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

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

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      When a TikTok Influencer Dances, Who Gets Credit?

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

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      Phoebe Bridgers Reworks Paul McCartney, and 11 More New Songs

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

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      Alan Vega Left a Robust Vault. The Excavation Begins With a New Album.

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      The Suicide singer died in 2016. Now his wife and musical partner, Liz Lamere, is releasing “Mutator,” an album the duo made in the mid-90s.In 1978, the adversarial New York duo Suicide played a show in Boston, opening for the Cars, local heroes who’d crossed over into pop success. Suicide performed a set of assaultive and static electronic music, and the unhappy audience demonstrated its distaste by throwing ashtrays, some of which hit the singer Alan Vega. But Vega and his bandmate, Martin Rev, had recently finished European tours opening for the Clash and Elvis Costello during which they caused a literal riot in Belgium. (It was later documented on a live recording, “23 Minutes Over Brussels,” named for the length of Suicide’s set before the gendarmes were summoned.)The day after the Boston gig, a local radio D.J. who’d seen it interviewed Vega and asked how it had gone. “Well, we beat the hell out of them,” Vega replied, laughing happily.Liz Lamere, Vega’s wife and musical partner for several decades, called the anecdote “a beautiful analogy for Alan’s life.” (Vega died in 2016 at 78.) “People think Alan sang about gloom and doom, all this negative stuff,” she said. “There was always a layer of beauty and hope in everything he did.”That contrast is an enduring hallmark of “Mutator,” a posthumous Vega album due April 23, which he and Lamere recorded in 1995 and 1996, and she recently produced and mixed with Jared Artaud, a Vega disciple who fronts the minimalist Brooklyn band the Vacant Lots.Liz Lamere and Vega in 1986, the year after they met at a party for his album “Just a Million Dreams.”John DiMiceliIt’s the first in a planned series of archival releases, drawn from what the singer called “the Vega vault,” that will be issued by Sacred Bones Records. The vault, a vast catacomb of Vega’s writings, paintings, drawings and music, includes a cassette tape that Artaud calls “the Holy Grail of the archive”: a soundboard recording of Suicide’s September 25, 1971, performance at Lincoln Center.When Vega and Lamere met in 1985, at a party for his album “Just a Million Dreams,” he was in his 40s and living at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and she was a Wall Street corporate lawyer two decades his junior. “We were both thunderstruck when we first saw each other,” she said during a video call from Florida, where she was visiting her mother, Toots, who briefly wandered into the frame. “Just a Million Dreams” was a tidy, new wave-sounding record helmed by hitmakers, and it was supposed to be Vega’s bid for pop success.“That was the mantra at his record company: ‘There’s a diamond in the rough here. He could be a rock star,’” Lamere said. The idea turned Vega’s stomach, Lamere said, “because that would take away some of his freedom to, as he said, be the research scientist in the basement.”At the time, New York’s punk rock era was starting to be documented, but “Suicide was never mentioned,” Lamere said. “And Alan would be like, ‘Do I exist? Did that all really happen?’” She got his song publishing rights in order and persuaded him to produce his own master recordings and then license them to record labels. They also began making music together in the Financial District loft where they lived with their son, Dante, now a 22-year-old hip-hop producer.The Vega-Lamere partnership wasn’t as unlikely as it might initially sound. Lamere played varsity soccer at Tufts before getting her law degree at Columbia, but she’d already exhibited signs of restlessness: She played drums in rock bands, including Backwards Flying Indians and SSNUB (an acronym for Sgt. Slaughter’s No Underwear Band), which performed at CBGB.Lamere said Vega’s record label believed he could be a rock star, an  idea that turned Vega’s stomach.via Saturn Strip, Ltd.Vega was known (to the extent he was known at all) for brandishing a bicycle chain onstage as a weapon, self-mutilating with broken glass and making music that was corrosively anti-commercial. But the musician born Boruch Alan Bermowitz had a life before Suicide, one that steered him toward art, confrontation, desperation, anxiety and compassion.Vega’s parents, Louis and Tillie Bermowitz, were Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were able to move from the Lower East Side to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, thanks to Louis’s job as a diamond setter. Vega