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      Britpop’s Back. But What Happened to Cool Britannia?

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      Some of the biggest ’90s bands are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals abroad. Yet Britpop’s swaggering sense of national self-belief feels like a distant memory.In 1994, Luis Chuva was 14 and on summer vacation at his grandparents’ home in Costa Nova, Portugal, when, one Saturday, he glimpsed something on TV that changed his life: a music video for “Girls and Boys,” by the British band Blur.Onscreen, Blur’s singer, Damon Albarn, dressed in a track jacket and wearing a hint of eyeliner, glanced seductively at the camera, and then launched into an upbeat song about British tourists on promiscuous, beer-fueled Mediterranean holidays.The swaggering track couldn’t have been further from Chuva’s simple teenage life: It featured Albarn singing in a regional British accent about “Girls who want boys / Who like boys to be girls.” But Chuva recalled in a recent interview that he “was hypnotized.”Damon Albarn in the 1994 music video for Blur’s “Girls and Boys.”Soon, the teenager was scouring Portuguese music magazines to find out everything he could about Blur and the other so-called Britpop bands, which included Pulp, Suede (known as the London Suede in the United States) and Oasis. He taped their songs off the radio. He got hold of bootleg tapes of their concerts, which he dreamed of attending.And Chuva made a decision: At the first opportunity, he would move to London. Viewed from sleepy ’90s Portugal, Britain looked optimistic, exciting, colorful. “It just felt like the place to be,” he said.Now 44, Chuva has lived in London for almost two decades, and, this summer, he’s busy — because Britpop is back. Some 30 years after the genre emerged, paving the way for the wider phenomenon known as Cool Britannia, some of its biggest acts are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals from Mexico to Japan.This month, Blur released “The Ballad of Darren,” the group’s first album in eight years, and played two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium, a London soccer venue that can seat 90,000 people. Chuva went to both concerts.Pulp, another Britpop mainstay, has also re-formed for a major tour. (Chuva saw them, too.) There was even chatter about a potential Oasis reunion — although Noel and Liam Gallagher, the brothers at the heart of that boisterous rock group, quickly knocked the idea back, pointing out on separate radio shows that they don’t talk to each other.Wembley Stadium, where Blur performed their London shows, holds 90,000 people.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe comebacks have received euphoric reviews, but they are occurring at a starkly different moment for British pop music, compared with the ’90s. Although Britpop never reached the same heights of popularity in the United States that it did in Australia, Canada, Japan and continental Europe, it coincided with a high point for British soft power. In 1996 Newsweek declared London the world’s coolest city. In 1997, Vanity Fair devoted 25 pages to the bands, artists, chefs and designers making Britain “the place we must all look to.” The same year, The New Yorker called Britain’s music scene “a scary paradise.”Today, however, neither British nor global news media are portraying Britain as the musical place to be — despite it giving the world current stars like Ed Sheeran, Adele and Harry Styles. Instead, news articles about the country’s music scene are more likely to touch on venues shuttering — at a rate of one a week this year, according to the nonprofit Music Venue Trust — or the country’s bands, DJs and rappers struggling to tour abroad after Brexit brought in a tangle of red tape. Local news outlets have also lamented the British government’s cuts to arts funding, and warned about the decline of music teaching in schools.Sitting in his West London recording studio recently, Albarn said some things hadn’t changed since Britpop’s heyday. He was still “completely obsessed with this country,” he said, and writing songs with lyrics that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.”But there were also big differences, he added. He was now 55, and wore knee supports onstage. And the challenges facing the country’s pipeline of musical stars were clear: “The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” he said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Chuva, the Portuguese music fan, said he felt a change, too — not just in Britain’s music, but in the national mood. “The weather here’s always been gray,” he said. “Now everything is.”Damon Albarn said he was still “completely obsessed” with Britain, and still wrote songs that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.” Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBut there were challenges to the country’s pipeline of musical stars, Albarn said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” Albarn said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe emergence in the early 1990s of Britpop — a catchall term for almost any guitar music that came out of Britain at the time — was, in many ways, a reaction to America. At the end of 1992, Blur traveled to the United States for a 44-date tour, only to find a country gripped by grunge music and indifferent to the band’s danceable indie charms.Not long after British journalists labeled the style “Britpop,” and highlighted its rejection of American tastes, it became a pop juggernaut in Britain, with bands vying to top the country’s pop charts.Blur’s music seemed to typify the genre, with cheeky singles about life in modern England. But it quickly expanded to include a variety of acts, including Elastica — a sneeringly cool punk-influenced band — and the anthemic Oasis. Each had different ideas about Britishness, but they all seemed united in a swaggering sense of self-belief.The crowd at a Blur gig, in London, in July. The audience included new and old fans.