Music

Chynna, the hip-hop artist who first turned heads on the modeling runway and then with her talent as a rapper, died on Wednesday in her native Philadelphia, her manager said. She was 25.The cause of death was not immediately known, John Miller, the hip-hop artist’s manager, said in an email on Wednesday night.The rapper, whose full name was Chynna Rogers and who lived in both Manhattan and Philadelphia, was known for her solo recordings and her collaborations with the hip-hop collective ASAP Mob. Death was a recurring theme in Chynna’s music, including in her album, “in case i die first,” which was also the name of one of her tours.“I think there’s too many soundtracks to our lives,” Chynna said in an Instagram video that she shared on Tuesday, her final post. “I need music to die to.”Her family said, “Chynna was deeply loved and will be sorely missed,” according to a statement provided by Mr. Miller.Word of Chynna’s death stunned the hip-hop world, which has grappled with the loss of a number of young rappers, including Juice WRLD, who died in December of an accidental drug overdose at 21, and ASAP Yams, one of Chynna’s mentors, who died at 26 in 2015 of accidental drug intoxication.“She was an extremely inspirational and unique artist and person,” Mr. Miller said.At 14, Chynna was discovered by a Ford Models scout during an outing at the amusement park Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J. She did catalog work for the agency for three years and appeared in a runway show for DKNY, which featured Chynna in its denim campaign.When she was 15, Chynna approached the rapper ASAP Yams on Twitter and asked to be his intern. They ultimately became friends. He encouraged her to write her own rhymes and she began releasing singles and performing with ASAP Mob, including at the South by Southwest music festival.“He probably felt cool that this little high school girl wanted to follow him around,” Chynna told The New York Times in 2015.Music platforms like SoundCloud and Spotify have streamed Chynna’s songs millions of times. Her viral hits included “Selfie” and “Glen Coco.”In 2017, Chynna’s mother, Wendy Payne, died at 51. Chynna is survived by her father, Michael Magness; two brothers, Jeremy Payne and Michael Magness; and a sister Nala Magness. More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Ahmed Ismail Hussein, whose sweet-stringed and melancholic melodies captivated generations of Somalis and made him one of Somalia’s most important musicians, died on Tuesday in London. He was 91.He had been infected by the novel coronavirus, according to Hanna Ali, the artistic director of Kayd Somali Arts and Culture, based in London, with which Mr. Hussein had been affiliated in recent years.Mr. Hussein was famous for playing the oud, the pear-shaped lutelike instrument that is central to Arab and Middle Eastern music.“The oud is my greatest pleasure,” he told a BBC interviewer in 2003. “If there’s an oud lying near me, I’ve just got to play it.”He moved between Somalia, Djibouti and Britain over the course of his recording and performing career. His music was influential in defining and popularizing the traditional Somali style known as qaraami, which involves a singer or a poet backed by the oud or drum.Mr. Hussein was born on April 15, 1928, in the coastal town of Berbera in northwestern Somalia. He spent his childhood and teenage years in the Yemeni city of Aden, where his father worked as a police sergeant.Mr. Hussein said he fell in love with the oud at 14 when he saw a man playing one there. He later apprenticed with the prominent Somali musician and poet Abdullahi Qarshe.His nickname, Hudeydi, came from his grandfather, who sailed boats to the Red Sea port of Hodeidah in Yemen.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Hussein, keen on preserving and passing on musical tradition, started offering oud lessons at his apartment in London in recent years, Ms. Ali said.His music and legacy were crucial to Somalis wherever they lived in the world, said the British-Somali novelist Nadifa Mohamed, who began studying the oud with Mr. Hussein in 2012. “His place in our cultural pantheon is fixed.”[embedded content] More

