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    MTV Video Music Awards: 7 Memorable Moments

    Taylor Swift set a record and Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Katy Perry delivered noteworthy performances as the show struck a balance between past and present.Wednesday night’s MTV Video Music Awards marked the show’s 40th anniversary, and much of the festivities strived for déjà vu by honoring memorable performances and moments from shows past. Montages of “V.M.A. flashbacks” like Michael Jackson heartily kissing Lisa Marie Presley, Madonna writhing through “Like a Virgin,” and Eminem storming the building with a regiment of bleached look-alikes peppered the telecast.This year’s show paid homage to those events too, sometimes explicitly. Eminem, for instance, opened the show performing his latest single, “Houdini,” alongside an army costumed to look like him, with dark beards underneath blond wigs that referenced the old days. The host Megan Thee Stallion donned an outfit that nodded to the silky green top Britney Spears wore in 2001 to perform “I’m a Slave 4 U,” and sported a yellow boa constrictor to boot — though Megan’s genuine discomfort with the creature worked to comedic effect.The V.M.A.s are forever looking to inaugurate new stars to take up the mantle of the classic music-video era icons. This year’s class, including Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Tyla and Rauw Alejandro stood out amid the throwback references. Katy Perry bridged the gap between eras, and Taylor Swift did what she does best at award shows — dance zealously to other artists and collect hardware. Here are the highlights.Shawn Mendes returned to the stage with new music.The last time Shawn Mendes was on the V.M.A. stage, it was 2021 and he was performing “Summer of Love” with Tainy. He’d last released an album, “Wonder,” in 2020 but later postponed a 2022 tour to focus on his mental health.Wednesday Mendes returned to the stage to perform an acoustic and stripped-down new single, “Nobody Knows,” from his upcoming album “Shawn,” expected to release in October. Fans on social media speculated that the song contained a reference to his ex-girlfriend and fellow V.M.A. performer, Camila Cabello. In the song, Mendes sings, “When the bottle is open, anything can happen/flying too close to the sun”; Cabello’s Instagram bio reads, “long, thick black hair turned white from flying too close to the sun.” — SHIVANI GONZALEZWe 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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    Production Company for Katy Perry’s ‘Lifetimes’ Video Under Investigation in Spain

    Local authorities opened an investigation into the production company for filming in a protected area without clearance, according to a news release.The production company behind Katy Perry’s music video for her single “Lifetimes” is under investigation in Spain for filming in a protected area without clearance, the authorities said Tuesday.The government of the Balearic Islands, an archipelago off eastern Spain, said in a news release that its Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and the Natural Environment has opened an investigation into the filming in the Parc Natural de Ses Salines. It is a national park and UNESCO World Heritage nature reserve that stretches across the islands of Ibiza and Formentera.According to several published reports, part of the video was apparently filmed within the dunes on the islet of s’Espalmador, a preserved area that Balearic Islands tourism authorities say is “highly valuable” ecologically because of the plants and animals that live there.“In no case had the production company requested authorization from the Regional Ministry to carry out the filming,” according to the news release, which is in Spanish.The government agency also said that filming was not an environmental crime and is permitted with appropriate authorization. Authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comments on Tuesday evening.“Lifetimes,” which premiered on Thursday and is a single off Perry’s upcoming studio album “143,” features the star singing and dancing on a beach and on a boat, cliff jumping and performing in a crowded nightclub. The video was directed by Stillz and produced by WeOwnTheCity, according to the end credits. Perry teased the video’s release in several posts on her Instagram account in recent days. “Sending love from Ibiza,” Perry wrote on Instagram on Thursday, the day the video premiered, using an orange heart emoji for love. The post features “Lifetimes” lyrics and a series of postcards from locations including Ibiza and Formentera, where the national park is, set against images of what appears to be seaside cliffs. The postcards appear to be outtakes from Perry’s video.WeOwnTheCity did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Katy Perry had yet to comment.According to Formentera Island Council Tourism’s website, the park includes rich, biodiverse land and marine habitats stretching from southern Ibiza to northern Formentera. The park is also a nesting area for more than 200 species of migratory birds and is home to Posidonia, a seagrass endemic to the Mediterranean Sea that plays an important role in maintaining and protecting the water and marine life. The park has been listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO since 1999, the tourism agency said.The islet of S’Espalmador is part of the park and has “one of the best-preserved and most amazing beaches,” with crystal-clear waters and a forest of pine trees and junipers, according to the Balearic Islands tourism authorities.Perry’s “143” album is set to be released in September.Jesus Jiménez More

