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      Shock G, Frontman for Hip-Hop Group Digital Underground, Dies at 57

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      The group had a string of hits in the 1990s, including “The Humpty Dance,” and helped introduce a little-known rapper named Tupac Shakur.Gregory Edward Jacobs, known as Shock G, the frontman for the influential hip-hop group Digital Underground, was found dead on Thursday at a hotel in Tampa, Fla. He was 57.His death was confirmed by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, which did not provide a cause .Digital Underground had a string of hits in the early 1990s and introduced its audience to a little-known rapper named Tupac Shakur. The group’s name sounded like “a band of outlaws from a cyberpunk novel,” with a sound that “straddles the line between reality and fantasy, between silliness and social commentary,” The New York Times wrote in 1991. “Digital Underground is where Parliament left off,” Shock G said at the time, referring to the groundbreaking George Clinton band.Shock G had been shuttling from his home in Tampa to Northern California in 1987 when the group made a self-released single, “Underwater Rimes.” That helped get the attention of Tommy Boy Records, which released Digital Underground’s first album, “Sex Packets.” It sold a million copies and featured the hit single “The Humpty Dance.”The album stood out for melding funk and jazz riffs on top of catchy drumbeats. And with Shock G’s lanky frame and toothy grin, the group had a visual aesthetic ripe for the dawn of the music video generation. Shock G, who produced music in addition to rapping, was known for spinning different personas, depending on his surroundings. In the video for “The Humpty Dance,” Shock G took on the persona of Humpty Hump, the title character, donning a pair of dark-rimmed glasses with an obviously fake nose, a fur hat and tie. “I’m sick wit dis, straight gangsta mack / But sometimes I get ridiculous,” he raps on the song. “I’ll eat up all your crackers and your licorice / Hey yo fat girl, come here — are ya ticklish?” Part of the hook for the song: “Do the Humpty Hump, come on and do the Humpty Hump.”Shock G can be seen in a similar outfit, both goofy and suave, in the video for the group’s song, “Doowutchyalike,” where he encouraged listeners to let loose and enjoy themselves as a saxophone gently riffs over the beat.Shock G’s most lasting impact on hip-hop and music may have come when the group released the hit “Same Song,” which was Mr. Shakur’s “first vocal appearance on a song,” according to Genius.com. Shock G, who appears first on the song, once again cast himself as the good-time host. “I came for the party to get naughty, get my rocks on / Eat popcorn, watch you move your body to the pop song.”When it was Mr. Shakur’s turn, he quickly unleashed a thoughtful verse about the dangers of success: “Get some fame, people change.”Mr. Shakur had auditioned for Shock G and was hired to be a member of the group’s road crew. He eventually performed and recorded with Digital Underground, appearing on the group’s “This Is an EP Release” (Tommy Boy), and “Sons of the P” (Tommy Boy), which was nominated for a Grammy Award.In 1991, Mr. Shakur started a solo recording career with the album “2Pacalypse Now” (Interscope), which sold half a million copies. It included two modest hits, “Trapped” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a song about an unwed teenage mother’s plight. Before the album was released, he also started a career as a movie actor, playing the violent, unpredictable Bishop in the Ernest Dickerson film “Juice.”By 1993, Mr. Shakur was a rising star. Shock G and another Digital Underground member, Money B, appeared on Mr. Shakur’s album, helping create his first major hit, “I Get Around,” a poolside anthem with scantily clad women and a laid-back beat. But now, it was Shock G, sporting an Afro and oversized purple T-shirt, with the message: “Now you can tell from my everyday fits I ain’t rich / So cease and desist with them tricks / I’m just another Black man caught up in the mix / Tryna make a dollar out of 15 cents.”Shock G’s musical instincts were forged by a childhood spent moving around the country. His mother worked as a television producer and his father worked as an executive in computer management. After the couple divorced, “I spent my biggest chunk of time in Tampa but I also lived in New York, Philly and California,” Shock G had told The Times. “I have always been into music and played in bands starting when I was 10 or 11.”His grandmother, Gloria Ali, was a pianist and cabaret singer in Harlem in the 1950s. She taught him how to play “Round Midnight” on the piano. Then, as hip-hop began to gain traction in New York in the late 1970s, Shock G, who was living there at the time, recalled, “All of my friends and I sold our instruments to buy mixers and turntables.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Shock G saw music as expansive, inclusive and experimental. “Funk can be rock, funk can be jazz and funk can be soul,” he told The Times. “Most people have a checklist of what makes a good pop song: it has to be three minutes long, it must have a repeatable chorus and it must have a catchy hook. That’s what makes music stale. We say ‘Do what feels good.’ If you like it for three minutes, then you’ll love it for 30.”Christina Morales More

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      She’s Marianne Faithfull, Damn It. And She’s (Thankfully) Still Here.

