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      Beyoncé’s ‘Break My Soul,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Taylor Swift, the Mars Volta, Gorillaz featuring Thundercat 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.Beyoncé, ‘Break My Soul’The first song from Beyoncé’s album due July 29, “Renaissance,” has a clubby house beat and an attitude that equates defiant self-determination with salvation. She and her co-producers, Tricky Stewart and The-Dream, work two chords and a four-on-the-floor thump into a constantly changing track. They sampled shouted advice — “Release your anger! Release your mind! Release your job! Release the time!” — from “Explode” by the New Orleans bounce rapper Big Freedia. Beyoncé extrapolates from there: joining the Great Resignation, building “my own foundation,” insisting on love and self-love, facing every obstacle with the pledge that “You won’t break my soul.” When she invokes the soul, a gospel choir arrives to affirm her inner strength, as if anyone could doubt it. JON PARELESGorillaz featuring Thundercat, ‘Cracker Island’A kind of living cartoon character in his own right, the charismatic bassist Thundercat is a natural fit in the Gorillaz universe — so much so that it’s almost surprising he’s never collaborated with them before. Thundercat’s insistent bass line and backing vocals add a funky jolt to the group’s “Cracker Island,” a sleek and summery jam that happens to be about … a made-up cult? Thankfully the tune doesn’t get bogged down by anything too conceptual, though, and invites the listener to simply lock into its blissed-out groove. LINDSAY ZOLADZElizabeth King, ‘I Got a Love’The Memphis-based vocalist Elizabeth King once seemed headed toward gospel stardom. In the early 1970s, she and a group of all-male backing singers, the Gospel Souls, scored a radio hit and won the Gospel Gold Cup award, presented by the city’s gospel D.J.s. But then King stepped back, spending decades raising 15 children; her public performances were limited to singing on a weekly gospel radio program. It wasn’t until last year that King, now in her 70s, released her first full album, the impressive “Living in the Last Days.” She returns this week with “I Got a Love.” On the title track, King reprises the sultry style of praise-singing that she had perfected in the 1970s, telling us about her rock-sturdy romance with God over a slow and savory tempo. Behind her, a tube-amplified guitar slices out riffs, an organ alternates between full chords and long rests, and a heavy, pushing bass keeps the band’s muscles flexed. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAmanda Shires, ‘Take It Like a Man’The title track from Amanda Shires’s upcoming album is a poetic and provocative torch song enlivened by an electrifying vocal performance. Featuring her husband Jason Isbell on guitar, “Take It Like a Man” is a sweeping ballad that continuously builds in blistering intensity — sort of like something Shires’s Highwomen bandmate Brandi Carlile might release. But the song is a showcase for the unique power of Shires’s voice, which is both nervy and tremblingly vulnerable at the same time. “I know the cost of flight is landing,” she sings as the melody ascends ever higher, “and I know I can take it like a man.” ZOLADZThe Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicWith two quarantine albums and new recordings of her older albums, the pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10-minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman’s attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories.Taylor Swift, ‘Carolina’“Carolina,” from the soundtrack to the forthcoming movie “Where the Crawdads Sing,” holds the distinction of being one of the spookiest songs in the Taylor Swift catalog; save for “No Body, No Crime,” it’s the closest she’s come to writing an outright murder ballad. Co-produced with Aaron Dessner, “Carolina” sounds of a piece with Swift’s folky pair of 2020 releases: The arrangement begins with just a sparsely strummed acoustic guitar that eventually swells into a misty atmosphere with the addition of strings and banjo. As on her 2015 single “Wildest Dreams,” there’s a hint of Lana Del Rey’s influence as Swift digs into her breathy lower register to intone ominously, “There are places I will never go, and things that only Carolina will ever know.” ZOLADZSessa, ‘Canção da Cura’“Canção da Cura” (“Song of Healing”) from the Brazilian songwriter Sessa’s new album, “Estrela Acesa” (“Burning Star”), hints at some clandestine ritual. In his gentle tenor, Sessa sings, “To the sound of the drums I’ll consume you.” Acoustic guitars and percussion set up an intricate mesh of syncopation, and in his gentle tenor, with hushed backup vocals overhead, Sessa sings, “To the sound of the drums I’ll consume you.” It’s a brief glimpse of a mystery. PARELESThe Mars Volta, ‘Blacklight Shine’After a decade of other projects, the wildly virtuosic, conundrum-slinging guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López and the singer and lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala have reunited as the Mars Volta, with a tour to start in September and a new song: “Blacklight Shine.” It’s a six-beat, bilingual rocker, full of complex percussion and scurrying guitar lines, with lyrics like, “the high control hex he obsessively pets with his thumbs/thinking no one’s watching but I got the copy that he can never erase.” But unlike many of Mars Volta’s past efforts, this one strives for catchiness, and its rolling rhythm and harmony vocals hint, unexpectedly, at Steely Dan, another band that tucked musical and verbal feats behind pop hooks. An extended “short film” connects the song’s underlying beat to the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Puerto Rican bomba. PARELESCKay featuring Davido, Focalistic and Abidoza, ‘Watawi’Commitment is an iffy thing; in “Watawi,” the Nigerian singers CKay and Davido and the South African rapper Focalistic stay evasive when girlfriends ask “What are we?” CKay suavely croons a non-answer: “We are what we are.” Keeping things up in the air is the production by Abidoza from South Africa, which hovers around a syncopated one-note pulse as it fuses the cool keyboard chords of South African amapiano with crisp Afrobeats percussion. In its final minute, the track introduces a fiddle that could easily lead to a whole new phase of the relationship. PARELESAlex G, ‘Runner’There’s something wonderfully uncanny about the music of Philadelphia’s Alex G. His songs often gesture toward familiar sounds and textures — “Runner,” from his forthcoming album “God Save the Animals” bears a melodic resemblance to, of all things, Soul Asylum’s early ’90s anthem “Runaway Train”— but their gradual accumulation of small, idiosyncratic sonic details produce an overall sense of strangeness. “Runner” initially sounds like warm, pleasant alt-rock pastiche, but before it can lull the listener into nostalgia, the song suddenly erupts with unruly emotion: “I have done a couple bad things,” Alex sings a few times with increasing desperation, before letting out a thrillingly unexpected scream. ZOLADZLil Nas X featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again, ‘Late to da Party’Exile comes in many forms — sometimes it’s spiritual, sometimes it’s literal. The pop-rap phenom Lil Nas X recently took umbrage — seriously or not, who can tell — at not being nominated for a BET Award at this year’s ceremony. YoungBoy Never Broke Again remains on house arrest, one of rap’s most popular figures but one who’s achieved that success without the participation of traditional tastemakers. Together, they share the kinship of outsiders, even if they never quite align on this song, which is notionally aimed at BET; the video features a clip of someone urinating on a BET Award trophy. They are radically different artists — two different rapping styles, two different subject matter obsessions, two different levels of seriousness. By the end it feels as if they’re seeking exile from each other. JON CARAMANICATove Lo, ‘True Romance’“What does a girl like me want with you?” the Swedish songwriter Tove Lo asks in “True Romance,” a four-minute catharsis. The track uses only two synthesized chords and a slow pulse, but the vocal is pained, aching and constantly escalating the drama: a desperate human voice trying to escape an electronic grid. PARELESRachika Nayar, ‘Heaven Come Crashing’The composer Rachika Nayar explores the textural and orchestral possibilities of electric guitar and digital processing: effects, loops, layering. Much of her work has been meditative, and so is the beginning of “Heaven Come Crashing,” with shimmering, sustained washes of guitar and abstract vocals from Maria BC. But there’s a surprise midway through: a hurtling drumbeat kicks in, and what had been a weightless drift is suddenly a warp-speed surge forward. PARELESAbraham Burton and Eric McPherson, ‘Will Never Be Forgotten’In an alternate universe, the release of new music from the tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton and the drummer Eric McPherson would be a major event. Both are Gen X jazz eminences, and across decades playing together, their styles have grown in complement to one another. Burton holds long notes in a strong but wavery yowl or shoots out notes in string-like bursts, conveying a wounded tenderness in spite of all that volume and power. McPherson has a relatively gentle touch on the drums, but still channels the earth-moving polyrhythmic force of Elvin Jones. Last summer, these longtime musical partners gave a concert, joined by the bassist Dezron Douglas, as part of Giant Step Arts’ outdoor series at the old Seneca Village site in Central Park. The performance closed with “Will Never Be Forgotten,” a lament with a descending bass line and a melody that winds downward like a teardrop. A full recording of the concert was released on Juneteenth, as “The Summit Rock Session at Seneca Village.” RUSSONELLO More

