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    ‘American Symphony’ Review: Intimate Harmony

    This portrait of the musician Jon Batiste and the author Suleika Jaouad follows an artistic couple through ambition and adversity.Partway through “American Symphony,” the musician Jon Batiste pokes gentle fun at the coverage he received in advance of the 2022 Grammys. The breadth of his 11 nominations, which bridged pop, jazz and classical categories, made him tough to label. He ultimately fended off Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish to win album of the year.This documentary, directed by Matthew Heineman, is likewise deceptively tricky to peg. In the broad strokes, it is a process film, following Batiste, who grew up in the New Orleans area and trained at Juilliard, as he prepares a wildly original symphony that shares a title with the movie. “My ambition for composing this symphony is massive,” he says. “I’m trying to expand the canon of symphonic music, break through long-gatekept spaces.”(Ben Sisario, writing in The New York Times, described the piece, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2022, as a “Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums.”)But this is also a movie about two artists, their love, their creative attitudes and how, as a couple, they approach living a “life of contrasts.” That description comes from the writer Suleika Jaouad, Batiste’s partner (they marry during the film), whose best-selling memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” was published in 2021 and who, before college, studied at Juilliard herself, with a specialization in double bass.As Batiste gets ready for his Grammy and Carnegie Hall coups, Jaouad undergoes a bone marrow transplant after a recurrence of cancer. (She received her first leukemia diagnosis at 22, and from 2012 to 2015 wrote in The Times about her experiences.)While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments. It captures Batiste hiding his head under a pillow as he talks on the phone with his therapist and sits in with the couple as a doctor discusses the open-ended course of chemotherapy he is recommending. When it comes to the music, too, the film is unafraid to dwell on a drawn-out silence or phrase.American SymphonyRated PG-13 Potentially upsetting medical scenes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Scott Kempner, Del Lords Guitarist and Punk Rock Pioneer, Dies at 69

    The Bronx-born musician played guitar for and co-founded the Dictators, an early punk band. He later founded the Del Lords.Scott Kempner, a guitarist and songwriter and a co-founder of the Dictators, one of the first punk rock bands, died on Wednesday. He was 69.His death, at a nursing home in Connecticut, was confirmed by Rich Nesin, who managed his solo career. Mr. Kempner died from complications related to early onset dementia, Mr. Nesin said.Born and raised in the Bronx, Mr. Kempner started his music career not long after he had graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He was born Feb. 6, 1954, to Manny and Lynn Kempner.In 1972, while visiting a friend who was in college in New Paltz, N.Y., Mr. Kempner started playing music with Andy Shernoff and Ross Friedman, who was known as the Boss, and together they created the Dictators.That was when he earned the nickname, Top Ten. The band’s first album, “The Dictators Go Girl Crazy,” was released in 1975, a year before the Ramones made their debut. The All Music Guide called the band “one of the finest and most influential proto-punk bands to walk the earth” but said that on its debut album, the group’s satire and “ahead-of-their-time enthusiasm for wrestling, White Castle hamburgers, and television confused more kids than it converted.”The band was dropped by its label, Epic, after its first album. It recorded two more albums, on the Elektra label, that failed to find a big audience, and the band split up, though the members occasionally reunited over the ensuing years.After the breakup, Mr. Kempner founded the roots rock band the Del Lords and took the lead as chief singer and songwriter. “In the Dictators, he was a team player, the heart of the band,” Eric Ambel, a member of the Del Lords, said of his former bandmate.Frank Funaro, the drummer for the Del Lords, said Mr. Kempner had been someone he looked up to.“Scott Kempner was like the older brother that I never had,” Mr. Funaro said in an interview. “The older, cool brother, that turns you on to an encyclopedia worth of rock ’n’ roll, country music, soul music.”The Del Lords released seven albums, including “Elvis Club” in 2013, which featured the doo-wop star Dion DiMucci one on track. Mr. Kempner also played and toured as a side man in several bands, including Little Kings, with Mr. DiMucci, and the Paradise Brothers.Starting in 1992, Mr. Kempner also released three solo albums: “Tenement Angels,” “Saving Grace” and “Live on Blueberry Hill.”The Dictators re-formed in 2019 with Mr. Kempner on board, until he was diagnosed with dementia and had to leave the band in 2021.Mr. Kempner is survived by his wife, Sharon Ludtke, and by his sister, Robin Kempner, and her wife, Mary Noa-Kempner. More

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    Taylor Swift Beats Out Bad Bunny in 2023’s Spotify Wrapped

    The “Midnights” singer ended Bad Bunny’s three-year reign as the music platform’s most-streamed star.Don’t you just love the holiday season? Diwali. Thanksgiving. Hanukkah. Christmas. And, uh, Spotify Wrapped Day.On Wednesday, the platform released its highly detailed annual survey of its listeners’ streaming habits. As in previous years, the Spotify data dump was a social media occasion, giving music fans the stats they need to show off their taste and perhaps pick fights with those who do not share it.The data showed that Taylor Swift was the most-streamed artist on Earth in 2023, with more than 26.1 billion streams on Spotify, the company said. She is the first female artist to claim the top spot since the platform started Spotify Wrapped in 2015.Bad Bunny, Spotify’s top-streamed artist for the last three years, was the runner-up. It was not a close second, according to Sulinna Ong, Spotify’s global head of editorial.