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      BTS to Enlist in South Korea’s Military

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      Ending months of debate, the band’s label said that the seven members would serve their military conscriptions. They plan to reunite in a couple of years.The biggest question about the biggest K-pop band has been answered.The members of BTS will enlist in South Korea’s military as required by law, the band’s label said on Monday, ending months of public debate about whether the group qualified for an exemption to mandatory conscription.The announcement of the band’s decision — which came less than two days after it had performed its first concert in months — effectively confirms the hiatus that the members had first mentioned this summer. The seven members will reconvene “as a group again around 2025” after completing their service, the label, Big Hit Music, said in a statement posted on Twitter.Millions of dejected fans, who call themselves the Army, took to social media to express their support, grief and disbelief. The move is also likely to have wider ramifications, deprivingSouth Korea of the billions of dollars the band’s followers pump into its economy.South Korea requires all able-bodied men to enlist by the time they turn 30 and to serve for about two years. Exceptions can be granted, for example to athletes who win medals at international competitions like the Olympics and to some high-level classical musicians, but pop music artists do not qualify. The first member of BTS to enlist will be Kim Seok-jin, known as just Jin, who turns 30 in December.After the announcement, the stock price of Big Hit’s parent company, HYBE, fell 2.5 percent on Monday. The company has lost about half its market value since June, when BTS talked about a hiatus as the members pursued solo projects.Jin announced a solo project at the BTS concert on Saturday in Busan, South Korea, an event that was free of charge and drew about 50,000 fans. On Monday, the label had a message that seemed targeted to both fans and investors.“‘Yet to Come (The Most Beautiful Moment)’ is more than a track from their latest album, it is a promise,” the label said. “There’s much more yet to come in the years ahead from BTS.” More

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      ‘My Window’ Review: An Out-and-Proud Trailblazer Finds Her Way

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      Melissa Etheridge’s limited run at New World Stages is a celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, and contains some confessions, along with her hits.Not long into the second act of Melissa Etheridge’s new Off Broadway show, she tells a funny, sexy, completely charming tale of falling in love with a married woman in the late 1980s, and pairs it, playfully, with a gorgeous version of her 1995 song “I Want to Come Over.”Discreetly — no names — she recalls what a blast she and that partner and their showbiz friends used to have together in 1990s Los Angeles, in the heady early days of Etheridge’s rock fame. Then she mentions cannabis, which she didn’t enjoy at the time.“It always made me feel like everyone knew I was hiding something, you know?” she said on Friday, the second night of a 12-performance run at New World Stages. “Like they could all see this sadness that I was hiding.”In an almost solo show that wants very much to be a good time for the audience, and a kind of celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, suddenly here is a confession of personal vulnerability — spoken, not sung. It turns out to be valuable foreshadowing, because there is some deep, dark sadness in “Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through Life.” And mostly, amid some staggeringly beautiful renditions of songs, that sadness is well camouflaged.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed by Amy Tinkham, the show recounts the story of Etheridge’s life in strict chronological order, from the day she was born in 1961 in Leavenworth, Kan. It’s a journey from midcentury, Midwestern conformity to a career as a Grammy Award-winning, out-and-proud trailblazer.Starting with darling black-and-white baby pictures shown huge on the upstage wall, the smart projections (by Olivia Sebesky) become increasingly intricate and eye-popping throughout the evening, particularly when Etheridge’s memories turn psychedelic. (The minimal set is by Bruce Rodgers, the luscious lighting by Abigail Rosen Holmes.)Some Etheridge hits are, of course, among the two dozen or so songs and song fragments strung through the performance, including a fiery version of “Bring Me Some Water,” from her 1988 debut album, and a buoying, sing-along “Come to My Window,” the 1993 hit that gives the show its name. She also plays endearing obscurities, like the first songs she wrote as a child.For all its musical polish, though, the show is verbally shaggy; Etheridge isn’t reciting memorized text but rather improvising, storyteller-style, from an outline of the piece’s main points, which scroll by on her monitor. (You will notice the monitor only if it’s behind you and you cheat like I did and turn around and look for it.) The upside to that looseness is a sense of thoughts articulated in the moment. The downside is a certain lack of eloquence.The instant Etheridge gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesClocking