Music

The original “Trolls” movie in 2016 was about the unique privilege associated with being a Troll — kaleidoscopically colorful lives, unrelenting joy, hourly hug-a-thons. Chipper, loopy songs peppered the film, which presented pop music, and Pop Trolldom, as sources of joy that are unimpeachably good (if a little oblivious).What horror lies beneath, though? In “Trolls World Tour,” which was released last week, Poppy, queen of the Pop Trolls, discovers that her tribe isn’t the only one out there, and that the Rock Trolls are intent on conquering them all, a residual effect of a time when Pop Trolls were, in fact, invaders. The real lesson of the movie? That one Troll’s privilege never comes without another Troll’s suffering.And yet in a movie that features musical megastars including Justin Timberlake, George Clinton, Mary J. Blige, Kelly Clarkson, J Balvin, Ozzy Osbourne and Gustavo Dudamel, it is, somehow, the genial, sometimes grating funk-soul singer-rapper Anderson .Paak who’s tasked with the sociopolitical heavy lifting.He voices Prince D — a Funk Troll, but really a Hip-Hop Troll — who interrupts Poppy (played by Anna Kendrick as a walking embodiment of Troll privilege) on her quest to save Troll Kingdom from the evil, rhythm-deficient intentions of the Rock Trolls, led by Queen Barb (Rachel Bloom). Prince D presents her with a brief lesson in appropriation history called “It’s All Love (History of Funk)”: “The Pop Trolls started snatching up all of the strings/Put the melodies on top of poppy lil’ beats/They cut us out of the scene.”Turns out all that Pop Troll joy was built upon the subjugation of other musical Trolls. The actual truth: Pop absorbed all of the things that made each of the other styles great and watered it down! Pop wrote the history books — a scrapbook, in this universe — suggesting that it wasn’t, in fact, the aggressor!For 6-year-olds who sang along with Poppy and Branch (a tepid Timberlake) last time around, this might be a destabilizing plot twist. But this is exactly the sort of conversation that’s been de rigueur in music criticism for the last couple of decades, especially when compounded by the film’s other plot throughline, the impending imperialism of the Rock Trolls.This is the film’s central battle: poptimists vs. rockists. (Or, in non-critic terms, the idea that pop music has real cultural value vs. the belief that rock determines the framework through which popular music should be analyzed.) But in “Trolls World Tour,” which reads like a position paper written by someone extremely, perhaps unreasonably frustrated about how the dark side of pop history was erased by the first film, both sides are flawed.There are, in fact, six Troll tribes — Pop, Funk, Country, Techno, Classical and Rock — that do not overlap (apart from Cooper, a Funk Troll raised by Pop Trolls). The Country Trolls — fronted by Delta Dawn, voiced by an almost embarrassingly good Kelly Clarkson — are robust and protectionist, just like in real life. Classical and Techno merit little narrative exposition, however. There are characters representing reggaeton (played by J Balvin) and K-pop (played by the girl group Red Velvet) as bounty hunters living between tribes, though ones inclined toward dance-offs.As for pop, the genre is presented as a tonally narrow emotional ethos. “We love music with a hummable hook, with an upbeat melody, with a catchy rhythm that makes you want to snap your fingers, tap your toes and wiggle your butt,” says the Pop Troll king. This is, of course, a very specific and narrow definition that doesn’t much resemble the pop landscape in 2020 — no Post Malone-style miserablism, Drake-esque sing-rapping or Weeknd-like glittery angst.In this pluralist kingdom, rock is a convenient villain — its Trolls dress in shades of gray and black and prefer clothes and vehicles with spikes; its chords zing out from guitars like blades; and it is also out of fashion. The Rock Trolls come off like a tribe of aggrieved ancients, eager to restore their draconian dullness. They’re also cool villains: Perhaps the next generation of troublemaking kids will turn to rock for inspiration. Cue a heavy metal resurgence around 2030 or so.Though rock and pop are at odds in “Trolls World Tour,” the movie suggests their impulses are fundamentally the same — to colonize and absorb from others. Pitting pop against hip-hop or funk would have unwelcome racial overtones.And so all the wisdom comes from the Funk Trolls, whose king and queen are played by Blige and Clinton, black music legends. Even though Poppy ultimately foils the Rock Trolls’ plan for rock zombification of all the Troll nations, it’s only with the wisdom she gleans from the Funk Trolls that she’s set on that path.In the first “Trolls,” most of the rapping came from Zooey Deschanel’s character, a grave error corrected here with Anderson .Paak’s Prince D, and also Tiny Diamond (Kenan Thompson). There’s another nod to hip-hop’s generative power, too. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), in which Poppy rescues everyone from rock’s clutches, the thing that begins to restore life, color and music to all of the Trolls is Cooper’s heartbeat, followed by Prince D’s beatboxing. Pop gets the glory, but hip-hop is the foundation. Business as usual. More

