Music

Decades into his career, the British American journalist has an unlikely TikTok hit that could be the song of the summer. “I am not trying to make it as a rapper,” he says.Four or five times a week these days, some old friend will contact Louis Theroux and tell him, “My daughter keeps going around the house singing your rap,” or, “My wife was exercising to your rap in her Pilates class.” Passing by a primary school, Mr. Theroux has the feeling he is being watched, a sense confirmed when he hears a kid call out behind him: “My money don’t jiggle jiggle.”His agent has been fielding dozens of requests for personal appearances and invitations to perform. Mr. Theroux, a 52-year-old British American documentary filmmaker with a bookish, somewhat anxious demeanor, has turned them all down, not least because, as he put it in a video interview from his London home, “I am not trying to make it as a rapper.”But in a way, he already has: Mr. Theroux is the man behind “Jiggle Jiggle,” a sensation on TikTok and YouTube, where it has been streamed hundreds of millions of times. He delivers the rap in an understated voice that bears traces of his Oxford education, giving an amusing lilt to the lines “My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds/I’d like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.”For Mr. Theroux, a son of the American author Paul Theroux and a cousin of the actor Justin Theroux, the whole episode has been odd and a little unsettling. “I’m pleased that people are enjoying the rap,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a part of me that has a degree of mixed feelings. It’s a bittersweet thing to experience a breakthrough moment of virality through something that, on the face of it, seems so disposable and so out of keeping with what it is that I actually do in my work. But there we are.”The story of how this middle-aged father of three has taken hold of youth culture with a novelty rap is “a baffling 21st century example of just the weirdness of the world that we live in,” Mr. Theroux said.“Jiggle Jiggle” gestated for years before it became all the rage. It started in 2000, when Mr. Theroux was hosting “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends,” a BBC Two series in which he delved into various subcultures. For an episode in the third and final season, he traveled to the American South, where he met a number of rappers, including Master P. As part of the show, he decided to do a rap himself, but he had only a few meager lines: “Jiggle Jiggle/I love it when you wiggle/It makes me want to dribble/Fancy a fiddle?”Mr. Theroux with the rapper Master P. in a 2000 episode of the BBC Two series “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.”BBC TwoHe enlisted Reese & Bigalow, a rap duo in Jackson, Miss., to help him work it into shape. Bigalow cleaned up the opening lines and linked the word “jiggle” with the word “jingle” to suggest the sound of coins in your pocket. Reese asked him what kind of car he drove. His reply — Fiat Tipo — led to the lines, “Riding in my Fiat/You really have to see it/Six-feet-two in a compact/No slack but luckily the seats go back.”“Reese & Bigalow infused the rap with a genuine quality,” Mr. Theroux said. “The elements that make it special, I could never have written on my own. At the risk of overanalyzing it, the genius part of it, in my mind, was saying, ‘My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds.’ There was something very satisfying about the cadence of those words.”He filmed himself performing the song live on the New Orleans hip-hop station Q93, and BBC viewers witnessed his rap debut when the episode aired in the fall of 2000. That might have been the end of “Jiggle Jiggle” — but “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” got new life in 2016, when Netflix licensed the show and started streaming it on Netflix UK. The rap episode became a favorite, and whenever Mr. Theroux made the publicity rounds for a new project, interviewers would inevitably ask him about his hip-hop foray.In February of this year, while promoting a new show, “Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America,” Mr. Theroux sat down for an interview on the popular web talk show “Chicken Shop Date,” hosted by the London comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg.“Can you remember any of the rap that you did?” Ms. Dimoldenberg asked, prompting Mr. Theroux to launch into his rhymes in what he described as “my slightly po-faced and dry English delivery.”“What happened subsequently is the most mystifying part,” he added.Mr. Theroux’s February appearance on “Chicken Shop Date,” a popular British web series, kicked off new interest in his 22-year-old rap song.Chicken Shop DateLuke Conibear and Isaac McKelvey, a pair of DJ-producers in Manchester, England, known as Duke & Jones, plucked the audio from “Chicken Shop Date” and set it to a backing track with an easygoing beat. Then they uploaded the song to their YouTube account, where it has 12 million views and counting.But “Jiggle Jiggle” became a phenomenon thanks largely to Jess Qualter and Brooke Blewitt, 21-year-old graduates of Laine Theater Arts, a performing arts college in Surrey, England. In April, the two friends were making pasta at their shared apartment when they heard the song and hastily choreographed moves suited to the track — dribbling a basketball, turning a steering wheel — and the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance was born.Wearing hooded sweatshirts and shades (an outfit chosen because they weren’t wearing makeup, the women said in an interview), Ms. Qualter and Ms. Blewitt made a 27-second video of themselves performing the routine. It blew up shortly after Ms. Qualter posted it on TikTok. Copycat videos soon sprang up from TikTok users around the world.