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      Burt Bacharach, Composer Who Added a High Gloss to the ’60s, Dies at 94

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      His sophisticated collaborations with the lyricist Hal David — “The Look of Love,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie” and many more hits — evoked a sleek era of airy romance.Burt Bacharach, the debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His publicist Tina Brausam confirmed the death. No specific cause was given.A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.Bacharach-David songs like “The Look of Love” (Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the movie “Casino Royale”), “This Guy’s in Love With You” (a No. 1 hit in 1968 for Herb Alpert), and “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters) evoked an upscale world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Mr. Bacharach appeared as himself and performed his 1965 song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in the 1997 movie “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which spoofed the swinging ’60s ambience of the early James Bond films. He also made cameo appearances in its two sequels.Mr. Bacharach with Hal David, his most frequent collaborator, and Dionne Warwick, the pair’s definitive interpreter. Together they turned out a steady stream of pop hits.Frank Driggs Collection/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists over the years, and even wrote some of his own words. But his primary collaborator was Mr. David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music publisher’s office in 1957. The team’s artistic chemistry solidified in 1962, beginning with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, N.J.Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.The artistic synergy of Mr. Bacharach, Mr. David and Ms. Warwick defined the voice of a young, passionate, on-the-go Everywoman bursting with romantic eagerness and vulnerability. Their urbane style was the immediate forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the middle and late 1960s.Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David worked in the Brill Building, the Midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they are frequently lumped together with the younger writers in the so-called Brill Building school of teenage pop, like the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they rarely wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their more sophisticated songs were closer in style to Cole Porter, and Mr. Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter standards like “Begin the Beguine.”Hits and a MissBeginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in 1962, the team turned out a steady stream of hits for Ms. Warwick, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” Accepting the Academy Award for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1970. Mr. Bacharach also won the Oscar for best song that year, for the film’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”Associated PressMr. Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He won two Academy Awards for best song: for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” written with Mr. David, in 1970, and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His original score for the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which included “Raindrops” (a No. 1 hit for B.J. Thomas), won an Oscar for best original score for a nonmusical motion picture. And the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway in December 1968 with “Promises, Promises.”Adapted by Neil Simon from “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s 1960 film about erotic hanky-panky at a Manhattan corporation, “Promises, Promises” was one of the first Broadway shows to use backup singers in the orchestra pit and pop-style amplification. Along with “Hair,” which opened on Broadway that same year, it presaged the era of the pop musical.“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances, yielded hits for Ms. Warwick in the catchy but fiendishly difficult title song and the folk-pop ballad “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and was nominated for seven Tony Awards. (Two of its cast members won, but the show itself did not. Both “Promises, Promises” and “Hair” lost in the best-musical category to the much more traditional “1776.”) It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2010.At the piano in 1968 with the “Promises, Promises” team, from left: the actor Jerry Orbach, who won the Tony for his role; the actress Jill O’Hara; the director Robert Moore; the playwright Neil Simon, who adapted the musical from Billy Wilder’s 1960 film “The Apartment”; the producer David Merrick; and the actor Edward Winter.Bob Wands/Associated PressWith success both in Hollywood and on Broadway, as well as a high-profile movie-star wife, Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, Mr. Bacharach entered the 1970s not just a hit songwriter but a glamorous star in his own right. It seemed as if he could do no wrong. But that soon changed.In 1973, Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David wrote the score for the movie musical “Lost Horizon,” adapted from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy film of the same name. The movie was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to grow stale, split up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.Reflecting on his split with Mr. David in 2013 in his autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music,” written with Robert Greenfield, Mr. Bacharach acknowledged that “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart.”A New PartnershipMr. Bacharach endured several fallow years, personal as well as professional — his marriage to Ms. Dickinson was over long before they divorced in 1981 — but experienced a commercial resurgence in the 1980s through his collaboration with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982.Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Sager hit their commercial peak in 1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” and the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For,” which went on to win the Grammy for song of the year. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 movie “Night Shift,” and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends (Ms. Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John), “That’s What Friends Are For” was Mr. Bacharach’s last major hit. He and Ms. Sager divorced in 1991.Mr. Bacharach married the actress Angie Dickinson in 1965; they divorced in 1981. At the time of their marriage, he was not just a composer but a debonair, glamorous star in his own right. Associated PressBurt Freeman Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 12, 1928. His father, Bert Bacharach, was a nationally syndicated columnist and men’s fashion journalist who moved his family to Forest Hills, Queens, in 1932. His mother, Irma (Freeman) Bacharach, was an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged him to study music. He learned cello, drums and piano.While still underage, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs and became smitten with the modern harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which would exert a huge influence on him.After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he studied music at several schools, including McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York. Among his teachers were the composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. While serving in the Army in the early ’50s, he played piano, worked as a dance-band arranger and met the singer Vic Damone, with whom he later toured as an accompanist.He became the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich’s musical director in 1958 and toured with her for two years in the United States and Europe. Other performers he accompanied in the 1950s included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart, who in 1953 became his first wife. (They divorced in 1958.)Mr. Bacharach spent the 1950s accompanying famous performers, including the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, pictured with him in 1960.Werner Kreusch/Associated PressThe Bacharach-David songwriting team enjoyed immediate success in 1957 with Marty Robbins’s “The Story of My Life” and Perry Como’s “Magic Moments.” Mr. Bacharach’s emerging melodic signature was discernible in early 1960s hits like Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now” (lyrics by Mr. Hilliard) and “Make It Easy on Yourself” (lyrics by Mr. David), a success for Jerry Butler in the United States and the Walker Brothers in Britain. In their Gene Pitney hits “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” and “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa,” the team adopted a swaggering quasi-western sound.All the elements of Mr. Bacharach’s style coalesced in Ms. Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with Mr. David and arranged himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the arrangements emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the influence of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.Among the other artists who had hits with the team’s songs were Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”), Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Tom Jones (“What’s New Pussycat?”) and the 5th Dimension (“One Less Bell to Answer”). But Ms. Warwick was their definitive interpreter.A ReunionAfter the “Lost Horizon” debacle, Mr. Bacharach worked predominantly as a concert performer, conducting his own instrumental suites and singing his own songs in an easygoing voice with a narrow range. He periodically released solo albums, of which the most ambitious was “Woman” (1979), a primarily instrumental song cycle recorded with the Houston Symphony. But these records had a negligible commercial impact.Time eventually healed the wounds from Mr. Bacharach’s split with Mr. David and Ms. Warwick, and he reunited first with Ms. Warwick (most notably for “That’s What Friends Are For”) and later with Mr. David (for “Sunny Weather Lover,” recorded by Ms. Warwick in the early 1990s). He found his greatest interpreter since Ms. Warwick in the pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross, whose lush 1980s remakes of “A House Is Not a Home” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” transformed them into dreamy quasi-operatic arias decorated with florid gospel melismas.He married Jane Hansen, his fourth wife, in 1993. She survives him, along with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Ms. Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Angie Dickinson, committed suicide in 2007.Mr. Bacharach accompanied the singer-songwriter Elvis Costello at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1998.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn his 60s, Mr. Bacharach found himself regarded with awe by a younger generation of musicians. Bands like Oasis and Stereolab included his songs in their repertoire. The British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer, collaborated with him on the ballad “God Give Me Strength” for the 1996 film “Grace of My Heart,” loosely based on the life of Carole King. That led them to collaborate on an entire album, “Painted From Memory” (1998), arranged and conducted by Mr. Bacharach, for which they shared music and lyric credits.A track from that album, “I Still Have That Other Girl,” won a Grammy for best pop vocal collaboration. It was the sixth Grammy of Mr. Bacharach’s career; he would win one more, in 2006, when his “At This Time” was named best pop instrumental album, as well as a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2008. The Bacharach-David team was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Forty years later, shortly before Mr. David died at age 91, the two received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.Mr. Bacharach in 2007. “Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I get to make a direct connection with people.”Lisa Maree Williams/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach remained in the public eye until the end. In December 2011, “Some Lovers,” a musical for which he wrote the music and Steven Sater wrote the lyrics, opened at the Old Globe in San Diego. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined,” a New York Theater Workshop production built on his songs, opened Off Broadway in December 2013. (An earlier revue based on the Bacharach-David catalog, “The Look of Love,” had a brief Broadway run in 2003.) As recently as 2020, Mr. Bacharach was still writing new music, releasing a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Melody Federer.In 2013, Mr. Bacharach began collaborating with Mr. Costello, Mr. Sater and the television writer and producer Chuck Lorre on a stage musical based on the “Painted From Memory” album but also including new songs. That project never came to fruition, although some of the new material ended up on Mr. Costello’s recent albums. All the music from the “Painted From Memory” project is included in “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a boxed set that also includes Mr. Costello’s recordings of Bacharach songs, which is scheduled for release next month.Looking back on his career in his autobiography, Mr. Bacharach suggested that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most.”“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was also a performer, he noted, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Mr. Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”Alex Traub More

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      Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.

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      The newspaper, which started in 1966 with a focus on R&B, funk and disco, shut down in 1982. But one of its founders’ grandsons is devoted to finding it a new online audience.The rock ’n’ roll bible Rolling Stone was founded in 1967. The renegade music magazine Creem started in 1969. But another publication predated them both: Soul.Motown, Stax and Phil Spector’s Philles Records were busting out (and Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label was on the horizon), but until Soul, no publication had been feeding the growing appetite for even the most basic information about Black artists like Marvin Gaye, Carla Thomas or the Isley Brothers. The world knew the names of the Beatles’ wives, but not of the Ikettes.With the smoke barely cleared from the Watts riots, two men saw an opening: Ken Jones, Los Angeles’s first Black television anchor, and Cecil Tuck, who revitalized KRLA Beat, an early rock title. But the face of Soul, the one who told record company bosses where to get off and had artists calling her at night with scoops, was Regina Jones, Ken’s wife. Fly, flinty and self-created, Regina was at one time both the paper’s publisher and editor in chief.Soul was groundbreaking, but it flamed out in 1982. Now Matt Jones, Ken and Regina’s grandson, is giving the publication a second life, creating an online archive of its issues for paying subscribers and uploading select audio from interviews. (Hard copies — dead stock — are also for sale.)