“Bad Bunny has had an enormous year and is still very much leading the cultural conversation,” Ms. Ong said in an interview. “I think what’s significant this year, and what I have loved seeing, is the dominance of female artists, not just in music, but actually in the cultural conversation, like with the ‘Barbie’ movie. That’s been the tone of 2023.”The rest of the global top five included The Weeknd, Drake and Peso Pluma. In the United States, Ms. Swift was No. 1, followed by Drake, Morgan Wallen, The Weeknd and Bad Bunny.Some fans expressed embarrassment on social media concerning their 2023 listening habits.SpotifyIn the days before the Spotify Wrapped announcement, the music platform dropped hints on billboards in 21 cities, including São Paulo, Brazil; Jakarta, Indonesia; and New York. Swifties began trying to decode them for hidden messages.On TikTok, fans traded theories about an online image that seemed to show Ms. Swift with orange-tinted hair. Some of them offered the theory that the color orange signaled the imminent arrival of an album, “Karma,” that some of her supporters believe is locked in a vault.Ms. Swift did not drop a secret album on Wednesday, but did make a track, “You’re Losing Me (From The Vault),” available for the first time on streaming platforms. She also recorded a short thank you video, which is available to some Spotify users as part of the Wrapped campaign.Numerous other artists, including Dolly Parton and SZA, recorded thank you videos this year and released them to select Spotify users on Wednesday, Ms. Ong said.The Wrapped campaign involves a complicated calculus of streaming data and listening habits. User data is tracked from January until just a few weeks before the campaign is released to provide an accurate, and surprisingly introspective, depiction of what went into listeners’ ears over the last 11 months.Spotify’s release of listener data, which is designed to be easily shareable on social media, doubles as a marketing push. Apple Music, a rival platform, has its own year-end campaign, Replay, but it has yet to elicit the same online response.On X and other platforms on Wednesday, Swifties traded notes on how many minutes they had spent in 2023 listening to their favorite singer.“So Spotify wrapped is out and I can’t say I’m shocked! 116,000 minutes!” wrote one.“I spent 40,952 minutes with taylor this year,” another fan wrote. “maybe i need to calm down.”Not everyone shared in the excitement about Ms. Swift’s statistical victory.“Happy Spotify Wrapped Day to all who celebrate. Many blessings,” wrote a non-fan. “Except to those of you who have Taylor Swift in your top 5.”Other people seemed embarrassed by their own streaming data: “i love spotify wrapped season,” an X user posted, “because its just me going ‘OH NO’ to every one of my top artists.” More

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    Brenda Lee, a Queen of Christmas and So Much More

    “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has been a holiday staple for 65 years. But Lee, who recorded it at 13, has never rested on her laurels.On a balmy day 65 years ago, a 13-year-old girl walked into a Nashville recording studio decorated with colored lights, garlands and a Christmas tree, the air conditioning cranked up to approximate a late-December chill. Members of the A Team, the session musicians who churned out hits for everyone in town, gamely donned Santa hats.As she had many times before, the young singer laid down a raspy rockabilly vocal way beyond her years, then packed up and went home, hardly imagining that the result would outlive most of the people in the room.“I would’ve never thought in my wildest dreams that ‘Rockin’ would be my signature song,” Brenda Lee said on a recent afternoon in her wood-paneled Nashville house, which is filled with gold and platinum record plaques and personalized memorabilia. To Lee, the song is just “Rockin’.” Always. Only a crimson pillow in her living room is embroidered with its full title: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”As if frozen at the precocious age when she became famous, Lee, now 78, still stands at a diminutive 4”9’ — maybe 4”11” with the hair — and wears a size 2½ shoe. (She shops in the children’s footwear section, or brings an empty suitcase to fill when she’s in Thailand, the only place she’s found adult shoes that fit.) Clad in a sequined red pantsuit, her petite frame immersed in an oversized leather chair, Lee sipped a Diet Coke (“I’m addicted”) and reminisced about her Christmas classic that even after her retirement, is still climbing the charts. “I think I’m making more now than I did when I was singing,” she said, and laughed.Johnny Marks — who penned Christmas classics including “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Holly Jolly Christmas” — wrote “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” with Lee in mind. She was a child prodigy whose explosive vocal talent had earned the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite.” When he sent her a demo, she was extra impressed because Marks was Jewish.Lee’s voice was nimble: She could excite teenagers with rockabilly hits like “Sweet Nothin’s” and win over their parents by crooning ballads like “Emotions.” Rob Verhorst“I said, ‘Johnny! You don’t even believe in Christmas! How did you write this song?,’” she recounted. On a recent vacation, he explained, he’d been lying on a beach and was mesmerized by distant trees swaying in the ocean breeze. It almost seemed like they were … rocking. And unto us, a Christmas standard was born.Not that it was an immediate success. “Rockin’” arrived in 1958, but failed to make waves. Then in 1960, after Lee had her first No. 1 hit with the wrenching ballad “I’m Sorry,” her label, Decca Records, attempted to capitalize on her newfound popularity and rerelease her Christmas tune. It worked: The song hit No. 14 that holiday season, and throughout the ’60s it continued to chart in December.Prominent placement in the hit 1990 movie “Home Alone” introduced the song to a new generation. In more recent years, thanks to streaming, back-catalog Christmas music has become more lucrative than ever, and Lee’s tune — along with newer holiday standards like “Last Christmas” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — has made annual appearances on the Billboard Hot 100.“She is living proof of how important you can be and how long you can last if you’re talented and you work hard and you truly love people,” the country singer Tanya Tucker said in an email. Lee inducted Tucker into the Country Music Hall of Fame in October, and people are still talking about the dry delivery and killer comic timing of her speech. Lee has, Tucker added, “the best sense of humor known to man (or woman).”For the past four years, “Rockin’” has peaked at No. 2, but in honor of its 65th anniversary, Lee’s label is giving the song an extra push, including a new music video that features Lee lip-syncing to the tune she recorded as a teen, and even a TikTok account. Only one woman and her whistle register seem to stand in the way of this decades-old song hitting No. 1.