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      Sympathy for the Diva: Why We Love ‘Difficult’ Stars

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      A new Faye Dunaway documentary wants to turn us from gossips into cheerleaders.Before Faye Dunaway makes her big entrance, you hear her snap from off camera: “We need to shoot. I’m here now. Come on!” When we meet her inside her apartment, she’s using a piece of paper to fan herself with a petulance that’s reminiscent of Queen Charlotte from “Bridgerton.” This is the feisty opening to the HBO documentary “Faye,” and it doesn’t do much to dispel decades of rumors painting Dunaway as a temperamental diva. Difficult, erratic, vain, narcissistic: These descriptors have etched themselves into the reputations of many famous women, and they have also been countered in all sorts of media. Much like Barbra Streisand’s memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” or the 2018 Grace Jones documentary, “Bloodlight and Bami,” one clear purpose of “Faye” is rebuttal: to let Dunaway reconstruct the narrative.Like many in my generation, I first saw Dunaway in “Mommie Dearest,” the 1981 film — either a disaster or a masterpiece, depending on whom you ask and their tolerance for camp — in which she played another supposed she-devil: Joan Crawford, whom the movie depicts as an abusive mother and a fame-hungry prima donna. Unlike Roger Ebert, who called it “one of the most depressing films in a long time,” I was transfixed by “Mommie Dearest.” I couldn’t get enough of Dunaway’s shellacked eyebrows, the murderous rose-garden scene, the “no more wire hangers” theatrics. There’s an entire age cohort whose sense of Dunaway is all scrambled up in this role. Instead of meeting her via classics like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Chinatown” and “Network,” we met her as Crawford, berating everyone in her path. As Dunaway says in a 1984 interview clip shown in the new documentary, “There’s an inevitable tendency of people who both work in the industry and the audience to associate, to think you’re like the parts you play.”If you’re not up on the reputation that Dunaway now has to dispute, a quick scroll through Reddit threads about her should get you up to speed. There are first-person accounts, too, many of which appear in HBO’s documentary. In one clip, Johnny Carson asks Bette Davis — rumored to be a bit of a harpy herself — to name the most difficult person she ever worked with; Davis, looking prim in a white bucket hat, shoots back, “One million dollars, Faye Dunaway,” to great laughter. In a clip that’s not shown in the documentary, Brenda Vaccaro, who worked alongside Dunaway in the 1984 movie “Supergirl,” says that Dunaway “would terrify people” — though she also calls her a “brilliant actress” and adds that “you can see the struggle.”“Faye” uses a mix of straight-to-camera interviews, family photos, archival footage and plenty of film clips to humanize little Dorothy Faye, a girl from Bascom, Fla., who quickly achieved Hollywood-icon status. It also dwells on that “struggle” part and enlists talking heads to spring to Dunaway’s defense. We learn about her alcohol dependency and her late-in-life diagnosis of bipolar disorder, both of which Dunaway finally sought treatment for after years of unexplained mood swings, depression and erratic behavior. Sharon Stone, Dunaway’s chum and mentee, talks about the intense pressure on actresses to be thin and says that Dunaway has only ever been kind and generous to her. She becomes fiercely protective when the subject of “Mommie Dearest” comes up: “Everybody wants to make fun of her for ‘Mommie Dearest,’ but you tell me how you play that part,” she says. “The joke is on the director, the joke is not on the artist.”At each stage, we the audience have our own parts to play: fans, bullies, executioners, cheerleaders, allies.Mickey Rourke — whose own reputation isn’t exactly untarnished — starred in “Barfly” with Dunaway. He was, he says, “in awe of her and kind of a little intimidated.” He attempts to soften Dunaway’s image, but that task becomes complicated when people like Howard Koch come along to share their experiences. Koch was first assistant director on the set of “Chinatown.” In his first phone call to Dunaway, he says, she guessed that he was a Sagittarius, then informed him that this astrological offense meant they would never get along. He then dishes about Dunaway’s demanding that Blistex be applied to her lips before every take. Jack Nicholson, we learn, had a loving nickname for her on the set: “Dread.”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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      What ‘Inside Out 2’ Teaches Us About Anxiety

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      A new emotion has taken over Riley’s teenage mind. And she has lessons for us all.At the end of “Inside Out,” the 2015 Pixar movie about the emotional life of a girl named Riley, a new button appears on the console used to control Riley’s mood. It’s emblazoned with one word: Puberty.Joy, one of the main characters who embodies Riley’s emotions, shrugs it off.“Things couldn’t be better!” Joy says. “After all, Riley’s 12 now. What could happen?”The answer has finally arrived, nearly a decade later, in the sequel “Inside Out 2.” Riley is now a teenager attending a three-day hockey camp as new, more complex feelings take root in her mind.There’s Embarrassment, a lumbering fellow who unsuccessfully attempts to hide in his hoodie; the noodle-like Ennui, who lounges listlessly on a couch; and Envy, with her wide, longing eyes.But it is Anxiety who takes center stage, entering Riley’s mind with literal baggage (no less than six suitcases).“OK, how can I help?” she asks. “I can take notes, get coffee, manage your calendar, walk your dog, carry your things — watch you sleep?”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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      Real Housewife, Leah McSweeney, Files Lawsuit Against Andy Cohen and Bravo