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      The British musician has had several brushes with death in her 74 years. But Covid-19 and its long-haul symptoms didn’t derail her latest project: a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets.Several times in her 74 years of life, Marianne Faithfull has boomeranged from the brink of death.First there was the summer of 1969, when she overdosed on Tuinal sleeping pills in the Sydney hotel room she was sharing with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger; as she slipped under, she had a long conversation with his recently deceased bandmate, Brian Jones, who had drowned in a swimming pool about a week prior. At the end of their spirited talk, Jones beckoned her to hop off a cliff and join him in the beyond. Faithfull declined, and woke up from a six-day coma.That was before she became addicted to heroin in the early 1970s: “At that point I entered one of the outer levels of hell,” she writes in her 1994 autobiography “Faithfull.” It took more than a decade to finally get clean. Since then she’s survived breast cancer, hepatitis C and an infection resulting from a broken hip. But, as Faithfull told me on the phone from her London home one afternoon in February, her recent bout with Covid-19 and its lingering long-term aftereffects has been the hardest battle she’s fought in her entire life.“You don’t want to get this, darling,” she said. “Really.”She said it, of course, in That Voice, coated with ash but flickering with lively defiance underneath. As it’s matured — cracked and ripened like a well-journeyed face — Faithfull’s voice has come to possess a transfixing magic. It’s a voice that sounds like it has come back from somewhere, and found a way to collapse present and past. She can find the Weimar Berlin decadence in Dylan, or breathe William Blake’s macabre into a Metallica song.Right before she contracted the virus in March 2020, Faithfull was working on an album she’d dreamed of making for more than half a century: “She Walks in Beauty,” due April 30, a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets, who had first inflamed her imagination as a teenager. In the mid-1960s, the demands of Faithfull’s burgeoning pop career pulled her out of her beloved Mrs. Simpson’s English literature course, “but I went on reading the books,” Faithfull said. And through the ups and downs of her life, those poems stayed with her like well-worn talismans: “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shalott’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?”Faithfull had recorded recitations of seven Romantic poems, from Byron (“She Walks in Beauty”), Shelley (“Ozymandias”) and Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale”). After she was hospitalized with Covid-19 and fell into a coma, her manager sent the recordings to Faithfull’s friend and frequent collaborator Warren Ellis, to see if he would compose music to accompany them. Neither was sure Faithfull would live to hear the finished product.Ellis was told, “‘It’s not looking good,’” he recalled, on a video call from his Paris home. “‘This might be it.’”But — ever the Lady Lazarus — Faithfull pulled through. Only once she began to recover did her son, Nicholas, tell her what they’d written on the chart at the foot of her bed: “Palliative care only.”“They thought I was going to croak!” Faithfull said, likely for not the first time in her life.“But,” she added with a wizened chuckle, “I didn’t.”Faithfull said she wanted to attend Oxford and immerse herself in literature. But she was discovered by the music manager Andrew Loog Oldham instead.John Pratt/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMARIANNE’S FATHER, Glynn Faithfull — yes, that improbably perfect surname is real — was a British spy in World War II, and the son of a sexologist who invented something called “the Frigidity Machine.” Her mother, just as improbably, was the Austrian Baroness Eva von Sacher-Masoch — the great-niece of the man who wrote the sensationally scandalous novella “Venus in Furs” and from whose name we are blessed with the word masochism. Put all those things together and you get their only child, born a year after the end of the war.Her parents split when she was 6, and at 7, her mother sent her to boarding school at a Reading convent. (“Glynn begged her not to,” she writes in “Faithfull.” “I remember him saying, ‘This will give her a problem with sex for the rest of her life.’”) When she visited her father, who was living and teaching in a commune, she got a glimpse of the polar opposite end of the spectrum. At 18, she married the artist John Dunbar and gave birth to Nicholas shortly after.“I wanted to go to Oxford and read English literature, philosophy, and comparative religion. That was my plan,” she said. “Anyway, it didn’t happen. I went to a party and got discovered by bloody old Andrew Loog Oldham.”Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ first manager, hadn’t heard Faithfull sing a note; he just took a long look at her and decided this striking young blonde was destined to be a pop star. He had Mick Jagger and Keith Richards write a song for her, the melancholy ballad “As Tears Go By.” It was, in her words, “a commercial fantasy” that pushed “all the right buttons.”Which is to say she didn’t take this accidental pop career of hers that seriously, not at first. On her debut tour, she always seemed to have her nose buried in a book, “poring over my reading list for English literature as if I were going back to school.”But that wasn’t happening. In swinging, psychedelic London, Faithfull was a beautiful girl suddenly in the eye of a cultural hurricane. She met everybody. She left her husband and child behind, dabbling in everything the men did without apology. She and Richards dropped acid and went looking for the Holy Grail. She wrote in her autobiography that Bob Dylan tried to seduce her by playing her his latest album, “Bringing It All Back Home,” and explaining in detail what each track meant. (It didn’t work. “I just found him so … daunting,” she wrote. “As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me.”)Jagger had more luck, and for a few seemingly glamorous years they were a generational It Couple. But there were tensions from the start, and Faithfull wasn’t sure she was cut out for the wifely muse role that, even in such bohemian circles, she was expected to play. Then there was the Redlands drug bust.Tipped off by a sanctimonious British tabloid in February 1967, the police raided Richards’s Sussex home during a small party, and found a modest amount of drugs. Faithfull had just taken a bath when the cops arrived, and the only clothes she brought were dirty, so without thinking too much about it she flung a rug over herself.Jagger and Richards’s subsequent drug trial is now generally seen as a pivot in mainstream acceptance of certain countercultural behaviors. But Faithfull bore the brunt of the backlash. One headline blared in all caps: Naked Girl at Stones Party. “I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug,” Faithfull wrote, “while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.” It certainly wouldn’t be the last rage-inducing double standard she’d endure. “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shallot’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?” Faithfull said.