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      Push to ‘Free Britney’ Gains Steam on Capitol Hill

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      As lawmakers share social media posts and messages of solidarity, activists hope the increased attention on Britney Spears’s conservatorship case will prompt legislative change.In the weeks since Britney Spears publicly denounced the long-running legal arrangement that has controlled her life, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have jumped in to declare their support.Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, dedicated the latest episode of his podcast to the conservatorship, which has limited Ms. Spears’s decision-making and finances since 2008. “I am squarely and unequivocally in the camp of #FreeBritney,” he said, referring to the movement among her fans and fellow celebrities pushing for the end of the arrangement.Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, excoriated the case as “the craziest” he had “seen in a long time.”And the political arm of the House Republican caucus seized the moment to fund-raise, sending texts that described Ms. Spears as “a victim of toxic gov’t overreach & censorship.”Advocates are embracing the increased attention from members of Congress, saying that the case raises issues of civil liberties as well as the potential for such legal mechanisms to be abused, including by forcing the use of birth control, as Ms. Spears has contended. But they are also urging lawmakers to enact legislative change that could help those trapped in exploitative arrangements.“It’s always attractive for lawmakers to send out tweets,” said Cassandra Dumas, a founder of Free Britney America, which is based in Washington. “But my call to our lawmakers is, actions speak louder than words.”Ms. Dumas said that while members of her group initially united over Ms. Spears’s case, they were eager to push for changes that would help others in similar situations but who do not have access to the same resources.Another challenge is understanding how pervasive any abuse might be, advocates said.“We don’t even know how many people are in conservatorships and guardianships,” said Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s disability rights program. “We don’t know how long they’ve been there in them. We don’t know whether they want to be there. We don’t know why they’re there. We don’t know whether they have their own lawyers.”Free Britney America has worked with members of Congress in recent weeks, including Representative Charlie Crist, Democrat of Florida, whose office said he would soon introduce bipartisan legislation pressing for more rights and more transparency under such legal agreements.Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, for their part, have homed in on the lack of data about the prevalence of guardianships and conservatorships. In a letter, they urged the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department to work on closing that gap.In her testimony last month, Ms. Spears revealed that her father, who is her conservator, prevented her from having her IUD removed although she wanted to have more children. The disclosure prompted support from across the political sphere, including leaders at Planned Parenthood and Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina.“It’s insane you can force a woman to basically sterilize herself under the guise of protection,” Ms. Mace tweeted. “If this is happening to Britney Spears, how many other women across the country are silently suffering?” More

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      Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

