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      J. Cole Apologizes for Kendrick Lamar Diss Track

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      J. Cole also vowed to update the track, “7 Minute Drill,” or remove it from streaming services after it was featured on his new album, “Might Delete Later.”The rapper J. Cole apologized on Sunday for releasing a diss track about Kendrick Lamar, saying he felt “terrible” and vowing to update the song or remove it from streaming services.The apology followed an exchange of verses that began in October, when J. Cole and Drake ranked themselves, with Lamar, as the “big three” in hip-hop in the song “First Person Shooter.” In March, Lamar dismissed that comparison in a guest verse on the song “Like That” by Future and Metro Boomin, rapping that there was no big three, “it’s just big me.”In response, J. Cole on Friday released the diss track “7 Minute Drill” on his surprise new album, “Might Delete Later.” It includes the lines: “I got a phone call, they say that somebody dissing / You want some attention, it come with extensions / He still doing shows but fell off like ‘The Simpsons.’”Two days after the song was released, J. Cole apologized for it while onstage at his Dreamville Festival in Raleigh, N.C., according to videos posted on social media. During his headlining performance, he said that when he saw the response to the song after it came out, it didn’t “sit right with my spirit,” and that he was speaking about it at the concert to end the beef.He also called Lamar one of the “greatest” to ever use a microphone and said he hoped Lamar would forgive him.“The past two days felt terrible,” J. Cole said. “It let me know how good I’ve been sleeping for the past 10 years.”As of early afternoon on Monday, “7 Minute Drill” was still available on major streaming services.J. Cole released “Might Delete Later” on his Dreamville Records label, an imprint of Interscope Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group. Universal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Lamar does not appear to have addressed the track or the apology publicly. Representatives for Lamar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Drake seemed to respond to Lamar’s verse at a concert in Sunrise, Fla., in late March, according to Complex. He told the crowd that people had been asking him how he was feeling and that he had his “head up high,” and felt as if no one could mess with him.Lamar, Drake and J. Cole have worked together in the past and have individually received numerous awards for their music, including multiple Grammy Awards and nominations. In 2018, Lamar received the Pulitzer Prize in music for his album “DAMN.” More

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      Lizzo Says She Is Not Leaving Music Industry After ‘I Quit’ Post

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      Lizzo clarified that she was not quitting music after writing on Instagram last week that she was “starting to feel like the world doesn’t want me in it.”Lizzo, the Grammy Award-winning singer, clarified on Tuesday that she was not quitting the music industry, days after her social media post saying “I QUIT” led some fans to speculate that she was ending her music career.In a video posted on social media, Lizzo said she was not leaving the music business and instead was quitting “giving any negative energy attention.”“What I’m not going to quit is the joy of my life, which is making music, which is connecting to people, cause I know I’m not alone,” she said in the video. “In no way shape or form am I the only person who is experiencing that negative voice that seems to be louder than the positive.”She continued: “If I can just give one person the inspiration or motivation to stand up for themselves, and say they quit letting negative people win, negative comments win, then I’ve done even more than I could’ve hoped for.”Speculation that Lizzo was leaving the industry arose after she posted a message on Instagram on March 30 that ended with the words: “I QUIT.”“I’m getting tired of putting up with being dragged by everyone in my life and on the internet,” she wrote in the initial post. “All I want is to make music and make people happy and help the world be a little better than how I found it. But I’m starting to feel like the world doesn’t want me in it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Shirley Horn

