Music

The trio expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the 1980s and ’90s, but its early experiments with sampling led to legal troubles, and the group’s longtime exclusion from streaming.David Jolicoeur of De La Soul, the rap trio that expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early ’90s with eclectic samples and offbeat humor, becoming MTV staples and cult heroes of the genre, died on Sunday. He was 54.His death was confirmed by the group’s publicist, Tony Ferguson, who did not specify a cause or say where Mr. Jolicoeur was when he died. In recent years, Mr. Jolicoeur has openly discussed a struggle with congestive heart failure, including in a music video for the group’s song “Royalty Capes.”De La Soul arrived with the album “3 Feet High and Rising” in 1989, a time when hip-hop was still relatively new to the mainstream. The genre’s public face was often confrontational, with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A speaking out about the racism, police violence and neglect faced by Black communities in America.By contrast, De La Soul — three middle-class young men from Long Island — presented themselves with hippie floral designs and a music video set in a high school for their song “Me Myself and I.” The group wore baggy, brightly colored clothes, to the sneers and side-eyeing of their classmates in gold chains, black shades and matching B-boy outfits.Mr. Jolicoeur — whose original stage name in the group was Trugoy the Dove, though he was also known as Plug Two, Dove and later, just Dave — had the first lines of the track, riffing on a fairy tale. “Mirror mirror on the wall/Tell me mirror, what is wrong?” he rapped. “Can it be my De La clothes/Or is it just my De La song?”That album, with singles also including “Say No Go” and “Eye Know,” reached only as high as No. 24 on the Billboard 200 chart, but it was an instant classic that pointed to new directions in hip-hop. Later albums included “De La Soul Is Dead” (1991), “Buhloone Mindstate” (1993) and “Stakes Is High” (1996).With its producer, Prince Paul, the group developed an idiosyncratic and freewheeling style of sampling that brought new textures to hip-hop. “3 Feet High” contained pieces of more than 60 other recordings, including not only Funkadelic and Ohio Players grooves — de rigueur in 1980s rap — but also oddities like sounds from old TV shows and recordings of French language lessons.But legal problems related to its samples became the bane of the group. One sample, of the Turtles’ organ-driven psychedelic pop track “You Showed Me” (1968), had not been cleared properly, and the Turtles sued; the case was settled out of court.Ongoing legal problems with sample clearances prevented the group from releasing its music in digital form, which effectively blocked the trio from music’s most important marketplace in the 21st century. Recently, the group finally cleared those samples and was gearing up to release its music in digital form in March.The group’s lighthearted style — whimsical in-jokes, and lyrics that could be irreverent or earnest — delighted fans and captivated critics. It was one of the first in hip-hop to cross over to the collegiate crowd, and took on the reputation of “thinking-person’s hip-hoppers,” as the critic Greg Tate put it in a review of “Buhloone Mindstate” in The New York Times.“With irreverence and imagination,” Mr. Tate wrote, “De La Soul has dared to go where few hip-hop acts would follow, rejecting Five Percenter polemics and gangster rap for reflections on an array of topics: ecology, crack-addicted infants, Black suburbia, roller-skating, harassment by fans, male sexual anxiety and even gardening as a hip-hop metaphor.”Mr. Jolicoeur distilled the group’s worldview into a few lines in “Me Myself and I”: Write is wrong when hype is writtenOn the Soul, De La that isStyle is surely our own thingNot the false disguise of showbizDavid Jolicoeur was born on Sept. 21, 1968, in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island with his family as a child.In Amityville, N.Y., Mr. Jolicoeur joined with high school friends Kelvin Mercer, known as Posdnuos, and Vincent Mason, or Maseo, to form De La Soul. The group’s demo for “Plug Tunin’,” which later appeared remixed on “3 Feet High and Rising,” caught the attention of Prince Paul, the D.J. of the group Stetsasonic, who was then quickly establishing himself as one of the most gifted producers in rap. Their collaboration introduced the abstract, alternative hip-hop it would become known for.“Every last poem is recited at noon,” Mr. Jolicoeur rapped as Trugoy — yogurt backward, for a preferred food. “Focus is set, let your Polaroids click/As they capture the essence of a naughty noise called/Plug Tunin’.”The trio honed its sound and comedic stage presence at school concerts and parties at a space it called “the dugout,” on Dixon Avenue in Amityville. Proudly repping “Strong Island,” De La Soul noted that its proximity to New York City allowed it to keep an eye on the hip-hop stronghold, while the suburbs gave it space to grow and learn.“The island has given us the opportunity to see more things,” Mr. Jolicoeur told The New York Times in 2000. “It broadened our horizons.” He added, “We had the opportunity to soak in a lot more. And that’s why we are who we are today.”De La Soul went on to lead what was known as the Native Tongues, a loose collective of outsider hip-hop groups like A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers, which influenced artists like Mos Def and Common.In addition to sampling, De La Soul was formative in the incorporation of skits — spoken dialogue between tracks — on its albums. In a live review from 1989, the Times critic Peter Watrous wrote that the group “seemed on the verge of inventing a new type of performance — part talk show, part rap concert — where their funny conversations and routines were as important as their raps, even if the funniest lines were accusations about Trugoy’s status as a virgin.”The group’s absence from digital services kept it from reaching new audiences for years.“We’re in the Library of Congress, but we’re not on iTunes,” Mr. Mercer told The Times in 2016. Two years earlier, in frustration, the group gave away virtually all of its work, releasing it online to fans at no charge. Its 2016 album, “And the Anonymous Nobody,” was financed by a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $600,000. The album was largely sample-free.Still, the group retained a strong following among fans and fellow artists. In 2005, De La Soul was featured on “Feel Good Inc.,” a hit by Gorillaz, the multimedia project created by the British singer-songwriter Damon Albarn and the visual artist Jamie Hewlett. Mr. Jolicoeur co-wrote the song with Mr. Albarn. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and No. 14 in the United States.In the group’s interview with The Times in 2016, Mr. Jolicoeur spoke about the urgency the trio felt about getting its older work back before the public.“This music has to be addressed and released,” he said. “It has to. When? We’ll see. But somewhere it’s going to happen.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. More

