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      Britney Spears’s Father Files to End Her Conservatorship

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      In a new petition, lawyers for James P. Spears wrote that if the singer “believes that she can handle her own life, Mr. Spears believes that she should get that chance.”Britney Spears’s father, James P. Spears, who agreed earlier this summer to eventually step down from his own role in the conservatorship that has overseen her finances and controlled much of her life since 2008, filed a petition on Tuesday asking the court to “now seriously consider whether this conservatorship is no longer required.”The filing marked a turnaround for Mr. Spears, who long insisted that the guardianship — which was imposed 13 years ago amid concerns over the singer’s mental health and possible drug use — was in his daughter’s best interest. Last month, he said he would eventually step aside from his role overseeing the singer’s finances once there could be “an orderly transition to a new conservator,” but argued that he should not be immediately removed. Until now, he has not said that the conservatorship should end, something that Ms. Spears announced she wanted publicly for the first time in a June court hearing, when she called the arrangement “abusive.”“As Mr. Spears has said again and again, all he wants is what is best for his daughter,” Mr. Spears’s lawyer, Vivian Lee Thoreen, wrote in the new filing. “If Ms. Spears wants to terminate the conservatorship and believes that she can handle her own life, Mr. Spears believes that she should get that chance.”Ms. Spears, 39, has not yet filed her own formal petition to end the conservatorship; she has, however, asked the judge to remove her father as conservator of her estate. He has not served as her personal conservator since September 2019, when Jodi Montgomery, a licensed professional conservator, took over on an ongoing temporary basis.Mr. Spears’s lawyer wrote that Ms. Spears had recently “demonstrated a level of independence that calls into question whether a conservatorship of the person is required.” Ms. Thoreen cited news reports that the singer had been driving — something she had previously been unable to do under the strictures of the conservatorship — and that she had recently chosen her own counsel, Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor and Hollywood lawyer who took over as Ms. Spears’s representative in July. When the conservatorship began, Ms. Spears was found to be incapable of hiring her own counsel.“If Ms. Spears has the capacity and capability to engage counsel on her own, she presumably has capacity and capability to handle other contractual and business matters,” Ms. Thoreen wrote.In a statement, Mr. Rosengart called the filing “vindication” for Ms. Spears. “To the extent Mr. Spears believes he can try to avoid accountability and justice, including sitting for a sworn deposition and answering other discovery under oath, he is incorrect and our investigation into financial mismanagement and other issues will continue,” he said.As a movement among the singer’s fans known as #FreeBritney grew online, arguing that the conservatorship should end, Mr. Spears consistently defended his management of his daughter’s life. In the court filing, his lawyer again maintained that the arrangement “helped Ms. Spears get through a major life crisis, rehabilitate and advance her career, and put her finances and her affairs in order.”But, his lawyer wrote, the situation had changed when Ms. Spears spoke out fervently against the conservatorship. In June, Ms. Spears told the court that her father “loved” his control over her life and should be in jail for his actions as conservator. She has vowed not to perform as long as her father is in charge.As recently as last month, Mr. Spears had fought Ms. Spears’s efforts to remove him from the arrangement and sought to deflect blame for Ms. Spears’s complaints on other people with responsibilities, including Ms. Montgomery, who has opposed Mr. Spears’s continued involvement in the conservatorship.But in the new filing, Mr. Spears’s lawyer wrote that the singer should be able to choose her own doctor and manage her therapy. He also supported Ms. Spears’s request that the conservatorship end without a medical evaluation, which experts have said is unlikely.Over the years, Ms. Spears has raised questions about the fitness of her father to serve as her conservator, citing his struggles with alcoholism. Confidential court records obtained by The New York Times indicated that as early as 2014, she said that she wanted to explore removing her father as conservator; in 2016 the singer told an investigator that she wanted the arrangement terminated as soon as possible. She started publicly calling for its end in her rare public appearance in court in June, where she told the judge overseeing her case, “I just want my life back.”The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 29.Liz Day contributed reporting. More

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      Igor Oistrakh, Soviet-Era Violinist (and a Son of One), Dies at 90

