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      Olivia Newton-John’s Transformation Into Pop Royalty

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      When the singer smudged her classy image, she “unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop’s Olympus,” our critic writes: “The vestal vamp.”We would’ve just called her ONJ now. But part of the appeal, I think, was all of that name, the possible royalty of it. Nobody wanted to waste a syllable. Olivia Newton-John. Just saying it might bestow a crown. The rest of her allure sprang from that classiness: She was neither queen nor first lady of anything, yet she seemed, ultimately, like … a lady. And that was something she could have some fun with, a category she could smudge. Eventually. I mean, this was a person who, at the heights of funk, disco and glam rock, recorded six country-esque albums, throw pillows for your ears. And most of their singles topped what was once known as Billboard’s easy listening chart. (So maybe she was the queen of that.)By the end of the 1970s, though, she had figured out the whole “lady” thing and spent 90 percent of her first Hollywood movie disguised that way, as a princess. There’s a lot going on in “Grease.” Most of it’s bizarre and has to do with sex and a sort of pure whiteness, particularly how, in both cases, Newton-John, who died on Monday at 73, was holding onto hers. Not for John Travolta, per se, but for “You’re the One That I Want,” the duet with Travolta (and a triple-X bass line) that ends the movie. The virginal bobby-soxer Newton-John had been playing was now in pumps and skintight black pants. Her hair had expanded from Sandra Dee to Sophia Loren. You could see her shoulders.That transformation unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop’s Olympus: the vestal vamp. Nothing about the presentation of a four-minute pop song would be the same. Neither would anybody who sat through a dozen showings of “Grease.” The only reason my 5- and 6- and 10-year-old selves put up with it at all was the knowledge that we’d soon get to the part at the amusement park where Olivia Newton-John turns into an ONJ.In the movie “Grease,” Sandy (Newton-John, left) transforms into a sexpot to get back together with Danny, played by John Travolta.Paramount PicturesI didn’t learn much from Newton-John about sex. Only that its existence was there to be implied and winked at. It’s true that her pelvis was, at last, affixed to Travolta’s near the end of “Grease” but on a redundant ride called the Shake Shack. And, yeah, she does spend that zany video for “Physical” in a disco spa studded with Adonic gym rats, but when the tanned, fatless men walk off hand-in-hand, she gleefully locks arms with one of the spa’s tubbier clients. They’re the ones she wants — and, consequently, the ones I wanted, too.The videos, the hit songs, her lip-syncing them on “Solid Gold”: I also wanted Olivia Newton-John. And one of my parents must have known this because there was a copy of her second greatest hits LP, from 1982, at our house. And knowing what my parents weren’t listening to, the only reason it would’ve been there is for me; I wasn’t even 7. The thing about that album — more than any I’d ever studied up to then, except for Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July” (you could see his shoulders) — is the gatefold, a good album’s second strongest intoxicant. And this one was just Newton-John in a horizontal display, head to thigh, hair shortish and characteristically a-feather. White knit top, tight white pants, some gold jewelry. Was she truly on her back or simply shot to look that way? I’d have to wait a whole two months, for the gatefold of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (not a dissimilar pose but with a tiger cub), to see anything as mesmerizingly erotic.Newton-John revamped herself at the dawn of the music-video era. She knew the power of the art form — her Grammy-winning 1982 video album, “Olivia Physical,” was the “Lemonade” of its day, inspiring a prime-time network TV event. She only had to toy with going too far. Her real thing was limitations. She seemed to know what hers were — as a vocalist, as a dancer, as an actor. And she luxuriated in them. There was nothing inherently subversive about her. Yet she was an ironist — the person you’d least expect to see, say, mounting a fat dude on a massage table and riding him like a mechanical bull. Even when she was straining for eros — the way she was in the video for “Tied Up,” in a red leather vest, her mouth seemingly in want of irrigation — you were watching an angel pursue a dirty face.That’s the reason she survived “Xanadu” — the musical belch, from 1980, with her as a Greek muse on roller skates: an imperviousness to the surrounding absurdity. It’s the reason she came to embody the sleek fantasies of pleasure, painlessness and profit of the 1980s. Nothing disturbed her. She disturbed no one. Even that gatefold: She’s fully clothed! The skates and spandex were a prop and a metaphor. And “Physical” remained the decade’s longest-running No. 1 song.Gene Kelly, left, and Newton-John in the movie “Xanadu,” from 1980.