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      Ian McDonald, of the Bands King Crimson and Foreigner, Dies at 75

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      As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with King Crimson, he helped propel the progressive rock movement. He found more commercial success with Foreigner.Ian McDonald, a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter whose work with the British band King Crimson helped propel the progressive rock movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and who went on to help found the immensely popular group Foreigner, died on Feb. 9 at his home in New York City. He was 75.The cause was colon cancer, said his son, Maxwell, who is also a musician.Though Mr. McDonald’s work with Foreigner reaped far greater financial rewards than his efforts with King Crimson — his trio of albums with Foreigner sold a combined 17 million copies — his earlier band far outdistanced them in creativity and influence. Their debut album, “In the Court of the Crimson King” (1969), with its radical sound and structure, was a watershed work in the history of rock. It was the only release in the band’s wide catalog in which Mr. McDonald had full involvement.For the album, he was a co-writer of every song, played nine instruments and provided primary production.“Ian brought musicality, an exceptional sense of the short and telling melodic line, and the ability to express that on a variety of instruments,” the band’s leader, Robert Fripp, wrote in the liner notes to a box set of King Crimson’s work released in 1997. In a recent email he said, “In 1969, I trusted Ian’s musical sense ahead of my own.”For the title track of “In the Court of the Crimson King,” Mr. McDonald wrote the music and provided a Mellotron hook that became one of the most recognizable uses of that instrument in rock history. Highly melodic, the sound provided a striking contrast to the fury of the album’s other most famous song, “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Fired by the combination of Mr. McDonald’s shrieking alto-saxophone and Mr. Fripp’s brutalist guitar, “21st Century Schizoid Man” both startled and thrilled listeners.Pete Townshend of the Who was so impressed, he wrote ad copy for the album in Rolling Stone magazine that read: “Twenty-first century schizoid man is everything multi-tracked a billion times, and when you listen you get a billion times the impact. Has to be the heaviest riff that has been middle-frequencied onto that black vinyl disc since Mahler’s 8th.”The album went gold in the United States and made the Top 5 in the band’s native Britain. At the end of a U.S. tour to promote the album, Mr. McDonald left the band, as did the drummer, Michael Giles. “I was probably not emotionally mature enough to handle it, and I just made a rather rash decision to leave without consulting anyone,” Mr. McDonald told Sid Smith in the 2001 book “In the Court of King Crimson.”In 1970, the two departed members released their own album, “McDonald and Giles,” which showcased Mr. McDonald’s vocal skills as well as his Beatle-esque sense of melody. That same year, several long songs he had helped write for King Crimson appeared on the group’s second album, “In the Wake of Poseidon.” In 1974, Mr. Fripp invited him back, and he played on two tracks of the band’s “Red” album, released that year. The band broke up shortly thereafter.King Crimson in 1969; from left, the leader and guitarist Robert Fripp, the drummer Michael Giles, the singer and guitarist Greg Lake, the multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald and the lyricist Peter Sinfield. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen work slowed for him in England in the mid-1970s, Mr. McDonald moved to New York, where he helped form Foreigner with another British transplant, Mick Jones.Foreigner’s debut album in 1977 made Billboard’s Top 5 list and sold more than five million copies. One song Mr. McDonald helped write, “Long, Long Way From Home,” became a Top 20 Billboard hit. He was a co-producer of all three albums that he recorded with Foreigner, including “Double Vision” (1978) and “Head Games” (1979).Ian Richard McDonald was born on June 25, 1946, in Osterley, Middlesex, England to Keith McDonald, an architect, and Ada (May) McDonald, a homemaker. His father played banjo and piano, and, in a house filled with music, Ian played guitar and piano.His multi-instrumental approach broadened at 15, when he left school and entered the British Army as a bandsman. “I was taught clarinet, and from there I taught myself flute and saxophone,” he told Big Bang Magazine in 1999. “I was exposed to a number of different musical styles.”After leaving the army and moving to London, he met Mr. Fripp, who had a whimsical group called Giles, Giles and Fripp, including Michael Giles and his brother Pete. Mr. McDonald recorded songs with them before they evolved into King Crimson, with the singer and bassist Greg Lake replacing Pete Giles.Almost immediately a buzz grew around them, leading to an invitation to perform at a Rolling Stones free concert in London in Hyde Park; the event was originally meant to introduce the Stones’ new guitarist, Mick Taylor, but it wound up doubling as a salute to the musician he had replaced, Brian Jones, who had died two days earlier. Audience estimates for the show range from 250,000 to 500,000. In 2013, The Guardian reported that “King Crimson nearly stole the show.”The trailer for a forthcoming documentary titled “In the Court of the Crimson King” shows Mr. McDonald apologizing to Mr. Fripp for leaving the band so soon after it began. His run with Foreigner also ended when he was fired by Mr. Jones, who, Mr. McDonald said, desired more control. (Mr. McDonald did play with the band for its 40th-anniversary tour in 2017.)In 2002, he formed a group with other ex-members of Crimson (without Mr. Fripp) called the 21st Century Schizoid Band, which toured and released several live albums. Mr. McDonald issued a solo album in 1999, “Driver’s Eyes,” and formed a new rock-oriented group, Honey West, which featured his son, Maxwell, on their album “Bad Old World” (2017).In addition to his son, Mr. McDonald is survived by his sister, Linda Rice.Throughout his life he remained proud of how King Crimson’s debut album had endured.“One thing I tried to do as the main producer was to have every moment be able to be listened to hundreds of times so that, hopefully, the album would stand the test of time,” he told the entertainment blog The Los Angeles Beat in 2019. “Here we are 50 years later, and people are still talking about it.” More

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      Hollywood’s First Family of Putting It Out There