“We have bound volumes of all the issues that have been in my grandmother’s home for as long as I can remember,” Jones, 39, said. He has digitalized 82 issues with 291 to go, and is leaning on Regina, now 80, for historical context. (The two talk every day; Ken died in 1993.)As the most granular source of news and images of soul, R&B, funk and disco artists in the Golden Age of those genres, Soul is a gold mine for Black history and pop culture scholars. It “documents an important turning point in U.S. race relations and the arts,” Susan D. Anderson, who stewarded Regina’s gift of Soul’s archive to the U.C.L.A. Library in 2010, wrote in an email.Few people, she added, know that Soul, “in its drive to document African Americans’ perspective in a self-representative way, was a pivotal vehicle” powering the shift from “race records” to America “becoming the locus of popular culture production,” with Black artists the prevailing force.Selling originally for 15 cents, the biweekly also covered jazz, television, Black Power, Hollywood and theater. Page Six-style columns delivered gossip in bites. Style was a de facto component: the Pointer Sisters in high-’40s drag, Al Green in hot pants and over-the-knee boots. A glossy sister was spawned, Soul! Illustrated.Soul threw down the gauntlet from the first issue. James Brown and Mick Jagger shared a split cover under the headline “White Artists Selling Negro ‘Soul.’” Daphne A. Brooks, professor of African American studies at Yale, singled it out for “the audacity of its critical focus,” stunned that in 1966 a music publication would lead with a piece on the politics of cultural appropriation. “Are you kidding me?!” she wrote over email. Other covers the first year featured Stevie Wonder, the Impressions and Sam Cooke. The website highlights major interviews with Aretha Franklin, Rick James and Bob Marley.Soul “helps to fill out and complicate our understanding of a seminal moment,” Gayle Wald, author of “It’s Been Beautiful: ‘Soul!’ and Black Power Television,” wrote in an email. “Soul!,” a variety show, was unrelated to the paper but had a similar mission. “Serious cultural journalism about pop music was just emerging,” Wald added.Regina and Ken bought out Tuck in 1967, producing Soul from their home near Watts while raising five children. Regina said she did not view Rolling Stone as competition but did “resent” it covering Black artists: her territory. In 1975, both publications printed Labelle covers; Jones enjoyed a measure of satisfaction when she beat Jann Wenner’s magazine to the newsstands by four months. Nona Hendryx, a member of Labelle, purveyors of a landmark mash-up of funk, rock, R&B and gospel, said that “for an African-American artist, Soul was definitely more important than Rolling Stone.” Fans approached her in public: “Hey, I saw you in Soul.”“You got your feedback directly from the people,” Hendryx added. “It had more weight than Rolling Stone because it kept us in the community.”In a novel marketing gambit, Soul partnered with 30 Black radio stations across the country, printing a different edition for each. Stations had their call letters on the cover and a spread inside for rotation charts and advertisers. Bruce W. Talamon, Soul’s star photographer, said that in turn, “D.J.s gave us on-air promotion — ‘Buy your Soul newspaper!’”Regina’s unfiltered access to artists could mean fielding a call from David Ruffin announcing he’d just been fired from the Temptations — and wanted to tell his story. “That speaks to how highly he felt about Soul,” she said. “It was almost like going to your parents.” Diana Ross kissed the Supremes goodbye in 1970 during their final performance at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, then slipped into a booth beside Berry Gordy, still in her Bob Mackie stage velvets, to spill tea with Soul.Sublime talent showed up on Regina’s doorstep unbidden, including Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and Talamon, whose book, “Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972-1982,” is a definitive visual record of artists in the idioms and period it covers.Before freelancing for Soul in 1976, Pitts said in a video interview from the 2000s, “I was there every day on the day” Soul came out, waiting for it to go on sale, to learn that the Temptations had suffered yet another personnel change, that King had been assassinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening? My world is crumbling.’”Pitts, who later held the top editorial position, said in the video that he admired Soul because it didn’t pander, printing that there was no love lost between Rick James and George Clinton. Nobody else, he noted, thought Black music warranted that kind of attention: “No one else was telling you, you know, ‘This is why Philippé Wynne left the Spinners.’ It wasn’t what the press releases say. It’s because they had a fight.”Nichelle Gainer, author of “Vintage Black Glamour,” noted in an email that Soul’s “coverage of hot-button topics” like the Motown star Tammi Terrell’s illness was “steadier,” with “consistent updates,” compared with general interest Black publications. But the paper’s quality was not always how alumni and scholars remember it. The writing could be crude; handout images were sometimes accepted as cover photos. And as the ’70s wound down, Soul lost its teeth. The Joneses’ marriage was unraveling. Regina admitted she was no longer minding the store. In 1980, ‌J. Randy Taraborrelli, who followed Pitts as editor in chief and would go on to write “Call Her Miss Ross,” a biography of the supreme Supreme, pushed successfully for a cover the publication’s readership could not abide: Barry Manilow.Matt Jones will dutifully digitalize the issue. But he won’t be sad if it goes unnoticed among firebombs like the Brown/Jagger story. Before Soul, he said, Jet and Ebony talked about soul music “as this weird kind of niche thing — they had trouble describing it. The press packets of many Black musicians in the ’60s consisted of a single one-page write-up: ‘Here’s who I am. Here’s this great interview on me in Soul newspaper.’” More

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      Whitney Houston’s Enduring Legacy: Lifting Up Other Black Women

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      THERE ARE, STRANGELY, a lot of other women in Whitney Houston’s 1993 video for the song “I’m Every Woman,” that can-do anthem powered by Houston’s unparalleled midrange pipes. “It’s all in me,” she sings of a spellbinding force that would seem to make others unnecessary. Yet there alongside her we find the funk powerhouse Chaka Khan, who first recorded the song in 1978; the song’s co-composer Valerie Simpson; Houston’s mother and mentor, Cissy Houston; a dance team of young Black girls; and the trio TLC. Houston recorded “I’m Every Woman” for the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard” (1992), which she co-executive produced, and which secured her megastardom such that “the wonderment of her talent and her career impacted everyone,” as her sister-in-law and estate executor, Pat Houston, puts it. The open secret of this video is that Houston had a hand in that influence: She deliberately used her status as an icon to light up a whole network of Black female forebears and creative descendants.Now, 11 years after her death, Houston has a new MAC cosmetics line and a Scent Beauty fragrance; her original recordings are featured in the recent biopic starring Naomi Ackie. The coming months and years will bring, among other initiatives, a compilation of her unreleased gospel recordings and a Broadway musical. These ventures — the fruits of a 2019 partnership between the Whitney Houston estate and the music publishing company Primary Wave — invite us not only to look again at Houston herself but to realize that her own gaze was often turned toward other Black women. We now expect celebrities such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, Ava DuVernay and Lena Waithe to share their resources, establish record labels and production companies and engage in collaborations to demonstrate that they, in the words of Issa Rae at the 2017 Emmys, are “rooting for everybody Black” — especially other Black women. Yet it was Houston, who linked arms with gospel icons like CeCe Winans and Kim Burrell, and mentored pop stars such as Brandy