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      He Spent $12,495 to Be Gene Simmons’s Roadie (and Got More Than Expected)

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      A father-son pair ponied up for the V.I.P. experience last week and got a glimpse behind the scenes of a rock ’n’ roll show, and into a notorious star’s heart.A few years ago, The Financial Times named Kiss “rock’s greatest capitalists.” By the newspaper’s count, the band founded in 1973 had licensed its name to some 5,000 products, including Kiss Kondoms and Kiss Kaskets.The “Kiss thing,” Gene Simmons, the band’s brash founding singer-bassist, once said, “has become this huge monster, despite the fact that critics say that doing games and slot machines and golf courses is not credible. Critics still live in their mother’s basement. We own the world.”Kiss wrapped up its End of the Road (supposed) farewell tour at Madison Square Garden in December 2023, but not before introducing digital avatars designed to perform shows and, in theory, make money in perpetuity. (Actual members of Kiss will play together in November as part of the Kiss Army fan club’s 50th-anniversary celebration in Las Vegas.)Early this month, Simmons started a solo tour with his Gene Simmons Band. And, at the age of 75, he’s still upsetting critics. For each stop, Simmons is offering a “Personal Assistant and Band Roadie for the Day” experience to one fan. The rocker’s website promises that the roadie and one guest will get to help set up for the gig, attend the soundcheck, have a meal with Simmons, get an onstage introduction during the show and receive a signed bass. V.I.P. experiences have become standard in pop, but it was the package’s price tag — $12,495 (show tickets not included) — that set the internet off. “‘Greedy’ Kiss rocker worth $400M is slammed for charging fans insane money to be his assistant,” blared a Daily Mail headline.Dwayne Rosado, right, and his son, Zach, got to attend the soundcheck, have a meal with Simmons, get an onstage introduction during the show and receive a signed bass.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesIt’s not insane to everyone. “This is what I choose to spend my money on,” said Dwayne Rosado, a tattooed 52-year-old retired corrections sergeant from Middletown, N.Y. He and his soft-spoken son, Zach, a 5-foot-11 seventh grader into mixed martial arts, video games and electric guitar, were the roadies for the day at Simmons’s recent concert at the Count Basie Center for the Arts’ 1,500-capacity theater in Red Bank, N.J. On the afternoon of the show, father and son — both wearing the official Gene Simmons Band road crew shirts that had been provided for them — waited at the theater’s loading area for the rock star to arrive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dance Music Is Booming Again. What’s Different This Time? A Lot.