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      Inside New York’s Throwback Roller-Skating Extravaganza

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      Music is the key to a summertime experience for pros and amateurs called the DiscOasis in Central Park. Its curator: the funk-disco guru and lifelong skater Nile Rodgers.To some people, a roller rink is just a place to skim around in a circle, not even very fast, going nowhere. But to its devotees and to the creators of the DiscOasis, a new skate experience in Central Park, it is transformational, spiritual — time travel on four wheels.On Saturday night, more than a thousand skaters packed Wollman Rink, laced up their quads and spun off into sparkling nostalgia. Spotlights shone onto the surrounding trees, as a concert-level light show bathed the space in cyan, fuschias and golds. “Good Times,” that 1970s party staple, blared from D.J. Funkmaster Flex’s booth, as the crowd — some wobblies, some more expert — parted for the pros: One roller dancer in flared jeans dropped to a split, while another flipped off her wheels, uncoiling into a headstand. For 10 minutes, it was all hot pants and acrobatics, and then regular New Yorkers — many with a style not far-off — slid back in.Hovering over this opening night like a sequined demigod was Nile Rodgers, the Chic guitarist, funk-disco eminence and lifelong skater. He curated music for the DiscOasis, and, with voice-over introductions, provides its cultural through line from 1970s and ’80s New York, when he used to frequent the city’s now shuttered, once legendary rinks with Diana Ross and Cher. Kevin Bacon and Robert Downey Jr. too. (The ’80s were wild.) With some skill on wheels, “You feel like you have special human powers,” Rodgers said in a recent video interview. “You feel like you can fly.”Scenes from the opening night of the DiscOasis, which will be open through October.Thao Nguyen from Constellation Immersive (in purple sequins) and Lynná Davis of the Central Park Dance Skaters Association (in blue sunglasses) join the set designer David Korins (second from left in back row) and more DiscOasis stakeholders at its ribbon cutting.OK McCausland for The New York TimesRoller-skating is having another flash of popularity, but the DiscOasis sets itself apart from the city’s other rinks and pop-up events (Rockefeller Center is temporarily hosting wheelers, too) through its production value, theatricality and pedigree. There’s blossoming disco balls as big as eight feet in diameter, and a multitiered stage, created by the Tony-nominated set designer David Korins, who did “Hamilton” and shows for Lady Gaga. The cast of 13 includes legends of New York roller disco, like the long-limbed skater known as Cotto, a fixture in the city’s parks for more than four decades, whose signature leg twirls and pivots have influenced scores of skaters.“We call it jam skating,” he said. the DiscOasis coaxed him out of retirement — he’s had both hips replaced — for choreographed shows, five nights a week.The energy is ecstatic, and infectious. “Being on wheels is paradise to me,” said Robin Mayers Anselm, 59, who grew up going to Empire, the storied Brooklyn emporium. “I feel more connected to myself and my spirit when I skate.”That’s true even for the newbies, like Robin L. Dimension, an actress wearing an embellished jumpsuit and a chunky “Queen” necklace with her psychedelic-patterned skates. “I got a really nice outfit,” she said, “so I look good going down.”Billed as “an immersive musical and theatrical experience,” the DiscOasis began last year outside of Los Angeles.OK McCausland for The New York TimesBilled as “an immersive musical and theatrical experience,” the DiscOasis began last year outside of Los Angeles, the pandemic brainchild of an events company led by a C.A.A. agent. But its foundational home was always New York, and it will be open through October.“For us, DiscOasis is a movement, it’s a vibe — we want as many people to be able to experience it,” said Thao Nguyen, its executive producer, and chief executive of Constellation Immersive, its parent company, which partnered with Live Nation and Los Angeles Media Fund to stage the series.For New York’s skate community, it is first and foremost a good floor. “You know, we’re not impressed by the accouterments of the illusion,” said Tone Rapp Fleming, a New York native and skater for 50 years, who came for a preview on Thursday. That’s mostly because ride-or-die skaters like him and his friend Lynná Davis, vice president of the Central Park Dance Skaters Association, would skate on a trash can lid, as she put it. But they praised the rink’s glidable new surface, painted in primary shades of blue, yellow and red.The DiscOasis’ creators knew that if they won over the old-school skate crew, the world would follow; Davis, an ageless wonder in rainbow-flecked braids and custom bejeweled, be-fringed wheels, helped with casting. “Work it out, kids!” she cheered on the younger dancers, as they cartwheeled their routine, to a soundtrack that spun from Queen to “Rapper’s Delight.”For David Korins, who created the stage for the DiscOasis, the space is a Studio 54 throwback, but fresher. OK McCausland for The New York TimesRodgers created the playlists for the performances, which happen throughout the night, interspersed with live D.J.s (the daytime is for more relaxed skating). A longtime New Yorker, Rodgers coined his skate style as a 12- or 13-year-old on a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, when he tore up the town with other kids, performing little routines. “I had this wobbly leg way of skating,” he said. He still does, “even though I’m going to be 70. And it looks cool.”His crew stood out even then: “We used to skate to jazz,” he said, recalling their grooves to the guitarist Wes Montgomery’s 1965 classic “Bumpin’ on Sunset.”Fast forward 30 years, and Rodgers had largely hung up his skates. But he has been so energized by his association with the DiscOasis, which approached him for the Los Angeles event, that it reignited his devotion. Now on tour in Europe, he has been conjuring minirinks wherever he goes, one hotel ballroom at a time.“They lift up the rugs for me and create a big dance floor,” he said. “I can skate in a little square. There’s nobody in there, because I skate at such weird hours — 4 or 5 in the morning.” (He doesn’t sleep much. As befits a disco-era fashion legend, he also has personalized skates — orange, green, iridescent — which got stuck in customs on their way to Europe. His favorite are a classic pair of black Riedells.)Even for someone well-versed in skate culture, the Los Angeles version of the DiscOasis offered some lessons. Most skaters only stick to the rink for about 45 minutes, Rodgers said. The space around Wollman has a nonskate dance floor and a few Instagram-ready installations inspired by his music. The giant half-disco ball stuffed with oversize wedding bouquets, pearls and askew mannequin legs, for example, is supposed to symbolize Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” which he produced.For Korins, the production designer, the space is a Studio 54 throwback, but fresher. “We’re leaning into this oasis idea — if you think about mirrored balls and foliage coming together to have a child, that’s what we’re making,” he said. (Think discofied palm trees and cactuses.) And the Central Park location, with the Manhattan skyline rising above it, brings its own magic. “It takes all the best things about roller-skating and disco and it literally rips the roof off,” he said.Amateurs and pros alike fill the floor at the DiscOasis.OK McCausland for The New York TimesSome attendees (including Davis), come dressed in their skating finest.OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe cast of 13 that performs at the DiscOasis includes legends of New York roller disco.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLike other skate habitués, Korins has a theory about why it remains to addictive. “It’s really hard to find an experience in life that’s both kinetic and dynamic,” he said — you can flex your solo style and also get the communion of “an organism moving around together.”Shernita Anderson, the choreographer, saw that in action. For solos, the cast was on its own. “We were like, ‘Go off, live your best life!’” she said. “And that’s what they did.”Pirouetting and high-kicking his way through the act was Keegan James Robataille, 20, a musical-theater-trained dancer who only began skating two years ago as a pandemic outlet. A swing in the company, this is his first professional, contracted gig. He grew up near a rink in Amsterdam, N.Y. “I remember going there all throughout middle school and being like, ‘Wow, I wish I could skate backwards and do these cool tricks,’” he said. “And here I am performing in New York City, doing what little me would have dreamed of doing.”A closing number — set to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” naturally — came on and he sailed away for his cue. It had the skaters in capes dotted with LEDs, like luminescent butterflies.“I have never seen anything like this in New York,” said Samantha O’Grady, a 24-year-old native. The rinks she started learning at all closed “by the time I was a tween,” she said, but the retro ambience of the DiscOasis gave her a flicker of how the scene looked before her time. “I sent a picture to my mother; she was so jealous.”First-time visitors were already planning to become regulars, like Robbin Ziering, whose wedding was on wheels. “We love to work, we love to dance, we love music — but we live to skate,” she said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”Kalia Richardson contributed reporting.OK McCausland for The New York Times More

