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      Vanessa Williams Releases ‘Legs’ Music Video Featuring Edgy Ensembles

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      Vanessa Williams’s many ensembles in a music video for her new song, “Legs (Keep Dancing),” evoke her knack for portraying a diva with style.It might not come as a surprise that Vanessa Williams, in the music video for her new single, “Legs (Keep Dancing),” can be seen showing off her legs.Some may remember her showing off a lot more in a 1984 issue of Penthouse, that, after being published, led Ms. Williams to become the first Miss America forced to give up her crown, a decision that the pageant’s leaders have since apologized for.Her legs in the “Legs” music video, unlike in the Penthouse photos, are for the most part clothed. Moschino shorts and fishnets, a spangly gold bodysuit and a pink feathered outfit are among the many items Ms. Williams, 61, wears while moving — mostly dancing — between locations that include a white-walled studio, a dimly lit limousine and a nightclub.For certain viewers, Ms. Williams’s colorful wardrobe in the video might evoke other aspects of her career as an actress and singer, say, her past role as fashion editor Wilhelmina Slater in the TV show “Ugly Betty,” or her upcoming role as Miranda Priestly, the Anna-Wintour-inspired fashion editor, in the musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” arriving in London’s West End later this year.Ms. Williams, speaking on a phone call on Tuesday after flying from Japan to New York, said that certain attire worn in the “Legs” video had connections to some of her past roles. For instance: A silky chartreuse corset and matching cargo pants by Adrienne Landau, a label she has worn since her days on “Ugly Betty.”Another ensemble of sheer black top and zipper-covered red pants came from Trash and Vaudeville, the punk emporium in Manhattan’s East Village.An ensemble of sheer black top and red zipper-covered pants came from the store Trash and Vaudeville in New York.WMGA spangly gold bodysuit worn beneath a sparkly fringed belt brought to mind Ms. Williams’s reputation as a diva who embraces fashion.WMGMs. Williams, who developed her wardrobe for the video with the stylist Alison Hernon, said the clothes they chose were pieces she feels comfortable in and “that feel comfortable on my body.”She added that her outfits in the video for “Legs,” her first non-holiday-related single in 15 years, were meant to not only highlight the song’s titular anatomy, but also what she described as its underlying message: That her decades-long career is ongoing and ever-expanding.“I’m still here, still standing, still kicking,” Ms. Williams sings on the dance-pop single. “In fact, I’m the best I’ve ever been.”“I’ve got a lot of stuff going on,” Ms. Williams said on the phone. Her to-do list includes plans to release a full-length album on a newly announced record label. She is also a producer of a new musical about the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, which is coming to Broadway around the same she starts performances of “The Devil Wears Prada” in London.Ms. Williams has followed a career path blazed by Black performers like Diana Ross and Diahann Carroll, both of whom also served as inspiration for “Legs” and its music video, which opens with Ms. Williams dropping a cream-colored Michael Kors coat and a Worth & Worth hat — attire nodding to clothes Ms. Ross wore in the 1975 film “Mahogany,” Ms. Hernon said.A line in the song’s chorus, “They say the legs are the last to go,” echoes the title of Ms. Carroll’s memoir, “The Legs Are the Last to Go,” released in 2008. Its cover featured a leggy portrait of Ms. Carroll, who died in 2019.Ms. Williams, who starred in the film “The Courage to Love” alongside Ms. Carroll, said that the title and cover of her memoir reflect how, “with age, comes wisdom.”“She’s realizing and accepting her body shape and all that comes with it,” Ms. Williams said. “And that’s what I think is reflected in what I wanted to say with this phase of my life and also in the music.” More

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      Duane Eddy, Whose Twang Changed Rock ’n’ Roll, Dies at 86

