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      Sinead O’Connor, Evocative and Outspoken Singer, Is Dead at 56

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      She broke out with the single “Nothing Compares 2 U,” then caused an uproar a few years later by ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on “S.N.L.”Sinead O’Connor, the outspoken Irish singer-songwriter known for her powerful, evocative voice, as showcased on her biggest hit, a breathtaking rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and for her political provocations onstage and off, has died. She was 56.Her longtime friend Bob Geldof, the Irish musician and activist, confirmed her death, as did her family in a statement, according to the BBC and the Irish public broadcaster RTE.“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead,” the statement said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.” No other details were provided.Recognizable by her shaved head and by wide eyes that could appear pained or full of rage, Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, beginning with the alternative hit “The Lion and the Cobra” in 1987. She went on to sell millions of albums worldwide, breaking out with “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” in 1990.That album, featuring “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a No. 1 hit around the world and an MTV staple, won a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance — although Ms. O’Connor boycotted the ceremony over what she called the show’s excessive commercialism.Ms. O’Connor rarely shrank from controversy, though it often came with consequences for her career.In 1990, she threatened to cancel a performance in New Jersey if “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played at the concert hall ahead of her appearance, drawing the ire of no less than Frank Sinatra. That same year, she backed out of an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in protest of the misogyny she perceived in the comedy of Andrew Dice Clay, who was scheduled to host.But all of that paled in comparison to the uproar caused when Ms. O’Connor, appearing on “S.N.L.” in 1992 — shortly after the release of her third album, “Am I Not Your Girl?” — ended an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s “War” by ripping a photo of Pope John Paul II into pieces as a stance against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. “Fight the real enemy,” she said.That incident immediately made her a target of criticism and scorn, from social conservatives and beyond. Two weeks after her “S.N.L.” appearance, she was loudly booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. (She had planned to perform Mr. Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” but she sang “War” again, rushing off the stage before she had finished.)For a time, the vitriol directed at Ms. O’Connor was so pervasive that it became a kind of pop culture meme in itself. On “S.N.L.” in early 1993, Madonna mocked the controversy by tearing up a picture of Joey Buttafuoco, the Long Island auto mechanic who was a tabloid fixture at the time because of his affair with a 17-year-old girl.Once a rising star, Ms. O’Connor then stumbled. “Am I Not Your Girl?,” an album of jazz and pop standards like “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” was stalled on the charts at No. 27. Her next album, “Universal Mother” (1994), went no higher than No. 36.Kris Kristofferson spoke to Ms. O’Connor after she was booed off the stage during a concert in tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in 1992, shortly after her “Saturday Night Live” appearance.Ron Frehm/Associated PressThe British musician Tim Burgess, of the band Charlatans (known in the United States as the Charlatans UK), wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “Sinead was the true embodiment of a punk spirit. She did not compromise and that made her life more of a struggle.”Ms. O’Connor never had another major hit in the United States after “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” from “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” although for a time she remained a staple on the British charts.But in her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” Ms. O’Connor portrayed ripping up the photo of the pope as a righteous act of protest — and therefore a success.“I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career,” she wrote, “and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”She elaborated in an interview with The New York Times that same year, calling the incident an act of defiance against the constraints of pop stardom.“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” Ms. O’Connor said. “But it was very traumatizing,” she added. “It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”Sinead Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born in Glenageary, a suburb of Dublin, on Dec. 8, 1966. Her father, John, was an engineer, and her mother, Johanna, was a dressmaker.In interviews, and in her memoir, Ms. O’Connor spoke openly of having a traumatic childhood. She said that her mother physically abused her and that she had been deeply affected by her parents’ separation, which happened when she was 8. In her teens, she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to reform schools.Ms. O’Connor at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan in 2013.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesWhen she was 15, Ms. O’Connor sang “Evergreen” — the love theme from “A Star Is Born,” made famous by Barbra Streisand — at a wedding, and was discovered by Paul Byrne, a drummer who had an affiliation with the Irish band U2. She left boarding school at 16 and began her career, supporting herself by waitressing and performing “kiss-o-grams” in a kinky French maid costume.“The Lion and the Cobra” — the title is an allusion to Psalm 91 — marked her as a rising talent with a spiritual heart, an ear for offbeat melody and a fierce and combative style. Her music drew from 1980s-vintage alternative rock, hip-hop and flashes of Celtic folk that came through when her voice raised to high registers.She drew headlines for defending the Irish Republican Army and publicly jeered U2 — whose members had supported her — as “bombastic.” She also said she had rejected attempts by her record company, Ensign, to adopt a more conventional image.The leaders of the label “wanted me to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow my hair,” Ms. O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991. “And I decided that they were so pathetic that I shaved my head so there couldn’t be any further discussion.”