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      Year-End Listener Mailbag: Your 2022 Questions, Part 1

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicEach year, oodles of questions pour in from the Popcast faithful, and each year, the pop music staff of The New York Times tackles them with gusto.On this week’s Popcast, heated conversation about Olivia Rodrigo and strategic disappearance, Taylor Swift and intoxicants, Dua Lipa and other female pop superstar aspirants, the state of indie rock and more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect 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. More

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      A Musical Modernist’s Newly Polished, Smiling Guise

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      A three-CD set of music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, released by the Wergo label, backs up a more expansive view of the artist and is among the standouts of 2022.For devotees of fiendish musical modernism, Bernd Alois Zimmermann was one of the 20th century’s most notorious — and at times elusive — composers.Born in Germany in 1918, he was among the generation of musical prodigies whose early studies were waylaid and then fully interrupted by the rise of the Nazi party, which drafted Zimmermann into service on both the eastern and western fronts of World War II. Yet after his discharge in 1942, the composer quickly resumed the kind of polymathic, globally curious aesthetic that the Third Reich had sought to stamp out of German music academies.By the 1950s, when he had become a part of the postwar German avant-garde, Zimmermann also declared his interest in Brazilian moods of saudade, American boogie-woogie, as well as the similarly eclectic music of French composers like Darius Milhaud. Such catholic tastes put the composer at odds with self-appointed priests of the avant-garde like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.Yet just as Zimmermann was coming into his full aesthetic maturity — with towering, forbidding works like “Die Soldaten” (the opera that seemed to dramatize his lingering wartime agonies) and “Requiem for a Young Poet” — he succumbed to depression and died by suicide in 1970, at age 52.But was that the entire story? This familiar capsule biography is supported by plenty of facts: “Die Soldaten,” long reputed to be “un-performable,” does require a fantastically large orchestra playing dense, 12-tone music. And it also needs a staging that can accommodate near-simultaneous narrative flashbacks and flash-forwards. In 2008, a traveling production landed at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. (There, the director David Pountney dragged seated audiences to and fro, between all of Zimmermann’s discrete scenic zones, thanks to makeshift risers hoisted on rails.)It was an unforgettable scene — and a critical success. Subsequent productions of “Soldaten,” at the Salzburg Festival and Zurich Opera, seemed to ratify this official understanding of the composer as a gnarly and tragic visionary, full stop. Writing for The New York Times on the occasion of Zimmermann’s centennial in 2018, the musicologist and critic Mark Berry said of this final act in his life: “Family notwithstanding, his life had been lonely, and became lonelier; his work dark, and became darker.”But what about earlier decades? Berry also noted that Zimmermann’s broader musical story was “more complicated, contested and interesting” than partisans of various musical debates preferred to acknowledge. And yet polished musical documentation of that complex history has remained hard to access, until now.A new three-CD set titled “Zimmermann: Recomposed,” on the German Wergo label, is among the standout releases of 2022, precisely because it backs up this more expansive view of the artist. Thanks to vivacious performances from the conductor (and oboist) Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, we can now appreciate something we’ve rarely seen — namely, a Zimmermann who smiles.The venue for his good humor was the radio. Before Zimmermann could make a living with his own works, he brought his orchestrator’s skill to various groups — including light orchestras and pops ensembles — that populated West Germany’s airwaves in the late 1940s and early ’50s. This work has scarcely been heard since Zimmermann completed it. But what work it was (and remains)! Across the three CDs you can find witty, sparkling transcriptions of Villa-Lobos and Milhaud, and of Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky — and much else, too.Best of all, this material is often recognizably Zimmermann-like in nature. Very little of it gives the impression of grudging work for hire. Instead, the same orchestrator’s intelligence that is apparent in the densest moments of “Die Soldaten” shows up for duty here. And its owner is often clearly having a ball.To take one example, the French chanson “Maman, dites-moi,” a staple of midcentury Met Opera stars like the soprano Bidu Sayao. On the first CD of Wergo’s set, you can listen to what Zimmermann did with it back in 1950: By including the surprising, brittle sound of the harpsichord inside his orchestra, the composer lends a new edge to the tune’s nervy questioning of the mother figure. Yet it’s still plenty sumptuous, thanks to Zimmermann’s work with harp, celesta and winds. (The soprano Sarah Wegener also excels in this take.)Later, in the 1960s, when Zimmermann was working with a jazz quintet on improvisations based on his theatrical music, he would again employ similarly wiry keyboard attacks. (That material ought to get a reissue from Wergo down the line.)But in this earlier era of his radio work, the density of Zimmermann’s orchestral textures pushes the envelope, yet never goes so far that a lay listener might be moved to pull the plug out of the wall. When the composer allows himself volleys of brash percussive playing — say, near the middle of a three-minute orchestration of Milhaud — the explosion is truly brief, yet no less powerful for that focused expression.Time and again across these new CDs, that balance makes for ravishing listening. Also in 1950, Zimmermann took Rachmaninoff’s “Romanze,” from the youthful Morceaux de salon, and re-envisioned it as a suave saxophone-and-orchestra miniature. (Find it on the second of Wergo’s new CDs.) Even more impressive is his translation of Rachmaninoff’s “Humoresque” (from the same series) into a Concertino for piano and orchestra; Wergo bills it as a Zimmermann original, modeled “after” the Russian composer’s example.In the liner notes, Holliger, speaking of Zimmermann, makes the claim that “everything he did for the radio laid the foundation for his later work.” Along with the current WDR orchestra, Holliger proves this by taking on a few of Zimmerman’s original pieces as well, demonstrating for us how these radio transcriptions were more than mere outliers.Each disc in the set opens and closes with the composer’s own material, before sliding in and out of the adaptations. These performances are equally revealing. The “Caboclo” movement of Zimmermann’s Brazil-influenced “Alagoana” — with its three superimposed dances — has never more closely recalled the music of “Die Soldaten” than it does here. But it still retains the direct, singing quality that once made it attractive to the conductor Ferenc Fricsay.And Zimmermann’s other theatrical and balletic music — including “Un petit rien” and “Souvenir d’ancien balet” — has rarely sounded as light on its feet as it does on these discs. Holliger and the WDR players have real affection for the material, and for the fuller portrait it affords us of an artist too often described as unremittingly bleak in his outlook. But by the third CD, when Zimmermann has left day-to-day orchestration work behind, you can clearly hear how the once-parallel paths in Zimmermann’s creative life have diverged for good.“Apparently it was impossible for him to work in isolation. He needed to be surrounded by people he trusted,” Holliger says in the interview included in Wergo’s CD set. The conductor then goes on to describe the profusion of music (and musicians) that passed through the radio offices while the composer worked there. When reading between the conductor’s lines here, it’s easy to imagine an alternate reality — one in which Zimmermann stayed on longer at the radio gig with its social environment, while perhaps managing to steer away from the depressive isolation of his final years.Yet the music Zimmermann actually managed to make during these decades can, in all its voluptuous weirdness, prove even more inspiring than well-intentioned speculation. Liberated from the West German radio archives, this material is the best kind of music-history corrective — the kind that’s a blast to hear. More

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      The Year Pop’s Men Dismantled Their Masculinity