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      On the first page of Will Smith’s recent memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family entertainer to save his mother, himself and everyone else.“I would be the golden child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break character. Not once.”That he became a perpetual conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “I Am Legend,” a druglord-defeater in “Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “Ali” — might have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s most bankable actors. Off camera, he behaved much as he did on camera, revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.Over the last couple of years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s melting it down.This pivot to transparency makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23, and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there. Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show “Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.From left: Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Will Smith in an episode of “Red Table Talk.”Facebook WatchTheir path has been the opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and garish one, and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking, especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.Inside Will Smith’s WorldFor decades, the global superstar has won over audiences with his charm and charisma. Now, he is showing his more vulnerable side.A Commanding Presence: In a Times interview, the movie star reflects on his career, being a parent and learning to let go of perfectionism. ‘King Richard’: Here is what Smith said after he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the father of Venus and Serena Williams. His Memoir: “Will” is a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune told by an admittedly unreliable narrator, our book critic writes. Hollywood’s First Family: Among his various roles, Smith is also the patriarch of a family that has made intimacy its stock in trade.Theirs is a perfectly timed reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands, especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye, and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt out. It is also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its destigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.Will might be the Smith family member with the highest public profile, but it is Jada who helped draft the template of the family reinvention with “Red Table Talk.” The show, which appears on Facebook Watch, began in mid-2018, and quickly became known for unexpectedly vulnerable conversations, both with celebrity guests, and also between the hosts: Jada, Willow and Jada’s mother, Adrienne. Each woman holds her ground — take, for example, the episode about polyamory, in which Willow seems to baffle her co-hosts — but the inter-family good will prevents the show from ever erupting into true tension.Reality programming has only become an alternate safe space for the most famous in the last couple of decades. Previously, behind-the-scenes confessionals were more the purview of tabloids, an unsavory side effect of fame to be avoided at all costs. But beginning in the early 2000s, the era of “The Osbournes” on MTV, reality programming began to provide an escape hatch in which the famous could leverage their renown before being nudged toward the offramp of career irrelevance.It was novel then, and it ended up fomenting an entire cottage industry of second-chance grasps for attention, typically for C- and D-listers, both family docu-soaps and also shows like “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” and “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars.” Social media extended the available possibilities, granting new oxygen for the well known who were on their way to becoming less well known.For the Smith family, “Red Table Talk” provided proof of concept — it was acceptable, and even desirable, for the most prominent celebrities to make confessionals part of their brand.More than one episode delves into the challenges of Will and Jada’s marriage, offering small brushstrokes of revelation about an oft-gossiped-about couple. They insist they will never split, because after surmounting unspecified challenges, “We don’t have any dealbreakers.” (At the end of the chat, Will aims to dispel some frequent rumors: “We’ve never been Scientologists, we’ve never been swingers,” though Jada does point out that the second is a term for a “specific lifestyle.”)Watch enough “Red Table Talk” after reading Will’s book and absorbing his YouTube series and you might encounter the same tale told a few different ways — he’s been workshopping this unburdening for some time. Unlike Jada, who approaches the show and sharing her truths more casually, Will has fully embraced this shift and is treating it like he would a blockbuster film: rehearsal, polish, flawless delivery.Smith promoting “Will” with Queen Latifah last year. The actor’s memoir is surprisingly candid.Matt Rourke/Associated Press“Best Shape of My Life” begins as a weight-loss show — Will has a mild dad-bod paunch. To address it, he flies to Dubai to work with his personal trainer, as one does. He wants the process filmed, he says, because “the cameras act like my sponsor — they keep me accountable.” He partakes in intense physical challenges — walking to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet, or navigating the Dubai Police Academy obstacle course — and is also working on his memoir.Soon, he begins to chafe at that accountability. Agonizing over the weight loss goal begins to feel like false tension. So does stress about the deadline for his book (underscored by what feel like staged voice mail messages from his assistant). Instead what unfolds is a tug of war between his compulsion to perform and his need to retreat. The fourth episode is titled “I Quit,” and then he continues for two more episodes — this is, after all, a Will Smith production. But seams are fraying: In the fifth episode, he crows, “[expletive] the budget, [expletive] the deadline — they’ll get what we give them.”Several segments of the show are given over to Will’s reading segments of his memoir to family members and friends. These moments limn vulnerability without ever detaching it from performance — Will cries about the challenges in his childhood home, and his onlookers, including his therapist, nod along. At least a few years past his box-office-domination peak, he has built a more scalable reward system.(And lest you forget that the family rebrand is in no small way a business venture, there are untold cross-promotional opportunities. On “Best Shape,” Will often wears clothes from his Bel-Air Athletics line. When the family gathers in Miami to hear Will read chapters about them, the table is stocked with the signature blue square bottles of Just Water, Jaden’s company.)Jaden Smith holding a bottle of his Just Water at a film premiere in New York.