For an artist who has been releasing music for two and a half decades, Fiona Apple’s catalog has remarkably little filler.As her career has progressed, the time between her albums has grown longer — her first in eight years, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” will be released on Friday — honoring Apple’s exacting personal standards for her art. Recalling the fallow period between her masterful 1999 record “When the Pawn …” and its long-delayed but ultimately beloved 2005 successor “Extraordinary Machine,” she told Rolling Stone, “The first couple of years, I didn’t have anything left in me to write about. That was a good thing, because it meant I’d done my job on the last batch of songs.”Apple emerged as a precocious industry darling — she wrote most of the songs on her volcanic 1996 debut “Tidal” when she was 17 — but, much to the delight of rebel girls everywhere, quickly proved herself to be an outspoken iconoclast. She’s long battled with record executives who wish she’d streamline the textured complexities of her songs and write a lucrative “sequel” to her 1997 radio hit “Criminal.”But Apple has doggedly followed her own muse, at her own pace: Her magnificent 2012 LP “The Idler Wheel …” includes her most uncompromising and independent-minded music yet. In anticipation of her first new album in almost a decade, here’s a quick trip through some of her best songs.‘Sleep to Dream’ (1996)The “Tidal” opener is a sparse, earthshaking statement of purpose: “You say love is a hell you cannot bear, and I say give me mine back and then go there, for all I care!” The arrangement trembles in her voice’s wake. Jon Brion, who would eventually become a friend and frequent collaborator, plays guitar and vibraphone. The moody, restless video, directed by Stéphane Sednaoui, earned Apple the 1997 MTV Video Music Award for best new artist — for which she’d give that still-infamous acceptance speech declaring of the music industry’s glitz, “This world is [expletive].”‘Shadowboxer’ (1996)This wise-beyond-its-years torch song allowed Apple to show off not just the elegant lyricism of her songwriting but the smoky depths of her voice. (Note the opalescent tone she gives the final word in that anguished line, “To save the pain of once my flame and twice my burn.”) In the context of the late ’90s, this would-be standard felt like a glorious anachronism: It is still probably the closest thing to a Nina Simone song ever to receive alt-rock airplay.‘Criminal’ (1997)The notoriously sultry hit that Apple said she wrote about “feeling bad for getting something so easily and taking advantage of your sexuality and just using it to get whatever you want,” “Criminal” (and its controversial, Mark Romanek-directed music video) was responsible for some of Apple’s greatest successes and also for some of her most demeaning criticism. In more recent years, she has reclaimed the track’s power by turning it into what she calls her “little help-out-people song”: Apple relishes approving rights requests from “any college dancer or ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ [contestant],” and last year — after Jennifer Lopez unforgettably danced to it in “Hustlers” — Apple pledged to donate two years’ worth of the song’s proceeds to help refugees at the southern border of the United States. “I’m not that scared girl in underwear anymore,” she told Vulture last year. “The song isn’t that to me anymore. It’s my way of paying for things that I want to get done.” More

After more than a month of quarantine culture, most of us have some sense of what being on a desert island feels like. So we’ve had plenty of time to consider what we’d like to hear in our infinite leisure, beyond the roar of the surf. It is, in fact, just what we’ve been listening to, with gratitude, during these many weeks. If you’re like us, you may have compiled your own lists already. See how they stack up against the 20 albums we’ve chosen.Ben BrantleyEven though most of these recordings are tattooed onto my memory, they are still the ones I play the most, and every time I listen to them, I hear new things. Some of them were the basis for my fantasy life when I was a child. Today, all of them offer perspectives on life as I have come to know it since, and there’s enough variety here to match nearly all of my shifting chameleon moods.‘Chicago’John Kander and Fred Ebb’s sardonic take on the American justice system is musical satire at its most sophisticated. This is one case in which I’m going with the recording of a revival (the deathless version that opened in 1996 and was still running on Broadway before the shutdown), in which Bebe Neuwirth, Ann Reinking and James Naughton have a wonderful time proving that crime pays.‘Follies’It’s the first Broadway show I ever saw, and the older I get, the richer it sounds. Stephen Sondheim’s many-splendored score for this story of the reunion of Ziegfeld Follies-style performers deconstructs nostalgia — and specifically, the way we hear the songs of our past. The 1971 original cast recording features such jewels as Alexis Smith singing “The Story of Lucy and Jessie” and Dorothy Collins doing “Losing My Mind.”‘Grey Gardens’In this 2006 musical, inspired by the documentary film of the same title, Christine Ebersole’s performance as the eccentric society recluse Edie Beale (and as her own mother in an earlier time) is one of the most nuanced and deep-burrowing of all Broadway interpretations, ranging from antic exhibitionism to heartbreakingly quiet loneliness. And Scott Frankel and Michael Korie’s score provides a primer in the art of defining character through song.