music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Brings Her Eras Tour to Argentina, Shaking El Monumental

      by

      On May 31, Florencia Romeo slept in a tent outside Argentina’s largest stadium with her girlfriend and her sister. They had heard rumors that Taylor Swift might be coming to Buenos Aires, and they wanted to be first in line.The rumors were right: Ms. Swift was coming, but it would take a while. Her concert was more than five months away.The tent stayed anyway, occupied by a rotating cast of 30 die-hard Swifties who worked together over 163 days to hold their spots in line for a chance to get as close as possible to their idol when she walked onstage Thursday in the first stop of her Eras Tour outside North America.“We have been waiting for this for many years,” said Ms. Romeo, 23, who quit her job as a cashier partly to dedicate herself to waiting in line. “We didn’t expect her to come, and then she did. So it was obvious that we had to do what we had to do.”Florencia Romeo, second from left, with some of her friends who camped out for months before the concert.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesEvent organizers made camping fans disassemble their tents days before the show. Ms. Romeo’s group, which was first in line, put up a tarp for shelter instead.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesMs. Swift’s Eras Tour officially went global on Thursday when the pop megastar began a new phase of shows that would take her to 25 cities across South America, Asia, Australia and Europe over the next 10 months.Since March, the North American stretch of the tour has become an economic marvel and a cultural force, cementing Ms. Swift’s status as one of the most influential, and beloved, people on the continent. Now, she is set to demonstrate that her fame and adoration go well beyond borders.There are few countries better to display the intense passion of her fans than Argentina. While Ms. Swift has become a certified global icon, Argentina has become known for worshiping icons with religious fervor.Consider that Juan and Eva Perón became Argentina’s president and first lady in 1946 but are still lionized in political chants, are displayed in portraits in many Argentine homes and are the inspiration for a namesake political movement that still runs the country. Diego Maradona, the soccer star, became seen as such a deity here that tens of thousands of Argentines belong to the, yes, Church of Maradona, a legally recognized religion in its 25th year. And after Lionel Messi and the national soccer team won the World Cup last year, the crush of four million adoring fans during the victory parade forced the players to abandon their buses and fly over in a helicopter instead.“She’s like the female Messi,” said Ms. Romeo, offering Ms. Swift about the highest praise an Argentine could nowadays. Some fans in Buenos Aires this week wore jerseys of the national soccer team with “SWIFT” on the back, while others passed out a sort of prayer card with Ms. Swift’s head superimposed over Jesus Christ’s.Maria Claude Arzapalo and her friends holding cards showing Taylor Swift depicted as Jesus.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesMariale and Paula Nuñez, sisters from Peru, with the friendship bracelets that have become a badge of Swiftie fandom.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesSo it was no surprise that Ms. Swift’s arrival in Argentina became a national event. It received intense news coverage; Buenos Aires named her an official guest of honor; and she became a figure in next week’s presidential election after some of her fans organized against the far-right candidate, Javier Milei. Meteorologists even described forecasts for sun or rain this weekend as “dry Swifties” or “wet Swifties.” (Friday called for “wet Swifties,” so organizers rescheduled that show for Sunday.)“Everyone in the country knows her, and everyone knows about this show,” Renata Schyfys, 15, said at the show on Thursday, wearing at least six inches of friendship bracelets, which have become a badge of Swiftie fandom.In a country of 46 million people, Ms. Swift sold roughly 200,000 tickets across three sold-out shows, and yet the waiting list still had more than 2.8 million people — enough to fill Argentina’s biggest soccer arena, El Monumental, another 40 times.That stadium was shaking on Thursday night with near-constant, ear-piercing screams coming from the more than 70,000 fans there who repeatedly chanted, “Olé, olé, olé, olé, Taylor, Taylor.”Even Ms. Swift, who has seen her share of huge crowds, seemed taken aback. “I am looking out to possibly what might be one of the most epic crowds to ever exist,” she told the audience. “This is on another level.”Later, she removed her earpieces and motioned that she was struggling to hear over the roar of the crowd. She paused for a full two minutes, soaking in her fans’ adoration.“I don’t know how to thank you enough for the way you’re treating me tonight,” she said. “I love you so, so much, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to come see you.”Jack Nicas/The New York TimesThe show on Thursday was Ms. Swift’s first major concert in South America, the first of nine this month in Argentina and Brazil. After waiting for so long, many Swifties on Thursday said they had made a sort of pilgrimage, many from across the continent.Nahuel Ochoa, a medical student wearing a homemade bedazzled jumpsuit and a glittery jacket, had taken a bus with 50 other fans from the city of San Luis, 12 hours away. Unable to get a room in Buenos Aires, where hotels were nearly sold out, he was planning to take the bus back after the show — and then return on Saturday to see Ms. Swift again.“We have loved Taylor since we were 10 years old — we have been waiting 13 years,” Mr. Ochoa, 23, said, sitting alongside his childhood friend Andrea Garro. “Her songs reflect the majority of what we go through. It’s a form of expressing ourselves in a way that we can’t.”Ms. Garro, 23, a law student, added that Ms. Swift’s music helped her get past a deep depression. “We feel seen,” she said.But there was no show of devotion greater than the more than 100 fans who camped out in shifts outside the stadium for months. After Ms. Romeo and her friends staked out their spot and attracted local news attention, other tents followed.Fans lined up on the street the morning of the show.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesIn a country of 46 million people, Ms. Swift sold roughly 200,000 tickets across three sold-out shows.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesThe group of mostly young women set up shifts using a spreadsheet, with ideally at least two people present at the tent at all times. The 30 members of Ms. Romeo’s tent had to spend a minimum of 40 hours there a month, with each member spending about 10 to 12 nights at the tent on average. After spending the first few days sleeping with just blankets, they added a mattress.“She has the best relationship with her fans and is the one that can achieve this sort of mania,” said Lucas Forte, 24, a member of another tent who had slept outside the stadium for five nights since September. “No one camped out for the Weeknd, for example.”Ms. Swift herself was impressed with the effort. “I heard you guys were camping out to get good spots?” she asked the crowd on Thursday. “I actually didn’t believe it until I saw a video.”The fans camping out were not holding a place to get tickets to the show. Those were all sold online. Rather, the tents were set up so they could be first in line when the doors to the show opened and the fans could sprint to the guardrails along the stage for a closer view.Event organizers helped make sure the fans who had camped out were first in line — yet many still ended up behind rows of people whose pricier tickets had allowed them to enter even earlier.But some campers eventually reached the barricade along the stage.“I smashed my knee trying to get there,” said Atenas Astuni, 23, a member of the first-in-line tent, her voice hoarse the Friday morning after the show. “But if I had to smash my knee again to repeat exactly what happened yesterday, I would do it without hesitation.”The waiting list for people who could not get tickets stretched to more than 2.8 million.Sarah Pabst for The New York Times More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘My Name is Barbra,’ by Barbra Streisand