in at three hours, including an intermission, the performance is surprisingly light on songs for about the first 30 minutes, and pushes a little too hard with the comedy of a roadie character (Kate Owens), who comes on to swap out Etheridge’s many jackets and guitars. (Costumes are by Andrea Lauer.)Initially, Etheridge doesn’t even have the armor of an instrument as she roams the stage. The instant she gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes. Similarly, she is most expressive when she has the rhythm and structure of music to hold onto. So the show’s chatter works best when it’s threaded around and through a song, as happens gracefully with “Juliet,” the companion to Etheridge’s reminiscence of her brief time at Berklee College of Music, and of finding lesbian community in Boston.A life is a delicate thing to parade onstage, even or maybe especially in front of an adoring audience — lots of women, many apparent baby boomers and more straight couples than you might expect. A theatrical autobiography that’s honest can’t be neat, because some roughnesses refuse to be smoothed. So it goes here with the discussion of family, both the one Etheridge was born into and the ones she formed with the two women who are the other mothers of her four children.Personal details are skated around, presumably for the usual reasons — privacy, or to spare someone’s feelings, or because humans are complex and there simply isn’t time. Her father, who chaperoned her at the gigs she played when she was underage and responded with love when she came out to him as a young adult, emerges as a sympathetic figure. Others, in some ways including Etheridge, come off less than well. It’s here that you sense the sadness, hidden until it’s not.There comes a point, near the end of the show, when the stage plunges into inky blackness and Etheridge tells the story of the death of her 21-year-old son, Beckett, in 2020. It is spare and searing, the words uttered from a pit of grief.And as she speaks of the healing power that performance has for her, you realize that this is part of what she’s doing here — that music and memories and the embrace of an ardent crowd might help, just maybe, to assuage the pain.Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through LifeThrough Oct. 29 at New World Stages, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Dry Cleaning: It’s Spoken Rock ’n’ Roll, but We Like It

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      The British rock band’s distinctive sound comes from the vocalist Florence Shaw’s carefully delivered observations that float somewhere between stand-up, poetry and comedy.LOS ANGELES — At the Primavera Sound festival at Los Angeles State Historic Park, the British band Dry Cleaning played under the bright sunlight of a September afternoon. Festooned with tattoos, the guitarist Tom Dowse rocked out, grimacing and jutting out an impudent tongue now and then. A breeze wrapped the bassist Lewis Maynard’s long hair across his face, making him look like a headbanging plushie. The drummer Nick Buxton pummeled away as if in AC/DC’s engine room. But the vocalist Florence Shaw didn’t fit the picture at all.Instead of snarling or roaring like the music would seem to demand, she delivered a jumbled sequence of alternately humdrum and surreal observations in conversational tones that shifted subtly between dismay, disapproval and daydream. Wearing a long black lace skirt and a sparkly gold camisole, she curled her fingers around the mic stand like the stem of a wineglass and pulled distractedly at the hair at the top of her head, as if having a knotty heart-to-heart with a close friend.To twist a lyric from Dry Cleaning’s new album, “Stumpwork,” out Oct. 21, it’s a weird premise for a band — but I like it. So do a growing numbers of others. The London group recently embarked on a world tour that will take it through 17 countries. Its 2021 debut, “New Long Leg,” entered the U.K. album chart at No. 4. That feat reflected both the record’s originality and Dry Cleaning’s position at the forefront of the “speak-sing” movement: a trend that encompasses groups like Yard Act, Wet Leg and Black Country, New Road who have little in common besides vocalists who incant barbed social commentary rather than sing.Sitting at a garden table in Primavera’s artists-only enclosure, Shaw admitted that fronting a cult band was not on her bucket list. “It’s a very surreal turn of events,” she said, widening her eyes as if still surprised. “Totally unexpected. I like bands, but I never planned to be in one at all.”Until a few years ago, the 33-year-old earned her living as a visiting lecturer, teaching fashion drawing and illustration at art colleges. Then her friend Dowse suggested she contribute to a new band he’d pulled together with Buxton and Maynard. The three men had a long history of playing in various hardcore punk and noisy groups, mostly as a sideline to their primary occupations. But when Shaw came along to add her spoken-word collages to their tough, clangorous sound, something clicked.On paper, the formula looks like it ought to be irritating — pretentious, or simply awkward — but ultimately, it makes a magical sort of sense. While her bandmates weave riffs and textures drawn from across alternative rock history, Shaw doesn’t raise her voice, but commands attention through timing and phrasing, along with the shuffle-mode flow of her perceptions. Lines that could be from a transcript of a tetchy interpersonal skirmish will be followed by a pensive fragment plucked from some regretful or aggrieved interior monologue. Shaw has invented a strikingly original mode of nonmelodic songwriting that floats somewhere between stand-up, poetry and the fourth-wall-breaking soliloquies of a female comic auteur like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.