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      Nicki Minaj Reunites With Lil Wayne and Drake, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Olivia Rodrigo, Tony Allen, L’Rain 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.Nicki Minaj with Drake and Lil Wayne, ‘Seeing Green’In honor of Nicki Minaj’s still-incendiary 2009 debut mixtape “Beam Me Up Scotty” finally arriving on streaming services, she’s organized a little YMCMB family reunion. “Seeing Green” is more of a status update than a club banger à la the trio’s classic “Truffle Butter,” but everyone is still in fine form. Wayne, as usual, plays the gonzo court jester, and he seizes the opportunity to unload all of those pandemic-related rhymes he’s been holding onto for the last year (“I put you six feet deep, I’m being socially distant”). Nicki locks back into her standard eviscerate-the-haters flow, and Drake continues to rap with a precision and bite that suggests, as did the recent “Scary Hours 2,” that whenever his promised “Certified Lover Boy” arrives, it might actually be worth the wait. “I played 48 minutes on a torn meniscus,” he boasts, “who’s subbing?” (But maybe see a doctor about that, Drake — it’s serious!) LINDSAY ZOLADZOlivia Rodrigo, ‘Good 4 U’The third single from Olivia Rodrigo’s forthcoming debut album, “Sour,” tells a story that will be familiar to anyone who’s heard her first single, “Driver’s License”: A former flame moves on too quickly after a breakup, leaving Rodrigo alone with all her feelings. But this time the 18-year-old Disney actress refracts it through a different lens and a whole new sonic palette. Though it starts off quiet, by the chorus “Good 4 U” explodes into a kind of “You Oughta Know” for the TikTok era, all righteous anger and pop-punky, primal-scream rage: “Good for you, you’re doing great out there without me — like a damn sociopath!” ZOLADZTorres, ‘Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head’The new song from Mackenzie Scott — who makes brooding, searching indie-rock under the name Torres — might be the most accessible thing she’s ever released. And she knows it: She’s wryly described “Don’t Go Putting Wishes in My Head,” the first single from her forthcoming album “Thirstier,” as “my relentless arena country star moment.” More than anything, though, with its buzzing synths and soaring chorus, “Wishes” recalls the Killers at their most fist-clenchingly anthemic. “Just when I thought that it was over, it was only just beginning,” Scott sings, her voice trembling with intensity. She seems to understand that accepting joy can sometimes be an even more vulnerable act than confessing pain, but by the end of the song she sounds fearless, and ready to move toward the light. ZOLADZTony Allen, ‘Mau Mau’The drummer Tony Allen supplied the rhythmic foundation for Fela Kuti’s Nigerian Afrobeat in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on West African traditions, jazz and funk, he built an architecture of unpredictable offbeats, unhurried but kinetic. Before his death in 2020, he had started a hip-hop project, creating beats and synthesizer bass lines and lining up vocalists. Allen’s new album, “There Is No End,” was completed posthumously by the producers Vincent Taeger and Vincent Taurelle. “Mau Mau” features Nah Eeto, a rapper from Kenya, with multitracked vocals that calmly bounce around the syllables of her lyrics — some in English, some not — to highlight all the ways Allen could dodge the downbeat while constantly flicking the music onward. JON PARELESMaría Grand, ‘Now, Take, Your, Day’The rising tenor saxophonist María Grand wrote the tunes that appear on “Reciprocity,” her new LP, in the middle of a pregnancy, while reading spiritual texts and paying close attention to the bond she was building with her not-yet-born child. (The album’s liner notes include her written reflections on becoming a mother, and how this found its way into the music.) The album, featuring Kanoa Mendenhall on bass and Savannah Harris on drums, is also a testament to the constant regeneration that becomes possible within a close musical partnership; on track after track, Grand dances nimbly over Harris’s subtly shifting patterns, and Mendenhall stubbornly insists on never repeating herself. “Now, Take, Your, Day” begins with all three members singing the song’s title in harmony, before the rhythm section lays down a loosely funky beat and Grand introduces the song’s downward-slanting melody on saxophone. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBella Poarch, ‘Build a Bitch’Like many TikTok stars, Bella Poarch is making a move into her own music. “Build a Bitch” comes across cute and furious. Tinkly toy-piano sounds and perky la-las accompany her as she points out that women aren’t consumer products. “You don’t get to pick and choose/Different ass and bigger boobs,” she coos. “If you need perfect, I’m not built for you.” A post-“Westworld” video set in an android factory ends, inevitably, in mayhem. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Worry With You’The forthcoming, self-produced Sleater-Kinney album “Path of Wellness” will be the first the Portland band releases as a duo, since its longtime power-drummer Janet Weiss departed in 2019, and her absence certainly makes the song feel a bit muted and minor. But there’s still a familiar pleasure in hearing Carrie Brownstein’s snaking guitar riffs and staccato vocals intertwine with Corin Tucker’s, as they sing of a long-term togetherness that’s provided comfort in good times and bad: “If I’m gonna mess up,” they avow, “I’m gonna mess up with you.” ZOLADZMartin Garrix featuring Bono & The Edge, ‘We Are the People’The official 2020 UEFA European Football Championship song is exactly what you’d expect from a soccer anthem by a big-room EDM D.J. collaborating with half of U2: a grand, thumping march with pinging guitars, vast synthesizer swells and determinedly inspirational lyrics. “You’ve faith and no fear for the fight,” Bono sings, “You pull hope from defeat in the night.” The song uses familiar tools for stadium-scale uplift, but they can still work. PARELESHolly Macve, ‘You Can Do Better’Regrets and reverb both loom large on Holly Macve’s second album, “Not the Girl,” a set of country-rooted ballads that place her reedy voice — determinedly sustained through countless breaks and quavers — in wide-screen, retro arrangements. “You Can Do Better” is a stately, swaying waltz, a breakup-and-makeup scenario that builds up to dramatic questions, swirling across voices and strings: “Is it so wrong to love you?