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      Georgia Anne Muldrow Builds a Musical World of Her Own

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      The prolific and proudly woke musician has made 21 albums in 15 years. Her latest, “Vweto III,” is a largely instrumental LP that Muldrow composed, performed, recorded, produced and mixed.Georgia Anne Muldrow still had her mask on when she sat down at Blackout Studios in Los Angeles for a video interview this month. It was a black cloth mask covered in glittery studs: protection with flair. “That’s kind of my way since I was a kid,” Muldrow said, settling in and unmasking behind the studio’s professional vocal mic. “Whatever difficulty there is, to try to bring something sparkly to it.”As a songwriter, singer, rapper, musician and producer, Muldrow has addressed serious ideas with drive, hooks and sonic creativity throughout an extraordinarily prolific career. Her music encompasses R&B, jazz, hip-hop, funk, rock and a broader Pan-African diaspora; it can be lean and earthy, harmonically labyrinthine or richly disorienting, swirling with reverb. Like Prince, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, she makes many of her tracks entirely on her own, using instruments and computers to turn herself into a one-woman studio band.Muldrow has released a torrent of full-length albums since her 2006 debut, “Olesi: Fragments of an Earth.” Titles like “Umsindo” (Zulu for “noise” or “rage”) from 2009, “Oligarchy Sucks!” from 2014 and “Black Love & War” from 2019 make clear her career-long concerns: Black and African diaspora culture, justice, strength, liberation, exploration. Her 21st studio album, “Vweto III” — vweto means “gravity” in the Congolese language Kikongo — is due on Friday.Muldrow has also produced other performers and made EPs, singles and numerous guest appearances with, among others, Mos Def (who reworked Muldrow’s song “Roses”), Bilal, Dev Hynes and, most notably, Erykah Badu in their 2008 collaboration, “Master Teacher.” That song popularized the phrase “Stay woke,” which had been Muldrow’s admonition to herself at a low point in her life.In 2021, Muldrow enjoys seeing right-wing figures treating “woke” as a toxic epithet. “It makes me have faith that I’m doing something correctly if these little two-bit politicians have even got anything I’ve said in their mouth,” she said. “I want to be a thorn in their side. I want to keep them up at night.”Badu offered powerful praise for her collaborator. “She’s the truth,” she said by phone. “It’s as if she’s from another time somewhere, an ancient future where it meets and warps together, and she walked out of it looking like the female Jimi Hendrix, the young Marcus Garvey, swinging music like Stevie Wonder.”Badu added, “Her main focus is on freeing the African mind. It makes us want to be like her, to be as strong and have as solid a message as she does in everything. It’s Georgia’s bravery and sincerity, because she does this thing as fearlessly as she does. She’s not afraid of confrontation when it comes to what she believes.”“I want to promote consciousness — I’m not trying to promote myself per se,” Muldrow said. “Music gives me a world to walk through.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesMuldrow, 37, grew up in a family of jazz musicians in Los Angeles. Her father, Ronald Muldrow, was a guitarist who worked for decades with the soul-jazz saxophonist Eddie Harris. Her mother, Rickie Byars-Beckwith, sang with the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the pianist Roland Hanna.Alice Coltrane, a family friend, gave Muldrow the spiritual name Jyoti, which can mean “light” or “celestial flame”; Muldrow has billed herself as Jyoti for her most jazz-influenced albums, including last year’s widely praised “Mama, You Can Bet!,” which included daring remakes of Charles Mingus compositions alongside her own songs.In the early 2000s, Muldrow came to New York City to study jazz at the New School, majoring in voice. But she dropped out, she said, because, “I didn’t like the boxes they have for people. I feel as though we go out of the box just to survive emotionally as Black folk. We’re doing this for our emotional upliftment. The searching for one’s inner power and one’s inner ownership and one’s language — that’s what brings this music forward.”The teenage Muldrow delved into electronic music, building beats and devising abstract sounds on drum machines, synthesizers and computers. “The allure