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      Jerry Allison, Who Played Drums With Buddy Holly, Dies at 82

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      An original Cricket, he was also a co-writer of two signature Holly songs, “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue.”Jerry Allison, who played drums with Buddy Holly and was a co-writer of two of his signature late-1950s songs, “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue,” died on Monday at his home near Nashville. He was 82.Peter Bradley Jr., board director of the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation, confirmed the death.Mr. Allison was still a teenager in Lubbock, Texas, when he began playing with Mr. Holly, who was three years older and had already made a tentative start on a music career, releasing a few records in Nashville that did not do well. Back in Lubbock, he, Mr. Allison, Niki Sullivan on guitar (soon replaced by Sonny Curtis, Tommy Allsup and others) and Joe B. Mauldin on bass began honing a sound that drew on Elvis Presley and on country and, especially, Black music.“We’d have to listen to a radio station out of Shreveport, La., to hear the real blues — rhythm and blues — we wanted to hear,” Mr. Allison told The Globe-Gazette of Mason City, Iowa, in 1989. “Groups like Etta James and the Peaches, and the Midnighters and the Clovers. That wasn’t common music around Lubbock, but that was the kind of music we were trying to write.”At first, things were slow.“We’d be playing at things like supermarket openings,” Mr. Allison told The Lansing State Journal of Michigan in 1979. “Sometimes we’d get as much as $10 apiece.”Then, in May 1956, he and Mr. Holly went to see a new John Wayne movie, “The Searchers,” in which one of Mr. Wayne’s most memorable lines was “That’ll be the day.”Days later, according to an account written for the Library of Congress, Mr. Holly suggested that he and Mr. Allison write a song together, and Mr. Allison, imitating the Wayne line, said, “That’ll be the day.”“Right away, Buddy starts fiddling around with it,” Mr. Allison told the Lansing newspaper. “In about a half-hour, we had it.”Mr. Holly cut a country version of the song in Nashville that was unloved (a producer there is said to have called it “the worst song I’ve ever heard”), but in 1957 he and the Crickets, as his Lubbock group was called, recorded a rock ’n’ roll version that became a national hit and remained in Billboard’s Top 30 for three months. Mr. Holly, Mr. Allison and the producer who recorded that version, Norman Petty, got the songwriting credit, and in 2005 the record was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.Another touchstone song of early rock ’n’ roll appeared later in 1957, this time released under Mr. Holly’s name: “Peggy Sue.” Mr. Holly and the band were in Mr. Petty’s studio trying to record a song called “Cindy Lou,” but Mr. Allison, hoping to solidify his relationship with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Peggy Sue Gerron, suggested a name change.In her autobiography, “Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue?” (2008), she described hearing the song for the first time when the Crickets played a show in Sacramento, Calif., where she was going to school. It was a complete surprise to her, and it ignited the crowd.“My heart pounded, and my cheeks were on fire,” she wrote. “With people all around me bouncing, swaying and singing my name over and over, I sank down in my seat, covered my face with my hands, and cried out to myself, ‘What have y’all done to me?’”Apparently she got over her shock; she and Mr. Allison later married. The marriage eventually ended in divorce, but “Peggy Sue” lives on as a rock ’n’ roll classic.Mr. Holly’s career was a short one; he died in a plane crash in 1959 — “the day the music died,” as Don McLean later sang in “American Pie.” Mr. Allison, though, kept performing and recording with an ever-changing lineup of Crickets for decades.“I don’t mind being called an oldie,” he told The Tulsa World of Oklahoma in 1996, “because we are.”The Crickets in 1958. From left, Mr. Allison, Mr. Holly and Mr. Mauldin.Everett CollectionJerry Ivan Allison was born on Aug. 31, 1939, in Hillsboro, Texas. He started playing drums at an early age.In a 2005 interview with The Sunday News of Lancaster, Pa., he said the name the Crickets came about because Mr. Holly liked an R&B group called the Spiders. At his house one day, he said, he and Mr. Holly started thumbing through an encyclopedia’s section on insects.They rejected “Beetles,” he said, because beetles were something people stepped on. Mr. Allison said he suggested “Crickets” because they “make a happy sound.”Mr. Allison eventually settled on a farm near Nashville. His survivors include his wife, Joanie Allison. His ex-wife, Peggy Sue Gerron Rackham, died in 2018.Buddy Holly and the Crickets had a lasting influence on rock ’n’ roll. The band helped establish the classic rock four-piece: two guitarists, drummer, bassist. And it helped inspire another four-piece that did pretty well.“Paul McCartney did tell me that if there hadn’t been the Crickets, there never would have been the Beatles,” Mr. Allison told The Associated Press in 2013. Mr. McCartney sang backup, played some piano and produced the title track of the Crickets’ 1988 album, “T Shirt.”Mr. Allison also thought the group, which generally kept its songs pretty simple, encouraged youngsters to take up the instruments of rock.“When we went out on tour, we sounded just like our records,” he told the Lansing newspaper. “And whenever kids were starting a group, our songs were some that they knew they could do.” More

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      Rage Against the Machine, Roaring On

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor most of the past two months, the 1990s agit-rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine has been playing its first shows in more than a decade. It has been a roaring return, but one that was slightly derailed by an injury that the frontman Zack de la Rocha sustained during the show’s second stop, in Chicago, forcing him to perform seated for the remainder of the tour.It did not blunt the impact of the music, though. The group’s messaging feels particularly well-suited to the political moment, and the physical rush of its performance feels like a corrective to much of contemporary rock.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Rage Against the Machine’s comeback tour, the ways its message has evolved in a shifting political climate, and whether legacy bands need to update their act for a revival — or if it’s better to leave it intact.Guests:Andy Greene, senior writer at Rolling StoneJoseph Patel, former music journalist and a producer of “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)”Connect 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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      The Harry Styles Show (and Some Music) Comes to Madison Square Garden

