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      Beyoncé Fan’s Radio Request Reignites Country Music Debate

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      A fan asked his Oklahoma radio station to play a new Beyoncé song. The request was rejected, spurring hundreds of calls and emails about the exclusion of Black musicians from the genre.In Oklahoma, a small country music station that refused a listener’s request to play a new song by Beyoncé was forced to change its tune after an uproar from fans who say that Black artists are too often excluded from the genre.On Tuesday morning, Justin McGowan requested that the D.J.s at KYKC, a country music radio station in Ada, play “Texas Hold ’Em,” one of two new songs Beyoncé released as announced in a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday.Beyoncé, who grew up in Houston, sings about hoedowns, and the twangy song also features a fellow Black Grammy winner, Rhiannon Giddens, on banjo and viola.The station manager, Roger Harris, emailed Mr. McGowan back with a concise rejection: “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.” In sending the email, Mr. Harris unwittingly ignited a new flame in a long-simmering debate over how Black artists fit into a genre that has Black music at its roots.In the Super Bowl ad, Beyoncé joked that her new release would “break the internet.” She wasn’t kidding.Mr. McGowan put a screenshot of the rejection on social media, tagging a Beyoncé fan group in a post that drew 3.4 million views on X and sparked conversations on Reddit and TikTok.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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      Toby Keith’s ’35 Biggest Hits’ Tops the Billboard Album Chart

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      A week after his death at 62, the country musician’s 16-year-old hits collection is No. 1.Toby Keith, the boisterous, unapologetically patriotic country star who died last week at 62, has a posthumous No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, as a 16-year-old hits collection narrowly edged out Morgan Wallen’s latest — and easily topped releases by the rapper 21 Savage and the Grammy winners Taylor Swift and SZA — to reach the top of the chart.Keith’s “35 Biggest Hits,” with tracks like “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” “Who’s Your Daddy?,” “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” and the Willie Nelson duet “Beer for My Horses” — all of them No. 1 country smashes — re-entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1. It had the equivalent of 66,000 sales in the United States, including 64 million streams and 11,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.“35 Biggest Hits,” which came out in 2008 on two CDs and previously reached as high as No. 2, becomes Keith’s fifth album to go to No. 1, and the first since “Bullets in the Gun” in 2010.“35 Biggest Hits” is the first posthumous No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since “Faith” by Pop Smoke, in early 2021, about a year after the Brooklyn rapper was killed in a shooting at age 20. Billboard notes that Keith’s collection is also the first retrospective album to hit No. 1 since “The Very Best of Prince,” shortly after Prince’s death in 2016.The 66,000 equivalent sales for “35 Biggest Hits” barely beat out Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” a streaming blockbuster for much of the last year that has logged a total of 18 weeks at No. 1 and had the equivalent of 65,000 sales in its most recent week, landing at No. 2.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” is No. 3, 21 Savage’s “American Dream” is No. 4 and Swift’s “Midnights” — the album of the year winner at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 4 — rises four spots to No. 5. More

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      New Songs by Kacey Musgraves, Maggie Rogers, girl in red and More

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      Hear tracks by Beth Gibbons, girl in red, Angélica Garcia and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Kacey Musgraves, ‘Deeper Well’Folky fingerpicking and new-agey thoughts about self-help make “Deeper Well” one of the gentlest but firmest rebuffs imaginable. After musing on astrology and negative energy, Kacey Musgraves notes, “I’m saying goodbye to the people I feel/are real good at wasting my time.” In the next verses, she leaves behind marijuana and rises above the limits of her upbringing. There’s no rancor, no gloating, just added shimmery reverberations as she grows up and moves on. A new album of the same name is due March 15. JON PARELESMaggie Rogers, ‘Don’t Forget Me’Maggie Rogers wants someone who will “wreck her Sundays” on “Don’t Forget Me,” the warm, yearning title track from her forthcoming third album, which she co-produced with Musgraves’s trusted collaborator Ian Fitchuk. Her friends’ relationships, she admits, don’t provide models for what she’s looking for: Sally’s getting married, Molly’s out partying every night. Rogers is after something more casual — but still lasting in its own way. “Love me til your next somebody,” she sings to whoever’s listening. “And promise me that when it’s time to leave, don’t forget me.” LINDSAY ZOLADZWe 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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      Toby Keith’s Music and Politics Were More Complicated Than You Might Think