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBut at some point, she stopped perking us up. Well, we stopped letting her. Madonna had come along and threatened to put her out of business. I swore she was a parody of Newton-John’s flirty, jolly, heaven-sent persona; of her being staunchly white while adjacent to a wealth of Black and Latin music. What would it mean to mean it, not just to get dirty but to be dirty, to mix in some of that Blackness and brownness? “Like a Virgin,” for instance, is Newton-John but more ornately ironic, authentically, imaginatively lewd. Even though Newton-John’s hit machine was still going by 1985, she was already becoming a memory of a kind of innocence. Which is to say that she was never, ever forgotten. She’s a place pop music has been trying to get back to: the Stacey Q’s and Cathy Dennises, the Carly Rae Jepsens and Dua Lipas; the one and only Kylie Minogue.What I like to go back to with Olivia Newton-John isn’t her body at all. It’s her singing. There’s always more to it than I remember. I was putting it in sundresses and leotards. But, boy, that voice could work a singlet, too: She learned to flex her soprano so that it bent, barked, yipped and squealed. “Totally Hot,” from 1978, occasionally features sounds more typical for Sea World. Yet any deficiencies in soulfulness were repaid in spirit.She also perfected a great trick: layering. Instead of just one of her, suddenly, in a pre-chorus or a chorus-chorus, there was a fleet, of lilting, undulating, rainbowing, billowing, Bee Gee-ing selves, on “Have You Never Been Mellow,” on “A Little More Love,” on “Magic.” She had but one body, but on a record, she could become a multitude. The warmth of that sound; the glorious blue-sky of it still warrants exclamation — like “oh my lord” but alternatively divine. I like “ONJ.” More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Is No. 1 on the Charts

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      The pop star’s seventh album debuts at No. 1 with the second-biggest opening week of the year, while her song “Break My Soul” climbs to the top of the Hot 100.For her last two solo albums, Beyoncé turned the music business on its head by rewriting the standard marketing playbook. “Beyoncé” (2013) came without warning and had a music video for every song; for “Lemonade” (2016), she teamed with HBO for an hourlong film. Each went straight to No. 1 and became an instant pop-culture moment.For her latest, “Renaissance,” Beyoncé, now 40, took a more conventional route, sending a single to radio stations weeks ahead of time and taking advance orders for CDs and vinyl (though she released no music videos). The album leaked online two days early — the kind of breach that once upon a time could have sunk a new release.But “Renaissance” opens at No. 1 on the Billboard chart with the equivalent of 332,000 sales in the United States, slightly beating early predictions and notching the second-highest debut of the year, behind Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House.”Beyoncé also dominates the Hot 100 this week, as “Break My Soul” rises five spots to No. 1, becoming her first song to top Billboard’s flagship singles chart since “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” in late 2008 and early 2009.The success of “Renaissance,” her seventh solo studio LP — every one of them, beginning with “Dangerously in Love” (2003), has gone to No. 1 — affirms Beyoncé’s status as a chart-topping megastar. Her opening-week total bests those of a string of recent albums by younger, streaming-heavy stars like Drake (204,000), Kendrick Lamar (295,000) and Post Malone (121,000). But it was nowhere near the total for “Harry’s House,” which started with 521,000, thanks in part to record-breaking vinyl sales. (Now in its 11th week out, “Harry’s House” is in fifth place on the album chart.)The 332,000 “equivalent album units” for “Renaissance” includes 179 million streams and 190,000 copies sold as complete packages, including 121,000 on CD and 26,000 on vinyl, according to Luminate, the tracking service that supplies the data behind Billboard’s charts. “Lemonade” arrived with the equivalent of 485,000 sales, and “Everything Is Love” (2018), Beyoncé’s joint album with Jay-Z, arrived at No. 2 with 123,000.Also this week, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” by the Puerto Rican streaming king Bad Bunny, drops to No. 2 after holding the top spot for the last five weeks straight. Counting two earlier peaks since it came out in May, “Verano” has logged seven times in the top spot.The K-pop boy band Ateez opens at No. 3 with its latest mini-album, “The World EP.1: Movement,” driven largely by CD sales. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” a steady hit since early last year, is No. 4. More

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      The Stories of Teen Punks That Ruled New York In the Late ’70s

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      High school students spent their nights forging a colorful late-night scene marked by big choruses and few rules. The bands didn’t last, but the taste of art and freedom shaped their lives.The year was 1977, and the first generation of New York City punk and alternative bands had moved on to larger venues and the international touring circuit. The thrash of hardcore was still a few years down the pike. Yet the storied music venues of Manhattan were alive and aloud with excited, underage patrons.They passed their days at Stuyvesant High School. They came from the High School of Performing Arts and Murrow. They went to Friends Seminary, Walden and Dalton, and to Brooklyn Friends, too. Some were dropouts and runaways; some were even from the suburbs. Almost all of them were under 18.Over the next four