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      The first two nights of a 15-concert run at Madison Square Garden were heavy on charisma, banter and nods to the past.Over the weekend, Harry Styles began a 15-night stand at Madison Square Garden, an impressive feat befitting one of the most popular musicians in the world. (He’ll begin a similar stretch in October at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif. — his tour supporting his latest album, “Harry’s House,” consists of a series of residencies.) But Styles, who came to fame as part of the British boy band One Direction, is still relatively early in his solo career, and is still establishing his sonic ideas. Two New York Times critics attended the first two nights of his Love on Tour run in New York to see how he wielded his gravitational pull.JON CARAMANICA I always liked One Direction, more or less. Or maybe I liked what the group represented: a rejection of the hyperprocessed boy band, and by extension an acknowledgment that doing the least can still earn you the most. They weren’t trying to delude audiences about their artistry — their casualness was foundational to their appeal. But that approach wears thin in a solo act, and time and again during the Harry Styles show at the Garden on Saturday night, I found myself vexed. Off-the-charts charisma, collective exuberance, decently competent band, and yet at the center of it all, Styles was inscrutable. Musically, at least. I’ve rarely if ever seen someone more confident in their ownership of the stage, but everything underneath felt slight. All razzle, no dazzle. What am I missing? (I’m not missing anything.)The set included songs from Styles’s repertoire that lean toward mid-1970s rock.The New York TimesLINDSAY ZOLADZ Hmm, Jon, maybe a boa? Despite all of the construction around Madison Square Garden, I had no difficulty finding the venue’s entrance: I just followed the trail of rainbow feathers shed from the signature Styles neckwear that at least half of the audience seemed to be sporting. My thoughts today (and over the next several weeks of Styles’s 15-date residency) are with the Garden’s cleanup crew.I’ve long considered One Direction to be the quintessential boy band of the fan-service era — expertly primed to respond to the demands of their devoted, social-media savvy stan army — and after catching Styles’s show on Sunday night, I’m ready to declare him the defining solo artist of that era, too. I am not sure I’ve ever seen a pop star wave so much from the stage in my entire life? Roughly a third of his performance seemed to comprise waving, pointing and blowing kisses to various sections of the audience, whose volume approximated a jet taking off. Most of the time I could not hear Styles’s voice well enough to determine if he was hitting all the notes, though the crowd’s reaction was energetic enough that they did not seem to care. This show felt, as so much of Styles’s music does, first and foremost for the fans, which — I agree — can sometimes make the man at the center of it all feel like a bit of an enigma.The Dreamy World of Harry StylesThe British pop star and former member of the boy-band One Direction has grown into a magnetic and provocative performer.A 15-Night Stand: The first two nights of Harry Styles’ run at Madison Square Garden were heavy on charisma, banter and nods to the past.New Album: The record-breaking album “Harry’s House” is a testament to the singer’s sense of generosity and devotion to the female subject.Styler Fashion: Stylers, as the pop star’s fans are called, love to dress in homage to their idol. Here are some of the best looks seen at a concert.Opening Up: For his solo debut, Styles agreed to a Times interview. He was slippery in conversation, deflecting questions with politeness.CARAMANICA Let’s try to distill the Harry Styles musical proposition. He has nowhere near the determined agita of, say, Shawn Mendes; nowhere near the vocal litheness of Justin Bieber. (Also:#FreeZayn) And it goes without saying that despite the rampant Eltonisms on display throughout Styles’s solo catalog, and the (sub?)conscious echoes of John’s sartorial glamour in Styles’s Gucci gear, he has nowhere near John’s verve or panache. It is all quite a brittle foundation upon which to build this fame skyscraper.But yes, the waving. Also the utterly-at-ease shimmying. And that thing he did mid-show where he took a fan’s cellphone and tried calling her ex on it. (Josh, if you’re reading this, you got washed, buddy — everyone at Madison Square Garden hates you.) See also: him singing “Happy Birthday” to his friend Florence. Florence Welch, of the Machine? No. Florence Pugh, his co-star in the upcoming film “Don’t Worry Darling”? Also no. Florence, daughter of Rob Stringer, chairman of Sony Music Group? Yes.This is the essence of his appeal — his is not a top-down sort of fame. He’s the approachable but protective friend, the one who leads with good judgment and progressive wholesomeness. (At previous shows, he’s helped people come out, or to confess their love.) That’s part of why, even though public discussion of Styles often centers on his dating life or the ways he flirts with gender fluidity, his actual show is conventional and chaste. The most risqué bit was when he explained how the in-the-round performance would work. Sometimes, “we’ll be ass to face,” he said. “I’ll be sure to distribute face and ass equally throughout the show — there’s plenty to go around.” It was cheeky. Even “Watermelon Sugar,” his lightly erotic hit, was dry.The New York TimesZOLADZ Styles did not call any exes at our show, but he did a funny bit where he attempted to count all of the “golf dads” in the audience — 34, apparently. He also broke some solemn “bad news” about something that had happened just before the show: “I’ve blown my tongue on some soup.” So yes, effortlessly charismatic banter, and he works every corner of the stage. The set and wardrobe were a bit more minimal than I anticipated; I expected at least one costume change. But I would describe the look he was going for, in a red-and-white-striped jumpsuit, as “sexy candy cane.” The fashion, the fans, the force of personality — it feels like we’re talking about everything but the music here, which is perhaps telling. How did the songs strike you, Jon, and did you get anything out of them that you don’t get on his records?CARAMANICA Basically, we’re of opposite opinions on Styles’s albums — I’m more partial to the most recent one, “Harry’s House,” and I know you lean more