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      His father, David, was one of the 20th century’s finest violinists, but Igor more than held his own as a musician and interpreter performing throughout the West.Igor Oistrakh, a noted violinist who was part of a violin-playing family that included his father, David, one of the 20th century’s finest exponents of the instrument, died on Aug. 14 in Moscow. He was 90.His son, the violinist Valery Oistrakh, said the causes were pneumonia and heart problems.Though much of his career coincided with the Cold War, Mr. Oistrakh was well known in New York and elsewhere in the West, since the Soviet Union sent its best musicians on tour. He made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall in February 1962 performing with Symphony of the Air under Alfred Wallenstein. Harold C. Schonberg, reviewing the concert in The New York Times, noted that few could measure up to David Oistrakh and pronounced Igor “a good violinist, though far from a great one.”But by December 1963, Mr. Oistrakh had performed several more times in New York and had established himself as an admirable musician independent of his father.“Little can be said about the 32-year-old Soviet musician’s superb artistry that has not already been said again and again,” Howard Klein wrote in The Times in a review of a Carnegie Hall recital that month. “His beautiful, silky tone, his effortless execution in devilish passages, his restrained yet powerful emotional thrust, were in evidence and were as stunningly projected as ever.”Father and son frequently played together. When David Oistrakh made his American debut as a conductor, leading the Moscow Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1965, Igor was the soloist for the Tchaikovsky violin concerto.“David Oistrakh conducted like a proud father,” Theodore Strongin wrote in The Times, “giving his son all the leeway in the world and pacing the last movement up into a mad virtuoso fling. The sold-out audience loved it.”After his father’s death in 1974, Igor Oistrakh sometimes performed with his son. He was often accompanied in performances by his wife, the pianist Natalia Zertsalova, and critics often remarked on their like-mindedness.“One can sense them weighing every phrase,” James Allen wrote in The Scotsman, reviewing a 1999 performance at the Music Hall in Aberdeen, Scotland, “making minute adjustments, effortlessly setting up contrasts of tone and texture.”The Oistrakhs, father and son, in the United Kingdom in 1966. David Oistrakh died in 1974.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIgor Davidovich Oistrakh was born to David and Tamara Ivanovna Oistrakh on April 27, 1931, in Odessa, Ukraine. He was studying violin by the age of 6. The household was, of course, immersed in music, and young Igor witnessed bits of history, including the time the composer Aram Khachaturian dropped by in 1940 to unveil the violin concerto he had written for David Oistrakh.“He came to play it on our piano,” Igor Oistrakh told The Times in 2001. “He did not take his overcoat off. He did not even sit at the piano. He just played, very vigorously. He was so loud that my great-great-grandmother, my father’s grandmother, was scared awake from her nap.”Mr. Oistrakh studied at the Central Music School and then at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 1949 he won top prize at an international youth violin competition in Budapest, and in 1952 he won the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poland.He made his Western debut at Royal Albert Hall in London in 1953 and continued to perform all over the world in the Cold War era. International tensions occasionally intruded on his concerts, as they did in 1971 when, The Times wrote, a performance at Philharmonic Hall in Manhattan “was interrupted after the first piece by an unscheduled intermission during which security forces searched the hall for harassment devices that might have been planted by the groups that have been protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Oistrakh made many recordings and was a conductor and teacher, taking a post at the Moscow Conservatory in 1958. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he became a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels for a time. At his death, he lived in Moscow.His wife died in 2017. In addition to his son, he is survived by a grandson.Mr. Oistrakh’s physical resemblance to his father was striking, so much so that Tamara Bernstein, reviewing a 1992 performance with the Toronto Philharmonic for The Globe and Mail of Canada, began by saying, “It is unnerving, to say the least, to see a late lamented violinist stride on stage to wild applause.”In 1998 The Miami Herald asked him a question he must have confronted frequently: Did he feel overshadowed by his father?“I think I’ve had a wonderful career of my own, playing with the best orchestras and conductors in the world,” he answered diplomatically, “and that I was lucky to have had such a great and wonderful father.” More

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      10 Hours Gives Us (Almost) All of Schumann’s Songs