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesOnce the sort of superstar known for smooth maximalism, Will has experimented with this sort of behind-the-scenes content before: “Will Smith’s Bucket List,” a series on Facebook Watch, and “Will Smith: Off the Deep End,” a nature immersion doc. But the last year has constituted a multiplatform career rebrand in which Smith uses all the tools of celebrity in service of peeling back its layers.In his autobiography, he writes movingly of the tug of war he feels in regards to his father, who instilled in Will the discipline with which he would build his astronomically successful career but was also abusive. In one section, he suggests that he considered pushing his elderly father down a flight of stairs as retribution.But the real revelation about Will’s relationship to parental authority comes in “King Richard,” last year’s biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Richard Williams was often maligned for the single-minded way he raised his daughters, but Will plays him empathetically as a stubborn hero, leaning into his doggedness but never making him an object of derision. (He was nominated for an Oscar for the performance.) No means are beyond bounds when the ends are so enviable.It’s likely the role has double meaning for Will — on the one hand, it’s a celebration of the transformative discipline he learned from his own father (in a non-abusive context), and on the other, it’s an argument for his own style of parenting. In both the memoir and at the Red Table, he speaks openly of how his heavy-handed fathering of Jaden and Willow exploded in his face on multiple occasions. When Willow’s first single, “Whip My Hair,” became a hit, she rebelled against the pressures of touring by shaving her head. The action film he made with Jaden, “After Earth,” was a colossal flop. (Will has another son, Trey, from his first marriage, who is a sometime D.J. and occasionally appears on “Red Table Talk.”)And yet the levelheadedness of the younger Smiths is somewhat remarkable. They are untethered thinkers in the way that children of privilege can often be, but they are also curious and empathetic and, all things considered, decidedly warm. (Listen to Jaden talk about learning how to navigate paying for dinner and you’ll melt.) Given their parents’s full-circle journey to untouchable celebrity and back, and given that they were born into a far more transparent generation, it’s easy to adapt to their family’s newfound visibility.Jaden has largely retreated from the spotlight, though he did release an album last year, “CTV3: Day Tripper’s Edition,” full of spacey dream-pop. When he shows up on “Red Table Talk” or in the “Best Shape of My Life” series, he appears almost impossibly wise.Willow has, relatively quietly, released five albums, recently homing in on a wiry pop-punk style that’s both tart and fashionable. Last year’s “Lately I Feel Everything” is her best album, and it includes the scarred anthem about duplicity “Transparentsoul” and raw songs like “Xtra,” in which she seeks space for a deep exhale: “I don’t mean to break so easily under the pressure/Need some time alone to breathe, I need some tree and fresh air.” And the album she released in 2020 as part of the duo called the Anxiety (which also includes Tyler Cole) features “Meet Me at Our Spot,” which became a huge hit on TikTok last year as a soundtrack for young creators to shamanistically lose themselves in dance.At the Red Table, Willow is a beacon of earnestness and humanity. Feeling deeply is the center of her public presentation; her conversation with Paris Jackson was less interview than sympathetic embrace. (At one point, Willow suggested that she’d cut herself in her younger years.) In her music and in her Red Table conversations, she grasps the futility of hiding her feelings, so she doesn’t bother.For Will and Jada, though, the high wire act of confession is, naturally, a reassertion of power. To be this vulnerable, effectively without fear of reprisal or public collapse, is perhaps the ultimate test of celebrity. The only question that remains is what secrets still lurk behind all this transparency. More

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      Jon Zazula, Early Promoter of Heavy Metal, Dies at 69

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      With his wife, Marsha, he founded Megaforce, a label that released the first albums of Metallica and others.Jon Zazula, who with his wife, Marsha, founded Megaforce Records and was an important figure in the emergence of heavy metal music, giving Metallica, Anthrax and other bands their start, died on Tuesday at his home in Clermont, Fla. He was 69.Maria Ferrero, the couple’s first employee at the label and later the founder of Adrenaline PR, which specializes in promoting metal bands, said the cause was chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a neurological condition. Marsha Zazula died in January of last year at 68.Metallica memorialized Mr. Zazula in posts on its Twitter feed.“In 1982, when no one wanted to take a chance on four kids from California playing a crazy brand of metal, Jonny and Marsha did, and the rest, as they say, is history,” the band said.At that time, the Zazulas were trying to make a few bucks selling records from their collection of hard-to-find albums and picture discs at a flea market in East Brunswick, N.J. Their stock was heavy on metal, and their cubbyhole store, Rock N Roll Heaven, became a gathering spot for metalheads. At their customers’ urging, they started a D.I.Y. concert-promoting business to present some of the bands whose music they were selling; their first concert, in 1982, featured the Canadian band Anvil and drew almost 2,000 people.At some point someone brought them a demo tape by an unknown West Coast band, Metallica. The Zazulas liked what they heard, so much so that they contacted the members of the group and urged them to come east and play a few shows. Soon they had formed Megaforce, which released Metallica’s first two albums, “Kill ‘em All” in 1983 and “Ride the Lightning” in 1984.Megaforce also released the first albums by Anthrax (“Fistful of Metal,” 1984), Testament (“The Legacy,” 1987) and others.Heavy metal was just beginning to take hold in the United States when the Zazulas became involved, and it was sometimes dismissed as mere noise. But in a 1983 interview with The Courier-News of Bridgewater, N.J., Mr. Zazula explained the attraction.“It’s music that’s pure emotion,” he said. “Heavy metal is super-talent at breakneck speed.”The music, he said, was destined to endure.