“Nothing Compares 2 U” — originally released by the Family, a Prince side project, in 1985 — became a phenomenon when Ms. O’Connor released it five years later. The video for the song, trained closely on her emotive face, was hypnotic, and Ms. O’Connor’s voice, as it raised from delicate, breathy notes to powerful cries, stopped listeners in their tracks. Singers like Alanis Morissette cited Ms. O’Connor’s work from this period as a key influence.Ms. O’Connor in 2021, the year she published a memoir, “Rememberings,” in which she spoke openly of a traumatic childhood. Ellius Grace for The New York TimesNot long after “Nothing Compares” became a hit, Ms. O’Connor accused Prince of physically threatening her. She elaborated on the story in her memoir, saying that Prince, at his Hollywood mansion, chastised her for swearing in interviews and suggested a pillow fight, only to hit her with something hard that was in his pillowcase. She escaped on foot in the middle of the night, she said, but Prince chased her around the highway.The effects of childhood trauma, and finding ways to fight and heal, became a central part of her work and her personal philosophy. “The cause of all the world’s problems, as far as I’m concerned, is child abuse,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin magazine in 1991.Her mother, whom Ms. O’Connor described as an alcoholic, died when she was 18. In her memoir, Ms. O’Connor said that on the day her mother died she took a picture of the pope from her mother’s wall; it was that photo that she destroyed on television.On later albums, she made warmly expansive pop-rock (“Faith and Courage,” 2000), played traditional Irish songs (“Sean-Nós Nua,” 2002) and revisited classic reggae songs (“Throw Down Your Arms,” 2005). Her last album was “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” released in 2014.As her music career slowed, Ms. O’Connor, who had been open in the past about her mental health struggles, became an increasingly erratic public figure, often sharing unfiltered opinions and personal details on social media.In 2007, she revealed on Oprah Winfrey’s television show that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that she had tried to kill herself on her 33rd birthday. Her son Shane died by suicide in 2022, at 17.Ms. O’Connor said in 2012 that she had been misdiagnosed and that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from a history of child abuse. “Recovery from child abuse is a life’s work,” she told People magazine.Several years ago she converted to Islam and started using the name Shuhada Sadaqat, though she continued to answer to O’Connor as well.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Ms. O’Connor had two brothers, Joe and John, and one sister, Eimear, as well as three stepsisters and a stepbrother. She wrote in her memoir that she was married four times and that she had four children: three sons, Jake, Shane and Yeshua, and a daughter, Roisin.In discussing her memoir with The Times in 2021, Ms. O’Connor focused on her decision to tear up the photo of John Paul II as a signal moment in a life of protest and defiance.“The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act,” she said. “It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl.”Alex Traub More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): ‘Barbie,’ Jason Aldean’s Culture War and Drake’s Tour

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and the way in which even anti-corporate dissent has been fully absorbed into corporate brandingA conversation about the way the “Barbie” soundtrack uses contemporary pop stars, and its even more successful deployment of classic hits by Matchbox Twenty and the Indigo GirlsDrake’s current arena tour, his fan-like desire to enjoy Drake hits alongside his audience and his creative versatility, which includes U.K. rap and cringe comedy podcastsThe culture war push behind Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart after a week of controversyThe New York Times’ 50 Rappers, 50 Stories project and its inclusion of Violent J from Insane Clown PosseNew songs by Tanner Adell and Valee featuring Z MoneySnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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      Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at the Bayreuth Festival Experiments With AR

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      Cutting-edge technology has again come to the Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner premiered his final opera with the latest stagecraft in 1882.For Richard Wagner, the latest technology was crucial to staging his operas.In Bayreuth, Germany, where he opened a hilltop theater in 1876 to realize his vision for his works, he promised that “the most up-to-date artistic resources will be used to offer you scenic and theatrical perfection.”That year, the Rhinemaidens at the start of his “Ring” were supported behind the scenes by wheeled machines that made them seem to swim. A projector with prisms tried to create the effect of gods walking across a rainbow. The auditorium was dimmed — unusual at the time — to focus the audience’s attention and enhance the illusions.Nearly 150 years later, cutting-edge technology has come again to Bayreuth: augmented reality, which adds a dense, often impenetrable layer of surreal imagery to Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which opened on Tuesday.Among the many AR images visible through special glasses are motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze.Joshua HiggasonThis medium could hardly be further from the creaky machinery and gas lighting of the 19th century. But the goal is the same as Wagner’s: to create “scenes such as you might imagine had come from an ideal world of dreams.”But there’s a catch.After a squabble within the notoriously squabbling Bayreuth Festival about funding the expensive augmented reality, or AR, glasses, money was allotted for 330 sets in a theater of 1,925 seats.So 83 percent of the audience just experiences the old-fashioned article: Wagner’s operatic mystery play about a young man who ends up redeeming the ailing rituals of a corps of Holy Grail knights, straightforwardly staged and superbly sung, and conducted with muscular solidity by Pablo Heras-Casado. A much smaller group, including critics, gets the glasses, which superimpose on that live staging a crowded AR environment that is constantly in motion.Are the 83 percent missing much?They miss the space between them and the stage seeming to fill with twinkling stars as the soft prelude begins. The bare trees rotating in the ether. The motion-capture outlines of figures walking, embracing and suddenly ablaze. The asteroids. The fly that seems to land on the outside of the AR lenses.Later, the flocks of birds, blood-red globules and spiky strawberries. The slithering snakes and spinning, silently cackling skulls. The blossoming flowers. The arrows, spears, machetes, axes, grenades and severed arms. The forlornly quivering plastic bags and the bounding fox. The rocky ledge that appears to fill the area beneath the seats in the third act.In AR style, the 3-D images don’t move with you as you move your head. Rather, you seem to be able to pan across an environment that surrounds you: not a realistic landscape but a galaxy of disembodied elements floating in the darkness, a free-association, stream-of-consciousness panoply linked, to varying degrees, to the plot.Some of the images’ textures are photorealistic, but most emphasize their computer-generated unreality, their unnatural angles and fake finishes, their eerie weightlessness. The aesthetic — with its collagelike excess of uncanny juxtapositions and its flat affect — evokes the digital art that has sometimes been winkingly called post-internet.Georg Zeppenfeld on the spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi set for Act I, designed by Mimi Lien.Enrico NawrathBut for those wearing the glasses, the union of the production’s AR and live aspects isn’t generally happy. The lenses are tinted, so the live performance looks considerably dimmed, and the staging’s frequent video