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The Small Business Administration has essentially ousted the leaders of a deeply troubled $16 billion relief effort for live-events businesses, bringing in a new team to take over and fix the program. More
An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York documents a brief moment when rogue videographers shot an influential sliver of the music scene.In the summer of 1975, Pat Ivers filmed a legendary festival of unsigned rock bands at CBGB, which included Talking Heads, Blondie and Ramones. Ivers had unauthorized but easy access to equipment, thanks to her day job in the Public Access Department at Manhattan Cable TV, and other members of her video collective, Metropolis Video, helped out.“I was the only girl,” Ivers said in a recent interview. “And all the guys said, ‘You’re crazy. We’re not making money at this.’ They wouldn’t do it anymore, so for about a year, I sulked at the end of the bar at CBGB. Then I met Emily.”Emily Armstrong was a sociology major at the City University of New York who’d also taken a job in Public Access at Manhattan Cable, and shared with Ivers determination and a love of punk rock. The pair shot dozens of concerts, and hosted a weekly cable show, “Nightclubbing,” that showed their videos. The hulking Ikegami camera they used was “like a Buick on my shoulder,” Ivers said. They’d shoot bands until nearly sunrise, hurry back to Manhattan Cable’s offices and return the equipment before anyone noticed it was gone.Pat Ivers, left, and Emily Armstrong teamed up to shoot shows throughout the city using borrowed equipment from their day jobs at Manhattan Cable TV.Sean Corcoran, a curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, graduated from college in 1996 and was in kindergarten when Ivers and Armstrong were amassing their archive. But he’s fascinated with the flowering of new music that took place in New York starting in the late ’70s. When a colleague proposed an exhibition timed to the 40th anniversary of MTV’s August 1, 1981 arrival, Corcoran pounced on the opportunity to build a showcase for the music that emerged in the wake of New York City’s 1975 near-bankruptcy, subsequent economic distress and AIDS and crack epidemics.When Corcoran began curating “New York, New Music: 1980-1986,” which opens Friday, he knew most of the photographers who’d documented the era, including Janette Beckman, Laura Levine and Blondie’s zealous guitarist, Chris Stein. While searching the copious Downtown Collection of NYU’s Fales Library, he saw a listing of Ivers and Armstrong’s archive, which the library acquired in 2010, and was thrilled. Material from that duo, plus footage from Merrill Aldighieri, and the team of Charles Libin and Paul Cameron, provided Corcoran with a vast but rarely seen video catalog.“New York, New Music” chronicles a variety of genres, including rap, jazz, salsa and dance music, but the videos in the exhibition emphasize post-punk, the gnarled, joyously uncommercial cousin of new wave that happens to be having a moment. (An inescapable Apple ad campaign uses the Delta 5’s spiky 1979 song “Mind Your Own Business,” which was considered so uncommercial it wasn’t even released as a single in the United States.) The sound of this era, Corcoran said, “never gets the attention that disco and punk get.”“New York, New Music: 1980-1986” opens at the Museum of the City of New York on Friday.Museum of the City of New YorkThanks to the advent of portable (if Buick-size) video cameras, these five dogged videographers documented this fertile music, which was politically progressive and inclusive of races and genders. All were DIY self-starters, flush with moxie, who made the best of borrowed equipment and Gothic lighting. Aldighieri even shot with videotapes she’d scavenged from dumpsters outside the Time & Life Building. This grimy, seat-of-their-pants aesthetic was the dominant language of music video until MTV spread throughout the country and turned videos into gleaming advertisements for stardom.Like Ivers and Armstrong, Libin and Cameron plunged themselves into the scene. The pair met as SUNY Purchase film students who bonded over their love of Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese. In 1979, they drove down to the 62nd Street nightclub Hurrah in Manhattan, and shot a 16 mm film of a colorful new band from Georgia, the B-52’s, playing a jittery surf-rock song called “Rock Lobster.” They edited it using university equipment, then showed it at Hurrah by projecting it onto a white bedsheet. Music videos were still a novel idea, and “people went ballistic,” Cameron said.The head of their film department went ballistic for different reasons, and expelled the duo for using equipment without permission. Free of academic distractions, they moved to New York, bartended at Hurrah and shot dozens of the era’s best bands; they contributed videos of the jagged funk bands Defunkt and James White and the Blacks to the museum show. After a few years, their video work led to flourishing careers as cinematographers, leaving no more time for late nights in the clubs.James White in 1980 at Hurrah.Charles Libin and Paul CameronDefunkt at Hurrah in 1980.Charles Libin and Paul CameronFilming this scene was stressful and sometimes risky. While working at Danceteria, an unlicensed club near Penn Station, Ivers and Armstrong were arrested along with other employees; they also had a significant portion of their archive stolen. “It made us bitter,” Ivers said. In April 1980, after shooting Public Image Ltd., they ended “Nightclubbing.”“The scene we loved was over. A new scene was coming. I didn’t like Duran Duran,” Armstrong added. More than a dozen of their videos, including footage of the punk bands the Dead Boys and the Cramps, and the louche, chaotic jazz-rock of the Lounge Lizards, are displayed at the Museum of the City of New York show.Aldighieri, an intrepid Massachusetts College of Art and Design grad who’d worked as a news camerawoman and an animator, was hired by Hurrah to play videos between sets, and used the house camera to shoot bands. She filmed more than 100 different bands there, some more than once: “I was there five to seven days a week,” she said. But in May 1981, Hurrah closed, and a subsequent late-night mugging scared her into nightclub retirement. Aldighieri created a short-lived series of VHS video compilations for Sony Home Video, worked in production and postproduction, then moved to France. From her archive, the curator Corcoran used four clips, including the jazz avant-gardist Sun Ra and the South Bronx sister group ESG, which played minimalist funk.The footage from the five filmmakers forms “the core of the video content” in “New York, New Music: 1980-1986,” Corcoran said. It’s just a happy coincidence that the show is arriving at a time when post-punk music is finally in the limelight.Sun Ra onstage at Hurrah.Merrill AldighieriSonny Sharrock of Material performing at Hurrah.Merrill AldighieriThe acerbic British band Gang of Four released a boxed set in March; Beth B’s documentary of the No Wave warrior Lydia Lunch opens in New York this month; and Delta 5, heard constantly in that Apple commercial, has been cited as an influence by emerging groups from the United Kingdom (Shopping), Boston (Guerilla Toss) and Los Angeles (Automatic).