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      Beyoncé Will Change ‘Heated’ Lyrics After ‘Ableist Slur’ Criticism

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      The pop star’s decision to replace two words in her song “Heated” follows Lizzo’s removal of the same term, which has been used as a slur against disabled people, from her track “Grrrls.”Days after the release of her latest album, “Renaissance,” Beyoncé will modify the lyrics of one of its songs, a representative for the singer said on Monday, in response to an outcry from disability rights advocates who say the pop star should not have used a word that has historically been employed as a derogatory slur.In “Heated,” a dancehall-inspired track, the singer uses the words “spaz” and “spazzin’” in an energetically recited portion of the song that’s a callback to the freestyles at some ballroom events. Activists condemned the use of the word in social media posts, pointing out that another pop star, Lizzo, had removed the same lyric from a song following similar backlash in June.“The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced,” a spokeswoman for Beyoncé said in an email.The word at issue is based on spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy that causes motor impairments in the legs or arms. In June, Hannah Diviney, a writer and disability advocate from Australia, tweeted about Lizzo’s use of the word, noting that to a person with cerebral palsy like her, spasticity referred to an “unending painful tightness” in her legs, and urged the singer to “do better.” In response to the criticism from fans and activists, Lizzo changed her song, “Grrrls,” and wrote in a statement that “this is the result of me listening and taking action.”Diviney wrote in an op-ed, published in The Guardian on Monday, that her “heart sank” when she learned that Beyoncé’s new album had used the same word.“I thought we’d changed the music industry and started a global conversation about why ableist language — intentional or not — has no place in music,” Diviney wrote. “But I guess I was wrong, because now Beyoncé has gone and done exactly the same thing.”Disability right advocates have noted that the word has been more commonly used as a derogatory term in the United Kingdom compared to the United States. Scope, a group in Britain that campaigns for equality for people with disabilities, tweeted, “Disabled people’s experiences are not fodder for song lyrics,” and urged Beyoncé to follow Lizzo’s example. More

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      Mick Moloney, Musician and Champion of Irish Culture, Dies at 77

