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      What Are the Greatest 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is Deciding

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhat Are the Greatest 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is DecidingThe Philly radio station WXPN polled its listeners and is revealing their choices in a marathon show. “I treasure the folly of it,” our critic writes.Edith Piaf, from left, the Notorious B.I.G. and Paul McCartney are among the artists with music on the WXPN list of the 2,020 greatest songs.Credit…From left: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Raymond Boyd/Getty Images; Wood/Evening Standard, Hulton Arcvhie, via Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2020Updated 7:34 p.m. ETAre you busy right now? And if not, are you up for another year-end list? Are you up for another list that’s also basically another election? You see, since Thursday, WXPN, a public radio station in Philadelphia, has been unfurling what its listeners chose as the 2,020 greatest-ever songs, based on a preferential balloting system that permitted voters to choose as many as 10 songs and as few as one, of any kind from any century. Late Sunday afternoon, the countdown passed the halfway point. I like the collective act of building a list. I like the story it tells about the art form and the people who claim to love it. I love the aggregation of sensibilities and generations and blocs. I might more than love it.The unfurling lasts 24 hours a day until a summit is reached, which means that catching the songs you voted for (or would have) might entail some sleeplessness. On the first overnight, I missed the best song ever written about anybody named Leah (Donnie Iris’s “Ah! Leah!,” No. 1,826) and one of my Top 3 favorite Donna Summer songs (“State of Independence,” No. 1,797).Why do this to myself? Why do it for what’s essentially just another canon? Enough with those! They’re exclusionary, history-warping, gate-kept; perpetuators of the same-old same-olds — the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan. These hierarchies of worth are rarely about passion for art; they’re papacy. And didn’t I mention that this is a Philadelphia station and the list was likely determined by Philadelphia-area radio listeners? That means hours and hours of rock ’n’ roll — old rock ’n’ roll. Tons of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon. An onslaught of Led Zeppelin. Basic rock, as a friend put it when I told him what I was up to. Bad Bunny just had the No. 1 album in the country. Anything like him on this list? As of Monday afternoon: not so far.My best answers for “why do it?” include the aforementioned accounting for taste (I, at least, like knowing what other people like) and something more particular to our having to retreat indoors yet again. It’s been a terrible year for experiences — pleasant, frivolous, collective ones, anyway. This countdown is an oasis amid the sands of monotony and worse. I’ve done no dancing at any bar or club (or illegal house party) since mid-February. But there I was in my kitchen Friday night presented with a block of nourishment, wagging my fanny against the cabinet doors as Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” led to Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” then the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” (traditionally, a song that keeps me seated) and “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” the most physically addictive song Stevie Wonder has written, followed by “Highway to Hell,” essential AC/DC that my body treated as if DJ Kool had produced it.Frank Ocean has at least three songs on the list, including “Pyramids” at No. 1,891.Credit…Visionhaus#GP/Corbis, via Getty ImagesSo far, the usual suspects (see “old rock,” above) find themselves overrepresented. (It’s a mark of a kind of progress that, at some point, Radiohead had as many songs as Steely Dan and the Who. The station’s site is keeping track.) There’s also been much too much Van Morrison and Moody Blues yet no or not nearly enough Nina Simone, Carly Simon, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, Reba McEntire, Madonna, Björk, Tracy Chapman, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Shakira, Beyoncé and Erykah Badu. Joni Mitchell currently leads the song count among women. And an event featuring more than 1,300 titles so far has turned up less than 20 by rappers; that number includes De La Soul’s appearance on Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc.” I’m looking on the bright side. There’s plenty of time.Either way, that is not WXPN’s problem. Loosely, the station’s format is listener-supported rock, down at 88.5 on the proverbial radio dial. Rock was foundational to its programming the way flour and water are to