toward the previous one, “Fine Line.” When the songs were … funkier — and I use that designation extremely loosely — his performance felt more full. I’m thinking “Satellite,” and also “Cinema,” both from the new album — the rhythm section is in the lead, but doesn’t overpower him. I also liked what he did with “Adore You,” melting the chorus into more of a restrained tease. But when he went unadorned, like on “Matilda,” the air in the room felt heavier. And “Sign of the Times,” the first Styles solo hit, was ponderous, a karaoke take on mid-1970s power-mope.Styles’s performance was heavy on waving, pointing and blowing kisses to various sections of the audience.The New York TimesZOLADZ I sometimes detect a divide between the music Styles wants to make — the big, bold, if somewhat generic-sounding ’70s-style rock of his first album — and the more pop-oriented fare that better suits his personality. Not surprisingly, the songs that worked best for me live were the ones that manage to satisfy both of those impulses, like the groovy, Tame Impala-esque “Daylight” or the still-ubiquitous hit “As It Was.” I wish he’d ended the set on that note, but regrettably he had one more song to play after that, the stomping, Led-Zeppelin-cosplay rocker “Kiwi,” an unfortunate live staple that I consider one of his weakest songs. But, as ever, he seemed to relish playing the role of bombastic rock star, even if the material itself didn’t always electrify.I found it refreshing, though, that Styles is not shying away from his former group on this tour: The first song on his preperformance playlist is One Direction’s “Best Song Ever” — much to the shrieking delight of the thousands of fans who sang along to every word — and during his set he actually played a louder and more rock-oriented version of One Direction’s 2011 hit “What Makes You Beautiful,” which happens to be from an album that his former bandmate Louis Tomlinson recently called a disparaging word we can’t print here. How did you feel about Styles’s raucous 1D cover, Jon?CARAMANICA That was one of the musical high points, if not the peak. It was as if a rowdy bar band momentarily inhabited Styles’s very deliberately understated crew. On Saturday, too, people absolutely lost it when the opening bars of “Best Song Ever” hit right after the conclusion of Blood Orange’s temperate and tasteful opening set. It was the purest release of pent-up demand that I’ve witnessed in quite some time. And that’s how the rest of the night went, too — demand leading supply. Fervor without feeling (and certainly without friction). An arena-size canvas merely doodled on with pencil.And for the record, a friend lent me her pink-and-white boa for a few songs — it didn’t help. More

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      Blondie on the Music That Defined Its Legacy

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      Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and their bandmates built a career rooted in wit, excitement, pastiche and sex. A new boxed set, “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” traces their journey.As Chris Stein searched for rare recordings to include in “Against the Odds: 1974-1982,” a handsome chronicle of the new wave band Blondie’s emergence from underdogs to pop stars, he rummaged diligently inside a packed barn on his property near Woodstock and —“I don’t have a barn,” Stein exclaimed in a recent interview, in a tone that was exasperated but also comedic. “The boxed set says I have a barn?” He sighed. “It’s a garage.”Up in the Blondie stratosphere, something has always gone wrong, even when things were going right. “Against the Odds,” out Friday, documents a volatile timeline of massive chart successes accompanied by personal and professional missteps.“I mean, missteps is an understatement,” Debbie Harry said with a chortle.In an hourlong video conversation, Stein, 72, who plays guitar and functions as the abstract mastermind of Blondie, and Harry, 77, the alluring singer who fronts the band and writes its most elegant lyrics, reflected on the unlikely success hinted at in the title of the boxed set. From 1974 to 1982 and beyond, the pair were inseparable lovers who, with their bandmates, built a career rooted in wit, excitement, sex and a Pop Art sensibility that included pastiche and appropriation. Harry and Stein remained close even after their romance ended in 1987. She’s even godmother to his two daughters.Because they combined an omnivorous curiosity with a playful foxiness rarely attempted in that era of rock music, the band was not taken as seriously as its peers — Talking Heads, Television, Ramones — yet found its way to national TV appearances, arena shows and the top of the charts. Its biggest successes came when it traversed styles: Of Blondie’s four No. 1 hits on the Hot 100, two are disco (“Heart of Glass” and “Call Me”), one is reggae (“The Tide Is High”) and one is a prescient celebration of hip-hop (“Rapture”).The boxed set — the first authorized by the band — makes an argument for Blondie’s greatness, both musical and visual. The Super Deluxe Edition includes the band’s first six studio albums, 36 previously unreleased tracks, and a foil-wrapped 144-page hardcover book with liner notes and photos. At 17 pounds, it’s the definitive account of a sound, attitude, look, and aesthetic that proved inspirational to generations of artists across a spectrum of genres. Madonna has called Harry “a role model,” and the band’s songs have been covered or sampled by Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, the Black Eyed Peas, Missy Elliott, the Bad Plus and Def Leppard.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented, “which spoke of what was acceptable for girls at that time, and the way I had steered myself through life, having a certain facade,” she said from her Chelsea apartment, with a garden view behind her. “It was the same thing David Bowie did.” In her flinty 2019 memoir, “Face It,” Harry says she “was playing at being a cartoon fantasy onstage,” much like Marilyn Monroe. She never pretended that men and women didn’t stare at her, never pretended she didn’t like the attention, but also never took herself too seriously.