“I’m not hugely well-informed about politics, really,” Shaw said. “But I’m quite sensitive to how things feel and I know they don’t feel good!” Max Miechowski for The New York Times“She’s brilliant, she really reminds me of myself!” said Jason Williamson, the vocalist in Sleaford Mods, widely regarded as the progenitor of the current wave of British speak-sing groups. “There’s this mixture of extremely realistic observations with absurdism. Things that are just really bizarre. It doesn’t make a lot of sense — but then it does. She conveys meanings with just one word.”Expertly deploying pauses and stretching out syllables, Shaw is a virtuoso of intonation. “I am very interested in small differences,” she said. “I really enjoy that game where you put the emphasis on a different place in a sentence — and it means something completely different. The same words can sound scared instead of proud.”When Dry Cleaning was recording part of the new album in a Bristol studio, Shaw went out on foraging missions, trawling the streets for overheard remarks, shop signs and unusual sights, which she’d jot down in her phone’s notepad. Another expedition involved visiting a “car boot sale,” a flea market particular to the U.K. in which ordinary folk park their cars in a field and sell bric-a-brac from the trunk. Shaw also likes to collect words. “Stumpwork,” the title of a song as well as the new album, is something she’s been aching to use for ages.“I like the sound of it,” she said. “It’s a type of embroidery, like the braiding on military uniforms or American sportswear. Originally it was used to described the raised characters and padded people in tapestries.”Musically, “Stumpwork” is a conscious and concerted effort on the part of the band to show it’s more than post-punk. Leaving behind the first album’s gaunt sound and tense bass lines, the new LP shifts forward in time to the early ’90s and lo-fi “slacker” bands like Pavement. “I was thinking a lot about Stephen Malkmus when I was doing my guitar parts, that sort of wonkiness,” Dowse said, explaining that he played a Jazzmaster guitar because “it’s what all the ’90s groups like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. used.”Compared to “New Long Leg,” in some ways “Stumpwork” is an American album. The debut felt like a wet, wintry day, a mood mirrored lyrically in lines like “it was chucking it down” and “raincoat sweat.” In contrast, “Stumpwork” has the dazed, heat-hazy vibe of a drunken summer afternoon. Although Shaw still drops the odd glum line like “looks like strains and setbacks are on the way,” the ground-down despondency of “New Long Leg” has opened up to allow for moments of carefree joy and quiet contentment.If there’s gloom here, it stems less from personal life than from the political atmosphere. The track “Conservative Hell” expresses the outlook of the band and many of their generation. “Scandal after scandal, the levels of corruption and lying at the top of the government, and it feels like it’s almost completely unchallenged,” Dowse said. “I think it’s numbed everyone out.”While her bandmates weave riffs and textures drawn from across alternative rock history, Shaw commands attention through timing and phrasing.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesOn “Stumpwork,” Shaw gets explicitly polemical now and then. She’ll talk about seeing “male violence everywhere” or distill the U.K.’s dire deadlock into the three-line panorama “Nothing works/everything’s expensive/And opaque and privatized.” But her true forte is the micro-politics of ordinary life: petty humiliations and hassles, the way that advertising and media implant desires and anxieties in your head. “I’m not hugely well-informed about politics, really,” she said. “But I’m quite sensitive to how things feel and I know they don’t feel good!”That remark ended with a burst of laughter. Smiles and merriment are a constant in her conversation, in marked contrast with how Shaw comes across on record and onstage. The blanket description “deadpan” annoys her because it misses the subtle shades of gray she works with. Referencing a review that described her as sounding like “a bored fashion model reading from the pages of Grazia magazine,” Shaw noted that another time, “Someone said our gig was great but we spoiled it by smiling between the songs. Like we were breaking character. You can’t win!” Cue another burst of laughter.Williamson placed Dry Cleaning in a British lineage of groups who combined observational humor, gritty social realism and the vividness of everyday vernacular: “They’re a classic English band in the vein of the Jam, the Specials, Ian Dury and the Blockheads.”One way that Englishness manifests in Dry Cleaning is the gap between the music’s dramatic intensity and the mildness of Shaw’s emotional palette and low-key delivery. “There can be something very tender about that,” Shaw said. “Because in a way it’s sort of a failure to express oneself at the right moment.”“Missing the moment that you should get really angry and instead feeling it later — that’s a real hallmark of my life,” she added. “I think I’d much rather be a person who could emote functionally, at the right time. But it takes me a long time to process things and a lot of my performance is about exorcising those residual feelings. Maybe that’s a bit British.” More

