Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Margo Jefferson Discusses Ella Fitzerald and Childhood Icons

      by

      Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWhen Wesley was 11, he wanted to be just like Sandra from the sitcom “227,” played by Jackée Harry. Sandra was sassy, boisterous and always got what she wanted. But it took reading Margo Jefferson’s latest book, “Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir,” for Wesley understand the complexity of this memory.On today’s episode, Wesley and Margo Jefferson sift through their most deep-rooted, and sometimes difficult-to-explain cultural influences. Why did Margo adore the scatting of Ella Fitzgerald, but squirm at the sight of her sweating onstage? Why was Margo drawn to Ike Turner as a teen, but not Tina Turner? Together, Wesley and Margo unpack their cultural memories — and what they reveal about who they are now.Ella Fitzgerald.Photo Illustration: The New York Times. Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesHosted by: Wesley Morris and Jenna WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley, Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      The Colorful Mozart of Gen Z

      by

      Jacob Collier, the singer, songwriter and composer, who fancies crayon colors, clashing patterns and tie-dyed Crocs, doesn’t fit easily into any box. He’s OK with that.Jacob Collier was about to cross Fifth Avenue when a stranger stopped him to take a picture of his outfit. A Grammy-winning musician with millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, Mr. Collier is used to requests for pictures, but it was a nice change of pace to be asked because someone liked what he was wearing — a color-blocked jacket, acid-green patterned pants and tie-dyed Crocs — rather than because they recognized him from the internet.“I was always curious how someone would perceive me from a fashion perspective because I’ve never really perceived myself that way,” he said later from his perch on a rock in Central Park, where he spent a sunny afternoon between shows on his “Djesse” world tour. “I’ve never overly contrived it. I’ve gone for things I like that are comfortable and expressive, and that’s about it.”Following his artistic instincts has served the 27-year-old Brit well, turning him into an internet-age success story. As a teenager, his videos of multi-instrumental covers of classic songs went viral on YouTube, earning him professional representation. Since then, Mr. Collier has won five Grammys and been nominated for four more. He is commonly described as a genius by fellow musicians, and the list of his admirers is long: Coldplay and Lizzo are fans; Hans Zimmer called Mr. Collier his “hero”; and SZA said she “stalked” him on Instagram until she convinced him to collaborate with her.That Mr. Collier attracts admirers from across so many genres is a testament to the uncategorizable nature of his music, which contains elements from jazz, folk, R&B and classical. His songs often comprise hundreds of tracks layered over one another, in which he plays and sings every sound. He recently attempted to translate this enjoyment of complexity into the visual realm by using the music software Logic to color-code the hundreds of tracks that went into his arrangement of “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).” He printed the resulting pattern on a pair of pants in collaboration with the brand Skidz.“I find myself gravitating toward things that are highly patterned, because I’m quite highly pattern-minded,” he said. “Musically, I enjoy that exploration, and visually I think it follows suit.”Mr. Collier in Central Park in May.Isak Tiner for The New York TimesThrough it all, Mr. Collier’s look has remained remarkably homegrown. That’s not to say it’s tame: His wardrobe is wild and high-energy, full of crayon colors, power-clashing patterns and the occasional alligator onesie, paralleling the eclecticism of his whimsical and energetic soundscapes. But whereas many of his peers present a version of themselves to the world that has been polished by a team of professional image-makers, Mr. Collier has, for the better part of 10 years in the public eye, done his own thing. Until a few months ago, he’d never worked with a stylist. His biggest red carpet moment — when he wore a hot pink Stella McCartney suit to the 2021 Grammys (and promptly spilled ketchup on it, he divulged) — was a result of the brand reaching out to him directly.