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesSeveral of the bands were depicted with the Union Jack flag on magazine covers, and happy to deploy it in their visuals. Among them was Sonya Madan, the lead singer of Echobelly, who was born in India and moved to Britain as a child. She once appeared in a music video wearing a Union Jack T-shirt with the phrase “My Country Too” scrawled on it. “It was such a positive explosion,” she said in a recent interview, “with people exploring their self-identity and having this positivity about being British.”And it didn’t take long for Britain’s politicians to see an opportunity. In 1995, Tony Blair, then the leader of the opposition Labour Party, invited Albarn for a meeting in the Houses of Parliament. Over gin and tonics, Blair and a spin doctor peppered the singer with queries. They included, Albarn said: “What do you think young people are looking for in their governance?”“I didn’t understand,” Albarn recalled. “I’d just thought he wanted to meet me.”Two years later, when Blair became prime minister, Albarn turned down an invitation to a drinks reception for British cultural figures at 10 Downing Street, having decided that the new government was just using musicians for a photo opportunity.Some fans wore throwback British fashions including bucket hats. A handful even draped themselves in the Union Jack.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesLuis Chuva, a Portuguese Blur fan who relocated to London in the ’90s and still lives there. He attended both Blur gigs.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBlur’s latest album, “The Ballad of Darren,” is named for their former bodyguard. At a Wembley show this month, fans wore masks bearing Darren “Smoggy” Evans’s face.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIf Britpop made Britain feel good about itself, it also made people abroad feel positive about Britain.Derek Miller, a 46-year-old American actor, said in an interview that he became “immediately smitten” with Blur when he heard them as a teenager in Chicago. The music didn’t have the machismo of American rock, he said. “There was something about it that was just fun.”While studying at Indiana University Bloomington, he met other Britpop obsessives. (The college radio station had a Britpop show, and the presenter was prone to speaking in a fake British accent, Miller said.) After graduation he moved to Britain. He now lives in Yorkshire, in northern England, and has a son named Jarvis, after the Pulp lead singer.In recent interviews, a dozen other non-British Britpop fans offered similar tales. Jess Mo said that, at age 18, she moved to London from a village of “literally five houses” on an island off the coast of Sweden, because of her love of Blur. Anne-Sophie Marsh, a Frenchwoman, said she wrote to Pulp’s fan club for advice on what British college to study at, and then moved to the city of Brighton.Blur played hits including “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesMost expert interviewees for this article — musicians, academics and journalists — said they felt that Britain’s music scene was today less likely to draw fans to the country. Their reasons didn’t involve the quality of British music. Albarn said some of Britain’s younger, ever-online music stars were writing songs filled with such “universal references” that fans may not even realize they were British. That applied to his own group Gorillaz, too, he said. “I don’t think there’s any sense of it being English,” he said. “They think it’s American in America,” he added. “I think in England they think it’s American, too.”The only interviewee who didn’t seem downbeat about the prospects of Britain’s musical influence was an American, but one who knows a lot about soft power. Joseph Nye is a political scientist and a former Pentagon official, who in the late 1980s pioneered the idea that countries don’t need to use force to get what they want, but can achieve influence by building popular affinity. By phone, Nye said that, at first glance, it did seem Britain’s musical star was waning. “I hear a lot about K-pop,” he said of Korean artists like BTS. “I don’t hear much about Britpop.”But, he added, people would still be listening to touchstone British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles for decades to come. It almost doesn’t matter what Britpop’s legacy was; the country remains a cultural powerhouse by virtue of its earlier history. “I’m not saying Britain can rest on its laurels forever,” Nye said. “But laurels don’t wither.”A Times reporter at the show spoke to fans from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesAt one of Blur’s recent homecoming shows at Wembley Stadium, fans had begun lining up outside long before the scheduled showtime. Nye seemed to have a point. Many wore Blur T-shirts. Others were dressed in throwback British fashions, including bucket hats and Fred Perry polo shirts. Few of those die-hard supporters were British. Instead, they said, they were from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France, and many had flown over especially for the concert. Chuva, the Portuguese fan, was among them in the line.A few hours later, Chuva was at the front as Blur played hits like “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain — and his teenage favorite, “Girls and Boys.” As the band finished with “The Universal” — a euphoric song from 1995 — Albarn put his hands on his knees, emotionally and physically spent.It was a “truly special” evening, Chuva said. He just hoped the band’s aging members hadn’t exhausted themselves. He had tickets for the next day’s gig, too.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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      An Encounter With Shaun Cassidy, My First Crush

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      A fan finds herself in a backstage hug, decades after she kissed her poster of the onetime teen idol.I was approaching the George Washington Bridge when my friend Lynn fired a text into the Shaun Squad group chat: “GET READY, PARTY PEOPLE!”My heart sank as the message piped through the car speakers in a robotic female voice.I dictated back: “OMG, Lynn, you better not be about to text something that’s going make me regret that I didn’t get my brows waxed for tonight.”