“I loved how she presented herself,” Shirley Manson of the rock band Garbage said in an enthusiastic phone call. “It wasn’t pandering to the male gaze. She looked smart and sassy, and felt a little dangerous. You forget, because Blondie make it seem so stylish and effortless, how good the songwriting is. They’re the complete, untouchable package.”Harry was raised by adoptive parents in Hawthorne, N.J., but frequently wandered off to Manhattan, and moved into a $64-a-month apartment on St. Marks Place after college. She worked as a model, a secretary for the BBC, a Playboy bunny and a clerk at a head shop. None of it was satisfying. “Music was always a huge, haunting influence,” she said. “I wanted to be in the art world. I felt I should be making music.”Harry sang in a short-lived, bucolic hippie band called Wind in the Willows, and was “sort of a hippie” herself, she said. Her next band, the Stilletos, was an almost vaudevillian girl group whose set included a song called “Wednesday Panties,” and when the Warhol associate Eric Emerson brought his roommate Chris Stein to see the band, he was entranced by Harry.Stein, like Harry, had graduated with an art degree, and he had the advantage of growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, as the only child of intellectual immigrant parents who met as members of the Communist Party. When he was 17 and a self-described hippie weirdo, his band opened for the Velvet Underground, and he resolved to never get a job. “I was on welfare,” he said from his Lower Manhattan loft. “And I painted a bathroom once,” he added, deadpan.Both got a jolt of inspiration when they saw the New York Dolls play at the Mercer Arts Center. “They were funny and nasty and naughty,” Harry recalled. “It was everything I needed at that time.”Harry was naughty, too. A 1979 profile of Blondie in this newspaper made note of Harry’s “disregard for underwear.” Her purposeful use of sexuality wasn’t much more explicit than, say, contemporaneous TV ads for Serta mattresses or Calvin Klein jeans, but it was also an era when everyone, especially men, felt entitled to comment on women’s bodies. The attention on Blondie was “all about how I flaunted my underwear. It’s the Madonna/whore dichotomy — those seem to be the two acceptable occupations for women,” Harry said with a laugh.For Harry, “the lead singer of Blondie” was a character she invented.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesTheo Kogan, the singer of the punk band Lunachicks, said she saw Harry as part of a triumvirate of 1970s tough girls that also included Olivia Newton-John’s leather-encased transformation at the end of “Grease” and Pinky Tuscadero, the motorcycle-riding, butch-but-femme character on the hit show “Happy Days.” “They showed that you can be a glamorpuss and also be tough,” Kogan said in a phone interview.A clever and stylish couple, Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground. The two share many qualities, including hard-shelled cynicism and a capacity for not giving two figs about criticism. But Harry admits that at first, criticism “really floored me. It can knock you down, or it can make you want to fight harder. So it has a lot to offer,” she added with a laugh.So about those missteps Harry alluded to: Blondie’s backstage distractions included fights with the band’s manager and accountant, exploitative contracts, internal band squabbles that evolved into lawsuits, and for Harry and Stein, drug addiction. “Heroin and cocaine,” Stein said. “That’s what you did back then.”Much of this narrative becomes clear in “Against the Odds.” The first of the eight discs features early home recordings and demos of the band from 1974, all of them tentative and uncertain of style. Naysayers at CBGB who were unimpressed with the band used the derisive nickname Blandie, and they were relegated to a perpetual opening act.When they released their first album in 1976, Harry was 31 and Stein was almost 27, which was ancient per punk standards. But the material improved in subsequent years, especially with “Dreaming,” one of the best songs ever written about being young, broke and fabulous in the big city. The guys in the band — the keyboardist Jimmy Destri, the bassist Nigel Harrison, the drummer Clem Burke, the guitarist Frank Infante and Stein — perfected a look: dark suits, skinny ties, mod hair. The songwriting took a leap, with key contributions from Destri, Harrison and Infante, right as Blondie paired with Mike Chapman, a sharp Aussie producer who’d had glam rock hits with the Sweet and Nick Gilder. “It was like the Beatles getting together with George Martin,” Stein said.That creative relationship, however, was not without drama. “The first time Mike saw us play live,” Harry recalled, “he said afterward that he’d never laughed so much in his life. I guess I felt it was a compliment.”Chapman produced the band’s first No. 1, “Heart of Glass,” a thumping, synthesized, drum-machined disco track in which Harry finds herself “lost inside adorable illusion” and “riding high on love’s true bluish light,” a poetic summary of romantic ambivalence.Not for the first time, Blondie was accused of “selling out” (that was once a thing) by embracing trendy dance music. “The whole anti-disco movement smacked of class war to me,” Stein said. “When I was a kid, my heroes were 60-year-old Black men — Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf. Disco was just an extension of R&B.”“For me, it was about dancing,” Harry added. “I loved going to clubs.”Blondie earned a second No. 1, “Call Me,” working with the producer Giorgio Moroder, who observed the band working — or more precisely, bickering — in the studio and decided to record the music with players who weren’t wasting his time. “He’s a happy guy,” Harry said. “Why would he want to have that around?”A fifth album, “Autoamerican,” came out in 1980 and featured a smash cover of “The Tide is High,” a 1960s ska song by a Jamaican group, the Paragons, as well as “Rapture,” the first No. 1 song in the United States to feature a rap vocal. Stein and Harry were curious scenesters, always eager to find new trends, and it was inevitable that they’d cross paths with rappers. The “Rapture” video featured the future “Yo! MTV Raps” host Fab 5 Freddy, his fellow graffiti artist Lee Quinones and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Accusations that the group had appropriated music by people of color followed, and Stein doesn’t deny it. “I always say, Black people invented and the white people presented,” Stein said. “It’s just part of the power imbalance in America and elsewhere.”Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground.Stephen SprouseBy 1982, the final year of the boxed set, conflicts within the band were untenable, and Harry was spending most of her time tending to Stein, who was hospitalized with a near-fatal skin disease. “We were pretty stoned,” Stein said. “That’s what exacerbated the illness I had,” he added. Blondie broke up.Stein and Harry did, too, in early 1987. Their split seems to have been more sad and resigned than rancorous, and Stein was heavily involved in Harry’s post-Blondie solo albums. In 1997, they re-formed the band, which has continued to record and tour, now with only one other original member, Burke. When Blondie was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, the former members Nigel Harrison and Frank Infante stood onstage and fruitlessly beseeched Stein and Harry to let them perform at the ceremony. Blondie drama is eternal.Harry and Stein continue to work, both together and apart. He’s an accomplished photographer, has his own memoir coming out next year, and is toiling away on a Blondie documentary, which has been in progress since at least 1978. “We’re still hustling,” Stein said. Perhaps new missteps lie ahead.Harry has acting gigs, a reissue of her first solo album, “Koo Koo,” and is still active in the downtown music scene, braving smelly rock bars in search of inspiration. Well past the age of a Madonna or a whore, she’s inventing another acceptable occupation: the inspirational septuagenarian. “You’re not used to seeing someone Debbie’s age hanging out and going to clubs,” said Kogan, the Lunachicks singer. “That’s the beauty of her — she’s a role model for us as adults, as well as when we were younger.” More

