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      Moshing in the Rain: The Tenuous Return of the British Music Festival

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      Spending three days camping at a muddy music festival is a British tradition. But event operators fear that few will go ahead this summer, despite a trial last weekend.DONNINGTON PARK, England — At 5 p.m. on Friday, a metal band called Death Blooms walked onstage in a field here and launched into a pummeling track to open Download Festival, Britain’s first large-scale music festival to take place since the Covid-19 pandemic began.A second later, several hundred rain-soaked fans — including two men dressed as bananas — began careering into one another in front of the stage, arms and legs flailing, smiling ecstatically as they formed Britain’s first legal mosh pit in 15 months.After 10 minutes, Jim Ellison, one of the bananas, rushed out of the tent to catch his breath. “It’s so good to be back to normality,” said Ellison, 19. He acknowledged that most wouldn’t define normalcy as “a man in a banana costume moshing,” before cutting the interview short as Death Blooms started playing a song called “Life is Pain.”“I’m really sorry,” Ellison said, excusing himself, “but I love this tune.” He ran straight back into the pit.When the metal band Death Blooms opened Download, a mosh pit quickly formed in front of the stage.Joe Giddens/Press Association, via Associated PressSince the 1970s, music festivals have been a key part of the British summer: events where teenagers get a first taste of parent-free vacations, music fans find community and people generally get very muddy and carefree. But there is widespread concern that few events will go ahead this year despite nearly half of Britain’s population having been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. And organizers say they risk going bankrupt.Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that social distancing measures would continue in England until at least July 19 — almost a month after all restrictions were planned to be lifted. Within days, several major festivals were canceled for the second year in a row, with organizers saying they couldn’t afford to pay suppliers if there was no guarantee that the events would occur.“There seems to be a whole body of evidence saying, ‘You can do outside events safely,’ but for some reason the government won’t let us,” Chris Smith, the director of WOMAD, a world music festival, said in a telephone interview. His event was scheduled for July 22, and Smith was hoping that the government would provide support so the event could go ahead.British festivals range from world-renowned events like Glastonbury — which turns a farm in southwestern England into a temporary city for one week each year — to scrappier productions like Tribfest, an event for cover bands.In 2019, almost 1,000 were held, attracting 5.2 million attendees, according to the Association of Independent Festivals, a trade body. That year, festivals generated 1.7 billion pounds, $2.3 billion, for Britain’s economy.Download was initially canceled in March. This weekend’s hastily arranged special edition was able to go ahead only because it is part of a government trial to see whether and how cultural life can return safely. Previous pilot events — two 3,000-person club nights and a 5,000-capacity rock concert in Liverpool — led to eight cases of potential coronavirus transmission, according to one of the scientists involved, Iain Buchan.Arriving on the first day of Download for a typically rainy and carefree British festival. Joe Giddens/Press Association, via Associated PressDownload 2021 had a significantly reduced capacity: The three-day metal, punk and hard rock festival usually sees over 110,000 hard-rock fans camp in Donnington Park — a set of fields next to a racetrack in Leicestershire, England — to watch bands like Slipknot and Slayer. But for the government trial, only 10,000 fans were allowed, and the lineup featured only British acts to avoid the risks of international travel and quarantines.Attendees had to take a coronavirus test before going in, and agreed to also do one five days after the festival so that scientists could see whether the event caused the spread of coronavirus. But once inside in the grounds, masks weren’t required, while headbanging, moshing and drunken conversations at the camp site were prevalent.Melvin Benn, the director of Festival Republic, Download’s organizer, said he wasn’t concerned about a coronavirus outbreak at the site given the testing system. “I probably need to be more worried about trench foot,” he said while sheltering from a downpour.Attendees also weren’t worried about catching Covid. Harry Jackson, 26, a theater technician, said that the only anxiety he’d had around the festival was doing the pre-event test. “I sat there staring at it for half an hour going, ‘Please be negative, please be negative, I don’t want to miss this,’” he said. “I consider Download my home,” he added. “It’s my family.”The organizers of Britain’s other festivals say they can only be sure that their events will go ahead this summer if the government creates an insurance initiative to guarantee their costs if the country delays its reopening again. Austria and Germany have adopted such programs, but the British government has not, despite pressure from politicians.Last month, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, a cross-party group of lawmakers, said in a report on festivals that there would be a hole in the “lives of music lovers and makers alike” this summer as a “direct result of the government’s refusal to back insurance for the sector.”At least one festival has found a creative solution. Last month, Brainchild — a three-day event for up-and-coming musicians and theater makers that is planned for the beginning of August — asked its 2,500 attendees to agree to be refunded only half their ticket price if the event were canceled so the organizers could start paying acts and equipment suppliers.Only 106 people declined to lose the £60, Marina Blake, the festival’s creative director, said in a telephone interview. “It was extraordinary,” she said. “It shows people are so desperate to have something to look forward to,” she added, noting that such an initiative was probably not viable for large events.Ben Barlow, the frontman for Neck Deep, said during the band’s set that he was glad to be able to perform again.Katja Ogrin/Getty ImagesAt Download, the relief to be back at a festival was palpable. During the pop-punk act Neck Deep’s set, the singer Ben Barlow said, “This is our first gig in two years, and I never want to wait that long again.”“If we’re the lab rats, let’s give them a good experiment,” he added, encouraging the heaving crowd to mosh. Barlow looked close to tears several times during the set.On Saturday morning, the scene at Donnington Park was typical for a British music festival. Music fans wandered around bleary-eyed, and two interviewees said they’d decided to skip the on-site showers and instead freshen up with a combination of wet wipes and hand sanitizer.At 11:30 a.m. James Carroll, 23, stood by a stage, waiting for the day’s music to start. He was hurting a bit from moshing the day before, he said, but it was nothing that a few cans of beer couldn’t sort out. “Day two, straight back on it,” he said.Soon, a band called Lotus Eater took to the stage, its singer screaming into a microphone as his band created a cacophony behind him.Immediately, the mosh pit began again. There were no men in banana costumes this time, but soon there was someone dressed as a Tyrannosaurus rex. More