years, they spent their nights creating their own rock scene, playing aggressive, witty, sophisticated and intense pop and punk for fellow teenagers in places like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, Hurrah and TR3. These weren’t the all-ages shows that would become commonplace in the city a few years later. This was a unique moment in the city’s musical history that changed the lives of many of the artists and audience members who were there, though their stories have gone largely untold. Imagine an upbeat “Lord of the Flies,” styled by Manic Panic and Trash & Vaudeville.Their ranks included Eric Hoffert, who did four hours of homework from Bronx Science each weekday, then practiced his guitar for four hours; weekends belonged to his band, the Speedies. Arthur Brennan, a 16-year-old from Groton, Conn., who regularly hitchhiked 20 miles to the only newsstand where he could buy magazines that covered new music; he renamed himself Darvon Staggard and ran away to New York City to join a band. And Kate Schellenbach, a ninth grader at Stuyvesant who had heard a rumor that groups her age were playing the most famous music clubs in the world, just blocks from where she lived.In September 1979, Schellenbach was 13 and starting high school in an outfit assembled to express her interest in new wave music: overdyed painters’ pants from Unique Clothing Warehouse, white go-go boots from Reminiscence in the West Village, a bowling shirt and an Elvis Costello pin.“I remember going into the girls’ bathroom,” she said cheerfully, speaking via video chat, “and this girl, Nancy Hall, who was the coolest, was sitting on the sink.” Nancy suggested that Kate go see a band playing at CBGB later that week called the Student Teachers. The arty pop combo included a female rhythm section featuring some kids from Friends Seminary and, somewhat improbably, the rather distant Mamaroneck High School.“If I hadn’t seen the Student Teachers that fateful night, I might never have been a drummer,” said Schellenbach, who helped found the Beastie Boys in 1981 and went on to form Luscious Jackson. “Seeing Laura Davis play drums, seeing Lori Reese play bass and how exciting the whole scene was, everything about it made me think, ‘Oh, maybe this is something I can do,’” she added. “These people were still in high school — it seemed attainable.”From left: Joe Katz, David Scharff and Lori Reese of the Student Teachers, onstage at Trax in 1980. The band inspired Kate Schellenbach, who went on to help found the Beastie Boys the next year.Ebet RobertsThe timing was perfect: This was the first generation to grow up with punk as the status quo, not the exceptional rebellion. “Part of the call of history was that you weren’t supposed to just listen and take it in, you were supposed to listen to the conversation and form a band yourself,” the Student Teachers’ keyboardist, Bill Arning, now a prominent gallery owner and curator, said via video chat. “Of course you were supposed to form a band; it didn’t even seem like it was an ‘out there’ idea.”The key groups in the movement were the glam bubble gum Speedies, a high-concept bunch of overachieving teens (plus two very slightly older members) who “wanted to be the fusion of the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and the Bay City Rollers,” according to the founding guitarist Gregory Crewdson; the Student Teachers, who played art pop with elegiac touches reminiscent of Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground; the Blessed, who were the first, sloppiest and most fashionable group on the scene; and the mega poppy mod group the Colors, who like the Speedies were enamored with bubble-gum music and were mentored by Blondie’s drummer, Clem Burke. (Other bands on the edges of the movement included the Stimulators and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan.)If the core bands in the teen punk scene had anything in common, it was an affection for big choruses, flashy, colorful clothes and a near-arrogant certainty that the empowerment promised by punk rock was now theirs to inherit.From left: Nick Berlin, Billy Stone and Howie Pyro of the Blessed onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus,” Berlin said.Eileen Polk“We didn’t know any better,” said Nicholas Petti, who, in 1977 at age 13, started calling himself Nick Berlin and became a co-founder of the Blessed. He spoke to The Times via video chat just before attending the funeral for another founding member of the band, Howie Pyro. Last month at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, Pyro’s inheritors, including D Generation, Theo Kogan of the Lunachicks and Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, paid tribute to the New York mainstay with a memorial show.“We thought this was how you lived. We would watch John Waters movies and, yes, of course we would understand they were actors, but we thought, this is what you are supposed to do,” Petti said from his home in Fort Bragg, Calif., where he works as the head of the Culinary Arts Management program at Mendocino College. “This is your life, this isn’t how you dress up, this is all of it,” he added. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus. When we played an early show and a late show at Max’s, we would bring two complete changes of clothes for each set. This certainly isn’t how we would have expressed it at the time, but it was living life as a performance art piece.”The Blessed (pronounced as two syllables) were the band that Arthur Brennan ran away from Groton to join; after two weeks the money he had saved from his paper route ran out, and when private detectives came to retrieve him, he was happy to leave his new identity as Darvon Staggard behind. “After the first night, it’s really not that much fun sleeping at the all-night Blimpies on 6th Avenue,” Brennan, now a public-school teacher in Los Angeles, said via video chat. “But it was such a sense of relief to meet people who were like you. In your own hometown, you’d be considered a loser-slash-weirdo. We were kids learning how to act in a crazy, artsy adult world.”The author Jonathan Lethem, who wrote about his affection for the Speedies and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan in “The Fortress of Solitude,” noted that childhood was different in New York at that time. “The city was chaotic, in a way, but it was really easy for us to operate,” he said in a video chat. “You couldn’t convince a taxi driver to go back to Brooklyn if your life depended on it, but you could always walk over the bridge! I do feel that we essentially owned the city, that we were the actual ones it belonged to at the time.”Jill Cunniff, a scene patron who later founded Luscious Jackson with Schellenbach and Gabby Glaser, said the city seemed like a nonstop event. “Night was freedom,” she said, “and it felt like we were really safe. If you were a parent, you might think the opposite — those kids are going out to nightclubs, they are only 13, that’s so dangerous. No. My daytime at I.S. 70 was really dangerous,” she added, referring to her public middle school. “My nighttime was safe.”How did the scene keep going? None of the well-traveled downtown venues — CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, TR3 or Studio 10 — regularly checked IDs, the musicians recalled, and they said the ones uptown, like Hurrah and Trax, only loosely enforced age-based alcohol restrictions. (The legal drinking age in the city was 18 until late 1982.) In fact, the CBGB owner Hilly Kristal and Peter Crowley, who managed and booked Max’s, seemed to welcome the wave of underage New Yorkers eager to discover music.“Kids, generally, like to drink,” said Crowley, laughing via phone. “But we tried our best to make sure people were safe — though I did wear a badge that said, ‘I am not your mother.’”But was the safety an illusion? “For a long time, I looked at this period of my life nostalgically and sentimentally,” the author Christopher Sorrentino said in an email. “Only recently have I begun to recognize how vulnerable we all were, how many risks we were exposed to with absolutely no one to apply the brakes. This goes double for the girls, who at 15 or 16 often had ‘relationships’ with men in their late 20s and early 30s.”Laura Albert, who was in the scene from age 13 and later achieved fame (and notoriety) writing under the nom de plume JT LeRoy, agreed. “Access still came with a price, especially for girls and queer boys,” she wrote in an as-yet-unpublished memoir. “That said, there was a sense of possibility, age was not a barrier, I was a teen in foster care but I still had access to the musicians I admired, calling them on pay phones and interviewing them for fanzines.”The Stimulators onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978.Ebet RobertsBy 1980, the teen punk scene was simultaneously evolving and dissolving as its members grew up and moved on. Some of its participants went on to play prominent roles in the local hardcore punk movement: Hoffert and Crewdson of the Speedies produced the first Beastie Boys demo, and the Stimulators became a foundational band of the local hardcore punk scene. Others went to college or took jobs that required leaving their dalliance with late nights at Max’s Kansas City and shopping for brothel creepers on St. Marks Place in the rearview mirror.“As cool as I thought the scene was, I realized I just didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be in college,” Laura Davis-Chanin, the Student Teachers’ drummer, said via video chat. “That was a big thing for me, given the incredible, shocking, thrilling world of rock ’n’ roll that I was a part of.”While the punk scene that preceded this moment has been exceptionally well documented, far less has been written about the teens who ran the night as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s. None of the groups were signed by major record labels and only one of the bands, the Colors, released an LP within the initial span of its career. (The Speedies put out an archival collection in 2007, largely to take advantage of the use of one of their songs, “Let Me Take Your Foto,” in a Hewlett-Packard ad campaign).With only spottily distributed independent 45s to spread the word outside the five boroughs, what was a potent local scene never gained a national or international profile. But several of its members have had notable careers inside and out of the arts world. Crewdson, the Speedies’ guitarist, is an acclaimed tableau photographer; Hoffert, his bandmate, became a data technology pioneer who helped develop the QuickTime media player and is now the senior vice president of video technology at Xandr; Allen Hurkin-Torres played in the Speedies, too, and is a former New York State Supreme Court justice.“There was a magical empowerment from what we did that has carried us through life,” Hoffert said via video chat. “The photography Gregory has done, my work in digital media, is directly related to that.”Schellenbach had a similar outlook: “It spawned so many cool things — art, authors, hip-hop. A magical time in New York City!”Eli Attie, who began going to Max’s before he had even hit puberty, became a speechwriter for Al Gore, then a writer and producer on “The West Wing” and “Billions.” “It made me unafraid,” he said of the scene. “It made me realize your life can be anything you want. If you want to know these people, if you want to experience this music, even if it seems out of reach or not allowed, you can just do it. You can write your own story.” More