“You can tell when someone’s covering themselves up, and you can tell when someone is pulling things out from deeper within using clothes and colors,” Mr. Collier said. “That’s what I try to aim for.”Mr. Collier performing at Brooklyn Steel in May.Isak Tiner for The New York TimesAt his first of three “Djesse” shows in New York, that meant bounding joyously across the stage in lime-green corduroy pants from an upstart brand called Fried Rice and a shirt made of upcycled bandannas from Rcnstrct Studio. He went shoeless in mismatched socks, as is his custom when performing, partly because he uses his toes to play a bespoke instrument and partly because he likes feeling “grounded and in my body.” When he does wear shoes, they’re usually Crocs, because they remind him of the house where he has lived his whole life and recorded most of his music. (“Everyone in my family wears them,” he said.)Almost all of his signature wardrobe items are like that: If you ask him what he’s wearing, he’ll tell you about a relationship with someone he loves.The pair of patterned harem pants he wore to every show of his first tour, which started in 2015 and lasted for two years, came about when he tried on a pair of his sister’s. (Having grown up in a house full of women, he said, “I don’t think of clothes as having a gender.”)The T-shirt that he wore almost every night of that first tour also points to a major pillar of the Collier style philosophy in that it was handmade by a fan.“Fans like to give me things, and it has really sustained my fashion diet over the years,” he said. When he rifles through the suitcase that serves as his tour wardrobe, fan-made pieces abound: There’s a tie-dyed hoodie, a knit hat and a patchwork kimono embroidered with a “JC” logo. As an artist known for collaborating with his listeners — Mr. Collier regularly conducts live concert audiences as though they’re choirs and digitally duets submissions from followers on YouTube and TikTok — wearing pieces made by his fans allows him to feel as if he’s speaking “the same language,” musically and sartorially.Mr. Collier at Room 57 Gallery in New York.Isak Tiner for The New York TimesBut just as his musical trajectory started with him making songs alone in his room and has expanded to feature collaborations with world-class artists, he has recently decided it’s time to enlist others to help him with his look. Mr. Collier is working on a currently-under-wraps collaboration with an international brand that will be introduced later this year. And for the “Djesse” tour, he worked with the stylist Marta del Rio, who also creates looks for Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish and Tinashe, on his performance wardrobe.“He’s so advanced in his musical maturity, but he’s just starting to experiment with fashion,” Ms. del Rio said. “He communicates joyfulness and enjoyment, and we wanted to maintain that essence with the clothes.”At the beginning of their working relationship, Mr. Collier had a conversation with Ms. del Rio about sustainability in fashion, which he described as “a world full of possibilities to explore” that he is in some ways “just waking up to.” A onetime member of his school’s environmental club, Mr. Collier has started introducing climate awareness into his music-making process. He recently installed solar panels to power his music room, and he’s donating roughly 10 percent of net profits from merchandise sales on his current tour to Earth Percent, a nonprofit that raises funds for climate action.Mr. Collier’s most responsible dressing habit, though, is one that sets him apart from many of his social media-raised peers. While many young creatives associate self-expression with never being seen online wearing the same thing twice, he frequently wears his clothes again and again. A beloved striped Missoni knit, for example, appears in multiple music videos, at press events and in home videos.“I just really like it and wear it all the time,” he said, nodding at a group of street musicians whose eyes lit up in recognition as he walked by. “It’s a simple thing, but a lot of my friends and people in the industry will do something new for every show and event.”Though some of Mr. Collier’s fans have expressed a desire to imitate his look — there are Instagram accounts and Reddit threads devoted to documenting his style and parsing where to shop for pieces like his — he’s happy that his first concert in New York was attended by a crowd whose garb mostly didn’t mirror his own. More than anything, he said, he wants to inspire people to be their truest selves.“Certain people will wear a hat that looks like mine or something, but I get much more excited about people being really expressive as to who they are,” he said. “I love seeing people be themselves. I don’t want people to be like me. I want people to be like them. It’s that permission-giving that means the most.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Cannes 2022: ‘Elvis’ Is Remixed by Baz Luhrmann

