Music

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Playlist14 Largely Skeptical, Somewhat Unconventional Holiday SongsHear tracks by U.S. Girls, 100 gecs, Big Freedia and more.Meghan Remy of U.S. Girls sings about consumerism and the climate crisis on “Santa Stay Home.”Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Dec. 18, 2020Updated 4:41 p.m. ETEvery 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 [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.U.S. Girls featuring Rich Morel, ‘Santa Stay Home’[embedded content]If you’ve been searching for a Christmas carol that addresses rampant consumerism, the climate crisis, and even the strange mass-tradition of cutting down oxygen-giving pine trees only to throw them in the trash after a few weeks — have U.S. Girls got a song for you! “With both poles melting and the seasons blending,” the frontwoman Meghan Remy sings, “hurry up, slow down.” What saves the song from being too grinchy, though, is its toe-tapping beat and catchy melody, carrying on the U.S. Girls tradition of writing sweet-sounding songs about bitter truths. LINDSAY ZOLADZTayla Parx, ‘Ain’t a Lonely Christmas Song’“Ain’t A Lonely Christmas Song,” a festive offering from the hit songwriter and frequent Ariana Grande collaborator Tayla Parx, begins with humorous anti-sentimentality and Parx crooning, “I’m used to being at the family function showing up with liquor and myself.” But this year is different: “Since you came along, this ain’t a lonely Christmas song,” she sings on the chorus, the whole arrangement suddenly becoming merry and bright. ZOLADZTony Trischka, ‘Christmas Cheer (This Weary Year)’The bluegrass banjo player Tony Trischka wrote “Christmas Cheer (This Weary Year)” years ago for a song cycle about the Civil War, with lyrics envisioning soldiers during a holiday cease-fire: “Let us still our guns and dry our tears, friends and foe alike.” This quarantine year gives new resonance to its chorus: “Christmas cheer this weary year, not like the last you know/Hopefully by the next we’ll be united with our families back home.” The guitarist Michael Daves sings the lead vocal accompanied by virtuosic picking, with a coda of elegant string-band counterpoint. JON PARELESSam Smith, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’Sam Smith promises comfort, safety and happiness in “The Lighthouse Keeper,” a modern hymn that summons a cappella harmonies, a string section and subdued timpani. As Smith vows, “Don’t resist the rain and storm/I’ll never leave you lost at sea,” the cadence hints at “Good King Wenceslas”; perhaps that’s why they included the lines about “Hoping you’ll be home for Christmas time” for a song that offers far more than a seasonal visit. PARELESFinneas, ‘Another Year’Finneas’s Christmas song is decidedly secular: “I don’t believe that Jesus Christ was born to save me/That’s an awful lot of pressure for a baby,” he croons over cozy parlor-piano chords. Instead, it’s a seasonal love song, oddly tinged with uncertainty and pessimism; he proclaims his love, but adds, “I hope it lasts another year.” PARELESgirl in red, ‘Two Queens in a King Sized Bed’The holiday offering from Marie Ulven — who records as girl in red — sprinkles the dusty reverb of indie rock with enough saccharine chords to make you mindful it’s December without distracting from the song’s true purpose. That would be love, which she gently sings about with lyrics that merge the damp desperation of intense attraction with the wry lingo of holiday capitalism:I don’t have a lot to giveBut I would give you everythingAll my time is yours to spendLet me wrap you in with my skinJON CARAMANICAAlessia Cara, ‘Make It to Christmas (Stripped)’Alessia Cara released “Make It to Christmas” last year as a Phil Spector-style buildup, with drums kicking in for the chorus. Her “stripped” remake brings out the song’s underlying despair. She knows her romance is falling apart, but she just can’t bear the thought of being single during the holiday: “Don’t have me spending it alone/This time of year is precious,” she begs. The arrangement isn’t that stripped — she still has massed strings, chimes and choirlike backup vocals — but without the drums to propel her, hope fades. PARELESJulia Jacklin, ‘Baby Jesus Is Nobody’s Baby Now’“Last Christmas at my auntie’s house, I tried so hard to make my uncle shut his mouth,” sings the wryly observant Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin. But her holiday single “Baby Jesus Is Nobody’s Baby Now” is something much more affecting than a collection of Yuletide punch lines about family dysfunction: It’s a musical short story as vivid and specific as any on her excellent 2019 album “Crushing.” Out of materials as simple as a quietly strummed chord progression and her hushed but evocative voice, Jacklin weaves something as unique and haunting as a spider web. ZOLADZMandy Moore, ‘How Could This Be Christmas?’Slowly swaying, wistful and sweet, “How Could This Be Christmas?” is a vintage-style missing-someone-at-Christmas song. Written by Mandy Moore with her husband, Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, and Mike Viola from the Candy Butchers, it has piano triplets for a 1950s feel, and a vocal leap up to the word “Christmas” that sounds daring and forlorn each time she makes it. PARELESVíctor Manuelle, ‘Ya Se Ven Las Bombillitas’“Ya Se Ven las Bombillitas” (“The Lights Can Already Be Seen”) is the latest single released from Victor Manuelle’s 2019 Christmas album, “Memorias de Navidad,” which was just nominated for a Grammy. In upbeat salsa, punctuated by horns and laced by runs on the guitar-like