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      Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, peerless in lieder, have released an 11-disc set of Robert Schumann’s songs, many overlooked.Back in 1988, it was hearing the lieder of Robert Schumann that convinced Christian Gerhaher, then a philosophy student in Munich, to ask a pianist he knew from school, Gerold Huber, whether they might start playing some songs together.Three decades later, Gerhaher and Huber have long since become the greatest partnership in singing, and they come full circle this month with the release of an 11-disc box set of Schumann on Sony. As its cover announces, it contains “All the Songs.”“Gerold and I have worked on singing Schumann for 33 years,” Gerhaher, 52, said in an interview. “He composed nearly 300 songs, but what is astonishing is that every song is amazing, a revelation of possibilities, of thoughts, of beauty. There is maybe only one song I don’t like so much.” (It’s “Der Handschuh.”)Schumann has had an uncertain presence in the art song repertoire. While cycles like “Dichterliebe” are touchstones, much of his output remains overlooked. Gerhaher can cite only two prior attempts at anything comparable to a complete set, neither of them as cohesive as his new release.The baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among the leading lieder advocates of the 20th century, taped about half the songs in the 1970s. Graham Johnson, an accompanist with encyclopedic tastes, compiled a very full set on Hyperion from 1996 to 2009. But he split the songs among different vocalists.That makes Gerhaher the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups). Huber is at the piano throughout, and the goal is finally to give Schumann his due as a connoisseur of lyrics — according to Gerhaher, “one of the best-read composers that there has ever been.”Gerhaher believes that Schumann took a far more literary approach to songs than, say, Schubert — an approach that was intended “to make these poems even more complicated than they are.” He did this not just in introducing tensions between text and music (and vocalist and pianist), but also by writing almost exclusively in cycles, combining disparate poems into coherent sets.That has always been obvious with cycles like the Eichendorff “Liederkreis” (Op. 39), or the “Kerner Lieder” (Op. 35). But it is true, too, Gerhaher said, of less monumental groupings with innocuous titles like “Three Songs” (Op. 83) or “Six Songs” (Op. 107) — their texts (sometimes by the same poet, sometimes drawn from different ones) freighted with deeper, often darker meaning when set together.Gerhaher is the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups).Daniel Etter for The New York Times“He doesn’t want to finish thinking about a poem,” Gerhaher said. “By putting them into music and then combining them into cycles, he stretches the semantic nature of a poem, in order to create something very different and new. This is what I love.”Schumann composed his songs in two spells. The first period, from 1840, has been seen as the epitome of Romanticism. The second has been heard skeptically, if at all, but Gerhaher has increasingly found it the richer. Schumann wrote these songs from 1849 to 1852, not long before he jumped into the Rhine in 1854 and died in a psychiatric asylum two years later. Like most of his later works, the late songs have been lesser to some ears, as antiquated prejudices about mental health have led to misunderstandings of their experimental tone.Gerhaher dissents, citing the Violin Concerto and the “Ghost Variations” as further evidence that this view is wrong. “Saying that the late Schumann was a sick Schumann, mentally and spiritually weak, is an assumption which is dangerous,” he said. “The assumption that we understand something as being weak is always combined with the assumption that we understand something else very well. Both are wrong, I think.”With that in mind, Gerhaher chose five late songs to introduce his new recording. Here are edited excerpts from his comments.‘Schneeglöckchen’ (Op. 96, No. 2)In Op. 96, you have five songs. Two and four are very disturbing, about human sorrow. The third, in the middle, is an August von Platen poem that explains that words can’t convey what they try to convey. These three describe humanity’s horrible situation: being thrown into the world and not even being able to talk to each other properly.There is another “Schneeglöckchen” (“Snowdrops”) in the “Liederalbum für die Jügend” (Op. 79), where it means something nice, because it’s a sign of the end of winter. But the anonymous poem Schumann sets here in Op. 96 is harder to understand. A voice comes to a snowdrop and says, you have to leave, a storm is coming. But why? It’s the end of winter; the flower has nothing to fear. The voice answers that the snowdrop’s “Liverei” — its uniform — is white, with a green trim.Why does it talk about a uniform? I looked through some uniform books, and found a similar one for a cavalry called the Scheither Corps, part of the Hanover regiment in the Seven Years’ War. There was a battle at Moys, near Görlitz, where the corps was defeated by Austria. There was one snowdrop rider left hurt, who couldn’t get home. And in the poem the voice says you have to go home. This is so disturbing, even if I can’t prove the connection.‘Himmel und Erde’ (Op. 96, No. 5)This last song, “Heaven and Earth,” is a resolution for the Op. 96 cycle. The first song is Goethe’s “Nachtlied”; it starts with the two nouns “Gipfel” (“hills”) and “Wipfel” (“treetops”). This last one, by Wilfried von der Neun, starts with the reverse, with “Wipfel” then “Gipfel.” You are confronted with these opposites, then you are confronted with heaven, and you see that these oppositions are not important anymore; they come together. It reminds me of the medieval German philosopher Nicholas von Kues, who wrote about the “coincidentia oppositorum” — the falling together of opposites.‘An den Mond’ (Op. 95, No. 2)At first you can’t understand this cycle at all. You see number one, “Die Tochter Jephtas” (“Jephthah’s Daughter”), and number three, “Dem Helden” (“To the Hero”). All three are Byron texts. What does it mean?In 1847, Fanny Mendelssohn died, and Felix Mendelssohn shortly after, and Schumann wrote some Byron into his book of poems. The first song is a memorial to Fanny. Jephthah’s daughter was this warrior without a name; she fought for her father, the king, but she didn’t get a name. This was Fanny’s fate: She was a composer, but she didn’t make a name as one. “To the Hero” is about Felix’s role in these years, especially to Schumann: the splendid hero of music.In the middle is “To the Moon.” It says, look, moon, you are kind of a star, but you are a cold star, because you reflect warm light from the sun — you are only a memory, sad, cold, hard memory. This is how Schumann combined the deaths of his two friends.‘Die Blume der Ergebung’ (Op. 83, No. 2)This cycle so abstract. You have three songs, and they represent three ways to set a poem. The first song, “Resignation,” is the most advanced and through-composed; the second is a varied strophic song; the third, “Der Einsiedler” (“The Hermit”), is a perfect strophic song. In “The Flower of Resignation,” you have five strophes, and in the middle of the third strophe, you see this word “Liebesschalen” (literally “love bowls”). This is the center of the middle strophe of these three songs, the creation of a third person by a couple. It can’t be an ongoing error that Schumann had this maniacal tendency to conceive of combinations.“Requiem” (Op. 90, No. 7)Op. 90 is maybe my favorite cycle overall. There is a downward spiral. It’s very dark, about accepting the vanity of the world and the sadness of being alone. We start with a framing song again, the song of a blacksmith who is helping Faust on his travels, naïvely unaware that Faust is seducing his wife. In the middle you have two song couples, which are examples of losing faith in life. The fourth is a wonderful song about love vanishing and death taking over.Then Schumann added this “Requiem” as a requiem for the poet, Nikolaus Lenau, whom he thought was dead but in fact only died around the day of the first performance of these songs. You have these illusions of eternity, of never-ending life. It’s so full of feeling, a coming-together of spirituality and sensuality. More

