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    Can Usher Turn America On Again (to R.&B.)?

    One Saturday evening in February, the night before the Grammys, Usher, Interscope Records and Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace repurposed the Hollywood Palladium into a skating rink. Usher has been an ambassador of Atlanta culture for nearly 30 years — as long as he has been in the public eye — but as of late, he is also an emissary of the roller rink. The night’s event was one of several pop-up skating parties he had helped to curate in recent months. Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Usher moves through the world with the bearing of a homecoming king. He didn’t walk so much as float into the room on a cloud of cool and smiles. He wore a burgundy-and-beige leather varsity jacket that recalled the colors and insignia of Morehouse College, the prestigious men’s school in Atlanta. He stands about 5-foot-8, with a small but solid build refined by years of dancing and athletic conditioning. Usher cares about his body. He has to. Performing shirtless — six-pack rippling with sweat and suggestion — has been part of his stage show since he started making teenagers scream in the 1990s. But Usher will turn 45 this month. Staying in performing shape takes weeks of meal prep, physical therapy, acupuncture, cupping, voice lessons and vocal rest. He had spent the day editing the footage he shot for “GLU,” a single from his upcoming album, but here he was, pulling double duty, making work look like play.We arrived at the Palladium’s parking lot, where a throng of at least 50 people waited at the entrance. Walking over, I felt many hands grabbing at Usher for photos and greetings. Someone elbowed me in the head by accident; Usher pulled me steadily along. I stepped through the metal detector, and he waited for me on the other side while still managing the folks who were approaching him. “Come on, you hanging tough,” he said encouragingly. Once inside, he changed into custom skates with light-up wheels.Usher is a confident, beautiful skater, coasting backward, gliding crisscross, side to side. He darted in and out of social groups, doing laps with Chris Brown and Jermaine Dupri, and greeted the music executive Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and Paul McCartney. Lil’ Kim came into his section with a gaggle of girlfriends and squealed when Usher stopped by to give her a hug. The singer, actress and choreographer Teyana Taylor and her mother rolled over before pausing to chat. Busta Rhymes arrived in all black just when we were leaving and told Usher, then in his third outfit of the night, that his “drip” was “disrespectful,” in the way that bad means good. Occasionally, Usher skated alone — at one point, I saw him take a moment to himself while Al Green moaned about “Love and Happiness.” He seems so embodied and levelheaded, so smooth and free.Usher is, to date, the last R.&B. artist, and the last Black artist of any genre, to release a diamond-certified album.Usher told me that skating has been therapeutic for him amid the pressure of the past few years. It was a way to “work things out energetically, physically, musically and spiritually.” I got a liberating feeling watching him skate. “I’m not 40 years old in that rink,” he said. “I don’t even know how old I am. I might be the 13-year-old kid that’s just having a good time. I might be the 25-year-old who just figured out how the bop goes. I can just be super fly and sexy.” The singer took a moment to reflect at the end of the night. “It’s a lot,” he sighed.Usher was very, very busy again. Booked within an inch of his life. Despite the care he takes with his body, he was barely getting a good night’s rest. (Usher is a night owl and a bit of an insomniac. “That is something I think I’ll never completely fix,” he told me.) He was a few weeks shy of beginning the next leg of his My Way Residency in Las Vegas, which for the better part of the past two years has been arguably the hottest show in America.It feels as if we’re in the middle of another creative peak for the musician — an Usher renaissance, if you will. It’s coming almost 30 years after his self-titled debut was released in 1994, when he was 15, and nearly 20 years after the release of “Confessions,” his tour de force, which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. His “Tiny Desk” performance last summer was one of NPR’s most viewed ever. He made much-discussed appearances at Paris men’s fashion week, Vanity Fair’s Oscar party and the Met Gala. And in late September, it was announced that Usher would perform during next year’s Super Bowl halftime show. The game will be in Vegas, his turf now.Usher’s renaissance has unfolded in a season of anxiety about the viability of R.&B., amid existential threats from hip-hop, pop and Afrobeats. “Coming Home,” his ninth album — slated for release in February, on the same day as the Super Bowl — will be a referendum on the genre’s future as much as it is a statement about how a legacy artist continues to stay relevant. The album has been gestating for years, its release delayed more than once. In 2019, Usher teased, on Instagram, that he was working on “Confessions 2.” Since then, he has scrapped the idea (“I want to be better than I was,” he told GQ). He and his team have listened to dozens of his best recordings, refining themes while tweaking their sequencing. Singles have been released and, in effect, real-life market-tested with audiences. Most were hits on R.&B. radio. But so far, only one song reached the Top 40 on the pop charts, a far cry from his commercial peak in the late 1990s and 2000s, when Usher earned nine No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. At present, few Black artists rise to the mainstream charts’ highest spots.If the album is a hit, he is back on top again and a savior of R.&B. If it’s less than a success, Usher could be seen as a nostalgia act we turn to like a jukebox, playing the old songs on demand. Jermaine Dupri, one of Usher’s collaborators since 1997, believes the singer is at a crossroads. “From this point, Usher can’t go backward,” he says. “This show is so fabulous. Now he has to figure out the music to make that makes people feel the same way those records that he’s performing does so that he can actually stay in that space.” After so much success, how does an artist continue to grow? “You’re fighting to not do what you’ve already done and try to give people something different,” Dupri continues. “And the fans sometimes don’t want different; they want exactly what they’ve heard.”Across its many iterations, R.&B. has pondered the intricacies of connection — to your flesh, desires and spirit, to family, community or a higher power. The My Way Residency reflects those connections many times over, like a hall of mirrors. A theatrical exploration of love, sex, ego death and rebirth, with nearly a dozen costume changes, elaborate set pieces and multiple jaunts into the audience, the show moves through various moods: a speakeasy-inspired opener with energetic yet sensuous up-tempos; strip-club anthems; skating-rink bops; lovesick ballads; euphoria-inducing electronic dance music. It lasts for close to three hours.The concert feels like a second-line parade, a kind of post-pandemic celebration for thousands of R.&B.-loving shut-ins. Usher’s 20-performance run at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in 2021 grossed nearly a million dollars every night. Last year’s residency ran from July through October and sold out. This year, the show has been extended several times, and a remixed version opened in Paris in late September. Clips of celebrities like Issa Rae, Taraji P. Henson, Zendaya, Tom Holland and the Kardashians attending the concerts frequently go viral.It’s one thing to see clips of the show; it’s another to witness it firsthand. On one of the nights I went, in March, the crowd seemed to be full of what R.&B. enthusiasts call the “grown and sexy,” fans 30 and older and nearly all Black — couples on a luxe date night, bachelorettes, sister-friends on a girls trip. The women were dressed: bare midriffs, stiletto pumps, long wefts of hair, thick black lashes. Leather pants and bodycon. Sequins and tiny, sparkling purses. “Adults go out to be entertained,” the critic Nelson George, who also attended the show, told me. “They want to hear hits. They want some sexiness. They want some glamour.” My section was on its feet for most of the night. The audience’s enthusiasm is underserved. “When Usher, Beyoncé and Maxwell debuted in the ’90s, there was still R.&B. radio,” George says. “There were R.&B.