/Is it so wrong to care?” PARELESL’Rain, ‘Blame Me’L’Rain — the songwriter, musician and producer Taja Cheek — opens an ever-widening, ever more disorienting sonic vortex in “Blame Me,” from her second album, “Fatigue,” due June 25. Sparse guitars pick fragments of chords that fall, then rise, as L’Rain muses cryptically on mortality and remorse. Soon, they’re enveloped by a ghostly orchestra and distant voices intoning, “Waste away now, make my way down”; as the track ends, she’s still in a lush harmonic and emotional limbo. PARELESElaine, ‘Right Now’Elaine is from South Africa, where she already has a large audience. But her sound bespeaks international R&B ambitions, with programmed trap drum sounds and an American accent. In “Right Now,” she tries to juggle a damaged relationship against a burgeoning career. “I cannot continue carrying all your insecurities/I got more priorities,” she sings, quietly but adamantly. Her alto is low, intimate and flexible; with her priorities, she’s not about to indulge a cheating ex, even if she’s tempted. PARELESAlan Jackson, ‘Where Have You Gone’“Where Have You Gone,” the title song of Alan Jackson’s new, 21-song album, starts off like a lonely lament for someone who’s left him: “It’s been way too long since you slipped away.” But it turns out he’s lamenting the way “sweet country music” used to sound: steel guitar, fiddle, “words from the heart.” It’s the style Jackson has upheld through his career, looking back to Merle Haggard and George Jones, only to see it supplanted lately by arena-country and infiltrations of hip-hop. “The airwaves are waiting,” he insists; current country radio says otherwise. PARELESSons of Kemet featuring Moor Mother and Angel Bat Dawid, ‘Pick Up Your Burning Cross’Over the rough rhythmic onrush of this United Kingdom-based quartet — featuring Theon Cross’s pulsing tuba, Shabaka Hutchings’s roof-raising saxophone and the interlocked drumming of Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner — a voice hovers, singing and speaking and laughing. It belongs to Angel Bat Dawid, and it’s soon joined by that of Moor Mother, another revolutionary poet and musician from this side of the Atlantic. “I don’t think you remember me/I was in last place,” Moor Mother begins, serving notice as the band presses ahead. The piece is on “Black to the Future,” Sons of Kemet’s fourth album. RUSSONELLOErika Dohi, ‘Particle Of …’Erika Dohi, a Japanese keyboardist and composer now based in New York City, is one of the musicians affiliated with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver’s label 37d03d (“people” upside-down). “Particle Of …” comes from her new album “I, Castorpollux,” and while it was composed by Andy Akiho (who also directed her music video), it fits the album’s aesthetic of Minimalistic repetitions and startling fractures. It uses percussive, single-note patterns on piano and prepared piano, played live and then computer manipulated, equally virtuosic and digitally skewed. Chords arrive at the end, like a surprise visit from 20th-century modernism. PARELES More

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      St. Vincent Flirts With Autobiography and the Sounds of the ’70s

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      On her sixth solo album, “Daddy’s Home,” the singer and songwriter Annie Clark turns her world-building and role-playing briefly inward.In the middle of St. Vincent’s last album, the sleek and slinky “Masseduction” from 2017, there is an uncharacteristically sparse piano ballad called “Happy Birthday, Johnny.” Unlike a lot of St. Vincent songs, this one is almost provocatively simple: just a lovely melody that Annie Clark’s voice imbues with warm, weary pathos.It tells the apparently autobiographical story of two New York bohemians who’d once been inseparable, before the narrator got famous and her hard-living pal Johnny ended up on the street. In the last verse, he returns to hit her up for money. She hesitates, and he accuses her of “acting like all royalty” and severing their bond for good: “What happened to blood, our family/Annie, how could you do this to me?”That last line hits like an electric shock. Clark has always maintained a performance artist’s calculated caginess regarding how much of her private self she is willing to offer up in her music, and St. Vincent songs have never exactly presented themselves as first-person confessionals. Instead, Clark delights in world-building and role-playing, assigning each album its own highly stylized attitude, hairdo and mood board of references.Ever an interrogator of gender norms, Clark has used this technique to push back against the limiting assumption that female artists must always make “personal” music. And yet, with its first-name-basis and no-frills arrangement, something about “Happy Birthday, Johnny” feels especially raw. The New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten asked Clark who Johnny is — a fair question, it seemed, about a song that telegraphed such candor. But Clark demurred. “Johnny’s just Johnny,” she answered. “Doesn’t everybody know a Johnny?”When Clark announced the title of her sixth solo album, “Daddy’s Home,” it appeared at first like it might be another “Happy Birthday, Johnny” moment — a sudden, uncharacteristic pivot to straightforward autobiography. Cheeky as it is, the