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      What Songs Would ‘Saltburn’ Characters Have Spun in 2007?

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      The soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s movie has been a talker. Hear tracks by M.I.A., Girl Talk, Nelly Furtado and others that would have been a good fit.“Saltburn” has catapulted the 2001 song “Murder on the Dancefloor” back to the charts, but there’s a lot more to discuss about the film’s soundtrack.Chiabella James/Amazon StudiosDear listeners,Over the weekend, I finally watched “Saltburn,” the provocative, polarizing and occasionally downright icky coming-of-age thriller that no one can stop talking about right now.The movie, written and directed by the “Promising Young Woman” filmmaker Emerald Fennell and starring the current It Boys Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, charts the fates of two unlikely friends who meet at Oxford and later spend a debauched summer at the titular estate where the (much) wealthier of the two boys lives with his aristocratic family.“Saltburn” plays out like a diabolically dark, millennial take on “Brideshead Revisited.” And the operative word there is millennial, since the 38-year-old Fennell delights in planting innumerable period-specific details — including an evocative soundtrack — that remind viewers that these boys belong to the Class of 2006.The soundtrack has elicited such potent nostalgia that it has catapulted Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 neo-disco hit, “Murder on the Dancefloor,” used in a crucial scene, back into the Top 10 on the British charts. This week, the song cracked the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time.Fennell has confirmed that most of the movie takes place in summer 2007, and ever since, armchair script supervisors on social media have made a sport out of pointing out the film’s most chronologically questionable cultural references. (For example: Some of the characters are watching a DVD of “Superbad,” which was still only out in theaters that summer.)The most egregious music cue is a karaoke scene featuring Flo Rida’s party anthem “Low,” which was released in October 2007 and didn’t become a global smash until early 2008. Eagle-eared listeners have also pointed out that an Arcade Fire song released in mid-2007 plays in a pub scene meant to take place near the beginning of the 2006 school year, and that MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” the song that’s the soundtrack to a languid summer 2007 montage, appeared on an album that didn’t come out until that fall. (The movie’s music supervisor has responded, “It’s as close as possible, really, just to put you back in that space. If it had been a couple of years later, that would have been an absolute no.”)Still, ever since watching the movie, I’ve become obsessed with these quibbles and consumed with one question: What would the characters in “Saltburn” have actually been listening to in summer 2007? Today’s playlist is my attempt to answer that.I am not a professional music supervisor, nor am I member of the king’s nobility — I’m not even British. But I do have credentials that make me exceptionally qualified to create this particular playlist: In the summer of 2007, I was a rising junior in college with a nearly full 160GB iPod.I consulted a number of primary sources, including a playlist on said iPod that I actually created at the end of the year “Saltburn” takes place (titled, with undergraduate melodrama and for reasons I now truly do not recall, “2007 Was a Bad Year”). It features a few artists whose music does appear in “Saltburn” (MGMT, Bloc Party) and quite a few whose songs do not, but whose sounds I think would have potently conjured the era (M.I.A., Hot Chip, that auteur of the aughts sound Timbaland). It is probably not as quintessentially British as the film’s actual soundtrack, but alas, I did not go to uni, I went to “college.”As you can probably already tell, I had way too much fun putting this playlist together. You may call this sound “indie sleaze,” but I just call it my early 20s.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. MGMT: “Time to Pretend”Hilariously, or perhaps just fittingly, the first song on my actual 2007 iPod playlist is a song that was prominently featured in “Saltburn.” Few albums were debated as hotly around my college radio station office that year as MGMT’s glam-pop debut, “Oracular Spectacular.” While it technically wasn’t released until Oct. 2, this song is such a perfect, montage-ready encapsulation of that era’s sound that I will permit Fennell a little poetic license with this one. (Listen on YouTube)2. Spoon: “Don’t You Evah”Another one from my 2007 iPod playlist, from another album I played a lot that summer: Spoon’s effortlessly tuneful sixth album, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.” I can picture the elegantly wasted denizens of Saltburn vibing to this bass line. (Listen on YouTube)3. Johnny Boy: “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve”Any 2007 playlist worth its salt had to have at least one semi-obscure, critically adored indie-pop track downloaded from a music blog. This 2006 should-have-been-smash from the short-lived British duo Johnny Boy checks that box, with flair. (Listen on YouTube)4. M.I.A.: “Boyz”It was also the summer of “Kala,” M.I.A.’s bold, blown-out sophomore album, which I think still stands as her