and Monica, who pioneered this form of Black female boosterism on a grand scale.We haven’t been able to see this in part because of the scrim of myth that treats Houston’s Blackness only as a problem for her, not as a source of pride or opportunity. Too Black for the puritanical white pop mainstream, too white for the narrow-minded Black listeners who booed her at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, she married “bad boy” Bobby Brown, we are told, in an effort to regain her hometown Newark, N.J., street cred and to neutralize the whitening effects of her pop hits with Arista, the label founded by Clive Davis. The story of her life, thus staged as a battle between two charismatic men, admits Black women only as historical precedents (her musical mother, Cissy; her celebrity cousin Dionne Warwick), or as illicit lovers. (Her longtime best friend and creative director, Robyn Crawford, writes in her 2019 memoir, published in part to correct the record, that there was a sexual dimension to their relationship in the beginning — they met when Houston was 17 — a point on which the new biopic is refreshingly matter-of-fact.) Houston’s much-publicized addiction — she drowned in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub, with drugs in her system, in 2012 at age 48 — seals her reputation as a woman who was scarcely in control of herself, let alone over the prospects of other Black women across the entertainment industry. It’s nearly impossible to see how intently and compassionately she wielded that power in the post-“Bodyguard” years, given that most accounts depict that period as a blank free fall toward her death.YET FOR ALL that, Houston’s boosterism has also escaped us because it was personal. She wasn’t really a race woman: A star of her stature and ambition could not have declared her racial commitments like, say, the actress Ruby Dee, or, later, Rae herself; and Houston bid a raucous farewell to the race woman’s politics of respectability, as well as to the position of role model, with the 2005 reality TV series “Being Bobby Brown.” Nor was Houston a mogul like some of her contemporaries, such as Oprah Winfrey or Spike Lee. (An artist-management company and record label were both short-lived.) But she was part of that same embattled, entitled post-civil rights generation who integrated previously white spaces before drawing other artists into them. And because she was intimately aware of how punishing the spotlight could be, she did not simply guide Black women to greater visibility but tried to ensure they survived it.McKinniss’s “The Star Spangled Banner” (2022).Courtesy of the artist, JTT and Almine Rech. Photo: Charles BentonIn a shift signaled by the “I’m Every Woman” video, she began trading in her America’s sweetheart card in the mid-90s for that of Black culture worker, emerging not only as the Voice but as a multimedia strategist with a discerning ear for new talent. In 1994, she performed a series of concerts in Nelson Mandela’s South Africa. In 1995, she co-executive produced and appeared on an all-Black-female soundtrack for the film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel, “Waiting to Exhale,” in which she co-starred; the album featured everyone from Aretha Franklin to the R&B vocalist Faith Evans to the wunderkind Brandy — who later starred in the 1997 multicultural version of “Cinderella” that Houston co-produced (she herself played the Fairy Godmother). She helped put contemporary gospel on the map with her 1996 soundtrack to “The Preacher’s Wife” and by collaborating with Winans and Kelly Price. In 1998, she worked with the musicians Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill (whom she called “the new breed”) to help produce “My Love Is Your Love,” an album that initiated her turn toward a new bent-but-not-broken brand of hip-hop-inflected R&B. She had Price and Evans sing with her on the sultry track “Heartbreak Hotel.” The song doesn’t call out for a group arrangement, but Houston seemed to want to “shine some light on some other Black females from church,” Evans says. The Grammy-nominated song, as well as the video, brought Evans and Price even greater exposure to a pop audience (while also helping Houston reach the so-called urban music market these younger artists represented). Her last project was a 2012 remake of the 1976 Black film musical “Sparkle,” in which she portrayed the mother to a group of aspiring singers — fitting, given the supporting role she had been playing offscreen for nearly two decades.Having signed her own recording contract at age 19, Houston was, by her 30s, something of an industry elder. (Burrell, who was one of Houston’s closest friends, tells me that, following an unimpressive encounter with a rising female superstar, Houston wanted to make a documentary on dos and don’ts for women in the industry.) She encouraged Monica, a mentee 17 years her junior, to keep recording then-unorthodox songs about urban life such as “Street Symphony” (1998), and to stick to the thigh-high leather boots she preferred even when she was being told to wear gowns. Monica recalls that Houston also instructed her to keep her notes “pure” so as to distill a song’s feeling, instead of “mixing tones and textures,” the way the younger vocalist had learned to do in church. It was also crucial to find the “spaces and places to add inflections, but not too much,” she says: “Whitney was big on that.”The point of getting it right was less to impress than to properly perform one’s musical ministry. “It wasn’t about going onstage looking glamorous or wondering, ‘Did I sound good?’” Pat Houston says. “She came onstage to sing to you. She was looking to make sure you extracted what you needed from what she had to say.” The music mattered because it was the medium through which Houston enacted the best of what she aimed to be offstage: vibrantly available, sensitive to nuance and need. She encouraged Burrell’s dream of a church in Houston, where Burrell has served as the senior pastor. When Evans’s husband the Notorious B.I.G. was killed in 1997, Houston got her out of the house. When Monica suffered a tragic loss at 18, Houston flew to the singer’s home in Atlanta, staying for nearly a week.These gestures and generosities were things only her friends could tell you about. She had no desire to advertise them, not least since her private life had already been thoroughly consumed by the public. Yet she was nonetheless pleased when people found out. In 1998, the future journalist Quencie Thomas, then in her early 20s, interviewed Houston on MTV and thanked her for “employing so many of our people.” Houston sat up straight and said, “Do you know that?” Knowing has always depended on whom you asked, and where you looked. More

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      Grammys 2023: Hip-Hop Wins, Beyoncé Wins (Sort of)

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe major awards at this year’s Grammys were split: Harry Styles won album of the year, Lizzo took record of the year and Bonnie Raitt received song of the year. Beyoncé, nominated in each of those categories, won none of them.Which is to say another year, another set of Grammy shrugs for Beyoncé, who despite the ongoing snubs in major categories, is now the most awarded artist in Grammy history, with a total of 32 wins.Whether Grammy respect has meaning was an ongoing theme Sunday night, underscoring Beyoncé’s wins and losses, as well as the elaborate hip-hop history segment that ran through 50 years of the genre in 15 minutes, bringing many rap legends to the Grammy stage for the first time ever.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the Grammys finally reckoning with hip-hop’s long legacy and impact, the show’s ongoing tug of war with Beyoncé and the ways it might remain relevant in the future.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticLindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York TimesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Charlie Thomas, a Drifter Nearly All His Life in Song, Dies at 85

