Music

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.Cristina, a cult singer who brought avant-garde sensibilities to New York’s dance-music nightlife at the turn of the 1980s, died on Tuesday in New York. She was 64.Her daughter, Lucinda Zilkha Francis, said she had been suffering from several autoimmune disorders, including relapsing polychondritis, for approximately two decades. On Friday, her family learned she had tested positive for the coronavirus. In the fertile anything-goes downtown New York of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cristina cut a unique figure — a hyperliterary, well-to-do, seen-it-all performer who taunted club music culture with songs that could be read as wry parody or progressive updates.“My strength is not in my voice, nor do I have sexy ankles,” she told the Boston Globe in 1980. “I have an analytical brain, and maybe that’s a liability in rock n’ roll, but if I play it right, it will translate musical principles into theatrical terms, which is what I have to do anyway, given my lack of technical expertise in music.”Cristina Monet Palaci was born on Jan. 17, 1956, in Manhattan to Dorothy Monet, a writer and illustrator, and Jacques Palaci, a psychoanalyst. She attended Harvard, where she studied playwriting under William Alfred. She took a year off from college and came to New York, where she wrote freelance theater reviews for The Village Voice. It was there that she met Michael Zilkha, who became her boyfriend and, later, the engine behind her music career.Mr. Zilkha was starting Ze Records with a partner. Cristina, who didn’t have particular aspirations to be a singer, nevertheless became his first artist with the 1978 single “Disco Clone.” Produced by John Cale, it was a deceptively slick dismantling of disco’s sameness, sung in an aspirated and shrill voice: “If you like the way I shake it/And you think you want to make it/There’s 50 just like me.”“I thought it was so bad that it could be a Brechtian pastiche,” she told Time Out New York in 2004. “It turned out to be an eccentric and funny record — insane, enthusiastic, impassioned, amateurish.” (One version of the song features Kevin Kline on accompanying vocals.)According to a 1984 New York magazine article, after her first live performance, at the Squat Theater in Chelsea, Cristina’s mother told her, “You were always a brilliant writer. A good artist … a good actress. How could you be so self-destructive as to sing?”“Disco Clone” was successful enough that Cristina continued recording. Her self-titled debut album, released in 1980, was produced by August Darnell (who performed as Kid Creole), and featured disco paired with heavy Latin percussion. “The first theatrical, cinematic, nostalgic disco record, at a time when there wasn’t a lot of humor in disco,” Cristina said in an early-2000s interview with the zine Festive!Consistently, Cristina injected a wry, burned-out, misadventuring patrician sensibility into her lyrics and delivery, especially on her rendition, that same year, of the Leiber and Stoller song, “Is That All There Is?” (originally made famous by Peggy Lee).She tweaked the lyrics, making them both more whimsical and more terrifying: “I remember when I was a little girl, my mother set the house on fire — she was like that.” (Lieber and Stoller protested, and insisted the song be withdrawn from release.)The Cristina that appeared on records was unfiltered. “It was entirely her, there’s no confection or construction in it all,” Mr. Zilkha said in an interview.She and Mr. Zilkha married in 1983, and in 1984 she released her second album, “Sleep It Off,” produced by Don Was, with cover design by Jean-Paul Goude. On this album, she leaned into new wave, rendered again with savage satirical energy on songs like the punkish “Don’t Mutilate My Mink” and “What’s A Girl To Do.” (“If you loved the Pulitzer divorce trial, you’ll love this record,” crowed Rolling Stone.)“The one thing that pop music has lost lately is its sense of irony,” Cristina said when the album was released. “People either write dumb-funny novelty songs or dead-earnest serious songs. There’s nothing around that combines elements of both.”She and Mr. Zilkha moved to Texas soon after that album’s release, effectively ending her music career. “I believed the idea that Michael had bought me a career to such an extent that I felt sheepish and guilty, which I shouldn’t have been,” she told Time Out New York. After she and Mr. Zilkha divorced in 1990, she returned to New York.In its day, Cristina’s work was very much a product of its demimonde. But in 2004, her albums were reissued to great acclaim and wide attention. Her only other musical recording was a 2006 collaboration with Ursula 1000, “Urgent/Anxious,” which took advantage of the implied eye-rolling in her voice, which hadn’t diminished at all.Outside of music, Cristina retained an avid interest in theater and books. She was especially passionate about 19th-century literature. “When I was a child, she would read me Dickens, doing all the voices,” Ms. Francis recalled. She contributed occasional book and film reviews to the Times Literary Supplement, as well as articles to Tatler and London Literary Review.Her medical conditions were often debilitating: “It’s hard to plan a new album when you don’t know if you will make it down to the end of the street from one day to the next,” she told Time Out New York. But in recent years, she had recovered enough to begin traveling.In addition to her daughter, Cristina is survived by two granddaughters and her longtime companion, Stephen Graham. More

As certainly as country music tells a story about itself — it is rural, it is authentic — there are dissenters tugging it in new directions. Often those dissenters end up becoming revered in hindsight, even if their loyalties were questioned in the moment.Take Sam Hunt, the most proficient of the many hip-hop hybridizers that converged on Nashville in the early part of the 2010s. He has just released his second album, “Southside,” which combines his most traditionalist work and his most forward-thinking, and suggests that those need not be two different things.In the case of Kenny Rogers, who died last month at 81, the layer of pop gesture atop his country set him apart. He was a gentler, more centrist kind of country star than some of his contemporaries, but no less integral to the genre and its growth.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the borders Nashville polices, and the excellence that can emerge when they are tested.Guests:Bill Friskics-Warren, who contributes regularly to The New York Times and is the co-author of “Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles”Natalie Weiner, who writes about music for Billboard, Pitchfork and others More

For the past five years I have lived a mile from the Brooklyn Hospital Center — though I’m a bit ashamed to say that I did not realize it until a few weeks ago. I am fortunate to have until now moved through life with a breezy ignorance of the nearest hospital’s location. But that unawareness has been punctured hundreds, maybe thousands, of times over the past few weeks by a sound that has become my and my neighbors’ near constant companion: the sirens.They’re everywhere. They howl, yelp and bleat at all hours, like mournful electric coyotes. They Doppler in and out of my perception, one after another after another. Their persistence has a cumulative effect: I feel their presence in my body as an ever-increasing tightness in my shoulders and neck. It is as though, around the clock, the city itself were wailing for its sick and dying.Before the virus, there had been so much stimulus that many of us had learned to filter it out of our awareness — subway buskers’ pleas; sudden eruptions of earth-rumbling subwoofers at red lights — in order to preserve the emotional energy required to move through our days. But now in the absence of other sounds like heavy traffic, construction and the springtime shrieks of children on playgrounds, the sirens are all there is to hear. And of course, we cannot turn a deaf ear to what we know their escalating numbers signify.As I have been learning to live with the changing sounds of New York City, I’ve been thinking of the work of the experimental American composer Pauline Oliveros, who dedicated her long career to exploring “the difference between hearing and listening.” As she put it in a TED Talk in 2015, the year before she died, “To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”In the 1970s, Oliveros published a series of “Sonic Meditations,” playful koans meant to heighten our experience of listening. “Take a walk at night,” one of them went. “Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”I have heard the sounds of my city, incessantly, for the seven years that I’ve lived here, but the pandemic has demanded that I listen to them. To hear an ambulance siren is to faintly register the interruption of a high, whining pitch; to listen to an ambulance siren is to picture the face and the body and the family of the person it is carrying to a hospital, likely another neighbor suffering from Covid-19. More