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      Lucy Dacus Takes Confessional Songwriting to a New Level

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      For her third solo album, “Home Video,” the singer used her childhood journals as source material.In November of 2018, while on tour with the group boygenius, the singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus began performing a recently written song, “Thumbs,” partly at the urging of Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, her bandmates in that project. Dacus had already drawn on her own life for the wry and charged songs on her first two solo albums, “No Burden” (2016) and “Historian” (2018), but “Thumbs” — a confessional song about a violent impulse felt toward a close friend’s abusive father — with its blunt reminder that a survivor owes an oppressor exactly nothing, resonated particularly deeply with her fans. “I’ve probably received more messages about that song than anything else I’ve written,” Dacus told me recently. On her solo tour in 2019, she occasionally closed her sets with “Thumbs,” prefacing each performance with a request that no one record it.Lyrically the song often feels like a short story — the father and daughter’s tense meeting at a bar after years of estrangement, as witnessed by a protective friend (“I would kill him / if you let me … I don’t know how you keep smiling,” the narrator sings); the way they “feel him watching / walk a mile in the wrong direction.” But like all the songs on “Home Video,” Dacus’s third album, out on June 25 from Matador, the source material came directly and almost entirely from the journals she’s kept faithfully from the age of 7. The album’s 11 songs, together a forthright exploration of coming of age, deep friendships and young queer love amid a Bible camp backdrop, volley between grief and humor and darkness. They are her most intimate and deliberately personal work to date.For her third solo album, “Home Video,” the 26-year-old Dacus mined her own life, consulting the journals she’s kept since she was 7.Candace Karch“It was intentional that I talk plainly on this album about things that actually happened because I hadn’t done that yet,” the artist says on an early May afternoon while on her front porch in Philadelphia. Dacus, who’s trying to wean herself off a habit of wearing all black, has on a dark blue sweater and bright red pants that match her shade of lipstick. We’re having tea and leftover birthday cake — cardamom, pistachio, olive — that a friend made for Dacus’s 26th birthday a couple days ago. The party occasioned the first reunion of newly vaccinated friends, which Dacus says felt “slightly skittish, but really fun.” On Instagram, she posted a photo of the aftermath, a table covered in so many Pollock-like swirls it was impossible to decipher what had occurred there. “I woke up this morning and deep-cleaned the table,” Dacus says, looking down at it a little ruefully. “We had a crab bake. I really hope it doesn’t smell.”Dacus moved to Philadelphia — a city that had slowly grown on her while she was on tour — from her hometown of Richmond, Va., and after recording “Home Video” in Nashville, at the end of 2019. Heading into 2020, she felt oddly hopeful. When Dacus and her band did a three-night residency at the Philadelphia club Johnny Brenda’s, the audiences erupted in chants afterward for Bernie Sanders. She played her last show in March, in Florida. The release of “Home Video,” which Matador had slated for as early as fall 2020, was pushed back; a slowed-down, remote version of production continued throughout the pandemic.In May of last year, two months into lockdown and recovering from back surgery, Dacus dreamed she was running around a house with her best friends and, as one does during a pandemic, promptly went on Zillow, where a fresh listing for a rambling, early-20th-century rowhouse appeared on her screen. She rounded up six roommates, packed up her sizable library and moved in last summer. As we talk, various housemates drift past us and the dogwood tree in the front yard, wheeling out the recycling, returning from rock climbing. Recently, Dacus signed papers to buy the house, where she’ll continue to live communally. “I think I need one week every four months completely to myself, but other than that I want to be around people,” she says. “I struggle with depersonalization, so it’s nice to have a hustle and bustle around me.”In 2017 and 2018, when she began writing songs for “Home Video,” Dacus occasionally allowed herself to consult particular entries in her old journals, to check a detail for accuracy, and stumbled into a memoirist’s classic quandary. Dacus tends to lean on her emotional memory, layered with hindsight and grown-up knowledge, over what her childhood self was willing to put on the page. “Almost reliably the perspective is true and the entry is not and I’m pissed about that because I would really like to know what I thought in the moment,” she says. “Who’s to know which one I should trust more?” Otherwise, for a long time she says she stuck to another writerly instinct, to not reread the entries: “If I was too close to the event, it wouldn’t hit as an actual story.”Early in lockdown, though, Dacus sat down and began to type up her journals, starting from the beginning grade school years and stopping at age 16, when she hit around 100,000 words. When she looked back at the writing of her teen years, certain omissions stood out. “I really was just hovering around the fact that I was not straight,” she says. “A lot of the songs, like ‘Triple Dog Dare,’ are about that.” “Triple Dog Dare,” which, more precisely, is about queer love forbidden by the church, closes the album with astonishing and dark undertones, intentionally referencing an idea from “A Little Life” (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara (also T’s editor in chief). “There’s a section in the middle of the novel where a parent is talking about losing a child and expresses the surprising relief that nothing worse can happen now,” Dacus says. “That idea really stuck with me.”At 26, Dacus is thoughtful and forthright when describing her sexual identity. “Gay is the overarching word, queer is the better overarching word and more specifically bisexual or pansexual,” she says. “I have no allegiance. I think gender is a joke.”DACUS WAS ADOPTED as an infant and grew up on the rural-suburban edges of Richmond, amid the kind of teenage wasteland territories of her songs — overpasses, cornfields, goat farms. “It was a little isolated but I was also around a bunch of people my age going through the same angsty time, so it was kind of a pressure cooker for weirdness,” she says. From her father, a graphic designer, she acquired a belated love of Bruce Springsteen that translated into her fantastically rocked-out rendition of “Dancing in the Dark” — a song Dacus says has been covered so many times it’s attained the status of a hymn — on her EP “2019” (2019). She credits her mother, a pianist