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    Bad Bunny’s Surprising Return and 13 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Ice Spice, Sleater-Kinney, Roy Hargrove and more.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.Bad Bunny, ‘Mr. October’Bad Bunny surprise-released a new album, “Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana” (“Nobody Knows what’s Going to Happen Tomorrow”). Many of its 22 songs circle back toward the programmed trap beats that helped start Bad Bunny’s career, but now they’re just part of the sonic domain of a world-conquering star. In “Mr. October” he sings and raps about wealth, clothes, fame, sex and celebrity, comparing himself to Michael Jackson and Reggie Jackson and rightfully claiming, “Yo cambié el juego”: “I changed the game.” But the track is far from triumphal; with tolling piano notes, filmy minor chords and skittering electronic tones, the music laces every boast with anxiety. JON PARELESIce Spice and Rema, ‘Pretty Girl’The utterly unflappable Bronx rapper Ice Spice cannily connects with Afrobeats — and with the gentle-voiced, hook-making Nigerian songwriter Rema, who offers slick, robotic blandishments in what sounds like one repeating cut-and-pasted chorus. Ice Spice responds with encouraging, human-sounding specifics: “Think about my future, got you all in it.” But the track ends with Rema’s looped doubts — “Give me promise you ain’t gonna bail on me” — rather than her wholehearted welcome. Why give him the last word? PARELESDesire Marea, ‘The Only Way’The style-melting South African songwriter Desire Marea turns to funk and Afrobeat in “The Only Way.” His voice lofts a sustained melody and layered backup vocals over an arrangement that feels hand-played and organic: all staccato cross-rhythms — drums, bass, guitar, electric piano, horns — with a nervy, constantly shifting beat and one melodic peak topping another. The only lyrics in English are “It’s the only way” — and with such urgent music, there’s no need for more. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Não Ao Marco Temporal’If Esperanza Spalding has been in feeds this week for precisely the wrong reasons, consider this your cue to close that tab. Spalding’s mind has been elsewhere: specifically in Brazil, where the battle over the fate of the world’s largest rainforest is reaching a decisive point. On “Não Ao Marco Temporal,” recorded in Rio de Janeiro, Spalding and a small crew of musicians protest the Temporal Framework, a recent attempt to roll back Indigenous Brazilians’ land sovereignty that would have left the Amazon increasingly vulnerable to deforestation. (The Brazilian Supreme Court recently rejected the framework, but industry’s attempts to undermine that decision have continued.) Over strums on the cavaco and violão, the resounding of drums and the squeals of a cuica, Spalding sings of the “grabbing hands” that seek to violate the rainforest. “There are some men who stop at nothing to have their way with the body of a woman or a girl,” she and a small chorus of voices declare. “Right now they’re calling her Brazil.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBrittany Howard, ‘What Now’Brittany Howard, who led the Alabama Shakes, grapples with a disintegrating relationship in “What Now,” singing “If you want someone to hate, then blame it on me.” Over a fierce, choppy funk groove, Howard restrains her far-ranging voice to make her point about “learning lessons I don’t want to.” She is not happy about the breakup; she sings like she has no choice. PARELESMadi Diaz, ‘Same Risk’Madi Diaz sings about a high-stakes infatuation in “Same Risk,” spelling out both her physical passion and her misgivings. “Do you think this could ruin your life?/’Cause I could see it ruining mine,” she asks, then wonders, “Are you gonna throw me under the bus?” What starts with modest acoustic guitar strumming rises with an orchestral crescendo to match the urgency of her questions. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Hell’“Hell” will be the opening track on “Little Rope,” the album Sleater-Kinney will release in January and which was made in the wake of the sudden deaths of Carrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather. The song breaks wide open with anguish and inconsolable fury, as tolling, elegiac verses erupt into bitter power-chorded choruses. Corin Tucker unleashes her scream on the word “why.” PARELESJamila Woods featuring Saba, ‘Practice’Jamila Woods takes the pressure off a new relationship in “Practice,” the latest single from her excellent album “Water Made Us.” “We don’t gotta hurry up, you ain’t gotta be the one,” she sings in an airy, unburdened voice, carried along by an insistent beat. The Chicago rapper Saba sounds similarly breezy and wise on his verse — “learned from her, moved on, learned more” — and Woods’s lyrics extend the song’s playful basketball metaphor. After all, in the immortal words of Allen Iverson, we’re talking about practice. LINDSAY ZOLADZSen Morimoto, ‘Deeper’“I lost my senses like I’ve lost so many times/Why do the answers seem impossible to find?” sings Sen Morimoto, who plays most of the instruments on his tracks himself, in “Deeper.” A lurching beat, meandering chromatic harmonies and keyboard and guitar incursions that seem to have wafted in from other songs just add to the sense of disorientation. Morimoto’s saxophone solo sounds more sure of itself than he does, but he’s clearly not too perturbed. PARELESRoy Hargrove, ‘Young Daydreams (Beauteous Visions)’The trumpeter Roy Hargrove was just 23, but already near the top of New York’s jazz scene, when his friend and mentor Wynton Marsalis commissioned him to write “Love Suite in Mahogany.” The suite, which he performed with a septet at Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, in fall 1993, begins in a downward slide of moonlit harmony, gesturing toward Gil Evans and Billy Strayhorn (this was the Young Lions era; a direct address to the masters was encouraged). It finds its way gradually into a slowly creeping groove before a false ending gives way to a coda of driving post-bop. The track cuts off as he cues the band into the suite’s next movement. You can hear the rest of the suite’s debut performance, which has just been released as an LP on J.A.L.C.’s Blue Engine Records. RUSSONELLOMendoza Hoff Revels, ‘New Ghosts’There’s gristle and bone in every last satisfying bite of “Echolocation,” the debut album from Mendoza Hoff Revels, a four-piece band co-led by the guitarist Ava Mendoza and the bassist Devin Hoff. There is also a delightfully wide range of musical shapes at play. One moment, they’re descending straight from the slow drag of doom metal and stoner-rock; later, Mendoza’s wily, spiral-bound melodies have more to do with the tactics of John Zorn (both she and Hoff have played on Zorn projects). Her acid-soaked electric guitar rarely leaves center stage here. On “New Ghosts,” Mendoza, Hoff and the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis hover around a heavy minor chord, occasionally repainting it in an uncanny major. Then Hoff and the drummer Ches Smith join, and the improvisation ascends into a gray cloud of swirling saxophone and bludgeoning guitar. RUSSONELLOboygenius, ‘Afraid of Heights’Lucy Dacus regrets confessing her fear of heights on this wry highlight from boygenius’s new four-song EP, “The Rest”: “It made you want to test my courage, you made me climb a cliff at night.” Though, like all boygenius songs, it’s a collaboration with her singer-songwriter peers Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, here Dacus takes the lead, bringing complexity to a simple chord progression through the specificity of her lyricism. “I never rode a motorcycle, I never smoked a cigarette,” she sings, balancing poignancy with dry humor. “I wanna live a vibrant life, but I wanna die a boring death.” ZOLADZAllegra Krieger, ‘Impasse’The folky, deceptively understated songwriter Allegra Krieger released her album “I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane” in July; now she extends it with “Fragile Plane — B-Sides.” In “Impasse,” she calmly confronts someone who’s been “building quite a big brand,” touting “family values, patriot song” in a culture where “Everyone here is trying to win/Power or paper or recognition.” Over an unhurried modal guitar line, she warns how it could suddenly come crashing down, and she sings like she won’t mind if it does. PARELESNdox Électrique, ‘Lëk Ndau Mbay’Gianna Greco and François R. Cambuzat, who have worked with post-punk artists including Lydia Lunch, have spent recent years traveling the world, documenting and collaborating with musicians who play traditional trance rituals. For their latest project, Ndox Électrique, they collaborated with Senegalese drummers and singers who perform spirit-possession healing rituals called n’doep, layering drones and assaultive noise-rock guitars atop the fiercely propulsive beat, translating and transmuting the music’s incantatory power. PARELES More

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    CMAT Makes Country Music Sad, Smart and Strange

    In April 2020, a new force in Irish music announced herself with a song about love, loss and fried chicken.The video for “Another Day (KFC),” CMAT’s debut single, opens with the singer dancing cheerfully in front of a blue screen. “Baby give me something else to do,” she sings, in a style pitched between country twang and ‘60s pop, “I cried in KFC again over you.” Then, suddenly, the camera swerves to a dark room where the man this song is addressed to sits gagged and tied to a chair. CMAT, still grinning, dances over and slaps him in the face, then eats a bucket of chicken while sitting on his lap.Since the video came out, CMAT — an acronym for the 27-year-old artist’s name, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson — has become a huge star in Ireland and won fans further afield with country-pop songs that are irreverent, vulnerable, sad, smart — and decidedly strange.Her 2022 debut album, “If My Wife New I’d Be Dead,” went straight to No. 1 in Ireland, and was awarded the RTE Choice Music Prize, Ireland’s equivalent to the Grammys. A follow-up, with another grammatically wayward name, “Crazymad, For Me,” arrives Friday, and she has tour dates scheduled in Ireland, Britain and the United States.The connection between Ireland and country music is longstanding: The “singing cowboy” Gene Autry toured the country in the ’30s, and the genre was further popularized in the ’60s by groups known as showbands that played in rural dance halls. In the ’90s, Garth Brooks’s stadium gigs in Dublin triggered a nationwide craze for line dancing. CMAT brings this tradition up-to-date, combining the enduring country themes of heartbreak and self-destruction with camp humor and a distinctly Irish sense of the absurd.“I think the structure of everything I do is probably always going to come from country music,” Thompson said in a recent interview. “I’m always going to sing like a country singer.”CMAT’s country-pop songs are irreverent, vulnerable, sad, smart — and militantly strange.Ellius Grace for The New York Times“Crazymad, For Me,” however, also branches into psychedelia, anthemic pop and rock ‘n’ roll. For this album, Thompson said, she “wanted to make something that sounded very theatrical,” like Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell.”The Meatloaf influence is clear in the slow-burning, claustrophobic ballad “Rent” which builds to a rock ‘n’ roll chorus with a spiraling piano line and howling vocals — but there is also “Have Fun,” a pop anthem showcasing an Irish fiddle.Mattias Tellez, the album’s producer, said Thompson’s voice was “timeless, and powerful, and so distinct,” displaying “qualities I hear in the likes of Billie Holiday, or Ella Fitzgerald — that power, and control, and spontaneous humor.”The new album draws on Thompson’s life, looking back on a tumultuous relationship the singer began with an older man when she was in her late teens. It follows her from her lowest and messiest point, before she reckons with the past and decides to move on.Along the way, she weaves in references to St. Anthony (the finder of lost things — a favorite of Irish mothers), Miranda from “Sex and the City” and the “Wagatha Christie” trial that recently gripped Britain’s tabloids.The single “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” sees CMAT collaborate with the singer-songwriter John Grant. The two appeared onstage together in September, at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, where Grant was performing a concert of Patsy Cline covers. CMAT was the guest star, singing “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “She’s Got You.”In an email, Grant said working with Thompson was “a blast.”“They absolutely love her in Ireland, and with good reason,” Grant said. “Looks like the rest of the world is catching on.”CMAT began her career describing herself online, ironically, as “a global pop star” who “lives in Dublin with her grandparents.” Prepandemic, she was working in a cafe: She had no money, and was recovering from a period of depression and disillusionment, after the band she’d formed at 18, Bad Sea, failed to gain traction and split.She reinvented herself as a solo act, self-releasing singles including “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!” and “Nashville,” a dreamy (and surprisingly exhilarating) song about suicidal ideation. She rapidly gained fans, in particular among young Irish L.G.B.T.Q. people. (Thompson, who is bisexual, once told an interviewer that she’s “making music for the girls and the gays, and that’s it.”)