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      New Music From Blink-182, the 1975 and Queen’s Unheard Song With Freddie Mercury

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      Hear tracks by Blink-182, Lil Baby featuring EST Gee, Sevdaliza 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.Queen, ‘Face It Alone’Freddie Mercury packed drama into every syllable when he sang “Face It Alone,” a track Queen rediscovered in 1988 session archives while preparing a much-expanded reissue of its 1989 album, “The Miracle,” and has now rebuilt. It’s a dirge about inevitable, existential loneliness, set to slow, bare-bones arpeggios and funereal drum thuds, and Mercury’s voice expands it to arena scale as he moves between confidential croon and balcony-rattling rasp. JON PARELESThe 1975, ‘Oh Caroline’The 1975 regularly goes roving through rock and pop’s back catalog, trying on styles. “Oh Caroline” doesn’t go for the obvious musical reference — the incomparably vulnerable “Caroline, No” by the Beach Boys — but instead to the era when Michael McDonald led the Doobie Brothers, with electronic percussion, scrubbing guitars and burbling keyboard chords. “Caroline, I want to get it right this time,” Matty Healy sings, making abundant romantic promises, as he travels among eras with the freedom of the internet. PARELESNessa Barrett, ‘Tired of California’Nessa Barrett, 20, established herself on TikTok with songs about pain, self-doubt and thoughts of death. The comic relief on her new debut album, “Young Forever,” is “Tired of California,” a sweet-voiced summation of the attractions, superficiality and ennui of aspiring to stardom in Los Angeles. “I get sick of sunshine on my perfect skin,” she lilts, to a tune reminiscent of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega; then she contemplates death as a career move that would leave her “young forever”: “You get more famous when you die.” The production riffles through Los Angeles specialties: crunching EDM, orchestral bombast, hair-metal guitars and confessional piano chords. It’s supremely self-conscious. PARELESLil Baby featuring EST Gee, ‘Back and Forth’As Lil Baby eases into rap superstardom, he tends to lean on his melodic side, a combination of savvy and conciliation. But “Back and Forth,” from his new album “It’s Only Me,” is something slightly more pure — just a pair of icy verses from Lil Baby and the Kentucky firebrand EST Gee about all the various sorts of conquest. JON CARAMANICABlink-182, ‘Edging’The pop-punk-reunion Mount Rushmore is finally complete — the essential (but not original) lineup of Blink-182 has reunited (again). Tom DeLonge is rejoining Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker for a tour next year; the announcement came with a new song, “Edging,” which marks the first time this lineup has been in the studio together in a decade. It’s familiar but uncanny, Botoxed tight but with none of the puerile joy that marked the group’s breakout hits. Part of Blink’s charm was the sense that it might unravel at any moment; this suggests it is content to remain contained. CARAMANICASevdaliza, ‘Woman Life Freedom’Sevdaliza, who was born in Iran and grew up in the Netherlands, confronts the repression of women in “Woman Life Freedom,” a song that begins with stark intimacy — just vocals — and builds into a somberly devastating orchestral march. Sevdaliza sings, “I was taught compliance in the name of the sword/That stabbed every dream I could be.” The title is taken from the watchwords of current women’s protests in Iran, and the track mixes in spoken words calling for an end to Iran’s dictatorship. But the music’s impact and ambition are not only topical. PARELESLucrecia Dalt, ‘Atemporal’“Atemporal” (“Timeless”) is from “Ay!,” the latest high-concept album by Lucrecia Dalt, a Colombian composer and songwriter who has lately moved into film (“The Seed”) and television (“The Baby”) scores. “Ay!” is about an alien entity, Preta, who first experiences linear time and physicality on a visit to Earth; for Dalt, it’s also about memories and warpages — sonic, spatial and durational — of the music she grew up on. “Atemporal” is more or less a bolero, disassembled and rebuilt in ways that can sound vintage or computer-tweaked, with plenty of clanky percussion; it’s wayward with a purpose. PARELES More

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      On ‘ForeverAndEverNoMore,’ Brian Eno Sings for the End of the World