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      In 2022, stars including Harry Styles, Jack Harlow and Bad Bunny offered liberated takes on gender, but also risked pandering. Are men OK?In April, during his headlining set at Coachella, the reigning pop prince Harry Styles invited a surprise guest, Shania Twain, to the stage to sing a provocatively chosen duet: “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”Clad in a low-cut, silver sequined jumpsuit, Styles strutted, twirled and belted out the cheeky anthem’s lyrics. “This lady taught me how to sing,” he told the raucous crowd of over 100,000 when the song was over. “She also taught me that men are trash.”The performance was fun, headline-generating and relatively radical: It is difficult to imagine Styles’s generational predecessor, Justin Timberlake — or even Timberlake’s successor, Justin Bieber — playing so fast and loose with gender roles. That is partially because the Justins embraced hip-hop and R&B — genres where such experimentation is often less welcome — more directly than Styles ever has. But it’s also because the cultural forces that shape the norms and expectations of what a male pop star can and should be are evolving.While the year in music was dominated by a handful of female powerhouses (critically, by Beyoncé’s widely praised dance-floor odyssey “Renaissance” and commercially, by Taylor Swift’s moody synth-pop juggernaut “Midnights”), the top male pop stars — Styles, Bad Bunny and Jack Harlow — all found success while offering refreshingly subversive challenges to old-school masculinity.Styles and Harlow seem cannily aware of how to position themselves as heartthrobs in a cultural moment when being a man — especially one that scans straight and white — can seem like a minefield of potential missteps, offenses and overextended privilege. Bad Bunny, even more subversively, ripped up the English-language pop star’s rule book and offered a more expansive vision of gender and sexuality.Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose summery smash “Un Verano Sin Ti” spent more weeks atop the Billboard chart than any other album this year, has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo. Instead, he has embraced gender-fluid fashion, called out male aggression in his songs and videos and even made out with one of his male backup dancers during a performance at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards — decisions that carry extra weight considering his aesthetic-hopping pop is rooted in reggaeton, a genre that has leaned on heteronormativity.Bad Bunny has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo.Isaac Esquivel/EPA, via ShutterstockStyles, too, has won fans and admirers by treating his gender presentation as something of a playground, whether that means wearing a dress on the cover of “Vogue,” refusing to label his sexuality or flipping the familiar script of the older male auteur/younger female muse in his much publicized relationship with his “Don’t Worry Darling” director Olivia Wilde, who is 10 years his senior. None of it has been bad for business: Styles’s “As It Was” was the year’s longest-reigning Billboard No. 1 and, globally, Spotify’s most-streamed song of 2022.But there’s also an increasingly fine line between allyship and pandering, one that fans aren’t shy about calling out online. Styles and Bad Bunny have been accused of the very contemporary crime of “queerbaiting,” or cultivating a faux mystique around one’s sexuality to appeal to an L.G.B.T.Q. fan base. To overemphasize straightness and alpha-male stereotypes, though, presents its own risks, especially in a post-MeToo moment. What’s a man to do?Harlow, the 24-year-old Kentucky-born rapper, spent 2022 trying to figure it out. A technically dexterous rapper with an easy charisma and a head of Shirley Temple ringlets, Harlow is known for making artistic choices that spotlight his skills and convey his seriousness as an MC. He’s also cultivated a persona as an irrepressible flirt with a particular attraction to Black women. He famously shot his shot with Saweetie on the BET Awards red carpet, repeatedly popped into Doja Cat’s Instagram live broadcasts and even parodied his reputation during a star-turning “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig, when he played himself in a skit that imagined him seducing Whoopi Goldberg on the set of “The View.”Harlow’s music, too, actively cultivates the female listener. As he explained in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, “I always think about if I was in the car and the girl I had a crush on was in the shotgun and I had to play the song, would I be proud to play the song?”Jack Harlow’s music focuses on a kind of glorification of the female listener.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThroughout his second album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” Harlow paints himself as stylish and sensitive, a man who keeps his nails clean and discusses his romantic encounters in therapy. In the grand tradition of his elder Drake, Harlow often uses the pronoun “you” to directly and intimately address women in his songs. His biggest solo hit to date, “First Class,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 this spring, turned “Glamorous,” Fergie’s blingy 2007 hit about luxury and hard-earned success, into a chivalric invitation for a lady to come enjoy the good life on Harlow’s dime: “I could put you in first class,” he clarified.Stylistically, Harlow’s music is worlds away from Styles’s, but both share a kind of glorification of the female listener, a lyrical attentiveness to her pleasure and a subtle insistence that they are more caring partners than all those other men who, in Styles’s parlance (and on superhumanly empathetic ballads like “Boyfriends” and “Matilda”), are “trash.”In some sense, this is certainly progress. Consider that Timberlake’s early aughts success involved the excessive vilification of his ex Britney Spears, or that a performance that pantomimed a kind of hyper-heterosexual dominance over Janet Jackson had virtually no effect on his career, but nearly ended hers. Harlow’s collaboration with and public support for the gay pop star Lil Nas X and even his fawning over his female peers are worlds away from his predecessor Eminem, who negotiated his complex stance as a white man in a predominantly Black genre by punching down at women and queer people. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t exactly good for business anymore — and thank goodness.It’s hard to imagine these men making the same mistakes as their forebears, and overcorrection is in some sense welcome, given the alternative. (Bad Bunny, again, has taken even bolder risks, like vehemently criticizing the Puerto Rican government in response to island-wide blackouts.)But even responsibly wielded privilege is still, at the end of the day, privilege. And Styles’s and Harlow’s music often betrays that by its relative weightlessness, its sense of existence in a space free of any great existential cares. Styles’s songs in particular seem hollowed out of any introspection; most of the ones on “Harry’s House” pass by like cumulus clouds. The focus of Harlow’s music vacillates between girls and ego, with few gestures toward the riskier political statements he’s made on red carpets (decrying homophobia) and on social media (attending protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor). That failure to see oneself as part of a larger problem is a symptom of privilege, too. Even if he’s wearing sequins, a man declaring that “men are trash” is just a very subtle way of saying “not all men.” What about the guy saying it?On “Part of the Band,” a moody, verbose single released this year by the British band the 1975, the frontman Matty Healy imagines overhearing a snippet of chitchat between two young women: “I like my men like I like my coffee/Full of soy milk and so sweet it won’t offend anybody.” The implication is that Healy is decidedly not one of those men, and it’s indeed hard to imagine a listener — particularly a non-male one — making it through all 11 tracks of the 1975’s soft-focused “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” without cringing at something Healy says. (Just one example: “I thought we were fighting, but it seems I was ‘gaslighting’ you.” Yeesh.)But in Healy’s musings, there’s something often lacking in Harlow’s or Styles’s music: a genuine sense of self-scrutiny, and an active internal monologue about what it means to be a man at this moment in the 21st century. Healy’s songs are, as the critic Ann Powers put it in an astute essay tracing the cultural lineage of “the dirtbag,” excavations of “the curses and blessings of his gendered existence.” Under his relentless microscope, straight(ish) white masculinity is, blessedly, freed from its status as the default human condition and instead becomes a curiosity to poke and prod at, exposing its internal contradictions and latent anxieties.“Am I ironically woke?” Healy wonders later in “Part of the Band.” “The butt of my joke? Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke calling his ego imagination?” Cringe if you want. He’s man enough to let the question hang there in the air. More

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      Finding Community, and Freedom, on VRChat