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      Blackpink’s Genre-Clashing Return, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Blake Shelton, Chloe Moriondo and Madonna.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.Blackpink, ‘Pink Venom’Over the four years leading to its 2020 debut album, Blackpink — Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa, Rosé — became one of K-pop’s biggest global success stories: musically modern, engaged with pop from around the world, versatile. The first single from the group’s upcoming second album, “Born Pink” (due next month) has the comfort of anarchy.  Every four bars, a new approach enters — familiar K-pop elasticity, loose Middle Eastern themes, gaudy rock, West Coast rap, and more. It exists out where maximalism moves past philosophy to aesthetic. JON CARAMANICAMadonna, ‘Get Together’ (Jacques Lu Cont Vocal Edit)The remixes on Madonna’s “Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones,” out Friday, throb, zigzag and shimmer, highlighting the pop superstar’s deep connection to the dance floor — starting with her 1983 single “Holiday” and wrapping with “I Don’t Search I Find,” the glorious house standout on her most recent studio album, “Madame X” (its lyrics give the collection its name). As a full body of work, Madonna’s 2005 LP “Confessions on a Dance Floor” represents her most potent love letter to the form, and the Jacques Lu Cont Vocal Edit remix of its “Get Together,” available digitally for the first time, is a refreshing break from the (still great!) 4 a.m.-at-the-club pound that marks most of the set. Replacing its oozing synths with a snaking guitar riff, the track rides nearly like an indie-rock song that eventually glitches out and finds a way home again. CARYN GANZ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ), ‘[] vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ (۝ʅ(Ɵʅ():::()̵̳̗̊(Ɵʅ()vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ)’This garble of characters is an alias of the innovative electronic music producer Kieran Hebden (also known as Four Tet). His fleet and cheeky new song is indebted to sensual garage and boisterous house. CARAMANICAZedd, Maren Morris and Beauz ‘Made You Say’Like Zedd and Maren Morris’s previous collaboration, the unavoidable pop smash “The Middle,” “Make You Say” is the expertly engineered product of a whole cadre of collaborators: This time around, that includes co-writing credits from the sibling D.J. duo Beauz and the thirst trap aficionado Charlie Puth. All throughout, Morris hopscotches nimbly across Zedd’s syncopated arrangement and sing-songy melody, but the song is at its best when it really lets her rip, contrasting the grainy texture of her voice with the sleek surfaces of Zedd’s production. “You got your arms around her when you sleep,” she belts with alluring sass, “but I’m the one you dream about.” LINDSAY ZOLADZIsabella Lovestory, ‘Sexo Amor Dinero’An industrial post-reggaeton thumper about the sweat at the intersection of money and sex. CARAMANICAChloe Moriondo, ‘Fruity’The ever-evolving Chloe Moriondo — a young musician who basically came of age on her YouTube channel — makes an exhilarating pivot to hyperpop on “Fruity,” the first single from her forthcoming album, “Suckerpunch.” The song begins with Moriondo singing in her signature, sweetly muttered register atop some bright, pulsating synths, but as it builds in intensity her vocals become increasingly urgent and start to warp like melting plastic. “So close I can almost taste,” she sings of a “fresh and fruity” crush who she compares to a whole litany of sugary treats, building toward a chorus that’s deliciously hysterical and relentlessly catchy. ZOLADZPony, ‘Peach’It turns out that Pony, the tuneful grunge-pop band from Toronto, is quite aptly named: Earlier this year, the vocalist and guitarist Sam Bielanski announced a new gig: voicing a character in a “My Little Pony” cartoon. The charismatic pull of Bielanski’s vocals are on full display on the group’s new, ’90s-alt-rock-nodding single “Peach,” a bittersweet tale of love bombing and, eventually, cold clarity. “Picturing the salt of the beach,” Bielanski sings on the chorus, as a kind of personal reminder, “’Cause I don’t wanna drown in the taste of this peach.” ZOLADZBlake Shelton, ‘No Body’A sashaying splash of early ’90s power-country revivalism from Blake Shelton, a superstar who’s traversed many styles with ease in his career, but never quite owned one. Here he’s reviving a once-rowdy sound and nodding to Brooks & Dunn (“Don’t wanna scoot the boots with nobody”) — a convincing mimic, as ever. CARAMANICANick Hakim, ‘Happen’“Happen,” from the Brooklyn-based indie musician Nick Hakim, is a hypnotic, woozily romantic ballad that nonetheless contains flashes of melancholic darkness: The muted, sludgy acoustic guitar conjures Elliott Smith, while the close-miked, near-whispered vocals are faintly reminiscent of the softer side of the Deftones. That overcast sound, though, balances out the openhearted nature of Hakim’s lyrics, which are almost devotional in their description of a transformative love. “The sweetest angel fell into my world,” he sings. “She gives me reason, was lost for a damn long time.” ZOLADZ More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’: The Speed Round

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherBeyoncé’s “Renaissance” has been in the Top 5 of the Billboard album chart for two weeks, and its single “Break My Soul” has led the Hot 100 twice in a row. It is one of the year’s commercial success stories, and also one of its most ideologically provocative albums.On this week’s Popcast, a series of conversations relating to themes brought up by “Renaissance,” including the ways in which queer influence gets mainstreamed, the challenges of writing criticism about superstars, and the ethics and legalities of songwriting credits.Guests:Naima Cochrane, a music journalist and consultantJason P. Frank, a writer for VultureKiana Mickles, a New York staff writer at Resident AdvisorPatrik Sandberg, a former editor of V and CR Fashion Book who writes about music for Interview, i-D and othersConnect 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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      From Harry Styles to BTS, Pop’s Biggest Stars Are Looking to Residencies

