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      How Will Popular Culture Change in Trump’s Second Term?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn the months leading up to the election, Donald J. Trump appeared on several podcasts with young male audiences. Whether or not they tilted the outcome, they helped increase Trump’s visibility and appeal with a notoriously hard-to-reach demographic. And following his victory, Trump culture moved out of these comfort spaces and began seeping out in unexpected places: Trump danced in N.F.L. end zones, there were TikTok videos of people wearing MAGA hats in New York City.In many ways the cultural legacy of the first Trump administration was more visible in backlash and protest. But it’s possible the second time around, the impact will be an affirmative one.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the long tail of cultural response to political change, the de-monopolization of centrist broadcast and cable television and the different directions pop culture might take in Trump’s second term.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      The Berlin Philharmonic Is the Best in the Business

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      In three concerts at Carnegie Hall led by Kirill Petrenko, this orchestra played with awe-inspiring force and finesse.Around the turn of the 20th century, Arnold Böcklin’s brooding painting “The Isle of the Dead” made for one of the most popular images in Europe. Freud and Lenin owned prints; after seeing a reproduction in 1907, Rachmaninoff was inspired to write a tone poem.Nabokov wrote that copies of the Böcklin hung “in every home in Berlin.” Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead,” which the Berlin Philharmonic played on Sunday at the start of an amazing three-concert stand at Carnegie Hall, was also once ubiquitous, but these days is programmed less frequently and has a whiff of old-fashioned character piece about it.Great orchestras — and no orchestra is greater than this one, which plays with force and finesse under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — of course illuminate the deathless classics of the repertoire, as the Philharmonic did on this trip with Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and Bruckner’s Fifth. But the best ensembles also reveal unexpected depths in pieces you might take less seriously.Petrenko conducted “The Isle of the Dead” with the same luminous seriousness he might bring to Wagner’s “Parsifal,” making it taut and ferocious, morose without heaviness. Building in strength near the start, the Philharmonic sounded billowing rather than crushing, like a gathering storm cloud. Solos — like the wind fragments that twist around each other, one by one — were played with poise but never look-at-me self-regard. A violin elegy near the end achieved wrenching intensity in what can sometimes be mere mood music.I’ve often thought that Korngold’s Violin Concerto — which came between the Rachmaninoff and Dvorak on Sunday and again, all three even more potent, on Tuesday — is a lot of shallow showboating. But the Philharmonic and Petrenko made it seem newly sophisticated.These players’ cohesion allowed them to create uncannily evocative atmospheres. The first movement of the concerto had a moonlit glow. In the third, a golden full-orchestra blast, balanced so that no section swamped the others, dissolved into a fairy tiptoe. Small details were moving in their artfulness, down to a tiny diminuendo passage in the violins in the first movement: a short, tender motif played a few times, each time softer. It was a simple effect, executed with utterly unified subtlety.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rebuilding After Fire, Jacob’s Pillow Will Open a New Theater

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      The Doris Duke Theater, more than twice as large as the original and designed for modern technology, will open in July.When the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow, the bucolic dance festival in Becket, Mass., was destroyed by a fire four years ago, the festival’s director, Pamela Tatge, promised that it would be rebuilt.“The theater,” she said at the time, “is an essential component of the ecology of Jacob’s Pillow.”On Wednesday, Jacob’s Pillow announced that its new Doris Duke Theater would reopen on July 9, as part of its coming season. And the initial wave of programming there has been conceived specifically with the space in mind.“We all struggled when we lost the Doris Duke,” Tatge said in an interview. “But we had this moment to think of what we will build and why, and what sort of building we need in the future.”The campus of Jacob’s Pillow has other performances spaces: the large Ted Shawn Theater, and the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage. The old Doris Duke opened in 1990, with 230 seats and the look of a sleek barn.A $10 million gift from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, insurance claims and other gifts paid for the costs of the new theater. Jacob’s Pillow, Tatge said, wanted its new building to be a flexible space with “the ability to support the future of where this field is going.” The organization hired the Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo, and brought on the Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson as a consultant, to design a theater, Tatge added, “that was in dialogue with nature.”The result is a building nearly twice the size of the original theater, with a range of 220-400 seats and the ability to also house residencies and other events, perhaps at the same time. It will be equipped with a spatial audio system and specialized cameras for livestreaming and interactive video performances.Tatge said that next summer’s lineup of artists at the Doris Duke Theater was based on “works that could magnify and amplify the flexibility of the space, as well as works that demonstrate the intersection of dance and technology.”The programming includes the world premiere of Andrew Schneider’s “Here,” Shamel Pitts’s “Touch of Red” and Eun-Me Ahn’s “Dragons.” The Taiwanese choreographer and roboticist Huang Yi will make his Pillow debut, as will the Indigenous Sámi choreographer Elle Sofe. Faye Driscoll will return to the festival with her work “Weathering,” from last year, and Schneider and Pitts will create digital-first pieces.In the future, Tatge said, Jacob’s Pillow hopes to commission works that incorporate augmented reality, technology similar to video conferencing and other forms of mixed reality. And they can be developed year-round in the new building.“It will be a maker space,” Tatge said of the Doris Duke Theater. “At a time where there is a crisis of ambition in our country because a lack of resources, the fact that we’re going to be able to support artists — that is something.” More

