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      Paris Opera Plans New Productions of Strauss and Britten

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      Human complexities to take center stage in new productions of classics, including works by Strauss and Britten.PARIS — There is never anything very normal about opera. After all, no other art form demands such extreme suspension of disbelief. But after the disruptions caused by strikes and the Covid-19 pandemic, normality is the cherished goal of the Paris Opera as it unveiled its program for the 2022-23 season this week.“An unwelcome guest in our lives, the pandemic has reminded us just how ephemeral and fragile all life is,” Alexander Neef, the opera company’s director, wrote in a news release introducing the season. “Yet by upsetting time and our certainties, it has made the same life more valuable.”Quoting Falstaff in Verdi’s eponymous opera, “tutto nel mondo è burla” (“all the world is a farce”), he added: “I know of no better antidote to instability than to embrace life. And what better way to do so, at the opera, than by bringing meaning and poetry.”One delight of opera is that a poetic libretto penned a century or more ago can assume fresh meaning with each new production: Audiences know the story line but not how it will be interpreted.The baritone Ludovic Tézier at a classical music awards ceremony last year in Lyon, France. He is to perform as the Danish prince in Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet.”Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor the upcoming season, which opens Sept. 3 with a reprise of Pierre Audi’s production of “Tosca,” Mr. Neef has scheduled a rich array of operas, including new productions of Richard Strauss’s “Salomé,” with the South African soprano Elza van den Heever in the title role; Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” with Deborah Warner making her Paris Opera debut as a director; and Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet,” with the French baritone Ludovic Tézier as the Danish prince.In a new production of Charles Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” France’s new favorite tenor, Benjamin Bernheim, will share the role of Roméo with Francesco Demuro, while Elsa Dreisig and Pretty Yende will alternate as Juliette. This opera, scheduled for next summer, will offer an interesting contrast to “I Capuleti e I Montechhi,” Bellini’s version of the same story, albeit borrowed from a different source, which is to be presented this fall.The Bellini opera is just one of three next season to be directed by the Canadian Robert Carsen. His acclaimed production of “Die Zauberflöte” will return in September, with the powerful German bass René Pape sharing the role of Sarastro with Brindley Sherratt and Ms. Yende alternating with Christiane Karg as Pamina. Mr. Carsen, whose celebrated 1999 Paris Opera production of Handel’s “Alcina” returned here during the current season, will now also direct the same composer’s “Ariodante.”One production the Bastille Opera revives with some regularity is Peter Sellars’s celebrated version of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” much of which is set against the backdrop of a powerful video by Bill Viola, with his trademark images of water, fire and nakedness. With Gustavo Dudamel, the Paris Opera’s new music director, conducting, Mary Elizabeth Williams will be Isolde to Gwyn Hughes Jones’s Tristan.Renée Fleming is scheduled to sing the role of Pat Nixon in a new production by Valentina Carrasco of John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe season will also note two anniversaries. This year’s 50th anniversary of President Nixon’s bridge-building trip to Beijing will be recalled in a new production by Valentina Carrasco of John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” with Thomas Hampson as the American leader and Renée Fleming as his wife, Pat.The other production, “The Dante Project,” which premiered in London last October, is a ballet by Wayne McGregor to a score by the contemporary opera composer Thomas Adès. It is inspired by last year’s 700th anniversary of the death of Dante, the poet-author of the “Divine Comedy,.”Just as Puccini will be present with “La Bohème” as well as “Tosca,” Verdi is no less a must in every opera season, here represented by two revivals. “La Forza del Destino” is an austere production by Jean-Claude Auvray, with Anna Netrebko and Anna Pirozzi sharing the role of Donna Leonora, Russell Thomas as her lover Don Alvaro and Mr. Tézier as her vengeful brother Don Carlo di Vargas. The second, “Il Trovatore,” another stirring tragedy, returns in a production set around World War I by Àlex Ollé of the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus.The furious pace of 24/7 news today certainly tests directors hoping to give a current edge to operas composed decades or centuries ago. But for Mr. Neef, when productions are inspired by the works of great authors, from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, there is something unchanging in the way they “all delve into human complexities, the subtleties of consciousness and the tensions between the sexes and generations.” More

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      Review: In ‘Oratorio for Living Things,’ the Song Is You