“I am,” she replied.A flood of adrenaline sent my pulse racing.An hour later, I would be face to face with my original schoolgirl crush, Shaun Cassidy. Unruly eyebrows and all.In the late ’70s, thanks to the one-two punch of his starring role in ABC’s teen detective series “The Hardy Boys” and a run of hit singles, he was regularly on the cover of Tiger Beat and other teen magazines. His look — feathered hair, satin baseball jackets and skintight pants — launched a tsunami of adolescent hormones.Long before “nepo baby” was a thing, he rose to fame as the firstborn son of the musical star turned “Partridge Family” matriarch Shirley Jones and the Broadway legend Jack Cassidy. His half brother, David Cassidy, had preceded him in teen dream stature.Shaun’s most popular single was his cover of the Crystals’ “Da Do Ron Ron,” but my favorite was “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll,” a solid bop written by Eric Carmen. Centered on a narrator who’s 16 and sick of school, the lyrics preach the gospel of rock rebellion, and even in my grade school years, the song stuck.Each of his albums came with a poster — the record label knew its market — and my friend Kristin and I pretended to kiss him until we dissolved into giggles.As I marched into teendom, I moved from roller skates to combat boots, and my crushes took a more androgynous turn. MTV introduced a slew of British sad boys with teased hair and makeup, the most famous on American shores being Depeche Mode and the Cure. Their subtly subversive masculinity so besotted me that my real-life male contemporaries were a letdown. A memoir of my romantic coming-of-age could be titled “I Was Told There Would Be Eyeliner.”Then I saw Catherine Deneuve as the nightclubbing vampiress Miriam Blaylock in “The Hunger.” Kissing Shaun’s poster gave way to kissing a shy Goth girl under the poster for the film on her bedroom wall. But you never forget your first, and Shaun, with his faunlike visage, was the perfect gateway crush.I fell for him the second time because of the rats.Two years ago, one of his tweets appeared in my timeline. It showed a screen grab of a text from his wife asking him to talk with her about their “rat problem.” Shaun gave it a caption: “She is such a romantic.”Former teen idol turned Wife Guy? Sure, I’d follow that. Four of my friends also started following him on Twitter, and the Shaun Squad was born.So when the New York engagement of his “Magic of a Midnight Sky” solo show was announced, one Squad member, Joy, bought tickets the minute they went on sale, and Lynn contacted his tour manager, vowing to arrange a meet-and-greet.Not likely, I thought. But the girl in me held fast to the fantasy.As the club filled on the night of the show, our hopes for a meeting began to fade. Monica had a fresh keratin treatment, her hair a glossy curtain. Marjorie had found some old iron-on transfer paper and whipped up her own Shaun tank top. She even made us Swiftie-style “Shaun Squad” friendship bracelets. We were sighing dejectedly into our $18 cocktails when the tour manager appeared.“OK, let’s go,” she said. “But we’ve got to be quick.”We moved past the audience of women clutching vintage Shaun memorabilia. I noticed that one of them had brought her “Hardy Boys” lunch box.Up an elevator and down a narrow hall to the dressing room. And there he was — tall, his hair a mix of blond and gray, the shiny disco-era outfit traded for a black button-down and jeans.Shaun Freakin’ Cassidy, OK?I’m enough of an extrovert that I will go into a convenience store to buy chips and, five minutes later, end up saying, “What’s your Instagram?” to the clerk. But not now.Not now at all.I let my fellow Shaun Squad members go first, watching them angle in for photos and autographs while he chatted with them, the basso profundo of his speaking voice a pleasing rumble.Then there was nothing to do but move forward. I was like: “Why is he opening his arms? What is happening? Are we hugging? We are hugging!”It wasn’t a crazy hug — a quick companionable embrace, followed by that 1-2-3 closure pat — but it produced enough dopamine to make me unable to feel my face for the rest of the night.The show, even without a fan’s forgiving grading curve, was excellent, a mix of song and story. Given the heedlessness of 1970s celebrity culture, it’s a wonder that Shaun was able to survive the reverse panopticon of teen stardom.Tactful but candid, he talked about female fans tearing out chunks of his hair and his dad joking about putting his childhood bedroom up for rent when it seemed his son’s fame might eclipse his own. He also included a touching tribute to David, who died of liver failure at age 67 in 2017.Shaun made it clear that he wasn’t coasting on the fumes of his former glory, having segued from teen idol to television writer and producer. Yet he seemed comfortable enough with his cultural footprint that, in his side hustle as a vintner, his wine is branded My First Crush.Writing about a fangirl crush can make you feel like a goober, because it elicits contempt that is explicitly gendered. Female fandom — especially Top 40 fandom — carries a processed-cheese sheen. But a guy going on for an hour about a Bruce Springsteen chord progression or a Wilco set list? That’s depth, man. (And queer fandom? Big heteroblivious shrug.)But fandom cuts across all demographics, and everyone’s deserves respect. One of my favorite viral videos of recent years shows a subway car full of New Yorkers singing the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” in unselfconscious joy. We should not be pressured to be so mature in our tastes that we miss all the fun.In the Fugazi song “Bad Mouth,” the punk stalwart Ian MacKaye sang: “You can’t be what you were. So you better start being just what you are.” As a younger woman, I adopted those lines as a cri de coeur, taken by the hard stance against nostalgia and sentimentality. But I have since reconsidered.I drove home from the show listening to “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll” on repeat, knowing that a number of my friends were seeing the Cure that same night, my Gen X gloomster cohort having their own flashback moment. And I salute them.Nostalgia can be a blinkering agent, but it can also be a benevolent time lord, allowing who you were and who you are to join hands. Through the alchemical magic of fandom, you can occupy both phases of your life at once — sensible adult and keening fangirl. Steady sun and hormonal supernova, all of it just a song’s play away.That’s the crush spirit. That’s nostalgia. That’s rock ’n’ roll.Lily Burana is the author of “Grace for Amateurs: Field Notes on a Journey Back to Faith” and three other books. More

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      Dead & Company Fans React to John Mayer’s “Guitar Face”

