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      Self Esteem, a Pop Singer Who Wants Britain to ‘Prioritise Pleasure’

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      Rebecca Lucy Taylor is touching a nerve with brutally honest songs about not having it all figured out.LONDON — Rebecca Lucy Taylor — better known as Self Esteem — was onstage at a club here last Friday, performing “I’m Fine,” a pop song with a pounding beat about a sexual assault. The track includes a recording of a woman describing how she barks like a dog when approached by groups of men on the street: “There is nothing that terrifies a man more than a woman that appears completely deranged.” As strings soared, Taylor and her band started barking and howling along. Several women in the audience joined in.It was a moment that captured both the irreverence and sincerity of Self Esteem, a budding British pop star, whose second album, “Prioritise Pleasure,” is building her a fan base who say they feel seen by her music.For more than 15 years, Taylor, 35, has been working away in Britain’s music scene, first in the indie band Slow Club, which she said she left after years of finding her ideas stifled, then as Self Esteem, a name that “just accidentally become the exact thing I needed,” she said in an interview at an east London bar a week before the concert.If there’s a manifesto behind “Prioritise Pleasure,” it’s to encourage people to put themselves first.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesSlow Club toured internationally and had a cult fan base, but “Prioritise Pleasure” is bringing her much broader attention: magazine covers, TV performances and an onslaught of fans testifying on social media about how transformative they find her music. A number of particularly loyal ones have even been getting Self Esteem tattoos.“I have felt very alone most of my life, like ‘What is wrong with me?’” Taylor said, pointing to expectations for women to settle down and have children. Her recent success “makes me feel this overwhelming relief that I’m not a total weirdo.”If Taylor has a manifesto behind “Prioritise Pleasure,” it’s encouraging people to put themselves first without denying that they can also make mistakes. The “pleasure” mentioned in the album’s title can take many forms, she said, including what she was looking forward to doing that evening: going home, ordering take out and watching “Succession.”Self Esteem’s rise comes at a time when new attention is being paid to violence against women in Britain following the deaths of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped and murdered by a police officer while walking home in March, and Sabina Nessa, who was killed while walking through a park in September. This month, there have been reports of women being injected with syringes at nightclubs, a variation of “spiking,” when drugs are dropped into someone’s drink.Jude Rogers, a music journalist who has written about “Prioritse Pleasure,” said Self Esteem’s music feels right for the moment. “We needed a woman to appear who was going to say, ‘Enough,’” Rogers said. Self Esteem is “expressing all the messiness, all the frustration and all the anger of being a woman,” in ambitious pop music,” she added.Taylor said she’s been concerned about her safety since she was a teenager, “which I guess is like the zeitgeist now.” She started writing the album in 2019, and decided to process a sexual assault she had survived through her music. “As someone who lives very free, I like to be sexual, I like to do what I want,” she said. “But suddenly it was taken from me and I had a decision to never enjoy myself in that way again, to never be the person I like to be, or turn it all into defiant euphoria.”The end of a toxic relationship also informed the album, but the record has a strong thread of empowerment, which Taylor said was a result of more positive experiences. “I finally hit this beautiful cross section of I’m older, the therapy’s kicked in a bit, and I care less,” she said. While making the record, she stopped worrying about other people’s expectations of her and her career.“I finally hit this beautiful cross section of I’m older, the therapy’s kicked in a bit, and I care less,” Taylor said. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesAll those changes led Taylor to write songs like “I Do This All The Time,” a largely spoken word track in which she lists her struggles, including everyday anxieties (“Old habits die for a couple of weeks, and then I start doing them again”) and sexist comments from old tour managers (“All you need to do, darling, is fit into that little dress of yours”).Johan Karlberg, a member of the group the Very Best who produced “Prioritise Pleasure,” believes Self Esteem’s success is less about the current cultural climate in Britain and more a response to Taylor’s great songs and her “brute honesty.”“People like to say they’re being honest in their songs and interviews, but really they very rarely are,” he said. “Rebecca is in everything, and people relate to that.”At her London concert last week, the relating was nearly deafening, as fans shouted along with their favorite lines (“Sexting you at the mental health club seems counterproductive” was particularly loud).One fan, Cat Carrigan, 30, said she’s drawn to a danceable Self Esteem track called “Moody” that’s both a tale of a relationship collapsing and an attempt to reclaim a common insult used against woman. “I’ve been called a moody cow many times in my life,” Carrigan said. “It’s not going to affect me anymore.”But Rubie Street, 29, said there something else that’s made her a fan. The songs “are banging tunes, aren’t they?” she said. “That always helps.” More

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      El Alfa, the King of Dembow, Dazzles at Madison Square Garden

