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      Frank Farian, the Man Behind Milli Vanilli, Is Dead at 82

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      He had worldwide success with the disco group Boney M. He was better known for a duo that had hit records but, it turned out, only pretended to sing.Frank Farian, the hit-making German record producer who masterminded the model-handsome dance-pop duo Milli Vanilli and propelled them to Grammy-winning heights — until it was revealed that they were little more than lip-syncing marionettes — died on Tuesday at his home in Miami. He was 82.His death was announced by Philip Kallrath of Allendorf Media, a spokesman for Mr. Farian’s family.Mr. Farian was no stranger to the pop charts in the late 1980s, when he brought together Rob Pilatus, the son of an American serviceman and a German dancer, and Fab Morvan, a French singer and dancer, to create one of pop music’s most sugary bonbons.He was born Franz Reuther on July 18, 1941, in Kirn, Germany. His father, a furrier turned soldier, was killed during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, leaving Franz and his older siblings, Hertha and Heinz, to be raised by their mother, a schoolteacher.Coming of age on a steady diet of American rock ’n’ roll records, Mr. Farian eventually became a performer himself. He rose to the top of the West German charts in 1976 with “Rocky,” a bouncy, German-language interpretation of a hit by the American country artist Dickey Lee.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?  More

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      In Praise of Whistling in Pop Music

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      Billy Joel has a new song coming next week. Before it arrives, revisit “The Stranger” and tracks by Juelz Santana, Dick Hyman and more.Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” is a classic whistle song. Next week, he’ll release a new track titled “Turn the Lights Back On.”Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesDear listeners,When Billy Joel was working on what would become his breakout 1977 album, “The Stranger,” he played the opening chords of the title track for his producer Phil Ramone, whistling a melody that he imagined another instrument would play in the final recording. “I whistle the whole thing and I finish,” he wrote in 2013, “I look at him and I say, ‘So what instrument should that be?’” Ramone responded, “You just did it.” The rest is music history.On Monday, Joel announced he’ll be releasing his first new pop single in nearly two decades next week. Fortuitous timing! While listening to “The Stranger” over the weekend, I found myself considering the pop musical whistle.It’s such a simple expression, but in a song it can convey a wide range of feelings and tones. A whistle can be childlike and playful (see: the whistle solo on Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”) or it can be an adult expression of vulnerability (like the broken whistle that John Lennon musters on the wrenching “Jealous Guy”). Some whistles are innocent as lambs, and others — particularly those of the “wolf” variety — are unmistakably lascivious. Best of all, though, it’s a free instrument that almost all of us carry all the time. You don’t even need to take lessons to play it passably.While we await Joel’s latest, “Turn the Lights Back On” (which may or may not feature a whistle break), today’s playlist is a homage to the pop musical whistle, in all its glory and multitudes. I hope these 10 songs will wet your … well, never mind. And if you don’t know how to whistle along, you can always consult Lauren Bacall.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Billy Joel: “The Stranger”The aforementioned whistle acts as a kind of theme for the album “The Stranger,” setting its tone and recurring later, at the tail end of the closing track. Joel said the feeling he was going for was the “sound of a man walking down a Parisian street at night, and the streets are all glistening from rain.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Caroline Polachek: “Bunny Is a Rider”A repeated, beckoning whistle urges on Caroline Polachek’s restless heroine in this 2021 single, which plays out like a kind of pop travelogue. (Listen on YouTube)3. Peter Gabriel: “Games Without Frontiers”Peter Gabriel, hauntingly, depicts war as a kind of children’s game on this lilting hit from 1980, which features backing vocals from Kate Bush, invoking the French name of the European game show “Jeux sans frontières.” The whistled motif that echoes throughout is at once playful and eerie. (Listen on YouTube)4. Peter Bjorn and John: “Young Folks”I almost included this 2006 tune on my “Summer of Saltburn” playlist a few weeks ago, but it’s an even better fit here. “Young Folks,” the best-known track from the Swedish indie-pop group Peter Bjorn and John, has a happy-go-lucky whistled refrain that immediately recalls a particular sense of mid-2000s whimsy. (Listen on YouTube)5. Paul Simon: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Speaking of whimsy, here’s a Paul Simon classic that also made an appearance on my Wes Anderson playlist last year. The song’s arrangement is so light and childlike that a midsong guitar solo would be too intense — so, Simon wisely reasoned, how about a whistle solo? (Listen on YouTube)6. Dick Hyman: “The Moog and Me”You may recognize this one thanks to Beck, who memorably sampled it in the intro of his “Odelay” track “Sissyneck.” A whistled melody snakes through a 1969 song from the jazz pianist and electronic music pioneer Dick Hyman, who contrasts familiar human-generated sounds with the synthetic ones made with the a Moog synthesizer, then a novel instrument. (Listen on YouTube)7. Juelz Santana: “There It Go (the Whistle Song)”A minimalist, melodically descending whistle provides the infectious hook for this 2005 hit by the New York rapper and Cam’ron collaborator Juelz Santana, and provides the main reason this song still gets stuck in my head all the time. “I decided to simplify,” Santana once said of the song’s composition. “I knew that the whistle would be something that people would come back to — and be distinctive. People don’t want to hear too much.” (Listen on YouTube)8. John Lennon featuring the Plastic Ono Band: “Jealous Guy”I appreciate the wobbly imperfection in the whistling solo in the middle of this one because it heightens the vulnerability that Lennon channels throughout a deeply personal song. (Listen on YouTube)9. Guns N’ Roses: “Patience”A karaoke standard — even more so if you can match Axl Rose note for note in his extended whistle intro. (Listen on YouTube)10. Otis Redding: “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”Finally, I’ll play you out with this all-timer from Otis Redding, who perfectly captures the laid-back feeling of “sittin’ on the dock of the bay, wasting time” by idly whistling a tune as the song fades out. (Listen on YouTube)Whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“In Praise of Pop Music Whistling” track listTrack 1: Billy Joel, “The Stranger”Track 2: Caroline Polachek, “Bunny Is a Rider”Track 3: Peter Gabriel, “Games Without Frontiers”Track 4: Peter Bjorn and John, “Young Folks”Track 5: Paul Simon, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Track 6: Dick Hyman, “The Moog and Me”Track 7: Juelz Santana, “There It Go (The Whistle Song)”Track 8: John Lennon featuring the Plastic Ono Band, “Jealous Guy”Track 9: Guns N’ Roses, “Patience”Track 10: Otis Redding, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” More

