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      Musicians Flee Afghanistan, Fearing Taliban Rule

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      Dozens of artists and teachers from a prominent music school that promoted girls’ education left the country, but more remain behind. “The mission is not complete,” its founder said.More than 100 young artists, teachers and their relatives affiliated with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, a celebrated school that became a target of the Taliban in part for its efforts to promote the education of girls, fled the country on Sunday, the school’s leaders said.The musicians, many of whom have been trying to leave for more than a month, boarded a flight from Kabul’s main airport and arrived in Doha, the capital of Qatar, around midday Eastern time, according to Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, who is currently in Australia. In the coming days, they plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.“It’s already a big step and a very, very big achievement on the way of rescuing Afghan musicians from the cruelty of the Taliban,” Mr. Sarmast, who opened the school in 2010, said in a statement. “You cannot imagine how happy I am.”The musicians join a growing number of Afghans who have fled the country since August, when the Taliban consolidated their control of the country amid the withdrawal of American forces. Among figures in the arts and sports worlds who have escaped are members of a female soccer team who resettled in Portugal and Italy.Still, hundreds of the school’s students, staff and alumni remain in Afghanistan and face an uncertain future amid signs that the Taliban will move to restrict nonreligious music, which they banned outright when they previously led Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001.The school’s supporters, a global network of artists, philanthropists, politicians and educators, plan to continue to work to get the remaining musicians out of Afghanistan. “The mission is not complete,” said Mr. Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar. “It just began.”A girl practiced at the music institute in 2013. Hundreds of the school’s students, staff and alumni remain in Afghanistan and face an uncertain future under the Taliban.Musadeq Sadeq/Associated PressYo-Yo Ma, the renowned cellist, helped raise awareness about the plight of the musicians among politicians and other artists. He said he was “shaking with excitement” by the news that some of them had escaped.“It would be a terrible tragedy to lose this essential group of people who are so deeply motivated to have a living tradition be part of the world tradition,” Mr. Ma said in a telephone interview.Of the musicians who remain stuck in the country, he said, “I am thinking about them every single hour of the day.”The Afghanistan National Institute of Music was a rarity: a coeducational institution devoted to teaching music from both Afghanistan and the West, primarily to students from impoverished backgrounds. The school became known for supporting the education of girls, who make up about a third of the student body. The school’s all-female orchestra, Zohra, toured the world and earned wide acclaim, and became a symbol of Afghanistan’s changing identity.The school has faced threats from the Taliban for years, and in 2014 Mr. Sarmast was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber.Since the Taliban returned to power, the school has come under renewed scrutiny. Mr. Sarmast and the school’s supporters have worked for weeks to help get students, alumni, staff and their relatives out of the country, fearing for their safety. The government of Qatar helped arrange safe passage for the musicians to Doha, and played a key role in negotiating with the Taliban.An empty room at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music last month. The musicians plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSeveral students and young artists affiliated with the music institute said in interviews with The Times in recent weeks that they had been staying inside their homes, for fear of being attacked or punished by the Taliban. Many stopped playing music, hid their instruments and tried to conceal their affiliation with the school. They requested anonymity to make comments because of the fear of retribution.In the final days of the American war in Afghanistan, the school’s supporters led a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to evacuate nearly 300 students, teachers and staff affiliated with the school, along with their relatives. The operation was backed by prominent politicians and security officials in the United States. At one point, the musicians sat in seven buses near an airport gate for 17 hours, hoping to get on a waiting plane. But the plan fell apart at the last minute when the musicians were not able to obtain entry to the airport and as fears of a possible terrorist attack escalated.The Taliban have tried to promote an image of tolerance and moderation since returning to power, vowing not to carry out reprisals against their former enemies and saying that women would be allowed to work and study “within the bounds of Islamic law.”But they have sent signals that they will impose some harsh policies, including on culture. A Taliban spokesman recently said that music would not be allowed in public.“Music is forbidden in Islam,” the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in an interview with The Times in August. “But we’re hoping that we can persuade people not to do such things, instead of pressuring them.”John Baily, an ethnomusicologist at the University of London who has studied cultural life in Afghanistan, said it would be difficult for the Taliban to eradicate music in the country entirely, after years in which the arts have been allowed to flourish.“You have got literally thousands of young people who have grown up with music,” he said, “and they’re not going to be just kind of switched off like that.” More

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      Richard H. Kirk, Post-Punk Pioneer of Industrial Music, Dies at 65