-based magazines.” He adds: “There were a lot of ways to get the word out about new music. The desire for that live experience has probably grown with time.”Usher getting on a plane in Los Angeles; during a rehearsal at the Park MGM Las Vegas; preshow stretching.Without question, the buzziest moments of the residency involve Usher’s seductive serenades. He brings a woman from the audience onto the stage or comes to her, ambling into the arena, looks into her eyes and sings. With that voice: a velvety, acrobatic, mellifluous, full-bodied tenor. The partners of the women being serenaded must be managing a host of complicated emotions. Some annoyance or jealousy, maybe even a little titillation. Of his sex-symbol persona, Usher told me, “I’ve always been there.” These audience interactions distill his unique appeal and the tension at the core of his public image: He presents as both a really nice guy and a Lothario. A courtly Southern gentleman and a rascal. In songs and interviews, he jokes about this perception, playfully warning the husbands and boyfriends of the world, by way of the Notorious B.I.G. — “Don’t leave your girl ’round me.” He is charming and wholesome, but he also harnesses a powerful carnality.For one night’s opener, Usher wore a white three-piece suit: slacks and a tailored shirt with a vest. He held a drink of dark liquor — the main stage took on the ambience of a cabaret. Like Frank Sinatra, that other Vegas icon, Usher sang the hits. A fuchsia-clad dancer bent over at the waist. Usher placed his drink on top of her behind. The gesture was flirtatious and naughty without seeming rakish. The crowd erupted. His moves were graceful and fiery, infused with the influence of Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Ben Vereen, Bob Fosse and James Brown — a kind of liquid movement that rivals the notes he sings.Part of Usher’s appeal has been his beguiling interpretation of manhood’s many transitions, from tween boy to hormonal adolescent to fresh-faced Adonis. Usher says he serves “a very specific purpose” in the public imagination, adding, “it involves sexuality, fantasy and masculinity.” In Vegas, he flaunted a kind of virility that made space for the devoted women who had come to watch him work. “And the only thing that’s coming beside me out this situation is you waiting to get some more,” he sang. The crowd objectified him, adored him. He spun, leaped, skated and played a patron at a strip club handing out dollar bills. During “Nice & Slow,” he mimed humping a mic stand and traced a trail down his abs that led to the inside of his leather pants. At one point, he drenched himself with water. In one libidinous set piece after another, he sighed, and cried, and fell to his knees, lying on his back in a fit of ecstasy. In the end, he was born again, closing the show with a frenetic E.D.M. set. The shrieks from the audience sustained him. “I need you to be excited,” he told me, of his reliance on this kind of nonverbal call-and-response. “I want you to scream.” And did they scream. Before he was a legacy artist, modeling Black masculinity for millions; before the accolades and the clamoring women; before the epic albums confessing his sins, Usher was a child prodigy born in Texas and raised in the hills of Tennessee. Usher Raymond IV began singing in the youth choir of the St. Elmo Missionary Baptist Church in Chattanooga as a very little kid. His mother, Jonnetta O’Neal Patton, who raised him largely on her own, was the choir’s director. “He would sit with his grandfather during devotion, and he would lead songs with the older deacons,” Patton told me. “And then he would sing in my choir. People would request for this little kid to sing.”She entered him into talent shows, which he won. She quit her job and moved them two hours southeast to Atlanta. It was just a few years after the producer Antonio Reid (who is known by the nickname L.A.) and Babyface started LaFace Records in a suburb just north of the city. Before long, Usher was auditioning for Reid.In his memoir, “Sing to Me: My Story of Making Music, Finding Magic and Searching for Who’s Next,” Reid writes that he was reluctant to audition a child performer. But Usher’s confidence and charisma were preternatural, and Reid liked the way he sang a well-known cut — Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” — but made it his own. Reid called in all the women in the office. The 13-year-old singer worked the room without a mic and focused in on one woman in particular. He “dropped to his knee in front of her, singing, placing his hand on her thigh, looking dead in her eyes,” Reid writes. “He was seducing her with the confidence of someone who had done it before.” Reid signed Usher on the spot.“Usher,” his namesake debut, premiered near the bottom of the album charts, though its handful of singles earned good airplay on Black radio. Usher’s second album, “My Way,” was a breakthrough. Soon there were magazine covers and a recurring role on Brandy’s sitcom, “Moesha.” “8701,” his much-anticipated third album, dropped in the summer of 2001 and entered the pop chart at No. 4. It earned Usher his first Grammy, for R.&B. vocal performance, and set the stage for his magnum opus, “Confessions.”Reid wanted Usher to shed his boy-next-door persona for the fourth album. He wanted him to show more of himself, to let the public in. When recording began, Usher was in a high-profile romance with Rozonda Thomas, also known as Chilli, of TLC. So the songs about infidelity, apologies and sultry encounters piqued the public’s appetite for gossip; they were also beautiful. The two performers broke up shortly before the album debuted.Usher with his band and dancers right before the show; fans during a show in February; onstage during the show.“Confessions” was released in spring 2004, buoyed by the lead single, “Yeah!” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks. Tongues wagged at seemingly revealing lyrics like “my chick on the side said she got one on the way.” In The Village Voice, Amy Linden wrote, “He can sing his cheating ass off.” The LP sold 1.1 million copies in its first week, a record at the time for a Black artist. Four singles from “Confessions” went to No. 1 pop; deep cuts charted, too. “His ‘Confessions’ album is still his masterpiece because it had a beautiful combination of vocals, songs and emotional commitment,” George says. By 2012, it had become one of the best-selling American albums of all time, going diamond with sales of 10 million copies in the United States alone. That certification put “Confessions” in the company of albums like “Thriller,” “Abbey Road” and “Tapestry.” Usher is, to date, the last R.&B. artist, and the last Black artist of any genre, to release a diamond-certified album.In 2007, Usher married Tameka Foster, a stylist and design expert seven years his senior. Public outcry ensued; the main tenor of the criticism was that Usher, at 28, was still too young to become a family man. The marriage was seen as a threat to his bachelor image. His next album, “Here I Stand,” debuted at No. 1, but sales showed a decline from “Confessions.” The artist had continued his tradition of drawing from his personal life and chronicled newlywed bliss and new fatherhood. By 2009, the couple had divorced. Usher began to shift his sound, experimenting with E.D.M. In the years after, he introduced the public to Justin Bieber and became a judge on “The Voice.”Billboard changed the way it calculates its main Black music chart to account for streaming in 2012. By then, Black radio and retail outlets had been in decline for years. The shifts meant the popularity of an R.&B. song would be determined by anyone — not just specialized fans of the genre. The R.&B. and mainstream charts became whiter. In 2013, no Black artists earned pop No. 1 singles, a first since 1958, when the chart began. Usher’s eighth LP, “Hard II Love,” was released in 2016 as a TIDAL exclusive and sold just 38,000 album-equivalent units in its first week.Dupri told me, “He’s haunted by the ‘Confessions’ record.” I thought of this later, on the set of an Uber commercial Usher filmed to promote the residency. He had taken a break from shooting a scene and was talking to me offstage. He briefly held up the production to articulate a question he had about where he fits in the pop-culture landscape, in light of his past work. “Now that I’ve given people all those things,” he said, with some urgency, “at this age, what do I give them?”Usher’s 30-year career has been an elegant synthesis of the entire history of R.&B. In many ways, he stands alone. He is a bridge between the bygone era of earnest, harmonizing boy bands and the new generation working in the genre, like Chris Brown, Tory Lanez and Bryson Tiller, who all sing but focus less on vocal virtuosity than on the sonics of trap and hip-hop. This influence seems to rankle many who love R.&B. — some see this cross-pollination as a pernicious threat to its future. Others feel that the rise of melodic rappers like Drake, Gunna and Young Thug has eroded the public’s desire for lush, technically sophisticated vocals. Usher has also leaned into hip-hop, singing in raplike cadences. In some cases, like his first pop No. 1, “Nice & Slow,” he even raps himself. In recent years, he’s delved deeper into rap aesthetics; he released “A” in 2018, a collaboration with the producer Zaytoven, who is known for melding trap sounds and piano. The second version of the new album I heard had more rap features than the first.Rap and R.&B. overlap often, and influence each other. R.&B. has certainly borrowed a straightforwardness from rap that it didn’t always possess. Consider the different approaches of two R.&B. men: On his 1979 single “Turn Off the Lights,” Teddy Pendergrass asks his lover, “Would you mind if I asked you to?” and proceeds to softly entreat her to come closer. On “No Bullshit,” Chris Brown’s single from 2010, Brown tells his paramour, “You already know what time it is/Reach up in that dresser where them condoms is.”R&B’s sound is one of willful, defiant humanity. An insistence on the right to stretch out, breathe, rage, make love.Last August, the artist and music executive Diddy formalized these ambient fears by tweeting, “Who killed R.&B.?” In subsequent conversations, he doubled down on the statement, insisting that the genre’s excellence had been in decline. “I ain’t feeling no emotions,” he said on Instagram, before elaborating on the ways the old songs made the body awaken to all the sensations enfolded in them; the new records were sterile in comparison.Talk of R.&B.’s demise has been cyclical and insistent since at least 1988, when Nelson George wrote “The Death of Rhythm and Blues,” a book-length exploration of the idea. George supposed that the corporate imperative to cross over — to create songs specifically designed to break on mainstream radio — is how the music lost its way. Diddy’s declaration led to a new round of impassioned debate among R.&B. aficionados and artists. Mary J. Blige weighed in, saying, “You can’t kill something that’s in our DNA.” Yet she conceded that radio stations no longer play R.&B. as frequently as they did in years past. Brent Faiyaz, an emerging R.