who worked in musical theater, with turning her on to Prince and David Bowie. But as a kid, she admits, she mostly listened to Top 40 songs with her friends, musicians like the Shins that she’d discover from “Gilmore Girls” and church music. She wouldn’t buy her first guitar, a $100 Ibanez she found on Craigslist, until she was 19.Handwritten lyrics to “Partners in Crime,” a song on Dacus’s new album. The words and melody come first, she says. “I’ll go on a walk and sing to myself and go home and pick up the guitar and figure out chords.”Candace KarchIt was around this time that she came out to her then boyfriend and to her family. “I think they were cool with it, but they were not asking questions, not really following up,” she says of her parents. “It was more about me making sure they knew it than a piece of information that brought us together. I’m grateful there wasn’t a fight. It was more like, OK, next topic. Maybe one day. Maybe they’ll read this and ring me up about it.”Dacus was raised in what she characterizes as a fairly progressive church, but she also attended her friends’ churches, places that are referenced in her song “Christine” (“We’re coming home / from a sermon saying / how bent on evil we are”): “There was one church I’d go to a lot where they separated you by gender and they talked to you a lot about sex,” she says. “Like, the purpose of this church was to make sure kids did not have sex.”Talking to her parents about leaving the church was a conversation of coming-out-level difficulty that Dacus reserved for a drive. As she sings in “Brando,” “That’s only something you would say in the car.” “They’re both still Christian and I think they know that I’m not done with whatever journey I’m on and I think that brings them peace of mind,” she says.She sings about the confusion of religious feeling on “VBS,” a song whose title is an acronym for Vacation Bible School. The Dacus of this song, in her early teens, smokes nutmeg in her camp boyfriend’s bunk bed and tries not to laugh at his bad poetry. “He was my first boyfriend and he was a stoner who loved Slayer and we danced in a field with all these people to Christian rock and I thought, this is literally God that’s making me feel so good, when it was probably just endorphins and hormones,” she says.Concerts, Dacus says, fill a void that church once did. “For me, there’s no greater joy than hearing people sing together,” she says. On “Please Stay” and the stunning “Going Going Gone” (which was recorded in a single take), Baker and Bridgers join Dacus, the group reprising its boygenius harmonizing. In the days before my visit, the trio was commended on Twitter by the Chicks for their cover of “Cowboy Take Me Away.” They were also name-checked in an episode of “Mare of Easttown” when Mare’s daughter, Siobhan (Angourie Rice), is asked on a date to a boygenius show by a college radio DJ (Madeline Weinstein).“We were talking about it in our group chat and Julien said something like, ‘Welcome to the gay cultural zeitgeist,’ ” Dacus says. “For our band to basically be an indicator of gayness in a TV show is so funny — and also we only did one tour, so like, did this scene happen in November 2018?” The improbability factor puts boygenius in the pop cultural realm of Sonic Youth appearing on “Gilmore Girls,” the Pixies on “Beverly Hills 90210.” While there are no reunion plans on the horizon, Dacus, Baker and Bridgers message almost daily. “We started doing tarot together,” Dacus says. “Julien didn’t have a deck until recently, Phoebe has a really ornate one and I have the classic Rider deck. I love it. It’s like having a shared lexicon, having a ritual.”Dacus is eager to begin touring again this fall. She keeps a spreadsheet of song requests fans have made in specific cities. She’s excited to play the songs on “Home Video,” even though she hasn’t been able to listen to the entire album herself in a long time. To put out something so honest and vulnerable feels “scary, but good,” she says. It was her first grade teacher who gave her a blank composition book, her first journal — with the reminder that the writing she produced in it would be for Dacus’s eyes only, a pact she’s only now broken in adulthood. “It’s not that I had secrets to protect, but I wanted secrets,” she says. “So I had to find a way to create them.” More

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      Foo Fighters Bring Rock Back to Madison Square Garden

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      Over the weekend, Foo Fighters played Madison Square Garden, the first full-capacity concert in a New York arena since March of 2020.The house lights inside Madison Square Garden went down Sunday night, and the thousands of fans, packed like sardines in their seats, stood as if on cue. As they roared their approval, bouncing in place on the balls of their feet, the ground began to tremble. Cellphone flash lights illuminated the darkness.The sound of a keyboard echoed through the rafters. Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters’ frontman, appeared on the stage.“It’s times like these, you learn to live again,” Grohl sang.The lyrics had seldom felt so on point.After many difficult months of illness, death, hardship and pain, and shifting limits on how many people could gather, especially indoors, arena rock returned to New York City just over a year after the city was the center of the outbreak. It was the Garden’s first concert in more than 460 days, and it drew a full-capacity crowd that was asked to show proof of vaccination to enter. Inside, people grooved, tightly packed, with few masks visible.Jaclyn Mitgang, left, and Heather Morris, at the Garden’s first concert since the pandemic. “This is a book end to what we have gone through for a year and a half,” Morris said.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times“This is a book end to what we have gone through for a year and a half,” said Heather Morris, 47, of Chicago. “We’ve survived it. We’re going forward.”The return of concerts to the garden comes at an in-between moment when it comes to the pandemic in the United States. As more and more Americans have become vaccinated against the coronavirus, deaths from Covid have fallen off considerably. But only about two-thirds of adults in the United States have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, and there are still parts of the country where vaccinations lag.But after a year of being stuck inside, people have been eager to restart their hobbies and routines and to connect with one another again. Last week, both New York and California, where more than 70 percent of adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine, lifted virtually all coronavirus restrictions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask. The rapidly shifting rules allowed the Foo Fighters concert to go forward.Fans were asked to show proof of vaccination to enter the arena.