      by

      The super-splashy biopic presents the story of the King as told by a (fake) colonel, a narratively curious choice.CANNES, France — Close to the start of “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged highlight reel of the life and times of Elvis Presley, I wondered what I was watching. I kept wondering as Luhrmann split the screen, chopped it to bits, slowed the motion, splashed the color and turned Elvis not just into a king, but also a savior, a martyr and a transformational American civil-rights figure who — through his innocence, decency, music and gyrating hips — helped heal a nation.In conventional terms, “Elvis,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, can be classed as a biographical portrait, a cradle-to-grave (more or less) story of a little boy from Tupelo, Miss., who became a pop-culture sensation and sad cautionary tale — played as an adult by the appealing, hard-working Austin Butler — despite the evil man, a.k.a. Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who groomed him. But Luhrmann — whose films include “Moulin Rouge” and “The Great Gatsby” and, um, “Australia” — doesn’t do simple or ordinary. A visual maximalist, he likes to go big and then bigger, and he likes to go super-splashy. Most filmmakers just want to get the shot; the great ones strive for perfection. Luhrmann wants to bedazzle it.The movie’s narrative axis and, strangely, its most vividly realized character is Colonel Parker, whom Hanks embodies with an enormous, obviously false belly, flamboyant jowls, a nose that juts like the prow of a ship and a baffling accent. I would have loved to have listened in on Luhrmann and Hank’s conversations about their ideas for the character; if nothing else, it might have explained what in the world they were after here. I honestly haven’t a clue, although the image of Sydney Greenstreet looming menacingly in “The Maltese Falcon” repeatedly came to mind, with a dash of “Hogan’s Heroes.”Written by Luhrmann and several others, the movie traces Elvis’s trajectory through Parker, a curious choice given that the colonel is the villain of the piece. They meet when Elvis is a young unknown and still under the protective wing of his mother and father. As soon as the colonel sees Elvis perform — or rather, witnesses the euphoric reactions of the shrieking female audiences — he realizes that this kid is a gold mine. The colonel swoops in, seduces Elvis and puts him under his exploitative sway. The rest is history, one that Luhrmann tracks from obscurity to Graceland and finally Las Vegas.Even non-Elvis-ologists should recognize the outlines of this story, as it shifts from the beautiful boy to the sensational talent and the fallen idol. That said, those who don’t know much about the ugliness of Elvis’s life may be surprised by some of the ideas Luhrmann advances, particularly when it comes to the civil rights movement. A white musician who performed and helped popularize Black music for white America, Elvis was unquestionably a critically important crossover figure. What’s discomforting is the outsized role that Luhrmann gives Elvis in America’s excruciating racial history.In the gospel of Elvis that Luhrmann preaches here, the titular performer isn’t only an admirer or interpreter (much less exploiter) of Black music. He is instead a prophetic figure of change who — because of the time he spends in the Black church, Black juke joints and Black music clubs — will be able to bridge the divide between the races or at least make white people shake, rattle and roll. As a child, Elvis feels the spirit in the pulpit and beyond; later, he becomes an instrument for change by copying Black ecstasy and pumping his slim hips at white audiences, sending them into sexualized frenzy.As Elvis ascends and the colonel schemes, Luhrmann keeps the many parts whirring, pushing the story into overdrive. The 1950s give way to the ’60s and ’70s amid songs, pricey toys, assassinations, personal tragedies and the usual rest, though I don’t remember hearing the words Vietnam War. Family members enter and exit, tears are spilled, pills popped. There are significant gaps (no Ann-Margret or Richard M. Nixon), and, outside a nice scene in which the Las Vegas Elvis arranges a large ensemble of musicians, there’s also little about how Elvis actually made music. He listens to Black music and, almost by osmosis and sheer niceness, becomes the King of Rock ’n’ RollWhile Butler pouts, smolders and sweats, he has been tasked with what seems an impossible role. Elvis’s ravishing beauty, which remained intact even as his body turned to bloat, is one hurdle, and so too was his charisma and talent. Butler’s performance gains in power as Elvis ages, particularly when he hits Las Vegas. One insurmountable problem, though, is that Luhrmann never allows a single scene or song to play out without somehow fussing with it — cutting into it, tarting it up, turning the camera this way and that, pushing in and out — a frustrating, at times maddening habit that means he’s forever drawing attention to him him him and away from Butler, even when his willing young star is doing his very hardest to burn down the house. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Big Baritone Sound at Play in an Intimate Setting