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      An Irish immigrant to the U.S., he was a recording artist, scholar and concert presenter who also encouraged women to join a male-dominated folk tradition.Mick Moloney, a recording artist, folklorist, concert presenter and professor who championed traditional Irish culture and encouraged female instrumentalists in a male-dominated field, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan, in Greenwich Village. He was 77.Glucksman Ireland House N.Y.U., New York University’s center for Irish studies, announced his death. No cause was given. Less than a week earlier, Mr. Moloney had performed at the Maine Celtic Festival in Belfast, Maine.An immigrant from Ireland, Mr. Moloney was a pioneering scholar in the field of Irish-American studies at N.Y.U., where he was named a global distinguished professor. The university houses his extensive collection of materials in its Archives of Irish America. He reissued a wealth of music by 19th- and 20th-century Irish bands and brought the music to a wide audience whose familiarity with Irish culture often did not extend much beyond commercialized Saint Patrick’s Day events.A superb musician, Mr. Moloney sang and played the guitar, the mandolin and the banjo, with the tenor banjo his primary instrument. He was a founder in 1978 of Green Fields of America, an interdisciplinary Irish touring ensemble whose members include Michael Flatley, the founder of Riverdance, the theatrical show featuring Irish music and dance.Mr. Moloney was passionate about exploring the connections between Irish, African, Galician and American roots music and organized many concerts and lectures highlighting those synergies. On one program in the “Celtic Appalachia” series that he led, presented in 2012 at Symphony Space in Manhattan by the Irish Arts Center, the Malian musician Cheick Hamala Diabaté performed on Indigenous African instruments that predated the banjo. Mr. Moloney also collaborated with the Filipino vocalist Grace Nono, among other musicians.Mr. Moloney’s research extended to the often troubled relationship between Irish Americans and African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries; at his death he was working on a film called “Two Roads Diverged,” about how those communities found common ground through music and dance despite their antagonisms.His scholarship also embraced Irish-Jewish relations. On an entertaining recording called “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews,” Mr. Moloney highlighted vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley collaborations between those two groups of immigrants in America. (One verse asked, “What would this great Yankee nation really really ever do/ If it wasn’t for a Levy, a Monahan or Donohue?”)Mr. Moloney was involved as a musician or a producer, or both, on some 125 albums, according to the ethnomusicologist and musician Daniel T. Neely. Other notable Moloney recordings include “Slow Airs and Set Dances,” “Strings Attached,” “Green Fields of America,” “McNally’s Row of Flats” and “The Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra,” with an N.Y.U.-based ensemble he founded in 2000.Until the 1980s, instrumentalists in traditional Irish music were mostly male, but Mr. Moloney encouraged women to perform as well, organizing a festival in Manhattan in 1985 called “Cherish the Ladies” (the name of an Irish jig) and a concert the next year called “Fathers and Daughters.” He produced an album by the all-female group Cherish the Ladies called “Irish Women Musicians in America.”Mr. Moloney, who hosted shows about folk music on American public television, was honored by the Irish government in 2013 as a recipient of the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad. In 1999, Hillary Clinton, the first lady at the time, presented him with the National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts, given by National Endowment for the Arts.Mr. Moloney was a mentor to many subsequent N.E.A. fellows, including the flutist Joanie Madden, of Cherish the Ladies.He wrote a 2002 book called “Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song” accompanied by a CD of songs. And he led regular tours of Ireland, highlighting Irish culture through concerts, studio visits, castle tours and pub visits.“At the heart of the Irish American experience is a sense of displacement, from one country to another, from a rural to a more complicated way of life,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times in 1996. “There’s that sense of a tug from across the ocean. There’s a profound sense of loss.”Mr. Moloney performing at Symphony Space in Manhattan in 2015. He “has a charming, disarming gift of gab with which he deftly mingles wry humor and flashing barbs of comment,” a reviewer wrote in 1971.