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    Suicideboys Don’t Care for the Music Biz. They Got Its Attention Anyway.

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    The rap duo’s raw songs and festival-like touring strategy has paid off: Its latest album opened at No. 5 without traditional industry strategies or support.The Louisiana rap duo Suicideboys have avoided nearly all the trappings of the contemporary music machine. They rarely grant interview requests and make the occasional public appearance with their faces partially covered. Still, Scott Arceneaux Jr. (known as Scrim) and Aristos Petrou (a.k.a. Ruby da Cherry) recently celebrated their biggest opening week on the Billboard chart yet: a No. 5 debut for their fourth album, “New World Depression,” last month.“It’s kind of hard, dude,” Arceneaux, 35, said of dealing with their ever-growing visibility as one of the biggest independent rap groups in the United States. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”Over the last decade, a passionate and adoring fan base has been drawn to Suicideboys’ blend of Southern rap rhythms and pop-punk melodies, all cloaked in the lush, depressive fog of internet-native hip-hop. They became underground heroes by making raw music about triggering subjects, which they relentlessly promoted on their own until their fan base snowballed into a force the music industry couldn’t ignore.In 2021, on the strength of an audience they’d bootstrapped since 2014, they signed an eight-figure distribution deal with the Orchard, a Sony Music subsidiary, that was re-upped last year. Their semiannual Grey Day Tour — a mini-festival that’s featured similarly ascendant peers like the hardcore band Turnstile and the Florida rap aesthete Denzel Curry — has catapulted them onto the list of rap’s highest-grossing touring acts, taking in over $42 million and selling 431,000 tickets in 2023.Video chatting on the day of their new album’s release, the pair were nestled in a room speckled with soundproofing materials at one of their properties deep in the Florida panhandle, their home outside of New Orleans. Petrou, with waves of dark hair cascading from under a backward baseball cap, spoke casually and with curiosity, positioned in the background, while Arceneaux often sat half-profile at the forefront, slightly bowing his bowl-cut mullet when he wasn’t speaking thoughtfully about their journey so far.As cousins who grew up separately in the greater Louisiana area before coming together in New Orleans, Arceneaux and Petrou described their upbringings as chaotic. “Childhood was rough,” Arceneaux admitted. “There was always drama,” Petrou agreed. “Our parents would get into it. We’ve always remained close and very rarely let the family dynamic infect our relationship.”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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      He Wrote Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ and Has 2 More in the Vault

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      Steve Porcaro of Toto, who played on some of the biggest hits of the ’80s, has sold the rights to his music, including a pair of unreleased tracks with the superstar.After more than four decades, Steve Porcaro is still amazed that his song ended up on the biggest-selling album of all time.In 1982, when he was a keyboardist in Toto — the band of studio insiders that dominated rock radio with sleekly crafted hits like “Africa” and “Hold the Line” — Porcaro was tinkering with a new tune, a mid-tempo ballad inspired by his attempt to comfort his young daughter after a playground quarrel. The rest of the group wasn’t into it.But Porcaro kept working on the song at the studio of his Toto bandmate David Paich, the group’s primary songwriter, who was pitching Quincy Jones some rock-oriented material for Michael Jackson’s next album. One day, they put two of Paich’s songs on a cassette for Jones; on the flip side was a rough demo of Porcaro’s ballad.When Jones heard that tape, it was Porcaro’s tune that entranced him, with its mellow mood and searching chorus: “Why, why?/Tell her that it’s human nature.” With lyrics added by John Bettis, “Human Nature” became a key cut on “Thriller,” which sold 34 million copies in the United States alone and transformed pop music in the 1980s.“It was a total, absolute fluke,” Porcaro recalled in a recent video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles, which is lined with gold and platinum albums by Toto and Jackson.“Human Nature” is now part of the latest in the music industry’s big catalog transactions. This week, Porcaro signed a deal, estimated in the low eight figures, to sell the rights to his music to the Jackson estate and the independent music company Primary Wave, they confirmed.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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      in Music

      Alex Izenberg Was Almost a Teen Rock Star. His Second Chance Is Here.

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      On his 12th birthday, in April 2003, Alex Izenberg went to Guitar Center to jam.He was the prankster of his Los Angeles public school, a high-strung and mischievous kid who hated class but loved rock ’n’ roll. He dressed the part, too — a small, cherub-faced boy with a poofy brown mop tucked beneath a top hat, a black Stratocaster slung across a velvet vest. At Guitar Center, his friends marveled at his best Hendrix, and he attracted a famous listener, too.“I’m checking out, and I think, ‘Whoever’s playing has a really cool tone, a great feel,’” Linda Perry, the former 4 Non Blondes singer and pop songwriter, remembered in a phone interview. “I’m expecting to see some older dude, seasoned. But I see this dorky little kid in high-water pants and big glasses. I was in love.”Perry wanted to know everything: Were Izenberg’s parents musicians? Where’d he learn to play? Did he have that rig at home? When Izenberg chuckled and said no, Perry bought it for him, plunking down $5,000 for a “fiesta red” Fender Relic and a Marshall amp. She left her number, too, so he started calling, imploring her to see his preteen trio, Din Caliber. “It was a mini-Zeppelin or Beatles, all virtuoso-type geniuses,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to take you guys in.’”“Life doesn’t always make sense; oftentimes, it doesn’t,” Izenberg said.Peyton Fulford for The New York TimesIzenberg raced down a trail of teenage stardom. He shifted to home-school to focus on music. Perry introduced the band to a producer. The group changed its name to Paper Zoo, cut an EP for her label and toured with Roger Daltrey in 2009. But at 18, Izenberg left the band because its retro-rock no longer excited him like the indie-rock that had become an obsession — Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes.Bad news soon ballooned. His longtime girlfriend left. His parents split, and lost their house. He moved in with his grandmother. And there, in the speckles of the popcorn ceiling and in the reflection of the TV screen, he began seeing faces. In 2012, at 21, Izenberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia.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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      in Movies