      by

      MY NAME IS BARBRA, by Barbra StreisandHello, enormous.Of course Barbra Streisand’s memoir, 10 years in the making if you don’t count the chapter she scribbled in longhand in the 1990s and then lost, was going to approach “Power Broker” proportions.For one thing, she is — fits of insecurity notwithstanding — a bona fide power broker: tearing down barriers to and between Broadway, Hollywood, the recording industry and Washington, D.C., like Robert Moses on a demolition bender.For another, as Streisand writes in “My Name Is Barbra,” a 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her, with lingering high fives for the many supporters, she does tend to agonize over the editing process.After adding back material to her version of “A Star Is Born” for Netflix in 2018 — “I think I made it better. But did I? I’m never quite sure”— she fantasized about new, fuller cuts of both “Funny Girl,” which made her a movie star on arrival, and “Yentl,” her debut as director. Planning her wedding to the actor James Brolin in 1998, she tried to winnow down a long list of desserts before deciding “We’ll just have them all … why not?”It doesn’t take a psychiatrist — though Streisand, 81, has consulted many, played one in “The Prince of Tides” and even incorporated the therapeutic framework into one concert tour — to figure out why she has taken such a big bite out of life. As recounted before in a flotilla of biographies, none authorized (and at least one tell-all by an early roommate, who was promptly ghosted), she grew up deprived both economically and emotionally in a housing project in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Instead of a doll she carried a hot-water bottle — “I swear it felt more like a real baby than some cold doll” — for which a sympathetic neighbor knitted a pink hat and sweater.Such details may be familiar to fans, but for the most part they ring out more resoundingly in Streisand’s chatty, ellipses-strewn telling. She may possess megawatt fame — “a hollow trophy,” she assures us — but between these covers she’s just Bubbe Barbra at a kitchen table, talking about fabrics and fellows who got fresh and “my first fur coat, sold to me as ‘Zorina,’ a.k.a. ‘Alaskan sable,’ but in reality … skunk.”Her father, an educator from an Orthodox Jewish background, died at 35 after a head injury when Barbara, as they spelled it then, was 15 months old and her brother was 9. (She still has her father’s copy of “Tales From Shakespeare” for children on her bedside table: “Who knows? Maybe he had bought it to read to me.”)Her mother remarried a man named Kind who was anything but, gave birth to another little girl, and had distinct Madame Rose undertones, crooning into a broomstick microphone and so forth. “Where are my presents?” she screamed at a Christmas gathering in 1964, by which time her older daughter had released the Top 40 hit “People” and appeared thrice in Vogue. “I’m the mother! She’s nothing without me!”That the film rights to “Gypsy” have slipped from Streisand’s grasp after a prolonged tease seems one of showbiz’s prosecutable crimes. (She even gobbles egg rolls, Mr. Goldstone!) Another: This book, which is adorned with more boldface names than there were sequins on the Arnold Scaasi pantsuit she wore to the Oscars in 1969, has no index. You kind of want to resurrect Spy magazine to make one, as it did for “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Streisand in 1968 on the set of “Funny Girl” with the film’s director, William Wyler.Columbia/Kobal/ShutterstockLittle Barbara suffered from undiagnosed tinnitus, possibly a bug God planted in her ear urging her to run the hell away from her family’s dysfunction. She vowed to become a performer after seeing Susan Strasberg, the Method guru Lee’s daughter, in “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the Cort Theater, later contriving a meeting with Strasberg Sr., who didn’t intimidate her in the slightest. (“He reminded me of my uncle Irving.”)She also was swooning at the movies near Erasmus Hall High, where she was an honors student; her schoolmate Bobby Fischer, the future chess prodigy, “looked like some sort of deranged pilot from a 1940s movie,” she presciently noted.Streisand collected mentors who introduced her to books and records, and scratched up the money for classes in acting, pantomiming a chocolate chip and reading from Jean Anouilh’s “Medea”: “Why have you made me a girl?” Though she hates to fly, she longed to escape, and would become an expert criss-crosser of centuries and cultures onscreen.But it was her shimmery, almost wholly intuitive singing, first at a gay bar and then at the Bon Soir supper club in Greenwich Village, that would first dazzle the public. She found the spotlight “warm and comforting,” quickly lopped off that second “a” from her first name, and reminds us now that the second “s” in Streisand is soft, telephoning Tim Cook to get the pronunciation corrected on Siri.The author salts “My Name Is Barbra,” the title recycled from her 1965 TV special that itself cribbed the name of a Leonard Bernstein song, with Yiddishisms: tchotchkes (she likes pig ones); gonif, or thief (her ex-boyfriend Jon Peters); fakakta (what her then-agent David Begelman called the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story that was the basis for “Yentl”).Then there are the generous dollops of chutzpah. Besides sassing Strasberg, she somehow managed to resist all the advisers who told her to bob her long nose, ditch the thrift-store clothes and choose more standard numbers than, say, Harold Arlen’s “A Sleepin’ Bee,” with lyrics by Truman Capote.Streisand on the set of “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” which she directed and starred in.David James/Tri-Star/Phoenix via Kobal/ShutterstockNobody put Barbra in a corner. She clashed early with the prickly playwright and director Arthur Laurents, insisting she perform the secretary Miss Marmelstein’s eponymous solo in “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” from a swivel chair.“You’re never going to make it, you know,” he snarled at her, though the audience went wild for the sequence. “Never!” (They’d reunite later, on the massively successful picture “The Way We Were.”)A lot of men seemed to resent her drive. “I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body!” Walter Matthau told her on the set of “Hello, Dolly.” Mike Wallace called her “totally self-absorbed” and made her cry on “60 Minutes.”But many more fell at her feet, including Marlon Brando, who rubbed them. The king of England has sipped Constant Comment from her cup. Pat Conroy, the “Prince of Tides” author, compared her to the goddess Athena. (Athena on Conroy’s dancing: “Boy, he could really fling that tush around!”) Stephen Sondheim rewrote lyrics for her.Tabulating all the boyfriends and admirers — “I thought we were going to have an affair,” the married Mandy Patinkin tearily implored her during “Yentl,” she writes — might require a second index.Though she has a reputation for being controlling (basically the definition of being a director), Streisand here stresses, convincingly if somewhat exhaustively, her spontaneity. Contra Ethel Merman, who famously declared herself Miss Bird’s Eye when presented with new lyrics in rehearsals of “Call Me Madam,” she believes “to freeze something is to kill it.” She wanted to print the words “this is a work in progress” on the back of her 1976 lieder album — Glenn Gould loved it! — an example of her dogged refusal to stay in one lane. “Come to think of it, I should put it on this book, too….”Future editions, then, might excise some of the long block quotes of praise from her peers, like the one purportedly from Tennessee Williams collected by an interviewer whose veracity was questioned by Helen Shaw in The New Yorker. Not to get too Laurents about it, but Streisand maybe could have used a trusted collaborator, a J.R. Moehringer or even a J.J. Hunsecker, to rein in some indulgences, like long lists of boldface friends at later-career concerts.There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.There are just so many scintillating Streisands to contemplate over so many years: singer, actress, director, producer, philanthropist, activist, lover, mother, wife, friend, autobiographer. “I would make a very good critic,” she suggests at one point, and as I struggle to put a button on this, all I can reply is: Barbra, be my guest.MY NAME IS BARBRA | More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Sofia Coppola’s Best Needle Drops

