Music

Credit Drake for being both the most sonically consistent pop star of the last decade and also a work in progress. From album to album, year to year, he draws from a standard palette of moody R&B and puffed-chest rap, emotionally charged hip-hop and muscular soul. But at the same time, he’s always slathering his approach atop new inputs: dancehall, grime, Houston rap, Afrobeats and beyond. Unlike many of his peers, he’ll put his credibility on the line for a chance to absorb and repurpose new sounds.Which is why “Dark Lane Demo Tapes” — a largely effective album-length odds-and-ends collection but not, you know, an album — may be more valuable as data than as songs. As music, it’s a mostly sharp document of top-dog anxiety and solipsism. But it’s also perhaps a spoiler for the proper album Drake announced will be released this summer, his first since the blustery “Scorpion” in 2018.“Dark Lane” shows Drake songs at various developmental points — full-fledged experiments in a range of regional and microscene styles, half-cooked ideas from old projects, classicist exercises, formal rhymes, informal rhymes. Omnivorous and osmotic, he feels his way around new production styles and tries out new flow patterns, attempting to make them jibe with the soft-edged style he excels at.“War” is a U.K. drill song, ominous and sneering and full of deeply studied slang. “Demons” explores Brooklyn drill, a little jumpier than its overseas cousin. (It features two of that scene’s up and comers, Fivio Foreign and Sosa Geek.) “Toosie Slide,” which recently went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 thanks to its baked-in virality, is a quasi-dance song. And “Pain 1993,” a long-promised collaboration with Playboi Carti, is a chance for Drake to ably mimic his collaborator’s chirps.Drake, far more nimble than any of his peers, deals from different parts of the deck depending on the needs of the moment. Rough drafts presaging sleeker adaptations down the line: This is his version of showing his work. (Most stars of his stature wouldn’t dare tip their hands like this — only Taylor Swift has the confidence.)But the rough-hewed nature of “Dark Lane” also reflects a keen understanding of the current condition of internet-speed rap stardom, which is that completed ideas (and songs) are less important than consistent ideas (and “songs”). Unless you’re Adele, old-school formal release cycles only leave a vast chasm of time in which people can forget you.Drake, on the other hand, hasn’t left the spotlight in more than a decade. He ascended to hip-hop’s peak under one set of rules, and now is maintaining his throne under a wholly different one. He is also the first global superstar to acknowledge the uncertain cultural vacuum created by the coronavirus pandemic and proactively feed it with a full album, a boldness many of his peers haven’t dared. (He’s spoken in the past of wanting to be the soundtrack to listeners’ lives, and quarantine certainly could use one.)ImageDrake looks inward and outward on his latest release.For these isolationist times, Drake might be an optimal lyricist — increasingly, his songs ring tragic, his glee at having toppled his competition replaced with the dour understanding that ruling is lonely misery. This album is salted with lyrics both about exacting revenge on enemies and also, on “From Florida With Love,” about what it was like to be on the wrong end of a gun barrel. “Losses” is a vividly heartbreaking song about disloyalty: “You sold me up the river, but I rowed back/You put me on the road without a roadmap/I’m not tryna make no song, these are cold facts.”“When to Say When” — an updating of the melancholy Jay-Z classic “Song Cry” — is perhaps his most complete statement of deep-sigh success: “33 years, I gave that to the game/33 mil’, I’ll save that for the rain/500 weeks, I filled the charts with my pain.” Later in the song, he doles out advice to aspirants like Tony Robbins, then chuckles with his friends about everyone they’ve lapped.It’s a majestic track, though it does differ from Jay-Z’s version in one crucial way: Drake is feeling sorry for himself, while Jay-Z was feeling sorry for someone he’d hurt. This is the central midcareer Drake conundrum: someone who used to sing and rap about his flaws and made it safe for a generation after him to do the same is now playing emotional defense. The dull agony, on “Chicago Freestyle,” of love-and-run romance (“Galleria credit card swipes/I don’t even know if she a wife”) and the anxious skepticism on “Desires” are thematically thin. That goes double for “Not You Too,” a limp collaboration with Chris Brown.Curiosity about the world around him has been the hallmark of Drake’s sound. But it always means more when he’s curious about what’s happening inside him, too.Drake“Dark Lane Demo Tapes”(OVO Sound/Republic) More

