Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Drake and PartyNextDoor’s ‘Some Sexy Songs 4 U’ Is No. 1

      by

      Their collaborative album “Some Sexy Songs 4 U” opens atop the Billboard 200, unseating his foe Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX,” which surged after the Super Bowl halftime show.News flash: Drake’s music is not dead.Although the Canadian rapper, the longtime prince of streaming, was badly pummeled in a diss-track war with Kendrick Lamar last year, and two weeks ago Lamar performed Exhibit A of that fight — the vicious “Not Like Us” — at the Super Bowl halftime show, Drake’s latest album has sailed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.“Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaborative album with the singer and producer PartyNextDoor — with scant reference to Drake’s feud with Lamar — was released on Valentine’s Day and opens at the top of the latest chart. It had the equivalent of 246,000 sales in the United States, including 287 million streams and 25,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.It is Drake’s 14th title to go to No. 1, counting collaborative releases, which ties him with Jay-Z and Taylor Swift for the most albums by a solo act to reach the top of Billboard’s chart. (The Beatles have more No. 1 albums than anybody, solo or group, with 19.)The release of “Some Sexy Songs” also came after Drake sued Universal Music Group, the giant label behind him and Lamar, for defamation in “Not Like Us” (which was lightly censored at the Super Bowl). His joint album was released by Republic, a Universal label, along with OVO Sound, a Drake imprint, which is distributed through Sony Music, a Universal competitor.The numbers for “Some Sexy Songs” are modest for Drake, whose knack for taking over streaming services has made him one of the top-selling artists of the last decade-plus. Its 246,000 “album equivalents” last week — a composite figure that combines popularity on streaming with old-fashioned unit sales — is considerably lower than the opening-week totals for Drake’s last two releases, “For All the Dogs” (402,000 in 2023) and “Her Loss,” a joint album with 21 Savage (404,000 in 2022). But it is better than the 204,000 he had for “Honestly, Nevermind” in 2022 — still his lowest opening-week number for a studio LP — and the 109,000 for “Care Package,” a 2019 collection of non-album tracks.Also this week, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” rises five spots to No. 2 after the release of an expanded version, and Lamar’s “GNX” falls two to No. 3, after it returned to the top slot in the week following his triumphant Super Bowl appearance. SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4 and Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” is in fifth place. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      RZA Talks About Wu-Tang Clan’s Final Chamber Tour

      by

      Few groups have had more impact on the shape and evolution of hip-hop than Wu-Tang Clan, the Staten Island supergroup that helped define the sound of 1990s New York rap and transform the industry.And yet seeing Wu-Tang Clan perform a full-length concert in the flesh — all of the members onstage together — is a privilege not many have experienced. Even in its golden era, the Wu-Tang Clan was never a reliable touring unit. Its smaller shows were often unruly, and by the time the group graduated to bigger stages, performances were often undone by competing egos and unreliable artist attendance, to say nothing of the limits on the opportunities available to rough-edged rap stars in the 1990s and 2000s.“There’s so many places we really haven’t been,” RZA, the chief architect of the Wu-Tang Clan, said in an interview on Popcast, The New York Times’s music podcast. “We had some successful touring, right? But not at the level of what the brand is.”He’s aiming to fix that with Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber, billed as the group’s last tour, and the biggest road show it has undertaken as the headlining act, which will begin in June. All of the surviving original members — RZA, GZA, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Inspectah Deck, U-God and Masta Killa — are slated to participate, as well as Cappadonna and Young Dirty Bastard, who will perform in place of his father, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who died in 2004.“Jay-Z was like, Yo, I got the blueprint from you,” RZA recalled.Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesThe tour, RZA told Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, is the culmination of a five-plus-year plan of legacy-building for the Clan, including a multipart documentary series, a dramatized mini-series, several individual biographies and a Las Vegas residency, the first for a hip-hop act.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Roberta Flack’s 11 Essential Songs

      by

      One of the supreme voices of the 1970s and a master of revelatory reinterpretation has died at 88.At a New York concert in 1997, Roberta Flack referred to her voice as a “blessed instrument.” For generations of listeners it was just that, a spellbinding force that could be cool, or luxurious, or swell with suggestive power, often in the same song.Flack, who died on Monday at 88, began her career as a schoolteacher with a solid grounding in both classical music and Black church singing. She ended up one of the supreme voices of the 1970s, scoring multiple No. 1 hits that established her as a star of interpretive pop-soul, capable of stunning radio listeners and critics alike.She was a master of the revelatory reinvention. Her first hit, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” was originally a folk ballad by Ewan MacColl. Peggy Seeger’s 1957 recording of it is a brisk, warbling take with arpeggiated acoustic guitar — a classic example of the kind of carefree-songbird tunes from the early folk revival. In Flack’s hands it is slow, stirring eroticism, with a controlled range of vocal dynamics that moves from whisper-delicate to a kind of power that feels like a carnal memory.She did it again in 1973 with “Killing Me Softly With His Song” — originally by Lori Lieberman, another folkie — which Flack transformed into a hypnotic meditation. Two decades later, Lauryn Hill and the Fugees shifted its shape again with their own remake.With those tracks, Flack became the first artist to take record of the year at the Grammy Awards two consecutive times, with “The First Time” winning in 1973 and “Killing Me Softly” in 1974.Those are just two of Flack’s most familiar recordings, in a career that also included hit collaborations with singers like Donny Hathaway and Peabo Bryson, and later explorations into jazz standards. Here are 11 of her essential tracks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Michael Tilson Thomas, Facing Brain Cancer Recurrence, Scales Back Concerts