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      A New York City housewife speaks about a new lawsuit against Andy Cohen and Bravo in which she alleges all of these things (and more) created a “rotted workplace culture.”“I thought it was going to be fun,” Leah McSweeney, a former star of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of New York City,” said about joining the show’s cast in 2019.She was speaking on a video call on Wednesday, for which her lawyer and her publicist were present. The day before, Ms. McSweeney had filed a lawsuit against parties including the Bravo cable channel; its parent company, NBCUniversal; and Andy Cohen, the executive producer of the “Real Housewives” franchise, alleging the creation of a “rotted workplace culture” that “discriminated against, tormented, demoralized, demeaned, harassed and retaliated against Ms. McSweeney because she is a woman with disabilities, such as alcohol use disorder and various mental health disorders, all in the name of selling drama.”According to the complaint, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Ms. McSweeney, 41, joined the “Housewives of New York City” cast around the time she had relapsed after nine years of sobriety.She became sober just before she started filming the show and has alleged that producers developed “artificially close relationships” with her through which they “cultivated a treasure trove of Ms. McSweeney’s dark secrets with intent to place her in situations known to exacerbate her alcohol use disorder and mental health disabilities because they thought that intentionally making these conditions worse would create good television.”The complaint goes on to allege that producers frequently undermined Ms. McSweeney’s sobriety not only by encouraging her outright to drink but by “engaging in guerrilla-type psychological warfare intended to pressurize Ms. McSweeney into a psychological break and cause Ms. McSweeney to relapse.”It also claims that Mr. Cohen frequently uses cocaine with other “Housewives” stars and that he rewards those cast members with “favorable treatment.”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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      Michael Stone, Psychiatrist and Scholar Who Studied Evil, Dies at 90

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      He attempted to define evil by plumbing the biographies and motivations of hundreds of violent felons who had committed heinous crimes.Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar who sought to define evil and to differentiate its manifestations from the typical behavior of people who are mentally ill, died on Dec. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The cause was complications of a stroke he had in January, his son David said.Dr. Stone was best known to the public as the author of the book “The Anatomy of Evil” (2009) and as the host from 2006 to 2008 of the television program “Most Evil,” for which he interviewed people imprisoned for murder to determine what motivated them to engage in an evil criminal act.He ranked the acts on a 22-category scale of his creation. Modeled on Dante’s nine circles of hell, his taxonomic scale ranged from justifiable homicide to murders committed by people whose primary motivation was to torture their victims.Only human beings are capable of evil, Dr. Stone wrote in “The Anatomy of Evil,” although evil is not a characteristic that people are born with. He acknowledged that while acts of evil were difficult to define, the word “evil” was derived from “over” or “beyond,” and could apply to “certain acts done by people who clearly intended to hurt or to kill others in an excruciatingly painful way.”For an act to be evil, he wrote, it must be “breathtakingly horrible” and premeditated, inflict “wildly excessive” suffering and “appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.”“Mike’s major contribution to psychiatry was sharpening the distinction between mental illness and evil,” Dr. Allen Frances. a former student of Dr. Stone’s who is now chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., said in a phone interview.“The problem,” Dr. Frances said, “is that with every mass murderer, every crazy politician, every serial killer, the first tendency in the public mind and the media is that he’s mentally ill.” Dr. Stone, he said, helped to change that default position.Dr. Stone became known for his book “The Anatomy of Evil” and for hosting the TV program “Most Evil.”Prometheus BooksAnalyzing the biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits: narcissism, to the point of having little or no ability to care about their victims; and aggression, in terms of exerting power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering and death.In “The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime” (2019), a sequel to Dr. Stone’s 2009 book, he and Dr. Gary Brucato warned that since the 1960s there had been an “undeniable intensification and diversification” of evil acts committed mostly by criminals who “are not ‘sick’ in the psychiatric and legal sense, as much as psychopathic and morally depraved.”The reasons, they wrote, included greater civilian access to military weaponry; the diminution of