“This was all going on without me knowing about it,” Mr. Theroux said. “I got an email: ‘Hey, a remix of the rap you did on “Chicken Shop Date” is going viral and doing extraordinary things on TikTok.’ I’m, like, ‘Well, that’s funny and weird.’”It bursted out of TikTok and into the mainstream last month, when Shakira performed the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Snoop Dogg, Megan Thee Stallion and Rita Ora have all posted themselves dancing to it. The cast of Downton Abbey jiggle-jiggled during a red carpet event.“Anthony Hopkins has just done a thing yesterday,” Mr. Theroux said. “It would be too much to call it a dance. It’s more of a twitch. But he’s doing something.”The whole episode has been strange for his three children, especially his 14-year-old son, who is big into TikTok. “‘Why is my dad, the most cringe guy in the universe, everywhere on TikTok?’” Mr. Theroux said, giving voice to his son’s reaction.“I’ve left my stank all over his timeline,” he continued. “I think it’s made him very confused and slightly resentful.”Mr. Theroux said he doesn’t know what to do with his newfound social media fame. “It’s not like I have a catalog and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments,” he said.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesMs. Qualter and Ms. Blewitt find it equally surreal to see Shakira and others dancing to their moves. “I almost forget that we made that up,” Ms. Qualter said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s happened. It’s got over 60 million views. We see the number on the screen, but I can’t comprehend that there are people behind it.”After the original Duke & Jones remix went viral — that is, the one with the vocal track taken from “Chicken Shop Date” — the DJ-producer duo asked Mr. Theroux to redo his vocal in a recording studio. That way, instead of being just another TikTok ear-worm, “Jiggle Jiggle” could be made available on Spotify, iTunes and other platforms, and its makers could gain some exposure and profit from it.In addition to Mr. Theroux, five composers are credited on the official release: Duke & Jones; Reese & Bigalow; and the 81-year-old hitmaker Neil Diamond. Mr. Diamond became part of the crew when his representatives signed off on “Jiggle Jiggle,” which echoes his 1967 song “Red Red Wine” in the part where Mr. Theroux’s Auto-tuned voice sings the words “red, red wine.” The song hit the Spotify viral charts globally last month.So does this mean real money?“I sincerely hope we can all make some jiggle jiggle out of the phenomenon. Or maybe some fold,” Mr. Theroux said. “So far, it’s been more on the jiggle end.”In his career as a documentary filmmaker, Mr. Theroux has explored the worlds of male porn stars, the Church of Scientology, right-wing militia groups, and opioid addicts. In his new BBC series, “Forbidden America,” Mr. Theroux examines the effects of social media on the entertainment industry and politics. Years before Netflix had a hit show centered on Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who is better known as the Tiger King, Mr. Theroux made a film about him. The American documentarian John Wilson, the creator and star of HBO’s “How To With John Wilson,” has cited him as an influence.Now his body of work has been eclipsed, at least temporarily, by “Jiggle Jiggle.” And like many who go viral, Mr. Theroux finds himself trying to understand what just happened and figure out what he’s supposed to do with this newfound cultural capital.“It’s not like I have a catalog and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments,” he said. “I’m clearly not going to tour it. ‘Come see Mr. Jiggle himself.’ It would be a 20-second-long gig.” More

The band’s label saw its stock price plunge, and the possibility that the K-pop group won’t tour as pandemic restrictions ease threatens to reverberate through South Korea’s economy.The fallout from BTS’s announcement on Tuesday that the K-pop juggernaut would be taking a break as members explore solo careers was immediate and drastic.In just a day, the stock price of the group’s management label, HYBE, plummeted 28 percent to 139,000 won — or $108 — its lowest price since the company went public nearly two years ago, shedding $1.7 billion in market value. The stock price has barely moved since.The drastic plunge underscores how South Korea’s best-selling boy band has become not only a cultural sensation but also a powerful stakeholder in South Korea’s economy.Since the group’s debut in 2013, BTS has raked in billions of dollars through album sales, concert tickets and social media. Its YouTube channel alone, which is the 20th largest in the world, can generate up to $2 million a month. By 2020, the group was contributing $3.5 billion annually to the nation’s economy, according to the Hyundai Research Institute.Japanese fans of BTS sharing mementos of the band at a cafe in Seoul on Wednesday.Kim Hong-Ji/ReutersEven during the pandemic, which devastated the live concert industry, BTS drove a 58 percent increase in HYBE’s revenue, according to the company’s year-end reports for 2021. The label raked in a 1.3 trillion won last year, nearly a billion U.S. dollars.The group’s financial contribution to South Korea’s economy had only been expected to grow as pandemic restrictions eased, according to the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute, which predicted that a single BTS concert could generate upward of $500 million or more.News of the group’s planned hiatus convulsed the internet once the group posted its video announcement, which drew over 16 million views in two days. The group’s fans, who call themselves Army, swarmed social media in expressing support — and anguished distress — over the news.