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      The sold-out show by the Dominican artist was a watershed moment for the dembow movement.“Who said the Dominican Republic couldn’t go global?” El Alfa announced in Spanish from the stage halfway through his first concert at Madison Square Garden, as red and blue Dominican flags fluttered across the crowd of thousands. The 30-year-old performer, born Emanuel Herrera Batista, had good reason to celebrate: On Friday night, the global ambassador of dembow became the genre’s first artist to sell out the storied venue.It wasn’t just a personal success, but a watershed moment for the dembow scene he has spearheaded for over a decade — a street sound that contains the spiraling histories of the Caribbean. Dominican dembow is an Afro-diasporic music genre born in the Black and working-class neighborhoods outside of Santo Domingo in the late ’90s and early ’00s, reimagined from Jamaican dancehall riddims (from the Patois for “rhythm”), which form its foundation. But rather than lingering in a slow liquid haze, dembow producers crank the tempo up to lightning speed, stitching and alternating different riddims while rappers deliver breakneck, electric bars. Then, beatmakers chop up and duplicate hooks in the chorus, yielding supreme quotability and catchiness.Lyrically, dembow is a creative playground where artists are constantly inventing their own slang and vocabularies of becoming. The genre embraces the euphoria of everyday pleasures, like sex, dancing and partying. Unsurprisingly, it is often used as a scapegoat for Dominican social problems, a critique informed by racism and classism. Elites malign dembow as a breeding ground for crime, drugs and “sexual deviance,” characterizing it as pure vulgar expression — like the history of most music genres born out of struggle. The Dominican government regularly censors dembow songs it deems “explicit” and “obscene.” Also like many genres, dembow must contend with its patriarchal past and present, but it’s too simple, too narrow-minded to reduce it to plain raunch or misogyny. Dembow is also a gesture of defiance — a refusal to submit to colonial, “proper” ways of being, speaking and living.And honestly, it’s also just a lot of fun. El Alfa is a maximally charismatic performer, a comedian whose charm can transcend the stage and saturate an arena. Over the course of the night, he repeatedly demanded audience members scream if they were proud to be Dominican, conducted thousands of concertgoers sitting on different sides of the venue in a competition of volume and jokingly dedicated a song to parents who buy Louis Vuitton and Gucci for their children. When he brought out the merengue icon Fernandito Villalona, who strolled onstage in a shimmering silver jacket encrusted with red and blue rhinestones in the shape of the Dominican flag, El Alfa got on his knees in a gesture of deference and referred to Villalona as his father.The show was filled with wisecracking banter and playful antics, but it was above all a showcase of El Alfa’s artistry.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesUnder El Alfa’s command, the Garden, an already carnivalesque venue, became bacchanalian. At every turn, the artist reveled in excess and humor. He performed his laugh-out-loud summer hit “La Mamá de la Mamá” not once, but twice, a cabal of dancers in matching costumes gyrating behind him. Featured artists El Cherry Scom and CJ joined him onstage, a spectacle that ended in El Alfa climbing a monitor and the lime-haired Cherry taking his pants and shirt off, twerking passionately in his boxers in front of thousands. Before the show’s end, El Alfa claimed that he and his team had been fined for having too much fun and letting the show run over time.But focus too much on the wisecracking banter or the playful antics onstage, and you’ll miss the artistry. El Alfa has staggering control of his voice. On “Mueve La Cadera,” he sculpted it into percussive babbling; on “Tarzan,” it was ululating yells; on “Suave,” high-pitched baby talk. During his rendition of “Acuetate,” El Alfa had his D.J. cut out the track so he could spit the lyrics a cappella in double-time, effortlessly showing off his dexterity as a rapper. On “Sientate en Ese Deo,” his D.J. slowed the tempo so the lyrics could land with decelerated precision. It was a sublime display of El Alfa’s ability to stretch the boundaries of speech and language. For some, his voice might call to mind the falsettos of the Bee Gees; for others, the yelps of Atlanta rapper Young Thug. But let it be known: This is a distinctly Dominican way of speaking and manipulating language.Detractors often dismiss dembow for being repetitive, but that critique fails to recognize the creativity embedded in iteration. Repetition is part of why El Alfa can turn anything into a hook, and make listeners cackle in the process; quotable, recurring punch lines are an essential part of his brand. “La Mamá de la Mamá” is a song rooted in double entendre about oral sex, a gag that fully reveals itself once the chorus hits. When El Alfa performed it on Friday, the lyrics flashed onscreen in neon colors: “Dale cuchupla-pla-pla, cuchupla-pla-pla.” To an unsuspecting ear, this sounds like gibberish. I paused briefly and giggled to myself, wondering how I would translate the cleverness of this addictive, onomatopoeic hook into English. I realized it was futile, and that was precisely where the ingenuity bloomed.While the concert was a display of El Alfa’s agility and showmanship, it will go down as a celebration of a movement. A few minutes into the show, he set the tone for the evening, declaring, “This isn’t my success; it’s my country’s success.” He pointedly shared the spotlight, bringing out a parade of other Dominican artists (the pink-haired Kiko el Crazy, the playboy vocalist Mark B, the tough talking dembowsero Shelow Shaq) and a crew of non-Dominican collaborators who’ve helped him along the way (the Colombian pop star J Balvin, the New York radio personality Alex Sensation, the Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Farruko). Notably, none of the women who have helped push dembow forward were present. But the gesture still felt like a gleeful jab to those who said dembow would never travel beyond the borders of its birthplace. More