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      On any given weekend, there are dozens of parties happening on VRChat, a platform where users assume fantastical avatars of their own design.On a recent Saturday night, the street outside the nightclub Tube VR looked typical for East London: a boat moored on the canal, trendy retail spaces lining the waterfront, an underpass covered in graffiti. Inside, however, I found myself dancing next to a hedgehog wearing a top hat, an anime nun with an acid green halo and a humanoid fox in hot pants.Tube VR is a venue and one of the most popular party events on VRChat, a video-game-like social platform that takes place in virtual reality, or V.R., where users can assume fantastical avatars of their own design. When I removed my V.R. headset, I was alone in my bedroom. Wearing it again, I was thrown back into the throbbing heart of a party.During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, regular partygoers flocked to virtual clubs hosted on platforms like Zoom, but since physical venues have reopened, the popularity of these digital spaces has waned. Not so with VRChat. When much of the world was locked down, the platform’s daily user numbers steadily increased. That trend has mostly stuck, with numbers continuing to surpass prepandemic levels, according to data cited by the platform.To attend a virtual club in VRChat you only need a standard PC, but getting the most immersive experience requires a V.R. headset, and a moderately powerful computer. The Tube nightclub is just one of hundreds of thousands of discrete VRChat worlds where people gather and socialize in avatar form.via VRChatThe Tube VR nightclub is just one of hundreds of thousands of discrete VRChat worlds where users can assume fantastical avatars of their own design.via VRChatI felt out of place at my first V.R. party. There was a new social etiquette to learn around how to approach and talk to other clubbers, and I felt my default avatar looked basic compared with the imaginative creatures surrounding me. But with my headset translating my voice and movements into the virtual space and avatars dancing and chatting all around me, it felt surprisingly close to being in a real club.This experience provides a glimpse of how socializing might look in our increasingly technologically mediated future. “Just as video conferencing via Zoom has become a central part of ordinary life for so many people, now that it’s convenient and useful, it’s easy to imagine that in ten years’ time, VR could be playing that role” in daily socializing, too, David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University who has written a book about V.R., said over email.Naturally, some aspects of VRChat cannot compete with real life, and V.R. events suffer frequently from delays and glitches. But partying in virtual reality also offers distinct advantages: Personal safety and harassment are less of a concern; users have more control over their environment, and can adjust the volume of people’s voices or the music to their liking; and aside from the upfront hardware cost, events are free.This increased accessibility is particularly meaningful for people who live far from clubbing hot spots, and for users with impaired mobility. The VRChat user Turels was a professional musician until he was diagnosed with adult onset Still’s disease, a form of arthritis that meant he could no longer use his hands to play instruments.“When I got the diagnosis, I thought I was done — time to pack up my music equipment and sell it off,” Turels, who asked that his real name not be published for reasons of privacy related to his illness, said in a recent phone interview. But friends he made in the virtual club encouraged him to try out D.J.ing in virtual reality using specially adapted hardware. He now performs music in VRChat regularly.“VRChat has given that part of my life back to me,” he said.via VRChatShelter is a popular VRChat club that evolves according to a conceptual sci-fi narrative.via VRChatOn any given weekend, there are dozens of VRChat parties. There is Mass, a rave inside the head of a giant robot; Shelter, a popular club that evolves according to a conceptual sci-fi narrative; and Ghost Club, a pioneering Japanese venue that users enter via a phone booth. Each “VRchitect” who constructs a club makes the most of their freedom from the constraints of budget and physical space.One of VRChat’s distinguishing features is that almost all of its content is created by its users. There are few opportunities to monetize their in-game creations, and while some venues run Patreon pages to cover costs, a vast majority are created and run by volunteers — some, like Tube, also raise money for charity.VRChat itself is free to use and largely funded by investors, receiving $80 million in its last funding round in 2021. This caution around monetization has fostered a club scene that feels authentically grass-roots. There are, however, plans to introduce a creator economy in the near future.The ravers are just one of VRChat’s major communities. There are also L.G.B.T.Q. groups, worlds dedicated to role-playing, dancing, Buddhist meditation and erotic encounters. A deaf community teaches V.R. sign language in a virtual school‌.The avatars that users choose are often cartoonish, but the relationships they build in VRChat are unquestionably human.via VRChatMay S. Lasch’s avatar, center, at Concrete, an L.G.B.T.Q. club on VRChat. Lasch began to experiment with their gender expression in virtual reality and said it “helped me find my real self.”via VRChat“I met so many new people that I call my best friends nowadays, who I also met up with in real life,” May S. Lasch, who runs the L.G.B.T.Q. club Concrete on VRChat, said in a video interview. “In the end, V.R. is about the people, not the technology. The technology just brings people from far away closer.”One of the utopian promises of the internet was that you could reinvent yourself online and be anyone you wanted. In VRChat, Lasch is an anime girl with blushing cheeks and long white hair. Born in Germany, Lasch was assigned male at birth but realized at a young age they did not relate to that label. Today, they identify as nonbinary and use they and them pronouns.They did not feel supported in this by their conservative family, but began to experiment with their gender expression in virtual reality, which helped them build the confidence to start presenting differently in real life, too. “During rough times, I remade myself in this game,” they said, “and it helped me find my real self.”Perhaps the biggest barrier to VRChat becoming more of a mainstream clubbing space is the limitations of V.R. hardware. The best headsets are still expensive, and many find them bulky and report experiencing headaches or nausea. But with continued heavy investment in virtual reality from Meta and Sony, and with Apple working on a headset, the technology should keep improving and becoming more accessible.Since V.R. technology is relatively new, there has not been much research into the long-term effect of spending large amounts of time in virtual reality. “I’ve spent so much time in VRChat, close to 4,000 hours,” Lasch said, “I have dreams that are in V.R. Sometimes I spend 12 hours in V.R. and then when I come out of it, I still see the little mute microphone symbol in my vision.”Another obstacle is the fear that virtual reality is a substitute for actual reality. But many of its users said VRChat supplemented, rather than supplanted, real life.This is certainly true for Lincoln Donelan, who runs parties called Loner both virtually and in his hometown, Melbourne, Australia. I found him one evening in the virtual club’s dingy bathroom chatting with a giant fox, a couple of skater girls and a guy in a dinner jacket smoking a cigarette.Donelan’s avatar — an anime girl with dark hair, mint green eyes and tattoos spread across bone-white skin — explained his schedule for the coming weekend: D.J.ing in a real-life club on Friday night, running a V.R. party on Saturday afternoon before going out for dinner and another party in Melbourne, then getting up on Sunday to head back into virtual reality.“V.R. will never, ever replace real-life clubbing, ever. I think it’s the perfect complement to it, though,” he said. “Ultimately, V.R. is just another thing you can choose from.” More

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      Kendrick Lamar’s Unconstrained Next Chapter

