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      10 Essential Songs by Sinead O’Connor

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      Her catalog is full of raw passion and raw nerve.Sinead O’Connor did not hold back. Not her voice, not her ideas, not her troubles, not her rage, not her sorrows, not her faith. From the moment her debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” appeared in 1987, O’Connor — whose death was announced on Wednesday — flaunted raw passion and raw nerve.She seemed equally startling, at first, for her keening voice and her shaven head. Her singing encompassed cathartic extremes: lullabies and imprecations, sighs and howls. She made bold, intemperate public statements, like famously tearing up a photograph of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. Yet her songs also offered comfort, nurturing and righteousness; she was an idealist, not a provocateur. And she struggled openly: with the music business, with unforgiving journalists, with career pressures and with mental illness.O’Connor was emphatically Irish. The inflections of old Celtic music sharpened her voice, and she was shaped by her Catholic upbringing, if only to later reject it. Yet she was anything but provincial. She produced her own debut album when she was only 20, drawing already on punk, dance music, electronics and seething orchestral arrangements. She would go on to work with reggae, big-band music and more; her voice, even at its gentlest, could leap out.O’Connor’s first two albums were her most inspired ones. They were charged with youthful turbulence and unbridled ambition, as O’Connor sang about love, death, power and making her own place in the world. She went through some fallow patches afterward, but she never stopped striving to sing her own truth.‘Mandinka’ (1987)With a distorted, three-chord rock stomp, O’Connor brashly announces, “I don’t know no shame/I feel no pain,” landing hard on dissonant notes. The song seesaws between refusal and acceptance, with a final tease of “Soon I can give you my heart.” But O’Connor also flexes her high notes in nonsense syllables that are as defiant as any word she sings.‘Troy’ (1987)One side of a lover’s quarrel unfurls across an operatic six and a half minutes, backed by a string ensemble that underlines every churning emotion: memories, accusations, confessions, vows, pleas, warnings and the sheer desperation when O’Connor sings, “Does she hold you like I do?” followed by a howl of pain.‘I Want Your (Hands on Me)’ (1987)Chattering, percussive funk carries this call for physical pleasure, and as she bounces her voice against the syncopated beat, O’Connor summons unabashed rasps and moans.‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (1990)O’Connor’s commercial peak — a No. 1 pop single — thoroughly commandeered a song Prince wrote for a 1985 album by the Family. She makes her voice small and bereft, then lashes out at consolations; she places Celtic turns at the ends of phrases. And she brings crucial changes to Prince’s melody, making upward leaps when the chorus gets to the line “Nothing compares to you.” Its video clip — almost entirely a close-up of O’Connor’s face against a black background — forged an indelible image of loneliness.‘I Am Stretched on Your Grave’ (1990)A hip-hop beat backs an old Irish poem that was translated into English and turned into a song. Its narrator mourns the death of his lover, wishing to join her. O’Connor’s voice, completely exposed over the stark rhythm track, is otherworldly. A fiddle arrives near the end, completing the mesh of traditional and contemporary.‘The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’ (1990)The formal mechanics of a divorce — “I will meet you later in somebody’s office” — can’t contain the bitterness of the situation. For most of the song, O’Connor sings over two calmly strummed acoustic guitar chords, but agitation rises in her voice, and when a band eventually kicks in behind her there’s no mistaking her fury.‘You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart’ (1994)This incantatory rocker was written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer for the film “In the Name of the Father.” If it sounds like O’Connor fronting 1990s U2 — with a pealing piano and an implacable beat — it draws the best from both, with U2’s echoey depths, O’Connor’s primal peaks and the high-stakes dynamics they both thrived on.‘This Is to Mother You’ (1997)O’Connor promises to “do what your own mother didn’t do” in a song that radiates kindliness and womanly strength. It’s a folky, Celtic-tinged lullaby that promises to end a dark back story, to release someone — perhaps a lover, as the video suggests — from “All the pain that you have known/All the violence in your soul.” It’s pure unselfish comfort.‘Jealous’ (2000)“I don’t deserve to be lonely just ’cause you say I do,” O’Connor insists in “Jealous,” a not-quite-breakup ballad she wrote with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. The beat is measured. But the singer’s partner is keeping her dangling, and she’s not sure what she wants either; she makes her harshest judgments in her most fragile voice.‘Dense Water Deeper Down’ (2014)The folk-rock jubilation of “Dense Water Deeper Down” — with muscular guitar strumming, layered harmonies, even some happy horns — celebrates a lover who “makes me forget everything my mother warned.” There’s just one catch: He’s only a memory. More

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      The Night Sinead O’Connor Took on the Pope on ‘SNL’

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      Tearing up a photo was the moment nobody forgot. The performance that preceded it was just as powerful.What people remember about Sinead O’Connor’s Oct. 3, 1992, appearance on “Saturday Night Live” is this: At the end of her second performance of the show, a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor intoned gravely, “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.” As she held tight to the word, stretching it like a castigation, she grabbed a photo of Pope John Paul II and held it up to camera. When she let the word go, she punctuated her exhale by tearing the photo three times, followed by an exhortation to “fight the real enemy.” She tossed the fragments to the ground, removed her in-ears, and stepped off the stage into culture-war infamy.Throughout her career, O’Connor — whose death, at 56, was announced on Wednesday — was a fervent moralist, an uncompromised voice of social progress and someone who found stardom, and its sandpapered and glossed boundaries, to be a kind of sickness. She was also a singer of ferocious gifts, able to channel anxious passion with vivacious power and move through a lyric with nimble acuity. She was something grander than a simple pop star — she became a stand-in for a sociopolitical discomfort that was beginning to take hold in the early 1990s, a rejection of the enthusiastic sheen and power-at-all-costs culture of the 1980s.And so, in an era where late-night television performances could still prompt monocultural mood shifts, her gesture was a volcanic eruption. She became a target instantly — of the religious right, of other