Music

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

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

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

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

Mr. Lanez, a Canadian rapper, fired at the Houston hip-hop star after an argument in 2020. The matter became the subject of speculation and gossip on social media and in songs.LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles jury on Friday found Daystar Peterson, the Canadian rapper better known as Tory Lanez, guilty of shooting a fellow artist, Megan Thee Stallion, in both of her feet following an argument about their romantic entanglements and respective careers in the summer of 2020.Mr. Lanez, 30, was convicted of three felony counts: assault with a semiautomatic handgun, carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. He faces more than 20 years in prison and could be deported.Jurors reached a verdict after about seven hours of deliberation across two days, following a trial that lasted nearly two weeks. Mr. Lanez, who had been free on bail during the trial following a period of house arrest, was immediately taken into custody. Sentencing was scheduled for Jan. 27.Megan Thee Stallion was not present in court. As the verdict was read, Mr. Lanez appeared motionless and stared straight ahead until his father stood up and began shouting at the judge and prosecutors. “God will judge you,” he said, as bailiffs moved to block his path.Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Megan Thee Stallion, said in a statement: “The jury got it right. I am thankful there is justice for Meg.”The case, which played out as both a tawdry tabloid narrative and a weighty referendum on the treatment of Black women in hip-hop and beyond, was closely watched for both its famous characters and what it said about the recent adjudication of alleged abuse by notable men, such as Johnny Depp and Harvey Weinstein, in court and in public.Mr. Lanez, though not a household name before the case, has seen his celebrity profile rise since the shooting, earning explicit and implied support from various corners of the hip-hop universe, including influential blogs, social media accounts and the rappers-turned-talking heads 50 Cent and Joe Budden.In court, Mr. Lanez’s defense had raised the possibility of another shooter, a friend of Megan Thee Stallion’s who was also involved in the argument, which occurred on the way home from a gathering at the home of the reality star and beauty mogul Kylie Jenner.But Megan Thee Stallion, who testified in the case, identified Mr. Lanez as her assailant, tearfully recounting how he had shouted “dance” and a sexist slur at her before firing several times from the passenger seat of a sport utility vehicle.She said Mr. Lanez then apologized and offered her and the friend, Kelsey Harris, a million dollars each to keep quiet about what had occurred.In his closing argument, Alexander Bott, a deputy district attorney, said that Mr. Lanez had been pushed to a breaking point when Megan Thee Stallion demeaned his artistic stature, noting that she had been reluctant to come forward after the traumatic event.“Megan did find the courage to come and tell you what the defendant did to her,” Mr. Bott told jurors. “Was Megan telling the truth? I think everyone in the courtroom knows the answer to that question.”The lawyer added, of Mr. Lanez, “Hold him accountable for shooting the victim for nothing more than a bruised ego.”Mr. Lanez’s defense team argued that the two women were fighting that night over the male rapper, implying that Ms. Harris might have been motivated to shoot her friend out of jealousy when she learned that Mr. Lanez and Megan Thee Stallion had been intimate behind her back.George Mgdesyan, a lawyer for Mr. Lanez, said that the case “was about jealousy and a sexual relationship,” calling the prosecution’s case “full of holes and speculation.” Megan Thee Stallion “lied about everything in this case,” he told jurors.Some eyewitnesses provided muddled accounts of the shooting at trial, though most testified to seeing Mr. Lanez with a gun. Ms. Harris, who was offered immunity in exchange for her testimony, denied pulling the trigger or receiving hush money from Mr. Lanez, The Los Angeles Times reported. But on the stand, she also backtracked on her previous statements to the police that identified Mr. Lanez as the shooter, testifying that amid the drunken scuffle, she did not see who shot Megan Thee Stallion.Megan Thee Stallion, who testified in the case, identified Mr. Lanez as her assailant.Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesProsecutors then received the judge’s permission to play Ms. Harris’s entire 80-minute interview with detectives from September, in which she implicated Mr. Lanez. They also presented a text message Ms. Harris sent to Megan Thee Stallion’s bodyguard the night of the shooting, writing, “Help” and “Tory shot Meg.” (In response to her conflicting accounts, Ms. Harris said she could not remember what she had said previously and had not been entirely truthful with prosecutors in the past.)Another eyewitness, who saw the encounter from the window of a nearby home, said that he observed a violent, chaotic fight and that the first “flashes” — which he initially believed were fireworks, noting that he never saw a gun — came from a woman. But the witness added that he then saw a short man, believed to be Mr. Lanez, “firing everywhere” four or five times, Rolling Stone reported.Experts testified that gunshot residue was found on both Mr. Lanez and Ms. Harris, who were in close proximity, though DNA evidence tying Mr. Lanez to the weapon was inconclusive. (The police did not collect a DNA sample from Ms. Harris.)Ahead of the trial, the case had played out on social media, gossip sites and in music released by both rappers.Megan Thee Stallion, who had collaborated with Beyoncé shortly before the shooting and went on to win three Grammy Awards, including best new artist, in 2021, was initially circumspect about what had occurred.“Look what coming forward has done to her life, her reputation and her career,” Mr. Bott, the deputy district attorney, said in his closing remarks, raising his voice at times for emphasis. “Do you think she wants to be here?”In her testimony, the rapper said she did not tell police officers that she had been shot that night in July — claiming instead that she had stepped on glass — because tensions between Black people and law enforcement were high after the murder of George Floyd. “I didn’t want to see anybody die,” she said. “I didn’t want to die.”She was also worried about her career. “I didn’t want to talk to the officers because I didn’t want to be a snitch,” the rapper added. “Snitching is frowned upon in the hip-hop community,” which she identified as a boys’ club.In a statement after the verdict, George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, highlighted what he called Megan Thee Stallion’s bravery in court. “You showed incredible courage and vulnerability with your testimony despite repeated and grotesque attacks that you did not deserve,” he said. “Women, especially Black women, are afraid to report crimes like assault and sexual violence because they are too often not believed.”At first, Mr. Lanez was arrested and charged only with concealing a firearm in the vehicle. But in the days and weeks that followed, Megan Thee Stallion revealed online and in an interview with a detective that she had been shot, eventually naming Mr. Lanez as her assailant. That October, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office charged Mr. Lanez with assault.Still, for years since, some skeptics and conspiracy theorists have questioned whether Megan Thee Stallion was shot at all. At trial, a surgeon testified to removing bullet fragments from both of the rapper’s feet, with X-rays presented in court showing tiny fragments that remained.Mr. Lanez, who opted not to testify in his own defense, has not detailed his version of events, though he released an album barely two months after the encounter in which he denied shooting Megan Thee Stallion, focusing instead on their personal relationship.“We both know what happened that night and what I did/But it ain’t what they sayin’,” he rapped.Megan Thee Stallion later responded in her own track, titled “Shots Fired,” in which she seemed to recount what led to the shooting — “He talkin’ ’bout his followers, dollars,” she raps, adding, “I told him, ‘You’re not poppin’, you just on the remix’” — as well as its aftermath. (“You offered M’s not to talk, I guess that made my friend excited, hmm/now y’all in cahoots.”)On the stand, Megan Thee Stallion said she had initially lied about the extent of her personal involvement with Mr. Lanez, including in a television interview with Gayle King, because it was “disgusting,” she said. “How could I share my body with somebody who could shoot me?”Even as her career skyrocketed, the assault had caused her to “lose my confidence, lose my friends, lose myself,” she said in court. “I wish he had just shot and killed me.” More

As a songwriter, arranger and producer, he brought sophistication and melodic inventiveness to hits by the Delfonics, the Spinners and others.Thom Bell, the prolific producer, songwriter and arranger who, as an architect of the lush Philadelphia sound of the late 1960s and ’70s, was a driving force behind landmark R&B recordings by the Spinners, the Delfonics and the Stylistics, died on Thursday at his home in Bellingham, Wash. He was 79.His death was confirmed by his manager and attorney, Michael Silver, who did not cite a cause.Along with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Mr. Bell was a member of the songwriting and production team — the Mighty Three, as they were called (and as they branded their publishing company) — that gave birth to what became known as the Sound of Philadelphia. Renowned for its groove-rich bass lines, cascading string choruses and gospel-steeped vocal arrangements, the Sound of Philadelphia rivaled the music being made by the Motown and Stax labels in popularity and influence.A classically trained pianist, Mr. Bell brought an uptown sophistication and melodic inventiveness to Top 10 pop hits like the Delfonics’ “La-La (Means I Love You)” (1968) and