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesA FEW YEARS ago, over a Christmas dinner, Faithfull gave Ellis’s teenage children a long, anecdote-filled talk about why they should stay away from drugs. She spoke about the infamy at Redlands as though it was something they would be familiar with.“My kids had no idea what she was talking about,” Ellis said. “But when I drove her home, my son just looked at me and goes, ‘[Expletive], she’s awesome.’”Ellis — who Faithfull affectionately described to me as “a sexy old thing” — conducted his interview from a low-lit, brick-walled room that looked like it may or may not be a dungeon. This is where he was holed up for long hours last spring, listening to the voice of his dear friend, who may or may not have been dying, read him Romantic poetry.He said he found the poems “so incredibly beautiful and uplifting, a total balm for all this turmoil and sadness that was going on in the world.” This was new: When he read them as a schoolboy in Melbourne, Ellis had found the Romantics mostly “impenetrable.” But listening to a masterful interpreter like Faithfull intone them, he said, “suddenly they felt ageless. They felt freed of the page. Because of this authority and absolute belief in them. She believes what she’s reading.”In composing the tracks, Ellis wanted to shy away from the expected “lutes and harpsichords” approach. Instead he studied some of the records he thought most successfully blended spoken-word and music, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “I’m New Here,” Sir John Betjeman’s “Late-Flowering Love” and Lou Reed and Metallica’s “Lulu.” Like Faithfull’s fiery readings, Ellis’s meditative compositions — featuring contributions from Nick Cave and Brian Eno — accentuate the poets’ enduring modernity. (The Romantics might not have yet lived to see rock ’n’ roll, but they certainly knew a thing or two about sex and drugs.)Before Ellis was finished, he got the news that Faithfull had woken up from her coma, left the hospital — and, in time, recorded four more poems. “She survived Covid, came out, and recorded ‘Lady of Shallot,’” Ellis said shaking his head, referring to the 12-minute Tennyson epic. “She’s just the best, Marianne.”The remarkable — and even fittingly spooky — thing about the record is that you cannot tell which poems Faithfull recorded before or after her brush with death. Perhaps only Faithfull herself can hear the difference. “I was quite fragile, but I didn’t start to do it until I was better,” she said. “And I liked it very much, because I sound more vulnerable — which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.”Faithfull has fashioned sticking around into a prolonged show of defiance — a radical act, for a woman. She did not come into her own musically until her mid-30s, with the release of her punky, scorched-earth 1979 masterpiece “Broken English.” In the subsequent decades, her artistry has only deepened, and she has gradually, grudgingly earned her respect (“I’m not just seen as a chick and a sexy piece anymore — though I should think not, I’m 74!”). Her anger about the industry and the media subsided a great deal in the time between her 1994 and 2007 memoirs. What happened?“Just time, you know. From everything I know about life in general — which is probably not much — is that you have to get over those things, or they eat you up,” she said. “And I’m not going to let that happen. So I let it go. I don’t hold resentment anymore about the press.” She laughed, genially. “But of course I don’t let them near me, really!”She has a lighter attitude, but Faithfull has not made it out of her latest battle without some lingering scars. She lost her dear friend and collaborator Hal Willner to the virus. And after initially feeling better, a few months ago she started feeling worse. She has since been experiencing the stubborn symptoms of long-haul Covid, which for her include fatigue, memory fog and lung problems.She has been working diligently on her breathing; a close friend comes by weekly with a guitar to lead her in singing practice — her own version of the opera therapy that has shown promising results in long Covid patients. She’s been spending quality time with her son and grandson, reading (Miles Davis’s autobiography, among other things), and counting the days until she can once again go to the movies, the opera, the ballet. When she first got out of the hospital — après Covid, as she likes to call it — it seemed like Faithfull may never sing again. Now, she is looking forward to writing new songs, and envisioning what a return to the stage might look like.“I’m focusing on getting better, really better — and I’m beginning to,” she said. “I’ll certainly never be able to work as hard as I was, and long tours are not going to be possible. But I do hope to do maybe five shows. Not very long — 40 minutes perhaps.” Still, she admitted, “It’s a long way away.”Ellis said, “If anyone can do it, it’s Marianne, because she just doesn’t give up. She constantly surprises you.”Sometimes she even surprises herself. Earlier in our conversation, Faithfull had let me know, in her admirably no-nonsense way, that she hadn’t called me up to chat for fun, but because she had an album to promote. But she ultimately admitted to finding it vivifying to talk about her life, her art, her past and future. “It’s good for me to remember who I really am, not just an old sick person,” she said.“Of course,” I replied. “You’re Marianne Faithfull, damn it!”She mulled it over for a long moment. “It’s true, I am.” Then, with an unexpected surge of strength, like a hammer’s blow, she added, “Damn it.” More

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      Half a Century Later, John Lennon’s ‘Plastic Ono Band’ Still Hits Hard