both individual and personal responsibility, as preached by fascist and communist governments earlier in the 20th century; sexual liberation, which unleashed other inhibitions; the ease of communication on cellphones and the internet; the rise of moral relativism; and a backlash against feminism.In 2000, Dr. Stone figured in a sensational murder trial that tested the limits of doctor-patient confidentiality. He wanted to testify in the murder trial of Robert Bierenbaum, a plastic surgeon and former patient of his who was accused of killing his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, in 1985.Dr. Stone had written a letter to his patient’s wife two years before her death, advising her to live apart from her husband for her own safety. He had asked that she sign and return it, but she never did. He had also contacted Dr. Bierenbaum’s parents, with his permission.The judge ultimately excluded Dr. Stone’s testimony from the trial on the basis of professional confidentiality. But the testimony of several other witnesses about the letter contributed to Dr. Bierenbaum’s conviction.Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits in those who commit evil acts: narcissism and aggression.Librado Romero/The New York TimesMichael Howard Stone was born on Oct. 27, 1933, in Syracuse, N.Y., the grandson of Eastern European immigrants. His father, Moses Howard Stone, owned a wholesale paper business. His mother, Corinne (Gittleman) Stone, was a homemaker.A prodigy who learned Latin and Greek as a child, he was only 10 years old when he began seventh grade. As the youngest and smallest student in the school, as well as the only Jewish one, he formed an alliance with a 17-year-old classmate who was a boxer, his son David said: Mike would do the classmate’s homework, and the classmate would protect him from local antisemitic bullies.He entered Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he was 16, enrolling in a premedical curriculum but double-majoring in classics in case he was rejected by medical schools that had already met their quota of Jewish students. He enrolled in Cornell Medical School in Manhattan after graduating from Cornell in 1954 and received his medical degree in 1958.He originally studied hematology and cancer chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan, but his mother’s chronic pain disorder prompted him to switch to neurology and then, eventually, to psychiatry. He did his residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he met Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, whom he married in 1965.He is survived by two sons, David and John Stone, from that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1978; his wife, Beth Eichstaedt; his stepchildren, Wendy Turner and Thomas Penders; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.Dr. Stone spoke 16 languages and, like a vestige from another era, customarily wore three-piece suits. He was known for his impish sense of humor: His latest book, “The Funny Bone,” published this year, is a collection of his cartoons, jokes and poems.An amateur carpenter, he built the shelves that housed his library of 11,000 books. His collection included about 60 books on Hitler — further evidence, like his memories of childhood bullying, of his yearning to define evil.As a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and for many years a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Stone also conducted a long-term study of patients with borderline personality disorders, including those who had contemplated suicide. He concluded that, often as a result of therapy and other treatment, the condition of about two-thirds of them had improved appreciably some 25 years later.In “The New Evil,” Dr. Stone and Dr. Brucato offered a possible explanation for why “particularly heinous and spectacular crimes,” especially those committed in America and by men, had been on the rise since the 1960s. They warned against “the rise of a sort of ‘false compassion,’ in which the most relentless, psychopathic persons are sometimes viewed as ‘victims.’”The two concluded by invoking a familiar metaphor: A frog dropped in a pot of boiling water will immediately try to escape; but, if placed in cold water that is gradually heated, the frog will remain complacent until it’s too late.“It is our ardent hope that, after a period of terrible growing pains, our culture will eventually learn that true power and control come only after a lifelong process of mastering and inhibiting the self,” they wrote. “Perhaps, as a first step, we should admit that the water in our collective pot is growing disquietingly warmer, day by day.” More

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      Inside Kanye West’s Fraught Relationship With Adidas: 7 Takeaways

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      The runaway success of the Yeezy collaboration between Kanye West and Adidas came at a price as the company tolerated misconduct by him for nearly a decade.When Adidas cut ties with Kanye West a year ago, ending their wildly lucrative shoe deal, the breakup appeared to be the culmination of weeks of his inflammatory remarks about Jews and Black Lives Matter. But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the partnership was fraught from the start.Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, subjected employees to antisemitic and crude sexual comments and routine verbal abuse. As Adidas executives doubled down on a partnership that boosted company profits and made Mr. West a billionaire, they scrambled for ways to cope with the star’s demands and provocations.Interviews with current and former employees of Adidas and of Mr. West, along with hundreds of previously undisclosed internal records, including contracts, text messages and financial documents, provide the fullest accounting yet of the relationship. Here are seven takeaways.For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past Mr. West’s misconduct as profits soared.Mr. West’s first contract with Adidas, in 2013, had the most generous terms it had ever offered to a non-athlete. In the next one, three years later, Mr. West got more money, and Adidas got a morals clause — allowing it to end the partnership if he did anything that led to “disrepute, contempt, scandal,” according to a copy obtained by The Times.As the partnership earned billions of dollars, Mr. West’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. But it is not clear whether the brand ever considered invoking the morals clause before terminating the deal last year.Both Adidas and Mr. West declined interview requests and did not comment on The Times’s findings.Mr. West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler in the partnership.Shortly after signing with Adidas, he met with designers at company headquarters in Germany to discuss ideas. He was so offended by their sketches, he drew a swastika on one, shocking employees.He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. He informed a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a seven-figure settlement to one of his own employees who accused him of repeatedly praising Hitler.Mr. West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda. He also expressed a belief that Jews had special powers allowing them to amass money and influence.He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace.Weeks before the swastika incident in 2013, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. He continued showing pornography to Adidas employees at work. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film.Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.Big demands and mood swings weighed on the relationship.Mr. West contended repeatedly that Adidas was exploiting him. He sought more money and power, even suggesting that he should become chief executive.His complaints were often delivered amid severe mood swings, creating whiplash for employees. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury. In 2019, he abruptly moved his Yeezy operation to remote Cody, Wyo., ordering the Adidas team to relocate. He used “terms like ‘believer’ and ‘pilgrimage’” to describe those who would follow him there, an Adidas executive told colleagues in a group text chain. In a meeting with Adidas’s leaders that year to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.Adidas adapted to Mr. West’s behavior: ‘We are in a code red.’Managers and top executives started the group text chain, the “Yzy hotline,” to address issues involving Mr. West.The Adidas team working on Yeezys adopted a strategy they likened to firefighting, rotating members on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist. “We are in a code red,” the team’s general manager texted colleagues in 2019. “The first line is completely exhausted and don’t feel supported.”The company assigned a human resources official to the unit and gave new hires a subscription to a meditation app. The staff regularly gathered for something akin to group therapy.Mr. West on tour in 2016, the year he and Adidas renegotiated their deal.A J Mast for The New York TimesAs the brand grew more reliant on Yeezys, it sweetened the deal for Mr. West.Under the 2016 contract, he received a 15 percent royalty on net sales, with $15 million upfront along with millions of dollars in company stock each year.The “biggest issue,” an Adidas document from contract negotiations noted, was “putting CASH in Kanye’s pocket to show him we VALUE him.” The partnership would propel him to Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people.And in 2019, Adidas agreed to another enticement: $100 million annually, officially for Yeezy marketing but, in practice, a fund that Mr. West could spend with little oversight.He still stands to make money from the Adidas deal.After the relationship ruptured a year ago and Yeezy sales came to a halt, both Adidas and Mr. West were hit hard. The company projected its first annual loss in decades. Mr. West’s net worth plummeted.But they had at least one more chance to keep making money together. In May, the company began releasing the remaining $1.3 billion worth of Yeezys. A cut of the proceeds would go to charity. But most of the revenue would go to Adidas, and Mr. West was entitled to royalties. More

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      Elaine Mitchener and the Music of Screams

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      Elaine Mitchener will draw on a range of extended vocal techniques to give a sensitive portrait of mental illness in the music theater piece “Eight Songs for a Mad King.”When the British vocalist Elaine Mitchener performs Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King” at Wigmore Hall in London on Friday, a lot will be on her mind: the complex psychology of the work’s central character, the piece’s rich performing history and its sensitive perspective on mental health. That’s before she even gets to the notes.“It’s an exhausting piece emotionally,” Mitchener said in a recent interview. “You have to have a very still inner core in order to perform it. Otherwise, you just will not be able to get to the end.”