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      Carly Rae Jepsen’s Brand-New Boy Problems, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by DJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, Panda Bear & Sonic Boom, the 1975 and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Beach House’Boy problems? Carly Rae Jepsen’s got them in spades on “Beach House,” a cheeky earworm from her forthcoming album “The Loneliest Time.” Jepsen employs her deadpan sense of humor as she lists off the red flags and deal-breakers that marred relationships with “Boy No. 1” to “Boy No. I Can’t Keep Count Anymore.” Amid all the silliness, though (“I got a beach house in Malibu,” one prospect tells her, “and I’m probably gonna hurt your feelings”), the song effectively taps into the romantic frustration of endless, “Groundhog Day”-esque first dates and long-term singledom: “I’ve been on this ride, this roller coaster’s a carousel,” Jepsen sings on the anguished pre-chorus, “And I’m getting nowhere.” LINDSAY ZOLADZDJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, ‘Staying Alive’A quizzically melancholic opening salvo from the upcoming DJ Khaled album “God Did,” “Staying Alive” nods casually to the Bee Gees on the way to somewhere far less ecstatic. In this construction, staying alive is an act of defiance, not exuberance. Drake bemoans “This life that allow me to take what I want/it’s not like I know what I want,” while in the video, he plays a doctor smoking hookah in the hospital and absently signing off on charts of patients who might need some help achieving the song’s title. JON CARAMANICABenny Blanco, BTS and Snoop Dogg, ‘Bad Decisions’Equally unimaginative as the BTS English-language breakthrough hit “Dynamite” but somehow less cloying, this collaboration benefits from the grandfatherly presence of Snoop Dogg, who at this stage of his career always raps as if his eyebrow is arched, and he can’t quite believe what he’s called upon to do either. CARAMANICAThe 1975, ‘Happiness’“Happiness,” the latest single from the eclectic British pop group the 1975, manages to sound both sleek and a little spontaneous; the dense, ’80s-inspired production gleams but there’s always enough air circulating to keep the atmosphere well ventilated. The frontman Matty Healy sounds uncharacteristically laid back here, trading in his usual arch, hyper-referential lyrics for simpler sentiments: “Show me your love, why don’t you?” he croons on an ecstatic chorus that’s catchy without feeling overdetermined. The video, directed by Samuel Bradley, is a hoot, finding the group mugging in all variety of louche, gorgeously lit environments — basically the visual equivalent of the lush saxophone solo that drops in the middle of the song. ZOLADZBandmanrill, ‘Real Hips’A surprisingly luscious and nimble offering from the Newark rapper Bandmanrill that makes plain the through lines that connect drill music, Jersey club and bass music. CARAMANICAPanda Bear & Sonic Boom, ‘Edge of the Edge’Fans of Panda Bear’s beloved 2007 album “Person Pitch” will likely enjoy the sunny, collagelike “Edge of the Edge,” which will appear on “Reset,” the Animal Collective member’s collaborative album with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, out next week. “Edge of the Edge” pairs a playful sample of the doo-wop group Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 hit “Denise” with Panda’s serenely melodic vocals, which cut through the carefree, pop-psychedelic vibe with some light social critique: “Can’t say it’s what you bargained for,” he sings, wagging a finger at the frenzied escalation of technology, “It’s forever at the push of a button.” The song, in opposition, sounds contentedly off the grid. ZOLADZBonny Light Horseman, ‘Exile’The voices of Eric D. Johnson and Anaïs Mitchell entwine beautifully on “Exile,” the opening track from the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman’s upcoming second album “Rolling Golden Holy.” The song is a duet in the truest emotional sense, as Mitchell swoops in to finish some of Johnson’s lines and, on the chorus, provides a warm, glowing harmony that meets his lonely plea, “I don’t wanna live in exile.” ZOLADZYoungBoy Never Broke Again featuring Rod Wave, ‘Home Ain’t Home’The two loneliest howlers in hip-hop unite for a meditation on the joylessness of fame. CARAMANICA More

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      The Robust Return of Beyoncé