of technology and sound design and sound creation with computers was my experience as a composer of being listened to,” she said. “Regardless of how I look, regardless of my gender, regardless of my race, the computer listened to me.”One of her mentors and collaborators was Don Preston, who had played keyboards for Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention in the 1960s and ’70s and was Meredith Monk’s musical director. He encouraged her to work with the experimental synthesis that she now considers a “cornerstone” of her music. On “Fifth Shield,” a manifesto from her 2015 album “A Thoughtiverse Unmarred,” she rapped, “I know I’m abstract — it ain’t for everybody.”For Muldrow, the parameters that control synthesizer tones — attack, decay, sustain and release — offer lessons beyond the recording studio. “I’ll make everything a metaphor,” she said with a laugh. “The way we attack things shapes our lives, the way we hold on to things shapes our lives, the way we let go of things shapes our lives. That’s what makes me dig deeper every time I make music.”In Muldrow’s tracks, it’s often impossible to tell what was recorded on live instruments and what was sampled, looped or programmed. Her first electronics were drum machines, but from the start, she wanted to defy the quantization — built into much music software and hardware — that regularizes pitches and rhythms.“I wanted to find a way to get off the grid,” she said. “I didn’t like that I was playing something a certain way, and then it’s telling it back to me in a ‘corrected’ way. Time doesn’t work that way. When you talk about grief or healing or heartache, it doesn’t happen on a grid. It’s an upward spiral, it’s a roller coaster — it’s all these different things.”She added, “If everything is perfectly done, then where is the undifferentiated chaos that made everything? Where is the creativity?”“Regardless of how I look, regardless of my gender, regardless of my race, the computer listened to me,” Muldrow said of early explorations in electronic music.Erik Carter for The New York TimesMuldrow was the first woman signed to the hip-hop label Stones Throw Records, for her debut album. Brainfeeder, the label founded by the producer Flying Lotus, released her aptly titled 2018 album “Overload,” which was nominated for a Grammy as best urban contemporary album. Most of her other output has been released on her own labels: SomeOthaShip Connect, which she started with her husband, Dudley Perkins (they are now separated); and her own Epistrophik Peach Sound.“It’s a lot of music,” Muldrow said. “I never expect anyone, even if they’re my dearest friends, to know all my work. That comes with a downside, though. I’ve faced burnout, I’ve worked through it, I’ve beat it. Workaholism is a very real thing. But the expectation for someone that looks like me is so high, even from the people in my own community and beyond, that I have got to be a six-armed goddess in order to make a proper living. And I thank God that I have morphed into the six-armed goddess.”“Vweto III” is a largely instrumental album. Muldrow composed, performed, recorded, arranged, produced, mixed and mastered it with just two brief guest vocal appearances. It’s a producer’s showcase: 17 tracks that wander from lurching funk (“Old Jack Swing”) to foreboding ballad (“Unforgettable”) to neo-psychedelia (“Mufaro’s Garden”) to drone and noise-rock (“Grungepiece”) to blipping electronica (“Afro AF”), with Muldrow only singing an occasional refrain.After making “Mama, You Can Bet!,” Muldrow said, “I was at this place where I’m like, ‘I have literally said it all.’ This allows me the space to just feel and simply speak my piece and be off of it.”She intends the album as an open invitation. “I can have fun on hooks,” she said, “and then they’re like D.I.Y. songs that people can have for themselves. I want to see the sisters rapping up a storm.”The album’s cover art — an illustration by the South African artist Breeze Yoko with a mountain lion and a leopard peering from Muldrow’s shoulders — will be auctioned as a nonfungible token; half of the proceeds will go to Critical Resistance, an organization seeking to abolish what it calls the prison industrial complex.“I want to promote consciousness — I’m not trying to promote myself per se,” Muldrow said. “Music gives me a world to walk through. And I hope for other people, that I can help them to do this — to remember that their minds are powerful. There’s a lot that you can do in there.” More