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      For some fans of Dead & Company, which just finished its Final Tour, the faces made by John Mayer while performing are almost as memorable as the music.During the final show of Dead & Company’s so-called Final Tour on Sunday night, the crowd at Oracle Park in San Francisco swayed and bobbed like the current of a turning river.People in flower crowns grooved through the shimmying mass on the stadium’s field. A man in cowboy regalia cupped his hands around his ears and two-stepped to the beat. A woman in face glitter who gave her name as Honey Bee regaled strangers with the tale of how she came with a man she had met two days before, who happened to have an extra ticket. Other fans, who were not as lucky, danced on the sidewalk outside of the park.And onstage, the band’s lead guitarist, John Mayer, leaned back, sucked his lips inside his mouth and scrunched his eyes closed as he wailed on a guitar while playing the song “Althea.” Shortly after his impassioned solo, footage of it started spreading on Twitter.Mr. Mayer has been a member of Dead & Company, an offshoot of the Grateful Dead, since it formed in 2015. Though he is not the band’s face, the faces he has made while performing — which can cover the full spectrum of human emotion, from despair to sweet relief to sublime pleasure — have for some been almost as unforgettable as the music itself.Fans have made YouTube compilations, photo collages, a meme with a giant slug and niche Instagram accounts dedicated to Mr. Mayer’s expressive “guitar face,” which is not exactly an anomaly in the world of rock ’n’ roll. “I feel a little bit uncomfortable with people thinking that I made up the guitar face,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “God, wouldn’t it be great to go to the jungles of Borneo and give a tribe Fender Stratocasters and have them listen to Jimi Hendrix — but not show them Jimi Hendrix — and come back five years later and see if there’s any guitar face? I have a feeling there would be.”Mr. Mayer, through a representative, declined to comment for this article. The faces he made during the last leg of the Final Tour appeared to reflect the mood of its tie-dye-wearing fans, which alternated between grief and ecstasy as the music that seemingly would never stop finally did. (Dead & Company members have said the tour would be its last, but have not ruled out the possibility of a future for the band.)From far left, Mr. Mayer, Jay Lane, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart performing at the final show of Dead & Company’s Final Tour on July 16.Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images“The thing I love about him is he’s fully enjoying it — he’s in the music,” Tony Seigh, from Valparaiso, Ind., said of Mr. Mayer. “For those three, four hours, that guy is just in a different zone. And haters beware, he’s going to be making some very strange faces.”Mr. Seigh, 33, runs Holy Moly Mischief, which sells Dead-themed T-shirts, fanny packs and a bumper sticker that reads: “KEEP HONKING! I’m on my way to see JOHN MAYER and what’s left of the GRATEFUL DEAD.” Mr. Seigh, who used to work for Tesla, said he had seen Dead & Company 86 times, and he described Mr. Mayer’s faces using a word many others did: orgasmic.“It’s like a close-up of his face in an adult film,” he said. “There are moments where it’s like, Oh my gosh, something is happening to him. Like, is a ghost … massaging him?”Mr. Seigh, who was wearing a yellow “Always Grateful” hat that matched his yellow-painted toenails, added that Mr. Mayer’s expressions were one of many visual elements of live performances by Dead & Company, whose members have included Bob Weir, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane.“Bob looks like a gray werewolf, and Oteil has, like, pro-wrestler face paint on, and Mickey looks like ET playing some drum thing,” he said. “And then you look at John, and he looks like pictures of old Catholic saints when they’re getting visited by an angel.”Clif Edwards, 60, a graphic designer from Sacramento whose hair was styled into a long gray ponytail, said that as a guitarist himself, he knew how playing could be a full-body experience. Of Mr. Mayer’s facial expressions, he said, “I approve.”“But it’s odd to watch,” added Mr. Edwards, who said he had seen the original Grateful Dead play some 340 times.A man in a tie-dye bucket hat who was standing near Mr. Edwards chimed in: “You know you’re in the thick of the jam when he’s got the face going.”Susan Marston, 58, a program manager from Boise, Idaho, said that unlike some longtime Dead fans who were skeptical when Mr. Mayer joined Dead & Company, she knew from the very beginning that he would bring something unique to the spinoff band.“There’s a lot of crusty people who said, ‘Oh, I can’t see John Mayer,” Ms. Marston said. “But if you knew anything about John Mayer prior to joining Dead & Company, then you knew the guy could freaking rip the blues.”“Sometimes his eyes are rolling back in his head,” added Ms. Marston, who was wearing a black top covered with photos of Mr. Mayer. “It elevates everybody because he’s so into what we’re into — it’s our synchronization with the band.” As she spoke, a man with a fake scarlet begonia tucked into his hat interrupted her to show off a sticker that featured Mr. Mayer’s face flashing a particularly euphoric expression and surrounded by a highly suggestive lyric from the song “The Weight.”A few Dead & Company fans said they had never noticed Mr. Mayer’s expressions. Kim Holzem, 52, from Three Rivers, Calif., scoffed in disbelief when her husband, Tim, mentioned that he had never registered the guitarist’s faces before.“Sometimes he looks like he’s in pain, other times he looks like he’s blissed out,” said Ms. Holzem, who saw Dead & Company three times last weekend in San Francisco with her husband and two teenage sons.Mr. Mayer, she added, “makes some weird-ass faces, but he’s still adorable.”Skyler McKinley, 31, a bar owner from Denver who was standing not far from the stage at the last show of the tour, said Mr. Mayer’s face was “inescapable” at live performances, in part because it is often “blown up, to skyscraper size” on massive screens. He added that Mr. Mayer had the “sex energy of a rock star” while performing, and compared his facial expressions to the dance moves of Mick Jagger.“At first I thought it was absurd, these lewd faces,” Mr. McKinley said. “But this is his aspect of communing with Grateful Dead music, the same way we all do, in a religious sense.”“I have no idea what my face looks like when I’m at one of these shows,” he added, “but I bet I look pretty ridiculous, too.” More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): Fans Misbehaving at Concerts, and Pinkydoll’s NPC TikTok