cuatro, Manuelle sings about maintaining traditions through generations: both Christmas decorations and the vintage salsa style he upholds. PARELESCorey Porche & Paul ‘Bird’ Edwards, ‘Papa Nwèl Ap Vini o Vilaj’[embedded content]The guitarist Chas Justus gathered top musicians from Louisiana bayou country to make “Joyeux Noël, Bon Chrismeusse,” an EP of Cajun and zydeco arrangements of familiar Christmas songs translated into Cajun and Louisiana Creole. “Papa Nwèl Ap Vini o Vilaj” turns “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” into a genial zydeco shuffle, with accordion tootling and rub board ratcheting away. PARELESBig Freedia featuring Flo Milli, ‘Better Be’Call it sitcom bounce music: Big Freedia takes a bawdy spin on gift receiving on this song from a new seasonal EP, “Big Freedia’s Smokin’ Santa Christmas,” joined by the tart-talking rapper Flo Milli. CARAMANICA100 gecs, ‘Sympathy 4 the Grinch’When your music sounds like a bunch of addled tweens’ playtime, making holiday music likely comes naturally. The chirpy kitchensinkcore maximalists 100 gecs’s seasonal entry, “Sympathy 4 the Grinch,” is all about what Santa failed to bring, and the price he must pay for that transgression. It is the highest compliment to say it sounds like a foulmouthed outtake from an Alvin & the Chipmunks Christmas album. CARAMANICAPup and Charly Bliss, ‘It’s Christmas and I ___ Miss You’This wickedly catchy, obscenity-laced collaboration from the indie-rock bands Charly Bliss and Pup certainly captures the feeling of late-2020 exasperation: The Charly Bliss frontwoman Eva Hendricks is “crying on the couch to ‘Elf’ alone,” while Pup’s Stefan Babcock suggests, “We should call it, because this whole year’s been [expletive] anyway.” The video, though, is unexpectedly poignant: Amid clips of the band members recording their parts of the song remotely is archival footage from tours gone by and taken for granted, in much less socially distanced times. It’s a stirring holiday ode to missing your bandmates, or maybe just your friends. ZOLADZAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Year in Improvised Music: ‘Everything’s Changing. So the Music Should.’The pandemic compressed live music onto screens, and Black Lives Matter protests brought it back to the streets. What will it all look like, and sound like, in 2021?Norman Edwards and Endea Owens playing outdoors. Ms. Owens helped put together bands to perform at protests.Credit…Anthony ArtisDec. 17, 2020When concerts and in-person gatherings shut down this spring, livestreamed shows quickly started to feel like a glorified last resort. I found myself avoiding them. But a Facebook video caught my eye one day in June, of the trombonist Craig Harris performing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Accompanied by the keyboardist Pete Drungle, framed by a flowering grove and a trellis, he played “Breathe,” a suite of concise and soothing music that sounds like the sum of Mr. Harris’s experiences on the New York scene since the 1970s.He had written “Breathe” after Eric Garner’s killing by New York police in 2014; it was his reflection on the notion of breath as a great equalizer, and as the source of Mr. Harris’s own powers as a trombonist. But at the start of this video, he turns to those affected by Covid-19. He offers the suite as “a sonic reflection for those who have passed, and those who are born,” Mr. Harris says. “We have to think about the lives of the people who are born in this period now. That’s a whole thing, the beginning and the end.”The performance was taped in May, before George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and its nightmarish resonance with Garner’s death. By the time Mr. Harris’s video was released in June, protesters were constantly in the streets, and the suite’s original message had become painfully relevant again. But even in this new light, the poise and sensitivity that Mr. Harris had intentionally brought to this performance didn’t feel out of place.For any lover of live performances — but especially jazz and improvised music — 2020 will be remembered, joylessly, as the year of the stream. Musicians have done their best with what they’ve had, usually by leaning into intimacy; we saw a lot of artists’ bedrooms this year. But it was actually in the moments when musicians zoomed out — when they made our perspective bigger, and connected this difficult moment with a greater sense of time — that improvised music did its most necessary work.With concerts impossible, the vocalist and interdisciplinary artist Gelsey Bell assembled “Cairns,” a remarkable audio tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; it’s part philosophy talk and part experimental music composition, built of Ms. Bell’s overdubbed vocal improvisations and the sounds of the cemetery as she walks.Green-Wood is a majestic place, and there is something robust and alive about it, even though generations of history lie in its soil. “As I started making it, I was really thinking about our relation to the land and the history it holds, and then where we find ourselves now,” Ms. Bell said of “Cairns” in an interview. “To be connected to the land you live on is to be connected to both its history and the other people that you’re sharing space with.”On the hourlong recording, Ms. Bell tells of various little-known but significant figures, using their histories to illuminate what she calls “the apocalyptic foundations of this place.” And she gives us the histories of the trees, instructing us to listen to the ways they sing to each other, and will continue to after we’re gone.Hiking up a hill, Ms. Bell and