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      Who Will Win Eurovision 2021?

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      Who Will Win Eurovision 2021?Alex MarshallReporting on Eurovision ����[embedded content]San Marino: Remember Flo Rida, the rapper? Well, San Marino’s Senhit does, and has gotten him to travel to Rotterdam, and even quarantine, to guest on her entry. What will Eurovision fans think of an American muscling in on their contest? More

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      How to Watch Eurovision 2021

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      Even in a normal year, the competition’s unique traditions can be confusing to newcomers. Here’s what you need to know.LONDON — The Eurovision Song Contest is the world’s biggest music competition: a fiercely competitive, always surprising, sometimes surreal Olympics of song. Broadcast live across the world, the competition has taken place since 1956, making it one of the longest running television shows of all time. More

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      Punk-Rock Teens’ Anti-Hate Anthem, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Blk Jks, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen, City Girls and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.The Linda Lindas, ‘Racist, Sexist Boy’Don’t mess with The Linda Lindas.Watch the full concert: https://t.co/Usv7HJ1lLR pic.twitter.com/pKZ5TKDdiA— L.A. Public Library (@LAPublicLibrary) May 20, 2021
      It can be comforting, in times like these, to be slapped cold by undeniable truth. And so it is with the Linda Lindas, a band made up of four Asian and Latina teens and tweens — Bela, Eloise, Lucia, Mila — who this week had a clip of a recent performance at the Cypress Park branch of the Los Angeles Public Library go viral. The song is “Racist, Sexist Boy,” and it pulls no punches, switching back and forth between Eloise, 13, singing in an urgently aggrieved fashion (“You have racist, sexist joys/We rebuild what you destroy”) and the drummer, Mila, who is 10, whose sections are quick and finger-waving (“You turn away from what you don’t wanna hear”). The Linda Lindas have generated a significant wave of attention in the three years since the band was founded. A couple of the members’ parents are culture luminaries: Martin Wong, a founder of the tastemaking Asian-American cultural magazine Giant Robot; and Carlos de la Garza, a mixer and engineer for bands including Paramore and Best Coast. The band is beloved by Kathleen Hanna, who selected it to open one of Bikini Kill’s reunion shows; and it has appeared in the recent Netflix film “Moxie.” The band’s self-titled 2020 EP is sharp punk-inflected indie pop. And this new song, which Eloise said was inspired by a real-life experience, is a needs-no-explanation distillation of righteous anger. It’s severely relatable, so shout along with the band: “Poser! Blockhead! Riffraff! Jerk face!” JON CARAMANICABlk Jks, ‘Yoyo! — The Mandela Effect/Black Aurora Cusp Druids Ascending’It has been 12 years since the far-reaching South African band Blk Jks released its debut album, “After Robots”; it has returned with “Abantu/Before Humans,” which it describes, in part, as an “Obsidian Rock Audio Anthology chronicling the ancient spiritual technologies and exploits of prehistoric, post-revolutionary Afro bionics and sacred texts from The Great Book on Arcanum.” Blk Jks draw on music from across Africa, including South African choral traditions and West African guitar licks, along with psychedelia, funk, jazz and a fierce sense of political urgency. “They’ll never give you power/You’ll have to take the power” they chant to open the song, heralded by a barrage of drums and pushing into a syncopated thicket of horns and voices with a burst of acceleration at the end. JON PARELESAngelique Kidjo featuring Mr Eazi and Salif Keita, ‘Africa, One of a Kind’On Angelique Kidjo’s next album, “Mother Nature,” she collaborates across boundaries and generations. Kidjo — who is from Benin — shares “Africa, One of a Kind,” with Salif Keita, from Mali, and Mr Eazi, from Nigeria. The lyrics are multilingual, and the rhythmic mesh, with little guitar lines tickling against crisp percussion and choral