the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” (1972). He was particularly adept as an arranger: On records like “Delfonics Theme (How Could You),” strings, horns and timpani build, like waves crashing on a beach, to stirring emotional effect.He also wrote the arrangement for the O’Jays’ propulsive Afro-Latin tour de force, “Back Stabbers,” a No. 3 pop hit in 1972.Mr. Bell had a knack for incorporating instrumentation into his arrangements that was not typically heard on R&B recordings. He employed French horn and sitar on the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” (1970) and oboe on the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow” (1972). Both records were Top 10 pop singles, and “Didn’t I,” which was later covered by New Kids on the Block, won a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a duo or group in 1971.“The musicians looked at me like I was crazy. Violin? Timpani?” Mr. Bell said of his first session with the Delfonics in a 2020 interview with Record Collector magazine. “But that’s the world I came from. I had a three-manual harpsichord, and I played that. I played electric piano and zither, or something wild like that.”“Every session,” he went on, “there was always one experiment.”Mr. Bell, who typically collaborated with a lyricist, said that his chief influences as a songwriter were Teddy Randazzo, who wrote tearful ballads like “Hurts So Bad” for Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Burt Bacharach.“Randazzo and Bacharach, those are my leaders,” Mr. Bell told Record Collector. “They tuned me in to what I was listening to in a more modernistic way.”Mr. Bacharach “was classically trained also,” Mr. Bell said in the same interview. “He was doing things in strange times, in strange keys. He was doing things with Dionne Warwick that were unheard-of.”The recording engineer Joe Tarsia, the founder of Sigma Sound Studios, where most of the hits associated with the Sound of Philadelphia were made, was fond of calling Mr. Bell the “Black Burt Bacharach.” (Mr. Tarsia died in November.)Coincidentally, Mr. Bell’s first No. 1 hit single as a producer was Ms. Warwick’s “Then Came You,” a 1974 collaboration with the Spinners. (He also won the 1974 Grammy for producer of the year.)His other No. 1. pop single as a producer was James Ingram’s Grammy-winning 1990 hit, “I Don’t Have a Heart,” co-produced by Mr. Ingram.Mr. Bell produced dozens of Top 40 singles, many of which were certified gold or platinum. His influence on subsequent generations of musicians was deep and wide; numerous contemporary R&B and hip-hop artists, among them Tupac, Nicki Minaj and Mary J. Blige, have sampled or interpolated his work.Thomas Randolph Bell was born on Jan. 27, 1943, in Philadelphia. His father, Leroy, a businessman, played guitar and accordion. His mother, Anna (Burke) Bell, a stenographer, played piano and organ and encouraged young Tom (he only later started spelling his name Thom) and his nine brothers and sisters to pursue music and other arts — in Tom’s case, the piano.He was in his early teens when he first gave thought to pop music. The precipitating event was overhearing Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow” on the radio while working at his father’s fish market.“I fell in love with the whole production,” he said of the epiphany he experienced in a 2018 interview with The Seattle Times. “I listened to the background, the bass, a lot more than just the lyrics.”Mr. Bell, center, with his fellow songwriters Leon Huff, left, and Kenny Gamble in 1973, when Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff announced that he would be joining them in a production partnership.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Bell and his friend Kenny Gamble teamed up and made a go of it as a singing duo called Kenny and Tommy. They met with little success, but the experience confirmed Mr. Bell’s desire to pursue a career in pop music. He soon found work playing piano in the house band at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, and he was eventually invited to play on the soul singer Chuck Jackson’s 1962 hit, “Any Day Now.”But he got his big break — coming while he was working at Cameo-Parkway Records in Philadelphia as, among other things, the touring conductor for Chubby Checker — when he wrote “La-La (Means I Love You)” with William Hart, the lead singer of the Delfonics.In the late 1960s, while continuing to collaborate with the Delfonics, Mr. Bell re-established ties with Mr. Gamble and his creative partner Leon Huff. He became part of their team at Sigma Sound Studios and, ultimately, the Sigma Sound house band, MFSB (the initials stood for “Mother Father Sister Brother”).By the early 1970s, Mr. Bell had started working as producer, arranger and songwriter (most often with the lyricist Linda Creed), first for the Stylistics and later for the Spinners, whose career he helped revitalize after it had stalled at Motown.He remained active as the ’70s progressed, even as the Sound of Philadelphia was being eclipsed by disco and rap. But apart from successful collaborations with Johnny Mathis, Elton John, Deniece Williams and Mr. Ingram, the hits quit coming.Mr. Bell