Karol G, a global pop star from Colombia, said she wrote 60 songs, maybe more, for her new album, “Mañana Será Bonito” (“Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful”); eventually she winnowed them down to 17.The first ones, she recalled in a video chat from Medellín, Colombia, were full of “anger, sadness, bad love, toxic relationships.” They reflected the fallout of her 2021 breakup with the Puerto Rican rapper and singer Anuel AA, after the end of a romance they had made public with a 2019 duet, “Secreto,” that has since been streamed more than a billion times.Karol G, 32, wrote about feeling betrayed, about temptations and doubts, about partying away the pain, about no-strings sex with an ex. But eventually, she found herself writing wary love songs and counting her blessings. Just a few weeks before the album’s Feb. 24 release, she was wondering if she had been too candid.“I’m being really open with this album, and that gets me a little bit scared, because I’m not a perfect human,” she said from her office in her hometown, where she had just returned to meet her sister’s newborn.Karol G, born Carolina Giraldo Navarro, was wearing an oversized white hoodie, one of 100 that she has decorated by hand for a limited-edition merch sale. Her hair, which has changed color for each album and tour cycle — with her fans attending concerts in matching wigs — was the bold red she unveiled in recent videos.“The album is more Carolina than Karol G,” she said. “Personal things that I had inside me, I was just letting them go in my lyrics. People are going to know about a lot of my personal life with my songs. But I don’t want to have the songs inside me anymore, because I know people can heal a lot of things with music. Writing songs for me is a really good way to heal things that I can’t explain.”Instead of reggaeton’s machismo, Karol G offers cheerful, forthrightly sex-positive femininity.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesShe admitted to prerelease jitters. “Right now, I notice that artists are trying very hard to find a concept, to be very experimental,” she said. “I love that. And that’s a good way to do art. But the concept of this album is just me being me. I really didn’t want people to feel it was like very simple, or just normal. But then we put up the announcement of my album, and there’s already more than 80 million views on Instagram. Now I’m stressed because I think that expectations are very high.”“Mañana Será Bonito” is primed to be a blockbuster in the wake of Karol G’s 2021 album, “KG0516.” That LP included her billion-streaming 2019 collaboration with Nicki Minaj, “Tusa,” and her self-mythologizing 2020 “Bichota,” a word Karol G coined to turn “bichote” — Puerto Rican slang for a drug kingpin — into a feminine noun for, as she says, “a boss bitch,” a sexy and powerful woman.Her new slang caught on. “‘Bichota’ became a movement,” she said. “Las bichotas don’t cry, las bichotas work for themselves, las bichotas are big, las bichotas are strong, las bichotas can do everything. Everybody can have good songs, everybody can have a moment. But to have a movement, it’s a different thing to find. And I think it’s something that you don’t find if you’re looking for it.”Karol G played the main stage of Coachella in 2022, pointedly including a medley of worldwide hits in Spanish from acts who had never performed at the festival, including Selena, Ricky Martin, Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Shakira. “It was special for me to say with my show, I’m here now and I feel really proud,” she said. “But I have to say that I’m here because of this music that opened those doors for us to be here.”The core of Karol G’s music is the loping beat of reggaeton. But her songs replace the genre’s usual rapping with inviting pop melodies, delivered in her clear, teasing voice. Instead of reggaeton’s machismo, she offers cheerful, forthrightly sex-positive femininity.With each album, Karol G has also reached beyond reggaeton to collaborate with an international array of guests — a sign of Latin pop’s ever-expanding, border-crossing possibilities. “Right now is a really special moment with Latin music,” she said, “because everybody in the world is like, ‘I don’t care if I know the words or not,’ but they connect with our sounds.”Karol G grew up surrounded by music. Her father — who was her protector and manager in her early career — sang with a band and brought home all sorts of music: “Rock ’n’ roll, salsa, ballads, reggaeton, vallenatos, everything,” she recalled.From an early age, she knew she wanted to sing. As a teenager, she auditioned unsuccessfully for the Colombian edition of the music reality competition “The X Factor,” but soon afterward signed to record with the Puerto Rican label Diamond Music — a contract her father bought her out of two years later. By 2012, she had grown so discouraged that she decided to give up on music and study marketing in New York City.Karol G onstage at an Illinois arena in September 2022. In Latin America, she headlines stadiums.Rob Grabowski/Invision, via Associated Press“My father stopped talking to me for three months,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘No, you can’t do that. You are throwing away seven years of our hard work. I know who you are. I know we can get it. It’s hard, but when we get it, it’s going to be bigger than the rest.’”An advertisement for a music-business conference in Boston caught her eye as she was riding buses in New York. On an impulse, she attended, and it was a turning point. “I know I love music and I do this for passion,” she said. “But the teaching at that conference was how the music can be a really big business, and how you can work like that.”She returned to Colombia, enrolled to study music at the University of Antioquia, released songs independently and performed at every opportunity, eventually singing duets with established reggaeton stars like Nicky Jam. Her 