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    1984: The Year Pop Stardom Got Supersized

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    Forty years ago, the chemistry of pop stardom was irrevocably changed. Nineteen eighty-four was an inflection point: a year of blockbuster albums, career quantum leaps, iconic poses and an enduring redefinition of what pop success could mean for performers — and would then demand from them — in the decades to come.The indelible albums of 1984 were turning-point releases: Prince’s “Purple Rain,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” among them. Tina Turner reintroduced herself as a bruised but resilient survivor on “Private Dancer.” And Van Halen proved that hard rock could mesh with pop — even synth-pop — on “Jump.” These were pivotal statements from established acts who were decisively multiplying their impact.Those blockbusters were propelled by an unlikely convergence of artistic impulses, advancing technology, commercial aspirations and popular taste, all shaped by the narrow portals of the pre-internet media landscape. The eye-popping novelty of music videos, the dominance of major record labels and the cautious formats of radio stations still made for a limited, recognizable mainstream rather than the infinitude of choices, niches, microgenres and personalized recommendation engines that the internet opened up. It was a peak moment of pop-music monoculture. Listeners in the 1980s absorbed hits that felt like ubiquitous earworms: the fanfare-like synthesizer riff of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the saxophone cushioned by synthesizers in George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” the drone and percussion and bawled vocals of “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Younger generations have definitely heard and seen their repercussions, whether or not they’ve played back the originals. The sounds and lessons of 1984 have been durable and widely recycled by countless synthesizer-pumped 21st-century hitmakers, among them the Weeknd (“Blinding Lights”) and Sabrina Carpenter (“Please Please Please”). More

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      ‘You Can Never Look Back’: How ’70s Rockers Rebooted for the ’80s

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      The year 1984 was a watershed in pop music. The stars who’d made it big the previous decade had to embrace new instruments and MTV or risk being left behind.Don Henley was stuck.It was the fall of 1983, and the former Eagles star was cruising down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, listening to a working tape of a tune for his second solo album. While struggling for words to one section, he glanced to the left lane and saw a gold Cadillac Seville with a curious decoration: a Grateful Dead decal.That image went right into the song, “The Boys of Summer,” a synthesizer-bathed memoir of lost love that Henley delivered with the kind of cutting, resonant zinger that was the signature of all his best Eagles lyrics:Out on the road todayI saw a Deadhead sticker on a CadillacA little voice inside my head said“Don’t look back, you can never look back”“It was an odd juxtaposition, to see a Deadhead sticker on a car that is associated with conservatism,” Henley recalled in a recent interview. “To me, it was a symbol of changing times.”The music had changed too. Henley was far from alone as an A-list 1970s rocker who had arrived in the ’80s to find a music scene transformed in sound and vision, now driven by pop singles and buzzing with electronics. The hallmarks of mainstream ’70s rock — long guitar solos, bushy sideburns — were out. Synthesizers, drum machines and stylized, eye-popping music videos were in.In most tellings of pop music history, the 1980s were primarily the springboard for a fresh crop of stars like Madonna, Prince and Duran Duran, who embraced and defined the flashy artifice of the MTV age. But the new era also had a powerful impact on the generation that preceded it. For rock’s older guard, even those like Henley, who had scaled the heights of fame, the emergence of a new order in pop was a kind of evolutionary event, and its implicit challenge was clear: Adapt or be left behind.“The ’80s ushered in a whole new paradigm,” Henley said. “We all sort of had to get with the program. Some people got with the program, and some didn’t.”Don Henley came up in Eagles, but realized he had to shift his sound for his second solo album.Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty Images More

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      Ananda Lewis, Former MTV V.J., Says She Has Stage 4 Breast Cancer

