Music

Hear tracks by Taylor Swift, the Mars Volta, Gorillaz featuring Thundercat and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Beyoncé, ‘Break My Soul’The first song from Beyoncé’s album due July 29, “Renaissance,” has a clubby house beat and an attitude that equates defiant self-determination with salvation. She and her co-producers, Tricky Stewart and The-Dream, work two chords and a four-on-the-floor thump into a constantly changing track. They sampled shouted advice — “Release your anger! Release your mind! Release your job! Release the time!” — from “Explode” by the New Orleans bounce rapper Big Freedia. Beyoncé extrapolates from there: joining the Great Resignation, building “my own foundation,” insisting on love and self-love, facing every obstacle with the pledge that “You won’t break my soul.” When she invokes the soul, a gospel choir arrives to affirm her inner strength, as if anyone could doubt it. JON PARELESGorillaz featuring Thundercat, ‘Cracker Island’A kind of living cartoon character in his own right, the charismatic bassist Thundercat is a natural fit in the Gorillaz universe — so much so that it’s almost surprising he’s never collaborated with them before. Thundercat’s insistent bass line and backing vocals add a funky jolt to the group’s “Cracker Island,” a sleek and summery jam that happens to be about … a made-up cult? Thankfully the tune doesn’t get bogged down by anything too conceptual, though, and invites the listener to simply lock into its blissed-out groove. LINDSAY ZOLADZElizabeth King, ‘I Got a Love’The Memphis-based vocalist Elizabeth King once seemed headed toward gospel stardom. In the early 1970s, she and a group of all-male backing singers, the Gospel Souls, scored a radio hit and won the Gospel Gold Cup award, presented by the city’s gospel D.J.s. But then King stepped back, spending decades raising 15 children; her public performances were limited to singing on a weekly gospel radio program. It wasn’t until last year that King, now in her 70s, released her first full album, the impressive “Living in the Last Days.” She returns this week with “I Got a Love.” On the title track, King reprises the sultry style of praise-singing that she had perfected in the 1970s, telling us about her rock-sturdy romance with God over a slow and savory tempo. Behind her, a tube-amplified guitar slices out riffs, an organ alternates between full chords and long rests, and a heavy, pushing bass keeps the band’s muscles flexed. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAmanda Shires, ‘Take It Like a Man’The title track from Amanda Shires’s upcoming album is a poetic and provocative torch song enlivened by an electrifying vocal performance. Featuring her husband Jason Isbell on guitar, “Take It Like a Man” is a sweeping ballad that continuously builds in blistering intensity — sort of like something Shires’s Highwomen bandmate Brandi Carlile might release. But the song is a showcase for the unique power of Shires’s voice, which is both nervy and tremblingly vulnerable at the same time. “I know the cost of flight is landing,” she sings as the melody ascends ever higher, “and I know I can take it like a man.” ZOLADZThe Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicWith two quarantine albums and new recordings of her older albums, the pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10-minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman’s attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories.Taylor Swift, ‘Carolina’“Carolina,” from the soundtrack to the forthcoming movie “Where the Crawdads Sing,” holds the distinction of being one of the spookiest songs in the Taylor Swift catalog; save for “No Body, No Crime,” it’s the closest she’s come to writing an outright murder ballad. Co-produced with Aaron Dessner, “Carolina” sounds of a piece with Swift’s folky pair of 2020 releases: The arrangement begins with just a sparsely strummed acoustic guitar that eventually swells into a misty atmosphere with the addition of strings and banjo. As on her 2015 single “Wildest Dreams,” there’s a hint of Lana Del Rey’s influence as Swift digs into her breathy lower register to intone ominously, “There are places I will never go, and things that only Carolina will ever know.” ZOLADZSessa, ‘Canção da Cura’“Canção da Cura” (“Song of Healing”) from the Brazilian songwriter Sessa’s new album, “Estrela Acesa” (“Burning Star”), hints at some clandestine ritual. In his gentle tenor, Sessa sings, “To the sound of the drums I’ll consume you.” Acoustic guitars and percussion set up an intricate mesh of syncopation, and in his gentle tenor, with hushed backup vocals overhead, Sessa sings, “To the sound of the drums I’ll consume you.” It’s a brief glimpse of a mystery. PARELESThe Mars Volta, ‘Blacklight Shine’After a decade of other projects, the wildly virtuosic, conundrum-slinging guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López and the singer and lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala have reunited as the Mars Volta, with a tour to start in September and a new song: “Blacklight Shine.” It’s a six-beat, bilingual rocker, full of complex percussion and scurrying guitar lines, with lyrics like, “the high control hex he obsessively pets with his thumbs/thinking no one’s watching but I got the copy that he can never erase.” But unlike many of Mars Volta’s past efforts, this one strives for catchiness, and its rolling rhythm and harmony vocals hint, unexpectedly, at Steely Dan, another band that tucked musical and verbal feats behind pop hooks. An extended “short film” connects the song’s underlying beat to the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Puerto Rican bomba. PARELESCKay featuring Davido, Focalistic and Abidoza, ‘Watawi’Commitment is an iffy thing; in “Watawi,” the Nigerian singers CKay and Davido and the South African rapper Focalistic stay evasive when girlfriends ask “What are we?” CKay suavely croons a non-answer: “We are what we are.” Keeping things up in the air is the production by Abidoza from South Africa, which hovers around a syncopated one-note pulse as it fuses the cool keyboard chords of South African amapiano with crisp Afrobeats percussion. In its final minute, the track introduces a fiddle that could easily lead to a whole new phase of the relationship. PARELESAlex G, ‘Runner’There’s something wonderfully uncanny about the music of Philadelphia’s Alex G. His songs often gesture toward familiar sounds and textures — “Runner,” from his forthcoming album “God Save the Animals” bears a melodic resemblance to, of all things, Soul Asylum’s early ’90s anthem “Runaway Train”— but their gradual accumulation of small, idiosyncratic sonic details produce an overall sense of strangeness. “Runner” initially sounds like warm, pleasant alt-rock pastiche, but before it can lull the listener into nostalgia, the song suddenly erupts with unruly emotion: “I have done a couple bad things,” Alex sings a few times with increasing desperation, before letting out a thrillingly unexpected scream. ZOLADZLil Nas X featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again, ‘Late to da Party’Exile comes in many forms — sometimes it’s spiritual, sometimes it’s literal. The pop-rap phenom Lil Nas X recently took umbrage — seriously or not, who can tell — at not being nominated for a BET Award at this year’s ceremony. YoungBoy Never Broke Again remains on house arrest, one of rap’s most popular figures but one who’s achieved that success without the participation of traditional tastemakers. Together, they share the kinship of outsiders, even if they never quite align on this song, which is notionally aimed at BET; the video features a clip of someone urinating on a BET Award trophy. They are radically different artists — two different rapping styles, two different subject matter obsessions, two different levels of seriousness. By the end it feels as if they’re seeking exile from each other. JON CARAMANICATove Lo, ‘True Romance’“What does a girl like me want with you?” the Swedish songwriter Tove Lo asks in “True Romance,” a four-minute catharsis. The track uses only two synthesized chords and a slow pulse, but the vocal is pained, aching and constantly escalating the drama: a desperate human voice trying to escape an electronic grid. PARELESRachika Nayar, ‘Heaven Come Crashing’The composer Rachika Nayar explores the textural and orchestral possibilities of electric guitar and digital processing: effects, loops, layering. Much of her work has been meditative, and so is the beginning of “Heaven Come Crashing,” with shimmering, sustained washes of guitar and abstract vocals from Maria BC. But there’s a surprise midway through: a hurtling drumbeat kicks in, and what had been a weightless drift is suddenly a warp-speed surge forward. PARELESAbraham Burton and Eric McPherson, ‘Will Never Be Forgotten’In an alternate universe, the release of new music from the tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton and the drummer Eric McPherson would be a major event. Both are Gen X jazz eminences, and across decades playing together, their styles have grown in complement to one another. Burton holds long notes in a strong but wavery yowl or shoots out notes in string-like bursts, conveying a wounded tenderness in spite of all that volume and power. McPherson has a relatively gentle touch on the drums, but still channels the earth-moving polyrhythmic force of Elvin Jones. Last summer, these longtime musical partners gave a concert, joined by the bassist Dezron Douglas, as part of Giant Step Arts’ outdoor series at the old Seneca Village site in Central Park. The performance closed with “Will Never Be Forgotten,” a lament with a descending bass line and a melody that winds downward like a teardrop. A full recording of the concert was released on Juneteenth, as “The Summit Rock Session at Seneca Village.” RUSSONELLO More

The dance-oriented surprise release debuts with the equivalent of 204,000 sales — the streaming star’s lowest opening-week tally for a studio album.A little over a week ago, Drake announced a surprise new album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” and released it online a few hours later. Just like clockwork, it has now gone to No. 1, becoming Drake’s 11th album to top the Billboard 200 chart.“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh studio LP — and his 17th full-length release overall, counting compilations and mixtapes — opened with the equivalent of 204,000 sales in the United States, including 250 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Those figures were enough to send the dance-heavy “Honestly” to No. 1 by a comfortable margin. But they were low by the standards of Drake, who for more than a decade has routinely posted gigantic numbers for new work.The album’s 204,000 equivalent sales — a measurement that reconciles streams with downloads and any traditional album purchases — are a fraction of the 613,000 that Drake posted for the opening of his last studio album, “Certified Lover Boy” (2021). And they are Drake’s lowest since “Care Package,” a compilation of previously released tracks, which opened (at No. 1, naturally) with 109,000 in 2019. Apart from “Care Package,” no Drake album has begun with fewer than half a million equivalents since “What a Time to Be Alive,” a mixtape with the rapper Future from 2015, when streaming represented a minority of overall music consumption. (As of last year, streaming makes up 83 percent of recorded music sales revenue in the United States.)Still, a No. 1 is a No. 1. And with 11 of them, Drake has now matched Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen. Ahead of them on the list of artists landing the most chart-toppers on the Billboard 200 are Jay-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (19).Also this week, BTS’s “Proof,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4. Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is No. 2, Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is No. 3 and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 5. More

A survey at Oper Leipzig provides an opportunity to reassess the youthful efforts that have been excluded from the composer’s canon.LEIPZIG, Germany — How quickly Richard Wagner changed his mind about “Rienzi,” his first successful opera.In his self-aggrandizing memoir, “My Life,” assembled at the request of the Bavarian King Ludwig II and dictated to his wife, Cosima, Wagner described the 1842 opening night as something like the apotheosis of his artistic coming-of-age. “No subsequent experience,” he said, “has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of ‘Rienzi.’”Granted, that was written before bigger achievements: inaugurating his Bayreuth Festival Theater with the first “Ring” cycle in 1876, or premiering his final work, “Parsifal,” six years later. But Wagner nevertheless regarded “Rienzi” with affection.Affection, and then indifference. By the time he was working on “Lohengrin,” in the mid-1840s, “Rienzi” had become, he said, “a work that no longer interested me” — a welcome, much-needed source of income, but not a reflection of the poetry, mystery and singular musical language that would come to define his mature operas.And so, when the non-“Ring” and “Parsifal” works were slowly introduced to the Bayreuth stage by Cosima after her husband’s death in 1883, she stopped short of “Rienzi,” going back only as far as its successor, “Der Fliegende Holländer,” and codifying the 10 canonical operas that continue to be performed at the festival today.Doomed to exclusion and obscurity were his three earlier efforts, which in addition to “Rienzi” include “Die Feen,” a work never performed in Wagner’s lifetime, and “Das Liebesverbot,” from 1836. All have appeared onstage throughout the years, but they remain curiosities.Should they? At Oper Leipzig, in Wagner’s hometown, a survey of his entire stage output — a festival called Wagner 22, which continues through July 14 — offers a fresh opportunity to assess his early works in juxtaposition with their canonical siblings, and in chronological order.The trio of rarities reveals an impressionable composer who, before finding a voice of his own, knew how to expertly draw on those he admired; and who, before pioneering a declamatory style of operatic dramaturgy, rapidly developed a keen sense for theatrical storytelling and a grasp for the fashions of his time. In some ways, he is himself from the start, writing less in a mode of entertainment than of profound exploration — in the tradition of Mozart’s collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, like “Don Giovanni,” and of Beethoven’s fiercely political “Fidelio.”Mozart especially looms over “Die Feen,” composed when Wagner was 20 years old. It came after he had abandoned an earlier work, “Die Hochzeit,” and after he had rejected a suggestion to compose an opera about the life of the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He wrote the libretto himself, inspired by Carlo Gozzi’s “La Donna Serpente,” setting a precedent for all of his works.