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    Katy Perry’s ‘World’ of Mixed Signals, and 11 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Bright Eyes, Johnny Blue Skies (a.k.a. Sturgill Simpson), Magdalena Bay and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Katy Perry, ‘Woman’s World’“It’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be living in it,” Katy Perry insists in “Woman’s World,” a song with six writers (among them Lukas Gottwald, a.k.a. Dr. Luke, who was behind her blockbuster album “Teenage Dream” before his extended legal battle with Kesha). “Sexy, confident, so intelligent, she is heaven-sent,” Perry sings. “So soft, so strong.” With echoes of Madonna’s 1990s electro-pop, the praise continues throughout this synthesizer-pumped, positive-vibes affirmation of the obvious. It’s too bad the overblown video clip — including a postapocalyptic sequence dotted with social media influencers — doesn’t live up to the euphoric sound.Nelly Furtado and Bomba Estéreo, ‘Corazón’Bomba Estéreo, from Colombia, supplies the beat, flute, chant and Spanish-language bridge behind a cheerfully assertive Nelly Furtado in “Corazon,” from her album “7,” due in September. Floating a blithe, catchy chorus over the Afro-Colombian rhythm, Furtado summons a perpetual, be-here-now party spirit, insisting, “My heart can’t stop.”Bright Eyes, ‘Bells and Whistles’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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    Ticketmaster Finds Itself in a Royal Mess Over Coronation Concert

    Some British residents said they received misleading emails suggesting they had secured free tickets to the concert for the coronation of King Charles III at Windsor Castle.At five minutes past noon on Tuesday, Ticketmaster sent Joe Holmes and many others in Britain an email: “Congratulations, you have been successful in the ballot” for two tickets to King Charles’s coronation concert.Mr. Holmes, a student in his final year at the University of Essex, saw it immediately while checking his email and rushed to click the link to claim his tickets to the concert, an official coronation event that will take place a day after King Charles III is crowned — only to be met with a message saying that none were available.He was one of dozens of people who believed they had secured entry to the concert before being quickly let down once they tried to collect tickets. Many Twitter users posted screenshots of the same “congratulations” email Mr. Holmes received this week and expressed frustration about the confusing messaging; one user called the email “disgraceful” and said Ticketmaster had a “total shambles of a system.”It was “immediate excitement and then immediate disappointment,” Mr. Holmes said on Friday. He had already sent a screenshot of the email to his sister in celebration and believed his next step would be to book a train to the event.Ticketmaster was tasked with issuing 10,000 free tickets to the concert being held on May 7 through balloting, a process that fans are saying the site has made a mess of. It comes a few months after the company canceled the public sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour because of high demand, which spurred public outrage, a lawsuit from fans and a Senate hearing.Ticketmaster said in an emailed statement on Friday that people who had been selected in earlier rounds of balloting had three weeks to claim their tickets to the coronation concert. On Tuesday, after that time had expired, “unclaimed tickets were released on a first-come, first-served basis to those who had previously applied and were unsuccessful,” the company said. “These inevitably went very quickly.”A tweet from the company’s U.K. page on Tuesday announced the tickets had “sold out.” Replies to the tweet included stories of experiences similar to that of Mr. Holmes.The application to be included in the balloting was open from Feb. 10 through Feb. 28. Tickets were to be allocated “based on the geographical spread of the U.K. population,” according to the British royal family’s website.Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Take That will headline the concert, which is being organized and broadcast by the BBC. It is the first to be held on the grounds of Windsor Castle, the royal family said. Mr. Holmes, who said his mother traveled to London for the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1981, wanted to attend the concert to be present for “a part of history.”The email from Ticketmaster said Mr. Holmes was one of a “randomly selected group of ballot winners” offered tickets in a “supplementary round” that would be on “a first-come, first-served basis.” It urged him to “act quickly.” But farther down, it said he would have until noon on April 27 to claim the tickets, after which “they will be re-allocated.”Even so, Mr. Holmes said he acted within minutes to no avail. It was unclear how many tickets were actually available, or how many people received the same email about them.He searched Twitter and found many others who said they had a similar experience.Janine Barclay, 58, who received the same email on Tuesday, declined a lunch invitation for May 7 because she thought she was headed to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “I was telling everybody about this,” she said on Friday, “and then I’ve got egg on my face.”She received the email while she was out of the house and put off claiming the tickets, thinking she had a couple of days. Ms. Barclay said she was grateful that she lived close enough to Windsor Castle that her instinct was not to book a hotel or travel.“They misled people,” Mr. Holmes said, but he added that he knew to expect disappointment in these situations. “We know how it goes with concerts these days,” he said. “It’s so hard to get tickets, it’s an event itself.” He plans to watch the concert on television at a family barbecue.Beyond bad blood with Swifties, Ticketmaster was criticized in March when fans tried to attend the final round of the Eurovision Song Contest and some complained that glitches left them ticketless. The Cure said last month that Ticketmaster agreed to issue refunds to some fans after they complained of high ticket fees.“It is a fiasco,” said Ms. Barclay, a swim coach and teacher in Pinner, England, who was excited to take her husband to the coronation concert. “For a big company like this,” she said, “you would have thought that they would have handled it better.” More

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    Harry Styles Tries On Synth-Pop, and 13 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Angel Olsen, Koffee, Barrie and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Harry Styles, ‘As It Was’In “As It Was,” Harry Styles latches on to the kind of peppy electro-pop that the Weeknd updated from groups like a-ha. The song is from Styles’s third album, “Harry’s House,” due May 20, and its insistently upbeat production stokes the ambiguity of the lyrics. When he sings, “In this world, it’s just us/You know it’s not the same as it was,” it’s impossible to tell whether he’s pulling away or longing to reunite. JON PARELESBarrie, ‘Jersey’The Brooklyn musician and producer Barrie Lindsay makes music that sounds like the work of an introvert with a kaleidoscopically vivid inner world. Throughout her tuneful, gently melancholy new album “Barbara,” there’s a muttered, endearingly modest quality to her vocal delivery that’s contrasted with her colorful, adventurous production choices. That signature push and pull can be heard on the album’s lush opening song “Jersey,” where, atop an intricately layered track, Lindsay shrugs sweetly, “You didn’t dream so long, I’m just the girl that you got.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAngel Olsen, ‘All the Good Times’Angel Olsen’s forthcoming album “Big Time,” out June 3, was written during an emotionally tumultuous moment in her life: At age 34, she came out as queer to her family, only to lose both of her parents, in quick succession, to illness shortly afterward. Olsen certainly knows how to capture and exorcise melodramatic feelings in her music — see: “Lark,” the bombastic leadoff track from her great 2019 album “All Mirrors” — but the first single from “Big Time” is more of a slow burn, smoldering and occasionally sparking with sudden, cathartic surges. Pivoting from the luscious synth-scapes of “All Mirrors,” “All the Good Times” harkens back to Olsen’s twangy roots, and its melody has a laid-back confidence that occasionally brings Willie Nelson to mind. “I’ll be long gone, thanks for the songs, guess it’s time to wake up from the trip we’ve been on,” Olsen sings, as the instrumentation swells to meet her suddenly impassioned croon. ZOLADZJensen McRae, ‘Take It Easy’“I don’t wanna talk about it any more,” the Los Angeles songwriter Jensen McRae announces as she begins “Take It Easy,” from her debut album, “Are You Happy Now?” But of course she does. The tone is serene, two chords riding a gentle Caribbean lilt, even as she sings about grappling with burdens that seem to be both physical and emotional. She wonders, “Atlas, did your back get sore?,” but she finds a graceful equilibrium. PARELESThomas Rhett featuring Katy Perry, ‘Where We Started’What is country music right now? It’s a far cry from great pickers and singers collaborating in real time, as it was in honky-tonk history. Like the rest of pop, it’s a construction. Thomas Rhett, a country superstar, sings about a romance with a waitress who’s hoping for a musical career, played by Katy Perry, in “Where We Started,” the last song but the title