      by

      Hear songs that memorably accompanied scenes in “The Virgin Suicides,” “Lost in Translation,” “Priscilla” and more.Finely chosen songs are the lifeblood in almost all of Sofia Coppola’s films, including “The Virgin Suicides.”Paramount ClassicsDear listeners,Few working filmmakers curate soundtracks with as much flair, style and intentionality as Sofia Coppola: Consider the melancholy dream-pop smeared through “Lost in Translation,” the new-wave tunes that give “Marie Antoinette” a playful modernity, or the eerie, weightless Air score that haunts the sleepy suburbs of “The Virgin Suicides.”Coppola’s latest film, “Priscilla” — based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis & Me” — comes out today, and it features some of her boldest and most unconventional musical choices yet. That’s apparent right from the movie’s opening scene, in which the celestial sounds of Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” fade unexpectedly into the Ramones’ 1980 cover of a Ronettes ballad, “Baby, I Love You.”These aren’t obvious choices when it comes to soundtracking a movie about Elvis, but since Presley’s estate did not grant Coppola permission to use his music in the film, the obvious choices were off the table. No matter. Coppola — along with the music supervisor Randall Poster and the band Phoenix, whose frontman, Thomas Mars, is Coppola’s husband — used those limitations to create something more distinctive and personal than a standard biopic carpeted wall-to-wall with Presley tunes. (Plus, you know, one of those already came out last year.) They have instead crafted a movie that re-centers a woman too often pushed to the side in her own life story, and found the music — some historically accurate, some imaginatively not — that reflects her own increasingly disillusioned perspective.“Priscilla” may be the Coppola movie most explicitly about music, but finely chosen songs are the lifeblood of almost all of her films. Coppola characters often use music as a tool of communication, to sing or suggest things they can’t say aloud. Think of the unforgettable karaoke scene in “Lost in Translation,” or the way the imprisoned Lisbon sisters in “The Virgin Suicides” use their record player to communicate with the forbidden boys of the outside world.Today’s playlist is a collection of some of the greatest needle drops in Sofia Coppola’s filmography. Pour yourself a glass of Suntory, gaze dreamily out a window and press play.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Jesus and Mary Chain: “Just Like Honey”Only I know what Bill Murray whispers to Scarlett Johansson at the end of “Lost in Translation”: “The Jesus and Mary Chain. ‘Psychocandy.’ It’ll change your life! (Don’t expect quite as much from the rest of the discography, though.)” (Listen on YouTube)2. Gang of Four: “Natural’s Not in It”This spiky, 1979 post-punk song that opens Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette” immediately signals that this isn’t going to be an ordinary biopic — it’s going to be one with a deliciously anachronistic soundtrack. There’s a sly irony to the way Coppola uses it here, too, since the politics that Gang of Four espouses on “Entertainment!” aren’t exactly simpatico with the excesses of Versailles. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Ramones: “Baby, I Love You”Ever aware of the importance of plunging the audience directly into a film’s atmosphere, Coppola sets the tone of “Priscilla” by running this swooning 1980 Ramones cover of the Ronettes over the opening credits. (Listen on YouTube)4. Heart: “Magic Man”The seductive, bowl-cutted Trip Fontaine (played by Josh Hartnett) blows into “The Virgin Suicides” to the tune of this period-specific Heart classic, indicating to the Lisbon family that he and his aviator shades are a very particular kind of trouble. (Listen on YouTube)5. Gwen Stefani: “Cool”From the 2010 film “Somewhere” — in my opinion, Coppola’s most underrated, and one of her best — this Gwen Stefani ode to getting along with your ex soundtracks a memorable scene between an absent, movie-star father (Stephen Dorff) and his preteen daughter (Elle Fanning). The girl practices an ice-skating routine while her father watches from the bleachers. That she’s framed in a wide shot, and in long, unbroken takes, emphasizes both the distance between them and the affection of her father’s gaze. “Cool” is a perfect accompaniment for such a bittersweet moment. (Listen on YouTube)6. Air: “Playground Love”The French electronic duo Air composed the gauzy, atmospheric score for Coppola’s 1999 debut, “The Virgin Suicides.” Variations on the lead melody of “Playground Love” wind through the film like a recurring theme, before the haunting song — featuring vocals from Coppola’s future husband, Mars — plays over the closing credits. (Listen on YouTube)7. Bow Wow Wow: “I Want Candy”One of the great montages in the S.C.C.U. (Sofia Coppola Cinematic Universe) is the pastel-hued, shamelessly indulgent shopping spree scene that comes midway through “Marie Antoinette,” to the tune of this early ’80s bop. Let them eat candy! (Listen on YouTube)8. Sleigh Bells: “Crown on the Ground”This blown-out, sky-scraping song from Sleigh Bells’ singular 2010 album “Treats” — an underappreciated founding document of hyperpop — opens Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring” with a time-stamped jolt. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Cure: “Plainsong”If you’re going to use the Cure’s achingly gorgeous “Plainsong” in a movie, the scene had better be epic. Coppola understood this, and made it the sumptuous soundtrack to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI’s coronation. (Listen on YouTube)10. My Bloody Valentine: “Sometimes”Kevin Shields, the famously slow-working singer and guitarist of the shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, wrote four original songs for the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack — some of the first music he’d released since his group’s landmark 1991 album, “Loveless.” But it’s My Bloody Valentine’s dream-pop classic “Sometimes” that underscores one of the movie’s most beloved scenes, as Johansson gazes out of a taxi window in the middle of the night, the passing neon of Tokyo rendered a romantic blur. (Listen on YouTube)11. Tommy James & the Shondells: “Crimson and Clover”In “Priscilla,” Elvis and Priscilla share their first kiss in the late ’50s to the tune of this woozy classic — which, in reality, came out in 1968. I like the way the critic Stephanie Zacharek describes this anachronism in her review of the film: “After Elvis bestows his first, gentle kiss on Priscilla’s lips, she enters a fugue state, having shifted to a new plane of existence. At that point, it’s Tommy James & the Shondells’ ‘Crimson and Clover’ that cocoons around her like a whisper, a song from the future, a haunting in advance.” (Listen on YouTube)12. Roxy Music: “More Than This”A spot-on choice — world-weary, full of ennui, still showing off some taste — of what Murray’s “Lost in Translation” character Bob Harris would sing at karaoke. (Listen on YouTube)13. Dolly Parton: “I Will Always Love You”I don’t want to spoil exactly when this song plays in “Priscilla,” but I do want to give you some context that will make the moment hit even harder. Elvis loved Dolly Parton’s 1974 hit and wanted to record it himself, but his manager, Col. Tom Parker, asked for at least half of Parton’s publishing rights. Though it killed her to turn him down — Elvis! — selling off her publishing was a bridge too far. So she said no. Karma took until 1992 to arrive. “Then when Whitney’s version came out,” Parton said, “I made enough money to buy Graceland.” (Listen on YouTube)Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Sofia Coppola’s Best Needle Drops” track listTrack 1: The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Just Like Honey”Track 2: Gang of Four, “Natural’s Not in It”Track 3: The Ramones, “Baby, I Love You”Track 4: Heart, “Magic Man”Track 5: Gwen Stefani, “Cool”Track 6: Air, “Playground Love”Track 7: Bow Wow Wow, “I Want Candy”Track 8: Sleigh Bells, “Crown on the Ground”Track 9: The Cure, “Plainsong”Track 10: My Bloody Valentine, “Sometimes”Track 11: Tommy James & the Shondells, “Crimson and Clover”Track 12: Roxy Music, “More Than This”Track 13: Dolly Parton, “I Will Always Love You”Bonus TracksOn this week’s new music Playlist, we’ve got fresh tracks from Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion, Torres and more. Listen here.Also, there’s a new Beatles song? Sort of? In a Critic’s Notebook from earlier this week, Jon Pareles considered the wistful, uncanny “Now and Then.”And finally, regretfully, in Tuesday’s newsletter I provided the wrong link to Sam Sodomsky’s wonderful Pitchfork interview with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. For real this time: Read it here. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      What the Suburbs Did for Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen

      by

      A new book by the author Jim Cullen explores the uncanny parallels between the careers of these two musicians, and how they were products of their time and place.It was the 25th anniversary concert celebrating the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at Madison Square Garden in 2009 when Bruce Springsteen bellowed to the crowd: “Are you ready for the bridge-and-tunnel summit meeting right here, right now? Because Long Island is about to meet New Jersey on the neutral ground of New York City!”Out came Billy Joel, and the two performed a set together of their greatest hits. Springsteen crooned on Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” while Joel returned the favor on Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” The two had crossed paths occasionally in their hit-making careers, but never in such a high profile way.In retrospect, it was surprising it had taken so long. The author Jim Cullen argues in his new book released in October, “Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century,” that Springsteen and Joel’s careers had more uncanny parallels than most realize, and that their rise was a product of socioeconomic conditions of the era, particularly the growth of the suburbs. In fact, the author argues, it’s likely that Joel and Springsteen could only have become famous at the time they did.Both were born within months of each other. Both are intrinsically identified with their home states — Springsteen with New Jersey, Joel with New York. They both came from the suburbs — Freehold, N.J., for Springsteen, and Hicksville, N.Y., for Joel. Both were signed to Columbia Records and released their first albums the same year. Their careers started off slow — and almost sputtered completely — but broke through around the same time with records that would make them famous — Springsteen’s “Born To Run” (1975) and Joel’s “The Stranger” (1977).Mr. Cullen, a historian who has written several academic books about pop culture, discussed the connection between the two that formed the thesis of his latest book.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What does the rise of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen in the 1970s say about the era they were living in?They lived in what you might call the golden age of the American dream. This was the period when the American dream was most realizable on a mass basis. As products of suburbia, they were sort of in the cockpit of this.One of the things I found interesting when I started to look into their lives was that they were actually products of downward mobility. Their immediate families had suffered reverses in the generation before they were born. And then, of course, they caught the wind of this massive economic and social current in the aftermath of World War II.Mr. Cullen, a historian, has written several academic books about pop culture.Frances F. Denny for The New York TimesWhat were the conditions in the music industry that helped make someone like Joel or Springsteen such a success?The record business had been immensely profitable in the years prior to these guys making it. And so there was just a lot of money floating around to invest in new acts in a way that there really hadn’t been before or after this.Another is that the business was designed at that point to reward the thing that these two guys did really well, which was to perform live. This was an era when touring supported records — rather than the age we live in, which is the other way around.The last thing I would say is that the industry was much more tolerant of failure than it had been before or since. So both of these guys could literally afford to make a couple of records that stiffed before they built up enough of a head of steam to really take off commercially.People might argue that when we talk about the rise of the suburbs, we’re really talking about the rise of a white middle class. I don’t think there’s any question that these guys were beneficiaries of their racial identity. Broadly, their relative affluence gave them a leg up. That’s inarguable.I will say that both of these people had a very strong vision of integration as sort of the aesthetic basis of their work.Are there modern-day equivalents to Joel and Springsteen?One of the ways in which they were also really beneficiaries of their time is that they were products of what I’ll call generally an age of broadcasting. And I mean that not just in terms of television, but especially in terms of radio. There was a kind of shared national audience.I did a book on “All in the Family,” a television show [in the 1970s] that got 50 million viewers a week. The finale of “Game of Thrones,” people got excited because it got 10 million viewers. It’s just a different world. So it’s not easy for anybody to continue to do what Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen did. Not because Springsteen or Joel were sort of Promethean artists, but because they were beneficiaries of a media infrastructure that was very rewarding to them.Having said all that, I do think that there are figures who approach what they did. Beyoncé comes to mind as someone who’s built a very large, broad audience over a long period of time and inspires a level of commitment and engagement that I think is comparable. The obvious other example is Taylor Swift, who in commercial terms, has probably exceeded them. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Laufey’s Old-Time Pop Is Smooth. Its Relationship to Jazz Is Spikier.