went to Brooklyn College where he majored in astrophysics, but got derailed when an art teacher saw him sketching one day and advised him to change course.At college, he met Mariette Birencwajg, a Holocaust survivor from Belgium, and they married in 1960. She is the author of “Mindele’s Journey,” a 2012 book that memorialized her family, most of whom were killed by the Nazis. In a 2016 blog post, Mariette Bermowitz wrote thatthe Swiss surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann, who taught Vega, considered him “a prodigy.” Vega also studied with the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, another significant influence.To Lamere, this is the context that’s needed to understand her husband: “Alan came out of the Great Depression, post-Holocaust, Jewish immigrant parents. There was always a connection to what was happening to the underdog — the disenfranchised, the disempowered, the oppressed.”The young Bermowitzes lived a domestic life in Brooklyn. He worked for the welfare department (where he learned about government funding for the arts, which was soon to play a big role in his life) and painted in the evenings. In 1969, Vega saw Iggy Pop and the Stooges at Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, and was inspired to commit himself to a life of ideas and art. “And he made the decision, which was a very difficult one, to leave his married life,” Lamere said. (“My world crashed in,” Mariette wrote on her website.)Vega moved to Manhattan and helped run Museum: The Project of Living Artists, a Greenwich Village space that was open to performing and visual artists, political activists and anyone else 24 hours a day, thanks to the government funding he had secured. Late one night when he was there experimenting with musical feedback, he met Martin Rev (born Martin Reverby), a jazz keyboardist from Brooklyn. The two formed Suicide, initially with Vega on trumpet and Rev on drums, before they switched to vocals and keyboards.Vega tried to explain that the band name referred not to any particular suicide, but to the country’s. “America, America is killing its youth,” he howled on “Ghost Rider,” over Rev’s distorted, two-note organ riff. It was music made with an abundance of ideas and audacity, and a lack of money. Rev played a $10 Japanese keyboard, and a few years later added a $30 Rhythm Prince drum machine that spit out chintzy rumba beats.Gigs were hard to get. Record deals? forget it. By the time Suicide released its first album in late 1977, Vega was 39, making him the senior citizen of downtown punk.Lamere, Vega and Jared Artaud, the musician who befriended Vega and later helped mix and produce “Mutator.”Hillary ArcherThe singer Lydia Lunch, who’d recently moved to New York, wandered into Max’s Kansas City one night and joined the nine other people who’d come to see Suicide. The music “was raw, sexy, psychotic — but there was also a romance to it, with almost a doo-wop quality,” she said in an interview. “But it was Alan’s stare and intensity that was amazing. He was a Method singer — he was in those songs. If he saw you, he was seeing right frickin’ through you.”“And he and Martin were both really nice, on top of that,” she added.Artaud, who worked on the vault release, did not meet Vega until after his band covered a Vega song on “Psych Out Christmas,” a 2013 compilation. By then Vega was in what he called “the Tony Bennett phase of my career,” in which he was treated not as a pariah or a freak, but as a revered elder. He showed his light sculptures in prestigious galleries. His music was used in fashion shows by Agnès B. and Dries Van Noten. The Rollins Band covered Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” on the soundtrack to “The Crow,” which sold three million copies, and Bruce Springsteen did a version of “Dream Baby Dream.”“Suicide’s like the Beatles to me and my band,” Artaud said. He had “a close relationship” with Vega, who lived only one subway stop away. In 2012, Vega had a stroke, which slowed him to a shuffle, and his health continued to decline.“I think he knew his time wasn’t long,” Artaud said. “He would hint at things like ‘When I’m not here,’ or ‘When I’m gone.’ I felt we were building this kind of pact. The heaviest thing for me was when he said, the last time I saw him, ‘I’m ending. You’re beginning. And I’m passing the torch down to you.’”The posthumous album “Mutator” exemplifies Vega’s extremist senses of doom and beauty. On “Fist,” Vega croons “Destroy the dominators,” over a bed of swamp-crawling synths and a deadpan hip-hop beat, while on the bucolic ballad “Samurai,” he declaims lyrics that are by turns ominous (“Missing girls/Who’s been killing ’em?”) and impenetrable.Artaud is helping Lamere catalog and digitize the Vega vault. “It will take some time,” he said. Vega liked to record a bunch of songs, then move on to the next bunch without releasing or mixing the first, which has left a sprawling jumble of his work: “He was always focused on tomorrow.” More