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      Lewis, the host of the 1990s MTV show “Hot Zone,” tried to fight her illness without undergoing a double mastectomy. She says she is responding well after resuming treatment.The former MTV V.J. Ananda Lewis said in a CNN round-table discussion that was posted online on Tuesday that her breast cancer, which she first learned she had in 2019, metastasized last year and had reached Stage 4.In a phone interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Lewis, 51, said that she had since resumed treatment and was feeling much better. “I’ve turned it around really beautifully,” she said.Lewis first became recognizable in the 1990s as a host of “Teen Summit,” a long-running weekly live show on BET that aimed to speak to Black teenagers about current issues (Lewis interviewed Hillary Clinton, who was then the first lady, on the program in 1996). She went on to host “Hot Zone,” an MTV show in which she interviewed stars and gave style advice. The Times, in a 1999 profile, described her as one of MTV’s most popular stars and “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.”Stage 4 breast cancer means that the cancer cells have spread beyond the breast, often traveling to the bones, the lungs and the liver. It can be treated with tools like chemotherapy and hormone therapy, but it is considered incurable. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States and a leading cause of death from cancer among women globally.In the round-table — with the CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam, Lewis’s best friend since they met at Howard University in the 1990s, and the CNN anchor Sara Sidner, who had a double mastectomy this year after learning that she had Stage 3 breast cancer — Lewis said that she had decided not to get a double mastectomy despite her doctors’ recommendation in early 2019, when she first discovered the lump and learned she had Stage 3 breast cancer.She sought conventional care after receiving the initial diagnosis, speaking to “the right and best oncologists, the breast surgeons,” she said on Wednesday. As she told Elam, “I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way.”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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      in Television

      How ‘The Challenge’ Lasted 40 Seasons and Changed Reality Stardom

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      When Johnny Devenanzio swiveled in his chair and playfully called for his mother to bring some meatloaf, he knew exactly what he was doing. In his impression of Will Ferrell’s man-child from “Wedding Crashers,” he was really evoking Johnny Bananas, the Peter Pan-like alter ego he has played for much of his adult life on the grandfather of all reality-competition shows: MTV’s “The Challenge.”Devenanzio, 42, said he’d likely be a stay-at-home-son had his life not so permanently veered into the world of reality television. Or maybe he would have used his Penn State college degree to enter the world of finance. Of his large flock of one-time castmates, many have forged ahead with new careers, gotten married, started families. Not Devenanzio.“When I die I’m going to donate my brain to science to study what the long-term side effects of reality TV has been,” Devenanzio said over a Zoom interview. “Because I have literally clocked more hours than anyone on the show.”Devenanzio spoke just before embarking for Vietnam to film the 40th season of “The Challenge,” the flagship show on which he has appeared in more than half the seasons. Subtitled “Battle of the Eras,” the new season (premiering on Aug. 14) will feature 40 cast members representing various generations of the show vying for a slice of a million-dollar prize.That’s a long way from the show’s summer camp-vibes origin. The series premiered before the first Real Housewife ever chucked a drink, ahead of any chef-judge barking, “Hands up, utensils down,” and earlier than anyone surviving to outwit, outplay and outlast their competition. “The Challenge” even outstayed MTV predecessors like “The Real World” and “Road Rules,” which initially served as feeders for contestants to enter the show.The often harrowing daily challenges may be the underpinnings of the show, whether leaping from cars suspended over water or trying to fling fellow castmates off moving trucks.Paramount+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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      ‘Catfish,’ the TV Show That Predicted America’s Disorienting Digital Future

