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      ‘Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James’ Review: A Very Kinky Guy

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      A new documentary explores the serious artistry behind this “punk-funk” legend’s outlandish persona.The main title of this Sacha Jenkins-directed documentary derives from a sketch on Dave Chappelle’s still-mourned former show on Comedy Central. He regularly reenacted anecdotes told by the comic Charlie Murphy; in one of these, the funk renegade Rick James did some obscene blustering at a bar before announcing “I’m Rick James, bitch!” The sketch resulted in new visibility for James while also making him a cartoon.But then again, James’s outlandishness constituted the through-line of his visible career. This film strives to make the case for James as a serious artist, a social commentator and funk innovator who never got his due.To this end, the movie spends substantial time on James’s roots in Buffalo, N.Y. The contemporary rap artist Conway, also a Buffalo native, speaks of the miserable segregation of the city. James’s enlistment in the Navy in the early 1960s could be seen as a desperate bid to escape his origins. It was an unsatisfactory one. Going AWOL, he landed in Toronto and formed several musical alliances, among them an R&B inflected band with Neil Young that picked up many stylistic cues from the Rolling Stones. James was the lead singer and more than one interviewee from this time says he consciously imitated Mick Jagger.The period in which James’s woodshedding and partying achieved détente led to “punk funk” hits in the late ’70s. One interviewee insists on a distinction between the frat appeal of “Super Freak” and the deeply felt anger of “Ghetto Life.” But James’s vices soon overwhelmed his art and destroyed his character. MC Hammer’s sampling of “Super Freak” in the early 90s led to a windfall for James, which in turn was vacuumed up by his appetites. Despite a stint in prison and various stabs at sobriety, he died in 2004, an active user.The movie wants the viewer to believe that James didn’t have it easy — and he didn’t. But it can’t skate over the aberrant actions that led to his imprisonment. “Bitchin’” is fascinating and troubling viewing.Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick JamesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      Lorde Steals Her Sunshine Back

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      Lorde’s new album “Solar Power” marks a pivot for the New Zealand singer-songwriter, away from the insular and intimate relationship tension captured on her last album, “Melodrama” from 2017, into a brighter palette and songs about embracing wellness and posi vibes.This is something that can happen when you grow up in public — a rejection of the fixed gaze that stardom imposes on you. For Lorde, it’s meant a long retreat from the spotlight, and an insistence on making music that hews to no fixed idea about what a “Lorde sound” should be.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about this sunny phase of Lorde’s career, the ways pop stardom can dull a creative person’s edges and what it means to choose to move away from the expectations of superstardom.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterLindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times and others More

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      Aaliyah’s ‘One in a Million’ Finally Cracks the Billboard Top 10

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      Music from the R&B singer, who died in 2001, started to arrive on streaming services, helping her 1996 album, “One in a Million,” reach No. 10 for the first time.Vinyl helped Olivia Rodrigo reclaim the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart this week, while a long-delayed arrival on streaming brought a 25-year-old album by Aaliyah to the Top 10 for the first time.Rodrigo’s “Sour” notches a fifth week at No. 1 with the equivalent of 133,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking service. It had 70 million streams, very good for a three-month-old album. But it was the album’s release on vinyl that sent “Sour” back to the top. It sold 76,000 copies on LP, the second-best weekly number for a vinyl album in at least 30 years, after Taylor Swift sold 102,000 copies of “Evermore” in June. Just a few weeks ago, Billie Eilish sold 73,000 of her latest, “Happier Than Ever.”The success of these albums reflects the rising popularity of vinyl records, which last year in the United States generated greater retail revenue than CDs for the first time since 1986. But the releases have also benefited from a Billboard chart rule that went into effect last October. Before then, many vinyl sales were counted when fans first placed their order; even if the record wasn’t ready yet, fans often received a downloadable copy while they waited. Now, those sales count once the record is shipped to a customer — allowing many artists to rack up weeks’ or months’ worth of advance sales.Also this week, the rapper Trippie Redd opens at No. 2 with “Trip at Knight,” and Lorde’s new “Solar Power” makes its debut at No. 5. Rod Wave’s five-month-old “SoulFly” lands at No. 3 after a deluxe reissue, and Doja Cat’s recent “Planet Her” is No. 4.