      by

      Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years, said, “Now is the time to wind down my public appearances.”The renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas announced on Monday that he would scale back his engagements because of a recurrence of brain cancer.Thomas, 80, who has been grappling since 2021 with glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive form of the disease, said in a statement that his doctors recently told him the cancer had returned. Thomas, who was music director of the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years, said there were still treatment options available, but “the odds are uncertain.”“Now is the time to wind down my public appearances,” he said in the statement.Thomas, an eminent figure in the music industry, said he still planned a few more engagements. In late March and early April, he will conduct the New World Symphony, a Miami ensemble that he helped found in 1987. And in April, he will join the San Francisco Symphony for a celebration of his 80th birthday.“At that point,” he said, “we all get to say the old show business expression, ‘It’s a wrap.’”Thomas will withdraw from a planned appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra in early March, his representatives said.Thomas has defied expectations since his diagnosis, appearing with top orchestras even as he underwent treatment. He opened the New York Philharmonic’s season in September with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. And in October, he led the London Symphony Orchestra in performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony.At the same time, he has had a difficult medical journey. He underwent surgery at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center in 2021 to remove a brain tumor and had a second surgery in 2023. He said in the statement on Monday that he had also had to “manage complications from the treatments that have held the tumor at bay.”Even as he kept performing, Thomas reduced his administrative commitments. In 2022, he stepped down as artistic director of the New World Symphony, a prestigious training orchestra.Thomas said on Monday that he was passing the time at home in San Francisco with his husband, Joshua Mark Robison, and making occasional trips to Bolinas, a small township about 20 miles northwest of San Francisco.”Our home is filled with memories of a full life,” he said. “There’s a keyboard on each floor and occasionally a piece by C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Schumann, a Broadway melody or one of my own tunes seem to emerge. Sometimes I can share these moments. Other times I find my own personal peace and solace.”Thomas said having the chance to work with some of his favorite ensembles after his diagnosis had been “very special.” He compared this part of his life to a musical coda, the concluding passage of a piece.“A coda can vary greatly in length,” he said. “My life’s coda is generous and rich. Life is precious.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      100 Years Ago Recording Studios Got a New Tool: Microphones

      by

      On Feb. 25, 1925, Art Gillham’s session made history. The technology changed who was heard in recordings, how artists approach their music and how we hear it.One of the most significant innovations in recorded music took place a century ago in New York City. On Feb. 25, 1925, Art Gillham, a musician known as “the Whispering Pianist” for his gentle croon, entered Columbia Phonograph Company’s studio to test out a newly installed electrical system. Its totem was positioned in front of him, level with his mouth: a microphone.This was the moment when the record industry went electric. By the end of the year, a writer for the Washington, D.C. newspaper the Evening Star marveled at “the capitulation of the world’s leading musical artists to the power of the microphone.” (Hollywood’s sound revolution with “talkies” wasn’t far behind.) Today, a performer’s microphone technique can help define their sound. Yet no plaque marks the spot where Gillham made history with the first commercially released electrical recording.Archivists at the oldest label in the world, now owned by Sony Music, cannot confirm the studio’s exact location. The best guess is a site now occupied by the Rose Theater, the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue in Midtown Manhattan where Columbia’s offices once stood. The current building, a vast glass complex in Columbus Circle, is also home to the recording studio for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s in-house label, Blue Engine Records.Todd Whitelock, an award-winning engineer who runs the studio, called the advent of the microphone the most important technological development in recorded music. “It’s got to be the top of the pyramid,” he said in an interview from his home studio in Cranford, N.J.Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and the period until 1925 is known as the acoustical era. A conical recording horn would capture the music being performed; sound waves caused a stylus to cut grooves into a rotating wax disc, marking it with audio information.Whitelock collects antique 78 rpm records, which he plays on a windup Victrola phonograph. “Acoustical recordings are magnificent, but there’s no dynamic range,” he said. “It all stays at the same volume. Be it pianissimo or mezzo piano or forte, it’s all one dynamic.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Cover Bob Mould in a Weighted Blanket, and Turn on Vintage Wrestling