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      A self-taught electric guitar virtuoso, he influenced a generation of musicians. One of them, John Fogerty, called him rock’s first guitar god.Duane Eddy, who broke new ground in pop music in the 1950s with a reverberant, staccato style of guitar playing that became known as twang, died on Tuesday in Franklin, Tenn. He was 86. The cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of cancer, said his wife, Deed (Abbate) Eddy.Mr. Eddy had tremendous success as a strictly instrumental recording artist in the late 1950s and ’60s, selling millions of records worldwide with growling, echo-laden hits like “Rebel Rouser” and “Forty Miles of Bad Road.” In the process, he played a major role in establishing electric guitar as the predominant musical instrument in rock ’n’ roll.Mr. Eddy influenced a multitude of rock guitarists, including George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Springsteen, whose plunging guitar lines on “Born to Run” pay homage to Mr. Eddy’s muscular fretwork.“Duane Eddy was the front guy, the first rock and roll guitar god,” John Fogerty, the founding lead singer and guitarist of Creedence Clearwater Revival, is quoted as saying on the Rhino Records website.Mr. Eddy, who was self-taught, devised his rhythmic melodicism by playing the lead lines on his recordings on his guitar’s bass strings and by liberally using the vibrato bar. He never learned to read or score music, but he had a strong ear for pop idioms, including country, jazz, and rhythm and blues.Mr. Eddy in a publicity photo from 1958, the year his rollicking “Cannonball” charted in both the United States and Britain.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHe also had a knack for studio experimentation; at one point he brought a 2,000-gallon water tank to a session and placed a speaker inside to simulate the effects of an echo chamber.“I like exploring different textures on tracks in the studio, and different arrangement ideas,” Mr. Eddy said in a 2013 interview with Guitar Player magazine, which had honored him in 2004 with its Legend Award.“For me,” Mr. Eddy went on, “it’s not just playing the instrument, it’s also making the record. I guess a better way of explaining it is that I don’t write or arrange songs as such. Instead, I think of it as writing or arranging records. My sound is the common denominator that pulls all the threads and knits them together.”Easily recognizable, Mr. Eddy’s signature approach to the guitar accounted for 15 Top 40 pop hits from 1958 to 1963. “Because They’re Young,” a string-sweetened record, appeared on the soundtrack of the 1960 movie of the same name that starred Dick Clark and Tuesday Weld. More characteristic of Mr. Eddy’s gritty playing was “Cannonball,” a rollicking instrumental that reached the pop Top 20 in the U.S. and the Top 10 in Britain in 1958, and “(Dance With the) Guitar Man,” a 1962 hit that featured a female vocal group on the chorus. “The Ballad of Paladin,” a loping instrumental, was used as the theme for the CBS television series “Have Gun — Will Travel.”Most of Mr. Eddy’s albums from the late 1950s and early ’60s incorporated a variation on the word “twang” in their titles. This one, released in 1960, was co-produced by his frequent collaborator Lee Hazlewood.Jamie RecordsMost of Mr. Eddy’s early recordings were made with the producer and songwriter Lee Hazlewood and released on the Philadelphia-based label Jamie Records. The Rebels, his backing band, boasted several members of the celebrated West Coast studio collective known as the Wrecking Crew including the guitarist Al Casey, the saxophonists Jim Horn and Plas Johnson, and the keyboard and bass player Larry Knechtel.Most of Mr. Eddy’s albums from the late 1950s and early ’60s incorporated a version of the word “twang” in their titles.Mr. Eddy was born on April 26, 1938, in Corning, N.Y., a small town in the south central part of the state, and started playing the guitar at the age of 5. His father, Lloyd, drove a bread truck and later managed a Safeway grocery store, and his mother, Alberta Evelyn (Granger) Eddy, managed the home. The family moved to Tucson, Ariz., when Duane was 13, and then to Phoenix, where he met Mr. Hazlewood and they began their musical partnership.He acquired his first custom-made Chet Atkins-model Gretsch guitar when he was 16. He made his first recordings — as half of the duo Jimmy and Duane, with the pianist Jimmy Delbridge (who later recorded under the name Jimmy Dell) — the next year.Mr. Eddy on “American Bandstand” in 1958. A year earlier, he had begun touring with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesIn 1957, Mr. Eddy began touring as a guitarist with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, and he began releasing recordings under his own name shortly afterward.Mr. Eddy and Mr. Hazlewood parted ways over a contract dispute in late 1960, though they later reunited to work on projects. Mr. Eddy signed with RCA shortly after.The hit singles had stopped coming by the mid-1960s, but Mr. Eddy continued to release instrumental albums, including “Duane Does Dylan,” a collection of covers of songs written by Bob Dylan.The rockabilly revival of the next decade gave rise to renewed interested in Mr. Eddy’s work. The 1970s also saw Mr. Eddy producing albums by Phil Everly and Waylon Jennings, whose widow, Jessi Colter, was married to Mr. Eddy from 1962 to 1968.Mr. Eddy’s music was introduced to yet another generation of fans in the 1980s, when the British synth-pop group Art of Noise released an avant-disco reworking of his 1960 hit version of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn,” with Mr. Eddy on lead guitar. It won a Grammy Award for best rock instrumental performance in 1987.Mr. Eddy plays guitar at the 2009 Country Music Hall of Fame Medallion Ceremony in Nashville. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.Ed Rode/Getty ImagesMr. Eddy was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, the same year that his original hit recording of “Rebel Rouser” appeared in the movie “Forrest Gump.” “The Trembler,” a track he wrote with Ravi Shankar, was featured in Oliver Stone’s 1994 film, “Natural Born Killers.” He was also inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2008.In addition to his wife, Mr. Eddy is survived by three children, Linda Jones and Chris Eddy, from his first marriage, to Carol Puckett, and Jennifer Eddy Davis, from his marriage to Ms. Colter; a sister, Elaine Scarborough; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.Unlike many instrumentalists, Mr. Eddy said, he never seriously considered expanding his musical résumé to include vocals.Elaborating on the subject to Guitar Player in 2013, he recalled an interview with Conan O’Brien at which he was asked, “Duane, you’ve been in this business for many years now; what do you consider your greatest contribution to music?” He answered, “Not singing.”“I never felt that I had a good voice for singing,” he went on. “When I was young, this frustrated me a lot, so I took it out on the guitar.” More