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      Heather Christian’s rapturous new music-theater work turns a tiny amphitheater into a vast cathedral of sound.At the Academy of Music, where the Philadelphia Orchestra used to play, longtime subscribers were sometimes rewarded with a chance to move from floor-level seats to raised gilded boxes at the back of the horseshoe. After my parents took that step, my mother soon regretted the change. It’s true she saw the players better from above, but she’d felt them better from below, where the buzz of bassoons and the blast of tubas came through the wood directly to her feet, turning symphonies into seismic events.I thought of her vibrating metatarsals — and so much else about the rapture of intimate art — while sitting in the wooden amphitheater housing “Oratorio for Living Things,” Heather Christian’s profoundly strange and overwhelmingly beautiful new music-theater piece at Ars Nova’s Greenwich House theater. Tightly packed in the small, steep, egg-shaped bowl designed for the space by Kristen Robinson, six instrumentalists and 12 singers make music there that shakes the 100 audience members like a 90-minute earthquake.That seems appropriate for a work about profound human issues: our place in history, our place in the universe. At least that’s what I think it’s about, judging from lyrics I snatched from the sweep of sound and from reading the libretto later. Even then, I was not always sure I could pass a test on its content; though an author’s note in the program explains that the subject is time at three scales — quantum, human and cosmic — much of what was billed as quantum or cosmic felt distinctly human to me.Foreground from left: Divya Maus, Quentin Oliver Lee and Barrie Lobo McLain. Much of the text in Christian’s work is sung in Latin.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesNo matter. If the text is sometimes baffling and hermetic, it is confident enough in its oddness that you do not worry about crashing when it flies close to the twee line. Though I apparently didn’t recognize the “ballet of Chloroplasts and Mitochondria” that forms a part of an early section called “Oxygen + Photosynthesis,” I enjoyed it anyway. For Christian, ideas are fuel; it’s not that “these words mean nothing,” as one lyric coyly suggests, but that their meaning is not apprehensible through our usual interpretive circuitry. Unknowability, being part of the message, is necessarily part of the medium.As if to emphasize that, and draw parallels to traditional oratorios, much of the text is sung in Latin — but in this case translated backward, by Greg Taubman, from Christian’s English originals. Even when the words are contemporary, they are often drawn from unusual sources, including an accounting of how we spend our lives (13 days sneezing, 10 minutes giving bad directions to strangers) and a phone line Christian set up to solicit “memory mail”:“I was like 5 years old and both my parents were working late all the time,” one starts.“It’s 1964 or 1965, Beatles time, and I’m carrying a plate of spaghetti,” starts another.Kirstyn Cae Ballard, foreground, in the music-theater piece, which consists of several centuries of musical styles.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesWhat’s haunting is how the oratorio form and Christian’s private cosmology elevate such banal statements to an almost sacred plane. Alternating in the classical manner between massed choral singing and solo arias — all exquisitely performed under the music direction of Ben Moss — she throws several centuries of musical styles into the pot and swirls them around. The ear passes through currents of plainchant and gospel, blues and electronica; you may catch wisps of Orff and Reich, Holst and Massenet, in much the way you spot faces in a crowd scene.Yet this is not concert music. The production, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, highlights thematic cohesion and theatricality even without a traditional story. Both the set and the performers are draped in varieties of deep-space blue, as if to suggest a shared chemistry between people and their environment. (The beautiful costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) The sound (by Nick Kourtides) and lighting design (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) are likewise saturated, picking out voices and faces — great ones to begin with — to emphasize the shifting dynamic of individuals and groups.Even better, Evans has found a way of working with the singers so that every syllable sung, even the seemingly meaningless ones, feels as if it were informed by specific emotion.From left, Ballard, Ben Moss and Carla Duren in the 90-minute production.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesBut what is that emotion? Traditional theater often tries to bind audiences by pushing them toward a shared response, whether horror or hilarity. Christian is not working in that vein. As in earlier pieces like the requiem “Animal Wisdom” and the Mother Teresa cantata “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” she focuses on personal expression instead of story, content to let the formal elements shape the larger experience and leaving listeners free to make their own connections.In less skilled hands this could result in chaos or camp, but even her Mother Teresa, played by a man in drag with a ring light for a halo, avoided that trap. “Oratorio for Living Things,” which was shut down by the pandemic after two preview performances in March 2020, takes similar risks to get as close to spirituality as a contemporary theater piece dares. Near the end, after some sort of cataclysm brings the music to a halt, we are asked to stand in silence for a while, “feeling where we are on this New Year’s Eve of the cosmic year.” The performers admit that we may find this embarrassing: “We’re all embarrassed,” they say.But I — who usually slide under my seat when dragooned into acts of audience participation — was not embarrassed at all. I felt instead the kind of awe I feel in cathedrals, where the architecture itself forces one’s thoughts upward and outward. Or perhaps I felt more as my mother did when beautiful music came through her soles. Just so, in “Oratorio for Living Things,” Christian provides the notes but your body is the song.Oratorio for Living ThingsThrough April 17 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Charli XCX’s Ever-Evolving Pop