phrase does point quite directly to an event in Clark’s personal life: Her father, who in 2010 was imprisoned for his role in a stock-manipulation scheme, recently got out of prison. Clark has studiously avoided addressing the matter until now, though in interviews promoting “Daddy’s Home,” she has suggested for the first time that her emotional response to her father’s incarceration informed, however obliquely, her unsettling 2011 masterpiece “Strange Mercy.”That record was deliciously creepy and anxiety-ridden, but a decade later, on “Daddy’s Home,” Clark is more inclined to address her father’s experience with a canted humor and swaggering bravado. “I signed autographs in the visitation room,” she sings on the vampy title track, “waiting for you the last time, inmate 502.” The song struts woozily, and between the lines, it wonders: Has the daughter inherited more of the father’s vices than she wants to admit? And if so, who’s her daddy now?The cover of “Daddy’s Home.”As ever, the album exists within a fully realized visual aesthetic, all seedy 1970s simulacra: grainy photographs, louche leisure suits, Gena Rowlands wig. The sonic influences are similarly period-specific; sitar and Mellotron abound. Looser and more fluid than the blurty riffs and prickly-pear tempos that have characterized other St. Vincent albums, “Daddy’s Home” channels Pink Floyd’s hi-fi panoramas, the ecstatic chord changes of “Innervisions”-era Stevie Wonder and the self-described “plastic soul” of David Bowie’s “Young Americans.”Clark and her co-producer, Jack Antonoff, have clearly had fun with the creation of this finely tuned alternate universe, but at a point, its many detailed references start to feel like clutter, preventing the songs from moving too freely in their own ways.The yawning single “The Melting of the Sun” is weighed down by constant, wink-wink verbal and sonic quotations of ’70s rock; “Hello from the dark side of the moon,” Clark sings, as her guitar wolf-whistles like Steve Miller’s in “The Joker.” “Like the heroines of Cassavetes, I’m under the influence daily,” she sings, a little too on the nose, on the drifting “The Laughing Man.” One indelible highlight is the gorgeously immersive psychedelia of “Live in the Dream,” but it is also a Pink Floyd-indebted slow-burner that begins with an echoing, “Hello …” Get it? Too often, these references feel as though they’re there just for the sake of cleverness. As a result, more frequently than it invents or reveals, “Daddy’s Home” gestures.Eventually, though, across its six-and-a-half minutes, “Live in the Dream” manages to drill down a little deeper. “Welcome, child, you’re free from the cage,” Clark sings in a gentle, hazy voice, as though she’s greeting someone waking up from a long coma. In these moments, “Daddy’s Home” nods to the psychotherapeutic concept known as “reparenting” — a process of realizing the needs that were not met in one’s own childhood and then becoming, in a sense, one’s own daddy. It’s rich territory to mine.Later in the record, on the searching but still humorous “My Baby Wants a Baby,” Clark revisits this idea and wonders whether or not she wants to enter that endless cycle of familial trauma. “What in the world would my baby say, I got your eyes and your mistakes?” she sings. “Then I couldn’t stay in bed all day/I couldn’t leave like my daddy.”With its warm Wurlitzer and Greek-chorus backing vocals from Lynne Fiddmont and Kenya Hathaway, “My Baby Wants a Baby” is also framed in ’70s rock styles. But unlike some of the album’s flatter material, this song doesn’t feel impeded by its instrumentation and conceptual ideas. Instead, it seems to be discovering and revealing as it goes along.It’s a relatively rare moment, though. As a whole, “Daddy’s Home” ends up feeling like a record that wants it both ways: It flirts with and even valorizes autobiographical disclosure only to retreat from it and back into a place of light pastiche when things risk becoming a little too messy.One of the most surprising moments comes during “The Melting of the Sun,” when Clark shouts out three of her musical heroes: Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos. Like Clark, all three are known for virtuosity. But unlike Clark, they’re also known for the intense, fearless emotionality of their music and the way it can smudge the line between private emotion and public performance.If these are her lodestars, perhaps they can provide a pathway toward a genuinely revelatory new direction. Artifice can of course project larger truths, but it can just as easily become a trusty hiding place. On “Daddy’s Home,” Clark sometimes creeps up to her edge, only to return to that playfully distorted hall of mirrors that has become her comfort zone.St. Vincent“Daddy’s Home”(Loma Vista Recordings) More

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      ‘Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm’ Review: Rockers Ripping It Up

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      A documentary explores the Welsh farm-turned-studio, Rockfield, where Black Sabbath, the Stone Roses and others made music.Rockers endeavoring to “get their heads together in the country” has been one of the great clichés of popular music since the late-1960s. As “Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm,” an agreeable new documentary directed by Hannah Berryman, amply testifies, “the country” was just as likely a place for rockers to lose their heads.As recounted by the brothers Kingsley Ward and Charles Ward, their parents’ large pig and dairy farm in Wales was a dodgy inheritance. “No money in farming,” one of them shrugs. Avid rock fans since the mid-50s, they made music together on reel-to-reel tape and drove north to try to sell it; their first stop was a record pressing plant. (They got a “label” address off the back of an LP.)Various farm buildings had attractive acoustic qualities, so the Wards started cleaning them up and