Music

Nearly 30 years after emerging as a profane gangster rapper from Long Beach, Calif., Snoop Dogg has transcended his hip-hop roots and become culturally ubiquitous.Here he is in the new Addams Family movie. There he is on a Corona commercial. He has a show with Martha Stewart on VH1 and an investment fund, and is still releasing new music.Celebrities who cross genres can risk diluting their brand, spreading themselves too thin or alienating the core fans who propelled their rise to fame. Snoop has so far managed to avoid these pitfalls while, in crucial ways, remaining relentlessly on message.Zooming from his compound in Los Angeles, he smoked an enormous blunt while discussing how he went from a shy musician to a multiplatform entrepreneur with several new ventures in the burgeoning cannabis industry.To the brands he endorses, including Corona, Beyond Meat and Bic lighters, he is a gregarious spokesman. Yet Snoop has strong feelings about what he says is persistent racism in the business world, and is uninhibited in his critique of the status quo.This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.How have you managed to stay relevant for so long?The easiest thing you can do is just do you. I felt like doing me would be the easiest path to me remaining relevant in the industry. It’s originality and uniqueness. I just try to do me.OK. At what point did you think your career was going to be about more than just music?Probably after I did the “Murder Was the Case” movie. In the beginning, I wasn’t comfortable on camera. I was kind of shy. But once I got to that stage, as far as to be able to shoot a movie that I asked for, that I wanted to be a part of, and it came to life — it was fascinating to me.How did you overcome that shyness?Success and practice. The more success you have and practice you have, the more familiar you become with it. Either love it or hate. I love what it do for me and I love what it do for other people when they see me onscreen. It’s a feeling of joy when people understand it and they get it.How did you think about building out a career beyond music?We weren’t into branding or any of that at first. We were just into making good music and trying to be the dopest [expletive] in the world. My branding and my business came when I was able to go to No Limit Records with Master P, and be under his guidance and his tutelage and his wisdom. He taught me how to be a better businessman, how to be more than just a rapper, but to be about my business. It’s called show business. I had mastered show. But Master P showed me how to master the business.Who were your mentors besides Master P?Dr. Dre. Definitely Puffy. Russell Simmons. Guys like that, that were in my field but were able to jump outside of it and become bigger.I’m not really somebody that likes taking information from people. I’m more about: We trading game, chopping it up, bettering each other, giving information on how my business is going, how your business is working, how I see it from the outside looking in.I got a lot of relationships. Quincy Jones and Charlie Wilson are like uncles to me, where they shape and mold the lifestyle of Snoop Dogg, not just the business. What you learn about being a better person from somebody is more important than what you learn business-wise or career-wise.How did you make sure you had honest brokers around you as you were getting involved in new ventures?Sometimes you have to have the wrong people around you to know what the wrong people around you look like and what they act like. My experience came from having the wrong people in my business, to where they didn’t benefit me or didn’t teach me anything.A lot of people say don’t mix family and business, but you recently hired your wife as your business manager.Why not? You got to have people in your life that understand you, and understand business. She’s been my best friend for like 35 years, so she understands everything about me and how I get down. I don’t trust nobody like I trust her. At the end of the day, if something was to go wrong with me or if I wasn’t able to do it anymore, I know that everything would be in the right hands, and things would continue to run just like an operation.How do you think about which brands you want to work with these days?It’s got to be fun. And it’s going to make funds. So long as the word “fun” is involved, it’s cool.Do you consider potential partners through any moral or ethical lens?I think about all of it. I don’t want to associate myself with people who don’t have a like mind as me, just like they don’t want to associate themselves with me if I don’t have the same mind as them. Companies that get down with me know how I get down. They know the extracurricular things that I do. They know the things that I do in the hip-hop world and in the business world.They have to accept all of that when you’re dealing with Snoop Dogg. That’s the way I branded myself, to where when you get Snoop Dogg, you get all of it. It’s just, what version did you pay for? Did you pay for the version with the kids, the G-rated Addams Family movie? Or did you pay for the rated-R Snoop Dogg, the one the adults like? Which one did you pay for?“I helped make this business famous before it became legal.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesBack when you started making music, did you ever imagine how big the legal cannabis market would get?No. Not as many times as I went to jail for it. And it’s still on my criminal record. I don’t understand how it could go from being the most hated, the most vicious thing that you could do, to now everybody’s capitalizing off of it, and they’re leaning toward a demographic that can prosper off of it, as opposed to the demographic that created the business.We should be able to have some of our people — that look like me — as executives, as C.E.O.s, as platform owners. You know, the top of the chain, not just the spokesperson or the brand ambassador. We need to be the brand owners.Is that part of the reason you’re involved in the business?I helped make this business famous before it became legal. The forefathers were the ones before me. The jazz musicians, the Bob Marleys, the Cheech and Chongs, the Willie Nelsons. All of those guys laid the foundation down. I just continued what they were doing and put a little bit more spice on. I’m still paying respect to them, and knowing that this is a love branch. Cannabis, marijuana, whatever you want to call it, is all about love and bringing people together.Is the issue of trying to close the Black wealth gap something you’re thinking about beyond the cannabis