affirmations, is joyfully Pan-African. PARELESSharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen, ‘Like I Used To’A full-scale Wall of Sound — by way of the glockenspiel-topped “Born to Run” — pumps through “Like I Used To” as Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen grapple with prospects of post-pandemic reopening and reconnecting. The sound and voices are heroic; the lyrics are more hesitant, but hopeful. PARELESCarsie Blanton, ‘Party at the End of the World’“It’s too late now to fix this mess,” Carsie Blanton observes, “So honey put on that party dress.” Blanton shrugs off impending doom in a broad-shouldered Southern rock track slathered with guitars, allowing that she’s going to miss “snow in winter, rain in summer” as well as “banging drums and banging drummers.” PARELESLil Baby and Kirk Franklin, ‘We Win (Space Jam: A New Legacy)’Three types of not wholly compatible ecstasy commingle on the first single from the forthcoming soundtrack to “Space Jam: A New Legacy.” Just Blaze’s triumphalist production finds an optimal partner in Kirk Franklin’s exhortations. Lil Baby’s sinuous, reedy raps are perhaps not as sturdy, though — they feel like light filigree atop an arresting mountain peak. CARAMANICAJaimie Branch, ‘Theme 001’“Fly or Die Live” feels of a piece with the two studio recordings that Jaimie Branch — a trumpeter and composer, loosely definable as jazz, but with a punk musician’s disregard for musical pleasantry — has released in the past few years with Fly or Die, her cello-bass-drums quartet. That’s mostly because those records already had a rich, gritty, textural, semi-ambient vibe: They felt pretty much live already. But “Fly or Die Live,” which is full of long excursions by individual band members and intense, forward-pushing sections driven forward by Chad Taylor’s drums, finds the band clicking in and lifting off in a way that feels different. It’s especially palpable on “Theme 001,” originally a highlight from the band’s debut record, this time with new textures thanks to Lester St. Louis’s reverb-drenched cello. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOCity Girls, ‘Twerkulator’Look, it’s just TikTok-era sweaty talk over “Planet Rock,” which is, in the current pop ecosystem, is really all it takes. CARAMANICAOneohtrix Point Never & Rosalía, ‘Nothing’s Special’Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, traded up with his new remake of “Nothing’s Special,” the closing track from his 2020 album “Magic Oneohtrix Point Never.” He replaced his own processed vocal, which blurred into the track, with Rosalía in her latest unexpected collaboration. She sings a Spanish translation of the lyrics, with thoughts about staring into nothingness after losing one’s best friend. The original electronic track has been tweaked and transposed upward, with its misty descending chords, sampled voices and a hammered dulcimer. Rosalía’s voice is fully upfront: gentle, mournful, tremulous and humbled by grief. Now the song is unmistakably an elegy. PARELESLil Nas X, ‘Sun Goes Down’Less than two months after gleefully stirring up a moral panic with “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” Lil Nas X returns in an unassailably benevolent guise: fighting off suicidal thoughts in “Sun Goes Down.” In a reassuring low purr of a melody, cushioned by kindly guitars, voluminous bass tones and a string section, he acknowledges old wounds and self-destructive impulses, and then determinedly rises above them: “I know that you want to cry/But there’s much more to life than dying over your past mistakes.” PARELESRalph Peterson Jr. featuring Jazzmeia Horn, ‘Tears I Cannot Hide’The drummer Ralph Peterson Jr., who would have turned 59 on Thursday but died earlier this year, was known for the propulsion of his swing feel, and the sheer power of his playing. But he was given to forbearance and tenderness, too, when the circumstances called for it, and on “Raise Up Off Me,” his final studio album, it’s his subtlety that sends the album’s message of frustration and dignity home. That’s true on the semiabstract title track, which opens the album, and on “Tears I Cannot Hide,” a contemplative Peterson-penned ballad, to which the rising star Jazzmeia Horn adds lyrics and vocals. RUSSONELLO More