“I think the structure of everything I do is probably always going to come from country music,” Thompson said in a recent interview. “I’m always going to sing like a country singer.”Ellius Grace for The New York TimesHer career took off just in time for Covid-19 to rule out the chance of touring. “Everyone was stuck at home, and had nothing to do, and didn’t know how to exist on the internet,” she said. “But I did, because I’d been there. I’d spent a lot of time in a room by myself.”As a teenager, Thompson was an avid Tumblr user, and wrote fan fiction about Bombay Bicycle Club, an English indie band. She focused on building her own online following, with live streamed events including “CMAT’s Very Nice Christmas,” and the “CMAT Confessional Line,” during which fans called in with life dilemmas for her to solve.Thompson has since swapped Dublin for Brighton, England, and has reached a point of success where the “pop star” line is no longer a joke. She has even won the recognition of her idols: On the track “So Lonely” she asked “Who needs God, when I have Robbie Williams?,” attracting the online attention of the man himself. Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Williams called the duet with Grant “majestic.”“Now I am actually kind of living like a pop star,” Thompson said. “And now, trying to keep up the pop star thing, and having a fake life, and a fake personality to go with it, just feels wrong.” Instead, she is steadily cultivating a unique brand of anti-glamour, appearing in videos in clown costumes, elaborate wigs and male drag, or with facial prosthetics, bleached eyebrows and gems stuck to her teeth.The intimacy she has forged with fans has only intensified: Recently, Thompson promised on X that if “Crazymad” reaches the Top 10 in Britain, she would send her wisdom teeth, freshly removed, to a lucky follower.In the same spirit of authenticity, the album shows its creator’s flaws, as well as her triumphs. “When I was making this record, two things happened,” Thompson said. “I got angrier about some things, but then I also realized that I had done some things wrong in my life.” Across its 12 tracks, the album shifts from blaming her ex to forgiving herself for her own mistakes.“I feel like no one is trying to make themselves look bad anymore in their music,” she added, “but we’ve all done things wrong in our lives. I’m an embarrassing person who’s done some very embarrassing things.”The album’s ecstatic final tracks, “Have Fun” and “Stay For Something,” complete this journey from resentment to regret, through self-acceptance to, ultimately, optimism.“There’s no point in suffering,” Thompson said. “You could just have been having a good time. Because life is very short.” More

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    How Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Was Turned Into a Movie

    Movies like “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” rely on savvy tricks and sophisticated techniques to capture a semblance of the live experience.Taylor Swift’s globe-spanning Eras Tour is one of the musical events of the year, drawing record-breaking crowds and making headlines the world over since it kicked off in Glendale, Ariz., in March. Rabid demand has made procuring a ticket notoriously difficult, if not practically impossible. But starting Friday, Swifties will have a more accessible opportunity to catch a glimpse of the live phenomenon, when the concert film “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” is released by AMC Theaters — a moviegoing event that is widely expected to be a box office smash.Filmed over three nights in August at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., and directed by Sam Wrench, “The Eras Tour,” like most concert films, aims to capture some of the magic of seeing the artist perform live. “The main thing we’re trying to do is provide the theatrical audience with the best seat in the house,” John Ross, the rerecording mixer on “The Eras Tour” and a veteran of many other hit concert films, including Jonathan Demme’s “Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids,” said by phone. “If you were to attend a concert and get the premium seat, that’s my job, to convey that image sonically and situationally.”A scene from “Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids.” John Ross, who worked on that film and the new Taylor Swift one, said, “If you were to attend a concert and get the premium seat, that’s my job, to convey that image sonically and situationally.”NetflixBut capturing a live performance is not as straightforward as simply setting up some cameras and microphones and recording what transpires onstage. The demands of a film are incredibly complicated, and faithfully reproducing the look and sound of a concert for the screen is an arduous and painstaking process for the filmmakers and their crews. It’s a delicate proposition — a proposition some filmmakers believe is inherently doomed.“The idea itself, to film a concert, is a bad idea,” said Jonas Akerlund, a film and music video director who made the concert movies “On the Run Tour: Beyoncé and Jay-Z Live” and “Taylor Swift: The 1989 World Tour Live.”He explained, “It will never, ever be as good as the live experience. It’s basically like trying to film fireworks — everybody knows that seeing it live is not the same as seeing it on a TV screen.” But, Akerlund added, the concert film can have value, if looked at in a different way. “You can make it an equally good experience, but it has to be a filmic or cinematic experience rather than trying to compete with the live experience.”The secret to cinematic merit, he said, is having the time and means to shoot it like a proper movie. That means hiring upward of 40 camera operators; shooting over multiple nights; deploying drones, Spidercams and GoPros; and setting aside a separate dress rehearsal day, when the artist plays without a crowd to shoot extra footage, like close-ups that might not have been possible during the live show. All of the footage is assembled in the editing room “with the precision of a four-minute music video” to create the illusion that what you’re seeing was unfolding in real time. “I guess it’s cheating a little bit,” Akerlund said.These kinds of cheats are common and, to hear filmmakers tell it, necessary. When the “Crazy Rich Asians” director Jon M. Chu made “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” he shot the performance and the audience on separate nights, then edited them together because that, paradoxically, made the audience’s reaction feel more authentic. “I always love concert films where it feels like the audience is really there,” he said. But because of the cameras, the sound recording equipment and the lighting, “audiences don’t react as big” as they would on an ordinary night. “You try to emulate what it feels like,” he said.One of the most surprising things about the making of concert films is just how much tends to be emulated, even simulated, rather than merely captured as is. The actual sound of music being played live in an arena can’t merely be taped: “just a recording of the room would be useless,” Ross said. Instead, dozens of microphones — sometimes more than 100 for larger sites — record the vocals, instruments and crowd on separate tracks, and a rerecording mixer carefully blends them together, adding reverb and echo to simulate the sound of the space.Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the “On the Run Tour” movie. The director Jonas Akerlund acknowledged that the film can never be as good as the live experience.HBOIn other words, the tone of the room is essentially applied like a filter to the raw sounds recorded from the artist onstage. This filter, known as impulse response, takes readings from actual physical places, then “synthetically reproduces the sound of a real space like a club or stadium,” said Jake Davis, the lead mix engineer at SeisMic Sound, an audio facility in Nashville that specializes in concert films.Mixers like Jake and his father, Tom Davis, the SeisMic founder, have a lot of control over the sound in a concert film, and making adjustments is a large part of their job. Some are minor refinements. Others are more like corrections: They make the concert film sound more like what the artist wanted than what necessarily occurred on the night it was filmed. “When you lock something down for a DVD or for streaming or whatever it is, once it’s done, it lives forever,” Tom Davis said. “It never goes away. So you kind of want it to be as good as it can be.”Mixers can blend parts of a song recorded on one night with parts from another night to create the best combined version. They can fix an errant flat note in a guitar solo by manipulating it in postproduction, or they can ask an artist to rerecord a weak vocal in a studio, layering it into the mix so that it sounds as if it had been delivered live. “We copy, cut and paste, like you do on a word processor,” Davis said. “If there was a little clam in the first chorus, but he did it fine in the second chorus in the same part, we can cut and paste that. We can do vocal maintenance. We can fix a little pitch issue, or bend a note a little bit.”Although sound mixers record the crowd with a bevy of microphones hidden around the arena, it’s possible — and indeed, common — to exaggerate the sound of that audience, to artificially give the cheering fans some extra kick. “It’s kind of a dirty secret,” Davis said. “But the sound of the real audience is weak. It’s not enough. You end up adding to it, pumping it up. There’s something psychological to hearing other humans having a good time and reacting — it’s like a sitcom and a laugh track.” Jake Davis said that the ideal balance is to “start with the real reaction” and then simply “make it bigger and more obvious.”Of course, part of the appeal of a live show, even on film, is the impression of reality, and a sense of truth is critical. “The goal of the mix is to enhance the energy of the performance that exists as it went down in the best way possible,” Jake Davis said. “You maintain some element of rawness while taking out things that are distracting, the nuances of a wrong note or a background singer being a little bit off.”Swift at the Metlife Stadium show. Dozens and sometimes hundreds of microphones are placed throughout the site to capture the sound for film.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhile the film version strives to be “as good as it can be for the rest of history,” he said, “there’s a fine line between correcting something a little bit and making it perfect, because it’s not going to be perfect live.” It’s a bit like touching up a portrait in Photoshop: it’s tempting to clear blemishes, but too much airbrushing can make you look fake.Paul Dugdale, the director of “Shawn Mendes: Live in Concert” and “Taylor Swift: Reputation Stadium Tour,” said that while some live shows might lend themselves to “maximum authenticity” as an approach, other huge pop concerts don’t emphasize the authentic in the same way. “For shows that are quite theatrical, there’s a level of artifice — they’ve got screens, they’ve got pyrotechnics, they’ve got costumes, all that kind of stuff,” he said. “For someone like Taylor, I think that allows you to explore further in terms of camera angles and putting the audience in different positions.”A Swift concert, Dugdale pointed out, can last more than three hours, which affords the director more latitude in how to approach the film formally. “You can create texture just like the live show has texture,” he said. “Sometimes you can go heavy-handed with the director’s hand, and sometimes you can completely let go of the steering wheel and let the artist take over.”Despite the high level of difficulty, the job for filmmakers and sound engineers is quite thankless. The best concert films will, to the unwitting viewer, seem like nothing more than filmed concerts — the filmmaking itself remains invisible.“The goal is that you don’t want people thinking about the fact that this was worked on or changed at all from what it was live,” Jake Davis told me. “You just want the audience to be immersed in the experience and to accept that it’s happening in front of them — to feel like they’re there.” But Dugdale noted that however much he tries to plan out a concert shoot, the live aspect will always prove unpredictable. “Making these films, you can be as prepared as you can possibly be, but in the end you have to hold on for dear life and see how it turns out.” More

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    Rudolph Isley, an Original and Enduring Isley Brother, Dies at 84