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      Liam Payne’s Former One Direction Bandmates Attend His Funeral in England

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      The One Direction singer died at 31 last month after a fall from a balcony.A funeral was held for the former One Direction singer Liam Payne in England on Wednesday afternoon, a month after his death in a fall from a hotel balcony.The private service at a church in Amersham, England, about 25 miles northwest of London, was attended by Mr. Payne’s former bandmates in One Direction, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik.Simon Cowell, James Corden and the model Damian Hurley also attended, photos showed, as well as several members of the girl group Girls Aloud, including Cheryl, Kimberley Walsh and Nicola Roberts. Cheryl is the mother of Mr. Payne’s 7-year-old son, Bear Grey Payne. Mr. Payne’s girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, was also at the service.Harry Styles at the funeral.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Payne’s coffin arrived in a carriage drawn by two white horses. It was lifted by pallbearers and carried into the church.Mr. Payne died at 31 after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires on Oct. 16.Prosecutors said that a toxicology report showed that Mr. Payne had cocaine, alcohol and a prescription antidepressant in his system. The local prosecutor’s office said it had accused three people of crimes after his death, though it did not name them. Two of them, including a hotel employee, were accused of supplying narcotics, and the third, who was described as being with Mr. Payne daily during his trip to Argentina, was accused of abandonment of a person followed by death.One Direction was assembled on the British talent show “The X Factor” in 2010 when the members were teenagers. They went on to international success with hits like “What Makes You Beautiful,” “Live While We’re Young” and “Story of My Life.” The band separated in 2016 and the members continued to record on their own. More

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      The Singer Whose Work Feels Like Prayer

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      On her new LP, “Daughter of a Temple,” Ganavya is the central vocalist, composer and community builder for 30 artists who constitute a who’s who in jazz and experimental music.Before collaborating with 30 artists of various disciplines for her new album, Ganavya made a practice of kneeling to wash the feet of her guests. They’d often break down at the gesture.“Everyone cried,” she recalled. “It comes back to a grammar of care. In the tradition that I was raised, you can’t actually pay your teacher enough for what they’re giving you. So you do things around the house because you understand that there’s no amount of money that you could ever give that would ever make this make sense.”The 33-year-old vocalist, composer and bandleader was raised in the Hindu tradition of harikatha, a type of storytelling that blends music and poetry. A who’s who in jazz and experimental music — artists including Esperanza Spalding, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins and Vijay Iyer — sat in over the course of a week in Houston to record “Daughter of a Temple,” her 48-minute set of meditative chants and devotional hymns released last week. The LP features one of Wayne Shorter’s last recordings, the track “Elders Wayne and Carolina,” on which he and his wife recite the Buddhist chant “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.”The album is an example of community building as art. Born Ganavya Doraiswamy in Flushing, Queens, and raised in Tamil Nadu, a state in South India, Ganavya came up in a creative family, where, as a child, she studied the harikatha along the Varkari pilgrimage route. She and her family would walk and sing poems called abhangs — nonstop devotional poems — for several days on end.“As soon as you hear Ganavya’s voice, you want to hear it some more,” Esperanza Spalding, a collaborator, said.Adama Jalloh for The New York Times“By the time I was already born, the whole family on my father’s side were musicians; I was born into the eye of the storm already,” she said. “It was just what we did, it wasn’t a thing, it wasn’t a statement. We learned how to cook, do the laundry, and music.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      No More Nostalgia Concerts, Please

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      The culture industry keeps getting better at monetizing the past — including the new ritual of musicians playing old albums, in full, onstage.In March, the rock band Weezer announced plans to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their self-titled debut, known to fans as “the Blue Album,” with a special tour: At every stop they would play the album in full, from front to back. I may not have enjoyed Weezer’s new output in decades, but the Blue Album was a fixture of my teenage consciousness, as it was for many my age; I was tempted to buy a ticket and spend an evening among my cohort, transported back to that time. But as I watched the video announcing the tour, I also felt a nagging sense of déjà vu.I assumed I was just reacting to the whole ritual of touring years-old albums, a concept that has become a staple of the industry. It emerged in the mid-2000s, with a curated series of relatively small concerts self-consciously titled “Don’t Look Back” — but within a decade it had become big business. In 2016, Bruce Springsteen toured the world playing the entirety of his 1980 album “The River”; U2 came aboard in 2017 with a massive tour where they played the whole of “The Joshua Tree,” from 1987. Now these exercises are commonplace: Just this year, concertgoers could catch anything from the rap icon Nas playing all of “Illmatic” (30th anniversary) to the country star Clint Black playing “Killin’ Time” (35th) to the pop-punk band Green Day playing both “Dookie” (30th) and “American Idiot” (20th) — albums mostly from an era when people expressed their love for records by actually buying them.Then it came to me: It wasn’t just that Weezer’s Blue Album tour was the sort of thing every band seems to be doing these days. It felt familiar because it was something that Weezer themselves had already done, 14 years earlier, on their “Memories” tour.Back then, I remember finding the conceit intriguingly novel. Today that aura of novelty is itself a distant memory. Notices of new album-anniversary tours pop up incessantly in my inbox and social feeds. Taken together, they do not feel like fun experiments or celebrations of beloved albums. They feel like the onward acceleration of a culture industry that is unsettlingly dedicated — not just in our concert halls but on our screens and everywhere else it can reach us — to monetizing our nostalgic attachment to media from the past.It’s easy to sympathize with everyone involved. For fans who grew attached to these albums when they were originally released, the concerts function as powerful shortcuts back to poignant memories and distant modes of feeling. For new fans, they are a chance to reconnect with cultural moments they might have missed the first time around. As for the bands: Many are scrambling, looking for ways to pay the bills as album and tour revenues plummet for all but the most successful artists. Presumably, booking agents are reminding artists that these nostalgia exercises do help sell tickets, while streaming stats are reminding them exactly which of their albums people listen to most. Speaking to Yahoo News in 2017, Art Alexakis of the band Everclear noted that merchandise sales at their anniversary tours were almost twice as high as at their regular shows. (Nostalgia is a hell of a drug; side effects may include buying two vinyl LPs and a T-shirt.) So musicians become jukeboxes — playing exactly what the data says people want to hear, minimizing the risk of boring anyone with new material or new ideas.‘That means that all the good songs were up at the front.’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Lawyers Argue Seizure of Jail Notes Was Unjust

