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      in Theater

      ‘Heart of Brick’ Review: Finding Love in Black Gay Clubs

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      The production, about the slow rewards of romance, starring the musician serpentwithfeet, premiered at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan on Friday.“My vibe is cozy, comfortable,” the R&B musician Josiah Wise, professionally known as serpentwithfeet, says near the start of “Heart of Brick.” Covered in a fuzzy blanket, sipping a glass of wine, he tells us that he prefers to stay at home.It’s an unusual introduction for a show in a theater. But “Heart of Brick,” which had its premiere at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan on Friday, is an unusual production. It’s somewhat like a staged concert of songs from Wise’s latest album, “GRIP,” which he performs live to recorded tracks. But it’s also like an 80-minute jukebox musical in which he stars as a version of himself, the songs threaded with scenes of dialogue heard in voice-over while he and the other performers silently act and dance.The story is sweet and slight. Having made a confidante of the crowd, Wise gets up the courage to visit a nightclub where he has heard his ex-boyfriend might be showing up. The ex-boyfriend might as well be named MacGuffin, since he isn’t mentioned again. Instead, Wise meets Brick (Dylan M. Contreras), one of the owners of the club, and the two fall for each other immediately. Will the affair last? Is Brick a heartbreaker?These are the dramatic questions.While the format takes some getting used to, it focuses the point of view. Wise — the only one talking and singing to us directly, the only one holding a microphone — is telling us his story. The songs, which he delivers in a sensitive, tremulous tenor, express his feelings of romantic hope and vulnerability. The dialogue, by Wise and Donte Collins in collaboration with the other performers, is naturalistic and conversational, not too subtle or shaded. A slightly catty clique of five clubgoers offers a little comic relief, but between jokes and what Wise calls “heart stuff,” heart stuff predominates.Directed by Wu Tsang, the production is mostly clear and economical. Carlos Soto’s set design suggests location changes between the club and Wise’s apartment with little more than curtains and rails. Costumes (by Julio Delgado) and lighting (by Luke Rolls) are also mostly understated.So, too, is the choreography by Raja Feather Kelly. The clubgoers slink and ripple in fluid patterns and florid armwork, occasionally stretching a leg impressively toward the ceiling, hinging backward to the floor or unspooling multiple spins. But however sinuous, they are stuck in the role of backup dancers to serpentwithfeet.Wise’s songs don’t advance the narrative or deepen insight into the characters, and several of the dialogue-to-song transitions are clunky. But mostly, the show is a cozy, comfortable experience, about the slow rewards of romance rather than sex; the lovers spoon but don’t even kiss.Cozy and comfortable, that is, until Darius — the drunk shaman played by Justin Daniels — arrives, posing riddles and warning about poisoned plants. The clubgoers, now dressed in floral ruffles to embody the plants, entangle Brick, who collapses in a coma. To save him, Wise must go on a quest for a mystical flower.The company members, in a costume change that is meant to depict them as poisonous plants.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesThis might be a swerve into allegory, the poisoned plants symbolizing gossip (which the show also represents, amusingly, in the form of news reports). It might be a dream ballet. It is certainly an attempt to heighten the drama of intimacy issues. Not strange enough to break into the realm of the surreal, it lifts off awkwardly, as at the end of his quest Wise makes an underpowered leap into the light.That swerve is a risky move that fails, but the true value of “Heart of Brick” lies in its simple portrayal of love between two men and in Wise’s affectionate celebration of Black gay clubs. It’s a fuzzy blanket of a show.“Heart of Brick”Through Friday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org. More

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      in Music

      When Club Music Went Commercial, Remixes Kept It Real

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      Social justice, romance and gay pride are alive in a sound that would seduce the world.We gathered each Sunday. The place of worship: Tracks, a mammoth warehouse-turned-nightclub in Southeast Washington, D.C. We were a congregation of mostly Black gay men, there to celebrate one another, at a time — the early 1990s — when we were losing so many to AIDS. We danced — many vogued — to the music that endured after the anti-Black, anti-gay “Disco Sucks” movement of the late 1970s. This fledgling genre transformed dance music, through synthesizers, drum machines and the scrappiness of youth, into a sound that would seduce the world. Some would “call it house,” as the duo Mass Order sang on “Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away),” from 1991.So many songs reflected my values and interests: social injustice (CeCe Rogers, “Someday”), romance (MAW & Company featuring Xaviera Gold, “Gonna Get Back to You”), recovering from heartbreak (Ultra Naté, “It’s Over Now”) and gay pride (Carl Bean, “I Was Born This Way”). Other cuts I cherished weren’t songs written for the clubs, but remixes: R&B and pop songs reconfigured for the dance floor.Life is a remix. Or at least mine has been. Like many, I grew up exploring identity through pop culture. But being Black and gay, I felt most mainstream entertainment didn’t affirm my place in the world. I nevertheless sifted through mass media, embracing what served me, discarding what didn’t. This process of fashioning custom-fitted couture from cultural ready-to-wear is epitomized by the remix. “Remix” has a range of meanings, but in general it refers to a practice, with roots in Jamaican reggae, in which D.J.s and producers take a pre-existing song and tweak it for a specific audience. I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music.In the 1990s — when the advances from increased gay visibility bucked up against the backlash triggered by AIDS — remixes attested that the music cultivated in Black gay spaces had larger cultural value. It meant something to me when, say, Diana Ross reached out to a younger generation with “Workin’ Overtime (House Mix),” Jody Watley transformed into a sinister cyborg on “I’m the One You Need (Dead Zone Mix)” and Mariah Carey went on a historical Black music journey, evoking jazz, gospel and soul on “Anytime You Need a Friend (Dave’s Empty Pass).”I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music. Remixes can free a song from the dictates of radio trends, marketability and the pop conventions of boy-meets-girl. For example, Watley’s song “When a Man Loves a Woman” was released with the remixes “When a Woman Loves a Woman” and “When a Man Loves a Man.” One of my favorite remixes is Quincy Jones’s “Listen Up (Chakapella Dub Mix),” by Arthur Baker. Baker uses Chaka Khan’s vocals to create a narcotic soundscape. The mix opens with a low bass rumble, the way a storm signals its arrival. An uncharacteristically raspy Khan starts wailing. Her vocals bring to mind sounds Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography, music made by enslaved people: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.” She roars, “I’m in love,” over and over and over again. The wildness of the repeated phrase suggests madness, but a relatable kind. It makes me think about what, on the surface, seems so irrational: a Black queer person risking alienation from the larger Black community to shape a distinct identity around the inexplicable wants of the heart.Other remixes form narratives. On the “Every Woman’s Beat” remix of Whitney Houston’s 1993 cover of Khan’s signature song, “I’m Every Woman,” the producers David Cole and Robert Clivillés of C+C Music Factory use Houston’s vocals to create an impressionistic tale that charts the journey from external desire to inner fulfillment, similar to the theme of “The Wizard of Oz.” At the start of the track, Houston repeats, “anything you want” as if she’s compelled by craving. Then she yells, “I got it,” before proclaiming, “I’m the one.” It feels as if a glittery Glinda had just whispered to her: “You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”There is another function of the remixes I cherish most: They instigate precious memories. As James Baldwin wrote: “Music is our witness and our ally. The beat is the confession, which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.” Some remixes remind me of the 1980s and ’90s, when music forged in Black queer spaces began reaching the mainstream. Remixes were one way of preserving Black queer aesthetics amid economic incentives to make club music more commercial.The “FBI Dub” of Janet Jackson’s 1997 hit “Together Again,” by Zanzibar DJ Tony Humphries, takes me back to those days. It’s a reminder of the ferocity of many lost to AIDS. Humphries jackhammers a classic M.F.S.B. groove, breaking it into rhythmic slabs that are the perfect accompaniment to an exquisitely executed pose. It’s house music as hoodoo, conjuring angular apparitions trapped in a fierce dance battle. I listen to these and other remixes from the era to help me cope with a phantom past, the feeling I survived a plague that often seems forgotten. Remixes bring me hope because, by definition, they represent the possibility of change. I’m thinking about a line from Indeep’s 1982 club burner “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: “There’s not a problem that I can’t fix/’Cause I can do it in the mix.”Craig Seymour is a music critic and the author of “Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross.” More