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesMichael Moloney was born in Limerick, in southwestern Ireland, on Nov. 15, 1944, one of seven children of Michael and Maura Moloney. His father was the chief air traffic control officer at Shannon Airport, west of Limerick, and his mother was the principal of a primary school in Limerick.Mick, as he was called, studied the tenor banjo, the mandolin and the guitar in his youth, becoming particularly attracted to the “wild sound” of the banjo after first hearing it in the 1950s, he said. Lacking opportunities to hear traditional instrumental music in Limerick, he recalled, he would travel to nearby County Clare to listen to tunes in pubs and record them so that he could learn them.In his youth he played with the Emmet Folk Group and with a trio called the Johnstons, with whom he recorded and toured Europe and America. “Much of their personality stems from Mr. Moloney,” the critic John S. Wilson wrote in The Times in 1971, “who has a charming, disarming gift of gab with which he deftly mingles wry humor and flashing barbs of comment, punctuated by a marvelously Mephistophelian eyebrow.”Mr. Moloney received a bachelor’s degree in economics from University College Dublin and lived briefly in London as a social worker helping immigrant communities. He moved to the United States in 1973 and received a Ph.D. in folklore and folk life from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. In addition to N.Y.U., he taught ethnomusicology, folklore and Irish studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at Georgetown and Villanova.In 1982, Mr. Moloney founded the Irish/Celtic Week at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, W.Va., modeled after the Willie Clancy Summer School, an annual event in County Clare that teaches traditional Irish arts.In his last two decades, he lived in both Manhattan and Thailand, where he volunteered as a music therapist and teacher for abandoned children with H.I.V. at the Mercy Center in Bangkok. He performed online from Thailand for Irish for Biden presidential campaign events in 2020.His marriages to Philomena Murray and Judy Sherman ended in divorce. His survivors include his partner, Sangjan Chailungka with whom he lived in Bangkok; a son, Fintan, from his marriage to Ms. Murray; and four siblings, Violet Morrissey and Dermot, Kathleen and Nanette Moloney.While he dedicated much of his career to academia, Mr. Moloney never lost his energy for making music, describing himself as an artist first and foremost.“There are thousands of tunes in the tradition, so when we sit down for rehearsal, our job really isn’t to find material, it’s to exclude material, because we’d play them all if we could,” he said in a video interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “On my tombstone,” he added, “I want the inscription banjo driver.” More

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      Under Pressure to Cut Russian Ties, Maestro Forms New Orchestra

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      Teodor Currentzis, who has been criticized for his association with a Russian bank, has enlisted European benefactors to finance his new group, Utopia.The conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia, announced on Monday that he would form a new international ensemble with the support of donors outside Russia.The ensemble, to be called Utopia, will bring together 112 musicians from 28 countries, many of them soloists and principal players in renowned orchestras, for a European tour that is to begin this fall and go through 2023, according to a statement. The group will rely on ticket sales as well as donations from European benefactors to finance its operations, the statement said.Currentzis, who has made a career of defying conventions in classical music, said he wanted the new group to shake up the traditional model of orchestras, in which musicians play together for years in the same concert halls. He said in a statement that the new group would “leave behind the framework of respectable institutions which, while being blessed can also be doomed to create what could be described as a certain standardized international sound.”“We are stepping into a more experimental field of searching for the perfect sound with masterful musicians who all crave it,” he added.The statement did not address Currentzis’s future with his longtime ensemble, MusicAeterna, which has drawn fire for its reliance on VTB Bank, a state-owned Russian institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries but remains the ensemble’s main sponsor. Representatives for Currentzis and MusicAeterna did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.The statement did not offer details about Utopia’s European benefactors, except to say they included a private foundation called Kunst und Kultur DM.Currentzis has faced pressure in recent months to secure financing outside Russia for MusicAeterna, which he founded in Siberia in 2004. He has also been criticized for remaining silent on the war and working with associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including some who sit on the board of MusicAeterna’s foundation. Several of the ensemble’s engagements have been canceled or postponed since the start of the war because of concerns about the ensemble’s benefactors.Still, MusicAeterna has pushed forward with engagements in Russia and abroad. In recent days, Currentzis, who was born in Athens but was awarded Russian citizenship by Putin in 2014, has led performances before sold-out crowds at the prestigious Salzburg Festival in Austria.Some of his artistic partners praised his decision on Monday to form Utopia.Matthias Naske, the artistic director of the Vienna Konzerthaus, who has said he would not engage MusicAeterna until it secured independent financing, called Utopia an important achievement. The new group will perform at the concert hall in October, during a tour that includes stops in Luxembourg and Germany.“I am grateful to Teodor Currentzis for his commitment and look forward to many encounters with his new project in the interest of cultural life in Vienna,” Naske said in a statement. More

