Music

He was part of a British trio whose songs often directly addressed gay themes and issues in a way few other pop music acts were doing.Steve Bronski, part of the 1980s British synth-pop trio Bronski Beat, whose members were openly gay at a time when that was uncommon and whose early songs unabashedly addressed homophobia and other gay issues, died after a fire on Dec. 7 at his apartment building in the Soho section of London, British news outlets reported. He was 61.The London Fire Brigade confirmed that it had responded to a fire on Berwick Street and taken an unidentified man to a hospital, where he later died. Josephine Samuel, a friend who had been helping to care for Mr. Bronski since he’d had a stroke several years ago, told The Guardian that Mr. Bronski was the fire victim.Mr. Bronski formed Bronski Beat in 1983 with Jimmy Somerville and Larry Steinbachek, and their first single, “Smalltown Boy,” was released the next year. It was a stark story of a young gay man’s escape from a provincial town where he had endured a homophobic attack; a haunting chorus repeats, “Run away, turn away.” The official video for the song, fleshing out the events the lyrics allude to, has been viewed more than 68 million times on YouTube.The song became a Top 5 hit in Britain and made the charts in other countries as well, including the United States. A follow-up, “Why?,” another chart success, was equally direct, the lyrics speaking to the ostracism and social disapproval experienced by gay people. “You in your false securities tear up my life, condemning me,” one lyric goes. “Name me an illness, call me a sin. Never feel guilty, never give in.”At the time, a number of mainstream performers — Elton John, the Village People, Boy George — telegraphed gayness, often with stereotypical flamboyance, but rarely addressed gay issues directly in song. Bronski Beat was different, eschewing coyness and gimmicks.“They buck stereotypes,” Jim Farber wrote in The Daily News in 1985, “presenting themselves as everyday Joes.”The group’s debut album, “The Age of Consent” (1984), was as forthright as the two singles. The album sleeve listed the “minimum age for lawful homosexual relationships between men” in European countries, an effort to underscore that the age in the United Kingdom at the time, 21, was higher than almost everywhere else. The sleeve also included a phone number for a gay legal advice line.Mr. Bronski said the trio didn’t start out as a political or social statement.“We were just writing songs that spoke about our lives at the time,” he told Gay Times in 2018. “We had no idea ‘Smalltown Boy’ would resonate with so many people.”But when they began doing live performances in 1983, he told The Associated Press in 1986, the audience reaction helped them realize that they had struck a chord.“We had all these people coming backstage saying, ‘I think it’s great you’ve been so honest about it,’” he said.That same audience reaction landed them a contract with London Records in early 1984. Mr. Bronski was on keyboards and synthesizers along with Mr. Steinbachek; Mr. Somerville’s distinctive falsetto vocals were the group’s signature.Warren Whaley, an electronic music composer based in Los Angeles and half of the synth-pop duo the Dollhouse, struck up a running correspondence with Mr. Bronski when he wrote to him after Mr. Steinbachek’s death in 2016.“I recall hearing their debut single, ‘Smalltown Boy,’ on the alternative music radio station in Los Angeles in 1984,” Mr. Whaley said by email. “The song starts with a heavy octave bass. Then a staccato hook. Then Jimmy Somerville’s lovely falsetto. I was hooked by 22 seconds in. This band was something special. Something new — but old. Their sound harkened to disco and R&B. But it sounded new, different.”Mr. Bronski in 1996. He continued to make music after the original Bronski Beat trio broke up. Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesThe original Bronski Beat lineup didn’t last long; Mr. Somerville left the group in 1985. But Mr. Bronski continued to make music, with Mr. Steinbachek for a time and with others over the years, most notably “Hit That Perfect Beat,” a hit in Britain and elsewhere in 1986 and a dancehall favorite ever since. Mr. Whaley said that though Bronski Beat’s best-known songs had gay-centric lyrics, “their appeal crossed the boundaries of sexual alignment.”“Everyone bopped their heads and danced to their music,” he said.Mr. Bronski was born Steven Forrest on Feb. 7, 1960, in Glasgow. He had made his way to London by the early 1980s, where he met Mr. Somerville and Mr. Steinbachek.“It was a lot easier living in London,” he told Classic Pop magazine in 2019, explaining why he and other gay men had gravitated to the city, “since there was a thriving gay scene compared to other parts of the country.”Information on his survivors was not available.In 2017, more than three decades after the release of “The Age of Consent,” the only album with the original Bronski Beat lineup, Mr. Bronski teamed with Stephen Granville and Ian Donaldson to release the album “The Age of Reason” under the Bronski Beat name, revisiting songs from the original record and adding new tracks.“I think a lot of the songs are as relevant today as they were all those years ago,” he told Gay Times. More