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The recent scourge of concertgoers throwing things at pop stars onstage and how Adele, Harry Styles, Bebe Rexha, Drake and others have responded; plus the ways in which the stage/crowd barrier has become more porous in recent years, in both directionsThe TikTok streamer Pinkydoll, who has honed an NPC-style of performance that has been earning her thousands of viewers, and thousands of dollarsNew songs from Troye Sivan and Militarie Gun (as performed by Post Malone)Whether there’s still a Mason-Dixon line divide in pop music consumption, especially as it relates to hip-hop and countrySnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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      How Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ Became the ‘Scary’ Version

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      A fan thought she had ordered a new vinyl pressing of the pop star’s album. But what came out of the speakers was entirely different.Rachel Hunter could not wait to play her new vinyl recording of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now.”After waiting weeks for its arrival, Ms. Hunter placed the orchid-colored vinyl with Ms. Swift’s face on its center on her record player, lifted the needle and let it play. But instead of Ms. Swift’s catchy choruses, acoustic guitar and banjo strums, another woman’s voice came out.“I quit seeing people, quit looking at the flakes of flesh and dancing organisms,” an echoing voice said, without music in the background.Maybe there was something wrong with the speed, Ms. Hunter thought, or maybe it was one of Ms. Swift’s notorious Easter eggs. She flipped the record to the other side, but it only got weirder.“The 70 billion people of Earth, where are they hiding?” a man’s eerie voice said repeatedly.“It was a little scary. I was by myself,” Ms. Hunter recalled. “I thought, Is this a horror film? Because it didn’t feel like real life, especially when you’re expecting Taylor Swift.”The record wasn’t haunted. It was just British electronica music.Universal Music Group, which represents Taylor Swift, and Above Board Distribution, a small British label, use the same printing plant in France. But instead of pressing Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” album, the plant accidentally pressed “Happy Land,” a compilation of British electronica from the 1990s, onto the purple vinyl and put it into the “Speak Now” jacket.The first song Ms. Hunter heard was “True Romance,” which features more than 11 minutes of electronica by Thunderhead, and the second was “Soul Vine,” a deep-house track by Cabaret Voltaire, one of the most influential groups of the genre.That revelation materialized only after Ms. Hunter posted about her experience on TikTok: “Does anyone else’s ‘Speak Now’ vinyl not have Taylor Swift on it?” she asked. The video has been viewed over four million times.Now she’s fending off offers of $250 for the record. Her video set off a lengthy discussion on Discogs, an online music database, among collectors who are hoping to find another copy. Fans of Cabaret Voltaire have reimagined the band’s vinyl sleeves with the names of Ms. Swift’s albums; one even mixed Ms. Swift’s song “All Too Well” with Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag.”

      @mischief_marauder send help I got speak now (not Taylors version) this is so funny #speaknowtaylorsversion @Taylor Swift @Taylor Nation #erastour #speaknoworchid ♬ original sound – Rachel ✨ In a statement, Universal said it was “aware that there are an extremely limited number of incorrectly pressed vinyl copies in circulation and have addressed the issue,” adding that if customers receive a misprinted vinyl, they should contact their retailer.Ms. Hunter, who purchased the album through Ms. Swift’s official store in Britain, requested a new copy but had not received it as of Friday.Dan Hill, the managing director of Above Board, said the label had printed a couple hundred records of “Happy Land,” and he assumed that the stamper had been accidentally left on the machine and used for the “Speak Now” discs.“What’s happened in the making of this record is kind of like making a cake — they mixed up the ingredients,” he said, adding that misprints had happened from time to time, including with albums by Beyoncé and the Beatles, “but maybe not with this profile.”Mr. Hill believes there might be at least one more pressing out in the world like Ms. Hunter’s. He is looking as hard as the next record collector.“This is a total Willy-Wonka-style golden ticket. If someone has one, these could be worth thousands,” he said. “But no one knows how far they are.”Joe Muggs, a British music writer who reviewed the reissue of “Happy Land” for the online magazine The Quietus earlier this spring, said the tracks came from a variety of genres, including heavy dub reggae, industrial and electronica, that come together to make a “very narcotic kind of sound” that was emblematic of the 1990s.“That’s what makes the music on this album really exciting,” he said, “its ability to startle even now when someone hears it out of the blue.”The Cabaret Voltaire song is one of the darker tracks, he said, but many of the songs had a “pop compatibility” and were “very funky; there’s a lot of melody in there.”“The fact that TikTok will fling up these random things does leave the window open to magic in terms of changing people’s tastes or sparking little fires,” Mr. Muggs said.That’s exactly what Stephen Mallinder, a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, is hoping for. Cabaret Voltaire has always appealed to new audiences, he said, but being jump-started by Ms. Swift’s audience “is a different kind of magnitude.”“It has captured everyone’s imagination because it’s a cultural clash of big proportions,” Mr. Mallinder said, adding, “If we can convert a few and get them into electronica stuff, clubby stuff, that’s all right by me.” More

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      Why Can’t We Stop Quitting the Grateful Dead?