2017 debut album, “Unstoppable,” included duets with Bad Bunny and Quavo (from Migos), and it brought her a 2018 Latin Grammy Award as best new artist. Her popularity has only grown since then, stoked by lusty songs like “Mi Cama” (“My Bed”) and “Punto G” (“G-Spot”). In Latin America, she headlines stadiums.Her constant collaborator has been Daniel Oviedo, who records as Ovy on the Drums and has produced the vast majority of her songs. He tailors and refines reggaeton and other beats to suit her voice; he also strives to match her ambitions. “Karol’s mind is always going,” he said in a video chat from Los Angeles. “She always has an objective as to where the direction of the song should be, where the lyrics should go. She’s always thinking what’s the next move, the next step, the next accomplishment?”On “Mañana Será Bonito,” Karol G worked with Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother and collaborator), the Jamaican dancehall singer Sean Paul, the Bronx-born bachata singer Romeo Santos, the Dominican dembowsero Angel Dior, and her forerunner as a Colombian superstar, Shakira. She also embraces an elder generation of reggaeton with “Gatúbela” (“Catwoman”), a racy duet with Maldy, a Puerto Rican rapper from the duo Plan B, which released its first album in 2002.“I had never done anything with a woman before,” Maldy said in a phone interview via a translator. “But it was very natural. Being with a woman that brings that sensuality made the right combination for the song to have such an impact. She has the charisma to bring reggaeton to another genre. And international collaborations expand reggaeton, to maximize it culturally.”“For me to go to different styles of music, different genres is not hard, because I have music from everywhere that I really love,” Karol G said. Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesKarol G insists that her hybrids and connections are a matter of instinct, not crossover marketing. “For me to go to different styles of music, different genres is not hard, because I have music from everywhere that I really love,” she said. “I’m trying to show the world more what I do, instead of just doing things to open that door. I want to do it with my real identity. If I feel in my mind that a song has that feeling I go that way: ‘This is a rock, this is a salsa, this is a corrido mexicano.’”She had a hit with the Mexican-style waltz “200 Copas” (“200 Drinks”) from “KG0516,” in which she advises a friend to dump a terrible boyfriend and go out drinking. The new album has another one, “Gucci Los Paños,” (“Gucci Towels”) which furiously and profanely rejects an ex-boyfriend’s attempts to get back together. “If we’re going to do a really heartbroken song that needs to sound really angry, for me you have to use Mexican sounds,” she said.Another of the album’s good-riddance songs is “TGQ,” the duet with Shakira — a pairing Karol G had long hoped for. They had sent each other songs in recent years, but none had seemed exactly right. Now, with Shakira singing openly about her own breakup, Karol G thought they might share another song in which she was “letting a lot of anger go.” When Shakira heard it, Karol G said, “She was, like ‘Oh my God, thank you. Those lyrics are perfectly the way I feel right now.’” They completed the song together, and the finished track, a reggaeton-tinged minor-key ballad, seethes in sisterhood.The album doesn’t offer a narrative. Framed by two songs calling for hope — “Mientras Me Cura del Cora” (“While My Heart Heals”), which is built on Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “Mañana Será Bonito” — the track list wanders amid hookups and kiss-offs, heedless excess and cautious infatuation. In “Cairo,” she chides herself that the one-night stand she planned on has led to real affection: “I’m not in love but I’m almost there,” she sings.“That really happened!” she said. “I was really, like, I’m not going to get in love again. I’m not going to try to build my personal life with anybody. But life just brought somebody to my life that is like making me feel happy again, so that I wanted to share moments with somebody else again.”“That was a new thing that I learned with this album,” she continued. “I was going to be really mad about love and everything. And at the end of the album, now I’m feeling it again. I used to hate it and now I’m loving it again. So let’s be open to that.” More

Meet Christeene, a dystopian “drag terrorist.”The Market Hotel, a gritty music club in Brooklyn that shakes every time the subway rumbles overhead, gets its share of rowdy performances. But even its hardened patrons were not prepared for the spectacle of Christeene, a self-described “drag terrorist” who held an album release party on a recent Wednesday night.As discordant jazz notes erupted, Christeene waltzed through the dark graffiti-splattered room wearing a leotard made of ripped pantyhose, a stringy black wig, makeup resembling zombie war paint and aquamarine contacts that gave her eyes a radioactive glow.“All of us are dealing with something,” she said, before singing ballads about self-destruction and venereal diseases. “Whatever you’re dealing with, throw it to me on this stage.”“Once the eye makeup, gold tooth and wig goes on, I give up and let Christeene jump in,” Mr. Soileau said.Tanyth Berkeley for The New York TimesChristeene is the drag alter ego of Paul Soileau, 46, a musician and performance artist whose punk theatrics have been described as watching “Beyoncé on bath salts.”The evening after the show, Mr. Soileau was relaxing in his cluttered one-bedroom apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn..“Christeene is an artist, entertainer, a sister — really she’s a switchblade,” Mr. Soileau, said in a guttural Cajun drawl, his hair a platinum-blond mullet. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and pink eyeglasses, and he was surrounded by books on Angela Davis and Edward Gorey, half-opened paint sets, a taxidermy chicken and his cat, Tickles Pickles.“Once the eye makeup, gold tooth and wig goes on, I give up and let Christeene jump in,” he added, gesturing to ratty hairpieces hung on the door. “I never drop character.”Over the last 14 years, being a vessel for Christeene has turned Mr. Soileau into a celebrated performer in the underground world of music, art and fashion. He joins in the tradition of downtown New York characters who use shock theatrics to challenge gender and decency norms, including the “Flaming Creatures” filmmaker Jack Smith; the performance artist Karen Finley; the punk-drag artist Vaginal Davis; and the art provocateur Kembra Pfahler.Mr. Soileau is “a fractured romantic dystopian character that lives between ‘Buffy the Vampire Killer,’ Wallis Simpson, Veronica Lake and a fainting couch,” Ms. Finley wrote in an email. As Christeene, Mr. Soileau recently performed at the annual New Year’s Day marathon reading at St. Mark’s Church organized by the Poetry Project, staged a tribute show to Sinead O’Connor at London’s Barbican Center and sang a duet in underwear with the electroclash trailblazer Peaches at Avant Gardner in Brooklyn.