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      Arthur Pomposello, Impresario for a Cabaret Swan Song, Dies at 85

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      He was the host at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel during an improbable resurgence of cabaret from the 1980s to the early 2000s. He died of complications of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Arthur Pomposello, the host of the Oak Room, the cabaret supper club in the Algonquin Hotel, practiced the arts of theatricality and discretion.A dark-haired former model in a tuxedo, he parted a red curtain to allow guests inside. He glided onstage and introduced Andrea Marcovicci, for decades the Oak Room’s main attraction, as “our songbird.” He gossiped with journalists about what he called “my cabaret,” and in return the papers gave him labels like “a loquacious fixture.”But Mr. Pomposello could also work quietly. “This is cabaret,” he whispered to loud customers. “We don’t talk here.” He rearranged the tables, making light crowds appear livelier and making big crowds fit.Inspectors would check to see if the small-capacity room exceeded legal limits.“He would show them the kitchen or show them the upstairs — ‘Oh, come right this way,’” Ms. Marcovicci recalled. “They’d never see the room when it had 110 people in it. Never.”Mr. Pomposello died on May 6 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was complications of Covid-19, his son Sean said.When Mr. Pomposello started at the Algonquin as a bartender, in 1980, you could still feel transported to the hotel’s famed past as a daily gathering place for writers. He once entered the lobby and noticed Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut sharing a drink. The next instant, Eudora Welty walked in.Cabaret turned a profit for only a select few, but Mr. Pomposello kept his perch at the Oak Room under several different owners of the Algonquin.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the middle to late 1980s, as figures like Michael Feinstein and Harry Connick Jr. launched their careers from the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello’s responsibilities grew. He booked talent and managed the finances, keeping his perch under several different owners of the Algonquin.“I’ve not lost a penny in nine years,” he told The New York Times in 1998.When he saw his son Sean, he raved about visits from faded stars whose glow had never dimmed for Mr. Pomposello. The Nicholas brothers, tap-dancers who rose to fame in the 1930s, turned heads the night they arrived, Mr. Pomposello said.Sean recently looked through his father’s address book to invite people to the wake. “I can’t find too many friends,” Sean said. “I find a lot of cabaret stars, some of whom are no longer alive.”Arthur Pomposello was born on Nov. 19, 1935, in Harlem and grew up in the Bronx. His father, Arthur, played jazz guitar under his nickname, Scotty Bond. His mother, Concetta (Bellafatto) Pomposello, was a homemaker who went to work at the pocketbook counter in Bloomingdale’s after she and Scotty divorced, when their son was a teenager.Arthur dreamed of becoming a movie star and spent summers in Los Angeles. When that didn’t work out, he went to Michigan State University. He graduated with a degree in hotel management.Back in New York, he worked at a succession of hotels, including Hampshire House, and restaurants, including Café des Artistes. He modeled and found modest acting work. He cooked up entrepreneurial schemes like “Pompie’s Pushers,” models selling authentic Italian food from handcarts. Nothing took — until the Oak Room. Mr. Pomposello stayed until a dispute with management in 2002.Mr. Pomposello married Eunice Mahoney, a telephone operator, in 1958. They divorced in 1979. That same year he married Alicia Cirino, a bunny at the New York Playboy Club. She died of heart failure in 2007.In addition to his son Sean, Mr. Pomposello is survived by two more children from his first marriage, Peri Kish-Pomposello and Chris Pomposello, and five grandchildren. A son from his second marriage, Adam, died in an accident in 2008.After he left the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello worked as a night concierge at the Plaza Hotel until the pandemic last spring, when he was 84. Mr. Pomposello never stopped hoping to find a new venue of his own. In 2015 and 2016, he organized several performances at restaurants of an act he called “Pompie’s Place,” which featured jazz and blues singers and Mr. Pomposello himself as the impresario of an imaginary club.The discovery of a new restaurant or a theater with a large lobby set his gears turning, Sean Pomposello said: “He’d get this wistful look in his face, looking around the place, and thinking about how he’s going to book cabaret.” More

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      'Before I Let Go' is a Black Anthem and the Song of Every Summer