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      Lawyers for the music mogul objected at a hearing to prosecutors viewing handwritten materials from their client’s cell after a sweep of the Brooklyn jail where he is being held.Sean Combs appeared in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday as his lawyers objected to the prosecution’s use of handwritten notes found inside the music mogul’s jail cell, arguing that his rights had been violated when they were turned over to prosecutors.The dispute stemmed from a recent sweep of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Mr. Combs has been held since September. Prosecutors cited the notes, which they contend exposed prohibited behavior, in a court filing last week in which they argued Mr. Combs should remain incarcerated until his trial, which is scheduled for May.The text of Mr. Combs’s notes was redacted from the public record. But prosecutors said it showed that he was trying to obstruct their case, by suggesting that he had paid a potential witness to post a statement on social media expressing support for him. Another note, the government said, related to him directing someone to find “dirt” on two alleged victims.Mr. Combs’s lawyers quickly lodged an objection to the prosecution’s possession of the notes, arguing that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.“This has been a complete institutional failure,” Marc Agnifilo, Mr. Combs’s lead lawyer, said at the hearing.The prosecution has defended its handling of the notes, writing in court papers that the sweep was preplanned and not engineered to target Mr. Combs. The government further said that any recovered material was reviewed by a “filter team” within the U.S. attorney’s office tasked with excluding any privileged materials from prosecutors handling the case.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Bizarre Love Triangle Playlist

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      Sabrina Carpenter, Loretta Lynn and SZA sing about all the points on a love triangle.Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste” was the most successful of this year’s triangular tunes.Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersDear listeners,Today’s playlist is all about one of popular music’s favorite shapes: the love triangle.Full of drama, secrets and passion, songs about love triangles have never exactly gone out of style. But as I’ve been considering some of the patterns and trends in this past year of pop music, I’ve noticed that they’re more popular — and in some cases, subversive — than ever.This year has specifically been full of songs in which the singer is unusually fixated on “the other woman.” The most successful is “Taste,” a sassy, innuendo-stuffed pop-country smash by one of the year’s breakout stars, Sabrina Carpenter. “I’ve heard you’re back together,” she sings to her love interest’s former and current squeeze. “And if that’s true, you’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you.” That refrain has more than a hint of queer subtext, which Carpenter makes explicit in the campy, surprisingly gory music video, which ends with her kissing her female rival (played by Jenna Ortega) and the two accidentally killing their shared beau. In a twist, they’re not terribly bothered by it.But “Taste” wasn’t the only 2024 song with an eye on the other point of the triangle. Released in March, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Obsessed” — a track from the deluxe edition of “Guts” — finds the singer haunted by the imagined perfection of her current partner’s ex-girlfriend: “If I told you how much I think about her, you’d think I was in love,” she sings. Another prominent triangular tune, Billie Eilish’s “Wildflower,” from “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” has become such a beloved fan favorite that it has spent 26 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. “I see her in the back of my mind, all the time,” Eilish sings of a partner’s ex — whom Eilish comforted when they first broke up, causing her to wonder, “Did I cross the line?”These songs all suggest some sort of transference and, at times, even a flirtation with both opposing points on the love triangle. Pop songs about same-sex desire are not nearly as taboo as they once were, and I suspect the surge in these sorts of songs reflect that shift.But in another sense, they’re telling a tale as old as time, a point I wanted to underscore by putting them in conversation with some older tracks. On today’s playlist, you’ll hear all the aforementioned songs, along with classics from the Cars, Loretta Lynn and Robyn, among other artists. It also features a certain global superstar’s 2024 remake of the ultimate “other woman” song, “Jolene.” No matter how you slice it, it seems, three’s a crowd.I know I’ve been known to share,LindsayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More