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    From ‘The Materialists’ to ‘The Bear,’ Pop Culture Takes Up Smoking Again

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    From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo. It’s even being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful.In the new romantic dramedy “Materialists,” about 21st-century dating, Dakota Johnson loves cigarettes.Playing Lucy, a New York matchmaker, she’s puffing when she gossips with a pal during a work party. Later, she holds a lighted cigarette near her face while flirting with an ex. There’s no hand-wringing over her smoking. She’s just a smoker. And she’s wildly on trend. That’s because, at least in the world of entertainment, cigarettes are once again cool.“Materialists” is just the tip of the ash. The musicians Addison Rae and Lorde both mention smoking in recent singles. The stars of “The Bear” are smokers on- and offscreen. The “Housewives” count many among their ranks. Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd smoke in the big-screen comedy “Friendship,” while the chic Seema (Sarita Choudhury) on the series “And Just Like That” does as well. In the kitschy video for her track “Manchild” Sabrina Carpenter uses a fork as a cigarette holder. Even Beyoncé has lit up onstage during her Cowboy Carter Tour. In one instance, she throws the cigarette on a piano, which artfully ignites as she performs “Ya Ya.” If Beyoncé is doing it, you know it’s reached the upper echelon of culture.And these smokers are largely celebrated. The overwhelming sentiment is: Sure, cigarettes are bad for you, but they make you look good — as evidenced by Lucy, who keeps her smokes in an elegant silver case, perhaps to emphasize how sleek the habit is, and brandishes them to show just how effortlessly hot she can look bringing one to her lips.In a still from her music video for “Aquamarine,” Addison Rae wields not one but two cigarettes.Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers, which features photos of celebrities glamorously smoking, told me he had noticed an upswing in material recently. When he started the account in 2021 he had to look harder to find content.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Much Does It Cost to See Beyoncé? It Depends.

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      Some fans who paid top dollar for the star’s Cowboy Carter Tour are feeling miffed as prices drop. Other procrastinators are reaping the benefits.Tanaka Paschal, 43, was thrilled to be taking her son to Beyoncé’s final Southern California show on her Cowboy Carter Tour this month. They had missed the Renaissance World Tour two summers ago; tickets had sold out so fast, some fans ventured overseas to catch a gig.“I thought I was not going to be able to see her, so I jumped on it,” she said.Paschal bought a pair of floor seats for about $900 total, but like many others, she soon had a bit of buyers’ remorse. In the weeks that followed, she saw the price for similar seats drop by hundreds of dollars, then increase, then drop again.“It’s frustrating,” she said. “The next time, I’m going to wait until the day of.”When tickets for big summer tours by acts like Lady Gaga, the Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar and SZA go on sale, the prevailing wisdom is you have to move fast during one of the presales offered by artists and credit card companies or you’ll be shut out.Most, if not all, tickets are usually snatched up immediately, with prime seats popping up on resale platforms like StubHub or Ticketmaster’s own secondary market at inflated prices. (Fans hoping to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour famously didn’t even get a shot at the general on-sale: All the tickets were long gone.)Kendrick Lamar is also on a stadium tour this year, supporting his recent album, “GNX” and a big year.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesBut things have been different for Beyoncé’s tour this time supporting her Grammy album of the year-winning “Cowboy Carter”; tickets moved during the presales, but a glance at the seat maps on Ticketmaster’s pages later revealed not only a lot of pink dots indicating resale tickets, but plenty of blue dots representing available seats that had gone unpurchased, too. And those prices were notably changing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Inspirations Behind the Met Opera’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