    He provided harmony vocals and the occasional lead. He also helped write some of the group’s biggest hits, including “Shout,” “Fight the Power” and “That Lady.”Rudolph Isley, who held dual roles in the influential vocal group the Isley Brothers as a mellifluous harmony singer and co-writer of many of their greatest hits, died on Wednesday at his home in Chicago. He was 84.He died in his sleep, his brother Ernie said, adding that he was unaware of any health issues his brother might have had.Mr. Isley spent much of his three decades with the Isley Brothers harmonizing with his brother O’Kelly in support of Ronald Isley’s lead vocals. But he also sang lead on some notable tracks. On “I’ve Got to Get Myself Together,” recorded in 1969, his gentlemanly tone gave the song a touch of grace. He also lent a suave lead to the group’s fleeting entry into the disco field, “It’s a Disco Night (Rock Don’t Stop),” which was a club hit in the United States in 1979 and reached the Top 20 in Britain.The Isley Brothers were always fashionable, and in the 1970s and ’80s Mr. Isley made a fashion statement of his own by wearing hats and furs and carrying a bejeweled cane, giving the Isleys added panache.He and his brothers wrote a number of pivotal hits, beginning with “Shout,” the group’s 1959 breakthrough, which applied the dynamic of gospel music’s call-and-response to a pop context. They also wrote the enduring political anthem “Fight the Power,” a Top Five Billboard hit, as well as the Top 10 pop hits “It’s Your Thing” and “That Lady.”The always fashionable Isleys (from left, Rudolph, Ronald and O’Kelly) in the 1970s.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesSixteen of the Isley Brothers’ albums cracked the Billboard Top 40, 13 were certified gold and nine went platinum or multiplatinum.In 1989, Mr. Isley retired from the mainstream music industry to pursue his long-deferred dream of a career in the ministry, although he continued to sing in church. He also recorded some gospel songs, and in 1996 released a religious album titled “Shouting for Jesus: A Loud Joyful Noise.” He and his brothers were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.Rudolph Bernard Isley was born on April 1, 1939, in Cincinnati, the second of six sons of Sallye (Bell) and O’Kelly Isley. He began singing in church as a child, and during his teen years he and three of the other older Isleys performed together and toured locally.”I have some very special memories of listening to music with my brothers when we were young,” Mr. Isley told the music journalist Leo Sacks for the liner notes to a 1999 boxed set that Mr. Sacks produced, “It’s Your Thing: The Story of the Isley Brothers.” He added: “Billy Ward and the Dominoes, now that was a group. We idolized them. We got our own thing together because we never lost that harmony group dynamic.”In the group’s early days, the eldest brother, Vernon, sang lead. He was killed at age 13 when the bicycle he was riding was struck by a car, and Ronald became the lead singer.The Isleys were still quite young when Rudolph, O’Kelly and Ronald moved to New York to pursue a record deal. Contracts with small labels led to one with RCA, one of the biggest in the business, in 1959, and shortly after that the Isleys wrote and recorded “Shout.” It sold over a million copies and came to be acknowledged as a rock ’n’ roll classic, spawning covers by Dion, Bruce Springsteen, Garth Brooks and many others. (It was also heard in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and other movies.)In 1962, the Isleys had a Top 40 hit with their cover of “Twist and Shout,” written by Bert Berns and Phil Medley and originally recorded a year earlier by the Top Notes. Their recording provided a template for the far more popular version recorded by the Beatles in 1963.For a brief time in 1964, the Isley Brothers’ band included a young guitarist named Jimmy James, who would later be known as Jimi Hendrix.The Isleys signed with Motown in 1965. But despite the label’s reputation for generating hits, they had just one in their brief tenure there, “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” written by the label’s top songwriting team, Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland (with Sylvia Moy). It reached No. 12 on the Billboard chart and No. 3 in Britain. Frustrated by Motown’s controlling approach, the brothers, in an unusual move for an African American act at the time, left the label to form their own, T-Neck Records, named after Teaneck, N.J., where they were based.Switching to a rawer and funkier style influenced by James Brown and Sly Stone, the trio found a new métier, and a new commercial connection. Their 1969 single “It’s Your Thing” rose to No. 2 on Billboard’s pop chart and No. 1 on the magazine’s R&B list.The Isley Brothers on the British television show “Ready Steady Go!” in 1964.Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAt the start of the 1970s, the group expanded to include the two youngest siblings, Ernie and Marvin, along with Rudolph’s brother-in-law, Chris Jasper; all three contributed instrumental work, and Mr. Jasper also sang. The result was a mostly self-contained band, another rarity for Black artists of the day. Together, they pioneered a unique rock ’n’ roll-tinged brand of funk and soul. Over the years, their music covered a wide range of genres, from doo-wop to gospel to quiet-storm ballads.From 1973 through 1981, all the group’s albums went gold, platinum or multiplatinum. Most of the tracks on those albums were co-written by Mr. Isley and the other members.The group also scored a platinum album in 1986 with “Between the Sheets,” whose title track offered their sensual answer to Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” Rudolph Isley shared lead vocals with his brother Ronald on two tracks of that album, the spacey funk number “Way Out Love” and the sensual grind “Slow Down Children.”With the rise of hip-hop, the Isleys’ classic material provided the source for more samples than any act other than James Brown and George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic.The death of O’Kelly Isley from a heart attack in 1986 hit Rudolph particularly hard. The group’s next album, “Smooth Sailin’” (1987), featured just him and Ronald on the cover and was dedicated to O’Kelly. Two years later, Rudolph quit the music business.Still, the ever-resourceful, forward-looking group endured and made a successful comeback in 1996 with the album “Mission to Please,” buoyed by production and writing from R. Kelly. Rudolph Isley reunited with his brothers for one night in 2004, when the group was given a lifetime achievement honor at the BET Awards.In March, Rudolph sued his brother Ronald, claiming that he had sought to secure a trademark for the group under his own name exclusively. The suit claimed that the founding members were “at all times” a “common-law partnership.”Marvin Isley died in 2010 from complications of diabetes.In addition to his brother Ernie, Rudolph Isley’s survivors include his wife, Elaine Jasper, whom he married in 1958; their children, Rudy Jr., Elizabeth, Valerie and Elaine; his brother Ronald; and several grandchildren.“Music and faith, they just run through our blood,” Mr. Isley was quoted as saying in the “It’s Your Thing” liner notes. “I may have stopped singing pop music, but I will always be an Isley Brother.”Bernard Mokam More

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    Review: Arca Struts the Catwalk Between Diva and Meta Diva

    In “Mutant;Destrudo,” her show at the Park Avenue Armory, the experimental musician delivers what is essentially a traditional concert.Amid the boundaries that the musician Arca has explored over the past decade — between technology and nature, male and female, vulnerability and aggression — another has arisen recently: the line between a pop diva and an artist commenting on pop divas.As with those other binaries, Arca hovers somewhere in the blurry, ever-evolving middle of this one: a Schrödinger’s diva, simultaneously performing stardom and deconstructing it.“Mutant;Destrudo,” her four-performance show that opened on Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, is essentially a traditional concert. There is a stage, a large screen behind it that shows a mixture of live and premade video, and a catwalk protruding into the crowd.Regularly during the two-hour show, a camera at the end of the runway relays a thighs-down view of Arca strutting in spike heels as she sings, à la Beyoncé. There’s a piano on one side of the stage, at which she sits for some quieter moments, à la Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift. There are reggaeton beats overlaid with flowing, easygoing raps, à la Rosalía or Bad Bunny. She takes selfies with phones handed up to her.If you squint, this is pop.That is a world in which Arca, the pseudonym of the Venezuelan-born Alejandra Ghersi, has spent time. She started as a producer for Kanye West, FKA twigs, Björk and others as she built a following for her own music, including the kaleidoscopic five-album cycle “Kick,” released in a flurry in 2020 and 2021.But if parts of “Kick” and “Mutant;Destrudo” seem like plays for mainstream eyes and ears, Arca stubbornly resists being too digestible. The Armory show, like Swift’s touring behemoth, picks and chooses from a catalog that is, after only 10 or so years, widely varied. But unlike Swift, Arca’s eras are spiky and hard to define; she doesn’t do anthems. “Destrudo” is billed as being structured in three acts, but the divisions between them are murky.This is restless, unsettled music, evoking both exhilaration and anxiety that a single person can produce — and can be — so many different things. Wednesday’s set began with murmured lullaby torch songs, in the airy yet sultry, prayerful, sometimes crooning voice of “Arca” (2017) and the fifth “Kick” album. The evening’s climax — long, seething, groaning, grinding synthesizer instrumentals — could hardly have been more different.Arca at the synthesizer where she made the kinds of sounds she specialized in at the beginning of her career: glitches, explosions, video-game-style machine-gun rounds, spacily stretched tones.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesBetween those extremes were hip-swaying bits of reggaeton, from the second “Kick,” and explosive electronics; in one number, smooth vocals and a low-slung beat were disrupted by metallic squeals. Songs seemed to end almost arbitrarily, as if Arca were simply ready to move on to something else. The mood was twitchy, fractured, a perpetual transformation.For all the arresting high-tech video imagery — psychedelic layers superimposed until they took on hologram-like pseudoreality — there was a studiedly rough, decidedly non-stadium aspect to the show.Arca’s first costume change — out of a slinky, shimmering black dress into a plastic breastplate with lights at the nipples and a patchwork miniskirt — took place in full view of the audience, without much rushing or showmanship. The awkwardness of how long it took, the lack of spectacle, seemed intentional: This, she seemed to be saying, is the glamorous drudgery we put female artists through. We sometimes saw Arca on video as she lay on an examining chair, as if our perspective was that of her surgeon.Her piano — unlike Swift’s or Lady Gaga’s — is prepared with magnets that turn it into an electroacoustic machine of woozy, otherworldly lyricism, tinged with buzz. And unlike most pop divas, Arca had a synthesizer setup on the other side of the stage, at which she grinned maniacally and made the kind of noise that she specialized in at the beginning of her career: harsh shards in wet earth, glitches, explosions, video-game-style machine-gun rounds, roars, spacily stretched tones.It was the kind of soundscape that fit the show’s title: “Destrudo” is a term relating to the Freudian death drive, a theme in keeping with Arca’s gothy-cyborg self-styling. But while the music occasionally got loud on Wednesday, there was little of the heavy, disorienting, oozingly morphing melancholy of her early work. Lacking the encompassing (if changeable) moods of the albums, this was a performance more endearing than emotional; even the dancey parts were too brief to build up much joy.“Destrudo” follows “Mutant;Faith,” her 2019 production at the Shed. In that period, when she began identifying as a nonbinary trans woman, pre-“Kick,” it landed more squarely on the side of experimental performance art. Arca did the show in a dirt pit, wore hoofed stilts, used a stripper-pole synthesizer and rode a mechanical bull.Now, trying more than ever to have it both pop and not, she is still fascinating, but — maybe inevitably — not fully satisfying.At the Armory, she was charming, game, sweetly grateful to the crowd. “This is fun, right?” she said, sincerely, as she paused to correct something wrong with the technology in her high heels that seemed meant to translate her steps into sounds. And it was fun — sort of.ArcaThrough Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org More

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    Taylor Swift ‘Eras Tour’ Movie: 4 Takeaways