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesOn Sunday, a concert attendee would have had to squint to see signs of the pandemic persisting. In many ways, the evening felt like prepandemic times.In a sea of thousands, only a few patrons here or there wore face coverings. Thousands of vaccinated people, their faces bare, belted out the lyrics to well-known songs, sending aerosols flying through the air. No one seemed concerned.Fans were packed together. A sudden arm gesture could send a beer flying. Strangers hugged and high-fived. They bumped into each other in the busy concourse. They punched the air, swung their hair and danced, twisting and swaying at their seats in a state of high-decibel music-induced bliss.It was “just epic,” said Rachael Cain, 51, who was among the first people to arrive at the Garden on Sunday afternoon.But there were subtle reminders of the pandemic everywhere. Hand sanitizer pumps were clamped to the walls, and wipes could be found near any napkin dispenser. Ticketing was digital and concession buying appeared mostly cashless.At the entrances, staff members checked people’s vaccine cards with varying levels of scrutiny. Some asked for identification to match with proof of inoculation, in a slow-moving process. Other checkers simply waved people through as they flashed their passes while walking by. A small anti-vaccine protest on the sidewalk outside drew little attention.Several patrons said that the vaccine requirement helped them feel safe about returning to such a big indoor gathering.“I was expecting it to be a little longer before I came to a concert again,” said Nick Snow, 29, who was among the few fans who wore a mask while inside the arena. “The precautions with the vaccinated only, they help.”Grohl himself took care to acknowledge from the stage the unique milestone he and his band were participating in. At various points during the roughly three-hour show, he asked the crowd rhetorically if they had missed music, and mused about how good it felt to be around thousands of people while playing rock songs. The band sang “My Hero” as a tribute to those who had made the concert possible. And in a surprise cameo to celebrate the occasion, the band brought out the comedian Dave Chappelle to sing a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.”Dave Chappelle made a surprise appearance, singing Radiohead’s “Creep.”Kevin Mazur/Getty Images“Welcome back, New York City!” Chappelle yelled as he exited the stage.The show represented the return of some old, familiar comforts that music lovers may not soon take for granted again. There was call and response; people gesturing wildly to no one in particular; fans screaming the lyrics to songs only to realize their voices were drowned out by the music; and an entire floor section jumping up and down as one wave.“I would get vaccinated 10 times over just to see a live show like this with people,” said Rich Casey, 53, of Massachusetts.Having reached the ground floor of the venue and the echoey plaza that leads to the street, Foo Fighters fans seeking one last communal experience for the night sent up a chant, reveling again in one of the band’s most well-known songs, “Best of You.”OhhhhhhOhhhhhh.Ohhhhhh.Ohhhhhh.Then they erupted in one final cheer and walked out into the New York night. More

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      ‘I Needed It’: A Well-Timed Outdoor Theater Opens on Little Island

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      The island’s first performances, by Broadway Inspirational Voices choir, were post-pandemic catharsis for both the singers and the audience.The timing could not have been better.After the pandemic drove New Yorkers outdoors for everything from dining to haircuts, a 687-seat al fresco amphitheater opened for its first ticketed shows over the weekend on Little Island, the new oasis on the Hudson River, offering a new place for those tentatively re-emerging into crowds again to gather for open-air performances.The amphitheater opened with an emotionally rousing performance by Broadway Inspirational Voices, a professional choir run by Michael McElroy that is made up of chorus members who sang in Broadway musicals like “Ain’t Too Proud” and “The Lion King” before their theaters were shut down and they were thrust into unemployment.Some cheered, and some wept at the return of sights and sounds that had been in short supply during the many months of strict limitations: of hundreds of people piled into the curved wooden benches of the sleek new amphitheater, few of them masked, watching the sun set over the Hudson as a choir belted out “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin.”Michael McElroy, leader of Broadway Inspirational Voices choir and an artist in residence at Little Island, who started working on the show in January.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe choir, made up of Broadway musical actors, performing at dusk. The audience cheered and wept at the return of live entertainment.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesAt the show, McElroy urged the audience to reconnect with one another, opening with the line, “After the darkness, there is always the light.”Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“This is the first time that I’ve been here, and I’m overwhelmed,” said Barry Diller, the mega-mogul who paid for Little Island, before entering the amphitheater for Sunday’s performance.Although an outdoor theater was always part of the plan for Little Island, Diller had no idea how useful it would be as the city emerges from a pandemic — offering culture-starved New Yorkers a place for performances as indoor venues slowly begin to come back to life. “It’s the exact right moment,” he said.His family foundation will bankroll the first two decades of the park’s operations, which includes six days a week of arts programming. Without tickets to the amphitheater, visitors can perch themselves atop one of the island’s overlooks to peer down at the performances. Or, if they’re lucky, they can stumble upon one of the artists hired to perform at various spots on the island, like intentionally placed, well-paid buskers.The audience on Sunday. The sun sun set over the Hudson as a choir belted out “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThis weekend’s program was designed as a sort of post-pandemic catharsis for both the singers and the audience, some of whom rose from their seats to sway and clap along with the choir. It was shepherded by McElroy, whose homiletic interludes urged the audience to reconnect with one another, opening with the line, “After the darkness, there is always the light.”The evening of musical theater and gospel music was punctuated with drama and dance — which revolved around the themes of reawakening and reconnection. The actress Phylicia Rashad delivered a monologue about rediscovering the inner child; Daniel J. Watts and Ayodele Casel imitated sounds like thunder and a babbling brook with their tap shoes; Norm Lewis sang a commanding rendition of “Go the Distance” from “Hercules.”“Out of this space of necessary, required isolation, we come into a place that was created for community,” McElroy said in an interview.The evening featured musical theater, as well as gospel music, drama and dance — with themes of reawakening and reconnection. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe show was McElroy’s last major performance with Broadway Inspirational Voices, a group that he founded in 1994, at a time when his friends were dying of AIDS and he saw a need for spiritual healing. Twenty-seven years later, McElroy has decided to leave the group to focus his time on other creative pursuits, as well as to serve as the musical theater chair at the University of Michigan.But first, McElroy wanted to put together a show that filled a new spiritual void created by the current pandemic.So in January, McElroy, an artist in residence at Little Island, started planning for a live concert scheduled for June, not knowing how quickly the city would be able to get vaccinated and return to see live theater. For the initial rehearsals, which happened on Zoom, members of the choir would gather virtually to go over the music and ask questions, then mute themselves when it was time to sing.In May, the choir moved to a spacious recording studio, where they sang socially distanced and masked. And at the end of the month, they started rehearsing in a park, and then eventually, on the island itself, which floats over the Hudson River near West 13th Street.“It’s the exact right moment” for outdoor theater, Barry Diller, the mega-mogul who paid for Little Island, said.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“We were rehearsing on the faith that we would be able to come together and do this concert,” he said. “It all depended on where the world would be at this time.”While Broadway itself still has a few months to go before it returns in full force, about 60 of the industry’s chorus members were able to get onstage to sing songs from some of the most popular musicals of all time, including “Wicked” and “West Side Story,” as well as some of the newer musicals that were shuttered by the pandemic, including “Hadestown” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.”Watching from the audience, David Plunkett, 52, started out with his mask hanging from his wrist, then alternated between waving it in the air like it was a handkerchief at a church service, and using it to dab at his teary eyes.“I knew I needed it,” he said, “but I didn’t know how much I needed it.” More

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      In the Weeds of ‘In the Heights’

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      The film adaptation of the Tony-winning musical “In the Heights” was released this month, one of the first blockbuster movies to arrive after more than a year of pandemic shutdowns. The original musical was the breakthrough for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote its music and lyrics and went on to gain global fame with “Hamilton.”The film opened to successful box office numbers, but also spawned several critical conversations, particularly about the lack of Afro-Latino representation among the film’s lead actors, and the ways in which it failed to capture the full mosaic of the actual neighborhood of Washington Heights.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Miranda’s evolutionary approach to the musical theater lineage, how the film left certain elements of the musical on the cutting room floor and the critical blowback brought on by the film’s casting choices.Guests:Sandra Garcia, a Styles reporter for The New York TimesIsabelia Herrera, an arts critic fellow for The New York Times’s Culture deskLena Wilson, a film critic who has written for The New York Times, Slate and others More

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      Now Sparks Can Confuse Fans on the Big Screen

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      The musical brothers Ron and Russell Mael are known for catchy songs and perplexing shifts. But they longed to be in films. This summer they’re part of two.Sparks is a band unlike any other. Ron and Russell Mael — the brothers who have made up the eccentric, unclassifiable duo for more than 50 years — have played a pivotal, if unheralded, role in multiple musical movements, from glam rock to new wave to synth-pop.Their witty, hyper-literate songs, along with the singer Russell’s good looks and keyboardist Ron’s deadpan, glowering stage presence, made Sparks icons of a sort in Europe, but never more than a cult band in the United States. With 25 albums to their name, they have often followed up their biggest moments with radical shifts in style that thrilled loyal fans but baffled more casual listeners.In 2017, the music-obsessed director Edgar Wright, fresh off the success of “Baby Driver,” went to see Sparks perform in Los Angeles. For years, he had been telling his friends that someone needed to make a documentary about the group, and as he looked at the audience, which ranged from teenagers to graying 60-somethings, and the weird mix of celebrities in attendance, he insistently repeated the idea to his friend, the filmmaker Phil Lord — who told him to make the movie himself.“I thought, if not me, then who would do it?” Wright said in a recent video conversation.Four years later, “The Sparks Brothers” is reaching theaters, an exhaustive, proudly overstuffed two-hour-20-minute celebration of a group described in the film as “successful, underrated, hugely influential and overlooked at the same time.” In addition to interviews with the enigmatic Maels, Wright conducted 80 interviews, talking with Sparks fans like Beck, Flea, members of Duran Duran, Mike Myers and Neil Gaiman, as well as collaborators and associates.Edgar Wright filming the Maels in Japan. If there’s one takeaway from the band’s story, the director said, “it’s about the persistence of vision.”Richie Starzec/Focus FeaturesOne theme in the documentary is the Maels’ lifelong interest in film, and their multiple near-misses in trying to bring their music to the big screen, including a proposed collaboration with the French comedian Jacques Tati and a project with Tim Burton. So it’s ironic that just weeks after “The Sparks Brothers” arrives, they have another movie release: “Annette,” a musical written by the Maels, directed by Leos Carax, and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The story of a comedian and opera singer who give birth to a daughter with a “unique gift,” it will open the Cannes Film Festival in July.“Even before we had a band, the merging of music and movies just seemed so perfect,” Ron, 75, said, adding, “To be sitting on a movie set in Brussels and watching Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing something you wrote — it’s surreal, way beyond what we expected.” (Carax was unavailable for comment.)Wright presented his idea to the Maels that night he saw them onstage, but they expressed some trepidation, for the same reasons they had turned down previous offers for a documentary.