“Eight Songs for a Mad King” is a 30-minute music-theater monodrama, written by Davies in 1969 in collaboration with the actor Roy Hart. It is based on the life of King George III, who reigned in Britain in late 18th and early 19th centuries and who had an unknown mental illness. Onstage, a highly distressed King George battles with, and eventually succumbs to, the sounds in his head. It’s a challenging work for any singer, requiring a five-octave vocal range, a variety of speech-singing techniques, plus multiphonics — singing two or more notes at the same time.Mitchener has honed these capabilities over nearly 15 years as an experimental vocal performer, but she is also and composer and movement artist. Her practice incorporates improvisation, choreography and research.Although Friday’s performance, in which she will sing with the contemporary music ensemble Apartment House, was programmed long before the coronation of King Charles III was announced, Mitchener said that watching the May 6 ceremony had fed into her preparation. It had helped her imagine the psychological extremes that George III must have experienced, she said: “from being crowned, to being completely mad,” and ending up “beaten, whipped, mocked, jeered.”Mitchener, center, in rehearsal with the contemporary music ensemble Apartment House in London on Tuesday.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The more I’ve understood the context of George III’s illness, and reading behind the scenes of what Davies was trying to do with this work — which was to destigmatize mental illness — I have a much more sympathetic approach to the character,” Mitchener said. “We as a society are becoming more understanding about these issues that could happen to any of us,” she added.Her research had also led her to believe that Hart’s contribution should be better recognized, she said. Hart developed the hyper-expressive vocal technique that the piece requires at the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Center, a Berlin- and London-based institute that explored sounds beyond speech or song, informed by the screams that its founder heard in the trenches of World War I.Hart’s involvement in “Eight Songs” informed not only the piece’s many vocal requirements, but also its emphasis on drama, said Kelvin Thomas, a baritone who has performed “Eight Songs for a Mad King” over 100 times. “It’s the drama that drives the music and the technique,” he said. “It’s not just that you’re technically screaming,” Thomas added, “there’s a reason why you’re screaming.”“Eight Songs for a Mad King” requires a five-octave vocal range, a variety of speech-singing techniques and the ability to sing two notes at the same time.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“Eight Songs for a Mad King” is toward the older end of the repertoire that Mitchener usually tackles. This past Sunday, she performed in London alongside the American poet Moor Mother in a series of improvised duets. In March, Mitchener performed a program of works by Jason Yarde, Matana Roberts, Tansy Davies and others, all written in the last three years, at the MaerzMusik contemporary music festival in Berlin.“I consider myself a performer who composes — in that order, really,” she said. “But to me,” she added, “the responsibility of any performer is to really liberate the score from what you see.”Michener was born in 1970, in London, to Jamaican parents. Early exposure at home to ska, dub, gospel and Rastafarian music was later nurtured at a local Adventist church. “If you go to particularly Black churches, and people discover that you have a talent for music, or delivering text, that’s really encouraged from a young age,” Mitchener said.Her path to contemporary music was complicated. As a student at Trinity College of Music in London, she encountered some modern works — including “Eight Songs for a Mad King” — although most of her studies involved classical singing. In her final year there, her singing teacher died, and a new tutor recategorized her voice from a low contralto to high mezzo-soprano. “I had to start again,” Mitchener said.After graduating, Mitchener took an eight-year hiatus from performing but continued taking vocal lessons while she worked jobs in theater advertising and music publishing. In 2008, she found a teacher who was “unfazed by contemporary music,” she said: the opera singer Jacqueline Straubinger-Bremar, whom she has continued lessons with for the past 15 years. “Some people never find the right teacher for their voice, for where they are musically, or where they are in their lives,” Mitchener said. “I was lucky to find her.”“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesAlongside interpreting others’ works, Mitchener has conceived performance projects herself, including “Industrializing Intimacy,” a work about togetherness and separation that uses improvised vocals, choreographed movement and computer-generated sound, and “SWEET TOOTH,” a music theater piece that examines the history of the British sugar trade and the brutalities of slavery.She said that foregrounding the historical contributions of Black performers and composers was particularly important to her, and noted that two of the best exponents of “Eight Songs for a Mad King” — Julius Eastman, the American composer and performance artist; and William Pearson, the baritone — were Black.“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.” She will be aware of this, as well as the lessons of her research, onstage on Friday. “When I do this piece, I’m thinking about all of these things,” she said. “How it comes out, I’m not sure I can say. But it all feeds in.” More

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      Kassa Overall Knows Artists Feel Pressure. His New Album Explores It.