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherDoes Charli XCX want to be a big pop star? Do her fans want her to be one?The 29-year-old singer and songwriter, whose fifth studio album, “Crash,” came out earlier this month, has inspired a mountain of discourse since the release of her debut, “True Romance,” in 2013. Her prodigious output — which has encompassed dreamy pop, punky new wave, spiky and noisy electronic music and more conventional pop over a series of albums, EPs and mixtapes — can be seen as commentary on pop music itself, an experiment to push the boundaries of the major-label system, the result of a firm commitment to collaboration, or simply the bold wanderings of a curious and sometimes chaotic creative mind.A sub-narrative following her journey, however, has been the size of her stardom. Charli XCX has written on blockbuster hits for other artists. Does she choose to release the kind of music that will make her a superstar? “Crash,” the final album of her Atlantic Records deal, opened at No. 7 this week, a career high.On this week’s Popcast, The New York Times’s pop music editor Caryn Ganz sits in for Jon Caramanica, hosting a conversation about Charli XCX’s unconventional major label career, her sonic evolutions, her complex relationship with her listeners and the successes and missteps on “Crash.”Guests:Hazel Cills, an editor at NPR MusicShaad D’Souza, a writer who contributes to Pitchfork, The Fader, Paper and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      K-Pop Star Luna to Make Broadway Debut in ‘KPOP’ the Musical

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      The show, which had an Off Broadway run in 2017, will begin previews this fall at Circle in the Square Theater.“KPOP,” a high-energy multimedia show about Korean pop stars, will transfer to Broadway this fall.And at New York’s Korean Cultural Center on Wednesday morning, it was announced that the K-pop star Luna will be making her Broadway debut as the star of the show.“Anyone who has followed my career knows that musical theater has always been a driving passion of mine,” Luna said at the announcement. “Broadway represents the pinnacle of achievement in my profession, so being able to bring my culture to the fans who flock here from all over the world to see a Broadway show is the honor of my life.”The musical, conceived by Woodshed Collective and Jason Kim, had an Off Broadway run in 2017 at A.R.T./New York, where it was an immersive performance piece that occupied two floors of a building in Hell’s Kitchen. Kim wrote the book, and music and lyrics are by Helen Park and Max Vernon. “The world we explore in ‘KPOP’ is cutthroat, relentless in its pursuit of perfection, full of passionate, hugely ambitious artists, and ultimately a source of joy,” Park said on Wednesday.The show’s Off Broadway director, Teddy Bergman, and its choreographer, Jennifer Weber, will return for the Broadway production. Previews are to start on Oct. 13 at the Circle in the Square Theater; opening night is set for Nov. 20.Luna began her career in 2009 as the main vocalist and lead dancer of the K-pop girl group f(x) — one of the first groups to cross over into the United States — and went on to establish herself as a musical theater actress. In 2011, the singer, born Park Sun-young, starred as Elle Woods in the South Korean production of “Legally Blonde.”The same year she also starred as Violet Sanford in a musical adaptation of “Coyote Ugly” in Seoul. Since then, she has had lead roles in “High School Musical on Stage!” (2013), “In the Heights” (2015-16) and “Mamma Mia!” (2019-20).The cast of “KPOP” during the Off Broadway run, which was an immersive performance piece that covered two floors of a building in Hell’s Kitchen.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesNow, she’ll be starring in “KPOP.” The producers say that the Broadway version of the show will tell the story of one singer’s internal struggle, which in turn threatens to dismantle one of the biggest labels in the industry. At the same time, a host of international superstars are risking it all for a one-night-only concert.“For those of you who already know and love K-pop music, this show is going to remind you why you fell in love with it in the first place,” Luna said. “For those of you yet to discover K-pop, get ready. We are going to blow you away.”The lead producers of the Broadway production of “KPOP” are Tim Forbes and Joey Parnes. The Off Broadway show, which had a sold-out run, was an Ars Nova production in collaboration with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective.The Off Broadway production received mostly positive reviews. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley, said: “The show is best when parody blurs into the already surreal dimensions of what’s being parodied.” More

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      For Grammy Nominee Rogét Chahayed, Pop Isn’t Far From Mozart

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      Up for producer of the year, non-classical, on Sunday, a conservatory-trained collaborator focuses on “finding the simplicity, finding that golden chord progression.”Two very different kinds of education went into the music that has brought Rogét Chahayed a 2022 Grammy nomination for producer of the year, non-classical. One was traditional music school: the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where Chahayed studied classical music and jazz and earned a degree in piano performance. The second was a studio apprenticeship of late nights and split-second decisions: playing keyboards and building beats for the Los Angeles hip-hop mogul Dr. Dre.“The real me is a blend of classical music, jazz harmony and technique, everything together,” Chahayed said, speaking via video from his home studio in Los Angeles, where rows of electronic keyboards filled a wall of shelves, “So you’ll hear the voicings of Debussy and Ravel and stuff like that, that I really love, in my left hand, but maybe in the right hand I might be trying some Art Tatum. I love to try and see the connection between everything.”Chahayed’s huge catalog includes Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More”; Jessie Reyez’s “Far Away”; Halsey’s “Bad at Love”; Big Sean’s “ZTFO”; Miguel’s “Sky Walker”; Kali Uchis’s “I Want War (But I Need Peace)”; Nas’s “27 Summers”; and two Grammy-nominated songs from previous years, Drake’s “Laugh Now Cry Later” and Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode.” His nomination on Sunday is for songs with Kali Uchis, Doja Cat and Anderson .Paak, among others.Chahayed’s studio work draws on a store of music theory and music history along with instinct, attentiveness and luck. As a producer and songwriter, he can assemble complex harmonies and