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      The pianist and vocalist was at once magnetically powerful and laid-back, glamorous and understated. A mix of musicians, writers and radio personalities share their favorites.We’ve spent five minutes with icons of the avant-garde, big-band heroes and saxophone titans. This time around, we’re putting the spotlight on one of jazz history’s rarest talents, the pianist and vocalist Shirley Horn, who would have turned 90 next month.Horn was at once magnetically powerful and laid-back, glamorous and understated. A daughter of Washington, D.C.’s Black bourgeoisie, Horn often attired herself in furs and white gloves, but she could outlast even the hardiest barfly as the night wore on. Her claim to fame will always be her way with a ballad — slow, smoothly poetic, not exactly beckoning but fully inviting — but she also had a ferocious knack for swing rhythm. As influenced as her musical language was by the French Romantics, like Ravel and Debussy, the blues was always her mother tongue.Born, raised and stationed throughout her life in the nation’s capital, educated in classical piano at Howard University, Horn developed a reputation in Washington by her mid-20s, but she had little interest in chasing the spotlight. She remained only a rumor in New York until Miles Davis — after hearing her 1960 debut album for the small Stere-O-Craft label — convinced Horn to bring her trio for an extended run opposite him at the Village Vanguard. The club’s owner had never heard of her, but Davis insisted: “If she don’t play, I ain’t gonna play.” Her showing there led to a contract with Mercury Records, and a solid run of recordings followed, including the Quincy Jones-arranged “Shirley Horn With Horns.”But Horn prized the comforts of hearth and community, and she had the benefit of plentiful local scene in Washington, where she had become a linchpin. For most of the 1970s she barely recorded. But she kept working, holding together the same trio of expert D.C. musicians for decades, with the bassist Charles Ables and the drummer Steve Williams. The three developed a joyous dynamic, not so much telepathic as alert from moment to moment, so that Horn’s suave but intensely improvised playing always had a plush bed to land in.Here the fact of her immense slowness — Horn often played at tempos so draggy that, at 30 or 40 seconds in, it felt like the song had barely begun — became an asset: You’ll often hear Ables reroute gamely in response to a rhythmic choice she’s made or a transitional chord she’s adjusted. The famed vocalist Carmen McRae loved the sound of that trio so much, she hired them as her backing group; on McRae’s final album, from 1991, Horn can be heard tossing glittery harmonies on ballads and driving the band on up-tempo tunes. It was around this time that Horn swept back into the spotlight, thanks to a deal with Verve Records, and enjoyed one of the great late-career renaissances in jazz history, in particular with her Grammy-winning 1992 album, the now-canonical “Here’s to Life.”Below, read a selection of appreciative takes on Horn’s distinctive sound from a mix of musicians, writers and radio personalities, some of whom knew Horn personally by way of the Washington scene. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

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      I don’t want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?I guess probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.When I did stumble on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, I called.It’s possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” After one ring, a male voice answered.I said: “This is Brett Martin. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”The man had no idea who I was. More

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      Peter Eotvos, Evocative Modernist Composer and Conductor, Dies at 80

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      A tireless Hungarian advocate of contemporary music, he adapted literary sources both modern and classic, instilling his work with “inimitable character and pathos.”Peter Eotvos, a towering Hungarian composer and conductor who linked modernist traditions in 20th-century European music and whose multifaceted work was singularly evocative, died on Sunday at his home in Budapest. He was 80.His wife, the librettist Maria Eotvosne Mezei, announced his death.Mr. Eotvos (pronounced OAT-voesh) was a tireless advocate of contemporary music and composed in almost every conceivable genre. At the dawn of the 21st century, he found widespread acclaim as an opera composer. His final work in that genre, “Valuska,” premiered at the Hungarian State Opera in December 2023. Based on the novel “The Melancholy of Resistance,” by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, it was his first opera written to a Hungarian libretto. (Others are in a number of languages, including German, French and English.)Like his German opera-composing contemporary Aribert Reimann, who also died this month, Mr. Eotvos was drawn to literary works both modern and classic. He adapted novels and plays by Anton Chekhov, Jean Genet, Gabriel García Márquez, Tony Kushner and Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who was awarded last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.“His music may be rigorous, but his gentle, soft-spoken spirit gives his work its inimitable character and pathos,” the American opera director Yuval Sharon, who directed a 2016 production of Mr. Eotvos’s 1998 opera, “Tri Sestri,” in Vienna, said in a statement. Calling the work, which is based on Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters,” “unquestionably one of the great operas of our time,” Mr. Sharon said that it was only while working with Mr. Eotvos that he “realized how much of his emotional life is invested in the work.”For the otherwise reserved Mr. Eotvos, music was his vehicle to express that inner life. “In everyday life I’m not a dramatic person at all,” he said in a 2020 documentary about him. “Perhaps this veiled dramatic trait can only come to the surface if it has a job to do.”In the interview, he described how the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight into outer space in 1961 — the first for a human and “the first major event of my life” — inspired him to write the piano work “Kosmos” when he was 17. He would revisit the work at various stages in his life, including in the 2017 concert piece “Multiversum.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Aya Nakamura, French-Malian Singer, Is Caught in Olympic Storm