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      Extended runs in one venue, once associated with legacy acts, have become popular with stars including Harry Styles and BTS, lowering bills and building hype as touring costs rise.On Saturday, Harry Styles will take the stage at Madison Square Garden as part of the tour for his chart-topping new album, “Harry’s House.”Then, next Sunday, he will play the Garden again. Next Monday, too. And another 12 times through Sept. 21. At the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., Styles will perform another 15 times in October and November. The entire North American leg of the singer’s latest tour, which opened in Toronto this week, consists of 42 shows in just five cities.Styles’s tour is the most prominent example of a bubbling trend of concert residencies: extended runs by artists in a limited number of cities and venues. In a rebounding touring market, with concert-starved audiences buying tickets in record numbers — and at higher prices than ever — these bookings are deliberate choices by prominent artists to reduce their time on the road and set up shop in far fewer places than they could on a traditional tour.Besides Styles’s, high-profile residencies have been completed recently by the K-pop phenom BTS and the Mexican rock band Maná, which has booked 12 dates since March at the Forum, the group’s only performances in the United States all year. In Las Vegas, the place that arguably birthed the residency format, Adele will begin a 32-date weekend engagement at Caesars Palace in November, and Katy Perry and Miranda Lambert also have dates lined up for the fall.“We thought doing a whole tour would be really challenging, maybe impossible, given all the variables,” said Fher Olvera, the lead singer of Maná.Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesAccording to talent agents and industry observers, the reasons include clever branding, the protection of artists and crews in the pandemic and a cold calculation of financial efficiencies. More concerts in fewer cities means fewer trucks on the road and lower bills all around.Those financial advantages are key at a time when gas prices are high and the concert world must deal with the same supply-chain shortages that have hit other businesses, said Ray Waddell, who covered the touring business for decades for Billboard magazine and now runs the media and conferences division of the Oak View Group, which operates sports and entertainment venues around the world.“The math is challenging right now,” Waddell said. “It costs way more to tour, more to produce the shows for everybody, more for labor. At the same time, inflation is going to impact discretionary income and force fans to make choices. That’s bad calculus.”For artists like Adele, Harry Styles and BTS, whose vast fan bases seem to have unquenchable demand, asking fans to come to them — and perhaps incur travel expenses of their own — may not be a great risk. But this model does not translate well below the superstar level, agents say.Of course, extended bookings are nothing new. Bruce Springsteen played Giants Stadium 10 times in the summer of in 2003. Prince played 21 shows around Los Angeles in 2011, most at the Forum. But the pandemic may have led to a critical mass.For artists and venues, touring has had a much-needed return to full capacity this year. According to Pollstar, a trade publication that follows the concert industry, gross ticket sales for the top 100 tours in North America reached $1.7 billion for the first six months of 2022, up 9 percent from the same period in 2019. Live Nation, the global concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, recently reported that the company had already sold 100 million tickets for the full year, more than in 2019. Still, the tightening of the wider economy has many in the industry worried about the rest of the year.On the road, and in venues packed with unmasked fans, the threat of Covid-19 still lingers, leading to occasional postponements and cancellations. A residency plan can limit the risk of exposure, and also give an artist a temporary break from the rigors of the road. In one recent Instagram post from a tour stop in Germany, Styles showed himself collapsed in an ice bath. (Styles and his representatives declined to comment for this article.)Adele will begin a 32-date weekend engagement at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in November.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for AdeleThe complications of touring in the age of Covid-19 were behind Maná’s decision to limit its U.S. shows to the Forum. Last year, as the group began making its plans for 2022, the rise of the Omicron variant, and the tangle of local health regulations across the country, made a nationwide tour seem daunting.So they decided to stick to one spot in the Los Angeles area, the group’s biggest worldwide market. The band has already played eight sold-out shows at the Forum, drawing 110,000 fans, and has four more announced through October.“We just wanted to get out and play, to be with our fans,” said Fher Olvera, Maná’s lead singer. “We thought doing a whole tour would be really challenging, maybe impossible, given all the variables.”“After everything that’s happened over the last few years,” Olvera added, “the residency is more than a series of concerts for us — it’s a celebration of life.”The origins of the contemporary concert residency go back to Celine Dion’s decision to set up in Las Vegas in 2003, a time when that city was still seen as a pasture for fading acts.“It was a very big risk at the time — everybody thought we were fools,” said John Meglen of Concerts West, Dion’s promoter, which is part of the AEG Live empire. “At the time, Vegas was like the end of your career. It was like, ‘Come die with us.’”But Dion’s two residencies sold about $660 million in tickets to more than 1,100 shows, according to Pollstar. Dion’s engagements, as well as two by Elton John, recalibrated the industry’s approach to Las Vegas, and were followed by residencies there with Garth Brooks, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Drake and many others.The crucial artist for expanding the residency outside of Las Vegas, however, was Billy Joel. After being named the Garden’s first “music franchise” in late 2013, Joel began playing there monthly in 2014, and, aside from a hiatus during the pandemic, never stopped; his 86th concert in the series was recently announced for Dec. 19.Through his June show, the Garden residency has sold about $180 million in tickets. If the rest of his concerts there this year sell out — a fair bet, since every other night of the residency has — the cumulative gross will be around $200 million.