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      She played the accordion in the camp’s orchestra. Decades later, she spoke out against fascism and racism, using music as well as words.When Esther Bejarano was 18, she played accordion in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, which played marches as prisoners left the concentration camp for hard labor and upbeat music as train loads of Jews and others arrived.“They must have thought, ‘Where music is playing, things can’t be that bad,’” she told The New York Times in 2014, recalling how some detainees smiled and waved at the musicians. “They didn’t know where they were going. But we knew. We played with tears in our eyes.”Mrs. Bejarano died on Saturday at a hospital in Hamburg, Germany. She was 96. With her death, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist, is believed to be the only member of the orchestra still alive.Mrs. Bejarano’s death was announced by the International Auschwitz Committee, which was founded by survivors of the death camp and to which she belonged, serving as a powerful voice against intolerance in her later years.She would also form a band with her children to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs and, in her 80s, joined a hip-hop group that spread an antifascist message.Being in an orchestra at a concentration camp was often an escape from forced labor, and possibly from death. For Mrs. Bejarano, playing music for her captors relieved her of having to carry heavy rocks and earned her decent medical treatment during two illnesses.Women deemed fit for work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, in a photograph taken in May 1944.Vashem Archives/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Mrs. Bejarano learned that a women’s orchestra was being formed at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, she approached its conductor, Zofia Czajkowska, a Polish music teacher.She played the piano, but there wasn’t one at the camp at the time. When Ms. Czajkowska asked if she could play the accordion, she said she could, although she never had. Yet she passed her audition, playing a German song, “Du hast Glück bei den Frauen, Bel Ami” (“You’re Lucky With Women, Bel Ami”).“At the time it was a very well-known hit,” Mrs. Bejarano said in an interview cited in “Auschwitz Studies No. 27,” published in 2014 by the Auschwitz Memorial State Museum. “I didn’t have any problems with my right hand, because I knew how to play the piano and immediately found the keyboard, but the bass is on the left, and only thanks to the fact that I have a good ear could I find the right tones. I managed.”Orchestras were formed in many concentration camps — to entertain the Nazis, but also to serve other purposes.“They were for the benefit of the administration and staff,” said Bret Werb, the musicologist and recorded sound curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “They believed that quick march music would get the prisoners to march in time, and quickly, to hard labor.”Mrs. Bejarano, who arrived at Auschwitz in April 1943, performed at the camp for several months until being moved later that year to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. On a death march from the camp near the end of the war, she and several other prisoners escaped.She celebrated the Allied victory over the Nazis in a market square in Lubz, Germany. A picture of Hitler was set on fire by American soldiers. A G.I. handed her an accordion, which she played as soldiers and other camp survivors danced.“That was my liberation, an incredibly great liberation,” she told Der Spiegel last year. “The American and Russian soldiers embraced and shouted, ‘Hitler is dead.’”She found her way to a displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, near a former concentration camp, where she learned that the Nazis had killed her parents in Riga, Latvia. Her sister Ruth, who had fled to Switzerland, was deported and sent to Auschwitz before Esther’s arrival.“That is so fateful,” Mrs. Bejarano told the British newspaper The Telegraph in an interview. “I came to Auschwitz in April 1943, and if she had lived, I would have met her there.”From Bergen-Belsen, Mrs. Bejarano hitchhiked to Frankfurt and took a train to Marseille, France, where in August 1945 she boarded a boat to what was then British Palestine and was reunited with her sister Tosca. Their brother, Gerhard, had immigrated to the United States some years earlier.Mrs. Bejarano in 2015, with Efim Kofman on accordion. She formed a band late in life to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs.Daniel Reinhardt/picture-alliance dpa, via Associated PressEsther Loewy was born on Dec. 15, 1924, in Saarlouis, in southwestern Germany, near the French border. Her father, Rudolf, was a teacher and cantor. He met her mother, Margarethe, in Berlin when they were teenagers; he was her piano teacher, and the two fell in love.Ms. Bejarano described her childhood as “lighthearted,” but that part of her life ended when she was sent at 16 to a Nazi work camp near Berlin, from which she would be sent to Auschwitz.After the war, she restarted her life in what would become Israel. She studied singing, joined a choir, gave music lessons and in 1950 married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver, with whom she had two children, Joram, a son, and Edna, a daughter. In 1960, she returned to Germany, settling in Hamburg, and ran a laundry service with her husband.She is survived by her children, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren.She found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist, and she joined the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime. She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.“I use music to act against fascism,” she told The Times. “Music is everything to me.”Around 2009, when she was in her 80s, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver.Onstage with the group’s Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino, Mrs. Bejarano was an unusual figure: a tiny woman with a snow-white pixie haircut, singing in Yiddish, Hebrew and Italian.Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.“Twelve years together and almost 900 concerts together, and all this thanks to your strength,” Microphone Mafia wrote on its website after Mrs. Bejarano’s death. “Your laughter, your courage, your determination, your loving manner, your understanding, your fighting heart.”Mrs. Bejarano, a recipient of Germany’s Order of Merit, issued a statement this year through the International Auschwitz Committee calling for Germany to declare May 8 a federal holiday to commemorate the end of World War II in Europe.“And if you are concerned about whether Germans should celebrate this day solemnly,” she wrote, “imagine: What would the world look like if the Nazis had won?” More

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      Rolling Stone Hires Daily Beast Editor as Its Top Editor

