Music

Marlis Petersen, one of the greatest acting talents in opera, prepares for Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case” in Berlin.BERLIN — You might know her as the world-famous diva Emilia Marty. Or as Ellian MacGregor — maybe even Eugenia Montez or Elsa Müller. It’s an open question in Janacek’s operatic thriller “The Makropulos Case,” about the twilight of a woman who has adopted an assortment of identities throughout her unnaturally long life.Her real name is Elina Makropulos, born 337 years ago on Crete and still going, thanks to an elixir her father tested on her as a teenager. She’s not so different from Marlis Petersen, the soprano playing the part in a new production that premieres at the Berlin State Opera on Sunday.OK, Petersen is a mere 54. But like Emilia, she comes from Greece, and is currently inhabiting just the latest in a long line of personas. There are few singers with Petersen’s dramatic ferocity and intelligence — who understand that opera is, fundamentally, theater.“In the beginning of my career, the singing was most important,” she said in a recent interview at the Berlin opera house. “Then the music became as important as the text, and then came playing the role. And I wouldn’t say it’s 33-33-33. It’s three times 100.”She loves, she added, to linger in and study the psychologies of women. It’s what has made her, despite a voice on the slender side, one of today’s greatest singer-actors — a small club with the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Asmik Grigorian and Karita Mattila — and a director’s dream.“She’s in this extra class of singer,” said Claus Guth, who is directing the new “Makropulos Case.” “This is to a certain degree people with an energy and a little craziness, in a positive way. I would tell Marlis, ‘We do everything upside down and on the moon,’ and she would say, ‘Let’s go for it.’”Petersen playing the changeable diva Emilia Marty in the Berlin State Opera’s new production of Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case.”Monika RittershausPerhaps surprisingly, Petersen never studied acting beyond basic movement in school. “It’s like a gift from nature that I have,” she said. “It came to me by God.”Opera, too, was more of a random discovery than a deliberate plan. Born in Southern Germany, Petersen said music was “a big nothingness” in her house while she was growing up. She learned piano and flute, but didn’t hear much classical music; she listened to pop, but her parents considered a lot of it dirty, like her treasured ABBA cassette tape.Still, they were supportive, and Petersen’s piano teacher exposed her, she recalled, to “everything from Bach to Hindemith.” In a school music class, her voice was noticed, which led to singing in a church choir and learning the sacred repertory of Schubert, Mozart and more. When she was 15, her parents took her to her first opera, Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” She fell asleep.“I didn’t understand anything,” Petersen said. “I came late to opera, actually.”That happened when she studied voice in Stuttgart, financing her education in part by performing in a cover band called Square on weekends. Petersen played keyboard and sang hits like Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love” and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” With a keyboardist colleague, she would do gigs that included performing “Starlight Express” on roller skates.“It was good training, because the nights were long and there was a bit of toughness involved,” Petersen said. She imitated the voices of the original singers, a skill that paid off later when she entered a competition with categories for classical repertory, then chansons and musical theater. She won the top prize in both, channeling Barbra Streisand in “Yentl” for her show tune.But once she turned 25, she focused entirely on opera. She joined the ensembles of houses in Nuremberg and Düsseldorf. As a light coloratura soprano she sang roles like Ännchen in “Der Freischütz” and Oscar in “Un Ballo in Maschera.” Then, in 2003, she went freelance.Petersen began to develop a more personal repertory, and signature roles. There was Susanna in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” whom she saw as a “quick, funny and inventive” kindred spirit. And the title antiheroine of Berg’s “Lulu,” which she sang in about 10 runs before retiring it at the Metropolitan Opera in 2015. That role, notorious for the complexity and extremity of its music and psychology, was, she said, “the big thing in my life.”There is a little of Lulu in Petersen’s Emilia Marty — the chilly pragmatism and canny manipulation — but she said that this debut has been a challenge. Her colleague Ludovit Ludha, however, who is singing Albert Gregor, Emilia’s pawn, in the production, said that when he first rehearsed with her, he asked her whether she was sure she had no Czech in her blood, she navigated the language so well.“In each rehearsal I was crying,” he added. “It’s basically unprofessional from my side, but she’s so impressive.”Guth’s staging is also tailored, in part, to Petersen. Handsomely designed and stylized, the production has a crucial intervention: a white void, occupied by Emilia in the opening and between acts.Claus Guth’s “Makropulos Case” staging includes a white space that Emilia Marty inhabits between the acts.Monika Rittershaus“There is no single moment where Emilia is alone,” Guth said, “She’s always playing a role. So I invented a special room for her, where we see the emptiness of someone who is going for 300 years through life.”Without music or text, these interludes depend entirely on Petersen’s silent acting. Dressed in a slip and mostly bald, with patches of wiry white hair, she wears Emilia’s true age on her face and throughout her body as she wearily dons the costume for the coming act. The scenes that follow are long decrescendos; always, by the end, her energy is depleted.“This,” Guth said, “is a very specific quality that only Marlis can give me.”Barrie Kosky, who directed her role debut as the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera last season — a production she returns to this spring — said that in the rehearsal room, “there’s never anything less than 100 percent,” adding: “There may be marking high notes, but there’s no marking with acting.”He recalled that in preparing the first act of “Der Rosenkavalier,” she began to eagerly eat a croissant when it was brought into the scene. She told him that if her character had been having sex all night, she would be starving.“I thought,” he said, “there is a God in the theater, and he’s given us Marlis Petersen.”Many of Petersen’s latest triumphs have been at the Bavarian State Opera, where last summer she was named Kammersängerin, designating a special relationship with the company — “an old title, but a lovely surprise,” she said. There, she found a partner in the conductor Kirill Petrenko, the house’s former music director, with whom she sang in “Lulu,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and Strauss’s “Salome.”Around the time she was learning that opera, she bought a Harley-Davidson, which she named Salome. “I wanted to give her — yes, her — a fiery name,” Petersen said. The motorcycle is in Munich right now, but she otherwise keeps it with her in Greece, where she has lived since 2009: first in Athens, then in a house she built on land she has long owned in the Peloponnese.“I cry when I come home,” she said. “Whenever I board the plane, the tears begin. I need the sun as an inspiration.”Home is where she also keeps busy with her second calling: olive oil. Her region, she said, produces olives that are second only to those on Crete, and with the harvest on her property she makes oil that she sells, and gives away to friends. (Kosky has a small collection at his apartment in Berlin.)The label? In a coincidence that might remind you of “The Makropulos Case,” it’s called “Diva’s Elixir.” More