“One in a Million,” the second album by the R&B singer Aaliyah, who died in 2001 at age 22, has long been absent from the market. But a recent deal made by the company that controls her catalog — run by a man who happens to be her uncle — brought it back in print and finally began releasing Aaliyah’s music on streaming services.This week, “One in a Million,” which had stalled at No. 18 when released in 1996, lands at No. 10. It was not Aaliyah’s first time ever in the Top 10, however. Her third album, “Aaliyah” (2001), went to No. 1, and a posthumous collection, “I Care 4 U” (2002), reached No. 3. More

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      John Coltrane’s Unearthed Live ‘A Love Supreme,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by SZA, Fantastic Negrito, Mary Lattimore 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.John Coltrane, ‘A Love Supreme, Pt. IV — Psalm (Live in Seattle)’When John Coltrane recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” in late 1964, he was demanding an escape from the confines of modern jazz. He was improvising on the level of sound, as much as notes, and he’d already started bringing in new, more freewheeling collaborators to join his quartet. Partly because of that shift, and partly because of how intimate the piece felt to him, he barely played “A Love Supreme” live. But this week, Impulse! Records revealed the existence a 56-year-old tape of him performing the suite in Seattle, in fall 1965, with an expanded version of the quartet. It’s the only known recording of Coltrane playing it for a club audience, and it will be out as a full album on Oct. 8. “Psalm,” the suite’s serene finale and the only publicly released track so far, is the most personal part: Coltrane had set “Psalm’s” melody to the cadence of a praise poem he wrote, and in Seattle he played it without either of the two other saxophonists in that evening’s band. More than an hour in, with the energy of the set suffusing the stage, he turns pieces of the melody into little incantations, coaxing a deep-bellied cry from his horn. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSZA, ‘Nightbird’SZA released a trio of intimate songs on SoundCloud this week, perhaps as a place holder before her next album. On “Nightbird,” the mood is toxic and the singing is limber. SZA has a way of frankly and unflashily relating profoundly complex emotional experiences, building on the melodic structures of 1990s R&B, but also adding some of the sonic distance that’s been built into the genre over the last decade. “Nightbird,” both offhand and devastating, is among her best. JON CARAMANICAFantastic Negrito featuring Miko Marks, ‘Rolling Through California’“Rolling Through California” has a twangy, country-soul groove that harks back to the late-1960s San Francisco of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, all affable and gleaming. But Fantastic Negrito, with Miko Marks harmonizing above his bluesy cackle, sings about how the old California dream has given way to wildfires and pandemic; the foot-stomping chorus goes, “Can you hear the sound/It’s burning to the ground.” JON PARELESThe Felice Brothers, ‘To-Do List’This “To-Do List” starts with everyday chores — “Go to the bank and deposit checks” — but escalates quickly, casually and magnificently to greater goals: “Defy all natural laws,” “Proclaim a lasting peace,” “Discover a miracle drug.” True to the band’s upstate New York location, the Felice Brothers hark back to the Band, with hand-played instruments and a chugging beat; it’s romping honky-tonk existentialism. PARELESRandy Travis, ‘Ain’t No Use’Listen to the mechanical beat of the drums and the ultraprecise mesh of the twin guitars in “Ain’t No Use,” an unrequited love song complaining, “It ain’t no use to talk to you about love.” It’s a track that was shelved from Randy Travis’s 1986 album “Storms of Life,” and even with Travis’s conversational vocal, it’s also a harbinger of the computerized country to come. PARELESDeerhoof, ‘Plant Thief’“Someone’s cooking with my spices!” Satomi Matsuzaki complains in “Plant Thief”: just one reason for the song’s pummeling drums and bass and guitar that wrangle in stereo with staggered, constantly shifting jabs. The song starts out frenetic and builds from there, assembling and discarding dissonant patterns, switching meters and coming to a fiercely open-ended conclusion: “They never weren’t!” she sings. PARELESTerence Blanchard, ‘Diana’No