had moved to Tacoma, Wash., in 1976 with his first wife, Sylvia, who suffered from health issues that her doctors believed might be alleviated by a change of climate. The couple divorced in 1984, and shortly afterward Mr. Bell remarried and moved to the Seattle area. He settled in Bellingham in 1998, having by then retired from the music business.Mr. Bell at a concert honoring the recipients of lifetime achievement Grammy Awards at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2017. He had been given a Grammy Trustees Award the year before.Michael Kovac/Getty Images for NARASHe was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006 and the Musicians Hall of Fame 10 years later. In 2016, he received a Grammy Trustees Award, an honor that recognizes nonperformers who have made significant contributions to the field of recording. (Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff received the award in 1999.)Mr. Bell is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Vanessa Bell; four sons, Troy, Mark, Royal and Christopher; two daughters, Tia and Cybell; a sister, Barbara; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Early in his career, Mr. Bell was met with questions about his often unconventional production and arrangements, particularly his extensive use of European orchestral conventions on R&B records.“Nobody else is in my brain but me, which is why some of the things I think about are crazy,” he told Record Collector magazine. “I hear oboes and bassoons and English horns.“An arranger told me, ‘Thom Bell, Black people don’t listen to that.’ I said, ‘Why limit yourself to Black people? I make music for people.’” More

A superstar in Africa, she sang in the language of her tribe and often addressed social concerns, insisting on women’s strength and decrying abuse. Tshala Muana, a Congolese singer who brought a supple voice and sensual dance moves to songs about women’s dignity and social issues, died on Dec. 10 in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was 64.Her death, in a hospital, was announced on Facebook by her producer and companion, Claude Mashala. He did not cite a cause, but Ms. Muana had a stroke in 2020 and had diabetes and hypertension.Unlike other internationally successful Congolese performers, Ms. Muana sang most of her songs in Tshiluba, the native language of her Kasai tribe, rather than in French or Lingala, the Congolese lingua franca. Her songs often addressed social concerns, insisting on women’s strength and decrying abuse; she also promoted condom use to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa.She was praised as the “queen” of mutuashi, a traditional Kasai rhythm and hip-pumping dance which she updated in her hits and carried to concert stages worldwide. In the early 2000s, Ms. Muana was elected to Congo’s parliament along with another top musician, Tabu Ley. She championed issues involving women, children and the poor and became widely known as Mamu Nationale, “Mother of the Nation.”Elisabeth Tshala Muana Muidikay was born on March 13, 1958, in Élisabethville, in what was then the Belgian Congo; the city is now Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was the second of 10 children of Amadeus Muidikayi and Alphonsine Bambiwa Tumba. Her father, a soldier, died during civil warfare in Congo when she was 6 years old.Ms. Muana had an arranged marriage as a teenager, but she left it after the death of an infant daughter. She moved to Kinshasa, where she became a dancer and backup singer in the band led by the singer M’Pongo Love.In 1980 she left her homeland, which by then had been renamed Zaire, and traveled through West Africa. She settled in Ivory Coast, where she started her solo career, and recorded her first single, “Amina,” in Paris in 1982. She moved to Paris around the time she recorded her first album, “Kami,” there in 1984.By the time she returned to Zaire in the mid-1980s, she had established herself as a hitmaker in Africa. In 1987, she had a pan-African hit with “Karibou Yangu,” whose lyrics were in Swahili.She moved to Paris again in 1990 and remained there until the end of the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 before returning to what was now the Democratic Republic of Congo.Ms. Muana maintained a long and prolific career, releasing nearly two dozen albums and performing in Africa, Europe and the United States. The percolating grooves of her songs fused mutuashi rhythms with salsa, Congolese soukous and other African and Caribbean rhythms, deploying synthesizers and horns alongside traditional percussion. One of her most highly regarded albums, “Mutuashi,” was released in the United States in 1996.Her songs often carried messages of ethical uplift and social criticism, at times veiled in metaphor. At her concerts, which brought her to stadiums across Africa, she was renowned for dancing that fans considered sexy and detractors considered vulgar. In 2003 she shared the Kora All Africa Music Award for best female central African artist with another Congolese singer, M’bilia Bel.In November 2020, Ms. Muana released her last single, “Ingratitude,” a song chiding someone for disloyalty to a mentor. She was arrested and imprisoned, apparently because Congo’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, believed the song was criticizing him for breaking away from Joseph Kabila, Congo’s former president, whom Ms. Muana had supported. She was released within a day, and Mr. Mashala, her producer and companion, said at the time that the song was aimed more generally at a lifetime of betrayals by people and corporations. Ms. Muana had no children. Information on survivors other than Mr. Mashala was not immediately available.Although Ms. Muana championed her Kasai roots, she strongly supported multicultural unity for her strife-torn country.