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      Steve Albini, Influential Producer of Nirvana and Pixies Albums, Dies at 61

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      A musician and audio engineer, he helped define the sound of alternative rock while becoming an outspoken critic of the music industry.Steve Albini, a rock musician and revered studio engineer who played a singular role in the development of the sound of alternative music in the 1980s, ’90s and beyond — recording acclaimed albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey and Pixies, along with hundreds of others — while becoming an outspoken critic of the music industry, died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 61.The cause was a heart attack, said Taylor Hales of Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio that Mr. Albini founded in 1997.With a sharp vision for how a band should be recorded — as raw as possible — and an even sharper tongue for anything he deemed mediocre or compromised, Mr. Albini was a visionary in the studio and one of rock’s most acerbic wits.On his own, he led the bands Big Black and Shellac, both of which venerated loud, abrasive guitars and snarling vocals. In those groups, and in virtually every project he worked on, Mr. Albini clung to punk’s defiant do-it-yourself ethic with an almost religious tenacity.He also long maintained an impish zeal to provoke and offend. Big Black’s last, most acclaimed album, from 1987, has a typically unprintable title, and he once dismissed Nirvana — the group that later hired him to record the album “In Utero” (1993), at the peak of their fame — as nothing but “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox.”Nirvana hired Mr. Albini to record the album “In Utero” at the height of the group’s fame.DGCWe 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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      Madonna’s Hits-Filled Celebration Tour, Dissected

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      Hear five standouts from the set, and six we wish she’d played.Pablo Porciuncula/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,Lindsay is desperately seeking some time off this week, so I am the first of your guest playlisters: Caryn, the pop music editor. I’m going to tell you a secret — you could consider it one of my confessions on a dance floor. I saw Madonna’s Celebration Tour seven times; eight if you include the livestream from Rio de Janeiro on Saturday night, where the Queen of Pop wrapped her first-ever retrospective with a free show before an estimated 1.6 million people on Copacabana Beach.Some have asked why, so a brief explanation: I believe Madonna is the most important and influential solo figure in pop history, and I don’t skip opportunities to see her onstage, where she has innovated and thrilled throughout her four-decade career. (If you’re wondering who was behind “60 Times Madonna Changed Our Culture,” wonder no more.) I was too young to catch the Virgin or Who’s That Girl tours — and nobody took me to Blond Ambition or the Girlie Show (ahem, parents) — so my live history begins with Drowned World in 2001 and I have done my best to catch up.The Confessions Tour from 2006 is the best I’ve seen in person, the Tears of a Clown revival at Art Basel in 2016 was the zaniest, and Celebration is the first one I’ve reviewed (on its U.S. leg’s opening night in October). Repeated viewings haven’t changed my initial critical overview, though some parts of the show grew on me, some vocal performances sharpened up, and some of the extemporaneous speeches Madonna gave during the two breaks each night designed for them were stunningly raw and moving. (See Bonus Tracks below for more on that.)But the point of today’s playlist is to take a deeper (and deeper) look at the songs Madonna did — and didn’t — select for the tour. The first five tracks are my favorites from the show, which has a lot to do with how she staged them. The second six are songs that were sorely missed, so should you ever do a Celebration 2, M, please consider them official requests.Crazy for you,CarynListen 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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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets’ Posts a Huge Second Week on the Chart

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      After a blockbuster opening, the singer’s new album earned the biggest second-week totals since 2015, nearly doubling the rest of the Top 5 combined.In its second week of release, Taylor Swift’s latest blockbuster album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” holds at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, nearly doubling the rest of the Top 5 combined.One week after tallying the largest opening week since Adele in 2015 — selling the equivalent of 2.6 million albums in the United States — “The Tortured Poets Department” sold another 439,000 album units, down 83 percent, according to Billboard, but still the highest second-week total since Adele’s “25” almost a decade ago. Last month, Beyoncé’s latest album, “Cowboy Carter,” opened with 407,000 sales in its debut, then the biggest sales week for any release so far this year.Whereas Swift’s total last week included 1.9 million copies in traditional album sales — 859,000 for vinyl alone — and factored in advance orders, that number dipped 94 percent in week two, to 107,000. Instead, “The Tortured Poets Department” was consumed largely via digital streaming this time, with about 429 million plays of the album’s 31 tracks, down from a record 891 million the week prior.Also on this week’s chart, the country singer Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” released in March 2023, jumps two spots to No. 2, with 69,000 units. Future and Metro Boomin’s “We Don’t Trust You,” the first of the pair’s two recent albums (and the one featuring Kendrick Lamar dissing Drake on the hit single “Like That”), is No. 3 with 61,000 units. Rounding out the Top 5 is “Cowboy Carter” at No. 4 with 52,000 units and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” at No. 5 with 41,000 units. More