“Now I gotta worry about Mariah,” Lee said with a feisty laugh. “Get outta here, girl!” Growing more serious, she added, “Oh, there’s room for everybody. Her song’s good, too. I love her singing.”Lee and Carey have never met, but they would certainly have a lot to talk about — like how it feels to have a groundbreaking, history-making career reduced in the popular imagination to a seasonal novelty. Because while Brenda Lee is a Christmas queen, she’s also so much more.A LOT OF PEOPLE have stories. Brenda Lee has stories. She first met Elvis Presley in 1957 (“He was the pretty Elvis then”) when she was 12, the night she made her Grand Ole Opry debut; he was watching in the wings. “I’m never star-struck by anyone, and I’ve met the biggest,” she said. “But I was tongue-tied when I met him.”Patsy Cline was her early tour mate and mentor (“a good old broad, in the nicest sense of the word”). While still in her teens, Lee shared bills with Little Richard, Chubby Checker, Dusty Springfield — the list is seemingly endless. In 1962, at the peak of her worldwide popularity, while in Hamburg on tour, the Beatles opened for her. “They were raw musically,” she said, “but they were fabulous.” The admiration was mutual: Years later, in a Rolling Stone interview, John Lennon declared that Lee “has the greatest rock ’n’ roll voice of them all.”She’s still not quite sure where that voice came from. “I ask myself that sometimes,” she mused. “It’s just how I sing.” Raised poor (“you spell that ‘p-o-o-o-o-r,’ with four o’s,” she wrote in her 2002 autobiography) in the red clay of east Georgia, Brenda Mae Tarpley was born on Dec. 11, 1944. By age 3 she was standing on the counter at the general store, singing for change, and by 7 performing Hank Williams tunes on Atlanta TV.She was a preternaturally quick study, picking up the hiccuping vocal style she heard Williams use on the radio as well as the growl of a bluesman who played around town, blending them into a unique style made even more remarkable by the fact it was coming out of the mouth of a girl who looked and dressed like Shirley Temple. Lee got her national break at 11, performing “Jambalaya” on the popular “Ozark Jubilee”; a recording contract with Decca soon followed. Her debut single billed her as “Little Brenda Lee (9 years old).” “Apparently,” Lee wrote, “being 11 wasn’t dramatic enough.”“I would’ve never thought in my wildest dreams that ‘Rockin’ would be my signature song,” Lee said.Gabriel McCurdy for The New York TimesBy then, though, Lee was already the family’s sole breadwinner. When she was 8, her construction-worker father died after a hammer dropped on his head. To support her mother and two siblings, she developed a tireless work ethic, booking countless studio sessions and touring relentlessly. “We went by car and I slept up in the back window, that’s how little I was,” she said. “I just loved it so much that I didn’t mind the hardship. And I was young.”Lee’s voice was nimble: She could excite teenagers with rockabilly hits like “Sweet Nothin’s” — Presley’s favorite Lee song, which was many years later sampled by Kanye West — and win over their parents by crooning ballads like “Emotions.” Her ability to straddle the worlds of pop, rock and country made her a constant fixture on the hit parade. Lee had the fourth most chart hits in the 1960s (47), surpassed only by Elvis, the Beatles and Ray Charles. She was the first woman to be inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Lee was also one of the first American pop stars to find an international audience. At the time, she said, most artists didn’t want to give up domestic tour dates. Lee realized how shortsighted that approach was the first time she went to Japan and was greeted by a crowd holding “BLFC” signs: “Brenda Lee Fan Club.” She returned 31 more times. “They love you if you’ll come,” she said, sitting beside a sepia-toned globe several times larger than her head. “All they ask is that you come, and I loved to go.”Lee’s house is cluttered with souvenirs from her travels and mementos from her peers. A sketch by Elton John sits on the piano, alongside a close-up photograph of Keith Richards’s hand, skull rings and all (“because it’s so distinct,” Lee said, adding, “He loves me. He’s a fun guy, too.”). Cyndi Lauper — an acolyte Lee particularly admires — once visited and left her lipstick in the bathroom. “And I’ve still got it,” Lee said, and giggled mischievously. “I’m Hector the Collector. Like the Shel Silverstein book. That’s just me.”IN 1961, LEE booked a three-week stint headlining Las Vegas’s Sahara Hotel. The previous headliner had been her idol, Judy Garland, and when Lee arrived, she approached Garland as she was lounging by the pool. Lee still remembers the encounter vividly: “I said, ‘Miss Garland?’ And she looked up and I said, ‘Uh, my name is Brenda Lee and I’m an artist and I love you.’” Lee asked Garland if she had any showbiz advice. “She took those sunglasses off and she looked at me and she never faltered. And she said, ‘Don’t let anyone take your childhood.’”Lee credits the support of those around her for helping her avoid the tragic fate of so many child stars. “I had people that cared about me,” she said, like her longtime manager Dub Allbritten. “He respected my wishes.” She continued to attend high school in Nashville when she could, and if something came up on her social calendar — “so-and-so’s graduation party” — Allbritten would let her prioritize that over the road. That autonomy was important to her. “I didn’t do that very often,” Lee said. “But I knew I could.”And then there’s Ronnie Shackett, the impossibly tall guy she once spied across the aisle at a Jackie Wilson concert. Lee passed him a note: “Hi, my name’s Brenda, here’s my number. But I’m going to be gone for three months in Europe, working.” When she got back, he called. “Sometimes it works,” she said. They married in 1963.Midway through our conversation, Shackett walked through the living room. “Fifty-seven years,” Lee marveled.“It’s more than that, Brenda,” Shackett said. “We had a daughter in ’64.”Lee is the first woman inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Gabriel McCurdy for The New York Times“I guess it is more than that,” Lee said. She paused for a moment to do the math and then clapped her hands in delight. “Sixty years! Lord. And he’s a good man. I lucked out.”When Lee thinks back on her days recording with Bradley and the A Team, she mourns a version of the industry that doesn’t exist anymore. “I miss all of them that are gone tremendously because they were my friends,” she said. She can’t believe what often passes for a session in the digital age. “It just seems like now, you don’t even see the musicians,” she said. “You go in and sing to a track. The musicians always gave me my energy.”“There’s no standards being written today,” Lee added. “And that hurts me, ’cause I go back to the ’60s all the time and listen to those songs. They’re still played all the time, ’cause they were good. They were done with people that loved what they did.”Still, she added, there’s plenty of talent in Nashville today — “it’s oozing” — and she’s just glad she doesn’t have to compete with it. Despite the renewed attention to “Rockin,’” Lee retired from singing publicly in 2020. “God has blessed me that I don’t miss it,” she said. “I love to sing, but I can get that out of my system right here. I can go in the shower and sing. Good acoustics.”She admitted that there’s nothing like the thrill of singing before a crowd, trying to win over the skeptics. But she’s traded that in for something else. “I can finally put my kids and my grandkids and my friends first,” she said. “For once, I’m here to see them.”After 65 years of traveling the world, Lee has earned her rest. That’s not to say she won’t break out into an impromptu tune now and then; she recently went viral for surprising passengers by singing “Rockin’” on a plane intercom. Just don’t expect to see her on the road. “If somebody said, ‘Brenda, we’re coming to get you in the bus,’” she said in no uncertain terms, “I’d say, ‘Oh, no you’re not.’” More

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    Dolly Parton (Really) Rocks