“Always surprised that there’s still resonance after 40 years,” Ros Allen, who played bass in Delta 5 and is now an animator and senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland in England, said in an email. “‘Mind Your Own Business’ has got a catchy beat and bass lines and a cracking guitar break, and then there’s the ‘go [expletive] yourself’ lyrics.”The Gang of Four drummer Hugo Burnham, who is now an assistant professor of experiential learning at Endicott College in Massachusetts, said in an email, “There was so much interesting and lasting music made during that post-punk/pre-New Romantic time.” He added, “And maybe our own kids will be generous enough of spirit to click ‘like’ and allow us relevance, once again.”Bad Brains onstage at CBGB, as captured for “Nightclubbing.”via GoNightclubbingIn the course of the 1980s, Corcoran noted, New York changed from an unregulated city hospitable to artists to a tightly policed city hospitable to stockbrokers, which brought the era to a close. Much of the footage he chose has rarely been seen, and other important video documents of the era are frustratingly difficult or impossible to find.Chris Strouth, a composer and filmmaker, spent years searching for the videotapes of M-80, a groundbreaking 1979 two-day music marathon staged in Minneapolis. After he finally located it, he spent “four or five years,” he said, turning it into a feature length documentary. At the last minute, the singer of an obscure local band he declined to name pulled permission to use its footage, which Strouth described as “heartbreaking.”Some filmmakers didn’t get signed releases from the bands, which limits their commercial use. Some got releases that have gone missing or didn’t anticipate the rise of digital media. In lieu of a contract, videos can’t be licensed without facing a gantlet of opportunistic lawyers and moody band members. “It’s hell,” Strouth said with a bruised chuckle. “Music licensing is hell.”But it wasn’t always that way. Ivers was able to film nearly every act from the late ’70s, except Patti Smith and Television, who declined permission. Thanks to Ivers and others, an obscure era of music was thoroughly memorialized. “The shows we saw — my God,” she said. “It was lightning in a bottle. It was only going to happen once.” More
On the heels of winning his second Grammy, and on the verge of publishing a memoir, the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is enjoying a long-delayed moment of recognition.The air was thick with termites when Bobby Rush stepped onto an outdoor stage in New Orleans for one of his first live performances in over a year — an uncharacteristically long break, the result of pandemic shutdowns, in a career that began in the wake of World War II.It was early May, and the swarming was so bad that the blues musician wove the insects into his lyrics: “Somebody come get these damn bugs.” He later moved to the ground in front of the stage, determined to continue his show in the dark, beyond the reach of the termite-attracting lights.“I never seen anything like that before,” Rush said by phone a week later, from his home in Jackson, Miss. “I could hardly play my guitar.”Rush has relied on practical improvisations, often in unglamorous circumstances, his entire life. His first guitar was a diddley bow he made from hay wire nailed to the side of his childhood home. Much later, Rolling Stone christened him “The King of the Chitlin Circuit,” an acknowledgment of the years he spent touring the network of small clubs for Black performers and audiences, mainly in the South, in a 1973 Silver Eagle Trailways bus he customized himself.On the heels of winning his second Grammy in March, and on the verge of publishing a memoir in June, Rush, now in his 80s, is enjoying a moment of recognition. A lesser-known figure compared to many of the luminaries he has considered friends and mentors, including Elmore James, Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Rush is one of the last remaining Black blues musicians who experienced the horror of Jim Crow-era racism and participated, however tangentially, in the genre’s postwar flowering.“I may be the oldest blues singer around, me and Buddy Guy,” he said in October, during the first of several conversations, this one via video conference. Rush sat at the edge of a couch at his son’s house in Jackson, slouching to peer into a laptop screen and trotted out a quip he uses onstage: “If I’m not the oldest, I’m the ugliest.”Rush’s book offers three possible birth years — 1940, 1937 and 1934. “All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesHe wore the same New Orleans Saints baseball cap over his Jheri curls during an in-person interview a week later, at the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Miss. Speaking through a mask, he reflected from a dressing room chair about the “heavy” experience of outliving so many contemporaries. He was there to accept the Crossroads of American Music Award, a lifetime achievement of sorts.“I’ve known so many of these cats,” he said. “I’ve lived the history.”Scott Billington, a veteran producer who has worked with many blues musicians, including Rush, said the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is indeed among the last of a dying breed. “Bobby’s almost unique in the blues world today, because he has connections that go back so far,” he said. “He’s made this transition into a sort of iconic American figure.”Rush believes the racial awakening triggered by the murder of George Floyd, and reinforced by the pandemic, leaves him well positioned to reach a public primed to hear the blues with fresh ears. “I think what we thought was forwards wasn’t forwards,” he said of the suggestion that Floyd’s killing represented a step backward in the struggle for racial justice. “I been having feet on my neck all my life.”Rush’s memoir, “I Ain’t Studdin’ Ya: My American Blues Story,” written with Herb Powell and due out June 22, is frank about many things, including the reason he’s received so many standing ovations in recent years.“I’ve got enough good sense to know they are not applauding because I’m a household name,” he writes. “What they’re standing for is that I’m still here, doing it my way.”Rush onstage in 2000. He has become known for his over-the-top shows filled with music, comedy and quips.Linda Vartoogian/Getty ImagesFor much of his career, Rush tailored his show — a mix of soul, funk and blues interspersed with bawdy storytelling — to an audience he says was “99 percent Black.” He went decades without ever cracking into the broader, mainly white audience that brought fame (if not always fortune) to the blues’ biggest stars.That started to change around the turn of this century, when Rush starred in “The Road to Memphis,” one in a series of documentaries about the blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, that aired on PBS in 2003. Rush was a senior citizen by then, or about to be. His book offers three possible birth years — 1940, 1937 and 1934. Rush claims not to know the answer.