influence looms larger over the Grammy-winning pen of Terence Blanchard — an esteemed jazz trumpeter known for his Spike Lee film scores — than the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, with his terse yet seemingly horizon-less compositions. On “Absence,” a new album paying homage to Shorter, the trumpeter visits with a few rarely covered Shorter gems. Blanchard’s version of the cloud-dwelling ballad “Diana” opens with the strings of the Turtle Island Quartet (featured throughout “Absence”), entering one by one; eventually his quintet, the E-Collective, takes over. Swaddled in synthesizers and trumpet effects, avoiding a firm tempo, Blanchard savors each unorthodox harmonic payoff, feeling no need to take a solo. RUSSONELLOSelena Gomez and Camilo, ‘999’In “999,” Selena Gomez vies with Camilo for who can whisper-sing more quietly. Their voices, harmonizing and dialoguing, share a duet about infatuation, distance and anticipation: “I don’t have photos with you, but I have a space on the wall.” It’s set to a skulking bass line and percussion that wouldn’t wake the neighbors, enjoying the tease, the buildup and a nearly vanished 21st-century experience: privacy. PARELESIcewear Vezzo featuring Lil Baby, ‘Know The Difference’For Lil Baby, it’s new day, new flow on this collaboration with the Detroit favorite Icewear Vezzo. Rapping first, Lil Baby leans in on terse bars, tightening his flow until it’s taut: “I wasn’t ’posed to make it out/I stay by the governor house/I done found another route.” When Icewear Vezzo arrives, the fog lifts ever so slightly — his subject matter is the same, but his flow dances and shimmies. CARAMANICA​​Umu Obiligbo, ‘Zambololo’A duo of brothers from Nigeria, Umu Obiligbo shares close harmonies over their band’s dizzying six-beat, two-chord electroacoustic groove — Nigerian highlife — with constantly evolving tandem guitars and choral harmonies teasing and extending each other. Most of the lyrics are in the Nigerian language Igbo, but the glimpses of English are sharp: “What a man can do, a woman can do it better.” PARELESEsperanza Spalding: ‘Formwela 10’The bassist, singer and songwriter Esperanza Spalding convened not just musicians but also experts — in neuroscience and psychology, among other fields — as she wrote the therapeutic-minded songs for her album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” due Sept. 24. That that didn’t impair the virtuosic playfulness of her music. “Formwela 10” is an apology for mistreating a lover: “I put you through a living hell/This is a way to make the damages clear so I won’t do another that way”; it’s also a leaping, twisting, syncopated melody, a chromatic ramble, and a meter-shifting arrangement that dissolves and realigns around her as she makes peace with her regrets. PARELESMary Lattimore, ‘We Wave From Our Boats’Mary Lattimore’s music holds potent simplicity. The delicate plucks of a harp and the hum of a synth are all she employs on “We Wave from Our Boats,” a four-minute meditation with an arrangement that reflects the aquatic quality of its title: ripples of plucked strings stream over each other, like waves lapping on the shore. But there is also a kind of congenial intimacy to the song. Underneath its marine textures is the glow of closeness: maybe an after-dinner drink shared among friends, a tender embrace, a laugh that fills the belly with warmth. ISABELIA HERRERANite Jewel, ‘Anymore’There are breakup songs that express the profound heartache of a relationship’s end. And then there are songs that probe at the trickier feelings of its denouement, like Nite Jewel’s “Anymore,” from her new album, “No Sun.” Its bright synths and divine harmonies belie the song’s true content: “I can’t describe anything that I want,” sings the producer and vocalist Ramona Gonzalez. “I can’t rely on my desire anymore.” This is a song about the uncertainty and estrangement of a separation: the feeling of no longer recognizing yourself, of no longer trusting your own desires to find a way forward. HERRERA More

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      Inge Ginsberg, Holocaust Survivor With a Heavy Metal Coda, Dies at 99

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      Her rich life, spanning three continents and 11 decades, entailed wartime espionage, volumes of poetry, songwriting and a late-career turn as a rock band’s frontwoman.Inge Ginsberg, who fled the Holocaust, helped American spies in Switzerland during World War II, wrote songs in Hollywood and, in a final assertion of her presence on earth, made a foray into heavy metal music as a nonagenarian, died on July 20 in a care home in Zurich. She was 99.The cause was heart failure, said Pedro da Silva, a friend and bandmate.In a picaresque life, Ms. Ginsberg lived in New York City, Switzerland, Israel and Ecuador. She wrote songs and poetry, worked as a journalist and refused to fade