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      The Delicious Misery of the ‘Sad Banger’

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      Mitski Is More Than TikTok

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      Adele and Abba’s Songs of Experience

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      Turnstile on the Comfort of Hardcore Punk Shows

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      Taylor Swift and Tyler, the Creator Excavate Old Love

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      Remembering Avicii by Stepping Into His Bewildering World

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      The Avicii Experience offers a taste of the pressures that led up to the D.J.’s death. It’s the latest immersive exhibition trying to find the line between emotional engagement and entertainment.STOCKHOLM — Visitors filed one by one into a dark, 6 foot by 12 foot room at the Space exhibition center here last Friday, where they were greeted by a mix of ringing and muddled noises: camera clicks, audience cheers, plane engine roars. Strobe lights bounced off a ceiling-high screen showing the interiors of cars, paparazzi flashes and the reaching arms of a festival crowd in quick succession. Jagged mirrors in the ceiling reflected the chaos below.The effect was meant to reproduce the bewildering experience of being the wildly successful, globe-trotting D.J. Avicii. For some visitors, it made a big impact. “I think I would go crazy if I had to live like that,” said Magdalena Grundström, a 51-year-old classical musician.Had entrants turned right, they would have encountered a very different space. Through a beaded curtain, pan pipe music was playing in the neighboring room. On one of its sea-green walls, a text on hanging fabric explained how Buddhism can help with anxiety.These contrasting rooms are part of the Avicii Experience, a new immersive exhibition dedicated to the life of the Swedish electronic dance music producer that opened in Stockholm in late February. The temporary museum is designed to give visitors an insight into both the musical talents that brought him global fame as an in-demand D.J., and the pressures that led up to his suicide.It also grapples with how to memorialize a short life shaped by extraordinary public interest in a way that feels both entertaining and thoughtful.The museum, which was opened in late February, was curated with the support of Avicii’s family.Felix Odell for The New York TimesAvicii, born Tim Bergling, died while on vacation in Muscat, Oman, in April 2018. Two years earlier, he had retired from touring, citing the overwhelming schedule of an internationally famous D.J. He also struggled with alcohol and prescription painkillers.Avicii was only 22 years old when “Levels,” a hooky dance track featuring an Etta James sample, propelled him to stardom. Over the subsequent six years, his music took electronic dance music, or E.D.M., in new directions, blending beats with folk vocals on tracks like “Wake Me Up” from his 2013 debut, “True.” He was nominated for two Grammys, and his songs have been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify.After Avicii’s death, his family visited Abba the Museum, an interactive, immersive space dedicated to the Swedish pop group, also in Stockholm. They thought something similar could work as a tribute to Avicii, Lisa Halling-Aadland, the content producer of the Avicii Experience, said in a video interview.“It’s obviously two very different emotions tied to each of these,” Halling-Aadland said, “but we said yes, we can do something. Not the same, but something.”Halling-Aadland and her mother, Ingmarie Halling, the exhibition’s creative director, sought approval from the Bergling family throughout the planning process. “We just had to consistently turn to them. We had an idea that’s good for us, and then we said, does this seem right to you guys?” Halling-Aadland said.The Avicii Experience, which will run for several years, is designed to emphasize the contrast between Tim Bergling, an introverted person whose passion was composing music, and Avicii, a global E.D.M. brand.