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      The Soft Moon and Silent Servant Die in L.A.

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      Jose (Luis) Vasquez, John (Juan) Mendez and a third person, Simone Ling, were found unresponsive last week. Authorities had not determined a cause but said “possible narcotics” were at the scene.The musician Jose (Luis) Vasquez of the post-punk band the Soft Moon, John (Juan) Mendez, the D.J. known as Silent Servant, and a third person were found unresponsive at a loft apartment in downtown Los Angeles last week and were pronounced dead, according to their representatives and the authorities in Los Angeles.Vasquez’s death was announced in a post on the band’s Facebook page on Friday. Records kept by the Los Angeles County Coroner show that Jose Vasquez, 44, died at a residence the day before, Jan. 18.Triangle Agency, which represents Mendez, confirmed his death to the electronic music platform Resident Advisor. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office lists John Mendez, 46, as also having died on Jan. 18 at a residence.The coroner’s office said a third person, Simone Ling, 43, was also found the afternoon of Jan. 18 at the private residence in the 600 block of South Main Street in Los Angeles. A spokeswoman said the Department of Medical Examiner has deferred the cause of death in all three cases, and that it could take between three and six months to make a final determination about the cause.Lt. Letisia Ruiz, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, said officers had responded to a call about a missing person, and upon arriving at Pacific Electric Lofts downtown, they entered a unit to find three adults who were unresponsive. “The officers also observed possible narcotics and narcotics paraphernalia,” she said. All three people were pronounced dead at the scene, she added.Homicide investigators were deployed to the scene and found no evidence of foul play or forced entry into the location, Lieutenant Ruiz said. The coroner’s office will handle the case and perform toxicology tests, she said.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?  More