into the background as she aged, launching herself, improbably, into her heavy metal career.She was the frontwoman for the band Inge and the Tritone Kings, which competed on television in “Switzerland’s Got Talent,” entered the Eurovision Song Contest and made music videos. Whatever the venue, Ms. Ginsberg would typically appear in long gowns and pearls and flash the two-fingered hand signal for “rock on” as she sang about the Holocaust, climate change, mental health and other issues.In the 2017 music video for the band’s song “I’m Still Here,” Ms. Ginsberg stands in front of a screen showing filmed images of refugees. She sings — in a manner reminiscent of spoken-word poetry — about her grandmother and four young cousins, all of whom were killed in German camps. At the end, she slices the screen and walks through it, singing as she joins the other band members amid a roar of electric guitars, drums and a pounded piano.“All my life, I fought for freedom and peace,” she sings. In the last chorus, Ms. Ginsberg, who was in her 90s at the time, screams, “I’m still here!”The band grew out of a friendship between Ms. Ginsberg and Lucia Caruso; they had met in the audience of a concert in 2003 at the Manhattan School of Music. Ms. Caruso, a student there, was watching the performance of a doctoral composition by her boyfriend, Mr. da Silva. The couple married, went on to performing and teaching careers in classical music and stayed close to Ms. Ginsberg.One day in 2014, Ms. Ginsberg read out loud to Mr. da Silva the words of a children’s song she was writing. “She wrote these lyrics about worms eating your flesh after you die,” Mr. da Silva said. That had the ring of heavy metal to him, and he suggested building a band around her.The band began rehearsing and filming music videos later that year, the productions paid for by Ms. Ginsberg. She wrote the lyrics to their songs and performed them, with Mr. da Silva and Ms. Caruso and others accompanying her on various instruments, including the guitar, piano, drums, organ and oud.A short documentary video in 2018 for The New York Times Opinion section by the filmmaker Leah Galant recounted Ms. Ginsberg’s story. It shows scenes of her performing on “Switzerland’s Got Talent” and auditioning to appear on the NBC show “America’s Got Talent.” Speaking on camera, she said she wanted to prove through her performing that elderly people could still contribute to society.“In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the Op-Doc. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”A 96-year-old who fled the Holocaust finds a new way to be heard.Leah GalantMs. Galant said in an interview, “We felt energized by her as much she felt energized by us.”Ingeborg Neufeld was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1922, to Fritz and Hildegard (Zwicker) Neufeld. Her father ran a freight company, and her mother was a homemaker.Ms. Ginsberg described herself as a “Jewish princess” in her youth; she and her brother, Hans, had been afforded every luxury. But that changed with the rise of the Nazi Party.Ms. Ginsberg would tell Ms. Caruso and Mr. da Silva stories of the persecution of Jews in pre-World War II Vienna. In one instance, she said, she hid all night behind a grandfather clock in a building in town to evade Nazi paramilitary forces targeting Jews. Her mother assumed the worst, but Inge returned the next morning to a tearful reunion.After the war had begun her father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp but was freed, Ms. Ginsberg said, after he bribed Nazi officials. Her mother, meanwhile, using money from the sale of her jewelry, fled to Switzerland in 1942 with Inge, Hans and Inge’s boyfriend, Otto Kollman, who would become Inge’s husband.The family lived in refugee camps in Switzerland, and Ms. Ginsberg managed a villa in Lugano, which was used as a safe house for Italian resistance members; there, she said, she and Mr. Kollman would pass messages from the resistance to the American O.S.S., the precursor of the C.I.A.After the war, she and Mr. Kollman made their way to Hollywood, where they worked as a songwriting duo. The couple divorced in 1956.Ms. Ginsberg in an undated photo. “In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” she said. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”Inge GinsbergMs. Ginsberg said in the Times documentary that she eventually found Hollywood “all fake” and returned to Europe the year of her divorce. She worked as a journalist in Zurich, wrote a German-language memoir of her time at the villa and published several books of poetry. She had invested successfully in the stock market, which kept her wealthy throughout her life and allowed her to pursue writing.In 1960, she married Hans Kruger, who ran a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv, where the couple lived. They divorced in 1972. That same year, she married Kurt Ginsberg, and they mainly lived in Quito, Ecuador.Ms. Ginsberg is survived by her daughter with Mr. Kollman, Marion Niemi, and a granddaughter.After Mr. Ginsberg’s death, Ms. Ginsberg split her time among homes in New York, Tel Aviv and Zurich. By the spring of 2020, she was living in the Zurich care facility when she contracted the coronavirus. Pandemic restrictions often kept residents from seeing one another or from entertaining visitors, and the isolation took its toll.