&B. singer — his second album, “Wasteland,” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 last summer — insinuated that Diddy was simply out of touch. “Don’t nobody care about music genres anymore,” Faiyaz tweeted, calling them “primitive.”“All genres of music were routed in R.&B.,” Usher told me when I asked his thoughts on the state of the genre. “That was what started it all, in my opinion. It was more like soulful gospel music that then became jazz, that then became R.&B., and then all these other expressions of rhythm and blues became the next thing.” The sound is one of willful, defiant humanity. An insistence on the right to stretch out, breathe, rage, make love. The records unleash your feelings and your body because they’re freedom cries from a people with a precarious relationship to being free.In her book “The Meaning of Soul,” the scholar Emily J. Lordi explained that R.&B. singers enacted feats of “virtuosic survivorship” in their performances and recordings. James Brown’s grunts and dramatic drops to the ground; Jackie Wilson’s dive, legs akimbo, onto his knees. The way it seems as if he sprang back up in the blink of an eye. Love men, beginning with Sam Cooke but extending on to Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Teddy Pendergrass, brought an urbane sensuality to the music. It was all a dream. These artists are masters of the sublime and conjure pleasurable fictions that “channel the erotic fantasies of their audience through their words, movement and voice,” George says. “It’s a heavy burden to be the center of so much erotic energy night after night, song after song.” Marvin Gaye “both resented and required” the adoration, his biographer David Ritz wrote in “Divided Soul.” And now, in a post-#MeToo world, the sexual politics of R.&B. — especially given the abuses of R. Kelly, the prolific songsmith and convicted sex trafficker — are under even more scrutiny. Women and girls are often collateral damage. Several R.&B. figures, across generations, including Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Chris Brown, Trey Songz and Tory Lanez, have been accused or convicted of violent acts against women.On his podcast, the broadcaster and former rapper Joe Budden spoke with the singer Mario — best known for “Let Me Love You,” a No. 1 single from 2004 — about the fantasy of R.&B. “Writing songs is like shooting movies,” Mario said. “In real life, [expletive] never goes that way. It’s a song. It’s exaggerated.” He continued: “Women want to believe what you’re saying is true.” It’s easy to become swept up in the honeyed sweetness of a classic R.&B. record. We believe so wholeheartedly that romantic love exists. We prioritize this love, imbue it with religious fervor and purpose, centralizing it in the narratives of our lives as if we’re all halves of a perfect pair like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. As if we’re all heroes on epic quests for the one who will harmonize with us for life. Hip-hop’s realism splits the veil, piercing the romantic reverie as it makes space for the actual complication of being together with another person. With his two younger children, Sire and Sovereign, who were born to his partner, Jennifer Goicoechea.Usher has always sold cool, unflappability, a certain kind of perfection (even on a breakup record like “U Don’t Have to Call,” he rises above). The truth is much more interesting. “I’m like an actor, and as an actor I embody a character,” he says. “If I’m instigating sexuality in my music, that might not necessarily have anything to do with who I am as a person.” That statement echoes Mario’s admission from the podcast: “We’re selling energy. We’re selling ideas.” R.&B. comes with a polished sweetness that can sound like lies, false notes. People flock to see Usher in Vegas because they want to believe in the vision of love and romance that lives in the songs he performs there; others may have turned away from these kinds of messages because the ideals are too unbelievable.R.&B. is nothing if not a marriage of opposing energies. A dance between hard and soft. Real life versus fantasy; vulnerability and force; Holy Ghost and heaving flesh. A thin line between love and hate. Traditional R.&B. men were complicated, and they weren’t always truthful about it. Yet the music’s expansiveness and range — topics like climate change, war and political disappointment were all fair game — gave us a pathway toward understanding the conditions of the day. Some contemporary R.&B. men ceded ground to hip-hop in storytelling about the world and in relaying broad truths. Similarly, Usher exists at the threshold of contradictory ideas. His persona gleams with sheen and shine, but he is often tightly coiled, a bundle of nerves underneath glistening skin. It was 11:30 on a late-winter night in North Hollywood. The kind of night when lovers toss and turn and palm trees rustle in the moonlight. An unmarked storefront is home to a recording studio built by a son of Hal David, who, with Burt Bacharach, wrote aching, romantic pop ballads for Dionne Warwick.Usher had just arrived to lay down vocals. He lit a candle, and soon we were inhaling wafts of gardenia. He wondered what I thought about the new songs I’d heard and told me how he kept changing their sequencing. Just as kinetic in real life as he is onstage, he zipped between the cloth-covered control room, where I sat with Anthony Smith, the audio engineer, and the cavernous live room’s booth, which was colder than Usher usually likes it when he records. His new personal assistant, Kojo Littles, hunted down two space heaters in the studio’s spacious lounge. In the control room, the lights were low. Tiffany-style lamps with purple-and-red stained-glass shades and thick velvet tassels cast shadows on the walls.Before long, Usher was ready to sing. The engineer queued up an up-tempo track with synthy flourishes and staccato lyrics on the demo. A collaboration with the Colombian hitmaker J Balvin, the track sampled Usher’s “Yeah!” On the original, the singer delivered his lead vocal in an anxious frenzy, telling the story of an illicit flirtation in a nightclub. The new rendition elaborates the original by layering dembow rhythms, lyrics about smiling at a new paramour’s advances and a new verse by Usher.Though Usher was fresh off 12 hours of dance and music rehearsal a half-hour away at a soundstage in Burbank, he was full of energy and ideas about how he would like to be heard. In the booth, he gestured with his hands, closed his eyes. His body sometimes bounced, keeping time with the song’s groove. There was no party in the studio — no flowing libations, no room full of hangers-on. Usher was at work.He recorded, line by line, bass, baritone and tenor parts — multitracking himself. In industry parlance, he “punched in” his vocals, recording multiple takes of each lyric, listening as the engineer played the takes back to him. Then he rerecorded the parts of each line that he didn’t like. I heard Usher ask Smith, “Let me get that last one again,” at least three dozen times over the next five hours.Usher is anxious for everything to look good, feel good and smell good. He especially wants the music to sound good. He recorded numerous songs in the years leading up to “Coming Home.” “My creative process is kind of trial and error,” he told me. “I’m always trying to figure out what fits.” To that end, the album’s title has changed several times, going from “Naked” to “A.D.A.M” (a nod to the biblical figure) to “Coming Home,” a reference to reigniting his professional relationships with his producers in Atlanta.Usher in his pool in Los Angeles. “I’m like an actor,” he says. “As an actor I embody a character.”When we spoke on the phone, Marvin Gaye’s biographer David Ritz told me he felt hopeful about R.&B. as a lasting mode of Black expression. “The roots are deep, deep, deep in the ground. It celebrates vocal virtuosity, it celebrates groove. It’s all spirit, it’s all church and worship. If you’re praising a woman or praising God, you’re still praising.” And other signs point to the genre itself experiencing a renaissance, alongside Usher’s. According to Spotify, streaming numbers for R.&B. are up 25 percent from last year. Women like Jazmine Sullivan, Ari Lennox and Summer Walker write honest and sensual songs that provide counterpoint and balance the punishing sexual politics that have made listening to some of the old records fraught.Usher’s new music will most likely continue his forays into new forms — one of the best among the songs I heard was laced with the rhythmic propulsion of Afrobeats. But fundamentally, he told me, “my music offering will always be routed in R.&B.” I wonder if he’ll let some of his imperfections show. Audiences want more honesty, more “confessing.” When the album was still called “A.D.A.M,” it was inspired by the temptations and ups and downs of human life. Usher related the themes of the project to the challenges of his own stardom. “I’ve been designated to do something, to be on my best behavior and be perfect,” Usher admits. “You gonna go through [expletive],” he says, of the impossibility of perfection in this world. “As you work through that, what’s the result? It’s in the music. That journey is in the music.”In the booth, he traced the air with his fingers; he seemed to find the harmonies he would sing with his hands. He wouldn’t be able to record as much when he got to Vegas, he said, when he would need to balance the nightly performance schedule with preserving his voice. The hour crept closer to dawn, and still Usher remained in the booth, working and reworking his lines.Danielle Amir Jackson is a writer based in Little Rock, Ark., and the editor in chief of The Oxford American. She is writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about her grandmother’s restaurant in North Memphis and the role of women-owned juke joints in the incubation of the blues. More