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      The drummer whose genre-crossing work has brought acclaim here and abroad returns with “Animals,” an LP of jazz, rap and soul inspired by the struggle to be OK.On a cloudy afternoon, the drummer Kassa Overall strolled past his first New York City apartment, a second-floor room in a Fort Greene brownstone. He had moved to Brooklyn after graduating from Oberlin in 2006 to play in the local jazz scene while improving his chops as a beatmaker. To help him make ends meet, the drummer Billy Hart got him a gig playing the djembe for a physical therapy dance class at a nursing home in Harlem.“So I came into the game with a consistent paying thing, low rent, and it was just like, ‘Damn, I’m here,’” Overall, 40, said as he toured his old neighborhood in March. “So I just stayed.”Fast-forward to 2020: Overall had built himself into a noted musician here and abroad, with a multifaceted sound synthesizing jazz, rap and R&B, and an album called “I Think I’m Good” — on the British tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label — poised to push him into wider circles. Or so he thought. “It really felt like this was about to pop,” Overall recalled. “We did Japan, then we did the West Coast, and we were selling out merch every show.”But the pandemic shut down the possibility of further touring. Overall flew back to his native Seattle and wondered what was next. “I went from being a touring musician and always having extra income to barely having enough,” he said over lunch, opening up about his hard times without any apprehension. “I felt like I wasn’t as successful as it felt like I was on the internet.”The anguish led him to start work on a new album, “Animals,” out May 26, about the struggles of surviving as an entertainer, and how the pressure to stand out can push an artist too far. “I’m one of those people that’s like, I had mental illness stuff back in the day, and I have a sensitivity,” he explained. “I can’t just walk through the world normal. I got to do a lot of [expletive] to keep my train on the track.”“I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it,” Overall said. “So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Michael Tyrone DelaneyOverall had challenges throughout college, while he was studying jazz performance; he couldn’t sleep and had bouts of what he called “super high energy.” Then he’d be depressed for days. “I remember even telling my mom one day, ‘I think I’m bipolar,’” he said, recalling a moment when he was in high school. “I had this period where I was getting real isolated.” He described a manic episode where he began seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. “I started seeing stuff on me.”“I Think I’m Good” unpacked the experience of living with bipolar disorder through scant electroacoustic backing tracks and heavily modulated vocals. “Animals” takes a different approach, inspired by Overall’s feeling of kinship with unconventional musicians like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix — “artists that you could tell were special, but also couldn’t really handle the pressure,” he said.The album’s vigorous jazz, rap and soul blends live instruments with electronic drum tracks. Its formidable roster of collaborators includes the rappers Danny Brown, Lil B and Ish of Shabazz Palaces; the vocalists Nick Hakim and Laura Mvula; and the jazz instrumentalists Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer. “The Lava Is Calm” features chilling piano; “Maybe We Can Stay” spotlights sweeping strings and flutes darting across a bouncy backbeat.“It feels like you’re in a zoo — you can’t go full animal, you know?” Overall said. “I was feeling like, within this machine and within this whole organism, I can see within myself, I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it. So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Overall’s childhood in Seattle was filled with music and life lessons from his free-spirited parents. (His mother worked for the local PBS station, and his father did odd jobs and stayed at home with the children.) “Everybody else had Kraft singles and Coca-Cola,” he quipped, “we had soy milk and tofu.”He was a quick study who learned how to play drums as a young child, exploring a living room full of instruments that his father collected. There was a piano, saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, a broken violin, a four-track recorder and a beat machine that he said no one knew how to use. But Overall learned how to manipulate the electronic equipment; by fourth grade, he and his older brother, Carlos, started playing jazz songs like “Autumn Leaves” and “A Night in Tunisia.”