“Thank you BTS for being our home, for your beautiful music that enlightens our life, for your love & happiness to us,” one Twitter user posted. “We’ll support you. We’re always here for you. We’ll wait for you. ARMY FOREVER. We love you.”Fans were particularly confused by the term “hiatus,” which was used in the English translations in the original video. Reports in South Korean media outlets were quick to link the announcement to the fact that Jin, the oldest member of the group, would need to enlist for mandatory military service by the end of this year.Speculation about the group’s possible disbandment led to a quick backpedaling of statements by the label and the group members themselves.News organizations reported the group was not taking a hiatus, but that group members were pivoting to focus more on their individual careers. The group will “remain active in various different formats,” according to the statement.RM, the group’s leader, posted on the social media site Weverse on Thursday, saying that many people had sent him messages assuming the group was breaking up.A mural depicting RM, the leader of BTS, in Goyang, South Korea. Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Although it’s not like I didn’t anticipate this or was oblivious that this could happen, I still feel bitter,” he said, explaining that his intentions were to communicate openly with fans on the group’s reflections of the past decade and not to announce that the group was disbanding.Jungkook, the youngest BTS member, also tried to clarify matters in a live video stream on Thursday. “We don’t have any thoughts of breaking up,” he said, adding that BTS still had plans to perform in the future.In Tuesday’s announcement video, members gathered around a table and spoke candidly about the intense pressures they face to constantly churn out music and deliver, ultimately leading to their decision to temporarily pursue solo careers.“I felt like I was trapped and couldn’t get out,” said Namjoon, who explained that he felt the years of constantly being in the spotlight as a K-pop idol didn’t leave him much room for personal growth. More

Several films from Michael and Christian Blackwood, grounded in the nitty-gritty of art-making, are available to watch through June 28.The collected documentaries of Michael and Christian Blackwood offer an extended studio visit with some of the 20th century’s leading artists. Here are artists at work and in conversation, with a minimum of frills: painters painting, sculptors sculpting and the jazz genius Thelonious Monk blazing away at the piano (and later telling a band member to drop in “any note you want”). If you’ve seen one too many art and music documentaries that resemble Wikipedia entries, then these back-to-basics films will be a genuine tonic, grounded in the nitty-gritty of art-making.Born in Berlin before World War II and later safely settled in the United States, the Blackwood brothers started making their films in the 1960s at the height of a revolution in nonfiction storytelling. Over the years, their mid-length films didn’t garner the high profile of direct cinema pioneers like Robert Drew (“Primary”) or D.A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back”). But the Blackwoods’ art-friendly version of you-are-there filmmaking has a rarely rivaled scope of subjects, and a free sampling is now streaming online through Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn cultural center.“Monk”/”Monk in Europe” (1968) surely has one of the greatest opening shots in documentary: the jazz titan dancing in place in his inimitable style, spinning in the dark. From there the Blackwoods’ chronicle is off and running, leaning in to show Monk’s hands gliding across the piano in several lengthy performance excerpts, or hanging out backstage with him and a supporter (Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the Rothschild heir). The Blackwoods — Christian shooting, Michael directing and producing — skillfully set their documentary to Monk time, rather than cutting up his flow into bite-size pieces. He plays — he’s hustled to another gig across Europe — he chills — he waves away a producer’s request to record “something free-form,” preferring to play something easier “so people can dig it.”The artist Robert Motherwell, the subject of the documentary “Robert Motherwell: Summer of 1971.”Michael Blackwood ProductionsThe revealing offhand exchange is a signature moment of spontaneity for this style of documentary, and the Blackwoods are also strong when letting an artist hold forth at length. “Robert Motherwell: Summer of 1971” (1972) belongs to a subset of films about the New York School, and it’s a fascinating time capsule that’s part self-administered close reading, part art history lesson. The stately Robert Motherwell dabs another brush stroke on his latest elegy to the Spanish Republic, then reflects on how this recurring theme is like a lifelong relationship with a lover. We tag along for a visit to a genteel gallery opening in St. Gallen, Switzerland, but what sticks in the mind is Motherwell’s self-aware observations about the simultaneity of art movements. Picasso, Arp, Matisse and Degas were all alive and (mostly) kicking in the 1910s — the kind of insight that lights up other intersections all across history.