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      Screamers, a Missing Link of Los Angeles Punk, Is Missing No More

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      An archival release marks the technical debut of a band that helped build a scene, 44 years later.K.K. Barrett hadn’t spoken to Tommy Gear in two decades when he reached out about releasing a secret stash of their old music. There were no hard feelings — the two had simply grown apart over the years — but it was tricky business, regardless. Their band, Screamers, was something of a phantom in the history of Los Angeles punk rock.Despite being one of the most popular acts of the scene’s budding years in the late ’70s, routinely packing shows alongside peers like X and Germs, there had never been an official Screamers release. No LPs, no EPs — not even one measly single. To a certain subset of punk fans, Barrett may as well have been suggesting that he and Gear release the true contents of Area 51. But a five-song, 15-minute 12-inch called “Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977” will be out on Friday.“It wasn’t meant to have an afterlife,” said Barrett, 68, who’s best known as a production designer (“Being John Malkovich,” “Her”), on a video call. “It was just something we did. You document things.”The set was recorded at the band’s then-headquarters, a charming Craftsman in Hollywood dubbed “the Wilton Hilton,” solely as a means to get gigs early on. But after the music was recovered from Barrett’s archives 40-plus years later, and dusted off by the label Superior Viaduct, Gear relented.“Honestly, it wasn’t as if we were adverse to a record per se,” said Gear, the group’s main architect and songwriter, along with the vocalist Tomata du Plenty, in a phone interview. “We actually had conversations with managers and record company people at the time, because they clearly thought we were drawing people to clubs and getting press. But frankly, they didn’t know what to do with us. We didn’t fit their paradigm. And, of course, they were making offers that were useless, anyway.”Gear was speaking on the record about his former band for the first time in at least 30 years, by his estimation. Any lack of promotion on his part aside, though, the shadow of Screamers has been growing substantially since the rise of internet-aided bootlegs and YouTube. These “Hollywood 1977” demos are among the hissy, unauthorized recordings already out there, but hearing a cleaned-up version, transferred from the original reel-to-reel tape, is like stepping into the Wilton Hilton after years of being stuck outside, listening from the street.“It’s not always easy/To get what you deserve,” du Plenty howls on “Punish or Be Damned,” over dueling distorted keyboards, one played by Gear, the other by David Brown, who left the group in late 1977. (He went on to co-found the seminal underground label Dangerhouse; du Plenty died of cancer in 2001, at 52, his illness having been complicated by a long battle with H.I.V.) Barrett anchors the group on drums, playing in tandem with a drum machine. There were no guitars, then or ever, in the band. “We’re talking about a period before ‘punk’ became a bin at a record store,” said Gear.Gear, right, with Barrett in 1978, said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: They’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Ruby Ray/Getty ImagesThe Screamers story takes place in Southern California, but Gear and du Plenty met in Seattle, as part of the queer performance-art troupe Ze Whiz Kidz, and soon formed a heavy glam band, the Tupperwares, ultimately deciding to try their luck in Hollywood. Barrett was an aspiring visual artist from Oklahoma, and left for Los Angeles with $100 in his pocket. The quartet adopted the Screamers name and were immediate icons among the sea of misfits flocking to the city. (The artist Gary Panter designed their logo of a hair-spiked punk, roaring full tilt.)“Was there something in the water?” said John Doe, the singer and bassist for the band X, who also felt a calling to move West on a whim in 1976. “Yeah, it was cheap rent. And people could own cars — and a sense of freedom.”A clique of “50 people, 60 tops,” according to Barrett, constituted the entirety of the initial Los Angeles punk scene. Concerts were just as much a social event as a musical one, and the nascent Slash magazine served as a “newsletter” for those who were hanging out. At that point, the crowd was notably diverse and free thinking, particularly in terms of sexuality.“I thought it was very inclusive,” said Joan Jett, who was one of those 50 or 60 people, and whose group the Runaways was a source of inspiration to many soon-to-be punks. She also produced the only Germs album, “(GI)” from 1979. “It was wonderful, actually. Some of the best times of my life I remember — or don’t remember — are from that time period.”It would prove to be a fleeting moment. By 1980, the scene’s music was transforming into something else entirely: faster, angrier. Eventually, conceptual acts like Screamers faded away. (A contentious, drawn-out film project known as “Population: 1,” made by the filmmaker Rene Daalder, drove the group apart as well.)Gear said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: they’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Since moving on, he has lived a private life — he cited his age as “ageless” — working mostly in the “personal computer world,” he said.The arrival of the first-ever Screamers release, almost a half-century late, seems to tie a bow on the band’s saga — but it may reopen it more than anything else. As to whether there’s any danger in ripping away the mystique that was so central until now, Barrett isn’t worried.“Whenever you try to dig out something from artistic scenes, you end up with crumbs that get you a flavor of what it might’ve been,” he said. “Those documents add up to tell a new truth, because the real truth is missing a lot of parts. So I feel like we’ve left some bread crumbs. And this is a pretty good one.” More