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      Soccer Mommy's ‘Tidal Wave’ of Feelings on ‘Sometimes, Forever’

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      The songwriter Sophie Allison finds new sonic frontiers alongside Oneohtrix Point Never on her third studio album, “Sometimes, Forever.”“I don’t know how to feel things small,” Sophie Allison, the songwriter behind Soccer Mommy, sings in “Still,” which closes her third studio album, “Sometimes, Forever.” She continues, “It’s a tidal wave or nothing at all.”With each album, she has expanded the ways she conjures those tidal waves. Allison, 25, started releasing home-recorded Soccer Mommy songs on Bandcamp as a teenager, layering her vocals and guitars, and she dropped out of N.Y.U. in 2017 after her dorm-room recordings landed her a recording contract.She formed a band and toured extensively, and on her studio albums “Clean” (2018) and “Color Theory” (2020), she confidently tapped a legacy of guitar-driven 1990s indie rock: Liz Phair, the Breeders, the Cure, Alanis Morissette, Smashing Pumpkins. Her tunes maintained a sturdy, old-fashioned clarity, even as her lyrics faced disorder, determinedly exposing her fears, depression and self-destructive impulses. “I am the problem for me, now and always,” she sang in “Royal Screw Up” on “Color Theory.”The same struggles run through “Sometimes, Forever,” pushing toward new extremes of misery and (possibly delusional) rapture. “Wherever you’re going I’m going too/Nothing else matters when I’m with you,” Allison vows in “With U,” amid a stately swell of Beatles-esque chords that could promise bliss. But there’s a streak of masochism in her devotion: “I’ll take the pain, feel it every day/Just to have you look at me,” she sings.Even a seemingly happy situation holds ominous undertones. “Shotgun” is the album’s more-or-less poppiest song. Its verse rides a grungy bass line as Allison recalls “coffee and menthol on your breath” and problems with drugs. But she realizes, “This feels the same without the bad things,” leading into a chorus that switches to euphoric major chords and promises “Whenever you want me I’ll be around.” Yet why is she thinking about weapons?Allison writes orderly tunes, with neatly delineated verses and choruses. Her melodies often rise and fall symmetrically and her singing stays levelheaded, almost reserved. But she chose a chaos agent as her producer: Daniel Lopatin, who makes albums as Oneohtrix Point Never and composed the white-knuckled score for “Uncut Gems.”Lopatin knows how to weaponize nebulousness. Working with Soccer Mommy, he used reverb, distortion, synthesizer tones and guitar feedback, at every volume level from subliminal to overpowering, to create backdrops that can easily warp from sumptuous to menacing. Allison fully unleashes him in “Unholy Affliction.” She sings, with a sinking melody, about a compulsive, unattainable, all-consuming perfectionism: “Carve me up and let the colors run,” she offers. Behind her, the production deploys distorted bass lines, salvos of drums, bleary Mellotron notes and down-tuned guitars, all battering just under her voice, clawing at her.In “Darkness Forever,” she confronts suicidal feelings. “Head in the oven didn’t sound so crazy,” Allison sings, alone amid echoes; then a lurching dirge rises around her like a haunted castle. The music is much more upbeat in “Don’t Ask Me,” a galloping rocker with gusts of guitar noise recalling My Bloody Valentine, but the best the lyrics can hope for is temporary numbness. “No more fire in my veins/My will is gone I don’t feel a thing,” she sings; later, she concedes, “I know it comes back around.”Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship. The modestly titled “Newdemo” — billed as just another work in progress — is a ballad that starts with Allison singing and strumming a lo-fi guitar. She sings about impending storms and destruction, but the music ascends into a glimmering psychedelic wonderland, with simulated cellos and sitar. Wistfully, warily, Allison observes, “What is a dream but a hope you hold onto?/A lie that you wish would come true.” She doesn’t expect it to last, but for the moment, she’s singing.Soccer Mommy“Sometimes, Forever”(Loma Vista) More

