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      How Sean Ono Lennon Helped His Parents Send a Message.

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      To keep their legacy relevant for a new generation, he worked on the short “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko.” Now it’s up for an Oscar.Three years ago, Sean Ono Lennon was asked to develop a music video for the 50th anniversary of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” the 1971 protest song by his parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which has become a rare type of perennial — a warmhearted Christmas tune that doubles as an antiwar challenge, telling ordinary citizens that peace can be achieved “if you want it.”But Lennon, 48, was not interested in making a simple video. That “felt unnecessary” for such a well-known track, he said in a recent interview. What intrigued him more was the possibility of expanding the song’s message through a narrative film. After about two years of work, that project became “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” directed by Dave Mullins, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short film.The 11-minute picture is set in a World War I-like battle zone where two soldiers on opposing sides take part in a secret chess game, communicating their moves via a homing pigeon that dodges bombs over a snowy No Man’s Land. In the story’s climax, both armies are ordered into bloody hand-to-hand combat while the opening lines of John and Yoko’s song ring out: “So this is Christmas/And what have you done?”“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said of the project. It’s aimed at “people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted.”ElectroLeagueFor Sean Lennon, who in recent years has gradually taken on the responsibility of managing his parents’ artistic legacies — his mother, 91, has officially retired — the film is part of a continual process to keep that work relevant for younger generations. He is well aware that even a Beatle’s classic can fade away without tending.“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said by phone. “You’re competing with generations of people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted. So, for me, it’s very important that the message of peace and love, which may be a trope, are not forgotten.”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 Collective’ Is Kim Gordon’s Coolest Act Yet

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      The day she turned 60, the artist and musician Kim Gordon felt, by her own admission, “shipwrecked.” She had recently gone through a painfully high-profile divorce from her husband of 27 years, Thurston Moore, and in the wake of their split, their band Sonic Youth — the freewheeling and fearlessly experimental group that almost single-handedly defined the sound and ethos of American alternative rock — ended its 30-year-run. Plenty of people she loved attended her 60th birthday bash in New York, but she still felt unmoored.Gordon’s 70th birthday party last year, though, was another story entirely.For one thing, it was in Los Angeles, the city she’d grown up in and returned to in 2015. But also, as Gordon explained on a video call from her book-strewn home in late February, it doubled as a celebration of finishing her second solo album, “The Collective.”“It was kind of great to have done that on my 70th birthday,” she said and laughed from behind tinted sunglasses. “Because I’d actually worked that day and felt a finality to the project, it was really satisfying.”Not many artists welcome their 70s with a new album, and virtually none with a record as blistering and gloriously strange as “The Collective,” which has more in common with postmillennial SoundCloud rap than the dulcet tones of 21st-century indie-rock. (The title is partially inspired by Jennifer Egan’s novel “The Candy House.”) But left turns are business as usual for Gordon, a restlessly curious artistic polymath who has never settled for the conventional, expected or familiar.“She’s one of those people that was meant to be an artist,” said the musician Kathleen Hanna, who has known Gordon since the early 1990s. “Painting, writing, music — she’s one of those people who was born to be around any kind of art.”Justin Raisen, the 41-year-old L.A.-based producer who worked with Gordon on “The Collective,” noted that “Lots of careers go downhill with age, but there are also lots that go upward.” He cited as examples David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave — and Kim Gordon.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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      Meet Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour Openers

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      The 21-year-old pop star wears her influences on her sleeve and, in one particular case, books them for her live show.Olivia Rodrigo onstage in California on Friday night.OK McCausland for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last Friday night, the pop sensation and verbal vampire slayer Olivia Rodrigo kicked off her Guts World Tour, one of the most anticipated live shows of the year. My colleague Jon Caramanica caught opening night in Palm Desert, Calif., and named it a Critic’s Pick, writing that Rodrigo “brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between.”An avowed student of female-driven ’90s alternative rock — when I saw her two years ago at Radio City Music Hall, she played a rousing cover of Veruca Salt’s “Seether” — Rodrigo wears her influences on her sleeve and, in one particular case, books them for her tour. Though the brash, big-voiced pop singer Chappell Roan kicked off the show in Palm Desert, for some dates Rodrigo will be joined by the legendary Gen-X rockers the Breeders. Any young pop supernova who picks the Deal sisters to open for her — and who convinces them that she’s a talent worth supporting — is all right by me.While not everyone who sees the Guts World Tour will be lucky enough to witness some lavender-clad grrrls experience “Cannonball” live for the first time, every opener Rodrigo selected is worth arriving early to catch. Today’s playlist, comprising her supporting acts, hopes to convince you of that.Roan, a rising star whose influences connect the dots between Katy Perry and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” opens the show until April 2, when the Breeders take over for a four-night stint at Madison Square Garden. They’ll pass the baton to Remi Wolf, an eclectic and charismatically in-your-face singer-songwriter, who will handle the European dates, until the tour returns to North America in July and is supported by the whispery electro-pop upstart PinkPantheress. In mid-August, for the tour’s last splash — forgive me — the Breeders return for several dates in Los Angeles.In her music, Rodrigo centers her own personal experience of girlhood, and in some sense all four of these supporting artists offer different variations on that theme. Get ready for some towering choruses, gigantic personalities and refreshingly expansive takes on musical femininity.Got that long hair, long beard, turtleneck sweater,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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      Faye Webster Hates Attention. But Her Songs Keep Getting Bigger.