    “Rockstar,” the country icon’s new double album of rock songs, is now the highest charting LP of her career. But her history with the genre runs deep.Rick Diamond/Getty ImagesDear listeners,At age 77, and with nearly 50 (!) solo studio releases to her name, Dolly Parton just scored the highest charting album of her career, the mammoth double LP “Rockstar,” which debuted on this week’s Billboard 200 at No. 3. (Darn those young whippersnappers Drake and Taylor Swift for standing in the way of Parton’s first No. 1!)“Rockstar” is not an album so much as a referendum on how incredibly well-liked Parton is at this moment. She seems to have drafted up a long scroll of dream collaborators, and — anything for Dolly! — each one of them picked up the phone: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Joan Jett, Miley Cyrus, Lizzo, Elton John, Rob Halford from Judas Priest … I could go on. And “Rockstar” does go on, for an indefatigable 30 tracks, clocking in at 2 hours and 22 minutes. When I finally finished listening to it, I expected someone to hand me one of those foil blankets you get after you run a marathon.While “Rockstar” might end up one of Parton’s most commercially successful albums, it’s not one of her best. (And isn’t that how it always goes?) My main quibble is the premise itself. Last year, when Parton was nominated for inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she initially tried to take her name off the ballot because she didn’t consider herself a rock artist. “This has, however, inspired me to put out a hopefully great rock ’n’ roll album at some point in the future,” she wrote in a statement. (She ended up changing course and accepted her induction.)I disagree with the notion that Dolly Parton wasn’t a rock star until she released an album called “Rockstar” — it feels like too narrow and literal an understanding of genre. Sure, Parton is a country artist at heart, but she’s also a dynamic, take-no-bull cultural icon with a powerful voice and a flair for spectacle. And, as I argue with today’s playlist, she’s been reshaping rock ’n’ roll in her own style for her entire career.The songs I’ve chosen put some of the best moments of “Rockstar” (featuring duet partners like Stevie Nicks and John Fogerty) in conversation with older songs in Parton’s vast catalog. They also highlight her history of covering — and completely transforming — rock songs from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Collective Soul and Neil Young.Parton is a living legend, and it’s wonderful that she’s continuing to reach fresh milestones and new audiences seven decades (!) into her career. But we certainly didn’t need approval from the notoriously suspect Rock Hall to confirm that Dolly Parton rocks. She’s been telling us that, in her own way, all along.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Dolly Parton: “Shine”One of Parton’s great stylistic pivots came in the late ’90s, when she revisited her bluegrass roots for the appropriately titled album “The Grass Is Blue.” This imaginative rework of Collective Soul’s 1993 alternative-rock hit “Shine” — which earned Parton a very deserved Grammy for best female country vocal performance — comes from her second return-to-bluegrass album, “Little Sparrow,” released in 2001. Say it with her now: “Yeah.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Dolly Parton featuring John Fogerty: “Long as I Can See the Light”One of the best tracks on “Rockstar” is this soulful duet on a Creedence Clearwater Revival classic. Parton and Fogerty’s voices mesh well together, and both sound at home emphasizing the original song’s gospel influence. (Listen on YouTube)3. Kesha featuring Dolly Parton: “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You)”There’s a special reason that Kesha included a cover of this 1980 Parton hit on her 2017 album “Rainbow”: It was co-written by her mother, the singer-songwriter Pebe Sebert. The original is a delicate ballad, but this later version features more of a rock arrangement, with chugging electric guitars and smoldering vocals from Kesha and Parton. (Listen on YouTube)4. Dolly Parton: “Dumb Blonde”“Just because I’m blonde don’t mean I’m dumb,” Parton sings on her first charting single, “and this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” Released in 1966, “Dumb Blonde” is technically a country tune, but it also proves she had a saucy rock-star attitude from the start. (Listen on YouTube)5. Dolly Parton featuring Stevie Nicks: “What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”For her contribution to “Rockstar,” Nicks offered Parton a previously unreleased track she’d written for Fleetwood Mac. It’s fun to hear it get a second life here — and to hear Parton and Nicks’s chummy chemistry on the spoken-word parts. (Listen on YouTube)6. Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris: “After the Gold Rush”Man, what a cover. Parton famously teamed up with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris for the hit 1987 album “Trio,” and this chill-inducing interpretation of a Neil Young classic appeared on the sequel, “Trio II,” from 1999. Their harmonies are otherworldly. (Listen on YouTube)7. Dolly Parton: “Stairway to Heaven”Though on “Rockstar” Parton includes a more traditionally “rock” cover of “Stairway to Heaven” (featuring Lizzo and … her flute, “Sasha Flute”), I prefer this one, from her 2002 bluegrass album, “Halos & Horns.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Dolly Parton featuring Linda Perry: “What’s Up?”Parton seems to find something personally resonant in her “Rockstar” take on this ’90s anthem, as she transforms a song about a quarter-life crisis into a deeper meditation on time passing. Bonus points for the way she enunciates the word “peculiar.” (Listen on YouTube)9. Dolly Parton: “Baby I’m Burnin’”Though many purists decried Parton’s pivot to pop in the 1980s, in the rearview it’s easier to appreciate it as a demonstration of her range, and an occasional foray into more rock-oriented sounds. Gotta love those laser sound effects, too. (Listen on YouTube)10. Dolly Parton featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Free Bird”Dolly Parton covering “Free Bird.” Backed by members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. This is now something that exists, and the world is better for it. (Listen on YouTube)If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Dolly Parton (Really) Rocks” track listTrack 1: Dolly Parton, “Shine”Track 2: Dolly Parton featuring John Fogerty, “Long as I Can See the Light”Track 3: Kesha featuring Dolly Parton, “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You)”Track 4: Dolly Parton, “Dumb Blonde”Track 5: Dolly Parton featuring Stevie Nicks, “What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”Track 6: Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, “After the Gold Rush”Track 7: Dolly Parton, “Stairway to Heaven”Track 8: Dolly Parton featuring Linda Perry, “What’s Up?”Track 9: Dolly Parton, “Baby I’m Burnin’”Track 10: Dolly Parton featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Free Bird”Bonus TracksIf you’re looking for even more Dolly reading, might I suggest this essay I wrote in 2019 on Parton’s uncommonly high approval rating? It has a special place in my heart, since it’s the first thing I ever wrote for The Times. And yes, all these years later, I’m still wondering about those tattoos. More