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      James Rado, Co-Creator of the Musical ‘Hair,’ Is Dead at 90

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      Working with his fellow writer and actor Gerome Ragni and the composer Galt MacDermot, he jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius.James Rado, who jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius as a co-creator of “Hair,” the show, billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” that transfigured musical theater tradition with radical ’60s iconoclasm and rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90.The publicist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardio-respiratory arrest.So much of the power of “Hair” resided in its seeming raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rado (pronounced RAY-doe) labored over it for years with his collaborator Gerome Ragni to perfect that affect. Contrary to theatrical lore, he and Mr. Ragni were not out-of-work actors who wrote “Hair” to generate roles they could themselves play, but rather New York stage regulars with growing résumés.They met as cast members in an Off Broadway revue called “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” a London transfer that closed after one performance in October 1964. Mr. Rado bonded with Mr. Ragni and was soon talking to him about collaborating on a musical that would capture the exuberant, increasingly anti-establishment youth culture rising all around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan — a musical about hippies before hippies had a name.A musician before he’d become an actor, Mr. Rado began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which they sometimes sang in what were then beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village.Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical in earnest, transcribing into song the sexual liberation, racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and opposition to the escalating Vietnam War that was galvanizing their young street archetypes. In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni let their short hair grow long.A museum stroll in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting of a tuft of hair by the Pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair.”“I called it to Jerry’s attention, and we were both knocked out,” Mr. Rado later recalled. Their nascent musical now had a name.A moment from the original production of “Hair,” at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1967.DagmarWhat happened next would become the stuff of Broadway legend, albeit in fits and starts. In October 1966, on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., Mr. Ragni recognized Joseph Papp, impresario of the then-itinerant New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a bound script of “Hair.” Mr. Papp took it, read it and resolved to consider making “Hair” the opening production at his Public Theater, just nearing completion in what had been the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village.Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had decided that their lyrics needed better melodies than the ones they had written, and embarked on a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. The search yielded the Canadian-born Galt MacDermot, a most unlikely choice: He was slightly older than his colleagues and a straight arrow with an eclectic musical background but scant Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for versions of “Aquarius” and several other songs, on spec, in less than 36 hours. It instantly became clear that he was the ideal choice for setting Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni’s lyric ruminations to rocking show music.A demonstration soon ensued in Mr. Papp’s office, with Mr. MacDermot singing and playing the trio’s new songs. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open the Public with “Hair.”Yet, second-guessing himself, he soon rescinded his offer, only to reconsider after a return office audition, this time with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni doing the singing. “Hair” did, in fact, open the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967, with the 32-year-old Mr. Ragni leading the cast as George Berger — a hippie tribe’s nominal leader — but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rado, who was deemed too old by the show’s director, Gerald Freedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, even though the character was based almost entirely on Mr. Rado himself.“Hair” — an impressionistic near-fairy tale of a flock of flower children on the streets of New York taking LSD, burning draft cards, shocking tourists and making love before losing their conflicted comrade, Claude, to the Vietnam War — ran for eight weeks at the Public’s brand-new Anspacher Theater, generating ecstatic word of mouth and reviews that ranged from perplexed to appreciative.A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong antiwar politics named Michael Butler stepped in to move the show, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then — much rewritten by Mr. Rado and his collaborators, and with a visionary new director, Tom O’Horgan, now in charge — on to Broadway, where Mr. Rado was restored to the cast as Claude.Mr. Rado, second from left, with, from left, the actor Paul Nicholas, Mr. Ragni, the actor Oliver Tobias and the director Tom O’Horgan in London shortly after “Hair” opened there in 1968.Getty“Hair” was a Broadway sensation, hailed for its irresistible rock- and soul-driven score, its young cast of utter unknowns, its often-searing topicality and its must-see 20-second nude scene. It ran for 1,750 performances after opening at the Biltmore Theatre, on West 47th Street, on April 29, 1968. (It is now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)“Hair” quickly conquered the culture at large — though there were naysayers, who found its nudity, flagrant four-letter words and flouting of the American flag objectionable. It played all across America and ultimately the world, engendering a 1979 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman — which was disavowed by Mr. Rado — and a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2009 that Mr. Rado helped guide. The original cast album won a Grammy Award and was the No. 1 album in the country for 13 straight weeks in 1969. (It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.)The score generated ubiquitous cover versions. In 1969 alone, the Fifth Dimension’s medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it went on to win the Grammy Award for record of the year), while the Cowsills’ version of the title song reached No. 2, Oliver’s “Good Morning Starshine” hit No. 3 and Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” got as high as No. 4. Among the many others who recorded songs from the “Hair” score was Nina Simone.“From the start, I envisioned that the score of ‘Hair’ would be something new for Broadway,” Mr. Rado later reflected, “a kind of pop-rock/show tune hybrid.”“We did have the desire to make something wonderful and spectacular for the moment,” he added. “We thought we’d stumbled on a great idea, and something that potentially could be a hit on Broadway, never thinking of the distant future.”James Alexander Radomski was born on Jan. 23, 1932, in Los Angeles to Alexander and Blanche (Bukowski) Radomski. His father was a sociologist who taught at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. Mr. Rado grew up in a Rochester suburb, Irondequoit, and then in Washington. He graduated from the University of Maryland, where he majored in speech and drama. A lover of Broadway musicals since childhood, he began writing songs in college and co-wrote two musicals that were produced on campus, “Interlude” and “Interlude II.”After serving two years in the Navy, he returned to pursue graduate theater studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, writing both music and lyrics for a revue there called “Cross Your Fingers.” After moving to New York, he wrote pop songs; recorded with his band, James Alexander and the Argyles; performed in summer stock; and did office work while studying method acting with Lee Strasberg.He landed his first Broadway job in 1963 in the ensemble of “Marathon ’33,” written by the actress June Havoc and produced by the Actors Studio. Following their initial encounter in 1964, he and Mr. Ragni were cast by Mike Nichols in his 1965 Chicago production of Ann Jellicoe’s comedy “The Knack.”In 1966, Mr. Rado appeared on Broadway in James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” originating the role of Richard Lionheart, the oldest son of Henry II of England. His mainstream theatrical focus, however, was being redirected to the downtown avant-garde by Mr. Ragni, who, through his involvement with the Open Theater and Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C., introduced Mr. Rado to the experimental aesthetic that became central to the experience of “Hair” onstage.“The truth is, we unlocked each other,” Mr. Rado wrote in a foreword to the book “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (2010), by Eric Grode. “He was my creative catalyst, I probably his. We were great friends. It was a passionate kind of relationship that we directed into creativity, into writing, into creating this piece. We put the drama between us onstage.”Mr. Rado in 2017 at a Jazz at Lincoln Center celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Off Broadway opening of “Hair.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of “Hair,” Mr. Rado’s fellowship with Mr. Ragni fractured. “We couldn’t be in a room together, we would burst into an argument,” he recalled. Mr. Rado wrote the music, lyrics and book (with his brother, Ted) for a “Hair” sequel he called “The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow,” which ran Off Broadway in 1972, just as Mr. Ragni and Mr. MacDermot were suffering an ignominious Broadway flop with their post-“Hair” musical, “Dude.” Mr. Rado then reunited with Mr. Ragni to write “Sun (Audio Movie),” an environmental musical, with the composer Steve Margoshes, and “Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom,” also with Mr. Margoshes.Mr. Ragni died in 1991. Mr. MacDermot died in 2018.In 2008, Mr. Rado confirmed in an interview with The Advocate what had long been an open secret among his “Hair” castmates and collaborators: that he and Mr. Ragni had been lovers.“It was a deep, lifelong friendship and a love of my life,” Mr. Rado stated simply. “Looking back,” he later elaborated about “Hair,” “what was really underlying the whole thing was the new way men were relating to each other. They were very openly embracing each other as brothers. It wasn’t gay; it wasn’t repressed… We suddenly realized this was a musical about love in the larger sense.”Mr. Rado, whose brother is his only immediate survivor, never married and did not identify as gay, but rather as “omnisexual.” Asked before the 2009 “Hair” revival opened if the show was based on his relationship with Mr. Ragni, Mr. Rado answered yes.“We were in a love mode,” he said, “and this whole love movement started happening around us, so the show got it. ‘Hair’ was our baby in a way, which is pretty cool.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      Muna’s Fresh Start