“The normal impression was perhaps, a very successful, rich guy: Why did he end his life the way he did?” Klas Bergling, the musician’s father, said in a phone interview. “I don’t mean that we have an answer. Not at all. But you get another perspective.”In a replica of Avicii’s childhood bedroom, the computer screen shows a scene from World of Warcraft.Felix Odell for The New York TimesAnother space recreates the studio in Avicii’s home on Blue Jay Way in Los Angeles.Felix Odell for The New York TimesThe exhibition includes a replica of Avicii’s childhood bedroom, complete with a discarded pizza box and a computer screen showing his World of Warcraft character. Nearby visitors can don a virtual reality headset, enter a replica of his recording studio and sing the vocals on one of his tracks.The last 10 years have seen a boom in immersive experiences. Globally there are currently at least five immersive Van Gogh exhibitions — Instagram-friendly shows that have attracted visitors beyond the usual audience for art galleries. In London, there have recently been immersive shows dedicated to the work of David Bowie, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, and the theater company Punchdrunk has been exploring immersive, interactive productions for the last decade.It’s not surprising that as immersive experiences become more widespread, the subjects they try to tackle will broaden too, said Sarah Elger, the C.E.O. of an immersive experiences company called Pseudonym Productions.But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get it right. “Designing an immersive experience in and of itself is an art form,” she said in a recent video interview. For immersive memorial spaces, Elger stressed the importance of a curator having a “personal connection” with the subject. “Challenges will arise if this becomes a mainstay of how we want to memorialize people,” she added.A virtual reality headset takes visitors into a a music studio where they can meet Sandro Cavazza, Aloe Blacc and Carl Falk, Avicii’s co-producers and musicians.Felix Odell for The New York TimesIn 2020, plans for an interactive, immersive Holocaust memorial experience in Kyiv, Ukraine, ignited a firestorm of criticism, including a rebuke from a curator who said it would be “Holocaust Disney.”The Avicii Experience is billed as a “tribute” to the musician, and includes spaces that feel funereal. The final room in the show is small and churchlike, with white stone-effect walls and flickering electric candles in alcoves. A slide show of Avicii photographs is projected on one wall, while a solemn orchestral version of his hit “The Nights” plays. In a section called “Unanswered Questions,” a text explains that nobody close to Avicii saw his suicide coming: “How could a human being be in the middle of such a creative flow and suddenly be gone?”Priya Khanchandani, the curator of an exhibition about Amy Winehouse at London’s Design Museum that includes immersive experiences, said that the line between emotional engagement and entertainment is a tricky one.“It’s about sensitivity, and the immersive elements have to be part of the storytelling rather than being a kind of gimmicky vehicle for sensory experience in themselves,” she said. “The danger, of course, with these kinds of experiences is they become too consumer focused. The museum becomes a theme park, or akin to a sort of retail experience.”In one area, visitors can make their own audio mixes.Felix Odell for The New York TimesThe room depicting the pressures of fame gives visitors a fully immersive experience.Felix Odell for The New York TimesOutside the Avicii Experience, a shop sold Avicii branded caps for 449 Swedish kronor, around $45. Part of the profits from the Experience go to the Tim Bergling Foundation, a mental health charity set up by Bergling’s family.For Avicii fans, visiting the exhibition means moving between the roles of consumer and mourner. Ayesha Simmons, 20, traveled from London to see the show. “That room with the jagged mirrors felt so important to me, because it gave us even the tiniest idea of what it must have felt like for him,” she said in a Facebook message.The immersive elements did not impact everyone, though. “I just thought I was in an amusement park,” Daniel Täng, 20, said after walking around the exhibition. “I didn’t really think about it.” More