celebrities, and, as she reported many years later in her memoir, of a couple of egg-tossing young men, as she exited the studio that same night.But none of that extinguished the power of her protest. And she was a savvy radical — reportedly she had done something slightly different in rehearsal, and saved the pope photo for the actual show. (The photo itself had hung on the bedroom wall of O’Connor’s mother, who O’Connor later said had physically and sexually abused her as a child.) Also, she was on live television, holding court for three minutes on the miseries of discrimination and abuses of power, under the guise of being a pop star performing a song. She was daring the cameras, and the viewers, to look away; no one did.The recriminations O’Connor faced recall the bankrupt culture wars of a different era — she was “banned” from appearing on “Saturday Night Live” again, and the show mocked her on subsequent episodes. The following week’s host, Joe Pesci, took direct aim at her. “I’ll tell you one thing: She’s very lucky it wasn’t my show. ’Cause if it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack.” Cue laughing and clapping from the audience. He continued, “I woulda grabbed her by her … eyebrows.” More laughter. At one point, he triumphantly held up the taped-together pope photo, like a feckless politician stirring up his base. (Tellingly, footage of Pesci’s monologue is available on the official YouTube channel of “Saturday Night Live”; footage of O’Connor’s performance is not, though it can be found in various unofficial locations online.)Joe Pesci on “Saturday Night Live” the week after Sinead O’Connor’s performance, holding up the taped-together photo of Pope John Paul II that O’Connor had ripped.NBCOf course, she was correct — the scale of sexual abuse perpetrated within the Roman Catholic Church that came to light in later years was staggering. By then, O’Connor’s protest felt distant, but the damage it did to her career was permanent.At the time, O’Connor was only a couple of years past her American breakthrough — her piercing cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written by Prince (and originally performed by his side project the Family). Subsequent to “S.N.L.,” she had a handful of hits, but mostly retreated from the pop spotlight. Or maybe the way to think about it is that she right-sized her career, away from the silly and grim expectations of complaisance that come with universal acclaim and toward a more earnest plane.Whichever the case, the pope brouhaha obscured something perhaps just as extraordinarily powerful — the song that O’Connor had been performing. Her “War” cover had lyrics slightly modified to allude to the abuses in the Catholic Church that she was protesting. (She also performed “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” that night.)She’s performing “War” a cappella, staring hard at a camera off to her left.Less singing than declaiming, she renders the song with a forceful clarity, landing every line with nervy syllables held just a microsecond past comfort, as if reminding the viewer of the need to gulp them down whole. Marley’s original — the lyrics are drawn from a speech given by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 — moves with a sly breeze. O’Connor’s, with its silence, turns the original plaint into a jolt.Her performance is anthemic, invigorating, a call to arms for the dispossessed and an elegant dissection of the authoritarian powers who hold them down. Her vocal is level and determined, but her howl is spiritual and undeniable:Until the ignoble and unhappy regimeWhich holds all of us throughChild abuse, yeah, child abuse, yeah,Subhuman bondage has been toppledUtterly destroyedEverywhere is warIf there is a moment of true singing here, it’s right before the grand gesture at the end. “Childrennnn! Childrennnn!” O’Connor sweetly chants, calling everyone to attention. Then, with everyone’s ears perked, she nods her head forcefully and jabs out a quick, urgent instruction: “Fight.” More

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      The Bald Power of Sinead O’Connor

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      The Irish singer’s shaved head was as much a part of her identity and allure as her sound.It was the bald head that became the avatar of a million dreamy rebellions; the shaved pate that bridged the gap between the angry and the sublime. It is almost impossible to think about Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer whose death was reported on July 26, or her work, without thinking about her hair. Or lack of it.Without thinking about the striking curve of her shorn skull on the cover of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” her face below caught mid-scream; the nakedness it seemed to convey in the 1990 video of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” as her blue eyes brimmed with tears; the purity of the line on the cover of her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings.” Which contains an entire chapter entitled “Shaving My Head.”It was effectively her signature — in a 2014 story in Billboard Ms. O’Connor, 56 when she died, identified herself as “the bald woman from Ireland” — along with her Dr. Martens and torn jeans, and it followed her throughout her life, just as much as her ripping up the photo of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 did. Even in the few periods when she grew her hair back, she was often referred to as the “formerly bald” Sinead O’Connor. And as such, she was an integral part of the renegotiation of old stereotypes of gender, sexuality, rebellion and liberation that is still going on today.“I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she told The New York Times in 2021.Now that female baldness has become more common, has become a badge of identity for women such as Ayanna Pressley, the representative from Massachusetts who went public with her alopecia in 2020, and X González, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student (then known as Emma) who became a campaigner for gun control, not to mention the Dora Milaje of “Black Panther,” it can be hard to remember how extraordinary it was when Ms. O’Connor emerged. “Shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin in 1991. “I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.”Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesBut that seeming repudiation of her own porcelain beauty in the wake of a spate of teen pop queens, at a time when armoring yourself in a helmet of big hair was a big thing and shaving your head was still largely seen as a punishment, was as much of a statement of singularity as her sound. Perhaps, it was also the first sign of the controversial politics to come, including refusing to play the national anthem before her concerts and stenciling the logo of Public Enemy into the side of her head at the 1989 Grammys when the show’s organizers declined to televise the first-ever award for Best Rap Performance.She offered various explanations of the choice. All the stories come down to the same thing in any case, which was a refusal to cater to traditional definitions of “pretty” as established by the male gaze as long ago as Rapunzel and Lady Godiva.In shearing her head “she was literally shearing away a false narrative,” said Allyson McCabe, the author of “Why Sinead O’Connor Matters.” In 1991 Ms. O’Connor told Spin, “shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing. I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.” However, she also said, “The women who are admired are the ones that have blond hair and big lips and wear red lipstick and wear short skirts, because that’s an acceptable image of a woman.” And, “Because I have no hair, people think I’m angry.”In a 2017 TV interview she told Dr. Phil that it was because during her abusive childhood her mother had compared her with her sister, who had long red hair, unlike Sinead. “When I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter,” Ms. O’Connor said in the interview. “And that’s why I cut my hair off. I didn’t want to be pretty.”The cover of Ms. O’Connor’s memoir.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Associated PressA still from her music video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.”In the interview she also said, “It’s dangerous to be pretty, too, because I kept getting raped and molested everywhere I went,” and “I did not want to dress like a girl. I did not want to be pretty.”In her memoir, she wrote that she was working on her first album in London, and had been told by a male music executive she should grow her (buzzed but not shorn) hair long and start to dress more like a girl. The next day she went to a barbershop and had it all shaved off.During the period after the “S.N.L.” appearance, when she was rejected by the music industry and revealed she had been diagnosed as bipolar, Ms. O’Connor’s bald head was taken as a sign of instability (just as it was later with Britney Spears). The fact that she continued shaving her skull for the rest of her life suggested it was, rather, a sign of selfhood.The first time she looked in the mirror after that visit to the barbershop, she wrote in the book, “I looked like an alien.” Another way to put it, however, is she looked like the woman she became. And in becoming that woman — in giving herself that permission — she helped extend it to us all. More

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      Sinead O’Connor, Evocative and Outspoken Singer, Is Dead at 56

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      She broke out with the single “Nothing Compares 2 U,” then caused an uproar a few years later by ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on “S.N.L.”Sinead O’Connor, the outspoken Irish singer-songwriter known for her powerful, evocative voice, as showcased on her biggest hit, a breathtaking rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and for her political provocations onstage and off, has died. She was 56.Her longtime friend Bob Geldof, the Irish musician and activist, confirmed her death, as did her family in a statement, according to the BBC and the Irish public broadcaster RTE.“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead,” the statement said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.” No other details were provided.Recognizable by her shaved head and by wide eyes that could appear pained or full of rage, Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, beginning with the alternative hit “The Lion and the Cobra” in 1987. She went on to sell millions of albums worldwide, breaking out with “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” in 1990.That album, featuring “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a No. 1 hit around the world and an MTV staple, won a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance — although Ms. O’Connor boycotted the ceremony over what she called the show’s excessive commercialism.Ms. O’Connor rarely shrank from controversy, though it often came with consequences for her career.In 1990, she threatened to cancel a performance in New Jersey if “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played at the concert hall ahead of her appearance, drawing the ire of no less than Frank Sinatra. That same year, she backed out of an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in protest of the misogyny she perceived in the comedy of Andrew Dice Clay, who was scheduled to host.But all of that paled in comparison to the uproar caused when Ms. O’Connor, appearing on “S.N.L.” in 1992 — shortly after the release of her third album, “Am I Not Your Girl?” — ended an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s “War” by ripping a photo of Pope John Paul II into pieces as a stance against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. “Fight the real enemy,” she said.That incident immediately made her a target of criticism and scorn, from social conservatives and beyond. Two weeks after her “S.N.L.” appearance, she was loudly booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. (She had planned to perform Mr. Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” but she sang “War” again, rushing off the stage before she had finished.)For a time, the vitriol directed at Ms. O’Connor was so pervasive that it became a kind of pop culture meme in itself. On “S.N.L.” in early 1993, Madonna mocked the controversy by tearing up a picture of Joey Buttafuoco, the Long Island auto mechanic who was a tabloid fixture at the time because of his affair with a 17-year-old girl.Once a rising star, Ms. O’Connor then stumbled. “Am I Not Your Girl?,” an album of jazz and pop standards like “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” was stalled on the charts at No. 27. Her next album, “Universal Mother” (1994), went no higher than No. 36.Kris Kristofferson spoke to Ms. O’Connor after she was booed off the stage during a concert in tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in 1992, shortly after her “Saturday Night Live” appearance.Ron Frehm/Associated PressThe British musician Tim Burgess, of the band Charlatans (known in the United States as the Charlatans UK), wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “Sinead was the true embodiment of a punk spirit. She did not compromise and that made her life more of a struggle.”Ms. O’Connor never had another major hit in the United States after “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” from “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” although for a time she remained a staple on the British charts.But in her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” Ms. O’Connor portrayed ripping up the photo of the pope as a righteous act of protest — and therefore a success.“I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career,” she wrote, “and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”She elaborated in an interview with The New York Times that same year, calling the incident an act of defiance against the constraints of pop stardom.