“From the moment we met, we were witchy, kindred sisters ready to collaborate” Peaches said.He collaborates with like-minded artists including the designer Rick Owens and his wife, Michèle Lamy (in a fashion film); Juergen Teller (in photos for i-D magazine); JD Samson of the dance-punk group Le Tigre (a lecture on the power of wigs and makeup for a class Professor Samson teaches at New York University); and Fever Ray, half of the former Swedish synth-pop duo the Knife (the pair will go on tour in May).“There is this monster inside of all of us that we would love to release every once in a while, but we just can’t,” said Mr. Owens, who flew Mr. Soileau to Paris in 2019 to participate in an “art orgy” at the Pompidou Center.Mr. Soileau’s histrionics trace back to his childhood in Lake Charles, a small city in Louisiana, where he was active in school plays. After studying theater at Loyola University New Orleans, he moved to New York City in 1998 to pursue acting, though he landed only bit roles.Between auditions, he was a bar back at Barracuda, a gay bar in Chelsea. There he picked up techniques from the transgender actress Candis Cayne and the drag comedian Jackie Beat. “They contributed to my understanding of how to command a room,” he said.Needing a break from the New York party scene and space to develop his characters, he moved back to New Orleans in 2005, and then to Austin, Texas, the year after Hurricane Katrina. To make ends meet, he worked as a drive-through barista at a Starbucks.“Christeene became a vessel for me to pour it all into, as though I summoned this spirit slash demon into my life to accompany me,” he said.Over the next few years, he continued creating his new persona by dressing up at home, taking photos and writing music. A mutual friend introduced him to the filmmaker PJ Raval, who ended up directing Christeene’s first music video in 2009: a low-fi, lowbrow clip with a grinding beat and raunchy lyrics.Mr. Soileau is “a fractured romantic dystopian character,” said Karen Finely, a performance artist also known for challenging norms. Tanyth Berkeley for The New York TimesMr. Soileau’s transgressive antics got the attention of Boy George, who praised Christeene’s “unapologetic, sick show” on Twitter after seeing Christeene at the Soho Theater in London.The raunchiness is not always well received. When Christeene opened for the rock band Faith No More in 2015, the crowd booed.Back in Brooklyn, Mr. Soileau walked to his work space at the opposite end of his apartment, and began rifling through an unkempt pile of Christeene’s clothes: a pair of yellow-painted boots with a busted heel, bracelets made from blue mayonnaise jar lids, various soot-covered fabric scraps.“I really experience her as a relationship,” Mr. Soileau said with a sigh, gazing at a broken stiletto. “Sometimes I am ready to take a break from her, and I’m sure she’s ready to take a break from me. But what can I say? I just love the challenge of keeping this crazy boat afloat.” More

The perfectionist composer was content with being a one-hit musical-theater wonder, calling the experience the hardest thing he had ever done.In the late 1960s, when Broadway show tunes and popular music were veering in opposite directions, the producer David Merrick, one of the most hidebound curmudgeons on Broadway, reached out to one of the most successful American pop composers of the time: Burt Bacharach.Bacharach (who died on Feb. 8 at age 94) already had more than a dozen international hits with his lyricist partner, Hal David, including “Walk on By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The Look of Love.” That last song was introduced in the spy parody “Casino Royale,” and, in fact, Bacharach had met Merrick at that movie’s London premiere in 1967. They agreed to work together if the right project came along.Bacharach wasn’t exactly bedazzled by the bright lights of Broadway. “When I was getting successful with pop songs, and having hits, there wasn’t something burning inside me that said, “Boy, I need to write a Broadway show,’” he said in an interview for the 1985 book “Notes on Broadway.” “I was quite content being in the studio and making my records.”It just so happens that when Merrick eventually wrangled the playwright Neil Simon to adapt Billy Wilder’s 1960 Academy Award-winning film “The Apartment” as a musical, it was Simon who pushed for Bacharach and David, as he wanted to update the material and incorporate a sound that might reach contemporary audiences. “Promises, Promises,” as the show would be called, centered on a well-meaning milquetoast accountant in a New York insurance firm who essentially pimps out his apartment to his superiors in exchange — so he is promised — for a series of promotions. Merrick, a master of the Show for Tired Businessmen (“Do Re Mi,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “How Now, Dow Jones”), assembled the perfect team for a show about tired businessmen.The material was beautifully tailored for Bacharach and David’s sensibilities — urban, witty, rueful, alienated but passionate — and the songwriters were faithful to the tone of Simon’s book: a savvy mix of wisecracks, romantic heartbreak and contemporary satire.But one early aspect of this collaboration was telling: While Simon and David crafted the text together in New York, Bacharach remained deeply involved with other studio projects in Hollywood, setting his music to David’s lyrics from afar. He would not arrive in New York until September 1968, with the first Broadway preview just two months away.Orbach, background center, in one of the “Promises, Promises” production numbers. He won a Tony Award for playing the nebbish accountant, Chuck.Getty ImagesDespite the distance, Bacharach was already demonstrating how his command of the pop charts could pay dividends — even before the show went into rehearsals. “I thought it would be great if the music came out a couple of months before, so [theater audiences] would have some familiarity with the work,” he recounted in the liner notes to a 1989 three-CD set of his music. His eternal muse, Dionne Warwick, recorded two songs from the incipient score, while Bacharach worked his usual meticulous magic in the protected confines of the recording studio, getting his complicated rhythms just right. Warwick’s single of the “Promises, Promises” title number hit No. 19 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.