Hillary Clinton delivered an unused election speech. Jennifer Aniston cried at Central Perk. It was a year for watching celebrities reinhabit their past selves.MasterClass, an online platform where you can watch famous people deliver video tutorials for $180 a year, recently debuted a course on the topic of resilience. It begins with a close-up shot of a weathered oval desk. We hear papers shuffling, birds chirping, the voices of an ethereal choir. A woman’s hands drift across a policy document. As white light flares through a garden window, Hillary Clinton appears. She wears a serene smile and a magenta blouse. It feels like she’s back from the dead.Clinton’s 16 video lessons in resilience are largely tedious (one is about binder organization), but the whole exercise builds to a rattling unease. The course culminates with Clinton reciting her unused presidential victory speech from 2016. Holding the text in her lap like a storybook, she seems to be impersonating a lost version of herself. She is accessing a faintly smug, terribly naïve Hillary Clinton, as if practicing in front of a mirror for a moment that would never arrive. It’s the kind of humiliating growth exercise you might spy through the keyhole of a therapist’s office. Even as Clinton has styled herself as an influencer on the subject of carrying on, it feels as if she is being held hostage by the past, compelled to relive her defeat again and again.This is, actually, a very 2021 way to be. Popular culture is saturated with famous figures playing their past selves, revisiting old haunts and resurrecting buried personal histories. This year, Taylor Swift began releasing note-for-note re-recordings of her early albums in a bid to reclaim control of her catalog after her adversary Scooter Braun assumed ownership of her masters and sold them to an investment fund. The cast of “Friends” reunited in an eerie replica of Central Perk, while the original “Real World” roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992. And celebrities have flooded TikTok, groveling to fans with corny re-enactments: Ryan Reynolds poorly lip-syncs a bit from his 2005 rom-com “Just Friends,” while Zooey Deschanel eagerly replicates her song and dance from the “New Girl” opening credits.I thought we had reached peak pop culture nostalgia a decade ago, when an endless buffet of 1990s-kid ephemera was rewarmed for digital consumption and a sepia Instagram filter could convert last night’s party photos into an instant retrospective. But there is something unexpectedly charged about this development, which invites us to watch a person squeeze back into her old skin. The literalness of the exercise emphasizes the slipperiness of time, shining a garish spotlight on mortality and lending a tragic depth to the most venal of reunion specials. Even the cringey TikToks have a measure of profundity, as aging celebrities play their younger selves to appeal to even younger audiences, all set on a perpetual loop.The imperative of the streaming boom is to turn the content spigot to full blast, but that makes content seem forgettable and cheap. So now producers are resurrecting properties from when content was scarce enough to feel precious, and inviting us to watch as the associated celebrities reinfuse them with their auras. Like the doomed characters on “Lost,” who manage to escape their spooky island only to feel compelled to return, the financial pull of existing I.P. is often too strong for famous people to resist. These re-enactments and self-impersonations represent the latest turn in the entertainment industry’s rapacious churn, as it mines psychodrama from the very process of rebooting culture.On “Real World: Homecoming,” the original roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992.Danielle Levitt/MTVIt all reminds me of a different kind of re-enactment: this year’s documentary “Procession,” which concerns six men who survived child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. With the help of a drama therapist and the documentarian Robert Greene, they revisit the scenes of the crimes, act out fictionalized versions of their memories and film them. One of the men recreates a priest’s quarters, paints it all white, then destroys it with a sledgehammer; another hunts down a priest’s old lake house and walks the overgrown path that led to his rape. Their hope is that by physicalizing these traumatic incidents, they can reinscribe their memories and dispel their power.These Hollywood re-enactments also have a sheen of exposure therapy, conjuring old dramas through sense memory. “Friends: The Reunion,” on HBO Max, emphasizes the production’s precise rebuilding of sets, and as soon as Jennifer