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      In four months, France will host the Paris Olympics, but which France will show up? Torn between tradition and modernity, the country is in the midst of an identity crisis.The possible choice for the opening ceremony of Aya Nakamura, a superstar French-Malian singer whose slang-spiced lyrics stand at some distance from academic French, has ignited a furor tinged with issues of race and linguistic propriety and the politics of immigration. Right-wing critics say Ms. Nakamura’s music does not represent France, and the prospect of her performing has led to a barrage of racist insults online against her. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.The outcry has compounded a fight over an official poster unveiled this month: a pastel rendering of the city’s landmarks thronging with people in a busy style reminiscent of the “Where’s Waldo?” children’s books.Right-wing critics have attacked the image as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history in a sea of sugary, irreproachable blandness most evident in the removal of the cross atop the golden dome of the Invalides, the former military hospital where Napoleon is buried. An opinion essay in the right-wing Journal du Dimanche said “the malaise of a nation in the throes of deconstruction” was in full view.The rapid immersion of the Olympics in France’s culture wars has its roots in a meeting on Feb. 19 at the Élysée Palace between President Emmanuel Macron and Ms. Nakamura, 28. Mr. Macron, doubling as the artistic director of the Olympics, asked if she would perform.The official poster of the Olympic Games in Paris has been attacked by right-wing critics as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history.Thierry Chesnot/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      N.Y. Philharmonic Adds 2 Premieres to a Diet of Classics

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      Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, led new works by Joel Thompson and Tan Dun amid pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.When Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, led the orchestra at the beginning of the year, the program featured repertory hits: a Wagner prelude, a Beethoven piano concerto and a Brahms symphony. Last week he returned with more of the same: a Mendelssohn overture, a Mozart piano concerto and a Beethoven symphony.This felt a little like “let Jaap be Jaap,” with van Zweden — whose short Philharmonic tenure ends in a few months — finally freed of the burden of presenting new works and past rarities, and able to focus wholly on the standards that have been at the center of his conducting career.But on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, he — or at least the administrators who have encouraged more adventure in his choices — offered a reminder that his time in New York had not been entirely without variety. In fact, the concert offered something unusual in the orchestral field: In a mixed program that will be repeated on Saturday and Sunday, the two (two!) premieres on the first half together lasted longer than the Mendelssohn symphony (yes, more Mendelssohn) after intermission.It was too bad that neither of those new pieces made a positive impression and that performing them together worked against both.First came Joel Thompson’s “To See the Sky,” obscurely subtitled “an exegesis for orchestra.” Two years ago, the Philharmonic premiered Thompson’s sumptuously moody song cycle “The Places We Leave.” Now 35, he has largely specialized in vocal music, and the 20-minute “To See the Sky,” heard for the first time on Thursday, is his longest instrumental work; you got the sense of a young composer trying to figure out how to fill such a substantial span.The titles of the piece’s three sections together form a quotation from the musician Cécile McLorin Salvant: “Sometimes/you have to gaze into a well/to see the sky.” From its beginning, with a series of soft rumbles that explode into violent bursts, much of the work alternates sections of loud and bumptious rhythms, like a parody of hip-hop beats, with periods of subdued lyricism. But these repetitive assertive-then-reticent cycles don’t accumulate interest or tension — though there are nice touches, like the sound of a trumpet flecked with harp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Dead Outlaw,’ a Mummy Musical, Is So Strange It Can Only Be True

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      The creators of “The Band’s Visit” reunited to tell the story of an outlaw whose body toured carnivals for decades.When the composer David Yazbek approached his “Band’s Visit” collaborator David Cromer in 2019 about directing “Dead Outlaw,” a high-energy song cycle that he was developing into a musical, Cromer wasn’t sure he was the right fit.“One of the first things he said was ‘I don’t tend to go out just to hear music; I want more than that,’” said Yazbek, who envisioned a show with an onstage band, interstitial narration and a minimal set. “‘And so maybe I’m the wrong person for this.’”“No, no, no,” Yazbek reassured him. “That makes you the right person. We’ve already got the rock-band-sounding-great part nailed down.”Unlike “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town that takes place over a single night, “Dead Outlaw” is a rollicking thrill ride about a bumbling turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw whose body becomes a traveling, decades-long sideshow exhibited across the country.It also happens to be true.“It’s what I’ve been calling documentary musical theater,” Itamar Moses, who wrote the books for “The Band’s Visit” and “Dead Outlaw,” said over dinner in Greenwich Village with Yazbek, Cromer and Erik Della Penna, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Dead Outlaw” with Yazbek.The rockabilly musical, which is scheduled to run through April 14 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, tracks the ineffectual, booze-filled career and subsequent death, in a 1911 shootout, of Elmer McCurdy, whose involuntary second act has inspired books, plays and a BBC documentary.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