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      Review: ‘M. Butterfly’ Metamorphoses Again, as an Opera

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      David Henry Hwang has returned to his Tony-winning play with a libretto for Huang Ruo’s new work. But can its story change with the times?SANTA FE, N.M. — “M. Butterfly” has been a Broadway hit, a watershed in Asian American representation, a film, and recently a revised version of the original play.Now, with the premiere on Saturday here at Santa Fe Opera of an adaptation by the composer Huang Ruo, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, the play’s author, the butterfly has returned to its operatic chrysalis.It was inevitable, really. Hwang’s Tony Award-winning script, from 1988, came to him when he saw that he could use the Orientalist stereotypes of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” as a mirror to explore how, for two decades, the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot (renamed Rene Gallimard in the play) carried on an affair with the Chinese opera singer and spy Shi Pei Pu (renamed Song Liling), only to discover, amid a lurid espionage case, that “she” had been a “he” all along.Hwang’s smash exposé of empire and race, gender and domination, could always be read as a reflection on the Puccini and the biases it still perpetuates as well as a gloss on the real-life tale. Find the right composer who could blend its elements with metatheatrical flair while maintaining the elusive quality that so marks the play, and the opportunity was obvious.Huang, a Chinese-born professor at the Mannes School of Music, whose works have often integrated Eastern and Western influences into a distinctive personal style, was almost certainly the best bet to be that composer.But the opportunity is missed.“M. Butterfly” had plenty of potential to fly at Santa Fe. Delayed for two years on account of the pandemic, James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, by Greg Emetaz, and moving easily between the personal and the geopolitical, as Gallimard’s fate entwines with that of the imperial pretensions of the French and Americans in Vietnam, and Song’s shifts with that of the Chinese Communist Party. Carolyn Kuan conducts with empathy, if not the rhythmic precision that the thudding score needs.James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, our critic writes.Curtis BrownThe cast is an exemplary one, too. Mark Stone makes for a suitably worn, confused Gallimard, and he sings his thorny vocal lines with impressive shape. The more minor parts are neatly delivered, especially Hongni Wu’s amused Comrade Chin and Kevin Burdette’s connivingly bureaucratic ambassador to China.All must bow to Kangmin Justin Kim, whose drag performances as Kimchilia Bartoli must have helped him portray Song with the extraordinary conviction he displays here. More than credible singing Cio-Cio-San’s “Un bel dì” and other soprano excerpts from the Puccini, this astonishing countertenor’s alluring, ringing tone, and the sensitivity as an actor that he shows in toying with Gallimard’s delusions and exploring Song’s own sexuality, announced an artist to watch closely.The problem with “M. Butterfly” is a deeper one, and it’s the same difficulty that Hwang grappled with when he rewrote the script for its return to Broadway in 2017: As times change, can “M. Butterfly” change with them and still be true to itself?That’s not to say that Hwang’s earlier themes are irrelevant now; far from it. Violence against women of Asian descent remains outrageously persistent, and there is still considerable value in confronting the Butterfly stereotypes that sustain it, especially in an opera world that remains stubbornly — no, offensively — reluctant to reckon with its many racisms, including in “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot.”But the play itself helped to expose related intricacies of sexism, racism and imperialism that have since become familiar, and the story has worn. Gender norms, for one thing, have shifted dramatically enough that the old question of whether Gallimard knew that Song was a man is barely titillating at all. By now we should also know that Gallimard’s desires are problematic; if we don’t, “M. Butterfly” still achieves its goal of showing us that we should. Either way, it’s hard to engage much with the bumbling, repressed central character, and the opera barely asks us to.Stone, left, and Kim in the opera, which has a distance from the original material, with a knowingly analytical air.Curtis BrownSo what is left? “M. Butterfly,” the play, always had ambiguity and illusion at its core, and this operatic version tries to break down binaries still further, especially through Song’s character. Fluidity washes; power blurs as East meets West; metaphor piles onto metaphor. There is a distance from the original material here, and the opera takes on a kind of knowingly analytical air.It’s more of a disquisition than a drama, and nowhere is that more apparent than in a big third-act aria for Song, “Awoke as a Butterfly.” She sings it as the Party tries to send her to France to spy on a lover she thinks has long forgotten her, and as the stage turns to black, you hope that her motivations are at last about to become more than dimly apparent. Is she just a Party stooge? Is she in love? What does she want from him?“I pretend to know, pretend to know the truth,” she sings. “I know the truth and so I pretend.”Alas, no luck.Huang Ruo’s music offers few such subtleties, though unlike in his earlier opera for Santa Fe, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” it declines to weave Chinese instruments into the orchestra. The intrigue here lies in how he deals with the musical legacy of “Madama Butterfly,” and, wisely, he has been careful with it.There’s no sense of pastiche, no resort to parody; direct quotation is limited to the few moments when Song is performing as Cio-Cio-San. When there are references, they are oblique or distorted, and they tend to follow Hwang’s story in inverting the original material, asking us who the Butterfly in the story really is. There’s a humming chorus, for instance, or at least a chorus that hums, but it intends to evoke Gallimard’s memories, not those of his lover.But much of the score otherwise tires as its pounding chords and thumping cross-rhythms alternate and overlap with more static, suspended passages. If there is plenty of tension, there is little variety, and this arid music rarely gives us insights that the words do not. It needed to; for without them, this Butterfly is lost.M. ButterflyThrough Aug. 24 at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico; santafeopera.org. More