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      Bomba Estéreo Strives to Save the Planet and Soothe the Heart

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      Mixing traditions and electronics, this duo from Colombia envisions a futurism with roots.When Bomba Estéreo, the Colombian duo of Simón Mejía and Liliana Saumet, had nearly finished recording its sixth studio album, “Deja,” the group took part in an age-old ritual: a pagamento, or payment. It’s a ceremony “to pay back what you have taken from the Earth,” Mejía explained in a video interview from his home studio in Bogotá.At a sacred site in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta — snow-capped mountains on Colombia’s Caribbean coast that are still home to Indigenous groups — Bomba Estéreo spent a night making offerings and sharing profound conversation with a mamo, a shaman of the Arhuaco people.As the ceremony was ending, Mejía asked the mamo, Manuel Nieves, to visit Saumet’s studio, at her home in Santa Marta, and to record a message for the public; it became the final words on the album. Speaking in Arhuaco, the mamo calls for preservation of the endangered environment, warning about climate change and concluding, “On this Earth, our duty is to take care of Mother Nature.”By video from Santa Marta, Saumet said, “What we talk about on this album is connection. Connection with nature, connection with people, connection with all that’s around us.”Over the past 15 years, the combination of Mejía’s music and production and Saumet’s voice, melodies and lyrics have brought Bomba Estéreo major hits across Latin America, like “Soy Yo,” a call for self-empowerment. and “To My Love,” both from the 2015 album “Amanecer.”From its beginnings, as a solo studio project for Mejía, Bomba Estéreo set out to fuse electronica with a Colombian heritage that encompasses Indigenous, African and European recombinations. “Colombia is all about mixture and diversity — we have it in our DNA,” Mejía said. “We’re not one thing. We’re many things at the same time in this small, crazy and conflicted territory.”For Bomba Estéreo, he said, “The concept was trying to make an electronic music that was original, that wasn’t a copy of the electronic music that was made in London or New York or Detroit or Berlin. It was kind of an identity search. OK, if we, as Colombians or Latin Americans, are going to make electronic music, how would it sound? Our dance music is cumbia, is champeta, is salsa, is merengue, is all the tropical and Caribbean and folk music. And the international dance music is electronic music. So what happens if those two worlds that come from dance — that connection with the ritualistic — can come together because they have the same root?”Mejía met Saumet at a party — “a really, really bad party,” Saumet recalled — and later invited her to sing and write at a recording session; their collaboration was forged when she finished a song, “Huepaje,” in 45 minutes. Her untrained voice had the biting tone of traditional Colombian styles, but she had also grown up on hip-hop and could write both raps and melodies; girlish but assertive, she easily cuts through Mejía’s electronic constructions.In Bomba Estéreo’s early years, Mejía traveled around Columbia to learn about regional styles. He worked on a documentary on the drumming of San Basilio de Palenque, a village founded in the 17th century by escaped African slaves, and set up a recording studio there; he delved into the carnival music of Barranquilla, and he sought out old LPs of local music. Meanwhile, the group’s studio expertise expanded rapidly.With each album, Bomba Estéreo’s music has grown richer, bolder, more intricate and more idealistic. “Deja” is simultaneously earnest, spiritual, euphoric, rooted and high-tech. “We’ve grown older and we’ve learned more about ourselves, about music, about the world. So you kind of develop more layers in life,” Mejía said.