“I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto,” he later recalled, “for now I realized nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.”Renaud Doucet’s production of “Die Feen” blends the opera’s dreamy fantasy with the realism of a contemporary apartment.Kirsten Nijhof“Die Feen” didn’t premiere until 1888, five years after Wagner’s death. So he was spared the pain of the public reception it might have had in his youth. It’s impossible to say what that would have been, but from the perspective of 2022, the opera is, frankly, not very good. And that’s not the fault of Oper Leipzig, which — in a reminder that the performing arts continue to tread carefully under the threat of Covid-19 — put on its production last week with last-minute replacements for not only the two leading roles, but also the conductor.If anything, the staging, by Renaud Doucet, helps orient viewers with a work they probably don’t know, aided at every turn by the clear and luxurious sound of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the pit. Doucet’s production is set in the present, at the home of a man who tunes in to a radio broadcast of the opera, which provides a contextualizing introduction. The dreamy action begins to intrude on reality; this evening is as much about discovering “Die Feen” as performing it.The libretto features the subplots of a Mozart comedy and the Romanticism of Carl Maria von Weber, whose “Der Freischütz” was formative for the young Wagner. Stylistically, the music is indebted to them as well. These arias are designed to open up the inner thoughts of the characters, without the grace that would come in, say, the incidental ruminations of Hans Sachs or the delirium of Tristan.“Die Feen” is a number opera — far from the “endless melody” Wagner would describe in his 1860s essay “Music of the Future.” And it’s a clumsy one, attempting in the third act to weave aria pauses into a breakneck pace and an abrupt, Orphic turn. Like Wagner’s instrumental works from around that time, it doesn’t need to be taken out of the curio cabinet except for the occasional dusting.A similar fate shouldn’t befall “Das Liebesverbot,” Wagner’s first staged opera. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” it was mostly met with shrugs at its premiere. But, while still a world from the mature works, it is a skillfully, entertainingly told story with depth and resonance.The Italianate overture, which begins with a ringing tambourine and festive percussion, isn’t recognizably Wagner. But the opera’s substance is. His librettos were like subtweets; that’s why, Wagner believed, the critic Eduard Hanslick cooled on him after a reading of the text for “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” a cri de coeur against artistic gatekeeping. Here, Wagner’s target is chastity-obsessed conservatism and the bad behavior it breeds.He would later wrestle with socially unacceptable sensuality in “Tannhäuser” and “Tristan und Isolde,” not without an element of autobiography. Neither of those works, though, is as barbed as “Das Liebesverbot,” which skewers hypocrisy — with crimes and punishment for the #MeToo age — while arguing that morality is a malleable thing on which we can only try to force rigidity.Tuomas Pursio as Friedrich, the moralistic governor who gets his comeuppance in “Das Liebesverbot.”Kirsten NijhofFor close listeners, there are flashes of the future Wagner. And coincidences as well; the line “Es ist ein Mann” recalls its opposite, “Das ist kein Mann!,” which Siegfried exclaims upon discovering the sleeping Brünnhilde in the “Ring.” Early on, when the heroine, the novice Isabella, is introduced with a prayer, the music seems to prefigure “Parsifal.”Much closer to mature Wagner is “Rienzi,” a sprawling, five-act adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel about Cola di Rienzo, a 14th-century tragic figure of Italian politics who took on a new importance in nationalistic movements of the 1800s. If “Tannhäuser,” another transitional work, is on unsure ground stylistically, “Rienzi” is even more so: transparently an answer to the grand operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, yet also contending with a new musical language that would take shape with “Holländer.”In Leipzig, “Rienzi” was, understandably, presented with extensive cuts. Employing requisite elements of grand opera, like a plot-stopping ballet, the original version ran more than six hours. It was so long, it was later split into two evenings, “Rienzi’s Greatness” and “Rienzi’s Fall,” but reverted to one after audiences responded negatively to paying for multiple tickets.After cuts, the Oper Leipzig “Rienzi” still lasted a little more than four hours, and unfolded on an expansive scale, despite missing 21 chorus members out with Covid-19. The work is best known today for its overture, a staple in the concert hall and the easiest way to share the music, which otherwise demands a substantial investment for an enormous cast and production, along with a tenor with the stamina to endure a punishing role on the level of Siegfried and Tristan. (Here, Rienzi was fearlessly sung by Stefan Vinke, a veteran Siegfried.)“Rienzi” speaks as much to the present as its own time, and not just because it includes a scene in which a mob storms a capitol building. As in “Lohengrin,” Wagner interrogates the limits of charisma and the burden of leadership, and begins to deal in the ambiguity and complication that would course through his canonical works. And he does so in an increasingly declamatory rather than melodic mode, never more than in Rienzi’s Act V prayer, “Allmächt’ger Vater.”The work was a hit when it premiered in Dresden, admired by colleagues and audiences alike. Less well received was “Der Fliegende Holländer,” which debuted at the same theater about two and a half months later and signified an entirely new direction for Wagner — one in which he would call his librettos “poems,” and in which he would bear out his vision of “The Artwork of the Future.”“The management saw itself compelled to prevent my reputation from being tarnished by putting ‘Rienzi’ back on the boards in short order,” Wagner said in “My Life.” “And now I had to ponder the success of this opera, as well as the failure of the other.”“Holländer,” as we know, won out. Yet Wagner’s achievements are now accepted wholesale, so there isn’t a need to categorize any of his operas as successes or failures — except, perhaps, for “Die Feen.” The doors of Bayreuth have long been shut to the early, worthy works of its founder. It’s time to open them up. More

