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      Justin Timberlake Arrest Causes a Stir in the Hamptons

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      As the serene Hamptons village is overrun with news vans, the locals eat oysters and engage in some light media criticism.On Tuesday afternoon in Sag Harbor, Janice Yu of WABC-TV was sitting in the passenger seat of a Nissan news van, eating from a bag of Smart Food popcorn. It was as close as she would come to getting to a kernel of news.“We don’t even know who he was with,” she said, referring to the singer and actor Justin Timberlake, who had been arrested by a Sag Harbor police officer shortly after midnight on Tuesday and charged with driving while intoxicated.Ms. Yu, a reporter for ABC7 Eyewitness News in New York, was one of many journalists parked along Main Street near the American Hotel, a 19th-century inn where waiters serve Gardiner’s Bay littleneck clams and Long Island duckling confit to boomer stock sultans. It was also where Mr. Timberlake had been partying with friends the night before.Now it was a muggy and sunny day on the leafy street of this quaint-by-Hamptons-standards onetime whaling village, lined by shops that sell everything from $30 Havaianas flip-flops to $4,600 swivel chairs by Charlotte Perriand. People in Lululemon activewear strolled by, clutching açaí bowls and iced drinks.Ms. Yu, who joined the local news team in 2022 after a stint at Fox5 in Atlanta, had on a turquoise and green J. Crew dress. John Sprei, her field producer, was seated behind her in the van, wearing shorts and a T-shirt.They had scored a copy of the arrest report that was filed in Sag Harbor Village Justice Court earlier that day — but so had the journalists in other vehicles lining the block, a convoy that included news trucks and vans from CBS, NBC, PIX11, Entertainment Tonight, The Associated Press and CNN.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Cage the Elephant’s Frontman Nearly Lost It All

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      Matt Shultz is a rock ’n’ roll ringmaster known for pushing himself to the brink. After a period of psychosis and an arrest, he had to put his reality back together again.In the spring of 2020 as the pandemic cut a terrifying path across the globe, touring bands packed up and went home, unsure how they’d survive. At the same time, Matt Shultz, the frontman of Cage the Elephant — the rare arena-scale rock act to emerge within the past two decades — was facing a different crisis in his own head.After releasing five hard-edged yet hook-filled albums with Cage the Elephant since 2008, Shultz, a frontman known for stripping down to underwear and fishnet tights and walking the length of venues atop his audience’s outstretched hands, was not himself.Suffering an extreme reaction to medication he was prescribed to treat A.D.H.D., he fell into psychosis. Consumed by paranoia and convinced he was being hounded by malicious actors who would routinely break into his home, the singer began carting around his belongings — photographs, journals, books and more — in bulky suitcases.His brother, Brad Shultz, who plays guitar in the band, recalled their mother describing Matt’s ever-present haul as “a physical representation of his emotional baggage.”Matt’s struggles came to a dramatic and very public head in January 2023, when he was arrested on weapons charges at the Bowery Hotel in Manhattan after police found two loaded handguns in his room. He has since regained his grip on reality through extensive treatment — and avoided jail time thanks to a plea deal — but his season in hell is immortalized on “Neon Pill,” the band’s sixth studio album, which it will support with a North American tour of arenas and amphitheaters starting this week.“I lost control of the wheel,” Matt, 40, sings on the deceptively breezy-sounding title track in his hoarse croon. “Double-crossed by a neon pill.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Fiery Sounds of the Monterey International Pop Festival

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      Revisiting the event’s memorable set list, 57 years later.Ravi Shankar onstage at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967.Ted Streshinsky/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,Fifty-seven years ago today, the Monterey International Pop Festival — the three-day event that arguably invented the modern music festival — concluded in a blaze of glory. That Sunday boasted quite a bill: Ravi Shankar mesmerized the crowd with a set of ragas that lasted more than three hours. The Who obliterated the calm with a proto-punk set which ended when Pete Townshend smashed his guitar. Jimi Hendrix attempted a one-up by lighting his on fire. The headliners the Mamas & the Papas had the unenviable task of following all that.I’ve had Monterey Pop on the brain recently, since last month I published an in-depth piece about the life and legacy of “Mama” Cass Elliot. (I began the essay with a self-deprecating joke that Elliot made onstage at the festival, which took place just six weeks after she’d given birth to her daughter.) The story of Monterey Pop is entwined in the story of the Mamas & the Papas: The group’s leader, John Phillips, was one of the organizers of the festival, and he even wrote the event’s de facto theme song, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which was recorded by the folk singer Scott McKenzie. The Mamas & the Papas were perhaps the most famous band on the bill at the time, but that would soon change. The festival — like D.A. Pennebaker’s era-defining, fly-on-the-wall documentary “Monterey Pop” — was a snapshot of the precise moment when the prevailing sounds of folk-rock began to give way to a louder, gnarlier kind of rock ’n’ roll practiced by Hendrix, the Who and another of the weekend’s breakout stars, the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis Joplin.One of the things that makes Pennebaker’s documentary so valuable is the fact that it captured, in vivid liveliness, so many musical luminaries who would soon be gone: Joplin, Hendrix, Elliot and Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash before the film was released. Pennebaker and his crew shot these artists in intimate, immediate close-up, pioneering the visual language of concert documentaries to come.Today’s playlist revisits some of Monterey Pop’s legendry set list, specifically focusing on the songs performed in Pennebaker’s film. It’s a mix of live cuts and studio versions, of flower-child folk and rabble-rousing rock. It is unlikely to inspire you to go full pyromaniac like Hendrix, but just in case, you might want to have a fire extinguisher handy.Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      NOFX to Retire After Final Tour Without Ever Having Had a Job