her collaborator Joseph White turn the sounds of her breathing and walking into a kind of mulchy, rhythmic music. “Because of breath, we’ll never forget how stuck in time we are, how mortal we are,” she says, making the word “mortal” sound like a good thing.It wasn’t impossible to make music via stream that really pulled people together — just rare — and on this front, couples had an advantage. The week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended all concerts be put on hold, the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and the pianist Sullivan Fortner propped up a camera beside the piano in their living room and broadcast a set of music via Facebook to thousands of viewers. The comments section turned into a chattery town square, full of nervous and grateful people unsure of what the coming months would bring.The bassist Dezron Douglas and the harpist Brandee Younger started performing duets from home every week, ultimately collecting them in a disarming album, “Force Majeure,” released this month. The saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and the drummer Tom Rainey got in the habit of recording their wide-ranging living room improvisations and publishing them on Bandcamp, in a series that continues under the name “Stir Crazy.”A listener taking in Gelsey Bell’s “Cairns,” an audio tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.Credit…Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesMs. Bell said she thought “about our relation to the land and the history it holds, and then where we find ourselves now.”Credit…Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesWorking alone, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg also started posting daily solo recordings in March on a Bandcamp page labeled “Plague Diary”; it now has nearly 200 entries. Listen for long enough and the tracks of overdubbed instrumentals and low, repetitive rhythms start to run together, like the hazy interminable feeling of existing at home amid lockdown.The saxophonist Steve Lehman swung in another direction, releasing a less-than-10-minute album, “Xenakis and the Valedictorian,” featuring snippets of exercises and experiments that he had recorded on his iPhone, practicing in his car each night so that his wife and daughter could have peace in the house.Continuing to perform during the pandemic — near impossible as it often was — was both a creative and a financial imperative for improvisers, many of whom saw all of their upcoming performances canceled in March. But newly liberated from obligation, inspired by the movement sweeping the country, many also began to organize.Much good critical attention was paid this year in the music press to the ways that our listening habits have had to adjust to lockdown, and to how performances have changed. But what about the institutions that also fell quiet — especially the schools and major arts nonprofits, which have perpetuated massive racial and economic disparities in access to the music? Will they all look the same when things come back online?The trombonist Craig Harris performed “Breathe” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in May.Credit…Brooklyn Botanic GardenMusicians across the world came together via Zoom to organize the We Insist! collective to address these questions, eventually coming up with a list of demands to promote racial equity in major educational institutions and philanthropic groups in the jazz world. A group of artists of historically underrepresented gender identities came together in the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians collective, striking a creative blow against patriarchy in jazz. And as protests overtook streets nationwide, jazz musicians were often there.The bassist Endea Owens showed up on the second day of protests in New York back in May, she said in an interview. She almost immediately felt a need to contribute music, and she helped put together bands that played daily at demonstrations over the next three weeks. “We were out there for two to three weeks, walking from Washington Square Park to the Barclays Center, just playing,” she said. “That created a ripple effect of something creative, something positive. You felt like you had to fight for your lives.”In Harlem, where she lives, Ms. Owens started a monthly series of masked, socially distanced cookout concerts. Using donations as well as money from her own pocket, she has handed out 100 free meals at each one, while paying underemployed jazz musicians to perform. As a member of Jon Batiste’s Stay Human, the house band for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Ms. Owens has been the rare jazz musician this year who could count on a steady paycheck.But without nightly gigs, she has still had an excess of downtime. Now that she has made connections with other organizers and mutual aid groups in the area, she is thinking about how to continue that effort into the future, even if the usual work opportunities for musicians come back.“There’s a big opportunity to make jazz feel more familiar and make it feel more accessible, where anyone can go to these shows,” Ms. Owens said. “I don’t even think it’s possible to go back to the way we did things. Everything’s changing. So the music should. The way we perform, the way we approach it, the places where we have this music.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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The 78-year-old musician admits he is reluctant to take the stage at the upcoming Glastonbury music festival over coronavirus concerns as he sees the event as a potential super-spreader.