He produced, arranged or engineered many of the era’s biggest nightclub hits, even if his records rarely got much play on the radio.Patrick Adams, a producer, arranger and engineer who brought experimentation, sophistication and infectious grooves to countless soul and disco singles — his fellow producer Nile Rodgers called him “a master at keeping butts on the dance floor” — died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.His daughter, Joi Sanchez, said the cause was cancer.If you’ve boogied the night away at a disco or circled a roller rink in the last 50 years, chances are you’ve done it to music that Mr. Adams helped shepherd into existence, even if his name doesn’t ring a bell. Despite his low profile, he left his fingerprints everywhere, often as an engineer or arranger, sitting behind the mixing board for acts like Gladys Knight, Rick James and Salt-N-Pepa.His greatest legacy, though, was the scores of tracks he produced in the 1970s for New York’s underground disco scene, the energetic, transgressive and insanely creative corner of a genre often written off as cheesy and uncreative. If radio stations in Cleveland and Topeka weren’t playing music he had produced, you could be sure that New York clubs like Gallery and Paradise Garage were.“He was very underground,” Vince Aletti, who covered disco for Record World magazine, said in a phone interview. “He was really popular on a club level. He rarely broke through above that, but that kind of made him even more like he was ours.”Mr. Adams’s style varied from album to album, but each release was expertly crafted and irresistibly catchy, at once lofty and raunchy — like Musique’s “In the Bush,” a summer-defining club hit of 1978 that one critic said was among “the horniest records ever made.”As with many of Mr. Adams’s studio acts, Musique was in a way just a front for his own musical prowess. After a record executive hired him to create a disco hit, he wrote the music and lyrics, arranged the instruments (many of which he played himself) and hired the singers.He did much the same with acts like Inner Life, Phreek, Cloud One, Bumblebee Unlimited and the Universal Robot Band — a stable of groups, often drawing from the same pool of personnel, that allowed him to spread his creative wings in different directions.Some singles, like Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair),” are classic strings-and-beat disco, while others, like Cloud One’s “Atmospheric Strut,” are trippy blends of sci-fi funk and proto-house.But if Mr. Adams was in control, he was never dictatorial; his studio was always a collaborative space.“He gave you room to develop, as long as he thought it was creative,” Christine Wiltshire, who sang lead vocals for Musique, said in a phone interview. “He was never ‘This is the way it’s supposed to go.’”Unlike many disco producers then and many dance producers since, Mr. Adams had little regard for beats and loops. Those came later. He emphasized the melody, the lyrics and above all the story his songs were trying to tell.“If you start with a great song that has an attractive melody, a lyric that tells a story people can relate to, you’re way ahead of the game,” he told The New York Observer in 2017. “If you start with a beat, which in reality is not much different than anything anybody else could contrive with Fruity Loops or other computer software, you’re just one of a million people making noise.”Mr. Adams was best known for his disco work, but he got his start with soul bands in the early 1970s, and in the ’80s, after disco faded, he was an engineer for some of the leading acts in New York’s emerging hip-hop scene, like Salt-N-Pepa and Erik B. & Rakim.“I always look at music as music, not necessarily having a genre,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “I was not trying to make a disco record. I was trying to make just a great record.”Mr. Adams was born on March 17, 1950, in Harlem, where he grew up four blocks from the Apollo Theater. His father, Fince, was a merchant seaman, and his mother, Rose, was a homemaker.Patrick was musically inclined at an early age: His father bought him a trumpet when he was 10 and gave him an acoustic guitar when he was 12. He sang in choir and played guitar in a band, the Sparks, when he was 16.But his real interest was production. He experimented with his father’s reel-to-reel tape deck to master skills like overdubbing. He hung out at studios, learning about mixing boards. He would dissect songs he heard on the radio, trying to understand their arrangements and structure.“I always shopped for records by producer, arranger and songwriter,” he was quoted as saying in a profile by the journalist Jason King for the Red Bull Music Academy website. “The way D.J.s shop for records now is how I used to shop for records when I was a kid.”Later he would hang around the back door of the Apollo, so often that Reuben L. Phillips, who conducted the in-house orchestra, let him distribute sheet music.In the late 1960s he began working for Perception Records as an entry-level jingle writer; by 1970, he was executive vice president. A year later he discovered his first big act, the group Black Ivory, which sang slow-soul hits like “Don’t Turn Around” and “Time Is Love.”Mr. Adams became known around New York for his lush, energetic string arrangements, and in 1974 he left Perception to start his own arranging and engineering company. A year later he and the music promoter Peter Brown founded a label, P&P Records, to release his underground music.Mr. Adams never married, but he was in a longtime relationship with Ms. Wiltshire, the mother of Ms. Sanchez. They later separated, but the two remained close. Along with his daughter, he is survived by a brother, Gus; another daughter, Tira Adams; a son, Malcolm Holmes; and six grandchildren. His brother Terry died in 2020.Mr. Adams in performance at the Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem in 2017. Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool While Mr. Adams never won the sort of public acclaim given to fellow producers like Mr. Rodgers or Quincy Jones, he did enjoy a renaissance in the 1990s among D.J.s who fell in love with his innovative productions. He found a similar following among hip-hop artists like Mac Miller, Raekwon and Kanye West, all of whom sampled his music.Still, he seemed at ease with his relative anonymity.“You can tell a Nile Rodgers record a million miles away because it has an imprint that emanates from his guitar,” Mr. Adams said in a 2017 interview for the Red Bull Music Academy. “In my case I tried to avoid that. I didn’t want my records to sound the same.“Whether that was a positive thing or a negative thing, I don’t know. But at the same time there is a signature in my music — sometimes it’s harmonic, and sometimes it’s just in the quirkiness of things. And sometimes you just don’t hear it until somebody points it out to you and asks, ‘Oh, he did that record too?’” More