industry?That’s why I’m trying to be one of those examples, of someone who creates his own everything, owns his own everything, and has a brand strong enough to compete with Levi’s and Miller and Kraft and all of these other brands that have been around for hundreds of years. That’s what I want the Snoop Dogg brand to be.Do you think the platforms like Apple and Spotify are treating artists fairly?I just don’t understand how you only get this little bit amount of money per stream. I just don’t understand the dynamics of those numbers, and how they can create these systems without Black people up top, while Black people are the ones generating the most money from these systems through the music. So I’m just trying to figure out when they’re going to cut us in in the beginning, as opposed to always letting us be the ones who get it to a point where these platforms can sell for billions of dollars, and then the Black people that made it famous get nothing.Just like the TikTokers. All of the young Black content creators on TikTok have boycotted because they see that when they do the dances they don’t get the attention or the money. But as soon as the white dancers do it, it’s the biggest [expletive] in the world and they on Jimmy Fallon. That’s not fair. It’s not cool to just keep stealing our culture right in front of us and not include us in the finances of it all.We need to be involved early. They always cut us out. They call Snoop after they got their companies up and are like, “Hey, Snoop, you want to be a brand ambassador?” I want some equity. Give me a piece of the pie. If I can’t get no equity, [expletive] you and your company.We’re seeing more of that with athletes like Kevin Durant and Steph Curry, who are making investments in start-ups.Right, because they understand that they got to get it. I mean, you would think that those businesspeople up top would say: “You know what? It’s time to change the world. We’ve got to stop treating Black people like they’re less. They’re always the ones who do the hard work, the groundwork, but we never cut them in.”Like, why don’t we have an owner in an N.F.L.? That’s just racist. Period, point blank. We need to own an N.F.L. team. We got one half-owner in the N.B.A., Michael Jordan. But the whole league is 90 percent Black. So we still the slaves and they still the masters.That’s why in the music game, we took the initiative to say, [expletive] that. We’re the masters, and we own our masters. We’re going to negotiate with you the way we think it should be. We changed that industry years ago, with our mentality of having our own labels. More

A full album has emerged from Prince’s vault that balances hard insights with visceral joys.It’s almost as if Prince knew what lay ahead.In 2010, Prince recorded but then shelved a finished album, “Welcome 2 America,” which was full of bleak reflections on the state of the nation. It arrives Friday as the Prince estate continues to open up Prince’s vault of unreleased music since his death in 2016. Unlike much of what has emerged so far, it’s a complete, stand-alone album — a disillusioned statement that sounds all too fitting in 2021.“Welcome 2 America” was made two years into the Obama administration, and Prince didn’t see much progress. In the title track, women sing, “Hope and change”; then Prince dryly observes, “Everything takes forever/The truth is a new minority.”The songs take on racism, exploitation, disinformation, celebrity, faith and capitalism: “21st century, it’s still about greed and fame,” Prince sings in “Running Game (Son of a Slave Master).” Eleven years after the album was recorded — as the 2020s have brought bitter divisiveness, blatant racism, battles over history and a digital hellscape of hyped consumption and algorithmically boosted lies — Prince doesn’t sound pessimistic, just matter-of-fact.“Welcome 2 America” wasn’t made casually. It’s one of Prince’s more collaborative albums, constructed in discrete stages with different cohorts of musicians. Prince started out recording instrumental tracks — without vocals or lyrics — live in the studio with Tal Wilkenfeld on bass and Chris Coleman on drums. Then he worked with the singers Shelby J. (for Johnson), Liv Warfield and Elisa Fiorillo, sharing leads and harmonies with them. Morris Hayes, billed as Mr. Hayes, added keyboards and intricately jazzy simulated string and horn arrangements, earning credit as co-producer for six of the album’s 12 songs. Prince also did some final tweaking, including a rewrite of the title track.But Prince had already released one album in 2010 — “20Ten” — and his attention turned to forming a new live band (including Mr. Hayes and the three backup singers) that would tour the world for the next two years. The American portion was called the “Welcome 2 America” tour, but the album stayed unreleased. (The deluxe version of “Welcome 2 America” includes a Blu-ray of a jubilant 2011 arena show in Inglewood, Calif.)“Welcome 2 America” was completed in 2010 but then shelved.Mike Ruiz, via The Prince Estate“Welcome 2 America” makes its way from the bitter derision of its title track toward a guarded optimism, with detours — it’s a Prince album after all — into physical pleasures. The title song telegraphs its mood with its first notes: a snake hiss of cymbals and a bass line that inches upward, skulks back down and then plunges further, against a backdrop of ambiguous chords and synthesizer swoops. The track edges toward funk, and the women sing, but Prince doesn’t; he simply talks, deadpan, about information overload, high-tech distractions, privilege, fame and culture, asking, “Think today’s music will last?” Singing in harmony, the women amend an American motto to “Land of the free, home of the slave.”In the cryptic “1010 (Rin Tin Tin),” Prince asks, “What could be stranger than the times we’re in?” over skeletal, choppy piano chords, and he goes on to decry “too much information” and a “wilderness of lies.” With “Running Game (Son of a Slave Master),” Prince confronts a microcosm of rich vs. poor: the way the music business takes advantage of newcomers.Yet as usual in Prince’s catalog, “Welcome 2 America” balances hard insights with visceral joys. He sings about pointless conflicts over religion in “Same Page, Different Book” — “So much more in common if you’d only look,” he insists — but his lyrics about rocks, missiles and car bombs arrive backed by crisp syncopations. In “1000 Light Years From Here,” he puts breezy Latin funk behind reminders of Black perseverance, touching on the subprime mortgage crisis and the 2008 financial-sector meltdown: “We can live underwater/It ain’t hard when you’ve never been a part/Of the country on dry land.” Prince put new lyrics to “1000 Light Years” as an upbeat coda to the even more pointed “Black Muse” — a song about slavery, injustice and America’s debt to Black culture — on the last album he released during his lifetime, “HitnRun Phase Two.”Prince pauses the sociopolitical commentary for “Check the Record,” a rock-funk stomp about infidelity, and for “When She Comes,” a sensual falsetto ballad marveling in a woman’s ecstasy. (Prince also reworked “When She Comes” for “HitnRun Phase Two,” emphasizing male technique instead.)As the album ends, Prince calls for positive thinking. “Yes” reaches back to the supercharged gospel-rock of Sly and the Family Stone. After that tambourine-shaking peak, “One Day We Will All B Free” eases into reassuring, midtempo soul. But the “Yes” that Prince calls for is an affirmation that “We can turn the page/As long as they ain’t movin’ us to a bigger cage,” and “One Day We Will All B Free” is also a warning about unquestioning belief in what churches and schools teach. Prince saw a long struggle ahead.Prince“Welcome 2 America”(NPG/Sony Legacy) More

More than 13 years after a strict legal arrangement gave James P. Spears control of the singer’s affairs, a new lawyer for Ms. Spears asked the court to remove him from the arrangement.More than 13 years after the life and finances of Britney Spears were put under the strict, court-approved control of her father, James P. Spears — and a month after Ms. Spears broke her public silence on the arrangement, calling it abusive and singling him out as its ultimate authority — a new lawyer for the singer has moved to have Mr. Spears removed from the unique conservatorship.The detailed petition to oust the singer’s father from the complex legal setup was filed in Los Angeles probate court on Monday by Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor and high-powered Hollywood lawyer, who has worked with celebrities including Sean Penn, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Steven Spielberg.The move, less than two weeks after Mr. Rosengart was approved as the singer’s lawyer, is framed as a first step in a broader strategy to examine the conservatorship, which the filing calls a “Kafkaesque nightmare” for Ms. Spears.Mr. Rosengart took over as Ms. Spears’s lawyer after Samuel D. Ingham III, the court-appointed lawyer who had represented her for the duration of the arrangement, resigned in light of the singer’s recent comments about her care. In 2008, at the outset of the conservatorship, Ms. Spears had been found to lack the mental capacity to hire her own counsel.In the filing Monday, Mr. Rosengart cited a section of the probate code that gives the court broad discretion to remove a conservator if it “is in the best interests” of the conservatee, and pointed to Ms. Spears’s recent comments in court as evidence that her father’s role was detrimental to her well-being.The filing added that “serious questions abound concerning Mr. Spears’s potential misconduct, including conflicts of interest, conservatorship abuse and the evident dissipation of Ms. Spears’s fortune.”“There might well come a time when the court will be called upon to consider whether the conservatorship should be terminated in its entirety and whether — in addition to stripping his daughter of her dignity, autonomy and certain fundamental liberties — Mr. Spears is also guilty of misfeasance or malfeasance warranting the imposition of surcharges, damages or other legal action against him,” Mr. Rosengart wrote.Lawyers for Mr. Spears did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. He has previously defended his care of, and concern for, his daughter.In an additional filing, Mr. Rosengart requested that a certified public accountant in California, Jason Rubin, be named conservator of Ms. Spears’s estate, which was listed as including cash assets of $2.7 million and noncash assets of more than $57 million.The lawyer noted, since the court had ruled recently that Ms. Spears had the capacity to choose her own lawyer, she “likewise has sufficient capacity to make this nomination.”In his petition to remove Mr. Spears, Mr. Rosengart added: “Any father who genuinely loves his daughter and has her best interests at heart should willingly step aside in favor of the highly respected professional fiduciary nominated here.”The petition was supported by Ms. Spears’s current personal conservator, Jodi Montgomery, as well as her mother, Lynne Spears, who said in the filing that her daughter’s relationship with her father had “dwindled to nothing but fear and hatred” because of his “microscopic control” over her life.At an emotional hearing on June 23, Ms. Spears, 39, said she wished to end the conservatorship, which oversees both her personal care and estate, without having to undergo psychiatric evaluations; she added that she had not known that she could file to end it.But Mr. Rosengart said in his petition on Monday that he was for now focusing on “the most pressing issue facing Ms. Spears: removing Mr. Spears as conservator of the estate.”The next status hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 29.Ms. Spears has long chafed at the conservatorship’s strictures behind the scenes, calling her father and his oversight over her life oppressive and controlling, according to confidential court records recently obtained by The New York Times. Ms. Spears also raised questions over the years about the fitness of her father — who has struggled with alcoholism and faced accusations of physical and verbal abuse — as conservator.“Anything that happened to me had to be approved by my dad, and my dad only,” Ms. Spears said at the hearing, as she described being forced into a mental health facility after a disagreement at a concert rehearsal.