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      Adele Is No. 1 Once Again, With ‘Easy on Me’

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      The singer’s long-awaited comeback single is No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart with 54 million streams and strong showings for downloads and radio play.After a six-year wait, new music by Adele was sure to be a hit. But how big of one, especially for a song like “Easy on Me” — a classic piano torch ballad that ignores virtually all contemporary pop standards — was unclear.Turns out it was a really big hit.The song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, with 54 million streams, 74,000 track downloads and 19,000 radio spins in the United States during its first full week out, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Released at midnight on Oct. 15, British time — it landed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, so was available to American fans the previous evening — it broke Spotify’s record for the most streams on a single day, with 24 million clicks around the world.While Adele’s streaming numbers are big, they did not break records on the overall chart. When Drake’s single “Way 2 Sexy” came out last month, for example, it logged 67 million streams. But it had far fewer downloads than “Easy on Me,” and it was not nearly as popular on the radio; Billboard’s chart is a composite of all those measurements. (In a quirk that was a result of the unusual timing of the song’s release, it had opened on last week’s chart at No. 68, thanks to just a few hours of availability before the new period began last Friday. So officially, it climbed 67 spots to the top in its second week out.)Online, YouTube musicologists have been praising “Easy on Me” as a prime example of Adele’s vocal talent and old-fashioned songcraft, and the song’s almost total absence of percussion has led enterprising drummers to audition the beats they would add. (Good luck, guys!)As of Monday, the music video — which opens with Adele pushing a cassette tape into a car stereo and goes from wistful black-and-white to an all-the-drama color climax — has logged 112 million views on YouTube.“Easy on Me” is Adele’s fifth song to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100. Her next album, “30,” is due Nov. 19.On this week’s album charts, the Atlanta rapper Young Thug’s new release, “Punk,” opened at No. 1 with the equivalent of 90,000 sales in the United States, including 102 million streams and 12,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data. “Punk,” which features appearances by J. Cole, Drake, Doja Cat, ASAP Rocky and others, marks Young Thug’s third time at No. 1, the last just six months ago, with the release of “Slime Language 2,” a compilation album from the rapper’s label, Young Stoner Life.Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” last week’s most popular album, falls to No. 2. A rerelease of “Faces,” a 2014 mixtape by the rapper Mac Miller, who died in 2018, is No. 3. Coldplay’s latest LP, “Music of the Spheres,” opens in fourth place, and “Let It Be,” the Beatles’ final studio album, originally released in 1970, is at No. 5 thanks to a deluxe reissue. More

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      Dee Pop, Drummer and Downtown New York Fixture, Dies at 65

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      Initially known for his tight and soulful playing with the celebrated post-punk band Bush Tetras, he later became an entrepreneur of avant-garde music.Dee Pop, a drummer who first found grimy rock stardom as a founding member of the underground New York band Bush Tetras during the no wave and post-punk scene of the late 1970s, and who later became an elder statesman of the city’s alternative music scene, died on Oct. 9 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 65.His brother, Tom Papadopoulos, said the cause was heart failure.Some 40 years ago, an avant-garde punk movement was rumbling from the underground scene below 14th Street. Bands like the Contortions, Liquid Liquid, D.N.A. and 8 Eyed Spy led the charge, playing nightly at venues like the Mudd Club, Tier 3 and CBGB. Amid the fray emerged the moment’s must-see band, Bush Tetras, who disbanded just four years later but left a profound impact on the scene.The female-fronted quartet, often clad in headbands and leopard-print scarves, played a danceable breed of post-punk rooted in jagged guitar hooks and funky rhythms. Key to the band’s dub-struck groove was their leather-jacketed drummer, Dee Pop, whose tight playing laced some soul into the nihilism of the no wave era.“The funk part of it,” Mr. Pop recently told The Village Sun, “became central to our sound. I guess I kind of destroyed no wave by putting a 4/4 beat to it. That’s what made the Bush Tetras a little more accessible.”The band’s other members were the vocalist Cynthia Sley, the guitarist Pat Place and the bassist Laura Kennedy (who died in 2011). The group’s “Too Many Creeps,” a punk anthem about the frustration of having to dodge being hassled by men on city streets, was released in 1980 and became a dance-floor hit. The rock critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time that it “summed up the Lower East Side circa 1980.”Thurston Moore, the singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth, said that in his 20s he admired what he described as the band’s abiding Downtown cool.