      by

      The veteran rocker, who’s releasing his 15th album, discusses the thrills of an exclusive techno club and loving “Only Murders in the Building.”Last fall, after an especially blistering concert overseas, the veteran rocker Bob Mould walked offstage and realized he couldn’t breathe. “I’d thrown myself so hard into the physicality of the show that I hyperventilated for about 15 minutes,” the musician, 64, said. “It was just one of those shows where I was like, ‘Did I leave a quart of blood up there tonight?’”Such energy-expending performances are typical for Mould, who’s been a regular on the road since venues reopened after pandemic shutdowns (“I was making up for lost time,” he said). His live gigs informed many of the songs on “Here We Go Crazy,” Mould’s 15th studio album. Due March 7, it finds the onetime Hüsker Dü and Sugar frontman piling on the sort of speedy riffs, dead-center hooks and scream-of-consciousness lyrics that have defined much of Mould’s nearly 50-year career. Many of the tracks were fine-tuned from the stage, with Mould keeping a close eye on the crowd whenever he was test-driving a new tune.“Sometimes you see people’s head bobbing, and they’re poking each other, like, ‘This is a good one,’” Mould said in a phone interview.” And sometimes there’s just a little golf clap, and I’m like, ‘OK. Got it.’”In a phone call from Palm Springs, Calif., where Mould lives part-time — he also resides in San Francisco — the musician discussed the rituals and getaways that get his blood pumping, both at home and on tour. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Morning Walks at Ocean Beach, San FranciscoI have really bad tinnitus from work — I mean, I will never have silence again. So one of my favorite things in life is to get up before the sun comes up, and just walk for two hours. It’s one of the few places where I can get my head right, because all I can hear is the sound of the ocean.GamesThis is so pandering, but no matter where I am, before I look at the news or start returning calls, I get on The New York Times Games app. Spelling Bee is addictive — if I don’t get Genius on it every day, I get really upset. And when I’m home with the husband, we play a lot of Catan, which is quite fun.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Voletta Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G.’s Mother, Dies at 78

      by

      She played the rapper music as a child, stood by his side during his meteoric career and navigated the legal and artistic questions that arose after his killing.Voletta Wallace, the mother of the Brooklyn rapper the Notorious B.I.G., whose stewardship of her son’s career and legacy after he was killed in 1997 helped cement him as a hip-hop legend, died on Friday. She was 78.Ms. Wallace died in hospice care at her residence in Stroudsburg, Pa., according to a news release from the Monroe County coroner, Thomas Yanac. A cause was not specified.A middle-class immigrant and single mother from Jamaica, Ms. Wallace was forced into the hip-hop spotlight after the Notorious B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace and also known as Biggie Smalls, was killed at 24 in a Los Angeles drive-by shooting.Biggie’s death came just six months after the Las Vegas slaying of the rapper Tupac Shakur, a onetime friend turned bitter rival, with the killings abruptly ending a formative and fruitful moment in mainstream gangster rap amid a tangled East Coast-West Coast beef that went far beyond music.For decades, both cases remained unsolved, fueling an ongoing ecosystem of true-crime books, documentaries, articles and more that have attempted to explain the possible links between the two killings, including the involvement of national gangs and crooked cops. (In 2023, prosecutors in Las Vegas charged Duane Keith Davis, a former gang leader known as Keffe D, with murder in the Shakur case; he is set to stand trial later this year.)Ms. Wallace, a preschool teacher, took on the mantle of her son’s career almost immediately. Biggie’s second album, “Life After Death,” came out two weeks after he died; six months later, Ms. Wallace accepted the MTV Video Music Award for best rap video (“Hypnotize”), telling the New York crowd, “I know if my son was here tonight, the first thing he would’ve done is say big up to Brooklyn.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Coming Soon to Trump’s Kennedy Center: A Celebration of Christ

      by

      President Trump took control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington only last week. But his administration is already making plans for reshaping the institution’s programming.Chief among them: a celebration of Christ planned for December. Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump named as the Kennedy Center’s new president, told a conservative gathering on Friday that the “big change” at the center would be that “we are doing a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”“How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production, to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime, which is the birth of Christ?” Mr. Grenell said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.The Kennedy Center has long held Christmas-themed events.Last December, the center hosted “A Candlelight Christmas” by the Washington Chorus; “A Family Christmas” by the Choral Arts Society of Washington; and “Go Tell It,” a Christmas celebration by the Alfred Street Baptist Church, a prominent Black church in Virginia. (On Sunday, the church said it would cancel its Christmas concert there this year because the Kennedy Center’s new leaders stood in opposition to the “longstanding tradition of honoring artistic expression across all backgrounds.”)Mr. Grenell’s comments were his first public remarks in which he discussed his plans as the Kennedy Center’s new leader. His appointment was part of a series of extraordinary actions Mr. Trump took to solidify control over the Kennedy Center, which has been a bipartisan institution throughout its 54-year history.Mr. Trump, who stayed away from the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term after some of the artists being honored criticized him, stunned the cultural world when he decided this month to purge the center’s board of all Biden appointees and install himself as chairman, ousting the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor. The new board fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade, and the post was given to Mr. Grenell, a Trump loyalist who was ambassador to Germany during the president’s first term.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More