With concerts and a new album, musicians are trying to draw attention to the case of an inmate, convicted in the death of five other prisoners, who they believe deserves a new trial.Keith LaMar has spent 33 years in prison, nearly all of it in solitary confinement. He is scheduled to be executed in Ohio next year, after being convicted in the 1993 killing of five fellow inmates during a prison riot.But a cadre of jazz musicians led by Albert Marquès, a pianist, composer and New York City schoolteacher, is convinced he is not guilty. And they’ve decided to put music to work as a tool to help LaMar, who they say was denied a fair trial in the inmate deaths and should be granted a new one.“I believe he’s innocent,” Marquès said in an interview. “But if you don’t believe that he’s innocent? Cool. Agree, at least, to judge him again. Reopen the case. Let him prove that what he tried to say, but he was not ever able to say, is false or true. Give him another chance.”For more than a year, Marquès has organized concerts to draw attention to LaMar’s case. He is part of a wider group of civic activists and lawyers — the “Justice for Keith LaMar” campaign — that argues the government illegally withheld inmate statements that could have helped LaMar at trial and offered inmates who testified against him leniency and special deals.LaMar, who was convicted in the 1993 deaths of five fellow inmates, has maintained his innocence through multiple appeals.  An impressive roster of jazz professionals, including Salim Washington, Brian Jackson, Arturo O’Farrill and Caroline Davis, have played at the Freedom First concerts, which began on a broiling afternoon in August 2020 at the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, where some 25 musicians performed in the middle of a pandemic. There had not been a single rehearsal. They had no permit. The sound equipment was cobbled together. The budget nonexistent.Three concerts later, Marquès and the others are producing an album this month in conjunction with LaMar. A year in the making, it will feature remarks and poetry by LaMar, a 10th grade dropout who has educated himself in prison by reading Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Cornel West, as well as jazz from sympathetic musicians who’ve recorded covers and fresh compositions from locations including Spain and Oregon.“To meet someone like Keith LaMar, who’s not only incarcerated, but on death row, unfairly, unjustly, it’s a heavy thing,” said Washington, a tenor saxophonist and jazz educator with a doctorate from Harvard. “But the warmth that he has as a human, and the elegance and eloquence that he has as a scholar, and just the charge that he has for himself, and that he’s able to exude to the rest of us, is a thing of beauty.”Beyond music’s primal power to sooth, energize and inspire, it has helped focus attention on the pleas of those incarcerated for crimes they say they did not commit. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer convicted of murder, spent almost a decade in prison before Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” raised the profile of his case. He was ultimately freed years later.Bob Dylan played “Hurricane” at a 1975 benefit concert for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter at Madison Square Garden.Larry Morris/The New York TimesCarter spent 19 years in prison. In 1985, a judge voided his conviction and ordered his release.William E. Sauro/The New York TimesMarquès, who by day leads the music department at the Institute for Collaborative Education in Manhattan, is not Bob Dylan. Still, his efforts drew nearly 100 people last November to the most recent Freedom First concert inside a black box theater at Northwestern University.When the prison riot erupted in 1993, LaMar, a former drug dealer, was serving an 18-years-to-life sentence after pleading guilty in 1989 to fatally shooting a man, a drug user and childhood friend, who he said had attempted to rob him.Authorities said that during the riot, LaMar became an enforcer and used the chaos of a cellblock takeover by other prisoners to kill inmates who some viewed as “snitches.”LaMar is adamant that he had no role in the killing of the inmates during what became known as the Lucasville prison uprising, an 11-day siege during which some inmates seized hostages and a cell block to protest conditions.Ten people, nine inmates and a guard, died.LaMar suggests he was a convenient scapegoat for officials, an inmate who loudly objected to prison conditions and who had refused to cooperate in the riot investigation.“I think they came to me under the impression that I would plead guilty,” LaMar said in an interview. “And I think that that was a way for them to really kind of sweep these cases under the table.”But multiple appeals court decisions have gone against him, and the prosecutors who handled the case, Bill Anderson and Seth Tieger, remain unswayed.“To Bill and I, he is extremely guilty, he is where he belongs: on death row,” Tieger said in an interview. “But all of this was brought out at the trial and in all of his different appeals, and nobody has believed that anything was done wrong at all, and that this death sentence has been upheld consistently all the way through this.”The riot at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility was triggered by the warden’s demand that inmates submit to tuberculosis testing that Sunni Muslim inmates objected to on religious grounds. LaMar was in a recreation yard, waiting to re-enter his cell block, when inmates inside overpowered the guards and took control. He said he briefly went in, intending to grab some personal belongings, but was told by one of the riot leaders that if he didn’t want to be involved in the takeover, he had to leave.The Freedom First concerts to benefit LaMar have been organized by Albert Marquès, a pianist and music teacher in New York.Danielle A. Scruggs for The New York Times“And so I came back out onto the yard without retrieving my property,” LaMar said. He said he remained there until two or three in the morning.Prosecutors said LaMar actually stayed inside the cell block, killing or ordering the killing of four inmates there, and a fifth inmate the next day after being placed in a separate cell block with other prisoners as the riot continued.In the aftermath of the chaos, the crime scenes were too contaminated for investigators to find forensic evidence, such as DNA, to help identify the killers. So witness statements became critical.But before the trial, when it came time to review who had identified LaMar in the killings, prosecutors balked at turning over the statements. All of the inmates had been promised confidentiality, they said.The prosecutors asked the judge to decide what information to give the defendant. The judge ruled that the names of 43 inmates who had been interviewed by investigators should be turned over to the defense. Separately, prosecutors were to turn over 11 pages of brief summaries, without any names attached.It was the defense’s job to figure out who had said what — a nearly impossible task, even with the additional time and funds the judge offered, said Herman Carson, one of LaMar’s trial lawyers.“That list of names and statements, it was like, ‘Judge, you could give me another five years; these guys aren’t going to talk if we just walk in there cold and say, ‘Hey, which one of these 43 statements did you make?’” Carson said.Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, and Justin Murray, an associate professor at New York Law School who researches disclosure disputes in criminal proceedings, called the judge’s decision unusual, one that unfairly handicapped LaMar’s lawyers.“People have tried to reopen the Lucasville cases, and it seems like the courts are just like, ‘Oh, this is that black hole called Lucasville,’” Godsey said. “‘We’re not going to look at it.’”Given the death of the prison guard, LaMar’s trial in 1995 was moved to avoid any prejudicial climate to the adjoining county, just 30 miles away and also overwhelmingly white. Prosecutors used peremptory challenges to remove the only two Black potential jurors, so LaMar’s case was heard by an all-white jury.Eight inmates testified that LaMar was involved in the killings. Six, including Stacey Gordon, said LaMar had led the “death squad.” But a year earlier, Gordon had given a sworn statement to investigators in which he said he had not seen LaMar in the cell block, and that he did not know who LaMar was.That statement was never turned over to the defense, one of a number that defense lawyers have argued would have helped LaMar, but were withheld. Initially charged with attempted murder and seven counts of assault in connection with the riot, Gordon testified after reaching a plea agreement for only two assaults.Ten people died during the uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, which lasted 11 days.  Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDana Hansen Chavis, a lawyer for LaMar, said Gordon’s statement could have been used to impeach his credibility and should have been turned over under the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense.“Before we, as a society, actually go through with taking the life of another human being,” Chavis said in an interview, “I believe that we need to be absolutely sure that society has followed all of the rules in posing the punishment and is absolutely sure that that person is guilty of the crime.”The prosecutors said that they had not withheld any evidence that was exculpatory from LaMar’s lawyers.