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      Brittany Howard Taps Into the Ancestors on ‘What Now’

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      When Brittany Howard was 17, she lived alone, in a haunted house in Athens, Ala., that had belonged to her great-grandmother.At first, she was thrilled. Alabama Shakes, the band she’d started with her high school classmate Zac Cockrell, practiced there. Then doors started to open on their own. Cabinets slammed shut. One day, Howard was outside the back door when she heard the lock slide closed on the inside. Thinking someone had broken in, she crept into the kitchen and grabbed a weapon she kept behind her fridge.“I had this machete, and I’m clearing rooms in the house like I’m Bruce Willis in ‘Pulp Fiction,’” she said on an afternoon in early January. “There’s nobody in the house.”After seven years, Howard abandoned the old, run-down duplex, but she has long maintained a connection to the ghosts of her past, and her music has often felt haunted. The Shakes were imbued with the essence of artists who preceded them by a few generations — Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Curtis Mayfield — and shaped by an American South that sometimes struggled to look forward instead of back. In 2019, after two albums, and just as the band appeared poised for superstardom, Howard walked away, releasing “Jaime,” a solo debut named after her late sister.On Feb. 9, she returns with “What Now,” an album filled with wailing soul, jittery funk and buzzing grooves born of frustration, pain, love and intense questioning. Its roots can be traced to the pandemic, and another house Howard believed might be haunted: a big 100-year-old yellow rental filled with antique furniture in East Nashville.“I came by this album pretty honest,” Howard, 35, said while sitting at a desk at the Sound Emporium in Nashville, the studio where she recorded it. She wore a gray button-down, white sneakers and rings on most of her fingers. She has spent nearly all her life in the South but in 2019 was living in New Mexico with her wife, the singer-songwriter Jesse Lafser. As Howard was getting ready to release “Jaime,” their marriage was coming apart.On Feb. 9, Brittany Howard returns with her second solo album, “What Now,” an LP filled with wailing soul, jittery funk and buzzing grooves.Ariel Fisher for The New York Times“I got divorced and drove back to Nashville,” Howard said. “I was like, ‘Man, I thought I was through with this place.’” In March 2020, she was preparing for a European tour when the pandemic scotched those plans. It was just as well. After nearly a decade of writing, recording and touring, Howard was burned out.“I was in the house, excited not to have to be a musician and just be a human washing groceries,” she said. “I was hiking, fishing, outside every day. I was listening to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ to keep my mood up. I finished all of ‘Tiger King.’ Then I ran out of stuff to do. I got to a point where I was like, ‘What am I for?’”She set up a bare-bones studio in a small spare bedroom. “I’d just go in there and make whatever I was feeling that day,” Howard said. She didn’t think the songs would ever see the light of day.It wasn’t until she revisited them a couple of years later that she realized what she had. “This album, for me, was just a series of journal entries,” she said. “Because it was the pandemic, my heart was going through so many things. There was all this sorrow about seeing the world on fire, seeing people the same color as you getting beaten in the streets. On the other hand, I was falling in love.”The joy of this new relationship was shaded not only by the darkness of the world around her, but also by the specter of past romantic failures. “There was a lot of fear,” Howard said. “What if this happens again? What if they don’t like me like that? Why can’t I enjoy this? All that had to go somewhere.”The songs aren’t really about Lafser or any other former partners. They aren’t even about Howard’s new relationship at the time, which ended before the album was finished. The songs are about Howard, herself. “I’m the common denominator,” she said.“There are so many interesting things about music,” Howard said. “Why just do one of them?”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesAFTER THE STUDIO visit, Howard walked into the living room of her latest house — a well-appointed but unassuming midsize home in East Nashville — and was besieged by her small, feisty dogs, Wilma and Wanda. The room felt like a display case for Howard’s enthusiasms. A wooden chess board sat atop a baby grand piano. “Sister Outsider,” a collection of essays by the queer Black feminist poet Audre Lorde, was on the coffee table. Tucked into a corner was a photo of Howard with the Obamas. A sitar case leaned against the credenza housing her record player. A giant portrait of the Supremes dominated one wall.“It’s from the first gay club in Nashville,” Howard said. “I’m just borrowing it because the person who owns it doesn’t have tall enough ceilings.”Howard bought the home from the singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton and her husband, John McCauley, of the band Deer Tick. Behind the house, between an old fishing boat Howard rebuilt and an archery target shaped like a deer head — “I have strange hobbies,” she noted, walking through the backyard — was a garage that had been converted into a home studio. Howard finished recording the “What Now” demos in this comfortably disheveled space with guitars adorning the walls, a movie screen hanging from the ceiling and a sauna beside the door.