“Un Ballo in Maschera” is the last in a series of Verdi operas led in concert by the Chicago Symphony’s music director, who departs after next season.CHICAGO — Mortality, the fragility of life, permeates Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” from its lonely first measures.As the opera opens, a crowd sings while a ruler sleeps. For those who love him, it is a state that should bring him rest and refreshment. For those who conspire against him, it is a premonition of his hoped-for death. That battle — between vitality and the grave — continues to the score’s crushing finale.It was particularly hard to avoid thinking of endings during the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s sumptuous performance of “Ballo” here on Thursday evening. Riccardo Muti, the ensemble’s music director since 2010, will depart after next season. And after more than a decade dotted by acclaimed concert versions of his beloved Verdi in Chicago, this is his last opera with this superb orchestra. (Saturday and Tuesday bring two final chances to hear it.)More proof of life’s fragility: Covid-19 very nearly derailed the run.After missing performances here in April because of a positive test, Muti tested positive again last Thursday, leaving that weekend’s concerts to another conductor and putting “Ballo” — which requires more rehearsals than a normal subscription program — in serious jeopardy.But on Thursday, there was Muti, who turns 81 next month. While the bags under his eyes looked heavier than usual, even from a seat in the balcony, he was still stomping on the podium and vigorously pumping his arms downward to draw out the weightiest marcato emphases. He was still crouching nearly to the floor when he wanted the volume softer, and reaching toward the ceiling to summon thunderous climaxes.Muti brings a gleaming, even fearsome clarity to Verdi’s operas.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraVerdi is his life’s work. Few who chat with him for more than a minute or two avoid a passionate lecture about how this composer’s scores remain underrated for their sophistication: messily conducted, vulgarly sung and damnably staged.This positions Muti conveniently in the role of savior: finally wiping the grime from long-dirty windows. Whatever he may think, he is not the only conductor who tries to do Verdi justice, but there is no question that he brings to these operas a gleaming, even fearsome clarity.And stretching back to his performances of the Requiem as the Chicago Symphony’s music director designate in 2009, Verdi has provided a series of exclamation points on his tenure here. Never have I attended an opera performance as breathtakingly focused and ferocious as their “Otello” in 2011. “Macbeth” (2013) was a grimly propulsive march, and “Falstaff” (2016) a witty wonder, a smile in the shape of a symphony orchestra. Only “Aida,” in 2019, struck me as excessively controlled and arid.A tense tale of disguises and deceptions, “Ballo” is by far the strangest of this collection, a product of Verdi’s middle-period experimentations in emotional ambiguity and sometimes jarring juxtapositions of tone. (It premiered in 1859, after “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “Simon Boccanegra,” and before “La Forza del Destino.”)The opera is an eerie combination of melodrama and lighthearted, operettalike moments, with a homoerotic whisper over its central love triangle: Renato kills his best friend, Riccardo, because Riccardo is in love with Renato’s wife, Amelia, but it can be hard to tell which one of them arouses Renato’s jealousy more.The quality of the singers, in some of opera’s most fiendishly difficult roles, has varied in the Verdi pieces Muti has led here. But the work of his orchestra has been consistently agile and virtuosic, an ideal vehicle for his goal of bringing out rarely heard details without stinting overall blend and drive.So in this grand but tight “Ballo,” you heard — as you usually don’t — the slight, sour instrumental harmonies under the conspirators’ bitter laughter. Later, as those assassins plotted, their crime was sternly echoed in the resonance and unanimity of the evocative combination of harp and plucked double basses.Meli, left, as Riccardo, with Yulia Matochkina as Ulrica.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraAs Amelia admitted her love to Riccardo, the strings trembled with a softness as palpable as it was audible; those strings had earlier roared with sinewy bristle when Riccardo asked a fortune teller who his killer would be. The prelude to the second act mingled lyrical expansion, somber brasses and a strangled stutter in the cellos; the Chicago winds these days combine artfully, their variety of textures united by their shared phrasing.Especially memorable on Thursday were the understated eloquence of John Sharp’s cello solo during Amelia’s aria “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” and the spine — sometimes strong, sometimes shadowy — provided by the timpanist David Herbert. “Ballo” is full of simmering quiet, from which the full orchestra was able, time and again, to suddenly explode with savage, Mutian precision.The Chicago Symphony Chorus — prepared by Donald Palumbo, here for a stint after the end of the season at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is the chorus master — sounded richly massed, and sometimes terrifyingly robust, but not turgid. Even forceful phrases did not cut off abruptly; consonants and vowels alike felt rounded and full.Best among the featured singers were the mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina, commanding as the soothsayer Ulrica, and the soprano Damiana Mizzi, sprightly but silky as the page Oscar, a rare Verdian trouser role. The baritone Luca Salsi was an articulate, occasionally gruff Renato. The tenor Francesco Meli — like Salsi, a Muti favorite — was brash and ringing as Riccardo; his generosity faltered only occasionally at the very top of his range.When the accompaniment was spare and the vocal line floating, the soprano Joyce El-Khoury sang Amelia with soft-grained delicacy, though her tone narrowed as more pressure was placed on it. With her sound brooding, she effectively projected her character’s pitifully unmitigated sorrow. But she and Meli were pressed to their limits by the ecstatic end of their Act II duet.Singing the main conspirators were two talented bass-baritones: Kevin Short and (especially solid) Alfred Walker. The baritone Ricardo José Rivera; the clear, forthright tenor Lunga Eric Hallam; and the sweet-sounding tenor Aaron Short showed the care with which the orchestra cast even tiny roles.But the star of the show was never in doubt. This was not Muti’s final performance in Chicago, not by a long shot. There was nevertheless special poignancy near the end, hearing — from the voice of a character named Riccardo, no less — a dying farewell to “beloved America.”Un Ballo in MascheraRepeats Saturday and Tuesday at Symphony Center, Chicago; cso.org. More