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      Noah Shachtman, an experienced online journalist with a newsy sensibility, will lead the pop music bible founded in 1967.Rolling Stone has chosen Noah Shachtman, the top editor of the news site The Daily Beast, as its next editor in chief, the magazine announced on Thursday, calling on him to continue the transformation of the 54-year-old pop music bible into a digital-first publication.Mr. Shachtman, 50, said in an interview that he plans to bring along The Daily Beast’s newsy approach and web metabolism when he starts his new job in September.“It’s got to be faster, louder, harder,” he said. “We’ve got to be out getting scoops, taking people backstage, showing them parts of the world they don’t get to see every day.”Mr. Shachtman will succeed Jason Fine, who stepped down in February after five and a half years as the top editor to take a job overseeing Rolling Stone’s podcasts, documentaries and other media ventures.The selection of Mr. Shachtman was driven by Gus Wenner, Rolling Stone’s president and chief operating officer and a son of Jann S. Wenner, who co-founded the magazine as a 21-year-old college dropout from a San Francisco apartment.The elder Mr. Wenner sold a majority stake in Rolling Stone to Penske Media, the publishing company led by the auto-racing scion Jay Penske, in 2017. Two years later, Penske Media bought the remaining stake from BandLab Technologies, a music technology company based in Singapore.“I love that his strength is in an area where we need to get stronger,” Gus Wenner, 30, said of Mr. Shachtman. “But he’s certainly got the skill set on long-form pieces, and that’s going to continue to be super important, too.”“Five years from now, I want Rolling Stone to be at the forefront of content creation across any platform: films, podcasts, the website, the magazine,” Mr. Wenner added. He cited, among other things, the Rolling Stone channel on the gaming platform Twitch.Before becoming the top editor of The Daily Beast in 2018, Mr. Shachtman covered technology and the defense industry as a freelance journalist and an early blogger. He later founded and edited the Wired blog “Danger Room,” a winner of a National Magazine Award in 2012.He brought to The Daily Beast a hard-hitting style reminiscent of New York’s tabloids. In recent years, the site, which the editor Tina Brown and the media entrepreneur Barry Diller started in 2008, kept a close watch on the Trump administration, the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case and conservative media outlets.Tracy Connor, The Daily Beast’s executive editor, will serve as interim editor in chief after Mr. Shachtman’s departure next month, the chief executive, Heather Dietrick, announced in a staff memo. Ms. Dietrick added of Mr. Shachtman: “Under his guidance, we made a bigger impact and reached more people in diverse formats than ever before. He was at our helm but also in the trenches every day.”Mr. Shachtman said that Rolling Stone would continue to cover pop music, digital culture and the entertainment industry, and that its outlook would often be skeptical. Some critics have contended that the magazine has sometimes veered away from journalism into fandom.“Rolling Stone’s at its best when it’s both celebrating great art and taking down bad actors,” Mr. Shachtman said, adding that he has little interest in cozying up to celebrities.In a statement, Mr. Penske said of Mr. Shachtman: “His experience, journalistic integrity and thought leadership make him the ideal choice to take this iconic brand into the next phase of growth and innovation.”Mr. Shachtman in Brooklyn with Rolling Stone’s chief executive, Gus Wenner, who said the magazine had become profitable again.Guerin Blask for The New York TimesA money-losing enterprise as recently as three years ago, Rolling Stone is now profitable, Mr. Wenner said. The monthly print edition, with a circulation of roughly 500,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, is profitable by itself, he added.In 2018, the magazine returned to its old large-size format, 10 inches by 12 inches, after a decade on newsstands in the more common 8-by-11 size. Rolling Stone started charging for online access last year. It attracts around 30 million unique visitors each month, Mr. Wenner said.Mr. Shachtman and Mr. Wenner are white men at a magazine known for publishing in-depth articles on white male rock gods like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger when the baby boom generation was ascendant.“We’re in a different era now,” Mr. Shachtman said. “No one appreciates the legacy of Rolling Stone more than me. But legacy is very different from future.”Mr. Wenner said he had considered “a very diverse and wide range of candidates” for the job of leading the magazine.“Diversity continues to be one of our biggest priorities, and it’s something Noah and I and Jay discussed at great length,” he added. “Continuing to bring in incredible leaders within the staff from all backgrounds will be a top mandate and priority of Noah’s.”Although he is a longtime journalist, Mr. Shachtman knows his way around a chord progression. From college into his 30s, he played bass in a series of ska, reggae and dub bands, including the 3rd Degree and Skinnerbox NYC. Along the way he played New York’s CBGB, Washington’s 9:30 Club and other storied venues.“He was good at appreciating the groove and holding things together,” said Jon Natchez, a saxophonist in the rock group the War on Drugs, who played alongside Mr. Shachtman in a ska band called Stubborn All-Stars.Mr. Shachtman, who lives in Brooklyn, said he had kept tabs on the latest in youth culture through his two sons, noting the social gaming platform Roblox as an example.“Getting into the spaces that are too weird, too confusing and too dangerous for parents to be in — that’s where Rolling Stone’s got to be,” he said. More

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      BAM’s Fall Season Kicks Off With a Beach Opera

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      “Sun & Sea,” which won top honors at the Venice Biennale in 2019, will make its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.The Brooklyn Academy of Music is bringing the beach to you.The star of its fall season, announced Thursday, is a theatrical installation — a surreal opera set at an indoor imitation beach — that paints a portrait of sunbather tranquillity with menacing undercurrents (did you catch the aria about a boyfriend drowning in the ocean?). The production, “Sun & Sea,” which will open at BAM Fisher and run for two weeks before touring the country, won the top prize when it debuted in the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. This will be the American premiere.“It’s an incredible spectacle,” David Binder, BAM’s artistic director who saw it in Venice, said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “The beachgoers are just passing the day away as things are coming to an end.”Those attending will watch from a 360-degree balcony as 13 singers and approximately 25 local community members who act as beachgoers scroll on their phones, play cards and fill in Sudoku puzzles. In Venice, lines stretched down the canal and around the piazza to see it. In a New York Times review of that installation, Joshua Barone wrote that the opera, created by the filmmaker and director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the writer Vaiva Grainyte and the artist and composer Lina Lapelyte, has a “haunting simplicity that insinuates itself into your memory and, possibly, your opinions.” The audience watched from above on the upstairs mezzanine of a warehouse, he wrote, “as if observing animals at a zoo or creatures under a microscope.”“Within a single hour of dangerously gentle melodies, it manages to animate a panoramic cast of characters whose stories coalesce into a portrait of an apocalyptic climate crisis that goes down as easily as a trip to the beach,” Barone wrote.The fall season continues with creations by artists from Japan, Brazil and Portugal, all of them New York premieres.Later in September, the Japanese sound artist ASUNA will perform his site-specific sound installation, “100 Keyboards,” in which the same note is simultaneously played and sustained on 100 battery-operated toy keyboards arranged in a circle, creating waves of overlapping notes until they climax to what BAM calls “a singular resonant reverberation.”In October, the Portuguese playwright-actor Tiago Rodrigues will stage his collaborative theater experiment “By Heart,” in which 10 audience members are asked to memorize a poem. It will be his first performance in the United States since being appointed the next director of France’s Avignon Festival, the storied annual arts festival that turns the city into a giant theater each July.“The theme is that if we can remember words or texts by heart, they can never be taken away, or suppressed, or censored, or destroyed,” Binder said. “It’s very simple, but also deeply political.”It will be followed in November by the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll’s dance piece “Cria.” Ripoll and the 10-member group Suave, an all-Black company that includes transgender performers, will mix funk, samba and break dance with passinho, the dance craze that grew out of Rio’s favelas, in the company’s first United States performance. It is billed as an experience that “relocates the wild exuberance of adolescence.”While BAM typically announces its fall season all at once, Binder said that, this year, additional programs will be announced on a rolling basis as details are finalized.“There’s just a huge appetite, I think, for artistic adventures right now,” he said. “And I’m so excited to see how artists respond to that hunger.” More