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      Madonna Performs Massive Free Concert in Rio

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      The pop superstar performed a final date on her global trek marking four decades of hits: a set on Copacabana Beach before the largest live crowd of her career.When Madonna stepped out onto the mammoth stage constructed on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach on Saturday night in a gleaming halo headpiece and black kimono, she was greeted by the largest live crowd of her four-decade career.The free show, announced in late March, was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 performances since last October. Without ticket data, concert crowd sizes can be difficult to gauge; Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded onto the 2.4-mile stretch of sand on Saturday that had been turned into a roughly $12 million playground surrounding the 8,700-square-foot stage.It was the culmination of days of Madonna-mania in the city, where talk of the singer, 65, was inescapable. Her songs spilled out of stores and car stereos. Fans assembled outside her hotel and shouted her name. Updates about the concert, which was broadcast on the network Globo TV, dominated local media reports.Fans traveled from across South America for Madonna’s Rio concert, her only Celebration Tour date on the continent. Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York TimesFans packed the shores of Copacabana Beach to watch Madonna’s free concert on Saturday.Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe spectacle in Rio was a milestone in Madonna’s career: the victory lap for her first stage retrospective, called the Celebration Tour, in which she chronicled her rise to stardom, performing hits like “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer” and “Ray of Light” with a cadre of dancers, four of her six children, and a wardrobe of elaborate costuming that recalled some of her most memorable looks.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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      Is ‘The Idea of You’ Harry Styles Fan Fiction?

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      The filmmakers do more to align star and character than the novel did. But somehow that doesn’t make the movie indebted to the musician.Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the new rom-com “The Idea of You,” has a bit in common with the mega pop star Harry Styles:In the movie, Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween girl fans. Styles was a member of a boy band called One Direction. You’ve probably heard of it.Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.Hayes eventually quits his band and starts making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.Hayes likes to date older women, and his relationship with a gallerist named Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is the backbone of the film. Harry, too, has been involved in tabloid-documented relationships with older women, most famously, the actress and director Olivia Wilde.So does “The Idea of You” come off as an act of fan fiction? Bizarrely, no, even if the shadow of Styles does loom large over the whole project.Plenty of headlines have already described the movie as “Harry Styles fan fiction,” though Robinne Lee, the author of the 2017 novel on which it is based, is typically coy in interviews about whether the pop star inspired her book.August Moon, the band in the film, above, resembles One Direction more than the band in the original novel does.Amazon Studios“Inspired is a strong word,” Lee has said. The author, who is also an actress with degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School and perhaps best known for her appearances in films like “Hitch” and “Fifty Shades Darker,” has described encountering “the face of a boy I’d never seen in a band I’d never paid attention to” and thinking it was “art.” After the novel became a viral sensation, Lee told Vogue in 2020, “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles.” In a piece for Time published this month, Lee argued that “assuming a novel with a fictional celebrity in a relationship must be based on an existing celebrity — in this case, the internet has decided, Harry Styles — is unimaginative at best and sexist at worst.”She is certainly less explicit about a pop star connection than Anna Todd, whose “After” series of novels started explicitly as Styles fan fiction on the platform Wattpad and have since been turned into a film franchise. (It’s a path that might be familiar to fans of “Fifty Shades,” which started as “Twilight” fan fiction.) However, unlike “The Idea of You,” the “After” series has nothing to do with a boy band. The Harry of “After” is a college student named Hardin, but when the first novel was published in 2014, the portrayal outraged some One Direction lovers with the way it turned Styles into a bad boy manipulating a young woman. One 14-year-old Styles fan told The New York Times then: “The way Harry in this book is portrayed is disgusting.”On the other hand, Styles fans have embraced “The Idea of You” as text that can feed their obsession. Kayla Kleinman, a social media manager at Bookshop.org, was not a Styles devotee when she first read the novel, but became one after finishing it during the pandemic. She felt “emotionally attached” to the book, and wanted the experience of reading it to continue, she said in an interview. So she sought out Styles’s music. “In my head it felt like a continuation of the story even though I very much knew that they were not,” she said. “But to me that next step was being like, ‘OK, I’m going to dive into this world as a thing to entertain myself.’” Now Kleinman has even gone to Harry Styles concerts with a friend she made from an “Idea of You” Facebook group.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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      Luca Guadagnino’s Key Musical Moments in “Challengers” and More Films