“When Bush Tetras first started playing out I was extremely impressed,” Mr. Moore said in an email, “and very envious.” Bush Tetras gradually started performing beyond the underground scene, at venues like the Roseland Ballroom and Irving Plaza, and shared bills with bands including X, Bad Brains and Gang of Four. They were a supporting act for the Clash during the band’s storied 1981 run at Bond’s International Casino in Times Square, and the Clash’s drummer, Topper Headon, produced their EP, “Rituals.” But before the group could record a full album, they disbanded in 1983.“When I first left Bush Tetras in ’83, one reason was that I felt we’d gone as far as we could,” Mr. Pop told The Village Sun. “I was very dissatisfied and looked at all of my influences — my love for Béla Bartók or King Oliver or 1940s and ’50s R&B — and that wasn’t what Bush Tetras was about.”Indeed, Mr. Pop’s musicianship stood out as more than a gutsy punk-rock attitude.“He was a very versatile player, and that’s not something that can be said of many drummers who came out of the East Village post-punk scene,” Andy Schwartz, the editor and publisher of New York Rocker magazine, the scene’s bible at the time, said in a phone interview. “He could play blues, jazz, free jazz, post-punk. He never seemed to stop learning.”After Bush Tetras broke up, Mr. Pop drummed across genres.He first joined the Los Angeles punk band the Gun Club, then played with artists like Richard Lloyd and Jayne County. He was a member of Radio I-Ching, an experimental outfit that dabbled in blues and Americana and incorporated unusual stringed instruments like the lotar and the glissentar. He went on to jam with free-jazz luminaries like Roy Campbell Jr., Eddie Gale and William Parker.Mr. Pop performing with Bush Tetras at a 40th-anniversary show in New York in 2020. The band broke up in 1983 and reunited three decades later, after Mr. Pop had worked across genres with several other bands.Sherry RubelDee Pop was born Dimitri Constantin Papadopoulos on March 14, 1956, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. His father, Dino Papadopoulos, was a vascular surgeon; his mother, Gigi (Bakalis) Papadopoulos, was a homemaker and artist.She was also a jazz enthusiast and introduced him early on to drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. While his friends at school listened to Jethro Tull, Dimitri favored John Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He graduated from St. Paul’s School on Long Island in 1974 and studied journalism at the University at Buffalo.In addition to his brother, he is survived by his mother; a sister, Tara Papadopoulos; a daughter, Nikki Ziolkowski; a son, Charlie Papadopoulos; and a granddaughter. Two marriages, to Elizabeth Vogdes and the musician known as Deerfrance, ended in divorce.In the late 1990s, Mr. Pop began hosting a weekly performance series that roamed the East Village showcasing live avant-garde music. He started it at a tiny coffeehouse called the Internet Cafe before moving on to CBGB, where he secured the club’s basement space on Sundays.“I wanted diversity,” he said of the series. “I wanted to challenge people.”After CBGB closed in 2006, Mr. Pop moved the series to Jimmy’s No. 43, and The Village Voice called him an “avant guardian.” In recent years he held shows at Troost, a bar near his apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.Around 2015, Bush Tetras reunited. The group recorded an EP, “Take the Fall,” in 2018, and then put out a single, “There Is a Hum,” on Third Man Records. A boxed set, “Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras,” is to be released next month on Wharf Cat Records.Mr. Pop died the night before a release party was held at the Howl! Happening arts space in the East Village. The gathering turned into a memorial.As video clips featuring Mr. Pop’s furious drumming played on a projector screen, Pat Place and Cynthia Sley stood up in front of the crowd, holding each other as they remembered their bandmate.“He lived to drum,” Ms. Sley said. “He loved the Bush Tetras.”She choked up.“Bush Tetras,” she added, “is a force that cannot be stopped.” More

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      Jay Black, Soaring Lead Singer of the Americans, Dies at 82

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      His majestic baritone was the key to hits like “Only in America,” “Come a Little Bit Closer” and his signature song, “Cara, Mia.”Jay Black, whose majestic voice on songs like “Cara, Mia” and “Only in America” made Jay and the Americans a potent force in pop music in the 1960s, died on Friday in Queens. He was 82.His son Jason Blatt said the cause was pneumonia that led to cardiac arrest. He also had dementia, his family said.Jay and the Americans began to thrive before the arrival of the Beatles in the United States in 1964. With Mr. Black as their lead singer, the group’s first major hit was “Only in America,” which peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963. That was followed the next year by “Come a Little Bit Closer,” which rose to No. 3, and “Let’s Lock the Door (and Throw Away the Key),” which hit No. 11.In 1965, their version of “Some Enchanted Evening,” from the musical “South Pacific,” peaked at No. 13.Mr. Black — whose original name was David Blatt — was the second “Jay” to front the Americans. He replaced Jay Traynor in 1963, a year after the group’s first hit, “She Cried,” climbed to No. 5 on the chart.Mr. Black’s signature song was “Cara, Mia,” a romantic ballad that peaked at No. 4 in 1965. Mr. Black, who had an impressive vocal range, opened the song slowly, almost operatically, before the melody turned upbeat. Memorably, he held certain notes for long, extended beats.He said two singers had warned him that he was endangering his voice by stretching it to its limits: Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons and Frank Sinatra.