“You’ve got to have a sauna in your studio,” she said. “To sweat it out.”A small control room was dominated by a large vintage mixing board once used to record Prince’s debut album. Howard is a huge fan, and apparently the feeling was mutual. In 2015, he invited her and the Shakes to play at Paisley Park, and joined them on guitar for “Gimme All Your Love.” One of the new songs, the dynamic, tempo-shifting “Power to Undo,” feels animated by his spirit.“When I was making it, I was like, ‘Prince would’ve liked this,’” Howard said. The song, she explained, is about trying to leave someone who keeps coming back. “There’s a part of you that’s like, ‘I kind of do want to go back,’ and then the older, wiser part that’s like, ‘Don’t you dare.’”“What Now” feels like a breakup album, albeit one tinged less with bitterness for her exes and more with a harsh lens turned on herself. “Out there, there’s a love waiting for me,” Howard sings on the opener, “Earth Sign,” her voice floating over spare, ethereal piano chords. “I can feel, I can’t see/But will I know when I feel it?”Howard produced the album alongside Shawn Everett, who engineered “Jaime” and the second Shakes album, “Sound & Color.” He recalled that “Earth Sign” was a spare 30-second demo when Howard brought it into the studio.Ariel Fisher for The New York Times“One day, she was like, ‘Just give me the drums,’” Everett said. “Then without any chords even being there, she put this insanely complex harmony over the whole thing.”Everett, who has worked with Adele, the Killers and John Legend, was taken aback. “The amount of singers able to build a complex ocean of harmonies without any chord progression is almost zero,” he said. “Then she sat there composing this beautiful piano arrangement. Some studied musician could maybe figure that out, but she just does it by feeling.” The resulting vibe is simultaneously hopeful and despairing, setting a tone for the album.From song to song, the album approximates the emotional whiplash of falling in and out of love. “The best time that I ever had/That’s when the worst times started,” Howard sings on the humid, stuttering “Red Flags,” a track about careening into new relationships. “I wanted to talk about how I just let my heart rule everything,” she said. “When I feel love, I’m going in that direction. It’s like, ‘Honey, that’s not a parade! That’s danger!’”For “Samson,” a hypnotic meditation on a dying union, she came into the studio with 16 bars of a drumbeat, some keyboard chords and a few lyrics. Working with Everett, she began to color in the rest, cutting, chopping and mixing in elements including a winding muted trumpet melody by the Nashville-based jazz artist Rod McGaha. As the deadline loomed, the lyrics remained unfinished. “I just made them up in real time,” she said. “The vocals on it are live. The way I sung it, it’s like you’ve been wrung out.”The effect is devastating. The singer-songwriter Becca Mancari, one of Howard’s closest friends, recalled when Howard first played her a rough mix, in her car one night in Nashville. “I started tearing up,” she said. “I have chills thinking about it now. I remember being like, ‘This is my friend tapping into the ancestors.’”Mancari introduced Howard to her current partner, Anna-Maria Babcock, when Howard was selling merch at one of Mancari’s shows. “When they saw each other, I felt this energetic wash,” Mancari remembered.Amid all the tumult and heartache, “What Now” offers moments to dance through the tears. “It feels like this liberated, queer Black music,” Mancari said. “You could hear these songs in a queer club, which I’d never thought about a Brittany song.”“What Now” doesn’t sound too much like what Howard has done before. As Cockrell, who played bass on both of Howard’s solo albums, put it: “The songs are all very different, but I can hear elements of Brittany in all of it.”“I wanted to talk about how I just let my heart rule everything,” Howard said of her new music. “When I feel love, I’m going in that direction. It’s like, ‘Honey, that’s not a parade! That’s danger!’”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesConsidering her previous successes — five Grammys, a Billboard No. 1 album, multiple performances at the White House — Howard’s refusal to repeat herself is refreshingly risky. Although she has never closed the door on another Alabama Shakes album, she is committed to her own restlessness. “There are so many interesting things about music,” she said. “Why just do one of them?”Howard credits therapy for helping her navigate her emotional life, understand her ghosts and channel it all into art. “Therapy has made my life bearable,” she said. It has also clarified her goals. She has a remarkably detailed vision of a not-too-distant future when she would like to be effectively retired, playing music only when and how she wants.“I want a farm with animals somewhere in the South, an orchard to grow plums, a five-acre pond, a golden retriever and maybe some kids,” she said. “I want to grow food in my backyard, and have this big barn with three doors, where my studio equipment is, a place for my hobbies. I can woodwork and do whatever weird projects I’m into. And I want one of them four-by-four vehicles.”As to whether she can imagine growing old with someone else in that picture, notwithstanding her current happiness, those old ghosts breed skepticism.“I’ve got to see it to believe it.” More