Hal Willner had a dream of connecting musicians who couldn’t possibly work together to play music that didn’t obviously suit them, and he somehow made it all work, creating albums and concerts that obliterated the lines between rock, jazz, country and soul, or between the mainstream and the avant-garde. And then on Tuesday, the experiment came to an end.Mr. Willner — matchmaker, yenta, fan, longtime music coordinator for the sketches on “Saturday Night Live” — had symptoms consistent with the coronavirus and died in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he lived with his wife, Sheila Rogers, a producer of “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” and their 15-year-old son, Arlo. He was 64.The death was confirmed by a spokesman, Blake Zidell.Mr. Willner was best known for assembling diverse casts of performers, including Rufus Wainwright and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, to play a slightly off-center body of work, such as the Disney songbook or the music of Nino Rota, who scored Federico Fellini’s movies. The music found a devoted following, but not breakout success.Maybe you’ve dreamed of hearing U2 with the horn section from Sun Ra’s Arkestra in a one-time-only performance at the Apollo Theater. If so, Hal Willner made your dream come true.Or Scarlett Johansson performing with Courtney Love? Ditto.He was obsessed with Soupy Sales and Laurel and Hardy, with old radio broadcasts, with the Holocaust memories of his father. And he jammed these obsessions into a small Midtown Manhattan recording studio stuffed to the rafters with puppets and memorabilia.“These were his talismans, his vestments, because his heart was like a reliquary,” said Tom Waits, a friend of 45 years.Lots of people own Popeye dolls. Mr. Willner’s were a gift from the punk-rock progenitor Richard Hell.Mr. Willner was born on April 6, 1956, in Philadelphia, to Carl and Etta Willner. His father and his uncle ran a delicatessen called Hymie’s. The brothers were the only members of the family to survive the Holocaust, and their experiences became a part of Hal’s childhood.“It explains everything,” Mr. Willner said. “I just retreated into television and records, and that was reality for me.”He moved to New York in 1974 to attend New York University, drawn by the sleazy Times Square milieu of “Midnight Cowboy.” New York did not disappoint.The jazz scene was evolving, punk rock was just coming together, comedy was becoming more experimental, the city was heading toward fiscal crisis. Mr. Willner wanted all of it.“The city was rough,” he said. “It had a smell to it.” But it was also, he said, “still an era where most people that you’d meet — what’s the line? The people who didn’t fit in anywhere else would move here.”For Mr. Willner it was home.He was apprenticed to the record producer Joel Dorn, left college, drove a taxi and got an idea: What if the jazz musicians he loved recorded the music from Fellini movies?Steven Bernstein, a jazz trumpeter and arranger, remembered discovering the 1981 album that eventually blossomed, “Amarcord Nino Rota.” “This was everything we loved, all in one place,” Mr. Bernstein said. “All these styles of music, I thought they were different. Hal just saw it all as one thing. It was completely revolutionary.”Mr. Bernstein became a regular in what Mr. Willner called his “renegade band of broken toys.” As their relationship deepened, Mr. Bernstein said, they talked often about people they had lost: Lou Reed; Levon Helm of the Band; Robert Altman, on whose film “Kansas City” they had collaborated. “He carried a lot of pain with him,” Mr. Bernstein said.In 1980 Mr. Willner joined “Saturday Night Live,” where his job choosing recorded music for the sketches gave him a steady income and a chance to bring his esoteric enthusiasms to a large audience.Albums followed, and concerts reimagining the work of Leonard Cohen, Kurt Weill, Bill Withers and Charles Mingus. He worked with the theater director Robert Wilson, including on a 2010 production in Poland on the 30th anniversary of the Solidarity movement. When Lech Walesa, the movement’s leader, walked onstage, an orchestra of Polish musicians played Sun Ra’s “Watusi.”Imagine.The actor and musician Tim Robbins remembered that during a low point in his life, Mr. Willner pushed him to get back into music, recording him with a band and then taking him to see some favorites.