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      The indie-pop band was dropped by its major label early in the pandemic, then scored a TikTok hit with “Silk Chiffon,” featuring a verse from its new label boss: Phoebe Bridgers.The members of Muna kept calling themselves “impenetrable.” They were sorry about this, they insisted, as each lurched into the frame of a video call from a backyard in Los Angeles, ping-ponging inside jokes and rearranging themselves into different configurations.The indie-pop trio of Katie Gavin, 29, Naomi McPherson, 29, and Josette Maskin, 28, operate on a frenetic frequency and have easy access to their emotions. By the end of the call to discuss their new album, out Friday, all three had teared up and begged themselves out loud to stop crying. The constant churn of promotion was adding up: “That’s why we’re chaos vibes,” McPherson said, dangling a whorl of curly hair over the screen.Any album release brings some chaos. For Muna, though, sending its third, self-titled album into the world means starting all over again. The group played at Lollapalooza and appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s show before its debut album, “About U,” came out in 2017, then opened for Harry Styles and followed up with a 2019 LP called “Saves the World.” But its label, RCA, dropped the band months into the pandemic, citing cost-cutting necessities.Muna was devastated. Then it went back to work. A friend of a friend, someone the members knew through what Gavin called “the lesbian Los Angeles support group,” rented them a studio in her basement for next to nothing, and the band started showing up every day. The songs it worked on there would become its most pop-oriented and propulsive yet. One of them became something the band had never had before: a viral hit.“Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” Gavin lilts on “Silk Chiffon,” which features Phoebe Bridgers and has caromed across TikTok, soundtracking cookie dough tutorials, hangovers and odes to crushes. The rest of “Muna” is filled with fizzy songs about twirling through gay bars and rollerblading through the night that barrel over slick, sputtering synths. Buoyed by the success of “Silk Chiffon,” the band is now on the verge of breaking out of its cult following and bringing its anthems about queer joy to a wider audience. But joy isn’t straightforward for Muna, either in its music or in its members’ lives.“Obviously, everything is going really well,” McPherson, who is nonbinary, said, prodding a toothpick between their teeth. “Which is when the demon wants to punish you.”Muna got its start at the University of Southern California, where McPherson spied Gavin biking through campus and murmured to their friend, “That girl is cool.” The feeling was mutual; they bonded, and Gavin introduced McPherson to Maskin at a party. Almost immediately, they started making music, workshopping guitar chords between classes. Gavin sings lead vocals, plays guitar and helps produce; Maskin (guitar) and McPherson (guitar and keys) work on production.Nearly a decade later, one part of their songwriting process is the same: Muna knows when to stop. The band likes to put in what McPherson calls “princess work”; they tinker with songs for a few hours each day, and quit just when a track starts to click into place. “You try to retain the magic,” Maskin said.The group spends the rest of its time hanging out — watching YouTube, doing bits. The easy intimacy, the way they finish each other’s sentences or can communicate with an eyebrow raise, is central to their process. It also takes work. Gavin and McPherson dated for years, and when they broke up, Maskin threatened to quit the band if they didn’t go to therapy. (The trio has also gone to what they call “band therapy.”)“The connective tissue is self-definition and agency and identity and interrogating those things,” McPherson said of the new album. “And also knowing that nothing is fixed.”Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesRecording can be stressful. “I would record all my vocals alone in a closet if I could,” Gavin said, after the band relayed that it had to redo the song “Solid” five or six times because she kept cooing the lyric, “My baby’s so solid,” in a way that sounded like, “My baby’s a salad.” But Muna has learned to hype one another up and not overwork the music.“At some point, you’re going to have song dysmorphia where you’re like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to sound good, you guys,’” McPherson said.“Muna” is a shift for the band, a step further into glitzy, shimmering pop. “At RCA, we were like, ‘We’re staying true to ourselves, we’re going to make interesting, indie-pop music, we’re not here to make hits,’” McPherson said. “And then the moment we leave, we’re at an indie label and we’re like, ‘Here’s our poppiest song ever.’”The small label is Saddest Factory Records, which is run by Bridgers, the indie-rock breakout star. The band refers to her as “Papa,” and she sings a giddy verse about straggling stoned through the aisles of CVS on “Silk Chiffon.”Another indie powerhouse, Mitski, left fingerprints on the album, too. She had first met the band at a festival. “We just started chatting, which is rare for me, because I’m very introverted and don’t just ‘start chatting’ with people,” Mitski wrote in an email. “It’s a testament to how friendly and kind they are.”Mitski came to McPherson and Maskin’s apartment in Highland Park and made them tea while they listened to disco. (Their downstairs neighbor kept texting them to be quiet.) “You have no idea/the things I think about you when you aren’t here,” Gavin sings on “No Idea,” the gradually building song that emerged from that session. “Mitski is the sexiest songwriter that I know,” she said.Like most songs on the record, “No Idea” toys with the gap between perception and projection, the clarity and confinement that come with claiming a label. “She is not a mirror in which you reflect,” Gavin coos over a thrash of guitar on “Solid.” On the slower, Shania Twain-indebted “Kind of Girl,” she gets more explicit: “I’m a girl who’s learning everything I say isn’t definitive,” Gavin sings.The album oscillates between dance-floor anthems and lyrics about meditation, coruscating synths and twinges of twang. “The album is kind of disparate sonically, disparate in terms of what the songs are saying, but the connective tissue is self-definition and agency and identity and interrogating those things,” McPherson said. “And also knowing that nothing is fixed.”“We are who we are,” Gavin said, “but it’s the compassion we have for ourselves, the awareness we have.”Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesWhile the band’s circumstances have changed, Gavin isn’t letting go of its past. “I don’t want this era to be, ‘Oh, we used to be one way, and now we’re another way, and everything’s great now,’” she said. “We are who we are, but it’s the compassion we have for ourselves, the awareness we have.” Earlier this month, the trio returned to “The Tonight Show,” and Gavin felt some of the panic she had experienced when the band first played there in 2016. The band members spent the cab ride to the hotel after the taping processing their performance. They talked about the significance of doing the show, how Gavin was feeling, what they hoped the album could do for them, if it could help them keep making music for as long as possible “and not have as much existential stress as we have now,” McPherson said.The driver eventually chimed in. “He said, ‘In my 20 years of driving, I’ve never heard people be so kind to each other,’” Gavin recalled. She and McPherson were wedged onto a bed in their hotel, beaming at a laptop screen; Maskin was in her room down the hall, packing and peeling a banana. “It just felt like the cheesy thing where — it’s a feat to do these big moments, but I do think that, like, the bigger thing —.” She paused. “I’m such a cheese ball.”“Do it!” McPherson shouted.Gavin rolled her eyes. “I do think that the bigger feat is having these friendships with each other.”All three went quiet for a second. Then they started giggling, faintly and then furiously. More