“We have no doubt whatsoever that she died because of boredom, loneliness and depression,” Mr. da Silva said.He and Ms. Caruso kept in touch with her over the phone, and the three began writing another song for the band called “Never Again,” also drawing on Ms. Ginsberg’s experience during the Holocaust.“Each one of my songs has a message,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the documentary. “Don’t destroy what you can’t replace.” She added a second message: “You can’t avoid death, so laugh about it.” More

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      Halsey Connects Past and Future in 'If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power'

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      On “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” the 26-year-old musician enlists a longtime role model and takes one step back from confessionals.Halsey’s fourth album, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” announces its character from its first sounds: slowly tolling piano arpeggios with a few notes flatted into dissonance. It’s an unmistakable echo of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” from 1994, the year Halsey was born. The new song, “The Tradition,” opens a cross-generational, album-length collaboration with a longtime influence: Trent Reznor, who started Nine Inch Nails as a solo studio project in 1987, and Atticus Ross, his partner in Oscar-winning film scores and an official member of Nine Inch Nails since 2016.Both Halsey — born Ashley Frangipane, who uses she/they pronouns — and Nine Inch Nails have made it their mission to pack the bleaker impulses of human nature into pop-song structures: noisy, desolate, sometimes assaultive tracks that still resolve into neat verses, choruses and hooks. As far back as Halsey’s first single, “Ghost” in 2014, their ominous, echoey electronic production drew comparisons to Nine Inch Nails; in a way, the new album is a visit to the source.For Reznor and Ross, who supply nearly all the instrumental tracks and produced the album, it’s a chance to work with a new voice, a different melodic sense and a fresh perspective: a young bisexual musician who speaks frankly about mental health. For Halsey, the album is both a homage to 1990s roots and a strategic pivot: away from (seemingly) direct autobiography and toward archetypes.“Manic,” the album Halsey released in January 2020, was a post-breakup album with ample blame for both Halsey and the ex. Its cover was a close-up of Halsey’s face, and it opened with “Ashley” which observed, “I told you I’d spill my guts/I left you to clean it up.” The new album, instead, establishes some formal distance. Its cover has Halsey holding a baby and seated on a throne with one breast bared, like a surreal royal or religious portrait; they unveiled the image while pregnant with their first child, Ender Ridley Aydin, who was born in July. The first track, “The Tradition,” is a cryptic, third-person tale of lonely young women sold into unhappy lives.Even when Halsey returns to first-person through most of the album, their lyrics are less confessional, more general, as if they have stepped back from immediate conflicts. In “Bells in Santa Fe,” as tension builds with repeated tones and looming distortion, Halsey ponders their tendencies to approach and avoid, with a reminder that “All of this is temporary.” In “Girl Is a Gun,” the vocal is giggly and teasing, lilting amid rapid-fire percussion, as Halsey flirts — “Let me show you how to touch my trigger” — but also warns, “You’ll be better with a nice girl, darling.”The album was a long-distance project, with Reznor and Ross recording in Los Angeles and Halsey singing nearly all of the songs at a studio in Turks and Caicos. (They also got remote contributions from Dave Grohl, slamming the drums in “Honey,” and Lindsey Buckingham, picking a folky guitar in “Darling.”) Yet the combination melded because Halsey and Nine Inch Nails have so much in common: skill at generating drama through sheer sound, along with a willingness to admit the worst. Halsey can be self-lacerating. In “Whispers,” which begins with Reznor’s bare-bones piano and turns into a mechanized dirge, they admit, “I sabotage the things I love the most.” In “I Am Not a Woman, I’m a God,” Halsey immediately mocks such self-aggrandizement: “I am not a legend, I’m a fraud.”And in “You Asked for