“As musicals go, it couldn’t have been easier,” Bacharach recalled in “Notes on Broadway.” “The financing, getting it done, getting it in the theater — it just went with lightning speed.”Then came the November tryout in Boston, where Merrick’s usual boorish behavior was on display. He apparently demanded a hit song for the second act, so that the nebbish hero, Chuck, could connect romantically (however tenuously) with Fran, the elevator operator for whom he pines.Bacharach would have gladly obliged, but he was sent to Massachusetts General with pneumonia. Merrick stomped around and cursed the songwriters and supposedly threatened to hire Leonard Bernstein to replace them, but David beavered away and came up with wistful lyrics to a duet called “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” He even incorporated Bacharach’s malady: “What do you get when you kiss a guy?/You get enough germs to catch pneumonia./After you do/he’ll never phone ya.”When he was released from the hospital, Bacharach found the melody to match the malady: “Maybe because I was still not feeling all that well, I wrote the melody faster than I had ever written any song before in my life,” Bacharach wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”Ahead of the New York opening, Bacharach wanted a sound more like what he was used to in a recording studio, so he brought in his frequent recording engineer Phil Ramone and had the Shubert Theater’s sound system redesigned. The orchestra was divided into small groupings (separated by fiberglass panels), each surrounding a microphone that would relay the sound to be mixed live at the back of the theater. And the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick (in one of his first Broadway jobs) added two guitars — one acoustic, one electric — and a quartet of female singers, billed as Orchestra Voices. The technical virtuosity of these innovations unnerved Merrick so much that, according to a New York Times article about the arrangements, he admonished Ramone and Bacharach: “I don’t want the audience walking out of the theater saying, ‘It’s a recording.’”But even Merrick fell in love again after “Promises, Promises” opened on Dec. 1, 1968, to rapturous reviews. On opening night, he told a reporter that Bacharach was “the first original American composer since Gershwin.” In an article in The Times, John S. Wilson wrote, “The tight Bacharachian rhythmic patterns keep bouncing around in your head as you walk into the night, songless but pulsing with a busy little beat.”Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises” at the Broadway Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the experience didn’t make Broadway burn any brighter inside Bacharach. “Somehow I lived through it, and I’m still alive,” he told Rex Reed in a Times interview before the show opened. “But this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m wiped out by this show, man. I’ll be in Palm Springs on Wednesday.” And he was as good as his word — joining his wife, the actress Angie Dickinson, in a newly-rented desert home with a tennis court and a swimming pool.A week or so later, a phone call to Palm Springs from Merrick confirmed that there were limits to what Bacharach could control in a live production, eight times a week. “He called me and said ‘Eight subs [substitute players] in the orchestra last night, including the drummer’ and guess who was in the audience? Richard Rodgers! This great, great composer. Richard Rodgers!,” he recounted in “Notes on Broadway.” “It made me feel just terrible, because my music is not that easy to play. A song like ‘Promises, Promises’ changes time signature in almost every bar. And I’ve got … a drummer who’s sight-reading, who’s never played it before.”“Promises, Promises” was hardly an irreparable disappointment for Bacharach: The original Broadway production ran for 1,281 performances (and Jerry Orbach, who played the accountant, won a Tony Award for the role); there was a robust West End run; and a Broadway revival (sized and trimmed for contemporary tastes) in 2010 starred Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Hayes. And “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” would become a smash single for Warwick in 1970, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart; it would also be the last time a song originating on Broadway reached the top spot on any of the Billboard charts.That was probably cold comfort to Bacharach. Looking back on his Broadway experience for the CD liner notes decades later, he was definitive: “If you’re doing a musical, it’s going to change every night,” he wrote. “If you’re doing something on record, it doesn’t get changed every night. So that’s what I prefer to do.”David, also quoted in the liner notes, said about his collaborator and the reality of Broadway: “If you’re a perfectionist, it can drive you crazy.”Sixteen months after “Promises” opened, Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” arrived on Broadway and the modernity of its sound would have been unthinkable without Bacharach’s innovations. Indeed, many of them were reintroduced by Tunick, the “Promises” orchestrator, when he took on the orchestrations for “Company.”“If I were hearing ‘Another Hundred People’ for the first time,” the music critic Will Friedwald said in an interview for this article, “I would have guessed it was Bacharach and not Sondheim.”Chenoweth with Bacharach, far right, and Simon, center, at the curtain call for the revival’s opening night performance in April 2010.Charles Sykes/Associated PressBacharach was initially philosophical about “Promises, Promises” — “If we knocked down a few doors with my rhythms or the new sound in the show, great,” he told Reed — but the theatrical magic he created for his only Broadway score is so apposite and hip and melancholy and sweet that it makes one ache for what might have been.Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at New York University. His latest book, “I’ll Drink to That! Broadway’s Legendary Stars, Classic Shows, and the Cocktails They Inspired,” will be published in May. More