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      in Movies

      The Thrill of Watching a Film That Isn’t Online Anywhere

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      They are a reminder of the countless histories that don’t exist there — and the work demanded to sustain them.When I was growing up in California, my mother would often describe a film that it was impossible for me to see: the great Carmen de Lavallade dancing to Odetta, dressed all in white like a priestess. She’d seen the footage a long time ago — 1974? — at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts by Lincoln Center in Manhattan, where she was researching the history of modern dance in America. De Lavallade was one of the first Black dancers to enjoy a long career in the theaters of high culture. But it wasn’t her reputation that secured her place in my mother’s memory; it was the spiritual elegance of her gestures. “She was attempting to embrace everything,” my mother told me. Even though we couldn’t watch the film together, she could share it in words — how de Lavallade seemed to gather, in her arms, everything lovely and lost. He’s got the whole world in his hands, Odetta sang, and de Lavallade’s dance made us both believe it — that we wouldn’t be dropped. Her grace was powerful enough to pierce me across the distance and the decades, to make me feel what I had never seen.It was partly this vision of de Lavallade that tempted me, in April, to attend a screening of rare dance films curated by Solange Knowles and her studio, Saint Heron, for a performance series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Knowles called the series the Eldorado Ballroom, after a legendary music venue in Houston, her hometown. The memory of that other space consecrated her own roving tabernacle of Black performance. There was no program listed online, but given de Lavallade’s pride of place among 20th-century dancers, I suspected I might find her there — if not as my mother described her, then perhaps from some other angle that would help explain her lasting hold on our imaginations. In the dark theater, I was anxious and alert: If she was there, would I recognize her?Most dancers age off camera, leaving us with the iconic image of the body at its athletic apex.The silver screen went black. The title card announced: “A Thin Frost.” Suddenly, there she was — much older than I’d expected to find her, but unmistakable nonetheless, her high cheekbones and supple neck. De Lavallade and two men were facing one another in metal chairs. They stuttered through cryptic gestures and sidelong glances to a soundtrack of unmusical human noises, as if searching for something to say without recourse to the familiar phrases of port-de-bras and arabesque. I looked for signs of the grace my mother had described, but this was not a hymn, and the dancers did not seem willing or able to repair the world. Instead, the world was smashed and scattered, and they were sifting through the pieces.This was the first work performed by Paradigm, a company of dancers over 50 that de Lavallade founded in 1998 alongside her pioneering peers Dudley Williams and Gus Solomons Jr. — both gone now, Solomons just a few weeks ago. They were, as this paper reported, free to be “as idiosyncratic as they wish,” having matured beyond “sheer youthfulness.” Most dancers age off camera, leaving us with the iconic image of the body at its athletic apex, but de Lavallade had refused to stay still. And why should she have? Dance is about movement, not stasis — dramatizing how one moment transforms to become another. I could feel my frozen image of de Lavallade in her so-called prime melt on contact with this film, time’s “thin frost” warming to release the smell of living earth. Somehow my own body loosened in response, so that I became a reflection of the dancers onscreen, each of us seated on either side of a magic mirror.As de Lavallade faded out and the remaining films unspooled, I remained vividly aware of the dancers as real people whose lives go on beyond the final cut. I kept grasping for them as the dissonant scenes swirled past: flashes of silver dunes blown through someone’s saxophone; a slender silhouette writhing inside an amniotic sac of silk. When I went home, I pored over the brochure I’d picked up by the door, eager to pin those shifting shapes to names, dates, material details that would stay in place. Four of the films were available on streaming platforms — Vimeo, YouTube, the Criterion Channel — and I watched them on repeat. But I couldn’t find the footage of de Lavallade anywhere: She had disappeared, again, into the archive.We often let ourselves believe that everything, now, is available to us — that nothing is lost and every experience can be accessed and repeated with the right subscription. But this blinds us to all the material that has not been translated to the new media, that no one is clamoring to see in part because we don’t even know it exists. With dance in particular, film is the only medium capable of “capturing” the form, but dance films that aren’t narrative musicals rarely receive wide circulation or preservation. This is doubly true for dance films created by Black artists who aspire to something more than commercial success. The problem, however, is becoming more universal: Many of us know the feeling of trying to summon an old season of a favorite TV show and coming up empty-handed, as companies unceremoniously disappear beloved works of art and avoid paying royalties to the people who produced the “content.” I fear for a future in which our primary experience of visual culture is a fire hose of viral video clips — GIFs, reels, TikToks — endlessly replicable but utterly forgettable.With the Eldorado Ballroom series, Knowles modeled another form of circulation, directing our attention to the moments that survive not because they’re easy to share, but in spite of great difficulty, because they mattered to someone that much. As I followed de Lavallade’s shadow down a rabbit hole of research, I thought of something Knowles said in a recent interview with Vulture: “That’s our mission, to just create that kind of studying around artists” like her. Some films might escape my grasp, but I’ve been rewarded by discovering, slowly, a dense network of relations among the dancers I’d seen onscreen: They had studied under one another, danced the same roles, passed through the same institutions, crossing conventional boundaries between genres and eras. The lines extend in all directions — how de Lavallade saw her friend Alvin Ailey on their high school gymnastics team and dragged him to her dance class with Lester Horton, who directed the first racially integrated company in the country; how Josephine Baker brought the young de Lavallade to Paris for her European debut. Especially before film, this is how movement was propagated from generation to generation: by hand. I wasn’t dancing — I was digging around online — but I felt as if I’d been handed something I had to sustain, and I liked feeling that my efforts reciprocated the physical intensity I’d seen reproduced in the movie theater.Since I watched “A Thin Frost,” I’ve worried and wondered over how I might hold on to an experience I may never relive. I’ve tried to describe the film by phone to my mother, returning, without repeating, the gift she gave me in childhood. I’ve tried to fill in the world around the film by seeking out interviews de Lavallade recorded later in life. At 83, she told a reporter at The Boston Globe that the structure for her one-woman show, “As I Remember It,” would have to be “Beckett-like.” As with a dancing body, the past has a bewildering vitality, “it jumps around” and makes us sweat through endless rehearsals. No technology can substitute for the human labor — effortful, embodied, attentive — to really make something last. No new god is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us to take the whole world in our hands, and pass it on.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images; Reg Innell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images. More

