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      Selena Gomez’s Boldly Revealing Ballad, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Yves Tumor, Yo La Tengo, Sipho and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Selena Gomez, ‘My Mind & Me’Selena Gomez has spoken openly of her mental-health struggles — bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis — in recent years. Her new song, “My Mind & Me,” arrives as the title track of a documentary that reveals some of her low points. The music moves from fragility to determination, from lone, echoey piano notes to a supportive march and a mission statement, as she sings, “All of the crashing and burning and breaking I know now/If somebody sees me like this then they won’t feel alone.” It’s self-exposure in service of empathy, and it tapers back to the hesitant solitude of those piano notes. But the video squanders some of its good will by ending with a product endorsement. JON PARELESLucius, ‘Muse’“Muse,” a one-off single from the indie-pop group Lucius, pairs a cool, clarion arrangement with Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s impassioned vocals — a tension of opposites that gives the song its spark. “I’m calling out your name, a desert that needs the rain,” they sing together on the chorus, a kind of prayer for divine inspiration and, as they put it, “the wild and holy window to the truth.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTiësto featuring Tate McRae, ‘10:35’On the sleek “10:35,” the rising Canadian pop star Tate McRae teams up with longtime EDM mainstay Tiësto (the D.J. whose remix of Calum Scott’s “Dancing on My Own” cover has turned into the Philadelphia Phillies’ victory anthem). McRae’s crystalline vocals are a fitting match for Tiësto’s gleaming, synthesized production, and the song is propelled by an effective push and pull between the anxieties of daily life and the blissful comforts of love. “The TV make you think the whole world’s about to end,” McRae sighs, before a lover’s embrace causes time to stop: “All I know, it’s 10:35 and I can feel your arms around me.” ZOLADZIbrahim Maalouf featuring De La Soul: ‘Quiet Culture’Ibrahim Maalouf, a Lebanese-French trumpeter, composer and producer, surrounds himself with guests — the Cuban musician Cimafunk, the New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas, the jazz singer Gregory Porter — on his new album, “Capacity to Love.” De La Soul makes its latest reappearance on “Quiet Culture,” counseling perseverance and relief from noise: “The quieter we become, the more that we can hear.” Maalouf’s track eases between a jazz ballad and unhurried funk, framing and counterpointing the rhymes with his Arab-inflected melodies. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘God Is a Circle’“Sometimes it feels like there’s places in my mind that I can’t go,” Sean Bowie, who records as the gothic glam-rocker Yves Tumor, begins on the haunting single “God Is a Circle.” Rhythmic, shallow breathing provides the percussive backbone of the track and adds a visceral chill to its nightmarish atmospherics. The song suddenly turns revealing, though, when it dredges up memories of a repressive past: “My mama said that God sees everything/My daddy always taught me to say ‘thank you,’ ‘yes ma’am,’ ’no, sir,’ ‘yes, please.’” The whole thing sounds like an exorcism, or maybe the antic, demonic moment just before one is deemed necessary. ZOLADZAlgiers featuring Zack de la Rocha, ‘Irreversible Damage’Irreversible Damage” is an exercise in seething, sputtering tension from the Atlanta-based rock-hip-hop-electro group Algiers. With a nagging electric guitar loop, a pullulating electronic bass, ominous synthesizer chords and programmed drums that keep disrupting their own beat, the song is an onslaught of abstract lyrics — “No rehab for my jihad/A rapture in a grief storm,” Zack de la Rocha (from Rage Against the Machine) raps — hurtling toward some dire but unknown outcome. When the words are done, the song shifts into a six-beat furor that feels both tribal and apocalyptic. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Fallout’In February, the New Jersey indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo will release their 16th album, “This Stupid World,” a place from which the calming, immersive first single “Fallout” offers a brief escape. “I wanna fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings on the chorus. “Reach back, unwind.” The band self-produced “This Stupid World” and recorded much of it while jamming together live; as a result, “Fallout” sounds as sumptuously shaggy and comfortingly loose as a favorite autumn sweater. This is the sort of timeless Yo La Tengo song that could have reasonably appeared on any of their albums across the last three decades, but something about its combination of prickly frustration and hard-won serenity feels especially appropriate right now. ZOLADZSipho, ‘Arms’The English songwriter and producer Sipho Ndhlovu revels in drama and desperation, with a voice that regularly leaps between grainy declamation and a tearful falsetto. “Arms” is one long crescendo of regrets overwhelmed by desire. He admits to being “led astray” and implores, “Can’t we share the blame?,” but by the end he’s unconditionally enthralled, brought to his knees by lust. Nearly the entire song uses just two chords but brings in massive reinforcements: strings, drums, voices, electronics and an arena-rock lead guitar, all pushing him closer to the brink. PARELESquinnie, ‘Itch’The 21-year-old songwriter Quinn Barnitt, who records as quinnie, has picked up the mixture of tentativeness and bold declaration, bedroom-pop intimacy and multitrack craftsmanship, that has paid off for Clairo and Olivia Rodrigo. In “Itch,” she juggles desire and fidelity, wondering, “What if I never scratched another itch for the rest of my life?/Would I die satisfied, knowing it can always get better than this?” The production often harks back to Simon and Garfunkel’s pristine guitars and the Beatles’ string ensembles, but her frank self-questioning is new. PARELESOld Fire featuring Bill Callahan, ‘Corpus’John Mark Lapham, a composer from Texas who records as Old Fire, called his 2016 album “Songs From the Haunted South,” a succinct self-description for his suspended-time blends of electronics and roots-rock instruments; his new album is “Voids.” On “Corpus.” he has the songwriter Bill Callahan, whose own extensive catalog is generally much folkier, intoning a few enigmatic lines — “I’ve got a child in Corpus/Hey Mac, can you bring that boat back” — in his somber baritone. Instruments and electronic tones gather around him like darkening storm clouds, and there’s no deliverance. PARELES More

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      Review: The Met Brings Back a Shorter, Weaker ‘Don Carlo’

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      David McVicar’s staging from last season has returned, but in a four-act, Italian-language form. In this case, less is less.Another week, another set of music without a definitive version.This time it isn’t a variant-strewn album rollout from Taylor Swift or Lil Baby, but rather a work by Giuseppe Verdi, whose “Don Carlo” returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday night in a four-act, Italian-language edition of a staging by David McVicar.When McVicar’s production premiered last season, it was a true event: the company’s first mounting of “Don Carlos,” a version of Verdi’s original, five-act, French-language take, from 1867.Now, the Met has returned to the Italian, based on Verdi’s 1884 conception. But in a puzzling move, it has done away with its vintage practice of presenting the opera in five acts. So on Thursday, the short but crucial opening act was cut.This may sound like hairsplitting, but when it comes to Verdi’s longest opera, less is less, even with a strong cast like the Met’s for this revival.The tenor Russell Thomas is an appealing, emotive Don Carlo; on Thursday, he sounded particularly noble (and ardent) at the higher end of his range. In house-filling phrases, Russell’s bright sound had a brassy, tossed-off assurance, with little sign of strain. Yet in lower-pitched lines, he occasionally sounded swamped by the plush orchestral sound under the baton of Carlo Rizzi.