subtle multitracked orchestrations, reflecting his conservatory studies.But Chahayed can also come up with skeletal, arresting, earworm riffs that he often enriches, spatially and harmonically, as a track unfolds. He doesn’t mind repeating just two or three chords. “A lot of my composer and classical instrumentalist friends might look at that as like, ‘Oh, it’s so simple,’” he said. “Actually, producing music today reminds me a lot about the way Mozart would compose. Obviously a lot of Mozart’s music is very simple and very digestible, and it’s so open that if you make a mistake, you can hear everything. The difficulty is finding the simplicity, finding that golden chord progression.”Chahayed adeptly navigates the way songs are made in the 21st century: a process that’s at once musicianly, technological, intuitive and brutally Darwinist. Hooks and beats that were recorded in a few moments can sit for months on a hard drive, to be discovered, tweaked and augmented by collaborators who have never met. All that matters is whether someone hears that a track has potential, wants to finish it and finds something that works.“I enjoy working with the artists who let me cook from scratch,” Chahayed said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times“If I have a philosophy, it’s that I want to be able to execute the vision of the artist first,” Chahayed said. “But also to do it in a way that’s innovative, that’s always finding a way to push the boundaries sonically.”The Colombian American songwriter Kali Uchis has only released a few tracks with Chahayed’s production — including “Aguardiente y Limón,” cited in his Grammy nomination — but they live near each other in Los Angeles, and she often visits his studio to work on music.A Guide to the 2022 Grammy AwardsThe ceremony, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, was postponed for a second year in a row due to Covid and is now scheduled for April 3.Jon Batiste Leads the Way: The jazz pianist earned the most nominations with 11, including album and record of the year. Here’s his reaction.The Full List: Pop stars like Justin Bieber, Doja Cat and Billie Eilish were recognized in several categories. See all the nominees.Snubs and Surprises: From a big shock to smaller slights, The Times music team breaks it all down.Performers: Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, BTS and Lil Nas X are among the first performers announced for the April 3 show, which will be available on CBS and Paramount+.A Major Change: The awards will be the first since the Recording Academy ended its heavily criticized anonymous nominating committees.“He just loves to just create, create, create,” she said by telephone from Los Angeles. “Just for the pure satisfaction of making things that are unique, and not for any type of ulterior capitalistic motives. If it so happens to end up being a big song, then great. But with me and Rogét, I’ve never gotten in the studio and felt any weird pressure to go in any direction. It was alway very organic, very natural and very, just, free.”After graduating from the conservatory in 2010, Chahayed moved back to Los Angeles, where he grew up; his mother is from Argentina, his father from Syria. He played jazz and chamber-music gigs and taught piano lessons; he also found a mentor: Melvin Bradford, better known as Mel-Man, one of Dr. Dre’s main producers since the 1990s.“I’d go to his house and make five to eight beats per day. From 1 p.m. all the way to sometimes 2, 3 or 4 in the morning,” he said. “We would send countless beats to Dre every day, just in hopes that maybe something would click.”He added, “It was definitely a big difference from sitting in a class learning about Bach chorales or ear training.”Chahayed also collaborated with others, including the producer Wesley Singerman. In 2013, they sold outright some tracks they had made; their music turned up, uncredited, on Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly” in “For Sale?” and “U.”In 2014, Mel-Man surprised Chahayed one day by taking him to an unmarked building. It was Dr. Dre’s studio. “This door opens, and I just see a giant S.S.L. and Dre is sitting there turning knobs with his hands,” Chahayed said, referring to a Solid State Logic recording console. “He told me that he heard I was nice on the keys and he was going to put me to the test.”He passed muster and started working on Dre’s productions. “You have a responsibility to be the best you can be all the time and constantly portray musical excellence: technique, taste, flavor, rhythm,” he said. “I’ve had Dre right there, standing over everybody saying, ‘Hey, what you got?’ And when you have the biggest, most influential producer and rapper in the world telling you that, you’ve got to act.”One of Chahayed’s first blockbuster hits was “Broccoli” by Dram (who now goes by Shelley FKA Dram), featuring Lil Yachty, which has been streamed more than a billion times. Its steady-plinking piano chords, Chahayed said, were a happy accident. He had packed up his equipment after a session with Dram, only to receive a last-minute call that Lil Yachty was on his way to the studio. He unpacked and plugged in a keyboard, playing a few chords to test the connection; those chords became the song’s central loop.One of Chahayed’s first huge hits was “Broccoli” by Dram (who now goes by Shelley FKA Dram), featuring Lil Yachty.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times“Where and how I find most of my success as a producer and songwriter is, you know, just showing up,” Chahayed said. “Finding a sound and coming up with the progression, or a riff, or something identifiable that catches people’s attention.”“Kiss Me More,” the hit by Doja Cat featuring SZA that is nominated for record of the year (the recorded track), song of the year (the composition) and as part of album of the year, could have ended up as one more stray computer file. Chahayed was working with Yeti Beats, Doja Cat’s longtime executive producer, at what he called “a beat cook-up session.” Yeti Beats suggested some “keywords” — “anime music” and “cuteness” — with Doja Cat in mind.