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      MTVThis is Danny. He fell in love with a woman he’d met online. When he saw her photo, he called it love at first sight.He and Rosa talked on the phone daily for months and exchanged reams of texts in Spanglish. They bonded over being Puerto Rican.“You’re so funny, Daddy,” she once texted him. “You’re so sexy, my love,” Danny replied. Though they’d never met, he was making big plans: marriage and family.When the red flags started to pile up, Danny contacted “Catfish,” on MTV, for help. The truth was far from what he’d hoped. Rosa was secretly Jose.The TV Show That Predicted America’s Lonely, Disorienting Digital FutureSince its first episode aired in 2012, “Catfish: The TV Show” has held up a mirror to our online lives, reflecting how we present ourselves and make sense of love, lust, trust, companionship and loneliness in an increasingly digital world. Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the host Nev Schulman summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryThe saga of Danny and Jose, which aired in 2017, is emblematic of the deception, dashed hopes and complicated situations regularly featured on the show.Danny contacted “Catfish” for help, believing Rosa had moved from Connecticut to Orlando, where he lived, but still would not meet him. Rosa had warned Danny that she had anger issues, in part because she had been molested as a child. When meeting with Schulman and his co-host Max Joseph, Danny said he wanted to help her by bringing more faith into her life. “I think I could make her a better person,” he said. “We plan to have a family.”In their research, Schulman and Joseph quickly discovered the so-called mask, meaning the unwitting person whose photos had been sent to Danny: a woman named Natalie. But Rosa’s real identity was harder to pin down. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Danny said when shown the evidence. “I never had anybody send me fake pictures.”Schulman called Rosa to inform her that Danny was now aware she’d lied about the photos. Though combative, she agreed to meet in Connecticut. It became clear that she had never moved.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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      in Movies

      Eli Noyes, Animator Who Turned Clay and Sand Into Art, Dies at 81

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      His innovative stop-motion animation influenced a generation of filmmakers, including the creators of Wallace and Gromit.Eli Noyes, a filmmaker whose use of clay and sand in stop-motion animation garnered an Oscar nomination and shaped the aesthetic of Nickelodeon and MTV during the early days of cable television, died on March 23 at his home in San Francisco. He was 81.His wife, the artist Augusta Talbot, said the cause was prostate cancer.Mr. Noyes made his first film, “Clay or the Origin of Species,” in 1965 as an undergraduate student at Harvard. To the accompaniment of a jazz quartet, clay model animals whimsically portray evolution in the movie, which lasts just under nine minutes.Though stop-motion filmmaking had existed for decades and clay was used in the 1950s to create animated characters like Gumby, directors and cinephiles credited Mr. Noyes’s rookie effort with reviving interest in the technique at a time when hand-drawn characters were more popular.“Clay or the Origin of the Species” (1965), Mr. Noyes’s first film, was nominated for an Academy Award.via Noyes familyThe film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short subject.“This recognition served as a tremendous boost to the credibility of clay as an animation medium, bulldozing a path for even greater works,” Rick Cooper, a former production manager for Will Vinton Productions, a Claymation film company, wrote in the journal Design for Arts in Education.Peter Lord, a founder of Aardman Animations, the English studio that used clay in the production of the “Wallace and Gromit” films, “Chicken Run” and other popular animated features, recalled seeing “Clay or the Origin of Species” on British television when he was getting started as a filmmaker.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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      Mojo Nixon, Who Mixed Roots and Punk Rock, Dies at 66

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      A self-styled voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird,” he was known for satirical songs including “Elvis Is Everywhere” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”Mojo Nixon, the psychobilly musician and radio host who gained cult status for his rabble rousing and celebrity spoofs like the 1987 hit “Elvis Is Everywhere”, died on Wednesday aboard a country music cruise that he was co-hosting. He was 66.His death was confirmed by Matt Eskey, the director of a 2020 documentary film about Mr. Nixon. He said that Mr. Nixon had a “cardiac event” while he was asleep as the Outlaw Country Cruise was docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico.A statement posted by the film’s official Facebook page said that Mr. Nixon had died “after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners.”Mr. Nixon was best known for his celebrity spoofs, like “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” and for satirical tirades like “I Hate Banks” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”“All of it was performed in maximum overdrive on a bed of rockabilly, blues, and R&B, which earned Nixon some friends in the roots rock community but had enough punk attitude — in its own bizarre way — to make him a college radio staple during his heyday,” the All Music Guide wrote.“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock-and-roll setting,” he told The New York Times in 1990. In another interview with the paper, he described himself as a voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird.”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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Abbott Elementary’ and Super Bowl LVIII

