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      Shane MacGowan: Raising a Farewell Pint in Dublin Pubs

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      The Pogues singer, who died Thursday, took traditional Irish music in a new direction. Most people in Ireland loved him for it.Christmas came early this year in Dublin, but too late for a beloved adopted son.On the last evening in November, a wet Thursday, cars at the rush hour stop lights blared “Fairytale of New York” on a thousand radios. From the sidewalk, you could hear drivers and passengers singing along: “The boys from the N.Y.P.D. choir still singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.”The song’s renowned lyricist and co-writer, Shane MacGowan, the British-born frontman of the punk-folk band the Pogues, died earlier that day. Ireland — his greatest muse, and ancestral home — was coming to terms with a death that had, thanks to MacGowan’s well-known addictions to alcohol and drugs, long been foretold.MacGowan would have turned 66 if he had lived to his next birthday — on Christmas Day, the subject of “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues’ greatest hit, in which an elderly Irish couple berate and console each other for lives gone to seed in a soured Big Apple.Photographs of MacGowan and the Pogues were shown on screens at the Wall of Fame in the Temple Bar area of Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn South William Street, in Dublin’s city center, a gaggle of young women, dressed for a night out, were singing “Fairytale” as they rushed through freezing rain to a nearby pub. Student nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, from which MacGowan was discharged last week after a long final illness, said they had heard news of his death at work that morning.“We all just started singing ‘Fairytale of New York’, and we got very emotional,” said Eve McCormack, 22.“He was fantastic,” said her friend Sophie McEvoy, 21. “We hoped he might make it, because Christmas is his birthday. But not this time, I suppose.”Leah Barry, 37, a social worker, was having a pre-dinner drink nearby at Grogan’s pub on Castle Street, one of the last holdouts of an older, more Bohemian Dublin. She grew emotional as she talked about her favorite Pogues songs — “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” about a broken veteran of a nameless war, and “Rainy Night in Soho,” a bruised and tender love song.“I was with a group of Irish students going off to America,” Barry recalled, “and we bought a compilation album of Irish songs at Dublin Airport on the way out. That’s how I fell in love with the Pogues. Whenever I hear those songs I think of five of us in the one bedroom in Montauk, having a mad summer.”Leah Barry said the Pogues’ music reminded her of traveling from Ireland to America, listening to their music on a summer abroad.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAcross the river Liffey in the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session was in full swing in the front bar: guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum. In the early 1980s, the Pogues gate-crashed this genre with a London-Irish swagger, subverting its pieties with punk vigor and venom. To its old tropes and titles — “The Boys from the County Cork,” “The Boys from the County Mayo,” “The Boys from the County Armagh” — MacGowan added his own variations, like “The Boys from the County Hell,” with lyrics that showcased his scabrous humor and diaspora-wide vision.Born in the county of Kent, near London, to Irish parents, MacGowan first came to music through the city’s punk scene, then found his lifelong inspiration in the dark poetry of his ancestral homeland, and in particular the Irish diaspora in the United States (“Body of an American,” “Fairytale of New York”), Britain (“Rainy Night in Soho,” and many more), Australia (a cover of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”) and even Mexico (“A Pistol for Paddy Garcia”).Far from being offended by MacGowan’s irreverence, most people in Ireland loved him for it.A book of condolences for MacGowan at Mansion House, the mayor’s residence, in Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn guitar at the Cobblestone traditional session on Thursday night was Colm O’Brien, a Dublin-born musician now living in Boston. “My own personal opinion is that we are only going to realize his genius in the next decades,” O’Brien said. “He introduced people to Irish music who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise, even Irish people. People who were young and who were punk, and wouldn’t have listened.”Tomás Mulligan, the 33-year-old son of the Cobblestone’s owner, Tom Mulligan, said that MacGowan had directly inspired his own musical project, a punk-folk collective called Ispíní na hÉireann (“Sausages of Ireland”).