Dec 19, 2020
AceShowbiz – Paul McCartney is reluctant to headline Britain’s Glastonbury music festival in 2021 over fears surrounding the coronavirus.
The Beatles legend, 78, had been due to top the bill at the musical extravaganza this June (20), before it was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic – and the “Hey Jude” hitmaker doesn’t expect next year’s festival to take place either.
He said, “Glastonbury, where you’ve got over 100,000 people packed into a field? That’s a super-spreader.”
Despite admitting they are “a long way” from being able to say if there will definitely be a festival in 2021, Glastonbury co-organiser Emily Eavis has insisted bosses are doing “everything” in their power to try and get the Worthy Farm music extravaganza to take place next year.

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The 50th anniversary of the iconic event, which was sadly cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic this summer (20), was due to be headlined by Sir Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, and Kendrick Lamar.
Despite being forced off the stage, the rocker has been busy making music and recently released a sequel to his classic albums, 1970’s “McCartney” and 1980’s “McCartney II”, by making a record in which he wrote and produced all the songs, as well as singing and playing all the instruments.
Reflecting on the newly-released McCartney III, he told The Sun newspaper, “We were shocked to find ourselves in the middle of this but, for some creative people, it gave us unexpected time.”
“I should have been rehearsing for my shows, culminating in Glastonbury, and suddenly all of that was knocked out, so I was able to do some recording,” he recalled. “I was just making music purely for me that no one really was going to hear, except me and my family. I suddenly had about 11 or 12 tracks, not knowing what to do with them… but then the penny dropped.”
“I thought of McCartney I and II. I’d played all the instruments on those, which put this in the same class, so this should be McCartney III. I’d found a place for it.”

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#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySwapping Songs With Chess Grandmaster Garry KasparovMusic brought a critic and a guest together, in a conversation about Bach, Beethoven, chess and politics.Garry Kasparov, shown here in 1997, picked Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) to share; our critic chose Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.Credit…Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesDec. 18, 2020, 10:00 a.m. ETMusic, we all know, can bring people together. To stimulate a conversation between a music critic and a guest — in this case, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov — about listening and life, there was one ground rule: Each participant suggests a single piece for the other to listen to ahead of the chat.I chose Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. Mr. Kasparov picked Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.”Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mr. Kasparov comes from a musical family: His paternal grandfather and uncle were composers, his grandmother was a pianist and his father studied the violin before becoming an engineer. A former World Chess Champion, Mr. Kasparov is now a political activist, a prominent critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative. He spoke by phone from his home in Croatia, where he has spent the pandemic with his wife, Daria, and their two children. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.[embedded content]The two pieces we picked are interesting in the context of the pandemic. The Beethoven symphony has the social dimension of the full orchestra and the Bach is a solitary puzzle.The “Goldbergs” are not just one piece! It’s like an encyclopedia of music.I like that. There is that sense of trying out a problem according to different possibilities. I picked Bach for you, with all his fugues, because I think of chess as having similar qualities. The elegance of algorithms and the beauty that comes out of processes that actually obey very strict rules.For me it was a new experience. I don’t listen to much music before Mozart. It was quite a discovery to understand that Bach introduced many future themes. From the chess or computer world, I would use the term founding father. I am amazed by people who are ahead of their time.Listening to the “Goldbergs” I was struck by what I see as parallels with the way pieces move in chess. Even in the opening Aria, there is this very methodical movement in the left hand, while the right hand has much more freedom.I’m not sure. I see the Aria as something godly, heavenly — but then it goes back to earth. It’s this combination.What do you make of the fugues in strict counterpoint? These lines that interlock in a way that is both a beautiful mechanism and has this creative freedom to it.Well, it’s about variety. I read the legend