“Don Carlo” demands a lot of strong voices, and the best addition in this revival is the exciting performance, particularly late in the evening, from the bass Günther Groissböck as King Philip II. If the mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina was a bit laryngeal during Princess Eboli’s early Veil Song outside the monastery, her take on the character had settled into a gloomy radiance by the time she needed to curse her own beauty (and thirst for machinations) deep into the plot.But what plot, exactly? Without the opportunity to enjoy the first act’s mysterious meet-cute in Fontainebleau, it’s difficult for an audience to root for the doomed pairing of Don Carlo and Elisabeth. (She’s originally Don Carlo’s intended; later she’s his stepmother and queen, after her marriage to his father, Philip.)Element after element in the opera was similarly hamstrung. The soprano Eleonora Buratto brought an elegant tone and brilliant high notes to bear in Elisabeth’s climactic final appearance onstage — yet the hourslong buildup to that moment felt rote. Throughout, Don Carlo’s advocacy on behalf of the oppressed Flemish also came across as muted without the first act’s sketching of diplomatic intrigue between France and Spain. The absence, and its effect on the opera’s momentum, was glaring, particularly in McVicar’s safe and budget-conscious production, which is light on theatrical coups and complex blocking.There was enjoyment, though, in the blends of voices among the singers — with the baritone Peter Mattei, as Rodrigo, seemingly always in the middle of the best moments. He often provided the jolt that the staging otherwise lacked: his big, supple sound worked well alongside Thomas’s Carlo in their early duet and in their jailhouse goodbye, and spurred Groissböck’s Philip into more dramatically varied phrasing during their early political debates.The Met could, in the future, milk McVicar’s staging for a five-act, Italian-language version. But this one was a dramatic fizzle; the big hits were present and accounted for, and largely well sung, but the evening was, strangely, a drag. Cuts aren’t supposed to make operas feel longer.Some fans will want to hear “Don Carlo” in any form. But as is the case with various editions of the same pop album, there’s no particularly urgent need to collect ’em all.Don CarloThrough Dec. 3 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      For ‘KPOP,’ a Broadway Transfer Is More Like a Reinvention

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      The show’s creative team talks about revamping the immersive Off Broadway hit so that it moves “around the audience” at Circle in the Square Theater.Back in 2017, the musical “KPOP” had the kind of Off Broadway premiere that showbiz dreams are made of. The buzz around the production — which had the rare distinction of being about a specifically Asian pop-music style and having a largely Asian creative team — was so intense that desperate New Yorkers were pleading for tickets to its sold-out run at the small A.R.T./New York Theaters in Midtown Manhattan.Talk of a Broadway transfer started quickly thereafter, but, for a variety of reasons including the pandemic, it took five years for “KPOP” to finally make the jump. Now, at long last, the show is in previews, with an opening night set for Nov. 20.The musical Broadway audiences will see, however, is a very different beast from the one that opened in 2017: This is not so much a transfer as a reinvention.The original Ars Nova production, presented with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective, was an immersive spectacle in which audience members followed a bunch of artists from room to room on two floors, and discovered how the Korean music industry relentlessly drills its stars (called idols) into poptastic precision.None of the 41 Broadway theaters could accommodate this sort of staging. But at least the one the show finally grabbed, Circle in the Square Theater, has a unique asset: It’s in the round.“I like to say it’s the world’s smallest arena — it’s a postage stamp of Madison Square Garden,” the director, Teddy Bergman, said. “For a show that traffics in pop, that collective energy and that collective effervescence felt like something we could capture like lightning in a bottle.”To preserve the sense that the audience is getting behind-the-scenes insights, the book writer, Jason Kim, altered the framing device: The show is now set up like a mockumentary about an upcoming American tour for a K-pop entertainment company’s roster — the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwE.“At Ars Nova, the audience moved around and in this production we’re very much trying to move the piece around the audience,” Kim said. “I think the spirit of the show has been preserved, although it is a different format, and we are trying to engage the audience in very much a different way. We loved that the new theater casts an extra member, which is the audience.”The show is now set up like a mockumentary about a K-pop label’s roster, which includes the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwEF8.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKevin Woo, center, in “KPOP,” now in previews at Circle in the Square Theater. There’s a “whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States,” the show’s director said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother reason for the transformation is the fact that the moment “KPOP” originally aimed to capture has changed dramatically. In 2017, most Americans had no knowledge of K-pop, save perhaps for the song “Gangnam Style,” by Psy. Nowadays, Korean acts like Stray Kids routinely top the U.S. music charts and in May a K-pop artist, AleXa, won NBC’s “American Song Contest” on behalf of Oklahoma, where she was raised.Over the past five years, Bergman said, “BTS happened and ushered in a whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States.”He added: “We wanted to focus on what is the journey, the cost, the joy, the exhilaration, the sacrifice of these pathbreakers who are journeying into new territories and spreading this music. I didn’t have to come from a position of having to explain much, or really anything to the audience. It really freed us up to be able to dig deeper psychologically, emotionally.” (The show’s close relationship with South Korea means the deadly crowd surge in Seoul was deeply felt; the Broadway production made a curtain speech last weekend and had a moment of silence, and posted a statement on social media.)One beneficiary of this change in focus has been the character of MwE, played Off Broadway by Ashley Park and now portrayed by Luna, a South Korea-based actress and former member of the K-pop girl group f(x).“What I’m very excited about in this version is the examination of the female characters,” said Helen Park, who wrote the bilingual score with Max Vernon, and orchestrated and produced it for Broadway. “They all have different ambitions, different journeys, different histories, different characteristics. As an Asian woman, that’s something so special.”While MwE, only in her mid-20s, is already a battle-hardened music-industry vet, the new character of Brad is at the start of his idol career and struggling because he is being shunned by his F8 bandmates. Not only was he the last to join the band, but his being mixed race becomes a factor as well. The role had resonance for the actor playing him, Zachary Noah Piser, who has Chinese and Jewish roots: This spring he became the first Asian American actor to play the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” full time on Broadway.“Brad’s whole situation is very kind of meta because it was very me — I was a newcomer to the Broadway production of ‘KPOP’ and he is the Asian white boy from Connecticut who gets plucked up and placed in this group,” Piser said in a video chat. Brad acts as an entry point into issues centering on identity — which were already present in the first version, but have since been retooled.