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      in Music

      Black Country, New Road, a Breakout Band, Starts Over (Again)

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      The group lost its lead singer just as it was gaining widespread acclaim. Its members have come up with an unusual solution.MANCHESTER, England — Last month, the six members of Black Country, New Road were joking around in a cramped rehearsal room about to try something new: everyone singing lead vocals.First, Tyler Hyde, the group’s bassist, sat forward and sang — her voice jumping between a smooth pop cry and a raucous shout. Next May Kershaw, usually on piano, took over, her voice gentle and brittle like a folk singer’s. Then Lewis Evans, the saxophonist, crooned two songs.“Dope as hell,” Charlie Wayne, the band’s drummer, said as Evans finished. Evans didn’t seem too sure. “I was a bit too slow!” he said, sounding frustrated.Just six months ago, Black Country, New Road, one of Britain’s rising rock acts, was a very different proposition. Back then, lead vocals were the domain of just one frontman: Isaac Wood, an intense and sometimes anxious-sounding singer, whose lovelorn lyrics helped Black Country, New Road win fan and critical devotion. The group’s debut album, “For the First Time,” was nominated last year for a Mercury Prize, Britain’s most important music award. Its second, “Ants From Up There,” was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick.But just before New Year’s Eve, Wood sent his bandmates a Facebook message. He couldn’t be in the public eye anymore, he said. The stress of pouring his heart out onstage was too much. He was leaving.Wayne said that when that message arrived, the band’s first thought was “the safety of our friend.” But once that was assured — Wood is in a much better place now, Evans said, happily working in a cake shop — the remaining members had to decide what to do next.Several of the bandmates gathered to discuss that moment in a sunny yard after the rehearsal last month. Splitting up was never an option, Kershaw said, since “playing together is so important to us.”The bandmates seemed to disagree on how hard restarting had been, though. When Evans said that beginning again after Wood’s departure “didn’t feel like a big deal,” Hyde and Kershaw gave each other confused looks, and laughed nervously. But his departure did make everyone appreciate more fully just how much pressure a band’s lead singer can be under. So they found a solution: share the load.A crowd gathers for Black Country, New Road’s first Manchester gig with its new lineup.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe bassist Hyde’s vocals fall between a smooth pop cry and a raucous shout.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesWhen Evans, center, opened a song with a jaunty saxophone melody, he was greeted by whoops from the audience. Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAt Wood’s urging, they kept the band name but decided to stop playing the tracks he had sung (Wood did not respond to requests for comment for this story). This meant that, before the rehearsal, the musicians had spent five intense, fun, but occasionally stressful, months writing nine songs to fulfill European festival dates this summer. Without the income from those appearances, Evans said, they would have had to get jobs, so they would have hardly been able to play together at all.The growing financial and emotional pressures on musicians have long been the focus of media attention in Britain. In 2017, Help Musicians, a nonprofit, set up a 24-hour help line to offer support for those with mental health issues or financial anxieties. Such worries only grew when the pandemic shut live venues, while the cost of living crisis has caused further concerns.Wood’s departure illustrated those pressures, said John Doran, a music journalist who has long championed Black Country, New Road. Being in a successful indie band could once lead to a good lifestyle. Now, Doran said in a telephone interview, acts exhaust themselves “to maybe one day have a mortgage and not need a side job.” It’s “no wonder musicians are under so much stress,” Doran added. “I do not envy them that at all.”This is, in fact, the second time the members of Black Country, New Road — all still in their early 20s — have had to restart.Four years ago, almost all of them were playing in another act, called Nervous Conditions, which was on the verge of breaking through in Britain’s competitive indie music scene. With only a couple of tracks online, taste-making websites declared the group one of the country’s “most exciting propositions,” and representatives from record labels flocked to its shows. But then its frontman, Connor Browne, facing anonymous accusations of sexual assault, issued a statement apologizing for the hurt caused, and the group disbanded.Hyde said that the bandmates had learned lessons from that moment. After the split, “the whole ethos became, ‘We’re doing this for us and because we want to,’” she said. Since then, the band has rewritten songs and changed lyrics whenever they’ve become bored of them, she added.When asked how they managed to keep reinventing themselves, the musicians said that having so many band members with different interests helped. But for the group’s fans, other factors were more important. Geordie Greep of black midi, a London-based band that is touring the United States with Black Country, New Road in September, said in a telephone interview that the group’s members were virtuosic musicians. That gave them the ingenuity to keep changing their style, he said.The members of Black Country, New Road — most of whom have known each other since they were in high school — also clearly had a strong communal bond, Greep added. “These guys genuinely go out of their way to just hang out as friends,” he said, sounding a little bemused. Most bands, including his own, don’t do that, he noted.Splitting up was never an option, said Kershaw, second from left, since “playing together is so important to us.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesEven for such a close group of musicians, the process of stepping up to lead vocals has not always been easy. Evans said that he “got shakes” the first time he sang a track he’d written to his bandmates. Kershaw said that she had found it “nerve-racking,” and told everyone “not to worry” if they thought her tracks weren’t “the right vibe.” She squirmed on her seat as she recalled the memory.But with shows looming, the band members had to overcome their nerves again to sing in front of paying audiences. A few days later, the band walked onstage at the Pink Room, a music venue in Manchester, northern England, filled with 250 people (the group canceled a sold-out 1,800-capacity show in the city shortly after Wood left).If Evans was still nervous, he did not need to be. As soon as he started playing a jaunty saxophone melody to open the track “Up Song,” he was greeted by whoops from the audience. When the band got to the raucous chorus, the crowd started jumping up and down and chanting along, as if they’d heard the song hundreds of times. “Look at what we did together,” the band sang in unison, “BC, NR/Friends forever.”A few tracks later, even the bar staff fell silent as Kershaw sang “Turbines/Pigs,” an eight-minute song in which she plays a gentle piano melody while singing, “Don’t waste your pearls on me/I’m only a pig.”After 45 minutes, the band walked offstage with a few polite waves goodbye. Some fans shouted for more, until they realized that Black Country, New Road couldn’t come back for an encore even if they wanted to. The new incarnation had played all the songs it had. More