“They were very, very aggressive attorneys,” Tieger said. “And we turned over everything that we were required to under the rules of discovery.”LaMar took the stand at trial and testified that he had not been involved in the killings. Five inmates testified for the defense, four of whom said they had seen LaMar in the recreation yard shortly after the riot started. Two said they saw him in the yard throughout the day.But the jury ultimately convicted LaMar in the murders and sentenced him to death, a decision that has been upheld through several appeals.In ruling against LaMar, some appellate panels found that, even if the withheld evidence had been exculpatory, it would not have outweighed other evidence and led to a different verdict. Several found that any withheld evidence was not “material” to his defense because they said statements from inmates who implicated themselves or others in the killings did not preclude LaMar from having had a role, since so many prisoners had taken part.Dwayne Svette, the son of one of the inmates LaMar was convicted of killing, said those trying to help LaMar are misguided.“I understand,” Svette said, “that there’s been people on death row before and they’ve got released because some evidence came up where they was actually not the people who did the crime. But that’s not the case in this man.”The cover of the “Freedom First” album features LaMar, Marquès and the names of other musicians who contributed music as part of an effort to block the execution next year.For those who have taken up LaMar’s cause, the evidence that he has been treated unjustly appears quite substantial and they have been equally impressed by his drive to overturn the verdict. In 2013, he spent eight months writing “Condemned,” an autobiographical book that details his experience from the day of the uprising through his time on death row. LaMar wrote the memoir on a typewriter, then dictated the story over the phone to a friend who transcribed each word.During his time in prison, LaMar became a student of jazz, and credits the music — especially “A Love Supreme,” the jazz journey by John Coltrane — with teaching him to improvise, to avoid being engulfed by his own anger. The Coltrane work is often played at the Freedom First concerts.LaMar came to the attention of the musicians after talking to Mother Jones about his case and his experience in making the best use of his time while in solitary confinement. Brian Jackson, a jazz musician who frequently collaborated with Gil Scott-Heron, then reached out to LaMar and they created a podcast about music and justice that attracted additional interest.LaMar typically calls in to the Freedom First concerts from the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown to say hello, offer remarks and poetry and listen to the music, his words at times interrupted by a tinny voice.“This call,” the voice says, “is originating from an Ohio correctional facility, and may be recorded and monitored.”On a bitterly cold Saturday in mid-November, LaMar called into the Northwestern theater outside Chicago for the most recent concert. He read poetry, both others’ and his own, like his poem “Tell ’Em the Truth.”Salim Washington performs at the Freedom First concert last November at the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center on the campus of Northwestern University. Danielle A. Scruggs for The New York Times“Children of slaves who braved the worst of it, so we, their children and grandchildren, could make the most of it,” LaMar read. “To shield us from the pain of knowing the truth, they never explained what kind of society we were born into.”The concert had opened with a Coltrane piece: “Alabama,” which some believe the jazz great wrote in response to the killing of four African American girls in a 1963 bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Later, the composer and alto saxophonist Caroline Davis blew the first haunting notes of “A Love Supreme” — the music that LaMar says freed him, at least internally.“This music was born out of suffering, I think,” Davis, a former composer-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, said in an interview. “That essence of it is what, in its musical form, people can feel. People can sense that suffering. But there’s also a lot of joy in the music.”Marquès said he is hopeful about the ability of the music to broaden support for LaMar’s case. But, he said, he had already benefited personally: LaMar, who he met in person last summer, has become one of his best friends.“There is a human connection,” he said, “that goes beyond those walls that are between us. And it’s very powerful. All of this comes from love.”Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Illinois. Susan Beachy contributed research. More

New albums by Jeff Tobias, Joseph White and Dave Ruder all have some experimental edges. But they also have catchy hooks.In his recent documentary about the Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes depicted both poles of that group’s creativity. There were moments featuring collaborations with experimental composers like La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, but also passages of fairly pure pop bliss.Subsequent generations of musicians in New York have demonstrated similarly diverse creative practices — take a trio of recent recordings produced by artists in their late 30s who are based in Brooklyn and Queens.Jeff Tobias’s “Recurring Dream,” Joseph White’s “The Wagging Craze” and Dave Ruder’s “not Great” all have some avant-garde edges. But they also have hooks — of the kind I’ve found myself humming on the subway in recent weeks. The new works don’t herald a total break with any of these composers’ past, noisier, more abrasive efforts. The present material is just what they happen to be up to right now.

Recurring Dream by Jeff TobiasConsider “Our Very Recent Past,” the first track on Tobias’s set, which he released on his own label in January. Over a repeating, fuzzed-out keyboard figure, this multi-instrumentalist initially uses a mellow approach to vocals, suggestive of the gentler corners of indie rock. But the lilting melody is in productive tension with the grim lyrics, nearly every word drawn out as though it were a somber proclamation: “By the time we figured out who the real fascists were, it was too late.”And then within that same first minute, there’s an entrance worthy of stadium rock, as Tobias’s stentorian yet sumptuous bass clarinet tone joins the arrangement. (The drumming, by Nick Podgurski, also summons you from your seat.) If the lyrics’ probing political sobriety might come across as something of a bummer, the music’s rousing invention is a kind of reminder not to curdle into passive cynicism.The album only becomes more playful as it progresses, even as the tight focus on contemporary ills hangs around. A track like “Transparency” has a touch of piano-driven rock ’n’ roll swing to it, but also a brief section of scorching reed textures — a nod to Tobias’s experience working in punk and free-jazz outfits. (Tobias will a lead a full band in this material at Roulette on March 1.)In an interview, he described the song “We’re Here to Help” — which follows a series of characters suffering from “money sickness” — as an “expropriation anthem,” even as it offers a modicum of pity for the greedy. The subjects include a financial wizard who pays no taxes — “his money lived in museums / his money lived on a dot / somewhere in the ocean” — as well as a woman who intends to “work around human rights” but winds up a consultant instead. (“Incidentally she never helped a single person,” the singer dryly observes over an up-tempo beat.)“I work on music, I work odd jobs, and I drink coffee and read the news until my head explodes,” Tobias said with a laugh in the interview. “So the lyrics are what’s on my mind, really and truly.”But, he added, when it came the music, “I was just enjoying myself; I was having a blast.”A live performance of Joseph White’s “The Wagging Craze,” which has recently been released as a recording.Ben AronsA similar sense of delight permeates “The Wagging Craze,” a theatrical piece White performed as a one-man show at Ars Nova in 2019. On the recording, released in December on the Gold Bolus label, there’s joy to be had in listening for the steadily morphing electronic music underneath the narration. Its fictional story revolves around a male-bonding exercise at college fraternities in the 1960s — involving a “a very complicated system of pulleys and levers” — that manages to attract the critical scrutiny of F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover.Structured around a series of faux-redacted documents, what White calls a radio opera has some compelling tunes. As Lyndon B. Johnson shifts away from his typically hard-driving Congressional negotiations, he also starts to record his own pop songs, like “New Motion.” Here, the president muses about loosening his grip on political power: “Let the world spin / let Nixon win / ’cause I’m a man with a body / and no one can stop me / with my wagging gang of guys, no misfortune can top me.”