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      After 40 years, the punk band NOFX is walking away with a farewell tour that is nothing short of a victory lap.When they were teenagers, the group developed an extreme do-it-yourself ethos. They had no interest in working for anyone else.As “the Grateful Dead of punk rock,” they played more than 3,000 shows, and sold more than seven million albums, without ever having a radio hit or much mainstream attention.And now they are ready to say goodbye — and unlike other bands they promise there will be no reunion tours.Can You Retire if You Never Had a Job? NOFX Will Try.The punk rock pioneers chose freedom — and chaos — over major labels. Pulling the plug while things are still working is one final act of rebellion.June 18, 2024“It’s like going to your own wake.”Mike Burkett, known exclusively in the punk rock world as Fat Mike, was talking about the farewell tour for his band, NOFX, during which the group is traveling to 40 cities, with 40 songs per concert, celebrating their 40 years as a band.The tour started a year ago in Barcelona and will end where it all began for them, in Los Angeles, with three shows from Oct. 4-6. Fat Mike, 57, along with Eric Melvin, Aaron Abeyta and Erik Sandlin are, collectively, experiencing the feels.“This is it,” Fat Mike, the band’s singer, songwriter and bassist, said of the prospect of touring again after this. “We aren’t Kiss, or Black Sabbath, or Mötley Crüe. This is the end.”“It’s kind of sad, saying goodbye,” said Mr. Abeyta, 58, the group’s guitarist and trumpet player, who goes by the nickname El Hefe. “We’re family. We’re basically brothers. We’ve lived on the road together, on a bus, sometimes in the same bed.”“It’s weird, it’s uncertain, it’s scary,” said Mr. Sandlin, 57, the group’s drummer who was nicknamed Smelly for the drug-fueled flatulence of his earlier days. (He’s been sober and clean for years.) “I feel like I’m losing a leg.”With an unmistakable style, NOFX was a mainstay at punk clubs for decades, typically playing to rooms packed with adoring fans.via Fat Wreck ChordsThe band’s core lineup consisted of Erik Sandlin, left, on drums, Fat Mike on bass and vocals, Eric Melvin on guitar and Aaron Abeyta on guitar and trumpet.via Fat Wreck ChordsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hozier Was Never a One-Hit Wonder. But Now He Has a Second Smash.

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      He broke out in 2014 with “Take Me to Church.” Then listeners on TikTok found his passionate, dramatic songs and a new single made its way to No. 1.A decade ago, the Irish singer-songwriter Andrew Hozier-Byrne, who performs as Hozier, scored a surprise global hit with his debut single, “Take Me to Church,” thanks in large part to its black-and-white music video depicting an intimate relationship between two gay men, one of whom is attacked by a masked mob. The soulful, octave-hopping track, written as a rebuke to the Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality, established Hozier as a serious, socially conscious artist. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned a Grammy nomination for song of the year.Though Hozier hardly disappeared — his second album, “Wasteland, Baby!” from 2019, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and its 2023 follow-up, the concept record “Unreal Unearth,” became his first U.K. No. 1 — for years afterward he operated at a lower public profile, tagged by some as a one-hit wonder. But Hozier, now on the road with a nine-piece band, is once again having a moment, courtesy of a younger generation of fans and a new hit song.“We’re selling more tickets now than when I was in the charts with ‘Take Me to Church,’” Hozier, 34, said in an interview this month while onboard his tidy tour bus, which was parked on the grounds of Forest Hills Stadium, a 13,000-capacity amphitheater in Queens, N.Y. The 6-foot-5 artist — dressed in a brown corduroy jacket and Adidas track pants, his shoulder-length hair pulled back in a bun — was just a few hours from playing the third of four sold-out nights there, a record-breaking run at the venue. In August, he will co-headline the first day of Lollapalooza in Chicago, with Tyler, the Creator.In April, Hozier reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 with the bouncy “Too Sweet,” becoming the first Irish artist to claim the top spot since Sinead O’Connor, with “Nothing Compares 2 U,” in 1990. Sung from the vantage of the hard-partying half of a mismatched couple, “Too Sweet” is featured on Hozier’s “Unheard,” a recent EP of songs that didn’t make the cut for “Unreal Unearth,” which was inspired by Dante’s “Inferno.” The track was at No. 7 for a second consecutive week in mid-June.“Most of the songs that I always admired and hoped to capture the quality of in my work were not charting hits,” Hozier said.Brian Karlsson for The New York TimesBoth Hozier and his manager, Caroline Downey, who’s been with him since the beginning, noted that all four Forest Hills shows sold out well before the release of “Too Sweet” and credited his surge in popularity to Gen Z listeners who discovered his music on TikTok. Songs featuring acoustic instruments, passionate vocals and dramatic dynamic shifts are ripe for heartstring-tugging clips about weddings, bucket-list trips and beloved pets, and Hozier has more than a few in his arsenal, including “Would That I,” from his second LP.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets’ Logs an Eighth Straight Week at No. 1