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      Jerry Garcia died in 1995. The band bid fans farewell in 2015. This weekend, Dead & Company will close out its Final Tour. Why can’t we stop quitting one of rock’s beloved acts?Dead & Company fans twirled on the floor of Citi Field in New York in June. The last shows on the band’s Final Tour are this weekend in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead got its start.The first time Albie Cullen said goodbye to the Grateful Dead was on Aug. 9, 1995.A co-worker told Cullen, an attorney for a Boston-area music label, that Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s iconic lead guitarist, had died that day. Cullen had attended dozens of shows. He reveled in the Dead’s improvisational spirit, the way no two performances were alike: “When you saw the Stones a dozen times,” he explained recently, “it was pretty much the same show.”Despite the Garcia news, Cullen kept his plans to see RatDog, a side project of Garcia’s bandmate Bob Weir, play a concert in Hampton Beach, N.H., that evening. Weir, a rhythm guitarist, told the crowd that Garcia — who at 53 suffered a fatal heart attack at a drug rehab facility — “proved that great music can make sad times better.” During an encore of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Cullen, 59, recalled, “There was not a dry eye.”“Everybody kind of knew that was the end,” he added.The Grateful Dead had replaced departed members before, but this was different. With his rootsy tenor, Santa-gone-gray beard and unmistakable plucking, Garcia had defined a touring juggernaut and its vibrant subculture, which had become synonymous with the ’60s. The band’s four surviving original members agreed they would never use the name “Grateful Dead” without Garcia.Fans at the band’s show in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., came decked out in a mix of tie-dye and ’60s chic.But the Dead did not die. The next year, several members participated in a tour. They maintained side projects that mainly played Dead songs. Different permutations toured together — as the Other Ones, as Furthur, as the adjective-less the Dead.Finally, in 2015, the band staged another goodbye, playing five shows with Phish’s Trey Anastasio on lead guitar. The mini tour was called Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead.That adieu, too, did not take. That fall, Weir and the Dead’s original drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, assembled a new act, Dead & Company, with the keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, the bassist Oteil Burbridge and the lead guitarist John Mayer (yes, that John Mayer).A funny thing happened as this new band wound its way across the United States: The Dead became a cultural touchstone again. Dead & Company attracted a new crop of younger fans, as did tribute bands like Joe Russo’s Almost Dead. Last August, the Dead had its largest week of record sales in 35 years, according to its publisher; in February, it won its first Grammy. Between 2012 and 2022, U.S. streams of Dead songs increased at nearly double the rate of the Rolling Stones, according to the tracking service Luminate.The Dead had found its moment again.The uniqueness of each Dead performance is crucial to the music’s lasting appeal.A young fan waiting for the Saratoga Springs show named a caterpillar “Bertha,” after the Dead song of the same name.“This could sound wildly corny, but I don’t care: The community of the Dead is a necessary community in a year like 2023,” said Bethany Cosentino, 36, of the indie rock band Best Coast. She became a fan just a few years ago thanks to her “Gen X boyfriend.”“There’s a real ethos of joy to be in a room with a bunch of people who are just connecting to music in their own way but having this communal, collective experience,” she added.Cullen said the Deadheads have taken note: “I joke with my friends — they’re bigger now than they ever were.”Now there is yet another farewell. After more than 200 shows, Dead & Company has sold out stadiums across the country with its so-called Final Tour. The run concludes this weekend with three shows at Oracle Park in San Francisco, the city where the Grateful Dead formed nearly 60 years ago.“It’s a part of the life cycle. In life, there’s death,” Hart said in a video interview. “But it all depends on what you call death. Because there’s life after death — in music, anyway.”What draws Dead fans to shows like the one that took place in Saratoga Springs? “There’s a real ethos of joy to be in a room with a bunch of people who are just connecting to music in their own way but having this communal, collective experience,” said the indie rocker Bethany Cosentino.Bands led by Weir, the original Dead bassist Phil Lesh and Kreutzmann (who was replaced for this tour by Jay Lane) all have concerts scheduled in the next couple of months. Hart allowed for the possibility of a future for Dead & Company, while confirming this was its last tour.“The music’s never going to go anywhere — and one of the brilliant things about the music is there are thousands of concerts we all have access to,” said Andy Cohen, the Bravo host and executive producer who has been a Dead fan since high school. “But the communal feeling of all of us being at Citi Field together and enjoying two banger shows,” he added, “that’s something I don’t envision we’re going to get again.”We are, it seems, always saying goodbye to the Grateful Dead. But Weir and Mayer warned fans not to expect a eulogy.“I think everyone’s had enough loss in their life to go to San Francisco and have this be funereal,” Mayer said.“I’m dead-set against that happening,” Weir added. “I’ll be stir-fried if I’m going to let that happen.”Mayer continued: “If I had my wish, it would be for people to say goodbye to Dead & Company without the pain of goodbye.”In the parking lot at Citi Field, where vendors hawked T-shirts, jewelry, fresh cooked food and less licit fare.Fans hoping for a spare ticket to the show outside the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.THE PROMOTER PETER SHAPIRO, who owns the jam band redoubts Brooklyn Bowl and the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., and promoted the Fare Thee Well shows, observed that the true volume of people who would pay to see the Grateful Dead — a band that stopped touring the year before Ticketmaster sold its first ticket over the Internet — wasn’t revealed until 2015, when Dead fans broke the site’s record for most buyers in a queue.Ticket sales for the five concerts that year — two at Levi’s Stadium near San Francisco and three at Chicago’s Soldier Field — brought in $40 million. Nearly 71,000 people attended each Chicago show; many more viewed theatrical and pay-per-view simulcasts.