      by

      The 24-year-old multi-instrumentalist found fame on TikTok with her nostalgic songs. But her dedication to her followers may be holding her music back.About 20 minutes into her set at Town Hall on Wednesday night — the first of two sold-out shows at the Midtown Manhattan theater — the nostalgic TikTok star Laufey put down her hollow-body electric guitar. With her hands free, she started singing “Dreamer,” the barbershop-pop tune that opens her second album, “Bewitched.” As she moved across the stage, she struck a new pose for each line: bending forward at the waist, as if to share a morsel of gossip; leg straight, hip bent; head turned sideways, as if mid-sigh.The act of posing is a key component in the Laufey equation. So is the big sigh.If you are one of the millions who have fallen for Laufey (pronounced LAY-vay) in the past 12 months, you are probably online enough to consume a good deal of your music through 15-second video clips; young enough to feel powerfully seen by a song about the catastrophe of a crush; and only vaguely aware of the midcentury pop repertoire that she so precisely draws upon.Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, 24, is a cellist and multi-instrumentalist who grew up between Washington and Reykjavik. Half-Chinese and half-Icelandic, she is a third-generation musician, and as a youngster she often tagged along to her violinist mother’s orchestra rehearsals. She studied music business at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and when the pandemic sent students home, she returned to Iceland and began posting videos of herself covering tunes by Billie Eilish and Chet Baker — always in a throwback style swelling with overdubbed vocal harmonies and jazzy acoustic guitar. (Mind that word, jazzy. We’ll come back to it.) Amid the pandemic, this content was a comfort, and a following developed fast.Laufey likes to remind interviewers that she considers herself “old-fashioned.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLaufey’s vibe is somehow both hopelessly nostalgic and ideally suited to our extremely online world, where huge feelings are best delivered in Pop Tart-size bites. Almost everything except her lyrics — which sometimes mention social media, or the disappointments of digital-age dating — would have sounded at home on the American radio waves between 1940 and the mid-1960s, before the Beatles and the Stones started breaking the rules.Before 2020, Laufey hadn’t written much original music, but as a talented, classically trained musician, she discovered a knack for piecing pleasant parts into a satisfying whole. (The jazz musician and YouTuber Adam Neely in September released an erudite explainer of the science of her music, and he had little trouble decoding its DNA.)One of the first original tunes Laufey wrote was “Street by Street,” which she recorded with the help of a music production major living across the hall, the day she left Berklee’s campus for lockdown. That song became popular in Iceland, and then all over the internet. It showed up on the EP that she released the following year, “Typical of Me,” which pulled some yellowy pages out of the old jazz and bossa nova books, but also felt lodged in a wishful dream of Laufey’s own making. With an unfussy drum machine sound and a Corinne Bailey Rae-adjacent grooviness, there was something distinct and precarious about this music. Like most of us in that moment, it wasn’t sure where it stood or what the future held.Since then, you could say that her process has become subsumed into her profile. She now has over three million followers on TikTok, plus another two million on Instagram, and her feed has gradually turned into a kind of direct-to-fan service. Putting a premium on relatability, posting almost daily, Laufey — who writes music primarily with the composing partner Spencer Stewart — says that her followers dictate much of what she writes and covers. When someone asked her to write a song about being a love interest’s second choice, she came up with “Second Best,” a doleful and catchy but hard-to-place tune from “Bewitched,” on which she laments, “You were my everything/I was your second best.”Onstage at Town Hall, Laufey sang in front of a dark-blue drape dotted with little stars and a set of big movie-set spotlights. It looked like a set from “La La Land.” (A follower recently said her music sounded “like if La La Land had a sequel”; she loved this feedback.) Joined by a four-piece band and a string quartet, she alternated between guitar, piano and cello, playing each one with an expert’s touch. She motored expediently through a set that fit 17 songs into almost exactly 75 minutes (not including a short encore).About 70 percent of the audience was in their 20s, but there was also a significant contingent of older listeners who seemed grateful to see that Laufey’s pleasant, everyday-can-be-Christmastime aesthetic had caught on with a younger crowd. We live, after all, in messy and anxious times. Laufey’s amalgam of bossa nova, romantic pop and show tunes is here to reassure us that, yes, some old standards do still apply. (Mid-set she played “I Wish You Love” and quoted “Misty.”)Laufey says that her followers dictate much of what she writes and covers. Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLaufey likes to remind interviewers that she considers herself “old-fashioned,” a term that, on her lips, sounds like it’s splitting the difference between quirky and virtuous. She talks often about her love for Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, and their influence is obvious. But the swooning syrup of her voice has a lot more to do with, say, Patti Page, the grande dame contralto of the 1950s, known for “Tennessee Waltz” and “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?”None of this is necessarily a problem. But it can be off-putting to hear Laufey (and her now formidable P.R. apparatus) proclaim herself an ambassador of jazz, a genre that she says has been “gate-kept” by an older crowd. “Jazz music was created in the first place as kind of like a deviation from rules, and something that was meant to be free and for everyone,” she told the podcast host Zach Sang recently. “So the fact that it’s become something that feels like it isn’t for everyone is kind of sad, actually. And I think is the death of the genre.”Equal access, openness, nonjudgmentalism. All important. And yes, it’s possible that her music will bring some listeners to the very much alive and wide-open creative landscape that is jazz. But Laufey — who does not improvise on her instrument, play music with even an ounce of swing rhythm or engage with the chancy collaborative spirit that is the real joy of jazz — is not the music’s ambassador. She is, in fact, making a kind of antiquated radio pop and calling it jazz — precisely the kind of thing that holds the music back, and leaves casual listeners confused about how jazz could possibly still be relevant.Meanwhile, there is a bumper crop of young, alchemical jazz singers who are smartly engaging with the past, reinventing it in the present, and trying to figure out how its values might translate in our increasingly isolated, digital future. Samara Joy, who won the Grammy for best new artist this year, knows what it means to celebrate the classics while pushing ahead. Esperanza Spalding has been doing it with peerless creativity for over a decade, and she too has caught on with young people by the millions. Melanie Charles’s live show is bold and joyous and well-crafted, but anything but careful or predictable.The biggest tell at Town Hall was how Laufey played her own tunes: more or less exactly as they appeared on record. It seemed not unrelated to her process on social media: When your followers are dictating what you make next, then you’re trapped in a loop of familiarity. What’s known of you is also what’s expected, and that becomes what you make. To take her music to another level, Laufey may want to take a cue from Mitski — a musician she has covered and for whom she’s expressed admiration — and log off for a while. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Second Woman Accuses Steven Tyler of Sexually Assaulting Her in the 1970s

      by

      In a lawsuit, a woman says that the Aerosmith frontman groped and fondled her in a New York phone booth when she was about 17.For the second time in the past year, Steven Tyler has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the 1970s, when his band Aerosmith was rising to fame.In the new lawsuit, which was filed in New York on Thursday, Jeanne Bellino accuses Mr. Tyler of assaulting her twice in one day in approximately 1975, when she was about 17 years old and a model living in Queens. He would have been in his late 20s at the time.While Ms. Bellino was visiting Manhattan for work, the lawsuit says, a friend arranged for them to meet Aerosmith. As Ms. Bellino was walking down the street with Mr. Tyler and his entourage, which included his bandmates, he forced her into a phone booth, where he aggressively kissed, groped and fondled her, according to the lawsuit.“Others stood by outside the phone booth laughing and as passers-by watched and witnessed, nobody in the entourage intervened,” the lawsuit says.Because Ms. Bellino did not have money for transportation home, according to the suit, she was taken to the Warwick Hotel with Mr. Tyler and his entourage. The lawsuit says Mr. Tyler pinned her against a wall in a public area and again assaulted her. Shortly after, a doorman at the hotel helped her get into a cab and flee.“He never even asked me what my name was,” Ms. Bellino said of Mr. Tyler in a news conference on Thursday.A representative for Aerosmith did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Bellino’s lawsuit was filed under a New York City law that in March opened a two-year window for people to accuse someone of gender-motivated violence that would otherwise be beyond the statute of limitations.In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in December, Julia Misley accused Mr. Tyler of using his status and power to “groom, manipulate, exploit” and “sexually assault” her over the course of three years, starting in 1973, shortly after her 16th birthday. Ms. Misley said in her lawsuit that she had met Mr. Tyler at an Aerosmith concert in Portland, Ore., and that the musician had persuaded her mother to let him become her legal guardian.Mr. Tyler, who is now 75, wrote about sexual encounters with a teenager in his 2011 autobiography, “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?,” saying that he gained custody of a person who nearly became his “teen bride.” More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘Chicago,’ With Nary a Finger Snap