projections are almost invisibly faint.The AR elements (designed, along with the video, by Joshua Higgason) often block the onstage action, even as those elements are fragmented enough to suggest they are offering a complement to that action, rather than a self-sufficient alternative.However dreamlike, the resulting visual confusion doesn’t convey the hypermaximalist, proudly absurdist overload of Bayreuth productions like Christoph Schlingensief’s 2004 “Parsifal” or Frank Castorf’s 2013 “Ring.” This is because Scheib’s sensibility — in both the virtual and live spheres — is basically plain and direct.When I peeked below the glasses to watch bits of the performance without AR, there was nothing particularly imaginative or illuminating about this “Parsifal.” The first act takes place in a spare, slightly ominous, vaguely sci-fi landscape — the sets were designed by Mimi Lien — with a halo of flashing lights that brings to mind the spaceships of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”These Grail knights wear stylish, contemporary clothes — long tunics, yellow skirts, boldly patterned hoodies — designed by Meentje Nielsen. The sorcerer Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors. After Parsifal destroys the garden, the third act is set in a lonely desert encampment, alongside a machine on the blurry line between war and industry: maybe an earthmover, maybe a tank.The tenor Andreas Schager is tirelessly passionate and convincingly boyish as the guileless Parsifal, and the bass-baritone Derek Welton is mournful yet reserved as Amfortas, the wounded king of the Grail. The bass Georg Zeppenfeld is an elegiac Gurnemanz, who oversees the knights; the baritone Jordan Shanahan, a brooding Klingsor.Klingsor’s enchanted garden in Act II is depicted as a psychedelic pool party in “Barbie” colors.Enrico NawrathThe mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca sounds luxurious — lean yet velvety — as the ambiguous, ambivalent Kundry, cursed to shuttle forever between the realms of Klingsor and the Grail and a role too often screamed. Bayreuth’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich, is, as ever, poised and powerful. On Tuesday, the orchestra didn’t quite bring out the exquisite transparency and delicacy of some important passages, but Heras-Casado’s conducting was vibrant, even-keeled and well-paced.There were a few memorable AR moments. At the end of Act I, a boy in jeans seems to walk through the space, slowly flapping wings attached to his arms — perhaps a melancholy nod to the winged children in Stefan Herheim’s celebrated 2008 “Parsifal” here, just as the dam we seem to be at the bottom of at the start of Act II may be a reference to the hydroelectric plant that opened Patrice Chéreau’s centennial “Ring” at Bayreuth in 1976.Yet there is something bland and empty at the production’s core. It’s not clear what Scheib thinks the nature of the sickness is at the root of this Grail cult, so it’s not clear what Parsifal’s climactic redemption offers. If the final AR image of plastic bags, echoed by one onstage, gestures toward a critique of environmental despoliation, it’s a wan gesture.This means the augmented reality has little profound substance to support, just a jittery desire to stimulate — to ornament and impress — which is just what Wagner didn’t want from stage technology. Scheib’s AR decorations rarely inspire emotion or a sustained sense of wonder: the impression, as Gurnemanz says to Parsifal, of time becoming space.The inadvertent result of all the lavish resources is to prove the superiority of the live over the digital — to keep us sneaking back under our glasses from the augmented real to the really real. The closest parallel in the opera to contemporary technical wizardry is Klingsor’s false garden; it feels rather perverse to extend those artificial seductions to the rest of a piece that’s condemning them.We have come a long way from this opera’s premiere at Bayreuth in 1882, when Gurnemanz and Parsifal stepped in place as a painted backdrop scrolled by, turned by hand on rollers, to create the illusion they were walking. “The simplest of means,” one observer wrote, “had brought about an overwhelming effect.”For all its ambitions and expense, Scheib’s “Parsifal” never overwhelms.ParsifalThrough Aug. 27 at the Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

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      Review: At Mostly Mozart, the Sense of an Ending

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      Louis Langrée, in his last season with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted a classic Langrée program: Mozart and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar.Change is coming for the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and for its longtime music director, Louis Langrée — this month is the beginning of the end of his tenure with the orchestra. When the ensemble appears at Lincoln Center next year it will be with a freshly conceived name, and with the conductor Jonathon Heyward at the helm. (Heyward also leads the orchestra in concerts on Aug. 4 and 5.)So there is a sense of finality hovering over this summer’s offerings, which began last weekend with a free outdoor concert in Damrosch Park. On Tuesday night, Langrée and his players resumed their more typical places in the recently refurbished David Geffen Hall — renovations that kept the festival orchestra out of that theater last year.In remarks before the concert, Langrée warmly recalled his two-decade relationship with the orchestra and with New York audiences. The program was classic Langrée: a substantial world premiere from Amir ElSaffar, a prominent jazz trumpeter and composer, nestled next to the Mass in C minor by Mozart, who, Langrée noted, sometimes looked eastward (as in the “Turkish March” movement of Piano Sonata No. 11).ElSaffar also spoke, telling the audience how his “Dhikra” (“Remembrance”) — inspired by the 20th anniversary of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq — incorporated Western classical instruments from the festival orchestra’s ranks, alongside the players in his Two Rivers ensemble. (Among other instruments, that group features oud, a steel-string lute and an Iraqi hammered dulcimer, as well as ElSaffar’s trumpet, which channels the melodic style of Iraq’s maqam tradition.)The composer Amir ElSaffar, performing in “Dhikra,” his world premiere, on Tuesday.Lawrence SumulongAll cogent and stylistically broad minded as a précis. But “Dhikra” is not on the same exalted level as ElSaffar’s past work for larger groups, particularly as heard on the album “Not Two” (2017). While “Dhikra” contained some passages of wondrous blended sonority, the amplification of ElSaffar’s musicians had the unfortunate effect of making the Mostly Mozart players inaudible, and for long stretches.It began promisingly enough, with Two Rivers players positioned on the stage near Langrée, and with 10 festival orchestra musicians — the only ones participating in this piece — strewn among the audience, one level up from the orchestra. (The conductor often faced the audience, in order to conduct his far-flung orchestral partners.)A convening salvo from ElSaffar’s trumpet — mellow yet mournful — seemed to inspire droning notes in the strings that gradually flowered into plucked passages that ricocheted across the hall. And when fervid motifs