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      A new boxed set tracking the making of Lennon’s first post-Beatles solo album reveals the construction of primal songs, and the clarity of his vision.It was raw. Yet it was meticulously thought through.“Plastic Ono Band,” released in December 1970, was John Lennon’s first solo album after the breakup of the Beatles earlier that year. It was a far cry from the tuneful reassurance of Paul McCartney’s one-man-studio-band album “McCartney” and the polished abundance of George Harrison’s triple album, “All Things Must Pass,” both of which were also released that year. In both music and lyrics, “Plastic Ono Band” was a stark statement of pain, separation, vulnerability and self-reclamation after the whirlwind that had been Lennon’s life as a Beatle. Half a century later, the album retains its power.Now it has been remixed, massively expanded, anatomized and annotated as “Plastic Ono Band: The Ultimate Collection”: six CDs, two Blu-ray audio discs and a hardcover book, delving into the music with a recording engineer’s attention to details. The compilation was produced by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow and a producer (with Lennon and Phil Spector) of the original album, and Simon Hilton; there are other configurations for less obsessive fans.The boxed set revisits the album and the Plastic Ono Band singles that preceded it — “Give Peace a Chance,” “Cold Turkey” and “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)” — by unearthing demos, alternate takes, raw mixes, studio jams and even individual vocal and instrumental tracks. A disc of “Evolution Mixes” turns each song into a making-of montage, from demo through studio chatter and stray ideas to a glimpse of the finished version. The revelation of “The Ultimate Collection” is that for all the unbridled emotion in the songs, Lennon was still a deliberate craftsman. And even as his work grappled with trauma, he had some fun.The music of “Plastic Ono Band,” on its surface, repudiated the elaborate productions of the late Beatles. Instead, the tracks relied on bare-bones, three-man arrangements: Lennon on piano or guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr on drums, rarely even using all the tracks of an eight-track tape. The sound can be deliberately lo-fi, particularly when he cranks up the electric-guitar distortion on “Well Well Well” and “I Found Out.”Yoko Ono was a producer of the original album, with Lennon and Phil Spector.Richard DiLello/ Yoko Ono LennonThe lyrics, and Lennon’s fully exposed voice, reflected the insights and catharsis of the primal scream therapy Lennon had begun (but never completed) with the practice’s leading exponent, Arthur Janov. “He responded very well because he had an enormous amount of pain,” Janov comments in the album’s book. “It was terrible and also good because it just drove him and made him what he was — incredibly insightful, very close to his feelings and driven by his feelings.”Lennon’s songs made large topics deeply personal: family, faith, class, fame, drugs, love, fear. “Mother,” which opens the album, starts with a heartsick declaration — “Mother, you had me/But I never had you” — and ends with a crescendo of desolation, with Lennon repeatedly imploring, “Mama don’t go!/Daddy come home!” in a voice that rasps, howls and breaks. (The boxed set includes the a cappella vocal track; it’s harrowing.)In “Working Class Hero,” Lennon sympathizes with drab, numb lives and wrestles with his own status, heroic or not, while in “Look at Me,” he pleads, “Who am I supposed to be?” In “Isolation,” he sings about feeling trapped and attacked, “afraid of everyone.” And in “God,” joined by Billy Preston’s gospel-piano flourishes, he renounces heroes, politicians, gurus and religions, a list that culminates in “I don’t believe in Beatles.” After a pause to let that sink in, Lennon sings, quietly and firmly, “I just believe in me/Yoko and me.” Then the album’s postscript, under a minute long, revisits a lingering childhood wound with a child’s diction: “My Mummy’s Dead.” (That song, recorded on cassette, had its own artifice; it was sped up in the studio, and filtered to sound like a vintage radio.)Remixes can’t help being anachronistic, and “The Ultimate Mixes” won’t please everyone who has long cherished the original album. The virtue of the latest mixes is that they somehow create new space and transparency around Lennon’s voice, bringing out the grain and passion of his performances. Stereo placements get shifted, sometimes for better — the guitar and drums sound even meaner in “Well Well Well” — and sometimes not, as Lennon’s double-tracked vocals on “Isolation” are pulled widely apart. The new mixes also regularly boost the lower register, at times elevating Voormann’s bass parts as if they were intended as counterpoint instead of a solid, unassuming harmonic foundation.The discs of additional material present Lennon as a musician at work with a clear sense of what he’s after. The demos reveal that most of the songs were substantially complete in their early stages, despite small changes to come. The demo of “Mother” was played on guitar rather than piano, but the drama of its final pleas was already built in. The demo of “God,” another song that moved from guitar to piano, doesn’t yet mention “Yoko and me.” And the solo demos of “Cold Turkey” and an early fragment of “Well Well Well” sound more like vintage rural blues than the electric band versions would.The music of “Plastic Ono Band,” on its surface, repudiated the elaborate productions of the late Beatles.Yoko Ono LennonFrom the demos, Lennon’s expertise and determination take over. The “Evolution” montages show him consulting and heeding Ono’s advice from the control room; the outtakes show him toning up arrangements, placing piano chords for maximum warmth and impact in “Isolation” and “Remember,” deciding whether to use his fingers or a pick in “Working Class Hero.” (The final choice, using a pick, gives the guitar its tolling gravity.)For the singles released before the album, Lennon treated Plastic Ono Band as a name for whatever group he wanted to assemble. “Give Peace a Chance” gathered the bystanders at a 1969 Bed-In, a weeklong antiwar happening-protest in Montreal, including the poet Allen Ginsberg and the singing comedian Tommy Smothers; when the basic live recording sounded too thin, a choir was added in the studio. “Cold Turkey” — which ends with Lennon’s increasingly agonized vocals — sounds spontaneous but went through 26 takes, with Lennon and Eric Clapton flinging barbed, feverish electric guitar lines back and forth.