“New wave music changes every week,” he said. “Metal gives the people something they can count on.”Jon and Marsha Zazula backstage at a Monsters of Rock concert in about 1990.Gene AmboJonathan David Zazula was born on March 16, 1952, in the Bronx. His father, Norman, was a shipping clerk, and his mother, Helen (Risch) Zazula, was recreation director at a nursing home.He grew up in the Eastchester Gardens complex in the Bronx and attended Lehman College. He married Lisa Weber in 1972, but the marriage ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Marsha Jean Rutenberg.He was working in financial planning and she in marketing when they left New York in 1980 and settled in Old Bridge, N.J. His finance career came to an end the next year when the company he worked for, which traded in metals, was raided by the authorities and everyone there was charged with fraud, accused of passing off scrap metal as the rare metal tantalum. Mr. Zazula served six months in a halfway house in Newark, and he and his wife began selling at the flea market during that time to try to make ends meet.“That’s how we started Rock N Roll Heaven,” he said in an interview for “Moguls and Madmen: The Pursuit of Power in Popular Music,” a 1994 book by Jory Farr. “Out of that pit of hell came all that we did.”Their fledgling concert-promotion business — Crazed Management was their company’s name — was very hands-on; they personally plastered telephone poles with fliers, and band members often crashed at their house.“I remember we had to sell every club we worked in on the idea of presenting an original heavy-metal show,” Mr. Zazula, recalling the early years, told The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., in 1988. “In those days all the clubs wanted cover bands.”Creating Megaforce Records, he said, was a fallback, after the couple had made some more demos with Metallica and tried to interest existing labels.“They thought we were crazy,” he told The Courier-News in 1987. “‘What kind of music is this?’ And we were forced to start our own record company to promote Metallica.”Bands given their start by Megaforce tended to move to more mainstream labels once they made it big; after its first two albums, Metallica signed with Elektra.The couple sold their stake in Megaforce in 2001, although Mr. Zazula continued to promote an occasional concert until retiring in 2018.Mr. Zazula is survived by three daughters, Danielle Zazula, Rikki Zazula and Blaire Zazula Brewer; two brothers, Evan and Robert; and five grandchildren. More

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      Kamasi Washington Blasts Into a Fresh Era, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Koffee, Lucy Dacus, Sasami 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.Kamasi Washington, ‘The Garden Path’ (Live on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’)The Los Angeles-based saxophonist and spiritual-jazz revivalist Kamasi Washington, 40, made his American late-night TV debut this week, performing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” With over a dozen instrumentalists and singers arrayed around him onstage, all draped in desert whites and golds, he presented a new composition, “The Garden Path.” Washington’s basic musical components haven’t changed since the release of “The Epic,” his breakout album: polyrhythmic funk and rock beats; a full blast of horns over a meaty rhythm section; scant harmonic or melodic movement in the song’s theme. The biggest source of magnetism here came from downstage right: It’s the voice of Dwight Trible, a Los Angeles jazz fixture, whose lush baritone carries the plangent lyrics in harmony with Patrice Quinn: “Bright minds with dark eyes/Speak loud words, tell sweet lies/Lost without a trace of a way/To get out of this misery.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKoffee, ‘Pull Up’The Jamaican firebrand Koffee, who made history as the youngest person and first woman to win a Grammy for best reggae album in 2020, has good reason to arrive triumphantly on “Pull Up,” the beatific new single from her long-awaited debut album, “Gifted,” due March 25. A liquid beat from the masterful British-Ghanian producer Jae5 trickles between Afrobeats and reggae; in the video, Koffee grins from ear to ear, mouth full of braces, as she leans out of the window of a drifting car and lets the barbs flow: “Zero to a hundred in two/Yeah, so me flex pon you.” ISABELIA HERRERAMachine Gun Kelly featuring Willow, ‘Emo Girl’A love song in which both MGK and Willow bemoan falling for the emo girl who’s just out of reach, sulkily celebrating her the way songs in the 1950s serenaded the prom queen. If this doesn’t inspire and soundtrack a Netflix awkward-teen meet-cute rom-com by this time next year I’m canceling my subscription! JON CARAMANICALucy Dacus, ‘Kissing Lessons’The songs on Lucy Dacus’s 2021 album, “Home Video,” revisited childhood memories, many of them fraught with difficult self-discoveries. “Kissing Lessons” is more cheerful. It’s a two-minute pop-punk reminiscence of being in second grade and learning to kiss from a girl who was a year older, sharing childish thoughts about what grown-up romance would be: a fond, brief, revelatory interlude. PARELESTate McRae, ‘She’s All I Wanna Be’Tate McRae has a dry, wiry voice that’s well suited to this convincingly mopey and skittish punk-pop thumper about envy: “If you say she’s nothing to worry about/then why’d you close your eyes when you said it out loud?” CARAMANICASasami, ‘Call Me Home’With each single she releases from her upcoming album “Squeeze,” the Los Angeles artist Sasami Ashworth shows off another subgenre of rock that she can pull off with effortless and idiosyncratic style. “Say It” was an industrial banger, “Skin a Rat” flirted with metal and “The Greatest” indulged in some slow-burning garage rock. Her latest, “Call Me Home,” is a lush, nostalgic blast of AM-radio psychedelia, suggesting that she’s not yet done revealing the many sides of her eclectic talent. LINDSAY ZOLADZArlo Parks, ‘Softly’The track cruises along easily, with a light boom-bap beat, a sprinkling of piano notes, leisurely guitar chords and a canopy of strings. Arlo Parks tries to keep her voice nonchalant. But she’s all too aware that her romance is ending: “Has something changed? Have I just missed the memo?” She’s shattered, and all she can do is beg her lover to “Break it to me softly.” PARELESKassi Ashton, ‘Dates in Pickup Trucks’A gifted soul vocalist hiding out in country music, Kassi Ashton sings with resonant wistfulness on “Dates in Pickup Trucks,” a lovely breeze of a song about what to do when there’s absolutely nothing to do. CARAMANICAObongjayar, ‘Try’Obongjayar is Steven Umoh, who was born in Nigeria and moved to London in his teens. He won’t be pinned down; “Try,” from his debut album due in May, jump-cuts among spacious, quasi-orchestral ambience to gently crooned electronic R&B to deep-growl toasting to a big, yearning chorus with an Afrobeats undertow. “All we do is try,” he sings, and there’s palpable ambition in every stylistic leap. PARELESMy Idea, ‘Cry Mfer’My Idea is a duo of two prolific New York-based indie musicians who also happen to be friends: Nate Amos of the experimental dance band Water for Your Eyes, and Lily Konigsberg of the art-rockers Palberta (who also released an excellent solo album, “Lily We Need to Talk Now,” late last year). “Cry Mfer,” from a forthcoming album of the same name, is less confrontational