The Wagging Craze – Original Cast Recording by Joseph WhiteThe president’s little aria has a finger-snapping charm, as well as flights of complexity. As Johnson starts to free associate about “boys smoking reefer, burning sage / naked girls shaking bells / indulging in strange smells,” White deviates from his established chord and rhythm patterns. In an email, he said, “My freewheeling approach to songwriting, and interest in looking under the hood of traditional masculinity, flow from the belief that we should have the freedom to crack open these formal structures and see if they’re really still necessary.”Ruder, a composer and performer who also runs the Gold Bolus label, said that his early looks at White’s songs have been useful for his own process, as he was working on his own new material. He released “not Great,” his latest collection of songs, late last fall. Humor and structural invention play crucial role here, too, though with more inward cast than the albums by Tobias and White.

not Great by Dave RuderOn a track like “Pious Rious,” pop culture ephemera is collected and jettisoned over strings, keyboard, clarinet and some syncopated guitar: “We got erased while watching old movies / The heroes were stupid / Archetypes ever-present and unavoidable / So we taped them over / With reruns of ‘She-Ra’ / This time I’ll be Skeletor.”Ruder said in an interview that while he sometimes writes with the hopes of creating a pop megahit, he keeps finding that “things just can’t be simple. The verse has to have one extra bar the second time it happens, and the next time it’s just got to have one random bit of 2/4 in there.”That’s all to the good. We already have a Max Martin, after all. But Ruder’s songs — like those of Tobias and White — fill a niche in the experimental music realm. And they enhance a listener’s appreciation of these artists’ other pursuits: Tobias’s scabrous improvised saxophone duets with Patrick Shiroishi, Ruder’s writing for detuned guitars, White’s sound-walk collaborations with the singer Gelsey Bell.When I started listening to these records, I wasn’t aware of the extent of the cross-pollination among them. Ruder provides guest vocals on Tobias’s album, and released White’s on Gold Bolus. But the associations go deeper. In our interview, Tobias described how, early in his time studying at Brooklyn College, he saw a mysterious ad for a musical collective. It simply read: “Sweat Lodge thinks you’re cool.”When Tobias went to a Sweat Lodge performance, he found that the collective included Ruder and White. Both of them were engaged in the performance of an experimental Alvin Lucier piece, across multiple floors of a stairwell in the building.“These are my people,” Tobias recalled telling himself. “This is the crew doing the work that I want to be around.”That crew’s warm, welcoming approach is still an attractive proposition for new listeners. More

The performing arts group in Charleston, S.C., will host 120 events in May and June, its first full season since the start of the pandemic.After two years of disruptions brought on by the coronavirus, Spoleto Festival USA, the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C, announced on Friday an ambitious season that it hopes will bring audiences back to live performances.The season, the first under Spoleto’s new general director, Mena Mark Hanna, will feature more than 120 opera, theater, dance and music performances across 17 days in May and June. The highlights include the world premiere of “Omar,” an opera by the musician Rhiannon Giddens about a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807.Hanna, the first person of color to lead Spoleto in its 45-year history, said the group hoped to offer a platform to overlooked artists.“We want art to be more than something that expresses received traditions, or something that is a reinforcement of a received canon,” Hanna, the son of Egyptian immigrants, said in an interview. “We want art to have this potential to bridge differences through its transformational power.”Other highlights include the premiere of “Unholy Wars,” an opera by Karim Sulayman, the Lebanese American tenor, which tells the story of the Crusades from a contemporary Arab American perspective, drawing on music by early Baroque composers. “The Street,” a new work for harp by the composer Nico Muhly will have its American premiere at the festival, featuring text by the librettist Alice Goodman.The pandemic forced the cancellation of the Spoleto Festival in 2020. Last year, the festival returned with a pared-down season; ticket sales were down 70 percent compared with before the pandemic amid lingering concerns about the virus.Hanna said he was optimistic audiences would return in force this year as the Omicron variant recedes. The festival plans to require audience members to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, and to wear masks.“This is truly about us saying to the world, ‘We have wanted this, we have needed this,’” he said. “That sense of collective catharsis is something that we missed and, even more now than ever, need because of the virus.”He noted that one of the planned works this season is a new production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” led by the director Yuval Sharon, that unfolds in reverse, with one if its main characters, Mimì, dying of tuberculosis at the outset of the opera. The reordered opera ends with cheerier scenes of friendship and revelry from the first act.“The first act is really about renewal and love and youthfulness,” Hanna said. “I see that as a metaphor of moving away from the darkness of the pandemic.” More

The singer-songwriter’s “Welcome to the Block Party” is a refreshing and ambitious pop-country debut filled with good-humored feminist anthems and pointed songs about an ex.NASHVILLE — In the summer of 2020, four months into the pandemic, Priscilla Block was broke and forced to move out of the apartment she was renting in a medium-fancy complex near Music Row. She’d been cleaning Airbnbs for money, and the work had dried up. Her mother and sister came into town to help move her into a far grimmer shared house nearby.“I was crying. I just felt like I failed so bad,” Block, 26, said one afternoon last month, parked outside the house in her white Jeep, one stop on a tour of dispiriting places she’d called home over the years.The small, ramshackle house had no air conditioning, and during that hot season, she came down with Covid-19 following a night out at a local bar. Quarantined and sick, Block nevertheless kept writing songs, including one about another misfortune from that same night: bumping into an ex.She’d been posting songs to TikTok for a few months at that point, including brassy, clever, uproarious feminist country anthems like “Thick Thighs” and “PMS.” But this song, “Just About Over You,” was different, a smoldering ballad that balanced resentment with determination. She uploaded a video singing it, and her fans reacted feverishly, raising money for her to record it professionally. Three weeks later, when she self-released it to streaming services, she went live on TikTok to thank them.“I thought that my life was changed then, you know?” she said. “I thought that was it.”The next day, “Just About Over You” unexpectedly topped the iTunes sales chart. For Block, who moved to Nashville in 2014 right after high school, and who sang at bars for tips in between other make-ends-meet jobs, the jolt was sudden. Before long, she had a record deal, a publishing contract and on Friday, she’ll release her full-length debut album, “Welcome to the Block Party.”It’s a refreshing and accomplished pop-country debut album, and an ambitious one, too. In a moment in which female performers are still scant on country radio, it is full of songs that announce their intentions loudly. The sheer scale of some of the album’s choruses — on “My Bar,” “Heels in Hand,” “Wish You Were the Whiskey” and others — recalls the power country of the 1990s and early 2000s, when the genre was taking its cues from arena rock, and when its pop ambitions were unfettered. Nothing about this album is shy.Earlier in the day, Block was sitting at a table at the Listening Room, a cafe and performance space where she used to work. Her hair was pulled up in a turquoise scrunchie that matched both her fingernails and her chewing gum. She wore a marble-dyed mesh shirt, tight jeans, clodhopper heels and a bounty of rings and necklaces. “Classy and trashy,” she joked, adding, “I like to wear clothes that fit my like hourglass shape, owning the whole body thing.”If Nashville has been inhospitable to female performers, it has been exponentially more so to anyone who deviates from its strictly proscribed beauty standards. As a young performer, Block found her role models far from country music; “I would watch Beyoncé get up on TV and like, she was a thicker girl, and that was cool.”