“Every Irish trad musician went through a phase when they were young, when their parents forced them to play the old music and then they rebelled,” Mulligan said. “But then they came back to it. It was the Pogues who brought me back to it.”In the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session in full swing, featuring guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAs Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in “The Leopard,” “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” John Francis Flynn, a rising star of the Irish folk scene, expressed a similar thought over a drink in the back of the Cobblestone.“Most good traditional artists have two things in common,” Flynn said: “a real respect for the source material, but also having an urge to do something new with it.” MacGowan had “opened a door into Irish music for people who might have thought it would be twee,” he added.“What trad songs do is, they are almost like a time machine,” Flynn said. “You can connect with people who are long gone, and with history.”MacGowan’s work “was romantic, but it was real and it was honest. It wasn’t simple,” he added. “And it was sometimes brutal.” More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Movie Bonus, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Hurray for the Riff Raff, Tyla, Lana Del Rey and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Beyoncé, ‘My House’Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour film opens in theaters on Friday, and a brand-new song plays over the closing credits: the bold, brassy and bass-heavy “My House.” Fusing ’90s house music with more hard-edge, futuristic sounds, the track draws from several of the different eras of dance music Beyoncé honored on her kaleidoscopic 2022 album “Renaissance,” with a little of the marching band flair of “Homecoming” thrown in for good measure. “Don’t make me get up out of my seat,” Bey growls with an extra curl in her lip. “Don’t make me come up off of this beat.” You heard her! LINDSAY ZOLADZTyla, ‘Truth or Dare’Tyla, from South Africa, is courting global audiences by bringing the breathy tunefulness of R&B singers like Aaliyah to songs that fuse sleek electronic 1990s R&B with current African beats. She’s nominated for a Grammy for her international hit, “Water.” In her new song, “Truth or Dare,” she glides above an amapiano groove to address an on-again, off-again affair that’s complicated by past disappearances and her newfound success: “Would you still want me if I didn’t have it all?” Singing “care” and “dare” as two-syllable words are just one of the hooks. JON PARELESOxlade, ‘Katigori’The Nigerian hitmaker Oxlade presents his success as a higher mission in his new single “Katigori,” gently crooning, “So many mysteries I gots to unfold/The music legacy I gots to uphold.” He goes on to dismiss imitators and backbiters, but Afrobeats syncopations, three rising chords and a panoply of vocal harmonies keep him sounding more sincere than smug. PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Alibi’Alynda Segarra, who makes music as Hurray for the Riff Raff, recorded the forthcoming album “The Past Is Still Alive” shortly after the death of their father. “Alibi,” the opening track and first single, takes a unique, ultimately poignant approach to grief: “You don’t have to die if you don’t want to die,” Segarra sings in a tough-talking voice that always threatens to break, caught halfway between denial and bargaining. The tempo is stomping and insistent, like the too-quick march of time. ZOLADZLana Del Rey, ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’On “The Grants,” the opening song off Lana Del Rey’s last album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” the (other) elusive chanteuse pays tribute to “‘Rocky Mountain High,’ the way John Denver sang.” She’s now released another tribute to Denver: a cover of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Leave it to Del Rey to take a ubiquitous piece of Americana and make it seem hauntingly new. She slightly slows Denver’s jaunty pace, swapping out acoustic guitar for melancholy piano. But just when you think she’s made this anthem too much of a downer for a singalong to break out, a warm chorus of other voices joins in and leads her home. ZOLADZEnglish Teacher, ‘Mastermind Specialism’English Teacher, a indie-rock band from Leeds, often spins terse little contrapuntal patterns that can grow into a post-punk blare. But on its new single, “Mastermind Specialism,” it stays fairly restrained and folky. The song is a waltz, with its patterns picked at first on acoustic guitars, while Lily Fontaine sings about the difficulty of making choices: “Bittersweet and less is more/Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” The song swells but stays appropriately inconclusive. PARELESOscar Peterson, ‘My One and Only Love’Oscar Peterson and his classic, airtight trio — with Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums — were more than five years into their life as a group when they performed in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1964. A recording of that concert recently resurfaced, and was released last week for the first time as an LP, “Con Alma.” Peterson plays the standard ballad “My One and Only Love” with his usual flair, splicing in moments of fond hesitation with lightning-speed dashes down the keyboard, wedging in an extended Gershwin reference (at 3:40) and ending with a quote from Bach. You get the idea: If it could be done on the keyboard, he could do it. And it was never anything but a marvel to hear him go. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLea Bertucci featuring Quartetto Maurice, ‘Vapours (Radio Edit)’The saxophonist, clarinetist and experimental sound artist Lea Bertucci uses musical systems both avant-garde and ancient to make music that leaves notions of harmony, rhythm and melody outside the door. Instead she’s focused on the resonance and slow disappearance of sound, in a moment when so much of our digital existence feels both immaterial and overwhelming. On “Vapours,” from her new album “Of Shadow and Substance,” she works with Quartetto Maurice, an Italian string quartet, using a semi-composed, semi-improvised compositional method to create a sense of pressure and release. The song’s title is a reference to the “pseudo-scientific term” that was once used “to diagnose types of hysteria in women,” as Bertucci writes in the album notes. In the spirit of modernists like Morton Feldman or minimalists like Éliane Radigue, she has developed a powerfully patient musical language, paying homage and also bidding good riddance to a world in decay. Call it music to let go by. RUSSONELLOAndré 3000, ‘That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild’A wordless album from a great rapper? That’s what André 3000, from Outkast, decided to release with “New Blue Sun,” an 87-minute instrumental-verging-on-ambient album featuring acoustic and electronic breath-powered instruments. The 10-minute “That Night in Hawaii …” hints at Native American music with a muffled six-beat drum pulse, assorted percussion and slowly unfolding flute improvisations, at once deliberate and open-ended. PARELESO., ‘ATM’O. is a raucous jazz-rock-psychedelic-noise duo that goes by first names only: Joe on saxophone and Tash on drums, bolstered by electronics and effects. In “ATM,” Joe’s baritone saxophone moves among squalls, barks, trills and shrieks when it’s not touching down in a low, brawny riff. Tash maintains a brisk, galloping beat — sometimes tapping, sometimes bashing — until the last full minute of the track, a slow meltdown that’s engulfed in electronic entropy. PARELES More

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      Kiss Loves to Say Goodbye. Is Its Rock ’n’ Roll Really Over?

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      Farewell tours are one of pop music’s signature moves. But there’s reason to believe Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley are throwing in the towel for real this time.When Kiss plays Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, it will bring down the curtain on the band’s End of the Road farewell tour, which began in January 2019. “We’re gonna go out on top,” the bassist Gene Simmons said last year during an interview with the Los Angeles radio station KLOS-FM. There will be no more Kiss tours, he’s vowed, not ever.Yeah, maybe.In show business, sometimes the curtain drops but then comes back up, and there’s an encore. And sometimes the encore lasts a long time. Kiss fans know only too well that in 2000, the group announced a yearlong Farewell Tour. “We’re the champs again, let’s retire on top,” the guitarist Paul Stanley said in an interview printed in the tour program. (At least they’re consistent.)Music fans have a growing number of reasons to be wary and even weary of the industry’s income-generating trickery, starting with egregious ticketing fees and extortive parking charges. This year was the 50th anniversary of David Bowie’s first retirement — “It’s the last show that we’ll ever do,” he proclaimed to a delirious crowd at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, but he was back on tour less than a year later — and there have been plenty of subsequent examples of bands taking their bows, then pivoting and coming back for more.Retirement announcements should be treated with skepticism, and some artists have had cheeky fun in acknowledging the widespread practice of going away but not staying away. In 2004, Phil Collins started his First Final Farewell tour, and in 2017, he called his true farewell tour the Not Dead Yet tour. (In 2021, he joined Genesis for its The Last Domino? tour.) In a nod to Raymond Chandler, Eagles are on the road with their Long Goodbye tour, which the band says will include “as many shows in each market as their audience demands.” It could easily become the “Cats” of farewells.Depending on the artist’s age, a professed leave-taking tour might merit more or less skepticism. Bowie was 26 at the time of his first retirement, not an age when entertainers are usually willing to throw in the towel. Simmons is 74, and stomping around in seven-inch platform heels while spitting blood and blowing fire in a costume that weighs almost 40 pounds must get more difficult every year.At some point, aging can start to undermine a band’s image. Simmons was 25 when he first sang, “I wanna rock ’n’ roll all night, and party every day.” Nearly 50 years later, that level of youthful bluster just isn’t as credible. (Simmons and Stanley are the band’s two remaining original members; Peter Criss and Ace Frehley were not part of the tour.)