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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

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      In a New Documentary, Janet Jackson Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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      A four-hour film on Lifetime and A&E touches on the highs and lows of a long career, but doesn’t dig deep into one of pop’s great risk-takers.Throughout her two-decade-plus heyday, Janet Jackson was an astonishingly modern pop superstar — a risk-taker with a distinctive voice, a vivid sense of self-presentation and an innate understanding of the scale of the labor required to make world-shaking music. She was the embodiment of authority and command, practically unrivaled in her day and studiously copied by later generations.But throughout “Janet Jackson,” a four-hour documentary that premiered over two nights on Lifetime and A&E, the highs and lows of Jackson’s career are often presented as a kind of collateral asset or damage. Her brothers were famous first; Jackson was the spunky younger sister who came after. When her brother Michael, then the most famous pop star on the planet, faced his first allegations of sexual impropriety, Jackson lost her opportunity for a lucrative sponsorship with Coca-Cola. When a wardrobe malfunction derailed Jackson’s performance at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, it is her career that’s tanked, and not that of her collaborator, the rising star Justin Timberlake.It’s a curious choice for the first official documentary about one of the most influential musicians of the last few decades. But what makes it even more curious is that Jackson herself is the executive producer (along with her brother, and manager, Randy). It is a bait and switch, using the lure of access and intimacy — cameras followed her for five years, we’re told — as a tool of deflection.“Janet Jackson” is a sanctioned documentary with the feel of a YouTube news clip aggregation. Jackson is interviewed extensively, but largely provides play-by-play, rarely color commentary. In some parts, especially when she’s shown in conversation with Randy, she’s the one asking questions, especially when the pair return to the family’s Gary, Ind., home. At almost every emotional crossroads, the film drops a whooshing thwack sound effect, an unconscious echo of the “Law & Order” cha-chunk, and cuts to commercial. That choice renders fraught moments melodramatic, and melodramatic moments comic.In between elisions, “Janet Jackson” is bolstered by some phenomenal archival footage, mainly shot by Jackson’s ex-husband René Elizondo Jr., who toted a camera throughout their time together — as romantic and professional partners — with an eye toward some future omnibus archive. We see Jackson in the studio with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, in a tug of war of wills while working out the sound of “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814,” her second album with them and the follow-up to the career-making “Control.” During the recording for the 1995 single “Scream,” we see Jackson and Michael talking about lyrics, and Michael asking for her to tap into the voice from her rock hit “Black Cat.” There’s sleepy but telling footage of a meeting with Coca-Cola as Jackson is being offered that sponsorship, and also scenes from the table read of the 1993 film “Poetic Justice,” in which Jackson starred alongside Tupac Shakur.As for drama — there is no drama, this film insists. Everything is fine. Joe Jackson, the family patriarch, is presented as a beacon of hard work and discipline, not abuse, without whom the children’s success would have been impossible. Jackson’s exes — James DeBarge, Elizondo, Jermaine Dupri — are largely forgiven for their improprieties. Her third husband, Wissam Al Mana (they split up in 2017), is never named, but the son they share, Eissa, is mentioned and briefly shown. As for the Super Bowl performance that derailed her career, well, Jackson and Timberlake are great friends, she says.Or maybe something else is going on. “She continually suffers privately, and doesn’t involve any of you,” says Wayne Scot Lucas, her longtime stylist.That seems to include Benjamin Hirsch, the film’s director and the one peppering Jackson with questions. In several segments, Hirsch uses the audio of his query in order to provide a more complete picture of the incomplete answer he receives. His asks are gentle but direct, with only a shadow of the awkwardness that comes with pushing a famous and famously private person in an uncomfortable direction. Often when he’s probing, Jackson is in the back seat of an S.U.V., being chauffeured to a location designed to trigger a memory; the most vulnerable aspect of these scenes is the physical proximity, a space-sharing closeness that’s a