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      Jonathan Mayers, a Founder of the Bonnaroo Music Festival, Dies at 51

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      He helped bring crowds of music fans to a remote Tennessee cow farm with Bonnaroo, and to San Francisco with the Outside Lands festival.Jonathan Mayers, a founder of the Bonnaroo music festival, a star-studded annual extravaganza held on a poplar-dotted Tennessee farm, and Outside Lands, a three-day musical gathering in the foggy mists of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco that has been called a love letter to its host city, has died. He was 51.His death was confirmed in a social media post by Outside Lands. The post did not say where he died or cite a cause.Mr. Mayers grew up outside New York City and, after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1995, got his start on that city’s storied music scene. He worked with Tipitina’s, the nationally famous music venue, and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as Jazz Fest.In 1996, he joined Rick Farman, Kerry Black and Richard Goodstone to found Superfly, a music promotion company. Their first concert, in New Orleans, featured the Meters, the venerable funk band; the saxophonist Maceo Parker; and the Rebirth Brass Band.Bonnaroo started in 2002, the result of Superfly’s partnership with Ashley Capps, of the concert promotion company AC Entertainment, and Coran Capshaw, the founder of Red Light, a music management and promotion company. The festival’s name, inspired by the Dr. John song “Desitively Bonnaroo,” meaning roughly “a really good time” or “good stuff” in Louisiana slang.Ben Harper performed on the second day of the first Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn., in June 2002.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      An Unearthed Joni Mitchell Jazz Demo, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Sarah McLachlan, Camilo, Us3 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.Joni Mitchell, ‘Be Cool’The first preview of “Joni’s Jazz,” an archival collection of Joni Mitchell’s collaborations with jazz musicians, is this 1980 demo of “Be Cool,” a song that featured Wayne Shorter on saxophone when it was released in 1982 on “Wild Things Run Fast.” This version — two guitars, drums and a click track — doesn’t have all its lyrics yet. It doesn’t need them. Instead, Mitchell flaunts some bold, sure-footed scat-singing. The groove and the attitude — “50-50 fire and ice” — were already fully formed.Sarah McLachlan, ‘Better Broken’Sarah McLachlan ponders giving a second chance to a fraught, long-ago relationship in “Better Broken,” her first new song since 2016 and the title track of a coming album. It’s in vintage McLachlan style: a stately piano ballad with a melody that climbs gradually and holds some aching notes. She knows the possible rationalizations, envisioning “a jagged edge worn smooth by time”; she also, it seems, knows better.Caroline Polachek, ‘On the Beach’It was probably inevitable that Caroline Polachek — whose pop pushes toward the posthuman without losing physical connection — would fulfill a videogame commission. With the hyperpop producer Danny L Harle, she created “On the Beach” for Hideo Kojima’s game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. She sings about Sanzu — the Japanese analog of the river Styx, dividing life and death — in a slow march with a melody that leaps to superhuman, computer-tuned peaks and valleys. She still sounds awe-struck.Us3, ‘Resist the Rat Race’In the 1990s and early 2000s, the British group Us3, led by Geoff Wilkinson, backed rappers with jazz grooves, mixing samples — primarily vintage Blue Note jazz tracks — with performances. Now Us3 has returned as Wilkinson’s instrumental band, still merging loops, beats and live musicians — now with arrangements for 18 brasses and reeds. A low-slung piano vamp and programmed trap drums run throughout “Resist the Rat Race,” topped by tootling synthesizer melodies and dense horn-section outbursts worthy of Gil Evans and Henry Mancini. It’s a swaggering alliance of human and machine.Camilo, ‘Maldito ChatGPT’Artificial intelligence matchmaking fails completely in Camilo’s “Maldito ChatGPT” (“Damned ChatGPT”). When he tells ChatGPT the attributes of his ideal partner, the system insists he’s chosen the wrong person, sabotaging his confidence. “I make a list of everything I’ve always dreamed of / And it looks nothing like the person next to me,” he sings. The track feels transparent, with a steady, subdued beat and skeletal piano chords. But as with an A.I. interface, there’s a lot going on under the surface: percussion, vocals, pizzicato strings, echoes. True to chatbot conventions, the A.I. ends its response with a question; Camilo can barely sputter an incredulous reply.