“I cried on the phone for an hour and he loved every minute of it,” she added. “The control he had over someone as powerful as me — he loved the control, to hurt his own daughter, one-hundred thousand percent.”At the July 14 hearing where Mr. Rosengart was approved as Ms. Spears’s counsel, she stated, “I’m here to get rid of my dad.” Mr. Rosengart asked for Mr. Spears to resign on the spot; a lawyer for the singer’s father declined.Mr. Spears, 69, has said instituting the conservatorship was necessary to save his daughter’s life and career during a period of concern about her mental health and substance abuse, and that he has acted out of love, working to protect her from exploitation.Since 2008, Mr. Spears has overseen his daughter’s finances, sometimes with a professional co-conservator. He had also largely controlled Ms. Spears’s personal and medical care until a personal conservator, Ms. Montgomery, took over in September 2019 on an ongoing temporary basis.Mr. Spears cited health reasons when he stepped down. But two weeks prior, there had been an alleged physical altercation between Mr. Spears and Ms. Spears’s 13-year-old son. No charges were filed in the incident, but the child’s father, Kevin Federline, was granted a restraining order barring Mr. Spears from seeing the children.Lynne Spears said in the petition to remove Mr. Spears that the incident “understandably destroyed whatever was left of a relationship between” Ms. Spears and her father.She added: “It is clear to me that James P. Spears is incapable of putting my daughter’s interests ahead of his own on both a professional and a personal level and that his being and remaining a conservator of my daughter’s estate is not in the best interests of my daughter.”Conservatorships are typically reserved for people who cannot take care of themselves. Ms. Spears’s case has received scrutiny in recent years because she continued to perform as a pop star — and bring in millions of dollars — while under the arrangement.“I shouldn’t be in a conservatorship if I can work,” Ms. Spears said at the June 23 hearing, while calling for its termination. “It makes no sense. The laws need to change.” She also requested that those behind the conservatorship be investigated for abuse.Lawyers for Mr. Spears have called into question the actions of the others involved in Ms. Spears’s care. In a court filing after Ms. Spears’s remarks, which were broadcast in the courtroom and, as she insisted, to the public, Mr. Spears’s lawyers called for hearings to look into her claims.“Either the allegations will be shown to be true, in which case corrective action must be taken, or they will be shown to be false, in which case the conservatorship can continue its course,” they wrote.Mr. Spears’s lawyers also denied the characterization that he was responsible for the singer’s recent treatment, noting that Ms. Montgomery had been “fully in charge of Ms. Spears’s day-to-day personal care and medical treatment” for nearly two years, despite some of Ms. Spears’s claims predating Ms. Montgomery’s appointment.“Mr. Spears is unable to hear and address his daughter’s concerns directly because he has been cut off from communicating with her,” Mr. Spears’s lawyers wrote last month, adding that he was “concerned about the management and care of his daughter.”Lauriann Wright, a lawyer for Ms. Montgomery, said that Ms. Montgomery had “been a tireless advocate for Britney and for her well-being,” with “one primary goal — to assist and encourage Britney in her path to no longer needing a conservatorship of the person.”Mr. Spears, known as Jamie, currently oversees his daughter’s finances. He temporarily stepped down as a conservator of her person in 2019.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Ms. Spears’s speech to the court last month, she said she had been forced to perform, take medication and remain on birth control.Following her remarks, the singer’s court-appointed lawyer, Bessemer Trust, the wealth-management firm that was set to take over as the co-conservator of Ms. Spears’s estate, requested to withdraw, in addition to Mr. Ingham. Outside of the conservatorship, Ms. Spears’s longtime manager, Larry Rudolph, also resigned, citing her stated intention to potentially retire.Ms. Spears had expressed concerns about her father’s level of control over her for years as part of the court proceedings, which were largely sealed. In 2016, the probate investigator in the case concluded that the conservatorship remained in Ms. Spears’s best interests based on her complex finances, susceptibility to outside influence and “intermittent” drug issues, according to the report.But the investigator’s report recommended over the longer term “a pathway to independence and the eventual termination of the conservatorship.” More

Through a mix of information sharing and advocacy, a fan account on Twitter has become a resource for people following Britney Spears’s conservatorship case.For a certain subset of Britney Spears fans, who call themselves her “Army,” there is no cause greater than emancipating Ms. Spears from the conservatorship that controls her life and finances.Thirteen years into the legal arrangement, which Ms. Spears recently described as “abusive,” her devotees are watching a movement that was once on the fringes of pop culture turn into one of the year’s biggest news stories. Even politicians are paying attention: “I am squarely and unequivocally in the camp of FreeBritney,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said on his podcast this month.The growing support for Ms. Spears speaks to the power of fan devotion, unleashed in the modern age through social media. The celebrity may be the famous one, but her followers, or stans (see: Nicki Minaj’s Barbz, Beyoncé’s BeyHive, Rihanna’s Navy), have the power to mobilize thousands of people online to support a cause.Some of Ms. Spears’s most visible supporters have shown up for protests in Los Angeles, but plenty more have been following the pop star’s legal case from home. For them, fan-run accounts on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms have provided live updates, a global community and advocacy ideas. (For example, the Free Britney website suggests filing complaints against Ms. Spears’s former lawyer and writing letters to representatives.)“People from all different backgrounds are involved and know what’s happening and feel that this is abusive and feel that it’s an injustice,” said Angela Rojas, a 30-year-old lawyer who is one of the five people behind the account @BritneyLawArmy. Ms. Rojas, who is Peruvian-American, leads the account’s engagement efforts with Spanish speakers.The other account administrators, all of whom live in and around Louisville, Ky., are Samuel Nicholson, 30, and Marilyn Shrewsbury, 32, who are lawyers who focus on civil rights cases; their assistant, Raven Koontz, 23; and Emily Lagarenne, a 34-year-old recruiting consultant.Though Ms. Spears is the focus of the account and the administrators are her fans, they see her fight for emancipation as one that anyone should be able to sympathize with. “This is about the human condition,” Ms. Rojas said. “It’s a human rights issue. It’s a disability rights issue. It’s a civil rights issue.”Mr. Nicholson, who created the Twitter account in January, has notifications on the Los Angeles Superior Court’s e-filing