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      Justin Bieber Reclaims No. 1, With Demi Lovato Close Behind

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      The manager Scooter Braun’s clients battled for the Billboard 200’s top spot, while Rod Wave slipped to third place.Justin Bieber’s new album, “Justice,” has returned to No. 1 for a second time, beating out Demi Lovato’s latest in a tight race for the top.“Justice,” which opened at No. 1 two weeks ago, then dropped to No. 2, reclaimed the Billboard 200 chart’s peak position with the equivalent of 75,000 sales in the United States, including 89 million streams and 6,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking service. Bieber, 27, has had eight albums go to No. 1, but this is the first time that one of them has accumulated more than a single week at the top since “My World 2.0,” which notched four chart-topping weeks in 2010.Close behind is Lovato’s “Dancing With the Devil … The Art of Starting Over,” which opened with the equivalent of 74,000 sales, including nearly 47 million streams and 38,000 copies sold as a full package.Bieber and Lovato share the same manager, Scooter Braun, who has also been in the news lately as the former owner of Taylor Swift’s first six albums, which she has pledged to rerecord as an assertion of control and economic revenge. (Over the last 21 months, Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings, bought Swift’s former label, Big Machine, for $300 million to $350 million, then sold Swift’s recordings to an investment firm associated with the Disney family, also for more than $300 million, and then Ithaca sold itself for just over $1 billion.)Swift’s first rerecorded album, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” was released last Friday and is expected to open at No. 1 on next week’s chart with big numbers.Also this week, “SoulFly” by Rod Wave, last week’s top seller, fell to No. 3 in its second week out. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4. And “Destined 2 Win” by the New York rapper-singer Lil Tjay opened at No. 5. More

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      In Rina Sawayama, Elton John Found a Collaborator and a Friend

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      From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home in Old Windsor, England, on March 1, 2021. New Friends The rising star and the established icon who’ve discovered they have a lot in common. From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home […] More