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      The musician and producer’s new songs meditate on folly and annihilation, playing like a far more fatalistic sequel to “Another Day on Earth” from 2005.When you’re expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance. That’s what Brian Eno has done on “ForeverAndEverNoMore”: a mournful, contemplative album that stares down humanity’s self-immolation in what he calls “the climate emergency.”“These billion years will end/They end in me,” he intones in “Garden of Stars,” as electronic tones go whizzing by and distortion flickers and crests around him like a cosmic radiation storm. It’s a song that marvels at the mathematical improbability of human life — “How then could it be that we appear at all?/In all this rock and fire, in all this gas and dust,” he sings — while envisioning its cessation.Although much of Eno’s solo catalog is instrumental — soundtracks, ambient albums, video and multimedia projects — he is no stranger to songs. He embraced pop structures, and riddled them with noise, on his early solo albums after he left Roxy Music in 1973, tossing off flippantly highbrow lyrics like “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics/You will find that their minds rarely move in a line” (“Backwater,” on the 1977 “Before and After Science”). Eno also produced hits, and sometimes sang, with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie and others, and he has extolled the individual and collective benefits of group harmony singing.“ForeverAndEverNoMore” is decades and decisions removed from Eno’s 1970s song albums. At 74, Eno has taken on the stoic reserve of a sage. The new album plays like a far more fatalistic sequel to Eno’s most recent song-centered album, “Another Day on Earth” back in 2005, when he was already concerned with the state of the planet.On “ForeverAndEverNoMore,” Eno has traded percussiveness for sustain. Long drones underlie most of the tracks, echoing ancient traditions of mystical music; most of the instrumental sounds seem to arrive from great echoey distances. Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.The songs deliver indictments of human folly with measured calm. Slow, deep breathing sets the rhythm of “We Let It In,” as Eno sings, “We open to the blinding sky” to the soothing notes of a major chord; his daughter Darla Eno quietly repeats the words “deep sun.” In its reverberating solidity, the song makes global warming sound encompassing and inevitable.“There Were Bells” has bleaker lyrics, with birdsong and blue skies giving way to war and annihilation: “In the end they all went the same way,” it concludes. Singing a doleful melody over a tolling, inexorably descending bass line, Eno’s voice takes on a deepening melancholy as the music darkens, thickens and eventually thunders around him; all he can do is bear witness before going silent.There’s little comfort on “ForeverAndEverNoMore.” In “These Small Noises,” set to operatic keyboard arpeggios from Jon Hopkins, Eno imagines a useful afterlife by becoming compost — “Make us into land/Land of soil we owe our fathers” — but ends with a curse: “Go to hell/in hell to burn.” The album’s two instrumentals, “Making Gardens Out of Silence” (based on music from his sound installation at the Serpentine Galleries’ exhibition “Back to Earth”) and “Inclusion” return to Eno’s ambient side, placing elongated, breath-defying melodies in an electronic ether. On this album, they sound like they’re anticipating a post-human eternity.Perhaps the planet’s surviving species will appreciate the music.Brian Eno“ForeverAndEverNoMore”(Verve/UMC) More

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      Art Laboe, D.J. Who Popularized ‘Oldies but Goodies,’ Dies at 97

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      A familiar voice on the California airwaves for almost 80 years, he saw the appeal of old rock ’n’ roll records practically before they were old.Art Laboe, the disc jockey who as a mainstay of the West Coast airwaves for decades bridged racial divides through his music selections and live shows, reached listeners in a new way by allowing on-air dedications and helped make the phrase “oldies but goodies” ubiquitous, died on Friday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 97.An announcement on his Facebook page said the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Laboe worked in radio for almost 80 years. In 1973, The San Francisco Examiner was already calling him the “dean of Los Angeles rock ’n’ roll broadcasting,” and he would be on the air for almost a half-century more after that.He started in the business as a teenager during World War II, working at a San Francisco station, KSAN, before gravitating to KPMO in Pomona and KCMJ in Palm Springs. The idea of a disc jockey with a distinctive personality had not yet become the norm in radio — at KCMJ, a CBS affiliate, he was mostly an announcer doing station identifications and such between radio soap operas — but for an hour late at night he was allowed to play music.He featured big bands, crooners and other sounds of the day. But as tastes changed, his selections changed, and sometimes he was at the front edge of the evolution. In 1954, by then working in Los Angeles, Mr. Laboe “was largely responsible for making the Chords’ ‘Sh-Boom’ (sometimes cited as the first rock ’n’ roll record) an L.A. No. 1,” Barney Hoskyns wrote in “Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles” (1996).He also saw the appeal of “oldies” practically before they were old. Around 1949 he had started working at KRKD in Los Angeles, selling advertising by day and playing music in the wee hours. He thought an all-night restaurant, Scrivener’s Drive-In, might be interested in advertising on his all-night show, so he paid a visit and sold the owner, Paul Scrivener, some spots. A few months later, Mr. Scrivener made a suggestion.