“When we first started writing, the main idea behind the show was ‘How could K-pop cross over in America?’ — it’s what these Korean artists have to sacrifice in their authenticity in order to be palatable to an American market,” Vernon said on the phone. “Obviously K-pop crossed over, so we asked different questions, like, ‘What’s going on in these artists’ mental state behind the scenes? What kind of pressure is that exerting on their psyche, on their relationships with other people in their band?’”Luna, who got her start in K-pop before turning to musical theater in South Korea (starring in shows like “Legally Blonde,” for example), pointed out that “KPOP” nails the genre’s emphasis on rigorous training.“There are such detailed scenes that are really rooted in the reality of that world,” Luna said via an interpreter in a video conversation. “I feel that people who are actually K-pop singers or who are trainees will really relate. It also gives a sense of consolation for the immense amount of effort and hard work put into creating K-pop.”From left: Park, Kim, Weber, Bergman and Vernon.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSUCH AN OVERHAUL of the show’s concept and characters also required a reshaping of the score, which The New York Times’s Ben Brantley described as being “as synthetically sweet and perversely addictive as the real thing” in his review. When asked about the balance between old and new songs, the creative team agreed that it was about half and half — “maybe more new than old,” Park said.She and Vernon also had to reflect the changes in the genre at large: The acts that were popular when they started working on the show, back in 2014, are different from the current ones, and fans were sure to notice dated references.“We were responding to Exo, 2NE1, Girls’ Generation, Psy, Big Bang, but K-pop music changes every three to four years so it would be like doing a show called ‘Pop’ and all the music sounds like Britney rather than Billie Eilish or whatever the great artists are that you’re listening to right now,” Vernon said on the phone. “Sometimes by the time musicals are on Broadway, it feels like they’re lagging 15 years behind the culture — we did not want that.”Similarly, the choreographer Jennifer Weber, who is also handling the Max Martin jukebox musical “& Juliet,” had to work within the specific parameters of K-pop dancing. Key elements are point moves, which are the visual answers to the songs’ hooks (one of the most famous remains Psy’s horse-riding gimmick in “Gangnam Style”).And because members of a group trade vocal lines at a quick pace, careful integration is needed to make the choreography work. “You have to almost break it down mathematically about who’s singing at what time,” Weber said on the phone. “You need to constantly be revealing who’s singing, so that person needs to pop out of the formation for their line — and that line could be as little as two bars.”Another way to assure that the show recreates the wondrous, kinetic excitement the best K-pop acts generate was to hire performers who had spent time in the trenches and could share their experience: In addition to Luna, the cast includes BoHyung, a former member of the girl group Spica; Min, formerly of Miss A; and Kevin Woo, once in U-KISS.“A lot of my questions in the first weeks were like, ‘How do you breathe? How do you execute this incredibly intricate choreography?’” Piser said. “The biggest response I got from the K-pop idols in our show was, ‘You’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to be good to yourself and you’ve got to trust the process.’”With “KPOP” now on Broadway, its creators are aware that the show is not just going up against other musicals but against actual K-pop artists — and this time again, the intimacy of Circle in the Square could come through.“We’re competing with Blackpink and BTS,” Bergman said, laughing, “but I don’t know where else you’re going to see BTS with 600 other people. Unless you’re Jeff Bezos or something.” More

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      For Ghana’s Only Openly Transgender Musician, ‘Every Day Is Dangerous’

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      Maxine Angel Opoku has found a new audience for her music with songs opposing a proposed law that would make it illegal to identify as gay, transgender or queer.ACCRA, Ghana — When Maxine Angel Opoku was still an upstart musician, relatively unknown and struggling to stand out in Ghana’s competitive music scene, she sang about love, romance and being sexy.Then, in August 2021, lawmakers in the country’s Parliament introduced a bill that would imprison people who identify as transgender, as Ms. Opoku does, and her art urgently turned to advocacy. Her music began to attract both legions of new fans as well as powerful adversaries.“Dear Mr. Politician, fix the country right now. The people who voted for you, are disappointed in you,” Ms. Opoku sings in one of her latest songs. “Kill it, kill it, kill the bill.”The subject of the song is the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill,” which, if passed, would make identifying as gay, transgender or queer a crime punishable with a maximum prison sentence of five years.As Ghana’s only openly transgender musician, Ms. Opoku, who is known on stage as Angel Maxine, is one of the most visible targets of the proposed legislation in a country where the gay and transgender community is largely closeted.Ms. Opoku, preparing for the day last month in Accra, Ghana.Francis Kokoroko for The New York Times“Music is the tool for my advocacy,” Ms. Opoku said in an interview in Accra, the capital of Ghana. “This is the only way my voice can reach the politicians, the president, the homophobes, the layperson.”Same-sex sexual acts are already criminalized in Ghana, in part because of a British colonial-era law, but it is currently not a crime to publicly identify as gay, transgender or queer.In response to the proposed legislation, Ms. Opoku released a song called “Kill the Bill” and, shortly before that, another song, “Wo Fie,” which means “in your home,” in the Akan language, one of the most widely spoken in Ghana.“Wo Fie” talks about how L.G.B.T.Q. people may be part of every family, and calls for tolerance and respect. In the lyrics, Ms. Opoku sings about being unapologetically herself.Ms. Opoku, the oldest of five children, was born in Accra on Sept. 3, 1985, to a fashion designer mother and a civil servant father.“Everybody that saw her would say: ‘Hey, you have a beautiful girl,’” her mother, Faustina Araba Forson, 60, recalled. “Then I would say: ‘No, it’s a boy.’”“She loved wearing girls’ dresses, playing with the girls,” her mother added. “She was a girl trapped in a male body.”Still, it took Ms. Forson many years to accept her daughter’s identity. Ms. Opoku recalled that mother and child would frequent churches to hear pastors, including the controversial Nigerian preacher T.B. Joshua, seeking to “cast the gay out.”“One day I was praying, and I heard God say, ‘I created her in my own image and I love her,’” Ms. Forson said.Ms. Opoku started out singing at home during morning devotional prayers with her family, and as a teenager shadowed members of a now defunct girl group. She began performing music as a woman in 2008 while studying hospitality management in Koforidua, a city north of Accra. It was a dangerous endeavor. Once, during a set, a bottle was thrown from the audience, striking her in the head, she said.With no label to back her or to sponsor recording sessions, she put her music — whose sound is a fusion of Afropop, dance hall and the increasingly popular Afrobeats — on hold and instead moved between jobs in the hospitality sector as a cook and waitress, where she faced issues such as misgendering.Ms. Opoku and her mother, Faustina Araba Forson.