“Christo: Wrapped Coast” (1969) might feel like a throwback with its voice-of-God narration: “Once Christo had decided to wrap part of a continental coastline …” But this 30-minute film of Christo’s project in Little Bay, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, yields shifting perspectives on the billowing fabric as workers drape it across crags on the shore. The white wrapping looks delicate, treacherous, glorious, and foolhardy; when gales cut it all to ribbons, art turns instantly into ruins. Christo has no shortage of chroniclers, but the film aptly shows off the Blackwoods’ mission of documentation. One of their favorite camera moves — in “Philip Guston: A Life Lived” (1981), for example — is an eager pan around a studio or gallery, as if to take it all in for posterity.A scene from “Wrapped Coast,” about the artist Christo.Michael Blackwood ProductionsMichael and Christian Blackwood began to work independently in the 1980s, but neither stinted on curiosity. “The Sensual Nature of Sound (1993),” covering the composers Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros, intersperses sit-down interviews with performances and rehearsals in a relatively routine way, but the bright vitality of the musicians is anything but. Their work rewires the brain, from Monk’s operatic, spoken-sung production of “Atlas” to the majestic Oliveros’s ethos of deep listening.A couple of times while watching these documentaries, the recent “Get Back” film on the Beatles’ recording sessions came to mind, because of its exhaustive attention to process. But that project’s thrill lies in seeing the very first fragments of pop songs that have played millions of times. The Blackwoods just as often take us deep into the abstract and the unknown. Listening to artists articulate their intentions and hazard guesses about reality opens up fresh conversations and musings for a viewer.The French artist Jean Dubuffet might have the best last word here. In “The Artist’s Studio: Jean Dubuffet” (2010), he responds to Michael Blackwood’s prompt by explaining that “culture is creation done” (that is, something already completed) and “art is creation in process.” It’s an intriguing and arguable distinction, but the sweeping terms neatly apply to the Blackwoods’ watchful art documentaries: they’re about art and culture, and delight in both. More

The video is grainy, the sound raw, but it’s hard to look away. A small, nervous man is describing the previous night’s commute to a police detective. In his telling, he has exited Grand Central Terminal onto East 43rd Street, heading to a midnight shift at a copy shop.“I cross the street on Lexington Avenue — I notice him standing on the side right there,” he says.The detective interrupts. “When you say him, who are you referring to?”“The guy that I stabbed,” the man says.The interview continues, and the nervous man explains why he stopped to talk to the man he stabbed: He did not want to alienate a potential fan. “I have a social status,” he says. “I’m part of this rap group called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.”The fatal encounter came on the first day of August 2017. The following day, Nathaniel Glover, better known as Kidd Creole, who helped create the blueprint for rap music, was under arrest for the murder of John Jolly, 55. He spent the next four and a half years in jail awaiting trial, was convicted of manslaughter in April and, last month, at the age of 62, was sentenced to 16 years in prison.“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he told the detective the night after the stabbing. “I wish that I would just have stayed home. I didn’t even want to hurt him. He just made me so afraid, that’s all. And I just didn’t want him to hurt me.”South Bronx RisingKidd Creole, right, with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 1984.Anthony Barboza/Getty ImagesThe saga of Kidd Creole, from the pinnacle of hip-hop stardom to a Bronx rooming house and a series of menial temp jobs, is a parable of rap’s first generation. It is a story of extravagant creativity, an industry that took advantage of its very young creators and a man who never stopped dreaming of a way back into stardom.“This entire music genre was founded by us,” said Grandmaster Caz, a contemporary of Kidd Creole. “And how much is it worth? How much do we own?”The answer, for most of the genre’s pioneers, is not much.Nathaniel Glover Jr. was born Feb. 19, 1960, the third of five children in a working-class Bronx family. His father, Nathaniel Sr., was a handyman who would repair floors; his mother, Sarah, took care of the home.“We basically were sheltered,” said his sister, Glander, one year older. “We weren’t allowed to hang out late at night, be outside, be late.”Nathaniel was a shy, undersized adolescent who favored soft rock and Motown. He and his younger brother Melvin would sneak away with their sister’s poetry notebooks, enchanted by the rhymes. In the Bronx, at that time, it was a useful interest to cultivate.By the mid-1970s, neighborhood D.J.s started holding parties in parks and community centers. In July 1977 — the month of a blackout that left New York City dark — the brothers met a D.J. named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Grandmaster Flash.Flash worked with a bowlegged teenager named Keef Cowboy, who energized the crowds with simple rhymes and exhortations. When a friend enlisted in the military, Cowboy teased him on the microphone: “Hip, hop, hip, hop!”The new culture would soon have a name.Nathaniel and Melvin were the next to join. Nathaniel became Kidd Creole, from the Elvis Presley movie “King Creole”; Melvin became Melle Mel.The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.Using the Vatican’s own archives, a soft-spoken scholar has become arguably the most effective excavator of the church’s hidden sins.TikTok choreography, dancing umpires, a ballet-trained first-base coach: The Savannah Bananas, a collegiate summer league baseball team, has amassed a following by leaning into entertainment.There is growing evidence that MDMA — the illegal drug known as Ecstasy or Molly — can significantly lessen or even eliminate symptoms of PTSD when the treatment is paired with talk therapy.They were the Three M.C.s — later the Furious Four, and finally, Five — giving shape to what hip-hop would become. Their parties were epic, and they were stars — untrained, disrespected by mainstream artists and creating the music that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.