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      Drake Accuses Universal of Boosting Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’

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      The Canadian rapper filed legal papers on Monday in New York and Texas accusing his record label of promoting “Not Like Us” ahead of Drake’s tracks.Drake’s war of words with Kendrick Lamar, through a vicious back-and-forth of diss tracks, generated some of the biggest headlines in rap this year.And now it has landed in court.On Monday, lawyers for Drake filed legal papers in New York and Texas accusing the Universal Music Group — the giant record company behind both rappers — of operating an elaborate scheme to to promote Lamar’s “Not Like Us” at the expense of Drake’s music, using bots to drive up clicks on streaming services and payola to influence radio stations.In documents filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan on behalf of one of Drake’s companies, Frozen Moments, the rapper’s lawyers said that Universal “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves with a song, ‘Not Like Us,’ in order to make that song go viral, including by using ‘bots’ and pay-to-play agreements.”In a separate filing in Bexar County, Texas, lawyers for Drake — this time filing under his real name, Aubrey Drake Graham — said they were considering a defamation claim against Universal over Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” the hit song that represented the climax of Drake and Lamar’s rap war.In that song, Lamar took various swipes at Drake — including calling Drake and his crew “certified pedophiles.” Universal, Drake’s filing said, “could have refused to release or distribute the song or required the offending material to be edited and/or removed,” but chose to put it out instead.“UMG knew that the song itself attacked the character of another one of UMG’s most prominent artists, Drake,” the filing said, “by falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, engaging in pedophilic acts, harboring sex offenders, and committing other criminal sexual acts.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      TV on the Radio, Brooklyn Rock Veterans, Return to the Stage

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      Some members of an art scene, once it has become the subject of myth, make a habit of downplaying its reputed virtues, usually for reasons of mercy, modesty, or self-preservation. But the turn-of-the-century Brooklyn rockers TV on the Radio won’t sugarcoat it: Things really were better back then.“It was better,” said the multi-instrumentalist Jaleel Bunton, 50, over dinner in Greenpoint last week, without even a moment’s hesitation.“It was way better than this,” the singer and songwriter Tunde Adebimpe, 49, concurred. “Not going to lie.”At the time, starting a scrappy rock band in nearby Williamsburg, where Bunton and the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kyp Malone, 51, have lived since the Bloomberg era, was the practical thing to do. (Adebimpe, a former resident, moved to Los Angeles in 2014.) Hermès and Chanel had not yet set up shop, and artists of all sorts took advantage of the neighborhood’s cheap rent and feckless enforcement of the building code.While the band was making its first album, “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes,” (which was recently rereleased in a special 20th anniversary edition and is the focus of a new run of live shows — the band’s first in five years), neighbors included the fellow indie-rock idols Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Grizzly Bear. It was still possible to go from your apartment to your barista job to your rehearsal space to your gig at one of several thriving D.I.Y. music venues without ever getting on the train.From left: Kyp Malone, Tunde Adebimpe and Jaleel Bunton of TV on the Radio. The goal all along, they said, was to be able to keep making music that excited them. OK McCausland for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Digging Into Kendrick Lamar’s Samples

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      Listen to some of the most notable sonic references on “GNX,” from SWV, Luther Vandross and Debbie Deb.Kendrick LamarAJ Mast/The New York TimesDear listeners,On Friday, the rap superstar Kendrick Lamar surprised everyone by releasing his sixth studio album, “GNX,” without warning. It is a fitting finale to a triumphant year for Lamar, who emerged victorious by just about every measure from a high-profile beef with hip-hop’s pre-eminent hitmaker Drake and scored one of the biggest smashes of his career with the caustic diss track, “Not Like Us.” The Compton rapper’s victory lap will continue into new year, too: On Feb. 2, he’s up for seven Grammys. A week later, he is set to headline the Super Bowl halftime show.On his intricately layered 2012 breakthrough “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” and its grand 2015 follow-up, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” Lamar established himself as an artist capable of epic statements and sweeping concept albums. He also proved to be a musician who takes his time between releases, tinkering with his bars and polishing sonic worlds until they are as close to perfect as he can make them. “GNX,” though, is a different kind of Lamar album: It’s lean, mean and immediate. The beef with Drake, as my colleague Jon Caramanica suggests in his sharp review of “GNX,” seems to have made Lamar more reactive and nimble, bringing him into the present tense.Accordingly, “GNX” carries its sense of history more lightly than some of Lamar’s denser releases — though it is still an album in deep conversation with the past and present sounds of West Coast rap. In order to evoke that history, Lamar often turns to one of hip-hop’s signature arts: sampling.Today’s playlist compiles the sources of some of the most notable sonic references on “GNX” — from SWV, Luther Vandross and Debbie Deb — and follows up on them with Lamar’s own tracks, so you can hear the ways he and his producers flip them into something new. It also features a few samples from earlier Lamar hits.This playlist is just a brief introduction to the samples in Lamar’s discography — “GNX” alone is overflowing with them. But I hope it’s an invitation to listen more deeply to all the references, homages and historical conversations happening between the lines of his music.Also, a programming note: I won’t be sending out a new edition of the newsletter this Friday, because of the holiday. If you need a Thanksgiving playlist, might I suggest revisiting this one from last year?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Brooklyn Academy, Musical Journeys Through Minefields