“In Congo there is no love for each other, no one has the country at heart,” she told The Observer, a Ugandan newspaper, in 2009. “We were elected to Parliament to represent our cultures and musicians, but the primary assignment was teaching love.” More

There is no house in the United States dedicated to presenting works from a prominent corner of homegrown music theater repertory.Whenever I’m trying to sell a friend on a night at the opera, my memory calls up a scene from “Twin Peaks.”The local doctor, Will Hayward, sits down to dinner, clearly haggard, thanks to his work mopping up local catastrophes. Then someone asks him how it’s going.“I feel like I’ve sat through back-to-back operas,” he says with a sigh. Everyone at the table smirks. In this view, even one opera might prove a test of endurance. It’s a somewhat surprising joke at the music world’s expense, given that “Twin Peaks” often found pleasure in an eclectic array of sound worlds (spurred on by the inventive, varied work of the show’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, who died this month at 85).But the gag also makes perfect sense. While “Twin Peaks” had art house trappings, it straddled the line between rarefied and popular: a feat that American opera hasn’t bothered with much since it stopped regularly letting its hair down on television in the 1950s.Long before grand Metropolitan Opera productions represented the first, last and final word about opera onscreen, thanks to its public-television broadcasts, audiences could find their way to sprightly, comedic musical spectacles. After a successful Broadway run in the 1940s, Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark,” with a book by Moss Hart and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, was performed live on NBC in 1954. This night at the theater at home featured a plot driven by psychoanalysis and songs that unfurled within dreams. (“Twin Peaks,” eat your heart out.)It was a critical hit again, just as it had been live. Weill’s “One Touch of Venus,” with text by Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman, followed on NBC in 1955. Around that time, audiences could also catch Oscar Straus’s “The Chocolate Soldier” and Victor Herbert’s “Naughty Marietta” on TV. Shows that would otherwise be found on the stages of comic opera houses — theaters that specialize in the genre of theatrical works with spoken dialogue and often humorous plots — were readily available in living rooms across America.Thankfully, all those telecasts have been preserved on DVD by the VAI imprint. And although the orchestrations in use weren’t those of the composers, at least the tunes are all there — which is more than you can say for the Hollywood adaptations of the same works. But why do we hardly see this kind of material today, on television or in theaters?Composers didn’t lose all purchase on humor around 1960. But since then, Broadway has become a less reliable steward of these kinds of scores. Pit orchestras have been reduced in size; amplification of voices has become more common. Sondheim’s catalog, with its complexity and wit, is the exception to these trends (and even his shows aren’t in consistent enough circulation today).Despite that reduced range of performance, American classical artists still demonstrate comic bents just waiting for an outlet. One example: Anthony Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes serious-minded grand stage works like “The Central Park Five” and “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which is headed to the Metropolitan Opera in 2023. But he also writes comic operas, and they have languished.Davis’s 1992 opera on the Patty Hearst saga, “Tania,” contains a satirical jewel titled “If I Were a Black Man,” with words by Michael John LaChiusa. It is sung by a white Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist, and lampoons the liberal fascination with what Tom Wolfe called radical chic. Anyone weary of cringe-y, performative displays of bien-pensant thinking might crack a smile — or let loose a belly laugh. (Davis, too, chuckled while singing a line to himself when I spoke with him this year.)But you really have to go searching for “Tania,” or this song. Rare is the algorithm that would promote it; and the CD version, from the Koch label, is catch as catch can on the secondhand marketplace.Davis’s fellow Pulitzer awardee William Bolcom is in similar straits. His verismo operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” from 1999, was prominently documented