Aniston crosses the threshold of the replicated apartment of her character, Rachel Green, tears are in her eyes. Later, she would say that she was so walloped by memories — the end of “Friends” overlapped with the dissolution of her marriage to Brad Pitt — that she paused filming to pull herself together. Aniston’s tabloid persona is haunted by her past romantic lives, and the scenario felt designed to rouse dormant narratives. Part of the lurid appeal of the reunion is watching the lightly debasing spectacle of the cast assembling around a table to re-enact old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising classic roles. Of course, the actual purpose is to prime viewers to revisit their own ’90s memories, via “Friends” episodes, which are now exclusively streaming on HBO Max.On “The Real World: Homecoming,” on Paramount+, the frisson of the reunion springs from their reoccupation of the loft they shared nearly 30 years ago. The housemates have hardly popped a bottle of prosecco when a tense 1992 argument about racism between Becky, a white songwriter, and Kevin, a Black activist, is replayed for the group. The cast seems prepared to calmly reprocess this exchange with the exception of Becky (now an alternative healer who goes by Rebecca), who instantly springs back to her familiar defensive posture, protesting that she “lost” her “skin color” through her experience dancing with a multiethnic troupe. So strong is the psychological pull of this place, she becomes convinced that she was actively set up as the scapegoat for white privilege, and she scurries from the loft for good.This messy display stands in contrast to Taylor Swift’s tightly controlled nostalgic exercise. Her re-recordings are deliberately unrevealing — she sounds as if she is performing uncanny self-karaoke — but the story she has spun around them is captivating. In April, she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2008 album. On it, we hear a 31-year-old woman impersonating her 19-year-old self reflecting on her 15-year-old self, and doing it all to smite the men who hoped to seize control of her songs.Part of the lurid appeal of “Friends: The Reunion” is watching the spectacle of the cast (including Jennifer Aniston) re-enacting old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising their classic roles.HBO MaxFor a time, the most indelible cultural artifact of this moment was a parenthetical bit of metadata, “(Taylor’s Version),” which Swift appended to the titles of her newly recorded songs, and which became a meme anyone could use to signal a prideful ownership of their own cultural outputs, no matter how slight. But in November, Swift’s immersion in her past built to a breakthrough, as she released a 10-minute extension of her beloved 2012 breakup song “All Too Well.” With the new version, she interpolates the wistful original with starkly drawn scenes that play almost like recovered memories, recasting a romance as a site of trauma that so reduced her that she compares herself to “a soldier who’s returning half her weight.”Nostalgia is derived from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” and before it referred to a yearning for the past, it was a psychopathological disorder, describing a homesickness so severe it could actually kill. Nostalgia itself represented a form of traumatic stress, and now pseudo-therapeutic treatments have made their way into our cultural retrospectives. So while Serena Williams appears on MasterClass to teach tennis, and Ringo Starr to teach drumming, Clinton arrives to school us on “the power of resilience.”Resilience suggests elasticity, and there is something morbidly fascinating about watching Clinton revert to her pre-Trump form. The victory speech itself reads like centrist Mad Libs — a meditation on “E Pluribus Unum,” nods to both Black Lives Matter and the bravery of police, an Abraham Lincoln quote — but at its end it veers into complex emotional territory. Clinton recalls her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011, and as she describes a dream about her, her voice shakes and warps in pitch. Dorothy Rodham had a bleak upbringing, and Clinton wishes she could visit her mother’s childhood self and assure her that despite all the suffering she would endure, her daughter would go on to become the president of the United States.As Clinton plays her former self comforting her mother’s former self with the idea of a future Clinton who will never exist, we finally glimpse a loss that cannot be negotiated, optimized or monetized: She can never speak to her mother again. Soon, Clinton’s MasterClass has reverted back to its banal messaging — she instructs us to dust ourselves off, take a walk, make our beds —  but for a few seconds, she could be seen not as a windup historical figure but as a person, like the rest of us, who cannot beat time. More