“‘You know, that show’s pretty good,’” Mr. Laboe, in a 2016 interview with The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, recalled Mr. Scrivener saying. “‘Why couldn’t you do that show from my drive-in?’ So I did.’”Mr. Laboe issued the first volume of his “Oldies but Goodies” series of compilation albums in 1959. It stayed on the Billboard chart for more than three years, and many more volumes followed.JP Roth CollectionHe would broadcast from the restaurant (he moved to KLXA and then KPOP in this period), stopping by cars and asking the occupants to pick a song from a list.“At the bottom of the list,” The San Francisco Examiner wrote in 1973, “were a half a dozen ‘oldies’ titles — songs at that time no more than three years old — and when this portion of the list began to show the heaviest action, Laboe wondered if there might be something to this.”He had already formed his own record label, Original Sound, and in 1959 it issued “Oldies but Goodies, Vol. 1,” a compilation album — a relatively new concept — that included “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins, “Earth Angel” by the Penguins and 10 other songs that, although they’d been on the singles charts only a few years earlier, had already begun to acquire a nostalgic feel. The album stayed on the Billboard chart for more than three years, and many more volumes followed.Early in his career Mr. Laboe began taking requests on the air, allowing listeners to dedicate a song to a friend, love interest or other special person. It became one of his signatures; few if any other disc jockeys were doing that in his early days. Some callers would dedicate a song to a loved one who was incarcerated. And early on, Mr. Laboe welcomed Black and Mexican callers, a barrier-breaking thing to do at the time.In the 1950s, Mr. Laboe also began producing and serving as M.C. at live music shows at the American Legion Stadium in El Monte, a blue-collar city east of Los Angeles, that were known for the racially diverse crowd they attracted. The Penguins, Ritchie Valens and countless other acts performed at the El Monte shows.Mr. Laboe with Jerry Lee Lewis at the American Legion Stadium in El Monte, Calif., in 1957. The shows Mr. Laboe produced there were known for the racially diverse crowd they attracted. Art Laboe Collection“Friday and Saturday night rhythm-and-blues dances at the El Monte Legion Stadium drew up to 2,000 Black, white, Asian American and Mexican American teenagers from all over Los Angeles city and county, becoming an alternative cultural institution from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s,” the scholar Anthony Macias wrote in American Quarterly in 2004.Mr. Laboe was still producing live shows into his 90s.“If you come to one of our concerts,” he told KQED in 2019, “you’ll see a mixture, a complete mixture, of what we have in California.”He was also still on the radio, on the syndicated “Art Laboe Connection,” after having logged time at assorted stations. In 2002, Greg Ashlock, the general manager of KHHT-FM in Los Angeles, where Mr. Laboe had a long run, summed up Mr. Laboe’s appeal in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.“There’s nobody that connects with the community like him,” he said. “The audience knows him and loves him like a family member. It’s almost like tuning in to Uncle Art.”Wherever he was spinning, Mr. Laboe made it a point of mixing genres and generations.“Sometimes the 20-year-old who wants to hear Alicia Keys will tolerate the Spinners,” he told The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2008. “It’s not off the course enough to make them want to change stations.”Russell Contreras/Associated PressArthur Egonian was born on Aug. 7, 1925, in Salt Lake City to a family of Armenian immigrants. His obsession with radio began at a young age: His sister gave him his first radio for his eighth birthday. In a 2020 interview with The Press-Enterprise, he recalled being amazed by the “box that talks.” That experience sparked his interest in the nascent radio scene.He attended George Washington High School in Los Angeles and studied engineering for a time at Stanford University.He was hired at KSAN while still a teenager; his voice, he said, had not yet acquired the timbre that became his calling card.“The very first words I uttered on radio myself, I said, ‘This is K-S-A-N San Francisco,’ and it was in 1943,” he said.The station manager suggested he Americanize his name, and he is said to have taken “Laboe” from the name of a secretary there. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he moved to Southern California, which became his home base.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.In 2015, the nonprofit online radio station DubLab turned the tables on Mr. Laboe, the man who was a conduit for so many on-air dedications, giving his fans an opportunity to call in and dedicate a song to him.“I don’t know what we would have done without you,” one caller said. “I spent a lot of time in a car without anything but a radio, and you made it good, and you exposed me to a lot of beautiful music.” More

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      The Young Women Who Make TikTok Weep

