actress and without speaking a word of French, she managed to be cast in a French movie, “Slogan,” starring Mr. Gainsbourg.The two fell in love, but Ms. Birkin did not see a way to remain long in France. Then, dining out one night, she had a chance encounter with the French director Jacques Deray, got hired to act in a movie of his, stayed in the country and solidified her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg.She lived in France for the rest of her life, and her engagement with Mr. Gainsbourg and his music proved equally enduring.The most notable product of their collaboration and romance was their 1969 hit recording of Mr. Gainsbourg’s song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”).In the song, a duet, Mr. Gainsbourg speaks of sex in a low, conversational voice as Ms. Birkin confesses her love in suggestive murmurs and moans and the high-pitched singing of an ingénue.The song was condemned by the Vatican and banned in several countries and by the B.B.C. television network. But it sold millions of copies.Nearly 50 years later, in 2018, Ms. Birkin was still singing music by Mr. Gainsbourg, by then on a world tour of orchestral versions of his songs.“If I am singing in Argentina in two weeks’ time,” she told The Guardian, “it is because of ‘Je t’aime.’”Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, to Judy Campbell, an actress who gained renown for performing for British troops with Noël Coward during World War II, and Cmdr. David Birkin of the Royal Navy.In 2021, her father’s exploits during World War II were recounted in “A Dangerous Enterprise,” a book by Tim Spicer, a former British military officer. Commander Birkin’s duties included navigating boats on moonless nights across the English Channel to bring to safety Allied spies, stranded airmen and escaped prisoners of war who had found themselves in France.Ms. Birkin, at 18, married the British composer John Barry, known for arranging the trademark theme to James Bond movies, and they had a daughter, Kate. At 20, Ms. Birkin appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hit 1966 movie, “Blow Up,” an erotic tale of a London fashion photographer. She played a fashion model — the credits listed her as only The Blonde — and gained some attention for a risqué nude scene.Ms. Birkin with the English actor David Hemmings in a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow-Up,” released in 1966.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images“Had it all worked out with John Barry, I would never have been curious to know what was going on anywhere else,” Ms. Birkin told The Guardian in 2017. “I would have just gone on being his wife. I would have been delighted. But because he went off with someone else, and I was left with Kate, I had to find a job quite fast.”That led to her audition for “Slogan.”The movie that kept her in France was “La Piscine” (“The Swimming Pool”), starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. (It found unexpected renewed popularity in the United States in 2021.) A sun-soaked film of sex and jealousy with many shots of scantily clad actors, the movie proved to be an effective showcase for Ms. Birkin’s long-limbed beauty.Her romance with Mr. Gainsbourg captivated the French public. She was the young doe-eyed expat, he the aging but still virile artistic genius. The relationship lasted for more than a decade, ending when she left him in the early 1980s for the French film director Jacques Doillon. Mr. Gainsbourg died in 1991 at 62.Though Ms. Birkin would later speak self-deprecatingly about her role as Mr. Gainsbourg’s muse, she embraced becoming “the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame,” as The New York Times labeled her in 2018.She described to The Times connections between the music he wrote for her and work by classical composers like Chopin and Brahms.“I would have thought that he was probably France’s most modern writer,” she said. “He invented a new language, he cut words in two like Cole Porter.”Ms. Birkin and Mr. Gainsbourg with her daughters Charlotte, left, and Kate Barry in 1972. Charlotte became a singer and actress. Kate became a photographer who died in 2013.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin released “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…,” her first album of her own songs written in English, in 2021. “The results are an emotional tour de force from an artist who has never gotten her musical due outside of France,” the music writer Ben Cardew wrote in a review for Pitchfork.Ms. Birkin also continued to act, including in films by Agnès Varda and plays by Patrice Chéreau. She was also popular in France as an activist for women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights as well as for her British accent when speaking French, which the French found endearing.“The most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wrote in a message on Twitter on Sunday. “We will never forget her songs, her laughs and her incomparable accent.”Ms. Birkin in 2021 at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Hermès put her name on a line of exclusive handbags.Stephane Cardinale/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin had a mild stroke in 2021 and had recently canceled a series of concerts because of health issues.She is survived by two daughters, one with Mr. Gainsbourg and the other with Mr. Doillon: the singer-actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, each of whom has, like their mother, inspired designers and followers of fashion. Her other daughter, Kate Barry, a photographer, died at 46 in 2013 in a fall from a window of her fourth-floor Paris apartment.Ms. Birkin discovered that her romantic separation from Mr. Gainsbourg did not dim their collaboration. He kept writing new songs intended for her until he died.After their breakup, “you could talk back to him for once,” she told The Guardian. “You were not just his creation any more.”Guy Trebay More

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      Review: A Met Opera-Bound ‘Semele’ Takes Its First Bows