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesEven before the threat of prison in the impending legislation, to be openly gay or transgender in Ghana was extraordinarily risky, with those identifying — or perceived to be — as such facing acts of violence from both strangers and their own families. Employment and housing discrimination is common.“Some get forced into marriages, get thrown out of their homes; some of them drop out of school because they no more have support,” said Leila Yahya, executive director of One Love Sisters, Ghana, an advocacy organization for L.G.B.T.Q. Muslims, and a friend of Ms. Opoku.Ms. Opoku returned to music in 2018, and while defiance has won her followers online at home and abroad, it has also marked her out. Her home was ransacked and looted by a mob last year, forcing her to scale back on public appearances. Ms. Opoku was not at home when the mob attacked.“They could have taken me to the police station, maybe I could have even died,” said Ms. Opoku, who now performs rarely, and only in private. “I could have been lynched.”After Ms. Opoku’s home was attacked, the maverick musician Wanlov the Kubolor and his sister, known as Sister Deborah, helped her find a safe space and began a professional and personal relationship. The siblings, long viewed as social contrarians in Ghana’s music industry, are featured on both “Kill the Bill” and “Wo Fie.”“It blew me away, the stuff she was living with from day to day: financially, psychologically, physically,” said Wanlov the Kubolor. “I don’t think I could have survived that life.”Ms. Opoku said she also wants to be known for music unrelated to her activism. But that has been an unrealized ambition, so far. A completed mini-album of non-advocacy songs remains unreleased because of a lack of sponsorship, she said.Ms. Forson with a picture of Ms. Opoku as a child next to her aunt.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesFor Wanlov the Kubolor, the recent rise in Ms. Opoku’s public stature has been equal parts joyful and painful.“It is painful because she could have bloomed much earlier, because she has a super talent, and she could have been a world star already,” he said.Recently, the song “Wo Fie” went viral on TikTok outside Ghana, and he believes Ms. Opoku’s increasing international visibility — although fraught with safety risks — could also serve as a protective factor for her.But Ms. Opoku isn’t so sure. “Every day is dangerous for me,” she said. “I cannot walk on the street as a normal person.”Taking a bus is out of the question, she said, as is going to the market. “I cannot do a lot of things,” she said.Her daughter’s safety is front of mind for Ms. Forson, too. “I fear for my daughter a lot,” she said. “She is a vociferous person and so she is a target, and I always pray that God should protect her.”If passed, the bill would criminalize positive portrayals of queer life in the media, codify the widely discredited pseudoscience of conversion therapy and compel the families and neighbors of L.G.B.T.Q. people to report them to the authorities.Those who are arrested can avoid prison by undergoing psychiatric and endocrinological treatment “to overcome their vulnerabilities.” The bill also states that allies who give any form of assistance to L.G.B.T.Q. people, such as housing, could be sentenced to between five and 10 years in prison.Ms. Opoku, with friends, at a hotel before a workshop she facilitated for people in Ghana who identify as transgender.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesThe proposed legislation is backed by the country’s powerful religious leaders, politicians from the two leading parties and large sections of the local media. It also has broad popular support in a country where a 2019 survey found that 93 percent of Ghanaians would dislike having a homosexual neighbor.The bill has also galvanized outspoken opposition from a small but influential coalition of local academics, lawyers and rights activists.Last month the Speaker of Parliament, who has previously expressed support for the legislation, said it was a priority and would be passed before the next elections in 2024.Thanks in part to the L.G.B.T.Q. antipathy fomenting around the bill, Ms. Opoku said it was difficult to see a future for herself in Ghana. It’s nearly impossible for her to perform freely in public now; the bill would make it legally impossible.“I don’t see a life here for me,” she said. “If I cannot come out openly, go on the streets to move about my daily life, if I cannot get a job, how do I sustain myself? This is no life.”Despite the difficulties, she remains resolute about speaking up for Ghana’s L.G.B.T.Q. community in the face of this rising hostility.Her next song, she said, will encourage at-risk people to sign up for the H.I.V. prevention pill PrEP.“I feel like it is a responsibility,” Ms. Opoku said. “If I win, people like me will also win.”She added, “People like me will also be happier, people like me will also feel free.”Ms. Opoku, at home.Francis Kokoroko for The New York TimesReporting for this story was supported in part by the Pulitzer Center. More

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      Review: In ‘Almost Famous,’ the Heart of Rock ’n’ Roll Flatlines

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      Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film, set in the world of bands and groupies, does not survive its Broadway musical transplant.At its best, rock ’n’ roll is “a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb” — or so decrees Lester Bangs, a character in the new musical “Almost Famous.”Alas, the show, which opened on Broadway on Thursday, gets the wrong part of that formula right. Though celebrating the rock world of 1973, when the real Lester Bangs was the field’s most influential critic, “Almost Famous” is neither glorious nor righteous. It barely even has a form.That leaves dumb, and I’m sorry to say that despite the intelligence of the 2000 movie on which it’s based, and the track record of its creators, the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been. In retelling the story of a 15-year-old who gets sucked prematurely into the world of bands and groupies and roadies and drugs, it lands instead in a mystifying muddle, occasionally diverting but never affecting.It needn’t have been that way; the source material is rich. But perhaps because the story is semi-autobiographical, Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed the movie, apparently saw little reason to rethink it for the stage. The 15-year-old, William Miller (Casey Likes), still sets out, under the tutelage of Bangs (Rob Colletti), to be a rock journalist. When Rolling Stone, thinking he is much older, assigns him to cover a middling band called Stillwater — a composite of several groups Crowe actually toured with — William is torn between Bangs’s warning not to befriend his subjects and his own craving to be cool.But musical theater is a radically different beast from film, let alone life, and Crowe, working with the composer and co-lyricist, Tom Kitt, and the director Jeremy Herrin, does not seem to have accounted for that. The screenplay limited itself to William’s point of view, revealing the other main characters — especially Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond, and his muse, Penny Lane — through the boy’s adoring eyes. William himself was characterized almost entirely by the act of watching, which was sufficient and even necessary to Crowe’s purposes.Solea Pfeiffer as Penny Lane, with Likes’s William. The Broadway show, our critic writes, reduces the story to little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical can’t work that way. If he’s going to sing — and if he’s the protagonist he has to — William must have something worth singing about. But Crowe and Kitt have given him only one real solo, the excellent “No Friends,” which is engaging because it grapples with a real conflict the boy faces. One is not enough, and though Likes, making his Broadway debut at 20, is appealing in the role and delivers when given the chance, there’s a hole at the center of the story that no amount of stage business can