“I can be the funny girl or I could be the girl crying her eyes out,” Block said. “The girl crying her eyes out or the girl trying to hype up the girl that’s crying her eyes out.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesBlock encountered resistance from her earliest days in Nashville: “I remember sitting down with somebody and it was that conversation, ‘I’m saying this in a nice way, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you need to lose weight if this is the career path that you really want to go down.’”The uproarious “Thick Thighs,” which had been a breakout success on TikTok, was written in a fit of pique. “I’ve been hearing ’bout ‘dad bods’ a little too long/So what about my muffin top is wrong?” she sings tartly, adding an implied eye-roll at the chorus: “I can’t be the only one who likes/Extra fries over exercise.” When she performed it for the first time at the bar where she sang covers of Carrie Underwood and the Chicks for tips, the crowd was singing along by the second chorus.But when it came time to put out her first EP (released last April) after signing her deal, she opted for a set of lovelorn heartbreak ballads. “I did have that fear of being the ‘funny song’ girl,” Block said. “I can be the funny girl or I could be the girl crying her eyes out. The girl crying her eyes out or the girl trying to hype up the girl that’s crying her eyes out.”But an urging from the president of her label — “She told me, ‘That is new. That is you. And that is ballsy for somebody to say that. I really want to make sure that doesn’t get lost.’” — made her realize how crucial both parts of her creative personality would be for her album.The album’s final song, “Peaked in High School,” plays to to her humorous side, with Block jubilantly dismissing the mean girls who made teenage life hard: “I got a deal, you got divorced/You see my face on billboards/I changed the number you’re still calling.” But the smokiness of her heartbreak songs is potent. They’re often pointedly about an ex who appears to still be lingering — on the insistently resilient “My Bar,” he tries to showing up at her local watering hole (“You think you’re such a star but here’s the funny part/ No one even knows who you are”), while on the slick kiss-off “I Bet You Wanna Know,” he’s painted as a stubborn shadow that Block can’t quite shake.Block’s blend of sass and angst is powerful, and a far cry from the music she was making when she first came to Nashville — “Taylor Swift meets Miranda Lambert” — and was building Pinterest boards charting what her style and aesthetic should be. “I basically was trying to cover up everything cool about me, you know?”Now, she leans into sparkle. In her Jeep, she sips water from a tumbler sent by a fan, covered in glitter and inscribed with the names of several of her songs. She’s having her album release concert at the Las Vegas branch of the bar she favors in Nashville. And she’s seeking out kindred spirits: “My goal is to do a ‘CMT Crossroads’ with Lizzo, and have her playing a frickin’ flute to ‘Thick Thighs’!” More

“Nasty Gal” and her two other 1970s albums influenced generations of R&B and hip-hop.Betty Davis, the singer and songwriter whose raunchy persona, fierce funk grooves and Afrofuturistic style in the early 1970s made her a forerunner of R&B and hip-hop to come, died on Wednesday in Homestead, Pa., the town outside Pittsburgh where she had lived. She was 77.Her reissue label, Light in the Attic, distributed a statement from her friend of 65 years, Connie Portis, announcing the death of a “pioneer rock star, singer, songwriter and fashion icon.” The cause was not specified. Ms. Davis, who first recorded as Betty Mabry, got her last name from her one-year marriage to the jazz bandleader Miles Davis. The music she made in the early 1970s didn’t bring her nationwide hits, but it directly presaged the uninhibited funk of musicians from Prince to Janet Jackson to Janelle Monáe.On the three albums she released from 1973 to 1975, Ms. Davis growled, moaned, teased and rasped through songs that were lascivious, bluesy and hardheaded. She posed in lingerie, in neo-Egyptian regalia and in space-warrior garb, with her hair in a towering Afro; she performed in silvery thigh-high boots, short shorts and a bustier. The poet Saul Williams described her as “the burning secret of Black womanhood and sensuality as expressed through song.”In a 2018 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Davis said, “I wrote about love, really, and all the levels of love,” proudly including carnality. “When I was writing about it, nobody was writing about it. But now everybody’s writing about it.”In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued Ms. Davis’s albums with her approval.“Nasty Gal” would be her last studio album released near the time it was recorded, and she never had a certified hit. As the 1980s began, she left the music business almost completely. Yet listeners and musicians have repeatedly rediscovered her, and Davis gained ever-increasing respect as her music was sampled — by Ice Cube, Method Man and Lenny Kravitz among others — and reissued. “This lady was hip before hip was hip,” Mr. Kravitz tweeted.She was born Betty Gray Mabry on July 26, 1944, in Durham, N.C., to Henry and Betty Mabry and grew up in rural North Carolina and in Homestead. Her father was a steelworker, her mother a nurse. In the 2017 documentary film “Betty: They Say I’m Different,” she recalled listening as a little girl to the blues and rock ’n’ roll — Big Mama Thornton, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Chuck Berry — and singing along with the record player. She was 12 when she wrote her first song, “Bake a Cake of Love,” and she sang in local talent shows.As a teenager, Ms. Mabry went o New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology; she brought along a notebook full of songs. She worked as a model for the Wilhelmina agency, appearing in Glamour and Seventeen magazines and as a pinup in Jet magazine. She also worked as a club hostess, and she savored the city’s 1960s nightlife and met figures like Andy Warhol and Jimi Hendrix.Her first single, in 1964, was “The Cellar.” According to Danielle Maggio, an ethnomusicologist and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh who wrote her dissertation on Ms. Davis, the song was named after a private club at Broadway and West 90th Street. Ms. Mabry became its M.C., disc jockey and hostess, and the club drew artists, musicians and athletes.In 1967, the Chambers Brothers recorded one of her songs, “Uptown.” The South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, then her boyfriend, produced a 1968 single for her, “Live, Love, Learn.”Ms. Davis with her husband, Miles Davis, at their home in New York in 1969. During their yearlong marriage she introduced him to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.Baron Wolman/Getty ImagesShe met Miles Davis at a jazz club and became his second wife in 1968. A photograph of her is the cover of Davis’s 1969 album, “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” which includes a tune titled “Mademoiselle Mabry.” Ms. Davis introduced her husband to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.While Mr. Davis was working on a later album, he considered calling it “Witches Brew”; his wife suggested “Bitches Brew,” the title that stuck. She also convinced him to trade the dapper suits of his previous career for flashier contemporary fashion. “I filled the trash with his suits,” she recalled in the documentary.Mr. Davis encouraged her to perform. In 1969, he produced sessions for her, choosing musicians including Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter from Davis’s quintet and Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox from Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. His label, Columbia Records, rejected the results, which remained unreleased until 2016.The marriage was turbulent and sometimes violent before ending in 1969. “Miles was pure energy, sometimes light but also dark,” Ms. Davis recalled in the documentary. “Every day married to him was a day I earned the name Davis.”She kept the name as she returned to songwriting. Material she wrote for the Commodores brought her an offer to record for Motown, but she turned it down because she insisted on keeping her publishing rights.Ms. Davis subsequently moved to London — where a new boyfriend, Eric Clapton, offered to produce an album for her — and then to the Bay Area, where Michael Lang, who had promoted the 1969 Woodstock festival, signed her to his label, Just Sunshine. Greg Errico, the drummer from Sly and the Family Stone, produced her debut album, “Betty Davis”; it opened with “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” and included “Anti Love Song,” which warned, “Just as hard as I’d fall for you, boy/Well