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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

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      Jimmy Buffett, Hospitalized After Bahamas Trip, Cancels Show

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      The 76-year-old performer canceled a Saturday performance in Charleston, S.C., for unspecified health reasons. He had resumed touring this year after canceling a series of shows in October.Jimmy Buffett, the singer-songwriter who has built a lucrative lifestyle empire on the basis of beach-bum anthems like “Margaritaville” and “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” canceled a show scheduled for Saturday in Charleston, S.C., after he was hospitalized for an unspecified illness.Mr. Buffett, 76, said in a statement on Thursday that he had a “sudden change of plans this week” after returning from a trip to the Bahamas.“I had to stop in Boston for a checkup but wound up back in the hospital to address some issues that needed immediate attention,” he said. “Growing old is not for sissies, I promise you.”Mr. Buffett said that he would perform again when he is “well enough.”A representative for Mr. Buffett responded to a request for information about his condition by referring to his statement and declined to comment further.It was unclear on Friday how long Mr. Buffett would refrain from performing. There were no events listed on his tour page, which told Parrotheads, as Mr. Buffett’s fans call themselves, to “stay tuned” for upcoming show announcements.Nick Pezzorello, the president of a Charleston-based Jimmy Buffett fan club, said that the Lowcountry Parrothead Club wished Mr. Buffett a “speedy recovery” so that his fans “may enjoy and celebrate his music and lifestyle for many more years to come.”“We will anxiously await his return to the Holy City,” Mr. Pezzorello said, referring to Charleston.It was the second time in seven months that Mr. Buffett has had to reschedule shows because of his health. Citing “health issues and brief hospitalization” in September, Mr. Buffett canceled five shows that had been planned in Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City and Nampa, Idaho, in October.“On doctor’s orders, he must take this time to recuperate and heal,” an announcement on Mr. Buffett’s website said in September.Mr. Buffett was soon back on the road, performing monthly since February. He rescheduled and performed two shows in Las Vegas in March and one in San Diego in early May. He also played in Key West, Fla., and Phoenix.Last month, his hit “Margaritaville” from the 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” was among 25 recordings that were added to the National Recording Registry.The registry, which is part of the Library of Congress, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and “worthy of preservation for all time.”When “Margaritaville” was released, the song stayed on the sales charts for months, “scoring with pop and country audiences alike, as well as teenagers and adults,” the Library of Congress said in a statement in April.The song celebrates a life of sunny leisure and frozen drinks, from the opening lines, “nibblin’ on sponge cake, watchin’ the sun bake,” to its earworm refrain, “wastin’ away in Margaritaville, searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt.”“Today, its lyrics are as memorized as any song in history,” the Library of Congress said, adding that the song is “as well known and omnipresent as ever — a regular component of bars, beach parties, karaoke and any place cool vibes are required.” More

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      Forests, Band from Singapore, Played On After U.S. Robbery