dough. I would describe it as “modern-rock singer-songwriter,” somehow without also being too “coffee shop” or “college radio.” XPN introduced my adolescent, late-1980s, early-1990s Philadelphia self to Joan Armatrading, Iris DeMent, Lyle Lovett, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Ben Folds Five and Olu Dara (a.k.a. Nas’s dad). It led me to Keb’ Mo’, Jonatha Brooke, Matthew Sweet, the Jayhawks, Jeff Buckley, post-“La Bamba” Los Lobos and Don Dixon, whose “Praying Mantis” is the “Boogie On Reggae Woman” of skintight, smarty-pants pop-rock. When John Prine died over the spring, years of WXPN are the reason I knew to shed tears.The city had other stations. WDAS for what I’d call grown-and-sexy R&B. Power 99 was rowdier and eventually more rappy. Q102 was pop. WMMR had become classic rock. WYSP seemed like rock before it was classic. One station had an alternative Friday night that played Nine Inch Nails and Meat Beat Manifesto. I was into all of it. XPN, though, was mine.The station still airs a show devoted to the ecstasies of lesbian musicianship (“Amazon Country”) and retains a Peabody-winning hour for kids. Today, its programming seems even more broad. In a given hour you could hear Solange Knowles, Sudan Archives, Chicano Batman and the late Sharon Jones, as well as Courtney Barnett, Josh Ritter, Kathleen Edwards, Fontaines D.C., Spoon, TV on the Radio and the War on Drugs. It’s still not a place where much current hip-hop meaningfully happens.This is a station in a city with a local music scene that it has remained part of. (The University of Pennsylvania provides its broadcast license but that’s really all.) The buoyant, affable on-air talent are audio veterans, not Penn students, and some of them sound like they couldn’t have grown up more than a mile from the West Philadelphia studio.Lady Gaga popped onto the list at No. 1,382 with “Born This Way.”Credit…Darron Cummings/Associated PressThis is a long way of saying that my personal excitement around this station daring to mount a greatest-songs-of-all-time chart arises from a tension between its inherent format and the music toward the other end of the dial. How much will the final list reflect WXPN’s values and broad, devoted audience and how much will it also ultimately reflect a station like WMMR’s?On Sunday, while the countdown was unveiling Beck’s “Loser” and Dion’s “The Wanderer,” I asked Bruce Warren, XPN’s program director, if he worried whether the results were going to tell him something about his station that he didn’t want to know. He laughed and reminded me that the program includes some kind of annual countdown and that, in his 30 years at XPN, eclecticism has always been the station’s raison d’être. Indeed, over the first five days, anyone listening even a little might have heard Metallica; Kurtis Blow; John Coltrane; Tash Sultana’s atmospheric dazzle; the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mozart; Lady Gaga; Frank Ocean; and a lot of Genesis.Warren has no official way of knowing how many of the 2,400 ballots cast were from the Philly area, but his hunch is most of them. “Today, we played a song by the Meters,” he said of the New Orleans funk band’s “It Ain’t No Use,” which came in at 1,063. “We’ve played them on XPN for years. They’re probably a band that, in that genre of music, we play a lot of. That speaks to the core listeners of XPN. They know the Meters because they know we play their music.” The same is true for the surfeit of Wilco entries, the high-ish positioning of Indigo Girls, and the decent showings of Loreena McKennitt and Bruce Cockburn, two very different Canadians and former XPN staples.But Warren is no fool. All of that Genesis testifies to some of the station’s older listeners “who grew up listening to them on WMMR.” He says that the final 200 songs will represent something of a consensus among those ballots, and that “No. 1 is No. 1 by a lot.” I wouldn’t let him spoil what kind of consensus, but I do wonder. Would it be what my friends who are also following along wearily predict? “Stairway to Heaven”? “Born to Run”? Would Aretha Franklin serve her usual canonical function of hauling both Black America and womankind to the top of the pile? Did no one write the words “Sinead” and “O’Connor” on their ballot?One compelling aspect of this countdown business is philosophical. At 2,000-plus songs, some percentage was probably always going to hew to XPN’s taste. Local acts like the Hooters, Amos Lee and Low Cut Connie are very much here. And believe it or not, “local” extends to Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, who, as of midday Monday, had almost 30 entries between them. But how would a countdown of the 2,020 greatest songs proceed over at, say, WDAS, where the format is now old-school R&B and “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” anchors