“I do believe this is the end of the road, finally, for Kiss,” Doug Brod, author of the 2020 book “They Just Seem a Little Weird: How Kiss, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll,” said in a phone interview. And if it’s a ruse and a stooped-over Kiss comes back in 2028 for a We Were Just Kidding tour, Brod is OK with that. “If you’re a genuine fan, don’t you want to see the band you love as many times as you can? I don’t know why anyone would feel cheated.”More than any previous generation, baby boomer musicians built sustainable careers, and in many instances, benefited from healthier touring circumstances. As a result, a lot of them are still on the road, including Paul McCartney (81), Mick Jagger (80) and Pete Townshend (78). The roll call of recent or current farewell tours includes Joan Baez, Paul Simon, the B-52’s, Foreigner, the Oak Ridge Boys, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dead & Company, Kenny Loggins, Ted Nugent, Gladys Knight, Aerosmith and Parliament-Funkadelic. Younger acts including the rappers Styles P, Scarface, Daddy Yankee and 50 Cent are also waving buh-bye.Bowie didn’t invent the faux farewell. It’s a tradition that probably dates back to vaudeville, if not Elizabethan theater, and Bowie knew of a pretty recent bait and switch: Frank Sinatra retired in 1971, telling reporters he planned to “read Plato and grow petunias.” And, he said, “I don’t want to put on any more makeup,” a sentiment Gene Simmons might share this week.But Sinatra returned two years later, to much ballyhoo and chart success, with the album “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back.” Bowie was paying attention. “David was a big Sinatra fan,” his former manager, Tony DeFries, recently told Mojo magazine. Bowie’s retirement was a ruse, DeFries added, to generate publicity and whip up demand for a headlining tour of big venues in the United States. It worked; in 1974, Bowie played arenas across the country, including two shows at Madison Square Garden.Bowie’s exit was an opportunistic hoax, but other retirements may be sincere at the moment they’re made. In 1977, Elton John announced he was done touring while onstage at Wembley Stadium in London. Though he was back two years later, he talked repeatedly about retiring, and in 2014, he told a French crowd, “No more shows, no more music.” The next day, his representative assured a reporter, “Elton was only joking.” In September 2018, the singer started his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which ended in July 2023 and grossed $939 million, based on figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. So far, he hasn’t reneged.Saying a dramatic goodbye is good business, and so is the Lazarus return. It’s easy to speculate that money is the chief motivation, but there are other reasons, too. “I’ve got a family I never go home to,” Ozzy Osbourne said when he retired in 1992. Three years later, he was back with a Retirement Sucks tour, leaving fans to speculate about how much or little he enjoyed getting to know his family.The retirement ruse is common among hard rock bands (Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Black Sabbath), but other perpetrators of the old switcheroo include the Who, Cher, Meatloaf, Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, Phish and LCD Soundsystem, who made a documentary about its farewell in 2011, only to return five years later. “I’d never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work,” Trent Reznor told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2009, when he sent his band Nine Inch Nails into that good night. After four years, he unretired, which gave them something in common.After Bowie retired in 1973, then unretired in 1974, he retired a second time in 1975. A year later, the journalist Cameron Crowe interviewed him for Playboy and challenged the singer, asking how he could release a new album despite having retired twice.“I lie. It’s quite easy to do,” Bowie replied. “I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe.” More

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      Hall v. Oates, No Longer a Mystery, Arrives at Court in Nashville