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      Forests, a band from Singapore, ended its tour in New York in high spirits, two weeks after being robbed in California.The band, Forests, did not miss a show.ForestsAn international rock band’s first U.S. tour is a moment to be celebrated, a sign that years of hard work have paid off. But just a few days into their American debut, the members of Forests, an emo rock band from Singapore, endured another rite of passage for some musicians traveling the United States when they stopped for the night at a California hotel.When they returned to their rental van a few hours later, they realized they’d been robbed.“In Singapore I kind of made a joke about it, like, oh, you know, your band is only legit if your stuff got stolen,” said Darell Laser, 36, the bassist. “Then it really happened.”Forests and the Oklahoma band they were touring with, Ben Quad, are hardly the first musicians to be robbed while on tour in America. (In 1999, Sonic Youth famously lost an entire truck’s worth of gear to a thief, also in California.) But the experience was still a shock for a band from a country as safe as Singapore.“It was the worst luck ever,” said Chris Martinez, 29, a Forests fan from San Diego who discovered the band years ago on a business trip to Singapore.The robbery prompted an outpouring of concern from both bands’ fans, and more than $9,000 in donations allowed them to buy replacement instruments. They did not miss a show, and they ended their tour in high spirits with a sold-out concert at a bar in Queens on Tuesday.“They seem to have moved past it,” said Mr. Martinez, who donated $200 to the bands’ crowdfunding campaign after learning of the robbery. “Keeping a positive attitude and trying not to let it bring them down.”Forests and Ben Quad had some instruments, along with other goods, stolen from their parked rental van while they were sleeping in a hotel after a show. ForestsThe May 1 robbery made for a surreal early leg of a cross-country tour — entitled “Get in losers, we’re going to Walmart” — that Forests had spent months planning and years looking forward to. It happened a few days after their tour began in Seattle and a few hours after their gig in Oakland.When the tired musicians from the two bands straggled into a Hampton Inn in Hayward, Calif., at about 1:30 a.m., they left their gear in the 15-passenger rental van they were sharing for the tour. They parked next to a security camera as a precaution, but it didn’t help: When they returned to the parking lot after 11 a.m., they noticed that some of their guitars, a bass, pedals, clothing and a box with cash from merchandise sales had been stolen.The theft was the latest in an area of California where property crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins are on the rise. The hotel management told the bands that its security footage did not show a theft. A location tag on one instrument appeared to show that the stolen gear had been taken to an Oakland apartment building, but the police said there was no easy way to get it back.“The cops told us, ‘Hey, there’s nothing we can do unless it ends up in a pawnshop,’” said Edgar Viveros, 27, Ben Quad’s lead guitarist. The pawnshops they called said that it had not.Instead of canceling the tour, the bands decided to play on with borrowed gear. They also set up a crowdfunding page and were surprised to see how quickly donations rolled in — $6,000 in about four hours.The robbery was “kinda heartbreaking,” Imre Griga, 23, a fan in Columbia, Mo., who attended three of the bands’ tour dates this month, said in an email. “I think the entire community felt Forests deserved much better for their first tour in America.”Within a few days, members of both bands were playing with new instruments. They went a little longer without the pedal board that Ben Quad typically uses to play samples, like the theme from an “Austin Powers” movie, between sets. But a replacement for that, too, was eventually found.Forests first played with borrowed instruments after the theft, then bought replacements after fans donated more than $9,000.ForestsBack home in Singapore, the story of the robbery, and the fan support, made headlines. Some readers commented about their own experiences of getting robbed in the United States. Others wondered how the three members of Forests, who all have day jobs and tour on their vacations, could have been so naïve.For Forests, it was not their first international tour: They have performed across the Asia-Pacific region over the years. But on their first tour of America, they loved watching the landscape — deserts, trees, snowy mountains — whip past the van’s windows.They also kept a list of “crazy things” they had seen, like people fighting in convenience stores, or the woman in Seattle who threw her luggage down three flights of stairs in a subway station. The band’s drummer, Niki Koh, 31, said he particularly enjoyed visiting a store that sold guns, knives and hunting gear — “ everything that we won’t find in Singapore.”“It’s culture shock,” he said, speaking in a video interview from Kansas City. “But at the same time, it’s very interesting.” More

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      K-Pop Stars BTS Will Release a Book Telling Their Own Story in July