that Bach wrote it for his patron to fight insomnia. But it doesn’t strike me as something that helps people go to sleep. The first 10 variations, he’s basically demonstrating his power as a composer. But then he shifts to something that is more interesting. In many of the variations we can hear the herald of new music. I have one favorite: Variation 25. It’s Chopin. It’s the first Ballade. And I love Chopin.What is it that attracts you to that? I hear a lot of melancholy in that variation.It’s not sadness. It’s a kind of realism. The world is as it is, and we have to accept it. It makes me feel comfortable. I also like Variation 13. It draws you into this water of music. And for energy and style I would pick number 16. In Variations 14 and 29, Bach is a virtuoso à la Liszt.I get the sense that the connections I made to chess don’t feel true to you at all. Did you find anything that you could relate to the game?It’s more how the music relates to me, Garry Kasparov, the person. I left the professional game years ago. Sure, the “Goldbergs” are an encyclopedia. It’s a demonstration of what could be done. It was prescient.I was also curious to ask you about artificial intelligence, and to what extent beauty can come out of a closed system with its own rules. Can a machine make moves that are elegant or is the human spark required? There are efforts that try to teach machines to write music, even in the style of Bach.A machine can learn rules, whether it’s chess or music. Offered a variety of options, it can eventually come up with something. But creativity has a human quality: It accepts the notion of failure.The way machines approach a problem is always about the bottom line: “This move is good because it offers the best return.” But creative beauty is not to go against the rules, but beyond the known pattern.You’re setting up a nice transition to the Beethoven symphony you picked. So much of that is about changing received patterns and disrupting expectations. He has accents in the wrong place that take you off guard and build drama. A machine would never see the advantage of breaking those rules.In a closed space a machine will beat humans. But when we are talking about art, the lines are blurry. We enjoy the journey into the unknown.In Beethoven’s period, music was structured around the development of a theme. It encounters an opposing theme and out of that a story unfolds. I was curious if you could connect that to a chess game. In the sense that the opening determines a lot, but that it’s in the encounter with your opponent that the game develops.Sorry to disappoint you again. I view this from a different angle. They wrote the music because they heard it in their heads. It’s pure genius. They can make very complicated constructions. But it’s flow. It’s intuition. That’s also my playing style. That’s the only time I can make a parallel to my playing. I know when a move is right.With Beethoven I see it as heroic. But it’s different from Wagner. That’s mythology. It comes from another world. With Beethoven it’s human.At a granular level the “Eroica” has this energetic play with the idea of disruption — creating crises and then rushing forward again. Are there parallels you can draw to your political activism, with how to effect change?Now you hit the right button. It’s more about my political engagement. You have to pretend to be heroic. But our fight is not for some mythological object or carving our name in the history books; it’s about other humans and improving the world we live in. And that’s a shift. The “Eroica” is very rich with this shift.I appreciate you being honest and rejecting my high-flung theories about counterpoint and chess. It shows that what one person reads into music is not necessarily what’s there at all. It was fun to try out these ideas with you.Thank you for forcing me to listen to the “Goldberg” Variations. Now I have a greater appreciation of Bach. I was very surprised by how modern it feels.It might have something to do with transparency. Because in Bach’s keyboard music the structure is visible, the same way in really good modern architecture form just follows function.I could use another analogy. These days I’m doing a lot of Lego with my five-year-old. You have a plan and then you have the Legos. And you can always see the structure.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRock Hall of Fame Reveals Plan for ExpansionThe $100 million project would add more programming space and a new band shell and renovate the Rock Hall’s original I.M. Pei building in Cleveland.A rendering of the expansion plan, in which a triangular wedge will appear to slice into the base of the Rock Hall’s original building.Credit…Practice for Architecture and UrbanismDec. 