“I grew up with four younger sisters, and we all bonded a lot over anime and video game stuff,” Chahayed said. “This cute jazzy vibe from a lot of games kind of seeped in. So I tapped back into that realm that specific day, and we made a few ideas.”He chose a guitar-like sound and recorded a twinkly little riff that “just kind of came naturally in the moment,” he said. “I knew there was something special about that track.” Yeti Beats repeatedly presented the riff to Doja Cat, and at one session, he sped it up; it clicked.As Chahayed’s reputation has grown, so has his control over his music. He sometimes turns down requests to use his beats for particular songs. And, whenever possible, he tries to work alongside the main artist in real time.“For most people, a general procedure is have tons of beats and melodies and ideas and things of that sort ready. A lot of artists have a different kind of attention span, and maybe react better to things that are ready-made. But I’ve adapted more to the spontaneity of just showing up with the instruments. I enjoy working with the artists who let me cook from scratch.”He’s also looking ahead. “I always have a five-to-10-year plan,” he said. “Thankfully, I have been able to hit my last five-year goal: You know, get No. 1s, get Grammy nominated, accumulate tons of record sales and charting stuff. And it’s cool, but it only fuels me to go further. My real passion is that I want to score movies. I want to do what John Williams, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Bernard Herrmann do. Those guys are my true heroes.”He added, “I’ll never stop producing. I’ll never stop making beats. I’ll never stop working with artists. But I would love it if you’re watching a movie and seeing ‘Music by Rogét Chahayed.’ That’s my obsession.” More

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      Lizzo Makes Shapewear

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      The many, many people who have applauded, criticized and otherwise taken part in what often seems like an endless discussion around Lizzo’s naked form may be surprised to learn that she does not spend quite as much time undressed as they may think.“Sometimes when I look at the internet, I have an identity crisis because I’m, like, ‘Wait, who do these people think I am?’” Lizzo (birth name, Melissa Jefferson) said recently via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. Behind her were many awards, an amethyst crystal for good vibes, and her Baby Yoda collection. “Right now I think people just think I’m naked all the time,” she said. “That’s the one thing I see: ‘Ooohhh, there’s old Lizzo, she’s naked again, I’m shocked she got on clothes.’”Sure, she has posted some nudes online, using her own body to force a reassessment of prejudices around size and beauty. Sure, she has gone to events like Cardi B’s birthday in a sheer crystal dress over a thong and pasties and set off a viral debate.But actually she has spent a good chunk of her time in the last three years not just on her upcoming album, or her new Amazon Prime reality show, “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” but also on an entirely different project. One that involves putting stuff on, rather than taking it off.It is, she teased recently on social media, “the biggest thing yet. Bigger than anything I’ve ever done.” It may also be the most controversial.Because Lizzo, champion of unfettered flesh, is making shapewear.You know, the type of underwear that traditionally has seemed the opposite of the message about loving yourself as you are, contained in such Lizzo songs as “Juice” and “Truth Hurts.” Not to mention her TV show.It’s the sort of potential contradiction that, in the social media echo chamber of personal sensitivities, can often end up viewed as a betrayal of the bond between fan and favorite. As Lizzo knows. Which is why she wants to be clear: She isn’t trying to change other people’s bodies. She’s trying to change the essence of shapewear itself.The line is called Yitty, after her childhood nickname, and it was created with Fabletics Inc., the parent company of Fabletics, the “active life wear brand” co-founded by Kate Hudson. It will be introduced this week with about 100 different pieces divided into three collections: Nearly Naked, Mesh Me and Major Label.Together, Lizzo said, they will “give everyone the opportunity to speak for themselves when it comes to how their body should look and how they should feel in their body.”“Shapewear was one of those untouched constructs in fashion people weren’t really messing with — or thinking about,” Lizzo said. ”At a certain point I started to make my own little pieces: little moments here, little moments there, little booty lift here. I wanted to share that.”YittyThe point is to do for the concept of so-called innerwear what Lizzo did for size in general, not to mention the flute, which she famously plays while twerking — what she has done for herself, really: break it out of the box where society and culture has stuck it. Get past body positive, which has become a sort of meaningless catchphrase for the mainstream, to body normative for everyone.“I’m selling that more than I’m selling thongs, more than I’m selling bodysuits or I’m selling shapewear,” Lizzo said. “I’m selling a mentality that ‘I can do what I want with my body, wear what I want and feel good while doing it.’” That whatever body you are showing off, it’s not, “‘Oh, how brave,’” she continued. “No. No more of that. Nothing to see here but a body, just like your body.”A Brief History of Shapewear“Shapewear” is a relatively new name for a very old concept (kind of like how “wellness” now encompasses “diet”) — that is, that a woman’s body should be altered via external means to make it more acceptable to the eyes of various beholders, most of them men. If that involved pain … well, such was the price of achieving society’s definition of beauty.What forms the alterations take have varied according to cultural norms; references to girdles can be found as far back as the “Iliad.” Panniers, those underskirt structures that exaggerated hips, were a 16th-century version of shapewear; so were steel or whalebone and canvas corsets. Come the mid-20th century, elasticated girdles were in vogue, which in turn