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      Laura Mvula Set Her Sound Free. It Ended Up in the ’80s.

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      After five years between albums, the award-winning English songwriter changed everything, trading orchestras for synthesizers and cranking up the beat.The English songwriter Laura Mvula changed nearly everything as she made her third album. She changed her sound, her songwriting method, her collaborators and (involuntarily) her label. After two award-winning, brilliantly idiosyncratic albums of time-warped orchestral pop, Mvula’s latest, “Pink Noise,” swerves in an entirely different direction: toward the brash, glossy, synthesizer-driven R&B-pop of the 1980s.“I need to be able to go — wherever,” Mvula, 35, said in a video chat from her living room in London. “There’s the feeling of risk, of not quite knowing what I’m doing. This was always going to be an album of liberation and championing myself. It’s channeling everything I want to channel without holding back.”Behind her, with its strings and hammers exposed, was the battered upright piano she learned to play as a child. Every so often, her cat, Marley, wandered by.Mvula was born Laura Douglas; her parents are from St. Kitts and Jamaica. She grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham, England, feeling like an outsider: a Black girl in a “predominantly white middle-class neighborhood,” she recalled. “I was never quite sure of where to place myself.”Her family was devoutly Christian, and Mvula’s songs often invoke prayer. (One new song, “Church Girl,” juxtaposes her naïve youthful expectations with the disillusionments of adult life, wondering, “How can you dance with the devil on your back?”) She sang regularly in church and also studied classical music, playing violin.She earned a degree in composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire. She also sang in Black Voices, an a cappella group directed by her aunt; wrote songs for her neo-soul/fusion jazz group, Judyshouse; and led school choruses and gospel choirs before concentrating on her own performing career. By then she had married a fellow conservatory student, Themba Mvula, an opera singer who was born in Zambia.Mvula’s 2013 debut album, “Sing to the Moon,” willfully and elegantly ignored most 21st-century sounds. In songs about idealism and self-affirmation, Mvula drew on conservatory skills to bolster the raw soul passion in her voice. She reached back to the studio pop of the 1950s and 1960s, writing plush harmonies backed by orchestral arrangements, dramatic choirs and jazz-tinged rhythm sections. The album earned comparisons to vintage Nina Simone, and was nominated for the Brit Awards and the Mercury Prize; it won her two MOBO awards, which recognize British “Music of Black Origin.” Mvula sang at the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize concert.“I wanted to feel uncomfortable in my own listening mind,” Mvula said.Nicole Fara Silver for The New York TimesMvula’s 2016 album, “The Dreaming Room,” grappled with, among other things, the end of her marriage and her bouts of depression and panic attacks; she suffered from monophobia, fear of being alone. As she sang about despair and exaltation, her music deepened the orchestrations while occasionally adding some funk. Mvula also went public with her mental-health struggles, appearing on the BBC program “Generation Anxiety.” (She has improved lately with therapy, she said.)Although “Sing to the Moon” reached the Top 10 in Britain, and one of its singles, “Green Garden,” entered the British Top 40, accolades and awards didn’t equal more hits. Months before “The Dreaming Room” won the Ivor Novello award, a top British award chosen by songwriters, Sony Music informed Mvula in a brief email that she was being dropped from the roster. “I was not used to the reality of the commercial music industry,” she said. “It was just so curt. It was, like, ‘Here endeth your value to us.’”Mvula was already reassessing her songwriting. “There was this pressure put on me, and that I put on myself, to make something new,” she said. “I had all these tags in my head. You know, ‘Created her own genre of music, created her own lane.’ But then I found myself like, ‘So what does this mean? Where do I go next?’”Between recording contracts, Mvula toured as the opening act for David Byrne in Britain. Her stripped-down shows sparked new attention from Briony Turner of Atlantic Records U.K., who is now the company’s co-president. Turner had wanted to sign Mvula before her Sony deal. Now, Turner said from London, “She had moved into this unexpected new realm, and I was blown away. I signed her because I think she’s a genius. I love what she stands for culturally and musically.”Mvula told Turner she had been thinking about 1980s R&B and that she wanted to experiment with collaborators. Her ideas, she now admits, were nebulous. “I had been boasting about making a record that I wanted to dance to, but that was an outright lie,” Mvula said. “I had no real plans. I had no sketches, I had nothing. I was just trying to magic it into reality.”With Atlantic’s help, Mvula tried songwriting sessions that were “like speed dating,” she said. None panned out until Turner suggested Dann Hume, a producer from New Zealand who ended up co-writing and co-producing the entire album with Mvula. “Little did I know my life was going to change,” Hume said by phone from southern Wales.Mvula had set up a home studio in her clothes closet in London. One day, she said, “I told myself that when I went in that closet, the next thing needs to be the thing that releases me. And I stopped thinking. I decided I’m not going to say, ‘I want to create an orchestral palette with these textures.’ I’m not going to go to the keyboard and just play all the chords and the voice things that I enjoy. I’m not going to play the familiar shapes any more. I’m just going to play the first thing that comes.”That first thing was the bass line of “Safe Passage,” the album’s opener: a celebration of moving on and sharing pleasure. “I went so rudimentary,” Mvula said. “I took my index finger and ‘dum-dum-dum,’” she said, jabbing an imaginary keyboard and singing some syncopated low notes. “And then a snare, I really wanted that to be a fiery sound. It wasn’t until I finished it that I was like, that’s kind of ’80s. This is a path to explore, a sound world.”She brought the tracks to the studio, Hume was enthusiastic and the album took off. “I knew that she wanted to make something big and bold,” Hume said. “She made clear from the very beginning that she didn’t want to retrace any steps. I accepted that, and we never really looked back.”For her new songs, Mvula consciously sought sparser, more open structures. “I wanted to move away from the richness of harmony — from using as many notes as I wanted, as many chord changes,” she said. “I decided that this time I was going to work with two or three elements. The harmony would be implied, and sometimes it would be obscured, completely ambiguous.“I wanted to feel uncomfortable in my own listening mind,” she added. “I didn’t want to feel like, ‘Oh, I know what that chord will make them feel.’ I wanted to move away from that bag of tricks.”The production of “Pink Noise” — a technical term for the whooshing sound of white noise, which mixes every frequency, but with the lows boosted — revels in the whip-crack drums, gleaming keyboard tones and spatial immersion of 1980s pop. Mvula ruled out using the instrument she wrote songs on: the piano. She also sang even more freely and forcefully than before. “On the older records, I think I was still trying to please the teacher. I’m still scared to offend, to show certain blemishes or tones or parts of my voice. But all those things — in ‘Pink Noise,’ I let go of it.”“There was this pressure put on me, and that I put on myself, to make something new,” Mvula said.Rosie Matheson for The New York TimesThere’s ample nostalgia in Mvula’s new music. “You hear me as my 14-year-old self listening to late-80s and early ’90s soul and R&B,” Mvula said. “My first record was ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.’ I was obsessed with Sting. I was obsessed with Michael Jackson and Prince. Now, I just stopped trying to get in the way of it all.“And you might say a lot of the songs on this record, it’s Black music, whatever that means,” she added. “Before this, I had been disassociated with Black music because I wrote for strings and horns. So I think I was subconsciously wanting to just do away with that — like, why did I place myself in this box?”Still, “Pink Noise” is not entirely a throwback. Mvula’s own musical instincts persist, with jagged, leaping melodic lines cantilevered over the beat, not-quite-dissonant counterpoint and unexpected blooms of vocal harmony. “That’s just Laura’s mind,” Hume said. “She’s got such great musical knowledge, but she always wants to come at it from a different angle. If she knows how to do it, she doesn’t want to do it. She only wants to do it if it’s pushing it further.”The album is full of songs about love found (“Pink Noise,” “Safe Passage”) and lost (“Magical,” “Conditional”). But the “most important” song on the album, Mvula said, is “Remedy.” It was written during a 2020 lockdown in Britain, while Mvula watched Black Lives Matter protests and spoke with family members about generations of racism. She recalled thinking, “I’m not going to be marching on the streets, but I’m going to offer a song. I suddenly felt this overwhelming privilege to be a part of this reaching the threshold: No more.” Over a bluntly slamming beat and a mesh of assertive, interlocking synthesizer and horn-section lines, the chorus of “Remedy” sums up many people’s experience of 2020: “How many more must die before the remedy?/Can you hear all my people cry for the remedy?”But Mvula also, hesitantly, allows herself to have some fun on the album. “Got Me” goes skipping along on a triplet groove that harks back to Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” as Mvula invites a lover to “do what you wanna do.”She didn’t want to put it on the album, she said. “But Dann was so passionate! He was like, ‘It’s such a good jam!’ And the label were like, ‘This is the big single that’s going to radio.’ The whole art versus commerce thing really blew up in my face again,” she said with a smile.“And it’s cool. I have a jam,” she added. “And I eat my hat. I’m learning about the universality of music. It just goes wherever it wants to go. And I’m learning that my fears, my insecurities — they’re not going to be allowed to prevent me from walking the path I’m meant to walk.” More