“We always say that we don’t like looking back because we think it kind of paralyzes you,” said Russell, 72, encapsulating the constant creative forward motion that has defined the band’s oddly incomparable history. “The proposition of doing a documentary is kind of the opposite of that, and in our minds we thought, is it like an obituary in some sense?”During a video call, Russell added that the endurance of the Maels’ partnership also seemed potentially problematic. “Sparks’ story isn’t the standard fare of a lot of music documentaries,” he said. “There’s no drug casualties, we don’t have that conflict of other bands with brothers in the band — so are there enough dramatic elements to make it interesting?”To Wright, on the contrary, their perseverance was exactly the point. “That’s the inspiring part,” he said. “Every other band story is about people squandering their talent, and at a certain point you lose sympathy. The fact that Sparks have lasted so long is partly because they’re always close to success but never mainstream. They’ve managed to exist in this sweet spot where they can keep going, but they never have to sell out.”To the surprise of many, the Maels were born not in Britain, but in Southern California, and were even star athletes in high school. They started playing in groups while attending the University of California, Los Angeles, inspired by the spiky spirit of the Who and the Kinks and by French New Wave cinema. Their band, Halfnelson, was championed by Todd Rundgren, but their 1971 debut album flopped. (Closing a circle, Sparks and Rundgren released the new song “Your Fandango” earlier this year.) They moved to England in 1973, after taking on the name Sparks.Russell and Ron Mael in the documentary. They got their start in the ’70s and continue to make music.via Focus FeaturesThat was the start of a crazy roller coaster career (including an appearance in the 1977 disaster movie flop “Rollercoaster”). The dramatic “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” reached No. 2 on the British charts in 1974. After hooking up with pioneering disco producer Giorgio Moroder, “The Number One Song in Heaven” (1979) was not only a huge club record, but also created a blueprint for dance-based electro-pop of acts like the Human League and New Order.Sparks’ theatrical presentation, from their album covers to their stage production, added to the allure. “What really stuck with me,” Wright said, “is these two performers who were staring down the camera at you, in sharp contrast to a lot of acts who would smile — it was quite unnerving.”Their most notorious signature is Ron’s mustache, alternately compared with that of Adolf Hitler or Charlie Chaplin. In Paul McCartney’s 1980 music video for “Coming Up,” in which he dresses as an array of rock stars from Buddy Holly to Frank Zappa, he appears behind a keyboard with Ron’s unmistakable scowl and facial hair.Teaming up with Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s, who was dating Russell at the time, Sparks had a genuine MTV hit in 1983 with “Cool Places.” By the time the lush, pulsing “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” was the top airplay record of 1994 in Germany, they were being accused of copying the artists they had inspired.But most of these hits were followed with rapid musical left turns, as if the group was eager to shed any expectations that might come with popular success. In “The Sparks Brothers,” Ron says, “we think it’s important to do something that’s polarizing.”Sometimes the results are gloriously weird (in “My Baby’s Taking Me Home,” the lyrics consist of the title phrase repeated more than 100 times), and sometimes they’re more confrontational: When a label executive suggested they make an album of music to dance to, they responded with a record titled “Music You Can Dance To” (the label dropped them), and when the idea of a project with the band Franz Ferdinand surfaced, the first song they sent to the other group was called “Collaborations Don’t Work.” (The resulting 2015 album, “FFS,” was a major critical success.)Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesBoth Maels, though, deny that there’s anything willfully destructive in their musical choices. “Within pop music, within three-minute songs, the exciting thing is to see how you can reshape the formula and still come up with something provocative that hasn’t been done,” Russell said. “You’re always searching for that new thing you can impose on the givens of pop music — that’s when the change becomes something exciting, and not just because we want to say we’re chameleons all the time.”The portrait that emerges in “The Sparks Brothers” is of musicians fully dedicated to their work — even in the years when Sparks didn’t have a record deal, the Maels continued to write and record with almost monastic discipline. “I don’t think it’s especially praiseworthy that even in those periods when things around us were kind of dire, we were working on the music,” Ron said. “There isn’t an alternative; that kind of work ethic is all that there is. At this point, we have an excuse and we could say we’re too old, but that’s a part of our DNA.”Wright said this example of artistic commitment beyond the pursuit of commercial success is the true intention of the film. “I hope that for people with creative ambitions, the lesson that comes out is to stay true to your beliefs, because really it’s about the persistence of vision,” he said. “Especially in this climate when musicians are having the hardest time they’ve ever had, I hope the documentary shows a way to do it.”Meanwhile, the Mael brothers have not slowed down. Last year, their album “A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip” became their fourth British Top 10 entry, and they plan to tour the United States, Europe and Japan in early 2022, alongside the release of a new album. They have a “very brash” sequel to “Annette” they will be pitching during the Cannes festival, and still hope to make an animated film of their 2010 radio musical, “The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman.”The experience of “The Sparks Brothers” has given the perpetually evolving Sparks a different attitude about revisiting their life’s work.“We’ve always said that we dispose of everything immediately after the moment,” Ron said. “But with this specific representation, we have to admit that perhaps some of those judgments were wrong. This way of presenting our legacy is the one way we want to be remembered.” More

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      'Arab Divas' at the Arab World Institute: Singers Who Took Center Stage

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      A multimedia exhibition in Paris offers a rich flashback to a period between the 1920s and the 1970s when many female performers took center stage.PARIS — The diva sings of love and unmitigated lust. Dressed in a scarlet evening gown with her hair pulled high, she cries out to her beloved, longs for a night of undying passion and yearns for the sun not to rise.The vocalist in the 1969 concert video is Umm Kulthum: the Arab world’s greatest 20th-century performer, possibly the best-known Egyptian woman since Cleopatra and the star of the exhibition “Divas” at the Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris. The show, which runs through Sept. 26, is a richly illustrated flashback to the period between the 1920s and the 1970s. It portrays unveiled and openly voluptuous women performing on stage and screen without fear of censorship or religious condemnation, and feminists, political activists and pioneering impresarios facing down the patriarchy.Costumes worn by the Lebanese singer Sabah in the 1970s, on display at the Arab World Institute.Alice SidoliBesides costumes and jewelry, passports and posters, album covers and high-heeled shoes, visitors get to watch footage of female performers wiggling their hips in mesmerizing moves and posing on the beach in hot pants. The overall picture contrasts sharply with present-day Western perceptions of the Arab world as a place where women are veiled from top to toe and silenced by all-powerful men.