for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn — all positioned at the back of the house — mingled with gentle notes from the Two Rivers bassist onstage, there was a glorious sense of collective blooming.But this was not to last. The orchestral players soon left their stations in the audience, gradually reappearing onstage. And it was there that the amplified nature of Two Rivers tended to swamp ElSaffar’s writing for his Mostly Mozart collaborators. (It was sad to see the violinist Ruggero Allifranchini sawing away with abandon, at a climactic moment, and not be able to hear his contributions over the Two Rivers rhythm section.)Some of this might be improved with slight tweaks to the levels on the Geffen Hall mixer. But some of the balance problems may be baked into the piece as written; 10 musicians is not a significant enough portion of an orchestra to graft onto a group as potent as Two Rivers.After intermission, audiences got to feel the full force of the festival orchestra in Mozart’s Mass in C minor. Also on hand were a quartet of vocal soloists — including the soprano Erin Morley — and a double chorus (well drilled by the director Malcolm J. Merriweather).Following his own edition of Mozart’s unfinished score, Langrée managed to inject an airy, delicate sense of bounce into the gravity of the Kyrie. Taken too sternly, the Mass sounds overindebted to Bach. Taken too lightly, you skate around the profundity of the work. Langrée found the right balance throughout. And he had a star turn from Morley, when it came to a showstopping “Et Incarnatus Est” aria, in the Credo.Change, for this festival and for classical music on the whole, is inevitable. But this Mass was a reminder of the wonders that should be carefully shepherded going forward. After Langrée departs, it will be important for the leaders of this orchestra — whatever it’s called — to continue to balance interpretations of this high order and taking big swings with artists on the level of ElSaffar.Mostly MozartProgram repeats Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org. More

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      In Rare Move, Japanese Pop Star Comes Out Publicly as Gay

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      “I don’t want people to struggle like me,” said Shinjiro Atae, making an announcement that is extremely unusual in conservative Japan.At first, there was total silence. Then, there were shrieks, wild applause, weeping and shouts of “I love you!”Fans of Shinjiro Atae, a J-pop idol who has been on a nearly two-year performance hiatus, had come to hear him talk about “the challenge of my life.” Standing onstage in a dark auditorium in front of 2,000 fans in central Tokyo on Wednesday night, he revealed something he has kept hidden for most of his life: He is gay.“I respect you and believe you deserve to hear this directly from me,” he said, reading from a letter he had prepared. “For years, I struggled to accept a part of myself. But now, after all I have been through, I finally have the courage to open up to you about something. I am a gay man.”Such an announcement is extremely unusual in conservative Japan, the only G7 country that has not legalized same-sex unions. Earlier this summer, the Japanese Parliament passed an L.G.B.T.Q rights bill but it had been watered down by the political right, stating that there “should be no unfair discrimination” against gay and transgender people.In making a public declaration, Mr. Atae, who spent two decades performing with AAA, a hit Japanese pop group, before embarking on a solo career, said he wanted his fans to know his true self. He also hopes to comfort those who might be grappling with anxieties about their sexuality.“I don’t want people to struggle like me,” he said.Activists said they could not recall an instance when a Japanese pop star of his stature had publicly declared they were gay, because of anxieties about losing fans or sponsors.“I think he has decided to come out in order to change Japan,” said Gon Matsunaka, a director and adviser to Pride House Tokyo, a support center for the gay and transgender community.Mr. Atae, who began dancing with AAA when he was just 14, said he has been preparing for — and fearing — this public coming-out for years.For most of his performing life, “I thought if I was found out it would end my career, and so I couldn’t tell anyone,” said Mr. Atae during an hour-and-a-half interview the day before his announcement at the apartment of his elder sister in western Tokyo, where he sat on a lime green straw mat in a gray T-shirt and baggy black faux leather shorts.Mr. Atae with his stylist and makeup artist during an interview in Tokyo on Tuesday.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesThe decision to open up about his sexuality, he said, evolved over seven years of living in Los Angeles, where he saw how freely gay couples could show affection in public and built an extensive support network.“Everyone was so open,” he said. “People would talk about their vulnerabilities. In Japan, people think it’s best not to talk about those things.”Gay and transgender performers who regularly appear on television do not talk explicitly about their sexuality.“Japanese society is not a place where people strictly state their sexuality,” said Satoshi Masuda, a researcher specializing in Japanese popular music at Osaka Metropolitan University. “Rather, it naturally comes to be known.”Mr. Atae, the youngest of three children, grew up in a town between Kyoto and Osaka.His mother insisted that he play baseball until the end of elementary school. Sticking with it, she told him, would teach him “gaman” — the Japanese word for endurance.When he discovered a local hip-hop dance studio, the discipline became an instant passion. “I just thought: ‘This is it,’” he said.His instructors encouraged him to try out for a new pop group. On a lark, he sent in a résumé and auditioned by video though he was still in middle school. After two weeks of training in dance, singing and acting in Tokyo, Mr. Atae was selected by the management company, Avex, as one of eight initial band members.AAA debuted in 2005, with Mr. Atae, the youngest member, forgoing high school. He performed mostly as a dancer, and began appearing in TV series and movies.His sexuality perplexed him. “It was a time when on TV, comedians would say two men kissing was gross,” he said. If anyone asked if he had a girlfriend, he just said he was too busy working.AAA rapidly scored with fans, eventually recording eight top 10 hits on Billboard Japan’s Top 100 chart. But as Mr. Atae wrote in a memoir, “Every Life Is Correct, But Incorrect,” published last year, “my mental state was in shambles.” He said he spent a period with AAA “stuck in a marsh of negative thinking,” frustrated that he was not as well known as other band members.What he left out was that he was terrified that a gossip magazine or fans would discover he was gay.Mr. Atae in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, where he used to perform at the beginning of his career.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesIn 2016, as some of the members of AAA embarked on solo acts, Mr. Atae moved to Los Angeles, where he attended entertainment business classes and studied English on his own.But when he visited neighborhoods popular with the L.G.B.T.Q. community, he ran into Japanese tourists and expats, and feared someone might leak a photo of him at a gay club or out with a male date.