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      Cabaret Voltaire, of which he was a founder, began as a band of experimental provocateurs and later moved to the dance floor.Richard H. Kirk, a founding member of the English group Cabaret Voltaire and a major figure in the creation of the post-punk style known as industrial music, has died. He was 65.His death was confirmed by his former record label, Mute, in an Instagram post on Sept. 21. The post did not say when or where he died or cite the cause.Mr. Kirk formed Cabaret Voltaire in 1973 in Sheffield, England, with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson. They borrowed the name from the Zurich nightclub where Dada, an art movement that responded to society’s ills with irrationality, was born in the early years of the 20th century.“When we started, we wanted to do something with sound, but none of us knew how to play an instrument,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview for a 1985 New York Times article about industrial music. “So we started using tape recorders and various pieces of junk and gradually learned to play instruments like guitars and bass.” Despite his claim, Mr. Kirk was initially a clarinetist, and he developed a scratching, slashing style as a guitarist.The members of Cabaret Voltaire created the template for what would become known as industrial music: hectoring vocals, mechanical rhythms, scraps of recorded speech snatched from mass media, conventional instruments rendered alien with electronic effects.On early-1980s recordings like “Three Mantras,” “The Voice of America” and “Red Mecca,” the group embraced the literary cutup techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the British author J.G. Ballard’s dystopian provocations and punk rock’s abrasive stance. Musical influences included Brian Eno, the German band Can and Jamaican dub.Mr. Watson left the group in 1981, and Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder pursued a more commercial direction that brought them to the cusp of mainstream success. Cabaret Voltaire disbanded in 1994, after which Mr. Kirk pursued a bewildering range of solo projects and collaborations. He revived Cabaret Voltaire as a solo effort in 2009, focusing exclusively on new material, and released three albums in 2020 and 2021.“Three Mantras,” released in 1980, was one of Cabaret Voltaire’s first albums.Mr. Kirk was born on March 21, 1956, and grew up in Sheffield, a steel town. “You looked down into the valley and all you could see was blackened buildings,” he told the author and critic Simon Reynolds in an interview for his book “Rip It Up and Start Again” (2005), an authoritative post-punk history.Sheffield was a bastion for Labour Party and radical-left politics, and as a teenager Mr. Kirk was a member of the Young Communist League. “My dad was a member of the party at one point, and I wore the badge when I went to school,” he told Mr. Reynolds. “But I never took it really seriously.”Mr. Mallinder, in a 2006 interview on the Red Bull Music Academy website, said that he and Mr. Kirk had been drawn to Black American music from an early age. “We used to go to soul clubs from when we were about 13 or 14,” he said. “We were both working-class kids; we grew up with that. And anything else that was in our world at that moment, it didn’t really matter to us.”But local performances by Roxy Music, then an up-and-coming art-rock band that included Mr. Eno on primitive synthesizers and tape effects, suggested new possibilities.“People like Brian Eno were a massive influence on us, because he was actually integrating things that were nonmusical, and that appealed to us,” Mr. Mallinder said. “We didn’t really want to be musicians. The idea of being technically proficient or learning a traditional instrument was kind of anathema to us.”Mr. Kirk attended art school and completed a one-year program in sculpture. He joined Mr. Mallinder and Mr. Watson, a Dada-besotted telephone engineer, in Cabaret Voltaire, which was initially an amorphous, boundary-pushing workshop project based in Mr. Watson’s attic.“We studiously went there Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and experimented for two hours or so, during which time we’d lay down maybe three or four compositions,” Mr. Kirk told Mr. Reynolds. Less musicians than provocateurs at first, the members of Cabaret Voltaire were soon swept up in England’s punk-rock revolution. In 1978, the group established Western Works, a rehearsal and recording studio based in what had previously been the offices of the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists.“Western Works gave us the freedom to do what we wanted,” Mr. Kirk said. An advance from the independent label Rough Trade helped the band outfit the studio with a four-track recorder and mixing desk. Rough Trade proceeded to issue some of the band’s most influential and enduring work.After Mr. Watson left the group, Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder moved increasingly toward unambiguous dance-floor rhythms, drum machines and lush synthesizer sounds, scoring underground hits like “Sensoria,” “James Brown” and “I Want You.” A major-label contract with EMI resulted in a collaboration with the influential producer Adrian Sherwood on the group’s album “Code” (1987), and a 1990 collaboration with Chicago house-music producers, “Groovy, Laidback and Nasty.” But audience indifference and mounting debt led to the group’s dissolution four years later.Mr. Kirk plunged into an array of pseudonymous side projects and collaborations. Performing with Richard Barratt (a.k.a. DJ Parrot) in a duo called Sweet Exorcist, he was among the earliest artists documented by the fledgling Warp label. He had another potent collaboration, with the Sheffield recording engineer Robert Gordon, as the techno duo XON.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kirk rejected lucrative offers by festivals like Coachella to revive the original Cabaret Voltaire. “Some people might think I’m daft for not taking the money, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable within myself doing that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Fact magazine. “Cabaret Voltaire was always about breaking new ground and moving forward.”He bolstered that impression by declining to perform any older Cabaret Voltaire material. “I always make it really clear that if you think you’re going to come and hear the greatest hits, then don’t come because you’re not,” he told Fact. “What you might get is the same spirit.” More

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      A Year in the Life: Who Gets a Master’s Degree in the Beatles?