“We didn’t have any idea that it would be an original form of American music,” Mr. Glover said last month, speaking from the floating jail barge where he spent years waiting for his trial. “We was just trying to have fun, make a couple of dollars, meet some women. It wasn’t that we had in our head, ‘Oh, this is going to be the start of something big.’”Creole was not as lyrically deft as the other group members, but he had a way of connecting with audiences, said MC Sha-Rock, a member of the Funky Four Plus 1, the Furious Five’s chief rivals in the early days. “Every rhyme, every word made you feel like he was talking to you,” she said. “It was strange: being a teenager, how did you just know that this is what you had to do to engage a crowd?”From another D.J.’s party, Creole picked up a phrase and made it a hip-hop fundamental: “Yes, yes, y’all.”Major record companies saw the music as a fad, leaving it to independents: Enjoy, Sugar Hill, Tommy Boy, Tuff City. When Sugar Hill offered the group a contract in 1980, the rappers signed the papers on the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car at the Englewood, N.J., home of the label’s owners, Sylvia and Joe Robinson, according to Guy Todd Williams, better known as Rahiem, another member of the Furious Five. He was under 18, the others just over. Like the other performers on the label, they knew nothing about the music business.The gloss of the studio and the authority of the engineers made Mr. Glover feel like he was a member of the Motown groups he looked up to, one of the Temptations, maybe.“We kind of felt like we were walking in their footsteps,” he said.What followed was music history and decades of litigation.Sugar Hill became the group’s managers, publishers, producers and recording company. Tension grew when the record label selected Melle Mel as a de facto frontman, alienating the others. Mel was the only member who participated in the Furious Five’s highest charting hit, “The Message” — it is his voice reciting the song’s familiar refrain: “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head.”The invention, the crowds, the concerts, made the six members of the group into celebrities. But it wouldn’t last. Even as the group recorded songs that defined the new genre, they never received any royalty payments, Rahiem said. (Flash, Melle Mel and Scorpio all declined to be interviewed for this article; Cowboy died in 1989.) Eventually, Grandmaster Flash had to sue just for the right to use his own stage name.It was a familiar story, said Rocky Bucano, executive director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, which is scheduled to open in the Bronx in 2024.“This goes not just for the guys in hip-hop, but the guys in R&B, soul and every other music genre,” Mr. Bucano said. “The early guys who started as teenagers got taken advantage of and ended up with the short end of the stick.”The band ultimately made some money when the label paid the performers to settle two lawsuits in 2002 and 2007; another is still ongoing.Leland Robinson, son of the label founders, said that Sugar Hill paid the performers all royalties due them, and that any lingering litigation would soon be resolved. “We are one,” he said, claiming close relationships with Scorpio and Melle Mel. “I’m just tired of bad press.”Styles ChangeKidd Creole, right, and his group became stars, helping to create the genre that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesOnstage, the group was dynamic and seamless. They toured the world. But offstage there were problems: egos, drugs, friction over loyalty to the Robinsons, which helped seed a rift between the Glover brothers that persists to this day.Styles were also changing. In 1983, the group Run-DMC. from Queens, came out with a stripped-down sound and look that made the Furious Five, with their flashy hair and designer leathers, seem dated. They still performed, but the hits stopped coming and the audiences were smaller. Mr. Glover was just 23, and his star turn was ending. The first generation of hip-hop pioneers — the oldest of the old school — were disappearing from view.“There was never a Plan B for them,” said Sha-Rock. As her career waned, she went on to become a corrections officer in Texas. (She couldn’t do it in New York, she said, “because I would know all the people coming through.”)Mr. Glover spoke candidly about the pain of losing his star status. “It was disappointing to stand on the sideline and watch people achieve,” he said.After a last brief turn in New York’s spotlight in 1994, hosting a call-in radio show on Hot 97 that was canceled the next year, Mr. Glover began to take on temporary jobs — security guard, maintenance, office work — which gave him flexibility for occasional gigs or short tours. In 1997, he moved into a modest rooming house in the West Bronx, still believing the group had the talent to get back on top.He bought himself a beat-making machine and an eight-track recorder so he could produce his own songs, but he could never get anyone to take much of an interest. In 2012, he posted a series of videos of himself rapping, hoping to drum up a following on YouTube. Five years earlier, the group had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but now his videos rarely got more than a few hundred views.