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    Rob Reiner Teases Details of ‘Spinal Tap’ Sequel

    Speaking on a podcast this week, the director said Paul McCartney and Elton John will appear in the film, among other real musical stars.The director Rob Reiner has said that an upcoming sequel to his 1984 documentary parody “This Is Spinal Tap” is scheduled to begin shooting in late February and will feature Paul McCartney, Elton John and Garth Brooks, among other stars.“Spinal Tap” satirized a bungled tour by a fictitious British heavy-metal band of that name, as well as the process of documenting it. The film, which was mostly improvised, was inspired by “The Last Waltz,” a Martin Scorsese documentary about the rock group the Band.Plans for “Spinal Tap II” were first announced last year. The entertainment news outlet Deadline reported at the time that the members of the fictitious band — the actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer — would all return for the sequel. Over the years, the three have played real-life concerts as their Spinal Tap characters.Reiner announced new details about the “Spinal Tap” sequel during an episode of a podcast hosted by the comedian Richard Herring that was released on Monday. The film had initially been scheduled for release in 2024, but that was before strikes that disrupted filming schedules in Hollywood. No updated release date has been announced, according to Variety.Without elaborating, Reiner said that there would also be a few other surprise appearances in the film.For most of the podcast episode on Monday, Herring and Reiner mostly talked about Reiner’s new podcast, “Who Killed JFK?” But they also discussed the original “Spinal Tap” movie, his directorial debut, which Herring said was his favorite film of all time.Asked if he regretted anything about what was and wasn’t in the 1984 film, Reiner said no. And did he anticipate how influential it would prove to be? Also no.“When we first previewed it, we previewed it in a theater in Dallas, Texas, and people … they didn’t know what the heck they were looking at,” Reiner said.“They came up to me afterward and said, ‘I don’t understand. Why would you make a movie about a band that nobody’s ever heard of? And they’re so bad! Why would you do that?’” Reiner recalled. “They said, ‘You should make a movie about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.’”“I said, ‘Well, it’s a satire,’” Reiner said on the podcast. “I tried to explain, you know. But over the years, people got it, and they started to like it.”Reiner’s comments on Herring’s podcast were reported earlier by the music magazine NME and other outlets. More

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    Institutionalized

    Fat Mike likes to be on time — to “put the punk in punctual,” as he says. So he was mildly distressed to be a few minutes late meeting me at the new Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, of which he is a founder and the public face. I had pleasantly cooled my heels at the museum’s bar, the Triple Down. At the Triple Down, you can order a Fletcher, a double rum and Coke served in an emptied Pringles can, named for Fletcher Dragge, guitarist for the band Pennywise and a member of the museum’s governing “Punk Collective.” (You get the chips on the side.) Or you might choose a Double Fatty, honoring Fat Mike himself: a double shot of Tito’s vodka, served with lime-flavored Liquid Death sparkling water and also a shot of Jameson. Fat Mike, as he told me within five minutes of his arrival, was a first-round investor in Liquid Death.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Fat Mike, né Mike Burkett, is, among other things, the frontman and bassist for the band NOFX. He was wearing a black T-shirt and blue plaid shorts that reached almost to the tops of his black socks. At 56, Fat Mike has thick white hair and sideburns, except where they’ve been dyed the blue of plastic sharks or cotton candy. He wore a padlock on a chain around his neck. He looked like what network executives may have imagined punks looked like when they were a staple category of bad guy on 1980s cop shows, the punk of a Spirit Halloween “punk” costume. To be fair, he had a hand in shaping that image. NOFX formed in Southern California in 1983, long before punk was a viable career path or, by their own admission, the band’s members knew how to play their instruments. By the mid-1990s, they had migrated to the Bay Area and improved enough to be part of a wave of groups — most famously Green Day, the Offspring and Blink-182 — that found improbable fame and commercial success. The pop-punk sound of the ensuing era remains so pervasive that, listening to an episode of Slate’s “Hit Parade” podcast about it, I could not quite tell where the Fall Out Boy ended and a bank commercial began.At the Triple Down, the bartender had a shot of vodka already poured. Fat Mike drank it and began what appeared to be a familiar ritual of haggling over whether the bartender wanted his tip in cash or in ownership shares in the museum. Fat Mike has $3 million in shares, he told me later, and he is giving a portion of them out to museum employees — “At least the good ones.” “If you believe in the museum and think we’re going to kill it — which we are — maybe you take the shares,” Fat Mike said. “I don’t really understand the shares thing, Mike,” the bartender said, shaking his head. “I’ve never worked in a museum before.” He poured another shot. Fat Mike downed it, pulled a roll of cash from his pocket and plunked down a $100 bill. At the Triple Down bar, double rum and Cokes are served in emptied Pringles cans, with the chips on the side.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAbout three years ago, Fat Mike came to Vegas with the idea of opening a punk rock store. He asked for help from Lisa Brownlee, a longtime veteran of the Warped Tour, the skate- and pop-punk juggernaut; she suggested filling the store with punk memorabilia. From there, it was a small step to a museum. The Punk Rock Museum opened on April Fools’ Day, in a 12,000-square-foot onetime antiques market decidedly off the Strip. Its closest neighbor is an enormous pink gentlemen’s club that advertises “1000’s of Beautiful Girls and 3 Ugly Ones.” All around the country, there are institutions devoted to commemorating and celebrating what was once fringe, rebellious or underground. Rock has its hall of fame and museum in Cleveland; hip-hop’s long-gestating counterpart is supposedly nearing an opening date in Harlem. The pipeline from pop-culture transgression to academic enshrinement has been wide open at least since the 1990s, when Madonna studies made news. If the Who survived “hope I die before I get old” to become elder statesmen, you might think the matter of how binding such promises are would be settled. Still, punk, born specifically in reaction to rock’s decadent self-regard, presents a uniquely hard case. There is something self-evidently absurd about an institution devoted to a movement which, to the extent that anybody can agree on a definition, is specifically about resisting institutions. Nostalgia, hierarchy, hero worship, the establishment of a canon, the separation between audience and artist — all of these are both the natural tendencies of museums and the things that punk was invented to smash. A few years ago, some aging members of a long-running utopian punk scene in Pensacola, Fla., set out to preserve the house in which the scene had flourished by establishing something called the 309 Punk Museum. That last word caused such consternation that it was dropped, in favor of “project.”To Fat Mike, this resistance looks like a hole in the market. “There’s no Billboard chart for punk, although there’s one for bluegrass,” he says. “There’s no Grammy for punks. There’s no award show anywhere for punk. We needed a place where any punk rocker can go and celebrate our heritage.” Fat Mike leading a special midnight tour group in October during the When We Were Young festival.