“Colombia is all about mixture and diversity — we have it in our DNA,” Mejía said.Frank Hoensch/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe songs on “Deja” are grouped under elements: water, air, earth and fire.Frank Hoensch/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSince the 2010s, Bomba Estéreo has been strongly committed to environmentalism. With songs like “Siembra” (“Sowing”) and “Dejame Respirar” (“Let Me Breathe”), with benefit concerts, with speeches and with a 2020 documentary film, “Sonic Forest,” Bomba Estéreo has spoken out against deforestation, mining and pollution. Recording under the name Monte, Mejía released a solo album in 2020, “Mirla,” that put nature sounds at the center of instrumental tracks.The songs on “Deja” began emerging while Bomba Estéreo was touring Europe in 2019. On the bus, the guitarist and co-producer José Castillo and the percussionist Efraín (Pacho) Cuadrado started coming up with rhythms and guitar licks that would end up in new songs. After the tour, Mejía returned to Bogotá, building studio tracks and sending them to Saumet, who was in Canada with her Canadian husband and their children. Saumet brought in a longtime friend, Lido Pimienta, a Colombian songwriter who had moved to Canada in her teens; Pimienta was a singer, songwriter and arranger on “Deja”; Saumet has also been writing a solo album with her.“I’m her filter,” Pimienta said from her studio in Toronto. “Liliana is a fountain of words and singing. She is very free, and I’m more, like, methodical. She always tells me, ‘You’re my nerd,’ and I’m like, ‘You’re my hippie.’” Bomba Estéreo also invited other singers for the album: the Cuban duo Okan, the Mexican songwriter Leonel García and the Nigerian Afrobeats singer Yemi Alade. Cuadrado, the band’s percussionist, takes over lead vocals on “Tamborero,” a song that harks back to Afro-Colombian chants amid the electronics, as it celebrates the drums at the core of the music.“This is what music and art is,” Saumet said. “Something that was really awful in that moment, or was super strong, can be now something inspiring for other people.”Belulita PerezAt its best, Bomba Estéreo’s music hints at what Mejía calls “an Indigenous futuristic kind of civilization.”Belulita PerezIn January 2020, just before the pandemic lockdown, Bomba Estéreo and guest musicians gathered for three weeks of recording at Saumet’s home on the coast of Santa Marta, with the beach out front and a jungle and mountains behind it. The sounds of monkeys, birds and splashing Caribbean waves, recorded on the spot, surface often throughout the album.“The really cool thing about this album is that we finished it all together,” Mejía said. “In general, it’s everyone sending things on the internet. But I had always seen Bomba as a community effort, and finishing it together was kind of like having this hippie community, with everyone sharing energy.”The songs on “Deja” are grouped under elements: water, air, earth and fire. But that framework is open enough to encompass songs offering ecological pleas, dance-floor bliss, glimpses of mystical revelation and thoughts about loneliness, depression and healing.“Agua” (“Water”) opens the album with Saument, Pimienta and Okan harmonizing on a traditional-sounding chant, joined by a Colombian beat — a bullerengue — along with electronic blips and bass lines, and birds recorded in Santa Marta. The lyrics equate a woman’s body with an endangered planet: “Give me water, give me wind and I will survive,” Saumet sings.“Tierra” (“Earth”) uses a six-beat rhythm and plinking marimba patterns, drawing on Afro-Colombian styles from the Pacific Coast, to lament rapacious exploitation of natural resources. “The rivers were drained, the mountains were left empty for coal,” Saumet sings. “We are standing in the middle of the forest, watching its extinction.”Yet the album also has more lighthearted moments — like the Afrobeats-tinged “Conexión Total,” with Saumet and Alade wanting someone to go offline and get physical — and more introspective ones. The title track, written with Pimienta, is about trying to live through depression and leave it behind.“Lido and me, we both have a personal story with depression,” Saumet said. “When we finished that song, we started crying together. Now we can hear the song and know other people can be touched. This is what music and art is. Something that was really awful in that moment, or was super strong, can be now something inspiring for other people.”At its best, Bomba Estéreo’s music hints at what Mejía calls “an Indigenous futuristic kind of civilization,” he said, and added: “Obviously we’re not going back to living as an Indigenous tribe lives in the Amazon. We already live in cities, and we have computers and phones and whatever. But we can find a level of mixing our technology and respecting and being with nature. It’s like having one bare foot in the roots, while the head is looking to the future.” More