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      Mary Weiss, Who Sang ‘Leader of the Pack,’ Is Dead at 75

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      As the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, she conveyed passion, pathos and toughness — and reached the Top 40 six times while still in her teens.Mary Weiss, who in 1964 was the lead singer of the Shangri-Las’ No. 1 hit, “Leader of the Pack,” extracting every ounce of passion and pathos available in a three-minute adolescent soap opera, died on Friday at her home in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 75.Her death was announced by the author and television writer David Stenn, who had been collaborating with Ms. Weiss on a stage musical about the Shangri-Las. He said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.“Leader of the Pack,” the Shangri-Las’ second and biggest hit, was narrated by a young woman who falls in love with a motorcycle-riding tough guy without her parents’ approval — “They told me he was bad/But I knew he was sad” — and is then left bereft when he dies in a road accident on a rainy night.Produced and co-written by Shadow Morton, the single featured call-and-response vocals, full-tilt teenage angst and motorcycle sound effects. It was excessive and melodramatic, requiring acting as much as singing, but Ms. Weiss sold it with her yearning performance. She was just 15 when it topped the charts.From left, Mary Ann Ganser, Betty Weiss and Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las in 1965.David Dalton“I’m kind of a shy person, but I felt that the recording studio was the place that you could really release what you’re feeling without everybody looking at you,” Ms. Weiss was quoted as saying in “Always Magic in the Air,” Ken Emerson’s 2005 book about notable songwriting teams of early rock ’n’ roll. “I had enough pain in me at the time to pull off anything and get into it and sound believable.”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?  More

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      Green Day Gets Loud Again on ‘Saviors’