“I’m coming home with a lot of dollar bills and ironing them,” he remembered of their early performances. “And my dad was super hands-on with us. He would take us to the spot and set up, we’d find a corner and make bread.”Overall grew up listening to a wide array of artists — John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, Public Enemy and DJ Quik — which gave him a natural feel for all kinds of sounds. A turning point in his relationship to music came when he was a sophomore in high school and landed a $9 an hour job sweeping peanut shells and taking out trash at the Major League Baseball stadium in Seattle. After he and some friends were fired for smoking marijuana, he had a realization.“Wait a minute. I’m doing jazz gigs, getting a hundred a night, 150, sometimes 200 on a good gig,” Overall remembered thinking. “So I could either level this up or I could get better at sweeping peanuts and stuff. And I haven’t had a real job since then.”Hart, a mentor and one of Overall’s Oberlin professors, was taken by his student’s assertiveness. “I knew he had a certain amount of self-confidence that was obvious when he got there,” said Hart, who is also a noted Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner collaborator. “As far as I’m concerned, Kassa is a jazz musician who has excelled in the pop field,” he added. “He’s found a unique direction all his own. If he keeps going the way he’s going, he’s going to be a major star.”Peterson, the Brownswood Recordings founder, was one of Overall’s early supporters, and he said he was struck by Overall’s curiosity for sounds outside jazz. “He’s kind of incorporated all these elements and made something fresh and new, but with all the aspects of traditional music,” he said. “He has a really great sense of being able to push the audience to a point where they can’t take anymore before bringing the beat back in — it’s brave.”Speaking and writing candidly about his own struggles requires its own bravery, but Overall says the new album isn’t simply about one person’s trials.“We’re all aspiring to reach a higher place. And we’re all aspiring to do better,” he said. “But also have empathy for those who don’t. Because I know how hard it is. I know how hard it is to just do OK. There’s a large percentage of us that are not going to do OK. So maybe those are the people we consider animals. But it could have been you, could have been me. May have been me in the past life, or in the next life.” More

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      Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?

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      It has become a social credential to be in therapy. It’s also incredibly difficult to access.About 30 minutes into “Stutz,” a new Netflix documentary from Jonah Hill, the movie’s slick veneer cracks open to expose a deeper artifice. We see Hill and his therapist, the 70-something Phil Stutz, shot in crisp black and white, sitting side by side in what appears to be Stutz’s Los Angeles office. Hill has long hair and a scraggly beard; he says he’s going to use one of Stutz’s treasured “tools,” and he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Then he makes a confession: “I’ve been lying to you in our private therapy sessions.” As he reveals this, the film flips into color and lays bare that they are actually on a set, in front of a green-screen simulation of Stutz’s office. Hill removes the wig he has been wearing to hide a haircut. The film’s initial premise was that we were seeing a single session unfold, but we now learn that it has been filmed over the course of two years — and Hill, in his real sessions, has been hiding his feeling that the project is stuck.Hill’s mission, announced early in the film, is to spread the healing power of therapy and share Stutz’s psychological tools with Netflix’s enormous audience. But the whole endeavor, he now tells Stutz, has felt “weird and false.” For half an hour, Hill has played the role of a distanced documentarian, interviewing Stutz while dodging any personal questions he received in return — like one about being an overweight kid and the conflict that generated with his mother. “I’m not going to go into it because this film is about you, not me,” Hill says. But the film, he eventually comes to realize, is like therapy itself: It can’t work unless he is willing to be vulnerable and share his own grief, fear and insecurity. The movie’s breakdown, however contrived, is meant to replicate a breakthrough — an opportunity to take a risk, connect with others and move forward.In today’s therapy-saturated culture, you hear countless messages about what therapy is and what it is for, many of them starkly different from Hill’s. Back in 1979, the historian and critic Christopher Lasch wrote that the New Left had retreated from politics and turned inward, focusing on personal psychological well-being instead of external collective struggles. These days that is funnily reversed: Psychology is often used, especially online, as a way to collectively press others. In some corners therapy has become a kind of social imperative, something anyone can urge strangers to engage in — not so they can explore their own experiences, but