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      Benson Boone, a Showy Male Pop Star for This American Moment

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      Pop in the 21st century has largely been a woman’s game, but Boone has flipped his way into the upper echelon by satisfying at least four different internet niches.If you asked a social media executive to design a pop star with maximum virality in mind, they might show you someone like Benson Boone.The 23-year-old Utah native satisfies at least four different internet niches: He is a belter, and has mastered the pained expression of singers dramatically straining for the high notes. He flips — you already know this, of course — often enough that he has his own acrobatic video compilations. He is patriotic in a vague, pseudo-apolitical way; his second album, released last week, is called “American Heart,” and its cover features Boone holding an American flag while covered in soot and grime, as if recently returned from the battlefield. And he is a sexual showboat, donning revealing outfits and grabbing his crotch onstage; he also possesses what British GQ described last year as a “sexy little dirtbag mustache,” the facial hair du jour for Gen Z celebrities.But Boone is also something rare in 2025: a successful white male pop star. Pop music has been a woman’s game for much of the 21st century, but the disparity has been even more stark during the 2020s. The male stars on the charts right now who aren’t named Bruno Mars either come from the worlds of country (Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey) or rap (Drake, Kendrick Lamar) or both (Post Malone). Aside from Harry Styles, who hasn’t released new music in over three years, very few male stars — artists who can sell out arenas or stadiums like their female counterparts — are playing in the pure pop space. (The TikTok prankster-turned-Christian rocker Alex Warren, whose execrable wedding song “Ordinary” tops the Hot 100 right now, feels like the product of every media ecosystem other than the pop industry.)Boone’s debut album mostly contained sweet, simple songs about late adolescence, but his latest, “American Heart,” is slightly more complicated.Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesToying with gender and sexuality has been a big part of Styles’s performance and appeal: He’s both explicitly embraced femininity — wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue, painting his nails — and tapped into hoary rock star tropes with songs like “Kiwi,” about the fear that you’ve gotten a fan pregnant. Boone has done his own version of blurring the lines. While he dates the actress and social media personality Maggie Thurmon and acknowledges that most of his fans are young women, he saves his sweetest, most intense love songs for the men in his life (like his father and his best friend, Eric). And in terms of presentation and stage panache, he explicitly nods to a queer forebear: the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. The two share a penchant for cat suits, mustaches, even an imperious stage presence. But where Mercury covertly gestured at gay subculture, Boone seems to imagine an alternate history.Boone was born in a small town in Washington and raised Mormon. A competitive diver from a young age, he only began singing in his late teens, then started posting videos of himself on TikTok. He had grown up a voracious fan of acts like One Direction and Justin Bieber — he and his pal Eric, he has said, would watch their videos for hours. At 18, he auditioned for “American Idol” and wowed a panel of judges including Katy Perry, who predicted the world would “swoon over Benson Boone.”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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      Cannonball With Wesley Morris: My Love Affair With Bruno Mars

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      Wesley Morris has a confession to make: He loves Bruno Mars. Nothing wrong with that, right? With the help of the culture writer Niela Orr, Wesley untangles his crush from his discomfort with the pop star’s cozy relationship to Blackness.You can listen to the show on your favorite podcast app, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and iHeartRadio, and you can watch it on YouTube:Cannonball is hosted by Wesley Morris and produced by Janelle Anderson, Elyssa Dudley, and John White with production assistance from Kate LoPresti. The show is edited by Wendy Dorr. The show is engineered by Daniel Ramirez and recorded by Maddy Masiello, Kyle Grandillo and Nick Pitman. It features original music by Dan Powell and Diane Wong. Our theme music is by Justin Ellington.Our video team is Brooke Minters And Felice Leon. This episode was filmed by Alfredo Chiarappa, and edited by Jamie Hefetz and Pat Gunther.Special thanks to everyone who helped launch this show: Daniel Harrington, Lisa Tobin, Sasha Weiss, Max Linsky, Nina Lassam, Jeffrey Miranda, Mahima Chablani, Katie O’Brien, Christina Djossa, Kelly Doe, Shu Chun Xie, Dash Turner, Benjamin Tousley, Julia Moburg, Tara Godvin, Elizabeth Bristow, Lynn Levy, Victoria Kim, Jordan Cohen, Clinton Cargill, Bobby Doherty, Dahlia Haddad, Paula Szuchman, and Sam Dolnick.And an extra special thanks to J Wortham. More