Opera America’s study found a striking dearth of minorities in the administrative ranks of opera companies.Opera has long grappled with a lack of racial diversity. Black, Latino and Asian singers have struggled to be cast in principal roles. Works by composers of color have rarely been performed.And, according to a study released on Thursday, there is also a striking dearth of minorities behind the scenes, in the ranks of opera administration.The study, by Opera America, a service organization for opera companies, found that only about a fifth of employees and board members at opera companies in the United States and Canada identify as people of color, compared with 39 percent of the general population.The findings underscore the challenges many companies face as they work to attract new and more diverse audiences, challenges that gained fresh urgency after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, which brought renewed attention to questions about representation in the arts.“It shows there is a great deal of work to do for opera companies to more consistently reflect our nation and their communities,” Marc A. Scorca, the president and chief executive of Opera America, said in an interview. “For opera to truly be the connected, contemporary cultural expression that we want it to be, we have to reflect this country.”The study showed some signs of progress: Women now hold 61 percent of positions in administration in opera, and they account for 54 percent of leadership posts.And opera companies have taken steps in recent years to bring more racial diversity to the stage.The Metropolitan Opera, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, last year staged Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first opera by a Black composer in its history. The Houston Grand Opera last year premiered “The Snowy Day,” based on the 1962 book, one of the first mainstream children’s books to feature a Black protagonist.Wayne S. Brown, a chair of the Opera America board and the president and chief executive of the Detroit Opera, which this year staged Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” said it was important that companies worked to attract people of different backgrounds to administrative posts, through mentoring programs and other efforts.“It’s a time of awakening,” he said in an interview. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we reflecting who we are? Is this the image that we choose to project?’ ”The study, based on surveys of about 1,200 administrative staff members and 1,500 trustees at 97 different companies, is one of the first of its kind in the industry. More

Austin Butler plays the singer, with Tom Hanks as his devilish manager, in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic.My first and strongest memory of Elvis Presley is of his death. He was only 42 but he already seemed, in 1977, to belong to a much older world. In the 45 years since, his celebrity has become almost entirely necrological. Graceland is a pilgrimage spot and a mausoleum.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” — a biopic in the sense that “Heartbreak Hotel” is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom. Luhrmann, whose relationship to the past has always been irreverent and anti-nostalgic, wants to shock Elvis back to life, to imagine who he was in his own time and what he might mean in ours.The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist with jolts of hip-hop (extended into a suite over the final credits), slivers of techno and slatherings of synthetic film-score schmaltz. (The composer and executive music producer is Elliott Wheeler.) The sonic message — and the film’s strongest argument for its subject’s relevance — is that Presley’s blend of blues, gospel, pop and country continues to mutate and pollinate in the musical present. There’s still a whole lot of shaking going on.As a movie, though, “Elvis” lurches and wobbles, caught in a trap only partly of its own devising. Its rendering of a quintessentially American tale of race, sex, religion and money teeters between glib revisionism and zombie mythology, unsure if it wants to be a lavish pop fable or a tragic melodrama.The ghoulish, garish production design, by Catherine Martin (Luhrmann’s wife and longtime creative partner) and Karen Murphy, is full of carnival sleaze and Vegas vulgarity. All that satin and rhinestone, filtered through Mandy Walker’s pulpy, red-dominated cinematography, conjures an atmosphere of lurid, frenzied eroticism. You might mistake this for a vampire movie.It wouldn’t entirely be a mistake. The central plot casts Elvis (Austin Butler) as the victim of a powerful and devious bloodsucking fiend. That would be Col. Tom Parker, who supplies voice-over narration and is played by Tom Hanks with a mountain of prosthetic goo, a bizarre accent and a yes-it’s-really-me twinkle in his eyes. Parker was Presley’s manager for most of his career, and Hanks portrays him as part small-time grifter, part full-blown Mephistopheles.“I didn’t kill Elvis,” Parker says, though the movie implies otherwise. “I made Elvis.” In the Colonel’s mind, they were “the showman and the snowman,” equal partners in a supremely lucrative long con.Luhrmann’s last feature was an exuberant, candy-colored — and, I thought, generally underrated — adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” and the Colonel is in some ways a Gatsbyesque character. He’s a self-invented man, an arriviste on the American scene, a “mister nobody from nowhere” trading in the unstable currencies of wishing and seeming. He isn’t a colonel (Elvis likes to call him “admiral”) and his real name isn’t Tom Parker. The mystery of his origins is invoked to sinister effect but not fully resolved. If we paid too much attention to him, he might take over the movie, something that almost happens anyway.Luhrmann seems more interested in the huckster than in the artist. But he himself is the kind of huckster who understands the power of art, and is enough of an artist to make use of that power.Butler with Tom Hanks, left, as Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager. The film depicts him as a small-time grifter and full-time Mephistopheles.Warner Bros.As a Presley biography, “Elvis” is not especially illuminating. The basic stuff is all there, as it would be on Wikipedia. Elvis is haunted by the death of his twin brother, Jesse, and devoted to his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Relations with his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), are more complicated. The boy grows up poor in Tupelo, Miss., and Memphis, finds his way into the Sun Records recording studio at the age of 19, and proceeds to set the world on fire. Then there’s the Army, marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), Hollywood, a comeback broadcast in 1968, a long residency in Las Vegas, divorce from Priscilla and the sad, bloated spectacle