“All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said.Rush was born Emmett Ellis Jr. in northwest Louisiana. His father, Ellis Sr., was a preacher and sharecropper; his mother, Mattie, a mixed-race homemaker who passed for white. Rush, the sixth of 10 children, said his mother acted differently when the family went into town.“Many times when I was in the public, she wasn’t my mom. She was my babysitter, and my dad was her chauffeur,” he said. “It was a strange situation.”Rush’s family moved to Sherrill, a small town in the Arkansas Delta, when he was still a child. By his early teens, Rush was regularly sneaking into the music clubs in nearby Pine Bluff, a hub of Black culture and commerce.In his book, the Arkansas Delta years are when Rush becomes a character in the history of the blues. It is where he befriended Elmore James, learned to wear his hair like Big Joe Turner, absorbed the harp playing of Sonny Boy Williamson, and first saw the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, the Black vaudeville group that he briefly joined.Arkansas is also where Rush fell in love with the spaces where African-American culture flourished in the segregated South, and changed his name. In “juke joints we fixed onto being segregated. Being in the thick of ourselves with our own groove,” he writes. “There was freedom in these places.”Rush stands over six feet and has a taste for dapper clothes.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesRush joined the Great Migration north when he moved to Chicago in the early ’50s. He got a job pumping gas, and started a family with his first wife, Hazel. As a musician, he spun his wheels.He was in Chicago over a decade before he cut his first single, “Someday,” released in ’64. He bought a hot dog cart to park outside clubs where he played — and ended up making more money selling hot dogs. In 1969, he opened Bobby’s Barbeque House.He was a savvy, prolific networker. Rush’s book is strewn with lessons in life and music gleaned from legends like Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter, a neighbor who taught him the basics of tongue-blocking, a harmonica technique. In his memoir, he recalls the harp player explaining, “That’s how you git it dirty — make them notes bend.”Rush was ultimately more successful living the blues in Chicago than playing them. The chapter of his book where he discovers Hazel was cheating on him — including with a police officer who put Rush in jail for a night in order to be with her — is one of many where he admits feeling inferior to his more successful friends.“Hidden behind the hurt of her infidelity were feelings of inadequacy,” he writes. “My status in the world felt small.”Part of the hurt came from discovering that racism in the North was comparable to what he knew in the South. The memoir includes a story about a gig in the 1950s he took in a small theater outside Chicago, where he and his band were forced to play behind a curtain. The job was offered to him by a Black musician friend. In one of our interviews, Rush said he wished he could go back in time and ask the friend, “Why you recommend me to a place where I got to play behind the curtain? Why you think I would do that?”The raw vulnerability was at odds with Rush’s physical presence. He stands over six feet and is fit for a person of his age, which, coupled with a taste for dapper clothes — he changed into a tuxedo to record a solo acoustic performance at the museum — allows him to slip easily into the role of an eminent, occasionally immodest bluesman. (He often claims to have made nearly 400 records; the discography in his memoir lists 67, including singles.)Powell, Rush’s co-author, said the musician softened as he reflected on the pain he’d experienced — including the deaths of three of his four children, from complications of sickle cell disease — during interviews for the book.“When we started to look back at his formative years, it created a bond between us that allowed the sensitivity — unusual for a man of his age — to come through,” Powell said. “He cried a bit, which was beautiful.”“I’ve lived the history,” Rush said.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesThe way Rush talks about affairs of the heart suggests a greater emotional complexity than many of his songs, and his stage show, would imply. In our first conversation, he discussed the inspiration for the song “Porcupine Meat” that a casual listener could assume is about little more than sex. The truth is deeper.“I loved her more than she loved me,” he said. “I wanted to leave her, but I was afraid that she would find someone else better than I, and I’d never find someone that compared to her.”Rush moved from Chicago to Jackson in 1983, to be closer to family and the Black fans who frequented the Black-owned juke joints where he’d found a loyal audience — and better money.“A Black man will pay another Black man what he’s worth,” he said.Rush continued to play live, finding ways to reach new ears. Christone Ingram, the 22-year-old blues guitarist and singer, was in grade school in Clarksdale, Miss., when he first heard Rush’s music coming through the windows of his neighbor’s house.“I just loved his style,” Ingram said in a phone interview. “He was the first one I heard that brought the funk to the blues.”In the mid ’90s, while playing a blues festival in the Netherlands, Rush realized the vaudeville-inspired show that delighted the juke joint crowds didn’t go over as well with larger, mainly white blues audiences. Vasti Jackson, a guitarist and longtime collaborator, was in Rush’s band at the time. “His thing was as much about the talking, telling stories, the comedy,” Jackson said. Jackson recalled advising Rush, “To get this kind of audience, you got to make it raw.”Rush ultimately took the advice to heart. In 2016, the producer Billington convinced him to record what became the album “Porcupine Meat” with a group of New Orleans musicians.“Chorus after chorus he never repeated himself. There was one great idea after another,” Billington said of Rush’s harmonica playing during the sessions. “The sound of his playing has such depth and authority that you couldn’t mistake it for anyone else in contemporary blues.”“Porcupine Meat” went on to win a Grammy, Rush’s first, a validation of his turn toward a rootsier blues sound.Scott Barretta, a blues historian based in Greenwood, Miss., likened Rush’s success with white audiences to the second act Big Bill Broonzy had in the ’50s, after transitioning from urban to folk-blues and receiving support from white taste makers Studs Terkel and Alan Lomax.A difference, he said, is that Rush has “been able to keep a foot in both markets” — something Rush calls “crossing over, but not crossing out.”The past 16 months have been good to Rush, even though they started with him contracting a fever so persistently high he wondered, “Am I going to make it out of this thing alive?”Rush’s battle with what he assumes was Covid-19 — he was never tested — made news not long before he was ready to promote the August 2020 release of “Rawer Than Raw.” It’s a collection of solo acoustic blues songs, a mix of originals and standards by Mississippi blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf, Skip James and Robert Johnson.Rush performed a sample of the songs at the museum last fall, stomping his foot to keep rhythm. Asked if there was a club he was eager to play when the pandemic was over, he mentioned Blue Front Café, in Bentonia, Miss., the oldest surviving juke joint in the state. It’s tiny.“I’d probably have to play outside,” he said. “I don’t mind playing the juke joint, but I’m bigger than that now.” More