“I thought, everything is over,” he said. Then the long-ago baseball lessons from his mother kicked in. “I thought there had to be a way,” he said.Gradually, Mr. Atae made friends he could trust with his secret. He began to plan his public revelation.He would have to tell his family, his mother first. “It was the most nervous I have ever been in coming out,” he said.“I was super surprised, and I had never imagined it,” said his mother, Suzuko, 66, who asked to keep her surname private to avoid harassment.Although she supported her son personally, she balked when he said he wanted to go public. She was anxious about Mr. Atae facing online attacks or discrimination. Now, she said, “I am 200 percent supportive.”On Wednesday night, his mother sat in the back row of the auditorium, across the aisle from her two other children and their families, crying as he broke down sobbing as he told the audience that he once “thought my feelings were wrong.”Even as Mr. Atae started recording solo songs with lyrics like “Pretty girl, I still adore you,” he had started telling more people about his sexuality. His solo career has been modest, with no chart-topping hits.To his friends, the news was often a surprise. But many, including fellow band members from AAA, showed up on Wednesday to cheer him on. “The word ‘diversity’ started becoming more common, but how to take in that word is still a very difficult issue in Japan,” said Misako Uno, 37, a AAA member, in a backstage interview. “I want to be a good cushion” for him.Writing his memoir, Mr. Atae said, was a way to soft-pedal his eventual announcement to fans.“I figured it was not a good idea to just suddenly say ‘I am gay,’” he said.Mr. Atae’s decision, he said, was not political. All he wanted, he said, was to “normalize” being gay.On the day before his announcement, a stylist, a makeup artist, a publicist and several assistants trailed Mr. Atae during a photo shoot where he wore a Céline shirt and John Lawrence Sullivan trousers. He seemed relaxed, despite repeating how nervous he felt.Coming out, he knew, would likely draw criticism. “Whatever you do, there will be haters,” he said. “I can only focus on the people I might be helping.”After the announcement on Wednesday night, Miku Tada, 23, an art student in Tokyo, said her heart broke to think of how Mr. Atae had “struggled on his own.” But now, she said, “I think that he can have a lot of influence on other kids who may be feeling the same way.”Reiko Uchida, 43, a housewife from Saitama, a suburb outside Tokyo, said that normally, she would be taken aback if someone told her they were gay or lesbian. But with Mr. Atae, she said, “I see him as someone whose personality I like and a person that I respect.”The evening closed with a music video broadcast of Mr. Atae’s single, “Into the Light”:“I spent so long being these versions of myself/I forgot who I was, I was somebody else/You give me something I’ve been missing my whole life/I’m coming into the light.” More

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      Britpop’s Back. But What Happened to Cool Britannia?

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      Some of the biggest ’90s bands are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals abroad. Yet Britpop’s swaggering sense of national self-belief feels like a distant memory.In 1994, Luis Chuva was 14 and on summer vacation at his grandparents’ home in Costa Nova, Portugal, when, one Saturday, he glimpsed something on TV that changed his life: a music video for “Girls and Boys,” by the British band Blur.Onscreen, Blur’s singer, Damon Albarn, dressed in a track jacket and wearing a hint of eyeliner, glanced seductively at the camera, and then launched into an upbeat song about British tourists on promiscuous, beer-fueled Mediterranean holidays.The swaggering track couldn’t have been further from Chuva’s simple teenage life: It featured Albarn singing in a regional British accent about “Girls who want boys / Who like boys to be girls.” But Chuva recalled in a recent interview that he “was hypnotized.”Damon Albarn in the 1994 music video for Blur’s “Girls and Boys.”Soon, the teenager was scouring Portuguese music magazines to find out everything he could about Blur and the other so-called Britpop bands, which included Pulp, Suede (known as the London Suede in the United States) and Oasis. He taped their songs off the radio. He got hold of bootleg tapes of their concerts, which he dreamed of attending.And Chuva made a decision: At the first opportunity, he would move to London. Viewed from sleepy ’90s Portugal, Britain looked optimistic, exciting, colorful. “It just felt like the place to be,” he said.Now 44, Chuva has lived in London for almost two decades, and, this summer, he’s busy — because Britpop is back. Some 30 years after the genre emerged, paving the way for the wider phenomenon known as Cool Britannia, some of its biggest acts are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals from Mexico to Japan.This month, Blur released “The Ballad of Darren,” the group’s first album in eight years, and played two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium, a London soccer venue that can seat 90,000 people. Chuva went to both concerts.Pulp, another Britpop mainstay, has also re-formed for a major tour. (Chuva saw them, too.) There was even chatter about a potential Oasis reunion — although Noel and Liam Gallagher, the brothers at the heart of that boisterous rock group, quickly knocked the idea back, pointing out on separate radio shows that they don’t talk to each other.Wembley Stadium, where Blur performed their London shows, holds 90,000 people.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe comebacks have received euphoric reviews, but they are occurring at a starkly different moment for British pop music, compared with the ’90s. Although Britpop never reached the same heights of popularity in the United States that it did in Australia, Canada, Japan and continental Europe, it coincided with a high point for British soft power. In 1996 Newsweek declared London the world’s coolest city. In 1997, Vanity Fair devoted 25 pages to the bands, artists, chefs and designers making Britain “the place we must all look to.” The same year, The New Yorker called Britain’s music scene “a scary paradise.”Today, however, neither British nor global news media are portraying Britain as the musical place to be — despite it giving the world current stars like Ed Sheeran, Adele and Harry Styles. Instead, news articles about the country’s music scene are more likely to touch on venues shuttering — at a rate of one a week this year, according to the nonprofit Music Venue Trust — or the country’s bands, DJs and rappers struggling to tour abroad after Brexit brought in a tangle of red tape. Local news outlets have also lamented the British government’s cuts to arts funding, and warned about the decline of music teaching in schools.Sitting in his West London recording studio recently, Albarn said some things hadn’t changed since Britpop’s heyday. He was still “completely obsessed with this country,” he said, and writing songs with lyrics that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.”But there were also big differences, he added. He was now 55, and wore knee supports onstage. And the challenges facing the country’s pipeline of musical stars were clear: “The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” he said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Chuva, the Portuguese music fan, said he felt a change, too — not just in Britain’s music, but in the national mood. “The weather here’s always been gray,” he said. “Now everything is.”Damon Albarn said he was still “completely obsessed” with Britain, and still wrote songs that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.” Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBut there were challenges to the country’s pipeline of musical stars, Albarn said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” Albarn said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe emergence in the early 1990s of Britpop — a catchall term for almost any guitar music that came out of Britain at the time — was, in many ways, a reaction to America. At the end of 1992, Blur traveled to the United States for a 44-date tour, only to find a country gripped by grunge music and indifferent to the band’s danceable indie charms.Not long after British journalists labeled the style “Britpop,” and highlighted its rejection of American tastes, it became a pop juggernaut in Britain, with bands vying to top the country’s pop charts.Blur’s music seemed to typify the genre, with cheeky singles about life in modern England. But it quickly expanded to include a variety of acts, including Elastica — a sneeringly cool punk-influenced band — and the anthemic Oasis. Each had different ideas about Britishness, but they all seemed united in a swaggering sense of self-belief.The crowd at a Blur gig, in London, in July. The audience included new and old fans.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesSeveral of the bands were depicted with the Union Jack flag on magazine covers, and happy to deploy it in their visuals. Among them was Sonya Madan, the lead singer of Echobelly, who was born in India and moved to Britain as a child. She once appeared in a music video wearing a Union Jack T-shirt with the phrase “My Country Too” scrawled on it. “It was such a positive explosion,” she said in a recent interview, “with people exploring their self-identity and having this positivity about being British.”And it didn’t take long for Britain’s politicians to see an opportunity. In 1995, Tony Blair, then the leader of the opposition Labour Party, invited Albarn for a meeting in the Houses of Parliament. Over gin and tonics, Blair and a spin doctor peppered the singer with queries. They included, Albarn said: “What do you think young people are looking for in their governance?”“I didn’t understand,” Albarn recalled. “I’d just thought he wanted to meet me.”Two years later, when Blair became prime minister, Albarn turned down an invitation to a drinks reception for British cultural figures at 10 Downing Street, having decided that the new government was just using musicians for a photo opportunity.Some fans wore throwback British fashions including bucket hats. A handful even draped themselves in the Union Jack.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesLuis Chuva, a Portuguese Blur fan who relocated to London in the ’90s and still lives there. He attended both Blur gigs.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBlur’s latest album, “The Ballad of Darren,” is named for their former bodyguard. At a Wembley show this month, fans wore masks bearing Darren “Smoggy” Evans’s face.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIf Britpop made Britain feel good about itself, it also made people abroad feel positive about Britain.Derek Miller, a 46-year-old American actor, said in an interview that he became “immediately smitten” with Blur when he heard them as a teenager in Chicago. The music didn’t have the machismo of American rock, he said. “There was something about it that was just fun.”While studying at Indiana University Bloomington, he met other Britpop obsessives. (The college radio station had a Britpop show, and the presenter was prone to speaking in a fake British accent, Miller said.) After graduation he moved to Britain. He now lives in Yorkshire, in northern England, and has a son named Jarvis, after the Pulp lead singer.In recent interviews, a dozen other non-British Britpop fans offered similar tales. Jess Mo said that, at age 18, she moved to London from a village of “literally five houses” on an island off the coast of Sweden, because of her love of Blur. Anne-Sophie Marsh, a Frenchwoman, said she wrote to Pulp’s fan club for advice on what British college to study at, and then moved to the city of Brighton.Blur played hits including “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesMost expert interviewees for this article — musicians, academics and journalists — said they felt that Britain’s music scene was today less likely to draw fans to the country. Their reasons didn’t involve the quality of British music. Albarn said some of Britain’s younger, ever-online music stars were writing songs filled with such “universal references” that fans may not even realize they were British. That applied to his own group Gorillaz, too, he said. “I don’t think there’s any sense of it being English,” he said. “They think it’s American in America,” he added. “I think in England they think it’s American, too.”The only interviewee who didn’t seem downbeat about the prospects of Britain’s musical influence was an American, but one who knows a lot about soft power. Joseph Nye is a political scientist and a former Pentagon official, who in the late 1980s pioneered the idea that countries don’t need to use force to get what they want, but can achieve influence by building popular affinity. By phone, Nye said that, at first glance, it did seem Britain’s musical star was waning. “I hear a lot about K-pop,” he said of Korean artists like BTS. “I don’t hear much about Britpop.”But, he added, people would still be listening to touchstone British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles for decades to come. It almost doesn’t matter what Britpop’s legacy was; the country remains a cultural powerhouse by virtue of its earlier history. “I’m not saying Britain can rest on its laurels forever,” Nye said. “But laurels don’t wither.”A Times reporter at the show spoke to fans from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesAt one of Blur’s recent homecoming shows at Wembley Stadium, fans had begun lining up outside long before the scheduled showtime. Nye seemed to have a point. Many wore Blur T-shirts. Others were dressed in throwback British fashions, including bucket hats and Fred Perry polo shirts. Few of those die-hard supporters were British. Instead, they said, they were from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France, and many had flown over especially for the concert. Chuva, the Portuguese fan, was among them in the line.A few hours later, Chuva was at the front as Blur played hits like “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain — and his teenage favorite, “Girls and Boys.” As the band finished with “The Universal” — a euphoric song from 1995 — Albarn put his hands on his knees, emotionally and physically spent.It was a “truly special” evening, Chuva said. He just hoped the band’s aging members hadn’t exhausted themselves. He had tickets for the next day’s gig, too.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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      An Exclamatory Playlist!