      Leslie Uggams of ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Is a Fan of Nat King Cole and Billie Eilish

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      The actress, nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe for her performance in “Roots,” is still going strong with appearances in the TV series “Fallout” and the upcoming movie “Deadpool & Wolverine.”The veteran singer and actress Leslie Uggams likes to be busy.“Even when I’m home and I get to relax,” she said in a phone interview from her home in New York, “I have to be doing something — cooking, doing a puzzle — something.”The 81-year-old has kept busy since she made her debut at age 6 as Ethel Waters’s niece in the 1950s sitcom “Beulah.” The career that followed included an adolescence spent singing and dancing at the Apollo Theater; hosting her own televised variety show in 1969 (Sammy Davis Jr. and Dick Van Dyke were among her guests); winning a lead actress Tony in 1968 for the musical “Hallelujah, Baby!”; and earning an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination for portraying Kizzy in the 1977 mini-series “Roots.”Keeping ever current, Uggams appeared in the 2023 film “American Fiction,” performed in “Jelly’s Last Jam” at New York City Center last winter, then did a cabaret run at 54 Below.”After seven decades, I am still going strong,” she said.Uggams’s latest role, as the Vault official Betty Pearson on the TV series “Fallout,” has attracted a new wave of sci-fi devotees. (“I’m getting a lot of fan mail about Betty.”) And she’s returning as the feisty, foul-mouthed Blind Al in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” opening July 26.“I am still riding the wave,” Uggams said, while reminiscing about her family, the author of “Roots” and the way the Apollo toughened her up as a performer. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Alex Haley, ‘Roots’ AuthorHe changed my life, not just because of being cast in “Roots.” He gave me and the world an understanding of ancestry and the importance of knowing our true history, not just what’s taught (or not taught) in schools.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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      in Music

      Why Do Pop’s Biggest Stars Adore Michael Uzowuru?

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      The producer has helped A-listers including Donald Glover, SZA, Halsey and Frank Ocean to elevate their craft. How much longer can he avoid the spotlight?Shortly into a Monday morning piano lesson, Michael Uzowuru came alive. Seated at a black grand piano in a long, sunlit room, he warmed up with finger exercises and scales before his instructor, Riko Weimer, asked him to improvise a composition using diminished chords as a foundation. Closing his eyes, he kneaded his way into a languid, contemplative melody, his head bent gently over the keys.“I generally have a lesson plan,” Weimer said when Uzowuru stopped, “but then he digests it in one try.”Uzowuru, 32, sipped from a porcelain cup of espresso, rolled the sleeves of his bright pink sweater to his elbows and resumed playing. Four mornings a week, he drives 20 minutes from the Los Angeles home he shares with his girlfriend and son to Weimer’s Atwater Village studio. When he isn’t intensely working on his craft — “It almost hurts, the distance I feel between where I am and where I want to be,” he later lamented — he is helping some of the most influential figures in pop music spark their own imaginations.Uzowuru may not have the name recognition of Jack Antonoff or Rick Rubin, but his work with artists including Beyoncé, FKA twigs, Frank Ocean, Halsey, Rosalía and SZA has solidified him as a collaborator that A-list artists seek out to sharpen and elevate their craft. His reputation for concocting elegant, distinctive pop songs — like Ocean’s “Nights,” or twigs’s “Cellophane” — has made him one of contemporary music’s most respected producers even as he remains absent from the public eye.On Friday, his latest high-profile collaboration — “Bando Stone & the New World,” the sixth album from Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino — arrives, 17 songs filled with dramatic rock, clever rap and silky R&B that were driven by a concept for a film: an artist recording his masterwork on a remote island as civilization collapses around him.“For a while I thought he was some sort of shady character,” Glover said in a phone interview, with a laugh. “He works with Frank and that whole camp, and they’re very mysterious. I was intimidated.”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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      in Television