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod recorded a verse of an unfinished song called “Complex” and posted it to TikTok in August, she was tapping into the app’s penchant for confessional storytelling, and demonstrating its ease of distribution and repurposing.Overnight, the snippet propelled her into viral success, leading to a recording contract and placing her in a lineage of young women who have found success on the app via emotional catharsis — sad, mad or both. That includes Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” first gained traction there, and also Lauren Spencer-Smith, Sadie Jean, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, Gayle and many more.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the evolution of TikTok’s musical ambitions and the expansion of its emotional range, how the music business has tried to capitalize on the app’s intimacy, and the speed with which a bedroom-recording confessional can become a universal story line.Guest:Rachel Brodsky, who writes about pop music for StereogumConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      ‘Almost Famous’ Heads to Broadway, Purple Aura Intact

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      SAN DIEGO — In the 2000 film “Almost Famous,” William Miller, all of 15 and eager to conduct an interview for Creem magazine, can’t manage to slide past the brusque security guard at the arena where Black Sabbath is playing, despite his assurances that he is indeed a journalist. Not on the list, the guard says, then tells him to go to the top of the ramp “with the other girls.”One morning in August, Cameron Crowe — who made the coming-of-age movie, a gentle fictionalization of his days writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s — was back at that ramp. “This is where I’d be sent,” he said with a laugh, pointing to the spot where William, his cinematic alter ego, meets Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and the other Band-Aids, the not-groupies who would help him navigate the backstage world of rock ’n’ roll.“The fact that they befriended me and started showing me the ropes was the beginning of everything,” Crowe, 65, said. “There are so many times where, if one thing didn’t happen, there’s no ‘Almost Famous.’”The film earned him an Academy Award for best original screenplay and went on to become a beloved story about the transformative power of music. So it was perhaps only a matter of time that it would transform yet again into, yes, a musical.Solea Pfeiffer, left, as Penny Lane, and Casey Likes as William Miller in the musical “Almost Famous.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Almost Famous” opens on Broadway next month, three years after its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe. Scores of Hollywood films have been made into musicals over the years, but few of the original filmmakers have had their hands in the remaking (Garry Marshall’s “Pretty Woman” and Patricia Resnick’s “9 to 5” are notable exceptions), as Crowe is doing here, writing the book and co-writing the lyrics.Crowe, who has written and directed such movies as “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Vanilla Sky,” initially was unsure about making a musical out of his critically acclaimed film. “I was really nervous about whether it would translate,” he said. “Because the show’s not a jukebox thing. It’s meant to capture the same thing as the movie, a personal story with music that you love.”Despite his concerns, the musical received rave reviews (the Los Angeles Times called it “as shimmering as a stadium of lighters during a Led Zeppelin encore”). But a planned Broadway debut in 2020 was forced into cold storage by the pandemic. The ensemble stayed in touch over the intervening years via a group chat, however, and nearly all of the original cast is returning for the show’s Broadway run, including Casey Likes as William Miller and Solea Pfeiffer as Penny Lane.“One of the silver linings of this horrible moment that we all went through was that the work just deepened,” Pfeiffer said. “And Cameron’s rewriting stuff all the time. It’s like a living, breathing thing.”Both the show and the original film boast such hits as Joni Mitchell’s “River” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” The film’s Grammy-winning soundtrack album, already a double LP set, contains only a third of the 50-some songs in the film.According to Lia Vollack, one of the show’s producers and a former president of worldwide music for Sony Pictures Entertainment, none of the bands whose music they sought for the Broadway outing turned them down.Crowe based “Almost Famous” on his days as a young music writer for Creem, Rolling Stone and other rock magazines.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times“Cameron and I both used our personal relationships to make things happen,” she said.Back at the arena, Crowe wandered the cavernous backstage area. In one nondescript room, now used to host visiting teams, he remembered interviewing rock royalty, including the members of Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Traffic. “The last time I saw Ronnie Van Zant was in this dressing room,” he said.Despite a youth that many rock fans could only dream of, when Crowe began writing the “Almost Famous” screenplay, he didn’t make it about himself. “I initially wrote a script for David Bowie about a publicist who’s working with this Peter Frampton-type character named Ricky Fedora,” he said. “Penny Lane was there, but I was just a tiny character.”Inspired by