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      A Brief Tour of Pop Music’s Caffeine Addiction

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      Hear songs by Sabrina Carpenter, Squeeze, SZA and more.Sabrina Carpenter’s perky bop “Espresso” is … a bit addictive. (We’re sorry.)Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,A few weeks ago in our Friday feature the Playlist, I recommended a bubbly new single by the pop artist Sabrina Carpenter and made a bold prediction: “Get ready to hear this one everywhere.” Even more quickly than I imagined, the prophecy has come true. Last week, “Espresso” debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Carpenter’s highest charting hit yet. More important, it has taken over the nation’s psyche. You can hardly go anywhere these days without hearing someone quoting the song’s infectious hook “That’s that me espresso” or wondering aloud, “what is a ‘me espresso?’”That’s a profound philosophical question for another day. Today, we are simply honoring the absurdist joy of “Espresso” with a playlist of songs about caffeinated beverages.Coffee has been a consistently evocative theme throughout pop musical history, so this mix travels from 1940 right up to the present moment. That trusty beverage is often used to describe a sophisticated kind of romance (as it does on Otis Redding’s swooning ballad “Cigarettes and Coffee”) or perhaps the idle hours waiting around for said romance to occur (see Peggy Lee’s sultry take on the 1948 standard “Black Coffee”). Chappell Roan tries to use it as a shield against romance on a track from her 2023 album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” reasoning with a former flame, “I’ll meet you for coffee, ’cause if we have wine/You’ll say that you want me, I know that’s a lie.”In “Espresso,” Carpenter uses the caffeine metaphor to suggest how restless she makes a guy she has wrapped around her finger: “Say you can’t sleep? Baby, I know.” Also, crucially, she understands that “espresso” rhymes with “I guess so.” That’s poetry.It’s time for the percolator,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift Debuts at No. 1 on Billboard 200 With ‘Tortured Poets Department’