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      In Liverpool, England, a postgraduate program aims to turn Beatles fans into serious students of the band’s legacy.LIVERPOOL, England — On Wednesday morning, as a new semester began, students eagerly headed into the University of Liverpool’s lecture theaters to begin courses in archaeology, languages and international relations.But in lecture room No. 5 of the university’s concrete Rendall Building, a less traditional program was getting underway: a master’s degree devoted entirely to the Beatles.“How does one start a Beatles M.A.?” asked Holly Tessler, the American academic who founded the course, looking out at 11 eager students. One wore a Yoko Ono T-shirt; another had a yellow submarine tattooed on his arm.“I thought the only way to do it, really, is with some music,” she said.The Penny Lane street sign. The street immortalized in a Beatles song was covered in the course.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesA 2015 statue of the band on Liverpool’s waterfront.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesTessler then played the class the music video for “Penny Lane,” the Beatles’ tribute to a real street in Liverpool, just a short drive from the classroom.The yearlong course — “The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage” — would focus on shifting perceptions of the Beatles over the past 50 years, and on how the band’s changing stories affected commercial sectors like the record business and tourism, Tessler said in an interview before class.For Liverpool, the band’s hometown, the association with the Beatles was worth over $110 million a year, according to a 2014 study by Mike Jones, another lecturer on the course. Tourists make pilgrimages to city sites named in the band’s songs, visit venues where the group played — like the Cavern Club — and pose for photos with Beatles statues. The band’s impact was always economic and social, as much as a musical, Tessler said.Throughout the course, students would have to stop being simply Beatles fans and start thinking about the group from new perspectives, she added. “Nobody wants or needs a degree where people are sitting around listening to ‘Rubber Soul’ debating lyrics,” she said. “That’s what you do in the pub.”In Wednesday’s lecture, which focused almost entirely on “Penny Lane,” Tessler encouraged the students to think of the Beatles as a “cultural brand,” using the terms “narrative theory” and “transmediality.”A student’s pencil case. All 11 people taking the course said they were longtime Beatles fans.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesThen she applied those ideas to a recent Beatles-related event. Last year, Tessler said, street signs along the real Penny Lane were defaced as Black Lives Matter protests spread across Britain. There was a longstanding belief in Liverpool, she explained, that the street was named after an 18th-century slave trader called James Penny. (The city’s International Slavery Museum listed Penny Lane in an interactive display of street names linked to slavery in 2007, but it now says there is no evidence that the road was named after the merchant.)“What would happen if they did change the name to — I don’t know — Smith Lane?” Tessler asked. That would deprive Liverpool of a key tourist attraction, she said: “You can’t pose next to a sign that used to be Penny Lane.” The furor around the street name showed how stories about the Beatles can intersect with contemporary debates, and have an economic impact, she said.The course’s 11 students — three women and eight men, aged 21 to 67 — all said they were long-term Beatles obsessives. (Two had named their sons Jude, after one of the band’s most famous songs; another had a son called George, after George Harrison.)Dale Roberts, 31, and Damion Ewing, 51, both said they were professional tour guides, and hoped the qualification would help them attract customers. “The tour industry in Liverpool is fierce,” Roberts said.Alexandra Mason, 21, said she had recently completed a law degree but decided to change track when she heard about the Beatles course. “I never really wanted to be a lawyer,” she said. “I always wanted to do something more colorful and creative.”She added:“In my mind, I’ve gone from the ridiculous to the sublime” but said that some might think she’d done the opposite.Students would have to stop being simply Beatles fans and start thinking about the group from new perspectives, the course’s founder said.