you know you’d fall for me harder.”Ms. Davis wrote all the songs on her albums, and she produced the next two herself: “They Say I’m Different” and “Nasty Gal,” which brought her to a major label, Island Records. The music and arrangements were hers; she sang each part to her band members. Her songs were aggressive, jaggedly syncopated funk that was anything but shy. In “Nasty Gal,” she boasted, “You said I love you every way but your way/And my way was too dirty for you.”But while Davis conquered club audiences, she found little traction on radio, denying her any commercial success. In 1976, she recorded another album, which included the autobiographical “Stars Starve, You Know.” The song complains, “They said if I wanted to make some money/I’d have to clean up my act.”Island shelved the album, which went unreleased until 2009, and dropped Ms. Davis. “The doors in the industry kept closing,” she said in the film. “All these white men behind desks telling me to change. Change my look, change my sound. ‘Change your music, Betty.’”In 1979, she found independent financing to make another album, “Crashin’ With Passion,” recording it in Los Angeles with musicians including Mr. Hancock, Martha Reeves (of Martha and the Vandellas) and the Pointer Sisters; it, too, went unreleased. Ms. Davis felt that the music business was done with her. In 2018, she said: “When I was told that it was over, I just accepted it. And nobody else was knocking at my door.”The death of her father, in 1980, deepened her isolation and depression. On a yearlong visit to Japan in the early 1980s, she played some club dates with a Japanese band, her last live performances. She left no immediate survivors.But as the decades passed, she was far from forgotten. In the 2000s, Light in the Attic reissued her albums with her approval, along with the Columbia sessions produced by Mr. Davis and her unreleased 1976 album, “Is It Love or Desire.” Hip-hop samples made clear how hard-hitting her productions still sounded, and the 2017 documentary brought new affirmations that Ms. Davis had been ahead of her time.“Being different is everything,” she said in the film. “It is the way forward.” More

On the first page of Will Smith’s recent memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family entertainer to save his mother, himself and everyone else.“I would be the golden child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break character. Not once.”That he became a perpetual conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “I Am Legend,” a druglord-defeater in “Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “Ali” — might have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s most bankable actors. Off camera, he behaved much as he did on camera, revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.Over the last couple of years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s melting it down.This pivot to transparency makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23, and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there. Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show “Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.From left: Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Will Smith in an episode of “Red Table Talk.”Facebook WatchTheir path has been the opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and garish one, and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking, especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.Inside Will Smith’s WorldFor decades, the global superstar has won over audiences with his charm and charisma. Now, he is showing his more vulnerable side.A Commanding Presence: In a Times interview, the movie star reflects on his career, being a parent and learning to let go of perfectionism. ‘King Richard’: Here is what Smith said after he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the father of Venus and Serena Williams. His Memoir: “Will” is a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune told by an admittedly unreliable narrator, our book critic writes. Hollywood’s First Family: Among his various roles, Smith is also the patriarch of a family that has made intimacy its stock in trade.Theirs is a perfectly timed reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands, especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye, and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt out. It is also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its destigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.Will might be the Smith family member with the highest public profile, but it is Jada who helped draft the template of the family reinvention with “Red Table Talk.” The show, which appears on Facebook Watch, began in mid-2018, and quickly became known for unexpectedly vulnerable conversations, both with celebrity guests, and also between the hosts: Jada, Willow and Jada’s mother, Adrienne. Each woman holds her ground — take, for example, the episode about polyamory, in which Willow seems to baffle her co-hosts — but the inter-family good will prevents the show from ever erupting into true tension.Reality programming has only become an alternate safe space for the most famous in the last couple of decades. Previously, behind-the-scenes confessionals were more the purview of tabloids, an unsavory side effect of fame to be avoided at all costs. But beginning in the early 2000s, the era of “The Osbournes” on MTV, reality programming began to provide an escape hatch in which the famous could leverage their renown before being nudged toward the offramp of career irrelevance.It was novel then, and it ended up fomenting an entire cottage industry of second-chance grasps for attention, typically for C- and D-listers, both family docu-soaps and also shows like “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” and “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars.” Social media extended the available possibilities, granting new oxygen for the well known who were on their way to becoming less well known.For the Smith family, “Red Table Talk” provided proof of concept — it was acceptable, and even desirable, for the most prominent celebrities to make confessionals part of their brand.More than one episode delves into the challenges of Will and Jada’s marriage, offering small brushstrokes of revelation about an oft-gossiped-about couple. They insist they will never split, because after surmounting unspecified challenges, “We don’t have any dealbreakers.” (At the end of the chat, Will aims to dispel some frequent rumors: “We’ve never been Scientologists, we’ve never been swingers,” though Jada does point out that the second is a term for a “specific lifestyle.”)Watch enough “Red Table Talk” after reading Will’s book and absorbing his YouTube series and you might encounter the same tale told a few different ways — he’s been workshopping this unburdening for some time. Unlike Jada, who approaches the show and sharing her truths more casually, Will has fully embraced this shift and is treating it like he would a blockbuster film: rehearsal, polish, flawless delivery.Smith promoting “Will” with Queen Latifah last year. The actor’s memoir is surprisingly candid.Matt Rourke/Associated Press“Best Shape of My Life” begins as a weight-loss show — Will has a mild dad-bod paunch. To address it, he flies to Dubai to work with his personal trainer, as one does. He wants the process filmed, he says, because “the cameras act like my sponsor — they keep me accountable.” He partakes in intense physical challenges — walking to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet, or navigating the Dubai Police Academy obstacle course — and is also working on his memoir.Soon, he begins to chafe at that accountability. Agonizing over the weight loss goal begins to feel like false tension. So does stress about the deadline for his book (underscored by what feel like staged voice mail messages from his assistant). Instead what unfolds is a tug of war between his compulsion to perform and his need to retreat. The fourth episode is titled “I Quit,” and then he continues for two more episodes — this is, after all, a Will Smith production. But seams are fraying: In the fifth episode, he crows, “[expletive] the budget, [expletive] the deadline — they’ll get what we give them.”Several segments of the show are given over to Will’s reading segments of his memoir to family members and friends. These moments limn vulnerability without ever detaching it from performance — Will cries about the challenges in his childhood home, and his onlookers, including his therapist, nod along. At least a few years past his box-office-domination peak, he has built a more scalable reward system.