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAn exhibit of paraphernalia from the horror-punk band the Misfits, including a bass broken by Jerry Only. (He breaks a lot of basses.)Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThere is a culturewide urge to catalog, commemorate and nostalgify punk as it enters its fifth decade. Museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert have hosted punk-related exhibitions. Universities across the country offer courses with titles like “Punk Culture: The Aesthetics and Politics of Refusal.” The nonprofit label Trust Records, founded by the longtime music publisher Matt Pincus and the band merchandiser Joe Nelson, has been rereleasing classic out-of-print records — starting with Circle Jerks’ “Group Sex” — digitally and in deluxe vinyl editions. Pincus believes that punk’s D.I.Y. ethic has made it a folk tradition as fragile and vulnerable to disappearing as, say, early-20th-century blues once was. Fliers get pulped; storage units filled with self-released E.P.s get liquidated; parents die with their children’s hardcore masters moldering in their attics; independent labels disappear. What you might call the dissenting view was offered in 2016 by Joe Corré, son of the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood: He loaded his personal collection of memorabilia — worth, he said, five million pounds — into a boat on the Thames and set it aflame. It was, he said, a protest against Punk London, an officially sanctioned series of exhibitions and events commemorating the 40 years of British punk. To Corré, this was an unacceptable act of appropriation. “Do not tolerate hypocrisy,” he told the assembled crowd. “Investigate the truth for yourself.” One truth is that Punk London added Corré’s event to its own official website as soon as it was announced. Agatha Slagatha, an employee of the Punk Rock Museum, assisting a customer in the museum’s gift shop.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe museum’s artifacts, like these customized jackets, are generally allowed to speak for themselves, without much text or explanation.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAt the Punk Rock Museum, you both enter and exit through the gift shop, where you can buy T-shirts, patches, shot glasses, coffee table books and padlocks. Passing through on our way to tour the collection, Fat Mike and I ran into a father and son visiting from Ohio. The man was wearing a Descendents T-shirt, the teenager a NOFX one; Mom was in the tattoo parlor upstairs, getting her leg inked with an image of a Doc Marten and an anarchy symbol. “I’m famous,” Fat Mike blurted out. They did not need to be told. This was like spotting Mickey Mouse at Disney World. Like many things in Las Vegas, the elements of the Punk Rock Museum that are vulgar, cynical and/or tasteless are fairly easy to spot. So let me say quickly that a lot of the museum is also very cool. It is, to a large extent, a photography museum — filled with beautifully reproduced images from chroniclers of the scene both famous and obscure. One room is a recreation of a wood-paneled suburban basement, iconic breeding ground for frustrated middle-class punk energy; another contains Pennywise’s carpet-and-graffiti-covered rehearsal studio, airlifted wholesale from Hermosa Beach, Calif. There’s also the Jam Room, where you can actually play instruments like Joan Jett’s guitar and Fat Mike’s bass in a soundproof space like something at Guitar Center. One challenge to any project like the museum is how many different things punk has come to mean to different people. “Punk has many houses,” Vivien Goldman, an adjunct professor of punk and reggae at N.Y.U., told me, ticking off a few of them: the political, the artistic, the bacchanalian. Of course, some houses have more pee in them than others. It is hard to overstate the role of urine in “NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories,” a group memoir by the band, which is light on situationist theory and heavy on bodily fluids being expelled onto, or into, whatever happens to be nearby, including cats, vans, silverware drawers, ice trays and strangers passed out on the floor. Fat Mike has brought this preoccupation with him to the Punk Rock Museum. The reconstruction of Pennywise’s garage, he told me, was made all the more exact by Fletcher Dragge relieving himself on the floor, a kind of benediction before the museum opened its doors. The top tier of patronage during pre-opening fund-raising was a $25,000 package of perks that included having your name on a plaque over one of the museum’s urinals or toilet stalls. Fat Mike performing with Sum 41 in Pennywise’s rehearsal studio, which was relocated to the museum.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe museum is not big on written text or other forms of contextualization, content instead to let its cases filled with artifacts and memorabilia speak for themselves. Many of these are of a morbid cast, relics in the saintly sense. Fat Mike pointed out “Joe Strummer’s last bag of weed,” a stash supposedly found with the co-founder of the Clash when he died, and the key to the New Orleans hotel room where Johnny Thunders was found dead under mysterious circumstances in 1991. He showed me a black leather couch that once sat in Razor’s Edge Recording, a studio in San Francisco, beneath a photo of Kurt Cobain lying on it unconscious. Fat Mike sat on the couch and posed for a photo, slumped in the same position.A foyer outside the bathrooms attempts a partial answer to the question of why a punk rock museum should be located in Las Vegas, which has never had a punk scene of any significant repute. The walls are covered in fliers from a brief period of exception, when a scene sprung up around shows played at a water-retention basin off a desert highway called Losee Road. Generally, though, the museum is upfront about the fact that it is in Las Vegas because it’s a place millions of people visit every year. It also makes sense because the Punk Rock Museum’s definition of museum falls somewhere on the spectrum occupied by neighbors like the Mob Museum, the Neon Museum and the Harry Mohney Erotic Heritage Museum (current home of the 1990s sensation “Puppetry of the Penis”). A consultant from the Smithsonian visited before opening, Fat Mike told me, but his ideas for multimedia displays and other pedagogical this and that didn’t make the cut. Fat Mike’s record label, Fat Wreck Chords, is one example of a capitalist streak that might cause consternation for punk purists. “Just because something is capitalist doesn’t mean it’s bad,” he says.