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      He was heard on hits like “There Goes My Baby,” “Under the Boardwalk” and “Up on the Roof.” He kept singing them for decades.Charlie Thomas, who recorded memorable songs like “There Goes My Baby” and “Under the Boardwalk” with the Drifters, the silken-voiced R&B group that had a long string of hits from 1959 to 1964 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Fame, died on Jan. 31 at his home in Bowie, Md. He was 85.The singer Peter Lemongello Jr., a close friend, said the cause was liver cancer.Mr. Thomas, a tenor, was a Drifter for more than 60 years, from the version of the group that had its first hits in the late 1950s to the version he led and toured with until the pandemic struck.“He was aging, but he was active almost every weekend,” Mr. Lemongello, a former lead singer of the Crests, which performed on bills with Mr. Thomas, said in a phone interview. “Unfortunately, he went from being active to being at home and he started going downhill.”Mr. Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were also on the bill.After one of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the promoter of the show, the music historian Marv Goldberg wrote, Mr. Treadwell, who owned the name, fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Mr. Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.Asked how it felt to suddenly become a Drifter, Mr. Thomas told Mr. Goldberg: “As a kid, I used to play hooky to see the Drifters at the Apollo. It felt good!”The new Drifters fulfilled the former group’s road obligations and began recording the next year for Atlantic Records, produced by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.Mr. King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Mr. Thomas to sing. But Mr. Thomas froze at the studio microphone, according to Billy Vera’s liner notes for “Rockin’ and Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (1996), and Mr. King took over. The song rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era. They followed “There Goes My Baby” with songs like “This Magic Moment,”“Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.Mr. Lewis in performance in Holmdel, N.J., in 2016. He performed for many years with a group billed as Charlie Thomas’s Drifters.Bobby Bank/Wireimage, via Getty ImagesCharles Nowlin Thomas was born on April 7, 1937, in Lynchburg, Va. His father, Willis, was a minister, and his mother, Lucinda (Nowlin) Thomas, was a homemaker whose singing voice Charlie admired.“My dad was a holy roller preacher down in Virginia,” Mr. Thomas said in an interview in 2013 with Craig Morrison, a musician and ethnomusicologist. “At my father’s church, I used to take the tambourine and do collection, and my mother used to sing in the choir. That’s where I really got my training from singing.”He moved to Harlem with his mother and a sister when he was 10 and eventually got a job pushing a hand truck in the garment district. He sang on street corners and came to the attention of Lover Patterson, the Crowns’ manager, who hired him in 1958. The group recorded “Kiss and Make Up” for the songwriters’ Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s short-lived RnB label before Mr. Treadwell turned them into the Drifters.The lead singers on most of the group’s hits were Mr. King and, after he left for a solo career in 1960, Rudy Lewis and Johnny Moore, who had been in the group’s first incarnation and rejoined it in 1964.But Mr. Thomas sang lead on “Sweets for My Sweet,” which reached No. 16 on the Hot 100 in 1961, and “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” which peaked at No. 28 the next year. Mr. Thomas also took over the lead on the ballad “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” a day after Mr. Lewis’s death in a hotel room in 1964.“When he died, I was the one who closed his eyes,” Mr. Thomas told Goldmine magazine in 2012. He added, “I really do love that song because that one, in particular, brings back a lot of memories.”The Drifters broke up in the late 1960s, but they didn’t disappear. Some members headed to England, where they performed as the Drifters and were managed by Mr. Treadwell’s widow, Faye, who vigorously defended her legal right to the name.Bill Pinkney, a member of the mid-1950s lineup fired by Mr. Treadwell, went on to form a group called the Original Drifters. He died in 2007, but the group continues to perform under that name.Mr. Thomas later joined them briefly before starting Charlie Thomas’s Drifters, which performed until 2020. Still other groups have claimed the Drifters name over the years as well.Mr. Thomas is survived by his wife, Rita Thomas; his daughters, Crystal Thomas Wilson and Victoria Green; his sons, Charlie Jr., Michael Sidbury and Brian Godfrey, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted seven of the Drifters in 1988, it recognized members of the 1953-58 lineup — Mr. Pinkney, Clyde McPhatter, Gerhart Thomas and Johnny Moore — as well as those from the later years: Mr. Thomas, Mr. King and Mr. Lewis.“Time has hardly made their work seem quaint,” Michael Hill wrote in the induction essay, “rather their work has withstood the ravages of the years to become even more special, more knowing.” More

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      Best and Worst Moments From the 2023 Grammys

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      Questlove assembled a crash course in hip-hop history, Beyoncé made her priorities known and Kim Petras spoke from the heart at the 65th annual awards.The big news at the 65th annual Grammy Awards: Beyoncé broke the record for most wins in the event’s history. But her four victories didn’t come in the major, all-genre categories — album, record and song of the year. (Those went to Harry Styles, Lizzo and Bonnie Raitt.) Beyoncé, who led the night with nine nominations, did not perform; neither did Kendrick Lamar (eight nods) or Adele (seven). So how did the show fill nearly four hours of airtime? With some spectacular performances, bizarre fan moments and powerful speeches. Here are the show’s highlights and lowlights as we saw them.Best Opening Salvo: Bad BunnyBad Bunny earned his spot at the start of the telecast by making the commercial juggernaut of 2022: “Un Verano Sin Ti,” the year’s most streamed album and a Billboard No. 1 album for 13 nonconsecutive weeks. His performance — a medley of “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), a tribute to Puerto Rican culture amid adversity, and “Después de la Playa” (“After the Beach”), a come-on — was a carnival and a dance party. Over Afro-Caribbean bomba drumming, Bad Bunny paraded through the Crypto.com Arena aisle with a troupe of dancers, some carrying oversized heads of Puerto Rican figures including the songwriters Andy Montañez and Tego Calderón. When he brought his forces onstage, “Después de la Playa” was transformed from electronic pop to a brassy, galloping merengue that left the celebrities upfront no choice but to dance. JON PARELESBest Acceptance: Kim Petras’s Moving Speech About Trans ExistenceIn her speech for best pop duo/group performance, Kim Petras thanked Sophie, a trans artist who died in 2021.Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyMadonna may have oversold Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s relatively tepid performance of “Unholy” when she promised it would provide “controversy.” But Petras’s moving speech when she and Smith won best pop duo/group performance was far more radical. Smith blew Petras a kiss and graciously ceded the microphone because, as Petras then told the audience in a quivering voice, she had just become the first transgender woman to win this category. She thanked the trans artists who paved the way for her, most poignantly Sophie, the wildly creative electronic producer and artist who died two years ago, at 34: “I adore you and your inspiration will forever be in my music.” Petras also thanked her mother, memorably: “I grew up next to a highway in nowhere, Germany,” she said, “and my mother believed me, that I was a girl, and I wouldn’t be here without her and her support.” LINDSAY ZOLADZBest History Lesson: The Hip-Hop 50 TributePerformers from across the rap universe united for a special segment celebrating the genre’s 50th anniversary.