“So you’re the ‘Cara, Mia’ guy?” Mr. Black recalled Sinatra saying in 1977 when they were filming “Contract on Cherry Street” (1977), a television movie in which Mr. Black had a rare acting role. In an interview with The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2010, Mr. Black said that Sinatra had advised him, “You better lower your key or you’re going to lose your voice.”That voice sustained him as a solo oldies act long after Jay and the Americans broke up in 1973. But in 2017, during one of his last performances, Mr. Black apologized to fans at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., for struggling to reach his former vocal heights.“I’m not hitting any notes,” he said, explaining that he had not sung in more than a year. “I can’t sing.”David Blatt was born on Nov. 2, 1938, in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, Herman and Francis (Smith) Blatt, brought him up in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. David first sang publicly in the choir at Temple Beth-El.But he said he was thrown out of New Utrecht High School and three yeshivas.“I was a bad kid,” he told The Forward in 2014. “I was a wise guy. When I graduated from eighth grade, I was the class comedian. I was always a troublemaker.”Mr. Black began his singing career with two doo-wop groups, the Two Chaps and the Empires. Marty Kupersmith, who performs as Marty Sanders, had been in both groups with him before becoming one of the Americans; when Mr. Traynor left, he invited Mr. Black to replace him. Mr. Black was selling shoes at Thom McAn at the time.Although he had agreed to change his name to Jay, Mr. Blatt did not become Jay Black until he appeared on Mike Douglas’s talk show. He said that when Mr. Douglas asked him his last name, he misheard “Blatt” as “Black,” and from then on he was Jay Black.Mr. Black did not just have a stunning voice; he was also good-looking and could be as funny as a borscht belt comedian. But he was a heavy gambler, an addiction that started in high school and grew as he became more successful. He had also been a close friend of the mobster John Gotti since they were young men.Mr. Black in the mid-1960s. He was selling shoes at Thom McAn in 1963 when he was asked to replace the original “Jay” as lead singer of the Americans.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“I went to his trial,” Mr. Black told The New York Times in 1994. “I took some heat about it. I got death threats. But I love the family. I sang at this daughter’s wedding. I sang at his son’s wedding.”Mr. Black landed in bankruptcy court in 2005. He owed $500,000 in back taxes dating to 1993 because of his gambling addiction. Although he won a battle to continue to perform under his name the next year, he could not prevent the court from auctioning off the name “Jay and the Americans” to one of the group’s founding members, Sandy Yaguda (known professionally as Sandy Deanne).“Having an impostor group go out, that bothers me,” Mr. Black told Newsday after the court allowed him to keep his name. “I don’t know who’s going to be singing these songs. Even if someone does a great impersonation of me, it’s still not me.”Mr. Yaguda formed a new version of Jay and the Americans in late 2006, reuniting with two other original members, Mr. Sanders and Howie Kane, and adding a third “Jay”: Jay Reincke, whose given name is John.“We shared both wonderful and very contentious times,” the group said in a statement on Facebook after Mr. Black’s death, “and much like an ex-wife, we are so proud of the beautiful children we created. We’ll always remember The Voice.”In addition to his son Jason, Mr. Black is survived by two other sons, William and Beau; a daughter, Samantha; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; a sister, Gail Decker; and a brother, Norman Blatt. His marriages to Marsha Garbowitz, Kathy Izzo and Andi Francis ended in divorce. He died in a hospital.In February 1964, two days after the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Jay and the Americans and the Righteous Brothers opened for them at their first concert in the United States, at the Washington Coliseum. When the fans loudly chanted “We want the Beatles!” while the Americans were performing, Mr. Black felt he had to react.“Jay, being who he is,” Mr. Yaguda told the Vinyl Dialogues blog in 2020, “went out and said, ‘Hey, man, I’m glad you all came out to see us tonight.’ And they all cracked up. That won them over, so they shut up and listened to us and, when we were done, gave us a big round of applause.” More

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      Lana Del Rey’s Sisterly Solidarity, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Miranda Lambert, Summer Walker, My Morning Jacket 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.Lana Del Rey, ‘Blue Banisters’“Blue Banisters,” out Friday, is the ever-prolific Lana Del Rey’s second album released this year, and its melodically roving title track feels like a kind of spiritual sequel to “Dance Till We Die” from her previous record, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” Del Rey’s music has recently become populated with a kind of coterie of female first names, giving many of her songs an insular yet invitingly chummy atmosphere. If “Dance Till We Die” was a kind of matriarchal communion with some of her musical heroes (“I’m covering Joni and dancing with Joan/Stevie’s calling on