the a.m. block? Power 99 used to have a nightly countdown show that one song — Shirley Murdock’s “As We Lay” or Keith Sweat’s “Make It Last Forever” or Prince’s “Adore”— would dominate for what felt like weeks. What would a more epochal undertaking look like? Would WMMR find a way to make inroads there, too?And what would the same countdown reveal at a similar station in Anchorage or Montgomery or Chicago or the Bay Area? Does it matter that a few corporate behemoths have flattened pop’s palette? Can a chart still quantify local taste? Would an accurate answer prove as vexing as precise electoral polling data, because, in part, we now live on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube? Is this entire process just too random and subjective to be worth continuing?I vote no; it’s not. I treasure the folly of it, the surprises, the mind-bending idea that a ranking process could place the number 1,995 next to something as celestial as Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” and go on to play another song after Ella Fitzgerald turns “Mack the Knife” into thrilling mass murder. I think “Brilliant Disguise” is a better Springsteen song than the certain finalist “Born to Run,” but no chart will ever reflect that, because it’s a blasphemous position. But I like the drama of the blasphemy and the certitude of what a chart tells you: Modernization is hard work. XPN’s is a kaleidoscope nonetheless.It’s true that you could build your own massive, perfectly tailored playlist. But you’d miss the astonishment of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” kicking off the 767-to-764 block and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” ending it in smithereens. There’d be no shock at all in hearing, say, Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” (1,093) follow the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” (1,094), which had chased Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run” (1,095). There’s no happening upon Dan Fogelberg’s 40-year-old “Same Auld Lang Syne” and swearing it’s the lonely ghost lurking on Taylor Swift’s two quarantine albums. Ditto — if you’re up late enough — for hearing XPN’s newbie host Rahman Wortman go a little bonkers exclaiming that Outkast’s “B. O. B (Bombs Over Baghdad)” did indeed make the cut.And you certainly couldn’t cringe at Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” and the Richard Harris travesty known as “MacArthur Park.” I suspect that the people who voted for those two know that they’re trolls. But it doesn’t matter. Even songs as baffling (fine, as horrendous) as those have culminated in days and days of something we’ve grown increasingly estranged from: word-of-mouth radio.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How the Bee Gees Stayed Alive

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookHow the Bee Gees Stayed AliveThe HBO documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” traces the decades-long arc of a band that mastered a rare pop skill: adaptation.Maurice, Barry and Robin Gibb in “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” a documentary that explores the group’s long and winding career.Credit…HBO MaxDec. 14, 2020, 1:16 p.m. ETDiscovered, embraced, disbanded, reunited, ignored, reinvented, hailed, scorned, disguised, recognized — the Bee Gees’ long career was filled with improbable ups and downs. Most bands are lucky to get one Top 10 hitmaking streak. The Bee Gees — the brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb — had at least two, singing heartache ballads in the late 1960s and re-emerging in the mid-1970s as the multiplatinum pop face of disco.“The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” an HBO documentary directed by Frank Marshall, moves sympathetically and efficiently through the group’s decades of making music. It traces the ways artistic instincts, family dynamics, business considerations, cultural shifts and sheer coincidence can shape memorable songs.In the documentary, abundant archival footage — a cavalcade of flashy fashions from 1960s frills to 1980s cool — coalesces around 2019 interviews with the last surviving member of the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb, who is grizzled and thoughtful but by no means retired. The documentary shows him performing as a headliner at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival, and he has an album due in 2021, “Greenfields,” that revisits the Bee Gees catalog with country musicians. The documentary also features the Bee Gees’ studio collaborators and, cannily, members of other bands of siblings: Oasis and the Jonas Brothers.The Bee Gees were prolific and often masterly songwriters, and they sang three-part harmony as only siblings can. Many of their songs are credited to all three brothers. “The only way I can describe