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    One Question for Taylor Swift’s Eras Concert Film: How Big Will It Be?

    The pop star’s concert film, arriving in theaters on Friday, is expected to break box office records. “The fever and scale is unprecedented,” one analyst said.The world’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift, is about to become the world’s biggest movie star, at least for a weekend. The only question is whether turnout for her concert film will be enormous or truly colossal.Box office analysts keep raising opening-weekend estimates for “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which will arrive in cinemas on Friday evening amid a lightning storm of free publicity. (As you may have heard, Ms. Swift has lately been spending considerable time with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end.) The nearly three-hour film was initially expected to sell about $75 million in tickets this weekend in the United States and Canada, with analysts reaching that estimate by studying presales and moviegoer surveys. As of Tuesday, the domestic number was looking more like $125 million.Could it reach $150 million? “Yes, it could,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “The fever and scale is unprecedented.”“The Eras Tour,” which cost Ms. Swift roughly $15 million to make, is expected to collect an additional $60 million overseas — at a minimum — over the weekend.“We are wonder-struck,” said Wanda Gierhart Fearing, chief marketing and content officer for the Cinemark theater chain, which has a large presence in the southern United States and Latin America. In addition to standard screenings, Cinemark and other multiplex operators have been offering private viewing parties. (That’s $800 for 40 people. Dancing encouraged, but not on seats.)The domestic box office record for a concert film debut is held by “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” which Paramount Pictures released in 2011. It collected $41 million over its first three days in North American theaters, adjusted for inflation, and ultimately $101 million in the United States and Canada and $138 million worldwide.“Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” released by Sony Pictures in 2009, holds the record for total ticket sales. It generated $105 million over its entire North American run, and $380 million worldwide, adjusted for inflation.Box office analysts aren’t quite sure what to expect from “The Eras Tour,” in part because it comes only nine weeks after Ms. Swift concluded the six-month, 53-show initial leg of her sold-out North American tour. The trade publication Pollstar estimated that she had sold about $14 million in tickets each night.The initial leg of Ms. Swift’s tour wrapped up a few weeks ago after six months and 53 shows.Grace Smith/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesHas the thirst for Ms. Swift among casual fans been satisfied for the time being? To what degree did the cultural frenzy surrounding her Eras concerts pique the curiosity of a broader audience — people who would never pay hundreds of dollars to see her perform in a stadium but might shell out for movie tickets? (Most seats for the film cost $19.89, a nod to the name of Ms. Swift’s fifth album and her birth year.)Complicating predictions, Ms. Swift broke Hollywood norms in getting her film to theaters.Under the customary model, studios book movies into theaters and spend anywhere from $20 million to $100 million on marketing to turn out an audience. Theaters play movies and sell concessions. In return, studios collect as much as 70 percent of opening-weekend tickets sales, with theaters keeping the balance.Since she produced and financed “The Eras Tour” herself, Ms. Swift cut out the middle company (a studio) and made a distribution deal directly with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator. One reason involved marketing: Ms. Swift, with 369 million social media followers at her beck and call, barely needs to spend anything to advertise the film.Ms. Swift will keep about 57 percent of ticket revenue, with theater chains pocketing the rest, as first reported by a Puck newsletter. AMC will also receive a modest distribution fee.Box office forecasting, however, is based on moviegoer surveys that are designed to track the effectiveness of studio marketing campaigns — older women are not being persuaded by your ads, for example, but teenage boys are in the bag. “The Eras Tour” has had some paid advertising, including a commercial during a Chiefs prime-time game this month. But most movies arrive amid an advertising bombardment.“One of the questions involves staying power,” said Bruce Nash, founder of the Numbers, a box office tracking and analytics site. “Is ‘The Eras Tour’ going to do most of its business on opening weekend and then fall off a cliff? Or will people come back six times over the course of weeks? We have no idea.”Ms. Swift’s distribution choice made Hollywood gnash its teeth. Studio executives had to explain to their bosses why they missed a prime moneymaking opportunity and a chance to form a relationship with Ms. Swift, who has feature film directing ambitions. (She has also tinkered with acting, including in “Cats.”) Universal Pictures, fearing competition from “The Eras Tour,” scrambled to move “The Exorcist: Believer” to an earlier date; ticket sales were soft.Studios have also had to contend with an existential question: Does distribution for “The Eras Tour” mark the start of a paradigm shift? Are more movies going to bypass studios? Already, Beyoncé has followed Ms. Swift in making a deal with AMC to distribute her concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which will arrive in theaters on Dec. 1.Anything is possible. Mr. Nash noted that Fathom Events, an independent distributor that specializes in short-run screenings and simulcast opera performances, has found increasing success in taking faith-based projects (“The Chosen”) directly to theaters. Trafalgar Releasing found a studio-skipping hit in February with a concert film focused on BTS, the South Korean boy band.But most studio executives and entertainment industry analysts dismiss “The Eras Tour” as a one-off. When it comes to mobilizing a fan base, Ms. Swift, they say, is in a class by herself. Even Beyoncé has not shown the same selling power. First-day presales for “The Eras Tour” totaled an estimated $37 million, while “Renaissance” generated about $7 million.At the moment, theater chains aren’t thinking much beyond the weekend. The last two months have been quiet for theaters, with hits like “The Nun II” (Warner Bros.) offset by a string of duds, including “Dumb Money,” “Blue Beetle,” “The Creator” and “Expend4bles.”Two major movies originally expected this fall, “Kraven the Hunter” and “Dune: Part Two,” were pushed into next year because of the actors’ strike. (Until the strike is resolved, SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ union in known, has barred its members from engaging in any publicity efforts for films and TV shows that have already been completed.)Theater companies, of course, make most of their money at the concession counter, and AMC, for one, is counting on Ms. Swift’s fans to come hungry. Among other items, the chain plans to sell popcorn in collectible tubs for $20.Marketing line: “Swifties always snack in style.” More