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      Wet Leg Became Indie Superheroes Overnight. Now They’re Acting Like It.

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      Taking the stage in a muscled power pose is a declaration of frontwoman confidence. And Rhian Teasdale is gleaming with it.When her band Wet Leg played at Market Hotel in Brooklyn this spring, she strode up in a dingy undershirt and some glorified tighty-whities, and flexed her biceps at the crowd — a stance somewhere between bodybuilder and Wonder Woman.Launching into the come-at-me lyrics of “Catch These Fists,” the pulsing lead single from the band’s upcoming album — “I don’t want your love, I just wanna fight” the chorus snarls — Teasdale, the rhythm guitarist, dropped her custom-made, bubble gum pink instrument, and flashed her guns again. Beside her, Hester Chambers, the college friend she started the band with, was playing lead guitar with her back to the audience (her version of a power move). When they got into “Chaise Longue,” the underground hit that put them on the map, they were both dancing and grinning.Since Wet Leg emerged three years ago, its trajectory into indie-rock stardom has been a series of almost absurd feats. Pals from the Isle of Wight, England — a far reach from a musical hot spot — the group saw its self-titled debut LP explode, a chart-topper in the United Kingdom that also earned two Grammys. “Chaise Longue,” perhaps history’s catchiest track about a grandfather’s upholstered chair, had vocal fans in Elton John, Lorde and Dave Grohl; seemingly overnight, Wet Leg ascended from dingy clubs to stadiums, opening for Foo Fighters and Harry Styles.This is a heady place to activate a sophomore album, “Moisturizer,” out July 11. Especially because, unlike the debut, which was mostly written by Teasdale and Chambers, the latest effort is the work of a five-piece — including Henry Holmes, the drummer; Ellis Durand, the bassist; and the multi-instrumentalist Joshua Mobaraki, who is also Chambers’s boyfriend.And though Chambers, the lead guitarist, is still a full-fledged member of the group, she has stepped back from the sort of promotion she did for the first album, when the two women were featured as soft-spoken musical partners in matching cottagecore dresses. They were billed as a duo, and now, “we’re definitely a band,” Teasdale said decisively.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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      Global Arts Festival Taking Shape Inside Gowanus Power Station

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      The first Powerhouse: International will feature works from South Africa’s William Kentridge, Brazil’s Carolina Bianchi — and 10,000, $30 tickets.A new arts festival, featuring performance art from Brazil, an interactive installation from New Zealand, and a party presented by a Beyoncé dance captain, will be staged this fall inside a onetime power station along Brooklyn’s industrial Gowanus Canal.The three-month series, called Powerhouse: International and scheduled to run Sept. 25 to Dec. 13, is being curated by David Binder, a longtime performing arts producer and former artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It will take place at Powerhouse Arts, a hulking structure that since 2023 has housed fabrication studios for artists from a variety of disciplines.The festival will be the building’s first series of performing arts events, and will feature acclaimed artists like William Kentridge, from South Africa, who is presenting his multidisciplinary opera-theater work “Sibyl”; Christos Papadopoulos, from Greece, whose prizewinning dance piece “Larsen C” is about a melting ice shelf; and Carolina Bianchi, from Brazil, who will perform her “Cadela Força Trilogy,” a stage work about sexual violence, with her collective Cara de Cavalo.“We’re in this moment when there are so many barriers — cultural, physical, ideological — and this festival aims to break down those barriers,” Binder said in an interview. “What really interests me is the convergence of artists from different countries and different disciplines.”To keep the events accessible, the festival is making at least 10,000 tickets — just over half of the expected total — available for $30 each. At most configurations, the venue will have about 800 seats.Binder said he was motivated in part by a change in the types of work being presented in New York City in recent years. “There’s obviously a lot less international work in the city, a lot less art, a lot less new plays, a lot less music and dance,” he said. “I’m hoping we’re adding to the conversation.”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 Edge, U2’s Guitarist, Becomes Irish Citizen After 62 Years There