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      On “Saviors,” its 14th studio album, the pop-punk trio returns to stadium-sized rock.Praising a return to form is a barbed compliment at best. It implies recent missteps, a decline, the waning of youthful inspiration, the toll of a long career — perhaps all of them at once. It suggests that the sensible way forward is to double back. Still, “Saviors,” Green Day’s new album, is a decisive, even overdetermined return to form.Ever since its beginnings in the late 1980s, Green Day has stayed contentious. Billie Joe Armstrong has sung about personal grievances — including struggles with himself — as well as the ways they intersect with larger political currents, most ambitiously on the band’s 2004 concept album, “American Idiot,” which went on to be adapted into a Broadway musical.The band can still cause a stir. In recent years, Armstrong has been performing the song “American Idiot” by changing the line “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to end with “the MAGA agenda” instead. But when he sang that phrase on broadcast TV this past New Year’s Eve, right-wing media seized on the line to raise a fuss.“Saviors” finds contemporary targets. It opens with “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” which goes barreling ahead as Armstrong derides conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant attitudes, touches on homelessness and real-estate exploitation and declares that as a nation, “We are not well.”In “Living in the ’20s,” Armstrong confronts a decade that’s brought supermarket shootings and murder hornets, while in the quick-strummed “Strange Days Are Here to Stay,” he sings about bleak expectations: “I can’t see this ending well/Now that it’s too late.”While Green Day has pushed against power structures, it has honored musical ones. With Armstrong on guitar and vocals, Tré Cool on drums and Mike Dirnt on bass, there has always been a virtuosic neatness behind Green Day’s blare.Green Day arrived as a proud heir to the fast, blunt, tuneful, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes candid punk that the Ramones had formulated in the 1970s. As Green Day’s catalog grew, it became clearer that the band was well aware of generations of guitar bands, from its grunge contemporaries back through Van Halen, Cheap Trick, Boston and Aerosmith to the Who and the Beatles.Green Day invariably delivers precisely arranged songs with clear-cut verses, choruses and bridges. Its 1994 album, “Dookie” — with hits including “Basket Case” and “Welcome to Paradise” — heralded the commercial breakthrough of punk-pop that was simultaneously raucous and high-gloss.“Saviors” trumpets its connections to Green Day’s past. For its international tour this year — to be joined along the way by bands including Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Hives — Green Day has announced it will play all the way through both “Dookie” and “American Idiot,” coinciding with their 30th and 20th anniversaries. Green Day made “Saviors” with Rob Cavallo, the co-producer of both albums, who last worked on Green Day’s three stripped-down 2012 albums “¡Uno!,” “¡Dos!” and “¡Tré!”Green Day’s more recent albums had strained to be different: noisier, murkier and often using all its resources to simulate lo-fi recording. “Saviors,” by contrast, is forthrightly lavish. Guitars and vocals are multi-layered, and the drum sound is gigantic; orchestral arrangements appear out of nowhere. The band proudly blasts again in songs like the standout track, “Dilemma,” in which Armstrong — who entered rehab after an onstage tirade in 2012 — grapples with trying to stay sober. “I don’t want to be a dead man walking,” he proclaims over stadium-shaking guitar chords.“Saviors” revisits the production approach of the so-called “loudness war” of the 1990s and 2000s, when it seemed studios sought to make, as Meat Loaf sang, “everything louder than everything else.” The waveforms of nearly every song on “Saviors” measure as what recording engineers call “brickwalled” — pushed to a constant, flattened peak. On a playlist alongside tracks that include more ups and downs, that loudness is supposed to feel exciting. But on an entire unrelenting, 15-track album, it grows wearing.Perhaps it’s inevitable that on Green Day’s 14th studio album, some of the songs have beats and chord progressions that can feel like retreads. On “Saviors,” the production often strives to offset familiarity with impact. Yet “Father to a Son” — in which an uncertain parent vows to try his best — unmistakably echoes “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” even with an orchestra now supplementing the power chords.For sonic variety, Green Day flaunts its rock scholarship. “Bobby Sox” — with Armstrong singing about the homey comforts he’d offer a girlfriend, a boyfriend or a best friend — is an outright homage to Pixies, exploding from a quiet verse to a crashing chorus. And the depressive but stubborn “Goodnight Adeline” could almost have been an arena march from Oasis.“Saviors” doesn’t hide its craftsmanship or self-consciousness, but they are a means to an end. Green Day is still angry, disgusted, worried and no longer so amused about the state of the world. This time, the band has decided to shout about it.Green Day“Saviors”(Reprise/Warner) More