“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” Ms. O’Connor said. “But it was very traumatizing,” she added. “It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”Sinead Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born in Glenageary, a suburb of Dublin, on Dec. 8, 1966. Her father, John, was an engineer, and her mother, Johanna, was a dressmaker.In interviews, and in her memoir, Ms. O’Connor spoke openly of having a traumatic childhood. She said that her mother physically abused her and that she had been deeply affected by her parents’ separation, which happened when she was 8. In her teens, she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to reform schools.Ms. O’Connor at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan in 2013.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesWhen she was 15, Ms. O’Connor sang “Evergreen” — the love theme from “A Star Is Born,” made famous by Barbra Streisand — at a wedding, and was discovered by Paul Byrne, a drummer who had an affiliation with the Irish band U2. She left boarding school at 16 and began her career, supporting herself by waitressing and performing “kiss-o-grams” in a kinky French maid costume.“The Lion and the Cobra” — the title is an allusion to Psalm 91 — marked her as a rising talent with a spiritual heart, an ear for offbeat melody and a fierce and combative style. Her music drew from 1980s-vintage alternative rock, hip-hop and flashes of Celtic folk that came through when her voice raised to high registers.She drew headlines for defending the Irish Republican Army and publicly jeered U2 — whose members had supported her — as “bombastic.” She also said she had rejected attempts by her record company, Ensign, to adopt a more conventional image.The leaders of the label “wanted me to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow my hair,” Ms. O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991. “And I decided that they were so pathetic that I shaved my head so there couldn’t be any further discussion.”“Nothing Compares 2 U” — originally released by the Family, a Prince side project, in 1985 — became a phenomenon when Ms. O’Connor released it five years later. The video for the song, trained closely on her emotive face, was hypnotic, and Ms. O’Connor’s voice, as it raised from delicate, breathy notes to powerful cries, stopped listeners in their tracks. Singers like Alanis Morissette cited Ms. O’Connor’s work from this period as a key influence.Ms. O’Connor in 2021, the year she published a memoir, “Rememberings,” in which she spoke openly of a traumatic childhood. Ellius Grace for The New York TimesNot long after “Nothing Compares” became a hit, Ms. O’Connor accused Prince of physically threatening her. She elaborated on the story in her memoir, saying that Prince, at his Hollywood mansion, chastised her for swearing in interviews and suggested a pillow fight, only to hit her with something hard that was in his pillowcase. She escaped on foot in the middle of the night, she said, but Prince chased her around the highway.The effects of childhood trauma, and finding ways to fight and heal, became a central part of her work and her personal philosophy. “The cause of all the world’s problems, as far as I’m concerned, is child abuse,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin magazine in 1991.Her mother, whom Ms. O’Connor described as an alcoholic, died when she was 18. In her memoir, Ms. O’Connor said that on the day her mother died she took a picture of the pope from her mother’s wall; it was that photo that she destroyed on television.On later albums, she made warmly expansive pop-rock (“Faith and Courage,” 2000), played traditional Irish songs (“Sean-Nós Nua,” 2002) and revisited classic reggae songs (“Throw Down Your Arms,” 2005). Her last album was “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” released in 2014.As her music career slowed, Ms. O’Connor, who had been open in the past about her mental health struggles, became an increasingly erratic public figure, often sharing unfiltered opinions and personal details on social media.In 2007, she revealed on Oprah Winfrey’s television show that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that she had tried to kill herself on her 33rd birthday. Her son Shane died by suicide in 2022, at 17.Ms. O’Connor said in 2012 that she had been misdiagnosed and that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from a history of child abuse. “Recovery from child abuse is a life’s work,” she told People magazine.Several years ago she converted to Islam and started using the name Shuhada Sadaqat, though she continued to answer to O’Connor as well.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Ms. O’Connor had two brothers, Joe and John, and one sister, Eimear, as well as three stepsisters and a stepbrother. She wrote in her memoir that she was married four times and that she had four children: three sons, Jake, Shane and Yeshua, and a daughter, Roisin.In discussing her memoir with The Times in 2021, Ms. O’Connor focused on her decision to tear up the photo of John Paul II as a signal moment in a life of protest and defiance.“The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act,” she said. “It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl.”Alex Traub More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): ‘Barbie,’ Jason Aldean’s Culture War and Drake’s Tour

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and the way in which even anti-corporate dissent has been fully absorbed into corporate brandingA conversation about the way the “Barbie” soundtrack uses contemporary pop stars, and its even more successful deployment of classic hits by Matchbox Twenty and the Indigo GirlsDrake’s current arena tour, his fan-like desire to enjoy Drake hits alongside his audience and his creative versatility, which includes U.K. rap and cringe comedy podcastsThe culture war push behind Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart after a week of controversyThe New York Times’ 50 Rappers, 50 Stories project and its inclusion of Violent J from Insane Clown PosseNew songs by Tanner Adell and Valee featuring Z MoneySnack of the weekConnect 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. More

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      In Rare Move, Japanese Pop Star Comes Out Publicly as Gay

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      “I don’t want people to struggle like me,” said Shinjiro Atae, making an announcement that is extremely unusual in conservative Japan.At first, there was total silence. Then, there were shrieks, wild applause, weeping and shouts of “I love you!”Fans of Shinjiro Atae, a J-pop idol who has been on a nearly two-year performance hiatus, had come to hear him talk about “the challenge of my life.” Standing onstage in a dark auditorium in front of 2,000 fans in central Tokyo on Wednesday night, he revealed something he has kept hidden for most of his life: He is gay.“I respect you and believe you deserve to hear this directly from me,” he said, reading from a letter he had prepared. “For years, I struggled to accept a part of myself. But now, after all I have been through, I finally have the courage to open up to you about something. I am a gay man.”Such an announcement is extremely unusual in conservative Japan, the only G7 country that has not legalized same-sex unions. Earlier this summer, the Japanese Parliament passed an L.G.B.T.Q rights bill but it had been watered down by the political right, stating that there “should be no unfair discrimination” against gay and transgender people.In making a public declaration, Mr. Atae, who spent two decades performing with AAA, a hit Japanese pop group, before embarking on a solo career, said he wanted his fans to know his true self. He also hopes to comfort those who might be grappling with anxieties about their sexuality.