The chef and owner of Noma, the acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant, wants to engage all the senses.René Redzepi is the chef and owner of the acclaimed restaurant Noma in Copenhagen. His menus are heavy on local, seasonal, foraged ingredients, as well as the use of fermentation to make things like pine cones edible.For a conversation with him based around an exchange of pieces of music, I chose the “Water Cadenza” from Tan Dun’s “Water Passion” as an amuse-bouche, followed by the first movement of “Cantus Arcticus” by Einojuhani Rautavaara. Redzepi chose Philip Glass’s “Floe,” from “Glassworks.” Here are edited excerpts from the discussion.I wanted to pick pieces that speak to your sense of adventure when it comes to using ingredients that people haven’t considered edible before.There is something so spontaneous and simple about the “Water Cadenza” that I truly enjoyed. I felt it was something we could actually listen to in the test kitchen. I came to work and had it on my headphones, and it was really upbeat — a positive, energetic song.What made me think of you in these sounds of water being slapped and poured and decanted is also the quality of synesthesia, of engaging multiple senses. When I ate at Noma, the first course was a broth contained inside a pot of living herbs, with a hidden straw. In order to drink it, I had to bury my face in the living plant and there was the enveloping sense of smell and the leaves tickling my face.It’s a way of shaking people and saying: Stop everything else, be here. This is the natural world right now as we see it; please take it in. Some come here and are already attuned to being curious. But other people? It’s the same with music. People eat and listen to the same seven or eight things all of their lives.The second piece I picked for you is the beginning of the “Cantus Arcticus” by Rautavaara, a Finnish composer who died in 2016. It includes field recordings from a bog near the Arctic Circle so that the birdsong mixes with the orchestra. I thought there was an analogy to your cooking in the wild and the cultivated sounds, the foraged “found” sounds from the field and the composed ones.First of all, I loved the piece. I thought it was incredibly dramatic, like I was waking up in a jungle somewhere.Many things that I enjoy in art and design and crafts is when those two fuse: something raw and wild with something ultrarefined and very polished. When those two can meet I generally think that’s the future of our society. Becoming a little more wild and listening a little more to the wilderness so that we can be more attuned to it.The other thing is that it’s very local. The birdsong ties it to a specific place and a specific season. And that made me want to ask you about seasons. Music is the art of change over time, and I think you are making an argument for returning food to that context.It could also connect, as you said, to variety. We need to be better at using it. Eating variety. Listening to variety. And not having everything be the same all the time. It’s incredibly boring and it makes us lazy people.My childhood was spent partly in Denmark and partly in Yugoslavia. When we decided that Denmark would be our permanent home, I was very rootless for many years. As soon as I entered cooking I found myself with something I loved. I fell in love with flavor immediately. But I was still not 100 percent sure if I actually belonged here. I didn’t have a sense of belonging anywhere.When Noma opened in 2003 nobody foraged. I mean, they had done so out of desperation, but not for flavor or any exquisite texture. And we found ourselves on the shorelines and in the forest. And that’s when I found my sense of belonging, with my feet in some rotten seaweed or my hands deep in a bed of ramps. And I’d like to pass that along to anyone who is rootless: Go out and learn the seasons. See what’s edible. See what changes week by week. See how an ingredient is not that one thing you think it is. It can be five different ingredients as it grows from a little shoot to a berry.I guess another part of that is fermentation, which is another way of making time work on ingredients. It has its own logic and span that you can’t hurry.It’s an antidote to the world where everything is so fast; on-demand; lightning speed. To actually have things that you have to wait for and then something magic happens, I love that. The happiest people I know are people who are in nature all the time: foragers, bakers, fermentation experts. Sometimes I envy that focus. My job is to be at the center of everything that is going on.Speaking of a lot of things going on, let’s talk about the Philip Glass piece you picked, “Floe.”The first time I heard it I thought maybe it was techno, and then I thought: No, it’s something completely different. I got pulled into the rhythm and the way it just keeps building and building. A lot of our staff listen to it. There’s something about the energy in that beehive of sounds that resonates with us when we’re just about to get very busy.Listening, I was actually picturing a busy kitchen as well. It’s a demonstration of how much richness you can get out of changing just one variable, because the harmonic progression is the same over and over. So there are no surprises there. But there are constant surprises in how he changes the texture. He plays with these simple ingredients, but they’re quite weird put together: flutes, French horns, and synthesizers and saxophones. So you have airy, mellow and brash and — I don’t know what I would call a synthesizer. Sharp?People get focused by listening to this song. If you play it loud enough, no matter what’s going on you’ll think: I need to focus. A lot of cooks have Glass on their playlist now. There’s something about his music that really works in the kitchen.It doesn’t impose a story on you the way maybe the Rautavaara does. The Glass is very abstract. And to me, it’s fermentation: I picture things fizzing and bubbling.Maybe we should play it in our fermentation room. Do you know Mort Garson’s “Plantasia”? It’s an electronic album that was meant for plants. And we play that in our greenhouse for our plants. I know there are quirky farmers who play music to their animals.When you said “Plantasia” I thought it might be the amplified sounds of plants growing. John Cage wrote a piece for amplified cactus. And you can laugh or roll your eyes at that, but ultimately it comes down to the same thing you are doing — expanding people’s awareness of what’s audible and what’s edible.I think our senses are the biggest gift we have, and we use them poorly. We don’t eat well, we don’t listen well, we don’t see well. And our senses could be like ninjas. More