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Showtime. A bright light illumes an ethereal white curtain, and what sounds like a chorus of angels sings: “I hope you find some peace of mind in this lifetime/I hope you find some paradise.” A troupe of black-and-white-clad dancers march in formation on a catwalk. The dancers swing their arms, clapping in time to a string-heavy prelude. Quick-fast, thousands pull out their cellphones, transforming London’s O2 Arena into a starry cosmos.Kendrick Lamar sits at a black upright piano, remaining in shadow, till a single soft spotlight reveals him fingering chords, with a suited-and-booted ventriloquist’s-dummy version of himself he calls Lil’ Stepper — an enigmatic, mind-printing sight — seated atop the piano’s lid.He starts rapping a verse with his back to the crowd. Then, carrying Lil’ Stepper, he saunters onto the catwalk, his Chelsea bootsteps amplified, recalling the tap dancing that runs as a motif on his recent album, “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.” On giant screens behind him, you can see the chrome embellishments along the outseam of his pants, and one of his handles, “oklama,” emblazoned in bold white Old English letters across the back of his black vest, the yellow gradient of his sunglasses, the fulgent glint of his diamond earrings.All to say, homie looks every bit the sublime superstar he is.Kendrick stands stock-still at a mic stand, idles long enough to draw a chant of “ooooh, Kendrick Lamarrrr” from the expectant crowd, long enough that it seems as though he’s meditating, and then, as if someone hit a switch, he begins to spit the words of “United in Grief,” a song that catalogs the dysfunctional ways he has dealt with loss: buying mansions “for practice,” acquiring jewelry he never wore in public, having rendezvous on tour. In the third verse, he raps about his cousin Baby Keem copping four cars in four months, saying, “You know the family dynamics on repeat/The insecurities locked down on PC.” Throughout, he maintains his remarkable stillness, save his out-of-sight hands Geppetto-ing the dummy’s mouth.What we call ventriloquism, the ancient Greeks called gastromancy, believing the ventriloquist was speaking from the gut on behalf of the dead to the living. In the Middle Ages, ventriloquism was considered witchcraft by Christians, which was punishable by death. Kendrick on the stage, still and silent with Lil’ Stepper in his arms, conjures the spiritual nature of ventriloquism and suggests how aware he is of his powers, how willing he is to speak his mind and “stand on it.”Lamar with Lil’ Stepper during the Big Steppers Tour.Greg Noire/pgLangAt 35, Kendrick is the most important rapper of his generation, and he just might be its most elliptical too, sharing revelatory self-portraits in his work but little of himself outside it. Last year marked the 10th anniversary of “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” the album that established him as a virtuosic M.C., hailing from deep inside Compton, the fiery heart of West Coast rap.On the major-label albums that followed, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015) and “DAMN.” (2017), Kendrick deepened his portrayals of Compton and his own inner life. In addition to beaucoup Grammys, he became the first artist outside jazz and classical music to win the Pulitzer Prize. “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers,” released last spring, was another leap in Kendrick’s art; it’s more personal and out-and-out emotional than anything that preceded it. “I’ve never expressed myself the way I expressed myself on this album,” Kendrick told me. “From the moment I started picking up a pen and started freestyling. This was the moment that I was trying to get to without even knowing at the time.”On “United in Grief,” the album’s first track, he notes that it’s been 1,855 days since the release of “DAMN.” Kendrick took a hiatus after touring for that album, seldom appeared in public and, with Whitney Alford, became a father to two kids. He was “going through something,” he tells us on that song, and it’s clear that whatever interior work he endeavored is at the heart of “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.”The album is framed as a therapy session and covers, among other weighty subjects, Kendrick’s grappling with his id and ego, with generational traumas, with his responsibilities as a leader. Kendrick shares on “Mother I Sober” that his mother was both physically and sexually abused, and that his family once thought him abused by a cousin; reveals that he suffered from sexual addiction and hurt Alford with infidelities; tells us on “Auntie Diaries” that both an aunt and a cousin are trans — revelations more remarkable given the fraught history between rappers and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. He also risks criticism, plumbing the psychologies of abusive men and seeming to push against the idea of banishing them (Kodak Black, who was charged with rape and took a plea deal for lesser sexual-assault charges, appears four times on the album).“Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” was Kendrick’s last album on Top Dawg Entertainment (T.D.E.), the label that discovered and nurtured his talent, that helped establish him as a global superstar. Some time before announcing his departure from T.D.E. — a move that turned fans incredulous — he shared on his website that he was starting his own company, pgLang, with his longtime collaborator, Dave Free. That news arrived via a cryptic news release and a “visual mission statement,” a surreal short film that even Dave admitted to me “had nothing to do with the company.”Many fans are still baffled by just what this partnership means, but the show in London indicates the new direction they’re headed in, the expansiveness of what they’re exploring: It’s as much avant-garde performance art as concert. The aesthetic is minimalist. Gone, the hype man. Gone, the elevated D.J. Gone, an entourage serving as backdrop. Gone, the rapper habit of swaggering side to side, pulling people from the audience onto the stage. Kendrick spends much of the time onstage solo, nursing pauses that draw chants from the crowd, punctuating his lyrics — diddy-bopping at one point, crouching to knee-scrape level at another — with dancing and dramatic gestures. At one point, people dressed in hazmat suits pretend to give Kendrick a Covid test inside a light box.Dave, who has been crucial to Kendrick’s visual language, including as part of the brain trust of this show, watches it alongside me from the risers. A former D.J. and in-house music producer for T.D.E., Dave has created, with his Day 1 homeboy, some of the most celebrated music videos of the last decade and earned the bona fides to prove it. But he is creating more solo-credited work of late — astute, stylish videos and ad campaigns — proving he’s a force all on his own. He shuffles around for different vantages. Moves up to the front and looks over at the soundboard, standing at the back almost alone, a fashion plate in his sky blue mohair cardigan and plum wide-legged pants. He isn’t nodding his head or pumping his fist or rapping the lyrics like no few of the V.I.P.s present; in fact he seems almost nonplused. Is he nervous? “Maybe when we’re trying something new,” he tells me over the music. “But this one is dialed in.” You can tell that he’s seeing what most of us can’t: the show from the standpoint of execution.“Hood Beethoven — that was the initial idea,” Kendrick told me later. “Now incorporate that with dance and art, and you get this contextualized, theatrical type of performance. That’s what it built into. Then you put it all in the platform, all on the deck. It feels like a theatrical hip-hop show, and not the corny [expletive].” To Kendrick’s central concept Dave contributed the idea of using the light boxes that are an elemental part of the show, the Steadicam that follows Kendrick and broadcasts him on jumbo screens, the meta moment in the show when Kendrick turns to watch himself perform.Kendrick, grounded in narrative, and Dave, thinking in image and tools, has been a creative partnership that reaches back decades, back when Dave was a teenager obsessed with all the new technology and Kendrick was the first person he’d met “that didn’t care about the [expletive] that all the kids cared about.”Kendrick LamarRafael Pavarotti for The New York TimesDave FreeRafael Pavarotti for The New York TimesIt’s hard to overstate the shock it caused in the rap world when Kendrick announced that he was leaving T.D.E. It was like when the Jackson 5 left Motown. When Prince left Warner Bros. When Jay-Z left Def Jam. Kendrick had been signed to the label since 2007, when Dave, who was then working as a computer technician, hustled his music to the attention of the label’s founder, Anthony Tiffith, who goes by Top Dawg, during a service call. Though the label has other well-known artists like Jay Rock, ScHoolboy Q and SZA, Kendrick was the biggest. The label ruled the 2010s and presented itself as family, with Top Dawg and his co-president, Terrence Henderson, also known as Punch, serving as father figures.Kendrick has declined to address the split, beyond a public statement that offered blessings to T.D.E. and cited a need to pursue his “life’s calling.” (Smart money says if he speaks on it beyond that, it will be in his music.) T.D.E., for its part, has been mum on details but publicly supportive. What must be figured into the calculus of the departure is that Dave left the label back in 2019, almost two years before Kendrick made his official announcement. Dave, who took Kendrick, then K.Dot, to T.D.E. in the first place, who had been part of the label for as long as Kendrick, who was Kendrick’s longtime manager, who ascended to the level of co-president in 2010. Dave, who had believed in Kendrick in word and deed since they were high schoolers with abounding talent and ambition but scant dollars.The news release described pgLang as more than a music label, but it’s without doubt part of a long tradition of Black music enterprise. The first major Black-owned record company was Black Swan Records, founded around the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance by the businessman Harry Pace to address the paucity of opportunities for Black artists to record and sell their music. Pace’s marketing tag line was the antithesis of pgLang’s cryptic news release: “The Only Records Using Exclusively Negro Voices and Musicians.”pgLang’s forebears include Berry Gordy Jr.’s Motown hit factory; Gamble & Huff’s Philadelphia International Records, the producing team instrumental in creating the famed Philadelphia sound of the 1970s; as well as Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records, which introduced hip-hop to the mainstream via the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” For real for real, pgLang owes debts to Master P’s No Limit Records (1990); Baby and Slim’s Cash Money Records (1991); Dre and Suge’s Death Row Records (1991); Diddy’s Bad Boy Entertainment (1993); Jay-Z, Dame and Biggs’s Roc-A-Fella Records (1996); and of course T.D.E.But it’s also original in that none of those companies were co-founded by an artist at the pinnacle of his career, with the concomitant extraordinary expectations. In that its scope is broad from the get-go — a foundation in