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      On the page, John Adams’s opera “Antony and Cleopatra” is a pretty straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But on the stage, it is something else entirely.The production of “Antony and Cleopatra” that opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday is by Elkhanah Pulitzer, who turns Shakespeare’s play of torn allegiances, thwarted love and ascendant authoritarianism into a study of how people’s public images are constructed. She imagines a world in which celebrities can be tantamount to gods, the way they long have been treated in Hollywood.With all that in mind, Pulitzer developed an aesthetic universe for her production, with the help of the scenic designer Mimi Lien and the costume designer Constance Hoffman, made of three principal elements: Egypt in 30 B.C., Hollywood in the 1930s and celebrity media culture.Bullock, center, in the Met’s production.Karen AlmondYou can see each of those references in the third scene of the opera. Cleopatra has been left behind by Antony after he returned to Rome, and she is lounging by her pool in Alexandria, described by Pulitzer as “a deco gold world with palm leaves and her in a lovely robe drinking martinis.” Then Cleopatra receives the news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, which throws her into a rage.Take a closer look at how this moment comes to life through the layers of Pulitzer’s staging.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Sinners’ and Beyoncé Battle the Vampires. And the Gatekeepers, Too.

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      This moment might call for excessive, imaginative Black art that wants to be gobbled up. That’s Ryan Coogler’s new movie. That’s “Cowboy Carter.” Let’s throw in some Kendrick, too.When Beyoncé wails, in the opening moments of her “Cowboy Carter” album, that “them big ideas are buried here,” I’ve imagined “big” standing in for “racist” but have never hit pause to wonder about the GPS coordinates. That song’s called “Ameriican Requiem,” so the cemetery is everywhere. And yet partway through Ryan Coogler’s hit “Sinners,” I thought, Oh, this is where ‘here’ is, inside a movie about a 1932 juke joint whose music is so soulful that vampires, who are also a white minstrel trio, want to suck its blood.She’s envisioning utopia — a place where a Black woman feels free to make any kind of music she wants, including country. He’s imagined a nightmare in which Black art is doomed to be coveted before it’s ever just simply enjoyed. She’s defying the gatekeepers. He’s arguing that some gates definitely need to be kept. To that end, the movie keeps a gag running wherein vampire etiquette requires a verbal invitation to enter the club, leading to comic scenes of clearly possessed, increasingly itchy soul junkies standing in a doorway begging to be let in. People have been calling certain white performers interested in Black music vampires for years. Here’s a movie that literalizes the metaphor with an audacity that’s thrilling in its obviousness and redundancy.There’s never a bad time for good pop art. There’s never a bad time for Black artists to provide it. But these here times? Times of hatchet work and so-called wood-chipping; of chain saws, as both metaphor and dispiriting political prop; a time of vandalistic racial gaslighting. These times might call for an excessive pop art that takes on too much, that wants to be gobbled up and dug into, an art that isn’t afraid to boast I am this country, while also doing some thinking about what this country is. These here times might call for Black artists to provide that, too, to offer an American education that feels increasingly verboten. That’s not art’s strong suit, pointing at chalkboards. But if school systems are being bullied into coddling snowflakes, then perhaps, on occasion, art should be hitting you upside the head and dancing on your nose.Beyoncé on the opening night of her “Cowboy Carter” tour in Los Angeles last month.The New York TimesNow, it’s true that the knobbiest moments on “Cowboy Carter” and in “Sinners” are the equivalent of diagramed sentences. The album uses elders to do its explaining. Before “Spaghettii” gets underway, the singer and songwriter Linda Martell stops by to dissertate on the limitation of genres; Dolly Parton connects her “Jolene” to the home-wrecker in Beyoncé’s now nine-year-old “Sorry”; and Willie Nelson, as the D.J. on KNTRY, Beyoncé’s fictional broadcast network, turns his dial past some real chestnuts to tee up “Texas Hold ’Em.” They’re vouching for the validity of her project’s scope and sincerity, while, especially in Martell’s case, spelling everything out.The spelling in “Sinners” happens right in the middle of its young protagonist’s first big blues number. Earlier, we’d gotten a taste of what Sammie (Miles Caton), a preacher’s boy, could do. Caton’s molasses baritone and impaling guitar work were really doing it for me when the sound muffles, and in come not one but two micro lectures about this music’s power to “pierce the veil between the present and the past.” And as these explanations of Black music tumble forth, I was surprised to find a very Funkadelic fellow making love to an electric guitar right next to Sammie. Over by the kitchen twerks a woman arguably conjured from some extremely City Girls place. The temperature of instruments changes from live drums to what sound like drum machines. And I soon spy dashikied tribesmen, b-boys, a ballerina and, I’m pretty sure, a decked-out Chinese folk singer, and they’re all gettin’ in the way of the blues.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyoncé Cowboy Carter Tour Review; The Star Remixes American History, and Her Own