“He curated a trip for me at a time I needed it,” Mr. Robbins said. “We went to Lisbon to see Leonard Cohen, then to another part of Portugal to see Lou Reed, and then to Prague to see Tom Waits. He dreams of creating something that hasn’t been seen before.”Mr. Willner was both producer and close friend to Mr. Reed, who died of liver disease in 2013. In a statement, Laurie Anderson, who was married to Mr. Reed, called Mr. Willner one of her dearest friends — “hilarious, so tender and compassionate,” and “a soulful prince.”He wanted to see everything, hear everything and he was devoted to his friends, said David Johansen, a friend and frequent collaborator. Usually someone he knew was performing somewhere in town, Mr. Johansen said, and Mr. Willner was there.When Mr. Johansen performed at the Café Carlyle in January, filmed by Martin Scorsese, Mr. Willner attended every night. “He complained that he wasn’t seated with the beautiful people,” Mr. Johansen joked.In recent years, Mr. Willner would accompany his concert performances, reading poems and other Willner-type esoterica, such as a letter that Lenny Bruce wrote to his mother, orating with an impossibly dry sense of humor — a soft man with a crusty affect.“He was an O.G. hipster,” Mr. Johansen said.In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Willner is survived by his younger sister, Chari McClary, and his father, who is 95.He had recently completed work on a tribute album to the British rock star Marc Bolan, featuring a cast of hundreds. He told Mr. Bernstein it was going to be the album that finally made him as a producer.In his dreams, he still had further to go. More

John Prine was an Army veteran walking a U.S. Postal Service beat in Chicago and writing songs on the side when Kris Kristofferson heard him and helped spread the word about Prine’s gifts. Pretty soon, he resigned as a letter carrier; his supervisor snickered, “You’ll be back.” Nearly 50 years later, this January, he was given a lifetime achievement Grammy for his contributions to songwriting. The singing mailman almost always had the last laugh.Prine, who died on Tuesday from complications of the coronavirus, was legitimately unique. He took familiar blues themes — my baby left me — but filled them with whimsy and kindness. He liked a saucy lyric, and wrote movingly, in character, of the quiet lives and loneliness of humdrum people. He seemed like a Zen sage and offered an uncynical live-and-let-live morality in his songs, writing in a colloquial voice that revealed a love of the way Americans speak. He showed how much humor you could put in a song and still be taken seriously. He had less in common with any other songwriter than he did with Mark Twain.He grew up in Maywood, a western suburb of Chicago, and was reared by working-class parents from Kentucky, where he often spent summers with relatives and fell in love with country music and bluegrass. By 13, he was performing in rural jamborees. When he debuted in 1971, in his mid-20s, he sounded like an old man already, so years later, when he got old and went through two cancer treatments, he still sounded like himself. From his first to his last, he wrote songs that were tender, hilarious, and wise, without grandstanding any of these traits. Here are 15 of the best.‘Angel From Montgomery’ (1971)“Angel From Montgomery,” his best-known song, begins with a little declarative startle: “I am an old woman, named after my mother.” It’s an incisive and terrifying look at the dissatisfactions of a bad marriage and a woman’s sense of being economically trapped in her misery. Bonnie Raitt recorded it three years later and uncovered some of the song’s dormant melodies.‘Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore’ (1971)Prine’s self-titled 1971 debut album is a playlist all its own; it has more great songs than a lot of respected songwriters have in their entire careers. The moral stance of this sprightly folk-rock ditty is a response to what he saw as sham patriotism during the Nixon years, and it remains relevant: “Jesus don’t like killing/No matter what the reason’s for.” Prine, a former altar boy, stopped playing it live for a number of years, but when George W. Bush became president, Prine said, “I thought I’d bring it back.”‘Hello in There’ (1971)Some fans and critics are put off by this song and its slightly lesser companion, “Sam Stone,” which they see as performative displays of sensitivity toward the vulnerable, or what we now call virtue signaling. Yet somehow, we don’t ever criticize singers for signaling vices and meanness. Prine sings in the voice of an old married man with a dead son, who spends his days in silence and loneliness, and who at the end of the song, asks people to be kind to the elderly.