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      The Silkroad Ensemble’s “American Railroad” and Alarm Will Sound’s “Sun Dogs” used music and images to engage with difficult topics.The completion of the transcontinental railroad was a herculean achievement. In 1850, the United States had 10,000 miles of track; by 1900, trains carried people, goods and ideas from coast to coast over 215,000 miles of track. Recently, historians have begun to tally the human cost of this construction project, especially among the people who performed the dangerous and backbreaking labor and the Native tribes whose lands and livelihoods were slashed through by the tracks.On Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Silkroad Ensemble brought this history to life in “American Railroad,” an evening of multimedia storytelling that probed collective scars while letting musical lineages tangle in beguiling ways. Carried by the joyful collaboration of brilliant improvisers, the performance proved that this ensemble has lost none of its verve since Rhiannon Giddens, a musical polymath and scholar of Appalachian music, became artistic director in 2020. (The ensemble was founded in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma to celebrate the cultures along the ancient Silk Road.)A haunting tune from Appalachia, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” anchored the program. A work song created by incarcerated Black laborers, it describes the deadly cave-in of a railroad tunnel. Giddens sang it with a voice splintering with emotion over a background of harsh percussive thuds.Individual numbers paid tribute to dispossessed Native Americans, Irish famine refugees and Chinese laborers cut off from their families by racist immigration laws. While each time the cultural context was deftly sketched through specific sounds — a Celtic harp, a pentatonic tune — the interplay of instruments native to other regions revealed new affinities. Historical photographs, projected above the stage, added visual poignancy.Rhiannon Giddens, the artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, singing “Swannanoa Tunnel.”Ellen QbertplayaAt times, though, the program had a didactic streak that felt at odds with the polycentric spirit of the music making. The inclusion of an Indian-inspired segment with fiery tabla solos by Sandeep Das was a musical highlight. But the accompanying text slide, drawing links between the transcontinental railroad and industrialization in British-ruled India, brought an unnecessary whiff of the classroom. Silkroad is involved in curriculum design in middle schools in underserved communities across the country, and at moments like these, the desire (stated in its publications) to “reset the narrative” in historiography feels heavy-handed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘GNX’ Review: Kendrick Lamar Heads Back to His Comfort Zone on Surprise Album

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      After a war of words with Drake that yielded one of the biggest hits of Lamar’s career, the Los Angeles rapper is eager to shift back on his sixth album.Every so often, Kendrick Lamar steps into the present.The rapper, 37, is so mindful of hip-hop history, his role in it and the internal logic of the genre that it often seems like he’s performing on a different playing field than his ostensible peers. He’s a man on an island, and contentedly so.That’s part of what made his feud with Drake, which began in March and stretched through the spring and summer, so bracing. Not only did it place Lamar in the immediate present, and with real stakes on the line, but it underscored a streak of apparent disgust and resentfulness that emerges anytime he’s being pulled into the now. What’s happening in the moment is in essence a distraction from Lamar’s larger creative mission.His eventual triumph in the tug of war was led by the mainstream success of “Not Like Us,” one of the most popular songs of his career and, more important, an immediate contribution to the cultural zeitgeist. It was Lamar using Drake’s typical weapons against him — an acknowledgment that even if Lamar prefers not to pay attention to prevailing winds, he can ride them if need be.From a distance, “GNX,” his sixth album, which was released with no announcement on Friday, has some of that same immediacy. On the two opening tracks, “Wacced Out Murals” and “Squabble Up,” Lamar is rapping with the seething indignation he weaponized so effectively during the beef: “I’ll kill ’em all before I let ’em kill my joy”; “Before I take a truce, I’ll take him to hell with me.”But this is only one part of what Lamar is doing on “GNX,” an impressive but slight collection of flag-planting thumpers, puffed-chest posse cuts, conceptual experiments and moments of introspection — though nowhere near the intense internal interrogation of his last album, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” It’s a palate cleanse of a sort, potentially casting off the last dregs of the Drake kerfuffles, and also, given its thematic unevenness, potentially a place holder between more substantive releases. Drake is, at most, a spectral presence on this album — there’s nothing as savagely personal as “Meet the Grahams,” the vicious salvo Lamar released in May. Lamar appears keen to move on.But what that means is that he’s eager to move back — back in time, back into history, back into his comfort zones. Taken literally, that’s Los Angeles, a city with rich musical history that Lamar has been scrupulously updating for over a decade now.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charles Dumont, Who Wrote Enduring Melodies for Édith Piaf, Dies at 95