semi-autobiographical films by some of his cinematic heroes, including Neil Simon, Barry Levinson and François Truffaut, Crowe let his younger self take center stage. In the Broadway version, Crowe pulls even more from his own life, in particular, the relationship between his mother and sister.He recalled advice from Tom Kitt, the show’s composer, who told him, “The movie is your story, so let’s not adapt the movie when we have all this source material that came before that.”Anika Larsen, who plays William’s mother, Elaine, worried about playing the character brought to life in the movie by Frances McDormand. “The first week was terrifying and awful,” Larsen said. “She’s my favorite actor of all time. I was like, why would I do or say anything different than Frances McDormand?”Kate Hudson played Penny Lane in the 2000 film “Almost Famous,” earning an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.Neal Preston/DreamWorks PicturesUnderstanding the musical theater aspect of her role — where there are no camera close-ups at an actor’s disposal — helped her make peace with it. “Our tasks are so different,” she said. “Frances is telling you volumes with just the slightest look on her face. And I’m singing all of those things in songs.”In the film and the musical, Elaine Miller frets about the potential ill effects the rock world might have on William (“Don’t take drugs,” she famously and embarrassingly yells after dropping him off at the Black Sabbath concert). But Alice Crowe, the director’s mother, who died in 2019 before the musical opened, could not have been prouder of what became of her music-obsessed son. When the show was in rehearsals at the Old Globe, Crowe would call her every night, sometimes expressing doubts about how things were going.“She’d say, It’s going to be great,” he recalled. “Your negative thoughts are actions! You’ll create it! Never give up! You never give up! You love theater! This is the legacy of your family! Tell the story! Tell the story!”In addition to bringing a bit more of Alice Crowe into Elaine Miller, Crowe and his team took a second look at Penny Lane, with an eye to the #MeToo movement. “We wanted to give her more agency,” Crowe said.Much more than just an object of two men’s desires, Penny finds her voice in the show, literally, and sings just as much as the boys in the band. “In the film, it’s so much from William’s point of view,” Pfeiffer said. “In our version, Penny’s more humanized. We see her feet touch the ground.”The show’s producers have also dropped a scene in the film where she may or may not confess to being underage and omitted moments played for comedy when she overdoses.“I don’t think it’s about bringing Penny Lane and the Band-Aids up-to-date,” said Jeremy Herrin, the show’s director. “I think it would be appalling to give characters a vocabulary and a thought process they wouldn’t have had in those days. But we try to be very responsible about how we present it.”Crowe outside the San Diego arena where a key scene from his movie takes place. “There are so many times,” he said, “where, if one thing didn’t happen, there’s no ‘Almost Famous.’”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe creators are also shifting the perspective to more of the characters, largely through song. Kitt recalled writing a song a day for Crowe in the early stages of the show’s creation. “Cameron is a poet,” he said. “These characters want to have new thoughts in the voice of Cameron Crowe. So there are many places where you’ll hear something in the lyrics that came directly out of the film.”The show marks Crowe’s first Broadway musical, and the first time on Broadway for 15 members of the cast, including Likes, who debuted the part of William when he was 17. “I basically grew up on the show,” he said. “I do feel like the kid on this production. And when I don’t, I’m definitely reminded by my cast members.”After his visit to the arena, Crowe stopped by the San Diego apartment he lived in during high school, the place where his sister gave him the stash of LPs — “Pet Sounds” by The Beach Boys, “Cheap Thrills” by Big Brother and the Holding Company — that would later shape his musical tastes and, as his sister promised, set him free.While there, Crowe talked about what he had learned about writing musicals. “Be succinct,” he said. “It’s a great lesson for me, because I write really long scripts.” He also discovered the camaraderie and closeness that comes with working on a show for months and even years, as one does in the theater, as opposed to the short days and weeks one spends on a movie shoot.“I love, love, love that you live with the actors,” he said.Crowe is taking full advantage of the opportunity. “Cameron is there every minute of every rehearsal every day,” said Drew Gehling, who plays Jeff Bebe, the driven lead singer of Stillwater, the band William is profiling.As for William, Crowe’s eternally young alter ego, “I’m still that guy,” Crowe said. “I still love doing interviews. I love William and his relationship with his sister, just trying to make it all work in the family.”Not that it’s ever easy seeing his life play out in front of the masses, whether in a movie theater or on a Broadway stage. “It’s emotional,” he said. “When people would come up after the movie and go, ‘It’s too long. I don’t like him in Ohio,’” I’d be like, ‘Is my life too long?’ It’s hard not to take it personally.” More