than its title might suggest, revolving around a looping, hypnotic track and Konigsberg’s reflections on a collapsing relationship: “I could be the one that makes you cry, I could be the one that makes you — ouch.” ZOLADZIlluminati Hotties, ‘Sandwich Sharer’To describe the genre of her eclectic project Illuminati Hotties — or perhaps just to thumb her nose at the absurdity of genre itself — Sarah Tudzin coined a term: “tenderpunk.” “Sandwich Sharer,” her latest one-off single, oscillates restlessly between those two adjectives. At first it seems like this song will showcase the softer side of Illuminati Hotties: “Restarted kissing,” she begins over a dramatically strummed, slow-motion chord. But before the listener can gain footing at that tempo, Tudzin suddenly kicks the song into a spunky gallop, punctuated by her humorously offbeat lyrics (“You thought I was bleeding but that’s just my spit!”). Tudzin often paints vivid and lifelike portraits of modern human relationships, and the shape-shifting nature of “Sandwich Sharer” captures the feel of one that’s constantly in flux. ZOLADZWhatever the Weather, ‘17ºC’Whatever the Weather is a new pseudonym for the English electronic musician Loraine James, who thrives on concocting dance-floor rhythms that she skews with gaps, interjections and disorienting shifts of texture. “17ºC” — from a coming album of tracks named after temperatures — ratchets up a beat from hisses, thumps, boops and blips, but continually disassembles and reformulates it: with hollows of reverb, with street and party noises, with disembodied vocal syllables, with clusters of keyboard tones and with sudden drum-machine salvos. The pulse persists, even when it’s only implied. PARELESAyver, ‘Reconciliación Con la Vida’For nearly two decades, the Peruvian label Buh Records has showcased the esoteric and avant-garde sounds of Latin America, from forgotten electroacoustic legends of the ’70s to contemporary noise artists. That mission returns in its latest release, a compilation of new faces in the Peruvian electronic scene. “Reconciliación Con la Vida,” its standout, bottles a wide spectrum of emotional textures. Lying somewhere between profound tragedy and wistful wonder, tender piano keys and sweeping string crescendos bleed into trembling beauty. It is intimate but heart-rending, like the soft caress of a lover you may never see again. HERRERAPeter Brötzmann, Milford Graves, William Parker, ‘Historic Music Past Tense Future, Side C’“Historic Music Past Tense Future” is the first in a planned series of albums on the Black Editions Archive label that will exhume previously unreleased live recordings of Milford Graves, the drummer and polymath who died last year amid a late-career re-emergence. This is the first album featuring Graves alongside the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and the bassist William Parker — all lions of the avant-garde. The third of four freely improvised, quarter-hour-long tracks, “Side C” starts as a quiet conversation between Graves and Parker, then gets lit up by Brötzmann’s tone-smashing saxophone. Midway through, Graves guides things back down to a simmer, Brötzmann drops out, and Parker begins to play a repetitive, rhythmic drone, almost like something you’d hear in Gnawa ritual. Stroking his deeply resonant, hand-altered drums, Graves brings the energy back up slowly by playing around Parker’s plucks, adding rhythms that keep his drone dancing. RUSSONELLO More

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      Mitski Steps Back Into the Darkness

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      On her new album, “Laurel Hell,” the singer-songwriter delves into electronics and ambivalence.“Let’s step carefully into the dark,” Mitski sings to begin her new album, “Laurel Hell,” and continues, “Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around.”Strategic, sure-footed, vulnerable and prepared to face all sorts of trouble: That sums up Mitski’s songwriting as it has unfolded on the albums she has been making since she was a music student in 2012. Over the decade she has chronicled yearnings, frustrations, messy romances, the life of a performer and the persistence of doubts and questions. Along the way, her music has moved through piano-centered orchestral pop, guitar-driven indie-rock and, with “Be the Cowboy” in 2018, a willingness to try for pop bangers.On “Laurel Hell,” Mitski takes just half a step back from that extroversion. The new album is largely electronic and inward-looking, filled with a pandemic-era sense of isolation, regret and reassessment. Yet Mitski doesn’t entirely reject pop gloss, especially when she can give it an ironic twist. The album cover shows her dressed in red with bold crimson lipstick, laying back with her eyes closed in an expression that could be ecstasy or torment.Mitski’s new songs grapple with depression, uncertainty, dependence and separation; she’s constantly observing and interrogating herself. Her melodies are long-breathed and deliberate, sung with calm determination, while the arrangements, largely constructed by Mitski and her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, veer between austere, exposed meditations and perky, danceable propulsion.As Mitski contemplates risks taken and lessons learned, her ambivalences are fine-tuned. A disco march laced with firm piano chords and blippy synthesizers carries her through “Stay Soft” as she counsels, “Open up your heart/Like the gates of hell,” then declares, “You stay soft, get beaten/Only natural to harden up.” In “The Only Heartbreaker” — the album’s one co-written song, by Mitski and Dan Wilson (who has also collaborated with Adele, Taylor Swift and the Chicks) — the kind of upbeat, pulsing neo-1980s production lately favored by the Weeknd pumps along as she promises to accept any blame for a failing relationship. “I apologize, you forgive me,” she sings while the chord progression climbs; is it elevating her or drowning her?Throughout “Laurel Hell,” Mitski, now 31, both misses and rejects her youthful naïveté. In “Working for the Knife,” she struggles to pull herself out of a creative block, over sustained synthesizer tones, a trudging beat and gusts of spaghetti-western guitar: “I always thought the choice was mine,” she sings, “And I was right, but I just chose wrong.”In the stark “Everyone,” her voice floats above an impassive, ticking drum-machine beat and doggedly repeating synthesizer notes, while Mitski admits that she defied everyone’s advice. Instead, “I opened my arms wide to the dark/I said take it all, whatever you want,” only to find later that she can’t escape. The same desperation suffuses “Heat Lightning,” with droning guitars and muffled drums backing a desperate confession: “There’s nothing I can do, not much I can change/I give it up to you, I surrender.” And in the brief but telling “I Guess,” Mitski mourns the loss of a lifelong companion over hazy, tolling keyboard chords; her vocal melody wanders in and out of dissonance, as if the outside world is oblivious to her sorrow.Mitski deploys a full pop arsenal in “Love Me More.” Its title is concise and hook-ready; the track has a brisk beat and sturdy major chords, and when the chorus arrives, the drums kick harder while cascading piano chords and glittery synthesizers surround her like a barrage from a confetti cannon. But the music’s confidence utterly belies the raw longing in the lyrics. She’s trying to discover the will to go on, fighting anxiety, wondering how everyone else gets through “another day to come, then another day to come,” and begging for someone who can “drown it out, drown me out.” All of her musical command can’t stave off the dark.Mitski“Laurel Hell”(Dead Oceans) More