disguise.Not that Herrin doesn’t try. “Almost Famous” is one of the busiest book musicals I can recall, the stage so constantly and minutely activated (with choreography by Sarah O’Gleby) that it soon seems as flat and futile as an ant farm. Big moments, like Hammond’s acid-fueled dive from the roof of a house into a swimming pool, barely register; the settings by Derek McLane are resolutely unspectacular. And even in ordinary moments, filled with overdrawn caricatures slamming into one another, it’s often difficult to locate the important information amid all the empty industry.The same underwhelming overload hampers the music, which is obviously a bigger problem for a musical. Of the astounding 30 numbers listed in the program, only seven are what I’d call real theater songs. They are useful in establishing William’s overprotective mother (tartly played by Anika Larsen) and, in “Morocco,” the show’s best tune, Solea Pfeiffer’s dreamy but slippery Penny. “The Night-Time Sky’s Got Nothing on You,” a duet for her and Russell (Chris Wood), sounds, as it should, like an actual love song of the era, but for once with lyrics that trace a theatrical arc.Unfortunately, most of the rest of the songs are fragments, reprises or ensemble numbers so spliced with dialogue and served up in small bits as to nullify their expressive value. Some of them might be quite nice — Kitt’s melodies are never uninteresting — if they could just be sung through.But the show’s biggest musical problem comes from the fact that an unmanageably large proportion of its songs, perhaps a third, are covers. Originally made famous by the likes of the Allman Brothers Band, Deep Purple, Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin, these are performed diegetically, in whole or in part, in concert or backstage scenes.The use of covers made sense in the realistic format of the movie, where they add granular texture to William’s love affair with the world he was watching. But in the fundamentally surreal world of a musical, familiar pop tunes are like junk food, providing a ping of stimulation with no nutrition. Ending the first act with the company singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” — staged for our pleasure, not William’s — thus seems like a cheat and a sop.Foreground from left: Likes (kneeling), Brandon Contreras, Chris Wood and Drew Gehling in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical is not, ideally, a singalong. Nor is it a tone poem, in which it might be sufficient for songs simply to create a mood and please the ear. (At least the ones here do please the ear; they are for the most part well performed, if rarely with any special charisma.) Even the best of recent jukebox musicals have demonstrated the form’s inherent pitfalls in the process of overcoming them; the worst have demonstrated its bankruptcy. So why did the producers and the creative team of “Almost Famous” fall at least partway into the same traps?I can only conclude that they wanted to hedge their bets on material that as originally conceived seemed commercially dangerous. A quiet, personal look at the way a loud, popular medium inflates and then punctures private dreams may not have seemed very Broadway.And yet that’s exactly what coming to Broadway — a loud, popular medium if ever there was one — has done to “Almost Famous.” The workaround reduces the story to a far more conventional one, little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Russell. With no broader implications to give it gravitas, no real investigation of the way the rock revolution altered our concepts of celebrity, it floats away into the jukebox ether.If you believe that Lester Bangs’s precept applies equally to musicals — and it’s true that many fine ones are gloriously and righteously dumb — you might not mind that. But if you care about the form, you may wish “Almost Famous” had aimed (as its Stevie Wonder cover urges) for higher ground.Almost FamousAt the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; almostfamousthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      The Philharmonic Tests Its New Home With the Classics

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      David Geffen Hall reopened with a month of concerts that sketched a possible future for the New York Philharmonic. Now it’s back to business.The new David Geffen Hall has opened — and opened, and opened.In 1962, one performance was enough to cut the ribbon on the New York Philharmonic’s home at Lincoln Center. Sixty years — and many tweaks later, big and small — it took four weeks of festivities to celebrate the acoustically and aesthetically troubled hall’s decades-in-the-making, $550 million gut renovation.A month of opening nights: Call it inflation.I was in the hall for nearly all of those nights. For a crowd-pleasing concert dedicated to the people who constructed it. For a sober jazz-meets-classical, multimedia exploration of the history of the neighborhood razed to build the center.For an evening with the folksy mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, the coziness of which shocked anyone who had ever been to the drafty, dingy barn that was the hall pre-renovation. For the unveiling of three series in the glassed-in Sidewalk Studio. For the flashing lights, booming electronics and pitch-bending vocal octet of a slew of premieres.For not one but two fund-raising galas: first, a genial if never showstopping parade of Broadway stars like Bernadette Peters, Lin-Manuel Miranda and, the urbane highlight, Vanessa Williams; then, two days later, a brusque romp through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (which PBS will air and stream on Friday).For an open house last weekend with aerialists rappelling down the building’s facade, and a test of the 50-foot screen that will simulcast concerts to those who wander into the lobby. (The quality of the video is already crisp; the sound is a work in progress.)Members of Bandaloop performed an aerialist act as part of Geffen Hall’s open house weekend. Richard Termine/Lincoln CenterBy Wednesday, the confetti had settled. And after all that, we were deposited back into the standard repertory.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.Who Is David Geffen?: The entertainment magnate, who jump-started the renovation, has become avidly sought by culture and education leaders looking to finance a wave of new construction.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Expert Assessment: Right after the reopening our critic wrote that the renovation had a mightily improved sound. In the weeks that followed his feelings became more complicated.Because, for all of Geffen’s intended uses — as a community center and high school graduation spot, as a pop venue and corporate event rental — it is, first and foremost, a traditional orchestra hall. If Wednesday’s program, a Mozart piano concerto and a Bruckner symphony, didn’t work here, nothing else would matter — not the more spacious lobbies or the auditorium’s wraparound seating or the stylish restaurant.Beethoven’s Ninth had been a return to the wholly unamplified and wholly familiar, but in one-night-only, hastily rehearsed form. Wednesday was the back-to-business moment: the real opening night, a culmination of a month’s testing of the space, its acoustics and its house band.Weeks of performances under the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, had begun to form a portrait of Geffen’s sound: clear, clean and adroitly balanced, but a little colorless and cool, even chilly. Soft passages glistened, solos popped, and there was a palpable sense of the bass frequencies that had struggled in earlier iterations of the hall. Reducing audience capacity by 500 and pulling the stage forward to let seating encircle it resulted in a far more engaging experience.But especially when the playing was loud and densely massed, the clarity muddied, and there was little sense of the enveloping richness that is one of the great joys of hearing an orchestra live. The music blared at your face when it should have surrounded you.There was