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherBeyoncé’s seventh solo album, “Renaissance,” is a rich tribute to the long history of Black dance music, from disco up through ballroom house. It functions both as collage and history lesson, and also captures an evolution in her songwriting and personal presentation toward more modern directions.For Beyoncé, who is 40, it is a strong midcareer pivot that asserts her singular place in pop music, capable of essentially disappearing for several years then re-emerging on her own terms, and still finding her audience.On this week’s Popcast, a deep dive on Beyoncé’s new album, her push-and-pull between tradition and futurism, her relationship to queer music communities and the ways in which she reframes understanding of authorship and ownership.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterWesley Morris, a critic at large at The New York TimesJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticSalamishah Tillet, a contributing critic at large at 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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      Mo Ostin, Music Powerhouse Who Put Artists First, Dies at 95

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      At the helm of Warner Bros. Records from the 1960s into the ’90s, he worked closely with some of the most successful and influential performers of his era.Mo Ostin, who in his many years as the powerful chief executive of Warner Bros. Records made a point of putting the artist first, in the process encouraging the most important works of musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young and Prince, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95. The death was confirmed by his granddaughter Annabelle Ostin.“Between the early ’60s and the mid-’90s, under legendary record man Mo Ostin, no company was more successful at artist development — or operated with more sophistication,” the music industry trade publication Hits wrote in 2016.The list of artists signed to the constellation of affiliated Warner Bros. labels when they were guided by Mr. Ostin reads like a dream-world music hall of fame. It includes pivotal singers of the 1950s like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr.; innovators of the 1960 and ’70s like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead; and game-changers of the ’80s and ’90s like Madonna, R.E.M. and Green Day.“One of the great things about Warners, I always felt, was our emphasis and priority was always about the music,” Mr. Ostin told The Los Angeles Times for a profile of him in 1994.After a corporate power struggle led to his departure from Warner Bros. in 1995, he helped form DreamWorks Records, the music arm of the entertainment conglomerate created by David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and the former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. There he signed fresh mavericks like Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith and Nelly Furtado, along with veterans like the Isley Brothers and Burt Bacharach.One crucial factor in Mr. Ostin’s scouting and shaping of the brightest talents during Warner’s most vaunted years was his ability to hire and hold onto a tight executive team, highlighted by a prolific group of producers and A & R people like Lenny Waronker, Russ Titelman, Ted Templeman and Joe Smith.Another key was his saviness in creating joint-venture deals with a variety of labels, including Sire (which brought to the stable New Wave stars like Talking Heads, the Pretenders and Depeche Mode); Bizarre/Straight (tapping the netherworld of Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper and Captain Beefheart); Tommy Boy (hip-hop); Slash (punk and alternative music); and Quincy Jones’s Qwest (R&B).Mr. Ostin, right, and the producer Joe Smith appeared on a Los Angeles billboard in about 1973. Ginny Winn/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFor all his success, Mr. Ostin underplayed his role in public. Unlike his music-business peers Ahmet Ertegun, David Geffen and Clive Davis, who swooned before the spotlight, he granted very few interviews and kept a low profile on the party circuit.“To me, the artist is the person who should be in the foreground,” Mr. Ostin said in 1994.Still, the industry recognized the significance of his work. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Recording Academy honored him with a President’s Merit Award in 2014 and a Trustees Award in 2017.He was born Morris Meyer Ostrofsky on March 27, 1927, in Brooklyn to immigrant parents who had come to the United States from Russia during the Communist revolution of 1917. When he was 13, he moved with his parents and his brother, Gerald, to Los Angeles, where the family ran a produce market.He was a music fan from an early age, but his introduction to the music business came by happenstance. Living next to his family was the brother of Norman Granz, who owned the jazz label Clef Records and promoted concerts in the 1940s and ’50s. During his college years at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he majored in economics, Mr. Ostin wound up helping Mr. Granz by selling programs for his concerts. He married Evelyn Bardavid in 1948.Earning a bachelor’s degree with honors, Mr. Ostin enrolled in U.C.L.A.’s law school but dropped out in 1954 to support his wife and their young son. A job opportunity also came about through Mr. Granz, who hired him to be the controller for Clef at a time when the label’s roster included such important jazz artists as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker.Clef eventually changed its name to Verve; about the same time, Mr. Ostin changed his name as well.Toward the end of the 1950s, Frank Sinatra tried to buy the label, inspired by its artist-friendly approach. But he lost out to MGM Records, a disappointment that led him to form his own company, Reprise, in 1960. He named Mr. Ostin executive vice president, with the mission to model the new company on Verve.