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesPaul McCartney’s signature among graffiti on another street sign on Penny Lane.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesA postgraduate qualification in the Beatles is a rarity, but the band has been studied in other contexts for decades. Stephen Bayley, an architecture critic who is now an honorary professor at the University of Liverpool, said that when he was a student in the 1960s at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool — John Lennon’s alma mater — his English teacher taught Beatles lyrics alongside the poetry of John Keats.In 1967, Bayley wrote to Lennon asking for help analyzing songs on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Bayley said Lennon “wrote back basically saying, ‘You can’t analyze them.’”But these days a growing number of academics are doing just that: Tessler said researchers in several disciplines were writing about the Beatles, many exploring perspectives on the band informed by race or feminism. Next year, she plans to start a journal of Beatles studies, she said.Some people in Liverpool, however, were not convinced about the band’s academic value. In interviews around Penny Lane, two locals said they thought the course was an odd idea.“What are you going to do with that? You’re not going to cure cancer, are you?” said Adele Allan, the owner of the Penny Lane Barber Shop.“It’s an entirely silly course,” said Chris Anderson, 38, out walking his dog, before adding that he thought almost all college degrees were “entirely silly.”Others were more positive. “You can study anything,” said Aoife Corry, 19. “You don’t need to prove yourself by doing some serious subject,” she added.Students and academic staff members of the Beatles course, at the University of Liverpool on Wednesday.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesTessler concluded Wednesday’s class by outlining the subjects for the semester’s remaining lectures. It was a program that any Beatles fan would savor, including field trips to St. Peter’s Church, where Lennon and McCartney first met in 1957 in the church hall, and Strawberry Field, the former children’s home the band immortalized in song. Classes would cover key moments in the band’s history including a famous live television appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and Lennon’s murder in 1980, Tessler said.She then gave the students a reading list, topped by a textbook called “The Beatles in Context.” Were there any questions, she asked?“What’s your favorite Beatles’ album?” called out Dom Abba, 27, the student with the yellow submarine tattoo.Tessler gamely answered (“The American version of ‘Rubber Soul’”), then clarified what she’d meant: “Does anybody have any questions about the module?” The students clearly still had a ways to go before they become Beatles academics, as much as fans. But there were still 11 months of lectures left. More

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      Tirzah’s Genre-Less Pop Embraces the Beauty of Uncertainty

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      The British singer-songwriter’s new album, “Colourgrade,” is a fluid excursion through the contours of trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music.Some pop artists amplify familiar, universal feelings: the gentle moments spent in love, the torturous pain of heartbreak. But others require us to listen with different ears. They ask us to release control, to resist the desire to fully understand music — to linger in the experience of melody, feeling and sound, even if we can’t quite grasp its meaning.That is the crux of “Colourgrade,” the new album from the British singer-songwriter Tirzah. The 10-song collection is a fluid excursion through the contours of trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music, but even prohibitive genre categories cannot capture its free-flowing depth.Tirzah has long had a knack for meditative, asymmetrical pop. She was classically trained at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, but today her practice is rooted in reserved, cutting experimentation. Along with the producer Mica Levi, a childhood friend and Oscar-nominated composer, Tirzah released the stunning “Devotion” in 2018. It’s a stripped-down but luminous album developed over the course of a decade, one that ruminates on romance and human connection.