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      The last time Beyoncé performed “Daddy Lessons,” the stomping, biting number from her 2016 album, “Lemonade,” was at that year’s C.M.A. Awards, in a blistering rendition alongside the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks).Not everyone in country music embraced Beyoncé’s experimentation. “I did not feel welcomed,” she wrote in album notes leading up to the release last year of “Cowboy Carter,” her eighth solo album, an exploration of the many tendrils of American roots music and their connections to Black music of all stripes and generations.So it was meaningful, and pointed, that at the opening night of the Cowboy Carter Tour at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Monday, Beyoncé played “Daddy Lessons” for the first time since that rejection. It came right after she sang her renovated version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” — approved by the country royal herself — while soaring over the rapturous crowd in a flying horseshoe.At almost three hours long, her seventh solo headlining concert tour was a characteristic Beyoncé epic.The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show featured the debut of many of the album’s songs, but also brought back tracks from across her catalog.The New York TimesFull-circle moments don’t just happen — they are the products of intention and diligence and allergy to loose threads. Throughout this roisterous and clever show, there were suggestions that loop-closing has been very much on Beyoncé’s mind, along with culmination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tina Knowles Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis in New Memoir, ‘Matriarch’

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      A little over a decade ago, during quiet moments traveling between New York and Houston, Tina Knowles started freestyling, recording memories and childhood stories in voice notes on her cellphone.Then 59, Knowles was still busy styling and mothering her world-conquering daughters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles (she counts Kelly Rowland and a niece, Angie Beyincé, as her own, too) and had just divorced her husband of 31 years. There had been several deaths in her family.“I just started thinking about mortality, and ‘I’m not gonna be here forever,’” she said. “I felt old, I felt sad.” She wanted to leave a legacy for her kids and grandchildren.As Knowles, now 71, sat earlier this month in the great room of her home atop a Hollywood Hill, a sunny space filled with gallery-sized artwork at every turn, she described that personal nadir while infrequently waving a hand adorned with a few knuckle-sized gold rings and manicured in a bright red that matched her lipstick. Having changed into a tan Alo sweatsuit after a photo shoot — the right sleeve eventually slipped, leaving her shoulder bare — she radiated an offhand sultriness, a nonchalant glamour that couldn’t have been more removed from the dark era that launched the project.Her resulting memoir, “Matriarch,” available Tuesday, brings Knowles’s life to center stage. It has the drama of her upbringing in the segregated South and the personal improvement journey of a working mom compelled to stand up for her kids but not herself, as well as cautionary optimism: Knowles reveals for the first time that she was diagnosed with stage 1A breast cancer in 2024. (After surgery and treatment, she is cancer free — and daring to dress in “sheer mesh” after undergoing a reduction. “That was my silver lining.”)When she was first approached to write a memoir, Tina Knowles said she thought, “They’re going to want to hear about my kids; they’re not going to want to hear about me.”Kobe Wagstaff for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Tax Day Jam Session