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      What’s Next for Britney Spears and Her Conservatorship Case

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      The judge overseeing the legal arrangement controlling the singer’s life and finances approved the hiring of Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, as her lawyer on Wednesday.Three weeks after Britney Spears denounced the conservatorship that has long controlled her personal life and finances as abusive in an impassioned courtroom speech, a Los Angeles judge said the singer can hire her own lawyer on Wednesday.Judge Brenda Penny approved Ms. Spears’s choice of Mathew S. Rosengart, a prominent Hollywood lawyer and former federal prosecutor who is expected to take a more aggressive approach and push for the conservatorship to end, according to a person briefed on the matter.At a June 23 hearing, Ms. Spears spoke out for the first time at length about her life under the arrangement, which was put in place in 2008 amid concerns about her mental health and potential substance abuse, and said she wants it to end. Since her remarks to the court, there has been a flurry of court filings by those involved in managing the conservatorship.One of the most pressing questions going into the Wednesday hearing involved Ms. Spears’s legal representation. When the conservatorship was imposed in 2008, a judge declared the singer unfit to hire her own counsel; a court-appointed attorney, Samuel D. Ingham III, has represented her since.In her June 23 speech, Ms. Spears raised questions about whether Mr. Ingham had done enough to educate and support her. In a particularly shocking claim, Ms. Spears said that she did not know that it was possible for her to petition to terminate the conservatorship.After Ms. Spears spoke out last month, Mr. Ingham asked the court to step down. A law firm that Mr. Ingham had recently brought on to assist him, Loeb & Loeb, also submitted a resignation letter. On Wednesday, Judge Penny approved both Mr. Ingham and Loeb & Loeb’s resignations.Here are four questions that remain as the case continues.1. Will the Court Investigate Ms. Spears’s Account?Days after Ms. Spears told the court that she had been abused under her conservatorship — saying that she was forced to take mood-stabilizing drugs and was prevented from removing her birth control device, placing the blame for her treatment on her management team, caretakers and family — her father, James P. Spears, called for an investigation.Mr. Spears has been the key player in the arrangement from the beginning. In her speech, Ms. Spears described him as someone who had approval over everything in her life, saying, “he loved the control.”In court filings, Mr. Spears’s lawyers requested an evidentiary hearing into his daughter’s account, writing, “it is critical that the Court confirm whether or not Ms. Spears’s testimony was accurate in order to determine what corrective actions, if any, need to be taken.”They also attempted to distance Mr. Spears from questions about her well-being, arguing that he was “simply not involved in any decisions related to Ms. Spears’s personal care or medical or reproductive issues” after late 2019, and had been cut off from communicating with her.Lawyers for Jodi Montgomery, a professional conservator who took over Ms. Spears’s personal care from her father on an ongoing temporary basis in 2019, responded forcefully, calling Mr. Spears’s request “procedurally defective” and “wholly improper,” as well as a “thinly veiled attempt to clear his name.”On Wednesday, Mr. Rosengart, along with a lawyer for Ms. Montgomery, did not agree on how best to proceed with an investigation.2. Who Will Be in Charge of Ms. Spears’s Finances?Ms. Spears’s fortune, which is now estimated near $60 million, has been controlled by her father (sometimes alongside a co-conservator) for the entirety of the conservatorship; a wealth management firm, Bessemer Trust, was appointed as a co-conservator last year after Ms. Spears requested that her father be removed from the role.About a week after the June 23 hearing, Bessemer Trust requested to resign, according to court documents, citing Ms. Spears’s criticisms of the arrangement. Once the firm became aware of Ms. Spears’s wish to terminate the conservatorship, the filing said, Bessemer no longer wished to be involved. On Wednesday, Judge Penny approved its resignation.The question is now whether Mr. Spears will be allowed to remain as the sole conservator of Ms. Spears’s estate, despite both a formal request from her lawyer and Ms. Spears’s own emotional plea that he be removed. “I’m here to get rid of my dad,” Ms. Spears said in court on Wednesday.Mr. Rosengart, asked the singer’s father to resign as conservator on the spot, but a lawyer for Mr. Spears declined, calling the request inappropriate.3. Should Ms. Spears’s Conservator Be Granted Security?Since Ms. Spears’s speech, there has been a “marked increase in the number and severity of threatening posts” about Ms. Montgomery on social media, as well as other communications threatening violence or death against her, she said in a court filing.As a result, Ms. Montgomery has asked the court to require Ms. Spears’s estate to pay for her security, if Mr. Spears approves. A court filing on her behalf said that Ms. Montgomery sent the threats to the security company that Mr. Spears used, and it recommended that she retain 24/7 protection.Mr. Spears has objected to that arrangement. In his own court filing, lawyers asserted that Ms. Montgomery’s security services would exceed $50,000 per month for an indefinite period — an expense he called unreasonable. He also argued that such payments would set a standard in which Ms. Spears would need to cover security costs for anyone receiving threats as a result of the high-profile case.“Ms. Montgomery is not the only person involved in this conservatorship who has received threatening communications and/or death threats,” lawyers for Mr. Spears wrote.4. Is a Request to End the Conservatorship on the Way?The legal machinations that have followed the June 23 hearing all lead to the same question: Will Ms. Spears formally appeal to terminate the conservatorship?In court on Wednesday, Ms. Spears reiterated her wish that the conservatorship end without her undergoing additional psychiatric evaluations. Now that she has a new lawyer, it is likely only a matter of time before she submits formal paperwork to terminate the arrangement.After that, it is possible that someone else representing the conservatorship — most likely Ms. Spears’s father — could object to the termination, triggering a trial before the judge makes a final decision.Chris Johnson, a trust and estate lawyer in California who has worked with conservatorships and is not involved in the Spears case, said that judges tend to rely heavily on the opinions of medical experts in considering whether to end a conservatorship and that Ms. Spears would probably have to be evaluated again.“In many cases, it can be harder getting rid of a conservatorship than establishing it in the first place,” Mr. Johnson said. More