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    Victor Jara Killing: Ex-Chilean Soldier Arrested in Florida

    Pedro Barrientos, 74, is accused of killing the popular Chilean singer in 1973. In a civil case, Mr. Barrientos was accused of bragging about shooting Mr. Jara twice in the head.A former Chilean Army officer accused of torturing and killing the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara and others during the bloody aftermath of a 1973 military coup was arrested in Florida, officials announced Tuesday.The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 74, who moved to Florida in 1990, is wanted in Chile for the extrajudicial murder of Mr. Jara at a Chilean sports stadium. There, Mr. Jara and other dissidents had been detained after the coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled the country’s president, Salvador Allende, and thrust Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power.Federal immigration officials and local law enforcement officers arrested Mr. Barrientos on Oct. 5 during a traffic stop in Deltona, Fla., about 30 miles southwest of Daytona Beach, according to a news release published on Tuesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Mr. Barrientos is in ICE custody, officials said.“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” John Condon, a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division in Tampa, said in the news release.Mr. Jara, who has been described as the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a popular singer who hailed from the Chilean countryside and sang tales of poverty and injustice.He had supported the Allende government and was a member of Chile’s Communist Party when he was arrested at the State Technical University alongside hundreds of students and faculty members.Three days after his arrest, Mr. Jara’s bullet-riddled body was found outside a cemetery alongside those of four other victims. Before he was killed, soldiers smashed his fingers with their rifle butts and mockingly told him that he would never play guitar again.Mr. Barrientos’s arrest comes more than seven years after a federal jury in a civil case found him liable for Mr. Jara’s death and awarded $28 million in damages to the singer’s family, which had brought the case under a federal law that allows the victims of overseas human rights violations to seek redress.A former Chilean soldier testified in court that Mr. Barrientos had bragged about having shot Mr. Jara twice in the head.“He used to show his pistol and say, ‘I killed Víctor Jara with this,’” the soldier, José Navarrete, testified.A federal court revoked Mr. Barrientos’s U.S. citizenship in July based on a sealed complaint brought by the Department of Justice’s immigration litigation office.“The court found that Mr. Barrientos willfully concealed material facts related to his military service in his immigration applications,” the ICE news release said.It was unclear whether extradition proceedings for Mr. Barrientos were underway. The federal authorities could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday night, and it was unclear if Mr. Barrientos had retained a lawyer.Mr. Barrientos was the latest former Chilean official to be arrested in Mr. Jara’s killing. In 2018, eight retired military officers were each sentenced to more than 15 years in prison by a Chilean judge over Mr. Jara’s death. More

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    ‘For All the Dogs’ and Drake’s Latest Season of Discontent