of his last years.Butler is fine in the few moments of offstage drama that the script allows, but most of the emotional action is telegraphed in Luhrmann’s usual emphatic, breathless style. The actor seems most fully Elvis — as Elvis, the film suggests, was most truly himself — in front of an audience. Those hips don’t lie, and Butler captures the smoldering physicality of Elvis the performer, as well as the playfulness and vulnerability that drove the crowds wild. The voice can’t be imitated, and the movie wisely doesn’t try, remixing actual Elvis recordings rather than trying to replicate them.At his first big performance, in a dance hall in Texarkana, Ark., where he shares a bill with Hank Snow (David Wenham), Snow’s son, Jimmie (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and other country acts, Elvis steps out in a bright pink suit, heavy eye makeup and glistening pompadour. A guy in the audience shouts a homophobic slur, but after a few bars that guy’s date and every other woman in the room is screaming her lungs out, “having feelings she’s not sure she should enjoy,” as the Colonel puts it. Gladys is terrified, and the scene carries a heavy charge of sexualized danger. Elvis is a modern Orpheus, and these maenads are about to tear him to pieces. In another scene, back in Memphis, Elvis watches Little Richard (Alton Mason) tearing up “Tutti Frutti” (a song he would later cover) and sees a kindred spirit.The sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity of early rock ’n’ roll is very much in Luhrmann’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Its racial complications less so. “Elvis” puts its hero in the presence of Black musicians including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) and B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who offers career advice. An early montage — repeated so often that it becomes a motif — finds the boy Elvis (Chaydon Jay) simultaneously peeking into a juke joint where Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) plays “That’s All Right Mama” and catching the spirit at a tent revival.There’s no doubt that Elvis, like many white Southerners of his class and generation, loved blues and gospel. (He loved country and western, too, a genre the film mostly dismisses.) He also profited from the work of Black musicians and from industry apartheid, and a movie that won’t grapple with the dialectic of love and theft that lies at the heart of American popular music can’t hope to tell the whole story.In the early days, Elvis’s nemesis is the segregationist Mississippi senator James Eastland (Nicholas Bell), whose fulminations against sex, race-mixing and rock ’n’ roll are intercut with a galvanic performance of “Trouble.” Later, Elvis is devastated by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who was killed “just three miles from Graceland”) and Robert F. Kennedy. These moments, which try to connect Elvis with the politics of his era, are really episodes in his relationship with Colonel Parker, who wants to keep his cash cow away from controversy.Alton Mason as Little Richard in the film. Early rock’s sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity are in Luhrmann’s wheelhouse, our critic writes, but the music’s racial complications are not.Kane Skennar/Warner Bros.When Elvis defies the Colonel — breaking out in full hip-shaking gyrations when he’s been told “not to wiggle so much as a finger”; turning a network Christmas special into a sweaty, intimate, raucous return to form — the movie wants us to see his conscience at work, as well as his desire for creative independence. But Luhrmann’s sense of history is too muddled and sentimental to give the gestures that kind of weight.And Elvis himself remains a cipher, a symbol, more myth than flesh and blood. His relationships with Vernon, Priscilla and the entourage known as “the Memphis mafia” receive cursory treatment. His appetites for food, sex and drugs barely get that much.Who was he? The movie doesn’t provide much of an answer. But younger viewers, whose firsthand experience of the King is even thinner than mine, might come away from “Elvis” with at least an inkling of why they should care. In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.Like a lot of people who write about American popular culture — or who just grew up in the second half of the 20th century — I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Elvis. “Elvis,” for all its flaws and compromises, made me want to listen to him, as if for the first time.ElvisRated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters. More

Music is the key to a summertime experience for pros and amateurs called the DiscOasis in Central Park. Its curator: the funk-disco guru and lifelong skater Nile Rodgers.To some people, a roller rink is just a place to skim around in a circle, not even very fast, going nowhere. But to its devotees and to the creators of the DiscOasis, a new skate experience in Central Park, it is transformational, spiritual — time travel on four wheels.On Saturday night, more than a thousand skaters packed Wollman Rink, laced up their quads and spun off into sparkling nostalgia. Spotlights shone onto the surrounding trees, as a concert-level light show bathed the space in cyan, fuschias and golds. “Good Times,” that 1970s party staple, blared from D.J. Funkmaster Flex’s booth, as the crowd — some wobblies, some more expert — parted for the pros: One roller dancer in flared jeans dropped to a split, while another flipped off her wheels, uncoiling into a headstand. For 10 minutes, it was all hot pants and acrobatics, and then regular New Yorkers — many with a style not far-off — slid back in.Hovering over this opening night like a sequined demigod was Nile Rodgers, the Chic guitarist, funk-disco eminence and lifelong skater. He curated music for the DiscOasis, and, with voice-over introductions, provides its cultural through line from 1970s and ’80s New York, when he used to frequent the city’s now shuttered, once legendary rinks with Diana Ross and Cher. Kevin Bacon and Robert Downey Jr. too. (The ’80s were wild.) With some skill on wheels, “You feel like you have special human powers,” Rodgers said in a recent video interview. “You feel like you can fly.”Scenes from the opening night of the DiscOasis, which will be open through October.Thao Nguyen from Constellation Immersive (in purple sequins) and Lynná Davis of the Central Park Dance Skaters Association (in blue sunglasses) join the set designer David Korins (second from left in back row) and more DiscOasis stakeholders at its ribbon cutting.OK McCausland for The New York TimesRoller-skating is having another flash of popularity, but the DiscOasis sets itself apart from the city’s other rinks and pop-up events (Rockefeller Center is temporarily hosting wheelers, too) through its production value, theatricality and pedigree. There’s blossoming disco balls as big as eight feet in diameter, and a multitiered stage, created by the Tony-nominated set designer David Korins, who did “Hamilton” and shows for Lady Gaga. The cast of 13 includes legends of New York roller disco, like the long-limbed skater known as Cotto, a fixture in the city’s parks for more than four decades, whose signature leg twirls and pivots have influenced scores of skaters.