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      In late February, just after midnight, a cavernous warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard thumped with the Ibiza-based D.J. and producer Solomun’s dramatic, synth-heavy house music as red light strobed over a sea of raucous 20- and 30-somethings. Two days earlier, he had been at the 20,000-capacity Sphere in Las Vegas opening for Anyma, an Italian American electronic music star whose run of New Year’s Eve shows sold out in under 24 hours, grossing $21 million in ticket sales.Just before 2 a.m. a few weeks later, the London-based D.J. and radio host Moxie was shaking Brooklyn’s Public Records with a classic ’90s house track, smiling ear to ear as she watched over the sweaty 200-capacity nightclub. On a more frigid March night, Zeemuffin, a Brooklyn-based D.J. originally from Pakistan, was onstage at the Bushwick venue Elsewhere, headlining “Azadi” (“freedom” in Urdu), a bill that featured a wide array of global dance music sounds — Chicago house, Jersey club, Baltimore house, dancehall, the Baile funk of Brazil, the gqom of South Africa — while a sold-out crowd went wild.Zeemuffin at Elsewhere in Brooklyn.Zeemuffin (real name: Zainab Hasnain DiStasio) took a trip back to Pakistan around the top of the year to D.J. a club in Karachi where the near pandemonium at her set bordered on ecstasy. “Never in my whole life — and I’m from there — have I experienced anything like this” in the city, she recalled. She described a crowd of “queer people, trans people, Black people, white people, Asian people, all in one space,” and sighed. “It was unbelievable.”Over the past four years, scenes like these are increasingly playing out all over the world, as dance music experiences yet another boom period. Festival lineups are jam-packed with D.J.s, while some of the biggest names in pop music (including Beyoncé, Drake and Charli XCX) have made dance music-inspired or adjacent albums. It’s usually at this point — when a newspaper sees fit to write about it — that the comedown starts.This moment, however, is different.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fiona Apple’s Statement About Jailed Mothers, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis, Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, I’m With Her and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Fiona Apple, ‘Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)’Fiona Apple’s first solo single in five years is topical, focused on poor women who are imprisoned before trial and drawing on Apple’s time spent as a court watcher. Over a percussive track built on hand drumming, Apple sings about a single mother who can’t afford to post bail; by the time her case is dropped, she has lost her home and her family. Her voice is bitterly sympathetic; the video adds stark statistics.Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, ‘I Like It I Like It’Hayley Williams of Paramore joins Mosey Sumney for a song he wrote with a co-producer, Graham Jonson (a.k.a. quickly, quickly) about desire thwarted by its own intensity. “I turn cactus when we touch,” Sumney moans; “My lips clutch when you open up,” Williams admits. Deep, loping, stop-start synthesizer lines and a lumpy beat underline both their hesitancy and their obsession; all they can agree on is, “I like it too much.”Billy Woods and Preservation, ‘Waterproof Mascara’The most harrowing track on “Golliwog,” the new album by the rapper Billy Woods, is “Waterproof Mascara.” A sobbing woman and an elegiac melody share the foreground of the production, by Preservation, as Woods recalls domestic abuse and suicidal thoughts and tries to numb himself with weed. Like the rest of the album, it’s bleak and uncompromising.Kali Uchis, ‘Lose My Cool,’“Sincerely,” the new album by Kali Uchis, is one long, languorous sigh of relief at finding true love, then basking in it. The production luxuriates in relaxed tempos and reverbed guitars in songs like “Lose My Cool,” a two-part song — slow and slower — that shows off her jazzy side with melodic leaps and airborne crooning. She revels in clinginess: “Whenever I’m without you babe, it don’t feel right,” she coos.Hxppier, ‘Aller’Hxppier — the 20-year-old Nigerian songwriter Ukpabi Favor Oru — lets smoldering irritation boil over in “Aller,” singing, “I can’t right now with your wishes / You try but you lie.” The bass-loving production, by ValNtino, is grounded in an earthy low drumbeat and keeps expanding — with call-and-response voices, ululations, shouts, horns, strings, organ, even a crying baby — as if Hxppier is mustering allies from all sides.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ Radiohead Riffs on Shakespeare

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      The band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, created a show with the Royal Shakespeare Company that is both admirably ambitious and a little foolish.Radiohead meets the Bard: a mash-up for the ages — and kryptonite for purists, you might think. But a new, dance-infused take on “Hamlet,” set to the band’s 2003 LP, “Hail to the Thief,” which opened in Manchester, England, on Wednesday, is no mere gimmick.There is plenty in the album, both aesthetically and thematically, that resonates with Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, revenge and self-doubt: the title’s allusion to political infamy, the music’s gloomy timbre, the anxiously introspective lyrics. Immediately, the album’s opening line — “Are you such a dreamer / To put the world to rights?” — has echoes of Hamlet’s famous speech, “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!”“Hamlet Hail to the Thief” — co-directed by Christine Jones and Steve Hoggett for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and co-created by the Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke — runs at Aviva Studios through May 18 before transferring to the company’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon in June. Jones is best known as a set designer, and Hoggett as a choreographer. (They worked together on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” for which Jones won a Tony in 2018.) In this interpretation, the story is drastically abridged — clocking in at comfortably under two hours — and there is a strong emphasis on music and visuals.The onstage action is interspersed with subtly reworked snippets and deconstructed riffs from the Radiohead songs. A group of musicians, supervised by Tom Brady, plays behind glass at the rear of the stage, while two singers belt out vocals from a balcony. The actors periodically slip into trance-like dance moves, combining strange, synchronized gesticulations with an assortment of tumbling, swirling and rolling motions. They dance a creepy waltz to the funky bass line of “Go to Sleep,” and the song’s chorus — “Something big is gonna happen / Over my dead body” — portentously signposts the carnage that is to come.The actors periodically slip into trance-like choreographed dance moves with strange, synchronized gesticulations.Manuel HarlanThe music and movement combine to evoke a suitably eerie sense of menace, although it’s a shame that the production’s smartly rendered monochrome aesthetic has become so commonplace — thanks in large part to to its deployment in successive high-profile Jamie Lloyd productions — that it scarcely registers. Black-clad actors, a little obscured by smoke; a dark stage illuminated by stark spotlights or neon rectangles: It’s a gloaming-by-numbers, almost too crisp to be spooky. (The set design is by the collective AMP Scenography, in collaboration with Sadra Tehrani.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Smokey Robinson’s Victory Lap Upended by Allegations of Sexual Assault