“I don’t want people to struggle like me,” he said.Activists said they could not recall an instance when a Japanese pop star of his stature had publicly declared they were gay, because of anxieties about losing fans or sponsors.“I think he has decided to come out in order to change Japan,” said Gon Matsunaka, a director and adviser to Pride House Tokyo, a support center for the gay and transgender community.Mr. Atae, who began dancing with AAA when he was just 14, said he has been preparing for — and fearing — this public coming-out for years.For most of his performing life, “I thought if I was found out it would end my career, and so I couldn’t tell anyone,” said Mr. Atae during an hour-and-a-half interview the day before his announcement at the apartment of his elder sister in western Tokyo, where he sat on a lime green straw mat in a gray T-shirt and baggy black faux leather shorts.Mr. Atae with his stylist and makeup artist during an interview in Tokyo on Tuesday.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesThe decision to open up about his sexuality, he said, evolved over seven years of living in Los Angeles, where he saw how freely gay couples could show affection in public and built an extensive support network.“Everyone was so open,” he said. “People would talk about their vulnerabilities. In Japan, people think it’s best not to talk about those things.”Gay and transgender performers who regularly appear on television do not talk explicitly about their sexuality.“Japanese society is not a place where people strictly state their sexuality,” said Satoshi Masuda, a researcher specializing in Japanese popular music at Osaka Metropolitan University. “Rather, it naturally comes to be known.”Mr. Atae, the youngest of three children, grew up in a town between Kyoto and Osaka.His mother insisted that he play baseball until the end of elementary school. Sticking with it, she told him, would teach him “gaman” — the Japanese word for endurance.When he discovered a local hip-hop dance studio, the discipline became an instant passion. “I just thought: ‘This is it,’” he said.His instructors encouraged him to try out for a new pop group. On a lark, he sent in a résumé and auditioned by video though he was still in middle school. After two weeks of training in dance, singing and acting in Tokyo, Mr. Atae was selected by the management company, Avex, as one of eight initial band members.AAA debuted in 2005, with Mr. Atae, the youngest member, forgoing high school. He performed mostly as a dancer, and began appearing in TV series and movies.His sexuality perplexed him. “It was a time when on TV, comedians would say two men kissing was gross,” he said. If anyone asked if he had a girlfriend, he just said he was too busy working.AAA rapidly scored with fans, eventually recording eight top 10 hits on Billboard Japan’s Top 100 chart. But as Mr. Atae wrote in a memoir, “Every Life Is Correct, But Incorrect,” published last year, “my mental state was in shambles.” He said he spent a period with AAA “stuck in a marsh of negative thinking,” frustrated that he was not as well known as other band members.What he left out was that he was terrified that a gossip magazine or fans would discover he was gay.Mr. Atae in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, where he used to perform at the beginning of his career.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesIn 2016, as some of the members of AAA embarked on solo acts, Mr. Atae moved to Los Angeles, where he attended entertainment business classes and studied English on his own.But when he visited neighborhoods popular with the L.G.B.T.Q. community, he ran into Japanese tourists and expats, and feared someone might leak a photo of him at a gay club or out with a male date.“I thought, everything is over,” he said. Then the long-ago baseball lessons from his mother kicked in. “I thought there had to be a way,” he said.Gradually, Mr. Atae made friends he could trust with his secret. He began to plan his public revelation.He would have to tell his family, his mother first. “It was the most nervous I have ever been in coming out,” he said.“I was super surprised, and I had never imagined it,” said his mother, Suzuko, 66, who asked to keep her surname private to avoid harassment.Although she supported her son personally, she balked when he said he wanted to go public. She was anxious about Mr. Atae facing online attacks or discrimination. Now, she said, “I am 200 percent supportive.”On Wednesday night, his mother sat in the back row of the auditorium, across the aisle from her two other children and their families, crying as he broke down sobbing as he told the audience that he once “thought my feelings were wrong.”Even as Mr. Atae started recording solo songs with lyrics like “Pretty girl, I still adore you,” he had started telling more people about his sexuality. His solo career has been modest, with no chart-topping hits.To his friends, the news was often a surprise. But many, including fellow band members from AAA, showed up on Wednesday to cheer him on. “The word ‘diversity’ started becoming more common, but how to take in that word is still a very difficult issue in Japan,” said Misako Uno, 37, a AAA member, in a backstage interview. “I want to be a good cushion” for him.Writing his memoir, Mr. Atae said, was a way to soft-pedal his eventual announcement to fans.“I figured it was not a good idea to just suddenly say ‘I am gay,’” he said.Mr. Atae’s decision, he said, was not political. All he wanted, he said, was to “normalize” being gay.On the day before his announcement, a stylist, a makeup artist, a publicist and several assistants trailed Mr. Atae during a photo shoot where he wore a Céline shirt and John Lawrence Sullivan trousers. He seemed relaxed, despite repeating how nervous he felt.Coming out, he knew, would likely draw criticism. “Whatever you do, there will be haters,” he said. “I can only focus on the people I might be helping.”After the announcement on Wednesday night, Miku Tada, 23, an art student in Tokyo, said her heart broke to think of how Mr. Atae had “struggled on his own.” But now, she said, “I think that he can have a lot of influence on other kids who may be feeling the same way.”Reiko Uchida, 43, a housewife from Saitama, a suburb outside Tokyo, said that normally, she would be taken aback if someone told her they were gay or lesbian. But with Mr. Atae, she said, “I see him as someone whose personality I like and a person that I respect.”The evening closed with a music video broadcast of Mr. Atae’s single, “Into the Light”:“I spent so long being these versions of myself/I forgot who I was, I was somebody else/You give me something I’ve been missing my whole life/I’m coming into the light.” More

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      Britpop’s Back. But What Happened to Cool Britannia?