‘Gypsy’Of all American musicals, this 1959 collaboration among Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim may well be both the greatest and most perfect (attributes that are not always synonymous in art). It also provides peerless examples of song as psychodrama, gloriously evident in the fearsome, utterly un-self-conscious performance of Ethel Merman, as the mother of all stage mothers, in the original Broadway cast recording.‘Hamilton’The hip-hop version of the American Revolution, as delivered by the impossibly talented Lin-Manuel Miranda, has a musical momentum as propulsive as history itself. This is a work that’s almost as exciting to listen to as it was to see, and it’s a guaranteed cure for inertia.‘My Fair Lady’The most engagingly literate of musicals, with the team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe translating George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” into impeccably cadenced song. Rex Harrison, as the arrogant master of phonetics, Henry Higgins, and Julie Andrews, as his cockney flower girl pupil, redefine the nature of romantic star chemistry in the 1956 recording.‘Oklahoma!’This seamless masterpiece from Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II forever changed the form of the American musical, and it’s far from the simple, sunny portrait of frontier life that it’s sometimes made out to be. You can still hear the fear and uncertainty as well as the robust passion in the characterful interpretations of the now classic songs from the original Broadway version of 1943.‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’Vengeful, bloodletting rage churns magnificently through Stephen Sondheim’s score for this story of murder by tonsorial means in Victorian England. It also features some of Sondheim’s wittiest pastiche work and, in the 1979 album, two of the greatest musical performances ever recorded — by Len Cariou, in the title role, and Angela Lansbury, as his demented helpmate.‘The Threepenny Opera’Abrasive, snarling, didactic and downright irresistible when you’re in a misanthropic state of mind. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht reworked John Gay’s 18th-century “Beggar’s Opera” into a deliciously mordant indictment of the capitalist class system. The cast recording of the fabled 1954 Off Broadway version lets you hear the incomparable Lotte Lenya sing “Pirate Jenny.”‘West Side Story’Some of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard are in Leonard Bernstein’s music for this groundbreaking show from 1957 about rival street gangs in New York. And when Chita Rivera leads the sardonic anthem “America,” in the original recording, it’s with a visceral energy that turns song into dance, so that you can imagine Jerome Robbins’s original choreography.Jesse GreenMuch as I love them, I don’t need the likes of “West Side Story” and “My Fair Lady” on my desert island; they are so much a part of me already, having them there would be redundant. Instead I want the albums that still feel new no matter how many times I’ve listened to them, the works that are never completely knowable, that overwhelm me emotionally, again and again.‘The Band’s Visit’An Egyptian military band gets stranded in a dull Israeli desert town. What proceeds from this unlikely premise is a game-changing 2017 musical about the ways people cannot connect — and they ways they can, mostly through music. Avoiding Golden Age excess, David Yazbek’s urgent, exquisite score, with its lean song forms and its Israeli and Arab soundscape, maintains its mystery over many listenings.‘Caroline, or Change’The social conflicts of 1963 and their expression in the pileup of musical styles of that era make this 2004 musical about a black woman who works as a maid for a well-meaning Jewish family in Louisiana as dense and wrenching as documentary. Yet with its allegorical figures (a bus, a washing machine, the moon) and its sliver of a happy ending, Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner’s great work is also a great deliverance.‘Hairspray’For exercise, one needs a dancy beat on that desert island, and the songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman for this 2002 musical all but defy you not to move. But they are more than just clever reworkings of period grooves appropriate to the show’s 1962 setting, in which a Baltimore teen hair-hops her way to love and racial harmony. Like the best pastiche, they improve on what they copy, creating new standards in the process.‘The Last Five Years’I’ve never seen a version of this 2001 musical by Jason Robert Brown that didn’t move me, but the original cast album is still the one I listen to, for the eccentricity, emotional pitch and daredevil vocalism of Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz. As a couple breaking up and coming together at the same time (she in reverse chronology, he in the regular kind) they are so raw and vivid you feel like part of the therapy they obviously needed but failed to get.‘The Light in the Piazza’Kelli O’Hara has to be on my island somewhere, and how better than with Victoria Clark, as daughter and mother, in this 2005 musical that has a romantic yet spiky score by Adam Guettel? On vacation in Italy the two women encounter — and their beautiful songs extend into — an almost philosophical realm, the many kinds of love humans experience: new, transactional, faded, obsessive, hopeless, hopeful.