      by

      Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production of the 1975 musical adds a touch of burlesque and a dash of Bertolt Brecht.The seedy, culturally vibrant and rapidly modernizing Berlin of the 1920s was nicknamed “Chicago on the Spree.” That moniker sprang to mind recently during the premiere of a masterful and muscular new production of “Chicago,” directed by Barrie Kosky at the Komische Oper Berlin.“Chicago,” a “story of greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery,” to quote the prologue, is the longest-running show currently on Broadway, but it got a very mixed reception when it opened there in 1975. Many of those early audience members were uncomfortable with Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse and John Kander’s use of musical showstoppers in the service of an amoral satire, and the show’s jerky and pastiche-like narrative technique.For his production, Kosky has gone back to the original concept of the show as a musical vaudeville with a heavy dose of bile and a dash of Brechtian alienation, while also embracing burlesque elements. Michael Levine’s dazzling set is outfitted with nearly 7000 light bulbs, which intelligently frame the actors, and the action, in frequently changing configurations that suggest a nightclub, a prison cell and a circus ring.Many of the costumes in Kosky’s production give a nod to the musical’s roots in burlesque and vaudeville.Barbara BraunThere are definite echoes of Kosky’s darkly glittering take on “The Threepenny Opera” from 2021. But this “Chicago” is not another radical rethinking of a canonical work, nor is Kosky clearing the cobwebs from an aged classic, as he did previously with “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Candide.” This “Chicago” is simply a damn good show, with an attention to choreography and musical verve rarely found outside Broadway or the West End. The production offered further proof, if any was needed, that Kosky has made the Komische Oper — which has always embraced various forms of music theater — the best place for classic American musicals on the continent.The show, performed in a limber German translation by Helmut Baumann and Erika Gesell, is impeccably cast. Katharine Mehrling, an acclaimed chanteuse and regular Kosky collaborator, brings the right mix of naïveté and tenacity to the role of Roxie Hart, the washed-up chorus girl whose trial for murdering her lover catapults her to stardom. As her jail mate and rival vaudevillian Velma Kelly, Ruth Brauer-Kvam gives a sexy, assured performance. She’s also the cast’s truest triple threat, singing, twirling and acting her way through the evening without breaking a sweat.Jörn-Felix Alt brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as Billy Flynn, the shyster lawyer who orchestrates media circuses for his female clients. Andreja Schneider makes a sassy, straight-shooting Mama Morton, the crooked warden of Cook’s County Jail, while Ivan Tursic doesn’t overdo the pathos as Roxy’s chump of a husband, Amos.The music, performed in its original 1975 orchestration, sounds fantastic played by a full orchestra — a luxury you rarely get on Broadway. The conductor Adam Benzwi shapes the music with precision and vitality, and his band gives the changing temperatures and moods the score requires.Jörn-Felix Alt, center, brings a rakish, matinee-idol charm to his performance as the lawyer Billy Flynn.Barbara BraunHandsome and sleek, the staging is as stripped-down as some of Kosky’s other recent productions, but he also knows when to pull out the stops. Mehrling makes her bold entrance in “All That Jazz,” trailed by a dozen dancers hiding behind red ostrich feather fans. Kosky brings back the razzle-dazzle in the final number, “Nowadays,” when Roxy and Velma are outfitted in the sparkliest suits legally permitted onstage. In between, Victoria Behr’s costumes provide plenty of other fresh and smoothly executed ideas, including orange silk robes for the prisoners and surreal touches like masks of oversized heads and cartoon lips.The choreographer Otto Pichler, credited as a co-director, crafts sparkling dance numbers for the soloists and his 12-person troupe with nary a finger snap, twist or slow-motion hip roll in sight. This is a welcome choice, since anything that is overdone — even a style as vivid as Fosse’s — can become fossilized.After the Komische Oper opened its season with a monumental production staged in an airport hangar, “Chicago” is the company’s first show at the Schiller Theater, its temporary home, in the west of Berlin, while lengthy renovations to its historic house continue.Luring audiences to the other side of town this season doesn’t appear to be an issue: Even before opening night, virtually the entire run of “Chicago” had sold out.ChicagoThrough Jan. 27, 2024, at Komische Oper Berlin; komische-oper-berlin.de. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: An Opera About Drones Brings a Pilot’s War Home