so their psychic toxicity can be contained before it spills onto others. Social media is filled with memes and jokes in which people “beg” men to get therapy, or deploy variations of the formula that “men will literally do anything but go to therapy.” On dating apps, being in therapy can vouch for your emotional soundness, while not being in therapy may be considered a red flag. Articles suggest, in the words of one writer, that “therapy could be the secret to a flourishing love life.”Hill had to confront the fact that therapy is irreducible to a set of abstract tools.These competing images of therapy — one personal, the other social — each stem from the basic assumption that therapy can do a lot of people a lot of good, and from the impulse to share it widely. The version we see in “Stutz” is based largely on self-exploration; by revealing the parts of ourselves we often hide, it suggests, we come to know ourselves more deeply and live our lives more fully. (Hill says he originally came to Stutz “out of desperation to get happier,” having “no healthy self-esteem” despite his wild success in Hollywood.) Therapy as a kind of social credential, meanwhile, is more about proving to others that you are safe to engage — that your projections, defenses and unresolved traumas won’t hurt those around you. One is akin to cleaning up roadside litter because you think it’s the right thing to do; the other is like slipping on a fluorescent vest and picking up garbage because a court so ordered.It did not take long for therapy to go from a social taboo to something very much out in the open. The pandemic only furthered this shift, leaving countless Americans alone (meaning, for some, in bad company) amid incessant talk of mental health and an ever-growing bombardment of content taking therapy to the masses. Young people have been especially hard hit: In 2021, 44 percent of high schoolers reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless. No wonder that young people have also seemed especially receptive to absorbing the ideas of therapy into their lives and their lexicons — speaking with casual familiarity about triggers and traumas and diagnoses.On “therapy TikTok,” therapists amass millions of followers, to whom they offer tidbits and buzzwords about things like attachment styles. Pop stars like Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato serve as spokespeople for teletherapy companies. Other celebrities incorporate mental-health awareness into their work. The singer-actor Selena Gomez has released a documentary, “My Mind & Me,” about her own mental illness; in September, the rapper Megan Thee Stallion introduced a mental-health website linked to her album “Traumazine,” which features a song called “Anxiety” (“I’m a bad bitch, and I got bad anxiety”). Divulging mental-health struggles has become routine among pop figures, a way of both connecting with young fans and offering a message that it’s OK to seek help.And yet high-quality psychotherapy remains staggeringly expensive and hard to find. According to the American Psychological Association, six in 10 psychologists say they don’t have openings for new patients. (My own therapist’s website says there’s a waiting list for teletherapy.) Reading about therapy on social media, I came across a popular post from the writer Casey Johnston, who summed up the search for a therapist like this: “Finding a therapist is simple, just contact 50 people, 25 are no longer in network, 15 don’t answer, 5 have switched to $600/hr life coaching, 2 don’t like your vibe, one now only does pets.” The shortage is especially acute for professionals who work with children and teenagers.In lieu of access to actual therapy, we seem to be inundated with content about therapy, as though its material scarcity creates an urge to spread the gospel by other means. You can devour never-ending media feeds promising tools to help process trauma, techniques to regulate emotions, tips for setting healthful boundaries. But something crucial to therapy feels missing when we’re absorbing these ideas passively, in solitude.What Hill came to realize while making “Stutz,” after all, is that his true subject isn’t his therapist or the tools he has learned. The real action is found in the sui generis nature of the patient-therapist relationship itself — one that is vulnerable, endearing and genuinely moving to watch. Those of us doing the watching are mere viewers engaged in a risk-free parasocial relationship, connecting to someone else’s connection. Hill had to confront the fact that therapy is irreducible to a set of abstract tools. This is something different from any of the millions of articles or TikTok videos offering, say, nine tips for handling a narcissist. All the therapy content online helps to demystify something that long operated behind closed doors, but it also underlines a new problem — that many of us are facing these challenges alone.Source photographs: Netflix More