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      Janet Mead, Nun Whose Pop-Rock Hymn Reached the Top of the Charts, Dies

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      Her upbeat version of “The Lord’s Prayer” was an instant hit in Australia, reached No. 4 in the U.S. and was nominated for a Grammy (it lost to Elvis Presley).Sister Janet Mead, an Australian nun whose crystalline voice carried her to the upper reaches of the charts in the 1970s with a pop-rock version of “The Lord’s Prayer,” died on Jan. 26 in Adelaide. She was in her early 80s.Her death was confirmed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide, which provided no further information. Media reports said she had been treated for cancer.Sister Janet’s recording of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which featured her pure solo vocal over a driving drumbeat — she had a three-octave range and perfect pitch — became an instant hit in Australia, Canada and the United States. It soared to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 during Easter time in 1974, and she became one of the few Australian recording artists to have a gold record in the United States.The record sold more than three million copies worldwide, two million of them to Americans. Nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for best inspirational performance, it lost to Elvis Presley and his version of “How Great Thou Art.”Along with Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” famously covered by the Byrds in 1965, “The Lord’s Prayer” is one of the very few popular songs with lyrics taken from the Bible.Sister Janet was the second nun to have a pop hit in the United States, after Jeanine Deckers of Belgium, the guitar-strumming “Singing Nun” whose “Dominique” reached No. 1 in 1963. She died in 1985.When stardom struck Sister Janet, she was a practicing Catholic nun teaching music at St. Aloysius College in Adelaide. The video for “The Lord’s Prayer” was shot on campus.A humble novitiate who devoted herself to social justice, she donated her share of royalties for “The Lord’s Prayer” to charity. She had long helped raise money for the disadvantaged, the homeless and Aborigines and worked on their behalf.She later described the period of her record’s success as a “horrible time,” largely because of demands by the media.“It was a fairly big strain because all the time there are interviews and radio talk-backs and TV people coming and film people coming,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Shunning the spotlight, she declined most interview requests and all offers to tour the United States.She had already achieved some local notoriety by staging rock masses at St. Francis Xavier’s Cathedral, long the hub of Catholic life in Adelaide. Her goal was to make the Gospel more accessible and meaningful to young people, which she succeeded in doing by presenting religious hymns in a rock ‘n’ roll format and encouraging participants to sing like Elvis or Bill Haley. Her masses drew as many as 2,500 people and enjoyed the full support of the local bishop.Janet Mead was born in Adelaide in 1938 (the exact date is unknown). She was 17 when she joined the Sisters of Mercy and became a music teacher at local schools.She studied piano at the Adelaide Conservatorium and formed a group, which she called simply “the Rock Band,” to provide music for the weekly Mass at her local church.She was making records for her school when she was discovered by Martin Erdman, a producer at Festival Records in Sydney. The label had her record a cover of “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” which the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan had written and sung for a Franco Zeffirelli film of the same name about St. Francis of Assisi. It was released as the A-side of a 45; “The Lord’s Prayer” was the B-side.But disc jockeys in Australia much preferred “The Lord’s Prayer.” Listeners called in demanding to hear it again, and stations gave it repeated airplay. It became one of the fastest-selling singles in history.Its phenomenal success led to Sister Janet’s debut album, “With You I Am,” which hit No. 19 in Australia in July 1974. Her second album, “A Rock Mass,” was a complete recording of one of her Masses.Sister Janet later withdrew from the public eye almost entirely, and her third album, recorded in 1983, was filed away in the Festival Records vaults. The tapes, including a 1983 version of “The Lord’s Prayer” and covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Cat Stevens, were rediscovered by Mr. Erdman in 1999 and included on the album “A Time to Sing,” released that year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sister Janet’s hit single.Sister Janet explained her philosophy of using rock music to amplify religious themes in her liner notes for the album “With You I Am.”“I believe that life is a unity and therefore not divided into compartments,” she wrote. “That means that worship, music, recreation, work and all other ‘little boxes’ of our lives are really inseparable, and this is why I believe that people should be given the opportunity to worship God with the language and music that is part of their ordinary life.” More

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      ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’ Review: An Overdue Close-up