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      in Music

      Sean Paul Is Still Busy

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      The song is a giddy exaltation of oscillating hips in full swing, of beautiful backsides and the beautiful forms they belong to as they get jiggy, get crunked up, percolate. It is a knight’s declaration of courtly love to his five fair ladies: Jodi, Rebecca, Annabella, the Misses Donna and Cana. It is a lover’s sincere exhortation to his beloveds to shake that thing, made with a sly exuberance that is both worshipful and raunchy.This is the seminal dancehall classic “Get Busy,” a 21-year-old party anthem that has been the source of dance-floor awakenings for generations of horny teenagers and young adults. And the knight paying homage to the things he is so respectfully asking the ladies to shake is Sean Paul, arguably Jamaica’s most famous musical export to the United States since Bob Marley. Two decades ago, after dethroning 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” from its No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, “Get Busy” did for Sean Paul what “Taxi Driver” did for Paul Schrader and “Liebesträume No. 3” did for Franz Liszt. This was the work that made an instant legend of its creator, who until then had been only a moderately successful purveyor of dancehall, Jamaica’s musical successor to reggae.Young people today seem to be discovering Sean Paul with the same delight their elders once did in middle school. On TikTok, the barometer of all contemporary youth relevance, influencers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, who were un- or barely born in 2003, can be found participating in viral dance challenges to “Get Busy,” while millennial comedians 10 years their senior make videos about the unfairness of being in seventh grade when the song was ruling clubs. Like low-rise jeans, going-out tops and the “Fast & Furious” franchise, Sean Paul is one of those ubiquitous elements of Y2K-era American life that is experiencing a thundering resurgence.Paul performing at “MTV Spring Break” in Miami Beach in 2003.Scott Gries/Getty ImagesSting and Paul onstage at the Grammy Awards in 2004. Paul’s “Dutty Rock” won the award for best reggae album.Frank Micelotta/Getty ImagesI sat down with Paul on a salubrious June afternoon — “salubrious” was his choice of word — on Hellshire Beach near Kingston, where sargassum clogs the shoreline and clusters of shacks jostle for limited space on the ever-shrinking sands. At one of these establishments (either Screechy’s or Screechie’s, depending on whether you believe the indoor spelling or the outdoor one), covers were removed from platters of fried red snapper as Paul, wearing bright-orange cargo shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “DUTTY,” unrolled his smoking paraphernalia. He was by turns sprightly and pensive. The party-boy persona that once made him a megastar has evolved into that of a fun but responsible uncle — the one who still knows how to throw a party but will also ensure that everyone eats well and gets home safely afterward. The night before, for instance, in the courtyard of a studio I was told had been built by Shaggy and his former manager, I watched some of Paul’s associates smoke from a many-feet-long chalice pipe as they waited to begin rehearsals for a coming tour. When Paul drove up, he announced that he had brought a case of mangoes from his own orchard, and I was treated to the wholesome tableau of a group of grown men tearing into a cardboard box, each extracting a mango and biting in with sighs and groans of unadulterated relish. The rehearsal featured breaks to crack open bottles of industrial-strength white rum — and loud shouts of laughter, including at my saying I shouldn’t drink while working and at my frozen expression when I did finally try a sip. This jovial gathering of dad bods, dad shorts and dad jokes more resembled the vibe of an after-school band rehearsal than a multiplatinum recording artist preparing to play a sold-out arena — perhaps because some of these guys really have known Paul since his earliest days in music.As Paul explained to me at Screechy/ie’s, for his life to become what it is now — that of a Grammy-winning artist with YouTube views in the multiple billions and a catalog of beloved classics — a series of extremely fortunate events had to occur. And a fair number of them, he didn’t have much say in. Long before he became the bandannaed and cornrowed Sean Paul who entranced the American public, Sean Paul Ryan Francis Henriques was just another young offshoot of Jamaica’s famous Henriques clan, one of the oldest Jewish families on the island, who immigrated there from Portugal in the 17th century. Paul, who has British and Chinese heritage on his mother’s side, actually grew up Catholic in solidly respectable Uptown Kingston, watching the raucous parties thrown at his grandmother’s home by an enterprising aunt who ran a sound system. Kingston is a city that takes parties seriously, and the sound system was a key 20th-century innovation — a portable setup of amplifiers, turntables and mountains of speakers, all orchestrated by a D.J. and an M.C., who truck the equipment to makeshift venues and use its booming sound to draw crowds. Paul and his younger brother, Jason, were both enamored of this family business; Jason actually recalls falling asleep in a bass box as a child. It was both brothers’ earliest immersion in music, listening to the Uptown crowds dance to Michael Jackson beats blended with the dancehall and reggae rhythms of Kingston. Despite the legacy Paul was born into, his childhood was shaped by absences — like that of his father, Garth, who would disappear for months at a time, leaving his wife, Frances, hunting door to door, asking neighbors if they had seen him. He would materialize, months later, perhaps having whiled away the time in Mexico, once having crashed a Cherokee 6 plane stuffed full of marijuana in the Everglades. When Paul was 13, his father was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison. This devastated Paul — not because his father had been much of a presence in his life but because what little he had of him would now be gone. It felt, he says, like “that’s forever — Oh, I’ll never see this dude again.”Paul with his father, Garth Henriques, at the National Stadium swimming pool in Kingston.via Sean PaulHis mother sent him to Wolmer’s Boys’ School, among the oldest in Jamaica. Paul, who until then had been a bit of a dreamer, was thrust into a teenage milieu far removed from his former Jewish prep school; he began getting in fights with kids who teased him about his father being in prison. He was saved from a descent into hooliganism by swimming, a sport for which the Henriques family is well known. Both of Paul’s parents were champion swimmers, and he carried on that legacy, representing Jamaica at international competitions and as a water-polo player, his days beginning at 5:30 a.m. and spent training furiously.Still, his grades weren’t good enough to get him into college, which was beyond his mother’s means anyway. He enrolled in a program for hotel management and learned the basics of French cuisine (yes, Sean Paul of “Temperature” fame knows how to make hollandaise); for a time he worked as a bank teller while making demo tapes in private. He would freestyle with a group called the Dutty Cup Crew, and there was a time when his father, newly released from prison, tried to introduce him to people in the music industry. But watching Sean — thoughtful, introspective Sean — pursue a career as an M.C. and dancehall toaster still seemed outlandish to those around him. He recalls a well-intentioned friend getting drunk at a party and crying while asking him why he was throwing his life away.Paul in 1992. While privately making demo tapes, Paul worked as a bank teller and learned the basics of French cuisine while enrolled in a hotel-management program.Michael WoodsThe real hitch in his early career wasn’t his demeanor; it was the subjects he wanted to write about. The young Sean Paul was intensely affected by the differences he saw in the quality of life between Uptown and Downtown Kingston. The early songs he wrote were of a subgenre classified as conscious reggae — socially minded stuff, meant to highlight the injustices he saw around him. He didn’t see any trouble with this until a producer took him aside and told him flat out: No one wanted to listen to conscious songs from a light-skinned Uptown kid. He might have had a father in prison for manslaughter and a mother who, he says, did tie-dye to support the family, and he might have grown up occasionally eating callaloo picked from the backyard, but on paper he was a posh boy with a surname and family legacy that made it impossible for him to be taken seriously while singing about wealth inequality. Crestfallen but persuaded, Paul pivoted, channeling his sensitivities into the topics producers wanted him to sing about: parties, women and weed. One result was “Baby Girl,” a stripped-down track in which Paul entreats a woman to dry her eyes, leave her no-good man and come to him — a man who will “love yuh fi yuh body, but more fi yuh brain.” To him, Paul says, this was still a conscious song: “In dancehall, you always sing big of the ladies, how good they look or about wanting to get with them. But you never sing about: ‘I hear you in trouble? You’re in a relationship where you’re being abused? I’ll be there for you.’ That’s what the song was about.”In dancehall, masculinity is often a kind of balloon animal the M.C. inflates and twists into aggrandized shapes. In her book “Dancehall: Origins, History, Future,” the professor Donna P. Hope identifies the “six G’s” lyrics tend to dwell on (gun, gyal, ghetto, gays, ganja, God) and how each can be used to underline the vocalist’s machismo. The genre had made inroads into the U.S. market before — from Super Cat, Shabba Ranks, Beenie Man, Ini Kamoze — but if Paul would one day top them all, perhaps it’s because even at the peak of his party-boy persona, he understood that longing for things you cannot have is a universal sentiment. He has spent his entire career writing soft-focus love songs and ballads of unrequited yearning; they’re just disguised as songs to grind pelvises to. “Temperature” promises to “shelter you from the storm.” “Rockabye” is an earnest tribute to single mothers. On “Give It Up to Me,” he promises “love so clear/It gonna make you shine, and once you are mine/We be rockin it until the end of time.” These are club tracks, but if you, just hypothetically, happened to be listening to them on repeat during your fifth hour of silently hiccup-sobbing into a pillow (don’t ask), they would absolutely deliver in that arena as well.“Baby Girl” was Paul’s first local radio hit, earning him some popularity in Jamaica and paving the way for his first U.S. studio album. But it was his sophomore LP, “Dutty Rock,” that made Sean Paul into the commercial leviathan he is today. In 2002, a brief New York Times article noted an interesting new record featuring 19 songs, by different artists, all built on the same bewitching “riddim,” a basic beat for dancehall artists to record over. Created by a producer named Steven (Lenky) Marsden, the Diwali riddim — named after the Hindu festival — was built on frenetic syncopated hand claps that escalate over an underlying boom. At the time, Marsden had no sense of the classic he had created. But if you were alive in the early 2000s, you simply could not escape the contagious sound of this percussive loop, which would bounce and undulate its way through the culture everywhere, from Lumidee’s charmingly off-key hit “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” to Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go.” Paul in Norbrook, an upscale neighborhood in Kingston, in July. A younger Paul had wanted to sing about wealth inequality, until a producer told him that no one wanted those songs from an uptown kid like him. Naila Ruechel for The New York TimesMarsden received a phone call from VP Records asking if he would lend the riddim to one of their buzzy new artists: Sean Paul. The result was “Get Busy,” a monstrous hit that transformed Paul’s career and helped sell nearly six million copies of “Dutty Rock.” Back in the clubs-cars-and-Cristal era of R.&B., the “Get Busy” music video was an anomaly, too, depicting a party that would be recognizable to suburban diasporas everywhere: adults gathered around a dining table, young people crowding the unfinished basement below, an angry Caribbean dad in a loud batik-print shirt yelling at the youths to “stop banging on the damn furnace.”Paul is now closer to the age of that video dad than the basement party-starter he played. In the intervening years, he has remained booked and busy, ushering in a steady procession of hit songs, both his own and in collaborations with other pop stars. Whether you have recognized it or not, a new song of his has likely made its way to you in the past eight years — perhaps by way of “No Lie,” his collaboration with a sandpaper-voiced, prefame Dua Lipa; his work with the actor Idris Elba on the rambunctious “Boasty”; or his guest feature on Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” which seemed to blare constantly from the stock-exchange-size H&M in Times Square in the summer of 2017. Paul may now be an elder statesman of dancehall, but he is still producing, recording and performing with vigor. As for the Jodi in “Get Busy,” she’s now his wife. I am one of those millennials who discovered Sean Paul at age 12 — but I also grew up in a secluded, almost cultlike boarding school in India, where we were forbidden any sort of internet access and had little idea what was popular among people our age in the outside world. My only familiarity with reggae was by way of an English guy named Steven Kapur who grew dreadlocks, called himself Apache Indian and sang in a Punjabi-inflected patois about wanting an arranged marriage with a dainty Indian girl who would make him rotis. I did recognize the Diwali riddim, but only because the Lumidee hit based on it would play when Megan Fox’s character appeared onscreen in the Lindsay Lohan classic “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.” Still: Somehow, by way of some entrepreneurial soul who knew how to burn pirated music onto CDs, “Get Busy” would play on repeat at my all-girls school’s gatherings with boys from a neighboring school, where chaperones were stationed at every corner to prevent anyone from getting even remotely busy. Whether it’s at a grimy nightclub or in an auditorium full of emotionally stunted teenagers avoiding eye contact in Dehradun, India, there are a few things likely to occur whenever a D.J. puts on “Get Busy” for a crowd of the right age. There will be squeals of recognition as Paul booms “SHAKE … THAT … THING,” each word with its vertiginous pause. Then the delirious, almost incantatory hand claps will start to register: “It’s the ignition of those butterflies,” he told me. As Paul’s exuberant melodies combine with the boisterous throb of the Diwali riddim, listeners’ hips and waists acquire a sentience of their own, moving as if threatening to secede from the rest of the body.This was true in 2003 — some 40-year-olds I asked wistfully confirmed this for me — and it remains true two decades later. I watched Paul live in concert, not once but twice, last year in New York. He was a consummate showman, with unflagging reserves of energy, leaping around in front of the giant Jamaican flag draped over the D.J. console overseen by his brother. Paul seemed to know exactly who his audience was, and to this audience he gave exactly what we wanted: his biggest hits, opening immediately with the iconic intro of “Get Busy,” to which we all lost our minds. On both occasions, I witnessed elder millennials try hip movements far beyond our joints’ collagen levels. Each time I felt as though I had been factory reset as a person.Paul at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2022.Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated PressThe members of Paul’s preteen fandom — whether that means me in 2003 or the kids browsing TikTok a year ago — might not have had any frame of reference for the parties and spliffs that he was singing about, the Jamaican patois he was singing in or his place in the lineage of dancehall. But a thumping party track is a thumping party track, and not knowing the lyrics would not stop any of us from, as one recent video elegantly put it, “throwing ass” to his bangers, then or now. For decades, Paul has offered the service so much great pop does: distilling a mythical idea of the perfect party, the always-pumping club, and delivering it into the minds and ears of people who will not learn for years that real clubgoing tends to be much more tedious and involve uncomfortable shoes. For someone like me — someone who, until I moved away from home, wasn’t even allowed to go to parties, let alone parties with sexually suggestive dancing — Paul’s songs were about the poetry and promise of dark, sweaty basements and libidinous gyrations. Neither was part of my life at 12, and neither are part of it as a not-so-young-anymore adult with an office job. But Paul’s best songs take all your amorphous longings and feelings of exile — whether imposed by a pandemic or a boarding school or a lost youth — and exorcise them.I can’t wait for the weekend, I can’t want to see that girl again: That, Paul told me in Kingston, is the type of anticipation he puts into his songs. Because if there is one thing he has understood since he was 14, it is the stultifying restlessness that lurks beneath the lives of suburban teenagers. Today he considers it his artistic purpose to exalt uncomplicated ease and pleasure. His legacy is the pure euphoria that erupts on faces when he performs “Get Busy.” The fact that he has been doing this for more than 20 years struck him, recently, when he realized that the nieces and nephews who were infants when the song took off are now old enough to drink and party and experience their uncle’s concerts. “And then they start going to the shows,” he giggled, “and they’re like, Yo?!” At 22, he said, he had wanted to sing about social evils. At 50, he has found peace simply taking people’s minds off them.Iva Dixit is a staff editor at the magazine, where her past articles have included an ode to the delights of eating raw onions and an exploration of the popularity of the TV show “Emily in Paris.” This is her first feature for the magazine. Naila Ruechel is a photographer originally from Jamaica known for lush, elegant imagery with a heightened sense of intimacy. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Through the Eyes of a Dance Critic