    The rapper’s new album, “For All the Dogs,” comes after a summer of live-show triumph and extra-musical boredom.The dominant preoccupation of the hip-hop internet in recent days has been the matter of what Drake — who remains, at 36, the most popular English-speaking rapper on the planet — should rap about.It is a curious preoccupation but not a new one: Since the beginning of his career a decade and a half ago, Drake has been confounding conventional expectations for rap success. What’s different now is that he is positioned resolutely at the center of the genre, not outside it, and the collective distress about his modes feels like a referendum on an elected leader no one can quite figure out how to unseat.On “For All the Dogs,” his eighth solo studio album, Drake shows that, in some ways, he, too, is wondering what remains of life at the top. So much so, in fact, that he revisits some of his oldest and most familiar tactics. “For All the Dogs” is an album full of caustic songs about heartbreak, which have added tension now that Drake is a world-beating pop star — there is incredulity cutting through the sadness. These 23 songs are less generally wounded than the early ones that marked him as a signature figure in hip-hop, as fluent in vulnerability as bombast, but they’re scarred nonetheless.At the Brooklyn stop of his tour, in July, Drake entered the arena by walking through the crowd like a boxer preparing for a championship fight.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe peak of that approach, “Tried Our Best,” is a surprisingly gentle and soothing catalog of frustration: “I swear that there’s a list of places that I been with you, I want to go without you/Just so I can know what it’s like to be there without having to argue.” Time and again on this album, Drake describes offering trust, only to have it violated (“Bahamas Promises,” “7969 Santa”) — it is, in that way, a return to classic form.Every so often, he delivers a line so packed with unexpected syllables — “Chinchilla ushanka, we skiin’ out in Courchevel” — that he reinforces the fact that he’s a devilishly nimble rapper when he chooses to be. He doesn’t choose that often on this album, though. “For All the Dogs” includes some of his least ambitious rapping, and whereas on prior albums, he sometimes balances out his complexity with melody, that’s rarely the case here.In places he’s being deliberate about these choices — where most rappers aim for the gasp, Drake sometimes pointedly goes for the groan: “Feel like I’m bi ’cause you’re one of the guys, girl” (“Members Only”);“Whipped and chained you like American slaves” (“Slime You Out”).On prior albums, Drake has sometimes balanced out his complexity with melody.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd as is Drake’s wont, there are also a handful of deeply modern, innovative and unexpected production choices — few rappers are as sonically flexible. “Rich Baby Daddy,” which features Sexyy Red and SZA, recalls the Atlanta bass music of INOJ and Ghost Town DJs. “Another Late Night,” a collaboration with Lil Yachty, is full of off-kilter bleeps that feel wobbly, while on “8 a.m. in Charlotte,” he raps over the smoky, soul-drenched minimalism of Conductor Williams, known for his work with the boom-bap revivalist Griselda collective.This is also standard Drake technique — taking in the whole of hip-hop, from oddballs to traditionalists, and hearing himself in it. Last year he released two albums: the dance-music quasi-experiment “Honestly, Nevermind,” and the 21 Savage collaboration album, “Her Loss.” Implicit in those vastly differing releases was a proposition — perhaps no Drake album had to be an omnibus anymore; instead, he could pursue genre or style experiments to their creative conclusions, pick up a few months later and do so again.“For All the Dogs” is less focused than either of those albums. It is not an essential Drake album, but it is also possible that the essential Drake cultural contributions are no longer albums, or at least albums of this length and variance.Onstage during the It’s All a Blur Tour, Drake was as energized as at any point in his career.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOr perhaps, the signature Drake innovations may no longer be musical at all — they may be delineating what a musician, a rapper, a pop star does with his scale of success.Much of what Drake has been engaged in this summer suggests the malaise of boredom, musical or otherwise. He released a book of poetry, or perhaps “poetry” — “Titles Ruin Everything,” written with Kenza Samir — really just an inventory of Instagram captions, some funny. Much funnier, if far stranger, was the interview he conducted with Bobbi Althoff, a kind of method actress/comedian who deploys her ignorance of her subjects (feigned or otherwise) as a weapon. Drake treated the interview like a chess match, seemingly gleeful at the opportunity for a new kind of banter.There is some of that exuberance in his recent takedown of the social media personality Joe Budden, too. Budden is a onetime rapper who has remade himself as a wildly popular, often acidic commentator. After some unkind comments about the new album, Drake wrote a strikingly long and strikingly mean response online, largely noting how unsuccessful Budden had been as a rapper. But the lengths to which Drake went in order to, in essence, punch down were notable, perhaps the mark of someone who has run out of worthwhile nemeses.There are enemies on this album, too — he seemingly taunts YoungBoy Never Broke Again, the rare time he takes aim at a younger star. But he also pointedly puts women in his cross hairs: “Fear of Heights,” a song that appears to reference Rihanna, a rumored ex; and offhand and silly shots at the jazz star Esperanza Spalding, who bested Drake for the best new artist Grammy Award in 2011. (Yes, 2011.)The 23 songs that make up “For All the Dogs” are less generally wounded than Drake’s early tracks, which marked him as a signature figure in hip-hop, as fluent in vulnerability as bombast.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Drake, as ever, the top is a fraught place. But there is plenty of joy there, too. That much was clear during Drake’s It’s All a Blur Tour this summer, his first since the pandemic. At its Brooklyn stop, in July, he entered the arena walking through the crowd like a boxer preparing for a championship fight, creating a corridor of adulation.Onstage, he was as energized as he’s been at any point in his career, whether performing early-career lo-fi classics or pop-peak thumpers. He wasn’t a salesman hawking his wares, but an orchestra conductor — the show had the feeling of a fait accompli.In between songs, he recalled some New York-specific stories from early in his career — an eventful night at the Spotted Pig, a since closed gastro pub, and the 2010 show at the South Street Seaport that turned into a riot before he ever took the stage. Even back then, 13 years ago, the loyalists were shouting down the doubters. More

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    9 New Songs You Should Hear Now

    Get caught up on new music from Maren Morris, Earl Sweatshirt and Remi Wolf’s bold Paramore remake.Maren Morris conjures the glorious grit of a fed-up woman on “The Tree.”Natasha Moustache/Getty ImagesDear listeners,It’s good to be back! Last week, I took a little staycation and spent most of my time reading, dog-sitting a very good boy, and seeing a bunch of movies at the New York Film Festival.* But now I’m recharged, caught up on all the new music I missed — and, of course, ready to share it with you.Today’s offering is a compilation of highlights from our last few new music Playlists (from the likes of the Rolling Stones and Maren Morris), plus a few songs I would have put on last week’s Playlist were I not on vacation (one of Earl Sweatshirt’s collaborations with the Alchemist; Remi Wolf’s bold remake of a Paramore song). And while it includes some familiar names, I hope it also opens your ears to some new ones, too.Also! You still have a few more days to send me suggestions for the ultimate fall playlist. What’s a song that feels like autumn to you? Tell me here. We may use your response in an upcoming Amplifier.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Atka: “Lenny”If haven’t yet heard of the German-born, London-based musician Atka (also known as Sarah Neumann), that’s perfectly understandable: This propulsive single is only the second she’s ever released. But “Lenny,” which will appear on her forthcoming debut EP “Eye Against the Ashen Sky,” is quite a calling card. Industrial noises clang and suddenly cohere into a driving melody as Neumann deadpans a series of striking lyrics, beginning with a particularly vivid image: “Men like gods throwing rocks around the room.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Maren Morris: “The Tree”“The rot at the roots is the root of the problem,” Maren Morris sings on her smoldering new song, “The Tree.” “But you wanna blame it on me.” She has long been an outspoken critic of the country music establishment — see: her recent appearance on The New York Times’s Popcast (Deluxe) — and in one sense “The Tree” could be read as her breakup song with Nashville. But the song works just as well as a defiant end-of-a-relationship anthem, as Morris’s impressive vocal performance conjures the glorious grit of a fed-up woman. (Listen on YouTube)3. PinkPantheress: “Mosquito”The English pop singer PinkPantheress makes sugary sweet tunes cut through with sudden pangs of sour. Her latest single, “Mosquito,” is a fluttery reverie interrupted by a nightmarish admission: “I just had a dream I was dead, and I only cared ’cause I was taken from you.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Earl Sweatshirt & the Alchemist: “Vin Skully”When the rapper Earl Sweatshirt locks into his signature flow, he has a way of making language sound viscous, as though the words are just dribbling out of his mouth. On this track from “Voir Dire,” a collaborative album made with the producer the Alchemist, he’s effortlessly dexterous; and yes, it features a sample from the late, great Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully. (The M.L.B. team could perhaps use his blessing right about now.) (Listen on YouTube)5. Becky G featuring Chiquis: “Cuidadito”The stylistically nimble pop artist Becky G leans into regional Mexican sounds on her latest album, “Esquinas,” and especially on this playful duet with the singer Chiquis (daughter of the venerable Jenni Rivera). The pair trade fiery verses, letting their respective men know exactly what to expect if they dare cheat. (Listen on YouTube)6. Holly Humberstone: “Into Your Room”This one’s been stuck in my head for days. From the British singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone’s debut album, “Paint My Bedroom Black,” which comes out this Friday, “Into Your Room” is a moody, pulsating synth-pop number personalized with Humberstone’s endearingly chatty lyricism. “You’re the center of this universe,” she sings pleadingly to the object of her obsession. “My sorry [expletive] revolves around you.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Paramore & Remi Wolf: “You First (Re: Remi Wolf)”Earlier this year, the rock band Paramore put out its angsty, knotty sixth album, “This Is Why.” On the recently released remix album, “Re: This Is Why,” Paramore asked an eclectic group of artists — including Wet Leg, Julien Baker and Panda Bear — to rework the album, track by track. For the most part, it’s a compelling and successful experiment, though this galvanizing reimagining of “You First,” helmed by the avant-pop provocateur Remi Wolf, is a clear highlight. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga: “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”In 2012, Lady Gaga appeared onstage with the Rolling Stones to lend her vocals to a live rendition of “Gimme Shelter.” “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” the bluesy, fireworks-display climax of the Stones’ upcoming album, “Hackney Diamonds,” seems to pick up right where that performance left off. A soulful and unhurried Mick Jagger leads his band — which on this track includes Stevie Wonder (!) on keyboards — from the ground right to the great beyond, while Gaga accompanies him in an airy, angelic voice, showing off yet another facet of her impressive register. (Listen on YouTube)9. Jenn Champion: “Jessica”A tough listen, but also a cathartic one. Jenn Champion — a former member of the indie band Carissa’s Wierd, who used to record under the name S — pours all the feelings that sprang up in the wake of an old friend’s overdose into this sparse, haunting piano ballad. “I still love you,” she sings in a trembling voice. “But it hurts now.” This song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it, and I still can’t shake its unsettling power. (Listen on YouTube)I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom,Lindsay* The best thing I saw so far at the N.Y.F.F.? “Poor Things,” the latest wild ride from the cinematic Greek Freak, Yorgos Lanthimos. Emma Stone is on another level.The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“9 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Atka, “Lenny”Track 2: Maren Morris, “The Tree”Track 3: PinkPantheress, “Mosquito”Track 4: Earl Sweatshirt & the Alchemist, “Vin Skully”Track 5: Becky G featuring Chiquis, “Cuidadito”Track 6: Holly Humberstone, “Into Your Room”Track 7: Paramore & Remi Wolf, “You First (Re: Remi Wolf)”Track 8: The Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”Track 9: Jenn Champion, “Jessica” More