“Frank’s whole idea was to create an environment which, both artistically and economically, would be more attractive for the artist than anybody else had to offer,” Mr. Ostin said in 1994. “That wasn’t how it was anywhere else.”For the first few years, Reprise’s economics did not match its artistic efforts, in part because of Sinatra’s ban on signing any of the promising new rock ’n’ roll acts. “I went to Frank and said, ‘Look, we’re not going to be able to survive unless we become competitive,’” Mr. Ostin told Hits in 2016. “He hated rock ’n’ roll, but he realized what I was saying made a lot of sense. So he lifted the ban. That was a big, big turning point.”The first rock band Mr. Ostin signed, in 1964, were the Kinks, who scored a Top 10 hit that year with “You Really Got Me,” followed by another in 1965 and four more Top 40 entries by early the next year. By that point Sinatra, in need of cash, had sold Reprise to Warner Bros., which merged the companies and gave Mr. Ostin creative control.Along with Mr. Waronker and Mr. Smith, Mr. Ostin signed successful pop acts like Petula Clark, the Association and Harpers Bizarre before moving on to more hard-edge rock bands like the Dead, Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull. Mr. Ostin himself signed Jimi Hendrix in 1967, drawn by the early buzz Hendrix was stirring in Britain.Mr. Ostin, standing at left, and Mr. Smith, standing second from left, with three members of Fleetwood Mac in 1973: seated from left, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Warner Brothers ArchiveThat year, Mr. Ostin was named president of Warner-Reprise. By 1970, he was chairman and chief executive, a post he would hold for nearly a quarter-century.In the early ’70s, the company greatly magnified its power by launching the WEA distribution system, filtering in the rich catalogs of Elektra and Atlantic Records. By adding more and more affiliated labels, Mr. Ostin gained enough muscle to take on the music industry’s unchallenged market behemoth at the time, CBS Records.Rivalry between the two corporations escalated into a tit-for-tat battle starting in the late 1970s, when CBS’s chief executive, Walter Yetnikoff, lured James Taylor away from Warner Bros.; Mr. Ostin retaliated by signing Paul Simon away from CBS. In the 1980s, Mr. Ostin pulled off the same feat by poaching Miles Davis from his longtime home at CBS. (By that time WEA had overtaken CBS as the market champion.)The signing of Mr. Simon paid off particularly well in 1984, when his album “Graceland” became a major hit and, by incorporating influences from South Africa and elsewhere, stood as a game changer in Western awareness of global music.“There was no indication whatsoever when we started that the album had any chance of a commercial payoff,” Mr. Simon told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “But Mo loved the idea and encouraged me to take the risk.”Scores of culturally important or commercially mighty acts were nurtured by Warner Bros. in Mr. Ostin’s era. The list includes the bands Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Dire Straits, ZZ Top, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Sex Pistols, as well as George Benson, Rod Stewart, Rickie Lee Jones, Chaka Khan, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Ice-T.During those years Fleetwood Mac went from a cult band to a historic album seller with the blockbuster “Rumors” in 1977. The next year, Mr. Ostin wooed Prince to the company. Other top labels had been vying for him, but Mr. Ostin bested them by taking the rare risk of guaranteeing Prince a three-album deal and by giving him creative control.Of all the artists signed during the peak of his reign, Mr. Ostin singled out Neil Young and Prince as perhaps the most significant, in large part because their prestige became the incentive for important later artists to sign. “I can’t tell you how many new artists mention Neil Young when we’re trying to sign them — R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr. and tons of others,” he said.Mr. Ostin being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.Frank Micelotta/Getty ImagesMr. Ostin’s departure from Warner Bros. in 1994 came in the wake of a corporate reshuffling in which he would have had to report to Robert Morgado, the new chairman of Warner Music Group, greatly limiting his autonomy. “This business is about freedom and creative control,” Mr. Ostin told The Los Angeles Times. “An executive has to be able to make risky decisions with minimal corporate interference.”The next year, he joined with his son Michael, who had worked with him at Warner Bros., and Mr. Waronker to manage DreamWorks Records. Mr. Ostin retired from the music industry in 2004, after the DreamWorks label was sold to Universal Music Group, but he continued to do consulting work for Warner Bros.In addition to his granddaughter Ms. Ostin, he is survived by his brother, Gerald; his son Michael; three other grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. His wife died in 2005. Two of his sons died: Randy, a record promoter, in 2013, and Kenny in 2004.Mr. Ostin’s unflagging support for artists led them to lionize him. Flea, whose band the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been signed by Mr. Ostin, said in an interview for this obituary in 2019: “Mo was an exceptionally kind and intelligent man. When I talked to him, I felt understood.”That connection inspired Flea to write and record “a little country ditty,” in honor of Mr. Ostin after his departure from Warner Bros. — to Mr. Ostin’s great delight, he said.“Mo, Mo, why did you have to go?” the unreleased song began. “You’re the first record company guy/That looked me in the eye.”Alex Traub More