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      Hall has accused Oates of committing the “ultimate partnership betrayal” when he moved to sell off his portion of a joint venture. Oates denies wrongdoing.The nature of the dispute between Daryl Hall and John Oates, which had been obscured in sealed court documents, became clearer on Thursday as one of pop music’s most recognizable and long-running duos put their fight in front of a judge in Nashville.Details of the collapse of the 50-year artistic collaboration and business partnership between the two had been trickling out for days in court papers submitted before Thursday’s hearing in Chancery Court, where Hall and Oates were represented by lawyers but did not appear.Hall, the lead singer and songwriter for many of the band’s hits, is arguing that Oates violated their contract by moving to sell his portion of one of their business partnerships without Hall’s approval.Hall’s lawyers went to court to block any sale while their business disagreement goes through a separate arbitration process. On Thursday, Chancellor Russell T. Perkins granted their request, preventing Oates from going further in the agreement until the arbitrator resolves the impasse, or until Feb. 17.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?  More

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      Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor’s Enduring Friendship

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      The two Irish singers interacted like siblings, speaking of each other warmly, but needling each other, too.When I heard the news on Thursday that Shane MacGowan had died, I thought of Sinead O’Connor, his longtime friend and collaborator. I played their duet from 1995, “Haunted,” which MacGowan had originally written for the “Sid and Nancy” soundtrack. Then I watched their joint interview promoting the song for the Irish talk show “Kenny Live.”MacGowan appeared standoffish behind black sunglasses, a lit cigarette resting between his fingers. O’Connor was perched at his side in a big sweater, fiddling with her short hair and smiling slyly at her friend. The host, Pat Kenny, called the collaboration “strange and unlikely,” but they did not see it that way. “We’re different sexes, yeah,” MacGowan said, to which O’Connor replied: “Are we?”O’Connor died this summer, a few months before MacGowan did. When I profiled her in 2021, I interviewed them both. They spoke of each other warmly, but they needled each other, too. They seemed different in the way siblings are different — two musicians riffing on a shared context, picking up different threads of the same conversation.Both made music out of their troubled childhoods, mental illness and addiction. Both helped popularize Irish music around the world, even as they maintained a critical distance from their own stardom. In interviews, they were funny and blunt. Their public reception, however, was different. In our interview, O’Connor identified a double standard. “When men are drunk and on drugs — for example, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues — people idolize them,” she said. “A man could be like that, but a woman couldn’t.”Their relationship was complex. In a 2021 biography of MacGowan, O’Connor recalled performing a version of “Haunted” with him while he was using heroin. “The producers were freaking out because Shane was nodding out on smack in between the verses,” she told MacGowan’s biographer, Richard Balls. “I was singing my verse and they didn’t believe he was going to wake up and neither did I.” In 1999, a few years after that collaboration, O’Connor called the police on MacGowan when she found him using heroin at his home.They fell out over it, then grew back together. Later, when asked if O’Connor’s police call ended his relationship with her, he replied, “No, but it ended my relationship with heroin.” In 2004, when O’Connor gave birth to a baby boy, she named him Shane. And at MacGowan’s 60th birthday party, in 2018, she performed the song “You’re The One,” which MacGowan originally sang with Moya Brennan.O’Connor and MacGowan first encountered each other in the 1980s in London, MacGowan told me over email in 2021, though he did not remember the exact circumstances. What he recalled was their dynamic. “She was very shy and I was speeding, so I talked a lot,” he said. Hanging around with him and Joey Cashman, his Pogues bandmate, “must have been a nightmare for her,” he said. “I talk a lot, but Joey makes me look like an introvert.”In her 2021 memoir “Rememberings,” O’Connor did not write much about MacGowan, but she did make a little joke about him and speed. She experimented with the drug, she said, during a stay at St. Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin. “In the locked ward where they put you if you’re suicidal, there’s more class A drugs than in Shane MacGowan’s dressing room,” she wrote.Their collaborations highlighted the distinctiveness of their voices — his gruff, hers incandescent. But when I interviewed the singer-songwriter Bob Geldof about O’Connor, he found an aesthetic similarity between them. He appreciated that they were among the few singers who did not sound blandly American. “She has an Irishness to her voice,” Geldof said of O’Connor. “Bono doesn’t sound Irish. Shane MacGowan sounds Irish.” In our interview, MacGowan called O’Connor “a brilliant singer and a brilliant Irish singer, one of the best.”MacGowan described O’Connor as fragile, sensitive and genuinely spiritual. Mostly, he spoke of her care for him as a friend. “She is a generous soul, always looking after people,” he told me. “She looked after me when I really needed it.”You could see it in the “Kenny Live” interview: When Kenny asked MacGowan pointed questions about his drug use, O’Connor lightly intercepted them. “Do you worry at all about your own mortality?” Kenny asked MacGowan, but O’Connor slid in to answer the question herself. “I do,” she said.She took a dig at her friend and turned it into an insight into being a person. “Just the whole thing: What are we all doing here? How does the Earth hang in space?” More

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      Doja Cat Makes the Leap From the Internet to the Arena Stage

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      The extremely online 28-year-old singer and rapper’s Scarlet Tour accentuates her flair for big statements.More than most artists on pop’s current A-list, the 28-year-old rapper and singer Doja Cat is a child of the internet. Born Amala Ratna Zandile Diamini, she spent much of her youth making beats and rabble-rousing social media posts. She first experienced viral fame in 2018 when her goofy but surprisingly well-executed novelty song “Mooo!” blew up, and still — even after racking up bona fide hits, including two that ranked No. 1 on Billboard — retains the glint-eyed, anarchic spirit of an internet troll.Just as screen charisma doesn’t always translate IRL, not every terminally online musician can convincingly make the leap from, say, Instagram Live to the 19,000-capacity Barclays Center, where Doja headlined her first New York City arena show as part of her Scarlet Tour on Wednesday night.She has been a near constant presence on the charts for almost four years, but as a live performer she is still largely unproven. Her dreamy, disco-inflected breakout hit, “Say So,” was released in January 2020 and, during the pandemic, became a TikTok sensation.Doja Cat’s dreamy, disco-inflected breakout hit, “Say So,” became a TikTok sensation during the pandemic. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThere have been hints, though, that she can handle a large stage with flair. Many of her awards show numbers have been showstoppers, announcing her as an electric performer willing to take unexpected risks. During a pretaped appearance at the 2020 MTV Europe Music Awards, she reimagined the bubbly “Say So” as a brooding nü-metal anthem — and actually pulled it off. At this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, she vamped her way through a transfixing medley from her latest album, “Scarlet,” including the brash, rough-edged diss track “Demons.”“Demons” was the second song Doja Cat played during her commanding, confident and occasionally repetitious hour-and-a-half set at Barclays Center, which featured an opening set from the rising star (and Bronx-born hometown hero) Ice Spice. For that track, Doja Cat was joined by an animatronic spider nearly twice her size, a reference to the dark, occasionally nightmarish aesthetics of the uncompromising “Scarlet.”Prowling around a triangular stage that sometimes spurted fire, and flanked by a nimble troupe of dancers dressed as if Kanye West had designed the costumes for “The Warriors,” Doja was at her best when she was free to rap with dexterity and chest-thumping bravado. “Attention,” the sharp, self-assured first single from “Scarlet,” was a highlight, along with a few deeper cuts from the album, including the buoyant, lusty “Gun” and the imperturbably laid-back “Balut,” which has a vintage boom-bap vibe.In an age of fan service and stan armies, Doja Cat’s relationship to her listeners has been unique, even antagonistic. In July, she generated headlines when, on the social media platform Threads, she refused some fans’ requests to tell them she loved them (“i don’t though cuz i don’t even know y’all,” she replied) and criticized those who had chosen to call themselves “Kittenz.” Rude? Honest? You be the judge. But at a time when most pop stars are expected to cater to their most vocal fans to the point of infantilization, a dissenting voice can be refreshing.Doja’s online barbs didn’t seem to diminish the enthusiasm of the adoring fans at Barclays, some sporting Halloween-store devil horns (a reference to her recent hit “Paint the Town Red”), a few wearing cat ear headbands, and several having already changed into the most sardonic offering from the merch table, a white T-shirt that proclaimed its wearer’s “hate” for Doja Cat, emphasized with an expletive.Doja wore a form-fitting, full-body muscle shirt, imprinted with chiseled abs, bare breasts and exposed buttocks.