This” — with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio piling on multiple overdriven guitars — Halsey questions whether being “a big girl” means trading ambition and adventurousness for boring stability: “Lemonade in crystal glasses/Picket fences, filing taxes.” It starts out hurtling ahead like a Smashing Pumpkins rocker, then drops to half-speed for a finale like a grunge remake of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” But Halsey still craves turbulence. “I want a beautiful boy’s despondent laughter/I want to ruin all my plans,” they sing.Halsey has been releasing music since their teens, and at 26, they’re gaining a longer view. The album ends with “Ya’burnee,” an Arabic phrase for “you bury me” that implies not wanting to outlive a beloved partner: a lifelong commitment. True to both Halsey and Nine Inch Nails, the song has a morbid streak. But it’s also subdued, willing itself toward calm, as if growing up might not be all bad.Halsey“If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”(Capitol) More

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      The Uniform Cool of Charlie Watts

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      “Style is the answer to everything,” Charles Bukowski, of all people, once said in a lecture that’s still afloat in the ether of YouTube. Swigging Schlitz from a bottle, the pockmarked laureate of the underground discoursed on one of the few traits that, as is well known, one may possess though never acquire.Bullfighters have style and so do boxers, Bukowski said. He had seen more men with style inside of prison than outside its walls, he also somewhat questionably asserted. “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it,” he then added — and that much, at least, seems indisputable.Nobody ever accused the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died Aug. 24 at 80, of dullness. Yet so granitic and unshowy was he relative to his preening bandmates — in their face paint, frippery and feathers — that it was easy to be distracted from the ineffable Watts cool that anchored the Stones sound and that drew on a lineage far older than rock.Well before joining what is generally called the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll group, Mr. Watts, a trained graphic artist who learned to play after giving up banjo and turning the body of one into a drum, was a seasoned sessions player. He considered himself at heart a jazzman; his heroes were musicians like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Lester Young and phenomenal pop crooners like the unfairly forgotten Billy Eckstine.While the rest of the Rolling Stones dressed the part of rock stars, Mr. Watts found his style groove on Savile Row. Here, with Ron Wood, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, he celebrates the opening of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” in 1983.Carlos Rene Perez/Associated PressMr. Watts in London, 1989.John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesIn a double-breasted suit, in 1992.Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesHe studied famously natty dressers like Fred Astaire, men who found a style and seldom deviated from it throughout their lives. A famous story about the Stones describes them starving in order to make enough money to recruit a drummer then in no great rush to join the band. “Literally!” Keith Richards wrote in “Life,” his excellent 2010 memoir. “We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”Mr. Watts was expensive then and, as it happened, chose for himself an image that seldom looked otherwise. “To be honest,” he once told GQ. “I have a very old-fashioned and traditional mode of dress.”When his bandmates Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards began peacocking in Carnaby Road velvets, secondhand glad rags from Portobello Road, Moroccan djellabas, boas, sequined jumpsuits and dresses plucked from the wardrobes of their wives or girlfriends, Mr. Watts continued to dress as soberly as an attorney. And when, in the late 1970s, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards began adding suiting to their wardrobe, their selections tended to feature nipped waists, four-lane lapels, checkerboard patterns or Oxford bag trousers from the brilliant and flamboyant upstart Tommy Nutter.