“You went from having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”And in the rooming house, he was essentially anonymous.“Hardly anybody knew I was part of the recording industry,” he said. “I kept that to myself.”It was a life he never quite got used to.“Ain’t like nobody was walking up to him, ‘Ain’t you so-and-so from Grandmaster Flash?’” said Van Silk, a promoter who worked with the group. “Because the time has passed.”A Fatal ConfrontationInduction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Mr. Glover, center right, went from “having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesIn the summer of 2017, Mr. Glover thought he had finally caught a break. Capitalizing on growing nostalgia for old school hip-hop, the surviving Furious Five MCs were booked to perform at the 6,000-seat Dell Music Center in Philadelphia, on a bill with other veteran hip-hop acts. It would be Mr. Glover’s first time in front of an audience in more than five years, and he hoped it might lead to a full tour.“I always enjoyed being out on the road performing,” he said in a call from jail. “It’s in my blood. I can’t get away from it.”On Aug. 1, three weeks before the Philadelphia gig, Mr. Glover rode the subway to Grand Central Terminal for his midnight shift in Manhattan. Since being robbed after a trip to the store for milk and beer a dozen years prior, he had begun carrying a steak knife attached to his forearm with a rubber band.“I went across Lexington Avenue, that’s when I noticed the guy,” he would tell Mark Dahl, a prosecutor from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the next night. He said that seeing a man standing alone was “a red flag for me.”But Cheryl Horry, John Jolly’s cousin, doubted there was anything unusual going on: “Most likely my cousin was standing there drinking a beer,” she said. “When he’s drinking his beer, he’ll lean against the wall, and he’ll speak to everybody.”According to Ms. Horry, Mr. Jolly was born in Charleston, S.C., but moved to New York with an uncle after his parents died. As an adolescent, he left school for a series of jobs, Ms. Horry said, including a stint at White Castle. He had a habit of distancing himself from his family, and this became more pronounced as an adult, particularly after he’d been drinking heavily. Ms. Horry and others lost touch with Mr. Jolly, seeing him only occasionally, often during the holidays.“We never knew why,” she said. “When he’d come around, we always used to tell him: ‘We’re family. Even if you don’t want to be around family, call us, let us know you’re all right.’”According to Mr. Glover and surveillance video of the confrontation, Mr. Jolly said something to Mr. Glover as he passed by that August night. But Mr. Glover had earbuds in, listening to a song by the Eagles. Take it easy, take it easy / Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.Mr. Glover said that he took out his earbuds, not wanting to be rude, in case the man was a fan — in which case, he would have apologized for initially ignoring Mr. Jolly and thanked him for the recognition. But when he realized that Mr. Jolly had only said, ‘What’s up?’ he responded in kind. “Nothing, bruh, nothing,” he said and put the buds back in.Surveillance video from a neighboring office building shows Mr. Glover then strolling out of the frame. After several seconds, Mr. Jolly is seen gesticulating in the direction that Mr. Glover has gone. He then walks purposefully toward him, still gesturing, until he is right in the face of Mr. Glover, who has walked back into the frame. Mr. Glover makes to leave, and Mr. Jolly follows him. Both men drift out of sight. What happened next was not caught on camera.Throughout his four and a half years in jail, Mr. Glover has never denied that he stabbed Mr. Jolly, even pantomiming for the prosecutor during the interview the following night the motion he used, two sharp jabs to Mr. Jolly’s chest. On the phone recently from the Vernon C. Bain jail barge, he was just as blunt.“I’m backing up, and he’s moving toward me,” he said. “He was sweating and his eyes was bulging.” Mr. Glover backed off, he said, and Mr. Jolly moved forward. “And then that’s when I stabbed him.”Rahiem, who stayed in touch with Mr. Glover as he awaited trial, said that the rapper never appeared broken. “He seemed determined, resilient, innocent, but disappointed in the way the justice system was working against him,” Rahiem said.But while he expressed deep remorse in his initial interviews with law enforcement, Mr. Glover became increasingly fixated on the surveillance video during his years in jail, telling family members, friends and reporters that it had been manipulated to make Mr. Jolly seem less aggressive. (The New York Times asked a video expert, Catalin Grigoras, the director of the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado, Denver, to analyze the video in question, and he said it bore no signs of manipulation.)Finally, this March, a trial commenced. Mr. Glover’s trademark long hair was shorn, his face creased by time. He looked small and uncomfortable in an oversize suit, and he did not testify, leaving it to Scottie Celestin, the fifth in a string of lawyers representing him over the years, to argue that Mr. Jolly died from mismanaged care at the hospital, not from his two stab wounds.Mr. Glover’s supporters