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    Morgan Wallen Returns to No. 1 in a Slow Chart Week

    With Drake’s “For All the Dogs” and Taylor Swift’s rerecording of “1989” waiting in the wings, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” has its 16th time at the peak.In a relatively slow week of music sales before the arrival of blockbusters by Drake and Taylor Swift, the country star Morgan Wallen returns to the top of the Billboard album chart, notching a 16th time at No. 1 for his newest album, “One Thing at a Time.”Wallen’s album returns with the equivalent of 74,500 sales in the United States, including nearly 98 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“One Thing at a Time,” stuffed with 36 tracks, has been a steady streaming hit since March; only in the last month has it dipped below 100 million streams a week, a benchmark that relatively few albums reach even in their debut week, let alone their 40th. Wallen’s 16 reps at No. 1 are the most for any album since Adele’s “21,” which logged 24 weeks at the top in 2011 and 2012.Still, Wallen’s 74,500 “equivalent album units” — a composite number that represents an album’s popularity on streaming platforms and in purchases of downloads and physical copies — is notably low. That is the least units to top the charts in almost a year and a half, since Pusha T’s “It’s Almost Dry” opened with 55,000 in April 2022.The music industry is bracing for boffo numbers from Drake, whose long-awaited “For All the Dogs” came out Friday and is already a smash online, and for Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which comes out Oct. 27 and is all but certain to be huge on streaming services and in sales of both CDs and vinyl LPs. (“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” her concert film, is set to open on Friday and has already surpassed $100 million in worldwide advance ticket sales.)Ed Sheeran’s surprise “Autumn Variations” opens at No. 4, his second Top 10 new LP this year. His “-” (a.k.a. “Subtract”) opened at No. 2 in May, though it quickly plunged from there, falling out of the Top 20 after two weeks and the Top 100 after nine — a rare flop for Sheeran, one of the giants of pop’s streaming age.Also this week, Rod Wave’s “Nostalgia” falls to No. 2 after two weeks at the top, with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts” at No. 3 and Zach Bryan’s self-titled album No. 5. More

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    Book Review: ‘Madonna: A Rebel Life,’ by Mary Gabriel