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      Hear songs from “Challengers,” “Call Me by Your Name” and more.From left: Mike Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in “Challengers.”Metro Goldwyn Mayer PicturesDear listeners,This week I saw Luca Guadagnino’s much-hyped tennis love-triangle movie “Challengers” — like a lot of people, it seems. And also like a lot of people, including The Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, I had a good time at the movies. This film “isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief,” Dargis writes in her astute review. “It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.” She also characterizes Guadagnino, correctly I think, as a filmmaker adept at “blissfully gliding along the surfaces of life.”Throughout his career, Guadagnino has used music as a crucial tool in creating those slick surfaces. His first film to charm me was the lush 2015 drama “A Bigger Splash,” which features Tilda Swinton playing a rock star and Ralph Fiennes doing an ecstatic and very memorable dance to the Rolling Stones’ “Emotional Rescue.”Dance sequences recur throughout Guadagnino’s filmography, often as opportunities for bodies and desires to collide, and whether it’s a bunch of young people bopping to the Psychedelic Furs in his great 2017 romance, “Call Me by Your Name,” or Zendaya and her friends getting down to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” during a flashback scene in “Challengers,” the accompanying song choices feel authentic. In both of those scenes, Guadagnino isn’t looking for the most obscure needle drop, but a song that would convincingly get those characters on the dance floor in the particular cultural moment he is creating.“Challengers” got me thinking back to all the great musical moments in Guadagnino’s films, and before I knew it, I was compiling this playlist. It features a few of the aforementioned moments, along with original songs composed for his movies from the likes of Thom Yorke and Sufjan Stevens, and a selection from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping and prismatic “Challengers” score, which I have been listening to all week. I highly recommend it if you would like every moment of your life — washing the dishes, dashing for the subway, writing a newsletter — to feel like a high-stakes tennis match.Also! I’m out next week but will be leaving you in the capable hands of two special guest playlisters. Till then!Not like the other girls,LindsayWe 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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      Kendrick Lamar Gets Inspired (by Drake), and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Miranda Lambert, Illuminati Hotties, Mabe Fratti and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Kendrick Lamar, ‘Euphoria’Beefs make rappers productive. Earlier this week, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new salvo in his recently rekindled feud with Drake: a six-minute, multipart rejoinder to Drake’s recent “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle.” It starts with Lamar rapping quickly but calmly over a smooth-jazz backdrop, taunting, “I make music that electrify ’em, you make music that pacify ’em.” But after he warns, “Don’t tell no lie about me/And I won’t tell truths about you,” the track changes to a tolling, droning trap dirge and Lamar’s delivery becomes biting, nasal and percussive. He switches from flow to flow with an accelerating barrage of attacks, professional and personal, from recording deals to parenting skills: “cringe-worthy” is a milder one. This track is unlikely to be the last round. Lamar posted a follow-up, “6:16 in LA,” on his Instagram Friday morning. JON PARELESMiranda Lambert, ‘Wranglers’The country queen Miranda Lambert commands an atmosphere of smoky guitar licks and smoldering defiance on her new song “Wranglers,” her first solo single since her 2022 album “Palomino.” Lambert spins a third-person yarn of heartbreak and revenge at something of an emotional remove during the verses, but there’s a welcome grit in her voice when she gets to the irreverent hook: “She set it all on fire, and if there’s one thing that she learned/Wranglers take forever to burn.” LINDSAY ZOLADZIlluminati Hotties, ‘Can’t Be Still’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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      On Dua Lipa’s ‘Radical Optimism,’ Romance Is Everything