music, but also management (Tanna Leone, Baby Keem and Kendrick); film and TV (cinematic music videos, a forthcoming feature); advertising and brand partnerships (Converse). pgLang seems fresh in how it’s more concerned with artistic integrity than what’s commercial; fresh in its refusal to give away too much, in resisting the pressure to be prolific. In pgLang, we have the purest expression of what animates Kendrick and Dave, of what they want to do and say, of how and when to do and say it.For instance, the video for Baby Keem’s “Family Ties,” which was directed by Dave and heralded Kendrick’s return (the track won last year’s Grammy for best rap performance). It begins with a group of Black men in black, moshing, while Keem and Kendrick, distinguished in bright orange, attempt escape. Like almost all of Kendrick and Dave’s art, there are nods to home — Keem rapping outside a barbershop, young dudes posted outside an L.A. bungalow, an artful simulated gang fight. And like all their work, it’s full of subtext: a girl named Angel twerking on Keem, who never touches her, a troupe of Black ballerinas dancing around him as he raps among white sculptures, a mother holding her Black baby with her back turned, moments that emphasize the power and beauty of Black women. “Family Ties” is more lyric than narrative, moving from image to stunning image, using overlapping frames and VFX. The religious symbolism, the imagery of home, the technical innovation — all are signature aspects of the pgLang ethos.Or take the video for “The Heart Part 5,” the lead single off “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.” The seeds of the video’s concept were sown a couple of years before its release, during a time when Kendrick and Dave were thinking about polarizing figures: how people behave in and out of the hot seat; whether a public figure can reveal his flaws and maintain wide acceptance; what’s far afield of the Overton window. “I look at everything as a social experiment,” explains Dave, who directed the video with Kendrick. One figure they kept returning to again and again was the actor Jussie Smollett, who was prosecuted beginning in 2019 for targeting himself in a staged hate crime.Around the time of those discussions, Dave and Kendrick had a meeting with the creators of “South Park,” Matt Stone and Trey Parker, with whom they’re developing a live-action comedy. Stone, who, with Parker, owns a company specializing in deepfake technology, offered to show it to them. “You see Kendrick turned into Tupac, Kendrick turned into Kanye, and I think we had Eminem,” Stone told me over a Zoom call. He told Kendrick and Dave that they could be among the first to use the technology for one of their videos. On their way out, Dave and Kendrick turned to each other and exclaimed, “What if we did the Jussie Smollett!”The video for “The Heart Part 5” begins with the epigraph “I am. All of us,” attributed to Kendrick’s handle oklama, and shows him morphing into deepfakes of O.J. Simpson, Kanye, Jussie, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle — Black men who exist somewhere between problematic and tragic. Over a sample of Marvin Gaye’s soulful “I Want You,” Kendrick, in a crisp white T-shirt, his hair wild against a blood red background, begins critiquing the predation, violence and materialism of “the culture,” moves on to narrating the shock of receiving the news of Nipsey’s death and ends rapping in the persona of his slain friend, precisely mimicking his gestures.“The Heart Part 5” received a Grammy nomination for best music video — the third such accolade for Kendrick and Dave. Still, critics of the video argued that it defended problematic figures. What did Kendrick mean when he said he was all of them? Was he advocating for understanding and forgiveness, no matter the breach? That vantage makes sense given the world that shaped him, given the place he calls home.From the music video for “The Heart Part 5.”Genesis. Biddy Mason. The enslaved woman who slogged on foot behind her Mormon master’s caravan from Mississippi to Utah, and in 1851, from Utah to L.A. Who sheroed freedom for herself and 13 others and pioneered Black L.A. Genesis. The near 700,000 Black folk who arrived in L.A. between 1940 and 1970, who locomoted the City of Los Angeles streamliner or rode a grumbling Greyhound or braved the crucible of driving. Among them, Dave’s mother, Dee, from Chicago’s South Side in 1957, his father, Lee, from its North Side in ’68.Genesis. Compton, dubbed Hub City for being almost the dead center of L.A., was a more than 99 percent white suburb in 1950; later the predatory real estate scheme of blockbusting and the 1965 revolt in neighboring Watts stoked white flight. Genesis. In the 1970s, deindustrialization ceased the second great exodus west, though it didn’t stop Kendrick’s parents, Ducky and Paula, from loading up their ride in ’84 and driving the 2,000-plus miles from Chicago to L.A. with all of $500 to fund a new life.Genesis.Dave Free born Nov. 13, 1986 — in Inglewood.Kendrick Lamar born June 17, 1987 — in Compton.L.A. Compton. Home.Man-Man (Baby Kendrick) asleep on his cheetah pillow. Man-Man riding the shoulders of a grown man, while other grown men toss gang signs and pass a pump shotgun. Ducky and Paula’s 5-year-old boy witnessing a man get his chest blown out outside their apartment. Insouciant Man-Man chomping Now and Laters and carrying his basketball around the neighborhood. On a walk home from McNair elementary school, free-lunching Man-Man witnesses his second murder in the drive-through of Tam’s Burgers. Man-Man rolling with Ducky to the Compton Swap Meet to buy cassettes or CDs, sometimes the latest Nikes. Once glimpsing Suge Knight inside — the infamous giant.Blessed be Mr. Inge, the seventh-grade Vanguard Learning Center teacher who introduces Kendrick to poetry.L.A. Inglewood and Carson. Home.Dave Boy screaming his big wheel down the giant hill on 102nd Street. Mischievous Dave Boy playing with matches and starting a fire in a neighbor’s bush. Dee and Lee’s youngest boy sleeping in their bedroom till he’s 5 or 6, then sharing a room with his big sis. Thanks be to Dave’s older brother, Dion, for encouraging his interest in D.J.ing.Meanwhile, all around Man-Man and Dave Boy: the Pirus. The Bloods. The Crips. The Eses. O.G.s, B.G.s, the loc’d out whoever. The frequent set-tripping and boom, boom, boom of drive-bys and walk-ups; the bloody strife that turned the CPT into the “murder capital of the U.S.,” that made Dre rap “Inglewood always up to no good” on “California Love.”Better know your boundaries, homie. Better be prepared to prove where your grandmama lives.See home: the billboarded liquor stores and check marts; curbside effigies in the set’s colors and shoes flung over power lines; the low-lows on switches and spokes, a rag-top spinning doughnuts in a parking lot. Teenage Kendrick (K.Dot) bending corners with the homies — Alondra, Bullis, Rosecrans — in his mama’s Dodge Caravan, hootriding in a white Toyota. Kendrick foaming at the mouth the time somebody sneak-laced the weed.Dave working weekends at his pop’s floor-cleaning business. Teenage Dave (dj-dave) spending weekends wheeling Compton with his mentor for gigs. Dave saving enough scratch to cop an Acura.Kendrick and Dave’s high school days: shopping at Up Against the Wall because all the salesgirls are fine. Macking at the Galleria or Fox Hills Mall. Hitting Tam’s for a breakfast burrito, Ramona’s for Mexican food. Those months you couldn’t go nowhere in L.A. without hearing somebody bumping Jeezy’s first album.It was written — the day Dave travels to Centennial High to meet Kendrick, who’s got a burgeoning buzz as a rapper. Kendrick wowing Dave with the line, “I ship keys across the seas like a grand piano” while rapping in Dave’s makeshift garage studio. Kendrick and Dave recording at the Hyde Park apartment of Dave’s older brother, Dion. Dave the hype man and Dion the manager/D.J. for the earliest Kendrick shows. Like the one at the super hood comedy club. Like the one staged behind a tattoo parlor.Dave Free, Kendrick Lamar, Sounwave and MixedByAli (sitting) in 2009.MixedByAliLegend — the day Dave introduces Kendrick to Top Dawg, and he passes Top’s test of an interminable freestyle. Thereafter, Kendrick and Dave spend untold hours in Top’s home studio — christened the House of Pain — in Carson. Kendrick writing and rapping and Dave producing as part of Digi+Phonics.Kendrick and Dave steeped in the experience of home, but also daring to transcend it, which is no small feat in a place that often works as gravity — tugging, tugging — a truth that has made them essential to each other.“It’s nature versus nurture,” Kendrick explains. “I was nurtured in an environment where there’s, like, a lot of gang mentality. That certain language, certain lingo. How we walk. How we talk. All the little nuances and in-speaks that I have in Compton. I have that. That’s not going nowhere. That’s why I can go into any environment, any type of street environment, and be able to still connect even at this high of a level, as the son that never leaves. That’s nurture.”He pauses a moment.“But the nature of me is pure. … And therefore, I lean too much to the nurture of it, I won’t be able to be as expansive as I want to be. A lot of these artists, they want to be expansive, but they so tied into what they homeboys will think about them or their belief system.” He continues: “I know, because I was once there, but I got out of that mentality as a teenager, my teenage years. These cats still be 30, 40 years old and still trying to hold up a certain image.“And not to say it’s bad,” he goes on. “Everybody got their own journey. I was just fortunate enough to have a group of guys around me that gave me that courage to feed myself with the arts, whether it was the street cats in my neighborhood, whether it was Dave who pushed me to be an artist, whether it was Top from the projects, the Nickerson Gardens. I always was allowed to be myself.”Kendrick and Dave share a watershed for them, one that happened back when they were in their mid-20s, when just about all they knew was home.They drove over to their boy Fredo’s house to edit the video for “HiiiPower,” a song off “Section.80,” their official first album on T.D.E. Fredo shot the video and was supposed to edit it, but they had to commandeer the duties. “We were telling them this needs to be this, and they didn’t want to hear us,” Dave says. “They’re like, ‘No, this is how it needs to be done.’ So it was just me and Kendrick in there being like, ‘No we’re going to do it like this.’” Once their boys got burned out, Dave asked them to teach him how to edit. Two hours, five, 10. He and Kendrick kept going because it was their job to make sure it was perfect, because they couldn’t put their livelihoods in someone else’s hands.Kendrick jumps back into the story. “To see somebody that much devoted to artists’ crafts, where he’s willing to sit with them and edit the video himself, it lets me know what type of not only businessman, but what type of friendship and what type of dedication he has for something he believes in. It was my song. Not his song. I go on tour and perform that song and make millions of dollars. So, for him to be willing to sit there and do that, day in day out, that let me know. OK, this is a person you want to be around. He got the best interest to really thug it out with you without even thinking about a check at that point. We just thinking about being creative and the best, and from that day forward, everything flipped.” Under dark dusk and through the rainy streets that bespeak the Old Smoke’s subpar drainage system, we ride to the Saatchi Gallery. The director leads us to the second floor, where there’s a photo exhibit curated by the art critic Antwaun Sargent titled “The New Black Vanguard.” The exhibit is extraordinary, photograph after remarkable photograph, all of them of Black subjects, against walls painted in striking palettes: pale yellow, royal blue, fuchsia, tan.Dave, who’s fly in a Prada nylon jacket, indigo cargo pants and radiant yellow sweater, spends the most time analyzing a Kwabena Sekyi Appiah-nti portrait of a young woman posed in front of a painted truck. He calls Kendrick over to see it. “Look at the background,” he says, excited, and he points out the rich rust tones saturating the image, how the model is looking back at us. Dave making me think of something Charles Simic wrote, “The attentive eye makes the world mysterious.” It’s moving to see him and Kendrick in this space, curious, impressed, choosing and citing references. Yeah, Kendrick’s the GOAT and Dave’s an accomplished artist in his own right, but they are also Black men about the same age as my youngest brothers. Not soon after we met, Kendrick asked me what it was like growing up in Portland, Ore., and I joked that whatever was happening in L.A. happened 20 minutes later in my hometown. Which was also to say that in fundamental ways, we come from the same world. And yet, here we are across the pond, admiring art created by and featuring Black people. Look at us, dear Langston, living beyond the dream deferred.Later, we sit at a corner table in the dim dining room of Novikov, an Asian and Italian restaurant. The restaurant is packed and at a decibel level that requires us to lean in. This close, I notice Kendrick’s eyes. How they seem to be both present and distant; both focused on the moment at hand and processing it. Ain’t none of this eyes-are-windows-into-the-soul business with Kendrick. In fact, they might be paragons of the opposite: eyes wide open with revelations few to nil. They strike me as a kind of shield, as well as a way to foster the mystique that keeps people wanting more of him than he will ever share.Dave takes off his black baseball cap — it’s printed with the name Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of Bitcoin’s founder, in white lettering — and sits in a seat. In pictures, Dave can appear unemotive, but in person he’s kind, full of youthful exuberance. He pushes up the sleeves of his yellow knit sweater and grabs his chopsticks. He orders the same wine as I do because he’s never tried it. We end up chatting about egos, a convo Dave kicks off by admitting that he’s “ego challenged,” that when he and Kendrick broke through, he struggled with humility.From the music video for “HUMBLE.” from the album “DAMN.” The album won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2018.Kendrick, for his part, is intent on controlling his ego. You can see it in ways subtle and explicit. Subtle in how he didn’t assert himself as the only or even the most important voice in a pgLang meeting I attended. Subtle in how he prepares for his shows in hours of silence. Oh so obvious in this line from “Count Me Out”: “Some put it on the devil when they fall short/I put it on my ego, lord of all lords.” Explicit in the very fact that the cover of this magazine includes Dave.And of course, his wrestling with his ego is evident in his music. Tamping one’s ego is antithetical to the ethos of rap, a genre steeped in competition from the get-go and one in which rappers far and wide proclaim themselves the richest or freshest, the most unfeeling or toughest or most dangerous, in which even poot-butt neophytes proclaim themselves the indisputable king, a culture in which compassion is damn near an Achilles’ heel.Kendrick hasn’t been immune from filtering his music through a hype machine. He is, after all, a West Coast rapper, one negotiating the legacy — think N.W.A., Dre, Cube. Think Pac and Snoop. Think the Game — of rappers who at their apotheosis seemed not at all concerned about humility. It’s no wonder his ego asserts itself in his earlier work. Maybe none more memorable than on his verse for Big Sean’s “Control”: “I got love for you all but I’m trying to murder you —” here he used a racial epithet.But he has also made himself vulnerable, by spending more time than any rapper I can think of assuming personas. “Section.80,” his first album on Top Dawg, revolves around the lives of women named Tammy and Keisha, and includes the standout “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain),” about the tragic death of a sex worker. Kendrick’s canon in persona includes “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” from “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” and “Institutionalized,” from “To Pimp a Butterfly,” in which he embodies disaffected dudes in the hood.Maybe the furthest that he has gone is “The Heart Part 5,” in which he raps as Nipsey addressing his own killer: “And to the killer that sped up my demise/I forgive you, just know your soul’s in question/I seen the pain in your pupil when that trigger had squeezed.” The first time I heard Kendrick rap about forgiving the man who killed his friend, I was gobsmacked. But on subsequent listens, I understood. How could he not empathize when he lived years among men like the one who killed his boy, when he has dedicated so much of himself to detailing the bleak circumstances that forged those men, when that divining has demanded empathy, even for those who have wronged him, even for those marked all but irredeemable by the rest of us?Kendrick’s interest in accounting for his own strengths and limitations seems very much genuine. “My social media, most of the time, is completely off,” he says. “Because I know, like … I can easily smell my own [expletive]. I know. … Like, I’m not one of those dudes that be like, Oh, yeah, I know how good I am, but I also know the reason why I’m so good is because God’s blessed me with the talent to execute on the talent, and the moment that you start getting lost in your ego, that’s when you start going down.”Believe you me, no one succeeds in that project alone; Kendrick has needed people in his life, people he respects, who’ll tell him the truth, the sober truths, the hard ones. At or near the top of that list is Dave. “What I know for sure is we have this unconditional love to allow each other to grow,” Kendrick says. “I always allowed him to have his room to grow, and he always allowed me to have room to grow in mine.”A Black boy shuffles over to the window that looks onto the kitchen. He digs his hands in his pockets and toggles between craning to watch the chefs and stealing glances at Kendrick. We spent a while talking about that boy, wondering if he was another one of us, planning the seeming impossible.Night 2, I watch the show from a second-row seat and notice — as happens with all extraordinary art — details I didn’t catch the previous night from the crowded risers. The sweat sheening Kendrick’s forehead minutes into the show. The red block of recording time on the galaxy of cellphone screens. Which songs turn the mosh pit ecstatic to the nth: “Money Trees,” “Family Ties,” “Alright,” “HUMBLE.” The intensity of fuchsia coloring the mini ’fros of the male dancers for “Swimming Pools.” How long the “ooooh” is in the crowd’s chant of “ooooh, Kendrick Lamarrrr,” during Kendrick’s extended silent stillness.On Night 2, I consider the religious symbolism of his being lowered into the ground and resurrecting, that the square of light above his head could be a higher realm, his conscience even, that he spends half his performance of “Father Time”— a song about the influence of fathers in general and Kendrick’s father, Ducky, in specific — in chiaroscuro.In that song, one of my favorites on the album, Kendrick raps, “Daddy issues, hid my emotions, never expressed myself/Men should never show feelings, being sensitive never helped,” which strikes me now as the antithesis of the project he took up in “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.”The very next line he raps of his father: “His momma died, I asked him why he goin’ back to work so soon?/His first reply was, ‘Son, that’s life, the bills got no silver spoon.’”The first time I heard the lines, they reminded me of the one and only time I saw my father weep: The occasion was his father’s death, and he did his mourning in the dark on the living-room couch. The lines returned profound to me on Nov. 6, 2022, for no sooner than I landed in London and climbed in a car to meet Kendrick and Dave, I received a call from my sister who keened that my father — Wesley Frank Johnson Sr. — had died unexpectedly, gravely while I was in flight. I wept with my face in my hands and wondered if I should turn right around and board a flight back home.Why didn’t I?Because I was loath to disappoint the people who were counting on me. Because U-turning would have made me feel like a failure, and I never know which failure will wreck me. Because no matter what distance I travel from childhood, I still feel one foot in the poorhouse. Because my now-deceased father and others instilled in me the lessons to which Kendrick had testified: about the necessity of impenetrable toughness, about keeping all my emotions to myself, about weeping only in private. Because despite the resources I’ve invested to resist my own nurturing, I’m still liable to see weakness as anathema, to mistake aspects of humanness for the qualities of being a punk.Because the complicated truth is, for years my father (a good, good man) and I had a fraught relationship, and I wasn’t prepared to face its aftermath.But as well up ahead was the work. And in the world I must believe in, the work is a measure of hope.So I wiped my eyes and hopped out the car, and by the time I reached Kendrick and Dave and the pgLang crew huddled around a huge conference table in the Soho House, I wore as much of a mask as I could over my fresh woe.“Pulitzer Kenny!” I greeted him. “Pleasure to meet you, bro.”We shook hands, both of us minding the firm-grip rule he speaks of in “Rich Spirit.”The meeting happened the day before I heard the voice of angels and witnessed the show’s celestial backdrop. Before Kendrick sauntered on the catwalk with Lil’ Stepper in tow. Before he rapped the prophetic penultimate line of his opening song, what reached me the night of Nov. 7, 2022, as the truest words I’d ever heard — “Everybody grieves different.”Stylists: George Krakowiak, Jedi Mabana and Karizza Sanchez. Barber: Mark Maciver. Hair: Khristien Ray. Makeup: Mata Mariélle. Manicurist: Lauren Michelle Pires.Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award for feature writing. He is the author of the memoir “Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family” and the novel “The Residue Years.” He is the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the English department of Arizona State University. Rafael Pavarotti is a photographer from Brazil, currently based in London. He attributes the use of a vibrant color palette in his photographs to the everyday sights of his upbringing in the Amazon rainforest. More