how we work at it is to become one mind,” Maurice Gibb says in a clip from a 1999 interview.They started performing together before they were teenagers, in the late 1950s, looking to R&B vocal groups like the Mills Brothers and then, like countless others, to the Beatles. And like the Beatles, they soaked up all sorts of music: rock, country, gospel, vintage pop.But nearly from the beginning of their recording career, the Bee Gees clearly had something of their own. Barry and Robin Gibb, who traded off lead vocals, each brought a tremulous drama to their melodies, a striking mixture of eagerness and hesitancy. In an era of brash frontmen, they could sound like they were painfully shy yet simply unable to hold back.From 1967 to 1970, the Bee Gees released a string of hit ballads including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” With melancholy lyrics, delicately blended voices and careful, often Baroque-tinged productions, their songs offered yearning and solace in psychedelically turbulent times. Around the hits, their albums — notably “Odessa” — floated larger musical and poetic concepts and more eccentric productions.In 1969, egos boiled over. Robin quit the Bee Gees to try a solo career, and he and Barry sniped at each other via interviews for over a year as Maurice played go-between. They regrouped — in part to support their manager, Robert Stigwood, as he started his own company — and came up with more hits: “Lonely Days” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”But by 1974, the Bee Gees’ fortunes had waned. They had drinking and drug problems; their scattershot albums weren’t selling. Their label was “about to drop us,” Barry Gibb recalls in the documentary. “We had to adopt a new sound. We had to adopt a new attitude.”The Bee Gees were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Credit…Ed Caraeff/HBO, via Getty ImagesLuckily Stigwood also managed Eric Clapton, who suggested that they record where he had, at Criteria Studios in Miami. There, in 1975, some alchemical combination of sunny skies, close collaboration with their backing band, the stirrings of disco culture and a producer close to American R&B — Arif Mardin — led to the Bee Gees picking up their tempo and finding a brisk, guitar-scrubbing groove they would use in a new song, “Jive Talkin’.” In the documentary, Gibb connects it to the clicking rhythm he heard driving across a bridge to the studio each day.Because the Bee Gees had fallen so far out of fashion, their label sent “Jive Talkin’” to radio stations without identifying the group. With a blank label, the song became a radio hit; the Bee Gees were back.There was another breakthrough at the Criteria sessions. Barry Gibb was ad-libbing some backup vocals at the end of “Nights on Broadway” when he happened upon a sound he hadn’t fully realized he could make: a bright, piercing falsetto, androgynous and insistent, linking the Bee Gees to a longtime falsetto tradition in Black American music. It was a voice — a whole new sonic persona for Gibb, not shy at all — that would leap out of club and radio speakers in “You Should Be Dancing” and in songs the Bee Gees wrote for “Saturday Night Fever.”When they wrote those songs, the Bee Gees were at the Château d’Hérouville, a dumpy old French estate where Elton John had recorded the album “Honky Chateau.” During the sessions there, the band’s drummer, Dennis Bryon, was called away for a family emergency; to keep working, Albhy Galuten, a co-producer, made a tape loop from two bars of “Night Fever,” slowed it down and ran it as the Gibbs brothers wrote “Stayin’ Alive.” The mechanical feel of the loop gave the song something mysterious and tenacious; it stayed in the finished song, and has spawned innumerable looped drumbeats ever since.The 1977 “Saturday Night Fever” album, a two-LP anthology of disco hits and Bee Gees songs, became a record-setting blockbuster. Although disco had emerged from Black music and Black and gay clubs — as the documentary takes pains to point out — the Bee Gees, smiling in their silvery suits, became disco’s pop figureheads. In the late 1970s, the Gibb brothers’ music was everywhere: their own hits; songs for their younger brother, Andy; songs written for others. In 1979 they toured stadiums. They didn’t realize an anti-disco backlash was building.For a directorial flourish, Miller intercuts a euphoric July 1979 Bee Gees concert in Oakland with an event that happened two days later: “Disco Demolition Night,” promoted by Steve Dahl, a rock disc jockey who had popularized the obnoxious slogan “Disco Sucks.” Between games of a Chicago White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Dahl exploded a pile of disco records, which set off a hugely destructive crowd rampage. In the documentary, Vince Lawrence, who worked as an usher at Comiskey Park that night and