‘The Frying Pan’ (1972)For his second album, “Diamonds in the Rough,” Prine assembled a small, mostly acoustic band and pursued a front-porch, Appalachian simplicity. Like a lot of his songs, this one takes a lighthearted view of domestic complications: A man comes home and discovers his wife has run off with a traveling salesman. He cries miserably, recounts what he loved about her (“I miss the way she used to yell at me/The way she used to cuss and moan”), and full of pride, comes to the wrong conclusion: Never leave your wife at home.‘Please Don’t Bury Me’ (1973)For people who love Prine’s music, there’s some small solace in listening to his songs about death, which have the same sense of mischief and acceptance as the ones about broken marriages. (Try “Mexican Home” or “He Was in Heaven Before He Died.”) The narrator is dead, and as angels explain to him how it happened, they also recap his last wish: to not be dropped into a cold grave, but to be put to practical use, as an organ donor: “I’d druther have ’em cut me up/And pass me all around.” A kind of recycling anthem from his terrific third album, “Sweet Revenge.”‘You Never Can Tell’ (1975)Almost like an apology, Prine concludes “Common Sense,” a grieving, downhearted album, with an exuberant Chuck Berry cover, one great writer nodding to another. The Memphis R&B guitarist Steve Cropper produced the record and put together a crack horn section, which pushes ahead of some barrelhouse piano. Prine wasn’t a rocker, but he could rock.‘That’s the Way the World Goes Round’ (1978)Prine seemed to have an unlimited ability to expand and vary songwriting structures and perspectives. This track, which has been covered by Miranda Lambert and Norah Jones, has two verses: In the first, the narrator describes a drunk who “beats his old lady with a rubber hose,” and in the second, the narrator gets stuck in a frozen bathtub (it’s hard to explain) and imagines the worst until a sudden sun thaws him out. Both verses illustrate the refrain: that’s the way the world goes round. Even when circumstances are bad in Prine songs, he favors optimism and acceptance.‘Iron Ore Betty’ (1978)A lot of Prine songs celebrate physical pleasure: food, dancing and sex, which he gallantly prefers to call “making love.” The working-class singer in this soulful, up-tempo shuffle feels unreserved delight at having a girlfriend (“We receive our mail in the same mailbox/And we watch the same TV”), and wants us to know he and Betty aren’t just friends (“I got rug burns on my elbows/She’s got ’em on her knees”). OK guy, we get it.‘Just Wanna Be With You’ (1980)A stomping number from “Storm Windows” in the style of Chuck Berry, with the Rolling Stones sideman Wayne Perkins on guitar. Prine’s lyrics don’t distinguish between reality and absurdity — they don’t clash, they mix — and here’s one more way to say you’re happy and in love: “I don’t even care what kind of gum I chew.” And another: “Lonely won’t be lonesome when we get through.”‘Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian’ (1986)Prine had a sideline in novelty songs, which give full voice to his comic absurdity, throwaways that are worth saving, including the 1973 semi-hit “Dear Abby,” and this now-problematic number from “German Afternoons” inspired by a paperback book called “Instant Hawaiian.” Prine and his co-writer Fred Koller began making up Hawaiian-sounding nonsense words full of sexual innuendo, and Lloyd Green added airport-Tiki-bar bar steel guitar for maximum faux authenticity. You can say Prine’s loving disposition makes the song OK, and you can also say it doesn’t.‘All the Best’ (1991)After five years away, Prine returned with “The Missing Years,” a Grammy-winning album produced by Howie Epstein, Tom Petty’s bass player. The singer in this gentle, masterly miniature claims to want good things for an ex-lover, but feelings aren’t simple: “I wish you don’t do like I do/And never fall in love with someone like you” twists the knife. Now recording for his own label, Oh Boy Records, Prine was about to hit a hot streak.