“The exhibition knocks down a fair number of clichés and preconceived ideas about this part of the world. Women actually occupied center stage, embodied modernity and were not at all absent from history,” said Élodie Bouffard, the exhibition’s co-curator. “They sang, acted, made people cry, broke hearts and showed off their bodies just as Western actresses did at the time.”“These images are still very present in the minds of younger generations,” she added. “They don’t just represent the past.”The institute’s president, Jack Lang, who was France’s culture minister in the 1980s and early 1990s, recalled in an interview that when he was a boy visiting Cairo, he sneaked into a theater where Umm Kulthum was performing, and was “stunned, absolutely breathtaken.” He later heard another singer, Fayrouz (the exhibition’s other major diva), while touring in Lebanon as a young actor, he said, then gave her a medal as culture minister in 1988.A poster from the 1968 movie “Bint El-Hares” (“The Guard’s Daughter”), which starred Fayrouz, center. The poster is included in the Paris show.Abboudi Bou JawdeThese women were not just exceptional vocalists, Lang noted: Some participated in their country’s struggle for independence from the colonial powers, Britain and France, and joined in a wave of nationalism that swept across the Arab world. “The emergence of these divas coincided more or less with a time of collective emancipation,” Lang explained. “The music sung by them is an extraordinary expression of freedom.”The exhibition opens in pre-World War II Cairo, the artistic and intellectual hub of the Arab world, where concert halls and cabarets proliferated, many of them established by women, the exhibition co-curator Hanna Boghanim said. Women also had a significant role in the film industry, she added, working as “directors, producers, actresses, costume makers, talent scouts.”Many of these women came from very humble backgrounds, including Umm Kulthum, who is introduced in a velvet-curtained enclosure in the show. Born in a village in the Nile Delta, she first performed disguised as a boy, singing religious songs that bewitched the crowds. Eventually, she came into her own, as a woman and as a voice, and became famous for her improvisational style. Her songs sometimes went on for more than an hour.Her story is told through photographs, album and magazine covers, videos, and bright-colored costumes created for the 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum,” directed by the Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.An installation at the Arab World Institute featuring stills and video from Shirin Neshat’s 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum.” Alice SidoliThere are no loans from the Umm Kulthum museum in Cairo, the curators said; they were too complicated and expensive to organize. Nor are there loans from Fayrouz, who is still alive, despite requests made via the family and entourage of the reclusive vocalist. Her section contains posters, album and magazine covers, photographs and other paraphernalia, some compiled by a dedicated fan.By contrast, the section on the half-Algerian, half-Lebanese diva Warda is full of her personal possessions: sunglasses, medals, earrings, passports, an oud instrument, a brown leather suitcase and an Agatha Christie crime novel. Born in the Paris suburbs, Warda made her debut as a child in her father’s cabaret in the city’s Latin Quarter and became a successful recording artist before moving to Algeria in 1962, the year the country gained independence from France. There, she married an army officer who stopped her from singing. Her career took off when she moved to Egypt a decade later.The exhibition gets racier as it goes along, culminating with the last wave of 20th-century Arab divas, including the Egyptian-born Dalida, who became a superstar in France. Interspersed among displays of sequined evening gowns, stilettos and powder compacts are video monitors that show a woman singing from a hot tub and rows of others lifting their legs in skimpy outfits worthy of the Folies Bergère.In the decades since, the place of female performers in Arab countries has changed. Islamist movements and migration from rural areas have made parts of society more conservative about women’s dress and public behavior. That has led to assumptions in the West that Arab women are veiled and constrained today, as opposed to the decades when the divas reigned. The Egyptian-born performer Dalida in Giza in 1959. She became a superstar in France.D.R. Orlando ProductionsTo Coline Houssais, the author of “Music of the Arab World: An Anthology of 100 Artists,” these then-versus-now perceptions, which the exhibition risked encouraging, were misguided.“There are two visions of the Arab world,” she said in an interview. “One is: ‘They’re barbarians, they’re Islamists.’ The other is: ‘Everything used to be so good before. It was a golden age.’”“The Arab world’s development is measured using ultra-Western criteria, such as whether women smoke or not, or whether they wear short skirts,” she said. There were “more important factors, to do with equality: the number of women who work, women’s civil rights,” she added.Despite the coronavirus epidemic, the show is a hit with Parisian museumgoers, and visitors to the exhibition appeared to validate Houssais’s assessment. On a recent afternoon, onlookers seemed intrigued by the story of these stars of yesterday, who bucked contemporary stereotypes about Muslim women in France.“It’s really very interesting to find out about the emancipation of women in these societies and to see the contrast with today, even in terms of hairstyles,” said Camille Hurel, 23, a visitor to the show. “These were strong personalities who were known all around the world.”“Nowadays, I have the feeling that there isn’t as much freedom of expression,” she added.Randa Mirza and Waël Kodeih’s installation, “The Last Dance” (2020), featured in the Paris show, brings together the two D.J.s with vintage footage, converted to a hologram.Thierry RambaudHoussais said that, in fact, the Arab world today was mostly populated with people under 30, a generation “glued to social media, completely open to the world, and leading their own private revolutions against their families and their communities.”The notions of family, community and religion were fading, and these societies were in the middle of a major “recomposition,” she noted.“There are still 1,000 places in the Arab world where you can wear a bikini, snort coke and listen to American music,” she added. 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      Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Next Musical Generation