later became a house-music producer, describes the event in hindsight as “a racist, homophobic book-burning.”The Bee Gees finished their tour amid bomb threats; radio stations pivoted away from dance music and shunned the Bee Gees. “We’re just a pop group, we’re not a political force,” a defensive Barry Gibb says in television footage from the time. “We’re just making music, and I don’t think there’s any reason to chalk us off because we existed in the ’70s and we would like to exist in the ’80s.”Avoiding the spotlight, the Gibb brothers persisted as songwriters and producers. The longtime Bee Gees sound — tuneful midtempo ballads, vocal high harmonies, distinctive chord progressions — comes through unmistakably in songs they wrote for others, including Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” and the Kenny Rogers-Dolly Parton duet “Islands in the Stream.” Even in post-disco purgatory, the Bee Gees were still hitmakers. And as disco and the backlash receded (and dance music never went away), the Bee Gees returned more modestly, making albums every few years and garnering the respect they deserved. Yes, they got into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Maurice Gibb died in 2003, Robin Gibb in 2012; that vocal blend is extinct. In the documentary, Barry Gibb understands exactly what his brothers and his band accomplished. “We never really had a category. We just had periods and we managed to fit into different eras,” he reflects. “We didn’t always connect. But we stayed around.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Shawn Mendes Hits No. 1 for the Fourth Time

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ChartsShawn Mendes Hits No. 1 for the Fourth TimeThe pop-rock singer and songwriter’s latest album, “Wonder,” debuted at the top a week before Taylor Swift’s surprise “Evermore” arrives on the chart.Credit…David Livingston/Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2020, 12:27 p.m. ETFive years ago, Shawn Mendes was a fresh-faced 11th-grader from Pickering, Ontario, who had ridden a wave of six-second videos on the defunct app Vine — the proto-TikTok — into a surprise No. 1 debut album.Now, at 22, he is a veteran hitmaker whose four studio LPs have all gone to the top of Billboard’s album chart. His latest, “Wonder,” opened with the equivalent of 89,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen Music, including 47 million streams and 54,000 copies sold as a complete package.Mendes reached No. 1 just in time before Taylor Swift’s “Evermore,” her second quarantine album, which came out on Friday with less than a day’s notice and is expected to have a huge opening on next week’s chart.The rest of this week’s Top 10 is dominated by recurring hits and holiday albums.Bad Bunny’s “El Último Tour del Mundo,” last week’s No. 1, fell to second place in its second week out, while Ariana Grande’s “Positions,” another recent chart topper, is No. 3.Michael Bublé’s “Christmas,” a steady seasonal hit since 2011, is No. 4, and Carrie Underwood’s Christmas album “My Gift,” which had peaked at No. 8 when released in September, rose to No. 5. Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” is No. 7, Pentatonix’s “The Best of Pentatonix Christmas” is No. 8 and Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas” is No. 10.According to Billboard, it is the first time in seven years that five holiday-themed albums were in the Top 10.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      'Evermore' Review: Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Sequel Is a Journey Deeper Inward

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAlbum Review‘Evermore,’ Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Sequel, Is a Journey Deeper InwardThe singer and songwriter’s July album traded glossy sheen for an acoustic-Minimalistic palette. A second album with the same collaborators moves even further from her pop past.Taylor Swift surprised fans with a second album written and recorded during the coronavirus lockdown, “Evermore.”Credit…Beth GarrabrantDec. 11, 2020Sequels are always tricky. The original is a creative leap; the follow-up is likely to be incremental. Until now, Taylor Swift has switched up her collaborators and general sound with each album. But she has rightly billed “Evermore,” her surprise-release ninth album, as the “sister” to the one she released less than five months ago, “Folklore.”“It feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music,” Swift wrote in a statement. “We chose to wander deeper in.”She continued writing songs with the “Folklore” brain trust of producers and musicians — primarily Aaron Dessner of the National, who plays most of the instruments and collaborated on 14 of 15 songs. Swift’s boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn, had a hand in three songs under the pseudonym William Bowery; Jack Antonoff, who also wrote with Swift on “Folklore,” worked on two.