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      in Music

      ‘The Interview’: K-Pop Trained Rosé to Be ‘a Perfect Girl.’ Now She’s Trying to Be Herself.

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      South Korean pop, known as K-pop, is not just a type of music — it’s a culture, where bold style, perfectly choreographed dance moves and ebullient earworms that draw from pop, hip-hop and traditional Korean music attract a huge and particularly devoted global fan base. The genre’s stars, known as idols, are trained, often for years, by entertainment companies that then place the most promising trainees in groups, write and produce their music and obsessively manage their public images. It’s a system that works for the idols who make it big, but it has also drawn criticism for its grueling methods, which some call exploitative.One of the biggest stars to come out of that system is Rosé. Born Roseanne Park, she trained for four years with one of K-pop’s largest agencies, YG Entertainment, eventually breaking through as part of the girl group Blackpink. Now at age 27, she is striking out on her own with her first full-length solo album, “Rosie,” which comes out on Dec. 6 from Atlantic Records. (The album’s first single, “APT.” a collaboration with Bruno Mars, is a true bop and has made history as the first track by a female K-pop artist to break into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.) She is still a member of Blackpink, and the group re-signed with YG in 2023. But after years of singing other people’s songs and performing as Rosé, which she described to me as “a character that I really worked hard on as a trainee,” writing her own songs for this solo album has made her think about where she came from and who she is, separate from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Listen to the Conversation With RoséThe Blackpink star talks about striking out on her own, away from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou’re about to release your first full-length solo album. Can you tell me what you’re feeling? Like I’ve been waiting to release this album for my whole life. I grew up listening to a lot of female artists. I used to relate to them, and they used to really get me through a lot of tough times. And so I would always dream of one day having an album myself. But I never really thought it would be realistic. I remember last year when I first began the whole process of it, I doubted myself a lot.It probably would be surprising to anyone who would look at Rosé, with all your success, with the enormous fan base that you have, to know that you doubted yourself so much. I don’t think I ever learned or trained myself to be vulnerable and open and honest. So that was the part I feared, because it was the opposite of what I was trained to do.You were born in New Zealand to South Korean immigrant parents and then you moved to Australia when you were 8. In 2012, when you were 15, you auditioned for a slot in YG Entertainment’s trainee program, which is basically a boarding school for becoming a K-pop star. It was your dad’s idea, right? Yes. More

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      in Theater

      Francesca D’Uva Works It All Out Onstage

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      With a solo show about grief and life, the comedian and composer brings her experimental musical comedy to an Off Broadway audience.Francesca D’Uva moved across the rehearsal room, singing and dancing, making the space her playground.Her voice jumped from a guttural, emo-metal drone to a high-pitched, almost operatic belt to a soft serenade. She played a surreal cast of characters: a sexy nurse from a Wii game she used to play; British children looking for the nanny of their dreams; Shakira.The show was an emotional pinball machine, seeming to invite laughter and tears. In one scene, she conjured the memory of her kindergarten Nativity play in which she was cast as a cow.“Everybody’s laughing at me, everybody’s mooing at me,” she sang.A familiar face in New York’s alternative comedy scene, Ms. D’Uva, 30, performs regularly at venues around the city and has appeared on television in “Three Busy Debras” and “Fantasmas.” Vulture named her a “Comedian You Should and Will Know” in 2024.Ms. D’Uva’s dramatic instincts find an outlet during the show in a range of characters, including at least one Colombian pop star.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWith the Off Broadway premiere this week of “This Is My Favorite Song,” her solo show at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, she takes her genre-defying act to a new arena.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      How Will Popular Culture Change in Trump’s Second Term?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn the months leading up to the election, Donald J. Trump appeared on several podcasts with young male audiences. Whether or not they tilted the outcome, they helped increase Trump’s visibility and appeal with a notoriously hard-to-reach demographic. And following his victory, Trump culture moved out of these comfort spaces and began seeping out in unexpected places: Trump danced in N.F.L. end zones, there were TikTok videos of people wearing MAGA hats in New York City.In many ways the cultural legacy of the first Trump administration was more visible in backlash and protest. But it’s possible the second time around, the impact will be an affirmative one.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the long tail of cultural response to political change, the de-monopolization of centrist broadcast and cable television and the different directions pop culture might take in Trump’s second term.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      in Movies