The Long Island rapper David Jolicoeur, known for his freewheeling rhyme style, has died at 54, just weeks before his trio’s catalog arrives on streaming services.David Jolicoeur, best known as the rapper Trugoy the Dove of the climate-shifting rap group De La Soul, weathered decades of industry shifts with acerbic wit, oblique rhyme styles and intense bouts of self-reflection that flew in the face of hip-hop’s boast-centric bottom line.Jolicoeur, also known as “Plug Two” in the Long Island trio he helped found in 1988 with Kelvin Mercer (Posdnuos) and Vincent Mason (P.A. Pasemaster Mase) died on Sunday at 54, just weeks before the group’s songs, long absent from streaming services, will finally arrive on digital platforms.De La Soul’s debut album, “3 Feet High and Rising,” from 1989, was nothing short of a sea change moment in the genre’s sound, fashion, attitude and aesthetic. As leading lights of the Native Tongues collective — a loose crew of fellow travelers that included Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah and Monie Love — De La’s baggy bohemian look would replace rap’s thick gold chains and sweatsuits with Afrocentric leather medallions and vintage patterns. It was Jolicoeur’s innovation to raid their dads’ closets for bell bottoms and straighten the legs, not to mention stylizing their asymmetrical haircuts.De La Soul broke the Top 40 that year with the pop splash “Me, Myself and I” — for years the trio would reliably add “We hate this song!” when performing it live — but went on to become hip-hop royalty thanks to the emotional depth plumbed in tunes like “Tread Water” and “I Am I Be.”Quirky production, introspective lyrics and its unorthodox look had De La Soul dubbed “alternative hip-hop,” a feel that would rapidly spawn similar-minded artists like the Pharcyde, Digable Planets, P.M. Dawn, Arrested Development and Dream Warriors. But over time, its legacy became less a recognizable “sound” and more a model for any rap act open to aesthetics and ideas that cut against the hardcore grain, like the Roots, the Fugees, Common, Black Star and eventually world-conquering artists like Kanye West and the Black Eyed Peas.Here are 10 essential verses from an artist whose “Delacratic” attitude toward self-expression helped rewire hip-hop’s DNA.De La Soul, “Plug Tunin’” (1988)On its debut single, De La Soul introduced an abstract “new style of speak” that landed in the middle of the hard-edge Def Jam era like a prismatic fracturing of hip-hop, beat poetry and alien transmissions. On the first song the trio did as a group, Jolicoeur coolly raps like a Slinky tumbling down stairs, “Dazed at the sight of a method/Dive beneath the depth of a never-ending verse/Gasping and swallowing every last letter/Vocalized liquid holds the quench of your thirst.” As he told the author Brian Coleman of their lyrics at that time, “Maybe it was our warped character, but we didn’t really want people to understand it at all. Sometimes we were trying to make it difficult, because it would make people always want to know more.”De La Soul, “Me, Myself and I” (1989)De La Soul’s biggest hit was also De La Soul’s biggest albatross: The Day-Glo visuals around its single and video promptly burdened the group with the label “hip-hop hippies.” In a sad irony, Jolicoeur’s verses on “Me, Myself and I” were specifically about not being judged by his unconventional fashion choices. Borrowing the rhyme flow from “Black Is Black” by the Jungle Brothers, another Native Tongues crew, Jolicoeur opens the trio’s first and only Top 40 pop hit with a radical mix of exhaustion and self-questioning: “Mirror mirror on the wall/Tell me mirror, what is wrong?/Can it be my De La clothes/Or is it just my De La song?” “If some think that we have a hippie style and a hippie sound, that’s just fine,” Jolicoeur told Melody Maker in 1989. “But we’d be offended if it was said that we wanted to be hippies. We don’t. We just want to be ourselves.”De La Soul, “Pass the Plugs” (1991)The second De La album — sardonically titled “De La Soul Is Dead” — pushed back on the daisies and fluorescents with a sound that was a little more disillusioned and dark but still breezy. Taking the second verse of “Pass the Plugs,” Jolicoeur bemoans the industry panopticon of radio programmers, promoters and a record label that wanted more hit singles.De La Soul, “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” (1991)The most lyrically and thematically intense song of De La Soul’s career, “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” tells the story of a Brooklyn girl abused by her father — by the song’s end, she takes her revenge with the titular weapon as he works as a department store Kris Kringle. The story is narrated mainly by Mercer, who was channeling real-life emotions after finding out a friend was a survivor. However, in a masterful storytelling technique, Jolicoeur takes two verses as the doubting acquaintance who doesn’t believe the girl’s accusations.Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, “Fallin’” (1993)Treating an entire song like one of its famous skits, De La play washed-up, once-successful rappers on this collaboration with the Scottish jangle-rock band Teenage Fanclub for the “Judgment Night” soundtrack — a weirdly prescient rock-meets-rap experiment. “We wouldn’t play ourselves to do something that was wack, but the way the concept plays itself out, it’s supposed to be wack,” Jolicoeur told Vibe in 1993. “The track is supposed to sound wack.” Instead, the group’s look at the other side of fame produced some of the most poignant verses of its career. Raps Jolicoeur, “I knew I blew the whole fandango/When the drum programmer wore a Kangol.”De La Soul, “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” (1993)On this single from De La Soul’s jazz-flecked third album, “Buhloone Mindstate,” Jolicoeur draws a sarcastic line between his group and contemporary hip-hop machismo and bragadoccio. “I change my pitch up, smack my bitch up, I never did it,” he raps, flipping a classic line from New York’s Ultramagnetic MC’s. “The flavor’s bein’ bought, but brothers ain’t gettin’ it.”De La Soul, “Stakes Is High” (1996)“Stakes Is High” was not just the evocative title to De La Soul’s fourth album. As Mason told Okayplayer, “I mean the whole energy around developing that record, it was a crucial place of not knowing if we was going to continue or we going to be forced to go get regular jobs and become common folk.” For the lead single and title track — produced by the emerging beatmaker Jay Dee, later known as J Dilla — Jolicoeur unleashes a torrential downpour of criticism deriding the state of mainstream hip-hop: “Sick of swole-head rappers with their sickenin’ raps/Clappers of gats, makin’ the whole sick world collapse.”De La Soul, “Itzsoweezee (Hot)” (1996)The last track recorded for “Stakes Is High,” though it ultimately became the album’s second single, was a rare solo turn for Jolicoeur. As Mafioso imagery began taking over hardcore New York rap, Jolicoeur popped the bubble with lines like “Why you acting all spicy and shiesty?