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      Beyoncé Will Change ‘Heated’ Lyrics After ‘Ableist Slur’ Criticism

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      The pop star’s decision to replace two words in her song “Heated” follows Lizzo’s removal of the same term, which has been used as a slur against disabled people, from her track “Grrrls.”Days after the release of her latest album, “Renaissance,” Beyoncé will modify the lyrics of one of its songs, a representative for the singer said on Monday, in response to an outcry from disability rights advocates who say the pop star should not have used a word that has historically been employed as a derogatory slur.In “Heated,” a dancehall-inspired track, the singer uses the words “spaz” and “spazzin’” in an energetically recited portion of the song that’s a callback to the freestyles at some ballroom events. Activists condemned the use of the word in social media posts, pointing out that another pop star, Lizzo, had removed the same lyric from a song following similar backlash in June.“The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced,” a spokeswoman for Beyoncé said in an email.The word at issue is based on spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy that causes motor impairments in the legs or arms. In June, Hannah Diviney, a writer and disability advocate from Australia, tweeted about Lizzo’s use of the word, noting that to a person with cerebral palsy like her, spasticity referred to an “unending painful tightness” in her legs, and urged the singer to “do better.” In response to the criticism from fans and activists, Lizzo changed her song, “Grrrls,” and wrote in a statement that “this is the result of me listening and taking action.”Diviney wrote in an op-ed, published in The Guardian on Monday, that her “heart sank” when she learned that Beyoncé’s new album had used the same word.“I thought we’d changed the music industry and started a global conversation about why ableist language — intentional or not — has no place in music,” Diviney wrote. “But I guess I was wrong, because now Beyoncé has gone and done exactly the same thing.”Disability right advocates have noted that the word has been more commonly used as a derogatory term in the United Kingdom compared to the United States. Scope, a group in Britain that campaigns for equality for people with disabilities, tweeted, “Disabled people’s experiences are not fodder for song lyrics,” and urged Beyoncé to follow Lizzo’s example. More

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      Bad Bunny Reigns Again Before Beyoncé’s Chart Arrival

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      The Puerto Rican pop star logs a seventh week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart; numbers for “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s latest, arrive next week.Before Beyoncé arrives with oomph on the charts, Bad Bunny is spending a seventh nonconsecutive week at No. 1.“Renaissance,” the feverishly anticipated and extensively teased seventh solo studio LP from Beyoncé, will debut on next week’s Billboard rankings; industry estimates predict an easy ride to No. 1 on the album chart, with totals between 275,000 and 315,000 total units including sales, streams and downloads. Spotify said on Saturday that the first 24 hours of “Renaissance” made it the most-streamed release by a female artist in a single day so far this year.Those predictions, though not final, would put the singer near the top of the sales heap for 2022 debuts. But Beyoncé would still fall well short of the biggest opening to this point: Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which opened with 521,500 units in May, including 182,000 copies on vinyl, the most of the modern era. Beyoncé, too, is selling multiple physical versions of her new release, but Billboard’s rules dictate that they will only be counted toward chart position when they are shipped to customers — an open logistical question that will affect her final first-week totals.In the meantime, Bad Bunny remains on top of the Billboard 200 for the fifth week in a row, during a relatively slow time for fresh releases from major artists. “Un Verano Sin Ti,” the fourth album from the Puerto Rican rapper and singer, earned 98,000 in sales by Billboard’s metrics, almost all of which came via the 135.9 million streams of songs from the album, according to the tracking service Luminate.Released in May, “Un Verano Sin Ti” had topped 100,000 units in each of its previous 11 weeks on the chart, according to Billboard.Also in the Top 5 this week, with modest numbers: the country singer Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” released in early 2021, is back up to No. 2 with 49,000 units; “Harry’s House” is No. 3 with 48,000 units; the South Korean group Seventeen is No. 4 with 34,000 units; and Future’s “I Never Liked You” is No. 5 with 33,000 units. Jack White’s latest solo album, “Entering Heaven Alive,” debuts at No. 9. Lizzo’s “Special” falls to No. 7 from No. 2 in its second week out, down 58 percent to 29,000 units. More