sealing them off, building a residential studio. Black Sabbath rehearsed there; the space-rockers Hawkwind recorded there. After leaving Led Zeppelin, the singer Robert Plant found at Rockfield a place to experiment, an environment where he was “free to fail.”The tales become more picaresque as New Wave and Britpop bands begin checking in and behaving like New Wave and Britpop bands. Simple Minds sing backup vocals for an intermittently sober Iggy Pop, and so on. The studio’s biggest upturn comes when the Stone Roses stay for over a year. And then there’s Oasis. Its former lead singer, Liam Gallagher, recalls the fights with his bandleader brother, Noel (of course he does), and rushing to the village pub.This stuff is best appreciated by rock mavens. Many of the other bands telling their stories (including the Boo Radleys and the Charlatans) didn’t have much of an impact in the States, so Anglophilia helps, too.Rockfield: The Studio on the FarmNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      Tina Turner and Jay-Z Lead Rock Hall of Fame’s 2021 Inductees

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      Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Carole King and Todd Rundgren were also voted in, meaning nearly half of the 15 individuals in this year’s class are women.For years, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has been pummeled by criticism that its inductees — the marble busts in the pantheon of rock — were too homogeneous, and that the secretive insiders who create the ballots showed a troubling pattern of excluding women.This year the voters seem to have listened: The class of 2021 features Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, the Go-Go’s, Carole King, Tina Turner and Todd Rundgren — a collection of 15 individuals that includes seven women.That ratio alone should lend a new energy to the 36th annual induction ceremony, planned for Oct. 30 at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.In past years, when women have been inducted, they have been far outnumbered by men. In 2019, for example, Stevie Nicks and Janet Jackson may have stood triumphant, but their earnest speeches — Jackson: “Please induct more women” — did not seem to last as long as it took to name every male bass player of the rock bands that joined alongside them.Dave Grohl, center, and the members of Foo Fighters. Grohl is already in the hall as a member of Nirvana.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe latest inductees show a balance of genre and generation that has come to be a feature of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s expanding tent. Foo Fighters, led by Dave Grohl, represent the cream of 1990s-vintage alternative rock. Jay-Z is rap incarnate. And the Go-Go’s stand for joyful, upbeat 1980s power-pop.Each of those acts was a first-time nominee, although the Go-Go’s — the first and only all-woman rock band to score a No. 1 album on Billboard’s chart — have been eligible since 2006. (Artists can be nominated 25 years after the release of their first recording.)The Go-Go’s in the early 1980s: from left, Kathy Valentine, Jane Wiedlin, Gina Schock, Charlotte Caffey and Belinda Carlisle.Paul Natkin/WireImageRundgren, the prolific producer and multi-instrumentalist, occupies the role of the auteur from classic rock’s flowering in the late 1960s and early ’70s; Turner is a force of nature whose career has stretched from old-school R&B to MTV-era pop; and King is the singer-songwriter and conscience who brings gravitas to the proceedings.Three of this year’s inductees were already in the hall: Grohl as a member of Nirvana, Turner with Ike and Tina Turner, and King as a nonperformer, with her songwriting partner and former husband Gerry Goffin.The story of the inductions is also told by who didn’t make the cut. The voters — a group of more than 1,000 artists, journalists and industry veterans — decided against the bands Iron Maiden, Devo, New York Dolls and Rage Against the Machine, as well as Kate Bush, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan and Dionne Warwick.The Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti would have been the first Black musician from Africa to join the hall, but was not voted in this year. Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFela Kuti, the Nigerian-born pioneer of Afrobeat, had been the surprise nominee this year, and was one of the artists chosen in the Hall of Fame’s fan vote — an online public poll that creates a single official ballot — thanks in part to support from African stars like Burna Boy. Kuti would have been the first Black artist from Africa to join the hall, but he failed in his first time on the ballot. (Trevor Rabin of Yes is from South Africa, and Freddie Mercury of Queen was born in Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania; both bands are in the Hall of Fame.)And LL Cool J, a titan of hip-hop who also received high-profile support this year, lost after a sixth nomination. But he has been given a musical excellence award, for people “whose originality and influence creating music have had a dramatic impact on music.” This category was once known as the sidemen award, but it is also something of a consolation prize: The producer and guitarist Nile Rodgers won it in 2017 after Chic, his band, was passed over 11 times.The other musical excellence recipients this year include Billy Preston, the keyboardist who was a frequent collaborator of the Beatles, and Randy Rhoads, a guitarist with Ozzy Osbourne.Also this year, the Ahmet Ertegun Award, for nonperformers, will go to the record executive Clarence Avant, and “early influence” trophies will go to Gil Scott-Heron, Charley Patton and Kraftwerk, the German electronic pioneers who had been nominated for induction six times.The induction ceremony is to be broadcast later on HBO and streamed on HBO Max. More

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      Can’s Live Shows Will Be Heard at Last, Thanks to a Bootlegger in Big Pants