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      At the White House, Olivia Rodrigo Says Vaccines Are ‘Good 4 U’

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      The pop star with the No. 1 album in the country joined the Biden administration’s efforts to encourage the young and unvaccinated to get their shots.WASHINGTON — Nixon and Elvis. Trump and Kanye. Biden and Olivia.On Wednesday, Olivia Rodrigo, the 18-year-old pop star with the No. 1 album in the country, visited the White House and joined the Biden administration’s efforts to use the young and influential to reach the young and unvaccinated.“It’s important to have conversations with friends and family members,” Ms. Rodrigo said, reading from prepared remarks during a short appearance in the White House briefing room, “and actually get to a vaccination site, which you can do more easily than ever before.”The White House could not have scripted it better. (In fact, White House officials helped her craft her remarks, according to an administration official.) The “Good 4 U” singer has millions of followers on social media who hang on her every word, and she is part of a growing list of creators, celebrities and influential people who are interested in working with the White House to deliver a pro-vaccine message directly to their respective communities.Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, has been organizing an effort to reach out to people like Ms. Rodrigo and invite them to Washington to create content. The plans for bringing her to the White House, Mr. Flaherty said in an interview, began in June. After she arrived, Ms. Rodrigo wandered the halls of the West Wing with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, stopping by desks and chatting with officials before it was time to film a series of educational videos with President Biden.“Not every 18-year-old uses their time to come do this,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said from the lectern.Administration officials are hoping the time investment pays off. In recent weeks, as the federal strategy has shifted to more personalized efforts to reach unvaccinated people, the White House has recruited YouTube stars, social media influencers and celebrities who can send the messaging to their own channels. It has also highlighted efforts by popular dating apps to encourage young singles to promote their vaccination status.Ms. Rodrigo has millions of followers on social media who hang on her every word.Evan Vucci/Associated PressHealthy young adults are historically hard to reach, and the White House has been upfront about the difficulties that officials have faced in persuading those groups to receive a vaccine. Hesitancy can result from a mix of inertia, fear, busy schedules and misinformation.At times, the young stars who have met with Mr. Biden have gone on to directly address those concerns with their followers. In a video titled “I COLLABED WITH PRESIDENT BIDEN! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” after he interviewed the president in May, Manny MUA, a YouTube star and makeup artist, told his four million followers that he had enjoyed the experience but that getting vaccinated was still a personal choice.“You can do whatever you guys want,” he said in the video, “but I am pro-vaccine.”Mr. Biden’s aides say he is open to taking questions from YouTubers and welcoming celebrities to the White House if it might help sway the unconvinced.“There’s only so much we as a White House can do to stop misinformation,” Mr. Flaherty said. “What we can do is go on offense. That underscores exactly why this work is so important.”Young people under the age of 27 are vaccinated at a lower rate than older people, according to the White House, and they were part of the reason the administration said it fell short of Mr. Biden’s goal of partly vaccinating 70 percent of adults by July 4. Younger people became eligible for immunization later in the vaccine rollout, after other high-priority risk groups, and children aged 12 to 15 became eligible for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine only in mid-May.Across the country overall, providers were administering about 0.55 million doses per day on average, as of Wednesday, about an 84 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported on April 13.The White House still faces significant challenges in reaching reluctant Americans, particularly in states where officials say they face pressure against evangelizing for a vaccine.After Ms. Rodrigo left the podium, Ms. Psaki was asked about Dr. Michelle Fiscus, a pediatrician and Tennessee’s top vaccination official, who said she was fired from her job after distributing a memo that suggested that some teenagers might be eligible for vaccinations without their parents’ consent. The memo repeated information that has been publicly available on the state Health Department’s website for years.“We continue to see young people hit by the virus,” Ms. Psaki said, “and we’ve been crystal clear that we stand against any effort that would politicize our country’s pandemic response and recovery from Covid-19.” More