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVarious chroniclers have agreed that 1973 was the dawn of hip-hop, making it a full 50 years old this year — old enough for the Grammys to finally treat it as a genre rather than an annoyance. That half-century point is also an occasion to start constructing a hip-hop canon. Given the constraints of time (12 minutes) and performer availability, Questlove produced a rough draft of a hip-hop chronology that was a cavalcade of dozens of performers onstage, most spitting a memorable line or verse, and a few — like a forthright Queen Latifah and a speed-tongued Busta Rhymes — getting more valuable seconds to show off. From Grandmaster Flash and Run-DMC to GloRilla and Lil Uzi Vert, it was a hip-hop Cliff’s Notes. (Jay-Z, who belongs in that canon, was reserved for a later appearance with DJ Khaled); it was a great way to start a discussion. And in 12 quick-changing minutes, the Grammys have probably multiplied their number of performing hip-hop acts. PARELESWorst Three-peat: Trevor NoahTrevor Noah had some groan-inducing moments as the Grammys host.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersFor a third consecutive year as Grammys host, Trevor Noah brought an arsenal of groan-worthy dad jokes. If his bits felt stale by the end of the first year, they were, dare we say, unholy the third time around. The Recording Academy needs to switch it up in 2024. Is Cardi B booked? Everyone in the audience seemed to know and like the Rock — why not give him a try? On the bright side, it can’t get much worse. ZOLADZBest Fashionably Late Entrance: Beyoncé Smiling and Nodding at Trevor NoahBeyoncé made it to the Grammys after her first televised win of the night, but in time to accept the honor that gave her the record for the show’s most victories ever.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressWhen Noah delivered his cheesy opening remarks, joking about the stars in the room, Beyoncé was nowhere to be found (much to Lizzo’s consternation). Some time later, when Beyoncé won best R&B song, her third of four awards on the night — and first on the televised prime-time show — she still wasn’t in her seat. (The-Dream, one of her fellow writers, spent a few seconds onstage instead.) And when Noah, after blaming Los Angeles traffic, eventually did find Beyoncé at her table, bringing her the trophy she had won, the singer just nodded politely, giving him — and the show that would go on to both celebrate and disrespect her, again — basically nothing. By the time she did step to the microphone for a proper acceptance speech, having taken the all-time Grammy record and also opted not to perform, Beyoncé had made her priorities clear: She posted to Instagram about her Grammy wins before actually showing her face at the Grammys. JOE COSCARELLIMore Coverage of the 2023 GrammysQuestlove’s Hip-Hop Tribute: The Roots drummer and D.J. fit 50 years of rap history into 15 minutes. For once, the awards show gave the genre a fitting spotlight.Welcoming Rebels: The Grammys need to build bridges between generations. That means convincing once-overlooked upstarts to show up as elders, Jon Caramanica writes.Viola Davis’s EGOT: The actress achieved the rare distinction during the Grammys preshow, becoming the 18th person to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.Protest Song: Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye,” which has become the anthem of the protests in Iran, won in a new special merit category recognizing a song for social change.Worst Participation Trophy: The Useless Fan SegmentsSuperfans of the artists nominated for album of the year shared personal stories about their relationship with their idols’ music.CBS/Paramount+Stan service gone wild was on full display during the misleading — and often humiliating — interstitial segments that showed (alleged) superfans of the 10 artists nominated for album of the year spouting P.R. talking points about their faves around a table and in the audience. If the Grammys has an optics problem, it’s that the public does not fully comprehend just who from the industry’s back rooms tends to vote for these peculiar winners, year after year. So acting like an everyday listener’s opinions about Harry Styles’s good looks, Lizzo’s body positivity or Bad Bunny’s domination on streaming services had anything to do with who was going to take home the prize was not only pointless propaganda, it actually hurt the Recording Academy’s cause by further fuzzying how the system works. Hopefully those people got paid. COSCARELLIBest Tribute That Should Never Have Been Necessary: Quavo Remembering TakeoffQuavo paid tribute to his Migos group mate and nephew, Takeoff.Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyThe annual in memoriam segment is never short on tear-jerking moments, given the bonds that fans — and fellow musicians — have with their favorite artists. But seeing Quavo perform “Without You,” a tribute to his nephew and Migos group mate Takeoff, who was killed as an innocent bystander to a shooting in November, was almost too much. Seated at first, wearing a “Phantom of the Opera” mask, in the shadow of a microphone stand holding Takeoff’s glistening rocket chain, Quavo eventually stood up, hoisting the necklace skyward. Seeing him up there alone — even backed by the power of the Maverick City Music collective — only drove home how little we’ve seen the two rappers apart, ever. It will take some getting used to. COSCARELLIBest Beyoncé Appreciation: LizzoLizzo made her feelings about Beyoncé known during her acceptance speech for record of the year.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressIn 2017, when Adele’s “25” triumphed over Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” for album of the year, the British musician announced, “I can’t possibly accept this award,” because the “artist of my life is Beyoncé.” The moment was both uncomfortably sincere and charged with larger tensions, namely the Grammys’ dire history of overlooking Black excellence in the major categories. It wasn’t quite Macklemore-apologizing-to-Kendrick awkward, but it was awkward nonetheless. Since then, beating Beyoncé has become a minefield. Lizzo managed to traverse it with elegance and flair, though, when her uplifting “About Damn Time” won record of the year. In a speech full of joy and grace, she thanked Beyoncé while also celebrating herself and enjoying her moment. Through tears, Lizzo recalled skipping school in 5th grade to see a Beyoncé concert, addressing her idol directly: “The way you made me feel, I was like, I wanna make people feel this way with my music.” But — whether inadvertently or winkingly — she did end up paraphrasing Adele, saying to Beyoncé what now seem to be the magic words: “You clearly are the artist of our lives.” ZOLADZBest Agenda Transcendence: Stevie WonderStevie Wonder performed three songs during the prime-time Grammy ceremony.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressAny performance by Stevie Wonder is an occasion, even one that’s overloaded with guests and agendas. Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder, and Smokey Robinson, the songwriter and longtime Motown executive, were the persons of the year at the Grammys’ MusiCares gala this year. So with Grammy logic, Wonder’s segment became a Motown tribute — the first one since all the way back in, well, 2019. Add a dynastic element; Wonder’s first guest, WanMor, is a boy band formed by the sons of Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men. They shared a Temptations hit co-written by Robinson, “The Way You Do the Things You Do.” Robinson himself joined Wonder for a song they wrote together (along with Hank Cosby), “The Tears of a Clown”; then Wonder performed his own “Higher Ground” with the country hitmaker Chris Stapleton, and the music finally took off. Stapleton brought a blues-rock earthiness to his vocal and guitar lines, and Wonder tossed a synthesizer counterpoint at him that made him grin and dig in harder — a real jam. PARELESBest Graceful Shocked Reaction: Bonnie RaittBonnie Raitt told the story of her Grammy-winning track “Just Like That” as she accepted her award for song of the year.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersIt’s no wonder that Bonnie Raitt, who had just joined a memorial for Christine McVie singing “Songbird,” was surprised when the Grammys chose “Just Like That” as song of the year. She is one of the mature singers and songwriters who have been relegated to formats like “Americana” and “Legacy.” But Raitt had learned from the best — notably John Prine — how to tell a sad but uplifting story with a voice and a small band. Some proportion of Grammy voters — enough to lift her into a plurality above Beyoncé and Adele — obviously recognized the combination of passion and terse craftsmanship. PARELESWorst Face-Saving Maneuvers: Televised CategoriesBad Bunny won best música urbana album, an award that is not usually televised on the main Grammys show. Mario Anzuoni/ReutersLike a nervous baseball manager, the Grammys have lately been re-examining their stats — particularly for representation of minorities, women and marginalized groups, who happen to be the loci of innovation in music. It may have seemed odd that some categories usually relegated to the Grammy Premiere Ceremony — where the vast majority of awards are presented as a webcast but not as a prime-time telecast — had arrived on the main Grammy stage. But look what they were. One was música urbana album, way down at Category 43; it gave a prime-time award, finally, to Bad Bunny. (But the main telecast should have had English subtitles when he switched to his more comfortable Spanish.) And the dance/electronic music album category? Congratulations to Beyoncé for breaking the Grammy record for most awards. But in the top categories, where she has belonged for multiple releases, she still hasn’t gotten her due. PARELESWorst Instance of Gravity Holding Him Back: Harry StylesHarry Styles was a big winner at the podium, but gave a lackluster performance on the Grammys stage.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe usually preternaturally spunky Styles was curiously low energy throughout his performance of “As It Was” Sunday night, hardly selling himself as the sort of entertainer who sells out 15 nights at Madison Square Garden. Several singers seemed to be having issues with their in-ear monitors, and Styles visibly adjusted his a few times, but that still doesn’t explain the curious sluggishness of his time onstage. It certainly didn’t help justify his album of the year win to the skeptics, either. ZOLADZ More

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      How the Grammys Bring Rebels Into the Fold

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      The awards show needs to build bridges between generations. That means convincing once-overlooked upstarts to show up as elders.Around midway through the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night, Madonna came out to introduce a performance by Sam Smith and Kim Petras of their theatrically gothic collaboration, “Unholy.”The track, a robust and cheeky song about infidelity with a playfully erotic video, went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, making Smith and Petras the first nonbinary and transgender artist, respectively, to top the chart. (On Sunday, “Unholy” also won best pop duo/group performance.)“Here’s what I’ve learned after four decades in music,” Madonna said dryly, riding crop in hand. “If they call you shocking, scandalous, troublesome, problematic, provocative or dangerous, you are definitely onto something.”Madonna would know, of course — the first decade of her career, she was aggressively, provocatively and campily pushing the boundaries of pop feminism, religion and sexuality, becoming one of the signature superstars of the 1980s. The Grammys, naturally, all but ignored her. She didn’t win a trophy for one of her studio albums until “Ray of Light,” in 1999. To this day, she has never claimed a Grammy in one of the major categories.Sam Smith performed “Unholy” after an introduction from Madonna in which she discussed the joys of provocation.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersAnd yet here she was, a revered and often-imitated elder, now fully absorbed into the Grammys ritual of baton passing between icons old and new.The Grammys, more than any of the other major award shows, needs these sorts of intergenerational handoffs to survive. Often it fudges them, by emphasizing and over-celebrating younger artists, like Bruno Mars and H.E.R., who make deeply traditional music.More Coverage of the 2023 GrammysQuestlove’s Hip-Hop Tribute: The Roots drummer and D.J. fit 50 years of rap history into 15 minutes. For once, the awards show gave the genre a fitting spotlight.Welcoming Rebels: The Grammys need to build bridges between generations. That means convincing once-overlooked upstarts to show up as elders, Jon Caramanica writes.Viola Davis’s EGOT: The actress achieved the rare distinction during the Grammys preshow, becoming the 18th person to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.Protest Song: Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye,” which has become the anthem of the protests in Iran, won in a new special merit category recognizing a song for social change.But the story of pop music is far more often about the mainlining and then mainstreaming of frisky outsider ideas into broad palatability. Innovators and interlopers become the establishment. Those who emerged pushing back fiercely against their elders eventually become elders.For the Grammys to last for decades to come — if it even should, but that’s a debate for a different time — it needs to turn rebels into institutionalists.Nowhere was this more clear Sunday night than in the elaborate and rousing hip-hop history revue that anchored the broadcast — a performance that underscored the Grammys’ often-tortured relationship to newness and rebellion, to say nothing of pop music rebels’ often-tortured relationship to the Grammys.Start at the end, when Lil Uzi Vert stomped out onstage, his hair jelled into spikes, rapping his bizarro viral hit “Just Wanna Rock.” This is how hip-hop works now — an idiosyncratic stylist finds fervor online and builds a cult atop it, a mechanism that couldn’t be further from the Grammys stage.Lil Uzi Vert represented rap’s current generation, performing “Just Wanna Rock.”Kevin Winter/Getty Images For The Recording AAnd yet here he was, anchoring a 12-minute feat of logistics and favor-pulling (orchestrated by Questlove) featuring several titans who had previously never touched the Grammy stage. Rakim, never nominated for a Grammy, with a morsel of “Eric B. Is President.” Too Short, never nominated for a Grammy, plowing through “Blow the Whistle.” The Lox, only nominated for featuring on a Kanye West album, performed “We Gonna Make It,” a song reliably certain to ignite a Hot 97 Summer Jam in New York but not usually the purview of an industry gala.Like all historical surveys, it was both impressively broad and woefully incomplete. Jay-Z was in the audience, not onstage. Drake and West didn’t attend (likely for very different reasons). Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj were M.I.A. The lineup also brought to mind boatloads of other legends who could have taken a star turn — Cam’ron, Lil’ Kim, UGK, KRS-One, E-40, Master P, Big Daddy Kane — to say nothing of the countless rappers who died before seeing the genre reach its 50th birthday.Mostly it underscored the uncharitable ways in which hip-hop has been handled by the Grammys, and the long-running resistance of hip-hop’s biggest stars to the show’s butter-finger approach to handling them. At the 1989 Grammys, the first to honor hip-hop with an award, several of the nominated artists boycotted because the category was not being televised. But some of those original boycotters, Salt-N-Pepa and DJ Jazzy Jeff, appeared during this Sunday’s performance, more evidence of time healing all wounds.In recent years, the Grammys have ever so slightly sped up their relationship to pop music’s evolution. Opening the show this year was Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper-singer whose 2022 release “Un Verano Sin Ti” was last year’s most streamed LP. It was also nominated for album of the year, the first Spanish-language album so honored. The memorial segment included a tribute for Takeoff, the Migos rapper, from his group mate Quavo, a saddening indicator of the Grammys’ growing acceptance of hip-hop. And in her acceptance speech for record of the year, Lizzo framed her unabashedly positive and joyful music as an act of rebellion that paid off.And then there is the matter of Beyoncé, now the most decorated artist in Grammy history while still feeling like something of an outsider. Claiming that record didn’t quite overshadow her losses in the three major categories she was nominated in — to Bonnie Raitt (nice), Lizzo (sure, OK) and Harry Styles (errrr … great rings, beautiful rings).Beyoncé took the Grammys stage once, to accept the award for best dance/electronic music album, which gave her the record for most Grammy wins ever.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBeyoncé is a shadow traditionalist, but her short-straw-drawing at the Grammys has fashioned for her something of an outsider lore. She did not perform at this year’s event, and hasn’t for some time, a choice that feels pointed. It’s possible to be the most awarded artist in Grammys history, and still be an anti-Grammys rebel.This goes for her husband as well. Jay-Z boycotted the Grammys in 1999, but has shown up from time to time in the years since, largely to support his wife. He’s won 24 Grammys to Beyoncé’s 32.He was nominated five times this year, but more important, he was the key element in the show-closing performance of “God Did,” a signature DJ Khaled-orchestrated posse cut. What’s notable about this song isn’t that it was a hit — it was not — but that it features a dramatically long, boast-filled, conversation-starting Jay-Z verse.Jay-Z rapped the whole thing, all four minutes of it, seated at the center of a Last Supper-style table, flanked on either side by his longtime business associates Emory Jones and Juan Perez. He looked relaxed, unbothered, rapping like a benevolent uncle from whom you’re lucky to hear old war stories.For someone who’s been vocally skeptical about the Grammys over many years, Jay-Z ended the show wholly on his terms, like the final move in a decades-long chess game. An agitator finally ceded the throne.Whether he — or Beyoncé — will ever deign to sit in it again remains to be seen. More

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      Jill Biden Shines at the Grammys

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      In silver Oscar de la Renta, the first lady hit the high notes.Jill Biden got the dress code memo.As the first lady walked onstage at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles toward the end of the 65th Grammy Awards — one of the few first ladies in modern memory to present at the show — she did so wearing an off-the-shoulder silver column gown made to sparkle all the way to the nosebleed seats, shining like the gleam of Lizzo’s smile.Actually, shining just like the ruched silver minidress Lizzo herself was wearing (after she changed out of her orange Dolce & Gabbana rose cloak). Not to mention the tinsel-spangled silver Gucci jumpsuit Harry Styles wore to perform his number. Or the silver of Beyoncé’s ruffled Gucci corset gown — the one she wore when she made history as the winningest artist at the Grammys, before she changed into black Schiaparelli and, later, velvet Balmain.Harry Styles in spangled Gucci. Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven though Dr. Biden’s dress was by Oscar de la Renta, one of the first lady’s go-to designers, and simply a more eye-catching version of the de la Renta navy lace column she had worn to the state dinner in December (the one with hand-embroidered cutouts), it was an unusual choice, given that she generally hews more to the floral and the understated.But it was also a clever one — like the decision to be part of the Grammys. Michelle Obama appeared, in 2019, but her husband had left office by then; Hillary Clinton won, in 1997, for best spoken word or nonmusical album.More Coverage of the 2023 GrammysWelcoming Rebels: The Grammys need to build bridges between generations. That means convincing once-overlooked upstarts to show up as elders, Jon Caramanica writes.Viola Davis’s EGOT: The actress achieved the rare distinction during the Grammys preshow, becoming the 18th person to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.Protest Song: Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye,” which has become the anthem of the protests in Iran, won in a new special merit category recognizing a song for social change.After all, if you are the soft-power face of an administration whose much-discussed Achilles’ heel is the age of its leader; if you are the partner of a president contemplating running again who was already the oldest person ever to assume the office; if the goal is to get out of establishment Washington and be seen in a different, more … energetic context, the Grammys is not a bad way to do it.Lizzo wore a ruched silver mini. Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesEspecially a Grammys powered by the combined attention of the BeyHive, Swifties and Harries. Especially one recognizing the legacy of 50 years of hip-hop.Especially one in which Dr. Biden was handing out the first Grammy in the category of song for social change, given to Shervin Hajipour, a young Iranian whose song “Baraye” has become an anthem for the women’s rights protests and a way for those around the world to demonstrate solidarity. (Haider Ackermann used it in his recent couture show for Jean Paul Gaultier.)The first lady also gave Bonnie Raitt her surprise Grammy for song of the year, but it was the award to Mr. Halipour, currently in Iran awaiting trial and charged with disseminating propaganda against the regime and inciting violence, that made the political point. Albeit one couched in the glitz and circumstance of an awards telecast.If an administration wanted to underscore exactly what side it was on, that was a pretty slick way to do so.Machine Gun Kelly in silver foil Dolce & Gabbana with a crystal harness. Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesThe first lady knew the constituency she was speaking to, and she fit right in. How often do Dr. Biden and Machine Gun Kelly (in a reflective silver foil Dolce & Gabbana suit) look as if they are in the same universe? Being part of the most dominant fashion trend of the night is a very specific form of outreach, the planting of a visual earwig.It’s like the yin to President Biden’s upcoming State of the Union yang; the pop culture version of the political theater scheduled to take place Tuesday, a mere two days after the Grammys, back in D.C. When it comes to curtain-raisers, you don’t get much better than that. And all the silver meant it was impossible to miss. More