The first product of the much-hyped collaboration made a big splash. But can Kanye West actually save Gap?The reveal of the first Yeezy Gap jacket on June 8, a year after the partnership between Kanye West and the beleaguered maker of American basics was announced, went pretty much as expected.First came the crazed excitement, the release of all that pent-up expectation: OMG! OMG! The future is finally here. And on Kanye’s birthday!Then, when it was clear you could preorder the jacket, the rush to get there first was on. CNBC excitedly reported it had sold out! So fast! The news went viral. It turned out to be fake.(Actually, the site crashed and is now back up. This is a preorder, not a limited edition drop. There is no finite number of sales because no actual jackets have yet been produced. You can keep buying for six more days.)And finally, the backlash: Wait, the jacket, which is made of recycled blue nylon, actually looks sort of like a trash bag. Also a deflated balloon.Now that 24 hours have elapsed and the dust has settled, perhaps it is time to step back and consider the jacket itself: Is it any good? And is it likely to do what it is supposed to do — what this whole partnership with Mr. West is supposed to do — which is wipe the slate clean, offer a new start and make Gap, which was struggling even before the pandemic, cool again?A qualified maybe.via GapThe jacket itself arrived like a puffer from another planet, suspended bodiless in the air of a Gap Instagram post or projected ghostlike against buildings in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, wafting slightly in the breeze. It is made from recycled nylon with a polyester fill (which one hopes is also recycled, though Gap did not specify; if it isn’t, that would be kind of … ahem). It is unisex and oversize with a squishy, tactile look and curving, tubular arms. There is a seam up the backbone and under each arm.It has no closures or additions to material of any kind, which may be interesting from a conceptual point of view but slightly problematic from a functional one, especially if, say, your hands are full so you can’t clutch it shut, and there’s a big wind.It also costs $200, which is pretty high for Gap, albeit lowish for Yeezy. It is named, in a Warhol way, the “round jacket,” because it looks, you know, round.And it is apparently the next stage of Mr. West’s new aesthetic, which has to do with reduction and the stripping away of excess. (See his most recent Paris Fashion Week return, where he described his clothes as made for “the service industry,” though it was hard not to think the service industry he was talking about was located on planet Jakku of “Star Wars.”)Mr. West himself had modeled his creation a few days earlier while out and about, and the brief appearance showed just how big and duvet-like the jacket, which swallowed his hands, actually is.To a certain extent, of course, it doesn’t matter if the jacket is flattering, or pragmatic. It is a first, and this is a historic collaboration from both a business and cultural perspective, so it will serve as a sort of artifact, or totem. The deal between Mr. West and Gap is long-term and lucrative; both brands are, in their own ways, part of the story of our times. Those who rushed to preorder may get their jackets and find out that they don’t like them at all, but they will do just fine on the secondary market. There are no doubt many who, schooled in sneaker entrepreneurship, bought them expressly for resale.That won’t affect Gap’s ability to boast about the sales figures of the jacket, though it may not set a reliable precedent when it comes to the next drops, and the drops after that. Gap is not a provider of limited resources, and limited resources are, of course, the most exciting ones. Though maybe the plan is to change all that.It seemed that way at first because Gap wiped its entire Instagram history to show simply the jacket, as though it was Day 1, a move that is rarely taken by an established brand since it seems to repudiate everything its customers bought before. See when Hedi Slimane arrived at Celine.And it also seemed that way because the jacket was apparently introduced and offered only in the United States.It turns out, however, that an international rollout is imminent, though Gap would not say exactly when. So Yeezy fans outside America don’t have to plot how to get their hands on a jacket after all.As for investors, Gap’s share price rose slightly on the day of the release but not in any unusual way. (At least it didn’t drop; maybe investors were relieved that Mr. West didn’t carry through on his threat to not make any product unless he got a Gap board seat.)But here’s the thing: Cool and accessibility are antithetical concepts; the more accessible and omnipresent something becomes, the less cool. If Mr. West and Gap can change that, they will have changed a lot more than style and their own reputations; they will have changed how we think. The real test will come with a full collection.Especially because Gap recently announced another new deal, for homewares — with Walmart. More
The pioneering pop singer on her beauty and wellness journey.Debbie Gibson, the pop singer who shot to fame in the late 1980s with “Electric Youth,” is still making new music. She has an album out in August, “The Body Remembers,” her first in 20 years, and is performing in Las Vegas (at the Venetian) to boot. “Electric Youth” may have influenced fashion (her signature headwear) and beauty (Electric Youth perfume) for a certain generation, but Ms. Gibson, 50, is living firmly in the moment. “I never stay back in the day because today is today, and that’s how I approach life,” she said. Here, her current take on beauty products and wellness regimens.She’s a Morning PersonI joke that I if I was not in entertainment, I would be a farmer. I’m down with the sun and up with the sun. I did half the vocals of my new album by 5 a.m. in my nightgown. I do try to linger in bed with my dogs, three boy dachshunds. That snuggle time with puppy kisses for me is everything.I need breakfast within a half-hour of waking up. I’m a basic eggs, orange juice and coffee person. On a decadent day like today, it’s an almond croissant.Mad Scientist Skin CareI’m kind of a mad scientist with my skin regimes. I do what I need on that day. I love micellar water for cleansing. I just got the Soap & Glory Triple Action Jelly Eye Makeup Remover. I also have this Tarte Knockout Tingling Treatment. It’s got glycolic in it. It really wakes my skin up. I also love the Tatcha brand — the deep cleanse and the moisturizer.Basically I try to use fragrance-free lines now. My life really took a turn 10 years ago when I got Lyme. I started to have chemical sensitivities I never had before. My skin especially reacts to sunscreen. Now I use the Derma-E Sun Defense Mineral Oil-Free baby sunscreen.I have