appealing intimacy and considerable warmth on Wednesday, though, in an account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 that featured Yefim Bronfman — a veteran too often taken for granted — playing with lucid, gentle eloquence. He was the first real, acoustic concerto soloist in the new space, and he was a gallant partner; the piano, properly, sounded somewhere both inside and in front of the orchestra. In the slow second movement, silky, misty strings made a poised counterpart to familial interplay in the winds.Van Zweden, as in his breakneck second movement in Beethoven’s Ninth, pressed the third-movement Allegro of the Mozart a few shades past comfort. You get the sense that he thinks this kind of breathlessness transmits excitement, but it comes off as harried rather than thrilling or witty.His briskness can bulldoze eddies of feeling. A few moments before the end of the Mozart, the rambunctious mood suddenly shifts for maybe 10 seconds of wistful sublimity. The passage is over before you know it, whisked back to a spirited rondo, but it epitomizes the piece’s — and its composer’s — mixing of the jovial and aching. Van Zweden zipped through it to the final bars.And in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, his prioritization of lyrical flow — overall, a welcome sense of naturalness from a conductor better known for punchy climaxes — pressed the Adagio slightly too fast to allow for the building of what can be excruciating intensity. The Finale was, unusually, more moving, with its seesawing between peace and war; in van Zweden’s smooth, happy-minded rendition of the work, neither too heavy nor hectoring, it was no surprise which side eventually triumphed.The playing wasn’t flawless. There was a lack of depth in the mesmerizing unwinding lines for the violins in the Adagio, and some iffy intonation in the brasses. But there wasn’t the sense I had had in earlier concerts, particularly when I was sitting on the ground level, of distance or almost clinical detachment in the sound.Jaap van Zweden leading the Philharmonic in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22, featuring Yefim Bronfman as soloist.Fadi KheirOr of that blare. Even if the brasses sometimes felt overly bright at top volume, there was more transparency and better blend at those heights. The consistent problem since the opening remains the hard, strident sound that the violins take on at the top of their range and force.This may be the playing of an orchestra that tends aggressive — in other words, something that can be fixed — rather than a feature of the room itself. Or it might be a shortcoming of the hall, a slight but consequential lack of sufficient reverberation.Only time will tell: Such are the ambiguities of acoustics. But some of the concerns about the basic sound of the place that I’d had over the past few weeks were assuaged on Wednesday; the orchestra is, as expected, adapting to its new home, so impressions are evolving, too.This Mozart-Bruckner pairing signals a return to the classics after the showy progressivism of the opening month’s programming. That multimedia event early in October, Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” was essentially an 80-minute land acknowledgment, mustering narration, archival images, poetic filmed reconstructions of street life early in the 20th century, oral history, notation and improvisation to sketch a lost community.After the piece opened with a long set by a jazz ensemble, the Philharmonic awkwardly shuffled onstage in the wake of a section called “Destroyer”: interlopers invading an already vibrant culture. The self-castigating aspect felt very much of our moment. Then, of the two October subscription programs, the first was dominated by living composers. The second featured a half-hour premiere by Caroline Shaw and was anchored by a rediscovered symphony by Florence Price; in an inversion of the usual format, the opener was the standard — Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” — rather than a new piece.This is all hardly the model for what is coming up. There are intriguing scores being performed: Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion gets a rare hearing in a couple of weeks, and the Philharmonic has never played Shostakovich’s 12th Symphony, which is scheduled for the beginning of December.But while there’s no shortage of contemporary pieces this season, living composers — or even unusual selections from the past — get that anchor slot at the end of the concert only a few times. October sketched a possible future for the Philharmonic; it didn’t describe the present.That future will be guided by a new music director; van Zweden, hardly a driving creative force even before the pandemic break separated him from the ensemble, is leaving after next season. Over the coming months both promising younger artists (the likes of Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Makela) and veterans (Marin Alsop, Gianandrea Noseda) make guest appearances. Gustavo Dudamel, the star maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who returns in May, is the elephant in the room.Whoever ends up with the job will be a crucial part of the continuing adjustment to the new hall, a process that will not be over soon. The promise of the space is clear. The building is far more spacious and comfortable than it was, even if the public spaces evoke the mid-market casualness of an airport terminal — usable but disposable — more than an inspiring house of culture.Every aspect of the hall seems to have embraced this half-vulgar, half-lovable ethos. First I cringed, then I giggled, at one of the orchestra’s cellists, who has recorded the “please silence your cellphones” announcement that plays as the lights dim.“Now here,” she concludes with goofy, irresistible relish, like she’s channeling Ed McMahon, “comes the music!” More

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      When Technology Makes Music More Accessible

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      In Britain and Ireland, a series of recent projects show the rich possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are considered in the creative process.LONDON — As the audience at Cafe OTO, a venue here, settled down to hear Neil Luck introduce his ambitious new piece, “Whatever Weighs You Down,” bemused smiles flickered across many faces.The evening’s performances had already featured an intriguing selection of musical technologies, including sensor gloves, text-to-speech software and recordings of bird song processed by artificial intelligence.So when Luck launched into a low-tech étude, raucously inflating a balloon while gasping into a microphone, audience members couldn’t help but laugh.A dark humor punctuated “Whatever Weighs You Down,” a bizarre, violent 40-minute work for piano, video, electronics and sensor gloves. It was the centerpiece of an evening that presented works made with Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound ($1.6 million) project, led by the pianist and composer Zubin Kanga, to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.“Whatever Weighs You Down” is one of several experimental works that recently premiered in Britain and Ireland that show the rich musical possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are incorporated into the creative process. These works also point to newly developed technologies as both malleable tools for expressing diverse perspectives in experimental music, and as potentially enabling greater accessibility to composition, which traditionally has been a rarefied and exclusive world.In recent years, increasing attention has been paid, particularly in Britain, to making classical music more accessible. This includes the widespread adoption of what are called relaxed performances in concert halls — where audiences are allowed to make noise — and the creation of professional ensembles for disabled musicians, such as BSO Resound, part of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and the Paraorchestra, which is based in Bristol, England.For “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Luck worked closely with the Deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura, who in the piece appeared on a video screen and used sign language to retell her own dreams about falling, one of the main themes of Luck’s work.