      by

      Justin Austin’s program in the Board of Officers Room at the Armory included three cycles of Langston Hughes poems.In a program of songs highlighting a broad range of American compositional voices — Black, gay, female, old, new — the baritone Justin Austin showed off a mighty lyric voice with dramatic flair at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan on Tuesday evening.Austin’s tone is deep and earthy, with a firmly stitched timbre that withstands some high-octane singing. At the Armory, he found operatic climaxes in most songs — his high notes were strong, shattering, indefatigable. And as he warmed up, his breathy soft singing began to convey feeling too, though there was little color in his treatment of texts. (Suffering from allergies, he turned upstage to blow his nose between most songs.)This has been a busy time in New York for Austin. Earlier this year, he sang the lead role of the rough laborer George in Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera “Intimate Apparel” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, where his big, hard-edge sound overwhelmed the microphone he didn’t need. In May, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Marcellus in Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” projecting into that capacious house with youthful vigor.But in the intimate recital setting of the Board of Officers Room at the Armory, his built-for-power voice tended to run roughshod over poetry, as in the opening group of nine Gordon settings of poems by Langston Hughes. Gordon’s rushing, exuberant melodies suit a supple voice that soars, but Austin’s swings like a hammer. At times it worked: He rode a path to glory in the punishing conclusion of “Harlem Night Song,” with its ecstatic series of high notes.He connected more profoundly with Hughes cycles by the Black composers Margaret Bonds (“Three Dream Portraits”) and Robert Owens (“Mortal Storm”). Bonds’s “Minstrel Man,” about a performer whose humanity is invisible to his audience, stirred a wry, subversive spirit in Austin. In “Dream Variation,” his voice flowed naturally, and “I, Too” was defiant — the sound of someone no longer willing to wait for his moment in the sun when he has the strength to seize it for himself.There are times when Owens’s “Mortal Storm,” which featured the evening’s most pessimistic poems, sounds like a dense piano reduction of an opera score. “Jaime” is a 40-second tempest, and “Faithful One” is thick with bass chords. The pounding triplets of “Genius Child” recall Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” both of them harrowing fantasies of a murdered boy. It’s not a cycle for the faint of voice, and Austin excelled in it, even finding rhythmic playfulness and a touch of sensual romance. “Genius Child” ended with a devil’s ride into the bracing line “Kill him — and let his soul run wild!”Then, in a breath-catching turn, came Aaron Copland’s lullaby to a crying baby, “The Little Horses,” sung in hushed, consoling tones. Its simple starlight inspired the prettiest playing of the night from the pianist Howard Watkins, who often made the program’s wide-ranging styles sound homogeneous and unsubtle.Toward the end, Austin sang spirituals and gospel with an unforced expressivity that sustained each piece’s mood. His single encore, “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me,” was delivered a cappella. Without a piano at his back, he rose to the occasion. There were highs and lows, thunder and cries — and beauty, too.Justin AustinPerformed Tuesday at the Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Robert Ainsley Is Named Glimmerglass Festival Director