greatest achievement. Though “Kala” was not released until early August, this exuberant single came out in June, setting the season’s tone. (Listen on YouTube)5. Hot Chip: “Boy From School”I actually cannot believe this song was not used in “Saltburn”: The title says it all! Though released in 2006, the British electro-pop group Hot Chip’s moody dance floor anthem would still have been getting plenty of play the following summer, especially in Britain, where it peaked at No. 40 on the singles chart. (Listen on YouTube)6. Justin Timberlake featuring Timbaland: “SexyBack”Another 2006 banger that would have still been ubiquitous the following summer, the Timbaland-produced “SexyBack” was released at the height of Justin Timberlake’s commercial popularity and his poptimist-approved hipster cred. (Listen on YouTube)7. Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone: “Ridin’”This is the song I would have put in place of “Low”: another instantly recognizable, era-defining hip-hop track, but one that would have by then been out for long enough that an out-of-touch bloke could have credibly mangled it at karaoke. (Listen on YouTube)8. Nelly Furtado: “Maneater”It was simply not a party in the summer of 2007 until someone put on “Maneater,” the sublime and slightly hipper alternative to Furtado’s other 2006 single about a lascivious woman. (Listen on YouTube)9. Bloc Party: “Banquet”Of course there was song from the post-punk revivalists Bloc Party’s 2005 debut, “Silent Alarm,” in “Saltburn”; I just would have chose this more propulsive and admittedly on-the-nose selection instead of “This Modern Love.” (Listen on YouTube)10. Girl Talk: “Bounce That”And finally, nothing said “college party in the mid-to-late-aughts” like a cut from Girl Talk’s 2006 hyperactive mash-up opus, “Night Ripper” — or maybe just someone stealing the aux cord and playing the entire album from start to finish. (Listen on YouTube)Take ’em to the chorus,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“2007: The Summer of ‘Saltburn’” track listTrack 1: MGMT, “Time to Pretend”Track 2: Spoon, “Don’t You Evah”Track 3: Johnny Boy, “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve”Track 4: M.I.A., “Boyz”Track 5: Hot Chip, “Boy From School”Track 6: Justin Timberlake featuring Timbaland, “SexyBack”Track 7: Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone, “Ridin’”Track 8: Nelly Furtado, “Maneater”Track 9: Bloc Party, “Banquet”Track 10: Girl Talk, “Bounce That”Bonus TracksAfter I featured the British musician and poet Labi Siffre in Friday’s newsletter, a Times editor sent me a link to Siffre’s exquisitely funky 1975 song “I Got The …” — which is prominently sampled in Eminem’s star-making 1999 single, “My Name Is.” I admit that this kind of blew my mind. It also led me to two fascinating facts I’d like to share with you.First, that Beck and his producers the Dust Brothers were planning to sample “I Got The …” on a single from the 1999 album “Midnite Vultures,” but Eminem beat him to it. (What could have been!) Also, even more impressively, Siffre refused to clear the Eminem sample for the producer Dr. Dre until they removed all lyrics that Siffre had deemed homophobic. “Diss the bigots not their victims,” Siffre said years later in an interview. “I denied sample rights till that lazy writing was removed.” If only every Eminem song had undergone the Labi Siffre test! More

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      Sinead O’Connor Died of Natural Causes, Coroner Says

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      The Irish singer-songwriter, known for her powerful, evocative voice, died at 56 at a residence in London in July.A London coroner’s office said Tuesday that the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor died from natural causes.Ms. O’Connor, 56, was found dead at a residential property in London in July. Shortly afterward, the local coroner announced they would conduct an autopsy of her body. In a brief statement on Tuesday, the coroner said that “Ms. O’Connor died of natural causes.” The coroner said they had “therefore ceased their involvement in her death.” No further details were given about the cause of death.Best known for her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Ms. O’Connor became a global star in the 1990s — not just for her music, but for her political provocations, on- and offstage. Most memorably, Ms. O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II during a 1992 “Saturday Night Live” performance to protest child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.In an appraisal of Ms. O’Connor’s career for The New York Times, the pop critic Jon Caramanica said the singer “was something grander than a simple pop star.”She “was a fervent moralist, an uncompromised voice of social progress and someone who found stardom, and its sandpapered and glossed boundaries, to be a kind of sickness,” Mr. Caramanica wrote. “She was also a singer of ferocious gifts,” he added. More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ Tops Chart Again