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      Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the three opening notes of the song hit, there’s only one thing to do: Find your people and dance. Today, we’re talking about “Before I Let Go,” by Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, and the song’s unique ability to gather and galvanize. It wasn’t a huge hit when it came out in 1981, but it has become a unifying Black anthem and an unfailing source of joy. We dissect Beyoncé’s cover, and we hear from friends, listeners and the Philadelphia DJ Patty Jackson about their memories of the classic song.Frankie Beverly performs with Maze at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2019.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressOn Today’s Episode‘Before I Let Go’ (1981)“If you are of the African-American persuasion and alive and have movement in your body, you need to be up and dancing,” said Joy, a friend of Still Processing, about what happens whenever she hears “Before I Let Go.”The song has a special place in the Black American psyche.“It’s a great way to find out who’s Black in your town,” Wesley joked. “If you move somewhere new, you just hold up your phone and start playing it — people will just come running.”“We run toward it, literally and psychically, when we hear it,” Jenna added. “The song to me definitely feels like a protective bubble, and it allows for that five minutes to just exist in this space of joy and optimism.”When Jenna and Wesley asked listeners to share their memories of the song, they heard stories of cookouts, weddings, funerals and car rides with the radio on. Uninhibited joy was a unifying thread.“I’m instantly transported to my grandmother’s backyard in the summer,” Lindsay said. “And I’m smelling crabs and beer, and I’m hearing laughter and I’m just seeing jubilation.”Another listener, Davina, said, “It almost just seems like one of those songs that was always playing in the background of my life.”◆ ◆ ◆A Love Letter from BeyoncéBeyoncé covered “Before I Let Go” during her Coachella Festival set in 2018. She was headlining that year, the first Black woman to ever do so.She used the performance, inspired by homecoming at historically Black colleges and universities, to pay homage to more than a century of Black musical traditions — “Before I Let Go” included.“What better way to pay tribute to Black culture than to perform a song that everyone knows and thinks about,” Jenna said. “Like, she knew it was going to be a performance that a lot of us were going to see at home and be playing at barbecues.”One Still Processing listener said Beyoncé’s cover powerfully transports her into a “secret galaxy where it’s just Black girls dancing,” while another said they “only ever want to hear the Frankie Beverly and Maze version” (admitting that might be an “unpopular opinion”).For Jenna and Wesley, Beyoncé’s cover has a special relationship to the original. “One is not meant to replace the other,” Jenna said. “It’s actually meant to be a love letter to the other.”Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley MorrisProduced by: Elyssa DudleyEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrExecutive Editor, Newsroom Audio: Lisa TobinAssistant Managing Editor: Sam DolnickSpecial thanks: Nora Keller, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani and Desiree IbekweWesley Morris is a critic at large. He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his criticism while at The Boston Globe. He has also worked at Grantland, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner. @wesley_morrisJenna Wortham is a staff writer for The Times Magazine and co-editor of the book “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew. @jennydeluxe More

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      Silk Sonic or J. Cole Has the No. 1 Song, Depending on the Chart

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      In a rare but not unheard-of discrepancy, Billboard and Rolling Stone named two different singles as the week’s biggest.What is the No. 1 song in the country? These days, it depends on the chart.On Wednesday, Billboard announced, after a two-day delay, that “Leave the Door Open” by Silk Sonic, the new retro-soul project of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, reached the top spot on the Hot 100, the magazine’s singles chart and the industry standard since 1958.But days earlier, the competing Rolling Stone 100 crowned J. Cole’s new “Interlude” as its No. 1, with “Leave the Door Open” just No. 10. On Billboard’s latest chart, “Interlude” reached only as high as No. 8.Even more strange, both charts are now owned by the same company. When Rolling Stone introduced its rankings in 2019, they were positioned as competitors to Billboard’s, with different data sources and methodologies. Rolling Stone chart positions are often hyped by fans and press agents, but have not proved a major challenge to Billboard’s authority.Last year, a deal between the publishers of Rolling Stone and Billboard brought both companies under a new joint venture, P-MRC. Jay Penske, the young media entrepreneur who represents half that deal, controls those publications as part of a portfolio that now also includes The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, WWD and Vibe. P-MRC also has a 50 percent stake in the South by Southwest festivals.A spokeswoman for MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm, said the delay in the magazine’s Hot 100 was a result of data anomalies that were being investigated by its chart experts, and was not related to Rolling Stone having a conflicting song at No. 1. It is also not the first discrepancy: Early this year, Olivia Rodrigo’s blockbuster “Drivers License” topped the Billboard chart for eight weeks, but Rolling Stone’s for only five.Rolling Stone looks at songs’ sales and popularity on audio streaming services, but not radio; for the Hot 100, Billboard considers sales, audio and video streams, along with radio spins. Still a persistent head-scratcher in the music world is why the same company maintains two separate and competing charts.In a slow week for albums, the Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo reclaims the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 chart with “A Gangsta’s Pain.” It had the equivalent of 61,000 sales in the United States, mostly from streaming, according to MRC Data. “A Gangsta’s Pain,” which had opened at the top two weeks ago, then dipped to No. 2, had the lowest sales number for a No. 1 album since early January, when Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” notched its third time at the top with 56,000 sales in the post-holiday doldrums.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is in second place, while last week’s top seller, DJ Khaled’s “Khaled Khaled,” falls to No. 3 in its second week out. Justin Bieber’s “Justice” is No. 4.Dua Lipa is in fifth place with her album “Future Nostalgia.” Lipa’s song “Levitating,” featuring the rapper DaBaby, is No. 2 on Billboard’s singles chart thanks in part to its popularity on TikTok. More