“Colourgrade,” its follow-up, is a little less legible — and that’s exactly the point. Recorded after the birth of Tirzah’s first child and shortly before the arrival of her second, the album engages themes of motherhood, birth, death and community. But rather than make a rosy album about parenting, the album revels in mood, intimacy and texture. There is abstraction here, but it never collapses into pure experimental expression. Tirzah is still precise, even if she’s purposefully unpolished and offbeat.The title track, which opens the album, plummets listeners into this world with immediate dissonance. Tirzah’s voice decays into jagged, vibrating distortion. “Keep your face straight Colourgrade,” it quivers, eventually trembling into focus. “Did I know, little did I know I’d feel like this/I wish, I wish I could see you again, you again.” Her voice shines like dapples of pale moonlight, and is especially arresting in moments of ambling melancholy. A swirl of eerie whistles envelops the production, and her chant of “I wish” leaves behind a sense of palpable longing.“Beating,” another elegantly coarse number, lies at the center of the album. Slow but steady drum kicks lurch over hissing, crackling whispers, and crepuscular synths bubble under the surface. It’s hard to believe this is a song about companionship and the tenderness of new life, but when Tirzah sings, “You got me/I got you/We made life/It’s beating” in the final verse, the clarity of emotion is piercing.Midnight melodies and sparse, repetitive instrumentation are at the core of “Colourgrade.” Tracks like “Hive Mind” and “Tectonic” rely on thumping kicks and rolling synths that build into a brooding, gritty trance. The call-and-response duet of “Hive Mind” gives the song a seesawing quality, and every lyric is delivered with a cool, melodic steadiness that allows emotion to command our attention.Tirzah delivers the songs on “Colourgrade” as small mysteries. Many of them are icy, minimalist sketches. And yet the album is rife with tender (but cryptic) lyrics. That incongruity is what makes “Colourgrade” all the more magnetic. Perhaps it is a reminder, particularly in our current moment, that leaning into uncertainty and the discomfort of the unknown can be freeing. It can force us to confront difficult feelings, to push against protocols — and unlock a world of openness and possibility.Tirzah“Colourgrade”(Domino) More

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      ‘Enormous: The Gorge Story’ Review: A Musical Paradise

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      A loving documentary about a Pacific Northwest amphitheater, created by a long-ago natural catastrophe, that is a haven for concertgoers.What’s the ideal place to experience live music? For some, a midsize hall with immaculate acoustics; for others, an intimate nightclub with a well-stocked bar; for others still, a clamorous, sweaty dive. For those who are able to get there, and who have an affinity with its vibe, the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wash., with its scenic beauty and open-air sonics, is heaven.Early in this friendly and entirely uncritical documentary about the venue, directed by Nic Davis, a geologist explains that while the Grand Canyon formed over five to six million years, it took mere minutes for a Columbia River flood to create this striking narrow valley whose geography practically demands an amphitheater.The land once belonged to a couple of adventurous vintners, who put out seating and began hosting modest musical events there. Promoters, sponsors, and others took notice, and after a Bob Dylan booking in 1988 that showed the commercial potential of the site, the place grew.It’s now home to several genre festivals, and a Labor Day weekend event hosted by the Dave Matthews Band. Matthews himself is a wittily self-effacing interviewee. Other famed players chime in, mostly with bromides. Footage from certain concerts does make the place look like a great, if rather exclusive, place to experience music.Threaded through “Enormous: The Gorge Story” are the reminiscences of Pat Coats, a devotee of Gorge shows who shares 30 years’ worth of sometimes exhilarating stories, capped by one of loss. The dimension this adds is welcome. It reminds us that death is unavoidable, even in an anodyne documentary about a music venue.Enormous: The Gorge StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Why Write About Pop Music? ‘I Like When People Disagree About Stuff.’