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      His choice to become a post-9/11 culture-war champion overshadowed the work of a musician who was funnier, subtler and more politically slippery than his most famous work let on.It is important to note right from the beginning that Toby Keith, when presented with the opportunity to become the music industry’s jingoist-in-chief, leaned in. At the turn of the millennium, just after the Sept. 11 attacks, Keith, who died Monday at 62, released a string of songs that were notable for their political stridency, commitment to American exceptionalism and flexed-bicep threat.Keith had a three-decade career in country music, selling more than 20 million albums and releasing 20 No. 1 Billboard country singles. But he will indisputably be remembered first and most intently for this era of songs: “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American),” a thunderstorm of pro-war propaganda peaking with the exclamation “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way”; “American Soldier,” a warm hum of bombastic treacle; and even “The Taliban Song,” a cheeky ditty in the Jimmy Buffett mold aiming to satirize, if not quite sympathize with, life in Afghanistan under the repressive Taliban regime.These songs, released in 2002 and 2003, made Keith a culture-war champion. He understood instinctually that culture is politics, and politics is theater, and for this fraught period in American history, he was determined to provide the soundtrack.Nonetheless, Keith’s career was also an object lesson in how one incandescent and hard-to-ignore moment can shine so brightly that it obscures more nuanced truths below. For most of the rest of his career, Keith was a sly humorist, a good-natured blowhard, a chronicler of what really happens below thick skin.Much of his best music was about how masculinity is performance. Take “As Good as I Once Was,” one of the great country songs of the 2000s, which is delivered from the perspective of a man in decline, physically and sexually:I got a few years on me nowBut there was a time, back in my primeWhen I could really lay it downAnd if you need some love tonightThen I might have just enoughThe semi-rapped “I Wanna Talk About Me” manages to wrap a critique of male petulance in a song superficially about a woman who doesn’t come up for air. And then there’s “How Do You Like Me Now?!” which is perhaps Keith’s most blustery song, a victory march in search of a Ford F-150 commercial.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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      A Timeline of Toby Keith’s Biggest Songs and Career Moments

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      The singer-songwriter was known for anthems, and political stances, that alternated between confrontation and big-tent populism.Toby Keith first drew recognition beyond country music as the artist behind the divisive post-9/11 rallying cry “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” But the singer-songwriter, who died Monday at the age of 62 after a battle with stomach cancer, appeared to view himself as a unifying force. “As far extreme as I seem,” he said in 2003, “I’m probably catching the average Joe in the middle better than anybody.”Keith topped the country chart 20 times with a catalog of sturdily built anthems including those that romanticized the cowboy’s life and traded on the big-tent appeal of a favorite bar and the charms of drinking beer out of a “Red Solo Cup.” His robust voice was just as adept at conveying rueful heartache as it was at carrying riled-up swagger, and his surprisingly shaded political stances showed a similar range and savvy. Here’s a look back at some of his biggest hits and most prominent moments during a three-decade career.1993‘Should’ve Been a Cowboy’Keith topped the U.S. country chart with his debut single, in which he longed for a life spent “wearing my six-shooter, riding my pony on a cattle drive,” and tipped his Stetson hat to legendary screen cowboys like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon of “Gunsmoke.” But the song was hardly the first rodeo for Keith, who had spent years playing the honky-tonk circuit in and around his native Oklahoma after high school. The 6-foot-4 musician also worked at an oil field — an experience that, he later reflected, “made a man out of me” — and played semipro football. He would come to view his winding path to success as a blessing.“If I’d come out of the box with my first No. 1 hit at 21, instead of when I was 29, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it because I wasn’t mature enough then,” he said in 2012. 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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      Toby Keith, Popular Country Music Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 62

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      Mr. Keith, who announced in 2022 he had cancer, cultivated an in-your-face persona with hits like “Who’s Your Daddy” and “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.”Toby Keith, the larger-than-life singer-songwriter of No. 1 country hits like “Who’s Your Daddy?” and “Made in America” and one of the biggest stars to come out of Nashville in three decades, died on Monday. He was 62.His death was announced on his official website. Elaine Schock, Mr. Keith’s publicist, said in an email that he died in Oklahoma, where he had lived his entire life.Mr. Keith announced in the summer of 2022 that he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and was being treated with chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.In a recent interview with the Oklahoma City television station KWTV, Mr. Keith, who played a run of shows in Las Vegas in December, said he was still in treatment. “Cancer is a roller coaster,” he said. “You just sit here and wait on it to go away — it may not ever go away.” He said that his Christian faith was helping him get through the treatment and the potential dark outcome.Singing in an alternately declamatory and crooning baritone, Mr. Keith cultivated a boisterous, in-your-face persona with recordings like “I Wanna Talk About Me” and “Beer for My Horses.”Built around clever wordplay and droll humor — and more than a little macho bluster — both topped the Billboard country chart, with “Beer for My Horses,” a twangy, Rolling Stones-style rocker that featuring Willie Nelson as guest vocalist, crossing over to the pop Top 40.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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      Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs Gave America a Rare Gift: Harmony