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      A series of concert albums by the influential German band were made possible by Andrew Hall, a fan who followed the group around in the 1970s with a Sony cassette recorder hidden in his trousers.In February 1972, following the surprise success of the single “Spoon,” the experimental rock group Can staged a massive free concert in its Cologne, West Germany, hometown. To better entertain the crowd, it punctuated the music with a slapdash circus, including a juggler, a singing saw player and a team of acrobats.The band planned to document the event with a live recording, as well as a concert film directed by Peter Przygodda, who became Wim Wenders’s editor. The film footage turned out fine — shot in part by the renowned cinematographer Robby Müller — but there was a glitch with the audio. “Something went wrong and the equipment didn’t record,” Irmin Schmidt, one of the group’s founders, recalled ruefully in a phone interview last month. Schmidt’s keyboards and Michael Karoli’s guitar were inaudible. The film was rescued with overdubs, but the live album was scuttled.The incident was one of several mishaps that prevented Can from issuing a proper concert album during its 1968 to 1978 existence or since, despite numerous releases on its own Spoon label mining its voluminous archives. (A few odds-and-ends live recordings have arrived over the years.) But later this month, Mute Records will release “Live in Stuttgart 1975,” the first in a series of restored and remastered live albums made possible by Andrew Hall, a British fan who beginning in 1973 followed the group around with a Sony cassette recorder hidden in his pants.“We didn’t talk to each other onstage at all,” Schmidt said. “Everything we had to say to each other, we did with our instruments.”Sandra PodmoreHall’s job as a developmental chemist allowed him to travel, and he organized his schedule to coincide with Can gigs in the United Kingdom and northern Europe. “I think the number of live shows I attended was 44,” Hall said in an email. “I recorded every one.”Hall, who had a 28-inch waist size, wore 36-inch trousers to fit the recorder and threaded microphones down each of his sleeves. He donned a heavy overcoat to camouflage the illicit ensemble. “If the temperature was turned up,” he writes in the album’s liner notes, “I just about melted.”Whenever Hall couldn’t make a gig, he’d ask other fans to send their own cassettes. His bootleg archive ultimately reached several hundred recordings, “most of them in quite a bad technical state,” said Schmidt. “I refused all the time to go through it, but Hildegard is very insistent, and finally she convinced me,” he added, referring to his wife, who has managed the band’s affairs since 1971.The album is the first recording issued under the Can banner since the deaths of the bassist Holger Czukay and the drummer Jaki Liebezeit in 2017. (Karoli died in 2001; the band’s primary vocalist, Damo Suzuki, whom Czukay and Liebezeit recruited when they heard him busking in Munich, remains a globe-trotting troubadour.) For most of the last 40 years, Schmidt, 83, has lived in the south of France with Hildegard.Though they recorded their first several albums in a 14th-century castle, Can uniquely anticipated 21st-century music making. Blending the heady experimentation of Schmidt and Czukay, both former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen — including the use of noise, sampling and minimalist repetition — with the body-moving hypnotic groove generated by the jazz-trained Liebezeit’s drums, Can created a free-flowing improvisatory psychedelia that put the “trance” in “transcendent.”The group inspired multiple generations of post-punk and alternative bands and electronic musicians, and found its way to hip-hop (see Kanye West’s “Drunk and Hot Girls,” among other songs). It also made the opening boast of LCD Soundsystem’s debut single “Losing My Edge,” where James Murphy announced, “I was there in 1968/I was there at the first Can show in Cologne.”In everything Can, Schmidt said, spontaneity was crucial. “When we went onstage, we didn’t even know beforehand what we would play. We just reacted to the atmosphere, to the acoustics, to the public, to the whole environment spontaneously, and started playing something, which we had never played before,” he said. “We didn’t talk to each other onstage at all. Everything we had to say to each other, we did with our instruments.”Despite taping its marathon daily studio sessions, the group neglected to make any board recordings from their live concerts. “We should have,” Schmidt lamented, “but we didn’t and that’s a pity.”The Stuttgart gig derives from a tour around the release of “Landed,” Can’s sixth studio LP and its second without a vocalist, Suzuki having departed in 1973. The four musicians connect in a freewheeling pyroclastic flow not dissimilar from the futuristic fusion of Miles Davis’s electric bands of that period. Karoli’s guitar weaves between inner and outer space until several of the untitled, totally instrumental pieces culminate in freaked-out sonic squalls, outbursts the band called “Godzillas.”The Mute Records founder Daniel Miller saw the band in London on that same tour. “I just wanted it to go on forever,” he said. “I couldn’t believe how they worked together as a band, how they fed off each other in the improvisational sense. It was beyond anything I’d seen before.”From left: Czukay, Liebezeit, Karoli and Schmidt. “There were of course also concerts which were horrible, really bad, because we played without any net,” Schmidt said.Via SpoonSchmidt feels that the Stuttgart gig is a good example of Can’s stage interplay. On the second track, Czukay begins the bass line from “Bel Air” but the melody ultimately drifts away when nobody joins in. “If we played something which reminded or was near to a song, somebody