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      Only the Beatles have more No. 1 LPs now: The pop superstar reigns atop the Billboard 200 for the 14th time with the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales.There was never any doubt that Taylor Swift’s latest release, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was going to be big. The question was just how big.And the answer is, gigantic.“The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift’s 11th studio album, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with historic numbers, including huge results in streaming and vinyl sales. It is Swift’s 14th chart-topping title, tying her with Jay-Z for the second-most No. 1 albums by any act in the 68-year history of Billboard’s flagship album chart; only the Beatles, with 19, have more.In its first week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales in the United States, according to Luminate, which tracks the data behind Billboard’s charts. That is the biggest overall first-week take for any album since Adele’s “25” in 2015, which opened with nearly 3.5 million, driven by in-store CD sales.The “equivalent” figure is a composite, based on a formula used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways listeners now buy and consume music. And in each way, “Tortured Poets” was a smash.It sold 1.9 million copies in traditional album sales, including 859,000 for vinyl alone, which blew away Swift’s own previous record of 693,000 LPs, set just six months ago. Advance sales through Swift’s website — begun the day Swift announced the album, at the Grammy Awards — were key. She offered an array of tinted vinyl variants and CDs, some in “deluxe” versions advertised with autographs or on-brand trinkets like engraved bookmarks that went for as much as $50 apiece. According to Billboard, 1.4 million copies of the album were sold on its first day, many preordered over the last two months.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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      Voice of Baceprot Wins Fans With Songs of Girl Power

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      Voice of Baceprot has electrified audiences and built a large following in Indonesia. Now the group is taking its music to the West.The drummer crashed her cymbals. The bass player clawed at her guitar. The crowd raised index and pinkie fingers in approval. The lead singer and guitarist stepped up to the mic and screamed: “Our body is not public property!” And dozens of fans threw themselves into a frenzy for the hijab-wearing heavy metal trio.“We have no place for the sexist mind,” the lead singer, Firda Kurnia, shrieked into the mic, singing the chorus of one of the band’s hit songs, “(Not) Public Property,” during a December performance in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.Nearly a decade after first emerging, Voice of Baceprot (pronounced bachey-PROT, meaning “noise” in Sundanese, one of the main languages spoken in Indonesia) has earned a large domestic following with songs that focus on progressive themes like female empowerment, pacifism and environmental preservation.Now it is also winning fans overseas. It’s been praised by the likes of Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. In the past year, the band — whose lyrics mix English, Indonesian and Sundanese — has played in the United States, France and the Netherlands.At the Jakarta gig, Ms. Firda, 23, who goes by Marsya, told the crowd that the band was “a little sad and angry to hear that someone here was a victim of catcalling.”“Anyone who does something like that, catcall or touch other people’s bodies without consent, those are the worst forms of crime,” she said. “Therefore, we can’t wait to curse this person through the following song.” And then the band played “PMS,” whose chorus is in Indonesian:“Although I am not as virgin as Virgin Mary/I am not your rotten brain servant/Although I am not as virgin as Virgin Mary/I am free, completely free.” More

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      Britney Spears and Her Father Settle Legal Dispute Over Conservatorship