New York City Ballet canceled Tuesday night’s performance, and a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall was called off.New York City Ballet canceled a performance of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” on Tuesday after several people involved in the production tested positive for the coronavirus, in the latest sign of how the surge in cases is disrupting attempts to bring back some of the city’s most beloved holiday performances.As the production, one of City Ballet’s most popular, was called off at Lincoln Center, plans to fill Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evening with the “Hallelujah” chorus were canceled when Music Sacra postponed a performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” citing the virus. And there are no more holiday kicklines at Radio City Music Hall: The remaining performances of the “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” were canceled Friday.The cancellations came shortly after it was announced that some of Broadway’s biggest hits would not resume until after Christmas, forgoing one of their most lucrative periods of the year amid concerns about the spread of the Omicron variant.It was not immediately clear when performances of “The Nutcracker” would return.“We are very disappointed to have to cancel this evening’s performance,” Jonathan Stafford, the company’s artistic director, said in a statement, “but the safety of our artists, staff and audiences has been New York City Ballet’s No. 1 priority since the Covid-19 pandemic began.”The company has worked hard to bring back the holiday favorite under difficult circumstances. It turned to a cast of dancers 12 and older — it typically casts younger, smaller children as its angels, soldiers and mice, and for its party scene — since only children of those ages were eligible for vaccinations when rehearsals began in the fall.The company said that ticket holders could exchange tickets for a future performance, get refunds or donate the tickets to the company. Music Sacra, which postponed its Tuesday night performance because of positive coronavirus tests among members of its performing ensemble, said that it would perform later this season at Carnegie Hall.It is not only New York that is seeing holiday performances canceled. A number of performances of “A Christmas Carol” at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles were recently canceled, with the theater saying that it would not come back until after Christmas. More

Last year, most carol singing in Britain was canceled because of the pandemic. This year, a group of roving singers was determined to carry on, despite the Omicron variant.LONDON — Last Thursday night, many people in Britain were worrying about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, and whether the pandemic was about to disrupt Christmas plans for the second year in a row.The country had just broken a record for new daily cases of the virus and Prime Minister Boris Johnson had urged the public to “think carefully” before going to Christmas parties.But for three carol singers standing outside Leadbelly’s, a bar in south London, there was a more immediate problem: a lack of tenors.Zoë Bonner, 41, a soprano and co-organizer of a caroling pub crawl to raise money for a homeless charity, explained that a scarcity of male voices “was always” an issue for choirs and carol singers.Then Peter Coleman, 24, strode across the square in front of the bar toward the group. “Houston, we have a man!” he said, introducing himself.Within a few minutes, the four singers began belting out an intricately harmonized rendition of “Deck the Halls” into the London night. When they hit the chorus, a group of nearby drinkers pushed themselves out of their chairs to see what on earth was going on.In Britain, the tradition of caroling dates to at least Victorian times and is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s novels.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesSince the coronavirus pandemic hit last year, live singing has been arguably the most demonized of cultural activities, after it was linked to several superspreader events. An infected singer, projecting their voice across a poorly ventilated space, can quickly spread virus particles.Last Christmas, caroling — when singers perform door to door, or pub to pub, a tradition that dates in Britain to at least Victorian times and is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s novels — stopped in much of Britain after government guidance for the holiday season said singers should consider canceling events, even outdoors. Many carol services in the country’s churches and cathedrals also came to a halt.This winter, it seemed attitudes had changed, at least among British lawmakers. On Dec. 8, when Boris Johnson announced that masks would become compulsory again in most indoor public spaces in England, in response to the Omicron variant, he said that singers were exempt. (A government spokesman later clarified that this didn’t mean people could sing while shopping and avoid wearing a mask in grocery stores.)At Thursday’s