track of his new album. “I’d be playing my guitar singing those covers in an empty room,” she faux-recalls. The beats are programmed drum-machine tones, like trap, with guitars that sound like loops, and the collaboration with Perry may well have been remote. It’s an artificial path toward a real feeling. PARELESIbeyi featuring Jorja Smith, ‘Lavender and Red Roses’Hand drums and echoey, hovering voices give “Lavender and Red Roses” the atmosphere of a ritual procession, as Ibeyi — the French, Afro-Cuban twins Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz — and the English singer Jorja Smith bemoan a self-destructive partner: “I’ve welcomed you with open arms baby/But you still walk towards the dark lately,” they sing, as hope fades. PARELESMichael Leonhart Orchestra featuring Elvis Costello, Joshua Redman and JSWISS, ‘Shut Him Down’The Grammy-winning Michael Leonhart Orchestra converts itself into a crack studio band on “Shut Him Down,” the guest star-fueled opener to its newest album, playing a groove infused with the bubbling patter of Nigerian juju music. Elvis Costello takes center stage, rattling off a few shifty-eyed verses from the point of view of a man fighting a charge. Then the rapper JSWISS drops his own bars, toying with wordplay and internal rhyme, before the tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman carries things to a close. Always an effusive improviser, he threatens to blow the lid off this medium-boiling track, but ultimately plays along with the chill, jammy vibe. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJuanita Euka, ‘Motema’Over the interplay of two crinkly, echo-laden guitars, the Congolese-born vocalist Juanita Euka sings with an easy confidence on “Motema,” which means “heart” in Lingala. The track comes from “Mabanzo,” the debut album from this young heir apparent (her uncle, Franco Luambo Makiadi, was a rumba star in Congo), who grew up in Buenos Aires and has lately become a promising voice on the London music scene. RUSSONELLOKoffee, ‘Where I’m From’The Grammy-winning Jamaican singer Koffee (Mikayla Simpson) widely stretches the reggae idiom on her debut album, “Gifted,” pulling in dembow, Afrobeats and more. In “Where I’m From,” she sing-raps about tough beginnings and current success, with a scrubbing funk guitar that echoes “Shaft,” a heaving bass line, ominous piano interjections and wordless choir harmonies that are at once mournful and lofty. PARELESVince Staples, ‘Rose Street’“I don’t sing no love songs, ain’t never sang no love songs,” Vince Staples proclaims at the top of “Rose Street,” and the title of the upcoming album it’ll appear on is possibly an explanation: “Ramona Park Broke My Heart.” As he raps nimbly atop a bass-heavy, vaguely ghostly beat, though, he gradually lets his guard down and confesses the reasons he’s reluctant to commit to the girl who wants him to stick around. “I promise you, you don’t gotta stress, it’s gon’ be OK,” he assures her before admitting, “OK, I’m lying, living day by day.” ZOLADZPup, ‘Totally Fine’The Toronto band Pup has long made frenetic punk-pop with neat verse-chorus-bridge structures underlying Stefan Babcock’s raucously overwrought and fully self-aware lead vocals. “Totally Fine,” from the band’s fourth album, “The Unraveling of Puptheband,” cranks everything up: feedback, drums, high and low guitars, Babcock’s blurted admission that “I just couldn’t decide/Whether I’m at my worst or I’m totally fine.” And then it cranks up further, with a big, stadium-ready singalong. The video, a fine sendup of tech-bro vanity, is a bonus. PARELESsadie, ‘Nowhere’Anna Schwab, the Brooklyn songwriter and producer who records as sadie, uses the twitchy double time, the computer-warped vocals and the cheap-sounding presets of hyperpop as a digital native. Yet in “Nowhere,” she also conveys something more than games-playing: a sense of how hard it is to cope with the pressures of 21st-century romance. “Think I’ll get it all right/Then it’s over,” she sings with knowing resignation. PARELESFlume featuring Caroline Polachek, ‘Sirens’In her purest soprano, Caroline Polachek sings her most benevolent aspirations, written during a pandemic peak: “If I could I’d raise my arm/And wave a wand to end all harm.” The Australian electronic musician Flume and his co-producer, Danny L. Harle, give her ethereal support at first — tremulous string tones and echoey arpeggios — but then throw up all sorts of sonic obstacles: clattering, thudding, lurching, scraping, distorting, and even bringing back the sirens she wishes she never had to hear again. PARELESGerald Clayton featuring Charles Lloyd, ‘Peace Invocation’The coolly warbling saxophone sound of Charles Lloyd, 84, is unmistakable on “Peace Invocation,” a duet with the pianist Gerald Clayton that appears on the younger musician’s newest album, “Bells on Sand.” The influence of a couple of other legendary saxophonist-composers hangs over this track, too: There’s the open-ended, shadow-casting style of Wayne Shorter, and hints of John Coltrane’s classic “Naima” in the irresolution of Clayton’s bittersweet melody. RUSSONELLO More