“Instant Karma! (We All Shine On),” a single that leapt out of radio speakers in 1970, was both Lennon at his purest — it was recorded in a single day — and Lennon at his most professional. “I don’t believe in Buddha,” he sang in “God,” but the idea of karma — consequences — clearly appealed to him. As the multiple versions in the boxed set show, the basic shape of the song was complete from its demo, but Spector — an expert on microphone placement, piling on overdubbed instruments, reverberation and effects — gave it an explosive impact, in multiple iterations. The means were technical; the result was heartfelt.For all the concentration on his own new songs, Lennon also had a way to blow off steam, find a focus and consolidate his band: playing the oldies, as one disc in the set reveals. Between takes of his new, bruised songs, he hopped back to what was, even as far back as 1970, vintage rock ’n’ roll: Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley. It was a common language, a shared joke, a way to regroup, some comic relief. Then they went back to the hard stuff.After all of the boxed set’s traversals of Lennon’s album sessions, there’s an Easter egg tucked into the Blu-ray audio discs. It’s the jam sessions, recorded on Oct. 10, 1970, with Lennon, Voormann and Starr, that Ono would edit down to most of her own “Plastic Ono Band” album, which was released the same day as Lennon’s. (Ono’s finished album isn’t included in the boxed set; it was most recently rereleased in 2016.)The unedited Ono tracks are long and usually nonstop: 21 minutes of “Why Not,” 16 minutes of “Touch Me.” The stalwart rhythm section takes up a vamp — bluesy, rocky, droning — and Lennon tops it with slide guitar, swooping and jabbing and quivering. Then Ono joins in to unleash a thoroughly astonishing array of vocal sounds — shrieks, mews, moans, whoops, ululations, yowls, glottals, keening long lines, baby cries, witchy cackles — with Lennon’s guitar hovering nearby, mingling with her and egging her on. “Paper Shoes,” with assorted echoes and reverb layered atop vocals and instruments, becomes utterly dizzying. In 1970, the music’s closest kin would have been the burgeoning krautrock of Can in Germany, who — like Ono and the Plastic Ono Band — were merging psychedelic improvisation with mantric Minimalism, simultaneously focused and deranged.The sections of the jams that Ono excerpted to fit on an LP in 1970 were usually the most tense, jarring, abstract stretches — which is to say she chose well. But the full-length tracks testify to the Plastic Ono Band’s stamina and closeness, especially to how attentively Lennon and Ono were listening to each other. Teasing, goading, exploring and intertwining, their wordless interactions are intimate primal screams. More

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      Jim Steinman, ‘Bat Out of Hell’ Songwriter, Dies at 73

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      The rocker Meat Loaf’s interpretations of Mr. Steinman’s songs became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.Jim Steinman, who wrote all the songs on “Bat Out of Hell,” Meat Loaf’s operatic, teenage-angst-filled 1977 debut album, which remains one of the most successful records of all time, died on Monday in Danbury, Conn. He was 73.His longtime manager, David Sonenberg, announced the death. He said that Mr. Steinman had a stroke four years ago and that his health had recently been declining.Mr. Steinman had a wide-ranging résumé that included writing Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 No. 1 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and serving as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lyricist on “Whistle Down the Wind” (1996). But his career-defining achievement was “Bat Out of Hell,” a record that no major label wanted but that has now sold tens of millions of copies.Although the various lists of the top sellers differ in how they compile the rankings and categorize albums, “Bat Out of Hell” routinely lands near the top of any such list, along with albums like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits” and “Hotel California.”Appearing at a time when disco and punk were in vogue, “Bat Out of Hell” was defiantly different. It contained only seven songs, all of them heavy on drama and influenced by the opera music Mr. Steinman had loved since he was a boy.In an era of three-minute songs, the title track, which opens the record and is about a motorcycle crash, is a mini-opera in itself, clocking in at 9 minutes 48 seconds. Another track, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” is almost eight and a half minutes long and includes a segment in which Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee broadcaster and former star shortstop, narrates a sexual tug of war between Meat Loaf’s horny male character and a resistant female, a part sung by Ellen Foley.“Bat Out of Hell” sold slowly at first but eventually took off, propelled by Meat Loaf’s exhaustive touring and some favorable radio play in a few markets. It was one of Mr. Steinman’s earliest successes, and it had recently come full circle in a sense: “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical,” a stage production written by Mr. Steinman, opened in Manchester, England, in 2017. Its story, a sort of post-apocalyptic “Peter Pan,” was something Mr. Steinman had envisioned almost 50 years ago.“This was meant to be a musical,” Meat Loaf told The New York Times in 2019, when the show had a brief run at New York City Center in Manhattan. “I made it a rock show. Jimmy turned it around and made a musical. That’s what he wanted it to be.”Meat Loaf and Mr. Steinman collaborated again on “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” a 1993 album that yielded another Meat Loaf hit, “I’d Do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That).” Among many other songs, Mr. Steinman also wrote “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” a Top 10 hit for Celine Dion in 1996.His works tended to be vivid in their imagery and heavy on drama. “Most people don’t like extremes,” he once said. “Extremes scare them. I start at ‘extreme’ and go from there.”Some detractors called his songs schlocky, but not Meat Loaf.“Every Jim Steinman song is alive,” he told The Lancashire Telegraph of England in 2016, when “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” was preparing to open. “It’s not just pen on a piece of paper. It lives, it walks around, it haunts you, and it’ll eat at your heart and soul.”Andrew Polec, at the mic stand, in a special performance of Mr. Steinman’s “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” at the London Coliseum in 2016. The show officially opened in Manchester the next year.Dave J Hogan/Getty ImagesJames Richard Steinman was born on Nov. 1, 1947, in Hewlett, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Louis, owned a steel distribution warehouse — first in Brooklyn, then in California — and his mother, Eleanor, was a Latin teacher. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, where, he said, he was such a borderline student that people were betting money on whether he would graduate.