“It’s basically the Super Bowl of music events,” said Dennis Arfa, Joel’s longtime booking agent. Joel has said he would continue the engagement “as long as the demand continues,” and there is no sign of that letting up.For Arfa, the scale of engagements like Joel’s and Dion’s raises a question of nomenclature. Do 15 shows over a few weeks count as a “residency” compared to 86, or to 1,100? If not, then what is it?“The word residency is kind of undefinable,” Arfa said. “Now everything is a residency. People do four nights and they can call it a residency. It’s a matter of verbiage and perception. I think the accomplishment is more important than the title.”Whatever these are, they are likely to continue. Omar Al-joulani, Live Nation’s president of touring, said he expected around 30 residency-type engagements in 2023. “That’s including a big Vegas year.”But talent agents and music executives say that these kinds of events cannot replace full-scale touring as a way to satisfy demand and cultivate audiences. When Styles announced his tour dates, Nathan Hubbard, a longtime ticketing executive who is the former chief executive of Ticketmaster, on Twitter declared the strategy “the future of live.” But in a recent interview, he took a more nuanced view.“This is not the new touring model,” Hubbard said. “This doesn’t mean nobody’s going to Louisville — indeed, most artists are still going to have to go market to market to hustle it.”And when a major venue announces its next block booking, what do we call it? Is it a residency, or something else? Arfa, Joel’s agent, pointed to Styles’s dates at the Garden.“It’s a run,” he said. “It’s a great run.” More

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      If It’s All Going to Hell, Rina Sawayama Can’t Wait to See You There

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      On a sticky June afternoon at the Balloon Saloon, a party store in Tribeca, a casual shopper would have found an array of stick-on piercings, a host of glow-in-the-dark finger puppets, a shocking selection of fake excrement and one pop star giggling about it all.Rina Sawayama wandered through the aisles squeaking with equal parts delight and mild horror, posing for pictures with mannequins before settling on two flags: a rainbow one, in honor of Pride Month, and, seeing as it was one of the British-Japanese artist’s last days in the United States for a while, a Stars and Stripes.It was the final week of a pandemic-delayed tour supporting her 2020 debut, “Sawayama,” and she was feeling emotional. “I’m going to miss stories with the fans and just sharing that incredible energy in the space,” she said a few hours earlier, over lunch. “It’s almost like a relationship.”Her shows at Brooklyn Steel in May showed off the depth of that bond, as well as the breadth of Sawayama’s musical palate: part rock concert, part pop spectacular, part group therapy session for a mostly young, mostly queer crowd. As the bass throbbed and heads bobbed, Sawayama commanded the stage, singing, swearing and offering words of affirmation and appreciation: “Thank you for making me feel seen, and thank you for making me feel heard,” she announced; later, she instructed audience members to tell each other they’re hot.Sawayama, 32, has muscled her way to pop stardom as a devoted student of it, building an aesthetic out of the parts she likes — Lizzo’s empowerment, Charli XCX’s fun-and-freakiness, Lady Gaga’s genre-clashing vastness — and tossing aside the rest. (Her studiousness isn’t limited to music: She graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology and sociology.)“Sawayama,” an unexpected mix of head-thrashing rock and early aughts bubble-gum pop, arrived after seven years of making (and largely funding) her own music. Its April 2020 release date was not fortuitous. Now the singer and songwriter is trying to regain the momentum lost when the pandemic swallowed her debut and turn it up to 10 for her second album, “Hold the Girl,” due Sept. 16.“A lot of times, artists feel the pressure to do sessions and just bash out songs, but I am just not like that,” Sawayama said earlier this year during the first of two long interviews. “I don’t like working hard, I like working intentionally.”Sawayama knew she needed to pivot. So much had changed, in big and small ways, since her first album: The world was tense and dangerous; she’d turned 30 and entered a new era of personal evolution, starting an intensive form of therapy and folding its revelations into the DNA of “Hold the Girl.” She won’t reveal those realizations just yet, in part out of fear that she’ll influence her fans’ responses to the songs.“I think the temptation, as an artist these days, is to look online and see what the fans want,” she said. “But I’m going to write something that’s meaningful and worth people’s time.”The result is an expansive album that stuffs in even more of her musical inspirations, with nods to everyone from Shania Twain and Abba (on “This Hell,” a cheeky, country-flecked song that sounds like when a church group facilitator accidentally makes purgatory sound really fun) to Gwen Stefani (she wanted the floaty “Catch Me in the Air” to resemble the Corrs writing a song for the frontwoman turned pop star) to Madonna (the sparse, echoey introduction to the single “Hold the Girl” feels related to “Like a Prayer”).Combining nostalgic sounds with the latest technology allows Sawayama to experience the best of both sonic worlds. “What I think about the New Jack Swing era, and production from the ’90s in general, it’s like …” she groaned. “The sound was so ambitious, but I think just the tech of that time didn’t capture the full breadth of it.”Clarence Clarity, the primary producer on both of Sawayama’s albums, described his process of making music with Sawayama as throwing a bunch of disparate eras and aesthetics together and seeing what works. “It doesn’t really matter what genre it is from song to song — it’s how can we evoke these different feelings,” he said in an interview.