18, 2020, 9:00 a.m. ETThe Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland on Friday released designs for a $100 million renovation and expansion, which would grow the museum’s footprint by a third with a dramatic addition to the original I.M. Pei building.The Rock Hall announced that the architecture firm PAU will lead the project, which will bring 50,000 square feet of programming space and a new band shell overlooking the shores of Lake Erie. The triangular addition will resemble a guitar pick slicing into the base of the original waterfront pyramid, which opened in 1995.Vishaan Chakrabarti, the architecture firm’s founder and creative director, will oversee the expansion with assistance from other design firms including Cooper Robertson, James Corner Field Operations and L’Observatoire International.“Our theme for the project is the Clash,” said Mr. Chakrabarti, who also serves as dean for the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. He said the new design has “a sense of grit” that is in line with the rebelliousness of rock ’n’ roll.The desire to create a campus around the Rock Hall originated about five years ago, its president and C.E.O., Greg Harris, said. The hall hoped to add space for exhibitions and events, as well as offices with a view of the water.“We wanted to host exhibitions like the Brooklyn Museum’s David Bowie show, but we just didn’t have the space,” Mr. Harris said. “We want to give our audiences the giant wow moment that you would expect from a place of our magnitude.”The museum had originally embarked on a $55 million capital campaign for renovations, but the expansion nearly doubled the financial cost to a total of $100 million. With the help of trustees, the Rock Hall said, it has raised $73 million.PAU was chosen because it is one of the top architectural firms in the world, Paul Clark, the chairman of the museum’s board, said. “Their experience will be instrumental as we work through our vision to enhance the Rock Hall,” he said.It has been a difficult year for the Rock Hall, which relies heavily on ticketed attendance. The coronavirus pandemic put a $14 million dent in its revenues, and the museum was forced to lay off nearly 50 employees.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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Following rumors of the surprise album that circulated last week, the Detroit emcee has debuted the sequel to his January 2020 set with 16 additional tracks.

Dec 18, 2020
AceShowbiz – Eminem is capping off 2020 with a new album. The 15-time Grammy Award winner has surprised fans by dropping new music through “Music to Be Murdered By: Side B”, a follow-up to his eleventh studio album “Music to Be Murdered By” that was released earlier this year in January.
Hitting streaming service at midnight Friday, December 18, the deluxe edition of his most recent LP contains 16 additional tracks. It features Dr. Dre, who appears on “Guns Blazing”, with Ty Dolla $ign, DJ Premier, Skylar Grey and more also making appearance on other tracks off the album. Dre is also reportedly responsible for co-producing “Discombobulated”.
Along with the surprise album, Em has released a music video for one of the new tracks, “Gnat”. The Cole Bennett-directed video has the Detroit emcee playing different characters in different costumes, including one that has him in a hazmat suit.
A real take on the global COVID-19 pandemic, one scene has him in daily outfit while wandering around the street and wearing a face mask, before he’s getting shot. He, however, survives as he’s seen waking up in a corridor despite still sporting a bullet wound on the chest.

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On another song titled “Zeus”, Em offers an apology to Rihanna, whom he shaded in a song that leaked in 2019 featuring lyrics about him “siding with Chris Brown” despite having collaborated with the Barbadian songstress in 2010’s hit “Love the Way You Lie” and its sequel “Love the Way You Lie (Part II)”. “And wholeheartedly apologies Rihanna for that song that leaked/ I’m sorry, Rih, it wasn’t meant to cause you grief/ But regardless it was wrong of me,” he raps on “Zeus”.
Em marked the album release with a post on his Instagram page. “Uncle Alfred heard you screaming for more… enjoy Side B,” he wrote along with the album cover art.

Prior to this, the 48-year-old star never addressed rumors about the deluxe edition. Fans, however, got their hope high after Dem Jointz fueled the rumors by revealing the “Music to Be Murdered By: Side B” cover art among several projects he said he worked on this year. “Even Thru The S**t-Storm, Thank God For Another Successful Year!! . . . #ProducedWrittenMixedByDemJointz,” he captioned it.

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The ‘Cardigan’ singer gushes about the ‘pure’ way she made her latest studio album ‘Evermore’ as she talks about the creative process of the new studio installment.

Dec 18, 2020
AceShowbiz – Taylor Swift enjoyed not having to “check a list” with her latest albums.
The “Cardigan” hitmaker released “Folklore” and its sister album “Evermore” this year (20) and has enjoyed being able to pen songs without a usual “checklist” in her mind as she used to feel a “lot of pressure” to craft particular types of songs.