      Vic Flick, Guitarist Who Plucked the James Bond Theme, Dies at 87

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      A busy session musician, he also recorded music for the Beatles’ film “A Hard Day’s Night” and contributed to several hit songs.Vic Flick, a British guitarist whose driving riff in the theme for the James Bond movies captured the spy’s suave confidence and tacit danger, died on Nov. 14 in Los Angeles. He was 87.His death, in a nursing facility, was announced on social media by his son, Kevin, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.The Bond films produced signature catchphrases (“shaken, not stirred,” “Bond, James Bond”) that have been endlessly recited and parodied since “Dr. No,” the first in the series, was released in Britain in 1962. But it was the sound of Mr. Flick’s guitar in the opening credits that helped make the spy thrillers instantly recognizable.During the title credits of “Dr. No,” when moviegoers were introduced to or reacquainted with the works of the author Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, Mr. Flick’s thrumming guitar sounded out through a brass-and-string orchestra.“The selection of strings available in the late ’50s and early ’60s was abysmal compared to today,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography, “Vic Flick, Guitarman: From James Bond to The Beatles and Beyond.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      The Singer Whose Work Feels Like Prayer

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      On her new LP, “Daughter of a Temple,” Ganavya is the central vocalist, composer and community builder for 30 artists who constitute a who’s who in jazz and experimental music.Before collaborating with 30 artists of various disciplines for her new album, Ganavya made a practice of kneeling to wash the feet of her guests. They’d often break down at the gesture.“Everyone cried,” she recalled. “It comes back to a grammar of care. In the tradition that I was raised, you can’t actually pay your teacher enough for what they’re giving you. So you do things around the house because you understand that there’s no amount of money that you could ever give that would ever make this make sense.”The 33-year-old vocalist, composer and bandleader was raised in the Hindu tradition of harikatha, a type of storytelling that blends music and poetry. A who’s who in jazz and experimental music — artists including Esperanza Spalding, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins and Vijay Iyer — sat in over the course of a week in Houston to record “Daughter of a Temple,” her 48-minute set of meditative chants and devotional hymns released last week. The LP features one of Wayne Shorter’s last recordings, the track “Elders Wayne and Carolina,” on which he and his wife recite the Buddhist chant “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.”The album is an example of community building as art. Born Ganavya Doraiswamy in Flushing, Queens, and raised in Tamil Nadu, a state in South India, Ganavya came up in a creative family, where, as a child, she studied the harikatha along the Varkari pilgrimage route. She and her family would walk and sing poems called abhangs — nonstop devotional poems — for several days on end.“As soon as you hear Ganavya’s voice, you want to hear it some more,” Esperanza Spalding, a collaborator, said.Adama Jalloh for The New York Times“By the time I was already born, the whole family on my father’s side were musicians; I was born into the eye of the storm already,” she said. “It was just what we did, it wasn’t a thing, it wasn’t a statement. We learned how to cook, do the laundry, and music.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      No More Nostalgia Concerts, Please

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      The culture industry keeps getting better at monetizing the past — including the new ritual of musicians playing old albums, in full, onstage.In March, the rock band Weezer announced plans to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their self-titled debut, known to fans as “the Blue Album,” with a special tour: At every stop they would play the album in full, from front to back. I may not have enjoyed Weezer’s new output in decades, but the Blue Album was a fixture of my teenage consciousness, as it was for many my age; I was tempted to buy a ticket and spend an evening among my cohort, transported back to that time. But as I watched the video announcing the tour, I also felt a nagging sense of déjà vu.I assumed I was just reacting to the whole ritual of touring years-old albums, a concept that has become a staple of the industry. It emerged in the mid-2000s, with a curated series of relatively small concerts self-consciously titled “Don’t Look Back” — but within a decade it had become big business. In 2016, Bruce Springsteen toured the world playing the entirety of his 1980 album “The River”; U2 came aboard in 2017 with a massive tour where they played the whole of “The Joshua Tree,” from 1987. Now these exercises are commonplace: Just this year, concertgoers could catch anything from the rap icon Nas playing all of “Illmatic” (30th anniversary) to the country star Clint Black playing “Killin’ Time” (35th) to the pop-punk band Green Day playing both “Dookie” (30th) and “American Idiot” (20th) — albums mostly from an era when people expressed their love for records by actually buying them.Then it came to me: It wasn’t just that Weezer’s Blue Album tour was the sort of thing every band seems to be doing these days. It felt familiar because it was something that Weezer themselves had already done, 14 years earlier, on their “Memories” tour.Back then, I remember finding the conceit intriguingly novel. Today that aura of novelty is itself a distant memory. Notices of new album-anniversary tours pop up incessantly in my inbox and social feeds. Taken together, they do not feel like fun experiments or celebrations of beloved albums. They feel like the onward acceleration of a culture industry that is unsettlingly dedicated — not just in our concert halls but on our screens and everywhere else it can reach us — to monetizing our nostalgic attachment to media from the past.It’s easy to sympathize with everyone involved. For fans who grew attached to these albums when they were originally released, the concerts function as powerful shortcuts back to poignant memories and distant modes of feeling. For new fans, they are a chance to reconnect with cultural moments they might have missed the first time around. As for the bands: Many are scrambling, looking for ways to pay the bills as album and tour revenues plummet for all but the most successful artists. Presumably, booking agents are reminding artists that these nostalgia exercises do help sell tickets, while streaming stats are reminding them exactly which of their albums people listen to most. Speaking to Yahoo News in 2017, Art Alexakis of the band Everclear noted that merchandise sales at their anniversary tours were almost twice as high as at their regular shows. (Nostalgia is a hell of a drug; side effects may include buying two vinyl LPs and a T-shirt.) So musicians become jukeboxes — playing exactly what the data says people want to hear, minimizing the risk of boring anyone with new material or new ideas.‘That means that all the good songs were up at the front.’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      TKTS to Open Booth in Philadelphia, Hoping to Boost Local Theaters