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesInevitably, the museum is heavy on varieties of white, male, very often shirtless aggression. But care has been taken to be inclusive, and Fat Mike took care to point this out. The first gallery you encounter contains 10 portraits of canonical punk acts. Fat Mike told me that it is one of the rooms he insisted on curating himself, and he directed my attention to portraits of Alice Bag, the Latina lead singer of the seminal Los Angeles punk band the Bags; Poly Styrene, the mixed-race frontwoman of X-Ray Spex; and Laura Jane Grace, the transgender singer of the band Against Me! That month, there was a temporary exhibit devoted to the photographer Angela Boatwright’s work chronicling the largely Latino backyard punk scene that flourished in East and South Central Los Angeles in the 2010s; it was followed, in October, by one titled “Black Punk Now.” There is also an exhibit case simply marked “Diverse,” which highlights queer bands like Pansy Division and Toilet Böys. For all that, it’s the pop, skate and emo punk of NOFX’s generation that predominates. This is a function of Fat Mike’s sensibility (there are few scholars who would grant Pennywise such a central place in the music’s history) but also of which artists have chosen to contribute and which have declined. As Fat Mike will be the first to tell you, not everybody in the punk community loves him. Fairly or not, NOFX and its Warped Tour compatriots are easily written off as empty-headed, obnoxious, adolescent bros. Fat Mike’s capitalist streak rubs many purists the wrong way. Among other ventures, he has created the label Fat Wreck Chords, the punk rock/craft beer festival Punk in Drublic and a line of panties for men. The zine writer Aaron Cometbus once wrote that he was “Trump in a mohawk.” And Fat Mike is consistently, gleefully offensive in a way that suggests both a compulsion and a sense of professional obligation. The wedding chapel at the Punk Rock Museum is decorated with photos of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. One of the few disagreements he has had with the rest of the museum’s management, he told me in all seeming earnestness, was over his idea of playing “Yakety Sax” whenever the wheelchair lift to the second floor made its ascent.The newlyweds Nadia Pérez and Pablo Cabutti kissing in the museum’s wedding chapel, which is decorated with pictures of one of punk’s most famous couples, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesStill, Fat Mike believes his reputation is unfair. “It destroys me,” he says. NOFX, he pointed out, remains the one band of its cohort to never sign to a major label. In a world of independent labels with lofty rhetoric and a bad habit of not paying their musicians, Fat Wreck Chords has an honorable reputation. In the early 2000s, Fat Mike spearheaded Rock Against Bush — two compilations and a tour — which he says raised over $1 million to campaign against George W. Bush, and PunkVoter.com, which he says registered over 200,000 young voters. He identifies as queer and has spoken emotionally about the difficulty of coming out publicly as a cross-dresser and a devotee of B.D.S.M., but he says the L.G.B.T.Q. community has failed to embrace him.“I’m always just the California bro,” he lamented. Ultimately, Fat Mike says he knows why he’s not better liked: “Why do people hate Tom Brady? Why do people hate the Dallas Cowboys? Why do they hate Machine Gun Kelly? Because they hate success. And they hate when that successful person is stoked. I do what the [expletive] I want. I don’t follow society’s rules, and people hate that: How come he gets to do everything he wants to?” he says, before answering the question himself, not inaccurately. “Because I’m punk.”While you can explore the Punk Rock Museum by yourself, one of its unique selling points is that, for an extra fee, you can get a tour given by a punk celebrity. Among the musicians who have given tours are members of the Germs, Circle Jerks, Fishbone and Suicidal Tendencies, as well as Fat Mike himself, who pointed out that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame “doesn’t have B.B. King giving tours.” (King died in 2015.) The day after my visit with Fat Mike, I returned and ran into Marko DeSantis waiting for his afternoon tour group in the gift shop. DeSantis was the lead guitarist for a Santa Barbara band named Sugarcult, which had a couple of pop-punk hits in the 2000s. The museum had flown him in and put him up at a hotel for a three-day stint giving two tours a day. He received a cheat sheet of highlights to make sure to hit but otherwise was free to tell his own story. That afternoon, his tour turned out to be a group of one: a 42-year-old in the LED industry named Tristan who lives in Los Angeles and had been excitedly following the museum’s opening since it was announced. Tristan had blown off the day at a lighting convention to attend because, as it happens, he is a huge fan of Sugarcult.“Dude, I am very excited!” he told DeSantis. “So, am I!” DeSantis said. They beamed at each other and repaired to the Triple Down for a quick beer before beginning. Their joy trailed after me as I drifted through the museum alone. Goldman, the professor of punk, had given me an assignment of what to look for: “Let’s be real, I’d want to know if there’s anything political, really,” she said. There wasn’t much that explicitly qualified, unless you counted the simple weight of the compounded evidence: generation after generation of youth and energy and creativity and community. Which, to be honest, I was more and more inclined to do. Watching a video of Indonesian teenagers whirling and clashing in an enormous mosh pit, I found myself a little choked up. The museum’s recreation of a suburban basement, the iconic wellspring of middle-class punk energy.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesJeff Gross, who came from Miami to attend the When We Were Young punk music festival, was eager to visit the museum, where he got a tattoo of the Blink-182 logo.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times“It looks like they get it,” came a heavy English accent behind me. I turned to see Morat, the museum’s mononymous, tattoo-covered, maroon-mohawked talent coordinator. Morat runs the visiting-tour-guide program, a battlefield promotion he received after working in the gift shop for a few weeks. He told me that he heard the Sex Pistols’ “Did You No Wrong” in a London schoolyard, not long after it came out in 1977, and thought, “Right, that’s my life, messed up.” He formed a band, Soldiers of Destruction, but they were too busy being soldiers of destruction to get around to recording their own album until 2021. He has stayed in the scene ever since.“This is not just about fun,” he said. “It’s about staying alive.” As far as the museum was concerned, there were some exhibits and some featured bands that he could do without, but that was life. Morat has little time for arguments about what punk is and isn’t. “That’s the thing. Nobody knows,” he said. “I’ve been at it since 1977, and I don’t know.” He looked around, as if to be sure we were alone, then leaned in. “I mean, it was all just made up to begin with.”Brett Martin is a writer in New Orleans and the author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.” Jamie Lee Taete is a British photographer who is currently based in Los Angeles. His work mainly focuses on reality and perceived realities in the United States. More