site that alert him every time a document is filed. He and the others comb through those filings in search of new details, which they translate from legalese into easy-to-understand takeaways.In June, when Ms. Spears spoke before a judge for the first time about her desire for the conservatorship to end, the administrators of @BritneyLawArmy tweeted transcribed sections of the audio from her testimony.The group also works with other social media accounts, like @FreeBritneyLA. “There are group chats and FaceTime calls, and a very organized effort for everybody to be getting as much information out as fast as possible on all of the pages,” said Ms. Shrewsbury (who also goes by her middle name, Linsey).Megan Radford, 34, described @BritneyLawArmy as “a really reliable source of information” about the court proceedings. “They explain court documents for people who aren’t lawyers,” said Ms. Radford, who helps manage the @FreeBritneyLA account and has organized some of the #FreeBritney rallies in Los Angeles from her home in Oklahoma City.Ms. Radford, a marketing director, flies to Los Angeles regularly for protests. “This movement was founded by people sharing information on social media,” she said. “We’re not just fan accounts. We’re definitely activists.”The tweets that @BritneyLawArmy posts are not purely informational; their purpose is also to cheer the Army forward, to channel the frustrations and hopes of Ms. Spears’s supporters.Sometimes the messages take the tone of a fiercely loyal friend who is mad on a B.F.F.’s behalf. That ire may be directed at the judge in Ms. Spears’s case (Brenda Penny), at Ms. Spears’s court-appointed lawyer (Samuel D. Ingham III, who resigned from that role this month) or at her father’s lawyer (Vivian Thoreen).Nonetheless, there is a gravity to the Law Army’s tweets, especially those that report directly the words of Ms. Spears or highlight court documents.The group believes that the conservatorship is on its last legs. “The game is over,” Mr. Nicholson said. “They’re not going to be able to just throw Britney Spears back up onstage like nothing ever happened.”But they acknowledge that the process of releasing Ms. Spears to live independently will likely take many months, if not years.“We talk a lot about what we hope for her when she’s free,” Ms. Shrewsbury said. “We just really want to see her happy.” More

The band, known for its hard-charging, blues-inflected rock, was one of the biggest acts of the 1980s, selling more than 50 million albums.Dusty Hill, the quiet, bearded bass player who made up one third of ZZ Top, among the best-selling rock bands of the 1980s, has died at his home in Houston. He was 72.His bandmates Frank Beard and Billy Gibbons announced the death on Wednesday through Facebook and Instagram. They did not provide a cause or say when he died.Starting in the early 1970s, ZZ Top racked up dozens of hit records and packed hundreds of arenas a year with their powerful blend of boogie, Southern rock and blues. But the band really took off in the 1980s, when Mr. Gibbons, the lead singer and guitarist, and Mr. Hill grew their signature 20-inch beards and the band released a series of albums that added New Wave synthesizers — often played by Mr. Hill — to their hard-driving guitars, producing MTV-friendly hits like “Legs” and “Sharp-Dressed Man.”The band paired their grungy sound and innuendo-filled lyrics with a knowing, sometimes comic stage act — Mr. Hill and Mr. Gibbons, in matching sunglasses and Stetson hats, would swing their hips in unison, spinning their instruments on mounts attached to their belts. (Despite his name, Mr. Beard, the drummer, sports just a mustache.) Their stage sets might include crushed cars and even livestock.Though in public Mr. Hill and Mr. Gibbons were often mistaken as twins, their musical styles differed — Mr. Gibbons a showy virtuoso, Mr. Hill a grinding, precise musical mechanic.Mr. Hill rarely gave interviews, preferring to let Mr. Gibbons speak for the band. And he gladly accepted his supporting role for his bandmate’s masterful lead guitar playing.“Sometimes you don’t even notice the bass,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I hate that in a way, but I love that in a way. That’s a compliment. That means you’ve filled in everything and it’s right for the song, and you’re not standing out where you don’t need to be.”Joseph Michael Hill was born in Dallas on May 19, 1949. He started his musical career singing and playing cello, but he switched instruments at 13, when his brother, Rocky, who played guitar, said his band needed a bassist. One day Dusty came home to find a bass on his bed; that night, he joined Rocky onstage at a Dallas beer joint.“I started playing that night by putting my finger on the fret, and when the time came to change, my brother would hit me on the shoulder,” he said in a 2012 interview.In 1969, Dusty was living in Houston and working with the blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins when Mr. Beard, a friend from high school, suggested that he audition for an open spot in a trio, called ZZ Top, recently founded by Mr. Gibbons. They played their first show together in February 1970.Mr. Hill, left, and Mr. Gibbons performing in 1973. The band was successful throughout the ’70s but really took off in the ’80s.Tom Hill/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe band’s humor was evident from the start: They named their first album “ZZ Top’s First Album.” Real success came in 1973 with their third release, “Tres Hombres,” which cracked the Billboard top 10. That same year they opened for the Rolling Stones in Hawaii.Many of their early songs leaned heavily on sexual innuendo, though sometimes they set the innuendo aside completely. “La Grange,” their big hit on “Tres Hombres,” was about a bordello.In 1976, after a string of hit albums and nearly seven years of constant touring, the band took a three-year hiatus. Mr. Hill returned to Dallas, where he worked at the airport and tried to avoid being identified by fans.