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      Annie Nightingale, Pathbreaking British D.J., Is Dead at 83

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      She was initially told there was no room for her on BBC Radio 1 because a woman’s voice lacked the authority of a man’s. Once she was on the air, she stayed there for 53 years.Annie Nightingale, who became the first female disc jockey on BBC Radio 1 in 1970 and remained a popular personality there until her final show, late last year, died on Jan. 11 at her home in London. She was 83.Her family announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.“This is the woman who changed the face and sound of British TV and radio broadcasting forever,” Annie Mac, a longtime BBC Radio D.J., wrote on Instagram after Ms. Nightingale’s death.Ms. Nightingale became well known in music circles in the 1960s as a columnist in British newspapers. And she was a familiar face to stars like the Beatles, whom she interviewed at the Brighton Hippodrome in 1964.“As Derek Taylor liked her, she was welcome at Apple,” the Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn said in an email, referring to the Beatles’ press officer and the company they founded in 1968.In 1967, she applied to be a D.J. on BBC Radio 1, the pop music outlet that had just been started in reaction to the rise of popular offshore pirate stations.But she found herself up against the station’s sexist hiring policy. She was told that its all-male D.J. lineup represented “husband substitutes” to the housewives who were listening, and that a woman’s voice would lack the authority of a man’s.“It came as a huge shock,” Ms. Nightingale told The Independent in 2015. “I was almost amused. What do you mean, ‘No women’? Why not?”But in October 1969, the BBC offered her an on-air trial. Before her first appearance, she told The Manchester Evening News, “I am sure that a lot of girls would make marvelous D.J.s if given the chance.”Before Ms. Nightingale became a D.J., she had become well known in music circles through her columns in British newspapers.Virginia Turbett/RedfernsShe was hired the next year for a weekday record review program, “What’s New,” and two years later she became a host of an evening progressive-rock show, “Sounds of the 70s.” Later in the decade, she became the host of a Sunday afternoon request show and a music interview program. She hosted a variety of other shows through last year.“From Day One, I chose the records I wanted to play and stuck to it ever since,” she said in her autobiography, “Hey Hi Hello: Five Decades of Pop Culture From Britain’s First Female DJ.” (2020). “I preferred the evenings, where I wouldn’t have to introduce playlist tunes I didn’t like. That would have been like lying to me.”Anne Avril Nightingale was born on April 1, 1940, in the Osterley district of London. Her father, Basil, worked in the family’s wallpaper business. Her mother, Celia, was a foot doctor. As a girl, Anne listened to children’s programs on her father’s radio and came to love that it could tune in to distant cities.“I still feel when you’re broadcasting, you don’t know where it’s going and it could be reaching outer space somewhere, and I am still in love with that, completely,” she said in an interview in 2018.After graduating from the Lady Eleanor Holles School, she studied journalism at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London. She began her journalism career soon after, first as a reporter for The Brighton and Hove Gazette and then at The Argus, in Brighton, where she wrote a music column called Spin With Me. She later wrote a music column for a national tabloid, The Daily Sketch.In 1964, she collaborated with the pop group the Hollies on a book, “How to Run a Beat Group.”She found a measure of television fame on BBC’s “Juke Box Jury,” where she was part of a guest panel that reviewed new record releases, and as the host of “That’s For Me,” a record request program on ITV, and the Rediffusion network’s quiz show, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” both in 1965.But she was best known for her time at BBC Radio 1, which began with some rocky moments because of her inexperience — like the time there was eight seconds of dead airtime when she accidentally pressed an “off” switch while a record was playing.“What I found difficult in those early days was being bad technically,” she told The Western Daily Press of Bristol in 1979. “Every time I made a mistake I thought they’d all say, ‘Oh yes, woman driver!’”She remained the only female D.J. on BBC Radio 1 — the “token woman,” she said — for 12 years. In 2010, when she was more than halfway through her 41st year there, Guinness World Records cited her for having had the longest career ever for a female D.J. (That record has since been surpassed twice, by the Peruvian broadcaster Maruja Venegas Salinas and Mary McCoy, a D.J. in Texas.)“It was not until the 1990s and the ‘girlification’ of Radio 1 with the likes of Sara Cox, Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball that Nightingale’s exceptionality became her longevity and impact rather than her gender alone,” Lucy Robinson, a professor at the University of Sussex, and Dr. Jeannine Baker, who at the time was with Macquarie University, wrote on the BBC website.Ms. Nightingale’s success went beyond radio. In 1978, she was named a host of BBC’s live music television show “The Old Grey Whistle Test,” where she focused on new wave music.After John Lennon was killed on Dec. 8, 1980, Ms. Nightingale and members of the “Whistle Test” staff were trying to round up people to talk about him. During the program, a producer appeared in the studio and told Ms. Nightingale, “Paul’s on the phone and he wants to speak to you.”“I had no idea who he meant,” she recalled on the podcast “I Am the Eggpod” in 2018. It was Paul McCartney.Ms. Nightingale in 2015. Throughout her career she championed new music, from progressive rock to acid house and grime.Graham Prentice/Alamy“He wanted to say thank you on behalf of Linda and himself and Yoko and George and Ringo,” she said. “And that’s what really got me.” She added: “I got back in front of the camera and it’s live and I thought right, right, you’re the messenger. And he said, ‘You know how it was.’”Ms. Nightingale’s survivors include a son, Alex, and a daughter, Lucy, whose name was inspired partly by the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” Her marriages to Gordon Thomas, a writer, and Binky Baker, an actor, ended in divorce.Throughout her career, Ms. Nightingale championed new music — from progressive rock to acid house to grime.She described her visceral connection to new music when she was interviewed in 2020 on the popular BBC Radio 4 program “Desert Island Discs.”“It’s a thrill, it’s absolutely so exciting,” she said. “I actually get a physical sensation. I get shivers up and down my legs when I hear something that becomes very successful.” More