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      Carlos Barbosa-Lima, 77, Dies; Expanded Classical Guitar’s Reach

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      A virtuoso since his teenage years, he performed concerts that ranged from classical repertory to Brazilian music to the Beatles and Broadway.Carlos Barbosa-Lima, who was a virtuoso on classical guitar while still a teenager in Brazil and then spent a lifetime expanding the instrument’s possibilities, bringing classical techniques and sensibilities to his arrangements of Gershwin, the Beatles and especially the music of his fellow Brazilian Antônio Carlos Jobim, died on Feb. 23 at a hospital in São Paulo. He was 77.The guitarist Larry Del Casale, who had performed with him for years, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Barbosa-Lima recorded some 50 albums and performed all over the world, at small recitals and on prestigious stages, including those of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. A Barbosa-Lima concert might include a sonata by the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, “Manha de Carnaval” by the Brazilian composer Luiz Bonfá, “I Got Rhythm” and an encore of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” from the musical “Evita.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima was known for his delicate, intricate playing, which Mr. Del Casale said was made possible in part by the unusual strength and flexibility of the fingers of his left hand.“He had a very, very, very long left-hand stretch,” Mr. Del Casale said in a phone interview. “If you try to play some of his arrangements, you can’t do it, because people can’t make those kinds of reaches.”“He was able to bring out and give voice to the bass, the soprano and alto lines and the melody, and give them each a different volume, a different rhythm,” Mr. Del Casale added. “When you’re listening to it, you think it’s two guitars.”At one of Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s earliest New York performances, a 1973 recital at Town Hall in Manhattan, those skills impressed Allen Hughes, who, in his review for The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Barbosa-Lima had “made his points modestly and quietly, but with such authority that each work he played became an absorbing musical experience.”Some 24 years later, Punch Shaw, reviewing a performance in Texas for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was especially impressed with Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s handling of two Scarlatti sonatas.“The delicate lacework of those pieces is difficult enough to create on the keyboard instrument for which it was composed,” he wrote. “Taking it so successfully to the guitar as Barbosa-Lima did, as both arranger and performer, was breathtaking.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima applied his arranging skills to contemporary composers as well, including Mr. Jobim, with whom he began working in the early 1980s when both were living in New York. Mr. Jobim, who died in 1994, was known for his contribution to the score of the 1959 movie “Black Orpheus” and for fueling the bossa nova craze of the 1960s with songs like “The Girl From Ipanema,” when Mr. Barbosa-Lima first proposed adapting some of his songs.“I thought, ‘Why not treat Jobim’s music as if the guitar were a little chamber orchestra?’” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1995.The result, in 1982, was the album “Carlos Barbosa-Lima Plays the Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and George Gershwin,” which included Jobim works like “Desafinado” as well as “Summertime” and other Gershwin compositions. The record raised Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s profile in the United States considerably.“Day in, day out, we discussed rhythm, harmony, counterpoint and intention,” Mr. Jobim wrote in the liner notes, describing the making of the album. “I watched him with awe as he strove for perfection.”Another composer who experienced Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s skills as an arranger firsthand was Mason Williams, best known for the 1968 crossover hit “Classical Gas.” In 2016 Mr. Barbosa-Lima released “Carlos Barbosa-Lima Plays Mason Williams,” an album that included his two-guitar version of Mr. Williams’s hit, with Mr. Del Casale playing the second guitar part.“He knew where the essence of the composition lay and stayed true to all of that,” Mr. Williams said of the Barbosa-Lima “Classical Gas” on a 2016 episode of the YouTube series “Musicians’ Round Table,” “but he knew exactly where he could expound on aspects of it for his arrangement.”Though Mr. Barbosa-Lima often performed solo, he also arranged a number of works for two guitars, and since 2003 Mr. Del Casale had often been his onstage playing partner. The pieces they played could be challenging, but Mr. Del Casale said the maestro always had his back if he started going astray.“If you’re doing a duo with him, he’ll catch you and bring you back in,” he said. “He was that kind of player.”Antonio Carlos Ribeiro Barbosa-Lima was born on Dec. 17, 1944, in São Paulo to Manuel Carlos and Eclair Soares Ribeiro Barbosa-Lima.He started playing as a boy, by happenstance.“My father was trying to learn the guitar but couldn’t,” he told The Orlando Sentinel in 2006. “Instead, his teacher began giving me lessons.”The boy proved to be a prodigy. In 1957 he gave his first concert, and the next year he began releasing albums on the Chantecler label. (They were rereleased a few years ago by Zoho Music as “The Chantecler Sessions.”) Mr. Del Casales said Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s first record had a reputation among players because he did things on it that most adult professionals couldn’t.“People say ‘Don’t listen to that album, you’ll burn your guitar,’” he said.Mr. Barbosa-Lima first played in the United States in 1967. Not long after that, in Madrid, he met the Spanish classical guitar master Andrés Segovia. He was playing classical repertory at the time, and, Mr. Del Casale said, it was Segovia who advised him not to be afraid to follow his own instincts and apply his classical techniques to Brazilian music, jazz, pop or whatever else he wanted. After that, Mr. Del Casale said, “He took off his tuxedo, he put on a nice Hawaiian dress shirt, and that was it.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and at the Manhattan School of Music in the ’80s. He lived in Puerto Rico for a time, but since about 2000, Mr. Del Casale said, he had had no permanent address; he had basically been on the road full time.He is survived by a sister, Maria Christina Barbosa-Lima. A brother, Luiz, died in 1973.Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s last record, “Delicado,” a homage to Brazilian music made with Mr. Del Casale and others, was released in 2019. “This music is romantic, joyful, and surprisingly accessible given the complexity of some of the arrangements,” Glide magazine wrote in a review.Mr. Del Casale remained in awe of his mentor even as he played alongside him.“The palette of colors he got out of the instrument — he could paint a picture with that guitar,” he said.Mr. Barbosa-Lima once described his technique in a video interview. “I like the guitar to be with me, you know?” he said. “Not me against the guitar.” More

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      Joni James, Heartfelt Chanteuse of the 1950s, Dies at 91