gave way to pantyhose, which evolved, in 2000, into Spanx, which is what made shapewear modern-day famous.By swapping out cut-and-sew technology for Lycra knit, the Spanx founder Sara Blakely transformed Hollywood red carpets becoming a billionaire along the way.Still, Spanx, like all the corsets and girdles before it, was a kind of “foundation garment,” made to be hidden, its very existence suggesting that what was underneath was somehow not quite up to par, even as it acted as a secret weapon to allow bodies of all types access to clothes made for the few. Also, “comfort,” when it comes to shapewear, remained a relative term.In part to change that, lots of new players have entered the market, most notably, Yummie Tummie, founded in 2008 (and now rebranded as Yummie); Honeylove, created in 2016; and, above all, Skims, the Kim Kardashian brand, introduced in 2019, trumpeting comfort and a variety of skin color tones, and valued at $3.2 billion during a fund-raising round earlier this year.Allied Market Research recently issued a report predicting the global compression and shapewear market would be worth $6.95 billion by 2030.Lizzo: “The story goes that when I was born, my brother could not say ‘Melissa,’ so he would go, ‘Meyitta,’ and my Auntie Carmen would go, ‘Did he call her Yitty?’ From then on it was ‘Yitty, Yitty.’ Sadly, my auntie passed in May of 2020, and a few months later, I decided to call this Yitty in her honor. She would have loved this, she would have been so proud.”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesThough shapewear sales declined during the pandemic (who needs it when you are lounging around at home in your sweats?), Kristen Classi-Zummo, an apparel industry analyst for the NPD group, said that there has been an uptick in interest as Covid-19 protocols have relaxed and nightlife has returned.Comfort remains important, she said, but growth was most apparent in “innovation, and pieces worn to shape and be seen,” especially among consumers under 40. Cora Harrington, the founder and editor in chief of The Lingerie Addict blog and the author of “In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie,” pointed out that for younger people, “Spanx tend to be more associated with their mothers. They want something more fashionable.”“I think there is space for another brand to bubble up and control that narrative,” Ms. Harrington said. Perhaps because, despite all the advances in the sector, the overriding aesthetic has remained tied to the Barbification of the body.That’s where Yitty comes in.A Briefer History of YittyThough it may seem, in the wake of Fenty and Skims, that Lizzo, 33, is simply jumping on the celebrity shapewear bandwagon, she has actually been thinking about the sector since she was 12.That, she said, was when she was growing up in Houston (her family had moved from Detroit when she was 10) and, starting in middle school, learning to be “ashamed of my body.” Later, once she had begun to assert herself musically, she rejected that mind-set, and the undergarments that came with it, entirely. And it was only after that, when she finally started to “have fun with my body, creating shapes and allowing my body to be curvaceous, loving the rolls that you’re supposed to hide, and exploring through fashion,” that she started to think about shapewear again.“I went to a store — I won’t name the store — looking for something for a party,” she said. “And the shapewear aisle was in disarray, like someone went in there in a mad dash looking for something they couldn’t find. There were pieces on the floor, and there were only three colors — jet black, ivory white or pink, the color of my nails.”Lizzo waved her hand, with its long, pointy nails the color of ballet shoes. “No one is that color!” she said. She got serious about changing that around the time of “Truth Hurts,” when she had a handful of meetings with different brands. “I was like: ‘Guys, I’m telling you, I’m trying to revolutionize shapewear and our relationship with it and with our bodies,’ and they were like, ‘Well, you could do a capsule collection with us for X, Y and Z,’ and I was like, ‘They’re not getting the vision!’”“It was important for me when I wear it and model it, I am not looking different than I normally look,” Lizzo said. “You see my rolls and see a belly, and sometimes you see me in super-high compression. A lot of times I will do red carpets and not wear shapewear at all, or not wear a bra. It depends on how I feel. You see me as I want you to see me.”YittyShe wanted shapewear that announced itself with pride — and felt like a hug. The kind of shapewear that if you sat down and your shirt rode up or your pants pulled down, you’d be happy to show off. The kind of shapewear you could wear with nothing on top. She didn’t even want to call it “shapewear.” She wanted to call it “bodywear,” but no one knew what that meant.Then Kevin Beisler, her manager, told her he had met with the Fabletics team, who had been doing a lot of customer surveys.Those customers had said that “the No. 1 category they wanted us to start was shapewear,” said Don Ressler, who founded Fabletics Inc., along with Adam Goldenberg. Mr. Ressler had seen what can happen when you combine celebrity power and a clothing sector in which the celebrity has some personal authority. (Fabletics was previously named TechStyle Fashion Group and had produced Savage X Fenty, which it spun off in 2019.)“They get it,” Mr. Beisler told Lizzo.