were irate when the judge, Michele S. Rodney, told the jurors not to consider whether Mr. Glover acted in self-defense. New York law says that deadly physical force is permissible only in response to an aggressor who is also using deadly physical force; Mr. Jolly was unarmed.On April 6, the jury returned a verdict acquitting Mr. Glover of murder — which requires intent — but convicting him of manslaughter. On May 4, Mr. Glover was sentenced to 16 years. If he serves the full term, he will be 73 when he leaves prison. Asked to speak before the sentencing, he made no apology to anybody, as Cheryl Horry noted bitterly afterward.Mr. Glover said to the judge, “I’m very disappointed in the way that the whole situation has played out,” adding that he had been portrayed as a person with no remorse or humanity. “I also feel that at a certain point the truth of all this will be revealed and I will be exonerated,” he said. Mr. Celestin said he planned to appeal.The day of the sentencing, Sylvia Robinson, who had been the chief executive of Sugar Hill Records, was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The music that she, Mr. Glover and a small handful of others brought into the world is now almost 50 years old, and it is the dominant form of popular music today. Hip-hop’s legacy includes revolutions in fashion and language, lasting fame and enormous fortunes — but it left Mr. Glover working a midnight shift over a photocopier.The tragedy of Kidd Creole, the rapper, is that the culture he helped create had so little need for him. The tragedy of Nathaniel Glover and John Jolly was a random encounter of no more than seven minutes. Mr. Glover believed to the end that he was one break away from relaunching his music career.Sha-Rock, now 60, sees in Mr. Glover’s fall a legacy of neglect: first by the city, and then by the industry.“Sugar Hill Records created the space for people to hear us outside of New York City,” she said. “But we were supposed to be protected as young teenagers. He shouldn’t have had to be working at a copy shop, I shouldn’t have to be working as a corrections officer. We were supposed to have been protected. We gave you everything that was dear to our heart and dear to the culture of hip-hop. That’s real.“We gave you our blood, sweat and tears, and transformed rap records,” she continued. “You were supposed to protect us.”Mr. Glover agrees. “If I was doing anything that had any relation to the industry, I wouldn’t have been there,” he said. “I would have been home.”He protests the case against him, talking to anyone who will listen about his issues with the surveillance video. Though he has never stopped admitting to the stabbing, the contrition he displayed on the night after the killing has disappeared. “My conscience is clear,” he said.“He initiated this whole thing,” he said of Mr. Jolly. “I didn’t want anything to do with him.” He mentioned the show scheduled for later in the month. “The group was ready to get back together,” he said. “I was getting ready to go back to my life the way it was.”The concert in Philadelphia went on without him. More

The new project, apparently with the subtitle “Act I,” will be released on July 29, according to the singer’s social media accounts.Cue up the celebratory tweets: A new Beyoncé album is coming.Early Thursday, Beyoncé updated her social media accounts to indicate that a new project called “Renaissance,” apparently with the subtitle “Act I,” would be released on July 29. A link on her website allowed fans to add the album in advance to their collections on streaming music services, and her site is selling four “poses” — versions, or at least bundles — of boxed sets for the album, containing items like T-shirts, posters and a collectible box.“Renaissance” will be Beyoncé’s first solo studio album since “Lemonade” in 2016. But she has released other material since then, including “Everything Is Love,” her joint album with Jay-Z, her husband, in 2018 (credited to the Carters); “Homecoming” (2019), a live album and concert film from her appearance at the Coachella festival; “The Lion King: The Gift,” a companion album to the 2019 remake of “The Lion King”; and songs like “Black Parade” (2020), which won a Grammy Award for best R&B performance, and “Be Alive” (2021), which appeared in the movie “King Richard” and was nominated for an Oscar.Most surprising is that Beyoncé teed up “Renaissance” in advance at all. Back in 2013, she blew up the music industry’s marketing playbook by releasing her visual album “Beyoncé” with no notice, simply telling fans via social media that it was available to purchase. The album, and its novel method of release, became a global news story, demonstrating the power of superstars on social media to corral their fans and bend the rules of the business to their favor. For years after, artists and their record companies sought to “pull a Beyoncé” and repeat her success. Of course, only Beyoncé could pull it off again, as she did in 2016 with “Lemonade.”To Beyoncé’s superfans in the BeyHive, who constantly scour the internet for any clues about their heroine, the news about “Renaissance” was not a total surprise. In recent days, fans have tweeted about the registration of what appear to be new Beyoncé songs on industry databases, like the one for ASCAP, the licensing agency for songwriters and music publishers. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLast month, the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, Okla., offering researchers unparalleled access to Dylan’s archives and peeling back the layers on his songwriting process, long the object of study and fascination. And this month, “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars” opened at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center — it’s the first exhibition drawn from Reed’s archive, which was acquired by the New York Public Library.Both of these seek to offer deeper understandings of these rock icons, but they also offer the opportunity for alternate narratives to emerge. Dylan and Reed always carefully tended to their own mythologies — now the behind-the-scenes tools are available for all to see.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the value of even the unlikeliest ephemera, the difference between public and private archives and the specific ways Dylan and Reed found methods to distance themselves from their pasts.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business reporterConnect 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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

Original vinyl records, turntables and other ephemera belonging to the hip-hop pioneer D.J. Kool Herc will be included in a sale at Christie’s.In the 1970s, D.J. Kool Herc and his sister Cindy Campbell were famous for throwing parties in the rec room of their Bronx high-rise at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, which became known as the “birthplace of hip-hop.”Now some of the original vinyl records and turntables from those neighborhood jams, and other memorabilia, will be auctioned online in a sale organized by Christie’s with Payal Arts International, a consultancy practice.The sale, from Aug. 4 through Aug. 18, represents a larger effort by Christie’s to reach out to a broader population of clients and collectors. An exhibition of the more than 200 items included in the sale will be open to the public at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from Aug. 5 to Aug. 12, as part of Hip-Hop Recognition Month in New York City.Up for auction are some of the turntables and original vinyl records from the parties Herc and his sister Cindy threw at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Christie’s Images Ltd. 2022.“For far too long, our country has neglected to celebrate the contributions of Black Americans to the extent that is deserved,” Darius Himes, Christie’s international head of photographs, said in a statement. “The spirit of the parties that Herc and Cindy would throw were always about inclusion — people from all races and cultures across New York’s many neighborhoods would come to hear the best new music played loudly on Herc’s famous sound system.“From the depths of Planet Rock, a.k.a. the Bronx — came a fire and energy that first captivated the 5 boroughs, and then permeated every facet of the globe,” Himes added. “There isn’t a country today whose youth haven’t been influenced by this movement. And it all started here, in New York City, by a talented Black American with very few resources.”The sale will include disco balls, shoes, hats, belt buckles and jewelry of that pioneering period, as well as Polaroids of Herc and friends, and numerous awards.“At our parties in 1970s New York, it was about something that was bigger than ourselves,” Herc, whose real name is Clive Campbell, said in a statement. “Hip-hop is both an American immigrant story and a global story — it belongs to everybody. And we can still see and feel it today.” More

Members of the K-pop juggernaut said in a video conversation that they wanted time to explore their individual artistic identities.After nearly a decade together, the seven members of BTS need some time apart.The Korean boy band released a video on Tuesday discussing the members’ desire to take a break from their current arrangement in order to explore their individual music careers; the move, they said, would also take some pressure off their lives as international pop sensations.“We’ve talked among ourselves several times and we believe it’s good to take some time apart,” J-Hope, one of the members, said in the video. “I hope that people don’t think negatively about this step and that they see this is a healthy, important part of our plan that will let BTS grow stronger.”But messages of support and heartbreak from the group’s dedicated fan base — known as Army — became tinged with confusion on Tuesday when news organizations reported that the entertainment company associated with the Grammy-nominated band had released a statement saying that BTS was not, in fact, taking a hiatus and that its members were simply focusing more on solo projects. The statement said BTS will “remain active in various different formats.”The BTS video was released as the K-pop group celebrated the ninth anniversary of its debut. While chatting and reminiscing over a meal, the members — J-Hope, RM, Jin, Suga, Jimin, V and Jungkook — touched on some of the challenges they were facing as artists, including the pressure to keep churning out hit songs.“I should be writing about what I’m feeling and the stories I want to tell,” Suga said, “but I’m just forcefully squeezing out words because I need to satisfy someone.”RM, who often speaks for the group in English — including at a recent White House visit — said it was challenging for him to balance his own artistic work with the demands of acting as a kind of group spokesman.The singers seemed to agree that some time focusing on their solo careers would strengthen their future collaborations and would ultimately be in the service of their fans. And future solo performances are already on the books: Earlier this month, Lollapalooza, a music festival in Chicago, announced that J-Hope would be a headliner at the event this summer.“I want to keep performing,” RM said, “but I feel like I’ve lost direction.” More