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      Kelefa Sanneh hopes to start some arguments with his new book, “Major Labels,” which chronicles the past 50 years of rock, hip-hop, country and other musical genres.Seventeen years ago, Kelefa Sanneh was doing what he likes best: poking at conventional wisdom.As a pop music critic for this newspaper, he wrote a piece against “rockism,” the longstanding critical bias that favored guitar-driven popular music written by its performers (Bruce Springsteen, U2) as more authentic and worthy than songs by production-heavy pop idols (Christina Aguilera, Usher). Sanneh argued for the possibility of “a fluid musical world where it’s impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures.”Rockism was an insider’s concept at the time, bandied about among critics, but it became a household word, along with its antagonist, poptimism, a belief in not only expunging the guilt from those pleasures but investing deep thought in them.Sanneh had been trying to muddle things, but soon afterward, they got very simple again. Poptimism won. In a rout.“At the time, it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Sanneh is hoping to kick-start a few new disputes and revisit some older ones in his first book, “Major Labels,” a history of the past 50 years of popular music told through the stories of seven genres: rock ’n’ roll, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music and pop. It is due out from Penguin Press on Tuesday.Kelefa Sanneh’s book “Major Labels” is out on Oct. 5.Since 2008, Sanneh has been on staff at The New Yorker, where he’s written about politics, boxing, comedy and sociology in addition to music. After years away from the critic’s beat, “the idea of diving back into music started to seem exciting,” he said. “And I realized I was still obsessed with it.”Browsing through Metropolis Vintage, a T-shirt shop just south of Manhattan’s Union Square, Sanneh approvingly noted the democratic mix of concert mementos. “One of the things I like about popular music is how it frustrates pretension,” he said, skimming through the hangers. “You have all these arguments, but they all end up on T-shirts next to each other on the rack. The arguments fade and someone is like: ‘Should I grab a Madonna shirt or maybe Bob Seger?’”Sanneh, tall and reedy at 45, was wearing a baseball hat with the phrase “Woo Ah!” across the front in pink — a keepsake from a concert by the German star Kim Petras, a current pillar of poptimism.Sanneh writes early in the book that “Major Labels” is “a defense of musical genres.” It’s popular now to praise people who can “slip between” genres or “transcend” them, he said. But to his ear, genres are not only inevitable but valuable.“Every community is defined by inclusion and exclusion,” he said. “And every musical community is in part a critique — implicit and often explicit — of other forms of music, other communities. You don’t get that tight-knit sense of being part of something without at least a little bit of pigheadedness.”His book ponders the historical divisions between R&B and hip-hop, the disco wars and the ensuing paths of dance music, the ways in which country music has hewed closer to the mainstream without losing its defining characteristics. He wanted to retrace how genres developed and solidified (and where they might remain ductile), and to recount the types of debates that he says don’t arise much anymore, like “whether Prince is a sellout, or whether Grand Funk Railroad is the future of rock n’ roll.”Sanneh describes a typical Gen X childhood of being introduced to popular music — Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Bob Marley — by peers, sometimes taped off the radio. (Sanneh said he’s a full-time streamer these days and no longer buys physical copies of music.) But it wasn’t until he discovered punk as a young teenager — the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols — that he felt a passion for it.“It really was linked to the idea of having opinions,” he says of the time when his fandom intensified. He had previously thought, “Here are the Beatles, everyone likes the Beatles and you’re listening to the Beatles. I didn’t realize you could say: ‘No, I’m turning this stuff off, and this stuff on; that’s bad, that’s good.’ That was almost more seductive to me than the music; the idea that you could make up your own mind about it.”Sanneh at Academy Records in New York’s East Village. In the 2000s, “it was easy to argue that pop and R&B music weren’t being taken seriously,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that that’s no longer a problem.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesAs a student at Harvard, Sanneh worked in the punk department of the radio station WHRB, a position that required he pass a written examination. He still considers himself a punk at heart, a jarring claim for someone with his temperament and who writes about his mother chaperoning him at a Ramones concert when he was 14.It’s easy to imagine that he inherited his kindly but questioning spirit from his parents. His father, Lamin Sanneh, was born and raised in poverty in Gambia. Raised Muslim, as a teenager he converted to Christianity, which he discovered through his own studying. He went on to become a leading scholar of world religion who taught at Yale for 30 years.His son can remember him discussing various subjects at the family dinner table and becoming “impatient with pat explanations.” He was equally annoyed by simplistic Christian political positions and by knee-jerk dismissals of Christianity; and, after 9/11, by broad-stroke arguments that either lumped Islam together with Christianity or posited the faiths as polar-opposite rivals. Kelefa Sanneh’s mother, Sandra Sanneh, followed her own remarkable trajectory. White and raised in South Africa, she became a scholar of Zulu and other African languages, retiring from Yale in 2020 after her own three decades there.Kelefa Sanneh was born in Birmingham, England, and soon after moved to Accra, Ghana, where his father was teaching. Two years later, another job took the family to Aberdeen, Scotland, and when Sanneh was 5, the family moved to Massachusetts. He’s always been most comfortable and confident writing in a mode that’s “a bit more analytical, a little less hot-blooded,” he said, and tries to explain subjects as if coming to them from another world.