      by

      Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday, is headed to the Metropolitan Opera next year.The young mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo has a wide grin, haunted eyes and a mellow, confident voice that flashes with lean anxiety. In tone and presence, she’s driven, intense, wry. Onstage she’s unsentimental — and unsettled.She is, in other words, perfectly cast as a swaggering fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator in “Grounded,” which Washington National Opera premiered on Saturday at the Kennedy Center.“Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next fall, originated as a one-woman play a decade ago, when the ethics of drone warfare were at the center of national attention. Written by George Brant, the play traveled widely, and had an Off Broadway run featuring Anne Hathaway, who at one point was planning to star in a film adaptation.But opera swept in first. The Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, known for intelligently audience-pleasing musicals like “Fun Home” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” took on the project through the Met’s commissioning program.Tesori and Brant expanded the piece, giving the anonymous pilot a name (Jess) and giving voice to other characters, including Jess’s beleaguered husband and the cacophonous “kill chain” of commanders she hears over her headset. Washington National Opera was eventually brought on as a kind of out-of-town tryout for Michael Mayer’s production.This led to some unwelcome news coverage earlier this year, when Washington announced its season — sponsored by the military contractor General Dynamics, a longtime company donor. The headlines wrote themselves: A drone maker was paying for a “killer drone opera.”The production, directed by Michael Mayer, with set design by Mimi Lien, is dominated by LED screens.Scott SuchmanThe company put out a statement insisting that benefactors had no role in the work’s creation. But it was still a little surprising to hear Timothy O’Leary, the general director in Washington, thank General Dynamics, alongside other major givers, from the stage at the Kennedy Center before the performance on Saturday.The opera begins in Iraq, where Jess is doing her best “Top Gun” impression as a hotshot F-16 pilot. (The F-16 was developed by General Dynamics.) The quietly ominous rumble at the start of Tesori’s score gives way to a chorus of fliers whose stentorian march morphs into a neo-Baroque fugue.The Middle East is suggested by rustling rainsticks, part of a big, varied percussion section, and some modal harmonies; Jess’s voice soars as she sings of “the solitude, the freedom, the peace” she finds in the sky. Tesori’s lyrical ease and eclecticism, the fluidity with which she blends, blurs and moves between styles, are impressively on display, guided with a sure hand by the conductor Daniela Candillari.On leave with her squadron in Wyoming — the pretext for some whispers of swaying cowboy hoedown music — Jess falls in love with a rancher, Eric, and gets pregnant. (The brief duet when she returns to let him know, her profane apologies melting into shared happiness, is perhaps the most charmingly natural moment in the piece.)Her pregnancy, and the birth of their daughter, takes her out of her beloved cockpit. When she wants to return to the skies, she is instead assigned to drone duty — appropriately enough in Las Vegas, the capital of American not-quite-reality.However demeaning for a onetime star pilot, the job will let Jess go home at night, and she is promised by her commander that “the threat of death has been removed” — a mantra taken up by Washington National Opera’s excellent chorus with grim fervor. The Trainer (Frederick Ballentine, his tenor frighteningly shining) describes the Reaper drone’s capabilities and exorbitant cost in a worshipful call-and-response, religious-style chant.Tesori smartly conjures the uncertainty with which Jess begins to learn her new task, with an orchestral landscape of eerie, jittery spareness. Missile explosions happen with uncanny, anesthetized sweetness, a soft choral “boom.”The assurances that this will be “war with all the benefits of home” go awry, of course, as Jess’s professional and domestic lives begin to collapse together. On a trip to the mall with her daughter, she grows paranoid that they’re being surveilled by cameras, just as her Reaper spies on its targets. A double, Also Jess (the forbiddingly pure-voiced soprano Teresa Perrotta), emerges for duets of slippery dissonance as the tension ratchets up.Ratchets up, but not enough. The impact of “Grounded” is surprisingly unexplosive. This may be because Tesori is at heart a composer of normality — even (or especially) when abnormal things are happening, like the accelerated-aging disease at the center of “Kimberly Akimbo.”D’Angelo as Jess, the fighter pilot turned drone operator.Scott SuchmanHer 2003 masterpiece, “Caroline, or Change,” was a perfect marriage of her music with a text, by Tony Kushner, that steadily maintained its reserve amid heartbreak. Her previous opera, “Blue” (2019), about police violence, emanated a sad, wounded dignity. Tesori is at her best mining emotion from this dignified reserve — from the everyday.But “Grounded” is more surreal — and eventually psychotic — material, and Tesori and Brant don’t pursue Jess’s dissolving mental state with the relentlessness, economy or extremity of, say, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” While it’s understandable that the Met would want a single-actor play expanded into something more traditionally grand, the bagginess is palpable in the transition from an 80-minute monologue to a two-and-a-half-hour opera.Eric, for one thing, remains a cipher. His arias feel more like the result of post-workshop notes — “flesh out Jess’s husband” — than emotional imperative or importance to the plot. While the tenor Joseph Dennis is affable in the role, his chemistry with D’Angelo is nil. Besides the messianic Trainer, the stylized characters of the drone operation — the Commander; Jess’s teenage partner, the Sensor; and the “kill chain,” amplified over loudspeakers from offstage — are insufficiently vivid.And while Jess’s ambivalence and troubles are clearly depicted, the storytelling, especially in the second act, is too busy to build the necessary claustrophobia, despite D’Angelo’s talent and earnest commitment. “Grounded” should come as a sobering shock, with the laser-guided horror of a Tomahawk, but for all the touches of churning darkness in the music, it’s oddly gentle.In Mayer’s swiftly shifting if not quite elegant staging, much of Mimi Lien’s set is dominated by LED screens. The projections have been designed by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson, who did similar work on the triptych “Proximity,” which premiered earlier this year at Lyric Opera of Chicago.On the screens, in impressive high definition, we see blue skies rushing past, nighttime mountains, a sonogram, the grayish desert landscape observed from above by the Reaper drone’s pitiless eye. And we see the Reaper stretched across the stage, as rivetingly chilly as an empire vessel in “Star Wars.” On our first encounter with it, there’s even a shiver of sinister John Williams in Tesori’s score.Yet it is a little pat to describe “Grounded” — as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, did in an interview in May with The New York Times — as an “antiwar opera.” It is not exactly that, even if it culminates (spoiler alert) in Jess intentionally crashing the $17 million Reaper because she hallucinates that her target’s daughter is her own.The opera implies that old-fashioned fighter piloting is nobler, and better for soldiers’ mental health, than the video-game-style drone deployment that has expanded the battlefield to encompass, potentially, all of us. Darkly, given the state of global affairs lately, the piece seems to say that war is OK; there are just better and worse — more and less authentic — ways of waging it.GroundedThrough Nov. 13 at the Kennedy Center; kennedy-center.org. More