Speaking about her spontaneity on the records, she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “Pure is a really, really perfect word for that because what happens to you as your career builds and builds and builds and builds is that if you’ve accomplished a thing in the past, all of a sudden you’re expected to accomplish that thing plus another new thing, plus this other thing over here.”

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“It becomes sort of like I had felt at times when I felt a lot of pressure, I had felt like I was doing some sort of obstacle course. And that’s not how you should feel when you’re creating. You shouldn’t feel like, ‘I need to make a tracklist where this one’s for the stadium show, this one’s for radio, this one’s for people who want to get in their feelings.’ Check, check, check, and you can end up doing that.”
And Taylor also revealed it is something other artists like Ed Sheeran have felt too.
“And it’s good to have friends who are artists who have similar pressures,” she continued. “Like Ed Sheeran and I talk about this a great deal. This was a time when we both stepped back, and I would say to him, ‘This is the first time I felt like I threw the checklist away.’ Like I threw it away and I definitely could have gone into the pandemic thinking, ‘I’ve got to wait for everything to open up so I can do things exactly the way that I am used to doing them.’ But then about three days in, I thought, ‘Wait, this could be an opportunity for me to do things in a way I haven’t ever done them before. What would my work sound like if I took away all of my fear-based check listing that I have inflicted on myself?’ So I guess – I know the answer now.”

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#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEven When the Music Returns, Pandemic Pay Cuts Will LingerThe coronavirus crisis is leading many performing arts unions to agree to concessions, but some fear it could change the balance of power between labor and management.The Metropolitan Opera says that it will need long-term pay cuts if it is to survive after the pandemic, but its workers, many of whom have gone unpaid since April, are resisting.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDec. 17, 2020Updated 7:22 p.m. ETWhen the coronavirus outbreak brought performances across the United States to a screeching halt, many of the nation’s leading orchestras, dance companies and opera houses temporarily cut the pay of their workers, and some stopped paying them at all.Now, hopes that vaccines will allow performances to resume next fall are being tempered by fears that it could take years for hibernating box offices to rebound, and many battered institutions are turning to their unions to negotiate longer-term cuts that they say are necessary to survive.The crisis is posing a major challenge to performing arts unions, which in recent decades have been among the strongest in the nation. While musicians at some major ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, have agreed to steep cuts that would have been unthinkable in normal times, others are resisting. Some unions fear that the concessions being sought could outlast the pandemic, and reset the balance of power between management and labor.“Historically, labor agreements in the performing arts have been moving toward more money and better conditions,” said Thomas W. Morris, who led major orchestras in the United States for more than three decades. “And all of a sudden that isn’t an option. It’s a fundamental change in the pattern.”Nowhere is the tension between labor and management more acute than at the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts organization in the nation. Its artists and other workers, many of whom have been furloughed without pay since April, are resisting an offer by management to begin receiving reduced wages of up to $1,500 a week again in exchange for long-term pay cuts and changes in work rules. After failing to reach an agreement with its stagehands, the company locked them out last week, shortly before more were scheduled to return to work to begin building sets for next season.But musicians in a growing number of orchestras are agreeing to long-term cuts, recognizing that it could take years for audiences and philanthropy to bounce back after this extended period of darkened concert halls and theaters.The New York Philharmonic announced a new contract last week that will cut the base pay of musicians by 25 percent through mid-2023, to $115,128 a year from $153,504. Then some pay will be restored, but the players will still earn less than they did before the pandemic struck when the contract expires in 2024. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the richest ensembles in the nation, agreed to a new three-year contract reducing pay by an average of 37 percent in the first year, gradually increasing in the following years but only recovering fully if the orchestra meets at least one of three financial benchmarks. The San Francisco Opera agreed to a new deal that halves the orchestra’s salary this season, but later makes up some ground.Unions play a major role behind the scenes at many arts organizations. The contracts they negotiate not only set pay, but also help establish a wide range of working conditions, from how many permanent members an orchestra should have to how many stagehands are needed backstage for each performance to whether Sunday performances require extra pay. It is not uncommon to see major orchestras abruptly end rehearsals mid-phrase — even when a famous maestro is conducting — when the digital rehearsal clock shows that they are about to go into overtime.Workers and artists say that many of these rules have improved health and safety and raised the quality of performances; management has often chafed at the expense.Many nonprofit performing arts organizations, including the Met, faced real financial challenges even before the pandemic struck. Now, they say, they are fighting for their survival, furloughing or laying off administrative staff and seeking relief from unions.After stagehands at the Metropolitan Opera rejected calls for a new contract with long-term cuts, management locked them out.