‘Lake Marie’ (1995)Bob Dylan, who was a huge fan, called the haunted, mysterious “Lake Marie” his favorite Prine song, and who are we to disagree with Dylan on the topic of songwriting? Even though Epstein’s booming production draws too much attention to itself, “Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings” is full of winners: the simple, loving ballad “Day is Done,” the rapid-fire doggerel of “We Are the Lonely” and the calm, ornery “Quit Hollerin’ at Me,” where Prine tells his wife that the neighbors “already think my name is ‘Where in the hell you been?’”‘In Spite of Ourselves’ (1999)Prine was diagnosed with cancer, and doctors removed a tumor from the right side of his neck, which took away his already-modest ability to project his voice. But incredibly, his stolid singing was now perfect for harmonies, and he cut a duets album called “In Spite of Ourselves” with female country and Americana singers. On its one original song, Prine and Iris DeMent trade backhanded compliments (“She thinks all my jokes are corny/Convict movies make her horny”) that read like a divorce complaint, but turn out to be only pillow talk.‘Some Humans Ain’t Human’ (2005)At seven minutes and three seconds, this track from “Fair and Square” is the longest song on any of his studio albums. A cloud of slide guitar keeps this soft waltz afloat and allows Prine to express his disapproval of, if not contempt for, so-called humans who lack empathy for others. There’s a couplet that is clearly about George W. Bush, and Prine noticed that some audience members were surprised by it. “I never tried to rub it in anybody’s face, but I thought it was pretty clear that I wasn’t a closet Republican,” he told the Houston Press.‘When I Get to Heaven’ (2018)In 2013, doctors removed the cancerous part of Prine’s left lung, which sidelined and weakened him. It’s hard now to listen to his final album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” which was nominated for three Grammys, and not think that Prine heard the clock ticking louder. There’s so much tenderness in “Knockin’ on Your Screen Door,” about a man whose family left him with only an 8-track tape of George Jones, and in the elegiac, reassuring parental entreaty “Summer’s End.” In the last song, “When I Get to Heaven,” Prine describes his ideal afterlife: a rock band, a cushy hotel, a girl, a cocktail (“vodka and ginger ale”) and “a cigarette that’s nine miles long.” He removes his watch, and asks, “What are you gonna do with time after you’ve bought the farm?” More

In ordinary times, Pearl Jam and Green Day would both be on the road right now. Pearl Jam has just released “Gigaton,” its first studio album since 2013, and was set to headline arenas. Green Day’s 2020 album has a title that appears in family newspapers as “Father of All…,” and the band booked an international stadium tour — archly titled the Hella Mega Tour — as a nostalgia-tinged triple bill with a fellow 1990s band, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy, whose debut album appeared in 2001.Both Pearl Jam and Green Day are well aware that they’re rarities: 1990s bands that can still count on arena-sized audiences. They arrived as upstarts and have persisted through decades as headliners. The question facing them is how to avoid becoming dinosaurs.Pearl Jam and Green Day are survivors of two disparate 1990s rock attitudes: both rooted in punk, but otherwise mismatched. Where Pearl Jam was troubled and earnest, Green Day was flippant and sarcastic; where Pearl Jam let songs grind and ruminate, Green Day’s aesthetic was loud, fast and catchy, soon to be polished into pop-punk as the band’s meticulous musicianship emerged. Both have held onto their concert audiences, and built into the songs — frequently for Green Day, more occasionally for Pearl Jam — is decades of experience hearing singalongs echoing back from the bleacher seats.With the worldwide shutdown of concerts to stem the coronavirus pandemic, those singalongs are only figurative now. Which leaves the albums themselves, and each band’s coping strategy. In some ways, Pearl Jam and Green Day have more in common now. Both bands place themselves within a longer history of rock, flaunting their selected influences, and both have shrugged off any kind of purism or austerity, punk/grunge or otherwise.On their new releases, the two bands have swung decisively away from the approach of their previous albums. Green Day’s 2016 “Revolution Radio” directly addressed political and social issues, with a minimum of snark or jokiness; the