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      Swift holds at No. 1 as Christmas favorites vanish from Billboard’s top 10 albums. Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is at No. 2.A week ago, holiday titles dominated Billboard’s album chart, occupying half the top 10. But now that streaming playlists are no longer overindexing on roasting chestnuts, things have gone back to normal. Which means, of course, that Taylor Swift is (still) on top.Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” her latest rerecording, holds at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, the sixth time the album has landed at the top since its release 10 weeks ago. In a slow week for music sales, though, the new “1989” held its perch with the equivalent of a modest 64,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate — a lower take than any No. 1 album had in 2023. (The lowest chart-topping sales number last year was for Morgan Wallen’s 16th time at No. 1 with his hit “One Thing at a Time,” back in October, when it earned 75,000.)Three other Swift titles charted high this week: “Midnights” is No. 5, “Lover” is No. 6 and “Folklore” is No. 10.The rest of the Top 10 is all repeats, with nary a sprig of mistletoe in sight: Wallen’s “One Thing” (No. 2), Drake’s “For All the Dogs” (No. 3), Nicki Minaj’s “Pink Friday 2” (No. 4), SZA’s “SOS” (No. 7), Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” (No. 8) and Zach Bryan’s recent self-titled LP (No. 9). More

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      Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Is Becoming a Musical

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is lined up to write the book, and Lileana Blain-Cruz will direct.“Purple Rain,” Prince’s breakout rise-of-a-rock-star film, is being adapted into a stage musical featuring some of the pop musician’s best-loved songs.Orin Wolf, the producer who previously shepherded the Tony-winning adaptation of “The Band’s Visit” to the stage, and who is currently backing the theatrical adaptation of another music industry movie, “Buena Vista Social Club,” announced on Monday that he is developing the musical, based on the 1984 film.The stage adaptation will feature a book by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner whose family drama, “Appropriate,” is now running on Broadway. The director is Lileana Blain-Cruz, whose revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” (with new material contributed by Jacobs-Jenkins) had a short run on Broadway in 2022.“Purple Rain” is about an ambitious musician, called the Kid, facing strife with his parents, his love interest, and his fellow musicians. The film won an Academy Award for best original song score.Wolf did not announce any other details, including when or where there might be an initial production (most musicals have runs either Off Broadway or outside New York before braving the high costs and intense glare of Broadway). Prince died in 2016; representatives of the rightsholders to his music were quoted in a news release describing themselves as supportive of the production. More

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      How ‘Insomniac’ Became an a Cappella Sensation

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      Few people were aware of the 1994 single “Insomniac” by the rock duo Billy Pilgrim, and it quickly sank into obscurity. But a cappella groups can’t stop singing it. We set out to find an explanation.In high school, I joined Rebel Yell, an a cappella group named after the Billy Idol song. I mostly beatboxed or sang background vocals. But one year, my chorus teacher gave me a lead vocal.It was on a song called “Insomniac,” by a folk rock duo called Billy Pilgrim. Our audiences didn’t know the song before we sang it. None of us did, which made it an odd choice for contemporary a cappella, where most of the songs performed are big hits. I didn’t realize until years later that groups all across the country were singing this song, without knowing anything about the original version.But why?Billy Pilgrim performing in the early 1990s. Two students at Emory University, Kristian Bush and Andrew Hyra, formed Billy Pilgrim in the early 1990s, and their self-titled major record label debut came in 1994. “Insomniac” was released as a single, but never charted. The band, named for the lead character in the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” didn’t collect much acclaim either.The duo stopped playing together in 2000. Bush formed Sugarland with Jennifer Nettles, and his music career took off. Hyra became a carpenter.However, the strangest thing happened with “Insomniac.”It took on a life of its own. For almost three decades, the song has been a staple of a cappella groups all over the country at all levels, whether high school, colleges, professional groups or otherwise.Go on YouTube, and you’ll find countless performances of the song through the years. A sampling: The professional group Straight No Chaser. Ow! at Glenbrook North High School. Section 8 at Ohio University.Amid the roster of popular songs typically selected by a cappella groups, “Insomniac” stands out as an unusual favorite. Alex Kaplan, a 20-year-old junior at Wesleyan University, said he performed the song with his group, the Wesleyan Spirits, “a couple days ago.”“It’s not uncommon for the occasional song to sort of gain a foothold in the a cappella community if it’s got particular qualities that lend themselves well to performance,” Kaplan said. “‘Insomniac’ is a weird one because it’s, with maybe one or two exceptions, just about the most unknown song that I’ve seen multiple a cappella groups do.”It is a melancholy, guitar-driven love song, with lines like, “I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor/I don’t have to have these dreams no more.”The recording begins with a wailing Hammond organ and the middle of the song has a musical interlude, which extends into a jam of sorts. Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls sings background vocals on the Billy Pilgrim version.“I was looking for a girlfriend,” Bush, the song’s writer, said.The path for “Insomniac” becoming ubiquitous in the a cappella world began before the record was even released.Sheet music for “Insomniac.”Billy PilgrimIn the early 1990s, a cappella — singing without instrumental accompaniment, with the sheer power of the human voice — was changing.Groups like Rockapella and The Nylons were ushering in a new mainstream approach, different from the traditional barbershop quartet style of many predominantly white male groups of the time. This newer style of performance meant that every instrument on a given song was accounted for. Drums would be represented by beatboxing, guitar strums and piano chords represented by rhythmic vocal approximations.Deke Sharon, an a cappella-obsessed student at Tufts University, also helped pioneer the shift, particularly on college campuses. As musical director for the Beelzebubs, the Tufts group, he encouraged previously unperformed arrangements of pop songs. After graduating in 1991, Sharon aimed to make a career spreading the gospel of a cappella.“Everybody laughed,” he said. They said, “You can’t make a career out of a cappella,’” but he said he told them: “It’s so wonderful. If people only knew, they would literally fall in love.”Deke Sharon was part of a shift to a new style of a cappella where every instrument was accounted for. He started compiling the best performances from college campuses.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThere wasn’t much recorded a cappella before that, except for occasional exceptions like Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” or the Huey Lewis and the News cover of “It’s Alright.”Sharon formed a nonprofit called the Contemporary A Cappella Society, with the aim of popularizing this new, more modern form of vocalizing through a cappella festivals, awards shows and networking events for enthusiasts.He also had an idea. Back then, college groups had no way of spreading their music beyond campuses. There was no YouTube or Spotify. The web had yet to arrive, and even email was uncommon.Using a meticulously crafted database of groups that he had compiled in his dorm room, Sharon started taking submissions for “Best Of College A Cappella” compilation albums. Groups that made the cut would be on a compact disc that they could sell at shows. They could buy them from for $5 and sell them at shows for $15. Suddenly, a performance from, say, Rutgers University, could be available at Boston College.It was around this time that John Craig Fennell, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, joined the Virginia Gentlemen, an all-male offshoot of the Virginia Glee Club. Working at a summer camp in New Jersey, a co-worker handed him the newly released Billy Pilgrim debut.“You hear those first few squeezebox notes on the Billy Pilgrim track,” Fennell said. “I love it. it was immediately compelling.”An arrangement made by John Craig Fennell for the Virginia Gentlemen at the University of Virginia assigned vocal parts to all singers.John FennellHe saw an opportunity to take advantage of the shift in a cappella and stretch the abilities of the Virginia Gentlemen. He painstakingly transcribed the arrangement by hand — how most arranging was done back then — with voices emulating the sounds of the guitar and organ: “JUM-BUH-DUH, JUM-BUH-DUH.”The arrangement marked one the first times that all 14 members of the Virginia Gentlemen had their own vocal part on a song, he said.They submitted their recording to Sharon, who liked it enough to put it on one of the first “Best Of College A Cappella” albums in the mid-1990s.From there, the record hit campuses and the arrangement began to spread the old-fashioned way: word of mouth.Other groups copied the arrangement by ear. A member of the Wesleyan Spirits who had performed a version in high school brought it to the Spirits. That arrangement made its way to the Vineyard Sound, a group based on Martha’s Vineyard. Similar arrangements were performed at the University of Rochester and Plymouth State.“This song is what made me fall in love with my group,” Michelle Shankar, who was part of the Dartmouth Dodecaphonics from 2008 to 2012, said. “They open almost every show with this piece. It’s high energy, super upbeat, at least the a cappella version of it is. And it just starts with this wall of sound — that really high belt that’s like, ‘Whoaaa!’, and that just became an iconic line.”Many of the singers interviewed about the song could not help but sing a few bars, unprompted.Straight No Chaser during a performance. Its members have been singing “Insomniac” since it was a college group at Indiana University in the 1990s.Ashley White“It’s a perfect storm that is specific to ‘Insomniac,’” Walter Chase, a founding member of Straight No Chaser, said.Chase arranged a version after hearing it off the compilation album for the group in the mid-1990s, when it was still a college group at Indiana University: “When you’re a college student and one of the main purposes you do a cappella for is to sing for girls, to get attention and to be able to croon, the soloists’ material is this very heady love song.”On an annual retreat in New Orleans around 2000, the Wesleyan Spirits performed the song at a bar during the day. The bartender informed the group that it just so happened that Bush, the song’s writer, happened to be performing that same night. The Spirits returned that evening and Bush invited the group onstage to sing his song.