just came up with it all of a sudden,” Schmidt said. “It was sometimes sort of like a game. You threw something towards the other, and he picked it up, or he didn’t use it and threw it to somebody else. When it worked it was very beautiful and inspiring, even very amusing, using parts of what you have already done, but giving it a totally new direction.”The band’s concerts were usually three hours long, comprising two 90-minute sets. For the live series, Schmidt plans to largely avoid single songs from different nights in favor of entire gigs, “which shows how we structured the set, how the flow was going, the feeling of a real concert,” he said.Can’s improvisatory ethic did not always guarantee consistent results. “You can’t play like this onstage, giving yourself totally up to the atmosphere and to the moment spontaneously, without sometimes risking failure,” Schmidt explained. “There were of course also concerts which were horrible, really bad, because we played without any net.”But even in the worst-case scenarios, there was still potential for magic. “Quite often, when the first set went terribly, people didn’t leave and the second set became really wonderful,” he said. “So the public sort of took part in our efforts to create. It was really like, if it didn’t work, they suffered like us, with us, and if it worked they enjoyed it like us.”The next release will be from the Brighton, England, stop on the same 1975 tour, Schmidt said, but he hopes to feature earlier performances, including potentially a recently discovered 1970 German TV performance.“When I more or less founded this group, I wanted to bring together totally different musical experiences and styles,” Schmidt said. “I wanted musicians who were professionally at home in different contemporary musics like jazz, rock, electronics, and neo-classical music. To bring it together was not easy and created a lot of tension, but that made the music so interesting because when it succeeded, the tension made sense, and created beauty.” More

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      Lloyd Price, ‘Personality’ Hitmaker, Is Dead at 88

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      His “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was a rhythm-and-blues smash that hooked white listeners in 1952, anticipating the rise of rock ’n’ roll. Even bigger records would follow.Lloyd Price, who provided some of the seeds for what became rock ’n’ roll with his New Orleans rhythm-and-blues hit “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952 and later had major pop hits with “Personality” and “Stagger Lee,” died on Monday at an extended-care center in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 88. The cause was complications of diabetes, said Jeffrey Madoff, the writer and producer of “Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical,” a stage show scheduled to open next year in Pennsylvania.Nicknamed Mr. Personality after his most recognizable hit, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart in 1959, Mr. Price found success with Black and white audiences alike. He was a prolific songwriter as well as a gifted singer — a combination that was relatively uncommon at the time — and his songs were covered by many others. Among the artists who recorded versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” were Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney.He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.Mr. Price found success early: He was still in his teens when he recorded “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” its title an exclamation borrowed from a local disc jockey, for Specialty Records, an independent label founded by Art Rupe. On that session, recorded in New Orleans, he was accompanied by a band, led by the local musician and songwriter Dave Bartholomew, that included the pianist Fats Domino.“Lawdy Miss Clawdy” topped the Billboard R&B chart for seven weeks and introduced Mr. Price’s emotionally direct vocal style and infectious New Orleans beat to white listeners years before the term “rock ’n’ roll” was in wide use. Mr. Rupe later recalled, “That was the first Black record that wasn’t intended to be a white record — it became a white record, versus the previous Black records which were designed for the white market.”Mr. Price’s career was interrupted by Army service, and by the mid-1950s other Black artists, among them Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Mr. Domino, were achieving comparable crossover success. Mr. Price made up for lost time with huge pop hits of his own.Mr. Price in concert at the Apollo Theater in Manhattan, probably in the mid-1960s.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives-Getty ImagesAlong with his successful music career, Mr. Price had an entrepreneurial streak: He founded record labels, managed other performers, owned nightclubs, promoted boxing matches, ventured into real estate and even promised to champion the sweet potato with his company Lloyd Price Icon Food Brands.But the songs came first. “Music brings my soul more joy than anything else does, or can,” he once said. “It makes my heart beat faster with excitement; and my love for music has never changed! If you love music, you know what I’m talking about.”Lloyd Price, a self-described “country boy,” was born on March 9, 1933, in Kenner, La., one of 11 children — eight boys and three girls — of Beatrice and Louis Price, who owned the Fish ’n’ Fry Restaurant. As a child, Lloyd sang in the gospel choir at his family’s church, picking up trumpet and piano along the way while also working at the family business.A high school dropout, Mr. Price started his first band, the Blue Boys, at age 18. To the dismay of his parents, he also got a job at a New Orleans nightclub, but he quit at their insistence to work construction.His breakout success with Specialty Records came to an end when he was drafted in 1953, leaving the