production harked back to “American Idiot,” clear and expansive and largely naturalistic. But the group upended all those notions for “Father of All …”The new album updates Green Day for a 21st-century attention-deficit environment. Fast, loud and catchy is back; only three songs run longer than three minutes, and every one of those minutes is crammed with studio razzle-dazzle. Instead of taking up specific issues, most songs simply roar with generalized frustration and rage: “Drink it in, dumb it down, suck it up/As we watch the world burn,” Billie Joe Armstrong moans in “Junkies on a High.”Instead of building the production around the sound of the band onstage, “Father of All …” piles on the overdubs, abetted by the producer Butch Walker. Guitars and drums ricochet around in stereo, changing tone and location, while shouts and screams are tucked into the mix to heighten an air of mayhem. There are squadrons of guitars, vocal harmonies and handclaps, harking back to 1970s glitter-rock. There are direct homages to early Beatles (in “Stab You in the Heart”) and to late-1960s Beach Boys (in the verses of “Graffitia”), and there are polished bursts of buzz saw punk.It’s all very industrious, knowing and tuneful. Green Day heaps on the melodies and stadium shoutalongs-in-waiting, and its musical reflexes are strong, though some songs come close to recycling the band’s riffs and chord changes. But much of the album also comes across as merely frenetic, desperately trying to connect with memories of adolescent adrenaline. Too often, it flails so wildly to be noticed that little else registers.Pearl Jam’s 2013 album, “Lightning Bolt,” felt labored in its own way, with insistently lean production and songs that strained for significance. The one before that, in 2009, was titled “Backspacer,” as if acknowledging that Pearl Jam was combing its past for ideas. After a seven-year gap, though, “Gigaton” presents a band that’s far more comfortable in its own identity: mature but not complacent, equally ready to reflect or roar. “Whoever said it’s all been said/gave up on satisfaction,” Eddie Vedder declares in “Who Ever Said,” the album’s opener, adding, “All the answers will be found/in the mistakes that we have made.”That outlook runs through “Gigaton.” The lyrics often touch on the idea of acknowledging and learning from the past but not being mired in it, and of trying to transcend a dire present moment. And the music strives to live up to those goals. It keeps on stretching, prizing the limber, jamming live interplay that the band has built over the decades, but also extrapolating from it anew.Even songs that start off in established Pearl Jam modes — the clawing guitar riffer, the steadfast march, the somber ballad — often open out in new ways. Pearl Jam has a new co-producer for “Gigaton”: Josh Evans, who has a long association with the band and with members’ solo projects. Abetted by Evans, Pearl Jam lets its songs billow outward with neo-psychedelic richness: clouds of vocal harmony or guitar tones, subtle bulwarks of keyboard, impulsive instrumental passages, playgrounds of percussion.The songwriting on “Gigaton” comes from across the band, presumably winnowed through those seven years. Although Vedder wrote most of the lyrics, as usual, there are also songs written entirely by the drummer Matt Cameron (“Take the Long Way,” with churning 7/4 guitar riffs), the bassist Jeff Ament (the tinkling, meditative, loop-laden “Alright”) and the guitarist Stone Gossard (“Buckle Up,” a psych-folk ballad made uneasy by a spiraling guitar line and lyrics about murder).“Dance of the Clairvoyants,” the one song credited to the entire band (which also includes the guitarist Mike McCready), is a curveball: a bass-and-blips funk workout with Vedder’s vocals echoing David Byrne in Talking Heads’ 1980 “Born Under Punches.” In “Quick Escape,” by Vedder and Ament, the band emulates Led Zeppelin — burly and wailing guitars over bashing drums and pushy bass — while Vedder sings about a Morocco excursion that turns into an exile to Mars. The band sounds like it’s having a blast.This isn’t music that’s destined to make brand-new converts in an era of TikTok dances, laptop productions and bedroom-recorded mutterings. Its ambitions are still arena-scale: unwilling to compromise, but more than ready to shake the second mezzanine if and when a tour can happen again. More