“Those words alone were so incredible, because I hadn’t heard them,” she said. “Nobody had believed in my wild dream.”Actually, Mr. Ressler said, “we think it’s a multibillion-dollar opportunity.”The Lizzo FactorLizzo does not think the market is saturated or that she missed the boat because there are other brands ahead of her. “There’s nothing like feeling like you’re in the right place at the right time,” she said.Yitty is “something personal to me, something for the baby version of me,” she continued. “I have been parallel with the body positive movement for a long time, and people have made my name synonymous with it, and I’m always like, body positivity belonged to the people who truly created it, the Black, brown, queer big women, my girls in the 16 plus.” As an indicator of intended audience, the ad campaign features models of all sizes, including Lizzo’s best friend, who is an extra-small, as well as Lizzo herself.Lizzo is the chief executive and co-founder of Yitty; Kristen Dykstra, the former chief marketing officer of Fabletics, is president. The lines took three years to develop and will range from XS to 6X (which is one size bigger than any of Skims’ current offerings). Prices for leggings are $69.95 to $74.95, and bras will be $49.95 to $59.95.There are two compression weights, antimicrobial fabrics so the shorts and thongs and leggings can be worn without extra underwear, bras that hold their shape without underwire, a print that looks like a butterfly wing, and recycled packaging. Lizzo named all the colors, though her favorite inventions — for a bright blue and a bright pink — are unprintable here.”I don’t want to be the only one who can enjoy autonomy with my body because I am now in privileged position where people want to make me stuff and I can afford it,” Lizzo said. “I want to help other people out in that way too, so they’re not just looking at me and thinking, ‘Damn, I wish I could afford custom thousand-dollar pieces.’”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesShe also tried everything on. “I love a cheeky panty, I really do,” she said. “It can be tricky when you’re using compression fabric because if it’s too cheeky, it can roll up.” But, she said, many times “I’d put a panty on and say. ‘Can you slide the side up this way?’” — she mimed raising the cut of the leg — “because it makes the booty look good.”She has very strong opinions about what she likes. “I could not take off the Yitty convertible bandeau for a long time,” she said. “I’m a bandeau innovator.” As for the shaping thong: “I’m like: ‘Hello, big girls wear thongs. Let us wear thongs and give me that little love up top.’”Yitty will be sold on its own website and on the Fabletics website. It will also be sold in shop-in-shops in the 76 Fabletics stores and have its own pop-up in Los Angeles on April 12. And it will be front and center at Lizzo tours and in her videos and TV shows. As far as she’s concerned, it’s the beginning of her next stage.“I want to be a world changer,” she said. “I wasn’t just making cool music — my art always had a bigger purpose. Now I’m just taking that usefulness and making it tangible.”“This is something I’m building that can hopefully last for generations — not just the company or the product, but the mentality of Yitty,” she continued. “This idea of liberation with your body and being able to express it in different ways can go so, so far.” More

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      Stray Kids, a K-Pop Octet, Debuts on the Chart at No. 1

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      The eight-member group sold more than 100,000 copies of its new mini-album, “Oddinary,” on CD, which came in an array of collectible versions.Stray Kids, a K-pop group formed through a reality-TV show, has made its first appearance on the Billboard 200 chart a big one, opening at No. 1.“Oddinary,” a seven-track EP with lyrics mostly in Korean, had the equivalent of 110,000 sales in the United States in its first week out. The vast majority of those sales were for CDs, as the eight-man group’s “Oddinary” came out in a variety of collectible versions including stickers, posters, trading cards and other goodies. The mini-album also had 10 million streams, according to Luminate, the tracking service formerly known as MRC Data (and, before that, Nielsen Music).Lil Durk’s “7220,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2 with the equivalent of 81,000 sales, mostly from streaming, a 33 percent drop. Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack is No. 3, and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4.“Fighting Demons,” the second posthumous album by Juice WRLD, the singer and rapper who died at age 21 in late 2019, jumped 30 spots to No. 5 after it was rereleased in a deluxe version and also came out on physical formats like CD and vinyl LP. “Fighting Demons” had opened at No. 2 in December.The Weeknd’s compilation “The Highlights” is in sixth place, and the British pop singer and songwriter Charli XCX opens at No. 7 with “Crash,” a career high.On the singles chart, Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” a nearly two-year-old song that has become newly hot at pop radio after it became a meme on TikTok, holds at No. 1 for a fourth straight week. More

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      Daddy Yankee, Reggaeton’s First Global Star, Steps Aside

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      For “Legendaddy,” an album billed as his last, the reggaeton forefather surveys the shifting styles that shaped his career.Plunge into the recesses of YouTube, and you’ll find a video of Daddy Yankee performing live in his late teens, wearing a silver zip-up windbreaker and a creeping caterpillar mustache. It was 1996, and the future global ambassador of reggaeton freestyled a cappella to a crowd of hundreds. He flaunted a breathless flow with touches of Patois intonation, a signature of the time, when the genre “underground” — a predecessor to reggaeton — was flourishing. The D.J. dropped a beat, chopping drum breaks and syncopated dembow riddims. Yankee effortlessly kept up, brandishing the hyperspeed raps that would make him a superstar in the next decade.Daddy Yankee, cherub-cheeked and about 19, grew into a reggaeton kingpin, a pop star and a tycoon, helping transform a street sound into an industry cash cow. In 2004, he announced his ascent into the mainstream with a strategic and simple opening statement: “Who’s this? Da-ddy Yan-kee!” A little over a decade later, he rode the acoustic guitar strums and liquefied, popeton beat of “Despacito” into vexing, international ubiquity.But after a 32-year career, is it time for Yankee to rest on his laurels? In a sentimental video posted on March 20, the Big Boss announced his retirement from the music industry. There is one victory lap left: a final tour and an impeccably titled album, “Legendaddy.”Retirement