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      Pandemic Woes Lead Met Opera to Tap Endowment and Embrace New Work

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      Facing tepid ticket sales, the company will withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment and stage more operas by living composers, which have been outselling the classics.Hit hard by a cash shortfall and lackluster ticket sales as it tries to lure audiences back amid the pandemic, the Metropolitan Opera said Monday that it would withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment, give fewer performances next season and accelerate its embrace of contemporary works, which, in a shift, have been outselling the classics.The dramatic financial and artistic moves show the extent to which the pandemic and its aftermath continue to roil the Met, the premier opera company in the United States, and come as many other performing arts institutions face similar pressures.“The challenges are greater than ever,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “The only path forward is reinvention.”Nonprofit organizations try to dip into their endowments only as a last resort, since the funds are meant to grow over time while producing a steady source of investment income. The Met’s endowment, which was valued at $306 million, was already considered small for an institution of its size. This season it is turning to the endowment to cover operating expenses, to help offset weak ticket sales and a cash shortfall that emerged as some donors were reluctant to accelerate pledged gifts amid the stock market downturn. As more cash gifts materialize, the company hopes to replenish the endowment.To further cut costs, the company, which is giving 215 performances this season, is planning to reduce the number of performances next season by close to 10 percent.The Met’s decision to stage significantly more contemporary operas is a remarkable turnabout for the company, which largely avoided newer works for many decades because its conservative audience base seemed to prefer war horses like Puccini’s “La Bohème,” Verdi’s “Aida” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”But as the Met staged more new work in recent years that dynamic has begun to shift, a change that has grown more pronounced since the pandemic: While attendance has been generally anemic, contemporary works including Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” this season drew sellout crowds. (Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” by contrast, ended its run this month with 40 percent attendance.)Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicBoosters: Americans who received updated shots for Covid-19 saw their risk of hospitalization reduced by roughly 50 percent this fall compared with certain groups inoculated with the original vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.Seniors Forgo Boosters: Nearly all Americans over 65 got their initial Covid vaccines. But only 36 percent have received the bivalent booster, according to C.D.C. data.Free at-Home Tests: With cases on the rise, the Biden administration restarted a program that has provided hundreds of millions of tests through the Postal Service.Contagion: Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies.From now on, Mr. Gelb said, the Met will open each season with a new production of a contemporary work.It will begin next year with the company premiere of Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” and the season will feature its first performances of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X”; Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” and a staged production of John Adams’s “El Niño.” And Mr. Gelb said that the Met was rearranging next season to bring back “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours,” with its three divas, Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara, reprising their roles.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, left, said that the company would embrace more contemporary works. He spoke with the composer Philip Glass in 2019. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Opera should reflect the times we’re in,” said Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director. “It’s our responsibility to generate new works so that people can recognize themselves and their realities on our stage.”Mr. Gelb said that the company’s change in strategy was possible in part because major stars are increasingly interested in performing music by living composers. “It’s a big shift in terms of opera singers themselves, embracing new work and understanding that this is the future,” he said.The Met has drawn many of the most illustrious singers of the day since Enrico Caruso ruled its stage, and it gave the world premiere of several Puccini operas and the American premiere of works by Richard Strauss and Wagner. It returned triumphantly last year after the long pandemic shutdown, which cost it $150 million in anticipated revenues. Audiences were back, though still lagging. Donations were up. And the determination of the whole company, including its artists and stagehands and ushers, was on full display: even as Omicron shut down many theaters last season, the Met never missed a curtain.By summer, however, the company, which has an annual budget of $312 million, making it the largest performing arts organization in the United States, began to feel the strains of the pandemic more acutely.Ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and the Met’s Live in HD cinema presentations were down by more than $40 million compared with before the pandemic. Paid attendance in the opera house has fallen to 61 percent of capacity, down from 73 percent. Donors have stepped in to fill much of the shortfall: During the pandemic, they have pledged more than $150 million in extra emergency funds. But amid the market downturn, some were hesitant to quickly deliver those gifts.“When the economy shudders, major donors shudder along with it,” Mr. Gelb said.The company had avoided dipping into its endowment in the early days of the pandemic, even as many other struggling opera companies and orchestras did, partly because it had taken the painful step of furloughing workers, including its orchestra and chorus, without pay. But now it has withdrawn $23 million from its endowment and can draw another seven million.A recent cyberattack that left the Met website and box office unable to sell new tickets for nine days has added to the company’s woes.But as more private donations come in — in the beginning of the new year the company expects to take in an additional $36 million in cash above its normal contributions — it hopes to replenish the endowment before the end of the fiscal year, at the end of July. It is unclear if that will be possible.“The Hours,” the new Kevin Puts opera starring Renée Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen, was such a strong seller this year that the company will bring it back next season. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s decision to turn to its endowment undoes some of the work it has undertaken in recent years to build it back up. A few years ago the company announced a fund-raising drive to double the endowment, and took steps to lower the amount its draws from it each year down to 5 percent of its value, from 8 percent.The Met is not alone in finding it difficult to emerge from the pandemic.Portland Opera in Oregon, which is struggling with a prolonged decline in ticket sales, has reduced its staff and cut in half the number of operas it stages each season to three from six before the pandemic. “The situation currently facing Portland Opera is not unique, but it is still a crisis,” said Sue Dixon, the company’s general director, who said that the cuts were necessary in the short term but would hurt the company’s ability to grow back.The Philadelphia Orchestra has seen paid attendance hovering at around 47 percent this fall, down from about 66 percent before the pandemic, though a recent uptick in sales has provided some optimism. “Many people are not back in the habit,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra and the Kimmel Center. “We need to remind them that it’s not only a beautiful and extraordinary and special experience, but it’s also easy and inexpensive.”Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, a troupe in Ohio, canceled its holiday shows this month because of tepid demand and rising production costs. And the Philly Pops, a 43-year-old orchestra, has announced plans to dissolve next year, citing mounting debt and a sharp decline in subscriptions during the pandemic.Verdi’s “Don Carlo” ended its run this fall with only 40 percent paid attendance.Ken Howard/Met OperaThe prospect of a recession next year is further rattling arts groups and raising fears that weak attendance could extend into next season and beyond. Federal assistance, which helped many companies survive the pandemic shutdown, has now largely dried up.“We’re still in this period of great uncertainty and anxiety,” said Simon Woods, the president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “The need to build new audiences is more urgent than ever.”For many opera companies and orchestras, the pandemic has accelerated the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets, which was once a major source of revenue.At the Met, subscriptions are expected to fall to 19 percent of total box office revenues this season, compared with 45 percent two decades ago. As single tickets become more popular, and some older subscribers stay at home because of virus fears, the average age of the Met’s audience has dropped to 52, from 57 in 2020.Mr. Nézet-Séguin, who became the Met’s music director in 2018, succeeding James Levine, who led the company for four decades, said the company would remain committed to the classics even as it embraced innovation. And he said that the company could try to appeal to different audiences with an array of works, both old and new.“I want everyone to feel welcome at the Met,” he said. “Will they fall in love with every opera we do? Of course not. But I don’t want anyone to say, ‘The Met is not for me.’” More