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      Culture can too often drive us apart. At the Grammys on Sunday, two artists delivered something different.When a beloved artist who has not performed live in some time returns to the stage, we often expect them to appear fragile, unsteady, ill at ease. But during Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, when the camera first pulled back from a tight shot of a woman’s fingers picking a familiar riff on an acoustic guitar and revealed the face of the great, elusive folk singer Tracy Chapman, what you noticed was the joy radiating from her face. Her contented smile. The unwavering tone and rich steadiness of her voice.It was a genuine moment of warmth and unity, the sort seldom offered these days by televised award shows — or televised anything, really. Singing her rousing 1988 hit “Fast Car” live for the first time in years, duetting with the country star Luke Combs — whose faithful cover of the song was one of last year’s defining hits — and taking in the rapturous applause of her musical peers, Chapman gave off the feeling, in the words of her timeless song, that she belonged.Thirty-five years ago, at the 1989 Grammy Awards, Chapman stood alone onstage and performed a wrenching rendition of “Fast Car” accompanied by only her own acoustic guitar.What made Sunday night’s performance feel different wasn’t just the time that had passed, or the gray hair that now elegantly frames Chapman’s face. It was the presence of Combs, born a year after that Grammy performance, regarding Chapman with an awe-struck reverence. He seemed to be a stand-in for the many, many people over the years — of all races, genders and generations — who have heard their deepest desires reflected in this song and wished to pay Chapman their gratitude.They traded a few lines and harmonized beautifully on the chorus — her tone opalescent, his bringing some grit — but Combs never overshadowed Chapman. He knew that in that moment, no one could. Something about the way he looked at her said it all: His eyes shone with irrepressible respect. Here was a grown man, an assured performer who sells out stadiums, visibly trembling before the sight and the sound of the folk singer Tracy Chapman.He was hardly alone in that: The few crowd shots during the performance revealed some of music’s major stars, including Brandi Carlile, on their feet, thrilled, before a standing ovation. More

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      Meet the 2024 Grammys’ Best New Artist Nominees

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      Listen to songs by Ice Spice, Jelly Roll, Victoria Monét and five more competitors for one of the show’s big four awards.Ice Spice.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesDear listeners,Some people swear there’s a curse that comes with winning the Grammy for best new artist, but it’s difficult to believe that when you remember who has actually taken home the trophy.In the past five years, the award has gone to quite a few bona fide superstars-in-the-making, including Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and Olivia Rodrigo — all of whom are currently nominated for song of the year. Toggle the winners list back another decade and you’ll see some established industry power players like John Legend (best new artist 2006), Carrie Underwood (2007) and Adele (2009). The Grammys even got it right as far back as 1965, when the award went to a group of worthy Liverpudlian newcomers called the Beatles.Today’s playlist is an introduction to the eight artists who stand a chance to join their ranks at this Sunday’s Grammys. They include some names you might already be familiar with, like the overnight rap sensation Ice Spice and the gravel-throated country crooner Jelly Roll, and a few you might not be, like the married Americana duo the War and Treaty and the R&B stylist Coco Jones.The current betting favorite is Victoria Monét, a trusted pop songwriter who has garnered previous Grammy nominations for her work on hits recorded by Ariana Grande and Chloe x Halle. Monét has a total of seven nominations as a solo artist this year, including two for her breakout album “Jaguar II” and one for a collaboration with Earth, Wind and Fire. Personally, I’d be happy to see the 34-year-old mom take home best new artist; I love when someone who’s been toiling in semi-obscurity for years finally gets her moment in the spotlight.But, as you’ll see below, Monét isn’t the category’s elder — one of these artists turns 40 this year, and stands a chance to become the oldest solo act ever to be crowned best new artist.As the Justin Bieber fans who unleashed unnecessary wrath on Esperanza Spalding will tell you, though, the category always holds the potential for an upset. For that reason, I wouldn’t be shocked to see the rootsy 27-year-old singer-songwriter Noah Kahan accept the award, even if his yelpy emotionalism isn’t exactly my thing. Still, best new artist is a rare Grammy category that skews female, which means that if Kahan wins he’d be the first male artist to do so since Chance the Rapper in 2017.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