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      The choreography on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour doesn’t ask her to do too much, but she knows how to use her simple moves to her advantage.Since it’s an understatement to call Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour the dominant pop concert of the year, it isn’t surprising that snippets of the show, captured by fans on their phones, have been flooding social media sites for months. Watch a few of these clips, and it might strike you that the dance moves, in contrast to the designer costumes and visual effects, are rather simple and unoriginal, the sort of thing anyone might be able to pull off.At least that’s what I thought before seeing the Eras Tour live. Experiencing it in Los Angeles, at the end of its first United States leg, I changed my mind. As dance, the show is simple and unoriginal — yet exceptionally effective.Swift is a pop superstar who dances but is not known for her dancing. Even many of her admirers will admit that in this respect she’s no Beyoncé, no Britney Spears — that as hard as she tries, she’s a little stiff and awkward. Be that as it may, body language is crucial to how the three-hour-plus performance works.Swift’s Eras Tour is wrapping up its initial U.S. leg with a run of shows in Los Angeles.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Friday, at the second of six Los Angeles concerts, the most significant gesture came early, between songs. Basking in the deafening roar of 70,000 fans, Swift struck a coy “Who, me?” pose and said she wanted to try something. She pointed at a section of SoFi Stadium, and the cheering from that section somehow got louder.“I feel so powerful,” she said, kissing a bicep. But the power she was flexing wasn’t muscular. It was her ability — with the magnification of giant video screens — to connect with every member of the crowd. The choreography helped keep that connection a live wire.I don’t just mean the dance numbers, though there are plenty of those, choreographed by Mandy Moore (“La La Land,” “So You Think You Can Dance?”). The backup dancers sometimes contributed to the spectacle. They handled the billowing floral parachutes that concealed and revealed Swift at the start. They wielded glowing orbs during “Willow,” clouds on ladders during “Lavender Haze,” umbrellas during “Midnight Rain.” Not especially imaginative, this was all just something big enough to see.Elsewhere, the dancers helped suggest the situations of the songs. The bicep kiss was a segue to “The Man,” a complaint about gender double standards that was staged as an ascent up the stairs and levels of an office set populated by chest-thumping workers. In other songs, a few dancers played roles: the boyfriend that Swift berates for emotional neglect across (and atop) a long dinner table in “Tolerate It,” or the scandalizing socialite protagonist of “The Last Great American Dynasty.”Backup dancers help suggest the situations of some Swift songs, but mostly serve as a friend group or party guests.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut really, the concert has only one character, Swift. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” the dancers were costumed as earlier versions of her, trapped in transparent boxes like dolls. Mostly, though, they served as a friend group or party guests. A happy, diverse bunch, they did a little ballroom dancing to evoke the romantic fantasy of “Lover,” a little vogueing to give “Bejeweled” some shimmer.And then they left. Which is to say, they left the audience alone with Swift, again and again, re-establishing the thrill of mass intimacy. Other pop stars use this effect, but it’s especially potent with Swift because she’s also a singer-songwriter, who can sit at a piano or tap into the iconography of a guitar-slinging truth teller.The most intense moments of the show were in this mode: the 10-minute extended version of “All Too Well” and the acoustic mini-set of “secret songs” that differ from night to night. This is almost pointedly not dancing, but it requires a particular physicality at which Swift excels. She has the wide stance, both confident and confiding. She looks grounded, comfortable, at home.The tour will begin its international leg later this month in Mexico.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat’s generally true when she isn’t dancing. She can strut or skip around the huge catwalk and stage that extend across the stadium floor without looking small. She can strike over-the-shoulder poses for the camera. She can inhabit her many sparkly costumes — rolling her hips in fringe dresses and Louboutin boots, using the flowy sleeves on her “Folklore” dress the way Stevie Nicks uses scarves.So does it matter that in the cafe chair burlesque routine for “Vigilante ___,” a homage to louche Bob Fosse dances, she’s imprecise and physically uncommitted to the pleasures and dangers of sex? (She caresses her body like she’s afraid to.) It doesn’t, because her fans love her anyway. And it does, because this imperfect dancing is, I think, part of her nonthreatening Everywoman image. It makes her easier to identify with.And that is what the whole concert is about, the identification between Swift and the fans she continually thanks and flatters, the fans who know every word to every song. Swift told the L.A. crowd that when those fans sing her lyrics along with her, she takes that as a sign that they too have felt what she felt.It makes sense, then, that she moves the way anyone might move. So that anyone might imagine being her — just pointing and feeling powerful. More