proxy for actual feeling-sharing closeness.When the spotlight is ceded to others, especially Jackson’s behind-the-scenes collaborators like Lucas and the dancer Tina Landon, little flickers of clarity emerge. And a fuller appreciation of Jackson’s artistry comes from Jam and Lewis (who also serve as music supervisors on the documentary), and her former choreographer Paula Abdul. Plenty of other superstars are corralled — Whoopi Goldberg, Mariah Carey, Samuel L. Jackson, Barry Bonds (!), Missy Elliott — simply to shower Jackson with platitudes, a colossal missed opportunity.It’s churlish to linger over what’s not covered here, but given that official documentaries can tend toward the hagiographic, there’s perilously little analysis or appreciation of Jackson’s music or videos, just assertions of their greatness. The one exception is Questlove, who discusses advocating for her election to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Jackson’s life has spanned many traumas, but this film mostly recalls them gauzily, and doesn’t argue strongly enough for her triumphs. What’s more, the editing is choppy, and the lighting is often garish — a tabloid-style production for an artist who merits vanity treatment.But the pall is coming from inside the house. Even at her pop peak, Jackson was often reluctant, and years of public scandal that tarred her even from a distance have not seemingly inclined her to do much beyond shrug and retreat.By that measure, the film is a success. And sometimes the reticence is rendered literal. When Jackson’s mother is asked about Michael’s death, she falters a bit, and someone off camera, seemingly Jackson, asks her if the questioning is too much for her. She indicates that it is, and they move on. And when Jackson is discussing her father’s death — “I got the opportunity to thank him, thank God” — it’s the rare moment where emotion gets the best of her. After just the faintest shudder, though, she erects a wall: “OK, Ben, that’s enough.” And yet. More

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      ‘Encanto’ Soundtrack Repeats at No. 1 for a Third Time

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      The Disney album held off the latest from the prolific rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again on the Billboard 200.The soundtrack to “Encanto,” Disney’s latest animated hit, tops the Billboard album chart for a third time this week, holding off the latest from the popular and prolific rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again.“Encanto” had the equivalent of 115,000 sales in the United States last week, up 11 percent from the week before, as songs like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and “Surface Pressure” remain big hits on streaming services. Its total included 139 million streams and 119,000 traditional album sales, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.“Colors,” the latest mixtape from YoungBoy, a 22-year-old from Baton Rouge, La., who has been a star attraction on YouTube for the last few years — and a regular contender on the music charts with a rapid-fire schedule of albums and mixtapes — was held to No. 2 with the equivalent of 79,000 sales. Most of that total came from the 119 million clicks that songs from the album drew on streaming services; “Colors” also sold a little under 2,000 copies as a complete package.Gunna’s “DS4Ever,” which opened at No. 1 two weeks ago, falls one spot to No. 3 in its third week out, followed by the Weeknd’s “Dawn FM.”Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” holds at No. 5. Since it came out 55 weeks ago, “Dangerous” has landed outside the Top 10 only once, when it was pushed out by a number of holiday albums in December. More

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      glaive Showcases His Less Hyper Pop, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Raveena, the Weather Station, Immanuel Wilkins 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.glaive, ‘Icarus’The ostensibly summery, mid-tempo “Icarus” shows off the relatively less hyper side of the hyperpop star glaive, though its lines still hit like angst-ridden daggers: “We’re flying too close to the sun,” he sings to his romantic partner in crime. A highlight from the deluxe edition of his 2021 EP “All Dogs Go to Heaven” (cheekily retitled “Old Dog, New Tricks”),“Icarus” has an instantly catchy hook that shows why many hail glaive as the potential breakout star of his underground subgenre. But the song still retains an appealingly edgy sense of emotional mayhem: “I’m setting fire to my room, ’cause I don’t know what else to do!” LINDSAY ZOLADZThe Smile, ‘The Smoke’The Smile — Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead with Tom Skinner, a drummer from Sons of Kemet — has quickly demonstrated its range. The trio snarled through its first