“When I did graduate,” he told an audience at the college in 2013, when he returned there to accept an honorary doctorate, “I got a huge standing ovation from about 80 percent of the people, who had bet on me graduating.”In 1969, while at Amherst, he created a musical called “The Dream Engine,” which drew attention beyond Amherst; Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival, he said, came to see it. After Mr. Steinman had graduated, Mr. Papp commissioned him to help write a musical called “More Than You Deserve,” which ran at the Public Theater in 1974. That introduced him to Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday), who was in the cast.While Meat Loaf went from that project to a role in the cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Mr. Steinman contributed music to another show at the Public, “Kid Champion,” which starred Christopher Walken. Then Mr. Steinman and Meat Loaf found themselves together again on a National Lampoon touring show.Mr. Steinman had by then begun playing around with his idea for the post-apocalyptic “Peter Pan,” writing several songs for it. When he couldn’t secure the rights to the elements of the “Peter Pan” story that he wanted, he channeled those songs into “Bat Out of Hell,” recruiting his friend to bring them to life.Todd Rundgren eventually agreed to produce the record, but no big label wanted it; Mr. Sonenberg often joked that he thought people were creating new record labels just for the purpose of rejecting “Bat Out of Hell.” Eventually Cleveland International Records, a small label distributed by CBS, took a chance.Mr. Steinman, who lived in Ridgefield, Conn., is survived by a brother, Bill.Meat Loaf and Mr. Steinman had their differences over the years, including legal ones, but they continued to work together. Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose,” released in 2006, wasn’t a pure collaboration like the previous two “Bat Out of Hell” albums, but it did include some Steinman songs. “Braver Than We Are,” Meat Loaf’s 2016 album, again consisted of Steinman songs.Mr. Steinman also wrote the score for “Tanz der Vampire,” a parody musical based on the 1967 Roman Polanski film “The Fearless Vampire Killers.” The show had its premiere in Vienna in 1997 and has enjoyed success in Europe. But a 2002 Broadway version, “Dance of the Vampires,” with Mr. Steinman providing the lyrics and contributing to the book, lasted less than two months.“The overall effect is of a desperately protracted skit from a summer replacement variety show of the late 1960s,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “the kind on which second-tier celebrities showed up to make fun of themselves.”“Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” seemed on track to do better, but a United States tour was aborted in 2019 in a financing dispute. Mr. Sonenberg said the project was expected to get back on track once the Covid-19 pandemic lifts. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Rerecorded ‘Fearless’ Is the Year’s Biggest Debut So Far

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      “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” opened with the equivalent of 291,000 sales in the United States, giving her a third No. 1 album in just under nine months.In the summer of 2019, after Taylor Swift’s first six albums were sold as part of a deal for her original record company, an idea was floated — by Kelly Clarkson, no less — that seemed an unlikely lark: that Swift could rerecord replicas of those albums, in part as revenge against investors who had traded her creative work like real estate. (Something that, to be fair, happens almost daily in the music business.)But with “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a newly released simulacrum of her 2008 breakthrough LP, that lark has become Swift’s latest smash hit. The new “Fearless” opened at the top of Billboard’s latest album chart with the equivalent of 291,000 sales in the United States — the biggest debut of the year, and Swift’s third No. 1 in just under nine months, after her surprise pandemic LPs “Folklore” and “Evermore.” It is Swift’s ninth No. 1 album altogether.According to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm, Swift’s new album had 143 million streams in its opening week — only a little above the weekly average for No. 1 albums this year, and less than recent hits by Justin Bieber, Morgan Wallen and Rod Wave have had in their opening weeks.Yet “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” also sold 179,000 copies as a complete package, as fans rushed to buy CDs, triple vinyl LPs and full-album downloads. That is far more than for any other title this year — more, in fact, than for any album since Swift’s “Folklore” opened with 615,000 copies sold in July, before a revision to Billboard’s chart rules that curtailed retail bundles and delayed when the sales of many physical releases were counted on the chart.The success of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” has also accomplished what appeared to be one of Swift’s goals: burying the original “Fearless.” On last week’s edition of the Billboard 200 chart, “Fearless” was No. 157, with the equivalent of 7,700 sales; this week, it dropped by 19 percent to 6,200, and fell off the chart entirely.On Sunday, Swift greeted the news of the chart success of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” by saying she was already at work on her next rerecording. Some fans, minutely analyzing Swift’s every public move, has guessed that she will next turn to “1989,” her blockbuster hit from 2014 that included hits like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space.” But Swift has not specified her plans.Also this week, “The Best of DMX” rose 71 spots to No. 2 after the news of the rapper’s death on April 9, at age 50. The compilation had the equivalent of 77,000 sales, including nearly 89 million streams and 9,000 copies sold as a full album.Last week’s top album, Bieber’s “Justice,” fell two spots to No. 3, Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and Rod Wave’s “SoulFly” is No. 5. More

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      Rusty Young, Country-Rock Pioneer, Is Dead at 75

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      As a founding member of the band Poco, he helped define a genre and establish the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in West Coast rock.Rusty Young, a founding member of the popular country-rock group Poco and a key figure in establishing the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in the West Coast rock of the late 1960s and ’70s, died on Wednesday at his home in Davisville, Mo. He was 75.His publicist, Mike Farley, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Young played steel guitar with Poco for more than a half-century. Along with other Los Angeles-based rock bands like the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco was among the architects of the country-rock movement of the late ’60s, which incorporated traditional country instrumentation into predominantly rock arrangements. The Eagles and scores of other bands would follow in their wake.Formed in 1968, Poco originally included the singer-guitarists Jim Messina and Richie Furay — both formerly of Buffalo Springfield, another pioneering country-rock band from Los Angeles — along with Mr. Young, the drummer George Grantham and the bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner after he left the band in 1969.)Poco initially came together for a high-profile show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, not long