Music

She wrote “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” on the same day and built a theme park around herself. She has given memorable onscreen performances as a wisecracking hairstylist and harassed secretary. She even helped bring about the creation of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”Now, Dolly Parton’s fans are crediting her with saving the world from the coronavirus. It’s an exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek claim, to be sure. But for legions of admirers, Ms. Parton’s donation this spring to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drugmaker Moderna to develop a coronavirus vaccine, was another example of how the singer’s generosity and philanthropy have made her one of the world’s most beloved artists.“Shakespeare may have written King Lear during the plague, but Dolly Parton funded a Covid vaccine, dropped a Christmas album and a Christmas special,” the author Lyz Lenz said on Twitter.In April, Ms. Parton announced that she had donated $1 million to Vanderbilt after her friend Dr. Naji Abumrad, a professor of surgery at the university, in Nashville, told her about the work researchers were doing to come up with a vaccine. Dr. Abumrad’s son, Jad Abumrad, is the creator of “Radiolab” and host of the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.”Her contribution, which became known as the Dolly Parton Covid-19 Research Fund, helped pay for the first part of the vaccine research, which was led by Dr. Mark Denison, a professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt. The federal government eventually invested $1 billion in the creation and testing of the vaccine, but Dr. Denison said it was Ms. Parton’s money that funded the “critical” early stages of the research.“Her money helped us develop the test that we used to first show that the Moderna vaccine was giving people a good immune response that might protect them,” Dr. Denison said on Tuesday.On Monday, after Moderna announced that early trials of the vaccine showed a 94.5 percent effectiveness rate, fans reacted rapturously.“I want everyone to know that Dolly Parton gave us Buffy the TV series, the song 9 to 5, Dollywood, and of course the Covid vaccine,” wrote one fan on Twitter.Ryan Cordell, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston, filmed himself singing a song about the vaccine to the tune of “Jolene.”“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vacciiiiine, I’m begging of you please go in my arm,” he sang, while playing guitar and describing the virus as “beyond compare with spiky bursts of auburn hair that Covid, that corona emerald green.”The lyrics were written by the linguist Gretchen McCulloch, author of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.”She said she wrote the lyrics in part because the song “Jolene,” about one woman begging another not to steal her man, has the “same desperate feel” that the pandemic has instilled in so many people.Now Ms. McCulloch is hoping Ms. Parton might release her own vaccine song, she said.“If Dolly Parton wants to record a vaccine P.S.A. to the tune of ‘Jolene,’” she said, “I think everyone would be very pleased.” More

The rapper, a felon, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. More

“69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez,” a new Hulu documentary about the hugely popular and wildly provocative rapper Tekashi69, features interviews with many people close to the subject: his next-door neighbor, his longtime girlfriend, his estranged father, his record producer, even his former chauffeur.It doesn’t feature an interview with Tekashi69 himself, but that hardly seems important — because the 24-year-old superstar has spent the better part of the last decade exhaustively documenting his own life, broadcasting every passing whim and fancy over YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram Live. The director Vikram Gandhi avails himself of the rapper’s social media output, turning it into source material. So while Tekashi69 declined to participate in this movie, he’s all over it.[embedded content]The artist came to prominence toward the end of the last decade as part of the musical subgenre SoundCloud rap, named after the music-sharing site. But as the film makes clear, it wasn’t the rapper’s music — an abrasive combination of hip-hop and hard-core — that made him famous. With his long, rainbow-colored hair, extravagant jewelry, and distinctive facial tattoos, Tekashi69 made a strong impression before he even opened his mouth. Or, as one of his former associates puts it, “a lot of his Instagram followers don’t even know his music.”Tekashi69’s rise to fame was sudden. His fall was faster. Brought up on a slew of federal firearm and racketeering charges and enticed to cooperate to reduce his sentence, Tekashi69 testified against nearly a dozen members of the Brooklyn gang Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods. Branded a rat, he’s since become one of the most widely loathed figures in the world of hip-hop.Gandhi’s insights into Tekashi69’s psyche are limited, and some of his conclusions about the disgraced rapper’s character are bizarre. He admits to a feeling of “deep sympathy” for his subject, but the movie doesn’t mount a particularly compelling defense. Gandhi also proposes that Tekashi69 may be a “cautionary tale” for the relentless pursuit of clout, and that feels closer to the truth — he wanted the attention of the internet so badly that he didn’t notice the likes turning to hate.69: The Saga of Danny HernandezNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More