“I remember trying to play it, and it was very square,” Bush said, laughing. “You can’t really play guitar to it.”Kristian Bush of Billy Pilgrim wrote the song “Insomniac” and performed it for the first time in 1994 with Andrew Hyra. The song became a staple for a cappella groups, despite it not being a hit itself.Elliot Liss for The New York TimesStill, Bush and Hyra had little awareness of the niche hit they had created. Hyra first realized it about a decade ago when he was sitting at a hotel in Martha’s Vineyard with his family, including his sister, the actress Meg Ryan.The Vineyard Sound were nearby and began to sing “Insomniac.”“I was like, ‘Holy cow!’” Hyra said.Ryan, who still calls herself Billy Pilgrim’s No. 1 fan, said she couldn’t believe her ears.“I’m not a singer, but I can always sing along with that song,” the actress said. “They always seem to write these songs that kind of give poetry to something very universal.”With the help of movies like “Pitch Perfect” and the former NBC show “The Sing-Off,” a cappella has gone more mainstream. Production values are higher, and transcription is easier using software. But the Virginia Gentlemen’s arrangement of “Insomniac” remains a constant.Billy Pilgrim reunited during the pandemic. The band has never made any money off the covers, but the song’s spread has left them elated. At concerts, “Insomniac” is their most requested song, Bush said. They even perform a new version.“Maybe that song should have been a big hit,” Hyra says.Bush finds the whole phenomenon delightful.“The music business is a whole series of ‘You’re already failing,’” he said, adding, “Every once in a while, something shows up and it ties a little balloon to your belt loop and suddenly you’re a little lighter, you know? And I think that’s what this does for me.” More

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      Klee Benally, Navajo Activist and Artist, Dies at 48

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      He helped found a punk-rock band when he was 14. That led to a long career as an advocate for Native American and environmental causes.Klee Benally, a dynamic Navajo activist, artist and punk-rock musician who championed Native American and environmental causes, died on Dec. 30 in Phoenix. He was 48.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his sister, Jeneda Benally. She did not specify the cause.For decades, Mr. Benally, who lived in Flagstaff, Ariz., fought the expansion of the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort on one of the San Francisco Peaks, a mountain range just north of Flagstaff that 13 tribes consider sacred. He also fought the resort’s use of treated wastewater to make snow, a practice that Native Americans and environmental groups said was poisoning the ecosystem. He protested against a pumice mine on those same peaks, and against uranium mining and transport in the area.He campaigned for the rights and care of Indigenous homeless people and against racial profiling. He made films and art about his activism.He was a community organizer and a youth counselor; he taught media literacy and film to Indigenous teenagers; and he marched against the celebration of Thanksgiving. Late last year he published a book, “No Spiritual Surrender,” about his efforts practicing what he called Indigenous anarchy, and he created a board game, “Burn the Fort,” in which Native American warriors fight off colonizers (and learn some history while doing so).He chained himself to an excavator, was charged with trespassing and joined numerous legal complaints.But his first foray into activism was through music, in 1989. He was 14 when he and his siblings, Jeneda and Clayson, formed Blackfire, a high-velocity punk band that mixed traditional Navajo chants and music with protest songs about the oppression of Indigenous people.Mr. Benally embraced the middle-finger-to-the-world punk ethos — he loved the Ramones, whose music he introduced to his mother, a folk singer — and he could really shred a guitar. The Ramones loved Blackfire back: C.J. Ramone produced the band’s first EP, “Spirit in Action” (1994), and Joey Ramone sang on two of the songs on “One Nation Under” (2002), its first full-length album.Critics were admiring, too. In 2007, David Fricke of Rolling Stone touted Blackfire’s fourth album, “[Silence] Is a Weapon,” as “pure ire, CBGB-hardcore-matinee protest with jolts of ancient chorale.”The band played at South by Southwest and other music festivals but declined to play in bars, at least at first. Mr. Benally thought it would be hypocritical, given that alcohol abuse was an issue on reservations. In addition, at the time the Benally siblings were all under 21.