“That’s the nice thing about working with Rina,” he added. “She doesn’t think in traditional terms.”WHEN WE MET up in February in the back of a verdant hotel lobby, our worlds finally thawing from the double-punch of a pandemic winter, Sawayama wore her long black hair straight down to her shoulders, her brutally cut asymmetrical side bangs emphasizing her angular face. Though onstage she favors dramatic, sculptural costumes, that day she resembled a ballerina out on a bodega run in a black hoodie and sweatpants. Looking at her hands felt like peering into a silverware drawer: a silver or green ring on nearly every finger, her nails painted chrome and covered in baubles and pearls in the same shade, like gilded sweat. She had only gotten them recently, and they were a lot to get used to.“I don’t know how Rosalía does it,” she said.I asked Sawayama about the last really good party she’d been to. Her answer sounded like a civilian’s fever dream, various celebrities brought together by nothing but vibes, or the sort of party you imagine happens once you make it. She ended up doing karaoke with Harry Styles, Karamo Brown and Bobby Berk of “Queer Eye” fame, the model Kiko Mizuhara and a stylist friend.That night was four years ago. “Have I been to a party since?” she wondered aloud. It’s unlikely. Even in her early 30s, Sawayama is a retired socialite, having gotten it all out of her system when she was in her teens. She was born in Niigata, Japan, and temporarily moved to London as a young child with her parents. They soon divorced, which changed not only her home base — she ended up staying in London — but also her family’s class status. The singer shared a bedroom with her mother until she was about 15; the combination of that claustrophobic proximity, adolescence and the language barrier — neither spoke much English — all weighed on her, coalescing into a new identity that Sawayama could form for herself: a pop music fanatic.She used the genre to connect with her classmates, forming close friendships that took her out of her home and into a much wider world. As an early teen, she’d listen to albums at the Virgin Megastore for hours — the Killers, Bloc Party — then shadow those bands from gig to gig. Once, she followed a group she liked to Paris on her own, bunking with a fellow fan she’d met at a show. At 16, she started uploading her own music to the internet — covers of her favorite songs.“I was very angry as a teenager, and me going out was a reaction to that,” she said. (When I asked what “going out” looked like, Sawayama said that people were basically pretending they were on “Skins,” a British TV show akin to “Euphoria” that was airing around this time.) “I really think I had to find my creative voice later on in life because I didn’t have that time on my own,” she said. “I didn’t have any space. I didn’t have any privacy. I was worried about even writing my diary.”Starting her career in music a bit later in life, “I’m able to come to the table with a bit more stories, say and life experience and things to write about,” Sawayama said.Olivia Lifungula for The New York TimesAt the ripe age of 15, Sawayama walked into her kitchen one morning and announced she was done having puberty. (Her mother was not easily convinced.) But she had gotten all of her partying out of her system, and just in time, too: She recommitted to her grades and ended up enrolling at Cambridge. The culture shock hit hard: Sawayama spent most of her program depressed, and her relationship with her mother continued to sour until she got kicked out of the house.Sawayama worked various jobs — as a model, at an Apple Store (until she got fired for modeling in a Samsung advertisement), in an ice cream truck, as a nail tech. On the side, she developed her music, uploading new recordings to SoundCloud in between shifts. Eventually, she started getting recognized while doing pedicures, so she gave that gig up.Her manager introduced her to Clarity, the producer, and they collaborated on “Rina,” an EP released in 2017 about digital and cultural anxieties. Sawayama played small tours at home and the United States, but needed to keep working various jobs to support herself in between shows.“I signed my first record deal when I was 29,” she said during our second interview in May, over French fries at the Odeon in Tribeca. “Which is just so late for a pop artist, and I love that I’m able to change that in a positive way. I’m able to come to the table with a bit more stories, say, and life experience and things to write about.”Maturity has other benefits, too: In between Sawayama’s albums, some of the artists she’d admired became collaborators. She remade her own song “Chosen Family” with Elton John, teamed with Charli XCX on the pop star’s single “Beg for You” and provided vocals on a remix of Lady Gaga’s “Chromatica” track “Free Woman.”Her reach still shocks her. “All those people I grew up listening to” — she said she’d also heard her fans include Katy Perry and the producer Jack Antonoff — “I can’t believe they know I exist,” she said.But Clarity, who noted that Sawayama’s new album is far more personal than her debut, isn’t surprised: “She was meant to be a pop star,” he said. “She was born to do this.”FOR YEARS, SAWAYAMA has kept a list of interesting quotes or phrases in a Notes app on her iPhone as potential sources for inspiration, lines from books or from conversations with friends. The title of one of her new singles, “This Hell,” sprung from that list: Though she had originally clacked out “this heaven is better with you,” the phrase had morphed by the time she got into the studio, where she realized hell could encompass more of her reality.For one, parts of the pandemic were certainly hellish. For another, restrictive religious beliefs are being codified into law across the world. Like Lil Nas X, another artist who responds with queer insouciance toward Judeo-Christian homophobia, the song’s lines — “God hates us? All right then!/Buckle up, at dawn we’re riding” — imply that there’ll be plenty of good company on the road to perdition.“I was just like, ‘If there is a belief that we’re wrong for wanting to have autonomy in our bodies or identities, then [expletive] it, we’re all going to go to hell, and let’s have a party,’” Sawayama said, laughing and adding a few additional expletives. She identifies as pansexual; the music video for the song features the singer in a three-way marriage with a man and a woman. “Hell is going to be the place to be, evidently.”Onstage in Brooklyn in May, Sawayama brought her fans into her version of it — devil chic — vamping about the stage in a blood-red, strong-shouldered unitard. Lithe but powerful, she twisted and snaked her upper body with aplomb, adding extra flicks of rhythm when she felt the call to. At one point, her guitarist came forward to join her at the front of the stage, shredding powerfully, losing herself as if in a trance. But Sawayama only had eyes for the instrument itself, her eyes locked onto its strings, dancing in response to its sounds, almost like she had been possessed. More