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      On 'Certified Lover Boy,' Drake Seeks an Enemy Besides Himself

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      His new album “Certified Lover Boy” is full of familiar anxieties and sounds, and barbed words for Kanye West, a mentor turned nemesis.At this point in Drake’s career, there are songs about the throne, and songs about the bed. Each milieu comes with a price. The first is about hard power: Remaining at the top means outmaneuvering enemies, building up an invulnerable enterprise. The other, in Drake’s hands at least, is about soft power — most often, the path to conquest is through humility, and sometimes awe. Rarely do the two modes meet.Which is what makes the concluding verse of “Race My Mind,” from Drake’s new album “Certified Lover Boy,” such a jolt. In the first half of the song, he’s singing, but his affection is starting to curdle; it’s a serenade to a woman who’s listening to other things. Midway through, the song shifts away from sweet plea to indignation, and Drake turns to rapping.He sounds frustrated, dismissive, a little anxious: “Don’t you dare hit me back with no ‘k, sure’/Soon as I tell you that you the one I would wait for/You too saucy, too flossy, you moved in and moved off me.” The woman he’s craving is spending time with lesser competitors, and it’s scrambling Drake’s two vectors of control: “Know who you be around, I know that they teaming up/Telling you you better off leaving me in the dust.”It’s a fevered rush of affront, and by far the most alert Drake sounds on “Certified Lover Boy,” his sixth studio album, and first in three years. Historically, his approaches have been hard to argue with — he has fundamentally rewritten the template for pop music over the last decade. But on “Certified Lover Boy” they have been polished smooth, become maybe a little shopworn. This album is better in the dark. Better in the car. It demonstrates how sonically rigorous even the most casual, tossed-off Drake songs are. But its storytelling doesn’t always hold up to strict scrutiny.This is particularly true in the songs about women: the silly “Girls Want Girls” with Lil Baby, “Get Along Better” with Ty Dolla Sign, the lightly grim “___ Fans.” Rather, what really gets Drake steaming on this album are naysayers and adversaries, especially evident in the 11th-hour rhymes about Kanye West, with whom Drake has been lately — and historically, and forevermore — locked in a tangle. (More on these Oedipal shenanigans later.) “Certified Lover Boy” will make its debut at No. 1 next week with the biggest opening-week numbers for any album this year, replacing West’s “Donda,” which just did the same.Throughout his career, Drake’s nimbleness has made him one of pop’s most consistently inventive stars, willing to absorb and reinterpret any number of regional and global styles. There are sonic bright spots when he nods to Houston (the OG Ron C intro on “TSU” and the sample of Bun B’s “Get Throwed” on “N 2 Deep”) and Memphis (the sampled Project Pat verse on “Knife Talk,” its elastically chewy flow pattern ably mimicked by 21 Savage), both long-running fonts of inspiration. And sometimes Drake calls back to older versions of himself — the piano motifs at the beginning and end of “The Remorse,” the album closer, directly nod to “Marvin’s Room,” the ne plus ultra of Drake’s magnetic toxicity.But “Certified Lover Boy” is his least musically imaginative album, the one where he pushes himself the least in terms of method and pattern. Apart from the lite Afrobeats number “Fountains,” with the feathery Nigerian singer Tems, most songs here hew to the familiar narcotic synths and claustrophobic samples that underlie much of his music. This album might mark something like the beginning of the end of the Drake era, except that the Drake era is simply all of pop music now, and his innovations have become the work of, well, everyone else.Drake is aware of this, of course — no one both performs, and watches himself perform, with the same intensity. Some of this album’s sharpest lines are about how Drake, the entity, functions out in the rest of the world. “Under a picture lives some of the greatest quotes from me,” he raps on “Champagne Poetry,” about your Instagram captions. “I apologize for my absence, I know I left you without a name to drop/I don’t know how I expected you to get your clout up and get your money up,” he taunts on “Papi’s Home.”But also Drake is the primary engineer — his image is not happenstance. Which is why the video for “Way 2 Sexy” (which samples Right Said Fred) is designed for memes, though it feels halfhearted. And his deep-sigh line about being a lesbian on “Girls Want Girls” is aimed not at the progressives who have lambasted it, but those in search of a cheap wink.The way Drake steadily manicures his public image couldn’t stand in more stark contrast to how West manages his, and that’s the primary reason the current tension between them feels so asymmetric. West’s lashings — including leaking Drake’s alleged home address — have been primal, broadsides against an impertinent child. But Drake is a father, too, and there’s been something chillier and more strategic about how he’s handled the recent back and forth. “Give that address to your driver, make it your destination/’Stead of just a post out of desperation,” he raps on “7am on Bridle Path,” a lightly deflated but acutely barbed accounting of learning to fall out of love with your mentor.The day after “Certified Lover Boy” was released, Drake leaked “Life of the Party,” an unheard song by West that included some ranting lines aimed at Drake. But the song, which features a majestic verse from the rarely heard Andre 3000, was something approaching spectacular, and also profoundly emotional — in trying to paint his nemesis as hubristic, Drake instead painted him as vulnerable, the good kind.The truth is that this isn’t really a battle, at least not one fellow artists feel compelled to take sides in — several appear on both “Donda” and “Certified Lover Boy.” And that’s not the only thing these two albums have in common: they’re summary statements of a once forward-thinking but now widely accepted worldview, not wild reinventions. Perhaps bored with battling themselves, the two superstars have turned to battling each other. But that won’t heal what’s within.Drake“Certified Lover Boy”(Republic) More

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      It’s Time to Give Enya Another Listen