“We call it jam skating,” he said. the DiscOasis coaxed him out of retirement — he’s had both hips replaced — for choreographed shows, five nights a week.The energy is ecstatic, and infectious. “Being on wheels is paradise to me,” said Robin Mayers Anselm, 59, who grew up going to Empire, the storied Brooklyn emporium. “I feel more connected to myself and my spirit when I skate.”That’s true even for the newbies, like Robin L. Dimension, an actress wearing an embellished jumpsuit and a chunky “Queen” necklace with her psychedelic-patterned skates. “I got a really nice outfit,” she said, “so I look good going down.”Billed as “an immersive musical and theatrical experience,” the DiscOasis began last year outside of Los Angeles.OK McCausland for The New York TimesBilled as “an immersive musical and theatrical experience,” the DiscOasis began last year outside of Los Angeles, the pandemic brainchild of an events company led by a C.A.A. agent. But its foundational home was always New York, and it will be open through October.“For us, DiscOasis is a movement, it’s a vibe — we want as many people to be able to experience it,” said Thao Nguyen, its executive producer, and chief executive of Constellation Immersive, its parent company, which partnered with Live Nation and Los Angeles Media Fund to stage the series.For New York’s skate community, it is first and foremost a good floor. “You know, we’re not impressed by the accouterments of the illusion,” said Tone Rapp Fleming, a New York native and skater for 50 years, who came for a preview on Thursday. That’s mostly because ride-or-die skaters like him and his friend Lynná Davis, vice president of the Central Park Dance Skaters Association, would skate on a trash can lid, as she put it. But they praised the rink’s glidable new surface, painted in primary shades of blue, yellow and red.The DiscOasis’ creators knew that if they won over the old-school skate crew, the world would follow; Davis, an ageless wonder in rainbow-flecked braids and custom bejeweled, be-fringed wheels, helped with casting. “Work it out, kids!” she cheered on the younger dancers, as they cartwheeled their routine, to a soundtrack that spun from Queen to “Rapper’s Delight.”For David Korins, who created the stage for the DiscOasis, the space is a Studio 54 throwback, but fresher. OK McCausland for The New York TimesRodgers created the playlists for the performances, which happen throughout the night, interspersed with live D.J.s (the daytime is for more relaxed skating). A longtime New Yorker, Rodgers coined his skate style as a 12- or 13-year-old on a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, when he tore up the town with other kids, performing little routines. “I had this wobbly leg way of skating,” he said. He still does, “even though I’m going to be 70. And it looks cool.”His crew stood out even then: “We used to skate to jazz,” he said, recalling their grooves to the guitarist Wes Montgomery’s 1965 classic “Bumpin’ on Sunset.”Fast forward 30 years, and Rodgers had largely hung up his skates. But he has been so energized by his association with the DiscOasis, which approached him for the Los Angeles event, that it reignited his devotion. Now on tour in Europe, he has been conjuring minirinks wherever he goes, one hotel ballroom at a time.“They lift up the rugs for me and create a big dance floor,” he said. “I can skate in a little square. There’s nobody in there, because I skate at such weird hours — 4 or 5 in the morning.” (He doesn’t sleep much. As befits a disco-era fashion legend, he also has personalized skates — orange, green, iridescent — which got stuck in customs on their way to Europe. His favorite are a classic pair of black Riedells.)Even for someone well-versed in skate culture, the Los Angeles version of the DiscOasis offered some lessons. Most skaters only stick to the rink for about 45 minutes, Rodgers said. The space around Wollman has a nonskate dance floor and a few Instagram-ready installations inspired by his music. The giant half-disco ball stuffed with oversize wedding bouquets, pearls and askew mannequin legs, for example, is supposed to symbolize Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” which he produced.For Korins, the production designer, the space is a Studio 54 throwback, but fresher. “We’re leaning into this oasis idea — if you think about mirrored balls and foliage coming together to have a child, that’s what we’re making,” he said. (Think discofied palm trees and cactuses.) And the Central Park location, with the Manhattan skyline rising above it, brings its own magic. “It takes all the best things about roller-skating and disco and it literally rips the roof off,” he said.Amateurs and pros alike fill the floor at the DiscOasis.OK McCausland for The New York TimesSome attendees (including Davis), come dressed in their skating finest.OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe cast of 13 that performs at the DiscOasis includes legends of New York roller disco.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLike other skate habitués, Korins has a theory about why it remains to addictive. “It’s really hard to find an experience in life that’s both kinetic and dynamic,” he said — you can flex your solo style and also get the communion of “an organism moving around together.”Shernita Anderson, the choreographer, saw that in action. For solos, the cast was on its own. “We were like, ‘Go off, live your best life!’” she said. “And that’s what they did.”Pirouetting and high-kicking his way through the act was Keegan James Robataille, 20, a musical-theater-trained dancer who only began skating two years ago as a pandemic outlet. A swing in the company, this is his first professional, contracted gig. He grew up near a rink in Amsterdam, N.Y. “I remember going there all throughout middle school and being like, ‘Wow, I wish I could skate backwards and do these cool tricks,’” he said. “And here I am performing in New York City, doing what little me would have dreamed of doing.”A closing number — set to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” naturally — came on and he sailed away for his cue. It had the skaters in capes dotted with LEDs, like luminescent butterflies.“I have never seen anything like this in New York,” said Samantha O’Grady, a 24-year-old native. The rinks she started learning at all closed “by the time I was a tween,” she said, but the retro ambience of the DiscOasis gave her a flicker of how the scene looked before her time. “I sent a picture to my mother; she was so jealous.”First-time visitors were already planning to become regulars, like Robbin Ziering, whose wedding was on wheels. “We love to work, we love to dance, we love music — but we live to skate,” she said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”Kalia Richardson contributed reporting.OK McCausland for The New York Times More