caroling pub crawl, Meg McClure, the event’s other organizer, said she realized that the event carried a risk — it felt a bit like “caroling on the edge.” But every singer had done a rapid antigen test before attending, she said, and the group had decided to perform outside if any of the pubs they visited were too busy.Also, she said, there was a chance the singers would only be caroling to a handful of people, since many Londoners were deciding to stay home. “I called all the pubs earlier to make sure we could come,” McClure said. “One actually said to me, ‘I’m not sure we’re going to have anyone in, love — but you’re welcome to visit.’”The evening felt a bit like “caroling on the edge,” one caroler said, although each singer had done a rapid antigen test before attending.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesWhen the group arrived at its first stop — The Salt Quay, a gastro pub overlooking the River Thames — it looked like that prediction might come true. The vast space contained only 11 drinkers, including three young men watching soccer on their phones. The group sang three carols, peaking with an uproarious “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” to polite applause, but few donations.At the next pub, The Brunel, it seemed things might be even worse. When the carolers arrived, the quaint venue had only five customers, two of them visibly drunk. But as soon as the group started singing — now boosted by another male singer, who had arrived late — they grabbed their audience’s attention.One of the pub’s patron’s, George Parrin, 77, pantomimed a heart attack when the voices soared. “Listen to these harmonies!” he shouted to a friend. The friend shushed him back.Two women moved close to the singers and swayed to the music, and several passers-by walked in looking surprised but happy to see the group. Spare coins and bills were soon landing in red collection tins.Molly Thomson, 26, said she had originally planned to go to a concert by the rapper Little Simz, but had decided not to go, because she was worried about catching the virus. “So this is amazing,” she said. “It’s the next best thing.”Outside The Mayflower pub, the eight-strong carol group sang a raucous “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and the haunting “Coventry Carol.”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesFor the professional singers in the group, like Bonner, the last few weeks had been some of the busiest since the pandemic began. This month, she had performed in 12 carol services and concerts, and had a regular gig singing Christmas music while afternoon tea was served at an expensive London hotel. After a year of struggling to make a living, those jobs couldn’t have been more welcome, she said, though she feared new public health restrictions could soon make the work dry up again.After a couple of hours, the roving chorus reached the final pub: The Mayflower, named after the ship that in 1620 took Pilgrims to what is now the United States. The group was now eight members strong — including four men. They stood on the pub’s terrace, looking out onto the Thames, and sang a raucous “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and the haunting “Coventry Carol.”When they came to “Silent Night,” one of the onlookers, Clare Phillips, 32, turned to a friend and said, “This was my grandmother’s favorite carol,” then pulled her close for a hug.Afterward, the carolers gave one final performance on the cobbled streets outside the pub. People came to the windows of nearby apartments to listen, and customers drinking outside grabbed their phones to record the performance. A few even dared to join in.Helen Birkenshaw, a digital producer in her 40s, was one of those rapt by the singing. “These people just appeared out of nowhere,” she said. “It was like a little Christmas magic.” More

Sara Davis Buechner and Conrad Tao both appeared in New York on Saturday.Before Franz Liszt, it was rare for pianists to do solo programs. But when Liszt was preparing to perform in London in 1840, an advertisement said that he would give “recitals on the pianoforte.”The word confused many. How do you “recite” a piano piece? But Liszt had chosen deliberately: His recitals would offer not just an arbitrary mixture of scores but also, as with literary readings, a program with larger thematic threads, musical resonances and even personal significance.His idea certainly caught on. Yet too many recitals today fall far short of the Lisztian ideal; they come across as just a string of performances of this and that.But on Saturday, not one but two adventurous pianists gave recitals that harkened back to the form’s origins, drawing out musical, social and deeply personal connections. In the afternoon, at Theaterlab, an intimate space for experimental fare in Manhattan, Sara Davis Buechner presented “Of Pigs and Pianos,” an 80-minute performance in which she played while relating the story of her often grueling but finally triumphant gender