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      Bad Bunny Reigns Again Before Beyoncé’s Chart Arrival

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      The Puerto Rican pop star logs a seventh week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart; numbers for “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s latest, arrive next week.Before Beyoncé arrives with oomph on the charts, Bad Bunny is spending a seventh nonconsecutive week at No. 1.“Renaissance,” the feverishly anticipated and extensively teased seventh solo studio LP from Beyoncé, will debut on next week’s Billboard rankings; industry estimates predict an easy ride to No. 1 on the album chart, with totals between 275,000 and 315,000 total units including sales, streams and downloads. Spotify said on Saturday that the first 24 hours of “Renaissance” made it the most-streamed release by a female artist in a single day so far this year.Those predictions, though not final, would put the singer near the top of the sales heap for 2022 debuts. But Beyoncé would still fall well short of the biggest opening to this point: Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which opened with 521,500 units in May, including 182,000 copies on vinyl, the most of the modern era. Beyoncé, too, is selling multiple physical versions of her new release, but Billboard’s rules dictate that they will only be counted toward chart position when they are shipped to customers — an open logistical question that will affect her final first-week totals.In the meantime, Bad Bunny remains on top of the Billboard 200 for the fifth week in a row, during a relatively slow time for fresh releases from major artists. “Un Verano Sin Ti,” the fourth album from the Puerto Rican rapper and singer, earned 98,000 in sales by Billboard’s metrics, almost all of which came via the 135.9 million streams of songs from the album, according to the tracking service Luminate.Released in May, “Un Verano Sin Ti” had topped 100,000 units in each of its previous 11 weeks on the chart, according to Billboard.Also in the Top 5 this week, with modest numbers: the country singer Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” released in early 2021, is back up to No. 2 with 49,000 units; “Harry’s House” is No. 3 with 48,000 units; the South Korean group Seventeen is No. 4 with 34,000 units; and Future’s “I Never Liked You” is No. 5 with 33,000 units. Jack White’s latest solo album, “Entering Heaven Alive,” debuts at No. 9. Lizzo’s “Special” falls to No. 7 from No. 2 in its second week out, down 58 percent to 29,000 units. More

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      Dan Smith Might Teach You Guitar