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      Everybody Dance Now! ‘Here Lies Love’ Dictates Your Moves.

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      Engaging viewers’ bodies is central to this Broadway musical, a rare production that sets its audience in motion on the dance floor.Like many Broadway musicals, “Here Lies Love” involves a lot of dancing. Notably less common: how much moving is done by the audience.It isn’t unheard-of for a musical to tell the story of a dictator’s wife, but this one, with songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, is distinctly focused on its subject’s dancing habits. Imelda Marcos — wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime president of the Philippines — was fond of discothèques. Accordingly, the Broadway Theater has been half-converted into a club on the model of Studio 54. There is a giant disco ball and a D.J., and the orchestra seats have been stripped out so that up to 300 members of the audience can experience the 90-minute show while crowded on a dance floor.As at a disco, those standing can dance as they like. But they are also herded by wranglers in magenta jumpsuits with light-up wands like the ones used to direct taxiing airplanes. Wheeled platforms and runways are regularly rearranged around the floor area, displacing audience members. One cruciform platform is aptly called the Blender. It churns the crowd like batter.The rest of the audience is seated, above the dance floor and back into the depths of the mezzanine. But these viewers move, too, encouraged by the D.J. to join the standing folks in a simple line dance, picking up the moves from cast members spread throughout the theater on more platforms and catwalks. A lot of the story action happens up there, too.“The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual,” Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer, said. “And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”The choreographer Annie-B Parson: “The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual. And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”Naima Green for The New York Times“Here Lies Love” has developed over more than a decade in various incarnations, but dance and audience motion have been at the center of the conception from the start, said Alex Timbers, the director: “We didn’t want it to be interactive, with people pulled up onstage and feeling embarrassed. We wanted the audience to be moving as a unit so no one feels singled out.”The idea is to cast the audience in the drama as extras, Timbers said. They aren’t just dancers at the club. They are guests at the Marcos’s wedding; the public at political rallies and election parties; witnesses to the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the Marcos’s rival; participants in the People Power Revolution that overthrew the dictator in 1986.“Your journey changes, just like America’s relationship with the Philippines,” Timbers said. “After Aquino’s assassination, you feel a little complicit in having danced at Imelda’s wedding.”Similarly, the D.J. telling everyone what to do is somewhat dictatorial. When Marcos institutes martial law, no audience member “is getting tortured or anything,” Timbers said, “but there is a metaphor at play physically.”“You watch the audience applaud,” Parson said, “and you watch them wonder why they’re applauding. It’s pretty Brechtian.”Development of the show has been a trial-and-error experiment in how to get audiences to move as the creative team wants. “You don’t have the same audience every night,” Timbers said, “so you’re looking at trends, at human nature.”Elaborate charts delineate how the wranglers can redistribute the crowd effectively and safely without being distracting. And since the people in the mezzanine face in one direction while those on the floor face in several, directing everyone to “step to the right” in a line dance isn’t a simple matter. (Well-placed performers and video screens help.)Parson, who has worked with Byrne on concerts tours and on his recent Broadway show, “American Utopia,” comes from the world of postmodern dance. She said that while Timbers “has a beautiful sense of the body and space,” he and she had opposing, if complementary, attitudes about the fact that no audience member of “Here Lies Love” could see everything.The director of “Here Lies Love,” Alex Timbers, said the idea was to cast the audience in the drama as extras.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Alex worked really hard to share all the story material with everyone in the theater,” she said, whereas she was thinking about the composer John Cage’s philosophical idea that every seat in the house is perfect. “It becomes about perception. I love the experience of watching someone watch things that I might not be seeing. You feel things in your body that you may not see.”It’s a question of perspective, and not the only one. Many reviews of “Here Lies Love” and public objections to the show have focused on how the glamour and play of the club atmosphere rub against the show’s critique of the Marcoses.Parson said the context of disco — “an ecstatic dance form that tips quickly into despair” — is intentionally ambiguous. “Dancing is relative. You can use it for ill or for the greater good.”Imelda’s use of dance, what became known as her handbag diplomacy, “was embodied statesmanship,” Parson said. “She didn’t put a table between her and Nixon or Castro. She asked them to dance. She wasn’t a great dancer but that gave her a lot of power.”At one point, cast members act this out, wearing masks of famous political leaders. At other points, the choreography borrows a few of Imelda’s signature moves: circling her eye with two fingers, tapping the tops of her butterfly sleeves.The line dance, Parson said, was designed to be “fun and easy, something you could do in a chair if space was tight.” (“The Philippines have a really muscular tradition of line dancing,” she added, noting that the line dancing performed by the all-Filipino cast at parties is much more intricate.)Much of the choreography for the cast is more complicated, but mostly in tone, Parson said. In the title song, for example, Imelda tells the audience to remember her for love. “But let’s talk about the families she destroyed,” Parson said. “It’s a beautiful song, but it is ironic, so that’s how I choreographed it, with swinging umbrellas and sternum to the ceiling. You can’t take it straight.”Timothy Matthew Flores, who plays Aquino’s son along with other ensemble roles, said the detail of Parson’s choreography — “every single movement has a meaning” — made it more difficult than flashier and harder-hitting dance he’s done before. And running all around the large theater is “90 minutes of cardio.”But getting the audience out of their seats and dancing? That’s just fun, Flores said. “They start off shy and then they end up having a really good time. You can see them thinking, ‘Wow, this is not like any other Broadway show.’” More