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      Even at her peak, she was hugely famous but never especially cool. But maybe we’re finally ready to heed her whispered call to awaken.On the long drives through Ireland that peppered my childhood like bouts of flu, my father played songs from a small a pool of classic albums. Many of these would be familiar to any Irishman from that time. The cheerful ribaldry of the Dubliners, Christy Moore’s “Live at the Point” and the earnest, heart-tugging confessionals of Eleanor McEvoy and Mary Black all soundtracked our winding trips through the unending swatches of green that formed the Irish countryside. But none of those artists struck me like my father’s personal favorite, Enya.My father’s fascination with Enya was mysterious. Her music wasn’t like anything else he listened to, but then, it’s not much like the music anyone else makes either. Enya’s music is suffused with an aura of mysticism so nebulous it borders on the occult; nevertheless it enraptured a man so Catholic he would interrupt family holidays with cheerful visits to Marian shrines. The global success of this mélange of Irish traditional music and new-age electronica was unlikely given that the bulwark of her fandom, in Ireland at least, appeared to be people like my father: rank traditionalists entering middle age, few of whom would have countenanced synthesizers, arpeggiated strings or heavy reverb in any other aural context.I, a youthful devotee of ambient music, loved Enya for her place in that genre’s canon. I was mesmerized by the folding synthscapes of “Caribbean Blue” or “Sumiregusa (Wild Violet),” which hit my childhood ears like probes from a far-flung planet. Her melodies recursed and interwound; her vocals shimmered and shone, at once new and old, alien and familiar. It just confused me to see my father similarly moved. After all, even Aphex Twin’s most soothing ambient works often made him unplug my CD player, as if their nontraditional musical forms might damage our wiring. How, then, could Enya reduce this same man to tears?It helped that she was local. As a child, Eithne Brennan grew up not far from Mullennan, my home, in one of the most prestigious families in the history of Irish traditional music. She departed from the Brennans’ band, Clannad, at a young age, boned up on Japanese synths and crafted a strange musical form that was all her own. By the time I was an adolescent, the shy little sister of Clannad had become one of the biggest-selling recording artists on Earth. Within the spiraling melody of ‘Aldebaran’ there is euphoria and gravitas, as well as something approaching dread.When I was a teenager, Enya was hugely famous but never especially cool, at least not among people my age. I adored Enya for the sonic worlds she charted for her listeners: filled with pomp and grandiosity, yes, but also rivers of deep and intense wonder. I found in her music that same pinch of the infinite I felt listening to “An Ending (Ascent),” by Brian Eno, or “Polynomial-C,” by Aphex Twin. Yet when I tried to posit her as a peer of those artists, the stares I received were blank and pitying. The images blaring out from Enya’s album covers and videos were unerringly earnest, simultaneously too camp to be serious and too serious to be camp. For all her peculiar complexity, my classmates wrote Enya off as easy listening, on par with panpipe Muzak.This skepticism was probably because of the mythological visual style that Enya built around herself: She lived in a castle, rarely gave interviews or performed live. Her videos present her as an ethereal being, surrounded at all times by 400 lit candles, wearing a wardrobe bequeathed to her by a faerie queen who had too many velvet capes lying around and hated to see them go to waste. This imagery made Enya a world unto herself. Nothing typifies this more than my favorite Enya track, the beguiling “Aldebaran.” It first found fame as part of the soundtrack she composed for the BBC documentary “The Celts,” a 10-episode series that told the story of the Celtic people from prehistory to 1987. Featuring Irish-language vocals delivered at Enya’s most breathy, “Aldebaran” marries the Irish past to the future through a bonkers tale of intergalactic travel. The production is beatless and ever-winding, girded by a coruscating, arpeggiated riff that tumbles through major and minor chords in a cycle of atmospheric tumult. Within its spiraling melody there is euphoria and gravitas, as well as something approaching dread (she dedicated the song to Ridley Scott). Beneath the song’s soaring chords and breathy vocals, an alien undercurrent has smuggled itself aboard — a reminder that, in space, no one can hear you sing. Enya’s music has other unique attractions. If you visit her Twitter page, you might be recommended not just Phil Collins and Tina Turner but also Bob Ross: Even the algorithm seems to know her work is contemplative and therapeutic. Enya’s hallmarks — the angelic wash of reverb, ASMR-ready vocals; her deeply textured and layered synths — were soothing for me on long journeys as a child. They still provide a portal to long-dead worlds and distant stars, but also a town a few parishes over from my own.Nowadays, when I recommend Enya, and “Aldebaran” in particular, ears aren’t quite as deaf as they once were. The cosmos may now be heeding her whispered call to awaken, whether she knows it or not. I hope she does, and that somewhere, dressed in velvet, Enya sometimes plays “Aldebaran” still. Bringing another candle to another window, might she look out from the stone walls of her castle, and once more point her face toward the stars? More

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      Miss the Old Kanye? Try the New Kanye.