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    Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Film: 4 Takeaways From the Premiere

    The star skipped the red carpet and slipped into the celebrity-filled screening on Saturday night. But the movie pulls back the curtain — a little.Near the end of her new concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” Beyoncé states that she’s tired of being a “serial people-pleaser.” Since she was a child, she says, she has been striving for stardom, but now that she’s on top of the world and two years into her revelatory 40s, it’s time to recalibrate.“I have nothing to prove to anyone at this point,” she says.Maybe that’s why Beyoncé decided to skip the red carpet entirely at the Los Angeles premiere of her movie on Saturday night, leaving that task to a starry list of invitees that included Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, Lizzo and Issa Rae. Though Beyoncé made a posed appearance at the Oct. 11 premiere of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” — like that concert documentary, “Renaissance” will be distributed by AMC Theaters — she entered her own premiere only after the lights had been turned off and the movie was seconds away from beginning.Unlike Swift, who shares plenty about her life and is currently in a high-profile, well-documented romance with the N.F.L. player Travis Kelce, Beyoncé is one of our most private superstars. She has given virtually no interviews over the last decade, and any insight into her life or work mostly has to be inferred from brief statements released on social media or her website. “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which chronicles the most recent world tour in support of her seventh studio album, offers fans something new to interpret, pulling back Beyoncé’s curtain ever so slightly.Here are four the takeaways from the premiere of the movie, which is out in theaters Dec. 1.This is more than just a filmed concertSwift’s AMC film was a straightforward concert documentary that never left the stage: It was meant to feel as if you had the best seat on her tour stop, but it included no behind-the-scenes frills.“Renaissance” does things a little differently. Like Beyoncé’s film “Homecoming,” which chronicled the assemblage of her 2018 Coachella performance, the new movie often takes us behind the steel girders to see just how the mammoth tour was put together. “I’m excited for people to see the show,” Beyoncé says in the film, “but I’m really excited for everyone to see the process.”That process comes in bits and pieces as we watch Beyoncé call the shots on everything from lighting to set decoration to orchestration, sometimes getting frustrated that her notes aren’t heard. “Communicating as a Black woman,” she says, “everything is a fight.”Still, people come around to Beyoncé’s will sooner or later, she says: “Eventually, they realize this bitch will not give up.”Beyoncé also devotes behind-the-scenes segments to her recovery from a knee injury, a hometown visit in Houston, and her late, treasured Uncle Johnny, whose love of house music helped inspire the dance bangers on “Renaissance.” And there’s plenty of fan footage, too: The film often cuts away to shots of audience members in various states of ecstatic crying or frozen, religious awe.Only a little bit got left outThough the ballad-heavy prelude that opened Beyoncé’s Renaissance set list is trimmed, nearly every other song from the tour is included in the film. She even found room for “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind,” a Renaissance double-header excised from many of her tour stops.The only egregious omission in this two-hour-48-minute movie is a behind-the-scenes bit that goes by way too quickly: Beyoncé convenes a Destiny’s Child reunion in Houston that includes not just Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams but also two of the girl group’s first members, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, who were contentiously pushed out. “It was like a new birth for us, and a lot of healing,” Beyoncé says in her narration, though we only see the five of them together for a second and don’t hear a single thing they discussed. I would have watched three more hours of that summit alone!The missing ‘visuals’ remain a mysteryThe “Renaissance” album was released in July 2022 without any sort of music-video accompaniment, a surprise given Beyoncé’s recent run of game-changing visual albums for “Lemonade” and her self-titled 2013 record. A subsequent teaser video for the first “Renaissance” album track “I’m That Girl” seemed to promise more to come, but none did.At a Louisville, Ky., stop on the Renaissance tour, a fan held up a sign asking where the visuals were, prompting Beyoncé to grandly tell the crowd, “You are the visuals.” (The crowd didn’t love that.) The “Renaissance” movie is cheeky enough to include that moment, but otherwise, there’s no mention of the missing visuals, nor an explanation of why they’ve seemingly been scuttled.Blue Ivy fought for her tour spotBy and large, the Renaissance tour eschewed celebrity cameos and surprise drop-ins, preferring to keep the focus on the queen bee herself. Big names joined Beyoncé onstage at only two tour stops: Houston, where Megan Thee Stallion performed “Savage,” and Los Angeles, where Diana Ross and Kendrick Lamar came out for the concert held on Beyoncé’s 42nd birthday.Those appearances all made it into the movie, but the special guest the movie is most interested in is Beyoncé’s 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, who often participated as one of the dancers on her mother’s songs “My Power” and “Black Parade.” I caught one of Blue Ivy’s first tour appearances last May in London, where she was still getting the hang of her choreography, but by the end of the Renaissance tour, she had everything — the moves, the attitude — down pat.Turns out, Blue Ivy’s performance was only supposed to be a one-off, and even that took some negotiating. “She told me she was ready to perform, and I told her no,” Beyoncé says in the film. Though she finally relented, Beyoncé was dismayed when Blue Ivy read comments on social media that criticized her lackluster moves. But it thrilled her mother that instead of quitting, she decided to put in the work and train even harder for future stops.Blue Ivy also pops up in much of the behind-the-scenes footage, offering her often unsugarcoated opinion on stage design, song choices and more. In a film where everyone else treats Beyoncé as a boss or a goddess, Blue Ivy is an amusingly irreverent presence: To this 11-year-old, Beyoncé is just a mom. More