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      Claus Guth’s entertaining and often sexy new staging of Handel’s opera-oratorio hybrid in Munich is a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera.Staging oratorios in the opera house is nearly routine nowadays, especially those by Handel; for every “Agrippina,” you’re likely to get a “Messiah” too.Somewhere in between is “Semele,” a dramatic work that Handel described as “after the manner of an oratorio.” It lends itself both to the concert hall and the opera house, and with a long list of principal characters thrives best with a luxury cast — which it received at the Bavarian State Opera in an entertaining, lucid and often sexy new staging by Claus Guth that premiered on Saturday, a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera that will eventually travel to New York.That “Semele” has been categorized as an oratorio has more to do with context than form. By the time it premiered at Covent Garden in 1744, Italian operas, which Handel had been composing for decades, were falling out of fashion, and he had moved on to English-language concert works like “Messiah.”In writing “Semele,” Handel and an unknown collaborator adapted William Congreve’s early 18th-century opera libretto of the same name. But rather than present it as a theatrical work, Handel disguised it as an oratorio for the Lenten concert season — even though the secular story, based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” wasn’t right for the occasion. There was hardly anything Christian about its brazen eroticism and adultery, or about a god having to explain to his mortal mistress that she needs rest because she doesn’t have his sexual stamina.Handel wasn’t able to have it both ways; “Semele” ran for several performances, then languished until the 20th century. But its resurgence has been richly mined, with musicians and directors continuously inspired by its Epicurean longing and sensuality, its psychological complexity and its timeless treatment of incompatible love — all thoughts and feelings, in Handel’s aria writing, repeated, examined sculpturally and reconsidered with doubt and revelation.From left, Nadezhda Karyazina, Rae and Emily D’Angelo in the production, in which the world of Semele’s fantasies is rendered in shades of black to contrast with the white of reality.Monika RittershausGuth’s production dives into the Semele’s subconscious, her frustrations and fantasies, on the day of her wedding. A reluctant bride, she is first shown posing next her groom, Athamas, before stepping out of a shell-like gown that maintains its shape without her. It’s not the last time that happens; she always seems to be getting into or out of a dress as she drifts between reality and daydream, between accepting her life and rejecting it.During the overture, crisply and briskly articulated in the pit under Gianluca Capuano’s baton, Semele and Athamas are seen posing with friends and family for increasingly cringe-worthy group portraits, their forced smiles as uncomfortably glaring as the enormous floral letters spelling out “LOVE” behind them. Distracted by a black feather — Guth’s nod to the libretto’s depiction of the god Jupiter as an eagle — Semele retreats into her mind, represented by a sudden change in light from bright to dark in Michael Bauer’s design.She imagines breaking out of her wedding’s austerely white, grand room with an ax as she tears a hole into the wall of Michael Levine’s bandshell-like set of a three-sided room enclosed with a ceiling. In doing so, she opens a portal into the world of the gods, where her affair with Jupiter will set off a chain of events that leads to her doom.Here, however, the story isn’t so straightforward. And neither are the performances. A Guth production often demands actorly skill of its singers, and in Munich — at the Prinzregententheater, one of the Bavarian State Opera’s smaller halls — the principal cast members were intimately close to the audience, exposed both visually and musically.No one more so than the soprano Brenda Rae as Semele, who rarely leaves the stage and is given one of the show’s most athletic arias, “Myself I shall adore.” As an actor, she sympathetically traced a downward plunge from hesitation to ecstasy, then harried despair and hollowed catatonia. Musically, however, she struggled to match the challenging score; her voice on Saturday was agile but thin, particularly through runs and ornamentation. Even the soft serenity she achieved in “O sleep, why dost thou leave me?” gave way, on a sustained trill, to a disorientingly jagged warble.As Jupiter, Michael Spyres, too, gave an unsteady account of a difficult role. His instrument remains baffling: immense in its power and remarkable in its baritone-tenor range, but also unwieldy and better suited to the legato phrasing of the famous aria “Where’er you walk” than the more acrobatically breathless “I must with speed amuse her.” At the end of that, though, he impressively joined a high-kicking chorus line choreographed by Ramses Sigl.He wasn’t the only singer given movement onstage. Jakub Jozef Orlinski, the countertenor in the role of Athamas, is also a breakdancer, which Guth spotlights when his character desperately attempts to entertain Semele. Charismatic and handsome, Orlinski stopped the show with the applause his dance earned. But more enchanting was the purity of his sound — sublimely crystalline in “Come, Zephyrs, come” — which blended warmly with the lower end of Athamas’s altolike tessitura.Orlinski, a break dancer beyond the opera house, is made to do so in a scene of his character trying to impress Semele.Monika RittershausThat aria, put in Athamas’s mouth rather than Cupid’s, made for a shattering juxtaposition with Semele’s “O sleep.” Orlinski and Rae sang near, but not at, each other, embodying that painfully familiar feeling of two people expressing themselves yet failing to truly communicate.As Jupiter’s enraged and scheming wife, Juno, the typically mighty but pleasant mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo seemed to have been handed a part not suited to her voice; but with the sprightly soprano Jessica Niles as Iris, she provided much of the show’s levity, through musical delivery and physical comedy. Charming, as well, was the bass-baritone Philippe Sly, his sound focused and vibrant as Semele’s father, Cadmus, and the drowsy Somnus.Among the smaller roles, Nadezhda Karyazina, as Semele’s sister, Ino, was prone to excessive gesture, but found a touching balance of outward emotion and poise in the climactic scene of her stepping in to marry Athamas.By that point, Guth shows Semele as alive, but so deep in her imagination that she can’t find her way back to reality; rather than reduced to ashes by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, she sits in the wedding hall lifeless as the world goes on around her. Semele may be free from the institution of marriage, but the institution endures without her.It’s a bittersweet ending that comes through persuasively and clearly. In that regard, when it reaches New York, Guth’s staging will be a fitting addition to the Met’s current era of many handsome, cosmetically modern productions. More uncertain, though, is how it will scale from the Prinzregententheater — whose seating capacity barely tops 1,100 — to the 3,800-seat Met, a company in desperate need of a second, smaller house.Semele transforms in the final moments from lifelessness to something like rebirth, suggesting that she may be more of a prophet than a mere dreamer. But the change occurs on her face alone; the question, now, is whether Guth can repeat that subtlety at the Met.SemeleThrough July 25 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich; staatsoper.de. More

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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More