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      The artist from Benin showed African songwriters how to reach the world. Now they’re repaying the favor.Angélique Kidjo, the singer from Benin who has been forging Pan-African and transcontinental hybrids for three decades, didn’t really need another Grammy.In 2020, she received the best world music album award for the fourth time with “Celia,” her tribute to the Afro-Cuban salsa dynamo Celia Cruz. True to form, Grammy voters chose familiar names and snubbed the year’s world-music phenomenon: the Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy’s “African Giant,” an ambitious, thoughtful album that drew hundreds of millions of streams and made him an international sensation. (“African Giant” also included a guest appearance by Kidjo.)In her acceptance speech, Kidjo was gracious, but she pointedly looked ahead. “The new generations of artists coming from Africa gonna take you by storm,” she said, “and the time has come.”Kidjo, 60, follows through on that declaration with her new album, “Mother Nature,” which is full of collaborations with rising African songwriters and producers: Burna Boy, Mr Eazi and Yemi Alade from Nigeria as well as the Zambian rapper and singer Sampa the Great, the Zimbabwean-American songwriter Shungudzo and the singer Zeynab, who was born in Ivory Coast and lives in Benin. Throughout the album, her guests give their all to keep pace with Kidjo’s leather-lunged fervor.“This young generation has the same concern that I’ve had throughout my career — trying to give a very positive image of my continent, Africa,” Kidjo said via video from Paris. “I also wanted to hear from them about climate change and the impact it’s having on their life, and the way that they want to tackle that. With climate change, we in Africa are going to pay the greatest price for it, especially the youth. It’s going to be up to the future generation not to ask questions, but to act. Because the time to ask questions is running out.”Kidjo with the singer Zeynab, who appears on “Mother Nature.”via Angelique KidjoThe songs on “Mother Nature” feature snappy programmed Afrobeats, lilting Congolese soukous, rippling Nigerian juju and a dramatic orchestral chanson. Irresistible beats carry serious messages about preserving the environment, about human rights, about African unity and about the power of music and love.Kidjo recorded “Dignity” — a song that was galvanized when protesters against police brutality in Nigeria were shot — with Alade, 32, a major star in Nigerian pop whom she had worked with previously, in 2019. Alade, like Kidjo, has collaborated with musicians from across Africa and beyond (including with Beyoncé on the “Black Is King” soundtrack).“I grew up listening to her music,” Alade said in an interview from Lagos. “She is one of the few role models that I have. The one thing that definitely drew me to Angélique is her unapologetic Africanness, no matter where she goes. As far as Africa is concerned, she’s definitely our Angélique, our songbird — any time, any day. It’s always heartwarming to see her do what she does and the way she does it, despite the fact that she’s been doing it for so long. I look at her and I’m encouraged to just keep doing what I do.”Like most of Kidjo’s music through the years, the new album is multilingual — primarily English, but also French and West African languages like Fon and Nago — and it fuses new sounds and technologies with Africa’s past. In “One Africa,” Kidjo celebrates the year she was born — 1960 — because it was a turning point in African history, when multiple countries gained independence. (She planned a March 2020 Carnegie Hall concert around the milestone, which was canceled as New York shut down for the pandemic.) She based the music on “Indépendance Cha Cha,” released in 1960 by Joseph Kabasele’s group L’African Jazz.“What this album taught me,” Kidjo said, “is that if we take the time really to speak to one another, we come up with beautiful stuff.”Julien Mignot for The New York TimesFor “Africa, One of a Kind,” Mr Eazi constructed the track around a sample of the Malian singer Salif Keita’s 1995 song “Africa,” but Kidjo raised the ante: She coaxed Keita, now 71, out of retirement to sing it anew. The song’s video features a dance, gogbahoun, from Kidjo’s home village in Benin, Ouidah.“Gogbahoun means the rhythm that breaks glass,” she said. It’s a beat, she explained, that was originally tapped on an empty bottle with a piece of metal: a ring, a spoon, a coin. “And when the bottle is broken, the party is over,” she said.The recording of “Mother Nature” was shaped by the pandemic. “We had time on our hands and nowhere to go,” Kidjo said. Her two previous albums were re-Africanized tributes to music from the Americas: “Celia” and, before that, a transformative remake of the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light.” But Kidjo and her husband and longtime musical partner, the keyboardist and programmer Jean Hébrail, were writing songs of their own in 2019, the year she also released and toured for “Celia.”When lockdowns were imposed in 2020, Kidjo set out to complete the songs with new, far-flung collaborators working remotely. On an album concerned with global warming, there was an upside: “a minimal carbon footprint,” Kidjo noted.She assembled the album’s personnel through connections and serendipity. Kidjo happened to hear Sampa the Great, 27, a rapper and singer who was born in Zambia and built her career in Australia, on an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and contacted her via direct messages on Instagram. They had actually met years earlier in a fan encounter, when Kidjo autographed a T-shirt for Sampa at WOMADelaide, a world-music festival in Australia.Their song together, “Free & Equal,” draws on the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights and the United States’ Declaration of Independence. “We been in the struggle since before I could speak,” Sampa raps, then praises “Angélique/connecting through the generations, power of musique.”“She was that person I saw who looked like me, who was from the continent, who spoke in her own language and made a huge impact outside of the continent,” Sampa said in an interview from Botswana.“She knows how much of a reach African music is having now — the continent is just connected with the world,” she continued. “The beauty of this album is to have legends who are able to give a nod to the young people, to acknowledge that we continue what people like Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo had started. She said, ‘I want you to express yourself. That’s why I’m reaching out to you.’”Kidjo with Burna Boy. She appeared on his album “African Giant,” and he returned the favor on “Mother Nature.”Jean HebrailKidjo didn’t just invite songwriters and rappers to add vocals. She also handed skeletal tracks over to some of the electronics-savvy producers, like Kel-P from Nigeria, who are spreading Afrobeats and other African rhythms worldwide. “I said, you guys have found a way to make this a global rhythm,” Kidjo said. “Anyone in any part of the world can claim Afrobeats and do it their own way, because their own culture fits in perfectly. The jigsaw is just perfect. All the music that comes from Africa, based on our tradition, always has an inclusive way of doing things.”Some of Kidjo’s vocals get a computer-tuned twist in “Do Yourself,” a duet with Burna Boy that calls for self-reliance for Africa. “I asked Burna Boy, I asked his engineers and producers, ‘What did you do with my voice?’” she said. “He sent me a snapshot of the board, and I don’t understand anything about that stuff. It looks like something from out of space!” She laughed. “But it’s OK, I’ll take it. I don’t have to understand it to love it.“Every time I do a collaboration, it is always about keeping people’s freedom,” she added. “I would say, I’m going to send you the song, and you let the song lead you to what you want to do. I said, ‘Just go for it.’ What this album taught me is that if we take the time really to speak to one another, we come up with beautiful stuff.” More