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      Dancers Accuse Lizzo of Harassment and Hostile Work Environment in Lawsuit

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      In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, three dancers claim that touring with the Grammy winner meant working in an “overtly sexual atmosphere” that subjected them to harassment.Three of Lizzo’s former dancers filed a lawsuit against her on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, accusing the Grammy-winning singer and the captain of her dance team of creating a hostile work environment while performing concerts on her Special Tour this year.The lawsuit, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by the plaintiffs’ law firm, said the dancers had been “exposed to an overtly sexual atmosphere that permeated their workplace,” which included “outings where nudity and sexuality were a focal point,” it said. The suit was first reported by NBC.The defendants include Lizzo, using her full name Melissa Jefferson instead of her stage name; her production company, Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc.; and Shirlene Quigley, the tour’s dance captain. It does not specify whether the singer was aware of the plaintiffs’ allegations linked to Ms. Quigley.The suit alleges that Lizzo and Ms. Quigley were involved in several episodes that lawyers for the three dancers said amounted to sexual and religious harassment and weight shaming, among other allegations.The suit alleges that Ms. Quigley “made it her mission to preach” Christianity to the dancers, and fixated on virginity, while Lizzo sexually harassed them.On one occasion while at a nightclub in Amsterdam, the lawsuit says, Lizzo began inviting employees to touch nude performers and handle dildos and bananas used in their performances.Out of fear of retaliation, a dancer eventually “acquiesced” to touching the breast of a nude female performer despite repeatedly expressing no interest in doing so, the suit says.Representatives for Lizzo and her production company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.Dancers on Lizzo’s “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls” reality show last year. Arianna Davis, bottom right, is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesTwo of the plaintiffs, Arianna Davis and Crystal Williams, began performing with Lizzo after competing on her reality television show on Amazon Prime, “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” in 2021. The show was an opportunity to give plus-size dancers representation, Lizzo said at the time. Ms. Davis and Ms. Williams were fired in the spring of 2023, the lawsuit says.Separately, a third plaintiff, Noelle Rodriguez, was hired in May 2021 to perform in Lizzo’s “Rumors” music video and remained on as part of her dance team. According to the lawsuit, Ms. Rodriguez resigned shortly after Ms. Davis and Ms. Williams had been fired.Some of the allegations seemed to take aim at Lizzo’s reputation for championing body positivity and inclusivity.“The stunning nature of how Lizzo and her management team treated their performers seems to go against everything Lizzo stands for publicly,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Ron Zambrano, said in a statement on Monday. Privately, he said, Lizzo “weight-shames her dancers and demeans them in ways that are not only illegal but absolutely demoralizing.”Some of Lizzo’s statements to the dancers gave Ms. Davis, who was diagnosed with a binge eating disorder, the impression that she had to “explain her weight gain and disclose intimate personal details about her life in order to keep her job,” the suit says.Since her breakout hit “Truth Hurts” dominated charts in 2019, Lizzo has popularized “feel-good music” and self-love and has celebrated diversity in all forms by churning out empowerment anthems, introducing a size-inclusive shapewear line and racking up millions of views on social media.She won this year’s Grammy for record of the year for “About Damn Time.”Diana Reddy, an assistant professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that allegations that fall outside legally protected categories could undermine Lizzo’s body-positive message and “could certainly encourage a settlement.”Proving a hostile work environment in the unconventional entertainment industry is difficult, she said, so the plaintiffs’ lawyers could be hoping for a settlement. “Employment discrimination plaintiffs don’t fare particularly well in court,” Ms. Reddy said. More

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      Listening to Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ References