“I always felt totally out of place with the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Watts told GQ, at least in style terms. Photographs appeared of the band with everyone else wearing sneakers and Mr. Watts in a pair of lace-ups from the 19th-century Mayfair shoemaker George Cleverley. “I hate trainers,” he said, meaning athletic shoes. “Even if they’re fashionable.”Perhaps in some ways Mr. Watts was just ahead of the other Stones and the rest of us in purely style terms — more evolved in his understanding of convention and how stealthily to subvert it, a bit like a jazz musician improvising on core melodies. There may even have been something punk in his determination early on to forgo the likes of Mr. Nutter and instead patronize some of the more venerable Savile Row tailors, places still so discreet in the 1970s that they often had no signs on their doors. It was his brilliance to mold what those tailors did to his own assured tastes.Take, for instance, the 1971 Peter Webb images — lost for 40 years before rediscovery in the past decade — depicting the young Mr. Watts and Mr. Richards from “Sticky Fingers” at the very height of their fame. Mr. Richards is fabulously attired in zippered black leather, graphically patterned velvet trousers in black-and-white, a contrast-patterned shirt, a custom leather bandoleer belt and buccaneer shag. Mr. Watts, by contrast, is wearing a three-piece suit with a six-button vest in what appears to be stolid burgomaster’s loden.Or take the double-breasted dove gray morning coat the mature Mr. Watts is seen wearing in another shot of himself and his wife, Shirley, at Ascot. (The couple bred Arabian horses.) Beautifully cut for his compact frame (he was 5-foot-8), it is worn with a pale pink waistcoat and tie, a shirt whose rounded collars are pinned beneath the knot, a style he first glimpsed and copied from the cover of Dexter Gordon’s imperious jazz classic “Our Man in Paris.”Already by 1967, the Stones (with Brian Jones in rear) were venturing into Portobello Road glad rags, vintage scarves and their girlfriends’ dresses. A lilac tie with a velvet jacket was about as Mod as Mr. Watts would ever get.Tony Gale/AlamyIt takes gumption, and a good relationship with one’s tailor, to pair a morning suit with a waistcoat in powder pink, as Mr. Watts, seen here with his wife, Shirley Watts, did at Ascot Racecourse in 2010.Indigo/Getty ImagesEach of those suits was bespoke, the latter stitched by H. Huntsman & Sons, a Savile Row institution that has been dressing British swells since 1849. Theirs was one of just two tailoring companies Mr. Watts worked with throughout his life.“Mr. Watts was one of the most stylish gentlemen I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said Dario Carnera, the head cutter at Huntsman, in an email. “He imbued his own sartorial flair in every commission.” He ordered from the establishment for more than 50 years, the craftsman added. (In the Huntsman catalog there still exists a fabric — the Springfield stripe — of Mr. Watts’s design.)By his own rough estimate, Mr. Watts owned several hundred suits, at least as many pairs of shoes, an all-but-uncountable quantity of custom shirts and ties — so many clothes, in fact, that, inverting a hoary sexist cliché about fashion, it was his wife who complained that her husband spent too much time in front of the mirror.Mr. Watts seldom wore any of his sartorial finery onstage, however, preferring the practicality and anonymity of short-sleeved dress shirts or T-shirts for concerts or tours. It was in civilian life that he cultivated, and eventually perfected, a sartorial image as elegant, serene and impeccable as his drumming. More

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      Why the Baby on Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ Album Is Suing Now

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      Spencer Elden, 30, says Nirvana engaged in child pornography when the band used a picture of him naked on the cover of the breakthrough album.Spencer Elden was 4 months old when he was photographed by a family friend in 1991 drifting naked in a pool.The picture, taken at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena, Calif., would be used that year for the cover of “Nevermind,” Nirvana’s seminal second album that helped define Generation X and rocketed the Seattle band to international fame.In the decades that followed, Mr. Elden appeared to celebrate his part in the classic cover, recreating the moment for the album’s 10th, 17th, 20th and 25th anniversaries, though not naked.“It’s cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember,” he said in 2016 in an interview with The New York Post, in which he posed holding the album cover at 25.Now, however, Mr. Elden, 30, has filed a federal lawsuit against the estate of Kurt Cobain, the musician’s former bandmates, David Grohl and Krist Novoselic, and Mr. Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, among other parties. He claimed that they, along with Geffen Records, which released “Nevermind,” profited from his naked image. It is one of the best-selling records of all time, with at least 30 million copies sold worldwide.