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      The announcement by their U.S. publisher, Flatiron Books, came after days of frantic speculation by their fervent fans.The K-pop juggernaut BTS will release an oral history of the group in South Korea and the United States on July 9, its U.S. publisher, Flatiron Books, said on Thursday.The book, “Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS,” was written by the journalist Myeongseok Kang and members of the group, and it will be published in South Korea by Big Hit Music.The news confirms intense fan speculation over several days that Flatiron would publish a nonfiction title about a pop culture phenomenon this summer. The rumor spread once booksellers in the United States noticed last weekend that a mystery title with a July 9 release date was coming. It had an initial print run of one million copies and required booksellers to sign an affidavit to stock copies on publication day.Fans searched for clues of who the mystery author might be, zeroing in at first on Taylor Swift and citing her frequent use of the number 13 as evidence. (The book’s original announcement was slated for June 13.) Swift had also highlighted the date July 9 in her most recent album announcement.But June 13 and July 9 are also significant dates in the BTS community. The group debuted on the first date, and BTS’s passionate fan base, Army — which stands for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth — was founded on the second. The book’s release will coincide with the fan group’s 10th anniversary.As speculations mounted, preorders drove the still-untitled book up best-seller lists at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.The English translation of the book was led by Anton Hur, in collaboration with Clare Richards and Slin Jung. The U.S. edition will be 544 pages and contain exclusive photographs, according to Flatiron, and will have a first printing of one million copies.The group’s powerful, very online fandom has become famous worldwide, known for supporting the group by buying multiple versions of each physical release and running intricately coordinated social media campaigns. Devotees also assist each other by translating BTS content into English and other languages and providing robust fan communities.It is difficult to overstate BTS’s influence, in music and beyond. Last year, the seven members of the group — RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook — visited the White House to speak against anti-Asian American hate crimes.Since 2013, BTS has released nine albums and six EPs and helped K-pop become a dominant global force. In 2018, the group became the first K-pop act to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart with “Love Yourself: Tear,” a feat it repeated twice in 2019 with “Love Yourself: Answer” and “Map of the Soul: Persona” — matching a record set by the Beatles.In June 2022, after yet another No. 1 album — the three-disc compilation “Proof” — BTS released a video on social media announcing it was going on hiatus so its members could focus on solo creative projects. “I should be writing about what I’m feeling and the stories I want to tell,” Suga said, “but I’m just forcefully squeezing out words because I need to satisfy someone.” The clip drew more than 16 million views in two days. In October of last year, the group’s label confirmed that its members would enlist in South Korea’s military as required by law. Some of them already have.The hiatus was devastating news not only for BTS’s fervent fan base, but also for the entertainment business. The day after the news broke, the stock price for Hybe, the South Korean entertainment company behind the group, dropped 28 percent, which shaved $1.7 billion off its market value. As the group’s popularity has grown, it has become a pillar of South Korea’s economy, contributing $3.5 billion annually by 2020, according to the Hyundai Research Institute.Many fans say that while they are drawn to BTS’s music and performances, they are also inspired by its messages of love and acceptance, which have led some to become more politically active. “They’re really, really passionate people who just fight for what they love,” Nicole Santero, a fan who ran a data-focused BTS Twitter account, told The Times in 2020. “Those characteristics translate well when you look at social issues.”Caryn Ganz More

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      Beyoncé Returns to the Stage With a ‘Renaissance’ Spectacle