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      The English singer and songwriter’s third album, featuring production from Danny L Harle and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, is nonstop ear candy.Romance is a blast on Dua Lipa’s third album, “Radical Optimism.” It’s a thumping, reverberating, woofer-rattling, arena-scale sensation, something to exult in even when it doesn’t always go right.On Lipa’s first two albums, she juxtaposed flirtations and breakups with thoughts about power and gender. “I know you ain’t used to a female alpha,” she sang in the title track of “Future Nostalgia” in 2020, and she denounced male entitlement in “Boys Will Be Boys.” But on “Radical Optimism,” all that’s at stake is coupledom: sizing up each other, testing the possibilities, envisioning permanence or — surprisingly graciously — letting go. Her new songs treat single life as an adventure game full of ups and downs, but not as cataclysmic or tragic.Lipa, 28, has never bothered with subtlety. She aims for — and usually achieves — full-fledged bangers. There’s always an underlying confidence in her firm alto voice, and she has a gift for big, blunt, instantly legible pop hooks, the kind that sum up a situation in a terse chorus. “I’m not here for long/Catch me or I go Houdini,” she demands in “Houdini,” one of the album’s prerelease singles, creating an open-voweled, singable shorthand for making her escape.With “Future Nostalgia,” Lipa was an early mover in what grew into a pandemic-era disco revival. That album and others (from Jessie Ware, Doja Cat, Kylie Minogue, Roisin Murphy and Lady Gaga) would summon a communal clubland experience that had been shut down in 2020 and was sorely missed.Four-on-the-floor beats and snappy funk bass lines continue to drive Lipa’s tracks on “Radical Optimism,” which opens with “End of an Era,” a song about a club meet-up that might just be the right one. “Is this my happy ending?,” Lipa wonders amid cooing backup vocals, and she goes on to rap, “Another girl falls in love/Another girl leaves the club.”Lipa’s collaborators on “Radical Optimism” include Danny L Harle — who has easily moved from the self-conscious hyperpop of PC Music to making glossy, up-to-the-minute mainstream pop — and Kevin Parker, who creates era-melding grooves as Tame Impala. The productions reach back to the larger-than-life sounds of the 1980s, when hitmakers like Madonna and Michael Jackson commanded a pop monoculture with superhuman performances: singing, dancing, acting in videos, forever poised and strategic.Lipa shares that level of ambition. She has made it her business to be at once technical and physical, choreographed and carnal. Even in a much more fragmented pop landscape, her songs are built for a mass audience. The tracks on “Radical Optimism” are lavishly maximalist. They mingle sleek programmed sounds and luxurious live ones; bass, percussion and acoustic guitars bring a human touch, even as they’re surrounded by sci-fi synthesizers and metronomic beats.It’s an album of nonstop ear candy. “Training Season,” her demand for a partner who already knows “how to love me right,” has tickling guitar syncopations and girl-group harmonies popping out of nowhere. “French Exit,” in which Lipa decides to disappear instead of going through a laborious breakup — “Goodbye doesn’t hurt if I don’t say it” — laces a sputtering beat with playful, elusive instrumental cameos: finger cymbals, flute, handclaps, string-section swoops.“Falling Forever” harks back to disco-era dramas like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” but flips the tone to positive thinking. It summons thundering drums as Lipa savors a blissful connection, belting “How long can it just keep getting better?”And “Happy for You” is a post-breakup song that radiates absolution for all involved. The singer sees her ex with a new girlfriend — “I think she’s a model” — and instead of jealousy or regret, she’s overjoyed that everything worked out. “Even the hard parts were all for the best,” she decides, and her voice leaps up — above double-time drums, swirling backup vocals and cavernous bass tones — as she realizes, “I must have loved you more than I ever knew,” at once self-congratulatory and unburdened.There’s immense discipline and effort behind the songs on “Radical Optimism,” and Lipa flaunts her work in the studio and in her effortful onstage dance routines. But she also brings a determined lightheartedness to her new songs, somehow managing not to take them too seriously. Romance can be all-encompassing and all-important in the moment. But if it doesn’t work out, she knows she can move on.Dua Lipa“Radical Optimism”(Warner Records) More