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      Terms were not disclosed. The parties had been arguing over the payment of legal fees and James P. Spears’s financial oversight as his daughter’s conservator.More than two years after a judge ended the conservatorship that had given James P. Spears control of his pop star daughter’s life, Britney Spears and her father have settled their outstanding legal dispute over the payment of his legal fees and his management of her finances.The terms of the settlement were not disclosed in court filings made by both parties in Los Angeles Superior Court on Thursday. But the two sides had been at odds over the size of Mr. Spears’s legal fees and questions about his oversight of her money as conservator.Ms. Spears’s 13-year-long conservatorship, which began in 2008 after a series of public breakdowns, was terminated in 2021. Her father, who served as one of her conservators for its duration, had been seeking court approval for more than $2 million in fees to multiple law firms he had hired in that capacity. He had also sought payment of his current lawyer’s ongoing legal bill.Ms. Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, had objected to the fees.Mr. Rosengart argued that, in particular, his client should not have to pay her father’s current legal bills, asserting in court papers that Mr. Spears had paid himself $6 million, improperly surveilled his daughter and engaged in financial misconduct during his tenure.Mr. Spears has denied any wrongdoing. He held control over both Ms. Spears’s financial and personal affairs until September 2019, when he resigned as her personal conservator citing health issues, and was replaced by Jodi Montgomery, a professional in the field. A lawyer, Andrew M. Wallet, served as a co-conservator of her estate until he resigned in 2019.Alex M. Weingarten, a lawyer for Mr. Spears, said he could not discuss the terms of the settlement because they are confidential but he agreed that the parties had resolved all outstanding issues. One of the filings stated that his client “is fully and finally discharged as Former Conservator of the Estate.”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: The ‘Tortured’ Mailbag

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music“The Tortured Poets Department,” the new album from Taylor Swift, will have the biggest opening week of any album this year. Critical reaction to the release has been mixed, but fan interest has remained extremely high. And questions about Swift’s music and motivations abound.On this week’s Popcast, a listener mailbag episode full of questions prompted by Swift’s latest turns, includingHow does “TTPD” mark the return to an earlier, far more personal version of Swift’s music?What are the pros and cons of turning “TTPD” into a sudden double album?To what degree is Swift in dialogue with the leading indie-rock songwriters of the day?How does Swift engage with criticism, and with fans who lash out on her behalf?Could it be, despite the decidedly mixed response, that this album is Swift’s best?Will Swift ever voluntarily step away from the spotlight?Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorTom Breihan, senior editor at StereogumConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      St. Vincent’s 10 (or, Actually 11) Essential Songs

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      Sample her seven daring and eclectic albums as her latest, “All Born Screaming,” arrives.OK McCausland for The New York TimesDear listeners,One afternoon in late February, my editor Caryn asked if I might be interested in profiling St. Vincent ahead of her new album “All Born Screaming.” I said that I probably wasn’t — though I have long been a fan, my early spring schedule was quite full and the reporting would require a short-notice trip to Los Angeles — but that I would give the album a spin on the way home from work, just to see if it would change my mind. By the fourth track, I was searching flights to L.A.I’m so glad I took that assignment. Annie Clark (St. Vincent’s real name) was generous with her time and her explanations of her creative process, and I came away with a new appreciation of her work ethic. An accomplished songwriter, guitarist and producer, Clark is palpably fascinated by sound and how it is created, and it was revealing to see the way her eyes lit up when she was in the studio, surrounded by various mics and vintage consoles. At one point, when we were discussing some aspect of engineering, she stopped herself, remembering that this was an interview, and said, “That stuff’s kind of boring to a reader.” But I encouraged her to go on, because I could tell it was incredibly interesting to her, and I hoped that it would be illuminating for listeners to learn exactly what made Clark geek out. Even if those things are mic shootouts, modular synthesizers and the mechanics of signal flow.We also discussed the long, improbable arc of her career, during which she’s gone from a coy indie darling to a mainstream-adjacent provocateur. “I’m curious, so I’ll say yes to things that are like, ‘I don’t know if I can do that,’ or, ‘I don’t know what this kind of music is like, let me find out,’” Clark told me. “So all those things have led me to crazy places that I’ve never expected.”Today’s playlist is a map of some of those unexpected places: a collection of my 11 favorite St. Vincent songs, spread across her seven daring and eclectic albums, and featuring a few quotes from my interviews with Clark that did not make it into the profile. You’ll find tracks from her incomparable 2011 release “Strange Mercy,” her boldly slick 2017 LP “Masseduction” and more. I almost settled for 10 songs, but in classic Amplifier fashion, I added one more at the last minute. To make me choose between “Prince Johnny” and “Happy Birthday, Johnny” would have been cru-u-uellll.Seeing double beats not seeing one of you,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More