    There’s something in the singer’s highly anticipated new concert documentary for newcomers and superfans alike.As she greeted the audience at the premiere of her new movie, Taylor Swift sounded a bit sheepish.“You’re stuck with me, because I’m going to sit with you and watch this thing,” she told the crowd at the packed premiere of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” held at the sprawling Grove shopping complex on Wednesday night. Well, one of the crowds, anyway: Thirteen of the theaters at the Grove’s AMC multiplex were filled with eager fans, and Swift stopped by all of them to give a special introduction, eventually settling into an auditorium’s audience that included stars like Adam Sandler and Julia Garner.Regular moviegoers can only hope that an apologetic Swift shows up for more house calls as her concert documentary makes its way into theaters this week. Though it was originally set for release on Friday, Swift just announced that the film will begin screening one day early because of fan demand.Still, even if they can’t watch “The Eras Tour” alongside the singer herself — who came to the premiere in a pale blue Oscar de la Renta gown and danced in her seat for most of its running time — the movie is poised to deliver in a major way.For theatrical exhibitors, whose business has been in jeopardy since the actors strike scuttled plans to release tentpole movies like “Dune” this fall, “The Eras Tour” is being likened to the second coming of Barbenheimer: It’s got the grab-your-besties-and-go appeal of “Barbie,” the shock-and-awe soundscape of “Oppenheimer” and the box-office tracking to rival them both. Bullish film analysts expect an opening weekend between $150 to $200 million, meaning “The Eras Tour” has a shot at taking this year’s box-office tiara from “Barbie,” which notched a $162 million debut.In the meantime, here are four of the takeaways from the premiere.Expect no extras, though you’ll get a front-row seatIf fans are looking for insight into how Swift put her show together, or what was going on in her life behind the scenes, they won’t find it in “The Eras Tour”: There is no additional embroidering in this concert documentary, which was culled from Swift’s six-night August stint at the SoFi stadium in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles. For those who caught one of the 53 shows Swift played in North American this past year, or for the fans hoping to see Swift in her remaining American dates (an international tour begins in February), this film is more or less the same thing as buying a concert ticket.Swift stopped by all 13 screens in the multiplex of them to give each audience a special introduction.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere’s one crucial difference, of course: No stadium seat could offer as close a look at Swift’s performance as this documentary, which is vigorously shot and directed by Sam Wrench. And since the 33-year-old singer designed “The Eras Tour” as a journey through the shifting musical genres of her past 10 albums — from the country-pop “Fearless” all the way up to the recent, stripped-down records “Folklore,” “Evermore” and “Midnights” — this film is the closest thing that exists to a definitive document of one of the world’s biggest performers.In that way, it’s perfect viewing for newcomers and superfans alike: Curious people who were unwilling to shell out for tour prices can now check out Swift at a reduced rate, while Swifties who’ve already attended the concert can relive it in a compelling close-up. My teenage niece, who went to one of the SoFi shows, accompanied me to the premiere and was thrilled by the better look at Swift’s facial expressions and choreography. I noticed that hardly a song goes by without some big smiles from Swift and her backup singers: There’s enough joy on these faces to power entire blocks of Barbie Land.Only a few songs get snipped“The Eras Tour” runs a robust two hours and forty-eight minutes, and though that’s nearly as long as “Oppenheimer,” Swift’s real-life concerts during this tour were even more mammoth, typically clocking in just shy of three and a half hours. Do fans have reason to fear there have been major cuts to the set list?By my count, only a handful of her regular songs go missing on the way to the big screen, including “The Archer,” “Cardigan,” “Wildest Dreams,” and “no body no crime,” which Swift performed at SoFi with the band Haim.Taylor Swift fans Karen Boncan, left, and Petrushka Seville at the premiere on Wednesday.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressStill, fans will get plenty of bang for their buck, since Swift performs nearly 40 songs during the movie, including a 10-minute version of “All Too Well” and two other bonus tunes, “Our Song” and “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” that Swift plucked from a rotating selection of surprise songs during her tour. And another trim is sure to be appreciated: Swift now moves between the different eras and costume changes in the blink of an eye onscreen, eliding all the time those segues took onstage.In Hollywood, everyone is a SwiftieBlockbuster premieres have been hard to come by since the actors strike began, and an eclectic cross-section of celebrities turned out for the “Eras Tour” premiere, including Sandler, Mariska Hargitay and the singers Maren Morris and Hayley Kiyoko. Fashion choices ran the gamut from silver sequins to cowgirl fringe, and Alex Atallah, a co-founder of the NFT marketplace OpenSea, entered the theater lobby sporting the colorful, tie-dyed “I Am Kenough” hoodie seen on Ryan Gosling in “Barbie.”“I have very few shirts with this many pastel colors,” Atallah told me before posing for a photo with the “Barbie” co-star Simu Liu.Nearby, I caught Flavor Flav deep in conversation with Swift’s father, Scott. Though they made for an unlikely duo, the 64-year-old rap icon is no fly-by-night fan: He said that he’d seen the “awesome” Swift on two previous tours.“I’ve been a Swiftie for the longest, bro,” Flav insisted.“I’ve been a Swiftie for the longest, bro,” said the rapper Flavor Flav.Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty ImagesBut Swift’s biggest invite was reserved for another A-lister (and no, it wasn’t her new beau Travis Kelce, busy with a football game the next day): Before the premiere began, Swift dined and posed for pictures with Beyoncé, who has her own concert movie “Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé” due for release on Dec. 1. Like “The Eras Tour,” Beyoncé’s film bypassed traditional Hollywood studios and will be distributed by AMC Theaters.Finally, Swift will enjoy some big-screen successThough she’s a superstar in the music industry, Swift’s forays into film haven’t been as well-received. Her last three movie credits as an actress include the minor young-adult drama “The Giver,” the memorably cataclysmic adaptation of “Cats,” and last year’s David O. Russell-directed “Amsterdam,” which coaxed Swift to pop in for a quick cameo and then promptly ran her over.Unlike Lady Gaga, who has lately toggled between music and movies in equal measure, Swift has treated Hollywood as more of a side hustle, only committing to the occasional supporting role. But last year, after she signed a deal with Searchlight to write and direct an upcoming original film, eyebrows were raised all over town: Was Swift ready to take her movie career a bit more seriously?Bullish film analysts expect opening weekend box office takings between $150 to $200 million for the movie.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt remains to be seen whether Swift will star in her feature directorial debut, but “The Eras Tour” still supplies her with some much-needed big-screen juice. A fun presence in her biggest numbers, like the bouncy “Shake It Off” and rocking “Look What You Made Me Do,” Swift is even more appealing in acoustic numbers that trade busy choreography for simple guitar playing. And in the centerpiece song “Tolerate It,” she shows acting chops during a well-choreographed routine about a dinner date gone wrong: It begins with her beseeching an inexpressive lover and ends with her swatting a vase of roses off the table.Her real talent, though, is selling humility with a megawatt charisma that few celebrities can muster. Introducing one song, Swift insists she had to invent an outsized version of herself in order to write it: “In my fantasy, I’m not a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair,” the singer says, even though she’s spent the whole film looking impossibly glamorous in sky-high Christian Louboutin heelsAnd yet, you’re still tempted to believe her. What is that, if not a movie star? More

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    Devo’s Future Came True

    Half a century after Devo began singing about cultural De-Evolution, the visionary new wave band would have preferred to be wrong.Devo isn’t overjoyed about being prescient. The band got started half a century ago as a satirical art statement. But by now, much of what Devo mocked has become inescapable. Gerald Casale, who founded Devo with Mark Mothersbaugh, said, “If somebody would have told you 50 years ago where we would be at as a culture now, you probably wouldn’t have believed it. Neither would I. But here we are.”Devo’s lone hit, “Whip It” in 1980, only reached No. 14 in the United States. But the influence of Devo’s buzzy, blippy synthesizer tones, its robotic moves and its re-contextualized retro graphics has grown ubiquitous, from commercials to cartoons and perhaps even into K-pop, where synthesizers, uniforms and tightly synced dance routines reign. This year, with a continuing world tour and a new, 50-song boxed set, “50 Years of De-Evolution” — a knowing assortment of hits and obscurities — Devo is savoring and reasserting its legacy.“I think they’re highly underrated in terms of the zeitgeist,” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said in a phone interview. “Devo challenged the idea of what a rock band could be. It felt like rock was mutating. It made me realize, ‘Oh, there aren’t any rules. You know, you can do anything.’”Devo’s ideas grew out of anger, political disillusionment, visual instincts, sonic ambitions, skepticism about rock and an absurdist sense of humor. Its abiding streak of outsider independence was forged in Akron, Ohio, where the band spent its formative years before finding a national audience on the early punk circuit. “It worked to our advantage to be in a cultural wasteland for years,” Mothersbaugh, 73, said from his Los Angeles studio, Mutato Muzika.“It was mostly, you know, a smartass college guy being clever,” Casale said of the band’s “de-evolution” conceit. What actually occurred in American culture, he said, “is beyond my worst dystopian nightmare.”-Devo envisioned American culture evolving in the wrong directions, or devolving: dumbing down, losing individuality, succumbing to corporate imperatives and treating people as machines while anesthetizing itself with consumption. Those trends, to put it mildly, have not reversed.“We were noticing an exponential increase in a certain kind of dysfunction going on. And we labeled it,” said Casale, who is 75. He was also in Los Angeles, sitting in front of a favorite interview backdrop: a sliced-up world map with the word “DE-EVOLUTION” emblazoned across it. “But it was mostly, you know, a smartass college guy being clever. I didn’t really think that we’d go where we went, because de-evolution is real. And this is beyond my worst dystopian nightmare.”Devo anticipated the ascent of music videos in the 1980s, conceiving its early songs as inseparable from surreal short films. (The band expected video Laserdiscs to replace albums; it didn’t happen. The “visual album” would arrive much later.) By the early 1980s, Devo’s concerts had the band interacting with video footage, despite the era’s primitive technology. And decades before social media or influencers, Devo foresaw that artists and other public figures would end up marketing themselves as brands.Yet Devo’s founders also went on to participate in the mainstream consumer culture they distrusted. “We understood that dichotomy and that duplicity from the beginning,” Casale said. “We were playing with it. You know, having your cake and eating it, too. Making fun of corporations and being one. You have to suck it up and be an adult about it.”Since the 1980s, in the increasingly long gaps between Devo’s albums and tours, both Casale and Mothersbaugh have had extensive careers in film and advertising. Casale has directed music videos for acts including the Cars, Soundgarden and Foo Fighters, and Mothersbaugh has composed music for more than 150 films, television shows and video games, among them “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Lego Movie” and “Cocaine Bear.” The closing song on “50 Years of De-Evolution,” “Watch Us Work It,” was initially commissioned for a Dell computer ad.Devo’s founders studied visual arts at Kent State University, where on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot dead four antiwar protesters. The school shut down the next day, and in the unexpected hiatus, Casale, Mothersbaugh and some friends began conceptualizing what would become Devo.“We learned from Kent State that rebellion is obsolete,” Mothersbaugh said. “If the government doesn’t agree with you, and you become too big of a pain in the butt for them, they just push you back down and shoot.