      by

      Robert Ainsley, a champion of new American opera, takes the reins from Francesca Zambello. He said the festival would continue to showcase work that tells “everyone’s story.”The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., announced on Wednesday that it has named Robert Ainsley as it next artistic and general director, giving the festival a new leader as it moves toward its 50th season, in 2025.Ainsley most recently served as the director of the Cafritz Young Artists program at the Washington National Opera and of the American Opera Initiative where, over a span of six years, he commissioned, developed and premiered more than 30 new operas and other works. He has also held leadership positions at the Portland Opera, Minnesota Opera and Opera Theater of Saint Louis and has worked at other summer music festivals.He succeeds Francesca Zambello, who led Glimmerglass, a summer festival of opera and theater, for more than a decade. In an interview, Ainsley said he was committed to building on Zambello’s efforts to “make this an art form for everyone — telling everyone’s story and trying to ensure everyone has agency in how those stories are told.”“She’s really built something that is inclusive and representative of the diversity of America today,” Ainsley said. “And that’s something I really want to carry on and make a central part of our mission.”Robert Ainsley, the new artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival.Arielle DonesonHe also said he was dedicated to ensuring that the festival has a balance of everything from 17th-century opera to musical theater to the kinds of new works and formats he has championed in previous jobs.Glimmerglass has offered new productions and other stagings of opera and musical theater in Cooperstown every summer since 1975.“The intense experience of drawing so many people together from all over the country and all over the world is what makes a festival very special,” Ainsley said. “But what Glimmerglass has is the best bits of all of the summer programs.”In a news release, Zambello called Ainsley “a wonderful artist” who will bring “excellent vision and leadership” to a time of transition for the company. Robert Nelson, the chair of the Glimmerglass Festival board of trustees, said Ainsley “is perfectly poised to lead the Glimmerglass Festival into its next era.”Ainsley said he was eager to get to Cooperstown to become part of the community there.“When an institution gets me, they get all of me,” he said. “Bringing people together of all backgrounds and creating something wonderful is what has made Glimmerglass special, and that’s definitely what I want to do with it.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      An Opera About Harvey Milk Finally Finds Itself