/The only Italians you knew was Icees.”Prince Paul featuring De La Soul, “More Than U Know” (1999)Another prime example of Jolicoeur and Mercer’s storytelling abilities is this song from the producer Prince Paul’s wildly ambitious concept opera “A Prince Among Thieves.” Playing the role of a crack addict, Jolicoeur pulls the extended metaphor trick, rhyming about the drug as if it were a love interest: “I can’t refuse her, my denial’s a wish/Fell into her arm when I gave her a kiss.”Gorillaz featuring De La Soul, “Feel Good Inc.” (2005)This alterna-pop gem from Damon Albarn’s virtual cartoon crew ultimately became the biggest success story of De La Soul’s career, garnering the group its first and only Grammy. Known for a usually mellower delivery, Jolicoeur instead unleashes a barrage of high-octane bars: “Laughing gas these hazmats, fast cats/Lining ’em up like ass cracks/Play these ponies at the track.” More

Players from the ensemble came to New York to perform works by Bach, Telemann and Johann Gottlieb Janitsch at the 92nd Street Y, New York.At the 92nd Street Y, New York, on Sunday, Bach Collegium Japan — led by its founder and music director, Masaaki Suzuki — brought bold, brisk style to chamber works by its eponymous composer and his contemporaries.A small subset of this ensemble’s period-instrument forces — five strings, oboe, flute and harpsichord — came together in various configurations for a Bach orchestral suite, one of Telemann’s “Paris” quartets and a chamber sonata by Johann Gottlieb Janitsch. The baritone Roderick Williams joined them for cantatas by Bach and Telemann.It was an afternoon of fitful pleasures. When the players had a clear, distinctive musical character to embody — a blithe movement from the Telemann quartet or the slumber aria from Bach’s cantata — they tackled it with focused collaboration. Individual members of the group had moments of understated eloquence.At times, though, the ensemble, with Suzuki at the harpsichord, confronted the audience with an undifferentiated wall of sound. They shaped the music broadly, with little of the interplay between loud and soft, dark and light, that gives Baroque music its unique shimmer. (I wonder whether Suzuki misjudged the acoustics of Kaufmann Concert Hall, which, while not especially warm, still carry.)Suzuki’s approach brought to mind his conducting of Handel’s “Messiah” with the New York Philharmonic in December, when the players conveyed the music’s general shape without filling in the details.At the Y, the program’s opening, Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor (BWV 1067), came off a bit noisy when it should have been stately. A zippy tempo for the Rondeau made it difficult for the players to lock into the movement’s buoyancy. Ryo Terakado’s overly bright violin didn’t cohere with Emmanuel Balssa’s sensitively shaded cello.That suite, though, is really a showcase for the flutist, and Liliko Maeda played trippingly — airy and smooth, fleet and seamless. Alternating between legato and staccato, her tone practically bounced off the harpsichord, and she tumbled gracefully through intricate passagework.Janitsch’s spacious Sonata da Camera in G minor, altogether sweeter and less densely scored than the Bach, made room for Suzuki’s broad phrasing. The strings inflated their long lines, and Masamitsu San’nomiya’s oboe shone. Stephen Goist’s viola cut through like white light in the Largo.In the Telemann quartet, Balssa explored minute gradations in hushed dynamics, and Terakado, whose blunt leadership as first violin often dulled the luster of the music on the program, brought a sly smile in his playing.If the childlike pleas of Telemann’s cantata “Der am Ölberg zagende Jesus” struck a modern ear as a strange way to express Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, then Bach’s “Ich habe genug” was the opposite: magnificent and profound. It tells the biblical story of Simeon, who, having held the Christ child, says he can finally die in peace, for the world has nothing left to offer him.Williams has a lovely baritone that is almost tenorial in the lucidity of its middle and upper registers. I expected him to lean into that quality during the Bach cantata’s first aria, in which the melody is relatively high, but Williams’s Simeon, consumed by the music’s dusky beauty, was already preparing himself for death. It was only in the second aria, which envisions death as the ultimate slumber, that Williams revealed the downy softness of his voice, singing the final repeat of the verse entirely in piano — weightless and unburdened by earthly matters.The melancholy of Bach’s cantata hides a deeper contentment. At the Y, the players missed it in the first aria, skimming over its gentle undulations. Then, in the second, as they traced the descending musical figures, keenly attuned to one another and to the music’s character, they found it.Bach Collegium JapanPerformed on Sunday at the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan. More

The R&B singer-songwriter has matched Taylor Swift’s run with “Folklore,” the last time a female artist held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s chart for eight weeks.SZA is not done with No. 1 yet.After a one-week dip to second place on the Billboard album chart, SZA — the genre-blurring R&B singer-songwriter born Solána Imani Rowe — returns to No. 1 this week for an eighth time with “SOS,” the hottest LP of the season.“SOS,” SZA’s long-awaited second studio album, had the equivalent of 100,000 sales in the United States in its most recent week out. Virtually all of that activity was attributed to the album’s popularity on streaming services, drawing 135 million clicks, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since “SOS” came out nine weeks ago, it has been streamed 1.7 billion times in the United States alone.With eight weeks at the top, “SOS” has tied the chart run of Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” in 2020, the last time a female artist racked up as many times at No. 1. (For both albums, the accomplishment came in nonconsecutive spans; it took Swift 13 weeks to notch an eighth No. 1 for “Folklore.”) In the last few years, the only albums that have had more are Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack (nine weeks), Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” (10) and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” (13).Also this week, Swift’s “Midnights” rises one spot to No. 2, while the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together, which opened at No. 1 last week with big CD sales of its new five-song EP, “The Name Chapter: Temptation,” fell to No. 3. Wallen’s “Dangerous” is in fourth place — its 106th time in the Top 10 — and Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains” is No. 5.The country-pop star Shania Twain opened at No. 10 with her latest release, “Queen of Me.” More