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThroughout her set, Doja wore an outfit that was provocatively unprovocative: a form-fitting, full-body muscle shirt, imprinted with chiseled abs, bare breasts and exposed buttocks, which she paired with tall suede boots that extended up to her hips like chaps. In her own absurdist way, it was a Doja Cat power suit, lending her an exaggerated physicality and a playful androgyny that she controlled depending on how she moved her body. She could pantomime sexualized femininity one minute — while, say, twerking with her back to the audience — and conjure masculine swagger the next, strutting around the stage in a wide stance. At times, it felt like Doja (ever a student of ’90s hip-hop) was playing both characters in the video for Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson’s 1998 collaboration, “What’s It Gonna Be?!”The softer side of Doja Cat, though, is something she hasn’t yet learned how to communicate on an arena stage; a brief interlude when she sat on a stool and indulged in some R&B crooning was less than captivating. The performance of the pop hits from her previous era, “Say So” and “Kiss Me More,” felt rote, even if “Kiss Me More” featured a crowd-pleasing kiss cam.Doja often suggests on “Scarlet” that she is more at home making razor-edged rap songs than surefire pop hits, and her stage presence backed that up. Still, at an arena show, a musician must find a balance between challenging audiences and keeping them in their seats. The show could have used more visual variety, and its structure — superfluously divided into Acts I through V, though devoid of a narrative arc — was puzzling. When Doja finished the last of her biggest hits, her recent No. 1 “Paint the Town Red,” she still had seven more songs to go.Before a sultry, downbeat cover of “Red Room,” by the Australian band Hiatus Kaiyote, Doja, from her stool, briefly addressed the audience. New York, she said, “is where my mother’s side of the family is from, so I know this place a little bit.” The crowd cheered; modern concert rhythms had primed us to expect that this was the scripted part where the pop star would drop the armor and let us in on something personal, vulnerable, maybe even tear inducing. But she didn’t.Instead, ever the trickster, Doja Cat just thanked the opener and — enrobed in that costume that gave the cheeky illusion of nakedness — introduced the next song.Doja Cat’s Scarlet Tour, which comes to the Prudential Center in Newark on Thursday, runs through Dec. 13 in Chicago; dojacat.com/tour. More

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      A Harvard Professor Prepares to Teach a New Subject: Taylor Swift

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      Swift-inspired classes are sweeping colleges across the country.The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise budding scholars.Taylor Swift.In the spring semester, Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, will teach a new class, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Nearly 300 students have enrolled.The class is part of a wave at academic institutions around the country, including New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. Stanford has invoked the Swift song “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)” with a course planned for next year titled “All Too Well (Ten Week Version),” and Arizona State University offered a psychology class on Ms. Swift’s work.Next year, the University of California, Berkeley plans to offer “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” and the University of Florida will school undergraduates in Ms. Swift’s storytelling. The Florida course’s description begins with the words “ … Ready for it?” — an allusion to the song from the album “Reputation.”In a conversation with The New York Times, Professor Burt, 52, discussed her love of Ms. Swift’s music and what exactly her students will be studying. This interview has been edited and condensed.Let’s start with the big question. Are you a Swiftie?Ten or 12 years ago, I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was “You Belong With Me.”“Fearless” got you!It turned out she had a lot of other great songs. The thing that made me really think about her as an artist whose process and career I wanted to learn more about and thought about a lot was when I saw “Miss Americana,” the documentary.What about it?It really does such a great job of showing both how much support she’s had — she’s someone who’s come from a good deal of privilege and had parents who really wanted to help her realize her dreams, which, you know, honestly, I have, too — but also how she worked to become herself, and how she has become someone who makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people. I realize that she could probably take fewer private jet flights.The Harvard campus.David Degner for The New York TimesMs. Swift during an August concert in Inglewood, Calif.