“I always thought about it as related to being an immigrant,” he said.Growing up, Sanneh also recalls “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out: ‘What are they doing over there?’ And that immigrant’s sense of whenever someone says, ‘No, this is country music, they’re singing about the troops, this is not for you,’ saying, ‘Hold on a second, I’ll be the judge of that.’ So I’ve always thought of it as curiosity and maybe a bit of mischief.”“His basic stance is amused skepticism,” said Ben Ratliff, another former music critic for The Times who worked with Sanneh. “He can put on an extraordinarily dispassionate performance, in the best critical sense of that word.”Sanneh, who moved to the U.S. when he was 5, can remember, he said, “an immigrant’s sense of wanting to figure stuff out.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesSanneh comes across as more of a complicator than a contrarian, not reflexively antagonistic but suspicious of unanimity. “Fundamentally I like when people disagree about stuff,” he said. “Anytime there’s a situation in which people claim there can be no disagreement, I always get interested.” He has brought that interest to bear in nuanced pieces about affirmative action and antiracism, among other subjects.Henry Finder, the editorial director of The New Yorker, has known Sanneh for more than 20 years, and read drafts of “Major Labels” for him. Finder also met Sanneh’s father on several occasions before his death in 2019 and finds similarities in how father and son approach their fields.Lamin Sanneh, Finder said, “devoted a lot of energy to ecumenism; he wanted a world in which people can live together in a community without everyone being the same. In a cultural zone, K’s instincts are similar.” (Those who know Kelefa Sanneh call him K.)In the realm of music, Sanneh says, many listeners grow harder to please as they get older. He’s had the opposite experience, his interrogation of different genres opening him up to their various pleasures.“I got less judgmental over the years, which is probably a good thing for a music listener but maybe not such a good thing for a music critic,” he says. “I found it surprisingly more and more difficult to find stuff that I really, really hated.” More

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      Britney Spears's Supporters Cheered the Conservatorship Ruling

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      The crowd of Britney Spears supporters seemed to being holding its breath as one in the moments before the news broke that James P. Spears had been suspended as her conservator after 13 years.Robert Bordelon, 25, of Los Angeles was the first to tell the crowd the decision had been made, before instantly falling to his knees, sobbing.“They thought we were crazy,” he said through tears. “They thought she was crazy.”The crowd erupted, jumping and cheering. Many fans embraced, seeing it as vindication for the #FreeBritney movement.Arthur Avitia, 30, clutched his black fur stole as he took in the news.“I’m so relieved,” he said, breathless. “This is what Britney has wanted for 13 years, and it’s about damn time.”The news also interested activists who are seeking to advance the cause of ending conservatorship abuse, including Angelique Fawcette, 51, who helped organize today’s “unity rally.”“This is vindication on many levels for many people,” she said after being told the court’s ruling.“It means so much for the hundreds of thousands of people who are locked into conservatorships — both legal and illegal,” she said.As heart rates slowed and the tears stopped flowing, the crowd huddled in small groups, parsing what it means for the conservatorship going forward.Kevin Wu, 37, a data analyst from Los Angeles, has been a fixture at courthouse protests since 2019.“While Britney’s case has garnered attention all over the world, it’s not unique,” he said. “Nothing’s going to change without public awareness.”Mathew S. Rosengart, Ms. Spears’s lawyer, thanked her supporters on her behalf. “She’s so pleased and she’s so thankful to all of you,” he told them outside the courthouse. More

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      Bob Moore, an Architect of the Nashville Sound, Dies at 88