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      Some of the biggest ’90s bands are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals abroad. Yet Britpop’s swaggering sense of national self-belief feels like a distant memory.In 1994, Luis Chuva was 14 and on summer vacation at his grandparents’ home in Costa Nova, Portugal, when, one Saturday, he glimpsed something on TV that changed his life: a music video for “Girls and Boys,” by the British band Blur.Onscreen, Blur’s singer, Damon Albarn, dressed in a track jacket and wearing a hint of eyeliner, glanced seductively at the camera, and then launched into an upbeat song about British tourists on promiscuous, beer-fueled Mediterranean holidays.The swaggering track couldn’t have been further from Chuva’s simple teenage life: It featured Albarn singing in a regional British accent about “Girls who want boys / Who like boys to be girls.” But Chuva recalled in a recent interview that he “was hypnotized.”Damon Albarn in the 1994 music video for Blur’s “Girls and Boys.”Soon, the teenager was scouring Portuguese music magazines to find out everything he could about Blur and the other so-called Britpop bands, which included Pulp, Suede (known as the London Suede in the United States) and Oasis. He taped their songs off the radio. He got hold of bootleg tapes of their concerts, which he dreamed of attending.And Chuva made a decision: At the first opportunity, he would move to London. Viewed from sleepy ’90s Portugal, Britain looked optimistic, exciting, colorful. “It just felt like the place to be,” he said.Now 44, Chuva has lived in London for almost two decades, and, this summer, he’s busy — because Britpop is back. Some 30 years after the genre emerged, paving the way for the wider phenomenon known as Cool Britannia, some of its biggest acts are playing major gigs across Britain again, and headlining festivals from Mexico to Japan.This month, Blur released “The Ballad of Darren,” the group’s first album in eight years, and played two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium, a London soccer venue that can seat 90,000 people. Chuva went to both concerts.Pulp, another Britpop mainstay, has also re-formed for a major tour. (Chuva saw them, too.) There was even chatter about a potential Oasis reunion — although Noel and Liam Gallagher, the brothers at the heart of that boisterous rock group, quickly knocked the idea back, pointing out on separate radio shows that they don’t talk to each other.Wembley Stadium, where Blur performed their London shows, holds 90,000 people.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe comebacks have received euphoric reviews, but they are occurring at a starkly different moment for British pop music, compared with the ’90s. Although Britpop never reached the same heights of popularity in the United States that it did in Australia, Canada, Japan and continental Europe, it coincided with a high point for British soft power. In 1996 Newsweek declared London the world’s coolest city. In 1997, Vanity Fair devoted 25 pages to the bands, artists, chefs and designers making Britain “the place we must all look to.” The same year, The New Yorker called Britain’s music scene “a scary paradise.”Today, however, neither British nor global news media are portraying Britain as the musical place to be — despite it giving the world current stars like Ed Sheeran, Adele and Harry Styles. Instead, news articles about the country’s music scene are more likely to touch on venues shuttering — at a rate of one a week this year, according to the nonprofit Music Venue Trust — or the country’s bands, DJs and rappers struggling to tour abroad after Brexit brought in a tangle of red tape. Local news outlets have also lamented the British government’s cuts to arts funding, and warned about the decline of music teaching in schools.Sitting in his West London recording studio recently, Albarn said some things hadn’t changed since Britpop’s heyday. He was still “completely obsessed with this country,” he said, and writing songs with lyrics that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.”But there were also big differences, he added. He was now 55, and wore knee supports onstage. And the challenges facing the country’s pipeline of musical stars were clear: “The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” he said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Chuva, the Portuguese music fan, said he felt a change, too — not just in Britain’s music, but in the national mood. “The weather here’s always been gray,” he said. “Now everything is.”Damon Albarn said he was still “completely obsessed” with Britain, and still wrote songs that were “chipped out of that blue stone of Stonehenge.” Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBut there were challenges to the country’s pipeline of musical stars, Albarn said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The soul of the nation is in danger, if you want to get dramatic about it,” Albarn said, adding that music was “pivotal to our international place.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe emergence in the early 1990s of Britpop — a catchall term for almost any guitar music that came out of Britain at the time — was, in many ways, a reaction to America. At the end of 1992, Blur traveled to the United States for a 44-date tour, only to find a country gripped by grunge music and indifferent to the band’s danceable indie charms.Not long after British journalists labeled the style “Britpop,” and highlighted its rejection of American tastes, it became a pop juggernaut in Britain, with bands vying to top the country’s pop charts.Blur’s music seemed to typify the genre, with cheeky singles about life in modern England. But it quickly expanded to include a variety of acts, including Elastica — a sneeringly cool punk-influenced band — and the anthemic Oasis. Each had different ideas about Britishness, but they all seemed united in a swaggering sense of self-belief.The crowd at a Blur gig, in London, in July. The audience included new and old fans.