      by

      The composer Stewart Wallace has overhauled his 1990s score and says “the music is freer now, and more organic, and yet completely recognizable.”When he composed “Harvey Milk,” in the early 1990s, Stewart Wallace was adding to a string of much discussed “biopic” operas based on recent history. Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi; Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X”; and John Adams’s “Nixon in China” were still fresh in people’s ears.But in telling the story of the gay activist and politician who was killed in 1978 by a fellow member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Wallace introduced a twist. Gay men, long a fervent segment of opera’s audience, had rarely, if ever, been the subject of an opera.When “Harvey Milk” premiered in Houston in 1995, Edward Rothstein’s review in The New York Times called it “a rambunctious combination of banality and effective drama, posturing, playfulness and polemics.” Before it went to San Francisco, the following year, Wallace and the librettist, Michael Korie, made some revisions, adding arias for the title character, adjusting some orchestrations, and paring down the whole thing.A scene from the work when it premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1995.Jim CaldwellBut the work remained sprawling — in its length and its dozens of tiny characters. “It’s this monster piece,” Wallace said in a recent phone interview. “But we were young and ambitious and hungry, and we did what we wanted to do.”Putting on a monster, however, is hard. The work has barely been performed in the more than 25 years since its premiere, but the opportunity for a fresh hearing motivated Wallace to make an even more drastic overhaul. His new version, conceived for the San Francisco company Opera Parallèle but delayed by the pandemic, will premiere instead at Opera Theater of St. Louis on June 11.“I literally started on an empty page from bar one,” Wallace said in the interview. “So there’s not a single bar that’s the same, even though it’s definitely the same opera.”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did this new version come about?A long while ago, I called David Gockley [who commissioned the work at Houston Grand Opera and led San Francisco Opera from 2006-16] with my idea for the visionary Italian director Romeo Castellucci to direct a revised edition of “Harvey Milk.” Just to see it from a completely different angle.But David said that if we wanted to do it soon, we should go to Opera Parallèle. And so I went to them, and we decided to do it. They called me and said: “What about all these smaller roles? Would you take a look at them?” I said sure, and the next day I called them and said, “They’re all gone.”It had the advantage of clearing out the weeds and focusing on the narrative and the spirit of the piece. When we wrote it, we were concerned that people didn’t know who Harvey Milk was — not many, anyway. So I considered it an obligation to educate, which can be a little anti-art. So there are things in there that are no longer necessary. We now have what we originally hoped for, which is a kind of mythic interpretation of his life and his evolution into an activist.From left, Nathan Stark, Mack Wolz, Thomas Glass, Colter Schoenfish, Jonathan Johnson and Seán Curran rehearse for premiere of the new version, on June 11 at Opera Theatre of St. Louis.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesObviously Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film “Milk” exposed the story to many more people.Gus actually came to “Harvey Milk” in San Francisco, and he borrowed a few things from us, like “Tosca.” Which was in there because the night before Harvey Milk was murdered, he went to San Francisco Opera, and what was performed? “Tosca.” It was a very literal thing. But we turned the opera into a place of pilgrimage and revelation for him. So that and some other things we did are in the film.What exactly has changed about the opera?I started to look at it with all these years of experience in between — not trying to make it more refined or sophisticated, just thinking about how to deploy the resources, and not waste any time. I think the running time of the music is now an hour and 50 minutes, and it was an almost three-hour evening when we did it in the first run. At San Francisco Opera there were something like 80 or 85 players, and in St. Louis there will be about 66; and at Opera Parallèle, about 31. It can now be done by small or large companies.The music is freer now, and more organic, and yet completely recognizable as what we wrote. The bones are the same, but the meat is different; it’s leaner and more fluid and more direct, with more rhythmic clarity. There’s nothing to take you away from the thrust of the narrative and the music.What I wanted to do was not rewrite it from the vantage point of what I would do now; I wanted to fulfill what my intention was then. For example, when young Harvey goes to Central Park — he follows this man who he’s going to have sex with, and there’s sex going on all around him — the music was always driven by this very aggressive figure, pounding away. Originally, I won’t say I tarted it up, but I made it more elegant than it should have been, and also more complicated. And now it’s just this thing that hammers at you, and it’s much more effective. So in a way it’s rawer now than I had the confidence to do then.Archival images posted in the rehearsal room for the new production.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesHas it been fulfilling to return to something you did so long ago?I had a traumatic brain injury in 2010. I was on a bike, and then I woke up in an ambulance and had no idea how I’d gotten there. For about five years I couldn’t write music, which is something I’d done since I was a child. So it was devastating.I tried a bunch of things to try and ameliorate it, and the doctors were completely useless. I had to start these experiments on myself. So when we had the opportunity to do “Harvey Milk” again, and it was clear that I would actually rewrite the whole opera, I wasn’t sure I could do it.When you write music it’s like a bag of memories of the time you wrote it; it’s like a diary, but it’s abstract. And I hoped that if I dug back into this piece — I was in my 30s then, and I’m turning 62 this year — I would be able to find those memories that would reignite my compositional life fully. And the experiment worked. I’ve been on fire. I think I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done. So it’s very important to me, this moment. It’s not just about reviving the opera. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Peaches Reflects on Her Seminal Album, ‘The Teaches of Peaches’