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world. Language in Evolution: Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.In “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Minamimura wanted to express a deaf perspective on sound and music. “I have hearing loss, but I can feel things — I can feel sounds,” she said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. Workshops to develop the piece involved Minamimura responding to vibrations wherever she could find them: pressing her full body against the lid of the piano, feeling the underside of the soundboard and even biting the strings of certain instruments.As the performance of “Whatever Weighs You Down” drew to a close, it reached a striking semi-synthesis. Onscreen, Minamimura’s gestures mirrored Kanga’s onstage hand movements. Both performers provided a kind of accompaniment for each other, experienced in entirely different ways by audience members, depending on their relationship to sound.“Traditionally, music is just heard in an auditory sense,” Minamimura said, “but, of course, we can see someone playing a piano or playing a flute. For me, technology means incorporating a film, visuals, or a general feeling of something else; we’re adding more sensory experiences for an audience.”Chisato Minamimura’s 2019 piece “Scored in Silence” was created with the aim of giving deaf individuals a comparable experience to hearing individuals.Mark PickthallZubin Kanga leads Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound project to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesCreating music that incorporates multisensory experience is just one of the areas Cyborg Soloists explores. The project, supported by the government-funded U.K. Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, also involves new types of visual interactions, including virtual reality, the creation of new digital instruments and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.The next frontier for Kanga, he said, is finding a way to translate brain activity from electroencephalogram caps into sound. And in Ireland, a recent installation explores a similar process.The visual artist Owen Boss described the first time he heard the sonic reproduction of a brain mid-seizure as “an absolutely extraordinary moment,” describing “a very low-end bass sound, kind of rhythmic, it just emerges in these sweeping, intense bass noises that whoosh in and whoosh out.”The sound files were created by Mark Cunningham, a professor of neurophysiology of epilepsy at Trinity College Dublin, who analyzed slivers of removed brain tissue that had been put through a process that simulated a seizure. He translated the analysis into binary code, and then into sound. Inspired by those deeply jarring reverberations and his family’s own experience, Boss then began piecing together an installation, “The Wernicke’s Area,” which is named after the part of the brain involved in understanding speech. The installation is showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.In 2014, Boss’s wife, Debbie Boss, had surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was successful — the tumor was removed from her brain’s Wernicke’s area — but there were some side effects: The former soprano developed epilepsy and also now finds communication challenging.The violist Stephen Upshaw and the mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton took performance directions for “The Wernicke’s Area” from diaries Debbie Boss kept about her seizures.Pat RedmondWith his wife’s permission, Boss and the composer Emily Howard created what he calls “a portrait of Debbie,” a multimedia work including details from the diaries she kept of her seizures, images of her brain, warped snippets of her favorite Handel aria and a variety of electroacoustic music drawn from data produced by artificially induced brain seizures.For all involved, the first performance of “The Wernicke’s Area” was an extremely moving experience, particularly for the Boss family. Debbie Boss became emotional “watching people do what she couldn’t do anymore,” her husband said. Yet, because she wasn’t directly involved in shaping the work, there’s a slight distance to “The Wernicke’s Area.”Lived experience plays a large role in the work of the composer Megan Steinberg, which places neurodiverse and disabled practitioners in all aspects of the creative process.Steinberg’s “Outlier II,” created with the Distractfold ensemble and the artists Elle Chante and Luke Moore, explores, in musical form, how artificial intelligence, or A.I., can exclude disabled people by working off a generalized understanding of human experience. “Outlier II” involves an A.I.-generated melody that generalizes over time, gradually losing nuance before being disrupted by a series of chance-based improvisations.Steinberg considered accessibility from the start of the creative process, and produced scores that were tailored to each performer’s needs.“That’s so rare in arts environments,” said Chante, a vocalist with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a condition affecting her joints. “Normally, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this thing, and we want it to be accessible.’ Here, it’s, ‘We want to be accessible, and here’s this piece we’re trying to create.’ And that made a giant difference.”A graphic score created for Megan Steinberg’s “Outlier II.”via Megan SteinbergProjects like these also produce music that is more representative of the breadth of human experience, according to Cat McGill, the head of program development at Drake Music, an arts charity focused on music, disability and technology. These projects “force us to challenge our thinking around disability and neurodiversity,” she wrote in an email interview.“If we approach a situation with the assumption that each individual has a unique contribution to make, rather than feeling like we need to fix them,” McGill added, “we embrace the differences as a natural part of humanity.” More

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      Takeoff, of Atlanta Rap Trio Migos, Shot Dead at 28 in Houston

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      The rapper was killed in a shooting at a bowling alley in Houston overnight.The 28-year-old rapper, whose real name is Kirsnick Khari Ball, was killed in a shooting at a bowling alley in Houston.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global CitizenThe rapper known as Takeoff, a subtle vocal technician and one-third of the chart-topping group Migos, whose singsong flow helped define Atlanta’s ever-evolving, influential rap sound, was shot and killed overnight outside a Houston bowling alley, the authorities said. He was 28.Chief Troy Finner of the Houston Police Department confirmed the rapper’s death at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon. A 24-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man were taken to local hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, the police said.The police said the shooting occurred after a private party had ended at 810 Billiards & Bowling, as a large group of about 40 people gathered near the front door on the third level. An argument ensued and shots were fired from at least two weapons, they said, leading to many people fleeing.“We have no reason to believe that he was involved in anything criminal at the time,” Chief Finner said of Takeoff.No suspects have been arrested, the authorities said, and they requested that any witnesses who left the scene come forward with additional information.