“I had a short beard, regular length, and if you take off the hat and shades and wear work clothes and put ‘Joe’ on my work shirt, people are not expecting to see you,” he said in a 2019 interview. “Now, a couple of times, a couple of people did ask me, and I just lied, and I said: ‘No! Do you think I’d be sitting here?’”The band reunited in 1979 to release “Degüello,” their first album to go platinum, and the first time Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Hill grew out their beards. It was also the first sign that they were going beyond their Texas roots by adding a New Wave flavor to their sound, with Mr. Hill also playing keyboard.They achieved superstar status in 1983 with “Eliminator,” which included hit singles like “Legs,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Give Me All Your Lovin.’” It sold 10 million copies and stayed on the Billboard charts for 183 weeks.In 1984, Mr. Hill made headlines when he accidentally shot himself in the stomach. As a girlfriend was taking off his boot, a .38 Derringer slipped out, hit the floor and went off.Mr. Hill in a concert in 2015. Walter Bieri/EPA, via ShutterstockThe band’s success continued through the 1980s, and while later albums — in which they returned to their Texan blues roots — didn’t climb the charts, the trio still packed stadiums. And despite their raunchy stylings, they began to draw grudging respect from critics, who often singled out Mr. Hill’s subtly masterful bass playing.“My sound is big, heavy and a bit distorted because it has to overlap the guitar,” he said in a 2000 interview. “Someone once asked me to describe my tone, and I said it was like farting in a trash can. What I meant is it’s raw, but you’ve got to have the tone in there.”ZZ Top was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.Mr. Hill married his longtime girlfriend, Charleen McCrory, an actress, in 2002. He also had a daughter. Information on survivors was not immediately available.In 2014 he injured his hip after a fall on his tour bus. He required surgery, and part of the tour had to be canceled. On July 23, he left their latest tour, citing problems with his hip. It is unclear whether that had any connection to his death.Contrary to their image — and the hard partying that their music seemed to encourage — Mr. Hill and his bandmates kept a low, relatively sober profile. And they remained close friends, even after 50 years of near-constant touring.“People ask how we’ve stayed together so long,” he told The Charlotte Observer in 2015. “I say separate tour buses. We got separate tour buses early on, when we probably couldn’t afford them. That way we were always glad to see each other when we got to the next city.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

Mr. Jordison’s explosive, virtuosic playing and elaborate solos, sometimes performed atop a hydraulic riser, made him a fan favorite.Joey Jordison, the founding drummer for the ghoulishly theatrical metal band Slipknot, who helped write many of the group’s best-known songs and often performed wearing a crown of thorns and a silver mask streaked with black paint, died on Monday. He was 46.His family confirmed the death in a statement, which did not say where he died or specify a cause.In a tribute in New Musical Express, the culture and music magazine, the writer James McMahon called Mr. Jordison one of the greatest heavy metal players of all time.Mr. McMahon recalled that Slipknot’s self-titled debut was greeted in one of two ways when it was released in 1999.“One was a guttural disgust,” he wrote. “This was a band that huffed the fumes of dead crows before stage time, who punched each other in the face onstage.“The other was adoration: If you felt different, strange or unique at the dawn of the millennium, few bands offered you sanctuary like the nine-piece did.”“They were Slipknot, and you were a Maggot,” he added, referring to the nickname that the band’s fans embraced for themselves.Mr. Jordison founded Slipknot in 1995 with the percussionist Shawn Crahan and the bassist Paul Gray. By the time the band issued its debut album, its membership had expanded to nine members.Their first album was certified platinum within a year. “I was a night manager at a Sinclair gas station from ’95 to ’97,” Mr. Jordison told Rolling Stone in 2001. “That’s where most of ‘Slipknot’ was conceived.”The group helped to reinvent hard rock in the early 2000s, incorporating elements of alternative metal, shock rock and hip-hop into its sound and developing a stage show that leaned heavily on theatrics. Its members performed in matching jumpsuits and sinister masks, emphasizing their anonymity by using the numbers zero through eight as stage aliases.In 2005, Slipknot won a Grammy for best metal performance for the song “Before I Forget.” Slipknot had three Top 10 singles on the Billboard 200 during Mr. Jordison’s time with the band, Billboard reported, reaching No. 1 in 2008 with “All Hope Is Gone,” which Mr. Jordison wrote with his bandmates.Mr. Jordison’s explosive, virtuosic playing and elaborate solos, sometimes performed atop a hydraulic riser, made him a fan favorite. He remained with Slipknot until 2013 when, he said in an interview with Metal Hammer magazine, he was unceremoniously dismissed from the band by email in a “hurtful” misunderstanding about his health.In 2016, as he accepted a Metal Hammer Golden Gods award, he said in a speech that he had been booted from Slipknot after he learned that he had transverse myelitis, which is characterized by inflammation of the spinal cord that can cause sensory problems and limb weakness.Although some people recover with minor or no problems, the process can take years.“I got really, really sick,” he said. “I couldn’t play anymore. It was a form of multiple sclerosis, which I don’t wish on my worst enemy.” He said he “got myself back up, and I got myself in the gym,” and beat the disorder with therapy.“It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” he said.Nathan Jordison was born on April 26, 1975, in Des Moines and grew up about 20 miles west, in Waukee, Iowa, Rolling Stone reported. The oldest of three children, he discovered Kiss and Black Sabbath in the early 1980s. He began playing music with a friend, starting with the guitar and switching to drums because the friend could not play them well, according to Rolling Stone.His parents nurtured his interest in music, surprising him with his own drum kit when he was in the fifth grade.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Monte Conner, who signed Slipknot to Roadrunner Records in 1998, said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Jordison’s “manic playing style and innovative drumming were truly unique in every way.”Mr. Jordison “was an equally great songwriter who understood what went into writing songs with choruses and hooks that connected with and spoke to an entire generation of heavy metal fans,” Mr. Conner said. “Joey lived and breathed the music and was a total scholar in all things heavy metal. He used that knowledge to take everything he loved about the various genres of metal and combine it all into a melting pot of sounds that had never before been heard.”In his Golden Gods Award speech, Mr. Jordison said he had no ill feelings toward the members of Slipknot over his dismissal from the band. He asked the audience to “give them praise,” and fondly recalled his time “in the basements of Des Moines, Iowa,” with Mr. Crahan and Mr. Gray, who died in 2010.Despite his illness, Mr. Jordison rededicated himself to music, playing guitar for the bands Murderdolls and Sinsaenum, and playing drums for the metal band Vimic.In May 2000, Slipknot featured prominently in a New York Times article about what some at the time were calling new metal or heavy alternative music. Slipknot, then at the vanguard of that movement, had been rejected by 10 labels before landing on Roadrunner Records.“A guy at Sony told us, ‘If this is the future of music, I don’t want to be alive,’” Mr. Jordison recalled. “I just thought, If that’s what he thinks, then we are doing something right.”Isabella Grullón Paz More