“And I was thinking, well, who does change things in this world?” he continued. “Look at TV. It’s Madison Avenue. It’s commercials. It’s subversion. You get people to eat sugar that’s not good for them. You get them to buy cars that are stupid and not well-designed. And they’re happy when they do it. And we thought, what if you use those techniques for something else? What if you use those techniques to talk about de-evolution?”Casale was in a blues band; Mothersbaugh was in a prog-rock band. Neither was satisfied with what rock had become by the early 1970s. Arena-rock featured preening, strutting, self-indulgent stars. Early punk was developing its own orthodoxy. “You know, ‘You have to use these three chords and dress like this,’ and you had to a have certain kind of lyric that was anti-intellectual rage,” Casale said. “Devo was angry, but our anger was not misplaced, and it was certainly articulated, and it was not anti-intellectual. We were like punk scientists.”Devo coalesced as a band with Casale’s and Mothersbaugh’s brothers, both named Bob, on guitars, and the crisp, unswerving drummer Alan Myers. The band members’ backgrounds show up on early recordings included on the “50 Years” set, like the 1974 “I’m a Potato”; it’s a blues shuffle, but Casale was already singing about “De-evolution/Self execution/No solution.”Mothersbaugh was determined to change rock’s sonic vocabulary, and he got his hands on an early Mini-Moog synthesizer. “One of the Futurists had said that the contemporary orchestra does not have the instruments that are capable of creating the sound of an industrial society,” he said. “I wanted to know what the sounds were for 1972, 1973. I was thinking, ‘We’re watching the Vietnam War on television every night.’ And so I’m thinking V-2 rockets, mortar blasts, ray guns. And I felt like TV commercials were using synthesizers more successfully than bands. I was looking to create a new soundscape for the world.”Devo’s music quickly grew more dissonant and angular. Reznor described Devo’s first albums as “a rock band with electronics that sound like they’re from the TV repair shop thrown in,” he said. “That informed me a lot about what the role of a synthesizer and electronics could be.”Gerald Casale, left, and Mark Mothersbaugh performing at Lollapalooza in 1996. “Devo challenged the idea of what a rock band could be,” said Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesThe band’s early shows in Akron were largely greeted with indifference or hostility, a reception that only solidified the band’s sense of purpose and idiosyncratic showmanship. They performed in uniforms bearing corporate-style logos; they honed stiff-limbed dance routines. They sometimes wore masks, plastic hairpieces or their distinctive “energy domes”: tiered red plastic hats inspired by an Art Deco-era light fixture.By the time Devo started national and international touring, they were as tightly rehearsed as they were eccentric, a stark contrast to the anarchic punk bands playing the same clubs. Their homemade films and videos introduced recurring characters like the adult-sized, falsetto-voiced infant Booji Boy and the crass Big Entertainment executive Rod Rooter, whose dialogue, Casale said, was drawn entirely from actual meetings. On the coasts and abroad, Devo found a fan base among artists and musicians; Brian Eno produced Devo’s 1978 debut album, “Q: Are We Not Men? A:We are Devo!”“They found different ways of getting under people’s skin,” said Martyn Ware, a founding member of the English electropop bands Human League and Heaven 17; he first saw Devo in the late 1970s. “The artiness of it all, this idea of the interaction with film and presenting yourself as almost Dadaist, was something that just completely entranced us. It felt more like a Futurist manifesto than a rock band. And with de-evolution, there’s a little bit of Nostradamus there too.”Devo’s third album, “Freedom of Choice,” had Robert Margouleff, who had worked with Stevie Wonder, as associate producer. It brought out enough of a groove in the songs to yield a hit with “Whip It.” For Devo, that was a decidedly mixed blessing.Suddenly, its record company was paying attention. “When it finally was a hit, they were like, ‘Do another “Whip It”! Do another “Whip It”!,’” Casale recalled. “We couldn’t even imagine how to do that. We moved on. We were using different equipment, having different ideas, talking about different things, and we were incapable of making another ‘Whip It.’”Record-company pressures, self-consciousness and the temptations of new technology took a toll on Devo’s later albums. “Something went off the rails,” Casale said bluntly. “It got very intricate, very busy, with too many little sounds. So it started just sounding like ditties, trinkets and children’s music. Devo was always, like, humans playing like machines. Now suddenly it was machine music for real. So the interesting part of Devo — playing tightly like robots but really doing it — was buried.“Toys do run away with you,” he added. “We always cautioned about that, but there we were, including ourselves in the equation. We did say, ‘We’re all Devo.’ We didn’t exempt ourselves, and we proved it.”By the late 1980s, Devo’s principals were building their other careers, and after the 1990 album “Smooth Noodle Maps,” Devo didn’t make another studio album for 20 years. Casale was directing while amassing songs he’d eventually record as Jihad Jerry and the Evildoers. Mothersbaugh had taken on the prodigious job of scoring “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” composing for an entire show every week; it was the beginning of his prolific career writing soundtrack music. He’s had enough unused material from films to release full-length instrumental albums like the 2021 “Mutant Flora,” which began as additional music for “Thor: Ragnarok.”Devo in Copenhagen this year on its world tour. Is there hope for the future? “Even if it’s only greed, there has to be some human trait that’s going to avert total disaster,” Mothersbaugh said.Tom Little/ReutersMothersbaugh overcame ambivalence to start making commercials in the late 1980s. The first was for Hawaiian Punch, with dancing robots. “Yeah, I’m doing it — but I’m making a commercial for sugar,” he recalled thinking.A decade earlier, an audience member had accused Devo of placing subliminal messages — “submit and obey” — in its first film, “In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution.” There were none, but Mothersbaugh hadn’t forgotten the notion. He decided to add a subliminal message to the ad, intoning “Sugar is bad for you,” under a blast of drums. He went on to place other messages — “Question authority,” “Choose your mutations carefully” — in other ads. “I did about 30 commercials like that before I got caught,” he said.Devo also licensed its own songs to advertisers, sometimes with severe regrets afterward — a cringe-worthy Swiffer ad rewriting “Whip It” — and sometimes with a proud sense of subversion, like a beer ad using “Freedom of Choice,” a song that mocks the illusion of freedom.Through the decades, Devo has kept on touring, and its songs have continued to resonate with fans who can hear them as snarky predictions or present-day realities. Songs like “It’s a Beautiful World” can now describe the way glossy social media presentations spawn anxiety and depression.Yet Devo’s upbeat music and jokey visuals have always defied the songs’ more dire implications. “That’s the ironic thing about Devo,” Mothersbaugh said. “At the end of the day, we’ve always been hopelessly optimistic that even if it’s only greed, there has to be some human trait that’s going to avert total disaster. Because nobody wants total disaster, even though they do want to make a killing in the meantime. It’s like, you could trade a little bit of your killing for people staying around another hundred thousand years.”De-evolution doesn’t mean giving up hope. “I like the idea of the future,” Mothersbaugh said. “I like seeing what’s going to come. Sometimes you’re really disappointed. But sometimes something amazing happens that you really love.” More

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    This Is Not a Taylor Swift Profile

    Section 301, In the second-to-highest tier of Levi’s Stadium, floats 105 feet above Santa Clara, Calif. It comprises 251 seats — a mere hamlet in the vast 64,000-seat general kingdom of the place, but it was our hamlet, and on the last Saturday in July, we took up each one of those seats and watched, our collective breath held, as Taylor Swift emerged from a bevy of billowing pastel parachutes and rose up on a platform to perform the 47th show of her Eras Tour. A few songs in, she announced, laughing, that her father told her that Santa Clara had named her its honorary mayor during her two-night stay there and that the entire town had been renamed Swiftie Clara. On the way in, we saw the Police Department cheerfully exchanging friendship bracelets with legions of Swifties. The microcosm of Section 301 offered this same sense of sorority. What a nice neighborhood we had moved into, my 15-year-old son, Ezra, and I. Within minutes of sitting down, we were already a community with a shared, ardent sense of purpose. Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The mood was solemn — spiritual, even. I have prayed at dawn at the Temple Mount. I have stood among quivering supplicants at the graves of biblical forefathers. I have walked in trembling silence as I entered farther and farther into the inner sanctums of the Vatican. This was like that, except for girls. The young women to Ezra’s left wore moody black “Reputation”-era dress and could not have been more than 16. They were speechless and breathless and did not move or sit down once the entire night because they were afraid they might miss something. Three rows back sat a line of tweens in pink sundresses, white cowgirl hats and sparkling cowgirl boots — Taylor Swift’s debut era for her self-titled album. To my right were two men wearing matching T-shirts that said: “IT’S ME, HI. I’M THE HUSBAND. IT’S ME.” Their wives, who were friends, chose (smartly) to sit together on one side. During songs they didn’t know, which were most of them, they talked to one another, using words like “reps” and “C.E.O.” and “acquisition.” But listen: Over my right shoulder, just above the HUSBANDs and their wives, stood a young man with a glitter heart around his eye, like the one Taylor wears on the pastel cover of the “Lover” album, accompanied by a young woman, I guess his girlfriend, who wore a sparkly purple dress, like the one Taylor wears on the cover of “Speak Now.” If our kingdom was also our high school and our hamlet our homeroom, they were our prom king and queen. On the stage below, Taylor made her way from her “Lover” era to her “Fearless” one, and suddenly she was singing “Love Story,” one of her many early songs in which a girl loves a boy but he doesn’t love her back, or he doesn’t know to love her back because of some other girl who has unjustly commandeered his love. Or, in the case of “Love Story,” she’s Juliet, and there’s so much drama with Romeo’s family, and we all know what’s going to happen if they can’t be together.But then we get to the bridge, and the story changes. In “Love Story,” just as Juliet is despairing and hopeless, Romeo drops to his knees and tells her he has talked to her father and asks her to marry him. And here, in 301, on our very own balcony, something crazy happens. Over my and Ezra’s right shoulders, just behind the HUSBANDs, THE PROM KING ASKS THE PROM QUEEN TO MARRY HIM! AND THE PROM QUEEN SAYS YES!!!Does Section 301 go wild! We take pictures and congratulate them. We ask to see the ring. We shake our heads with our mouths open because this night is sparkling and young love is amazing.“Did you see that?” one of the HUSBANDs asked. I told him I did.“What are you writing down?” he asked. I told him that I’m a writer for this magazine and that I was writing about Taylor Swift.“Huh,” he said. “I would think that they’d give The New York Times better seats.”“You and me both,” I answered. The truth is, I bought these seats on my own.“Are you talking to her?” he asked. I told him no. I told him I had made my requests but was turned down. My boss, too. Her publicist had politely told us that she was too busy to do an interview. And that’s probably true. Or maybe she has an exclusive somewhere else. Or — and this was what I’d been thinking lately — maybe we were in entirely new territory. She hasn’t done a traditional magazine profile since 2019. She announced this tour on “Good Morning America” and her very own social-media accounts. She released two pandemic albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” by dropping them into the world with a day’s notice. For “folklore,” she released a full-length film in which she expounds on each song; it was called “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions,” and it was directed and produced by Ms. Taylor Alison Swift and needed no intermediary to explain it to her audience.She has become one of a new breed of postmedia celebrities who have set new rules of engagement with both the media and the fans. Technology has risen to meet these new rules, and perhaps there really is nothing I can offer her, that we the media can offer her, that would help her sell more albums or become better known or more successful or more beloved than she already is. Witness this historic cultural event: this no-signs-of-stopping, local-economy-upending tour. Eras is its own news cycle, its own tabloid, its own Tumblr, its own news release and, as we would find out in a few weeks, its own movie set.And we in Section 301 were enthralled by her, even though we couldn’t actually see her from where we were sitting. All we could really see was a tiny figure in an angelic dress, running across the stage down below. Our only proof that she was actually in the stadium was that the people close to the stage seemed to believe that she was, and we chose to believe them. But it didn’t even matter that we couldn’t see her. Our devotion is maximal; her engagement is total. We were in a trance. “That’s crazy,” said the HUSBAND, who turned back to the other HUSBAND to discuss, I think, baseball.Now, below, the mayor of Swiftie Clara was sitting at a moss-covered piano for a song called “Champagne Problems.” It’s a song about a woman who turns down a man’s proposal. Some of us in Section 301 shared a knowing laugh-nod because we knew that our prom queen’s rejecting the king’s proposal had been a possible outcome of what we just saw, and we were all very happy that we didn’t have to sit in that particular awkwardness. I looked up over my shoulder at the prom queen again. Her attention was burrowed toward the stage, as she mouthed the words to all the songs in deep concentration. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThe HUSBAND was talking to me again. He was saying he’d heard that Taylor Swift stood to make a billion dollars by the time this tour was through, and was asking if I had, too, but I needed him to repeat the question. I was still thinking about our prom queen, in her purple dress, about the way your life could change in the middle of a song you’d been listening to for years. I was thinking about the notion of dividing a life into befores and afters — into eras; I was thinking about the way that it feels as if you’re always leaving things behind. Ezra and I had arrived hours before showtime, to a stadium that was already almost completely full. The sun was still bright when we went to take our spots on the merch line, which — how can I describe it? Have you ever seen old pictures of Ellis Island? I told Ezra to stay close.We thought we were beating the system by ascending to the third level, but the joke was on us. We saw two merch stands, advertising $70 hoodies and $35 T-shirts. We had been warned that the sheer numbers would create the kind of chaos that exhausts a concertgoer before the opening act. I’d read savage stories about fans’ fainting in line or wearing adult diapers. But our line was peaceful; what nobody talked about when they posted crowd photos on social media was how gentle the experience was, an atmospheric sage-burning in time for the season of this football stadium’s normal, violent uses. Around us, stranger approached stranger and held out a wrist full of beaded bracelets that named various Taylor Swift albums, which were here doing business as “eras,” to choose from; stranger took another era off her own wrist and traded it back, a wordless ritual that everyone understood. Stranger was no longer stranger but friend. They were dressed as circus ringleaders and fully rendered mirrorballs. They were swamp creatures and zombies. They wore bustled strapless petticoated gowns; they donned black velvet hooded capes. They were girls in the bleachers; they were enchanted to meet you.The organizing principle of the Eras Tour is that it is a celebration of Taylor Swift’s own eras — how, at 33, she has already cycled through so many periods of identity on her public journey from girl to woman. Her life story is one that you could read about in the reams of magazine profiles that have been written about her over the years, one that even the least Swift-engaged young women across at least two generations have learned by sheer internet use and osmosis: She grew up on a Christmas-tree farm in Wyomissing, Pa., where she would listen to Shania Twain and Faith Hill and LeAnn Rimes and watch VH1’s “Behind the Music” and record demo tapes to send to Nashville. At 12, she sang the national anthem at a 76ers game. Soon after, she called her friends to see if they wanted to go shopping with her, but they all said they were busy. So her mother took her to the mall instead, and there were her friends, hanging out together. Her mother turned her around and took her to a different mall, but you can imagine that Taylor Swift died a little that day, and what she was reborn as was someone for whom there was not enough love and approval in the whole world. She would write a song about the experience, and she would feel better. She would realize that this new person she had become was someone whose best work would come from her reactions to the world, her urgent metabolization of her pain into poetry.The Swifts moved to Nashville to help support Taylor’s career, and one night, at a talent showcase at the Bluebird Cafe, she caught the eye of a Universal executive named Scott Borchetta. In 2005, Borchetta started his own label, Big Machine, and signed her immediately. It soon became clear that her music could serve the audience segment that country music had long neglected — teenage girls.“Which era are you?” one of three young women behind us in line asked. Have I mentioned the glitter? It was everywhere, and these three were covered in it. They were 18 or 19, and the one who asked me was wearing a gold, fringey dress, which connotes the “Fearless” era. “You Belong With Me,” off Swift’s second album, won a Video Music Award for best female video. During her speech, Kanye West stormed the stage and announced that it was actually Beyoncé who had made the best video of the year, leaving Taylor standing there, frozen, stunned and confused for too long a period. You could see in the ensuing years, as she talked about it in the press, that she was slowly coming to understand what really happened on that stage, which was that she had been murdered again, right there in front of everyone she knew and respected.“Oh,” I said to the young woman who posed the question, looking down at my outfit. I was wearing a bootleg gray T-shirt with a design of Taylor’s face wearing sunglasses. The sunglasses reflected back the numbers 1989. “I guess I’m ‘1989’? That was the first album I liked, but ‘Reputation’ is my favorite.”Her friends were in different eras, too. One was wearing a variation on a fluffy purple dress that a lot of them were wearing — the “Speak Now” era — and the other was wearing a black fedora and black sequin hot pants and a T-shirt that said: “WHO’S TAYLOR SWIFT ANYWAY? EW,” from the “Red” era. Part of the Swiftian ethos is learning how to take something that seems like a diss and turn it into a last laugh.“The era isn’t the album you like,” the “Red” one said. “It’s the one you are.”“Like, it’s where you’re at these days, you know?” the “Speak Now” one said.I nodded. Made sense. Ezra had to go to the bathroom, but so many of the men’s rooms had been turned into women’s rooms for the event that we hadn’t seen one from the line so far. I sent him off.Taylor released “Speak Now” the year after the Kanye incident. They had become something like friends; they even had dinner sometimes. By then, she seemed to feel bad for him. The world had judged him harshly for his behavior. The literal president, Barack Obama, had called him a jackass. Taylor wrote a song that is almost certainly about Kanye, called “Innocent.” “Who you are is not what you did,” it goes. On a visit to her Nashville apartment, a journalist noticed a framed photo of the moment Kanye interrupted her on the V.M.A. stage, a twisted reminder of either the fact that you can triumph over your own repeated murder or the fact that at any moment of triumph someone will be there to kneecap you. Ezra returned from the bathroom. “Wow,” he said. “The men’s room was emp-ty.” We’d been in the line for what seemed like hours by then. He’d grown a little bit of beard while he was gone. “It was really nice, actually. Peaceful.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesBy the time “Red” came out in 2012, Taylor was still holding on to who she wanted to be: a hardworking, songwriting-obsessed, fan-obsessed country-singing juggernaut. But if this story were one of Taylor’s beloved “Behind the Music” episodes, an ominous voice would come in and say that here was where things started to fray. People were starting to say that she dated too much. They said she cared too much. They accused her of being insincere. Some of the songs on her new album, “1989,” were about old relationships, but a lot of them featured this cartoon version of herself that she was hearing about — the version that stays out too late and goes on too many dates (“Shake It Off”), or the one that has a long list of ex-lovers who will tell you she’s insane (“Blank Space”). She stopped dating, and in the place of male romantic partners she formed a supergroup of famous female friends — everyone from Lena Dunham to the model Karlie Kloss to Lorde to Selena Gomez — and on the tour for “1989,” she marched those friends of hers out onto the stage for everyone to see. Take that, mallrat bitches of Wyomissing!Her music had changed by then. Suddenly, her slow creep from country sped into pure pop, leaving country behind, wishing it well and taking only its tradition of sinuous storytelling with her. Her voice changed, too. Gone was the yodelly vocal flip of the country singer. By then, we had endured a long moment of female artists whose voices seemed outsize for the body of a regular human: melismatic, with 10 notes to a syllable of a word, or a gravelly voice, where a woman sounds as if she is digging down, grinding something out. Consider Taylor’s approach: a voice so pure and pretty that it makes you wonder why so many of her musical peers and predecessors work so hard. It’s not an otherworldly voice, but a specifically worldly one. She sings how you would sing if you were talking and became so overcome with emotion that your voice was lifted and carried by it. It’s how I would sing if I could. Now Ezra wanted to check out the concession stand. I gave him some money and sent him off, noting a subtle balding that had begun around his temples. Two women wearing stuffed snakes around their necks came up, and one handed me her phone and asked if I could take their picture.The snake is Taylor’s biggest and best version of the diss-to-last-laugh boomerang, the “WHO’S TAYLOR SWIFT ANYWAY? EW” writ impossibly large and deadly. After the “1989” tour, in 2015, after the showboating of the friends onstage, after moving to New York and starting a new life, things got weird. In 2016, her friend Kanye resurfaced with a lyric in a new song called “Famous” that went: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous.” He made an accompanying video that featured what looked like Taylor Swift naked in bed with him (along with several other naked celebrities), though it was only a likeness of her. Taylor was appalled by it, but Kanye said he had her permission. His wife at the time, Kim Kardashian, released an edited video clip that appeared to support Kanye’s claim. Taylor continued to deny it, and later, when the full video surfaced, it was clear that Taylor was telling the truth. Now it was war. Kim Kardashian posted snake emojis, and everyone knew she was talking about you-know-who. A crowd at a Kanye show chanted, “[Expletive] Taylor Swift!” This came after a minor Twitter beef with Nicki Minaj and amid a falling-out with Calvin Harris. It seemed as though the entire world had turned on her. Now, they said, it was clear that she had always been a fraud. Now, they said, it was clear that even her feminism wasn’t real; it consisted of lining up her pretty, mostly white friends onstage to take pictures or wear matching bathing suits on the Fourth of July. And what kind of feminism was that video for “Bad Blood,” which features a bajillion famous women, when the song itself is said to be about a grudge Taylor had against Katy Perry?Taylor is a digital native. She watched this all play out and knew she couldn’t fight the tidal wave that had come for her. She nuked her social media and disappeared. Her website was nothing but a black page. When she re-emerged on social media, it was with a grainy video of — was that … ? It was a snake.“Reputation,” released a few months later, is an album full not of apology but of confession (real or performed). It is filled with ferocious songs of self-loathing, of admitted (ibid.) manipulations, of a self-awareness so minute that it is uncomfortable to look at directly. Witness “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” another song that is supposedly about Kanye, in which she begins laughing too hard to sing when she talks about forgiving him. Witness “End Game,” in which she sings, “Ooooh, I got some big enemies.” If you watch the Netflix special that documents the “Reputation” tour, you’ll see there’s a moment when she looks around at the stadium cheering for her. Much has been made about the Taylor Swift Surprise Face, an aw-shucks meme that might have been its own impetus for cancellation in the first place — you’re not allowed to show your surprise at your dominance during your dominance, even if you mean it. But what is the appropriate response to finding out that after your brutal death and your miraculous rebirth, you’re still so, so beloved? You can see in her eyes that she wasn’t just back in her fans’ embrace; she was realizing, night after night, that she never left it.Ezra returned with some nachos. I don’t want to brag, but he’s a doctor now! He had gotten married and bought a co-op downtown. They toasted me at the wedding, he said, me in this endless line for T-shirts.I saw someone draped in a sheet, and I wondered aloud if maybe it was someone who was afraid that her boss would see her skipping work for a concert. The young woman in front of me, a college student who had come in from Sacramento and was here for a second night in a row, said, “No, that’s all the people that she ghosted in the room” — a reference to “Anti-Hero,” a single from “Midnights.”The college student told me that the night before, she’d been “baptized” — her word. She’s in her 20s now, but she has been listening to Taylor Swift since she was a teenager. She used to sing her songs in front of a mirror, alone in her bedroom, and Taylor Swift was a part of her childhood, not just in the way you look back fondly, but in the ways you look back with embarrassment.