on a New World Records album from Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Yet Bolcom’s comedic efforts, like the 1990 “Casino Paradise” — with its Trump-like land developer protagonist — aren’t as widely known.Some elements of “Paradise” are dated, but the verve of “A Great Man’s Child,” the show’s failson anthem, with a lyric by Arnold Weinstein, still plays well alongside contemporary talk about “nepotism babies.” Bolcom’s accolades have tended to be for concert works like his “Twelve New Etudes for Piano.” When I interviewed him this year, however, he made his underlying affections clear, saying, “Since the beginning, I’ve had love for the theater.”This strain of American cultural life clearly exists. But how could it be better represented? The answer is simple: It’s time for this country to create a comic opera company of its own.The comic opera tradition — which traditionally has included not only spoken dialogue, but also smaller voices relative to grander works in the repertory — has since cross-pollinated with neighboring forms like the musical. The Komische Oper in Berlin or the Opéra Comique in Paris might play “Kiss Me, Kate” one night, and an experimental opera with spoken bits — or comedic angles — the next.Critics trip over one another for assignments to these houses. (One of the performance highlights of my year was a new production, at the Komische Oper, of Jaromir Weinberger’s riotous “Schwanda the Bagpiper,” whose orchestral music delighted American audiences in the mid-20th century.) But New York has no such organization. And aside from small, specialized troupes — a local Gilbert & Sullivan society, or Ohio Light Opera — the United States doesn’t really have any comic opera companies.The American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia commissioned and premiered both “Tania” and “Casino Paradise” but was shuttered in 2014. You might occasionally find a great chorus like MasterVoices in New York partnering with an estimable local ensemble like the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to stage the original, comic opera version of Bizet’s “Carmen” — but generally for one night only. That same creative team brought “Lady in the Dark” back for a triumphant one-weekend run in 2019. (The short run was billed as a celebration of a previous New York revival, during the first season of Encores!, in 1994.)Together, MasterVoices and St. Luke’s could form the backbone of America’s first true comic opera company. What else would they play and sing? Perhaps those comedies from Davis and Bolcom, and more of Weill’s works. But also, surely, shows by Sondheim — and perhaps other musicals that wouldn’t be appropriate for commercial runs on Broadway today.That catalog could include, for example, the vaudeville music of the composer and lyricist team Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, whose 1921 show “Shuffle Along” was a landmark of Black Broadway. The show employed William Grant Still, who was eventually called “the dean of African American composers,” as an oboist in the pit. (Still was said to have improvised a motif in performances that George Gershwin supposedly heard and later used for “I Got Rhythm.”)The book of “Shuffle Along” is weighed down by racial stereotypes of the period — yet Blake and Sissle’s music deserves a new outing. In 2016, Broadway tried a story-behind-the-show approach, though it shuttered prematurely after its star, Audra McDonald, had to withdraw because of a pregnancy. A new adaptation of “Shuffle” would be fitting for an American opera company, and more viable outside the profit-driven confines of Broadway.Contemporary composers who would be a good fit for a comic opera company include Joseph White, whose outlandish “The Wagging Craze” — a self-described “radio opera” from late 2021 — dramatizes a ribald (and, of course, fictional) male-bonding fraternity that attracts Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. (J. Edgar Hoover, for his part, is appalled.)There’s also Kate Soper — the dramatist, soprano and librettist behind out-of-the-box theater pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” We would all benefit from her having the space, and budget, to produce new works. (Her long-delayed opera “The Romance of the Rose,” originally intended for spring 2020, will at last make its debut at Long Beach Opera in February.) Or maybe Soper could just pop into the theater to perform a black box-style show based on her most recent album, “The Understanding of All Things,” in which she winningly dissects a male suitor’s negging in the Yeats poem “For Anne Gregory.”It’s not likely that we’ll see a contemporary version of mid-20th century opera telecasts. Those old Weill productions would be too ambitious; Soper’s conceits, too experimental.A proper stage for these and other works wouldn’t merely help to reclaim comic opera’s past and present; it could also set priorities for the future. After all, what incentive is there for budding artists to write in the vein of Davis and Bolcom if their own works can’t be heard? It’s time to give our comic spirits the opportunity to punch up the script of American opera. More