      by

      The electroclash pioneer looks back on her influential album 20 years later.In advance of a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of her 2000 album “The Teaches of Peaches,” the performance artist and musician Merrill Nisker, 55, who is better known as Peaches, dug into her archive. The archive is not metaphorical, but a storage unit full of photos, video footage and costumes.Among the old costumes were the original pink hot pants, purchased from the defunct Canadian store Le Château, that appeared up-close on that album cover.The shorts still might make an appearance on her 28-date tour commemorating the album that catapulted her to international fame, and positioned her at the forefront of a louche, glam and gritty aesthetic now called “indie sleaze.” She plays this Saturday at the East Williamsburg party palace Avant Gardner.In the interview below, which has been edited and condensed, Peaches looks back on that time and what she expects to see on tour this time around.What’s it like to go back to those things you were wearing 20 years ago?It’s been horrible because they don’t fit. Those hot pants, they don’t go past my thighs. But it’s amazing how it evolved. I wasn’t really interested in fashion, I was interested in wearing a cheap little bathing suit and a kinky top. And then people who were inspired by me would throw me stuff onstage.Did people really throw garments onstage when you were performing?Yeah, Wendy and Jim, these Austrian designers, threw a bodysuit onstage and it became the cover for an album. All these stories come flashing and it’s emotional. It’s really cool because I have a chance to make this show a little bit of a live archive, plus future-friendly, forward-thinking style.What did the old costumes smell like?Actually, they don’t smell so bad. Some of the leather is a little funky. The worst things are the fishnets, and I don’t know why. Maybe because I didn’t wash them. Actually, there’s one PVC costume I got. I was on the official Electroclash tour of 2001, and I had this band W.I.T. come onstage and throw cream pies at me while I sang. The cream pie on PVC never washed out. So that’s got a little bit of a memory. Also a little bit of a gag reflex.Damien Maloney for The New York TimesThere’s been a lot of talk about a “vibe shift” return to “indie sleaze.” What’s your relationship to that sort of nostalgia?I like to look at the “indie sleaze” because I know all these people, and I was there. With early electroclash, there were all these women like Chicks on Speed, Le Tigre, Tracy & the Plastics with the same mindset as me: “Electronics are great! Let’s not take them so seriously that we can’t have fun and we can’t inject our queerness!” None of us lived in the same city, and none of us knew each other were doing this. But it was a beautiful thing to be at the forefront of it.It wasn’t just the music. You were synonymous with sexual freedom and positivity. I assume parts of that were fun. Were parts of it also exhausting?Well, I was in real time having this sexual revelation for myself. Recently, for some magazine, they asked me to do a paragraph on each song from the album. And I realized it’s a heavy breakup album.When you play these songs today, does the pain still resonate or has it morphed into something else?It doesn’t feel painful, it feels good. And it didn’t feel painful at that time either. That was the point: I wanted to make myself feel good. I felt like that’s what I was doing. It’s kind of a bit of a sexual self-help album.You’ve done so much in your career. I saw you star in the Monteverdi opera “L’Orfeo.” You recreated Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece.” Do you ever feel misunderstood?Starting back at “The Teaches of Peaches,” I think I was very misunderstood. I think people didn’t understand that it was music or that I had any interest in music. People would make up their own stories, like “Oh, Berlin D.J.s make her music” or “That’s just lip-syncing” or “She’s all about porn” or “That’s too much of a comedy act.” There were so many ideas about what I was doing or who I belonged to. I was trying to mix Kraftwerk and the Stooges and all these different kinds of things. People just didn’t understand it.Has that changed in the last 20 years?I feel like it’s become a mainstay of how people make music. I’ve always given this line: “I don’t want to be in the mainstream, I want the mainstream to come to me.” And it did, musically. Post-millennials, they don’t care if it’s nu-metal guitar. They put it in there with sexy ’80s sounds. It doesn’t matter. And also, look at how sexually direct music is now. Like every awesome female hip-hop artist to Kim Petras, it’s all there.Now we’re supposedly entering this phase where young people aren’t having sex. Are you moving away from the mainstream again?I think I’ll find out on this tour. Maybe it will just be people over 35. I love young people, but I also love people my own age. If older people are enjoying it, that’s cool, what’s wrong with that? More

    • 50 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Kendrick Lamar’s Anxiety Era

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherKendrick Lamar spends much of his fifth album, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” in a state of anxious lament. It’s been five years since he released “DAMN.,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning album that was also his most commercially ambitious, and in that time, Lamar effectively disappeared. But he’s been reckoning — with his own relationship struggles, and with the burdens placed upon him by fans who lionize him.The No. 1 album he’s made faces those struggles head on, with Lamar detailing the ways in which he’s been shaped by his family, and openly grumbling about the weight of the crown he has only sometimes asked to wear.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Lamar’s evolution, the specificity of his songwriting and how even the most individualistic musicians can find themselves at the mercy of a narrative created by their listeners.Guests:Jeff Ihaza, senior editor at Rolling StoneCraig Jenkins, music critic at Vulture/New York magazineStephen Kearse, contributing writer at The NationConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More