Part mixtape and part séance, this opera project by the famed performance artist attempts to unite two divas across time.MUNICH — In Leos Carax’s new film, “Annette,” the husband and wife played by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are described in inverse terms. As a comedian, he kills every night; as an opera star, she dies.That’s of course a reductive view of opera. But the alignment of the art form and demise persists in the popular imagination, and guides “7 Deaths of Maria Callas.” A dramaturgically misguided séance of a project by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, it played to its largest in-person audience yet on Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera here, after a heavily restricted run and livestream last year. It is bound for Paris and Athens in September, then Berlin and Naples — and who knows where else, with Abramovic’s celebrity behind it.“7 Deaths” is a meeting of divas in which Callas is invoked through a series of the arias for which she was notable. She is then inhabited onstage and in short films — the summoning of a spirit who, Abramovic argues, is still very much with us.In the work, Abramovic inhabits Maria Callas, miming to a recording of “Casta Diva.”Wilfried HöslShe’s right. Callas died in 1977, yet lives on in a still-robust stream of albums, art books and, yes, hologram concerts. She was known even to a public beyond opera as tabloid fodder, especially because of her affair with Aristotle Onassis — a love triangle involving Jacqueline Kennedy, his eventual wife. But her pop celebrity emerged from her being an indelible artist, who contributed to the 20th-century resurrection of bel canto repertoire with a transfixing stage presence. Even when silent, she emoted with the entirety of her face, arrestingly expressive with just a small hand gesture. Her voice failed her too early, but she embodied the “Tosca” aria “Vissi d’arte”: “I lived for art.”That voice caught the attention of a young Abramovic, who has said that she first heard Callas on the radio when she was a 14-year-old in Yugoslavia. Since then she has been haunted by their similarities: They share astrology signs, toxic relationships with their mothers and, she told The New York Times last year, “this incredible intensity in the emotions, that she can be fragile, and strong at the same time.”In the opera’s initial run, Adela Zaharia, left, sang an aria from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” On Tuesday, it was sung by Rosa Feola, in a standout performance.Wilfried HöslIn that interview, Abramovic noted one essential difference: how they reacted to losing the loves of their lives. Callas, in her view, died of a broken heart — a heart attack, to be exact — but Abramovic, so shattered that she stopped eating or drinking, eventually survived by returning to work.All this background about “7 Deaths” is clearer than the work itself, in which Callas is never present enough to persuasively intertwine with Abramovic, who upstages the great diva throughout. That’s the insurmountable flaw of the project, and the main reason it doesn’t belong in an opera house.“7 Deaths” is best experienced in person; the spatial audio design and immersive, big-screen film element made its 95-minute running time a breeze on Tuesday, compared with the tedious livestream last year. But its use of live performers relegates them to mere soundtrack, while also erasing Callas from her own history.This might have been more satisfying as a set of video installations, something like Julian Rosefeldt’s “Manifesto.” If Abramovic’s homage were accompanied by Callas’s storied recordings, the goal of joining and blurring divas could be more naturally achieved. Instead, “7 Deaths,” directed by Abramovic with Lynsey Peisinger, never quite approaches actual drama in its succession of arias and films, then its dreamy re-creation of Callas’s final moments in her Paris apartment.Nadezhda Karyazina, left, sang the role of Carmen last year against a backdrop of a video with Willem Dafoe, left onscreen, and Abramovic. On Tuesday, Samantha Hankey sang it.Wilfried HöslThe piece does include new music, by Marko Nikodijevic — ably conducted, along with the opera excerpts, by Yoel Gamzou. The overture begins with haunting bells and slippery melodies whose glissandos render them distant memories of unplaceable tunes. Behind a scrim, Abramovic lies still in a bed under soft lighting; not since Tilda Swinton has an artist so easily gotten away with sleep as performance.Then swirling clouds are projected onto the scrim — a tacky recurring “visual intermezzo,” as it is called in the credits — and a maid enters. She is the first of seven singers who dress identically and whose arias follow introductions in the form of poetic texts prerecorded by Abramovic.The characters are never named, but opera fans will recognize them instantly: Violetta Valéry from “La Traviata” (Emily Pogorelc); Desdemona from “Otello” (Leah Hawkins); Cio-Cio-San from “Madama Butterfly” (Kiandra Howarth); and the title protagonists of “Tosca” (Selene Zanetti), “Carmen” (Samantha Hankey), “Lucia di Lammermoor” (Rosa Feola) and “Norma” (Lauren Fagan).Their onstage appearances are an insult to the singers, who feel like interchangeably anonymous musical accompaniment to the short films — though Feola’s Lucia was defiantly present, a performance that captured the role’s emotional force and vocal acrobatics, even stripped of its dramatic context.In the work’s coda, Abramovic imagines herself in Callas’s Paris apartment on the day she died.Wilfried HöslA spotlight remains throughout on the sleeping Abramovic, as behind her the short