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesSeveral of the bands were depicted with the Union Jack flag on magazine covers, and happy to deploy it in their visuals. Among them was Sonya Madan, the lead singer of Echobelly, who was born in India and moved to Britain as a child. She once appeared in a music video wearing a Union Jack T-shirt with the phrase “My Country Too” scrawled on it. “It was such a positive explosion,” she said in a recent interview, “with people exploring their self-identity and having this positivity about being British.”And it didn’t take long for Britain’s politicians to see an opportunity. In 1995, Tony Blair, then the leader of the opposition Labour Party, invited Albarn for a meeting in the Houses of Parliament. Over gin and tonics, Blair and a spin doctor peppered the singer with queries. They included, Albarn said: “What do you think young people are looking for in their governance?”“I didn’t understand,” Albarn recalled. “I’d just thought he wanted to meet me.”Two years later, when Blair became prime minister, Albarn turned down an invitation to a drinks reception for British cultural figures at 10 Downing Street, having decided that the new government was just using musicians for a photo opportunity.Some fans wore throwback British fashions including bucket hats. A handful even draped themselves in the Union Jack.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesLuis Chuva, a Portuguese Blur fan who relocated to London in the ’90s and still lives there. He attended both Blur gigs.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesBlur’s latest album, “The Ballad of Darren,” is named for their former bodyguard. At a Wembley show this month, fans wore masks bearing Darren “Smoggy” Evans’s face.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIf Britpop made Britain feel good about itself, it also made people abroad feel positive about Britain.Derek Miller, a 46-year-old American actor, said in an interview that he became “immediately smitten” with Blur when he heard them as a teenager in Chicago. The music didn’t have the machismo of American rock, he said. “There was something about it that was just fun.”While studying at Indiana University Bloomington, he met other Britpop obsessives. (The college radio station had a Britpop show, and the presenter was prone to speaking in a fake British accent, Miller said.) After graduation he moved to Britain. He now lives in Yorkshire, in northern England, and has a son named Jarvis, after the Pulp lead singer.In recent interviews, a dozen other non-British Britpop fans offered similar tales. Jess Mo said that, at age 18, she moved to London from a village of “literally five houses” on an island off the coast of Sweden, because of her love of Blur. Anne-Sophie Marsh, a Frenchwoman, said she wrote to Pulp’s fan club for advice on what British college to study at, and then moved to the city of Brighton.Blur played hits including “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesMost expert interviewees for this article — musicians, academics and journalists — said they felt that Britain’s music scene was today less likely to draw fans to the country. Their reasons didn’t involve the quality of British music. Albarn said some of Britain’s younger, ever-online music stars were writing songs filled with such “universal references” that fans may not even realize they were British. That applied to his own group Gorillaz, too, he said. “I don’t think there’s any sense of it being English,” he said. “They think it’s American in America,” he added. “I think in England they think it’s American, too.”The only interviewee who didn’t seem downbeat about the prospects of Britain’s musical influence was an American, but one who knows a lot about soft power. Joseph Nye is a political scientist and a former Pentagon official, who in the late 1980s pioneered the idea that countries don’t need to use force to get what they want, but can achieve influence by building popular affinity. By phone, Nye said that, at first glance, it did seem Britain’s musical star was waning. “I hear a lot about K-pop,” he said of Korean artists like BTS. “I don’t hear much about Britpop.”But, he added, people would still be listening to touchstone British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles for decades to come. It almost doesn’t matter what Britpop’s legacy was; the country remains a cultural powerhouse by virtue of its earlier history. “I’m not saying Britain can rest on its laurels forever,” Nye said. “But laurels don’t wither.”A Times reporter at the show spoke to fans from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesAt one of Blur’s recent homecoming shows at Wembley Stadium, fans had begun lining up outside long before the scheduled showtime. Nye seemed to have a point. Many wore Blur T-shirts. Others were dressed in throwback British fashions, including bucket hats and Fred Perry polo shirts. Few of those die-hard supporters were British. Instead, they said, they were from Estonia, South Korea, Italy, the United States and France, and many had flown over especially for the concert. Chuva, the Portuguese fan, was among them in the line.A few hours later, Chuva was at the front as Blur played hits like “Song 2” — known in U.S. sports stadiums for its “Woo-hoo!” refrain — and his teenage favorite, “Girls and Boys.” As the band finished with “The Universal” — a euphoric song from 1995 — Albarn put his hands on his knees, emotionally and physically spent.It was a “truly special” evening, Chuva said. He just hoped the band’s aging members hadn’t exhausted themselves. He had tickets for the next day’s gig, too.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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      An Exclamatory Playlist!