(And lest you forget that the family rebrand is in no small way a business venture, there are untold cross-promotional opportunities. On “Best Shape,” Will often wears clothes from his Bel-Air Athletics line. When the family gathers in Miami to hear Will read chapters about them, the table is stocked with the signature blue square bottles of Just Water, Jaden’s company.)Jaden Smith holding a bottle of his Just Water at a film premiere in New York.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesOnce the sort of superstar known for smooth maximalism, Will has experimented with this sort of behind-the-scenes content before: “Will Smith’s Bucket List,” a series on Facebook Watch, and “Will Smith: Off the Deep End,” a nature immersion doc. But the last year has constituted a multiplatform career rebrand in which Smith uses all the tools of celebrity in service of peeling back its layers.In his autobiography, he writes movingly of the tug of war he feels in regards to his father, who instilled in Will the discipline with which he would build his astronomically successful career but was also abusive. In one section, he suggests that he considered pushing his elderly father down a flight of stairs as retribution.But the real revelation about Will’s relationship to parental authority comes in “King Richard,” last year’s biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Richard Williams was often maligned for the single-minded way he raised his daughters, but Will plays him empathetically as a stubborn hero, leaning into his doggedness but never making him an object of derision. (He was nominated for an Oscar for the performance.) No means are beyond bounds when the ends are so enviable.It’s likely the role has double meaning for Will — on the one hand, it’s a celebration of the transformative discipline he learned from his own father (in a non-abusive context), and on the other, it’s an argument for his own style of parenting. In both the memoir and at the Red Table, he speaks openly of how his heavy-handed fathering of Jaden and Willow exploded in his face on multiple occasions. When Willow’s first single, “Whip My Hair,” became a hit, she rebelled against the pressures of touring by shaving her head. The action film he made with Jaden, “After Earth,” was a colossal flop. (Will has another son, Trey, from his first marriage, who is a sometime D.J. and occasionally appears on “Red Table Talk.”)And yet the levelheadedness of the younger Smiths is somewhat remarkable. They are untethered thinkers in the way that children of privilege can often be, but they are also curious and empathetic and, all things considered, decidedly warm. (Listen to Jaden talk about learning how to navigate paying for dinner and you’ll melt.) Given their parents’s full-circle journey to untouchable celebrity and back, and given that they were born into a far more transparent generation, it’s easy to adapt to their family’s newfound visibility.Jaden has largely retreated from the spotlight, though he did release an album last year, “CTV3: Day Tripper’s Edition,” full of spacey dream-pop. When he shows up on “Red Table Talk” or in the “Best Shape of My Life” series, he appears almost impossibly wise.Willow has, relatively quietly, released five albums, recently homing in on a wiry pop-punk style that’s both tart and fashionable. Last year’s “Lately I Feel Everything” is her best album, and it includes the scarred anthem about duplicity “Transparentsoul” and raw songs like “Xtra,” in which she seeks space for a deep exhale: “I don’t mean to break so easily under the pressure/Need some time alone to breathe, I need some tree and fresh air.” And the album she released in 2020 as part of the duo called the Anxiety (which also includes Tyler Cole) features “Meet Me at Our Spot,” which became a huge hit on TikTok last year as a soundtrack for young creators to shamanistically lose themselves in dance.At the Red Table, Willow is a beacon of earnestness and humanity. Feeling deeply is the center of her public presentation; her conversation with Paris Jackson was less interview than sympathetic embrace. (At one point, Willow suggested that she’d cut herself in her younger years.) In her music and in her Red Table conversations, she grasps the futility of hiding her feelings, so she doesn’t bother.For Will and Jada, though, the high wire act of confession is, naturally, a reassertion of power. To be this vulnerable, effectively without fear of reprisal or public collapse, is perhaps the ultimate test of celebrity. The only question that remains is what secrets still lurk behind all this transparency. More

At Sunday’s game, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar will lead the first-ever halftime performance with rap at its center. The genre has taken a roundabout path to get there.On Sunday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., the Super Bowl halftime show will feature the local rap heroes Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, placing hip-hop firmly at the center of the annual spectacle, which is routinely watched by more than 100 million people, for the first time.The show, which is being produced in part by Jay-Z’s entertainment and sports company, Roc Nation, will also star Eminem and Mary J. Blige, but it will not be the first to include rap music. The genre has taken a rocky, roundabout path to headliner status at the Super Bowl, with this year’s event coming at an increasingly fraught moment for the N.F.L. regarding race.That baggage is nothing new: At least since 2016, when the quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police killings of Black people, the league has faced questions about its commitment to diversity and social justice, on the field and off. More than 70 percent of the league’s players are Black, but the N.F.L. has no Black owners and, until recently, only one Black head coach. This month, Brian Flores, the Miami Dolphins head coach who was fired last month, sued the league, claiming he and others had been discriminated against in the hiring process.Those debates have trickled into its entertainment business. In 2017, well before his company partnered with the N.F.L., Jay-Z turned down an offer to perform at the Super Bowl, and reportedly urged others to do the same. In subsequent years, with Jay-Z declaring “we’ve moved past kneeling” to some backlash among players and fans, Roc Nation has booked pop extravaganzas featuring the Weeknd, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.But Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg — while among the most recognizable hip-hop veterans with decades of hits and pop culture cachet between them — represent something different, and that may be the idea. “At one point, Dre was in a group that was banned by popular culture,” said Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, which headlined the show in 2011, referencing the widespread controversies of Dr. Dre’s early gangster rap act N.W.A.That the N.F.L. has now turned to these once-controversial figures with their own checkered pasts may seem far removed from the days of pearl-clutching regarding Janet Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction, M.I.A.’s middle finger in 2012 and Beyoncé’s nods to the Black Panthers in 2016. But some say it’s also indicative of the league’s long, jagged journey to embrace Black music and culture — especially rap — as well as its need to shore up its community bona fides now.“The N.F.L. is positioning the halftime show as a meaningful occurrence,” Dr. Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sport management at the University Michigan and the director of the Center for Race & Ethnicity in Sport, said in an interview. “But to some, it seems performative for the N.F.L. to feature these artists. It feels like window dressing. You’re using Black talent to entertain the masses, but what are you doing that would honor the essence of hip-hop, like addressing racial injustices in the communities that have bred this labor force of Black talent?”Dive Deeper Into the Super Bowl Optimism and Anxiety: This year, SoFi Stadium in Inglewood will host the Super Bowl. What does the event mean for the city? Home Advantage: The Rams will use their usual facilities and home stadium in the game against the Bengals. Here is how they are getting ready.Cooper Kupp: The Rams receiver managed an All-Pro season, becoming a sure-handed catcher and the driving force behind the team’s success.Joe Burrow: He has led the Bengals to their first Super Bowl appearance in 1989. But he still thinks about that playoff loss in high school.The Super Bowl halftime stage was not always a place for hitmakers. In 1967, with popular music venturing into daring directions, a television audience of about 51 million watched the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band perform a selection of tunes including the Dixie anthem “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”Other marching bands had the spotlight for years, as