films — starring her and a game Willem Dafoe, and directed by Nabil Elderkin — provide not reflections on Callas but (on a superficial level) the arias themselves, and (on a more thoughtful one) the nature of operatic artifice.In their embrace of excess, these videos flirt with winking camp. As Abramovic falls from a skyscraper in slow motion, inspired by “Tosca,” her enormous earrings dance in zero gravity; when Dafoe wraps thick snakes around her neck to strangle her like Desdemona, their slithering bodies smear her lipstick. Her Carmen is a bedazzled matador, while in the “Norma” film she and Dafoe trade gender roles, with him in a glittering gown and the penciled eyebrows of Marlene Dietrich.Little, if anything, is said here about Callas, but after the seventh aria, Nikodijevic’s music returns — now rumbling and tumultuous, with singers and instrumentalists perched in the theater’s boxes — as the scene changes to her apartment on the day of her death. It’s realistic yet suggests a place beyond, the window opening not to a streetscape but to a pale blue emptiness.In this long coda, Abramovic’s prerecorded voice both gives her directions for onstage movement and imagines Callas’s final thoughts in a collage of non sequiturs resembling a mad scene. She contemplates her luxurious bedding, “Ari” Onassis, her gay friends (Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli, Leonard Bernstein). Then, at some point, she leaves through a door. The maids come in, dispassionately clean the room and drape black fabric over the furniture.One of them lingers, opening a turntable and dropping the needle on a record of “Casta Diva.” The sound is scratchy, but a distinct voice comes through: Callas, for the first time. Abramovic returns to the stage, in a sparkling gold gown, and mimes the performance — an outstretched hand, a downcast look. The two divas unite at last, too late.7 Deaths of Maria CallasPerformed Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich. More

Teatro Nuovo’s “Barber of Seville” was the first full-scale live performance in the city since before the pandemic.Opera is back in New York City.On Tuesday evening, two months before the Metropolitan Opera is scheduled to reopen, a full-scale live performance took place, for the first time since before the pandemic. And it was in the Met’s shadow, in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, where Teatro Nuovo presented a semi-staged, concert-dress version of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” (There is a second performance on Wednesday evening.)Like almost all outdoor performances, this one required amplification. Usually this is a burden. Yet on Tuesday it proved a salve for the audience of roughly 750, as the music had to compete with the sounds of grunting generators and crunching machinery on a nearby street.Members of the cast get ready backstage before the performance.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesLike almost all outdoor performances, this one required amplification, which proved a salve for the audience of roughly 750.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesAn outgrowth of the Bel Canto at Caramoor series that Will Crutchfield, a conductor and scholar of early 19th-century Italian opera, ran for 20 years, Teatro Nuovo is a performing and training program focused on the bel canto repertory. Generally known for his devotion to complete performances of these works, Crutchfield had to make trims to Rossini’s score to end the performance by 10 p.m., the park’s curfew.No matter. This was still nearly three hours of opera. And what came through was a fresh, lively performance full of ideas and rich in subtleties.The artists who work with Crutchfield study the performance practices of a golden era of opera. His goal is not to make performers today feel beholden to the past in matters of ornamentation and rhythmic execution; after all, the style in Rossini’s day encouraged freedom and flair. Crutchfield tries to embolden his colleagues to start from scratch and think for themselves.Hannah Ludwig starred as Rosina.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe ensemble was made up of artists in Will Crutchfield’s training institute focused on bel canto operatic style.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThat this cast, backed by 31 orchestral players, had made their own interpretive choices came through consistently. Early in Act I, the tenor Nicholas Simpson — as Count Almaviva, who has fallen for the lovely Rosina — brought bright sound and expansive lyricism to the serenade he sings from below her balcony. Simpson certainly embellished the melodic lines with ornate ornamentation; not for nothing has Crutchfield called one offering of his program “ornamentation boot camp.” But his embellishments emanated from the melody and the mood, and never seemed overly elaborate.As Figaro, the dynamic bass Hans Tashjian, whose voice has a nice, light ping in its upper range, adorned the character’s famous aria “Largo al factotum” with fresh, inventive ornaments. Many singers overdo Figaro’s bluster as he boasts of being Seville’s indispensable jack-of-all-trades. But Tashjian sang the aria almost as a personal revelation to the audience — underplayed, with some wonderfully soft-spoken phrases. You felt that this Figaro seriously believed himself to be special, beyond arrogance.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe mezzo-soprano Hannah Ludwig, as Rosina, went perhaps a step too far in ornamenting her defining aria, “Una voce poco fa.” Still, with a rich, dark voice she shaped supple phrases and conveyed the character’s mix of reticence and sass.The baritone Scott Purcell excelled as the officious Dr. Bartolo; as his housekeeper, Berta, the soprano Alina Tamborini was unusually big-voiced and feisty. The young bass Daniel Fridley, as the wily Don Basilio, was downright chilling in the aria “La calunnia,” in which he explains to Bartolo that the way to deal with Almaviva is to start a rumor and help it spread until an explosive scandal erupts. (Rossini anticipated social media by two centuries.)Rather than relying on a single conductor, this performance — nodding to the usual practice in Rossini’s day — was guided by both Crutchfield, who also played the accompanying fortepiano, and the violinist Jakob Lehmann, the concertmaster, who led the orchestral players while seated on a stool. If this looser approach sometimes resulted in minor slip-ups, the gain in spontaneity and freshness was well worth it.The Barber of SevillePerformed Tuesday at Damrosch Park, Manhattan. More