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      Wham! Neu! “Oh! Darling” and more artists and songs that make a statement.George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in “Wham!”NetflixDear listeners,If you’re looking for something light, fun and full of ridiculous ’80s fashion, I can’t recommend the new Netflix documentary about the pop group Wham! enough — it’s basically the documentary equivalent of a beach read.As someone who wasn’t around for Wham!’s heyday, the movie allowed me to live vicariously through its rise and appreciate things about Wham! I’d never considered before. Like how confident a producer and songwriter George Michael was from a young age. And also that Michael and his immaculately coifed bandmate Andrew Ridgeley really knew how and when to break up a band. They announced their imminent demise in 1986, and then played one epic final show at Wembley Stadium. “Wham! was never going to be middle-aged,” Ridgeley says in the movie, “or be anything other than an essential and pure representation of us as youths.”That sentiment made me realize how uncommonly perfect a band name Wham! was for this group. Goofy, youthful, monosyllabic, here-for-a-good-time-but-not-a-long-time and above all things — exclamatory! Adults, “serious musicians,” newspaper style guidelines: All of them tell you that exclamation points should be used sparingly. Wham! was having none of that. The duo said, “We’re going to make you write or speak an exclamation mark every time you use our name.”It got me thinking about the art of using exclamation marks in band names and song titles. Which, of course, calls for a playlist.Sometimes the musical exclamation point almost mimics percussion: “Turn! Turn! Turn!” or “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” Sometimes it helps you hear the voice of a particularly emotive singer, as I can only hear the phrase “Everybody Wants Some!!” in David Lee Roth’s wail. But more often than not, the musical exclamation point is simply a way to raise the stakes, to indicate (at the risk of overcompensating) that there is something ecstatic about the sound that accompanies it.Like Wham!, I’ll now make my graceful exit. All that’s left to say: Listen up!Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Wham!: “Everything She Wants”This is one of my favorite Wham! songs, perhaps because it sounds, uncharacteristically, a little sinister. As my colleague Wesley Morris put it in his great review of “Wham!,” “there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Abba: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Famously sampled in Madonna’s 2005 dance-floor reinvention “Hung Up,” this lusty 1979 Abba classic also boasts some excellent parentheses use. (Listen on YouTube)3. Van Halen: “Everybody Wants Some!!”A double exclamation point? That’s bold. Then again, Eddie Van Halen’s solo in the middle of this 1980 track is, like any Eddie Van Halen solo, basically the sonic equivalent of a double exclamation mark. When Richard Linklater paid homage to this song by naming his (hilarious) 2016 movie “Everybody Wants Some!!,” he knew enough to honor the band’s punctuation. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Beatles: “Oh! Darling”The Beatles certainly knew how to employ the exclamation point: “Help!,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” and, if you expand the framework to their solo careers, John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” I love the first-syllable exclamation in “Oh! Darling,” though: Its clipped agony contrasts with the way Paul McCartney stretches out that “daaaarling” and effectively captures the raw-throated desperation of his vocal. (Listen on YouTube)5. The Byrds: “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”I confess that this song — and the Byrds’ lush, fluid delivery of that titular phrase — never really screamed “exclamation” to me. But given that it was written by Pete Seeger and known as a quiet folk ballad before the Byrds made it a No. 1 hit in 1965, those three typographical lightning strikes, though present in Seeger’s original title, now convey the excitement of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” gone electric. (Listen on YouTube)6. Sly and the Family Stone: “Stand!”Also the name of Sly and the Family Stone’s great 1969 album, “Stand!” is a command, an invitation and a call to action, bringing the listener right into the reality of the song. Its punctuation also effectively communicates the energy of the track’s ever-ascending chorus and frenzied, gospel-influenced final section. (Listen on YouTube)7. Los Campesinos!: “You! Me! Dancing!”There was a coy, sometimes run-on exuberance about many indie bands in the aughts, though few encapsulated that as expressively as the Welsh group Los Campesinos! Bonus points, of course, for exclamation points in the band name and song title! (Listen on YouTube)8. Neu!: “Hero”The name of the legendary krautrock group Neu! — German for “New!” — was, in a sense, a sendup of the consumer culture pervading the band’s Düsseldorf home in the early 1970s. As the wildly influential drummer Klaus Dinger said in a 2001 interview with The Wire, “‘Neu!’ at that time was the strongest word in advertising.” (Listen on YouTube)9. George Michael: “Freedom! (‘90)”In 1984, Wham! released a bright, buoyant single called “Freedom.” Michael chose to revisit that title — though now with a time-stamp, and an exclamation! — for this hit from his second solo album, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.” The lyrics revisit the image he cultivated back in those Wham! days, and reject it in favor of something truer to Michael’s authentic self: “Today the way I play the game is not the same, no way,” he sang. “Think I’m gonna get myself happy.” The exclamation mark sells it: This song was Michael’s liberation. (Listen on YouTube)Gotta have some faith in the sound,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“An Exclamatory Playlist!” track listTrack 1: Wham!, “Everything She Wants”Track 2: Abba, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Track 3: Van Halen, “Everybody Wants Some!!”Track 4: The Beatles, “Oh! Darling”Track 5: The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”Track 6: Sly and the Family Stone, “Stand!”Track 7: Los Campesinos!, “You! Me! Dancing!”Track 8: Neu!, “Hero”Track 9: George Michael, “Freedom! (’90)”Bonus tracksRIP Tony Bennett, who was such a musical institution that part of me thought he might actually live forever. Rob Tanenbaum put together a playlist of 10 of his best-known songs, and Jon Pareles wrote a lovely appraisal that begins with quite a musical brainteaser: “Has there ever been a more purely likable pop figure than Tony Bennett?” I’m still mulling it over. More