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      Billie Eilish is No. 2, and Charli XCX debuts strong at No. 3.Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor.For two months now, Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” has dominated the Billboard album chart, fending off challenges from Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and the K-pop group Ateez, often with the help of special “versions” featuring extra tracks.This week, “Tortured Poets” logs its eighth consecutive time at No. 1, with the equivalent of 128,000 sales in the United States, including 136 million streams and 23,000 copies sold as a full package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Although two of Swift’s previous albums have posted more times at No. 1 overall — “Fearless” and “1989” had 11 each — none has held the top spot for as many weeks in a row. Consecutive runs of eight weeks or longer are rare on the chart. The last releases to do so were both by Morgan Wallen: “One Thing at a Time,” which logged 12 last year, and “Dangerous: The Double Album,” with 10 in 2021. For another example you have to go back to Drake’s “Views,” which led the chart for nine straight weeks at No. 1 in 2016.Also this week, Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is No. 2 in its fourth week out, while “Brat,” the latest from the British pop singer-songwriter Charli XCX, opens in third place with the equivalent of 82,000 sales. Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 4 and Bon Jovi’s latest, “Forever,” starts at No. 5, helped by collectible vinyl and CD editions. More

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      A Hungarian Rapper’s Bandwagon Gets an Unlikely New Rider

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      Azahriah, who has rapped about the joy of cannabis, has shot to fame in Hungary. That may explain why he has been applauded by the country’s conservative leader, Viktor Orban.The 22-year-old rapper is so popular — he recently held three sold-out concerts at Hungary’s largest stadium — that even Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a stodgy champion of traditional values not known for being in tune with youth or its culture, claims he is a fan.Mr. Orban has said he particularly likes the song “Rampapapam,” a reggae-flavored ode to the joys of cannabis. It’s a surprising choice given the prime minister’s conservative views and one that raised questions about whether he has actually listened to it or just watched its video showing the musician playing soccer, the leader’s favorite sport.But Attila Bauko, a Hungarian superstar better known as Azahriah, has won so many passionate fans in Hungary that Mr. Orban, who has had 14 years in power, appears to want some of the rapper’s energy and stardust.“Since they see that a lot of people like me, it seems they want to be friendly,” Azahriah said in an interview backstage before a concert last month at the Puskas Arena, a sports stadium in Budapest, that attracted nearly 50,000 people for each of the three nights he performed.Official favor “should be flattering,” Azahriah said, “but feels strange and uncomfortable” when so many of his young fans loathe the governing Fidesz party.Fans singing along at Azahriah’s concert last month in Budapest.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sam Smith Throws a Gay Pride Party

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      The British singer selected Julius’, a Manhattan tavern with a storied past, as the place to celebrate the 10th anniversary of “In the Lonely Hour.”On Thursday night in the West Village of Manhattan, the soulful British balladeer Sam Smith hosted a private party at Julius’, which is known as the oldest gay bar in New York. Friends and fans sweltered inside the tavern, sipping vodka tonics as they waited for a late-night performance by Smith and a rumored special guest, Alicia Keys.Smith, who uses they/them pronouns, chatted with fans by the worn wooden bar. Standing about 6-foot-7 in Vivienne Westwood platform boots, paired with a tartan kilt and a big belt, the Grammy-winning singer towered above those who asked for selfies.The gathering commemorated the 10th anniversary of Smith’s debut album, “In the Lonely Hour,” which included the slow-burning anthems “Stay with Me” and “I’m Not the Only One.” Little menus along the bar advertised cocktails named after Smith songs like “Good Thing” (a cosmo) and “Life Support” (a margarita). And they noted Julius’ relevance as a historic site, detailing the events of the 1966 Sip-In, an act of civil disobedience that predated the Stonewall uprising by several years.The crowd at Smith’s barroom party.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWith Pride celebrations in full force throughout the West Village, Smith had chosen Julius’ precisely because of its connection to the Sip-In, when members of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group, visited Julius’ to challenge bars that would not serve gay customers. When the activists were refused service after intentionally revealing that they were “homosexuals,” the incident made news, attracting the attention of the Commission on Human Rights.“Why did I pick Julius’?” Smith said, leaning down to a reporter. “Because I’ve never felt more safe in any other bar in the world than here.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More