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      The pop superstar opened her first solo tour in seven years in Stockholm and performed tracks from her acclaimed 2022 album, but left most of the choreography to her dancers.They came from Iceland, Portugal, Switzerland, Detroit. Dressed in “alien superstar” chic — rhinestone boots and disco-ready, glittery cowboy hats — a huge crowd gathered on Wednesday at the Friends Arena, their cheers reaching an almost deafening pitch as a woman gradually emerged from below, lights bouncing off the sequins on her outfit.Beyoncé was back onstage.The singer, style icon and heroine of the global BeyHive fan community is on the road solo for the first time in seven years with her Renaissance World Tour, which opened on Wednesday in Sweden with elaborate visuals but with unusual physical restraint from Beyoncé herself.Onstage at the 50,000-capacity arena in Stockholm, she appeared flanked by dancers and backed by a live band, performing for three hours before a giant screen that displayed a constantly morphing tableau that was part retrofuturism and part disco fantasia. At one point, the 41-year-old artist traded dance moves with a pair of giant robot arms; at another, an image of a silvery alien dancer in heels hovered over a disco ball.But for one of pop’s ultimate dancing queens, Beyoncé’s performance was far less physical than on past tours. She often seemed to keep her feet stationary while shaking her upper body, and appeared to favor one leg. She spent much of one song sitting atop a prop.Fans came from around the globe, drawn in part by the more affordable ticket prices in Sweden.Felix Odell for The New York TimesThe star’s eagle-eyed fan community speculated online that the singer was injured. A spokeswoman for Beyoncé did not respond to questions about her performance.Kristin Hulden, a Swedish fashion student who was wearing an embroidered jacket she had made that depicted Beyoncé riding a horse (the image on the cover of her latest album, “Renaissance”), said she had noticed the star’s more limited movement, but it hadn’t bothered her. “The show was so great,” she said. “The dancers, the visual — it never stopped.” Like many fans at the opening-night gig, she will attend several shows on the tour, returning to Friends Arena on Thursday and then heading to Hamburg, Germany, in June. “I’m very excited,” she added.Competition for tickets to pop’s biggest, priciest concerts has been stiff, and many in the crowd had traveled far — even thousands of miles — to guarantee that they would see Beyoncé this time. (Thanks in part to favorable exchange rates, tickets in Sweden ended up being far cheaper than in the United States or Britain, costing between 650 and 1,495 Swedish kronor, or about $63 to $146.)Rhoyle Ivy King, 26, an actor wearing a fluorescent turquoise jumpsuit and shades, said before the show that he had come from Los Angeles for the concert, spending about $2,500. “Anything for mother,” he said. “Seriously.”Beyoncé has not toured on her own since her Formation outing in 2016, following the release of her pop-culture-dominating “Lemonade.” In 2018, she performed at the Coachella festival and hit the road with her husband, Jay-Z, for their joint On the Run II Tour.Because Beyoncé offered few visual cues for her “Renaissance” era beyond her album artwork, fans came decked out in looks inspired by the disco cowboy aesthetic she nodded to there. The new tour is for “Renaissance,” a homage to decades of Black queer dance music. The LP, her seventh solo release, opened at No. 1 last summer, and its single “Break My Soul” became her first solo No. 1 hit since “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” in 2008.It was, notably, the first Beyoncé album in nearly a decade to arrive without a full suite of accompanying videos. Starting with her surprise self-titled LP in 2013, the singer has become synonymous with elaborately choreographed and highly produced visual pieces.On Wednesday, she revealed several futuristic fashion choices: an iridescent-effect minidress; a shimmery gold bodysuit festooned with black opera gloves covering strategic locations; a black-and-silver suit that resembled royal armor. At one point, Beyoncé was dressed in sci-fi bee chic: a yellow-and-black leotard with cutouts and sharp angles, and knee-high black boots. The cyborg theme was fully reflected at the merch stands, with T-shirts, hoodies and totes carrying images of Beyoncé in silvery, “Metropolis”-like robot costumes.The set list featured songs from her debut solo album from 2003 (“Crazy in Love”), her 2008 double album “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (“Diva”), her 2011 LP “4” (including “Love on Top,” which Beyoncé let the crowd finish for her) and her self-titled 2013 release (“Drunk in Love”), alongside a host of tracks from “Renaissance,” including “Move,” “America Has a Problem” and “Cozy.” For the closer, “Summer Renaissance,” the singer sat atop a silver horse that was hoisted from the rafters and then ascended above the crowd by herself, sporting a grand, sparkling cape.Beyoncé has not toured on her own since her Formation outing in 2016, following the release of her album “Lemonade.”Felix Odell for The New York TimesIn February, Beyoncé announced the Renaissance tour by simply posting an image to social media. Three months earlier, the demand for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour had led to a Ticketmaster meltdown, leaving many fans frustrated and calling for Washington to examine the outsize market power of Ticketmaster and its corporate parent, Live Nation.To handle the ticketing for Beyoncé’s tour — which is being promoted by Beyoncé’s company, Parkwood Entertainment, and produced by Live Nation — Ticketmaster had an elaborate plan that included rolling out sales in batches, rather than all at once, and the process went far more smoothly.Still, Beyoncé drew controversy this year when she performed a private show at a luxury hotel in Dubai, in United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is illegal. “Renaissance” draws heavily on dance music of the 1990s and L.G.B.T.Q. culture; at the Friends Arena, signs denoted some “gender neutral restrooms” in the official tour font.Oless Mauigoa, 35, had traveled from Salt Lake City and said that “Renaissance” had made him desperate to see the show. “I feel like it’s dedicated to a lot of gay styles,” he said. “I’m connected to it more than anything she’s done.”Beyoncé played into those connections throughout the show, nodding to the ballroom and vogueing culture that inspired “Renaissance” at the end of the night by giving the stage over to her dancers, who tried to outperform each other to rousing cheers.Beyoncé’s tour continues in Stockholm on Thursday and then arrives in London for five shows at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, starting May 29. Its North American leg will open in Toronto on July 9, will head to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 29 and 30 and will close in New Orleans at the Caesars Superdome on Sept. 27. More