“Fare Thee Well was supposed to be an ending,” Shapiro said, “and it was a new beginning.”Mayer was secreted away during the Chicago shows, already a planned addition. He had met Weir and Hart through Don Was, the producer and record executive. Mayer gushed to them about the Dead’s music, which he came to well after his formative listening years; he compared it in a recent interview to “cilantro, if all I’ve been eating is meat and potatoes.”A fan gets an impromptu (and not permanent) tattoo in the Citi Field parking lot.Hart had been only glancingly familiar with Mayer’s music, but knew he was an excellent guitarist. “On our stage, he’s not a pop star or anything like that,” Hart said. “He has so much respect for the Grateful Dead — I have much respect for him for that. He treated the music like his own.”While some purists grumbled at Mayer’s inclusion (as, indeed, some grumbled about the Fare Thee Well shows), most fans “made a decision,” said Dennis McNally, a former Grateful Dead spokesman and biographer, “that they were not in love with ‘the band’ — the people — they were in love with the music, and that it was to some extent a matter of taste regarding who was playing it. That it was its own genre, almost like jazz or blues.”While many classic rock artists spawned cover acts, a website dedicated to Grateful Dead tribute bands has more than 600 groups in its database, 100 to 150 of which, its proprietors estimate, are active.Some Dead tribute acts are straightforward and quite popular, like Dark Star Orchestra, which recreates specific Dead concerts by set list. Others employ the Dead’s music as a jumping-off point. There is a jazz band and an Afrobeat one. Brown Eyed Women is all female. Warlocks of Tokyo sing in Japanese.The electronic artist LP Giobbi, a Millennial daughter of Deadheads, uses sonic loops and stems over house beats to create what she calls Dead House. “I am blown away by how many ravers I meet who are also Deadheads,” said the artist, who played at after-parties following many concerts on this Dead & Company tour.“The thing about this music is it doesn’t take place at home — no one’s home. People are trying to get home,” the guitarist John Mayer said.The uniqueness of each Dead performance is crucial to the music’s lasting appeal. Al Franken, the author, former senator and longtime fan who once opened for the band, recently caught up with friends who had seen Dead & Company outside St. Louis. “I asked what they played, and I was striking out. ‘Did they do “China Cat Sunflower”?’ ‘No.’ This is a big, big body of music. You can go to four nights in a row and basically not hear the same tune. And they play things differently all the time.”The Dead’s eclectic songbook comes out of rock, folk, blues, country and bluegrass; its lyrics, many by Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow, tend to be ambiguous yet buoyant (“strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand,” “wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world,” “what a long strange trip it’s been”).“The thing about this music is it doesn’t take place at home — no one’s home. People are trying to get home,” Mayer said.“There’s something about the fantasy of transience for people who don’t necessarily have it in their lives, like myself,” he added. “The fantasy of the perpetual searcher, the person with the knapsack who can sleep on couch after couch. Most people who go to Dead concerts don’t necessarily live that life, but aspire to spiritually have this devil-may-care attitude.”Trey Pierce, 20, began discovering the Dead in middle school via CD boxed sets, DVDs and the Internet Archive, which hosts free tapers’ recordings of Grateful Dead shows. Now he is a die-hard who drove for hours from St. Lawrence University in northern New York to see Phil Lesh and Friends perform in March outside New York City.“That’s what’s gotten me through much of my life,” he said. “Any weird stuff I’ve had going on, challenges I’ve had, it’s been relating to those lyrics and Jerry” — who died eight years before Pierce was born — “belting into my soul.”A fan displays “Grateful” knuckle tattoos in the Citi Field parking lot.IN A PARKING LOT across from Citi Field in Queens before the second of two Dead & Company shows last month, car stereos blasted recordings of live Dead as the subway clacked over the elevated lines. Vendors hawked T-shirts, jewelry, fresh cooked food and less licit fare. Erin Cadigan, who specified that she had seen 72 Dead shows “with Jerry,” performed tarot readings on a licensed, Grateful Dead-themed tarot deck she created with a partner.The tour has tended to be well reviewed by fans. “Closest thing to the original I’ve seen,” Cullen wrote in a text message after leaving Fenway Park in Boston last month. “Ironically it’s ending just as they seemed to have figured it out.”Mariah Napoli, 45, a self-described “second-generation” Deadhead, said she had seen on this tour “a lot more people crying the last two songs than you usually do.”She added, “I’ve been doing it so long, I don’t see myself stopping until they’re all dead. At that point, it’ll be time for me to hunker down and start to grow older.”Why do we keep saying goodbye to the Grateful Dead … then welcome them back, and then do it again?Several generations of Dead fans attended Dead & Company’s most recent run of shows.Dustin Grella and a friend bought a used Kentucky school bus and turned it into a canvas for Dead fans to express their love of the band through art.“The Buddhists believe that knowing every minute you’re going to die is what makes life so precious,” said Elena Lister, a New York-based psychiatrist and grief specialist. “If you know you’re going to lose something of any sort, you treasure it all the more while you have it. If you deny it, you miss that opportunity.”Dustin Grella, 52, a professor of animation at Queens College, has a more dramatic Dead story than most. In the spring and summer of 1995 he was following the Grateful Dead on what would turn out to be its last tour. But he missed the final two concerts at Soldier Field after he sustained an injury to his spinal cord when a porch collapsed at a campground outside a show near St. Louis.“When you’re experiencing that kind of trauma,” Grella said of the recovery period, “you want just to go back to normal. For me, that was being a touring Deadhead.”In 2015, he saw in the Fare Thee Well shows in Chicago a chance for closure — “my opportunity,” he said, “to make peace with the Dead.”But that did not mean he would miss another occasion to say goodbye. For Dead & Company’s final tour, Grella and a friend bought a used Kentucky school bus, attached panels to both sides and covered them in chalkboard paint. Grella, who uses a wheelchair, parked the bus in the lot, put chalk out and encouraged passers-by to add their own designs. He had begun the spontaneous artwork by etching a lyric from “Scarlet Begonias”: “Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right.” More

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      Is Beyoncé Linked to Sweden’s Inflation? An Economist Says So.