“Some people watch too many movies and think John Wayne killed all the Indians or they’re out dancing with wolves,” he told The Albuquerque Journal in 2003, explaining Blackfire’s mission to educate audiences. “But in reality there are over 500 nations throughout the U.S. carrying on their cultures, their own individual ways of life, their own languages and their own ceremonies.”Mr. Benally in 2005. He spent decades protesting the expansion of a ski resort on a mountain range that 13 tribes consider sacred.Jill Torrance/Arizona Daily Sun, via Associated PressKlee Jones Benally was born on Oct. 6, 1975, in Black Mesa, Ariz., on the Navajo reservation near Flagstaff. Music and activism ran in the family. Klee’s father, Jones Benally, is a traditional Diné (as the Navajo call themselves) medicine man; his mother, Berta Benally, is an activist and folk musician of Russian-Polish Jewish heritage who grew up in the folk scene of Greenwich Village. The couple met in Los Angeles, where she was working with Hopi elders.Klee and his siblings were brought up with their father’s Diné traditions, and they grew up performing traditional dances. Their mother introduced them to the folk canon; Blackfire would later set some of Woody Guthrie’s poems to music. The area where they lived was part of a land dispute that forced the relocation of thousands of Navajo people, and attending protests became a family affair.In addition to his sister and his parents, Mr. Benally is survived by his wife, Princess Benally, and his brother.Blackfire went on hiatus after two decades, mostly so the Benally siblings could concentrate more directly on advocacy and activism.Mr. Benally often framed his environmental work in terms of religious freedom. “As Indigenous people in the so-called United States, we don’t have guarantees for our religious freedoms like the rest of you,” he told The Arizona Republic in 2013. “This is a struggle for cultural survival — the struggle to protect sacred spaces.”Mr. Benally was a local hero in Flagstaff, where he founded a number of community organizations and aid groups. He was both angry and pragmatic; he liked to say that everyone was indigenous to somewhere.“He was a powerhouse of anticolonial thought and action — ever ready to protect the land,” Dallas Goldtooth, a Native American activist and actor, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Benally explained his worldview in a 2020 interview with Spirituality Health magazine: “As an artist, there’s no dichotomy between art and life with our traditional teachings as Diné people. There’s no separation; our life is creation. So our creative expression comes in many different ways. What I look at is: What are the issues facing our communities, and what strategies can be most effective? Is it going to be through song? Is it going to be through prayer or action? Or can it be all of them?” More

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      Overlooked No More: Cordell Jackson, Elder Stateswoman of Rock ’n’ Roll

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Cordell Jackson’s long and mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance in a popular beer commercial, in which she showed the guitarist Brian Setzer a few tricks), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: grandma, resplendent in a shiny ball gown and bouffant, peering through her old-lady glasses while ferociously rocking out on a cherry red electric guitar, amp cranked up to 10.Even if we had never seen or heard Jackson before, she seemed to reside in the dusty bric-a-brac of our country’s collective unconscious: one of rock ’n’ roll’s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century.Cordell Miller was born on July 15, 1923, to William and Stella Miller in Pontotoc, Miss., a small city once known as a hide-out for Jesse James’s gang of outlaws in the 19th century. She took an early interest in music-making, learning to play banjo, piano, upright bass and harmonica.By age 12, she was sitting in with her father’s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes: ‘Little girls don’t play guitar,’” she later recalled. “I looked right at ’em and said, ‘I do.’”Jackson moved through a variety of jobs, including interior decorator and D.J. on an all-female radio station, while waiting for her music career to take off.Jackson always claimed that she had been rocking out well before the men who would make rock ‘n’ roll famous. “If what I’m doing now is rock ‘n’ roll or rockabilly or whatever,” she told the newspaper The Tulsa World in 1992, “then I was doing it when Elvis was a 1-year-old. That’s just a fact.”Or, as she told Cornfed magazine: “Whatever song it was, I always creamed it, so to speak. I play fast. I have always gyrated it up.”In 1943, she married William Jackson, moved to Memphis and began trying to scratch her way into the male-dominated music scene. She eventually befriended and recorded demos with the producer Sam Phillips, who would go on to start Sun Records. But she grew impatient with Phillips, who saw her gender as an obstacle, and created Moon Records, becoming one of the first women in America to record and produce their own music (some say the first) and securing her place in history.“Cordell was immune to being told ‘no.’ It was almost like that was her art,” the country singer and songwriter Laura Cantrell said by phone. “A lot of artists are told ‘no’ — that what we want to do is not possible, but Cordell was absolutely determined to be an artist. That was not typical for a woman, especially in the South.”Recording sessions for Moon Records were held in Jackson’s living room, where she engineered, produced and released music by regional artists like Allen Page, Earl Patterson and Johnny Tate. Though Jackson initially hewed mostly to the production end of things, she also released some of her own performances, including 1958’s “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas.”In 1958, Jackson released her own performances of “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas” on her own label, Moon Records.But neither she nor her roster of artists hit the big time, and the 1960s and ’70s saw Jackson moving through a peripatetic series of other kinds of work: at a printing company; as an interior decorator with a real estate agency; as a D.J. on the all-female Memphis station WHER; running a junk shop. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she happened to cross paths with the musician, performance artist and filmmaker Tav Falco, that things really changed for her.The two first met at a Western Sizzlin steakhouse in Memphis, at a benefit for Don Ezell, the longtime gofer at Sun Records. “Every guitar player in Memphis was there,” Falco said in a video interview. That included Jackson, who approached him after hearing his band, the Panther Burns (featuring Alex Chilton), cover one of her originals, “Dateless Night.” The two became fast friends. He invited her to appear on bills with him and his band, and she accepted, despite the fact that, at almost 60, she had yet to play her first professional live gig.This marked the beginning of the startling second act of Jackson’s musical career, as she became — among a certain set — an elder stateswoman of grungy thrash guitar. During a 1988 appearance on the WFMU radio show “The Hound,” Jackson plugged in her guitar and let it rip; the result sounds less like a performance than a wild animal turned loose in the studio. In an interview, Jim Marshall, the show’s host, described Jackson’s playing as “some of the most vicious, nasty rock ’n’ roll guitar I’ve ever heard in my life.”Jackson in 1992 with the country singer Marty Brown, center, and the radio host Charlie Chase.Everett Collection, via ImagoJackson with members of the band the New Duncan Imperials in an undated photo.Ken CozzaShe headlined at colorful, now-vanished rock clubs in New York City, like CBGB, the Lone Star and the Lakeside Lounge, as well as at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, N.J. She mostly played solo, but occasionally local musicians backed her up, including the Brooklyn band the A-Bones. “There were no rehearsals,” Miriam Linna, the band’s drummer, recalled in an interview. “It was just, ‘Let’s go!’”Susan M. Clarke, editor and publisher of Cornfed magazine, added: “I can’t imagine anyone knew what to do with her. I’m surprised they didn’t have her committed.”Offstage, Jackson was down to earth but proper, and deeply religious. She did not curse, and she did not drink “anything but milk or water,” she told Roctober magazine in 1993. Falco recalled her saying that doctors had put her on “an all-meat diet,” and Kenn Goodman — whose Pravda Records released her album “Live in Chicago” in 1997 — said in an interview that whenever Jackson traveled (always in her yellow Cadillac; she disliked planes), it was with “her own steak, her own milk, and giant jugs of tap water from Memphis,” because she didn’t trust any other kind.Nancy Apple, a close friend and acolyte, said that when Jackson went grocery shopping, “she would wear white old-lady gloves — not for fashion; she’d just always say, ‘I don’t want to touch all that money!’” When she got home, Jackson would take any bills she had received as change, wash them in the sink and hang them from clothespins to dry.Eccentricities aside, it was what Jackson did onstage that was truly astonishing. Watching archival footage of her performances is a jolting experience. Speaking from the stage at a 1995 concert in Memphis, Jackson described her music as “anywhere from a barnyard disaster to classical.”There was an unbridled ferocity to Jackson’s playing, almost as though she were fighting with her guitar to give her what she wanted. Her compositions — most of them instrumentals — may not be terribly unusual, but what she did with them, in her urgent, raw and unapologetically abrasive way, was. Jackson didn’t just break guitar strings when she played. She broke picks. Jackson at her home in Memphis in 1992, when her mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture.John Focht/Associated PressIntonation didn’t seem to matter a whit to her. Neither did keeping time: In one interview, she said, “I’ve found that the faster I play, the more accurate I become.” Form and melody, too, seemed mostly beside the point. Instead, it was all attitude, attack, rhythm, speed and noise.She “was comfortable in her own skin,” said the bassist Marcus Natale of the A-Bones — she didn’t put on airs, made no concessions, and seems to have never been anything less (or more) than exactly who she was, her performances a testament to the exhilarating power of ragged, unmanicured music.“This is not a masterpiece,” she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, “but it could be so bad you’ll like it.”Jackson died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2004, in Memphis. She was 81.In her music, and in everything she set her mind to, Jackson was nothing if not determined. “I’ve never been confused about what I was supposed to do while I was down here,” she said in 1999. “If I think of it, I do it.”Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and the author of “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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      Ani DiFranco Learned (and Cried) a Lot During Her First Year in N.Y.C.