after Mr. Furay had invited Mr. Young to play pedal steel guitar on his composition “Kind Woman,” the closing track on Buffalo Springfield’s farewell album, “Last Time Around.” The music that Poco made generally employed twangier production and was more populist in orientation than that of Buffalo Springfield, a band that had at times gravitated toward experimentalism and obfuscation.Mr. Furay’s song “Pickin’ Up the Pieces,” the title track of Poco’s debut album in 1969, served as a statement of purpose:Well there’s just a little bit of magicIn the country music we’re singin’So let’s begin.We’re bringin’ you back down home where the folks are happySittin’ pickin’ and a-grinnin’Casually, you and meWe’ll pick up the pieces, uh-huh.Poco in 1973, clockwise from left: Paul Cotton, Mr. Young, Richie Furay, Timothy B. Schmit and George Grantham.Gijsbert Hanekroot/RedfernsAt once keening and lyrical, Mr. Young’s pedal steel work imbued the group’s music with its rustic signature sound and helped create a prominent place for the steel guitar among roots-conscious California rock bands.“I added color to Richie’s country-rock songs, and that was the whole idea, to use country-sounding instruments,” Mr. Young explained in a 2014 interview with Goldmine magazine, referring to Mr. Furay’s compositions.But Mr. Young, who also played banjo, Dobro and mandolin, was not averse to musical experimentation. “I pushed the envelope on steel guitar, playing it with a fuzz tone, because nobody was doing that,” he told Goldmine. He also played the pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, much as a Hammond B3 organist would, causing some listeners to assume he was indeed playing an organ.Mr. Young was not among Poco’s original singers or songwriters. But he emerged as one of the group’s frontmen, along with the newcomer Paul Cotton, after the departure of Mr. Messina in 1971 and Mr. Furay in 1973. Mr. Young would go on to write and sing the lead vocal on “Crazy Love,” the band’s biggest hit, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart (and No. 17 on the pop chart) in 1979.He also wrote and sang lead on “Rose of Cimarron,” another of Poco’s more enduring recordings from the ’70s, and orchestrated the 1989 reunion of the group’s original members for the album “Legacy,” which, like the 1978 platinum-selling “Legend,” yielded a pair of Top 40 singles.Norman Russell Young was born on Feb. 23, 1946, in Long Beach, Calif., one of three children of Norman John and Ruth (Stephenson) Young. His father, an electrician, and his mother, a typist, took him to country music bars, where he was captivated by the steel guitar players as a child.He grew up in Denver, where he began playing the lap steel guitar at age 6. As a teenager, he worked with local psychedelic and country bands.After moving to Los Angeles, but before joining Poco, he turned down an invitation to become a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, which at the time featured Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds.Mr. Young performing at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2018.Timothy Norris/WireImageAfter Mr. Cotton’s departure from Poco in 2010 over a financial dispute, Mr. Young became the group’s sole frontman. The band made its final album, “All Fired Up,” in 2013, the same year Mr. Young was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St. Louis. He released his first solo album, “Waitin’ for the Sun,” in 2017, and performed sporadically with the most recent version of Poco until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.Mr. Young is survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Brennan Young; a daughter, Sara; a son, Will; a sister, Corine; and three grandsons. His brother, Ron, died in 2002.Mr. Young’s emergence as a singer and songwriter in Poco in the late ’70s, after almost a decade as a supporting instrumentalist, was as opportune as it was fortuitous.“The band didn’t need another singer-songwriter when Richie and Jim were in the band,” he explained, referring to Mr. Furay and Mr. Messina, in his 2014 Goldmine interview. “My job was to play steel guitar and make the music part of it. So when my job changed, it opened up a whole lot of opportunity for me. So I liked the way things went.” More

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      When a TikTok Influencer Dances, Who Gets Credit?

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      Late last month, the TikTok influencer Addison Rae went on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and casually performed a suite of recent viral dance routines in a comedic skit. Critics reacted with cries of appropriation — the dances’ creators, many of them Black, were not credited — and with dismissals of Rae’s dancing ability.What the producers of the skit failed to acknowledge is how dance credits have become integral to TikTok, as they have been on apps where dance was previously popular, like Instagram and Dubsmash. Influencers like Rae and Charli D’Amelio might be the most well-known dancers on TikTok, but they are vessels for dances created by a range of others, from professional choreographers looking for a jolt of virality to teenagers working out new moves in their basement.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the ways dance has been central to the spread of TikTok, the relationship between Black choreographers and white influencers and a pocket history of dance credits on social media.GuestTaylor Lorenz, The New York Times technology reporter More

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      Phoebe Bridgers Reworks Paul McCartney, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Andra Day, London Grammar, José González 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.Paul McCartney featuring Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Seize the Day’Don’t take Paul McCartney’s enduring gifts — natural melody, succinctly surprising lyrics, sly chord progressions, tidy arrangements — for granted. Other songwriters don’t. Lest anyone has, the 78-year-old Sir Paul enlisted younger admirers (Beck, St. Vincent, Blood Orange, Anderson .Paak, Josh Homme, Dominic Fike) to rework the songs from his 2020 solo-in-the-studio album, “McCartney III,” as the new “McCartney III Imagined.” Phoebe Bridgers took on “Seize the Day,” a manifesto of unironic good intentions: “I’m OK with a sunny day when the world deserves to be bright.” She brings her own spirit of hushed discovery to the song, keeping McCartney’s march tempo but toning down his electric guitars. She ends her version with church bells, like a blessing. JON PARELESLucy Dacus, ‘Hot & Heavy’Since joining forces as boygenius, two-thirds of the band, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, have released searing solo albums that took their already strong songwriting to the next level. Now, it appears to be Lucy Dacus’s turn. “Hot & Heavy” begins in a synthesized glow, for a moment seeming like it might be a continuation of the stark sound she conjured on the recently released “Thumbs.” But it doesn’t take long for “Hot & Heavy” to kick into a gallop, coming alive with chiming guitars and gleaming pop-rock flourishes that recall “Full Moon Fever”-era Tom Petty. “You used to be so sweet,” Dacus sings on this tale of stinging nostalgia, “Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFiona Apple, ‘Love More’Ten years ago, Sharon Van Etten released her first great album, “Epic,” an enduringly wrenching account of a troubled relationship’s dissolution. To commemorate its anniversary, an impressive and eclectic array of artists — Lucinda Williams, Courtney Barnett, Shamir — contributed to a covers collection called “Epic Ten.” The ultimate co-sign, though, comes from the indomitable Fiona Apple, who offers her own interpretation of the album’s beautiful closing track, “Love More.” Van Etten’s version was a sparsely poignant dirge, buoyed by gentle waves of harmonium chords. Apple, instead, anchors hers to an almost chant-like rhythm accompanied by playfully layered backing vocal runs — though her delivery of the song’s verses provides the smoldering intensity these lyrics call for. “Chained to the wall of our room,” goes the opening line. Leave it to Fiona to fetch the bolt cutters. ZOLADZAndra Day, ‘Phone Dies’“We can feel these vibes until my phone dies,” Andra Day offers, casually pitting the promise of romance against limited battery life. In Anderson .Paak’s blithe, tricky production, a frisky Brazilian beat carries Day’s multitracked vocals through a maze of chromatic chords that gives the illusion of climbing higher and higher, all the way to a sudden, giggly end. PARELESTirzah, ‘Send Me’It’s been three years since the London artist and Mica Levi collaborator Tirzah released her hypnotic debut album “Devotion,” but the new single “Send Me” transports the listener right back to that singularly chill head space. “Send Me” is built from simple materials — a repeated guitar lick, a hi-hat loop and Tirzah’s sultry, Sade-like vocals — but combined they somehow create a dense, enveloping atmosphere. “Let me heal and now I’m sure, now I’m sure,” Tirzah sings, her words seeming to turn to vapor on the exhales. It’s a whole vibe. ZOLADZSaweetie and Drakeo the Ruler, ‘Risky’It’s only April, but Saweetie is already wishing you a very pretty summer. Her new single “Risky” is at once effortless and exuberant, patiently waiting for whenever the weather permits you to roll the windows down. Drakeo the Ruler’s murmuring flow provides a perfect counterpoint to Saweetie’s bombast (“All this ice drippin’ on my body like a runny nose”), while a minimalist beat provides plenty of space for her personality to shine like a freshly painted ride. ZOLADZMick Jagger with Dave Grohl, ‘Eazy Sleazy’For Mick Jagger, quarantine fatigue has curdled into sarcastic exasperation. “Eazy Sleazy” is a late-pandemic rant, a stomping, mocking checklist of sloppy rhymes and coronavirus-year phenomena, from “Cancel all the tours/football’s fake applause” to “TikTok stupid dance” to “Way too much TV” to wacky conspiracy theories. Dave Grohl, an accomplished student of classic rock, reconstituted the full Rolling Stones sound behind Jagger’s rhythm guitar, and every few lines there’s a scream tossed into the mix. The chorus looks forward to a “freaky” reopening, when “It’ll only be a memory you’re trying to remember to forget”; this song will be a throwaway souvenir. PARELESLondon Grammar, ‘Lord It’s a Feeling’Hannah Reid, London Grammar’s singer, plays a not-so-impartial observer in “Lord It’s a Feeling.” She stacks up the misdeeds of a friend’s callous, cheating lover — “I saw the way you laughed behind her back” — before revealing, “I can admit that I have been right here myself.” A decorous string orchestra backs her at first, as she sings in her purest tones. But when her own stake becomes clear, a beat kicks in, her voice hardens and the observer becomes the accuser. PARELESJosé González, ‘Visions’It’s a small world. José González, born in Sweden to Argentine parents, carries on a British tradition of folky, meditative singer-songwriters. “Visions,” built from vocal harmonies and acoustic-guitar picking, takes an eternal perspective on “sentient beings” who should “look at the magic of reality/while accepting the honesty that we can’t know for sure what’s next.” Accompanied by his guitar drone, distant electronics and bird song, he notes, as a kind of mantra, “We are here together.” PARELESLea Bertucci, ‘An Arc of the Horizon’Place is central to the music of Lea Bertucci, a multi-instrumentalist and sound artist whose recordings often spring from questions about how physical environments express themselves through sound. But her work isn’t meant to just document the sonic qualities of a place; through a process of layering and abstraction, Bertucci gives us something closer to the residue of an experience or a vanished memory. On her new self-released album, “A Visible Length of Light,” ambient recordings she captured in New York, Rio de Janeiro, California and Nebraska haunt tracks featuring lightly droning organ, bass clarinet, wood flute and saxophone. It’s not clear where the sounds on “An Arc of the Horizon” were captured, but instead the music — spatial more than melodic — becomes an environment of its own. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOWadada Leo Smith, Douglas R. Ewart and Mike Reed, ‘Super Moon Rising’Rustle, resonance and attentive listening are the coins of the realm when the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, the multi-reedist Douglas R. Ewart and the drummer Mike Reed come together. They’ve performed as a trio only rarely, but all three are improvisers and organizers with roots on the Chicago avant-garde and histories of involvement in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. “Super Moon Rising” is the centerpiece of their new album, “Sun Beans of Shimmering Light,” which connects to a long tradition of recordings by AACM-affiliated musicians that treat sparse and spacious free improvising as a style unto itself. RUSSONELLOSpirit of the Beehive, ‘Rapid & Complete Recovery’“Rapid & Complete Recovery” passes, briefly, as one of the milder, more approachable songs in Spirit of the Beehive’s catalog of dense, overloaded, compulsively morphing and often nerve-racking songs. It’s from the Philadelphia band’s new album, “Entertainment, Death,” and with its jazz-tinged opening bass vamp and acoustic-guitar syncopations it could pass for Laurel Canyon pop-folk — if not for its nagging high synthesizer tones, its cranked-up drums, its swerve into spoken words and the way instruments and vocals echo and melt at the end. “No limitations, you know what I’m after,” Zack Schwartz and Rivka Ravede calmly sing, perhaps as a partial explanation. PARELES More