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      The first domestic TKTS outpost outside New York comes at a time of rising concern about ticket prices and theater economics.TKTS, the landmark theater discounter that has been a Times Square mainstay for 51 years, is expanding to Philadelphia at a time when regional theaters are struggling and ticket costs are a persistent cause of consumer concern.The new booth, located inside Independence Visitor Center in the city’s historic district, will be the first in an American city other than New York. London and Tokyo also have TKTS booths, and New York has a second booth at Lincoln Center.The Philadelphia booth will sell tickets to local theater, dance and music productions, as well as for some touring Broadway shows; the tickets will be discounted by 30 percent to 50 percent and can be purchased up to 72 hours before curtain (in New York, the purchase window is shorter). The visitor center, which is near major tourist attractions including the Liberty Bell, drew 1.3 million people last year and already sells tickets to other attractions.The TKTS kiosk will begin selling tickets on Thursday and will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.Angela Val, the president and chief executive of Visit Philadelphia, a tourism marketing agency, said her organization had contacted TDF, the nonprofit that runs the TKTS booths, to propose the expansion. The agency was motivated by a concern that ticket prices were limiting audiences for local arts and culture events. “We wanted to make sure all people had access to theater,” Val said. “Everyone, no matter how much money you have, should have access to arts and culture.”More than 20 presenting organizations will offer tickets through the program, including Ensemble Arts Philly, which has three venues that host music, dance, comedy and theater performances, as well as touring Broadway shows. Also participating are the three top-tier regional theaters in the city — Arden Theater Company, Philadelphia Theater Company and Wilma Theater (the recipient of this year’s Regional Theater Tony Award) — as well as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Philadelphia Ballet and BalletX.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      At the Serpentine, Holly Herndon Taught A.I. to Sing

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      Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst are presenting their first large-scale solo museum show. It sounds gorgeous, even if its visual elements are lacking.Although it’s easy to feel alienated by the opaque processes behind artificial intelligence and fearful that the technology isn’t regulated, the artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst want you to know that A.I. can be beautiful.Their exhibition “The Call,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London through Feb. 2, is the first large-scale solo museum show for the artist duo, who have long been at the forefront of A.I.’s creative possibilities.Herndon — who was born in Tennessee, grew up singing in church choirs and later received a Ph.D. in music composition from Stanford — has made cutting-edge, A.I.-inflected pop music for over a decade. With Dryhurst, a British artist who is also her husband, she has branched out to make tools that help creatives monitor the use of their data online, and recently, into the visual arts.The couple’s work “xhairymutantx,” commissioned for this year’s Whitney Biennial, uses A.I. text prompts to produce an infinite series of Herndon portraits that highlight the playful nature of digital identities.The Serpentine show combines musical and visual elements. With the varied a cappella choral traditions of Britain in mind, Herndon and Dryhurst worked with diverse choirs across the country, from classical to contemporary groups of assorted sizes, to produce training data for an A.I. model. In a wall text, the artists explain that “The Call” consists of more than just the A.I.’s output. They also consider the collection of the data and the training of the machine as works of art.“We’re offering a beautiful way to make A.I.,” the artists’ statement adds. Their utopian take is that A.I. is collectively made: It learns from whatever it is exposed to and can therefore be shaped for good.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More