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York Times“Unions are very reluctant to make concessions; it goes against everything trade union strategy has told them for 100-plus years,” said Susan J. Schurman, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. “But clearly they understand that this is an unprecedented situation.”But at some institutions, including at the Met and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, workers are accusing management of trying to take advantage of the crisis to push for changes to their union contracts that they have long sought.Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, wants to cut the pay of workers by 30 percent, and restore only half of those cuts when box office revenues recover. He hopes to achieve most of the cuts by changing work rules. In a letter last month to the union representing the Met’s roughly 300 stagehands, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, he wrote that “the health crisis has compounded the Met’s previous financial fragility, threatening our very existence.” He also wrote that the average full-time stagehand cost the Met $260,000 last year, including benefits.“For the Met to get back on its feet, we’re all going to have to make financial concessions and sacrifices,” Mr. Gelb told employees in a video call last month.There are 15 unions at the Met, and while the leaders of several of the biggest have said that they are willing to agree to some cuts, they are pushing back on changes that would outlast the pandemic and redefine work rules that they have long fought for — especially after so many workers, including the orchestra, chorus and legions of backstage workers, have endured many months without pay. The Met’s orchestra, which is represented by Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, said in a statement that management was “exploiting this temporary situation to permanently gut contracts of the very workers who create the performances on their global stage.”Leonard Egert, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents members of the chorus, soloists, dancers, stage managers and others at the Met, said that unions recognized the difficult reality and were willing to compromise. “It’s just that no one wants to sell out the future,” he said.Musicians at the New York Philharmonic, and at other orchestras, have agreed to lasting pay cuts to help their institutions recover after the pandemic. Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn Washington, the stagehands at the Kennedy Center are fighting a similar battle. David McIntyre, president of Local 22 of the alliance, said he had been in contentious negotiations with the Kennedy Center for months over its demand for a 25 percent pay cut, something that is hard for the union members to stomach after many of them have gone without pay since March.Management is also asking for concessions such as an elimination of time-and-a-half pay on Sundays, he said, a change that would be permanent rather than limited to the pandemic. The union stagehands are particularly indignant because the Kennedy Center received $25 million from the federal stimulus bill passed in March.“They’re just trying to get concessions out of us by leveraging a pandemic when none of us are working,” Mr. McIntyre said.A spokeswoman for the Kennedy Center, Eileen Andrews, said that several of the unions that it works with already accepted pay cuts, including the musicians with the National Symphony Orchestra, and that the recovery from the pandemic needed to be accomplished through “shared sacrifices.”Organizations have lost tens of millions of dollars in ticket revenue, and the outlook for the philanthropy that they rely on for their survival remains uncertain. As union negotiations proceed within the grids of video calls rather than around the typical stuffy board room tables, both sides recognize the financial fragility.In some respects the pandemic has altered the negotiating landscape. Unions, which normally have tremendous leverage because strikes halt performances, have less at the moment, when there are no performances to halt. Management’s leverage has changed as well. While the Met’s threat that it would lock out its stagehands unless they agreed to cuts carried less menace at a moment when most employees were not working anyway, its offer to begin paying workers who have gone without paychecks since April in exchange for long-term agreements may be hard to resist.At some institutions, memories of the destructiveness of recent labor disputes have helped foster cooperation during this crisis. At the Minnesota Orchestra, where a bitter lockout kept the concert hall dark for 16 months starting in 2012, management and the musicians agreed on a 25 percent pay cut through August. Some orchestras that have recently experienced labor strife, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where the players were locked out in 2019, came together during the pandemic.Credit…Shawn Hubbard for The New York TimesAnd the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which had its own hard-fought labor dispute last year, managed to reach agreement on a five-year contract this summer, cutting the pay of players sharply at first before gradually increasing it again.The last time a national crisis of this magnitude affected every performing arts organization in the country was during the Great Recession, when organizations sought cuts to offset the decline in philanthropy and ticket sales, triggering strikes, lockouts and bitter disputes.Meredith Snow, the chair of International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, which represents players, said that labor and management mostly appeared to be working together more amicably than they did then — at least for now.“There is more of a recognition that we need to be a unified face to the community,” said Ms. Snow, a violist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “and that we can’t be squabbling or we’re both going to go down.”“You come together,” she said, “or you sink.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More