“Sometimes the hip-hop community gets a bad name,” Chief Finner said. “I’m calling up on everybody — our hip-hop artists in Houston and around the nation — we’ve got to police ourselves. There are so many talented individuals, men and women, in that community, who again I love and I respect, and we all need to stand together and make sure no one tears down that industry.”The commercial area where Takeoff was killed was quiet on a rainy Tuesday evening, with some young fans trickling past a few bouquets of roses and lit candles.“When I heard the news it got me to tears,” Tatiana Battle, 23, said. “Migos’s music got me through breakups, graduation, celebrations. And now I can’t listen to them anymore because it will never be the same.”It was Takeoff’s childhood obsession with Southern hip-hop that first inspired Migos as young teenagers in the Atlanta suburbs of Gwinnett County, on its way to becoming one of the biggest rap acts of the last decade, known for hits like “Versace” and “Bad and Boujee.”Even as he dodged celebrity and maintained almost no public profile, Takeoff became a connoisseur’s fan favorite of the trio, and was credited with initiating the stuttering, triplet delivery that came to infiltrate hip-hop and trickle into the pop sphere.Drew Findling, a lawyer for Takeoff and confidant to many rap stars, called his death “a devastating loss, particularly for Atlanta.”“When you’re around Takeoff, there’s a sense of peacefulness about his aura,” Mr. Findling said. “He listens to you, he looks at you, he’s more focused on what you have to say than what he has to say. The world was starting to learn about Takeoff. It was his time to shine.”Before becoming international rap superstars — and ushering in a new period of dominance for Atlanta music in the streaming era — Migos, which also included the rappers Offset and Quavo, was founded as a family bedroom act northeast of the city, in an area that Migos came to brand as the “Nawfside.”After releasing its first independent mixtape as Migos, “Juug Season,” in 2011, and then gaining local buzz and tastemaker attention with the track “Bando,” the trio rose to national prominence with the single “Versace” in 2013. The remix, though never commercially released, featured an appearance by Drake, who mimicked the group’s burgeoning signature pattern of rapid-fire, rollicking raps, known as a triplet flow, in which three syllables are piled rhythmically onto one beat to hypnotic effect.A New York Times review of Migos’s 2013 mixtape, “Y.R.N.,” called the group “insistent, noisy and chaotic” and “perpetually in fifth gear.”Pairing a punchy rap style that could sound broody or elated with sticky, repetitive hooks — like Takeoff’s defining choruses on “Fight Night” and “T-Shirt” — Migos’s trademark delivery would go on to become a go-to mode for popular music throughout the 2010s, as used by artists including Travis Scott and Ariana Grande. In 2021, former President Barack Obama put “Straightenin,” from Migos’s album “Culture III,” on his summer playlist, alongside songs by Rihanna, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder.In late 2016 and early 2017, the group soared to A-list fame around the world thanks to “Bad and Boujee,” a spare, uncompromising track featuring Lil Uzi Vert — but not Takeoff, who was absent from the song — that spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.In what may be Takeoff’s defining moment outside of the recording studio, he was once asked in a red carpet interview about being left off the track, drawing the visible ire of the entire group.“Do it look like I’m left off ‘Bad and Boujee’?” Takeoff responded, referring to sharing the financial windfall and fame with Quavo and Offset.The track became one of the first megahits of the streaming era, and has been streamed more than 1.5 billion times in the United States alone. The group’s subsequent 2017 album, “Culture,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart and earned Migos one of its two Grammy nominations.In an interview with The New York Times ahead of the album’s release, Takeoff compared the moment to Christmas Eve. “You just know that everything you asked for is going to be there up under that Christmas tree,” he said, his often-downcast eyes lighting up. “It’s our time now.”In the years since, Migos has released two sequels to “Culture,” and singles including “MotorSport,” “I Get the Bag” and “Walk It Talk It,” also with Drake. Takeoff’s solo album, “The Last Rocket,” came out in 2018, and debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Last month, Takeoff and Quavo — without the third Migos member, Offset — released the album “Only Built for Infinity Links,” which went to No. 7.Takeoff, whose real name is Kirsnick Khari Ball, was born on June 18, 1994, and grew up in Lawrenceville, Ga. He “always wanted to rap,” he told The Fader, a music magazine, in a 2013 interview, and found his group mates close to home: Takeoff and Quavo, his uncle, were raised by Quavo’s mother, Edna, a hairstylist. She is frequently shouted out in Migos songs as “Mama!”The first of the group to fall hard for rap music while the others played football, Takeoff soaked up music that he discovered online and bought at the flea market, particularly Southern rappers like Gucci Mane, T.I., Lil Wayne and his early group the Hot Boys, which provided a blueprint for Migos’s later success.As a duo initially called Polo Club, Takeoff and Quavo began performing music in their teens at the local skating rink, and released a mixtape when Takeoff was still middle-school age. Offset began spending time at Edna’s house and considered Takeoff and Quavo his cousins. Together, they started to map out a sound — waterfalls of rolling verses, ecstatic chanted phrases, jabbing background ad-libs — that was catchy and distinctive.The trio came to the notice of the local executives Pierre Thomas (known as P) and Kevin Lee (Coach K), who founded a label, Quality Control, around the trio in 2013. Already, Migos had fallen under the tutelage of the local rapper and talent scout Gucci Mane, who had heard the group’s early track “Bando,” and signed them to a cash deal.But with Gucci Mane in prison, P and Coach K became the group’s primary boosters, developing a grass-roots artist development strategy that they would later employ with other breakout acts like Lil Yachty and Lil Baby.Musically, it was Takeoff who first drew P’s attention with his bouncy, melodic triplet raps that the executive said reminded him of the ’90s group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. “The music was crazy,” P later said, “but what made me really want to go hard for them is that they packed all their clothes and moved into the studio — literally lived there, sleeping on reclining chairs and making music all day.”P had long heralded Takeoff as an unsung talent, given his reserved mien and lack of self-aggrandizing. “If he cared more about this rap game he would definitely be stepping on y’all,” the executive wrote on Twitter in May, “but unfortunately he don’t.”He added that he’d been that way since they first met. “Nothing has changed with him.”Describing Migos’s maximalist approach to music in The Fader, Takeoff said the group would make about “seven songs a day,” spending no more than 15 minutes on each track. Working on a song for any longer “kills the vibe,” Takeoff said. “You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh,” he added. “You gotta have character.”In the summer of 2020, Takeoff was accused of rape in a lawsuit by a woman who said she was assaulted at a house party in Encino, Calif. A lawyer representing the rapper called the claims “patently and provably false” and said Takeoff was known for his “quiet, reserved and peaceful personality.” The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the case because of a lack of evidence, according to Pitchfork.Recently, Migos had been coy about its future as a group as Offset battled in court with the trio’s label. But in interviews, Quavo emphasized familial loyalty and said that he and Takeoff would continue as a duo, which they sometimes referred to as Unc’ and ’Phew.“We don’t know all the answers,” Takeoff, always a man of few words, said last month on the “Big Facts” podcast. “God knows. And we pray, so only time will tell.”Reporting was contributed by More