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      Jason Aldean’s ‘Try That in a Small Town’ Charts at No. 2

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      “Try That in a Small Town” went from overlooked to almost topping the charts after a week of controversy.In May, the country star Jason Aldean released a single, “Try That in a Small Town,” with lyrics that paint contemporary urban life as a hellscape of crime and anarchy: “Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk/Carjack an old lady at a red light.”“You think you’re tough,” Aldean sings. “Well, try that in a small town.”Initially, the track got relatively little notice, landing at No. 35 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. That changed last week, after the song’s music video became a culture-war battlefield, with some accusing Aldean — one of country’s biggest hitmakers for nearly two decades — of employing racist dog-whistle tactics and the singer defending himself as the latest victim of an out-of-control “cancel culture.”The controversy led to a rush on Aldean’s song, with both streams and downloads exploding over the course of last week. “Try That in a Small Town” makes its debut at No. 2 on the Hot 100, Aldean’s best showing ever on Billboard’s all-genre pop chart, beating current hits by Olivia Rodrigo and Morgan Wallen. Aldean was surpassed this week only by Jung Kook of the South Korean supergroup BTS, whose debut solo single, “Seven,” opens at No. 1.The video for “Try That,” released on July 14, opens with Aldean performing before a stately building draped with an American flag; the structure was quickly identified as Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., where in 1927 a young Black man named Henry Choate was lynched by a vigilante mob after being accused — falsely, historians believe — of raping a white girl.The video features one montage after another of violent street protests, robberies and people antagonizing police officers in riot gear. Those scenes are juxtaposed with images of American flags being hoisted, children playing and what appears to be a television news segment about farmers helping out a neighbor.Three days after it was released, the video was pulled from rotation on Country Music Television, without explanation. But it has been widely criticized as a thinly veiled attack on the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.Justin Jones, a Tennessee state representative, wrote on Twitter that lawmakers “have an obligation to condemn Jason Aldean’s heinous song calling for racist violence. What a shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism.”Aldean, 46, has denied that race plays any part in the lyrics, or that “Try That” is a “pro-lynching song,” saying on social media, “These references are not only meritless, but dangerous.”Some artists came to his defense, including the country singer Cody Johnson, who said at a concert, “If being patriotic makes you an outlaw, then by God, I’ll be an outlaw.” Ted Nugent, who relishes any scuffle with liberals, said on Fox News, “The idiots hate this Jason Aldean song because they hate when we push back against violence.”At a concert in Cincinnati on Friday, Aldean was defiant. “Cancel culture is a thing,” he told the crowd at the Riverbend Music Center. “It’s something where if people don’t like what you say, they try and make sure they can cancel you, which means try to ruin your life, ruin everything.”“What I am is a proud American,” he added. “I love our country, I want to see it restored to what it once was before all this [expletive] started happening to us.” Chants of “U.S.A.” rang out in the amphitheater.Aldean is no stranger to controversy. In the past he has appeared in blackface for a Halloween costume and worn T-shirts onstage with the Confederate battle flag.As the debate over “Try That in a Small Town” boiled last week, the song’s consumption metrics spiked. According to Billboard, when the video was released the track had been getting about 1,000 download sales and 200,000 streams a day in the United States. But it closed the week with 228,000 sales — up more than 27,000 percent from the week before — and 11.6 million streams, according to data from the tracking service Luminate.While Aldean has long posted country hits, “Try That” is his first song to crack the Top 10 of the mainstream Hot 100 chart since 2011, when “Dirt Road Anthem” went to No. 7. (Aldean’s last single, “That’s What Tequila Does,” peaked at No. 77 earlier this year.)Jung Kook’s “Seven,” featuring Latto, opened at No. 1 on the singles chart with 21.9 million streams, 153,000 sales — as downloads and CD singles — and a radio audience of 6.4 million in the United States.On the latest album chart, Taylor Swift holds at No. 1 for a second week with “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” which had the equivalent of 121,000 sales in the United States, including 96 million streams and 47,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to Luminate. It is the third entry in Swift’s project to rerecord her first six albums, and each has gone to No. 1.Swift has three other albums in the Top 10: “Midnights,” her last studio album, is No. 4, “Lover” is No. 6 and “Folklore” is No. 10.Wallen’s latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” holds at No. 2, while his previous LP, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is No. 5. “Génesis,” by the Mexican songwriter Peso Pluma, is in third place. More