transition. In the evening, at the 92nd Street Y, Conrad Tao juxtaposed major works by Schumann and Beethoven with more recent scores by John Adams, Jason Eckardt and Fred Hersch, along with the premiere of an intense new piece by Tao and several improvisations.Improvisation “kept me in my life” during the pandemic, Conrad Tao told his audience at the 92nd Street Y.Joseph SinnottThough it had theatrical trappings — a simple set and projections of photographs — at its core, “Of Pigs and Pianos” was a recital, offering fine performances of nine varied and challenging works that poignantly defined moments in the journey of a courageous artist, now 62. Buechner’s story, though often wrenching, was rich with childhood fantasies, wistful longings and absurd turns that had the audience laughing along.The title, “Of Pigs and Pianos,” comes from her early years, when she was asked by her first piano teacher what she wanted to be when she grew up. “A pig farmer and a piano player,” Buechner answered.Buechner was born in the Chinese year of the pig, she said, adding that perhaps the way pigs dug in the mud prefigured her penchant as an adult pianist to champion overlooked repertory, including works by Turina, Busoni, Moszkowski and even the forgotten piano pieces of the operetta composer Rudolf Friml.She accompanied endearing stories of her childhood with elegant performances of Haydn and Mozart. Once, visiting a museum with her mother, Buechner was enthralled by a Rubens painting of a beautiful young noblewoman. “I’m going to look like her,” she told her mother, who promptly dragged her to an arms and armor exhibition.Buechner was unsparing in her description of becoming the “punching bag” at her elementary school, abuse that became so extreme that she was sent to a Quaker school. There she fell in love for the first time; Buechner said she wonders whether she was actually in love with this splendid young woman or she secretly wanted to be her.Music and piano became Buechner’s outlet — where she could be what she called her “true self.” As if to demonstrate, at the recital on Saturday she gave an exciting account of the teeming (and very difficult) first movement of Chopin’s Third Sonata. After tossing off the final chords, she proudly shouted: “I played that at my Juilliard audition! I was 16!”Indeed, Buechner had early success after success, including winning top prizes at major competitions and extensive tours. All the while, though, she struggled with her gender identity. On Saturday she shared stories of developing ulcers and contemplating suicide, and had the audience grimly laughing at her accounts of sessions with a series of hopeless psychiatrists.“Therapists are like piano teachers,” she said. “There are lots of them, and they are mostly bad.”Finally, in the late 1990s, Buechner began her transition to her true self, which included a botched surgery in Bangkok that later had to be corrected. In the process she lost friends, family, her manager and concert dates; her letters seeking teaching jobs were not even answered.Eventually she found her way to a new, more welcoming life teaching at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. From that point on, slowly and steadily, her international career was reborn. Today she teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia; the text for “Of Pigs and Pianos” comes from an autobiography she has written and hopes to have published. She ended the program with a melting rendition of a wistful Scarlatti sonata, which conveyed the place of satisfaction and peace at which she has arrived.In the evening, at the Y, speaking to the audience, Tao, 27, said that during the hard, lonely months of the pandemic, improvisation had become increasingly crucial to him, allowing him an immediate “response to an environment” — it “kept me in my life.”His recitals in recent years have been his own brand of Lisztian statements, like “American Rage,” a program (and a 2019 recording) of flinty works by Rzewski, Julia Wolfe and Copland, which Tao assembled, as a son of immigrant parents, to protest the hostility toward immigration and outsiders that was roiling America. Tao, who is gay, has pointedly played Copland’s steely piano works to reclaim this “gay, Commie Jew,” as he described Copland in an interview, from the perception that his music is solely about nostalgic Americana.He opened his program on Saturday by seguing from his own mercurial, rippling improvisation into Adams’s kaleidoscopic “China Gates.” An impish Eckardt piece led into a reflective Bach chorale prelude. Then another restless Tao improvisation set up a superb performance of Schumann’s “Kinderszenen,” followed, after intermission, by Fred Hersch’s “Pastorale” in homage to Schumann and Tao’s pummeling, thrilling “Keyed In.” A stirring and sensitive account of Beethoven’s late Sonata No. 31 ended the recital magnificently.As an encore, in honor of another composer Tao reveres, he played his own arrangement of “Sunday” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” Of all the tributes Sondheim has garnered since his death, none has moved me more. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor many, TikTok is a music discovery engine. Snippets of new songs make their way through the app, providing the soundtracks for dances or comedic sketches. Old songs get resurfaced in new contexts. It is a fount for curious and patient listeners.But there is a different and less central version of music discovery on TikTok: the videos made by the app’s informal gathering of music critics, historians and enthusiasts. Often, the music they’re recommending — which encompasses 1990s indie rock, contemporary video game music, old jazz, contemporary underground hip-hop and beyond — doesn’t overlap with what’s happening on the rest of the app. Instead, these are committed, independent voices following their own muse.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation with four of TikTok’s most singular music aficionados about their favorite albums and songs of 2021, which include releases from Charlotte Day Wilson, Japanese Breakfast, Elujay and more; what it’s like to develop individual taste in the age of the algorithm; and the unexpected joy of tracking down physical media.Guests:Margeaux Labat, @marg.mp3 on TikTokEric Morris, @cyberexboyfriend on TikTokCam Sullivan-Brown, @_itsjust_camm on TikTokHunter White, @wahwahmusic on TikTokConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

The Alanis Morissette musical becomes the first big show felled by the resurgent coronavirus pandemic.“Jagged Little Pill,” a rock musical fueled by the songs of Alanis Morissette and wrestling with a variety of contemporary social issues, will close on Broadway, becoming the first big show felled by the resurgent coronavirus pandemic.The musical stopped performing on Saturday, citing “a limited number of positive Covid test results.” And on Monday night, the producers said they would not reopen.The causes are multiple: the show, which opened in late 2019, was nominated for 15 Tony Awards but did not win the big one, best musical, and never fully found its footing before shutting down with the rest of the industry because of the coronavirus pandemic. It restarted in October, but then faced the renewed uncertainty caused by the Omicron variant.“The drastic turn of events this week with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant has, once again, changed everything,” the producers said in a statement. “We are dismayed by what appears to be another substantial public health crisis, and, due to the detection of multiple positive Covid-19 cases within the company, need to prioritize the health and safety of the cast, crew, and entire team working on ‘Jagged Little Pill.’”They added, “In light of the extreme uncertainty ahead of us this winter, and forced to choose between continuing performances and protecting our company, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our doors.” More

Traditional sales kept the singer’s “30” above “Fighting Demons,” the SoundCloud rapper’s second posthumous album, which dominated on streaming services.Last week, songs from “Fighting Demons,” the second posthumous album by the melodic rapper Juice WRLD, were streamed three times more than those from Adele’s blockbuster new album, “30.” But Adele’s huge edge in traditional sales — 146,500 for “30” versus just 4,000 for “Fighting Demons” — was more than enough to keep the singer at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a fourth week running.Combining its 47 million streams with downloads and sales for the album and its individual tracks, “30” ended its latest week with a total of 183,000 equivalent units by the industry’s current metrics, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm, down just 6 percent from the week prior.That marks the biggest week for an album in its fourth frame in more than three years, according to Billboard, and the first to log four straight weeks atop the chart since Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” at the start of the year. In all, “30” has sold more than a million copies as a full album since its release last month.“Fighting Demons,” which comes in at No. 2, totaled 119,000 equivalent album units, mostly from its 155 million streams. Juice WRLD, who rose from SoundCloud to become a chart-topping pop star as a teenager, died of a drug overdose in December 2019 at the age of 21. The rapper was also the subject of a recent Amazon-sponsored concert celebration and an HBO documentary in the lead-up to the release of “Fighting Demons,” his fourth studio album, which features Justin Bieber and Suga of BTS.Also this week, Taylor Swift’s rerecorded “Red (Taylor’s Version)” dips one spot to No. 3. Michael Bublé’s decade-old “Christmas,” a recurring favorite every winter, holds at No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” remains No. 5, with a slight bump in activity owing to holiday season vinyl sales. More