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      Teaching is a calling for New York’s king of the marketing flier, whose students include the former governor David Paterson. But he won’t take just anyone.For three decades, Dan Smith has been making a solemn promise to New Yorkers. He has posted his flier — “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” — thousands of times in the city’s bodegas, coffee shops, pizza parlors, delis and laundromats. Parodied by Jon Stewart and the guitar god John Mayer, Mr. Smith has reached local legend status alongside the likes of Cellino & Barnes, Dr. Zizmor and Keano.There have been at least 60 versions of the sign, and most have included a photo of a seemingly ageless, sinewy and smiley Mr. Smith posing with his instrument. But spotting one in the urban wild may soon become a rarity, because New York’s go-to guitar teacher is doing less of his vintage style of promotion and embracing a more 2022 approach.Three months ago, Mr. Smith, 51, started a YouTube channel, where he has posted short instructional videos to help aspiring guitarists navigate “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (by the Clash), “I’ll Be Your Man” (the Black Keys) and more songs. Others have had success as YouTube guitar instructors: “Marty Music” has 3.3 million followers, and “Andy Guitar” has 2.2 million. Mr. Smith, a newcomer to the world of online tutorials, had 144 followers as of this week.While reporting this story, I took my old guitar from its case, where a family of cockroaches had taken up residence a few months before, and tried to play along with a couple of his videos, only to get frustrated. I quickly gave up, as I had many times before when trying to learn instruments.My can’t-do attitude makes me exactly the kind of person Dan Smith does not want to teach. In fact, when I asked him if he would give me lessons, he said no. In other words, Dan Smith will not teach me guitar. At one point, he even threatened to cancel an interview.After we had re-established the traditional journalist-subject relationship, I asked him why he had soured on me. “You didn’t really want to learn how to play guitar,” he said.Correct.“I understand why I’m perceived as just an amazing promoter,” he said. “Of course, that’s how people perceive me, because, in many ways, that’s all they’ve known of me so far.”To crack Dan Smith the man, I would need to look past Dan Smith the marketer.Mr. Smith, with his Gibson Hummingbird guitar, at his teaching studio in Manhattan.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMr. Smith, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, Melissa, a photographer, charges $150 for a one-hour private session. He also offers group workshops and lessons in songwriting and solo performance. He said he has supported himself by teaching guitar since the mid-1990s.He started giving lessons at age 16 in his hometown, Newton, Mass. A few years later, after doing some experimental theater, busking outside Le Centre Pompidou in Paris and putting in some time at New York University, he decided to pursue a career in music and theater. He started teaching again to make money, and it soon became a calling.“I’m trying to help people connect to themselves,” he said.He has stipulations about whom he’ll teach and how, pedagogical rules he said he had come up with after thousands of lessons.Students must see him at least one hour a week, as a sign of their commitment. And they should not go to him with the idea that his lessons are all about learning to pick and strum or play solos like a guitar hero.“Music is a lot more than just putting your fingers on the strings,” he said. “It’s telling a story, it’s creating a mood, it’s evoking an emotion.”Mr. Smith does not teach his friends. “You need some distance,” he said. “You need some objectivity.”He does not take on students under 21. “Everybody pays as they go,” he said, “because I want everybody to think about it every time they have a guitar lesson: ‘I’m paying for this. What am I bringing to the table?’ The person who’s doing it needs to pay for it, because that’s what makes it real for them.”There are yet more stipulations: Mr. Smith does not offer gift certificates; he does not teach people who have signed up for lessons at someone else’s behest, like singers or actors whose managers want them to learn guitar; and he does not take notes for his students or permit them to take notes.“It doesn’t work,” he said. “I’ve tested everything that I know for a fact. That’s another thing that separates me from other teachers: I’ve done the research.”Mr. Smith plays his acoustic guitar in Central Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFor those who meet the criteria, the experience can be transformative.“It’s not just about learning an instrument but expanding my feelings about myself, about what I’m about,” said David A. Paterson, the former governor of New York, who has been studying with Mr. Smith since 2020.Mr. Paterson, who takes a two-hour lesson each week, said that he and Mr. Smith frequently spend half a session just talking. “I think that’s his meditation technique,” he said. “That’s how he gets you in the mood to play.”Mr. Paterson, who is legally blind, added that he appreciated his teacher’s patience and an approach that goes beyond technique. “He’s a psychologist,” he said. “I’ve always been someone who thinks that, to make up the difference, that I have to hurry.”“When you do a song,” Mr. Paterson continued, “it’s almost like you’re shoveling snow: You just drive through. You have a lot of energy and you work hard, but it’s not an intellectual pursuit; it’s getting the feel of things. The great musicians call it ‘Make room for Jesus.’ In other words, you play — and then you just stop. That little space is as much a part as the music. I’m still struggling with just stopping.”Mr. Smith said that the time spent in conversation serves a purpose: “If a student arrives and they are tense or distracted — everybody needs time to, in my opinion, clear the runway for themselves before they can really make music.”In 2020, six months into his studies with Mr. Smith, Mr. Paterson and his teacher took the stage of Bar Nine in Manhattan, where they performed “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye.The “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” flier has had at least 60 incarnations over the last three decades.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMr. Smith sometimes plays solo at Paddy Reilly’s Music Bar and other Manhattan clubs. His original songs include the city-centric “Sixth Avenue” and “New York Forever.” During our time together, he mentioned that he was about to perform in front of a large audience at an outdoor show in Battery Park. In the days leading up to the gig, he texted me to make sure I would be there. Mr. Smith’s wife echoed the gravity of the moment, telling me how excited they were for the occasion.It was billed as “a talent show” featuring the city’s “most notable and iconic characters.” The lineup was put together by Nicholas Heller, a filmmaker and social media personality known as New York Nico. It was timed to the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Mr. Heller’s documentary film short, “Out of Order.”“There’s a BuzzFeed list of people who are super-famous in New York, and Dan Smith is on it,” Mr. Heller said. “To me, he’s more important than a worldwide celebrity.”With his trusty Gibson Hummingbird guitar, Mr. Smith took the stage at dusk. He looked serious, earnest. It was clear that, unlike some others on the bill, he did not view his performance as a stunt, but as a chance to show New York what he is made of.He started playing “New York Forever,” which he had written in the early part of the pandemic as a tribute to the city’s resilience. In the middle of the song, another New York character appeared onstage, on stilts. It was the one-name street performer Bobby, who regularly walks the city towering over crowds.As Bobby loomed over the stage, Mr. Smith seemed unfazed. He has, after all, had decades of practice in teaching others about what it means to take your time and seize the moment. And when his song was over, the crowd cheered not for the man from the flier but for the performer who was trying to realize a New York dream like the rest of us. More

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      ‘Renaissance’ Review: America Has a Problem and Beyoncé Ain’t It