Moments after Rihanna stepped off the Super Bowl LVII halftime stage Sunday night at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., her representative confirmed what her performance had suggested: The singer is pregnant with her second child.It was, as pregnancy reveals go, not quite on the theatrical level of Beyoncé’s belly rub at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards. But for Rihanna, who last year gave birth to her first child, it was a stroke of performance savvy nonetheless — maybe the only gesture that could outshine, and reframe, the show she had just given.Rihanna hasn’t released an album since “Anti” in 2016, and many in her fervent fan base took her willingness to perform at the Super Bowl this year as a sign that her return to music might be imminent. Perhaps she would announce a new single or album, or maybe a tour.Instead, she used one of pop music’s biggest stages to assert that despite all of that collective anticipation, she had other things to focus on: a private life to return to. So if her actual onstage delivery had been slightly weary, well, there were more important things to focus on.In 13 minutes, Rihanna casually performed snippets of 12 hits, universally known songs that don’t require much in the way of fluffing or bombast. The closest she came to frisson, to sass, to authority, to verve came a little after the halfway point of the set.Rihanna didn’t overemphasize movement, instead holding court at the center of her dancers.AJ Mast for The New York TimesJust after the familiar horn fusillade of “All of the Lights” boomed from the speakers, Rihanna took a compact from the outstretched hand of one of her dancers with her right hand, applied two dabs of powder — a nod to Fenty Beauty, which has been a bigger professional focus for her than music in recent years — and returned it before grabbing the microphone with her left hand from another dancer.Then she launched into the hook of “All of the Lights,” a decade-plus-old collaboration with Ye (formerly Kanye West), whose antisemitic remarks late last year have made him a pariah. She followed that song immediately with “Run This Town,” another collaboration with Ye (and Jay-Z).A quick cosmetics ad? Sure. An implicit statement of support for an embattled peer? Why not. Rihanna — one of the crucial pop hitmakers of the 21st century — needs the Super Bowl less than the Super Bowl needs her, and her performance was a master class in doing exactly enough. She treated it like many people approach their professional obligations when their personal life is calling: dutiful, lightly enthused, a little exhausted, looking to work the angles ever so slightly.The queen of nonchalance, Rihanna first appeared Sunday night on a stage floating above the 50-yard line (a gesture cribbed from Ye’s 2016 Saint Pablo tour) singing “Bitch Better Have My Money.” She was tethered to the platform, limiting her maneuvering, but even when she reached the ground she didn’t overemphasize dance, instead holding sturdy court at the center of 100-plus dancers, sharing in their movements but never outdoing them. During “Work,” she led them as if she were a tutor calling out moves but not participating in them.Rihanna’s hits are plentiful — she has charted more than 60 times on the Billboard Hot 100 — and they are varied. But there was no true thematic through line to this casual revue of a dozen deeply beloved songs. Mostly, she leaned into the up-tempo side of her catalog — “Where Have You Been,” “Only Girl (in the World)” — with nods to her Caribbean heritage on “Work” and “Rude Boy.” At the set’s end, she emphasized her big-picture, one-word-title smashes, “Umbrella” and “Diamonds,” which prioritize melodrama over feeling.Rihanna is many things — a new mother, a billionaire mogul in fashion and cosmetics, an astonishingly reliable pop star with a deep catalog. But she is not a current hitmaker. And she had not performed a show of this scale since 2016.So in its marketing, the Super Bowl amplified how it was a coup to land her most visible effort in years. During promotional teases, Apple Music’s Ebro Darden portentously intoned, “The wait. Is almost. Over.”In essence, the event was her appearance. The event was the event. There were no guests, despite the frequency and power of her collaborations. No costume changes, despite her standing as a fashion innovator — she wore an all-red outfit, removing and adding layers throughout.Rihanna performed part of her set on a stage floating above the field.AJ Mast for The New York TimesThough the performance was brief and hurried, it nevertheless felt slow. There was little variation in tone or energy, no aesthetic nods to the lightly themed set list. It was a routine designed to trigger long-honed pleasure centers, not ignite new fervor — a triumph of foregone conclusion.That Rihanna appeared at all is a testament to the ways in which the N.F.L. has been successful in papering — or performing — over its controversies. She declined to perform at the Super Bowl in 2019, an era in which turning down a gig on one of the world’s biggest stages — a retort to the N.F.L.’s response to Colin Kaepernick’s activism — felt political. But the involvement of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation with the league in the years following has remade the halftime show both musically and socioculturally.From an entertainment perspective, that’s been for the best. And for Rihanna, playing halftime is a milestone befitting the scope of her achievements. But her show wasn’t overtly political, or even particularly celebratory of her litany of hits. Instead, it served as something of a placeholder. She’d come to perform, yes. But she also has more pressing things to attend to. More