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      in Theater

      New Soho Rep Season Spotlights Emerging Artists

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      A Bengali-English play and a meditation on the work of Whitney Houston are among the offerings.Soho Rep, a 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan, has always been a home for experimental, formally inventive work. But a play in its new season is beyond anything one of the company’s three directors, Meropi Peponides, ever thought it would be able to support: A Bengali-English play.“I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams when I started working at Soho Rep that that would be something we would ever be able to produce,” Peponides said. “It’s so exciting to be able to represent the experiences of South Asian Americans in the diaspora.”The play, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is part of the theater’s 2022-23 season, which is set to run from October to July 2023. There will be three world premieres, two of which were written by artists who were members of the first class of the theater’s pandemic-era job creation initiative, Project Number One.The premieres “are emblematic of what Soho Rep does,” said Peponides, who directs the theater alongside Sarah Benson and Cynthia Flowers. “We commit to an idea when it’s still an idea and develop it all the way through to production.”First up is Kate Tarker’s “Montag” (Oct. 12-Nov. 13), a play about female friendship set in a basement apartment in a small German town near an American military base. The production, which is set to be directed by Dustin Wills (“Wolf Play”), is described as a “domestic thriller, a sleep-deprivation comedy and a rebellion celebration under threat of annihilation.”It will be followed by Chowdhury’s bilingual “Public Obscenities” (Feb. 15-March 26, 2023), which originated during his time as a member of Project Number One. The production is a co-commission and coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company’s National Partnership Project. It tells the story of a queer studies doctoral student who returns to his family home in Kolkata, India, with his Black American boyfriend and makes an unexpected discovery. Chowdhury will also direct.Closing out the season is “The Whitney Album” (May 24-July 2, 2023). The play, by Jillian Walker (who also participated in Project Number One), explores Walker’s relationship to the life and death of Whitney Houston, as well as perceptions of her in the American imagination. Jenny Koons directs.And Project Number One returns, with its third class, this time with the stylist and costume designer Hahnji Jang and the lighting designer Kate McGee. The initiative brings artists into the organization as salaried staff members ($1,250 per week) with benefits, including a year of health insurance coverage and a $10,000 budget to create a new work. More

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      in Movies

      George Michael Preferred Music to Fame. The Doc He Made Does, Too.