[embedded content]“Evermore” clings to the acoustic-Minimalistic palette of “Folklore,” with homey piano and imperturbable guitar patterns. Swift and Dessner enlisted more backup musicians for mini-orchestral arrangements by Bryce Dessner, also of the National, but for most of “Evermore,” Swift turns even further inward, away from her pop past, than she did on “Folklore,” drifting toward elegant but cerebral craftsmanship.On “Folklore,” Swift decided she could set aside autobiography to tell stories that weren’t necessarily her own. “Evermore” features more character studies and role playing, as she sings about infidelity, con jobs, even murder. “Ivy,” written with Aaron Dessner and Antonoff, is a folky, convoluted song about a married woman’s secret affair, enfolded by banjo and guitar picking as she sings about the temptation that tears at her: “Your touch brought forth an incandescent glow/Tarnished but so grand.”In “’Tis the Damn Season,” the singer visits her hometown for the holidays and suggests a weekend fling with someone she had left behind. In “Champagne Problems,” the narrator turns down an earnest proposal, singing, “Sometimes you just don’t know the answer/Til someone’s on their knees and asks you.” The music is an elaborate, evolving sigh, starting with low-fi, oompah piano chords that grow entwined with guitar arpeggios and a choir of “aah”s. Swift has more fun with “No Body, No Crime,” joined by two of the sisters in Haim, Este and Danielle, singing about cheating, revenge and unsolved murders and egged on by a yowling harmonica.Swift’s latest breakup songs, her longtime specialty, seek maturity by stepping back. Churchy organ tones surround her as she faces the end of a seven-year romance in “Happiness,” slipping toward anger — “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool/Who takes my spot next to you” — but determined to be fair: “There’ll be happiness after you/But there was happiness because of you too.” And the album’s title song, “Evermore,” looks back, over a serene piano line, on how she used to believe “that this pain would be for evermore”; Bon Iver (Justin Vernon), returning after his appearance on “Folklore,” arrives midway through to recall more turbulent times, but Swift is determined to put pain behind her.Swift can still bristle, as she does in “Closure.” With insistently clattering percussion and electronic creaks behind her, she refuses to give an ex the satisfaction of pretending to be amicable. Even though “It’s been a long time,” she sneers, “Don’t treat me like some situation that needs to be handled/I’m fine with my spite and my tears.” It’s a glimpse of what Swift might call “the old Taylor,” still in close emotional combat.“Closure” is in an unconventional meter, 5/4; so is “Tolerate It,” in which Swift’s character is a woman giving her all to someone who takes her for granted. Those are two of the album’s countless musicianly flourishes, along with the restlessly intertwined guitar picking in “Willow” and the glimmering electronics and furtive pizzicato strings in “Marjorie” (which pays fond tribute to Swift’s grandmother, Marjorie Finlay). The sonic details of “Evermore” are radiant and meticulous; the songwriting is poised and careful. It’s an album to respect. But with all its constructions and conceits, it also keeps a certain emotional distance.Taylor Swift“Evermore”(Republic)AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Taylor Swift Announces Second Surprise Album of 2020, ‘Evermore’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTaylor Swift Announces Second Surprise Quarantine Album, ‘Evermore’The “sister record” to her Grammy-nominated “Folklore” again features Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff and Justin Vernon, along with new collaborators.Taylor Swift’s ninth album, “Evermore,” is a creative continuation of her blockbuster “Folklore.”Credit…Beth GarrabrantPublished More

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      Gwen Stefani’s Ska-Pop Flashback, and 10 More New Songs