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      As fans from around the world spent money to witness the kick off of the star’s tour in Sweden, they may have caused the country’s inflation rate to stay higher than expected.In Europe’s relentless battle against inflation, another culprit has apparently emerged: Beyoncé.Last month, as the star kicked off her world tour in Stockholm, fans flocked from around the world to witness the shows, pushing up prices for hotel rooms. This could explain some of the reason Sweden’s inflation rate was higher than expected in May.Consumer prices in Sweden rose 9.7 percent last month from a year earlier, the country’s statistics agency, Statistics Sweden, said on Wednesday. The rate fell from the previous month’s 10.5 percent, but was slightly higher than economists had forecast.Michael Grahn, an economist at Danske Bank, said that the start of Beyoncé’s tour might have “colored” the inflation data. “How much is uncertain,” he wrote on Twitter, but it could be responsible for most of the 0.3 percentage point that restaurant and hotel prices added to the monthly increase in inflation.Restaurant and hotel prices rose 3.3 percent in May from the previous month, while prices for recreation and cultural activities and clothing also increased.Fans came from around the world to attend Beyoncé‘s sold-out shows. Their spending could explain some of the reason Sweden’s inflation rate was higher than expected in May.Felix Odell for The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, her first solo tour since 2016, started on May 10 in Stockholm, with two nights at a 50,000-capacity arena. Fans from around the world took advantage of favorable exchange rates and flew in to buy tickets that were cheaper than in the United States or Britain, for example.Mr. Grahn said in an email that he wouldn’t blame Beyoncé for the high inflation number but “her performance and global demand to see her perform in Sweden apparently added a little to it.”He added that the weakness of Sweden’s currency, the krona, would have added to demand as well as cheaper ticket prices. “The main impact on inflation, however, came from the fact that all fans needed somewhere to stay,” he said, adding that fans took up rooms as far as 40 miles away. But the impact will only be short-lived, as prices revert this month.While this is a “very rare” effect, he said that Sweden had seen this kind of inflationary effect on hotel prices before from a 2017 soccer cup final, when foreign teams played in the country.“So it is not unheard-of, albeit unusual,” Mr. Grahn said.Carl Martensson, a statistician at Statistics Sweden, said that “Beyoncé probably had an effect on hotel prices in Stockholm the week she performed here.” But he added, “it should not have had any significant impact of Sweden’s inflation in May.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Wannabe,’ by Aisha Harris

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      In her essay collection “Wannabe,” Aisha Harris argues that Black critics can both appreciate, and demand more from, shifts in popular culture.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, by Aisha HarrisBeing a Black critic in a time of exceptional art made by Black people has immense rewards and myriad risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when engaging with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity inform a critic’s work? And should it?Harris can laugh about the demands of endorsing positive representations of Blackness, no matter how trite (“When encountering Black art out in the wild, be on the lookout for Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She cheekily pushes Issa Rae’s now-famous awards show proclamation — “I’m rooting for everybody Black” — to its most absurd extent: “It’s only right we take her at her literal word and support all Black artists and art, no matter how questionable, incompetent or just plain offensive they might be.” But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for finding the Will Smith movie “King Richard” middling, she roars back. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,’” she insists. “I want interiority and surprise and characters who feel as though they have a reason to exist beyond retelling history.”It’s complicated, though. Harris recounts conflictedness about being disappointed by “A Wrinkle in Time,” which was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose film career was firmly on the rise. Harris, who wrote movie reviews for Slate and is a former editor at The New York Times, worried that a lukewarm piece could mean it would “be decades before another studio handed a movie of this stature to a woman of color.” Looking back, she arrived at a place that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being scathing.”“Wannabe” is a blend of memoir and cultural analysis, framed as “reckonings with the pop culture that shapes me.” Harris flaunts a wide range of references, moving easily between decades and arenas. She makes smart use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits “Key & Peele” sketches and dissects bell hooks’s analysis of the experimental film hero Stan Brakhage. The book is especially effective when its author leans on her personal experience. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and she tenderly illustrates the trials of growing up “The Black Friend” in white environments.“These Black Friends,” Harris offers, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt as if I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I attempted to befriend.”Harris braids her personal pain with incisive critiques of the trope and its limitations, constructing internal monologues for famous pop culture examples, like Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Lamorne Morris’s Winston in “New Girl.” She deftly connects the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“The overpersonalization of pop culture begets acrimony and pathological obsession”); confronts her decision to not have kids through the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory involving an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”Still, for all its range, “Wannabe” contains occasions that demand more rigorous engagement. Contending with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I recognize that present-day Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I cannot pretend as though some of his old jokes no longer slap.” (She goes on to quote several of them.)And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, and risks dating the book.The groundbreaking success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is likely to matter for a long time; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” film or the Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” might lose potency for the reader not engaged with the mostly-online #discourse.But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’s expertise, arriving at “inadvertent self-formation by way of popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is a compelling affirmation that they’re looking in the right place.Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces,” a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me | By Aisha Harris | 280 pp. | HarperOne | $29.99 More