this Biossance Squalane + Glycolic Renewal Mask, and yesterday I got this Youth to the People Superclay mask at Sephora. I also love oils on my face. I live in Las Vegas, and it is so dry here — my hair won’t even grow past a certain point now. I have several oils that I rotate. I use the Farsáli Rose Gold Elixir. I also have the Tarte Maracuja Oil. I used to go for a super-matte look — I was a Broadway girl. It was my pasty New York era. Now I’m a glowy skin and makeup person.Glow OnI use multiple bases. Here I’m a mad scientist again. I have a Make Up For Ever stick, and I have the Ultra HD liquid base. I have some discoloration, some melasma on my jawline. I have to go a little heavier there. I love the L’Oréal Miracle Blur for my forehead lines. Obsessed. I don’t like a lot under my eyes — it brings out my lines if I’m tired. Sometimes I’ll use the Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Flawless Filter and blend it into my base. I love a highlighter by Melt Cosmetics — it’s a peach color and so pretty.I used to do a lot of contour under my cheekbones, but not anymore. I like my cheeks to show through my makeup now. Another go-to is my Lime Crime trio of highlighters. There’s a glowy pale peach that I love. I love all my glow!I use the Urban Decay waterline pencil and the 24/7 pencils. I line the inside top of my eye with a darker color and a lighter color on the top lash line. I like the look of a liner inside my lower lashline, but it irritates my eyes. If it’s a “I’m going to suffer for beauty” kind of day, that’s what I do.I have the Huda Beauty Rose Gold eye shadow palette. My favorites are the Fling and Rose Gold colors. I love the Stila Glitter & Glow eye glitter in Diamond Dust. I saw this brand Dear Dahlia on Instagram, and now I use their liquid shadow Paradise Shine Eye Sequins in Muse. I also have Fenty Beauty sheer white shimmer that you can put on top of your whole lid. I just love shimmer, shimmer, shimmer.My brows have gotten so thin. If you’re a young girl out there, and you’re going through a breakup, don’t take it out on your brows. I remember the tweezing session that changed my life. I have a sandy/taupe brow powder.I’m a lash fanatic. Lashes are the best! I immediately feel like a pop star if I put some lashes on. I use high-end lashes and pharmacy lashes. I have Ardell Wispies and I love Velour, which are at Sephora. If I’m going onstage, I’ll double up lashes. For mascara, I’m into good old Maybelline Great Lash. Then there’s Too Faced Better Than Sex mascara if I want more. That’s a fun one.I just bought two Pat McGrath lip glosses I’m so excited about. I like to do MAC Spice liner and a gloss on top. MAC also has this nude lip pencil color that’s like a nudish Brigitte Bardot liner that I love, too.Hair IssuesAge doesn’t matter for me in a lot of areas, but at 48 my hair started to change in texture. Now I’m 50. There’s gray in my hair — I have base and highlights. Twice in my life I got bonded extensions, and within 48 hours I had them removed. At the end of the day, I just like to feel natural. There are so many other ways to turn on the glam. I need a great wig in my life.I love Keranique Scalp Stimulating Shampoo. It has a mint scent. I alternate that with Desert Essence Fragrance-Free Shampoo, which is super gentle. I also have Original Sprout Leave-In Conditioner. And my manager just turned me onto the K18 hair mask. I also use the Philip B. Detangling Toning Mist.But my favorite thing to do, my kitchen hack, is to use avocado oil cooking spray in my hair. I spray my hands and do a piece-y thing at my ends. It gives it such an amazing texture.Making Peace With LinesI had gotten Botox twice in my 30s, and then the third time I did it — I think I was around 40 — I got this horrible reaction. I think it’s because I didn’t know then that Lyme was on board, and my body couldn’t handle it. I’ve accepted the fact that if you’re an expressive person, you’re going to have lines and flaws. I celebrate it all at this point. I’m not going to jeopardize my health just so I can freeze some lines.Diet PuzzlesFor a long time, I was scared of food because of Lyme. I didn’t know much then. I had to do food allergy and sensitivity tests. I was super, super strict, eating organic proteins, veggies and low glycemic fruits. I’m happy to say I know what works for me now. I’ve built my body back up to the point where nothing is going to take me completely down.I’ve been working with a dietitian since I was 17. I referred her to Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. She’s amazing — Lisa Giannini. She has so many great tricks, and she’s very into gut health. It’s about learning your own health and diet puzzle.Learning to RelaxI used to do three-hour workouts before a dance rehearsal! I was like an Olympic athlete. Since Lyme, I do just enough movement to be fit, but I can’t use up all my reserve. I did get a Peloton, and I do love it so so much. I also have an elliptical machine, and I do my own made-up version of a workout with light weights and a Pilates ring. And I do a whole lot of walking with my dogs.I try to do things that feel flowy. I discovered Kundalini yoga from this woman on YouTube, Sat Dharam Kaur, who does these amazing breathing exercises. I used to be addicted to that super-sore, I-can’t-walk-the-next-day feeling. It did me a lot of damage. I’m a more-is-more kind of person, but my body is, like, “Sorry, you have to learn moderation.”I think everybody has a journey — we all have edges we’re trying to contain — but I think one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that I’m not people-pleasing anymore. I have no problem saying I need to take a self-care day. More
Music and mindfulness have become increasingly linked during the pandemic, and artists like Erykah Badu, Grimes and Arcade Fire are teaming with tech companies to make it happen.When Erykah Badu creates a new song, she begins with instruments that are usually treated as accessories, like singing bells, shakers, mallets and tuning forks. It’s been that way since “Baduizm,” the vocalist and producer’s 1997 debut.“What draws me in, and you and anyone else, is that those frequencies and tones connect with our organs and cells,” she said from her home in Dallas. “You are able to cancel out certain ailments. You’re vibrating the molecules apart.”Badu is a longtime believer and practitioner in what she calls the healing arts. She became a doula in 2001 and a reiki master in 2006. For her latest journey, she constructed a 58-minute instrumental piece of “new age ancient futuristic medicine music” for the meditation app Headspace. Released as part of the company’s Focus Music series, it’s a gently undulating wave, occasionally punctuated by deep reverberations of bass.