‘The Most Happy Fella’The story of a waitress who becomes the “mail-order bride” to an older grape farmer gave Frank Loesser the raw materials for the most capital-R Romantic musical ever. Its roster of styles, including tarantellas, comedy showstoppers and Puccini pastiches, is beautifully captured in 2 hours and 15 minutes of nearly continuous song — highlighted by the operatic baritone Robert Weede’s enormously affecting performance in the 1956 original.‘Passion’Because Ben includes “Sweeney Todd” on his list — an obvious choice for mine as well, given the incredibly rich sound world it creates — I’ll cheat with my other favorite recording of a Sondheim score. That’s “Passion,” the much disliked 1994 musical drama about the impossible yet possible love between a sickly, ugly woman and a handsome, strapping soldier. There is simply no bottom to its depth of empathy for (and Donna Murphy’s vocal characterization of) the emotionally dispossessed.‘She Loves Me’Often referred to as a jewel box for its suite of glittering songs, this 1963 musical is actually built like a truck — a very pretty truck. The story of two clerks who hate each other by day but unknowingly love each other by mail provided Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick with the setting for one of the most polished musicals ever, and Barbara Cook with the material for one of her most brilliant performances. Maybe that’s why they call it a jewel box.‘When Pigs Fly’Few cast albums offer more hilarity per cut than the recording of this 1996 gay (in both senses) revue by Dick Gallagher and Mark Waldrop. Whether sending up the homophobe archvillains of the day in a series of lovers’ laments (“Newt,” “Strom,” “Rush”) or celebrating change with a “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” the album documents a moment when great loss (including the death of the show’s animating spirit, Howard Crabtree) was finally shading into hope.‘Zorba’Assuming I’ll be able to hear Ben playing “Chicago” at full blast on his nearby island, I’ll take a different Kander and Ebb cast album to mine: the thrilling 1968 recording of “Zorba.” Herschel Bernardi is unforgettable as the man who lives every second as if he would never die, and the rest of the cast delivers some of Kander’s earthiest melodies with power and pathos that time cannot seem to diminish. More

Since you can’t attend any live performances at the moment, you have lots of hours to fill with show tunes. But before you combine the Polish recording of “Les Miz” on your playlist with the sad 2010 revival cast album of “A Little Night Music” and cherry-picked highlights from some random “Porgy and Bess,” please heed a few idiosyncratic words of advice from lifelong listeners on how best to make your way through our desert island cast recording lists.1. Do get the original cast album.The first Broadway (or Off Broadway) recording is almost always better than any revival, studio, soundtrack, foreign language or London recording. Later versions may have more songs, or may include important new interpretations, and are always worth a listen. But with so few exceptions that you could probably count them on the sides of an LP — the 1968 “Funny Girl” film soundtrack is in many ways an improvement on the 1964 cast album — the original cast is the one that sounds the way it should, with the original orchestra playing the original orchestrations. Decide for yourself with the stage and screen versions of Barbra Streisand singing “Don’t Rain on My Parade”:[embedded content][embedded content]2. Don’t shuffle, pause or mutilate.A great cast album is not a collection of interchangeable songs; it’s a score that builds from start to finish, in the order the authors intended. Listen to the whole thing straight through in one sitting, if possible, or at least a full act at a time. Otherwise you’ll miss how the tension of “Sweeney Todd,” for instance, accumulates (and is not dissipated) by the lighter numbers that interrupt the darker ones. Or how “Hairspray” keeps topping itself on the way to its explosively giddy finale.3. Do excise any dialogue tracks.Listening to the interstitial scenes that some cast albums preserve for context can be informative the first time; by the third time you’ll want to plug your ears. This is even true when it’s Audra McDonald, so glorious in the song portions of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” doing the dialogue. Dialogue is not meant, as songs certainly are, to be heard over and over.4. Don’t read the liner notes.Except with musicals that are impenetrable without a plot summary — we’re looking at you, “Candide” — it’s better not to know, at least on first listening, what’s going on or what’s coming next. Write your own show in your head as you listen. Learn about the real one later.5. Do choose your listening companions with care.Musical comedy is as specific a taste as oysters or Marmite, and the sound of it can induce nausea and even violence in parties who do not share this affinity. Friendships, love affairs and marriages have been known to founder when an aficionado insists that a presumed soul mate sit in reverent silence while “The Golden Apple” fills the air. (Pro tip: Beware of people who refer to cast albums as soundtracks.)6. Don’t play a cast recording as background music at a party.The songs on these albums are in themselves a form of speech, of thought set to music, which evolves into a full conversation. Played in a room full of chatty people, this can sound irritatingly competitive. (See: The second version of “Good Thing Going” in the penthouse party scene of “Merrily We Roll Along.” You can find it in the second half of this recording of the 1994 revival — not the original, despite Rule No. 1.) More