label to focus instead on Little Richard and Larry Williams, Mr. Price’s onetime chauffeur.After returning to civilian life in 1954, Mr. Price founded his own record company, KRC, with two partners. The label did not make much of an impact, but one single he released on KRC, the ballad “Just Because,” was leased to ABC-Paramount Records and reached the Top 40 pop chart in 1957. Mr. Price was then signed directly to ABC-Paramount and soon had his greatest success with the song “Stagger Lee.” His upbeat take on a folk song that had been recorded numerous times since the 1920s, it reached No. 1 on both the pop and R&B charts in 1959.Mr. Price’s crossover success did not come without some compromise. Dick Clark, the producer and host of the immensely popular television show “American Bandstand,” decided that the lyrics of “Stagger Lee,” which involved gambling and ended with a fatal barroom shooting, were too violent for his show. Mr. Price, ever the savvy businessman, recorded a new version in which the song’s rivals are fighting over a woman and make up at the end: “Stagger Lee and Billy never fuss or fight no more.” (The cleaned-up version was not released commercially at the time, but it was included many years later on a compilation album.)That same year, “Personality” became almost as big a hit, certifying Mr. Price as a bona fide rock ’n’ roll star. In 1962, he set out on his own again, starting Double L Records with Harold Logan (who had also been a partner in his earlier label), with a roster that included a young Wilson Pickett. Mr. Price and Mr. Logan opened a nightclub, the Turntable, on the former site of the celebrated jazz club Birdland in Midtown Manhattan in 1968. Mr. Logan was murdered in 1969.Mr. Price reached the Top 40 for the last time with a version of the standard “Misty” in 1963, but by that time his star in the music world was fading. He wisely dipped into other arenas, including a partnership with Don King to help promote Muhammad Ali’s “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 and “Thrilla in Manila” against Joe Frazier in the Philippines the next year. Concurrently with the Zaire fight, he helped promote a music festival with a lineup that included James Brown and B.B. King. He lived in Nigeria from 1979 to 1983.Mr. Price is survived by his wife, Jackie Battle; three daughters, Lori Price, D’Juana Price and December Thompson; two sons, Lloyd Price Jr. and Paris Thompson; a sister, Rose Moore; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.In the 1980s, Mr. Price invested in real estate — he backed the construction of homes in the Bronx — and ran a limousine company. By 2007, at the age of 74, he was talking up his Miss Clawdy line of sweet-potato products to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s going to do things,” he said. “It’s going to bring attention back to the sweet potato.” His company also sold organic cereals and energy bars.There was always music in the background. Mr. Price helped organize oldies tours, on which he shared the bill with other early rhythm-and-blues acts like Little Richard and Ben E. King, throughout the ’90s and into the 21st century.Mr. Price released his last album, “This Is Rock and Roll,” in 2017. He published an autobiography, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy: The True King of the 50’s,” written with William E. Waller, in 2009, and a collection of essays, provocatively titled “sumdumhonky,” in 2015.Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      Tawny Kitaen, Star of 1980s Music Videos, Dies at 59

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      Ms. Kitaen gained fame for her carefree spirit and sultry dancing in music videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt and her role in the movie “Bachelor Party.”Tawny Kitaen, an actress who gained fame in the 1980s for her roles in rock music videos and who starred with Tom Hanks in the movie “Bachelor Party,” died on Friday at her home in Newport Beach, Calif. She was 59.Ms. Kitaen’s death was confirmed by a daughter, Wynter Finley, who said the cause was not known.Ms. Kitaen became a mainstay on MTV in the 1980s when the network was at its peak cultural influence with music videos playing all day.With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the Whitesnake music video “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”Julie Kitaen was born on Aug. 5, 1961, in San Diego. She studied ballet and gymnastics until she was 15. After appearing in a Jack LaLanne commercial, and in television shows and movies, she gained wider exposure as Mr. Hanks’s fiancée in the 1984 comedy “Bachelor Party.”But it was her appearance in music videos that solidified her image in Generation X’s imagination as a free-spirited beauty having the time of her life.She once described working with Paula Abdul on the set of one video.Ms. Abdul, then a choreographer, asked her what she could do. Ms. Kitaen said she showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” She then left, Ms. Kitaen said.“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”She married the Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale in 1989 and the couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a major-league baseball pitcher. They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.Later, Ms. Kitaen appeared on reality shows and spoke openly about her struggles with addiction to cocaine and painkillers.In a 2010 interview with The Daily Pilot, she described her volunteer work at a shelter for women who had left abusive relationships and said she herself was a survivor of domestic violence. Ms. Kitaen said that after her divorce from Mr. Finley, she became involved with a man who was physically and verbally abusive.“You don’t want to tell anybody because you feel like a complete fool for staying — you protect them,” she said. “You do everything you can so other people don’t find out that he’s abusing you.”Michael Goldberg, Ms. Kitaen’s agent, said in recent years she appeared on various podcasts and radio shows and relished talking about her time as a figure in rock history.“People still love to hear those stories because the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle is something we all fantasize about, isn’t it?” he said. “And she lived it. And had so much to say about it.”Ms. Kitaen is survived by her two daughters and a brother and a sister. More