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      “George Michael: Freedom Uncut,” a film the musician worked on with his longtime collaborator David Austin, tells the story of his professional life via interviews and previously unseen footage.George Michael and David Austin were best friends who met because their mothers were best friends. Austin’s family lived at 67 Redhill Drive in the working class East Finchley area of North London, and Michael’s family was at 57. The two wrote songs together and remained close even as one became a global superstar and the other didn’t.Michael was a gifted and determined musical dynamo who became a star at the age of 19, first as a member of the British duo Wham! He won two Grammys in the solo career that followed, and collaborated with some of the greatest stars of the previous generation, including Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and Elton John. He was a gifted writer, producer, arranger and musician, sometimes playing all the instruments on his songs. And as a singer, he moved fluidly from Motown pop to hard funk to Brazilian bossa nova, with a voice that was sure, expressive and flush with poignancy and drama.Neither Michael nor Austin had significant movie directing experience, but neither lacked confidence, so around 2014 they began directing a documentary detailing the vicissitudes of Michael’s career and life, including pop supremacy and international scandal, euphoric love and lacerating deaths.In December 2016, they’d picture-locked the film and planned a screening for their families, who’d gathered, as they often did, to celebrate Christmas together. “We were going to show it to our parents on Boxing Day,” Austin said. “George was immensely proud of it.” But Michael died in his sleep at 53 and was found by a lover, Fadi Fawaz, on Christmas morning. The cause was a heart condition.Austin trimmed Michael’s final cut to fit a TV time slot on Channel Four in England, where it aired in October 2017 as “George Michael: Freedom.” But he was dissatisfied with the edit because it didn’t tell the full story as Michael saw it. So in the following years, while resolving some worldwide rights issues, Austin restored the final cut and added an introduction by Kate Moss and tribute performances by Adele as well as Chris Martin of Coldplay. The film, now called “George Michael: Freedom Uncut,” debuts in theaters worldwide on Wednesday.“Freedom Uncut” was preceded in 2004 by the BBC’s “A Different Story,” which included interviews with Michael’s close friends as well as his father, a Greek immigrant who’d viewed his son’s dreams of stardom as juvenile and foolhardy. Throughout “A Different Story,” Michael discusses his private life with self-mocking candor, which was one of his most charming traits: “Oh my God, I’m a massive star and I think I may be a poof,” he says at one point, describing a time when he began coming to grips with being gay. “What am I going to do?”So for “Freedom Uncut,” Michael wanted to focus on his professional life. “He said, ‘This is a different film. This is about me and about the people I work with,’” Austin recalled in a phone call from his office in London. The documentary includes interviews with fellow music stars, including Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Mary J. Blige, the comedians Ricky Gervais and James Corden, the producer Mark Ronson and the supermodels Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and others who starred in his “Freedom! ’90” video. The film includes recently discovered 35 mm footage shot by the director David Fincher, who directed “Freedom! ’90” before his successful career in Hollywood, and unseen home videos Michael made of Anselmo Feleppa, his longtime boyfriend, who died in March 1993 of an AIDS-related illness.Michael was a self-described homebody who was happiest playing with his dogs at his country house, but his career brought him into contact with music and fashion’s biggest stars. “What struck me instantly was how down to earth and what a sweet, beautiful soul he was,” the supermodel Naomi Campbell wrote in an email. “He was unique, a one-of-a-kind divine personality of our time.”IN THE RAPID-ASCENT stage of his career, Michael was a remarkably prolific songwriter: Starting in 1982, Wham! (the duo he formed with Andrew Ridgeley) had four Top 10 U.K. singles in a row. The pair’s second album, “Make It Big,” gave them three No. 1 songs in the United States: “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Careless Whisper” and “Everything She Wants.” When I interviewed Michael following the breakup of Wham!, he described the duo as a carefully plotted return to pop escapism. “I can understand why people wanted to punch me out,” he admitted.Everything Michael learned about craft and marketing conjoined on his first solo album, “Faith” (1987), which made him a star on the magnitude of Michael Jackson or Madonna. But the celebrity he’d desired and attained “had taken me to the edge of madness,” he says in “Freedom Uncut.”For the release of his next album, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” he insisted his name and face not appear on the cover. He refused to promote the record or appear in his own videos. And in his song “Freedom! ’90,” he deconstructed pop stardom and exploded the foundational illusion of fandom: “I don’t belong to you, and you don’t belong to me.” It was, regardless of its message, a massive hit.Michael felt that his record company, Sony, was not promoting his new album avidly enough, and in 1992, he sued in the hope of terminating his contract. By then, he’d met Feleppa and felt loved for the first time in a sexual relationship. “I was happier than I’d ever been in my entire life,” he says in a “Freedom Uncut” voice-over.Andrew Ridgeley and Michael performing as Wham! in 1985, supporting their second album.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesHis disenchantment with stardom collapsed into depression over the following years. In June 1994, a little more than a year after Feleppa died, Michael lost the Sony case. In 1997, his beloved mother, Lesley, died of cancer. And in 1998, he was arrested in a Beverly Hills park for committing a “lewd act” with an undercover policeman, which is when he came out as gay and declared, “I don’t feel any shame whatsoever.”In the midst of these troubles, he released a 1996 album, “Older,” which included the Top 10 hits “Jesus to a Child,” written in tribute to Feleppa, and “Fastlove.” (Michael called “Older” “my greatest moment,” and an expanded edition will be reissued on July 8.) But he made only one more album of original songs in the following 20 years before his death.“Freedom Uncut” vivifies Michael for younger generations that didn’t live through the Pop Star Wars of the ’80s. He loved and emulated Black music, which created controversy in the moment — George Benson’s eyes nearly rolled back into his head when he announced Michael’s 1989 American Music Award win in the favorite soul/R&B album category. But time often engenders empathy, and the singer is now viewed as an ally. “Michael’s journey as a working-class gay white man from London who loved Black music and Black culture gave him an intersectional legacy that few artists (save Prince) will ever achieve,” Jason Johnson wrote in The Root, a website that focuses on African American issues, two days after the singer died.The fact that Michael was able to write, arrange and produce at such a high level places him in “the rarefied air of Sly Stone, Prince or Shuggie Otis,” Mark Ronson added in a phone interview. “It’s crazy, because he made incredible R&B music, but he didn’t go to America to record it” with Black musicians, he noted. “There wasn’t the insecurity of being a white soul boy from England.”Ronson also hears melancholic or even mournful qualities in Michael’s music: “A lot of our favorite artists sound catchy and peppy, but when you peel back one or two layers, you see somebody who’s dealing with serious inner demons.”Michael onstage accepting an American Music Award. The musician won two Grammys for his solo work.Alan Greth/Associated PressIN 1984, WHEN Michael was already a gleaming pop phenom in England, he went on TV and introduced David Austin, who was singing his debut single, “Turn to Gold,” which Michael wrote with Austin and produced. “I’ve known this young man since he was 2 years old,” Michael said, before declaring his pal “the biggest star of 1984.”Austin recalled, “He was telling a porky pie,” and laughed, using Cockney rhyming slang for a lie. “We’d known each other since he was the grand old age of 6 months, and I was 11 months older. From early childhood, right through to our late teens, we were together all the time.”David Austin is a stage name; he was born David Mortimer, to Irish parents. George Michael was born Georgios Panayiotou, to an English mother and an industrious Greek Cypriot father who worked in a fish and chips shop and became a restaurateur.Austin doesn’t often give interviews. Although he’s sometimes described as Michael’s manager, he wasn’t — he was a collaborator, an adviser, a deputy and since his friend’s death, he’s been in charge of the estate’s artistic decisions. In the course of a 70-minute phone call, he talked warmly about Michael, sometimes referring to him in the present tense, and joked about his own modest recording career. (“What career?”)His father made trumpets and other instruments for the British music company Boosey & Hawkes. Their home was full of instruments, and Austin learned clarinet and guitar, while Michael played drums. “We both aspired to be pop stars,” he said.By age 6, Austin had learned to use a Revox recording machine, and he recorded four or five songs with Michael, including “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John, “Wig Wam Bam” by the Sweet, who were Michael’s favorite band, and their first co-written original, called “The Music Maker of the World.” (“I’m never going to tell you what the lyrics are, because I’m going red talking about it,” he said, and chuckled.)The two friends had a band called Stainless Steel, and they decorated Michael’s bass drum with the band’s initials. “But they were slanted S’s,” Austin recalled, which made them look like the Nazi Schutzstaffel logo. “One of the parents came up — ‘Right, off with that!’ We were like, ‘What?’ We hadn’t been taught about World War II yet.”After that, Michael and Austin played in a five-piece ska band called the Executive, with their pal Andrew Ridgeley. “We were terrible, but everyone loved us,” Michael had told me years ago.But when the Executive broke up, Michael and Ridgeley kept working together, finding almost immediate success as Wham! while Austin chased a solo career. “It was very hard at the time, watching my two best friends have enormous success,” Austin admitted. “It took me a few years to accept.”The success of Wham! “opened the door to the industry for me,” Austin continued. But he turned out not to be the biggest star of 1984. After Wham! broke up in 1986, he and Michael went to the south of France and tried to write Austin’s next single. Michael wrote “I Want Your Sex,” which Austin demoed, and the two wrote “Look at Your Hands” together. But Austin’s label didn’t love the songs, so Michael held on to them and released them on “Faith.” (That album has gone 10 times platinum, giving Austin considerable publishing royalties.)As a director, Austin’s strength was his rapport with Michael, and his inside understanding of the singer’s feelings and fears, going all the way back to Redhill Drive. He even knew Michael during his awkward phase: “People have no comprehension of what I looked like as a kid,” the singer had told me, laughing wildly. “I was such an ugly little bastard.”Austin confirmed his friend’s self-effacing analysis: “George didn’t feel attractive as a child,” he said. “People who go on to have extraordinary careers, quite often there’s something lacking in their life. The career is filling a void, and that’s what the extra drive is about.“When you initially get there, it’s everything you want.” he added. “Then when it becomes huge, you realize fame will never, ever fill that void.”Rather than repairing anyone’s bad feelings, fame is more likely to exacerbate them. Michael figured this out, Austin said, which is why he spent his last two decades among friends and family, more than in front of fans. “Now I’m gonna get myself happy,” he sang, and he did.“George and I used to fight as kids, and even as adults,” Austin said. “But we were incredibly close. Music, family, close friendships — those are the things in life that fill the void.” More