single, “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” only to play things cool on its second, “The Smoke.” A minute-long instrumental intro sticks to syncopated bass and dub-echoed drums, in a 10-bar pattern that threatens to trip up unwary dancers as it seems to switch between 4/4 and waltz. Yorke’s high vocals and a hazy horn arrangement join the rhythmic crosscurrent as he sings about what might be the heat of desire or destruction, crooning, “Smoke wakes me from my sleep.” JON PARELESImmanuel Wilkins, ‘Fugitive Ritual, Selah’Peaceful and incantatory, “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” offers a moment to re-center amid the dicey, kinetic tour de force that is “The 7th Hand,” the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s second album with his quartet. Wilkins is more often in a high-octane mode, but here he nearly caresses each note. He wrote “Fugitive Ritual, Selah” — which weaves through a melody built around harmonic shifts until finally landing on a repetitious, soothing coda — as a tribute to spaces like the Black church, where a distance from the white gaze allows for freer expression. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOPierre Kwenders, ‘Papa Wemba’The Congolese musician Pierre Kwenders was born in Kinshasa and has lived in Montreal since 2001. “Papa Wemba,” from an album due in April, is a tribute to the singer, bandleader and snappy dresser Papa Wemba, who brought Congolese rumba, or soukous, to an international audience from the 1970s until his death in 2016. “Papa Wemba” adds electronic clout to the soukous beat — it sounds like it’s being punched out on a Teletype — and stirs up a rhythmic vortex with echoing guitars, gruffly sung and chanted vocals and a twin-saxophone riff that approximates the horns saying “Papa Wemba.” PARELESRaveena featuring Vince Staples, ‘Secret’Serpentine and luxurious, Raveena’s “Secret” is a pulsing after-hours affair. With her barely there voice, the R&B singer whispers silken come-ons, a steady thrum ricocheting off a muted tabla drum. It’s retrograde but futuristic, like the forthcoming concept album it appears on, which tells the story of a space princess from ancient Punjab. “Wait a sec, I’ll hit you right back,” Raveena coos in the chorus. You can almost feel her hot breath on your neck. ISABELIA HERRERASaba featuring G Herbo, ‘Survivor’s Guilt’“Survivor’s Guilt” is filled with wounds, yet Saba’s flow is breathless, like he’s outrunning the aftermath of trauma in real time. “I’m trying to move better/What’s really eating when you from a food desert,” he raps, echoing the hyper-speed flows of chopper forebears like Twista. A guest verse from G Herbo cements the song as an unforgettably Chicago linkup. HERRERAEx-Void, ‘Churchyard’Reuniting two members of the too-short-lived noise-pop band Joanna Gruesome, Ex-Vöid is a relatively new, jangly British power-pop group set to release its debut album later this year. The lush, taut “Churchyard” retains their previous band’s keen sense of melody, but this time favoring the sort of clean, bright guitar tones that broadcast their penchant for pop songcraft loud and clear. ZOLADZTess Parks, ‘Happy Birthday Forever’Tess Parks’s voice has an alluring, husky grain on “Happy Birthday Forever,” the first single from her upcoming album, “And Those Who Were Seen Dancing.” The Toronto-born artist hasn’t released an LP since her 2013 debut “Blood Hot,” and has since been collaborating with Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but “Happy Birthday Forever” proves she’s a confident, enchanting presence on her own. The song is propelled by a jaunty beat and a bright piano riff, but there’s a dark undercurrent to the way Parks delivers her lines, like she’s exhaling cigarette smoke from the corner of her mouth: “Get me outta here.” ZOLADZDora Jar, ‘Lagoon’A lurching drumbeat, a barely tuned piano: The songwriter Dora Jar — who has lived in New York, California, Poland and England — doesn’t need much more to profess her longing in “Lagoon,” in terms both mundane and surreal: “My heart is a crustacean/Could you come and crack it open?” There’s an Elton John backbeat in her piano chords, but also a 21st-century sense of possibility, as vocal overdubs surround her and, for some reason, what sounds like a banjo surfaces near the end of the tune. PARELESThe Weather Station, ‘Endless Time’“It’s only the end of an endless time,” Tamara Lindeman sings in the opening moments of this shattering new ballad, the first song released from the Weather Station’s upcoming album, “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars.” Lindeman has said the March 4 LP is a kind of companion piece to last year’s excellent “Ignorance,” and “Endless Time” certainly mirrors its predecessor’s chilling evocation of loss as well as its elegant weaving together of the personal and ecological. But while “Ignorance” experimented with fractured, jazzy rhythms, “Endless Time” echoes through a sparse negative space — just a haunting piano accompaniment and Lindeman’s elegiac vocals. Any “companion record” to a strong artistic statement risks being dismissed as a collection of B-sides, but this arresting first single is Lindeman bringing her “A” game. ZOLADZDonna Missal, ‘Insecure’​​Sooner or later, every sound ricochets around Donna Missal’s “Insecure”: ticks and taps of percussion, calm keyboard note clusters, grainy simulated strings and whispery vocals that split into harmonies, get pitched up and down and waft up out of nowhere. “Never want to see you again,” she announces as the song begins, and she goes on to denounce her “baby” as an unapologetic liar. But the confrontation is hushed, private and solitary, as if it’s taking place in a sonic hall of mirrors. PARELESKatie Dey, ‘Real Love’The Australian songwriter Katie Dey is both deadpan and devastating as she sings about an abusive relationship and her own self-destructive impulses in “Real Love.” The verses have an offhand sound — a thumpy drumbeat, dinky keyboard chords — as she recalls how “I made myself small/you made yourself big,” but her vocals take on hyperpop glitches and an Auto-Tuned edge on the way to a chorus that crashes in with distorted guitars, as she declares, “I want love that hurts.” PARELESTyler Mitchell featuring Marshall Allen, ‘A Call for All Demons’The bassist Tyler Mitchell played briefly in Sun Ra’s Arkestra during the 1980s, then put in decades of work as a straight-ahead jazz musician before rejoining the group about 10 years ago, after its patriarch had died. By now, he’s a deeply embedded member of the band. Leading his own sextet on a new album, “Dancing Shadows” — with the Arkestra luminary and alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, 97, as a featured guest — Mitchell covers a range of Sun Ra material alongside his own tunes; throughout, he guides things from below with the same bobbing, pulpy vigor that makes him sound at home in the Arkestra. “A Call for All Demons” is a tune that Sun Ra first recorded in the 1950s, and on Mitchell’s album it serves as the opening invocation. RUSSONELLONyokabi Kariūki, ‘Equator Song’Nyokabi Kariūki’s “Equator Song” radiates the dissonance of bilingual (or even trilingual) existence. Kariūki, who grew up in Kenya and now lives in Maryland, recorded the song on a trip to Kenya’s Laikipia county, collaging the chatter of weaverbirds — wordless, sky-high vocalizations floating into the ether. “You’ll find my soul on someone’s tongue,” she sings in English, harnessing the experience of living in a language that will never be your own. But instead of lingering in the discomfort or seeking some empty form of reconnection, Kariūki moves fluidly between English, Maa and Kiswahili. It is an acceptance of the diaspora’s constant condition of loss, and the beauty that exists within it. HERRERA More

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      Review: Philip Glass and the Bangles, Mashed at the Symphony

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      Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond brought their gleeful opera-cabaret show “Only an Octave Apart” to the New York Philharmonic.It’s not like the New York Philharmonic hasn’t been queer before. I can’t have been the only boy for whom Jessye Norman’s hair, when she sang Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene with the orchestra on national television in 1995, was a turning point. The ensemble backed Mariah Carey in Central Park, and Elaine Stritch for Sondheim’s 80th. It once paired Lou Harrison and Bruckner.But it’s safe to say it hasn’t presented anything quite like Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond’s Philharmonic debut as a duo on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Performing a rich helping of their recent show “Only an Octave Apart,” they cracked jokes about G spots and traveling for sex, mashed up Purcell’s Dido with Dido’s “White Flag,” layered Philip Glass over the Bangles, and generally camped up the joint.When “Only an Octave Apart” played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last fall, it was a riff on Beverly Sills and Carol Burnett’s high-low 1976 special of the same name, bringing together Costanzo, an operatic countertenor, and Bond, the gleefully savage cabaret diva. I went in with a little trepidation — a fan of both performers, but not quite sure whether the experiment would go off. Would it be too stiff? Too silly? Too talky? Too self-indulgent?It was sublime.By turns hilarious and tender — those dual Didos are very much not played for laughs — the show was a small miracle of careful craft and improvisatory looseness, of arch personae and moving sincerity. Costanzo was a superb, well, straight man to Bond’s