      Bob Newhart Stayed Funny His Entire Life

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      He basically invented the stand-up special in 1960 and continued to be a source of comic brilliance until his final years.Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy.Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.Onstage, he didn’t curse, bust taboos or show anger. His style was gentle and wry. As opposed to motormouth contemporaries like Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl, his defining trait was a cheerful, sloth-paced delivery, stammering, pausing, gradually, meticulously working his way through a sentence. He belonged to neither of the great branches of American humor — the legacies of Jewish or Black comedy. A Roman Catholic from the west side of Chicago, Newhart came off as an entirely respectable example of Midwestern nice.Newhart brought his own kind of neurosis, a comedy rooted in nuanced deadpan and silence. He was exasperated, clinging to sanity. He wasn’t one to get revenge in a joke. When I met him at his home for an interview tied to his 90th birthday, he had no scores to settle, no grievances or assumptions he was looking to upend. He was even humble and magnanimous talking about death, saying he thought he knew what awaited him after he passed away, but wasn’t sure. Then he joked about a comic who famously (and unfairly) accused him of stealing a bit: “Maybe I’ll come back as Shelley Berman and be pissed at myself.”Bob Newhart could occasionally get lumped in with the “sick comics” of the mid-20th century and his early work did have a political, even slangy edge. One of his signature bits, where an advertising man coaches Abraham Lincoln before the Gettysburg Address, was a pointed critique of the cynicism of professional politics. “Hi, Abe, sweetheart” begins the man from Madison Avenue, who encourages him to work in a plug for an Abraham Lincoln T-shirt. When the president says he wants to change “four score and seven years ago” to “87,” the ad man first patiently explains they already test marketed this in Erie. Then he says: “It’s sort of like Mark Antony saying “Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’ve got something I want to tell you.”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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      in Movies

      Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

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      Keanu Reeves doesn’t know exactly where the idea came from, but one day — sometime around the release of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” starring Keanu Reeves, and before he started shooting “The Matrix Resurrections,” also starring Keanu Reeves — he imagined a man who couldn’t die.“It became a series of what ifs,” he said. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”From there, Reeves added, “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.”For a while, the character only existed in Reeves’s head. Then he wondered, What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series?“And then, there’s another what-if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”Reeves’s ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise. The comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spinoff are in development at Netflix. More

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      in Television

      ‘Baby Reindeer’ Star Jessica Gunning on Her First Emmy Nomination

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      Jessica Gunning is still a little stunned by the size of the audience “Baby Reindeer” has found, and the acclaim that has followed.A Netflix drama about a comedian and his stalker, “Baby Reindeer” picked up 11 Emmy nominations on Wednesday, including one for best limited series and one for Gunning, her first, for supporting actress in a limited series.The show follows the aspiring comedian, Donny Dunn, as he is tormented by a woman named Martha. Richard Gadd, the Scottish comedian who created the series and also received an acting nod, plays Dunn; Gunning plays Martha. The series is billed as a true story based on Gadd’s experience.In an interview shortly after the Emmy nominations were announced, Gunning said she and other members of the show are “still pinching ourselves” over the fact that so many millions of people have found their work. As to the 11 nominations, she added, “I literally can’t quite believe it.”“I think if someone had said three months ago when the show came out that it and the Emmys would even be included in the same sentence, I’m sure Richard would agree that we would have thought we were being pranked,” she added in a video interview from her parents’ house, several hours’ drive from her home in London.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Some folks have called “Baby Reindeer” a surprise hit. Were you expecting this kind of audience and acclaim for the show?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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      in Television

      Manny Jacinto Turns to the Dark Side in ‘The Acolyte’

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      The actor discusses his complex role in the latest “Star Wars” series, which wrapped up its first season on Tuesday.This interview includes spoilers for the first season of “The Acolyte.”As it turns out, Manny Jacinto brought some relevant experience to “The Acolyte”: He understands how to change characters.Jacinto is best known for “The Good Place,” the hit NBC sitcom on which he played an unspeaking Buddhist monk before being unmasked as Jason Mendoza, a lovable, Jacksonville Jaguars-obsessed dummy who is anything but mute. “I had no idea what I was stepping into,” Jacinto said in an interview. “It was my first job in the States. I didn’t even have a green card yet.”He has since worked alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Nicole Kidman, in the television series “Nine Perfect Strangers” — a series in which he showed a more stoic side, playing a character who essentially served as Kidman’s acolyte. He then appeared with Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick.” And this summer he added arguably the biggest franchise of all to his résumé, taking a role in the latest big-budget “Star Wars” series on Disney+. Created by Leslye Headland, “The Acolyte” wrapped up its first season on Tuesday.As was the case in “The Good Place,” Jacinto’s character was not who he seemed.Jacinto, who is Filipino and Canadian, starred as Qimir, a pharmacist who began the show as a kind of accomplice to a young woman named Mae (Amandla Stenberg), who is on her mission to hunt and kill Jedi. In the fifth episode of the season, he was revealed to actually be a Sith Lord known as “the Stranger,” elevating Jacinto from an afterthought apothecary to a top-line “Star Wars” villain. In Tuesday’s season finale, he fought another lightsaber battle and got the acolyte his character always wanted.In two different interviews — one early in the season and another after the finale premiered on Tuesday — Jacinto discussed how he entered the “Star Wars” universe, his shift to the dark side and the possibility of more seasons of “The Acolyte.” Here are excerpts from the conversations.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