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      The Motown legend, 85, was touring to support a new album when he was sued and accused of sexually assaulting four women who had worked as housekeepers for him.At 85, the Motown legend Smokey Robinson was on something of a celebratory tour. With a new album to promote, he shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen last month, performed last week on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and was in the midst of playing a series of live dates in the United States and the United Kingdom.“I feel wonderful,” he told Entertainment Tonight in a recent interview. “I pray every night before we go on that we can be entertaining and uplifting to the people who are there.”But on Tuesday, Mr. Robinson’s victory lap was upended when four women who had worked as housekeepers for him filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault, claiming in the suit that he abused them dozens of times over many years.The suit, filed in Los Angeles, identifies the women only as Jane Does 1 through 4. They each accuse Mr. Robinson of raping them repeatedly while they were employed cleaning his home in Chatsworth, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, as well as in his other homes in Ventura County, Calif., and Las Vegas.Multiple attempts to reach Mr. Robinson and his lawyers and representatives were unsuccessful on Wednesday. The Daily Mail said it had reached Mr. Robinson by telephone and reported that he had said, “I am appalled.”Mr. Robinson was Motown royalty, writing and performing some of the most beloved hits in the catalog with the Miracles.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Liam Payne Left a $32.3 Million Estate and No Will, Reports Say

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      Mr. Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, died after falling from a third-story hotel balcony in October.Liam Payne, the former One Direction singer who died last year after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, left an estate worth 24.3 million pounds, or $32.3 million, but had not written a will before his death, according to British news outlets.Mr. Payne’s former partner, Cheryl Tweedy, will be an administrator of his wealth and property, the BBC and The Guardian reported on Wednesday. Ms. Tweedy, the mother of his 8-year-old son and a former member of the pop group Girls Aloud, shares oversight of the estate with a music industry lawyer but neither may distribute the wealth, the BBC said.Mr. Payne, 31, died in October, after falling from a third-floor hotel balcony while in Argentina, and a toxicology report found he had cocaine, alcohol and a prescription antidepressant in his system at the time of death. A statement from local prosecutors after the death suggested that it was not a suicide because of the determination that he fell in a state of unconsciousness.After an investigation, Argentine authorities charged three people with negligent homicide. Those charges, against a friend of Mr. Payne’s and two employees at the hotel where he died, were later dropped.A CasaSur Palermo Hotel employee and a local waiter are still accused of supplying narcotics to Mr. Payne in the days leading up to his death. The charge they face carries a sentence of four to 15 years in prison. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Sinners’ and Beyoncé Battle the Vampires. And the Gatekeepers, Too.