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      Music that walks the line between indie-rock and country — and her easy access to her emotions — has brought the singer-songwriter a growing fan base.Faye Webster was trying to get out. She had just performed the second of two shows at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, swaying in a dark blue gown in front of a 20-piece string orchestra, her hands knitted over her diaphragm. All she wanted next was to go home.Those hometown concerts in 2022 felt like the crystallization of her career — a more significant milestone than when Barack Obama put her on his annual playlist, or when she was asked to play Coachella this year. The lobby was clogged with fans, and Webster was focused on escape. Her mother had a hat, a cobalt blue ball cap with “haha” stamped across it, merch from Webster’s last album. She threw it on, tilted her head down and made it out the door.Webster, 26, hates attention. This, she realizes, is inconvenient for any artist, much less an up-and-coming indie star with a new and fervid TikTok following. Over two meandering video calls from Australia, where Webster was touring, she remained off camera for one of them. She mentioned a dog but only discussed its breed off the record. When she did slip into frame — perched in bed in a stark white hotel room, glancing at the ceiling or off to the side as she talked — she broke her sentences with long pauses, sometimes laughing at herself as she found the words.“I have a lot of friends that do what I do,” she said. “And I’m just like — I just don’t think I’m built for it. The attention really freaks me out.”The title of Webster’s new LP comes from a ritual she started in the months after her split. She would decide to see the Atlanta Symphony, a 15-minute drive from her house, moments before a performance was set to begin.Irina Rozovsky for The New York TimesThat attention has grown steadily since 2013, when Webster, then 16, self-released her debut album, “Run and Tell,” a folksy whirl of slide guitar and twang. She grew up in Atlanta, where she still lives, listening to her mother play Allison Krauss records and bluegrass fiddle songs, an aesthetic she has incorporated into her own music. But she has also moved, solidly and smoothly, into a middle ground between indie-rock and country — pedal steel mashed with bass, simmering drums beneath tropical synths — as she homes in on the banal brutalities of relationships.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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      Olivia Rodrigo’s Fans Show Up to Her Guts World Tour in Force

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      Olivia Rodrigo shot to pop stardom pretty much overnight: Her first single, “Drivers License,” rocketed to No. 1 in January 2021 while most of the world was still in coronavirus lockdown, making her the youngest artist to debut atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. In April of the following year, she finally brought her songs to life onstage with her punky Sour Tour, which played theaters, though she could have easily sold out arenas. Now she has done just that: Her tour supporting her second album, the cathartic, rock-oriented LP “Guts,” kicked off last Friday night at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif., with a performance “advertising the power of girlhood,” The Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote in his review. The venue, and its parking lot, was filled with young women ready to receive the message.A trio of fans prep for the show in the parking lot by watching Rodrigo’s “Traitor” video in a Mercedes Sprinter van.Violet Mueller, center, gets a dollup of lip gloss from her mother, Georgina, while her sister Olivia looks on.Paige Lebel, center, attending the concert in grunge finery with her father, Bryan, and mother, Casey. More

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      Mannequin Pussy’s Punk Is Built on Big Emotions (and Inside Jokes)