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      Franco Battiato, Pop Singer and Versatile Composer, Dies at 76

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      Though hugely popular as a singer-songwriter in Italy, he never stopped experimenting. He composed for movies, opera and ballet, directed films and painted.Franco Battiato, one of Italy’s most prominent singer-songwriters, who expressed esoteric ideas in catchy lyrics and, ever an eclectic artist, also composed operas and movie soundtracks, directed films and painted, died on Tuesday at his home in Milo, Sicily. He was 76.His manager, Francesco Cattini, confirmed the death. He did not give a cause but said Mr. Battiato had been ill for a long time.In a career of nearly 60 years, Mr. Battiato explored a variety of musical genres with an eye toward innovation. His works included experimental electronic music, symphonic compositions and ballets in addition to pop songs. Mystical and spiritual qualities permeated much of his work.President Sergio Mattarella, in a statement, called him “a cultured and refined artist who charmed a vast public, even beyond national borders, with his unmistakable musical style — a product of intense studying and feverish experimentation.”Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, referred to one of Mr. Battiato’s lyrics on Twitter: “How hard it is to find the dawn within nightfall. (Franco Battiato, R.I.P.)”Mr. Battiato began his career performing in a cabaret in Milan. He reached a wider audience in the 1960s, when he appeared on a variety show on national television. His “La Voce del Padrone” (“The Master’s Voice”), released in 1981, is said to have been the first pop album by an Italian musician to sell one million copies.Despite his commercial success, Mr. Battiato continued experimenting. He composed music that mixed historical, social, ethnic and mystical themes; he wrote lyrics in Italian dialects and foreign languages.“He had a vast musical and literary culture that was mostly self-taught,” Mr. Cattini said. “He did not like repeating himself, and that made him unique.”His lyrics included references to “Euclidean Jesuits,” Ming dynasty emperors and the whirling dervishes of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam.“Speaking of the Sufis in Italy in the 1980s was like talking about aliens,” said Giuseppe Pollicelli, one of the directors of “Temporary Road,” a 2013 documentary about Mr. Battiato. “But people got it, and loved it.”He added, “He had a magic touch in channeling complex topics through songs that were easy to listen to, memorize and internalize, even if people could not always decrypt the meaning.”Mr. Battiato’s 1991 pop song “Povera Patria” (“Poor Homeland”), a lament about an Italy crushed by the abuse of power and governed by “perfect and useless buffoons,” became a hit, and some of its lyrics entered everyday language in Italy.The next year, after the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Battiato performed with the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad as a gesture of solidarity, sitting on the floor and singing in Arabic and Italian.“He wasn’t interested in politics, but in people,” Mr. Cattini said.He was also a painter. In a 2012 video interview, Mr. Battiato explained that he had always had a restless curiosity and, frustrated by his lack of drawing skills, had decided to learn how to paint. His artwork, initially signed with the pseudonym Süphan Barzani, was exhibited in galleries in Italy, Sweden and the United States. He drew the covers of two of his albums and of the libretto for his second opera, “Gilgamesh,” written in 1992. (His first was “Genesis,” in 1987.)His soundtracks for Italian movies include one for “A Violent Life” (1990), about the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini; he also composed music for ballets staged at the Maggio Musicale theater in Florence. And as a filmmaker he was named “best new director” by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 2004 for his “Lost Love,” about a boy’s journey from Sicily to Milan in the 1950s.Francesco Battiato was born on March 23, 1945, in Jonia, a coastal town in eastern Sicily. His father, Salvatore, was a wine merchant; his mother, Grazia (Patti) Battiato, was a homemaker. He attended high school in Acireale, Sicily, and moved to Milan when he was 19 to try to make a living in music.He is survived by his older brother, Michele.After living in Milan for years, Mr. Battiato moved in the late 1980s to a villa in Milo, north of the eastern coastal city of Catania, tucked between the volcano Etna and the Mediterranean. He had spent most of his time there since then. More