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      In this new documentary, Poly Styrene’s daughter grapples tenderly with the legacy of her punk rock mother.Marianne Joan Elliott-Said found her stage name, Poly Styrene, running her finger through the yellow pages, she says in an on-camera interview circa 1976. The lead singer-songwriter of the British punk band X-Ray Spex and the first woman of color in Britain to front a successful rock band, she looks and sounds impossibly, wonderfully young. She has a mouth full of braces, soft eyes and an open smile. The name appealed because it suggested a kind of plastic, she said. Yet there was little synthetic about the rebellious performer with the startling voice. Nor are there any false notes in “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché,” a documentary directed by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and Paul Sng.Five years after her mother’s death in 2011, Bell, though emotional, was able to face a cache of photos, flyers, diaries, poems and lyrics. More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color. Styrene’s mother, a legal secretary who was white, met Styrene’s father, a dapper Somali dock worker, at a club. She and her sister grew up in a Brixton estate.Bell provides the film’s contemplative narration. The actress Ruth Negga (“Passing”) reads Styrene’s diaries and poems, as well as interview transcripts. Recollections from her X-Ray Spex bandmate Paul Dean and other musicians, including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, give a sense of time, place and, occasionally, bad-lad culture. But it’s the female rockers who pay resonant tribute: the X-Ray Spex saxophonist Lora Logic; Kathleen Hanna; and Neneh Cherry, who credits Styrene for her sense that a woman of color has a place in rock and punk.Poly Styrene: I Am a ClichéNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      How Poly Styrene Broke the Mold

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      A biracial woman in a predominantly white, male scene, the X-Ray Spex frontwoman brought fresh perspectives and sounds to punk. A new documentary explores her impact.Poly Styrene beams out from the screen, smile wide, braces cemented across her teeth. In most images of first-wave punk musicians, their eyes are filled with negativity and contempt. In footage from a new film, Styrene’s are bright with possibility.The singer and creative force behind X-Ray Spex died from cancer in 2011, 34 years after her London band released its seismic first single, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” The world is still catching up. A new documentary due Feb. 2 titled “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché” — taken from one of her song titles that mixed self-aware humor and cultural critique — is the latest ambitious project to chronicle her story, following an oral history book and a roving exhibition of her visual art, both from 2019.“My mum believed she was psychic,” Styrene’s daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film with Paul Sng, said in a video interview. “You can see that in her lyrics. She had this uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen.”Perhaps Styrene saw the future by paying attention. She set dynamite to the patriarchy on “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” and “Germfree Adolescents,” the band’s sole album released just months before its 1979 split, is filled with blazing anthems that address identity, consumer culture, environmental ruin, information overload and punk itself. (Its title track, a dubby postmodern love song, was her most successful single.) She wore Day-Glo colors and brought in saxophones and science fiction. She could sing cool hooks or turn her voice into a rocket. Over bionic riffs, her lyrics told rich stories, forming a folk music of her own creation. The effect was sonic Pop Art.A biracial woman in a predominantly white scene, Styrene was not a typical punk. And “I Am a Cliché” is by no means a typical punk film. Bell, who was finishing a master’s degree in political philosophy in 2015 when she began to face her role as caretaker of Poly Styrene’s legacy, appears onscreen and narrates her mother’s complicated life — from teenage runaway to punk sensation to Hare Krishna, all while struggling with bipolar disorder, all before her mid-20s — through her perspective as the (frequently neglected) child of a totemic, explosive figure in punk history.Was she a good mother? Not exactly. But while Bell poses the question and answers it early, she spends the duration of the film bearing out what her mother was always searching for in her lyrics — a complexity scaled large enough to show the truth.Styrene and her daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film.Tony BarrattThe film’s timing is apt: Styrene’s influence on and relevance within culture keeps growing. Where her brash vision once seemed futuristic, it now feels shockingly attuned to reality. Artists from the vanguard of pop, like FKA twigs, and the heart of punk, like the New Orleans group Special Interest and the London trio Big Joanie, cite her as a formative inspiration. Her influence can also be traced through the still-emerging impact of the riot grrrl movement. It spans decades and generations.The singer, songwriter and rapper Neneh Cherry, who appears in “I Am a Cliché,” said in an interview that she found her own voice by singing along to X-Ray Spex, and recalled listening to the band with her parents, the jazz musician Don and the textile artist Moki Cherry, who “absolutely got” Styrene’s fearlessness and honesty.“When we used to listen to her, they would be like: That’s what we’re talking about,” Cherry said. She noted that it was singing along to her father’s piano playing and entering “a Poly place, tonally,” that her voice first emerged. “Inside of hers is how I found my own voice,” she explained. “I also started listening to her when I was at a space in my life where — I knew who I was, but I didn’t always know how to be who I was, or how to feel that great about it. Poly was and still is like medicine for me.”The feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna first heard X-Ray Spex in 1989 — the year before her band Bikini Kill formed in Olympia, Wash. — and was awed by the breadth of ideas in her writing.“I was really blown away by the lyrics and how much there was a critique of capitalism,” she said in an interview, and how that extended, sometimes subtlety, to critiques of sexism and racism within punk. “Poly obviously is a poet. It was such a perfect marriage of emotion and technique. I was like, How have I never heard of this band before? It seemed better than the Sex Pistols.”Lora Logic and Styrene onstage with X-Ray Spex. The band released one album in 1979 and promptly split.Erica Echenberg/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSTYRENE WAS BORN Marianne Joan Elliott-Said in 1957 to a Somali father and an English mother, who raised Styrene and her siblings alone in a Brixton council estate. In her teenage years, struck with art and rebellion, Styrene fled home to hitchhike to hippie music festivals, stoking an ecological consciousness she would bring to punk. She immersed herself in theater, fashion, poetry and music. A bookish autodidact who left school at 15, she gravitated toward philosophy, the occult, Freud and Jung. As a cinephile she favored the retrofuturism of “Barbarella.” Her rock idols were David Bowie and Marc Bolan. She loved soul and reggae, and Bell said she cited singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Joan Armatrading as huge inspirations.Styrene’s first pre-punk single was a pop-reggae song called “Silly Billy” about teenage pregnancy. It was produced by a man 16 years her senior named Falcon Stuart who would become her