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      “The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city,” said the singer-songwriter, who will make her Broadway debut in “Hadestown.”Ani DiFranco calls herself the fairy godmother of “Hadestown,” the 2019 Tony winner for best musical. Anaïs Mitchell, its composer and librettist, calls her this too, as DiFranco discovered during a recent publicity event.“I said, ‘OK, it’s settled,’” DiFranco recalled. “Certainly many more people have put in much more time and contributed hugely along the way, but I sort of helped get it from zero to one.”DiFranco had already released a couple of Mitchell’s records on her label, Righteous Babe, when, some 15 years ago, Mitchell revealed that she had a play based on Greek mythology that she wanted to turn into an album. And so they did, with DiFranco singing the part of Persephone. Now DiFranco, 53, will make her Broadway debut in that same role in February.“I couldn’t say no,” she said in a discussion that touched on the importance of the acoustic guitar, punk and “gifts of nature.” “It was too thrilling at this point in my life and career, and at my age, to try something new and be out of my comfort zone and be challenged and grow and learn. I just knew it was a deep, resounding yes.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Abstract ExpressionismIn my late teens I was exposed to the genre of the painting culture known as Abstract Expressionism. It was so inspiring and validating because it was this form of visual representation which was not about meticulously reproducing reality. It was about having a canvas be a window into a moment, and you can feel the sweep of the arm and the energy behind it and the torque and the velocity and the ferocity and the emotion.2Acoustic GuitarHaving an instrument that I — over 10,000 hours and then some — became one with has been like having another limb. Sometimes when there’s nowhere else to turn and nobody, it’s there for me. Sometimes when my own voice is failing me, my guitar can say it for me.3New York CityI moved here when I was 18 or 19 from Buffalo. I cried my way through the first year for every reason that you can imagine. I had experiences that were terrifying, that were life-threatening but also just life-changing and beautiful and culturally mind-blowing. The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city.4PunkYou could be a performer without being a beauty queen. You didn’t have to be a buttoned-up, coordinated, put-together, choreographed, polished, perfected thing. There was something about the punk ethos that just really allowed that in me.5JazzMusic that has improvisation at its epicenter is so profound and essential because that’s what music-making is: watching somebody figure it out and solve the problems and face the adversities that exist on any given night, and inventing a new path to go with your fellow performers.6Feminist LiteratureIn the late ’80s and early ’90s, I started reading Audre Lorde and Alice Walker and Judy Grahn and bell hooks and Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton. These poets and philosophers and writers seismically unlocked me to myself. I grew up in a man’s world, and I was taught everything through a man’s eyes in a man’s words. It wasn’t until I read these women that I realized, “Oh, there’s more.”7World MusicWhen I started getting legit gigs at folk and roots music festivals, they would throw you onstage with other performers. There might be a singer from Guam, some Tuvan throat singers, some African dudes with guitars and an Eastern European choir. We didn’t share a verbal language, but we could talk to each other through music and become friends in this way.8New OrleansThe first time I played Jazz Fest, I thought, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” Every time I was not on tour, I would go to New Orleans, because I wanted to go where I felt inspired. Then I started renting an apartment, then I fell in love with a local, and he was my reason to stay and make a home. I’ve been there about 20 years, and the shine has not worn off one bit.9Marijuana and PsilocybinI’ve smoked a lot of pot in my day, and I know it to be a really instrumental element of my awakening. I haven’t engaged in mushrooms as much, but I feel like it is also fundamental to human evolution. Whole genres of music and artistic movements have evolved and moved forward hand in hand with these gifts of nature.10ReadingWhen I moved to New York, I was at the New School studying, and I found myself reading books and talking about them. It’s like, Oh my God, this is really important stuff. The format of a book, it’s a road deeply into another person’s mind and life, to a whole other way of being, to whole other worlds, that I don’t find paralleled in any other genre of art. More