did avatars of safe, family-oriented entertainment, like Andy Williams and Carol Channing. No rock performer played the halftime show until 1988, almost seven years into the MTV era, when the oldies act Chubby Checker twisted at Super Bowl XXII. Three year later, New Kids on the Block would become the first contemporary pop group to perform at the event, and the show remained blandly middle-of-the-road until Michael Jackson’s powerhouse performance in 1993.In the years that followed, established greats like Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder dominated, sometimes with more modern acts like Gloria Estefan and Boyz II Men as guests, though the burgeoning hip-hop of the 1990s remained absent. When Queen Latifah joined the Motown tribute in 1998, she performed “Paper,” one of her first songs to not feature any rapping.The next modern M.C. to take the Super Bowl stage was Nelly in 2001, as part of a larger ensemble of pop figures. He returned in 2004 and was joined by P. Diddy, bringing more contemporary rap to the performance than ever before. But that was also the year that changed everything: After a medley of appearances by Diddy, Nelly and Kid Rock, Janet Jackson sang, among other songs, “Rhythm Nation” — an idealistic ode to unity and Black power (“Join voices in protest/To social injustice”) — before finishing the show by duetting with Justin Timberlake on his hit “Rock Your Body.” Just before the commercial break, Timberlake put his hand on Jackson’s costume, pulled at it and exposed her right breast, triggering a national uproar.Missy Elliott, left, joined Katy Perry at halftime in 2015. Will.i.am performed with the Black Eyed Peas in 2011, ushering in a new era of pop on the halftime stage after a period of classic rock acts.From left: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images; Adam Bettcher/Getty ImagesFor years after, the Super Bowl halftime producers retreated to the safety of classic rock: Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and the Who all performed. It was during that period of careful conservatism that Will.i.am saw an opening.“I flew out to New Jersey, went to the N.F.L. headquarters, and I pitched the Black Eyed Peas,” he said in an interview. “We weren’t, like, ‘Yo, we’re family friendly!’ Or ‘We rated PG, bro.’ My pitch was, ‘You know you need to have pop on the halftime show again.’” It wouldn’t be long, he warned the N.F.L., before they ran out of classic rock bands.In 2011, the Black Eyed Peas got the gig, inching the N.F.L. back toward the modern mainstream. But concerns about putting on a show palatable to all audiences lingered. “There’s a girl in our group,” Will.i.am said, referring to the singer Fergie. “They were nervous about that,” he said, and “checked our wardrobe like we were going through freakin’ security at the airport.”“You’ve got to understand the circumstances, and the walls that were up,” Will.i.am added. “We cracked open the door to get the N.F.L. out of that fear of pop and urban music after a seven-year break of only going legacy. To now have everybody from Bruno to Beyoncé to Dre and Snoop — talk about a total perspective change on the importance of diversity and inclusion,” he said, referring to Bruno Mars, who headlined in 2014 and returned as a guest two years later.Yet even as rap slowly regained its place on the Super Bowl stage — with Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliott, Travis Scott and Big Boi all making cameos in the last decade — questions linger about whether the music and its messages can transcend the 12-minute show now that the genre is taking prominence.“The N.F.L. is trying to look better by celebrating hip-hop, but they need to do better,” said Dr. Armstrong, the professor. “I’m hoping the artists are going to use their own power and influence to get them to do so.”A Brief History of Hip-Hop at HalftimeSuper Bowl XXXII (1998)When in doubt, it’s always safe to program something nostalgic, like a salute to Motown’s 40th anniversary (the label was founded in 1959). The featured acts were the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, and Martha and the Vandellas. To balance the generational appeal, they were joined by the label’s then top current act — the throwback harmony group Boyz II Men — as well as the Motown rapper Queen Latifah, who sang a new-jack-swing-inspired version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”Super Bowl XXXV (2001)The St. Louis rapper Nelly, who’d released the breakout Top 20 pop hit “E.I.” in 2000, was an afterthought on this bill, which featured the rock band Aerosmith, then in its fourth decade, and the peppy pop phenoms ’N Sync. The two groups alternated songs, then united for the big finale, “Walk This Way,” joined by Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige and Nelly, whose “E.I.”/”Walk This Way” mash-up included only half of his first verse. Total camera time for rap: 18 seconds.Super Bowl XXXVIII (2004)Three years later, Nelly returned and performed his No. 1 hit “Hot in Herre,” which urged listeners to “take off all your clothes.” Combined with Kid Rock and P. Diddy, there was far more rap included than in any previous Super Bowl show. But this infamous halftime show is mostly remembered for the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake incident, in which her breast was mostly exposed. Not long after, Jawed Karim, a computer science and engineering student, grew frustrated at how difficult it was to find a clip of that moment online, and sensing a market niche for a video-sharing site, soon helped found YouTube.Super Bowl XLV (2011)The N.F.L. disappeared pop music from the halftime show for several years, eager to avoid bad publicity or Congressional criticism. But the supply of widely beloved rock stars was limited, and Ricky Kirshner, in his debut as the show’s producer, brought in the pop-rap group Black Eyed Peas. The group dashed through their many hits while leaping around a set that looked like a “Tron” reboot. And in the Super Bowl’s attempt at broader appeal, Slash of the rock band Guns N’ Roses played guitar while Fergie, of the Black Eyed Peas, sang the band’s ferocious “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”Super Bowl XLVI (2012)Madonna headlined the show in a gladiator’s cingulum — with ample help from the briefly massive party-rap duo LMFAO; the rapper and singer Cee Lo Green; and Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., two inventive rap talents who’d recently recorded “Give Me All Your Luvin’” with Madonna. M.I.A.’s verse had a few expletives, which were bleeped out, and in their stead, she raised her left middle finger to the camera. The F.C.C. reportedly received more than 200 complaints, about one for every 450,000 viewers. The N.F.L. apologized to its audience and filed arbitration claims seeking $16.6 million from M.I.A., whom they said violated a contract requiring her to comply with anti-profanity standards. This prompted M.I.A. to tweet at Madonna, “Can I borrow 16 million?” The conflict was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.Super Bowl XLIX (2015)In the most-watched halftime show ever, with nearly 115 million viewers, the headliner Katy Perry was joined by Lenny Kravitz for a rocking rendition of her hit “I Kissed a Girl,” but the true second banana was Missy Elliott, who performed parts of three of her tracks: “Get Ur Freak On,” “Work It” and “Lose Control.” The pairing of Perry and Elliott seemed more natural than other shotgun marriages, because both are pop surrealists. More than two years later, Elliott tweeted that she’d been in the hospital the night before the Super Bowl, and when her first song started, “I was SO SHOOK. I said Lord I can’t turn back now.”Super Bowl LIII (2019)In solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, a number of Black artists were rumored to have turned down offers to perform in 2019. Instead, Maroon 5 headlined with guest spots from Travis Scott and Big Boi of Outkast. “It’s what it is,” the Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine said after people criticized the band and accused it of violating a boycott. “We’d like to move on from it.”Super Bowl LIV (2020)The N.F.L. knew it had to fix its relationship with hip-hop, and partnered with Jay-Z and Roc Nation to produce the Super Bowl halftime show. Kaepernick “was done wrong,” Jay-Z told The New York Times. “But it was three years ago, and someone needs to say, ‘What do we do now — because people are still dying?’” The headliners were Shakira, a Roc Nation management client, and Jennifer Lopez: two Latina women who have released albums in Spanish as well as English. They were joined by Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper and singer; and J Balvin, a Colombian who brought reggaeton, rap’s younger Spanish-speaking cousin from the Caribbean, to the Super Bowl stage. More