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      The third season of the award winning sitcom airs on ABC. The Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers go head-to-head.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 5-11. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE EXORCIST 5:55 p.m. on Flix. There are two things I’m always in the mood to watch: reality television and horror movies (both involve a bit of schadenfreude). “The Exorcist,” of course, is genre royalty, and since it turned 50 last year, it’s a good time to watch Regan’s head go around and lament the ever-worsening quality in practical effects. You can also play my favorite TV game: trying to catch which parts have been edited out for broadcast.BELOW DECK 9 p.m. on Bravo. Our beloved “stud of the sea” Captain Lee Rosbach has finally sailed off into the sunset after 10 seasons of managing unruly young yachties (don’t worry, he’s fine: he’s gabbing about all things “Below Deck” on his podcast, “Salty”). Captain Kerry Titheradge, of “Below Deck Adventure” fame, is now manning the helm. Fraser Olender returns as the chief stew, and with the rumors that he’s now dating a charter guest confirmed, there’s sure to be plenty to rock the boat this season.TuesdayMatthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”Paramount PicturesFERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF 5:30 p.m. on Freeform. References to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” abound in the latest season of “True Detective.” The “Twist and Shout” parade sequence plays in the Tsalal station leading up to the mysterious death of the researchers — and it’s on a loop when Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) inspects the scene. Later, a murderer eerily whistles the Beatles tune as both taunt and callback. Perhaps a rewatch of the John Hughes classic, with Matthew Broderick starring as the charming truant, will unlock the deepening mystery?WednesdayABBOTT ELEMENTARY 9 p.m. on ABC. Coming off another semi-successful awards season (Quinta Brunson won an acting Emmy for her role in the show), “Abbott Elementary” returns for its third season. Once again, optimism and hilarity will be set against the backdrop of the grimly underfunded Philadelphia public school system. Last season ended with an unexpected turn for Brunson and Tyler James Williams’s will-they-won’t-they couple (and a cameo from my favorite local celebrity, the massive anatomical heart at the Franklin Institute), so I’ll be eager to check back in.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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      in Movies

      ‘Milli Vanilli’ Review: Blame It on the Fame

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      Luke Korem’s documentary retraces the manufactured pop duo’s rise and fall, while asking pertinent questions about the price of stardom.The performers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus earn your empathy in the documentary “Milli Vanilli,” a jolting, eye-opening investigation on how fame destroyed them. The war-of-words film, directed by Luke Korem, unfolds like a whodunit.The film retraces the bonkers events of Morvan and Pilatus’s naïve rise to the top in the late 1980s as Milli Vanilli, the image-forward pop duo who secretly lip-synced prerecorded songs to live audiences. Their hits included “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Baby Don’t Forget My Number.”At first, the duo needed money to escape poverty, but their celebrity status kept them hooked, and their German producer, Frank Farian, held the bait.And then, the documentary revisits their fall: During a live performance on MTV in 1989, the song started to skip, exposing them as frauds. In 1998, Pilatus died of an overdose. “I lost my sobriety and every sense of reality,” we hear him say in the film.Impressively, Korem gets those who ran the business side of Milli Vanilli, including officials at Arista Records, to spill the juicy details on what actually happened to the duo: Morvan and Pilatus became Farian and the label’s scapegoats. As presented here, it’s easy to see how this could be the basis for a horror film by Jordan Peele.Morvan is the heart of the documentary; he reflects on the group’s past treatment (he thinks they deserved that revoked Grammy) and raises still-relevant questions about the way the music industry exploits vulnerable performers. Charles Shaw, one of the real singers behind Milli Vanilli, says that Farian, who also worked with the group Boney M., “made most of his money on Black artists, and it worked.”Milli VanilliNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More