    Mary Gabriel’s biography is as thorough as its subject is disciplined. But in relentlessly defending the superstar, where’s the party?MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits, “Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound.“Before Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,” the record executive Seymour Stein observed.Though technically a solo vocalist, Madonna has been backed by dancers from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She has six children: two biological, four adopted from Malawi. Many more consider themselves her spiritual offspring: gay men to whom she’s been den mother; younger female performers she’s inspired.And she’s trooped around the world with an elastic entourage of friends, writers, producers, directors, handlers, photographers, publicists, reporters and fans, all of whom helpfully populate Mary Gabriel’s big, indignant new biography of her: a dogged, brick-by-brick bulwark against any detractors bobbing in the moat of her castle.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is one of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn’t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them. It’s not going to fit on the little shelf of the StairMaster at the gym — a classically Madonna piece of exercise equipment — though you might hoist it afterward for wrist curls.If you wander into an aerobics class instead, not only are chances high that the instructor will play a song from Madonna’s catalog, but she’ll probably be wearing a hands-free headset microphone — and that is muy Madonna as well. As Gabriel notes, though the technology was used before by pilots and Kate Bush, it was her subject who popularized it on her 1989 “Blond Ambition” tour.For this book, though, the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958, the same year as Prince and Michael Jackson, stayed quiet. Her voice is piped through from plentiful previous interviews, recorded performances and the occasional post on Instagram, where early in the pandemic she outcringed the Gal Gadot “Imagine” video with one of herself naked in a bath amid floating rose petals, declaring Covid-19 “the great equalizer.”The closest Gabriel gets to Madonna in the actual flesh is half a dozen conversations with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, whose best-selling 2008 memoir, “Life With My Sister Madonna,” caused at least temporary estrangement between the siblings, longtime professional collaborators. (Madonna’s sense of betrayal is hard to jibe with her ardent defense of free personal expression.)Gabriel also talks to 30-odd other sources, surprisingly few for the scope of the work, and turns up a few interesting archived nuggets, such as Norman Mailer, in an early draft of the more than 200 he wrote for a 1994 Esquire profile, describing Madonna as a “pint‐size” Italian American (he used an ethnic slur instead) “with a heart built out of the cast‐iron balls of a hundred peasant ancestors.”Previous Madonnagraphers have either been breathily unauthorized — Andrew Morton, J. Randy Taraborrelli — or taken a more “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” approach; universities have offered entire courses on her. Gabriel brings extra intellectual cred to the task. “Love and Capital,” her book about Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; her group portrait of five female painters, “Ninth Street Women,” was rhapsodically received. But she doesn’t describe her own connection to this project, as she did the others, and this reader was left wondering if it might be less love than capital.Not that Gabriel doesn’t make a diligent case for Madonna’s cultural importance: inviting us to consider, for example, her Mylar-encased coffee-table book “Sex,” pummeled with judgment when it was published in 1992, in the same light as James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room.” She airs at length the praise of the curator Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Madonna on a 2013 multimedia installation called “X‐STaTIC PRo=CeSS.”Maybe we’ve all miscast Madonna as the Queen of Pop — a dubious analogue to Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul — and she’s closer, on a mass scale, to Karen Finley, the performance artist who used to smear her nude body in chocolate or honey? Indeed, describing the period Madonna lived in Miami, Gabriel writes of her “daily ritual of covering herself in honey and jumping into Biscayne Bay, where she floated until the honey melted away,” with no apparent concern for sharks.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is organized as a busy, seven-decade, mostly urban travel itinerary. Like Franklin, Madonna lost her mother early and was raised in Detroit, where her father, who also had half a dozen children, “thought we should always be productive,” she said. Her Barbie would tell Ken: “I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight. I’m going bowling, OK, so forget it!” Among her formative influences were J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton (literary); the Shangri-Las and David Bowie (musical); Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo (visual). “The sight of her mustache consoled me,” she said of the latter.I might be biased as a native who craved rubber bracelets and lace socks and waited to hear if FM radio played “Borderline” through the “la-la-la-la,” but the section when Madonna arrives in New York City, though well trafficked, is one of the most compelling in this book. She eats French fries out of garbage cans; learns guitar at an abandoned synagogue in Flushing Meadows nicknamed “the Gog”; brings a demo tape to the DJ booth at Danceteria; and, signed by Stein from his hospital bed, hangs with a “coterie” of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was also raped at knife point on a rooftop, an ordeal not publicly aired until the punishing Abel Ferrara film “Dangerous Game” in 1993.Having segued to Hollywood (and later Broadway and the West End), she gave the middle finger to its male establishment: walking away from an early marriage to Sean Penn, cursing out David Letterman on the air and roundly shushing Harvey Weinstein when he offers feedback on “Truth or Dare,” her 1991 documentary. (“I don’t care what your point of view is,” she tells him. “I never want to hear it. Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing?”) Her onetime paramour Warren Beatty, who directed her in “Dick Tracy,” mocked how she wanted to live on-camera all the time; who with an iPhone now does otherwise?Madonna is rightly celebrated here as a pioneer of AIDS education — she lost countless friends to the disease — and a genuine philanthropist. But as she grows more practiced with the press and isolated by her fame, the book softens and suffers. The muchness of Madonna, her cross-disciplinarity — from MTV to “Evita” — seems impossible to corral.Madonna’s drug is work — she makes a discipline of even decadence — and “A Rebel Life” increasingly becomes a litany of remote description and tabulation: boundaries crossed, records broken, shows staged, money made, countries visited, foreign cultures sampled. “All artists appropriate,” is how Gabriel defends her against a frequent charge. “It is called inspiration.”Clichés sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror.Speaking of mirrors: Gabriel acknowledges Madonna’s talent for self-reinvention, but oddly ignores her transformation after cosmetic procedures and the resultant backlash — a sensitive matter to parse, but hardly irrelevant for someone whose oeuvre has been so entwined with image. “I’m going to make it easier for all those girls behind me when they turn 60,” the star said when promoting her 2019 album, “Madame X.” Well, some of those girls want to know why she can’t shake her skull-topped cane at the anti-aging industrial complex.“A Rebel Life” hits its marks but rarely soars, as Madonna did suspended by cables during her Drowned World tour. (Rather, the book is submerged in names, places and dates and historical exposition.) Then again, assessing Madonna’s legacy before she has a chance to recover from recent health setbacks may be an impossibly premature endeavor.“The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over,” Gabriel writes. “Time and again, the jury was wrong.”MADONNA: A Rebel Life | By Mary Gabriel | Illustrated | 858 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $38 More

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    Drake Releases ‘For All the Dogs’ Album, With Assists From Bad Bunny and Kevin Durant

    The album features appearances by SZA, 21 Savage and J. Cole, plus a surprise role for an NBA star. After its release, the rapper said he would consider a temporary break from music.After a summer of teasing, various delays, dozens of arena concerts and eventually another No. 1 single, the rapper Drake released his fourth album in barely two years on Friday morning, ahead of a tour-ending, two-night run of shows in his hometown, Toronto.“For All the Dogs,” Drake’s eighth solo studio album, not counting those he considers mixtapes, includes 23 tracks and features past collaborators like J. Cole, 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, SZA and the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny, plus artists from the hip-hop vanguard like Chief Keef, Yeat, Teezo Touchdown and Sexyy Red.The credits also list a role for Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns basketball player, who is given the title of A&R on “For All the Dogs,” a role that, in the modern music business, refers to a collaborator who helps to organize an album. Tracks include “Bahamas Promises,” “What Would Pluto Do,” “7969 Santa” and “Virginia Beach,” a song that immediately raised eyebrows because it is named for the hometown of Drake’s longtime rap rival, Pusha-T.The album was released at the unorthodox hour of 6 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, breaking from the industry standard. “Sorry to all my streamers,” Drake wrote on Instagram in his announcement, a reference to the fact that new albums are typically released to services like Spotify and Apple Music at midnight.It was the latest — and shortest — delay for a long-expected album. Drake, a perpetual chart-topper who prides himself on relentless productivity, began promising a new release even before the opening of his “It’s All A Blur” arena tour, which debuted in July, and he provided updates on his recording progress most nights onstage.“For All the Dogs” had previously been scheduled for release on Sept. 22, but fan anticipation stretched back further, to the beginning of summer.Drake first teased the album in June, with the surprise announcement of a book of poetry via full page newspaper advertisements in major publications. The ads and the book, “Titles Ruin Everything,” written with Kenza Samir, contained a QR code atop an image of two puppies that linked to a website revealing the existence of new music.It did not include a release date, but did come with a cheeky Drake lyric from “Headlines,” a song released in 2011: “They say they miss the old Drake, girl, don’t tempt me.”On Thursday, he called the new album “one of my best ever,” marking the release of the video for “8am in Charlotte,” the latest in his long-running time stamp series, which co-stars his young son, Adonis. The child also contributed the scrawled rendering of a goat — not a dog, according to the artist — that serves as the “For All the Dogs” album cover.The album was preceded earlier by the release of the singles “Search & Rescue,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April (but is not included on “For All the Dogs”), and “Slime You Out,” featuring SZA, which debuted at No. 1 last month, marking Drake’s 12th chart-topping song. That achievement tied him with Madonna and the Supremes for the fifth-most No. 1s of all time, Billboard said.This year, Drake has also appeared on tracks by the rappers J Hus, Central Cee, Young Thug and Travis Scott.Drake has 12 Billboard No. 1 albums in all, including two from last year — the dance music-inspired “Honestly, Nevermind,” released in June, and the more rap-focused “Her Loss,” with 21 Savage, from November.The “It’s All a Blur” tour, which also features 21 Savage, concludes on Friday and Saturday, at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. With more than 50 arena dates, Drake’s tour was one of many by music’s biggest stars this summer in which intense post-pandemic demand and ticket competition led to high prices, jarring some fans.Drake said on Friday that he would likely take a break following the tour and album, citing a persistent stomach problem. “I probably won’t make music for a little bit,” the rapper told listeners of his Sirius XM radio show, Table for One. “I need to focus on my health.”“I don’t even know what a little bit is,” he added. “Maybe a year or so, maybe a little longer.” More