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      Wham! Neu! “Oh! Darling” and more artists and songs that make a statement.George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in “Wham!”NetflixDear listeners,If you’re looking for something light, fun and full of ridiculous ’80s fashion, I can’t recommend the new Netflix documentary about the pop group Wham! enough — it’s basically the documentary equivalent of a beach read.As someone who wasn’t around for Wham!’s heyday, the movie allowed me to live vicariously through its rise and appreciate things about Wham! I’d never considered before. Like how confident a producer and songwriter George Michael was from a young age. And also that Michael and his immaculately coifed bandmate Andrew Ridgeley really knew how and when to break up a band. They announced their imminent demise in 1986, and then played one epic final show at Wembley Stadium. “Wham! was never going to be middle-aged,” Ridgeley says in the movie, “or be anything other than an essential and pure representation of us as youths.”That sentiment made me realize how uncommonly perfect a band name Wham! was for this group. Goofy, youthful, monosyllabic, here-for-a-good-time-but-not-a-long-time and above all things — exclamatory! Adults, “serious musicians,” newspaper style guidelines: All of them tell you that exclamation points should be used sparingly. Wham! was having none of that. The duo said, “We’re going to make you write or speak an exclamation mark every time you use our name.”It got me thinking about the art of using exclamation marks in band names and song titles. Which, of course, calls for a playlist.Sometimes the musical exclamation point almost mimics percussion: “Turn! Turn! Turn!” or “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” Sometimes it helps you hear the voice of a particularly emotive singer, as I can only hear the phrase “Everybody Wants Some!!” in David Lee Roth’s wail. But more often than not, the musical exclamation point is simply a way to raise the stakes, to indicate (at the risk of overcompensating) that there is something ecstatic about the sound that accompanies it.Like Wham!, I’ll now make my graceful exit. All that’s left to say: Listen up!Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Wham!: “Everything She Wants”This is one of my favorite Wham! songs, perhaps because it sounds, uncharacteristically, a little sinister. As my colleague Wesley Morris put it in his great review of “Wham!,” “there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Abba: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Famously sampled in Madonna’s 2005 dance-floor reinvention “Hung Up,” this lusty 1979 Abba classic also boasts some excellent parentheses use. (Listen on YouTube)3. Van Halen: “Everybody Wants Some!!”A double exclamation point? That’s bold. Then again, Eddie Van Halen’s solo in the middle of this 1980 track is, like any Eddie Van Halen solo, basically the sonic equivalent of a double exclamation mark. When Richard Linklater paid homage to this song by naming his (hilarious) 2016 movie “Everybody Wants Some!!,” he knew enough to honor the band’s punctuation. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Beatles: “Oh! Darling”The Beatles certainly knew how to employ the exclamation point: “Help!,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” and, if you expand the framework to their solo careers, John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” I love the first-syllable exclamation in “Oh! Darling,” though: Its clipped agony contrasts with the way Paul McCartney stretches out that “daaaarling” and effectively captures the raw-throated desperation of his vocal. (Listen on YouTube)5. The Byrds: “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”I confess that this song — and the Byrds’ lush, fluid delivery of that titular phrase — never really screamed “exclamation” to me. But given that it was written by Pete Seeger and known as a quiet folk ballad before the Byrds made it a No. 1 hit in 1965, those three typographical lightning strikes, though present in Seeger’s original title, now convey the excitement of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” gone electric. (Listen on YouTube)6. Sly and the Family Stone: “Stand!”Also the name of Sly and the Family Stone’s great 1969 album, “Stand!” is a command, an invitation and a call to action, bringing the listener right into the reality of the song. Its punctuation also effectively communicates the energy of the track’s ever-ascending chorus and frenzied, gospel-influenced final section. (Listen on YouTube)7. Los Campesinos!: “You! Me! Dancing!”There was a coy, sometimes run-on exuberance about many indie bands in the aughts, though few encapsulated that as expressively as the Welsh group Los Campesinos! Bonus points, of course, for exclamation points in the band name and song title! (Listen on YouTube)8. Neu!: “Hero”The name of the legendary krautrock group Neu! — German for “New!” — was, in a sense, a sendup of the consumer culture pervading the band’s Düsseldorf home in the early 1970s. As the wildly influential drummer Klaus Dinger said in a 2001 interview with The Wire, “‘Neu!’ at that time was the strongest word in advertising.” (Listen on YouTube)9. George Michael: “Freedom! (‘90)”In 1984, Wham! released a bright, buoyant single called “Freedom.” Michael chose to revisit that title — though now with a time-stamp, and an exclamation! — for this hit from his second solo album, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.” The lyrics revisit the image he cultivated back in those Wham! days, and reject it in favor of something truer to Michael’s authentic self: “Today the way I play the game is not the same, no way,” he sang. “Think I’m gonna get myself happy.” The exclamation mark sells it: This song was Michael’s liberation. (Listen on YouTube)Gotta have some faith in the sound,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“An Exclamatory Playlist!” track listTrack 1: Wham!, “Everything She Wants”Track 2: Abba, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Track 3: Van Halen, “Everybody Wants Some!!”Track 4: The Beatles, “Oh! Darling”Track 5: The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”Track 6: Sly and the Family Stone, “Stand!”Track 7: Los Campesinos!, “You! Me! Dancing!”Track 8: Neu!, “Hero”Track 9: George Michael, “Freedom! (’90)”Bonus tracksRIP Tony Bennett, who was such a musical institution that part of me thought he might actually live forever. Rob Tanenbaum put together a playlist of 10 of his best-known songs, and Jon Pareles wrote a lovely appraisal that begins with quite a musical brainteaser: “Has there ever been a more purely likable pop figure than Tony Bennett?” I’m still mulling it over. More