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      His dozens of songs included “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” a powerful anthem of redemptive love that became one of Piaf’s signature songs.Charles Dumont, who wrote the music for “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” the soaring song about sweeping away the past to find love anew that the hallowed but troubled singer Édith Piaf turned into an anthem of French culture, died on Nov. 18 at his home in Paris. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter Sherkane Dumont.Mr. Dumont had a prolific career, writing melodies for the likes of Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco and Barbra Streisand and music for French television and film. In the 1970s, he embarked on an award-winning career as romantic crooner.Still, it was the roughly 30 songs that he, with the lyricist Michel Vaucaire, wrote for Piaf — the diminutive and radiant chanteuse known as the Little Sparrow — that, by his own admission, defined his career. “My mother gave birth to me, but Édith Piaf brought me into the world,” Mr. Dumont said in a 2015 interview with Agence France-Presse.“Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (“No, I Regret Nothing”), introduced in 1960, became a definitive song for a definitive French singer, a woman who became not just a global star but also a cultural ambassador for her country.With its martial solemnity, the song had the feel of a patriotic anthem, which gave power and drama to lyrics that express, in blunt and defiant terms, a rejection of past memories, both good and bad, while moving toward a new future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Does the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä Deserve His Meteoric Rise?

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      The 28-year-old maestro, entrusted with two storied ensembles, visited Carnegie Hall with the superb Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.A raucously received performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Saturday was the latest exclamation point in the conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s meteoric rise. Mäkelä is just 28 and made his Carnegie debut a mere eight months ago with the Orchestre de Paris — one of the two very good ensembles he currently leads.He returned to the hall this week for a two-night stand with the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam — one of the two much-better-than-very-good ensembles he is set to take over in the coming years. (The news came in April that he would also be the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)Chicago and the Concertgebouw are more than excellent groups; they are cultural treasures, whose futures have been placed in the hands of a maestro who was widely unknown six years ago. It is safe to say that no conductor in modern history has been entrusted with so much at such a young age.Does he deserve it? With the physically extroverted Mäkelä bobbing, digging, punching and thwacking them on, the Concertgebouw’s musicians played superbly. By coincidence, the Berlin Philharmonic, another world-class ensemble, had visited Carnegie a few days before, and provided a useful comparison: Berlin’s kaleidoscopically colored, richly muscular force was distinct from the Concertgebouw’s blended and refined (though still sumptuous) elegance.It’s a luxurious sound, with full, liquid winds, discreetly burnished brasses and, best of all, sustained, velvety strings. Those strings had a beautifully restrained showcase joining Lisa Batiashvili in a hushed arrangement of a Bach chorale after her performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on Friday. And they were fevered yet lucid in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” on Saturday.Yet in some passages of the Schoenberg that were overstated, almost halting, you got a sense of Mäkelä’s shortcomings. He can be so deliberate, so obviously intent on creating precise rhythms and textures bar by bar, that some of the air can come out of the music. It all seems like it should be intense — he certainly looks intense — but you don’t always feel building energy or distinctive character over long spans. It’s a matter of moments over momentum.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83

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      Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple “Alice’s Restaurant” was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts.Alice Brock, whose eatery in western Massachusetts was immortalized as the place where “you can get anything you want” in Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 antiwar song “Alice’s Restaurant,” died on Thursday in Wellfleet, Mass. — just a week before Thanksgiving, the holiday during which the rambling story at the center of the song takes place. She was 83.Viki Merrick, her caregiver, said she died in a hospice from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ever since Mr. Guthrie released the song, officially called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” in 1967, it has been a staple of classic-rock stations every late November, not to mention car trip singalongs on the way to visit family for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock’s restaurant, the Back Room, does not feature much in the song itself. Over the course of a little more than 18 minutes, Mr. Guthrie — doing more talking than singing — recounts a visit that he and a friend, Rick Robbins, paid to Ms. Brock and her husband, Ray Brock, for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock with Mr. Guthrie in 1977. They met when she was a school librarian and he was a student.Peter Simon Collection, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst LibrariesA shaggy-dog story ensues: Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Robbins take some trash to the city dump, but, finding it closed, leave it in a ravine instead. The next morning the police arrest them for littering, and Ms. Brock has to bail them out.That night she cooks them all a big meal, and the following day they appear in court, where the judge fines them $50. Later, Mr. Guthrie is ordered to an Army induction center, where he is able to avoid the draft because of his criminal record.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More