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      He played bass on thousands of popular recordings, helping to create the uncluttered style that came to characterize the country music of the 1950s and ’60s.NASHVILLE — Bob Moore, an architect of the Nashville Sound of the 1950s and ’60s who played bass on thousands of popular recordings, including Elvis Presley’s “Return to Sender” and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” died on Sept. 22 at a hospital here. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his wife, Kittra Bernstein Moore, who did not cite a cause.As a mainstay of the loose aggregation of first-call Nashville session professionals known as the A-Team, Mr. Moore played on many of the landmark country hits of his day, among them Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”All were No. 1 country singles, and each typified the intuitive, uncluttered style of playing that came to characterize the less-is-more Nashville Sound.Mr. Moore, who mainly played the upright bass, also contributed the swaggering opening figure to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” as well as the indomitable bass line on Jeannie C. Riley’s skewering of hypocrisy, “Harper Valley P.T.A.” Both records were No. 1 country singles and major crossover hits, with Ms. Riley’s reaching the top of the pop chart in 1968.Over 40 years Mr. Moore elevated the bass in country music from a subordinate timekeeper to an instrument capable of considerable tonal and emotional reach. By turns restrained and robust, his imaginative phrasing revealed a gift for seizing the dramatic moment within a recording or arrangement.“No matter how good a musician you are technically, what really matters boils down to your taste in playing,” he once said. “A lot of guys can play a hundred notes a second; some can play one note, and it makes a lot better record.”Mr. Moore’s forceful, empathetic playing extended well beyond the precincts of country music to encompass the likes of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” and Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia,” among other pop and soul hits, as well as several notable rockabilly records.As session leader at Monument Records, where he worked in the late 1950s, Mr. Moore created arrangements for recordings by Roy Orbison and others, including “Only the Lonely,” a Top 10 pop single for Mr. Orbison in 1960. The record stalled at No. 2 and might have gone on to occupy the top spot on the chart were it not for Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry.” Mr. Moore played bass on that one, too.He had a Top 10 pop record of his own: the Mariachi-flavored instrumental “Mexico” (1961), credited to Bob Moore and His Orchestra. (The song was composed by Boudleaux Bryant, who, with his wife, Felice, also wrote hits for Mr. Orbison and the Everly Brothers.)In 1960 Mr. Moore and some of his fellow A-Teamers received an invitation to appear at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. After a series of violent incidents in Newport, some set off by an angry crowd of concertgoers who had been shut out of sold-out shows, the festival ended prematurely and Mr. Moore was unable to perform, so he and a group billed as the Nashville All-Stars, which included the vibraphonist Gary Burton, recorded an album of instrumentals called “After the Riot at Newport.”“Anyone who has heard me play bass knows my soul,” Mr. Moore said, looking back on his career in a 2002 interview with the website Art of Slap Bass. “I am studied, solid, thorough, steadfast, bold and dependable.”In 2007, Mr. Moore and his fellow A-Team members were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville.His son R. Stevie Moore is also a musician, having played a pioneering role in the lo-fi, or do-it-yourself, movement popularized by indie-rock artists like Pavement and Beck.“Anyone who has heard me play bass knows my soul,” Mr. Moore once said. “I am studied, solid, thorough, steadfast, bold and dependable.”Bill ForsheeBobby Loyce Moore was born on Nov. 30, 1932, in Nashville and raised by his maternal grandmother, Minnie Anderson Johnson, a widow.When he was 9, Bobby set up a shoeshine station outside the Ryman Auditorium, then home to the Grand Ole Opry. One of his regular customers was Jack Drake, the bass player for Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadours; Mr. Drake became an early mentor.Bobby appeared in local bands before going on tour at age 15 as a guitarist and stand-up bassist for the minstrels Jamup and Honey. Along with the future A-Team guitarists Hank Garland and Grady Martin, he spent time in the bands of the Opry stars Paul Howard and Little Jimmy Dickens before working with the singers Red Foley and Marty Robbins.Mr. Moore’s big break came in the early 1950s, when the Nashville bandleader Owen Bradley offered him steady employment with his dance orchestra. Even more auspicious, Mr. Bradley promised Mr. Moore, then weary of touring, steady work on the recording sessions he would soon be supervising as the newly established head of the local office of Decca Records.Over the next three decades Mr. Moore would appear on hits by Decca luminaries like Kitty Wells and Conway Twitty as well as others, like Jim Reeves and Earl Scruggs, who recorded for other labels. He appeared on virtually all of Patsy Cline’s 1960s recordings for Decca, including her hit “Crazy” in 1961, and much of Presley’s RCA output of the early to mid-’60s, including “Return to Sender,” released in 1962.As a new generation of session musicians began supplanting the original A-Team in the early ’80s, Mr. Moore pursued other projects, including a stint with Jerry Lee Lewis’s band. A hand injury forced his premature retirement from performing later that decade.In addition to his wife and his son Stevie, Mr. Moore is survived by a daughter, Linda Faye Moore, who is also a performing musician; two other sons, Gary and Harry; and two granddaughters.In the early 1950s, when Mr. Bradley offered him a career as a studio musician, Mr. Moore discovered a life-changing musical fellowship as a member of the A-Team.“We were like brothers,” he said in his Art of Slap Bass interview. “We had great musical chemistry and communication.” He continued: “We loved creating our music together. We were able to assert our personalities and express our feelings through our music in such an effective way that the public came to recognize our individual styles.” More