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      Kanye West’s 10th album, “Donda,” just had the biggest opening week of the year (though that mark is about to be eclipsed by Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy”). The success of “Donda” on the Billboard chart and on streaming services wasn’t guaranteed, given how West has receded from the center of hip-hop in recent years. But with an album rollout that grew increasingly rococo over several weeks, he displayed his true gift for garnering attention.Which, as it happens, isn’t much different from his old methods. Each new microgeneration is shocked anew by West’s antics, but since the beginning of his career, he has been dreaming big, speaking loudly, courting controversy and channeling all of that into music.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how West has remained steadfast in his roller-coaster approach to celebrity, and how perhaps the primary difference between West’s agitations 15 years ago and today is the financial power he is able to wield in the service of his goals.Guests:Datwon Thomas, the editor in chief of VibeJustin Charity, a staff writer at The Ringer and co-host of the “Sound Only” podcast More

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      Mas Aya’s Music Holds Quiet Rebellions

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      On his new album, the Nicaraguan Canadian producer considers the political expressions embedded in moments of stillness.Brandon Valdivia’s “Momento Presente” is like a summons. On the arresting track from his September album, “Máscaras,” an offbeat, not-quite-footwork rhythm thumps under the swirls of a tin whistle. A bell chimes, and before long, the godlike voice of an elder intones a call to action. “Right now, the oppressors and the oppressed are being separated,” it reflects in Spanish. “We’re not going to wait 2,000 years for the good ones to be on one side and the bad ones to be on another. We are living in that moment now.”This is the kind of militant magic that Valdivia, 38, better known as Mas Aya, invokes in his music. “I’m trying to meld a political take in addition to a very spiritual take,” he said in a video interview from his studio in London, Ontario. “You have to act; you have to be in the moment; you have to be in the world.”That sense of quiet urgency suffuses “Máscaras” (“Masks”), his first album since the 2017 LP “Nikan.” At times, the project makes direct references to revolutions in Nicaragua, his homeland. (The sample in “Momento Presente” is lifted from a gathering of guerrillas in the late 1970s led by the liberation theologist Ernesto Cardenal.) But “Máscaras” doesn’t just rely on explicit allusions to power. It also considers the small rebellions embedded in immersive moments of stillness.Valdivia said the album’s title describes the masks used in political marches and Indigenous ceremonies, but also his own compositional practice. “Instruments are hiding themselves within the cloud of textures,” he explained. The album’s songs are like impressionistic sketches, trading focal points for cool fluidity. The quena and bansuri flutes hover over drum loops. Clatters of claves or maracas evanesce into waves of crisp synths and off-kilter electronic beats, shape-shifting into sweet flurries of harmony.Valdivia grew up in Chatham, a small Canadian town about an hour’s drive from Detroit. His was one of the first Latino families to arrive, and he often longed for comrades in music, community and art.In Nicaragua, his father was a longhaired hippie who listened to Black Sabbath and cumbia, smoked marijuana and dropped acid. Valdivia fell in love with music at age 12 and learned to play the recorder, then eventually the drums. He watched MuchMusic (the MTV of Canada) and listened to Detroit public radio. He read French poetry and ordered a copy of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” at the local record store. It took a comically long six months to arrive.“I knew I was a weirdo,” he said of the conservative world that surrounded him. “I wanted to get out as fast as I could.”He did escape to college, studying composition at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, where he found “people who were creative, who were interested in pushing the envelope,” he said. “Like, weirdos. I use that word a lot.”Valdivia opted to start a solo project after he grew frustrated with the Toronto arts scene. “Nobody was talking politics,” he said.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesIn the years that followed, Valdivia became a well-respected multi-instrumentalist and percussionist in Toronto’s experimental and art-rock scene, playing in groups like Not the Wind, Not the Flag and I Have Eaten the City. He has also collaborated extensively with his partner, the Grammy-nominated, genre-crushing artist Lido Pimienta, who is featured on “Máscaras.” In his early 20s, he traveled to Nicaragua, where he visited family in Managua, Esteli and his grandmother’s hometown Masaya — and studied the country’s folkloric music traditions. After he returned to Canada, he decided to start a solo project inspired in part by his frustration with the Toronto arts scene.“Nobody was talking politics. Everyone was basically making weird nihilistic experimental music,” he said. Mas Aya draws its name from his grandmother’s home as well as the Spanish phrase “el más allá,” meaning “the beyond.”Valdivia described his practice as “harmelodic,” a term he borrowed from the jazz musician Ornette Coleman. “This type of music where melody, harmony and rhythm are all at the service of each other,” he explained. It’s a vision that captures Valdivia’s actual musical approach, but it also evokes the spiritual tones of the album as a whole.On the track “Quiescence,” Valdivia uses the mbira dzavadzimu (a type of thumb piano) as percussion, even though it is an instrument typically plucked on metal keys. Over feather-light flutes and shimmering synths, the sound of mallets hitting the mbira melt into a peaceful liquid ripple. On “18 de Abril,” he samples audio from a protester at a 2018 university demonstration in Nicaragua, connecting present-day resistance efforts to movements of decades past, and presenting political struggle as a continuum. The result moves beyond mere fusion or ancestral homage. It articulates prismatic, poetic language, demonstrating that political expression isn’t always obvious. It can arrive in moments of hushed contemplation and connection, too. More