“I feel like life is a process of healing after healing after healing,” said Badu. “Anything I make is going to reflect that.”Badu’s composition is part of the ever-expanding swirl of music and mindfulness that’s only grown stronger during the pandemic. With no dance floors or concert halls to fill, many listeners turned toward gentler, unobtrusive music to help quiet their restless minds. In response, artists who might not have publicly ventured into this sometimes esoteric terrain now feel emboldened to do so.John Legend is Headspace’s chief music officer. In that role, he inaugurated the app’s monthly Focus Music project.Jorge Guerrero/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLast September, Diplo released his first ambient album, “MMXX,” while in early May, Sufjan Stevens put out a five-volume collection of keyboard music called “Convocations.” Alicia Keys recently conducted a 21-day “meditation experience” with Deepak Chopra that is available through his meditation app website.Though new age artists have released music for meditation on cassette and CD for decades, now tech companies have become happy to financially support musical experimentation that meshes with their own goals. Over the past 15 anxious and uncertain months, wellness apps have grown flush with new subscribers looking for different experiences. In the past, musicians might align themselves with initiatives connected to Vans, Red Bull or Toyota — powerful brands willing to use their deep pockets to gain credibility with young consumers. Now, mindfulness apps are playing a similar role, offering artistic opportunities at a precarious moment for the music industry.Headspace wanted to develop more music that helps people concentrate on a task, and last August the company announced the appointment of John Legend as its chief music officer. Legend inaugurated the monthly Focus Music project with a licensed playlist of mellifluous jazz tracks. In addition to Badu’s contribution, subsequent installments have featured original, vocal-free pieces by artists including the acclaimed movie-score composer Hans Zimmer and the rock band Arcade Fire.“Musicians have always been about, can they evoke a particular frame of mind through a song or a sound,” said William Fowler, head of content for material that appears within the Headspace app. He noted that Focus Music arrived “in a year where musicians who had other plans found themselves with time for a project like this,” giving the company access “to people that otherwise might be doing other things.”In March 2019, Moby debuted “Long Ambients Two,” an album of extended compositions intended to help listeners fall asleep, exclusively on Calm, which started as a meditation app. Afterward, the company got inundated with inquiries from other musicians. Calm had limited experience with this world, and hired Courtney Phillips, the former director of brand partnerships at Universal Music Group, to become its head of music and grow its library.She has continued the streaming premieres, but also commissioned artists like the country star Keith Urban and the genre-twister Moses Sumney to create original tracks. Calm also released a series of hourlong “sleep remixes” of songs by Universal artists, including Post Malone’s “Circles” and Ariana Grande’s “Breathin.”“We’re a tech company, so we love to look at: What are people coming here for? What do they want?” Phillips said. “Piano is the most popular genre of all time, according to Calm, so I want to make sure that I’m offering a variety of different piano music for people. And at the same time, I want to work with artists and be like, let’s do something that maybe people don’t expect.”Endel, the Berlin-based tech company, has developed an approach toward fostering mental health through music that embraces European sophistication. Instead of the bright colors and feel-good iconography of its competitors, its app is strictly black and white with a minimalist interface. Oleg Stavitsky, the company’s chief executive, is an avowed music obsessive who during our video interview proudly pulled out his Laurie Anderson and Ornette Coleman albums. He said he got interested in delving deep after mining his parents’ vinyl collection.“Once you start digging you inevitably end up at Brian Eno at some point,” he said, referring to the producer and composer responsible for several of ambient music’s landmark works.Moses Sumney has been tapped to create original tracks for Calm.Rich Fury/Getty Images For CoachellaCalm has also released “sleep remixes” of songs by artists including Ariana Grande.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile the music on most meditation apps either loops or has predesignated start and finish points, Endel’s output is more dynamic. The company developed an algorithm that it says considers factors like time of day, weather and a person’s heart rate to deliver an individualized sonic experience each time.The neoclassical composer Dmitry Evgrafov is one of Endel’s co-founders, and he provides the original stems of music that the artificial intelligence incorporates, but naturally those within the company got curious about what would happen if the source material came from other artists. Grimes devised the sleep aid “AI Lullaby,” and Endel recently released a productivity piece called “Deep Focus” from Plastikman, the minimal techno alias of the D.J. and producer Richie Hawtin.“When we’re talking to a lot of these artists, either they have been thinking about doing something like this, or they have already been doing something like this,” Stavitsky said. “They are looking for low risk and interesting ways to put that content out there.”Hawtin enrolled in a series of Transcendental Meditation classes shortly before the pandemic engulfed Western Europe, where he resides. Now twice a day he takes 20 minutes to repeat his mantra. Those experiences remind him of a D.J.’s ability to guide and almost hypnotize a receptive crowd. “For all its beauty, the techno and electronic dance music community has been on this hamster wheel for so many years,” Hawtin said. “This has been a real introspective moment to reconnect to the music, the machines and alternative ways of thinking and producing.”Other artists arrived at meditation music during America’s last moment of financial uncertainty, in 2008. Trevor Oswalt, who releases music as East Forest, spent the early 2000s playing in bands in New York City, hoping to get signed. Then came the recession. “Things were falling apart externally, and that reflected in my internal life too,” Oswalt said from his current home in Southern Utah. “It was pushing me into finding alternatives.”He began making instrumental music to help him during his own meditation practice and to mentally prepare himself before taking psilocybin. Eventually he put out the music for the public. Since 2011, he’s averaged at least one new album a year, including a 2019 collaboration with the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who died that December. Years ago Oswalt created music for apps like Happy and one developed by the yoga and meditation instructor Elena Brower. He’s since become involved with apps like Wavepaths, Mydelic and Field Trip, which are designed to assist during psychedelic therapy sessions.Oswalt seems amused by the recent influx of artists creating music for mindfulness apps, comparing it to asking a painter trained in realism to make something abstract. He believes they might have the skills to pull it off, but they lack the experience to really know what they’re doing. But he respects the musicians’ willingness to give it a try.“It’s pretty clear on the face of things that we’re going through a major shift as a civilization, and that shift has to do with letting go of ways that aren’t working,” he said. “It’s sort of like you burn the fields, you have to do that to fertilize the soil.” More