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      'Aline': The Crazy Celine Dion Movie at Cannes

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      “Aline,” an unofficial biopic of the singer, boasts a singular casting choice that has all of Cannes buzzing.CANNES, France — The Cannes Film Festival is meant to be a holy temple of cinema, a place where sober works from the most respected directors have their first unveiling. But every so often, something completely off-kilter sneaks through, a film so unlike anything at Cannes that it feels out of place … that is, until it steers into its eccentricities so hard that it somehow boomerangs back into auteurism.These out-of-left-field movies often end up being my favorite experiences of the festival, and that’s why I’ve got to tell you about “Aline,” a wild Celine Dion biopic that screened at Cannes on Tuesday night and reduced the audience to giggles. Let me just get this out of the way: I’m still reeling from the instantly iconic decision of the film’s 57-year-old actress-director Valérie Lemercier to play Celine Dion at every age of her life, including as a 5-year-old child.You see a lot of nervy things at Cannes, but this surely takes the cake.“Aline” begins with a bit of a disclaimer, as the opening title card declares: “This film is inspired by the life of Celine Dion. It is, however, a work of fiction.” That’s why, even though the story follows nearly every element of Dion’s life beat for beat, the main character is instead named Aline Dieu and most of Dion’s best-known songs proved impossible to get the rights to. (Yes, “30 Rock” fans, we’re dealing with a Jackie Jormp-Jomp situation here.)Like Dion, Aline is born into a large Quebec family where she is the youngest of 14 children. Her public debut as a singer comes early: At 5, Aline takes the stage at her brother’s wedding and lets loose with an uncannily powerful singing voice. Dion did that, too, but I’m going to guess there was one crucial difference in real life: When 5-year-old Celine sang at that wedding, she wasn’t sporting the face of an AARP-eligible adult.Danielle Fichaud, left, Valérie Lemercier (yes, the director) and Sylvaine Marcel in “Aline.”Jean-Marie Leroy/Rectangle Productions/TF1 Films ProductionShrunk to Hobbit size and Facetuned into near-oblivion, Lemercier scampers, preens and unnerves. I’ve never seen anything quite like it: Not “PEN15,” not John C. Reilly at the beginning of “Walk Hard,” not even a fully grown Martin Short playing a psychotic 10-year-old in “Clifford.” As a cinematic presence, Preteen Aline looks less like our main character and more like she’s ready to terrorize Vera Farmiga in the next “Conjuring” movie.Why didn’t they just cast an actual kid? I’m told that as a French comedian, Lemercier has often played children, but “Aline” takes this shtick several steps too far: The movie is like “Bohemian Rhapsody” if they shrank Rami Malek and made him play his own teeth. Have you seen those Twitter prompts that ask you to reimagine a classic film with one character replaced by a Muppet? “Aline” reminded me of that, except the main character is the Muppet and instead of felt, she is made from your nightmares.You may be thinking, “Well, surely this insane 5-year-old portion of the movie doesn’t last very long.” You’re right, because the movie does eventually age Aline up … to 12. Here, Lemercier plays Aline as a gawky introvert thrust into fame after she signs with a manager, Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel). The character is based on Dion’s own producer-manager, René Angélil, whom she met as a preteen and eventually married, and Lemercier frames that problematic pairing as Aline’s greatest aspiration in life.Practically speaking, that means we’re watching a 57-year-old play a 12-year-old with a crush on her 40-year-old manager. I just don’t know what to do with any of that! Every time Aline’s mother tries to sever the union, declaring that Guy-Claude is far too old for Aline, I felt like my brain was short-circuiting.Jean-Marie Leroy/Rectangle Productions/TF1 Films ProductionIs Lemercier trying to sanction the romance by playing Aline herself, suggesting that the young woman was simply an old soul? I’m not sure that tracks, since by the time Aline has become an adult (which is when she and Guy-Claude finally consummate their relationship), Lemercier is still playing her as a sugar-loving, childlike diva.Eventually, you just have to surrender to the absurdity of “Aline,” and at least that sense of humor sometimes comes from a knowing place, like when Aline begins her residency in Las Vegas and gets lost in the giant mansion she just bought. After the film’s central romance is resolved in the first hour, “Aline” simply skims Dion’s adult life for stand-alone episodes: She’s picking a dress for the Oscars! She’s taking fertility treatments! Guy-Claude has a ponytail now!But even the film’s more straightforward dramatic scenes are still tinged with a bit of insanity. It almost can’t be helped: After you’ve sat through a half-hour of Preteen Aline, nothing feels normal anymore.And maybe that’s the way “Aline” ought to be. Cultural figures hardly get more mainstream than Celine Dion, but even her biggest fans would admit that the woman exudes pure camp. I can’t explain half of the directorial choices made in “Aline,” but at least they’re so goofy and distinctive that I’ll be thinking about them for years to come. Palme d’Or be damned: In an era where musical biopics are increasingly disposable, I know that “Aline” will go on and on. More