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      Prince’s Unearthed, Disillusioned Funk, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Doja Cat featuring SZA, Twenty One Pilots and Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi.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.Prince, ‘Welcome 2 America’Prince recorded an album called “Welcome 2 America” in 2010, but shelved it before his death in 2016; his estate will release it in July. Maybe Prince decided the album was too bleak. Its title song is ominous, funky, seemingly improvisational and deeply cynical about an era of misinformation, exploitation and distraction. A pithy, stop-start bass line leaves space for dissonant little solos, while Prince’s vocals are deadpan spoken words: “Truth is a new minority.” He’s answered by women singing precise, jazzy harmonies and layering on more messages: “Land of the free, home of the brave,” they sing with a swinging lilt. “Oops, I mean, land of the free, home of the slave.” JON PARELESDoja Cat featuring SZA, ‘Kiss Me More’The first single from the forthcoming Doja Cat album “Planet Her” features SZA and mixes the breeze of lite 1980s funk with the bawdiness of 2020s hip-hop, a juggling act that Doja Cat has pioneered, if not trademarked, by now. JON CARAMANICAMajid Jordan, ‘Waves of Blue’Crisply ecstatic new-wave R&B from the Toronto duo Majid Jordan. What’s most impressive about “Waves of Blue,” besides its spot on texture, is its modesty — the singer Majid Al Maskati doesn’t over-sing to emphasize his point, and the producer Jordan Ullman builds synths like pillars, unostentatiously building a whole world. CARAMANICATwenty One Pilots, ‘Shy Away’“Shy Away,” the first song from a May album called “Scaled and Icy” from the genre-agnostic Ohio duo Twenty One Pilots, starts off as jittery electro before expanding into the dreamy, arms-outstretched pop that keeps arenas and hearts full. There’s a Strokesian energy to the track, but the lyrics don’t bristle with angst; they (not so gently) nudge a loved one to start on a new path. CARYN GANZMiguel, ‘So I Lie’Over the last decade, Miguel has placed his darkest thoughts and most experimental music on his series of “Art Dealer Chic” EPs; he released “Art Dealer Chic Vol. 4” on Friday. In “So I Lie,” he sings, in a soulful falsetto, about fear, pressure, and alienation from himself: “I can barely breathe, treading water/Smile on my face while I’m turning blue/Nobody cares, just work harder/I do what I can to avoid the truth.” The chorus, repeating, “Lie, lie, lie,” would almost be jaunty if it weren’t surrounded in swampy rhythms, wordless voices and hollow echoes, like all the anxieties he can’t evade. PARELESCoultrain, ‘The Essentials’A singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist hailing from St. Louis, Aaron Michael Frison has been making music as Coultrain for well over a decade, pulling together what sounds like a hybrid of the early 2000s Soulquarian scene, the spiritual jazz of Lonnie Liston Smith and the kind of dusty old Southern soul records that you’d find hiding in the dollar bin. On “The Essentials,” from his new album, “Phantasmagoria,” over a glutinous backing of synths, vocal overdubs, bass and drums, he professes his commitment (“’Cause there’s no other for me/It ain’t no coincidence that you reflect my eyes”) before dipping into a wily rap verse and capping things with a mystical choral passage that sounds a note of uncertainty: “I wish I could promise forever/If I could promise forever/I would promise forever to you,” he sings, the layers of his voice all in a conversation with each other. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi, ‘Calling Me Home’Looming mortality becomes a refuge in “Calling Me Home,” written by the celebrated old-timey singer Alice Gerrard. It’s the sentiment of a man on his deathbed: “I miss my friends of yesterday.” The song provides the title for “They’re Calling Me Home,” the new album by the opera-trained singer, fiddler, banjo player and traditional-music explorer (and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient) Rhiannon Giddens with her partner, the early music expert Francesco Turrisi. She sings it in long-breathed lines, sometimes ended in Appalachian yips, accompanied by stark, unyielding drones, as if she’s a lone voice making itself heard before eternity. PARELESKat & Alex, ‘Heartbreak Tour’An earnest power country slow-burner from the new duo Kat & Alex, who competed on “American Idol” last year, and who sing in both Spanish and English (though not here), “Heartbreak Tour” is delivered with soul music conviction and just the right touch of melodrama. CARAMANICAMon Laferte featuring Gloria Trevi, ‘La Mujer’The Chilean singer Mon Laferte infuses vintage styles with up-to-date sentiments and fierce attitude. Her new album, “Seis,” looks toward Mexican music, and she shares “La Mujer” (“The Woman”) with one of her idols: the Mexican singer and songwriter Gloria Trevi. They trade verses and share choruses in a bolero with punchy organ chords and rowdy horns, escalating from sultry self-confidence to unbridled fury at a man who’s getting decisively dumped: “Goodbye, sad coward,” is Laferte’s final sneer. PARELESQueen Naija featuring Ari Lennox, ‘Set Him Up’Over a slow-motion strut of a bass line and a glass of chardonnay in the lyrics, Queen Naija and Ari Lennox sweetly intertwine their voices, enjoying each other’s explicit details about their latest hookups. Then they realize it’s the same guy — and the conversation turns into a conspiracy to “Set Him Up.” Female solidarity reigns. PARELESSteve Slagle, ‘We Release’Riding a slick, whipsaw groove, “We Release” casually calls back to a mainstream jazz sound from the 1970s, while serving as a proud opening shot for the saxophonist Steve Slagle’s new album, “Nascentia.” Now 69, he composed and recorded all the material during the coronavirus pandemic, providing him a project and a jolt of energy amid trying times. An unerring optimism of spirit is palpable throughout, as he’s joined here by a number of fellow jazz veterans: Jeremy Pelt on trumpet, Clark Gayton on trombone, Bruce Barth on piano, Ugonna Okegwo on bass and Jason Tiemann on drums. RUSSONELLO More