the telephone”), “Blue Banisters” finds her getting by with a little help from her less famous friends. This vaporous, searching piano ballad ponders a choice between settling down into conventional, wifely femininity and living a more restless and solitary artist’s life: “Most men don’t want a woman with a legacy,” Del Rey sings, quoting her friend Jenny’s poolside musings. By the end of the song, though, she’s eked out a third option, neither in love nor alone, surrounded by “all my sisters” who come together to paint her banisters a different hue than the one her ex once preferred. For all the criticism Del Rey bore early in her career for conjuring the loneliness of embodying a male fantasy, it’s been fascinating to watch her music gradually turn into a space warmed by romantic friendship and female solidarity. LINDSAY ZOLADZMiranda Lambert, ‘If I Was a Cowboy’Beyoncé famously mused “If I Were a Boy”; Miranda Lambert is now giving a similar song-length thought exercise a countrified twist. “If I Was a Cowboy” — Lambert’s first solo single since her eclectic, Grammy-winning 2019 album “Wildcard” — finds her in a breezy, laid-back register, as opposed to her more fiery fare. But the song’s outlaw attitude and clever gender commentary give “If I Was a Cowboy” a casually rebellious spirit. “So mamas, if your daughters grow up to be cowboys,” Lambert sings on the smirking bridge, “ … so what?” ZOLADZMy Morning Jacket, ‘Lucky to Be Alive’The seventh track on My Morning Jacket’s new album — its first in six years, and ninth overall — is an especially succinct encapsulation of two things the Louisville band has always been able to do well. The first half of the song is all effortlessly playful, carnivalesque pop (with the frontman Jim James hamming up his growly delivery of the word “aliiiiive”). Halfway through, though, “Lucky to Be Alive” transforms into the sort of psychedelic, Laser-Floyd jam session that suggests why MMJ has built a reputation as a stellar live band. Put the two sides together and you get the song’s — and perhaps the band’s — overall mantra: Always look on the bright side of the moon. ZOLADZAlex Lahey, ‘Spike the Punch’Here’s a potent blast of sweetly spring-wound power-pop, courtesy of the underrated Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lahey. If you’ve ever thrown a party at which the guests have lingered a little too long, this one’s for you and your beloved: “Spike the punch and get everyone sent home, so in the end it’s you and me dancing all alone.” ZOLADZSnail Mail, ‘Ben Franklin’The enticing second single from Snail Mail’s upcoming album, “Valentine,” finds Lindsey Jordan growling and vamping atop a slinky bass line. “I never should have hurt you,” she sings in a low register, “I’ve got the devil in me.” Jordan’s just as winningly charismatic in the music video: Come to see her channel VMA-snake-era Britney Spears as a yellow python slithers across her shoulders; stay to watch her share an ice cream cone with a puppy. ZOLADZSummer Walker featuring JT from City Girls, ‘Ex for a Reason’If the title suggests a kiss-off directed at a past boyfriend, think again: “Ex for a Reason” turns out to be a sharp-tongued warning to a current man’s stubbornly lingering former flame — consider it a kind of R-rated “The Boy Is Mine.” Summer Walker spits venom in a deliciously incongruous, laid-back croon (“Tonight I’ll end it all/spin the block two, three times, make sure all the cancer’s gone”), before JT from City Girls steps in to land the fatal blow, with gusto. ZOLADZÁlvaro Díaz featuring Rauw Alejandro, ‘Problemón’There are plenty of entanglement anthems in reggaeton, but the Puerto Rican singers Álvaro Díaz and Rauw Alejandro are masters of perreo desire. For their latest collaboration, “Problemón,” the pair tackle a tricky situation: a partner lied about being single, and now a romance has to be kept under wraps. Díaz and Alejandro put melody front and center on a track that spotlights the contours of their addictive pop. It’s an easy addition to sad girl reggaeton playlists. ISABELIA HERRERASam Wilkes, ‘One Theme’The bassist and producer Sam Wilkes has been gaining popularity among both jazz fans and beat-heads thanks to a series of woozy analog-tape recordings with the saxophonist Sam Gendel. On Friday, Wilkes released an album of his own, “One Theme and Subsequent Improvisation,” which flows from an equally viscid vein. He went into the studio with two drummer friends to record a lengthy improvisation, then picked apart and edited that recording, and had two keyboardists subsequently lay their own improvisations over it. The end product is a magnetic album that revolves around, and often spins out far away from, the harmonized bass figure that opens the album’s opening track, “One Theme.” Across 33 minutes, Wilkes can sometimes call up minimalist voyagers like William Basinski or even Éliane Radigue, or he can wind up in post-rock territory — especially when the twin drummers take the wheel. (Gendel also released a single this week, a wholesale reworking of Laurie Anderson’s “Sweaters,” from her hit experimental album from 1982, “Big Science.”) GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJlin, ‘Embryo’“Embryo,” from the producer Jlin, is pure electronic calisthenics. A buzzing synth flutters through the track like a nettlesome fly in your ear as a high-intensity workout session commences with overblown bass, thumping drums and four-on-the-floor rhythms that flicker in and out of focus. Before you know it, the whole thing is over, and your heart will need some recovery time. HERRERAAnimal Collective, ‘Prester John’The first offering from Animal Collective’s forthcoming album “Time Skiffs” (which will be out in February 2022) is surprisingly bass-heavy, a gently hypnotic groove that