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      On “Renaissance,” the pop star’s seventh solo album, she finds escape, rebirth, community, pleasure and control in decades of dance music steeped in Black queer bravado.It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy, too uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose, too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the perception of error. The word of the last few years — in American activist and academic circles, anyway — has been “precarity.” Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. Basically: We’re worried. And: We’re worried you’re not worried enough. Like I said: It’s too much.If I were a globally famous musician whose every blink gets inspected for Meaning, now might be the time to discover how it feels to mean something else, to seem lighter, to float, to bob, splash, writhe and grind, to sashay-shanté. To find “new salvation” in building her “own foundation.”Were I that musician, now might be the time to call my freestyle jam “America Has a Problem” and not say what the problem is because A) Psych! B) What I’ma say you don’t already know? And C) The person actually performing this song knows “that booty gon’ do what it want to.” Now’s the time to work your body in lieu of losing more of your mind. “America” is one of the closing tracks on “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, the one where she surveys the stakes and concludes they’re too damn high. Now’s the time to remind yourself — to be “telling everybody,” as she sings on the first single, “Break My Soul” — that there’s no discourse without disco.What a good time this thing is. All 16 songs hail from someplace with a dance floor — night clubs, strip clubs, ballrooms, basements, Tatooine. Most of them are steeped in or conducted entirely with Black queer bravado. And on nearly every one, Beyoncé sounds like she’s experiencing something personally new and privately glorious: unmitigated ecstasy. It takes different forms: bliss, obviously; but a sexy sternness, too. The exercise of control is as entertaining on this album as the exorcism of stress.As expensive, production-wise, as “Renaissance” sounds (one song credits two dozen writers, including samples and interpolations), Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. She coos, she growls, she snarls, she doubles and triples herself. Butter, mustard, foie gras, the perfect ratio of icing to cupcake.At about the halfway point, something arrives called “Plastic Off the Sofa.” Now, part of me wept because those are words she doesn’t even bother to sing. Plastic off the sofa? Got you again! The rest of me wept because the singing she does do — in waves of rhapsodically long, Olympic-level emissions — seems to emanate from somewhere way beyond a human throat: The ocean? The oven? But this is one of the few songs that sound recorded with live instruments — plinking guitar and some pitter-pat percussion. (The musical plastic comes off the album’s sofa.) The bass line keeps swelling and curving and blooming till it outgrows its flower bed, and Beyoncé’s voice does, too. It surfs the swells. It smells the roses. “Renaissance” turns to gospel here and there — on “Church Girl,” most brazenly. This is the only one that sounds like it was recorded in Eden.It takes a minute for all the rapture on “Renaissance” to kick in. First comes a mission statement (“I’m That Girl”) wherein Beyoncé warns that love is her drug. Then it’s on to “Cozy,” an in-the-making anthem about Black femmes luxuriating in their skin. This one has a bottom as heavy as a cast-iron skillet and a bounce the Richter scale couldn’t ignore. “Cozy” is about comfort but sounds like an oncoming army. The first true exhalation is “Cuff It,” a roller-skate jam held aloft by Nile Rodgers’s signature guitar flutter while a fleet of horns offer afterburn. Here, Beyoncé wants to go out and have an unprintably good time. And it’s contagious enough to overthink a throwaway line like “I wanna go missing” later, when I’m sober.Comedy abounds. Thank the sampled contributions of Big Freedia and Ts Madison for that. “Dark skin, light skin, beige” — Madison drawls on “Cozy” — “fluorescent beige.” Thank the tabloid-TV keyboard blasts on “America Has a Problem.” But Beyoncé herself has never been funnier than she is here. The sternness she applies to the word “No” on “America” alone would be enough. But there’s her impersonation of Grace Jones’s imperiousness on “Move,” some sharp-elbowed dancehall refraction in which the two of them command the plebes to “part like the Red Sea” when the queen comes through. (Here’s me not touching who the queen is in that scenario.) Pop music has been tattooed with Jones’s influence for 45 years. This is one of the few mainstream acknowledgments of her bounteous musical might. There’s also Beyoncé’s vamp at the end of “Heated,” which she recites to the crack of a splayed hand fan. It’s one of those round-table freestyles that go down at some balls. A fraction of hers includes: “Unnncle Jonny made my dress/That cheap spandex/She looks a mess.”This is an album whose big idea is house. And its sense of house is enormous. It’s mansion music. “Renaissance” is adjacent to where pop’s been: pulsing and throbbing. Its muscles are larger, its limbs flexier, its ego secure. I don’t hear marketplace concerns. Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable. That might be why I like “Break My Soul” so much. It’s Track 6, but it feels like the album’s thematic spine. It’s got tenderness, resolve and ideas — Beyoncé brokering two different approaches to church.On “Pure/Honey” Beyoncé breaks through wall after wall until she gets to the chamber that holds all the cousins of her 2013 sizzler “Blow.” It ends with her lilting next to a sample of the drag artist Moi Renee bellowing, “Miss Honey? Miss Honey!” And it’s as close to the B-52’s as a Beyoncé song might ever come. (But Kate, Cindy, Fred, Keith: Call her anyway!)The album’s embrace of house and not, say, trap unambiguously aligns Beyoncé with queer Black folks. On the one hand, that means she’s simply an elite pop star with particularly avid support. But “Renaissance” is more than fan service. It’s oriented toward certain histories. The knotty symbiosis between cis women and gay men is one. The doors of impersonation and tribute revolve with centrifugal force.With Beyoncé, her drag seems liberating rather than obfuscating. It’s not just these lesser-known gay and trans artists and personalities her music has absorbed. It’s other artists. On “Blow,” Beyoncé wondered how it felt for her partner when he made love to her. Now the wonder is: How does it feel for her to make love — and art — sometimes as somebody else? The album’s final song is “Summer Renaissance,” and it opens with the thrum of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” It’s not the first time she’s quoted La Donna. But the nod is not only there, where the reference is explicit. It’s in the album’s rich middle, which includes that sofa song and “Virgo’s Groove,” maybe the most luscious track Beyoncé’s ever recorded. This is to say that “Renaissance” is an album about performance — of other pop’s past, but ultimately of Beyoncé, a star who’s now 40, an age when the real risk is in acting like you’ve got nothing to lose.Another history is right there in the album’s title: 100 years ago, when things were also too much for Black Americans — lynchings, “race riots” all over the country — and flight north from the South seemed like a sound alternative to murder, up in Harlem, Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas and Jessie Fauset, to pick five figures, were at the center of an explosion of art that could be as frivolous, party-hearty and vulgar as some of what’s on this album. Its artists were gay and straight and whatever was in between. The point is they called that a renaissance, too. It sustained and delivered delight and provocation in spite of the surrounding crisis, it gave people looking for a house something that approximates home. New salvation, old foundation.Beyoncé“Renaissance”(Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia) More