David Balfe never thought the public would hear his deeply personal debut album. But it became a runaway success in his native Ireland.David Balfe feels guilty. The Irish musician’s debut album “For Those I Love,” which he recorded under the same name, has had the kind of success most artists only dream of: It has won widespread critical praise and was only beaten to the No. 1 spot in the Irish album charts by Justin Bieber.But the record wasn’t made for public release, and Balfe said he feels uncomfortable receiving recognition for an album about his working-class Dublin childhood and a friend’s recent death.“I seem to have benefited from the release of these difficult and deeply personal stories,” Balfe, 29, said in a recent video interview. “It’s a little bit out of my control now.”He described the album — which depicts gang violence, poverty and substance addiction — as “storytelling set against a backdrop of electronica.” Its lyrics mix reminiscences of all-night parties with Balfe’s close circle of friends and indictments of wealth inequality in Ireland — a country where both house prices and homelessness rates have surged in recent years.Balfe grew up in the North Dublin suburb of Donaghmede, but went to school and had family and friends in nearby Coolock, where crime levels were rising throughout his teenage years. “I emerged at a young age into quite a violent backdrop and aggressive place,” he said. To survive there, he added, “I needed to learn a coldness.”On the album, Balfe explores death, grief and inequality in Dublin, which he said were all “intrinsically linked.” On one track, “Birthday/The Pain,” he recalls a homeless man who was murdered on the street where he lived when he was six.Balfe said he was “struck by the universal acceptance of a record that is so descriptive of a very specific piece of geography,” adding that he was surprised to see the “minutiae of a world that I grew up in resonating with people from a world so far from mine.”Balfe’s best friend, Paul Curran, played a key role in many of the stories told on “For Those I Love.” They met in high school, and Curran went on to become a popular spoken word artist, writing and performing work about everything from politics to soccer.At Chanel College, in Coolock, the two discovered music in lunchtime guitar jam sessions organized by an English teacher, Mick Phelan. “David and Paul were non-judgemental,” Phelan said of Balfe and Curran in a video interview. “They had their friends, but they talked to everyone. I saw a humanity and a maturity in them that I don’t often see in teenage lads.”After graduating, Balfe and Curran continued making music and art together: first in a hardcore band called Plagues; later, as part of Burnt Out, a collective that made audiovisual works that addressed youth unemployment in Coolock, which was running at around 25 percent throughout Ireland at the time.Balfe returned to the problems of Dublin’s suburbs in 2017, when he began “For Those I Love,” layering vocals over a solo instrumental project he put together in his mother’s garden shed. He brought his own voice — half-sung, half-spoken, in a strong Irish brogue — to the sample-heavy dance music he had written, mixing in snippets of WhatsApp voice notes and spoken word work by Curran.The tracks were made to share with his closest friends and his family, he said: “A document of love and thanks for the sacrifices they made.”In April, Balfe released a short film, “Holy Trinity,” as part of the For Those I Love project. Tiberio VenturaBut in February 2018, Paul Curran died by suicide and Balfe, grief-stricken, put “For Those I Love” on pause. The next few months were “a thundering whirlwind of chaos,” he said, that felt like “a day and a decade in one.”“In the shadow of grief, all of us were very different people,” he said. “It’s very easy to believe that you might never be creative again.”Balfe’s return to writing music was the “first step in the recovery” after Curran’s death, he added. Some of the material, like the opening track “I Have a Love,” was rewritten completely, changing from an ode to his group of friends to a eulogy to Curran; nostalgic new songs, such as “You Stayed,” were added.“It was very much a mode of self expression and survival at the time,” Balfe said.When “For Those I Love” was finished, in May 2019, Balfe put it on the independent music platform Bandcamp, to share with family and friends. A few Irish music blogs found it, too, and the record received some favorable reviews. But Balfe’s fortunes really changed when “For Those I Love” came to the attention of Ash Houghton, an A&R manager at September Recordings, which also represents Adele and London Grammar.“The album speaks for itself,” Houghton said in an email. “My only thought at the time was that it would be a tragedy if more people weren’t able to hear it.”Houghton offered a release on the label, yet Balfe initially was hesitant to share such personal work with a wider audience, he said. But friends who had also known Curran suggested the album could help others, he said, “and speak to them as they move through their own grief.”In March, September Recordings rereleased “For Those I Love,” which entered the Irish album charts at No. 2, and Balfe’s debut live show in Dublin, scheduled for October, sold out in 10 minutes.Niall Byrne, the editor of Nialler9.com, an Irish music site that was one of the album’s early champions, said in a video interview that, while many Irish musicians were producing good music, “you don’t hear a lot of rawness.” It was this quality, he added, that set Balfe’s record apart.A recent wave of new artists, he said — including Balfe, the group Pillow Queens and the post-punk band the Murder Capital — were “less defined by genre or sound,” but rather “by the sensibility and values their music holds. Their lyrics are informed by real issues.”Balfe said he was working on a new album, that would also be informed by Dublin and its politics, but that the project had hit a “frustratingly stagnant brick wall.” Despite the success of “For Those I Love,” he was still working “a day job,” he said — though he didn’t want to say what that was. He kept the job, which he had before signing the record deal, out of “fear of turning the thing that I love the most, the creative pursuits, into labor.”Since the wider release of “For Those I Love,” Balfe said, fans had been messaging him on social media, to share how the record has “helped them shake their grief.”He still mourns Curran, he said: “A semi-successful local record isn’t going to make that better.” But, he added, he was happy that his music has touched others. “Those responses,” he said, “have gone a long way to help with some of the guilt.” More