unfolds across a pleasantly unhurried six-and-a-half minutes. As far as Animal Collective songs go, it’s relatively tame — devoid of its signature freak-out shrieks and sounding more like a cross between the Beach Boys and Grizzly Bear, as the quartet’s voices join in stirring harmony. Still, it feels like a natural step in the indie stalwarts’ gradual evolution, the sound of a band once so fascinated with childlike awe acquiescing to their own version of maturity. ZOLADZKazemde George, ‘This Spring’For the young, Brooklyn-based tenor saxophonist Kazemde George, to insist doesn’t necessarily mean raising the volume or pushing idiosyncrasy. His debut album — titled “I Insist” in a reference to jazz’s protest tradition, and to Max Roach specifically — is mostly about laying a claim to the straight-ahead jazz mantle. With a brisk swing feel and a set of suspenseful chord changes that only half-resolve, “This Spring” is one of 10 original compositions on the record, but it also would’ve been at home on an album from a young saxophonist 30 years ago, during jazz’s Neo-Classicist revival. Throughout, what George insists upon most — from himself and his bandmates — is clarity: Melody is never sacrificed to flair or crossfire, even as the momentum builds. RUSSONELLO More

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      ‘Learning to Live Together’ Review: Remaking a Once-in-a-Lifetime Band

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      Joe Cocker’s bacchanalian “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour gets a reconsideration and a revival in this documentary by Jesse Lauter.Joe Cocker’s mammoth 1970 “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” American tour presented itself as a freewheeling rock ’n’ roll jamboree. As such, it astonished audiences and yielded a couple of hit singles. In 2015 the first-rate blues-rock ensemble Tedeschi Trucks Band put together a tribute show to that project, enlisting many of the surviving participants. This documentary, directed by Jesse Lauter, chronicles that undertaking and revisits the counterculture phenom that inspired it.Mad Dogs was “an emergency tour, an emergency band,” singer Rita Coolidge recalls in a new interview. After blowing away Woodstock, among other festivals, an exhausted Cocker had fired his band, hoping to duck out of a long tour. But the dates were booked and defaulting would mean financial and career ruin. The American R&B artist and bandleader Leon Russell came to the rescue, assembling a musical commune.The sometimes-reclusive Russell answered the Tedeschi Trucks call in 2015. His recollections are certainly of interest, but his protean talent is more impressive still. His performances with the new band are thrilling. (He died in 2016.)The drug-and-booze-fueled utopianism reflected in the archival footage is replaced in 2015 by what appears to be relatively clean living, mutual appreciation and joyous pragmatism.Not all the memories of the reunited players are pleasant. Coolidge recounts being assaulted at the hands of Jim Gordon, the drummer who was later convicted of slaying his mother and is serving a life sentence in prison. The Mad Dogs’ second drummer, Jim Keltner, turns an old cliché about dysfunctional families on its head: “We were too young to be dysfunctional. I don’t think anyone was in their 30s yet.” Here the now-elders seem delighted to make a joyful noise with the generations they influenced.Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & EnglishmenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Leslie Bricusse, Prolific Songwriter for Stage and Screen, Dies at 90

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      His songs from “Stop the World,” “Willy Wonka,” “Goldfinger” and other shows and movies became hits for a range of performers.Leslie Bricusse, a composer and lyricist who contributed to Broadway hits like “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off” and “Jekyll & Hyde” and popular films like “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and “Goldfinger,” died on Tuesday. He was 90.The BBC said his agent had confirmed his death. News accounts said he died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, where he had a home.Mr. Bricusse’s songs, many written with the actor and singer Anthony Newley or other partners, were recorded by a vast range of vocalists. Among the first was Sammy Davis Jr., who, when performing in London in 1961, saw the Newley-Bricusse show “Stop the World,” which had just opened in the West End, and became an ardent fan. He garnered a Top 20 hit in America in 1962 with his version of a song from that show, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”A decade later Mr. Davis would take Mr. Newley and Mr. Bricusse (pronounced BRICK-us) to the top of the charts when he recorded a largely unnoticed song from the film musical “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” with the Mike Curb Congregation. (The film had been released the previous year to negative reviews.) The song was “The Candy Man,” and it reached No. 1 on both Billboard’s pop and easy listening singles charts, the biggest hit of Mr. Davis’s long career.Another song from “Willy Wonka,” “Pure Imagination,” has been recorded by numerous artists, among them Josh Groban, Maroon 5 and Barbra Streisand. Shirley Bassey had a Top 10 hit in 1965 with “Goldfinger,” the title song from the 1964 James Bond movie, for which Mr. Bricusse and Mr. Newley wrote the lyrics to John Barry’s melody. Another Bond film, “You Only Live Twice,” featured a title song by Mr. Barry and Mr. Bricusse that was sung by Nancy Sinatra and recorded later by many others.One of Mr. Bricusse’s biggest, and earliest, hits in his native England was a song that some listeners may not have even realized he had a hand in: “My Old Man’s a Dustman,” a chart-topping novelty number recorded by Lonnie Donegan in 1960. Mr. Bricusse wrote it with Mr. Donegan and Peter Buchanan but used a pen name, Beverly Thorn, “because I was worried about it being down-market,” as he told The Telegraph of Britain in an interview in January.When Mr. Bricusse published a memoir in 2015, “Pure Imagination: A Sorta-Biography,” one of its several forewords was written by his friend Elton John.