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      File your 1040 to tunes by Destiny’s Child, Dr. John, Big Tymers and more.Destiny’s Child onstage in 2005, giving a withering look to those bills in question.Rahav SegevDear listeners,Lindsay is still out, which means you’ve got me (an editor who focuses on pop culture) on a day where you may need a bit of good fortune: Tax Day.I don’t know what kind of anxiety April 15 provokes in you, but I’ve collected a playlist inspired by a bit of family lore. As the story goes, my newly married dad once griped to my grandfather about how quickly bills ate up a paycheck, down to the last dollar. Gramps’s response: “Be glad you had that dollar.”So in the spirit of celebrating having just enough, I’m sharing my Tax Day jams. Savvy reader, you do not need me to point out all the root-of-all-evil bangers, scrapin’ and scrappin’ classics or TV ad earworms that mention money, money, money. I am also not here to question the tax code. Instead, I’ve assembled a set of songs that bop in the face of financial constraints, because getting down is, for now, still free.I fly in any weather,ElenaListen along while you read.1. Ray Charles: “Busted”Harlan Howard’s lyrics are about as low as low gets (“my bills are all due and the baby needs shoes but I’m busted”) and suit the songwriter’s “three chords and the truth” approach to country classics. But under Ray Charles’s guidance, and with a blaring horn section, this 1963 single gains a “but who cares?” lilt that earned Charles the Grammy for best R&B recording.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ Was Inspired by Her Husband Carl Dean

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      She wrote the hit 1973 song after a bank teller caught the eye of Dean, who died on Monday. She attributed its success to its simplicity and the universal emotions it evokes.In the early years of her nearly six-decade marriage, Dolly Parton noticed that her husband was spending a lot of time at the bank, where he had developed a crush on a teller. She told him to knock it off.She later channeled her feelings into “Jolene,” a hit 1973 song. Her fans have been singing its haunting chorus ever since.Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, JoleneI’m begging of you please don’t take my manJolene, Jolene, Jolene, JolenePlease don’t take him just because you can.The song is one of several that Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, an asphalt paver who died on Monday at 82, inspired in the decades after they met outside a Nashville laundromat in 1964. It never reached No. 1 on Billboard’s main singles chart, but it topped the Billboard country chart, earned a Grammy nod and became the most-recorded song of any Parton has written.The album cover for “Jolene” by Dolly Parton.Donaldson Collection/Getty ImagesIn interviews over the years, Parton attributed the song’s staying power to a variety of factors, including the simplicity of its chorus and its “kind of mysterious” minor key.She said many women had told her that they found its story — a woman acknowledging Jolene’s beauty while pleading with her to not steal her husband “just because you can” — relatable.When the song appeared, “Nobody had been writing about affairs from that side of it — to go to the person who was trying to steal your man,” she told the entertainment news site Vulture in 2023.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Best Songs of 2024

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      Listen to 68 tracks that made major statements, boosted big beefs, propelled up-and-comers and soundtracked the party this year.Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesA Little Strife, a Lot of RhythmHere’s a dipperful of worthwhile tracks from the ocean of music released this year. The top of my list is big-statement songs, ones that had repercussions beyond how they sound. Below those, it’s not a ranking but a playlist, a more-or-less guided cruise through what 2024 sounded like for one avid listener. I didn’t include any songs from my list of top albums, which are worth hearing from start to finish. But in the multiverse of streaming music, there are plenty of other possibilities.1. Kendrick Lamar, ‘Not Like Us’Belligerent, accusatory and as tribalistic as its title, “Not Like Us” wasn’t an attack ad from the 2024 election. It was the coup de gras of Kendrick Lamar’s beef with Drake, a rapid-fire, sneering assault on multiple fronts. Its spirit dovetailed with a bitterly contentious 2024.2. Beyoncé, ‘Texas Hold ’Em’“Texas Hold ’Em” isn’t just an invocation of Beyoncé’s home state. It’s a toe-tapping taunt at the racial and musical assumptions behind country music as defined by record labels and radio stations. Rhiannon Giddens picks an oh-so-traditional claw-hammer banjo intro and Beyoncé — raised in Texas — promises “a real-life boogie and a real-life hoedown,” singing about drinking and dancing and daring gatekeepers to hold her back.3. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’Sabrina Carpenter delivers a sharp message on the slick “Please Please Please.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesComedy is tricky in a straight-faced song, but Sabrina Carpenter’s eye-roll comes clearly through the shiny pop of “Please Please Please.” The singer tries to placate and possibly tame a boyfriend who sounds more obnoxious in every verse. “I beg you, don’t embarrass me,” she coos; eventually she reaches a breaking point.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More