albums can be tricky. Some artists misguidedly ride recent trends in an attempt to reproduce the aesthetics of a younger generation; others reprise the tricks that made them famous in the first place; the most successful dare to bare their souls and create new intimacy with listeners.Yankee, 45, has never really been one for profound personal vulnerability. He was, however, always honest about his youth in the Villa Kennedy caseríos, or housing projects, in San Juan, where he and DJ Playero, another reggaeton pioneer, tinkered with reggae en español and freestyling, and distributed their experiments on mixtapes in the early ’90s. When Yankee was 16, a bullet lodged in his right leg, a souvenir of crossfire outside Playero’s studio one afternoon. It forced him into over a year of recovery, closed the door on his major league baseball ambitions and refocused his energies toward music.As underground, and later reggaeton, sprawled, Yankee fine-tuned the art of merging sex and bombast in song. Harnessing street swagger and dirty talk, he leveraged his breakneck rap flows into carnal dance floor anthems, like “Latigazo” from 2002 or his 2004 smash “Gasolina.” These became the songs that taught an entire diaspora about sex and the ecstasy of a perreo sucio, the kind of grinding that involves exchanging denim dye and sweat with a dance partner.There have been sporadic moments of social commentary in Yankee’s music, as on the theatrical blockbuster album “Barrio Fino.” But after “Gasolina” engulfed the Anglo mainstream, his celebrity grew and he swapped his prurient playboy image for that of a wealthy mogul: In 2005 alone, he inked a brand partnership with Reebok to design sneakers, apparel and accessories; agreed to model for Sean Jean’s spring collection; landed an endorsement contract with Pepsi; and signed a $20 million, five-album deal with Interscope Records.While Yankee settled into his role as a reggaeton capitalist, his mid-00s success also felt like affirmation for a generation of youth of the Caribbean diaspora. Reggaeton was the first music that was fully ours — fresh, raw, exhilarating, sensual. It brought us closer to the islands that birthed us, moving us toward some wistful dream of wholeness instead of constant loss.In the early and mid-2010s, Yankee released a spate of albums, but many of them lacked dimension and verve, relying on unimaginative commercial tropes. Around 2016, he started dabbling with two ascendant sounds: the first crest of EDM-reggaeton fusions, and the nascent genre of Latin trap, in which he became an in-demand featured guest. Both allowed him to remain in the spotlight, embrace his image as an elder statesman and avoid competing with a new wave of artists who were refreshing the movement with sentimentality and grit.For “Legendaddy,” his first solo album in a decade, El Cangri has inventoried the sounds and styles that have defined his career: self-mythologizing rap, perreo, EDM and popeton. The most dynamic moments come when Yankee reaches for the magic of the past — whether indulging in boastful hubris or summoning listeners into dance floor reverie. “Uno Quitao y Otro Puesto” is a corrosively effective blast of late-career posturing, complete with gunshot accents à la “Sácala.” On “Enchuletiao,” Yankee doesn’t rap, he barks a flood of bars about his unrivaled eminence in the genre, delivered through gritted teeth. “¿Qué tú me va’ a enseñar, si yo he esta’o en to’a las era’?” he says. “What are you gonna teach me, if I’ve been in all of the eras?” It’s a reminder of his technical skills — he hasn’t sounded this electric, this deliciously abrasive in years.With their stadium-sized trumpets and vibrant piano lines, “Rumbatón” and “El Abusador del Abusador” are thrilling, nostalgic callbacks to the salsa-reggaeton fusions of the mid-00s (fittingly, Luny of the duo Luny Tunes produced “Rumbatón”). “Remix” and “Bloke” are classic reggaeton romps, harnessing the kind of sexual fantasies and salacious exchanges that once made the sound so irresistible; the first even includes a reference to the Big Boss’s 2007 track “Impacto.”Yet a good portion of the songs follow prosaic, predictable pop formats: “Para Siempre” weaves acoustic guitar textures into a bland, mid-tempo popeton ballad, while “La Ola” and “Zona del Perreo” almost sound like they were engineered for Spotify’s “Viva Latino” playlist. “Pasatiempo,” with Myke Towers, lands primarily because of its interpolation of Robyn S’s “Show Me Love.” Sampling universally beloved bangers is a method Yankee has been unafraid to employ in the past (i.e., “Con Calma”), and it works here yet again.“Legendaddy” also has some egregious missteps: two EDM fusions, the globally popular style that has recently had a grip on the Latin charts. “Bombón,” featuring Lil Jon and the dembow visionary El Alfa, is virtually unlistenable — college spring-break music, complete with “Yeah!” ad-libs from an era long gone. “Hot,” which is dominated by its Pitbull feature, is essentially a caricature of Miami nightclub fare.Yankee does leave space for one refreshing moment of adventure with “Agua.” The track, a collaboration with Nile Rodgers and the reggaeton star Rauw Alejandro, is sparkling disco pop gloss, complete with groovy guitar riffs from the Chic legend.As a farewell album, “Legendaddy” honors all the styles of Yankee’s trajectory, highlighting the superpower that has enabled him to survive as a senior figure in a young artist’s game: flexibility. And in that way, the album also mirrors the history of reggaeton itself: a sound that is now unrecognizable from its political, grass-roots beginnings, and one whose history implies constant transformation.There is always the chance that Yankee will return on some kind of comeback tour, as plenty of hip-hop giants have done after bowing out. Yankee got his flowers while he was still around, and his indelible impact cannot be understated. But “Legendaddy” also speaks volumes about what reggaeton needs more of in this moment: fresh blood, unorthodox aesthetics and storytelling world-builders seeking to inject the genre with the euphoria, fireworks and narrative depth the movement has promised since its inception. More