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      Anita Lane, Rocker Who Was More Than a Muse, Is Dead at 61

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      Ms. Lane was Nick Cave’s collaborator and girlfriend during his formative period and helped define his sound. She also made records of her own.Anita Lane, who collaborated with the Australian rocker Nick Cave on some of his most striking songs and made distinctive records of her own, applying her sometimes girly, sometimes sultry vocal style to lyrics that could be haunting, gloomy, sexual or tongue-in-cheek, died last month in Melbourne, Australia. She was 61.Her label, Mute Records, announced her death in a posting on its website on April 29 but did not say when she died or give the cause. She lived in Melbourne.Ms. Lane met Mr. Cave in 1977, when both were teenagers. She was his girlfriend during the period when he was coming to prominence with the band the Birthday Party and continued to write with him after he formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1984.“She was the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far,” Mr. Cave wrote in an emotional tribute on his website.She contributed lyrics to a number of Birthday Party and Bad Seeds songs, including the title track from the first Bad Seeds album, “From Her to Eternity” (1985), and she helped define Mr. Cave’s dark, intense style. Mr. Cave was particularly enamored of a song for which she wrote all the lyrics, “Stranger Than Kindness” (1986), so much so that he has continued to perform it and borrowed its title for an autobiographical book published last year that documented memorabilia from his career. It’s an abstract song (arranged by Blixa Bargeld) that seems to be about both passion and estrangement, and ends this way:Your sleeping hands journeyThey loiterStranger than kindnessYou hold me so carelessly closeTell me I’m dirtyI’m a strangerI’m a strangerI’m a stranger to kindnessMs. Lane was sometimes described with a particular term, which Mr. Cave commented on in his tribute. “Despised the concept of the muse but was everybody’s,” he wrote.Yet she sometimes made her way into the recording studio herself, releasing two albums, “Dirty Pearl” in 1993 and “Sex O’Clock” in 2001 (both produced largely by Mick Harvey, Mr. Cave’s Bad Seeds bandmate).“Dirty Pearl” compiled studio recordings she had made over 12 years in Berlin (where she lived for many years), London, Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. Shane Danielsen, reviewing it in The Sydney Morning Herald, called Ms. Lane “a highly distinctive vocalist, purring in a manner at once erotic and unsettling.”The British newspaper The Express, reviewing “Sex O’Clock,” said of Ms. Lane, “She’s groovy like a chic sixties chanteuse and funky like a seventies disco queen but still sounds dead modern, and the songs are redolent of lust and boudoirs.”Erik Jensen, reviewing the same record in the German publication Politiken, said, “As a counterbalance to the many half-naked Barbies of the time on MTV, Anita Lane’s mature seduction is a pleasure.”Anita Lane was born on March 18, 1960, in East Melbourne to Rowland and Pearl (Petts) Lane.According to Ian Johnston’s book “Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave” (1995), when she was 17 she talked her way into the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, lying about her age because she was too young. Mr. Cave too was studying art. A portrait she painted of him in 1977 is included in his “Stranger Than Kindness” book, along with her comment about him: that if he were hit by a bus, he would be compelled to write about it in his own blood before he died.She was 17 and he was 19 when they met. Punk rock had blossomed.“I guess everyone came to life out of punk rock, all that feeling that was going around at the time,” she said years later. “It was funny for us because we weren’t poor, working class or very upset. What were we? I don’t know.”She didn’t stick with art school long after meeting Mr. Cave, whose band at the time was called the Boys Next Door but soon became the Birthday Party. When the band left Melbourne to try London in the early 1980s, Ms. Lane soon joined Mr. Cave there. She contributed lyrics to some of the songs on the band’s debut album, “Prayers on Fire,” released in 1981.She also began turning up in Mr. Cave’s songs in other ways.“In ‘Six-Inch Gold Blade’ Cave narrated a violent tale of extreme sexual jealousy, desire and hatred combined in the brutal murder of a girl not too dissimilar in appearance to Anita Lane,” Mr. Johnston wrote in his biography. “Although his obsession with Anita had manifested itself in a number of earlier songs, ‘Six-Inch Gold Blade’ marked her first obvious appearance as a narrative character.”Such depictions didn’t bother Ms. Lane.“To other people it may have been really shocking,” she said, “but I liked the idea of how shocking it was.”The two would sometimes collaborate even after their romantic relationship ended in 1983. Ms. Lane also worked with other artists, especially Mr. Harvey. She contributed vocals to several tracks on his “Intoxicated Man,” a 1995 album reimagining songs by the French star Serge Gainsbourg. Four years earlier she and Barry Adamson released a single of “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” the Nancy Sinatra hit.Her record company said Ms. Lane is survived by a son with Johannes Beck, Raphael; and two sons with Andrea Libonati, Luciano and Carlito. More