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistGwen Stefani’s Ska-Pop Flashback, and 10 More New SongsHear tracks by Sturgill Simpson, John Carpenter, Elle King and others.Gwen Stefani returns to the familiar sounds of her band, No Doubt, on a new single, “Let Me Reintroduce Myself.”Credit…Kevin Winter/Getty Images For IheartmediaJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Giovanni Russonello and Dec. 11, 2020Every 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.Gwen Stefani, ‘Let Me Reintroduce Myself’[embedded content]When the brash, sneering No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani emerged in the mid-90s to break up the boys-club monopoly of alternative rock, it would have been hard to predict where she’d be now, at 51. She is arguably even more of a household name than in the “Tragic Kingdom” days, but occupies a space at the deadest center of centrist pop — a fixture on a broadcast TV singing competition that is (somehow) in its 20th season, and an occasional (if sonically ill-suited) duet partner with her country-star fiancé. Her new single, the not-so-subtly-titled “Let Me Reintroduce Myself,” gestures back to Stefani’s middle period of, roughly, “Rock Steady” through “Hollaback Girl,” assuring the skeptical listener that she’s still “the original, original old” Gwen. A few clunky verse lyrics protest a bit too much (“It’s not a comeback, I’m recycling me”), but when her brassy voice rises to match the ska instrumentation of the chorus, there’s a fleeting rush of that old No Doubt magic. LINDSAY ZOLADZTroye Sivan, Kacey Musgraves and Mark Ronson, ‘Easy’The neon-kissed “Easy” was already a highlight off the Australian pop sweetheart Troye Sivan’s recent EP, “In a Dream,” but a new mix by Mark Ronson and guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves kick it into another gear. Ronson’s production expands the song’s spacious atmosphere, accentuating an echoing New Order bass line, starry synth flourishes and cavernous percussion. For all her disco flirtations on “High Horse,” Musgraves has never lent her benevolent croon to a song so straightforwardly poppy before — but she sounds so at home that it’s worth wondering if this hints at a potential post-“Golden Hour” direction. ZOLADZJohn Carpenter, ‘The Dead Walk’The director John Carpenter is a full-fledged musician who has also composed the scores for many of his films. “The Dead Walk” is from an album due in 2021, “Lost Themes III,” of music without movies. It’s a martial, suspenseful, pumping, minor-key synthesizer melody, with a guitar overlay, that has its beat drop out midway through, for blurred piano arpeggios, only to resume with even more ominous intent. JON PARELESGeorge Coleman Quintet, ‘Sandu’In 1971, seven years after his tenure with Miles Davis’s famed quintet, the saxophonist George Coleman was revving up his career as a bandleader in his own right. On this newly discovered live recording, “The George Coleman Quintet in Baltimore,” Coleman — an inveterate weight lifter — drives the band like a personal trainer, while syncing up with the colorful trumpet phrasing of Danny Moore and the brawny Midwestern swing of Larry Ridley’s bass. On “Sandu,” a classic Clifford Brown blues, Moore nods to its author with a few upturned, pretty lines, but he’s working out his own shapes. On Coleman’s solo, his fits of circular breathing seem to call back to the old R&B saxophone hollerers of generations before. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOFunkmaster Flex featuring King Von, ‘Lurkin’The first single from the forthcoming Funkmaster Flex compilation — 1990s back! — is a taut example of the storytelling rap that made the Chicago rapper King Von, who was killed last month, such a compelling talent. JON CARAMANICABenny the Butcher, ‘3:30 in Houston’Benny the Butcher raps “3:30 in Houston” from a wheelchair — the result of getting shot last month in an attempted robbery. At first, he’s laughing a little — after all, he notes, he’s been on the other side of a robbery in his day. But midsong, as he relives the moment of the attack, the mood sours:Rolls-Royce truck basically stood outOnly one mistake, I ain’t have a lookoutQuarter in jewels, shopping at WalmartTake me out the hood but can’t take the hood outSoon, it’s a deadpan revenge tale, including the suggestion that someone’s “pinkie finger’s getting sent to me.” CARAMANICAKing Princess, ‘Pain’“Cheap Queen,” Mikaela Straus’s 2019 full-length debut as King Princess, was a relatively subdued affair, full of mid-tempo tunes that telegraphed laid-back cool. So the in-your-face energy of her latest single “Pain” is certainly a departure, but it works: The kinetic maximalism of the song’s early 90s touchstones — a “Freedom! ’90” keyboard riff; some “Tom’s Diner” do-do-dos — keep the song from wallowing in the muck of its moody subject matter. “I can’t help turning my love into pain,” Straus croons. The playful music video, directed by Quinn Wilson, conjures some cartoonishly masochistic imagery, with that titular word suddenly appearing like the bam and pows in an old “Batman” episode. ZOLADZSturgill Simpson, ‘Oh Sarah’“Oh Sarah” is a desolate Southern soul ballad on Sturgill Simpson’s 2016 album, “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” losing itself in the loneliness and transience of the road: “Too old now to learn how to let you in/so I run away just like I always do.” On “Cuttin’ Grass — Vol. 2 (Cowboy Arms Sessions),” his second album of bluegrass remakes from his catalog, it’s far more reassuring, rooted in