boyfriend and the manager of X-Ray Spex. (Bell said she received conflicting stories about Stuart, who died in 2002, over the years, noting in the film: “Sometimes she’d say he was the love of her life; other times, that he’d ruined it.”)When punk hit, Styrene, at 19, was galvanized. Enamored of the Sex Pistols — a previously unseen clip of Styrene dancing in the crowd at one of their gigs recurs in the film — she placed an ad in Melody Maker searching for “yung punx” to “stick it together,” and assembled a crew that included the bassist Paul Dean and, briefly, the saxophonist Lora Logic (until Styrene kicked her out).The band signed with Virgin for the classic “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — its opening declaration, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard/But I think, oh bondage, up yours!” became feminist punk scripture — before moving to EMI for “Germfree Adolescents.” (Styrene was an uncredited producer on the album, Bell said.) The LP took them to “Top of the Pops” and the BBC, which broadcast a television documentary called “Who Is Poly Styrene?” where the singer famously described that she picked her stage name because it is plastic and disposable: “That’s what pop stars are meant to mean, therefore I thought I might as well send it up.”The early BBC film and “I Am a Cliché” both depict Styrene’s mental health struggles, which the pressures of fame exacerbated. In 1978, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia; she was in a psychiatric hospital the first time she saw herself singing on television. Bell believes her mother’s condition was worsened by the media’s sexist scrutiny of her body as well as the destabilizing nihilism in punk.“A lot of people think X-Ray Spex were a lot more underground than they were. But my mum did have that brush with celebrity,” Bell said. “There is a kind of fame where you can never escape from it, and that was the kind of attention that my mum had, even though it didn’t last very long. It didn’t last very long because she got out.”Bell and Styrene. “She could have made a lot more money,” Bell said, “but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Fabrizio RainoneStyrene went on to release the gentle, tabla-flecked solo album “Translucence” in 1981, and, around then, met the musician Adrian Bell. They married three months later and she gave birth to Bell. Not long after, Styrene eschewed the material world she had observed in her songs by joining the Hare Krishna movement and moving with her daughter to Bhaktivedanta Manor, a country house George Harrison had donated to the group in 1973. But her mental health struggles persisted. She left the temple, and Bell, then 8, went to live with her grandmother.Bell said her mother never had a steady job after X-Ray Spex. She lived off meager royalties, continuing to write and release music. Heartbreakingly, in the film, Bell recalls her mother saying “being broke and famous is the worst of both worlds.”By the early 2000s, Bell and her mother had reconciled. Styrene moved to seaside Hastings, which energized her, and she began to write a retrospective diary of her punk past. (Excerpts are threaded throughout the film.) Styrene had recently recorded a new solo album, “Generation Indigo,” when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Bell said her mother believed in reincarnation, viewing death as “the next great adventure.”“My mum didn’t have an easy life,” she said. “She had a lot of barriers to break through as a mixed race woman, but she did, and she did it on her own terms. She took the DIY ethic and really lived it.”In her diary, Styrene called herself “an ordinary tough kid from an ordinary tough street.” Her daughter said that she fought back when other children mocked her appearance: “She was always getting beat up. She’d been chased down the street by skinheads.”Styrene explored her heritage directly in early poems, which led to intersectional statements on tracks like “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — an indictment of the bondage aesthetic in punk fashion, which she loathed, as much as a liberationist rallying cry. She asked, presciently, in the X-Ray Spex song “Identity”:When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?Do you see yourself on the TV screen?Do you see yourself in the magazine?When you see yourself, does it make you scream?WHEN HANNA FOUND Styrene, her forebear’s influence was musical as well as philosophical. “She could do a vulnerable high-pitched voice and also a loud bellow,” she said. “She used the roundness in her voice, the piercing in her voice. There’s not a fear of pop music with Poly.”For Alli Logout, the vocalist for Special Interest, Styrene was thrilling proof that a person of color had helped invent punk while critiquing it; that vulnerability can exist in chaos; and that punk can be incisive but fun.“My original exploration with music in general was a sadness that I didn’t see any Black bodies occupying that space,” Logout, who uses they/them pronouns, said of their earliest experiences headbanging at metal shows in their small Texas town. But leafing through a stolen book on punk history, “I remember very clearly seeing a picture of Poly Styrene and her braces and being like, what?” Watching a live “Bondage” video, “I felt the otherness that she encapsulated by just being fully herself. Whenever I heard that song, I knew that it was the attitude that I have to present myself in every single day.”Styrene’s fashion sense has also proven to be influential.BBC ArenaBeginning in middle school, the singer-songwriter Shamir felt such a connection to X-Ray Spex that by the fall of 2016, he decided to get Styrene’s face tattooed on his thigh. “Poly was one of the main influences on me to keep the spirit of punk alive as a Black person,” he said in an interview. “She’s constantly staring at me when I wake up in the morning.”“So much of the time, what’s considered punk to everyone else is rage, but I don’t think anyone would categorize her as rageful,” he noted, saying Styrene communicated via different emotions. “I learned from that in a lot of ways.” He added, “You’re always going to be in the margins, but that doesn’t mean you have to be quiet. A lot of times we have to be the loudest in order to be heard slightly.”As Bell organized her mother’s archive, she was struck by the intensity of her process, uncovering many drafts of a single set of lyrics, or a mixed-media collage, like a piece that layered various forms of contraception packaging atop feminist comic strips to explore the nature of modern relationships. (Styrene created all of the band’s art herself.) “She walked away at the height of their popularity,” she said. It’s a decision Bell finds gives the film a hopeful message: “She could have made a lot more money, but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Ultimately, Bell said with conviction, “All my mum wanted, musically and artistically, was to be taken seriously.” More