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      The musician born David Evans was one of more than 7,500 people who became citizens in a series of ceremonies in southwest Ireland this week.The Edge, the U2 guitarist known for his omnipresent black beanie and his chiming, echoey sound, became an Irish citizen this week. It only took him 62 years.“I’m a little tardy on the paperwork,” the English-born musician, whose real name is David Evans, told reporters at the ceremony on Monday. “I’ve been living in Ireland now since I was 1 year old, but the time is right and I couldn’t be more proud of my country for all that it represents and all that it’s doing.”A representative for U2 did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.More than 7,500 people were granted citizenship in a series of ceremonies Monday and Tuesday in Killarney in County Kerry, nearly 200 miles southwest of Dublin, according to the Irish government. Applicants from over 140 countries made a declaration of fidelity and loyalty to the state. Since 2011, more than 200,000 people have received Irish citizenship.Evans, 63, was born in Essex to Welsh parents and moved to Ireland as a young child.The band formed in 1976 when Larry Mullen Jr. tacked a “musicians wanted” ad to a bulletin board in Dublin, according to the band’s website. The group — Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton (bass) and Mullen (drums), then all teenagers — practiced in Mullen’s kitchen.U2 became perhaps the most recognizable and successful rock group from Ireland and is considered by many fans there to be something of a national treasure. At the citizenship ceremony, Evans said that Ireland was showing “real leadership” on the world stage and that his becoming a citizen couldn’t have come at a better moment. “I have always felt Irish,” he told reporters, saying he was happy “to be in even deeper connection with my homeland.”Evans said the application process took a couple of years but was ultimately straightforward.“Honestly there were many moments in the past when I could have done it, with just the form to be filled out, but I’m happy it’s now,” he said. “It feels more significant, it feels more meaningful.” More

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      Mick Ralphs, of Mott the Hoople and Bad Company, Dies at 81

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      A guitarist and songwriter, he ditched glam rock at its peak and scored with meatier stadium-rock anthems like “Can’t Get Enough” and “Feel Like Making Love.”Mick Ralphs, a British guitarist and songwriter who glittered at the peak of glam rock with Mott the Hoople before joining forces with the vocalist Paul Rodgers to form Bad Company, the hard-rock quartet that rode high in the feathered-hair 1970s with anthems like “Can’t Get Enough” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy,” has died. He was 81.His death was announced on Monday in a statement on the official Bad Company site, which noted that he had suffered a stroke days after his final performance with the group in October 2016 and had remained bedridden until his death. The statement did not say where or when he had died, or give a specific cause.Bad Company, scheduled to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in November, combined muscular stadium rock with infectious hooks to become one of the most commercially successful groups of its era.Bad Company in 1973, from left: Boz Burrell, Paul Rodgers, Mr. Ralphs and Simon Kirke.Gems/Redferns, via Getty ImagesFormed in 1973, the group originally consisted of Mr. Ralphs (late of Mott the Hoople, known for the 1972 hit “All the Young Dudes”); Mr. Rodgers and the drummer Simon Kirke, both previously of Free, whose arena-shaking “All Right Now” was a No. 4 hit in 1970; and the bassist Boz Burrell, a veteran of King Crimson.Bad Company became an FM radio force. It sold more than a million copies of its first three albums, starting with its 1974 debut, called simply “Bad Company,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and featured “Can’t Get Enough,” a bluesy thumper written by Mr. Ralphs that soared to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.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