“His catalogue of songs is enormous — his achievements endless,” Mr. John wrote. “Anyone who has written ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ and ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ should be revered for ever.”Sean Connery as James Bond on the set of “Goldfinger” (1964). Mr. Bricusse and Mr. Newley wrote the words and John Barry wrote the melody for the movie’s title song.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty ImagesLeslie Bricusse was born on Jan. 29, 1931, in London.“I fell in love with the idea of writing songs when I was a child,” he told The Herald of Glasgow in 2016. “I thought I was going to be a journalist at first, but I gradually fell in love with all these great writers like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, who were at the peak of their powers then. The great thing about them as well was that they were literate, and wrote story songs.”As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, he was active in the drama club Footlights, writing and directing musical comedy shows. Beatrice Lillie, a star of the day known for offbeat musical comedy, saw his work and was impressed, hiring him to be her comic foil in a show she was performing at the Globe Theater, “An Evening With Beatrice Lillie.”“Auntie Bea sort of adopted me,” Mr. Bricusse told The Sunday Express of Britain in 2017.In 1961 he was working for Ms. Lillie when Mr. Newley approached him about collaborating on what became “Stop the World,” a show about an Everyman character named Littlechap and the lessons he learns from birth to death. Mr. Bricusse had free use of Ms. Lillie’s apartment in New York, and Mr. Newley joined him there from England; they wrote the show in four weeks (or, in another telling by Mr. Bricusse, eight days).“We had a nice thing of it in New York,” Mr. Newley told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1961. “Pleasant flat, no one to bother us. It went like cream.”From left, Anna Quayle, Mr. Newley and Susan Baker in the Broadway production of “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off,” the first Bricusse-Newley collaboration.Friedman-AbelesThe show, with Mr. Newley starring, opened at the Palace Theater in Manchester, England, in June 1961 and then hit London, where it caught on, propelled by strong songs like “Gonna Build a Mountain” and “I Wanna Be Rich,” in addition to “What Kind of Fool Am I?” It opened on Broadway in October 1962 and ran there for more than a year.The two men followed that with “The Roar of the Greasepaint — the Smell of the Crowd,” an allegory in revue form about class struggle in which Mr. Newley again starred; it also made Broadway, in 1965. Decades later, Mr. Bricusse had two other Broadway successes: “Victor/Victoria” (1995), for which he wrote the lyrics (as he had done for the 1982 film on which it was based), and “Jekyll & Hyde” (1997), for which he wrote both the lyrics (Frank Wildhorn did the music) and the book. That book earned him a Tony Award nomination, his fifth.He was equally successful in the film world, and not just for songs. He wrote the screenplays as well as the music for “Doctor Dolittle” (1967) and “Scrooge” (1970), among other films. He later adapted both into stage musicals. His song “Talk to the Animals” from “Doctor Dolittle” won him an Oscar, and he shared an Oscar with Henry Mancini for “Victor/Victoria.”Rex Harrison in the title role of “Dr. Dolittle” (1967), for which Mr. Bricusse wrote the screenplay as well as the songs. The best-known song from that score, “Talk to the Animals,” won Mr. Bricusse an Oscar.PhotofestIn an interview this year with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Mr. Bricusse recalled that when he visited the set during the filming of “Willy Wonka” he was struck by the contrast between the treatment it was receiving and the slick production being filmed on a neighboring soundstage: “Cabaret.”“I was a bit nervous about the amateur style of our show compared with the professionalism of Bob Fosse,” the director of “Cabaret,” he said.The critics, too, found “Willy Wonka” a bit amateurish, but it developed a following over time, especially once it began turning up on television and the music filtered into popular culture.Mr. Davis’s hit version of “The Candy Man” was one of some 60 songs he recorded that Mr. Bricusse wrote or co-wrote. One of Mr. Bricusse’s more recent projects had been a musical about Mr. Davis’s life and career. A version of it was staged at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego in 2009, and Mr. Bricusse had been continuing to refine it.Mr. Bricusse’s survivors include his wife, the actress Yvonne Romain, and a son, Adam.In a 2015 interview with the London publication The Stage, Mr. Bricusse talked about how he and Mr. Newley, who died in 1999, worked.“When I write a song, I hear the music and words at the same time — one suggests the form of the other,” he said. “And Tony was exactly the same. We would sing at each other across the room; it was a very bizarre, unofficial way of writing songs.”He was nonchalant about his ability to work with a wide range of other writers and composers.“I’m a good collaborator: I haven’t ever fallen out with any of them,” he said. “Though there have been one or two tricky ones that I won’t name.” More