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDo you have a favorite era?It bounces between “Red” and “Folklore”-slash-“Evermore.”Let’s talk a little bit about the coursework. What is on the syllabus?Each week pairs some body of her work with some body of work by other people. We are reading two different Willa Cather novels. We’re reading a novel by James Weldon Johnson about a performing artist who’s got a very different relationship to his own career in his hands. We are reading a contemporary novel by Zan Romanoff about One Direction fandom.We’re going to read some Wordsworth, Wordsworth being a Lake District poet. She sings about the poets of the Lake District in England. Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.What songs are going to be paired with those texts?We are reading Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope.” “Work Without Hope,” of course, being Coleridge’s version of “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”Of course. How about homework?The written work will include a couple of conventionally argued academic essays, where the student needs to make a well-supported argument with clearly framed evidence in easy-to-follow prose. One of them has to be on a Taylor topic. One of them has to be about something else that we read for the course. So you can’t write about nothing but Taylor Swift and get a good grade.Is there a final?The third of the three papers is the final assignment. I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun. On the other hand, Harvard students are also often taking other classes that absolutely demand a lot of time from them, especially if they’re, for example, future doctors. Or they have other commitments that eat up a lot of the time. If you don’t do something to make sure they feel like they have to do the reading, they will sometimes, regretfully, blow off reading.Any chance of a guest lecture by (the honorary) Dr. Swift?I have tweeted at her, and I would welcome her presence if she would like to pop in, but she is quite busy.A Harvard class about Taylor Swift feels ripe for detractors. What would you say to people who might criticize such a subject as unserious or not worthy of rigorous study?This is a course that includes plenty of traditionally admired dead people who’ve been taught in English departments for a long time, who I not only admire but am teaching in this course. Taylor’s work is the spine. If you don’t appreciate this body of songwriting and of performance, that’s not my problem. But they should remember literally everything that takes up a lot of time in a modern English department was at one point a low-prestige popular art form that you wouldn’t bother to study, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and, in particular, the rise of the novel. Can I quote Wordsworth?Please.Others shall love what we have loved and we will teach them how. If you’re going to teach people to love something that they see as obscure or distant or difficult or unfamiliar, your best shot at doing that honestly and effectively is to connect it to something that people already like. More

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      Shane MacGowan, Pogues Songwriter Who Fused Punk and Irish Rebellion, Dies at 65

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      As frontman for the Pogues, he delivered lyrics romanticizing whiskey-soaked ramblers and hard-luck stories of emigration, while providing a musical touchstone for members of the Irish diaspora worldwide.Shane MacGowan, the brilliant but chaotic former songwriter and frontman for the Pogues, who reinvigorated interest in Irish music in the 1980s by harnessing it to the propulsive power of punk rock has died. He was 65.Mr. MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, announced his death on Instagram. She did not provide additional details.Mr. MacGowan emerged from London’s punk scene of the late 1970s and spent nine tumultuous years with the initial incarnation of the Pogues. Rising from North London pubs, the band was performing in stadiums by the late 1980s, before Mr. MacGowan’s addictions and mental and physical deterioration forced the band to fire him. He later founded Shane MacGowan & the Popes, with whom he recorded and toured in the 1990s.Along the way, Mr. MacGowan earned twin reputations as a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish emigrant life. His best-known are the opening lines of his biggest hit, an alcoholics’ lament-turned-unlikely Christmas classic titled “Fairytale of New York.”It was Christmas Eve babeIn the drunk tankAn old man said to me, won’t see another one“I was good at writing,” Mr. MacGowan told Richard Balls, who wrote his authorized biography “A Furious Devotion,” which was published in 2021. “I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.”A full obituary will be published shortly. More