“All the ways you’re so ashamed of the person you were right before this moment,” she said. “You could so easily be ashamed of singing Taylor Swift in your bedroom. You could leave it behind. But she doesn’t let you. She says, ‘Look, I’m getting older, too.’ You grow with her. What if we weren’t ashamed of our eras? What if we realized they were always with us, and you just didn’t have to feel shame about who you were?” She started crying; baby, I did, too.“Mom,” Ezra said, his aging eyes aglow. “Look!” I turned to see that we had arrived at the front of the line. It was 10 minutes to showtime. We had been in line for two and a half hours, but somehow there was still merch to be had — a miracle! Instead of the T-shirts we were planning to buy, I got us both hoodies. The air was warm, but we were old now, and we got cold more easily than we did before. The sky turned into smeared unicorn pastels; it was in its “Lover” era now. A perfect moon hung over the stadium, a beautiful satellite suspended over a limitless star. Below us, in a purple dress that looked like a cake topper, holding a blue guitar, Taylor pumped her fist and sang: “Long live the walls we crashed through. How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesI couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder at the prom queen. Was I imagining her middle-distance stare? Please keep in mind that the answer is a resolute maybe with a high probability of probably. But hear me out: I was thinking about what my new friend from Sacramento told me in the endless merch line. You could watch this concert — you could watch this entire phenomenon — through the eyes of the idea that Taylor Swift frees women to celebrate their girlhood, to understand that their womanhood is made up of these microchapters of change, that we’re not different people than we were then, that we shouldn’t disavow the earlier versions of ourselves, our earlier eras. If you do look at it that way, you can also imagine why a young woman who tried to share Taylor Swift, this seminal part of her childhood, with the man she loves might have some feelings (again, this is conjecture! I might be making this up based on nothing more than a whim and a projection!) about the fact that he took a song she sang in her childhood bedroom and essentially hijacked it, making it about him and their relationship instead.“There’s not a lot of sex in this show,” one of the HUSBANDs, the other one, said now. They had switched seats, and he was bored by the “Speak Now” era. “That’s because this isn’t for you,” I told him, and I found myself getting angry as I spoke. “She wasn’t created to please you like the other women pop stars. She created herself to please me. She escaped the machine where women are only allowed to be pop stars if they don’t anger or threaten men. This just isn’t for you.”He squinted his eyes and furrowed his brow and pursed his lips and nodded like he understood, but I didn’t care, and I turned away.The HUSBAND wasn’t exactly wrong, though. No matter how grindy or seductive Taylor’s dance moves can be, she is also making funny faces while she does them. During “Vigilante [Expletive],” where the choreography isn’t not like a burlesque show, she has a move where she puts one leg up on the seat of a chair. Sometimes, when she performs it, she puts her hand on her chest, fingers pointing south, and starts to slide it down as she sings, “Lately she’s been dressing for revenge.” But as her hand passes her solar plexus, she gives a scandalized “What? Me?” look and laughs with her audience. Her dancing is a combination of intricately executed choreography and the kind of literal-gesture dancing that has you put your thumb and pinkie to your head to indicate a phone call. It’s a form of dancing I haven’t done in front of anyone for years; it’s the kind of thing I used to do with a group of other young women or girls when there were no boys around, or at least no boys we cared to impress. That’s what this entire concert reminded me of — time I spent in my own teenage bedroom, singing songs and pinballing between sexy stripper moves and goofy square dancing. Maybe that’s what Eras really is: the acknowledgment of girls as people to memorialize, of who we are and who we were, all existing in the same body, on the same timeline. You are your sluttiest version, your silliest version, your most wholesome, your smartest, your dumbest, your saddest, your happiest — all at once. I looked back again at the prom king and queen. He meant well, the poor guy. He knew how much she loved Taylor Swift, probably, and that song in particular. I wonder if she’d seen that TikTok/Instagram Reel where the entire wedding is jump-singing “Love Story,” and maybe one night she turned to him and said: “Look at this. Isn’t this something?” Maybe a plan began to hatch in his head, and he stood over the computer during the Ticketmaster fiasco and figured out how to get two tickets. He landed in the republic of Section 301 knowing, just knowing, that this was going to be the moment. He was going to give her what she wanted. If you listen to Taylor Swift enough, you would think that this was what we wanted.But listen more carefully. Read the liner notes. Decipher the codes. Know your Taylor Swift history. Her songbook is really only minimally about romantic love, and the best part of romantic love, which is its moment of revelation. It’s maximally about the other things that happen to a person in life: about the sometimes-questionable, sometimes-great, sometimes-tragic aftermath of that revelation, but it’s also about loss and betrayal and friendship and revenge.Witness Taylor Swift, in a white dress with sleeves that became what appeared, from where I was sitting, to be wings whenever she ran or danced, singing “My Tears Ricochet” — a song that poses as a love song but is really about a different kind of devastation.She begins curled up on the floor, standing only as her backup dancers, dressed in funereal black, join her. She starts to walk slowly, and they follow her, looking down. In 2019, Scott Borchetta sold Big Machine — and, with it, her masters — to the talent manager Scooter Braun, a man she hated. According to a Tumblr post she wrote in June that year, Borchetta’s company did give her the opportunity to get the masters back, but also insisted that, in exchange, she had to make a commensurate number of new albums, a kind of indentured servitude. She refused, and later announced that she would be rerecording her albums. The originals would be available still, but the new ones, the kosher ones, would be demarcated as “(Taylor’s Version).”Philip Montgomery for The New York Times“My Tears Ricochet” is a heartbreaker. I cannot remember a song about business malfeasance that is so affecting, that would cause 64,000 people to scream on your behalf. It is one of the fiercest and best-crafted songs I’ve ever heard.Especially the bridge. Taylor Swift loves bridges: The internet is rife not just with lists of and debates about the best bridges of her songs, but with videos of people sing-screaming those bridges as they run alongside the mechanism that’s recording them. In particular, she loves the kind of bridge that changes the nature of the song, as in “Out of the Woods,” a song about a doomed relationship where the bridge returns to the perspective of not yet knowing it’s doomed, or “the 1,” where someone breezily catching an ex-lover up on her new life shifts to the tenser question beneath the interaction, about where exactly the relationship went wrong. The bridge in “My Tears Ricochet” goes like this:And I can go anywhere I wantAnywhere I want, just not homeAnd you can aim for my heart, go for bloodBut you would still miss me in your bonesAnd I still talk to you (when I’m screaming at the sky)And when you can’t sleep at night (you hear my stolen lullabies)Imagine an entire football stadium singing about what a jerk you are. Imagine dozens and dozens of entirely-sold-out football stadiums singing about what a jerk you are.She has so far released three rerecorded albums. Some people say that she sounds older, or that she has less of the original emotion that fueled the songs in the first place, but that doesn’t account for what an interesting postmodern experiment the whole enterprise is — Eras as proof of concept, a woman looking back on her youth to remember what she is made of, not with shame but with curiosity and even delight. It had never occurred to me to look back on even my most carefree and innocuous eras with anything but shame. One can enter Swiftiedom at any level: avocation or vocation, background music or full-time job. Being a Swiftie at the highest level means access to an all-consuming, all-absorbing empire of evidence, where all the questions have answers, all the mysteries are solved, where you get to feel excited and smart and involved with something bigger than yourself without ever looking up from your phone. Let’s go straight to that level. That’s the level where we read the codes she leaves in her liner notes with random capital letters to equal the name of the guy that the song is about or a secret message. The level where she seems to indicate to her fans which album is being recorded next via a series of hidden images in an Instagram post. The level where, as I began writing this, legions of fans were crunching and computing and tabulating data to determine if (and why and how) the number 112 is significant when it comes to predicting the releases of her rerecordings.Take the single “Karma,” off “Midnights.” In it, she sings, “Karma is my boyfriend, Karma is a god, Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend. … Spider Boy, king of thieves, weave your little webs of opacity.” As I write this, I have been glitter-pilled enough to not be able to see anything but this: “Boyfriend” is a song by Justin Bieber. “God is a woman” is one by Ariana Grande; so is “my hair.” Now: “sweet like justice,” a lyric in that same song. “Sweetener” is a Grande album; she has a perfume named Sweet Like Candy. “Justice” is a Bieber album. On to “Spider Boy”: Both Grande and Bieber were clients of one Scooter Braun, who also shares his initials with Scott Borchetta. The song is called “Karma”! By the way, Grande and Bieber were among the clients reported to have dropped Scooter Braun as their manager on the day I wrote this sentence, which was also the anniversary of the announcement of the “Reputation” album. (Additional reporting by 1,000 TikTok accounts and a million other sources I found on the internet, which was originally built for the military.)This is the kind of thing you need to understand before you can begin to parse what happened with Karlie Kloss.People had been telling Taylor Swift for years that she looked just like the model, that she reminded them of her, that they should meet. Her first public mention of Karlie Kloss is in a 2012 Vogue cover profile, where Taylor says that she loves Karlie Kloss and would like to bake cookies with her. Karlie tweeted in response to the Vogue quote: “Your kitchen or mine?”The two became inseparable, taking pictures, dressing alike, dancing at concerts. Taylor gave a journalist a tour of her apartment in TriBeCa that included a room where Karlie stayed when she was over. Taylor sang at two Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, the two of them sharing looks and holding hands at various points. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesBut then in 2016, Karlie Kloss punted on a press question about Kim Kardashian, saying that Kim had been “a lovely person to me in the past.” This was right after Snakegate; were things starting to fray? Then, in 2018, Karlie married Josh Kushner, and TAYLOR WAS NOT THERE. But you know who was? SCOOTER BRAUN! WHO IS KARLIE’S FORMER MANAGER! A theory surfaced (one that I will continue to believe no matter what you tell me) that in a supplementary photo in the “Reputation” album, Taylor’s left eye had been replaced with Karlie Kloss’s left eye. What is “Reputation” but an album of coded regrets? What is revenge but exchanging an eye for an eye? I am worried I will be fired for even printing a draft of this theory, but I have examined this from all sides. The evidence is overwhelming! Consider the song off “evermore” called “it’s time to go.”When the words of a sister Come back in whispersThat prove she was not In fact what she seemed,Not a twin from your dreamsShe’s a crook who was caughtThat’s proof enough for me!Then there’s “Maroon,” the beautiful second song on “Midnights.” It begins with the story of waking up the morning after a drunken night. But even before the first verse is up, it’s clear that the story is a sad memory: “I see you every day now” is that first verse’s wistful last line.It goes on to recount a breakup, and the various colors of those memories, the hues of residual anger and loss, but mostly the sadness that’s left when the blush of love colored pink fades: “I feel you no matter what,” it goes. Then, almost in a yell, “The rubies that I gave up!” Its bridge is a simple two lines repeated:And I wake with your memory over meThat’s a real [expletive]ing legacy.I can’t remember the first time I saw the hashtag #kaylor; it’s as if the fan theory that Taylor and Karlie were in a romantic relationship always existed, with all its half-clues and song codes and blurry video that asks if they’re kissing. And maybe, I don’t know, sure. But it’s too simplistic to think of “Maroon” as a traditional romantic breakup song. I do think it’s about Karlie Kloss, though. Like all of Taylor’s songs, even the ones that absolutely probably are about her masters being sold to Scooter Braun, it’s built like a love song. But I would submit that this isn’t for subterfuge, or even to make the song more traditionally relatable. Instead, if this song is about Karlie Kloss, it is about the devastation of losing a best friend. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesI’m not sure why it never occurred to me that there should be more songs about things that aren’t romantic love, why I never thought we deserved more examination of the complex emotionality of the parts of our lives that exist outside it. I’ll tell you, I never think about any of my ex-boyfriends, not ever. But I do think about the times I’ve been screwed over in business by the people who were supposed to be taking care of me. And I do think about the best friends I’ve lost in my lifetime — I wake with their memories over me. If I wrote songs, I’d write about that. You could say that Eras is cynical; you of course would discourage disavowing your past if you needed to remarket it to your audience. But look around this stadium. You don’t enrapture an audience like this unless you’re saying something real — something these legions of girls and women have been waiting to hear: that we are more than the moment on the balcony, where romance awaits. We are also everything before and after that. What Taylor Swift knows is that it’s fun to sing about boys and men and romance, but that those moments when we stand on a balcony as the person we desire gallops toward us, or the moment that we win the affection of a person despite his allegiance to another, are only the smallest parts of a woman’s life, no matter what the movies tell you. The ways that our trust and loyalty are weaponized against us is also the dominion of femaledom — the pain we feel over it, the way we can’t ever quite forget. Those things are worth singing about, too. It is probably true that Taylor Swift was too busy to talk to me. (It is also possible she didn’t like something I wrote about her in the past?) It is almost certainly true that she didn’t want to talk to me — celebrities rarely do. But what is definitely true is that she didn’t need to talk to me. On the day I wrote this, Taylor Swift had 468 million followers across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, whereas The New York Times had a mere 92 million. Absent the usual publicity contract obligation, I honestly can’t see a reason that someone who has revolutionized the relationship a singer can have with her fans should want an intermediary. Certainly she has sold enough albums without our help. But also? I don’t know if I could tell a story about Taylor Swift that’s better than the story she tells about herself, through every song, every dance, every video, every social transmission. She is a master not just at the revelation of information but the analysis of each revelation, the scrutiny of that analysis, the contextualization of it all. The way this concert has consumed the world is the living embodiment of one destabilizing question to me: How could I interpret Taylor Swift better than she does, better than her fans do online, every day, without my interference or input? They’re reading her codes, hunting down her clues, complying with her wishes, finding themselves in her world — a place that someone like me used to have the privilege of visiting alone. She is inventing all of this in real time, and like other great inventions that cut out middlemen, this one might catch on. I’ve watched in recent years as our biggest stars have forgone sitting for interviews in favor of Q. and A.s with an equally famous friend, with an agreed-upon set of softball questions, or, worse, an Instagram post. This isn’t a loss for them; for the most part, they’ll be happy when the entire profile format is eradicated. I know this because over the last couple of years, I was on a leave of absence from The Times, and I worked with the exact kind of people I’d written about for years — actors, directors, producers — and sometimes, when we got to chatting, they would tell me about the time they were profiled and it ruined their life, or a relationship, or caused an embarrassment that they carry with them still. Sometimes they told me about a lie they told an interviewer because they were scared or trying to misdirect the journalist. Not one person I ever interviewed seemed to understand why the public was so interested in them personally. They spent their time defensive, waiting for a sneaky question or worrying how I would subvert something innocent they were saying.So the loss isn’t theirs, but ours — or maybe it’s just mine. Because I like writing other things, but I love writing celebrity profiles. To me, there’s no better way to understand the culture, and to understand the culture is to understand the world — to learn about ourselves by learning about the people we chose to celebrate, the people we voted to represent us in our own imaginations. I don’t know, maybe I’m just too in my earnestness era. Maybe I’m trying to call something a cultural shift when really it’s just a personal one. And it’s not even a big one: If profiles are over, I could, I don’t know, cover whatever else it is that this magazine covers. I could go anywhere I want, just not home. What I’m really saying is that once you go deep-state on Taylor — on the theories, on the codes, on the meanings — once you allow yourself to start thinking of your life in terms of eras, you can’t help but find yourself in your very own Taylor Swift song. Far below us, Taylor Swift was singing about an affair. “Look at this idiotic fool that you made me,” the lyric goes, and I screamed it along with everyone else, but my voice cracked, and I found that I was crying again. “What’s wrong?” Ezra asked.“You wouldn’t understand!” I sneered at him. “You’re just an old man!”I stood up so that a woman dressed as the scarf that Taylor Swift left at probably Jake Gyllenhaal’s house during her “Red” era could pass me on her way back from the concession stand. If this place looks a little like a comic-book convention or a clown car, that’s because there are no transitions in eras. Eras end definitively and violently. They come while you’re just trying to do your job and live your life, and one day you’re sitting in Section 301, and you realize that the transition happened without you ever even realizing it. If I did write songs, that would be the bridge. A little after 11:30 that night, the mayor declared her term over. The stage turned dark, and she sent the moon home, and the sovereign state of Section 301 of Swiftie Clara dissolved into a diaspora. By the time she retired, the mayor had donated enough money to a local food bank to make a significant impact to the 500,000 people it feeds per month, as she did in every city she visited. She had increased tourism spending by an average of $3 million for each night she was there, relative to the nights when the stadium hosts a football game. She had made a material passive contribution to the economy of Santa Clara by selling out its hotel rooms and crashing its rideshare apps. It’s estimated that her mere presence contributed more than $30 million to the local economy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted in on some of that action, so he tweeted at her to add some of that sweet Taylor Swift microeconomy to Canada; she complied by setting some dates in 2024. Autumn approached, and the wind picked up and blew all the glitter from the concert into the ocean, but just this once, the fish weren’t angry. The usher I saw trade bracelets went home and wondered why football fans couldn’t just enjoy themselves the way the Swifties did, why they had to get drunk and fight. Men with leaf blowers went out to extinguish all that the wind had left behind of the glitter, to transition the stadium back to its football era. And the police went back to arresting people. And a young woman lovingly hung a stuffed snake on her mirror. And the college student from Sacramento put Taylor back into her Spotify rotation, right there at the top. And the HUSBANDs, who I hope, along with everyone else in Section 301, will forgive me my hyperbole, went home and worked on their lats, and Ezra and I went home, too, but I still wear a beaded bracelet a woman gave me that says REPUTATION, and when I look at it I think: How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesAnd Taylor Swift arrived in Los Angeles, the next stop on her U.S. tour. She was to play the first of six shows on Aug. 3, which I hope by now you know is Karlie Kloss’s birthday, and what song that is not part of the regular Eras set list did she play as a surprise? SHE PLAYED “MAROON”! She played a song that we think is about Karlie Kloss ON KARLIE KLOSS’S BIRTHDAY, and we were expected to go to sleep that night and to work the next day and care for our children and generally function amid the legion of algebraic calculations we were making in our heads. And then, at her last Los Angeles show, two crazy things happened. One was that she wore a series of previously unseen blue outfits, and blue is associated with “1989” for some reason, and this indicated that SOMETHING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, and IT DID. She announced that since she was a teenager — I’ll say 19 — she has always wanted to own her own music, and that now, on this day in August (which is the eighth month of the year), and this is the ninth day of that month, she would be releasing the rerecorded “1989” in October.If that is not enough — and it is, it is — let me tell you the other thing that happened:KARLIE! KLOSS! HERSELF! SHOWED! UP!Yes, Karlie Kloss, who might not have been a romantic entanglement but could yes be called the love of her life, same as any of our best friends, came to the stadium and danced in the bleachers. The chaos this caused, the time I lost.And meanwhile, I saw on TikTok that a woman whose handle is @nikkiking23 solved the 112 thing, and by this far in the story I will declare it basically undeniable. (SHE IS RELEASING ALBUMS IN 112-DAY CYCLES BECAUSE 112 IS THE NUMBER OF SONGS THAT WERE SOLD TO SCOOTER BRAUN WITHOUT HER PERMISSION!!!!!!!!!!!) And I sat at home, trying my best to return to those feelings I had in the stadium. I sat in the bathroom, on the floor, going through TikToks every night that recounted the concert. I was in my “folklore” era by then, pensive and thinking about my life. I pitched an idea to my editor about the Real Housewives of New York trying to unionize. In the mornings, I waited till everyone was out of the house, and I sang songs from “Reputation” — dirty but also silly. I haven’t done that in years.And somewhere in Northern California, the prom queen of Section 301 of the kingdom of Swiftie Clara opens the closet door in her bedroom and touches the purple dress she was wearing the night she got engaged, but really the night she was at the Taylor Swift concert. She puts on the dress and picks up her hairbrush and puts on “Love Story,” and she sings the song that was playing when she got engaged, the song that was a little bit taken from her that day even as it became a monumental part of her own permanent history. But even as she sings, even as she finds the old pleasure in the song, she remembers her time on the balcony of Section 301. She understands for the first time that those balcony moments are more fun to wait for than to live. Because once you live them, there starts a backward-counting clock in which the bedroom is no longer yours alone, and singing “Love Story” in your purple dress will make less and less sense. And that’s when her pink landline phone rings. She answers it, and it’s Taylor and me, conference-bombing her. We tell her that we’re sorry that she has to move on. We tell her that it’s sad that you don’t get to decide to leave your eras, that the leaving is done for you. Time only moves forward, we say into the phone. You can’t be a girl forever — they won’t let you, and we all three have to grow and move on constantly. You will always have to leave a place before you’re ready. You can go anywhere you want, we tell her in a reprise, just not home. She cries into the phone, and we let her, me and Taylor — Taylor Swift, who sings the song of us all, who says all of this better than I ever could. I’ll tell you, I like being a woman OK, but long live being a girl. More