battiness, and their voices — one slender and pure, the other husky and vibrato-heavy — improbably blended. The return to live performance after a year and a half of lockdowns only increased the poignancy and delight of their obvious mutual love and respect. It was a confection that nourished.It still is. Alongside the release of an album version, the show is an apt opener for the festival “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within,” organized by Costanzo as part of his Philharmonic residency. Focused on marginalized identities and (forgive the self-helpism) being yourself, the festival’s programs include a pair of premieres sung by Costanzo, as well as a rare countertenor take on Berlioz’s song cycle “Les Nuits d’Été.”On Thursday I missed Zack Winokur’s daffy yet elegant full staging of “Only an Octave Apart,” especially Jonathan Anderson’s delirious gowns. But the 90-minute show compressed nicely into a 50-minute concert half, the union between classical and cabaret smoothed by Nico Muhly’s lush yet subtle orchestrations.Costanzo also joined the orchestra and its music director, Jaap van Zweden, in the premiere of Joel Thompson and Tracy K. Smith’s “The Places We Leave.”Chris LeeSome moody Nelson Riddle-style string arrangements — like the scoring of a Douglas Sirk melodrama — nodded to what came before intermission: the premiere of Joel Thompson’s “The Places We Leave.” Setting a new text by the poet Tracy K. Smith, Thompson also reveled in sumptuous, worried strings, and gave Costanzo mellow, narrative vocal lines that surge into piercing climaxes. There was even a patch of exhausting Handelian coloratura, a wink at the text’s account of a lover who “left me breathless,” and at a Costanzo specialty. (He appears in “Rodelinda” at the Metropolitan Opera in March.)The concert opened with Joan Tower’s stout “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” No. 1, and also included Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, “Classical.” What was this chestnut doing here? Particularly as conducted by Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director — who was otherwise a sensitive leader — with his all-too-characteristic clenched, unwitty approach to the standard repertory.But an aspect of the choice resonated. Like “Only an Octave Apart,” Prokofiev’s First was created in a time of crisis, the violence of the February Revolution in Russia, but has little hint of that darkness in a work of sparkling energy and grace.Is making joyful music in grim times escapist, even reactionary? Sometimes the opposite: The “Classical” looked, as does “Only an Octave Apart,” to the past with a fresh spirit, a kind of progressive nostalgia. And like Costanzo and Bond in their show, Prokofiev used the work not to rest on his laurels but to spur himself to develop; the symphony was the first big piece he wrote without leaning on his beloved piano as a composition tool. It made his future possible.As unlikely yet satisfying a pairing as Costanzo and Bond, then, these two works — bridging an intermission and a century — are a reminder that what emerges and survives from our distressing era may not be what we expect. All we can do is give artists the space to create, and keep our ears open.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Don Wilson, Who Gave the Ventures Their Distinctive Rhythm, Dies at 88

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      He was a founder, with Bob Bogle, of what has been called the best-selling and most influential instrumental band in rock ’n’ roll history.Don Wilson, co-founder of the instrumental rock group the Ventures, whose twanging, hard-driving sound, propelled by his dynamic rhythm guitar, led to hits like “Walk — Don’t Run” and helped shape the surf music of the early 1960s as well as influencing generations of guitarists, died on Saturday in Tacoma, Wash. He was 88.His daughter Staci Layne Wilson confirmed the death, at a hospital.Mr. Wilson and Bob Bogle formed the group that became the Ventures in the late 1950s and had been having modest success performing in the Seattle area when, with Nokie Edwards on bass and Skip Moore playing drums, they recorded “Walk — Don’t Run” in March 1960. It was their version of a song by the jazz guitarist Johnny Smith that had previously been recorded by Chet Atkins.The group had already released one 45 r.p.m. record, having formed their own label, Blue Horizon, with the help of Mr. Wilson’s mother, to do it. But that first record didn’t generate interest, and neither did “Walk — Don’t Run,” until they played it for Pat O’Day, who had the afternoon show on the Seattle radio station KJR. He smelled a hit.The station always played an instrumental leading into its newscast at the top of the hour, but without introducing it, Mr. O’Day said in an interview for “Sonic Boom! The History of Northwest Rock, From ‘Louie, Louie’ to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” a 2009 book by Peter Blecha. “So we put it on every hour as that filler there,” he said, “and of course you know what happened after that.”What happened was, callers flooded the station wanting to know what that catchy record was. One of the callers was from Dolton Records, which had earlier turned away the fledgling Ventures. Dolton signed them, and soon the record reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It stayed on that chart for months and became one of the most recognizable songs of the era.Mr. Wilson spoke when the Ventures were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. With him were, from left, John Durrill, Fiona Taylor (the band’s manager), Bob Spalding, Nokie Edwards and Leon Taylor.Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage The group went on to have a number of other successful singles, most notably its version of the theme from the television series “Hawaii Five-0,” which made the Top 10 in 1969. The lineup shuffled a bit — Mr. Bogle, who died in 2009, switched to bass; Mr. Edwards, who died in 2018, was the better player and became lead guitarist; and Mel Taylor, who died in 1996, settled in as drummer. Mr. Wilson pounded out his rhythm accompaniments for 55 years, turning over the job to Ian Spalding, son of another current member, Bob Spalding, during a show in Tokyo in 2015.In 2019 the Grammy Museum mounted an exhibition in honor of the group, calling the Ventures “the most influential, best-selling instrumental band in rock and roll history.” The group, the exhibition said, has recorded more than 250 albums, including a series of instructional records aimed at novice guitar players.Leon Taylor, Mel’s son, is the Ventures’ current drummer and had a close-up view of Mr. Wilson’s impact.“Don has been a part of my life since I was a little kid,” he said by email. “Don was a unique talent that influenced thousands of guitar players all over the world.”Mr. Blecha, too, cited the group’s influence on would-be guitar players, as well as its chutzpah in putting out its first records on its own label when no one else would, something rare for the time.The Ventures in 1999, from left: Gerry McGee, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bogle and Mr. Wilson.Richard E. Aaron/Redferns via Getty Images“But beyond all that,” he said by email of Mr. Wilson in particular, “you just gotta admire a musician who carved out such a lucrative and impactful career playing mainly rhythm guitar. Guys who have accomplished that comprise a rather short list.”Donald Lee Wilson was born on Feb. 10, 1933, in Tacoma to Woodrow and Josie Wilson. His father was a car salesman, and his mother became a record producer and was key to the band’s early success.“When I was younger I wanted to learn how to play the trombone,” Don Wilson said in an interview for “The Ventures: Stars on Guitars,” a 2019 documentary film directed by his daughter Staci. “I thought the trombone had such a mellow sound. It was Tommy Dorsey that I really liked.”He played trombone in an Army band, where a bandmate taught him chords on the guitar, adding to the few he had already been shown by his mother. After mustering out, he was working at his father’s used-car lot in Seattle when Mr. Bogle came in, looking to buy a car. They started talking and hit it off.Mr. Bogle got Mr. Wilson a job working with him as a bricklayer. They soon realized that, with all the rain in the Pacific Northwest, they had a lot of down time, since many of their jobs were outside. And both of them had rudimentary guitar skills.“We bought two guitars in a pawnshop in Tacoma, Washington, and we probably paid 10 or 15 dollars apiece for them,” Mr. Wilson said in the film.The group was just the two of them at first, Mr. Bogle playing lead and Mr. Wilson rhythm. That, of necessity, led them to develop a unique sound, underpinned by Mr. Wilson’s driving approach.“In the early days Don had to play very rhythmic and strong because they didn’t have a drummer,” Bob Spalding, who first played with the group in 1981 and joined for good after Mr. Bogle’s death, said by email. “Later, when they became a quartet with a drummer, his style never changed, and that unique rhythm guitar drive became a prominent characteristic of the band’s music.”In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”At his death, Mr. Wilson lived in Covington, Wash. In addition to his daughter Staci, his survivors include three other children, Jill Fairbanks, Tim Wilson and Cyd Wilson; and two grandchildren.In 2008 John Fogerty inducted the Ventures into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In his induction remarks, he marveled that the group had recorded more than 250 albums.“Good Lord, think about that,” Mr. Fogerty said. “Nowadays, some of us would be happy to sell 250 albums.” More