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      Terry Hall, a Face of Britain’s Ska Revival, Is Dead at 63

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      The son of Coventry factory workers, he overcame a traumatic childhood to find fame in the Thatcher years as the frontman of the Specials.Terry Hall, the frontman of the Specials, the British ska band that blended pub-fight energy with socially conscious lyrics that explored the political and racial tensions of Britain in the late 1970s and early ’80s, died on Dec. 18. He was 63.The cause was pancreatic cancer, his former bandmate Horace Panter announced on Facebook. The announcement did not say where he died.After enduring a traumatic childhood, Mr. Hall went on to enjoy a chart-topping music career.He forged his most lasting legacy as a face of the revival of ska — the pop genre that emerged in Jamaica in the 1960s, blending Caribbean styles like calypso with rhythm and blues — that shook the British music scene during the early, convulsive Margaret Thatcher years.The Specials were key figures in the movement, along with Madness, the Selecter, Bad Manners and the Beat (or the English Beat, as they were known in the United States to distinguish them from the American band of the same name).Clad in the fashions of Jamaica’s slickly attired rude boys — often with tapered suits, skinny ties and porkpie hats — the Specials sounded off about racial injustice, soaring unemployment and ultra-right-wing violence over a rave-up party sound that left sweaty audiences in a frenzy.Hollow-eyed and phlegmatic, Mr. Hall channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.The band released its debut album, produced by Elvis Costello, in 1979, two years before racial unrest rocked cities throughout Britain. With five white members and two Black ones, the Specials “were a celebration of how British culture was invigorated by Caribbean immigration,” Billy Bragg, the British singer-songwriter known for his leftist politics, wrote in a social media post after Mr. Hall’s death.“But the onstage demeanor of their lead singer was a reminder that they were in the serious business of challenging our perception of who we were in the late 1970s,” Mr. Bragg added.Mr. Hall performing with the Specials in London in 1980. He channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Hall believed that England needed a band to vocalize the country’s unease at the time. “What I didn’t realize,” he said in a 2020 interview with the music writer Pete Paphides, “was that it might be us.”The Specials scored seven straight Top 10 singles on the British pop charts, starting in July 1979 with “Gangsters,” which reached No. 6, and concluding in June 1981 with the No. 1 hit “Ghost Town,” a mournful rumination about a lack of opportunity for British youth in a sinking economy against a backdrop of perceived government apathy. Their other hits included “A Message to You Rudy” (No. 10) and “Too Much Too Young” (No. 1).The Specials in Los Angeles in 1980. From left: Horace Panter, Mr. Hall, John Bradbury and Neville Staple.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesEven when topping the charts, Mr. Hall and the band showed little interest in becoming part of the London entertainment machine.Proudly based in Coventry, a rough-and-tumble industrial city in the West Midlands known for its automobile factories and its sizable West Indian population, the Specials scarcely paid lip service to the frothy trends bubbling up from the banks of the Thames.“We’ve got everything we want here,” Mr. Hall said in a television interview in 1980, when he was at the peak of his fame but still living with his parents. “There’s a studio here, there’s a train station, that’s all we need.”As for London, he said: “There’s nothing for me, or for any of us; there’s no point in hanging around trendy London clubs until 4 in the morning. I’d rather stay in and watch telly.”In addition to his star turn with the Specials, Mr. Hall scored four Top 10 hits in Britain with Fun Boy Three, a deadpan and oddly experimental new wave group he formed in 1981 with the Specials’ other vocalists, Lynval Golding and Neville Staple. In 1983, the band hit No. 7 with its cover of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” a 1981 hit for the Go-Go’s that Mr. Hall wrote with that band’s Jane Wiedlin, whom he briefly dated.Terence Edward Hall was born in Coventry on March 19, 1959. His father, Terry Hall, Sr., worked at a Rolls-Royce aeronautics plant, and his mother, Joan, worked at a Chrysler factory.Growing up, Mr. Hall was a standout student and soccer player, but he spent his youth fighting inner demons. In 2019, he revealed a childhood trauma that he said sent him into a spiral of depression and substance abuse that lasted years.In an interview with the British magazine The Spectator, Mr. Hall said that “Well Fancy That!” — a 1983 song by Fun Boy Three about a harrowing sexual encounter — was about the time he was kidnapped and abused by a teacher.“It was about an episode where I was abducted, taken to France and sexually abused for four days,” he said. “And then punched in the face and left on the roadside. At 12, that’s life-changing. I still have that illness today and I will still have it in 10 years’ time, and it’s important for me to talk about that.”Prescribed Valium to deal with the emotional fallout, he soon became addicted. “Which meant I didn’t go to school, I didn’t do anything,” he recalled. “I just sat on my bed rocking for eight months.”Music was an escape. In the late 1970s, Mr. Hall joined a Coventry punk band called Squad, which brought him to the attention of Jerry Dammers, a songwriter and keyboardist who was in a band called the Automatics. That band would evolve into the Specials, with Mr. Hall taking lead vocals.“We didn’t even know who was going to play what,” he later said. “We passed around all the instruments until we found what we were comfortable with. I wasn’t comfortable with any of them, so I became the singer.”The Specials, an unstable collection of members with different backgrounds and agendas, unraveled after “Ghost Town.” The remaining members regrouped without Mr. Hall as the Special AKA and scored a Top 10 hit in 1984 with the up-tempo protest song “Nelson Mandela.”But Mr. Hall’s career was far from over. After Fun Boy Three disbanded, he helped form Colourfield, a pop band based in Manchester, in 1984. The Colourfield’s sunny love song “Thinking of You” hit No. 12 in Britain the next year.In 1990 he formed another band, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, which released one album, “Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes.” He later formed a band called Vegas, with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, and also collaborated with the Lightning Seeds, Gorillaz and other acts.Mr. Hall eventually drifted back to his roots with a new incarnation of the Specials, including Mr. Golding and Mr. Panter, that released an album, “Encore,” in 2019, that dealt with contemporary racial issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement. The pandemic interrupted plans for a reggae follow-up in 2020.In 2021, the band detoured from its ska roots with an album of covers called “Protest Songs: 1924-2012,” which included a honky-tonk cover of the Staple Singers’ 1965 civil rights ode “Freedom Highway” and a country-inflected version of Malvina Reynolds’s “I Don’t Mind Failing in This World.”By that year, the band was set to proceed with its delayed reggae album. But in October, The Guardian reported, Steve Blackwell, the band’s manager, disclosed that Mr. Hall had pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver. Treatment failed to stem the disease.Mr. Hall is survived by his second wife, Lindy Heymann; their son, Orson; and two sons, Theo and Felix, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.By the end of his life Mr. Hall had not entirely escaped his demons, but he had made a certain peace with himself, and with his role as half-willing pop star.When asked by The Spectator if he derived any pleasure from performing, he responded: “Absolutely none. That’s why I do it.”He quickly amended that. “I actually do enjoy that thing onstage where I turn round and I’ve got Horace and Lynval, who I’ve known most of my life, and we’re sharing something. That’s my night out. Don’t get out much.” More

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      After 40 Years of Fa-La-Laing, a New York Caroler Hands In His Bells

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      A onetime Macy’s elf, Tom Andolora founded a troupe that sang Christmas carols in Victorian dress. Now he is packing it in, worried about the survival of New York caroling.He has been heckled, slapped by a drunk Wall Street banker and ignored altogether. He has performed in the cake section of a Bronx supermarket, serenaded commuters on frigid Manhattan subway platforms and sung from inside a claustrophobic display window at Bloomingdale’s.Being a Christmas caroler in New York City is not for the fainthearted. Just ask Tom Andolora, a onetime elf at Macy’s Santaland, who has spent the past four decades leading the Dickens’ Victorian Carolers, which he founded in 1982.Now, after a long career in which the Carolers have tried to spread a little comfort and joy to sick children at Harlem Hospital, provided the soundtrack for wedding proposals at Rockefeller Center and serenaded several first ladies at the White House, Andolora, 65, is caroling for the last time this Christmas, before turning in his bells and retiring.“Caroling is a dying art form and I don’t know if New York caroling will even be around in a decade,” he said, wistfully flipping through old photos of himself, in his top hat and Victorian dress.“People don’t want religion or tradition anymore,” he worried. “I’ve given up my Christmases for 40 years. I’m done.”The lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic; holiday playlists that are now heavier on Mariah Carey than the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge; competition from younger upstarts who can rap “Jingle Bells”; and the closure of storied New York department stores like Lord & Taylor and Gimbels were all making traditional Victorian-style caroling increasingly untenable.Andolora said the caroling business had never fully recovered from the coronavirus. “We are still getting cancellations,” he said. “People are getting Covid or are afraid of getting it.”Bretana Turkon, Andolora, Rebecca Reres and Justin Tepper in 19th-century garb.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCarols and caroling dates back at least to the Middle Ages in England, when people would go “a-wassailing” — singing Christmas songs in the streets in return for an alcoholic drink known as wassail, traditionally made with warmed ale, wine or cider, blended with spices and honey.In New York, the caroling tradition has existed for decades, with dozens of groups who take to the streets in all five boroughs, bringing a little Christmas cheer to grumpy department store shoppers, neighborhood churches and soulless corporate parties, sometimes for as much as $1,500 an appearance.Andolora began his Christmastime career as an elf.The year was 1981 and Andolora, the grandson of Italian immigrants, had recently arrived in Manhattan from Jamestown, N.Y., eager to make it big in show business like another Jamestown native, Lucille Ball. To begin with, however, he had to pay the rent, and was soon wearing a jaunty green hat, a green velvet tunic and red knee-high boots at Macy’s Santaland.He quickly worked his way up from “Tree Elf” to “Cashier Elf” before graduating to “Photo Elf” — positioning sometimes screaming children for their photos with Santa. He taught acting at Brooklyn College for a time, and also adapted and directed a gothic play about the secret lives of the dead.But inspired after hearing caroling groups he found wanting, Andolora, a powerful baritone, decided he could do better. And so the Dickens’ Victorian Carolers were born, a quartet clad in 19th-century garb — black top hats, lace collars, capes, hoop skirts and white gloves — which has drawn its ranks from cruise ships and Broadway productions like “Show Boat.”It turns out there is a crowded field of Dickensian carolers, apparently inspired by “A Christmas Carol,” and it has sometimes been difficult for the Dickens’ Victorian Carolers to stand out. There are the Dickens Carolers of Seattle, the Dickens Carolers of Kansas and the Original Dickens Carolers of Denver.“I added the word ‘Victorian’ to our name to try and be different,” Andolora explained.Andolora paid his dues (and the rent) as an elf at Macy’s Santaland.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesLooking back on his caroling days, Andolora said there had been mirth but also some Grinch-worthy moments, including a shopper who jeered, “That was terrible!” On more than one occasion, a member of the quartet has belted out “Twelve Days of Christmas” with stentorian gusto when the group was supposed to be singing a soulful version of “Silent Night.”Some years ago, at a private Christmas party in a Park Avenue penthouse, Andolora accidentally shoved a porcelain Buddha with his foot during a spirited rendition of “Deck the Halls.” He dislodged the statue’s arm, which fell with a thump to the floor.“It was mortifying,” he said, adding that the host, a wealthy impresario, forgave him.There have also been high points, like when a New York State Police officer proposing to his fiancée hired the group to gather nearby and sing “Congratulations!” as he got down on one knee.“He still sends me a Christmas card every year,” he said.The Carolers have also performed at the White House during four administrations. Andolora recalled that Nancy Reagan’s party was impeccably run, that the Clintons never showed up to take their photo, and that President Barack Obama teased the group about its oversize hoop skirts.Whatever the challenges of caroling in the Big City, Andolora said he had no regrets.“I have loved caroling since I was a kid,” he said. “It can bring people to tears.” More