string-band picking. It’s a vow of enduring love despite the separations: “Don’t worry baby, I’ll come home.” PARELESElle King, ‘Another You’Bitterness seethes and crests as the string section swells in Elle King’s “Another You,” a knife-twisting response to a message from a despised ex. In the verses she details his failings, almost singing through clenched teeth; in the chorus, she belts with vindictive joy about a new romance, proclaiming, “It wasn’t hard to fill your shoes.” PARELESEl Perro del Mar featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alone in Halls’“I’m going through changes,” El Perro del Mar — the Swedish composer and singer Sarah Assbring — sings and speaks, again and again, in “Alone in Halls,” over two organlike chords that feel like inhales and exhales. She’s joined, now and then, by the voice of Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). Aren’t we all going through changes? PARELESMoontype, ‘Ferry’“I wanna take the ferry to Michigan,” Margaret McCarthy sings, buoyed by oceanic guitar distortion on the chorus of “Ferry,” the first single from the Chicago indie-rock trio Moontype’s upcoming debut album. “Ferry” marries the woozy swoon of Beach House with the rising sweep of a Galaxie 500 song, though McCarthy’s voice cuts through the haze with direct emotional lucidity. ZOLADZAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Dorian Electra, a Queer Pop Star Who Defies Genres

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUp NextDorian Electra, a Queer Pop Star Who Defies GenresThe singer recently released music that tangles together metal, dubstep and hard-core punk, “all these hypermasculine, testosterone-filled genres.”Dorian Electra released an experimental album, “My Agenda,” in October.Credit…Kevin Amato for The New York TimesDec. 11, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETName: Dorian ElectraAge: 28Hometown: HoustonNow Lives: In a spacious Victorian-style house in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles, with nine roommates.Claim to Fame: Mx. Electra is a singer and producer known for genre-contorting pop songs and elaborate music videos. Mx. Electra’s 2019 debut album, “Flamboyant,” is a glittery confection of convulsive hyperpop. The video for the title track featured the performer, who is gender-fluid, with neon green hair and a penciled-on mustache, twirling around a candlelit manor.Big Break: In 2017, Mx. Electra met A.G. Cook, a record producer, through mutual friends at a DJ set at Sunnyvale, a nightclub in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Mr. Cook, who founded the electro-pop record label PC Music, was the executive producer behind Charli XCX’s breakout mixtape, “Pop 2, ”and suggested that Mx. Electra appear on the track “Femmebot.” “I was like, I’m working with my favorite artists, how is this even real?” Mx. Electra said.Credit…Kevin Amato for The New York TimesLatest Project: In October, Mx. Electra released a frenetic, experimental full-length album, “My Agenda.” The songs expand on the ideas that animated their first album, with some written from the perspective of incels — so-called involuntary celibates who blame women for their lack of sexual activity — to examine how internet culture fosters toxicity online. “My Agenda” tangles together metal, dubstep and hard-core punk, “all these hypermasculine, testosterone-filled genres,” Mx. Electra said.Next Thing: Mx. Electra plans to release a remixed version of “My Agenda,” inspired by the styles of artists featured on the project, and will work on new music next year. The singer has been livestreaming performances of the record on Twitch and posting them on YouTube. Mx. Electra is also supporting Planned Parenthood in a new campaign, as one of 200 artists pledging solidarity with the organization.Catwalk: Fashion plays a key role in how Mx. Electra conceptualizes songwriting; the singer will plot out what colors to wear in a music video before even finishing a track. Mx. Electra walked in a runway show in London Fashion Week in February for DB Berdan, a Turkish brand, and is eager to do more modeling. “For me, fashion has been a way to be like, this is the body I was born with,” Mx. Electra said. “But what can I do with it? Who can I be?”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Best Albums of 2020? Let’s Discuss

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyPopcastSubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsThe Best Albums of 2020? Let’s DiscussAn absence of live music refocused attention on records, and work by Fiona Apple, Taylor Swift and Run the Jewels spoke loudly.Hosted by Jon Caramanica. Produced by Pedro Rosado.More episodes ofPopcastDecember 9, 2020The Best Albums of 2020? Let’s DiscussNovember 29, 2020Saweetie, City Girls and the Female Rapper RenaissanceNovember 18, 2020  •  More