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      The band started as a cathartic outlet for the singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice, and grew into a tight-knit act that makes confrontational and tender punk.“So, who’s the pig lover here?”Wandering the grounds of Ross Mill Farm, a foster home and boarding spot for porcine pets about an hour outside Philadelphia, the four members of the band Mannequin Pussy answered the facility’s owner nearly in unison: “We all are!”Pigs are pack animals — not so different from being in a touring rock band, the singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice, 36, noted playfully. Maxine Steen, 34, who plays synths and guitar, felt an instant kinship with a hesitant hog named Max, proclaiming them both “so aloof.” The band, which also includes the drummer Kaleen Reading, 31, and the bassist Colins Regisford, 37, known as Bear, has been spotted with livestock a lot lately. In two of its recent music videos, the quartet cavorts with cows and sheep, and a pig features prominently on the cover of its fierce new album, “I Got Heaven.”Mannequin Pussy’s earliest releases were a fuzzy punk squall, but in its more than 10-year-run, its music has come to incorporate shoegazey swirls of sound, sharp hooks and intimate moments of vulnerability. The band reached a turning point in 2019 with “Patience,” an album that struck a balance between its more savage and tender sides. The coronavirus pandemic subsequently halted its touring plans, but not its momentum.In 2021, a fictional act performed the group’s songs in the Pennsylvania-centric HBO show “Mare of Easttown,” and the band was featured in the comic book series “Witchblood.” “I feel like it’s rare to say this,” Dabice said, “but we got a little lucky with the pandemic.” The band capitalized on the chance to catch its breath while still finding new listeners, and returns on Friday with “I Got Heaven,” a striking collection of songs about desire, control and resilience.“There’s this sultry ferocity that feels very unique to them,” Michelle Zauner, who records as Japanese Breakfast and has been a fan since the band’s earliest days, said in an email. “But they’ve also got a wonderful knack for melody and real lyrical depth.”“We’re in the pursuit of making art, and that’s our personal experience with the divine,” Dabice said. Jim Bennett/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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      Lee Hoyang, Prolific K-Pop Producer and Songwriter, Dies at 40

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      Professionally known as Shinsadong Tiger, he created the upbeat, catchy and danceable musical style that defined K-pop in the early 2010s.Lee Hoyang, a prolific producer and songwriter of South Korean pop music who was professionally known as Shinsadong Tiger and who helped create some of the biggest K-pop hits of the 2010s, died in Seoul on Friday. He was 40.His management agency confirmed his death in a statement. It did not mention the cause of death, but said that a private funeral was being held in Seoul. The agency, TR Entertainment, did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A police detective in Seoul also confirmed Mr. Lee’s death, but would not disclose further details. Mr. Lee was often credited with shaping the musical style that defined K-pop in the early 2010s: catchy, upbeat and repetitive with a strong hook. He produced many commercially successful songs throughout the decade, mostly for young female artists. Among the hits were “Roly-Poly” and “Bo Peep Bo Peep,” both by T-ara; “NoNoNo” by Apink; and “Bubble Pop!” by HyunA.“He created an exciting, funky, beat-driven K-pop style that continues to be repeated over and over again,” said Do Heon Kim, a pop music critic in South Korea. “There is no place where his influence hasn’t been felt.”Mr. Lee was born on June 3, 1983, in Pohang, a city on South Korea’s southeastern coast. With no formal music education, he immersed himself in music starting in middle school, when he played in a band and remixed songs with his friends, he said in an interview in 2011.He debuted as a songwriter in 2004, when he produced a song called “Man and Woman” for the South Korean pop band the Jadu, he said. The song, which had a pulse of Brazilian bossa nova, was released in 2005.Mr. Lee’s career took a downturn in the late 2010s as his music came to be increasingly regarded as repetitive and he was faced with plagiarism accusations, which he denied, Mr. Kim said. The songwriter focused more of his energy on producing and helped form the girl groups EXID, which debuted in 2012, and Tri.be, which debuted in 2021.Jin Yu Young More

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      Olivia Rodrigo Guts World Tour: Testing Out Life After Girlhood

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      The opening night of the pop star’s Guts World Tour had sparkle and abandon, but making her songs feel big didn’t require much besides the songs themselves.As a pop star, Olivia Rodrigo wields a rather unusual arsenal of weapons. She is an acute writer and an un-self-conscious singer. She largely abhors artifice. She is modest, not salacious. In just three years, she has achieved something approaching stratospheric fame — a four-times platinum debut album and a Grammy for best new artist — while somehow remaining an underdog.But the weapon she returns to again and again is a very pointed and versatile curse word, one that she used to vivid effect on both her 2020 breakout hit, “Drivers License,” the first single from her debut album, “Sour,” and also on “Vampire,” the Grammy-nominated single from her second album, “Guts,” released last year. It’s in plenty of other places, too, giving her anguished entreaties an extra splash of zest. She wants to make it clear that underneath her composed exterior, she’s boiling over.On Friday night at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif., during the opening performance of the Guts World Tour, Rodrigo couldn’t get enough of that word. She used it for emphasis, to connote dismissiveness and to demonstrate exasperation. But mostly she used it casually, in between-song banter, not because she needed to, but because using it felt like getting away with something.Much of Rodrigo’s music — especially “Guts,” with its detailed and delirious ruminations about new fame and its discontents — is about how it feels to act bad after being told how important it is to be good. It’s situated at the juncture where freedom is just about to give way to misbehavior.Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed.OK McCausland for The New York TimesThis was true of her performance as well, which brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between. Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed. She led a reverent 11,000-person crowd — a sizable leap from the theaters she played on her first tour — in singalongs that were churchlike and raucous, but never rowdy.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