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      A tour through key samples, references and influences on the pop star’s 2022 album as her world tour arrives in North America.A scene from the screens at Beyoncé’s North American Renaissance World Tour opener in Toronto.The New York TimesDear listeners,Last weekend, I traveled to Toronto to catch the first North American date of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour. I returned home feeling like the human incarnation of the starry-eyed emoji (so many sparkles!) and with a new appreciation for “Renaissance,” the loose and sprawling album that Beyoncé released this time last year.“Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, is a sonic odyssey through the history of dance music, with a specific focus on the genre’s Black and queer pioneers. It achieves the perfect balance of many opposing forces: “Renaissance” is studied and referential but still maintains a fun lightness. It celebrates community and a kind of artistic plurality while still centering Beyoncé’s singular star power. It contains a few of Beyoncé’s strongest stand-alone singles and yet plays like a continuous D.J. set: Sometimes I will get an urge to hear one particular song and, before I know it, I will have listened to the rest of the album in its entirety — again!Witnessing the way Beyoncé staged some of these songs live has helped me hear new elements in an album I have already played approximately four billion times. Some of that has to do with the way she contextualized the “Renaissance” songs within the evolution of her own catalog (the vampy, hard-hitting “Diva,” from 2008, sounds like a transmission from Beyoncé’s future), but she also made sure to situate “Renaissance” within a larger continuum of pop music, electronic sounds, and Black and queer culture.That’s a project I’d like to continue with today’s playlist, which is a kind of musical tour of the samples, references and influences heard on “Renaissance.” It is highly indebted to a great piece that the music journalist and electronic dance music scholar Michaelangelo Matos wrote for The Times right after the album was released, which served as a listening guide to its many sonic footnotes.Come along for the ride as Beyoncé pays homage to the Chicago house of Adonis, the postmillennial bounce of Big Freedia, the pulsating bass of Reese and much more. May this playlist help you hear “Renaissance” anew, learn a little about electronic music history or maybe just make like Beyoncé and Grace Jones and move.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Adonis: “No Way Back”One of the formative early classics of Chicago house — a localized subgenre of dance music that spread through the Windy City’s underground club scene in the mid-80s — Adonis’s 1986 track “No Way Back” has a menacing intensity and a grimy low-end that would prove enormously influential … (Listen on YouTube)2. Beyoncé: “Cozy”… and “Cozy,” the second song off “Renaissance,” certainly bears that influence. Production and a writing credit from the Chicago-born D.J. and musician Honey Dijon also add some house-music credibility to this hypnotic track. (Listen on YouTube)3. Chic: “Good Times”Sumptuous, timeless, transcendent — Chic’s glittering “Good Times,” from 1979, remains one of the best-known and most frequently referenced tunes in the history of dance music. Bernard Edwards’s bass line is a thing of beauty, rightly given its own extended solo. (Listen on YouTube)4. Beyoncé: “Cuff It”If you’re going to pay homage to Chic, as Beyoncé does on this groovy disco throwback, you might as well get Nile Rodgers on the track. “When I got called to play on this song, it was the most organic thing that ever happened to me,” Rodgers said, accepting a Grammy when “Cuff It” won best R&B song. (Beyoncé was fashionably late.) “I heard the song and I just said, ‘I wanna play on that. Right now.’ And it was one take, I promise.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Robin S.: “Show Me Love”Driven by the unmistakable sound of the Korg M1 Organ 2, this 1992 hit — technically a remix, by the Swedish producer StoneBridge, of a little-heard 1990 track by Robin Stone — brought house music to the mainstream in the early ’90s, and its much-sampled keyboard riff is still ubiquitous today. (Listen on YouTube)6. Big Freedia: “Explode”Beyoncé first sampled Big Freedia, a.k.a. the Queen of Bounce, on her 2016 hit “Formation.” She once again drew upon the New Orleans musician’s highly flammable energy on “Break My Soul,” which samples her 2014 single “Explode.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Beyoncé: “Break My Soul”A house homage updated with some fresh zaps of New Orleans bounce, the “Renaissance” leadoff single “Break My Soul” was a worthy introduction to the album’s kinetic, highly referential sound. (Though, as the reporter Rich Juzwiak found when speaking to StoneBridge and Robin S., exactly how directly “Break My Soul” references “Show Me Love” is up for debate.) (Listen on YouTube)8. Reese/Kevin Saunderson: “Just Want Another Chance”The term “Reese bass” refers to the dark, warbling low-end that rumbles through the foundation of “Just Want Another Chance,” a pivotal Detroit techno track released by Kevin Saunderson — under the moniker Reese — in 1988. The Reese has become so popular that there are innumerable patches and presets that now replicate Saunderson’s groundbreaking bass sound. (Listen on YouTube)9. Beyoncé: “America Has a Problem”The most bonkers staging on the Renaissance World Tour comes when Beyoncé plays this one live — donning a custom Mugler bee costume and performing from behind a desk like she’s a newscaster attempting to brainwash the world. The Reese-indebted tones give this song, and its live performance, an ominous edge. (Listen on YouTube)10. A.G. Cook: “Beautiful”In the mid-to-late 2010s, the experimental production collective PC Music pushed pop to its most frenetic, gloriously synthetic extremes, reveling in surface sheen and outré ideas. The English producer A.G. Cook was at the forefront of this wave (sometimes called hyperpop), and his zanily infectious “Beautiful,” from the 2015 compilation “PC Music Volume 1,” is emblematic of his distinct sound. (Listen on YouTube)11. Beyoncé: “All Up in Your Mind”Beyoncé goes hyperpop — sort of — on this distorted earworm co-produced by Cook himself. The instrumentation sounds like a malfunctioning computer program, but there’s a growly physicality to Beyoncé’s vocal that gives the song an intriguing textural friction and keeps things in the realm of flesh and blood. (Listen on YouTube)12. Donna Summer: “I Feel Love”Arguably the most innovative and influential dance record of all time, “I Feel Love” is Giorgio Moroder’s wholehearted embrace of electronic music’s nascent, seemingly boundless possibilities. Donna Summer plays the ghost in the machine, unfurling an ecstatic vocal and achieving a kind of cyborgian bliss. (Listen on YouTube)13. Beyoncé: “Summer Renaissance”It’s risky business, referencing the iconic “I Feel Love” as blatantly as Beyoncé does here. But over the course of four-and-a-half minutes of airy falsetto and giddy sass, she effectively makes the argument that quoting Summer is the only way to end an album like “Renaissance.” It’s the ultimate, inevitable conclusion — a fireworks-display finale to this dazzling tour through dance music past, present and future. (Listen on YouTube)Release your wiggle,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ References” track listTrack 1: Adonis, “No Way Back”Track 2: Beyoncé, “Cozy”Track 3: Chic, “Good Times”Track 4: Beyoncé, “Cuff It”Track 5: Robin S., “Show Me Love”Track 6: Big Freedia: “Explode”Track 7: Beyoncé, “Break My Soul”Track 8: Reese/Kevin Saunderson, “Just Want Another Chance”Track 9: Beyoncé, “America Has a Problem”Track 10: A.G. Cook, “Beautiful”Track 11: Beyoncé, “All Up in Your Mind”Track 12: Donna Summer, “I Feel Love”Track 13: Beyoncé: “Summer Renaissance”Bonus tracksSpeaking of dance floor anthems that pull knowingly from house music history: I am very much digging Troye Sivan’s new single “Rush.” I don’t know if the Song of the Summer is a thing anymore, or if it ever really was, but I nonetheless appreciate him making a run for it.“Rush” is just one of the 11 new songs we recommend in this week’s Playlist. Check out the full selection, featuring tracks by Billie Eilish, Jamila Woods and Jlin, here. More