“Defendants knowingly produced, possessed, and advertised commercial child pornography depicting Spencer, and they knowingly received value in exchange for doing so,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday in federal court in California.Mr. Elden suffered “permanent harm” because of his association with the album, including emotional distress and a “lifelong loss of income-earning capacity.” The lawsuit did not provide details about the losses and said they would be disclosed at trial.Mr. Elden, an artist living in Los Angeles County, has gone to therapy for years to work through how the album cover affected him, said Maggie Mabie, one of his lawyers.“He hasn’t met anyone who hasn’t seen his genitalia,” she said. “It’s a constant reminder that he has no privacy. His privacy is worthless to the world.”The lawsuit said that Mr. Elden is seeking $150,000 from each of the 15 people and companies named in the complaint, including Kurt Weddle, the photographer who took the picture. Mr. Weddle did not respond to messages requesting comment.The photo of Mr. Elden was picked from among dozens of pictures of babies Mr. Weddle photographed for the album cover, which Mr. Cobain envisioned showing a baby underwater.Mr. Weddle paid Mr. Elden’s parents $200 for the picture, which was later altered to show the baby chasing a dollar, dangling from a fishhook.“They were trying to create controversy because controversy sells,” Ms. Mabie said. “The point was not just to create a menacing image but to cross the line and they did so in a way that exposed Spencer so that they could profit off of it.”She said her client sometimes agreed when the band, media outlets and fans asked him to recreate the photo as an adult, but he eventually realized that this only resulted in the “image of him as a baby being further exploited.”The representatives for Mr. Cobain’s estate did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Representatives for Mr. Grohl, Ms. Love, and Geffen Records, which is now part of Universal Music Group, did not respond to messages.Mr. Elden, who declined to comment on his suit, said in a short documentary in 2015 that the album cover had “opened doors” for him. For example, he worked with Shepard Fairey, the artist who was sued by The Associated Press for using an image of Barack Obama for his piece “Hope.”Over the years, he has expressed ambivalence about the cover.“It’d be nice to have a quarter for every person that has seen my baby penis,” he said in a New York Post interview in 2016.In a different interview that year, he said he was angry that people still talked about it.“Recently I’ve been thinking, ‘What if I wasn’t OK with my freaking penis being shown to everybody?’ I didn’t really have a choice,” Mr. Elden said to GQ Australia.He said that his feelings about the cover began to change “just a few months ago, when I was reaching out to Nirvana to see if they wanted to be part of my art show.”Mr. Elden said he was referred to managers and lawyers.“Why am I still on their cover if I’m not that big of a deal?” he said.Ms. Mabie said that Mr. Elden has long felt discomfort over the images and had expressed it in even earlier interviews when he was teenager.“Mr. Elden never consented to the use of this image or the display of these images,” she said. “Even though he recreated the images later on in life, he was clothed and he was an adult and these were very different circumstances.”Ms. Mabie said his parents never authorized consent for how the images would be used.She noted that Mr. Cobain once suggested putting a sticker over the baby’s genitals after there was pushback to the idea for the cover.The performer, who died in 1994, said the sticker should read: “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.”Mr. Elden is “asking for Nirvana to do what Nirvana should have done 30 years ago and redact the images of his genitalia from the album cover,” Ms. Mabie said.This lawsuit is not a typical child pornography case, said Mary Graw Leary, a professor at the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America.“Nudity of a child alone is not the definition of pornography,” she said. “The typical child pornography that is being seen in law enforcement and pursued in the courts can be violent. The children are young and it is very graphic.”But there are factors under federal law that allow a judge or a jury to determine whether a photo of a minor “constitutes a lascivious exhibition of the genitals,” including if they were the focal point of a photo, Professor Graw Leary said.That part of the law “gives a bit more discretion to the court,” she said. “It’s not a case with easy answers.”Mr. Elden’s past comments about the cover should not undermine his current claim that he was a victim of child pornography, she added. The law does not pick between children who immediately denounce their abusers and children who initially were dismissive about what happened to them, she said.“We don’t want to be in a position where we’re only going to consider one case criminal because in the other, the child didn’t think it was a big deal at the time,” Professor Graw Leary said. “We don’t only protect certain kids.” More