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      A top-selling artist known as the “Queen of Hearts,” she had a voice tinged with longing and melancholy and was an early influence on Barbra Streisand.Joni James, a best-selling chanteuse whose records climbed the Billboard charts in the 1950s and who was an early influence on Barbra Streisand, died on Feb. 20 in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 91. Her family announced the death, in a hospital, in an online obituary. No cause was specified.Known to her fans as the “Queen of Hearts,” Ms. James had an intimate vocal style tinged with longing and melancholy. She recorded nearly 700 songs and sold more than 100 million records — 24 going platinum and 12 gold.“I always sang from the heart,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1996. “I always sang about life and how it affected me. I’m Italian. Italians are passionate people.”Her debut single, “Why Don’t You Believe Me,” reached No. 1 on the three Billboard charts in 1952 (in those days there were separate charts for sales, radio play and jukebox play) and made her an overnight sensation.Her next showstoppers included “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a cover of the Hank Williams hit, which helped Ms. James establish herself as one of the first pop singers to bring country into the pop mainstream.In the mid-1950s, she had four Top 10 charted hits, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Have You Heard?,” which sold more than three million records, and “How Important Can It Be?,” which sold more than four million.In May 1959, she was among the first pop singers to perform a solo concert at Carnegie Hall, where she was backed by a 100-piece orchestra and 30 singers.It was Ms. James’s recording of “Have You Heard?” that drew Ms. Streisand to her. “My favorite singer while I was growing up was Johnny Mathis,” Ms. Streisand told The New York Times in 1985. “I also listened a lot to Joni James records and sang her hit ‘Have You Heard?’ at club auditions, but I didn’t really want to sound like her.”Whether she wanted to or not, some early Streisand recordings did recall those of Ms. James, at least to the ear of the Times critic Stephen Holden, who wrote in 1991, “Without having developed a rounded vibrato, she sounded a lot like her childhood idol, Joni James, a singer with only rudimentary technique who infused early-’50s pop ballads with a waiflike plaintiveness.”There was enough of a connection between the two singers that Ms. James was invited to be part of a star-studded cast for the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award tribute to Ms. Streisand in 2001. Onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Ms. James performed one of Ms. Streisand’s signature songs, “The Way We Were,” accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch on piano.Ms. James recorded nearly 700 songs in her career and sold more than 100 million records, but she largely left the music scene in 1964. Giovanna Carmella Babbo was born in Chicago on Sept. 22, 1930. Her father, Angelo Babbo, who sang operatic arias when he was a shepherd boy in Italy, had come to America at 18. He died at 36, when Giovanna was 5. That left her mother, Mary Chereso, struggling to raise six children by herself during the Depression.Giovanna babysat and worked in a bakery to help the family and to raise money to train as a ballerina. A petite woman — she stood 5 feet tall and wore a size 4 shoe — she dreamed of going to New York and dancing with the American Ballet Theater.That didn’t happen. After graduating from high school, she toured Canada with a local dance group, then took a job as a chorus girl at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. By then she had changed her first name, after her high school newspaper kept misspelling it. Later, when she worked as a model, her managers told her to find a new surname; Ms. Babbo promptly turned to the phone book and picked “James” at random.While she was focused on dance, singing was second nature to her. She grew up singing in the school choir and said her influences were the blues and Gregorian chants. Later, when she sang in nightclubs and entered talent contests, audiences always reacted warmly to her, but she didn’t consider herself a real singer like her idols, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Doris Day.Ms. James was finally noticed by MGM Records, which signed her to a contract in 1952. Her first single had been written as “You Should Believe Me,” but she tweaked the lyrics and the title, making it “Why Don’t You Believe Me.” She paid for and organized the recording session, which included a 23-piece orchestra. The song was an instant hit and sold more than two million copies.She married Anthony Acquaviva, her manager, arranger and conductor, in 1956 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Mr. Acquaviva, known as Tony, oversaw sessions on which she was accompanied by strings, which helped define her lush sound.She appeared on all the major television variety shows, including those hosted by Ed Sullivan, Perry Como and Andy Williams. She was in demand around the world and became the first American to record at Abbey Road Studios in London, where she made five albums.But at the height of her fame, her husband developed diabetes, and she largely left the music scene in 1964 to care for him. She told The Los Angeles Times that this included washing one of his legs six times a day to prevent it from getting gangrene and being amputated. He died in 1986.Though she still performed occasionally while he was still living, she had stepped so far away from the limelight that the newspapers called her “The Garbo of Song.”She then met Bernard A. Schriever, a retired Air Force general who oversaw the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They married in 1997, and with his encouragement she eased her way back onstage, performing memorable concerts in New York at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall.“I was a bent-wing sparrow,” she told The Oakland Tribune, “and he pushed me to come back.”Ms. James is survived by her son, Michael Acquaviva; her daughter, Angela Kwoka; her brothers, Angelo Babbo and Jimmy Contino; her sisters, Clara Aerostegui and Rosalie Ferina; and two grandchildren. General Schriever died in 2005.Asked by The Daily News in 2000 why she sang so many sad songs, Ms. James had a simple answer: “Because I know what they mean.” More