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      Sleater-Kinney’s 10 (or Actually 11) Best Songs

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      As the band’s 11th album arrives, listen back through the strongest moments in its catalog.From left: Janet Weiss (formerly of Sleater-Kinney), Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,I first heard the band Sleater-Kinney when I was a teenager, and it’s not an exaggeration to say it changed my life. The early 2000s were a particularly macho time in rock music — all wounded emo boys and nü-metal aggressors — and even in the late ’90s it was difficult to find female musicians lauded for how well they played their instruments rather than the way they looked. Then I happened upon a live recording of Sleater-Kinney playing its 1997 song “Words and Guitar,” and it blew my hair back like I’d entered a wind tunnel.The band sounded huge — loud and furious and virtuosic in its precision. The drummer, Janet Weiss, played harder than pretty much anyone I’d ever seen, of any gender, and she sometimes wore pigtails. Clearly, that meant I could do anything. Clearly, this was the best band in the universe.I still believe that Sleater-Kinney’s two-decade, eight-album stretch from 1995 to 2015 ranks among the strongest runs ever by an American band. But its last three albums, released since Weiss left the group, have largely left me cold. That was an inconvenient truth I had to confront this week when I reviewed Sleater-Kinney’s latest release, “Little Rope.”The album is a dark, brooding meditation on grief — the guitarist and singer Carrie Brownstein lost her mother and stepfather while she was writing these songs — and it does have fleeting moments of that old magic. But I’d be lying, or blindly stanning, if I said I rank this new album with the band’s best work. Something difficult about being a music fan and a critic is the fact that our longtime faves still have the potential to disappoint us.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?  More