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      A Guide to the Dance Music on Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’

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      Chicago house, hyperpop, classic ’70s disco: The pop star’s new album is a tour through some of the genre’s most well-known touchstones as well as more underground sounds.Beyoncé’s new album, “Renaissance,” is consciously steeped in dance-music history, cannily embracing decades of samples and sounds: the 1970s disco of Donna Summer and Chic, Jamaican dancehall, internet-speed hyperpop. She chose collaborators, references and even specific keyboard sounds that pay homage to club-land memories while making her own 21st-century statement. Here are some of the sources she celebrates, and an exploration of their significance.The album’s second and third tracks, “Cozy” and “Alien Superstar,” feature writing and production by the Chicago-born house-music D.J. and producer Honey Dijon. “Cozy” also includes a writing credit for Curtis Alan Jones, known as Cajmere or Green Velvet — one of Chicago house music’s greatest producers.That locale is key here. Chicago is house music’s birthplace, and Chicago house, in particular, often moves with a heavily pronounced swing, accentuated by octave-jumping staccato bass patterns. The canonical example is Adonis’s “No Way Back,” from 1986, and the bass line of “Cozy” plays like an inversion of it. The song is almost mnemonically recognizable as early Chicago house without simply sounding like homage.On “Alien Superstar,” the cadence of the hook (“I’m too classy for this world/Forever I’m that girl”) is credited to an interpolation of Right Said Fred’s dance-floor novelty smash “I’m Too Sexy.” Taylor Swift borrowed the same part (also with credit) on her 2017 track “Look What You Made Me Do,” and Drake sampled the 1992 song on “Way Too Sexy” from 2021.There’s another direct callback on “Cuff It”: The bass line is instantly recognizable as the progeny of Bernard Edwards’s monster riff from Chic’s “Good Times,” a No. 1 hit in 1979, and Edwards’s partner in Chic, Nile Rodgers, gets credit for writing and playing guitars here. (On bass and drums: Raphael Saadiq.) As Ken Barnes pointed out in his liner notes to “The Disco Years Vol. 4: Lost in Music,” a compilation on Rhino Records, rewriting Chic became a kind of national pastime during the early 1980s, not least via early hip-hop and post-disco R&B. This version of the one, two, three (rest) is as indebted to the many “Good Times” rewrites as the original: the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Vaughn Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll,” for example.“Energy” features writing and production from Skrillex, an EDM-festival superstar through the early 2010s known for his drops — dramatic buildups that resolve into a fresh beat — but since his heyday, he’s largely worked behind the scenes. (See Justin Bieber’s 2015 smash “Where Are Ü Now,” which he made alongside Diplo.) “Energy” seems to operate on wires; it’s taut minimalism, with the supplest layering of sub-bass tones.The song also has writing credits for Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, the songwriting and production duo the Neptunes, known for their work with a wide swath of singers and rappers starting in the 1990s. On Thursday, before the release of “Renaissance,” the singer and songwriter Kelis spoke out on social media, saying those credits were for a sample of one of her songs (it turned out to be an interpolation of “Milkshake,” from 2003), and that she hadn’t given permission for its use. Kelis wasn’t a credited writer or producer on most of the early albums she made with the Neptunes, and didn’t have credits on “Milkshake.” In a 2020 interview with The Guardian she said she had signed an agreement with the duo when she “was too young and too stupid to double-check it.”A similar situation arose with the album’s lead single, “Break My Soul,” which is indebted to the central Korg motif from Robin S.’s pop-house hit “Show Me Love.” But whether her 1992 remix was sampled was initially unclear, and for the first week of the song’s release, the credits shifted. (The latest version says the Beyoncé song “contains elements” of “Show Me Love.”) The Robin S. song’s afterlife has been robust: Its riff showed up in the Brooklyn producer AceMo’s 2019 “Where They At???” featuring John FM, which became a key underground dance anthem before and during the pandemic, as well as in recent releases from Charli XCX and Daddy Yankee.Another key to “Break My Soul” is the shouting of exhortations (“Release your wiggle!”) by the New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia, whom Beyoncé had earlier sampled on “Formation” (2016). Bounce is a New Orleans-bred dance-music style that’s dizzyingly fast, bass intensive and heavy on call and response; twerking emerged in response to it.Beyoncé glances back to the late ’90s again on “Plastic Off the Sofa.” While the bulk of the song is lush digital balladry, there’s a moment in its coda that could have come from “glitch” experimental-electronica, where the tail end of a vocal run, heavily overdubbed, is subjected to a deliberately audible edit. It’s a hair jarring but mostly humorous — an audible wink to the listener, one facet of modern pop’s high-tech production laid bare. (For an example from the ’90s, see Oval’s album “94diskont,” or the compilation “Clicks + Cuts,” released in 2000.)Classic disco asserts itself at the album’s midway point. “Virgo’s Groove” features layers of undulating percussion, synthesizer and bass that updates the production work Quincy Jones did with Michael Jackson — a sort of companion piece to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” “Move,” the next track, includes a feature from Grace Jones — disco royalty, just in case anyone wondered where Beyoncé may be coming from.Just as notable on “Move” — and even more noticeably on “America Has a Problem” — is the swarming low end known in the dance world as the “Reese bass.” The term is a reference to a 1988 record, “Just Want Another Chance” by Reese, one of many aliases used by Kevin Saunderson, one of the first producers identified with Detroit techno in the mid-80s.In much the same way that “Chicago house” refers not only to a style and its birthplace but also that swinging octave-hopping sound, “Detroit techno” tends to denote attention to detail and an aura of restless invention. The heavy-fog low end of “Just Want Another Chance” was often repurposed by London bass-music styles like jungle, drum & bass, U.K. garage and dubstep — what the writer Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” of Black British musical styles from urban areas that took root on London pirate radio.Beyoncé’s use of the heavy, undulant Reese bass on “Move” and “America Has a Problem” further locates the album in the Black dance-music continuum. “Problem” also opens with orchestral stabs, à la Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s landmark electronic-rap track “Planet Rock” — or, even more aptly given the title and lyrical theme, Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.”“Heated” features Beyoncé in commanding neo-dancehall form over a slinky, wood-block-heavy groove. At the end of the song, she mentions tapping out tracks with her fingers on the MPC, an instrument designed by Roger Linn that arrived in 1988. The MPC, made by Akai, isn’t played with a keyboard, but instead features a square grid of pads that trigger different sounds, and it has become a widespread compositional and performance tool.“Thique” sounds like something that would have been all over dubstep dance floors in the days before Skrillex, when the subgenre’s distended bass and variable tempos were primarily the province of British producers. Sure enough, the song’s writing and production credits include an artist influenced by those musicians: Chauncey Hollis Jr., a.k.a. Hit-Boy, who produced a dubstep-inflected hit on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” (2011).The Plasticine sounds of “Thique” segue into the even more heavily synthetic “All Up in Your Mind,” co-produced by A.G. Cook, the main mind behind the London label and art collective PC Music, which arrived in the mid-2010s with a sound built on stylish exaggeration: tones that weren’t just high in a machine-music way, but deliberately squeaky. (Sophie, the producer known for exhilarating hyperpop who died in 2021, came from this camp.) “All Up” is futurist robo-pop, with a sub-bass line that seems to be snorkeling under the speakers rather than emanating from them.“Pure/Honey,” next to last, is another sub-bass monster: The first part, propelled by a nasty kick drum, is a surprising approximation of techno at its steeliest, or maybe its most “pure.” The “honey” comes at the 2:11 mark, a bulbous neo-disco groove with feathery horns that recalls early Sylvester. The track runs in part off a sample of a Kevin Aviance song subtitled “The Feeling” — one of the key recordings in a queer house sub-style known as “bitch tracks.”The album’s final track, “Summer Renaissance,” features Beyoncé singing, “It’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s sooooo good” over a very familiar pinballing riff — yes, the finale interpolates Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” the 1977 disco hit with an all-synthesizer backdrop and pulsating rhythm that anticipated the future sound of dance music. But the main melodic phrase from “I Feel Love” sounds like it’s being played on the Korg keyboard that anchors “Break My Soul,” subtly tying two eras together in a third one. More