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      This moment might call for excessive, imaginative Black art that wants to be gobbled up. That’s Ryan Coogler’s new movie. That’s “Cowboy Carter.” Let’s throw in some Kendrick, too.When Beyoncé wails, in the opening moments of her “Cowboy Carter” album, that “them big ideas are buried here,” I’ve imagined “big” standing in for “racist” but have never hit pause to wonder about the GPS coordinates. That song’s called “Ameriican Requiem,” so the cemetery is everywhere. And yet partway through Ryan Coogler’s hit “Sinners,” I thought, Oh, this is where ‘here’ is, inside a movie about a 1932 juke joint whose music is so soulful that vampires, who are also a white minstrel trio, want to suck its blood.She’s envisioning utopia — a place where a Black woman feels free to make any kind of music she wants, including country. He’s imagined a nightmare in which Black art is doomed to be coveted before it’s ever just simply enjoyed. She’s defying the gatekeepers. He’s arguing that some gates definitely need to be kept. To that end, the movie keeps a gag running wherein vampire etiquette requires a verbal invitation to enter the club, leading to comic scenes of clearly possessed, increasingly itchy soul junkies standing in a doorway begging to be let in. People have been calling certain white performers interested in Black music vampires for years. Here’s a movie that literalizes the metaphor with an audacity that’s thrilling in its obviousness and redundancy.There’s never a bad time for good pop art. There’s never a bad time for Black artists to provide it. But these here times? Times of hatchet work and so-called wood-chipping; of chain saws, as both metaphor and dispiriting political prop; a time of vandalistic racial gaslighting. These times might call for an excessive pop art that takes on too much, that wants to be gobbled up and dug into, an art that isn’t afraid to boast I am this country, while also doing some thinking about what this country is. These here times might call for Black artists to provide that, too, to offer an American education that feels increasingly verboten. That’s not art’s strong suit, pointing at chalkboards. But if school systems are being bullied into coddling snowflakes, then perhaps, on occasion, art should be hitting you upside the head and dancing on your nose.Beyoncé on the opening night of her “Cowboy Carter” tour in Los Angeles last month.The New York TimesNow, it’s true that the knobbiest moments on “Cowboy Carter” and in “Sinners” are the equivalent of diagramed sentences. The album uses elders to do its explaining. Before “Spaghettii” gets underway, the singer and songwriter Linda Martell stops by to dissertate on the limitation of genres; Dolly Parton connects her “Jolene” to the home-wrecker in Beyoncé’s now nine-year-old “Sorry”; and Willie Nelson, as the D.J. on KNTRY, Beyoncé’s fictional broadcast network, turns his dial past some real chestnuts to tee up “Texas Hold ’Em.” They’re vouching for the validity of her project’s scope and sincerity, while, especially in Martell’s case, spelling everything out.The spelling in “Sinners” happens right in the middle of its young protagonist’s first big blues number. Earlier, we’d gotten a taste of what Sammie (Miles Caton), a preacher’s boy, could do. Caton’s molasses baritone and impaling guitar work were really doing it for me when the sound muffles, and in come not one but two micro lectures about this music’s power to “pierce the veil between the present and the past.” And as these explanations of Black music tumble forth, I was surprised to find a very Funkadelic fellow making love to an electric guitar right next to Sammie. Over by the kitchen twerks a woman arguably conjured from some extremely City Girls place. The temperature of instruments changes from live drums to what sound like drum machines. And I soon spy dashikied tribesmen, b-boys, a ballerina and, I’m pretty sure, a decked-out Chinese folk singer, and they’re all gettin’ in the way of the blues.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Going Back to Pavement’s Gold Sounds

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      Hear 11 songs to prep for the band’s bizarro documentary, “Pavements.”Stephen Malkmus fronting Pavement.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,This past Friday one of the more bonkers music documentaries ever to hit screens arrived: “Pavements,” the director Alex Ross Perry’s exploration of both the ’90s indie band Pavement and the ways we make myths around musicians. I talked to Perry and the Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus about how the movie ended up taking the wild form that it did, using split-screen images to show Pavement’s most recent reunion tour as well as a jukebox musical (real), a Hollywood biopic (fake) and a museum exhibition (a bit of both). The Times critic Alissa Wilkinson called it all “delightfully destabilizing.”Along with its meta pranks, though, “Pavements” is full of great music. In our interview, Perry said he wanted the movie to “perform like a two-hour Pavement concert where it goes from an achingly beautiful, tender song, to a very loud and bratty punk song, to just an endless, sprawling, loose jam.” It’s an apt description of the band’s catalog, which filtered avant-garde rock influences — like the Velvet Underground, Pere Ubu (R.I.P. David Thomas), Can and especially the Fall — through the suburban California sensibility of Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, a.k.a. Spiral Stairs. “The whole record collection kind of melts into what you are,” Malkmus says in the documentary.You can’t talk about Pavement in 2025 without getting into the story of “Harness Your Hopes,” a non-album track that was boosted by the Spotify and TikTok algorithms until it became Pavement’s best-known song for younger fans. (“That’s really like a crazy, crazy thing that happened,” Malkmus said in a phone interview. “That’s pretty fun.”) The band’s record label had Perry shoot a music video to capitalize on its success; it features Sophie Thatcher from “Yellowjackets” and references all of Pavement’s old videos from the ’90s.If you like that one, just think what they actually put on the records! Here’s a Pavement primer where the beautifully tender rubs shoulders with the loud and bratty and the endless, loose jams.Hi-ho, Silver, ride,DaveListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More