The Metropolitan Opera’s nightly streams of archival performances have attracted robust audiences since the company closed its doors in March because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Met has 15,000 new paid subscribers to its on-demand video service.And its four-hour At-Home Gala on April 25 was a technically impeccable, warmly received endeavor by the struggling company, which has already lost around $60 million because of the virus and stopped paying its orchestra, chorus and stagehands at the end of March.Yet despite some positive news — emergency fund-raising in the tens of millions; 10,000 new donors; its sizable virtual audience — its financial outlook remains grim. The prospect of large gatherings in New York is still far off and the planned opening of the Met’s season in September is in serious question. On Tuesday, the company — the nation’s largest performing arts organization, with a $308 million annual budget — said it would furlough 41 members of its administrative staff, a step it had previously said would not be necessary.“We have enjoyed greater success than I would have imagined in terms of keeping the Met connected through these various activities, and raising money through the emergency campaign,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in an interview. “On the other hand, the magnitude of the long-term damage — the immediate and long-term effects of the health crisis on the performing arts — seem graver and more challenging than they appeared a month ago.”In addition to the 41 furloughed staff members, 11 others will be cut to part-time hours, out of an administration of 237 people. Those furloughed will receive two weeks of pay and, like the unionized orchestra, chorus and stagehands, will retain their health benefits. The affected employees are spread across the company’s departments, including artistic affairs, production and marketing.Mr. Gelb said he had told the staff that he did not envision further cuts, at least through the summer. But in the interview he added that the Met’s financial picture was complicated by not knowing when operations might resume, and by the likelihood that recovery would be slow, even after reopening.“It’s very difficult to budget when you have so many uncertainties of timetable,” he said. “The performing arts are going to be the last business to return. We’re still selling tickets for next season, but obviously the fall is in jeopardy at this point. Hard decisions will need to be made in the coming weeks about the opening. Perhaps by some miraculous situation we can return in the fall.”When the Met announced in March that it would cancel the remaining eight weeks of its season, Mr. Gelb said that he would forgo his salary until operations returned to normal, and that senior management and some staff would see pay cuts. But he added that there were no planned salary cuts for those making less than $125,000 a year, and no plans for layoffs of administrative staff members.“We need an administrative staff to keep the institution running without performances,” Mr. Gelb said then. “The business of the Met has to go on.” More

When the author Susan Orlean wrote about Bon Jovi for Rolling Stone in 1987, she gave the hair of the band’s frontman, Jon Bon Jovi, a lot of attention: “Its color is somewhere between chestnut and auburn, and the frosty streaks in it give it a sizzling golden sheen. When Jon musses it or boosts it with a squirt of hair spray, it flares around his face like a nimbus, a halo — an aura of shiny fuzz. The hair has great body and good texture and a nice, natural wave, and the ends don’t look the least bit split.”The hair was crucial — important enough that a genre took its name from it. At its peak, hair-metal style was just as extreme and specific as the ethos of drag queens lip-syncing disco hits: Whether you achieved voluminous hair through a wig or through Aqua Net, you presented yourself in an exaggerated fashion that suggested even more passion than the music you were performing. Some hair-metal bands opted for full-tilt rock fashion and cosmetics, while others didn’t, but they all had the hair — even the ones who insisted they were playing hard rock or glam rock.Hair-metal bands were frequently absurd, mostly interested in women as eye candy and blatantly careerist. Their sound thrived from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, bookended by the success of Van Halen (an inspiration to many hair-metal bands) and Nirvana (grunge served as the genre’s death knell). Its epicenter was just a few city blocks — the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Calif., which was basically a hair-metal petting zoo on 1980s weekends — but the ethos spread around the world, propagated by music videos in heavy rotation on MTV.A video that combined a catchy song with over-the-top visuals could make you famous, and so the genre’s high points have endured. These are 15 of the best.Def Leppard, ‘Rock of Ages’ (1983)“Rock of Ages” took throbbing rhythms, metal guitars, hip-hop cadences, biblical references and the nonsense German phrase “gunter gleiben glauchen globen,” and blended them into an anthem. The video similarly chewed up Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” an absurdly phallic glowing broadsword and the shirtless drummer Rick Allen’s Union Jack shorts. “Rock of Ages” defined the ambitions of the hair-metal genre so well that it later became the title for the hit jukebox musical about ’80s rock in Los Angeles, even though the show lacked the actual Def Leppard song. The band, which later reversed course on the show, has repeatedly renounced the term hair metal and pointed out that Def Leppard had nothing to do with Hollywood high jinks: “Literally while everybody else is poncing around Sunset Boulevard doing whatever they did, we were in Holland living next to a windmill recording the ‘Hysteria’ album,” the singer Joe Elliott said last year.Autograph, ‘Turn Up the Radio’ (1984)Autograph’s first live shows ever, before it even had a record deal, were on a nationwide tour as Van Halen’s opening act. (The drummer Keni Richards went jogging with the Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and slipped him a demo tape.) Because of its name, the group managed to score a sponsorship from Paper Mate, which financed this video (hence the egregious product placement). The song features one of the genre’s favorite production tricks: a stripped-down chorus bolstered with backward drums.Ratt, ‘Round and Round’ (1984)The lyrics “looking at you/looking at me” encapsulate both the electric charge of a new love affair and the fashion interplay between metal bands and their audiences. This clip features Milton Berle, both in drag and with a stogie (his nephew managed the band), and the popular video theme of class warfare, here expressed by the guitarist Warren DeMartini interrupting a snooty upper-crust dinner party by crashing through the ceiling, onto the plates and silverware. More