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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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      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

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      in Theater

      Reviving ‘The Wiz’ Through ‘the Blackest of Black Lenses’

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      Schele Williams first saw “The Wiz” when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most “beautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.”Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of “The Wiz,” and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the show’s soaring finale, “Home,” as one of her audition songs.Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (“Aida”) and an associate director (“Motown”), she is directing the first Broadway revival of “The Wiz” in almost 40 years. It’s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what “The Wiz” has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture. The show blends Afrofuturism with classic Americana to enact a sort of creative reparation, reframing an allegory about perseverance and self-determination to feature Black characters who, in the ’70s, had rarely appeared in popular children’s stories.The 1978 Motown film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, was a critical and box-office flop. But the movie has been a trippy favorite of family living rooms for multiple generations, and the musical has remained a staple on local stages around the country.“The weight of that is not lost on me,” said Williams.The new production of “The Wiz,” beginning previews on March 29 at the Marquis Theater, arrives in New York after a 13-city national tour that began in September. The creative team said its goal is to celebrate both the property’s legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.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 Ultimate Hurray for the Riff Raff Primer

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      Listen to Alynda Segarra’s catalog as their latest album, “The Past Is Still Alive,” arrives.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last week, I published a profile of the 36-year-old singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, who makes spirited and defiant music under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff.* Their ninth LP, “The Past Is Still Alive,” comes out today, and though 2024 is still young, it’s an early contender for my favorite album of the year.Yes, I did say ninth album, which means that Segarra has quite the back catalog. Today’s playlist can serve either as an introduction to Hurray for the Riff Raff or, if you’re already familiar with them, a mix that places their new songs in rich conversation with what’s come before.Segarra grew up in the Bronx and left home just after turning 17, eventually ending up busking in a street band in New Orleans and riding freight trains during the hottest Louisiana months. Playing in communal spaces and collaborating with other musicians, they developed a repertoire of Appalachian folk, Delta blues and classic country, with the requisite Tom Waits song thrown in.By 2014, on the breakout album “Small Town Heroes,” Segarra had found their own unique voice as a songwriter who was able to adapt traditional forms to speak to present concerns. This playlist’s leadoff track, “The Body Electric,” is a perfect example: Sparsely arranged and sung with conviction, it is a kind of revisionist murder ballad that questions that genre’s history of violence against marginalized people. “He shot her down, he put her body in the river,” Segarra sings of the doomed Delia Green, before offering a line that would come to define the political motivation of subsequent HFRR albums: “He covered her up, but I went to get her.”Over the past decade, Segarra has released a consistently strong run of albums that update traditional folk music to consider modern scourges like gentrification (on the epic 2017 album “The Navigator”) and climate change (on the elegiac 2022 release “Life on Earth”).But “The Past Is Still Alive” is something else: a memoir, a travelogue, a loose campfire singalong. These songs have the sort of direct, plain-spoken confidence that comes with age. On “The Navigator,” Segarra created a protagonist named Navina and built a whole alternate universe in order to tell a story that had parallels to their own. Here, Segarra is narrating their own experiences, etching their own story into the American songbook, and asserting that they belong there.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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      SZA’s ‘Saturn,’ and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Rhiannon Giddens, Norah Jones, Les Amazones d’Afrique 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 sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.SZA, ‘Saturn’The song SZA introduced in a commercial during the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and released to streaming services in multiple versions; one, the sped-up version, brings out its clear pop structure. But the real-time version is better. The song is about a longing for the better place that her karma has earned: “Stuck in this paradigm/Don’t believe in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer around her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal lines argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, looking beyond Earth and insisting, “There’s got to be more.” JON PARELESLes Amazones d’Afrique, ‘Musow Danse’“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title track of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to dance floors. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and traditional drumming; it features Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the chorus, “Rise up African woman!” PARELESA.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’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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      in Movies

      ‘Kiss the Future’ Review: Seeing U2 in Post-Siege Sarajevo

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      Nenad Cicin-Sain’s smoothly calibrated documentary is part timeline of the concert’s development and part testament to the city’s defiance during the Bosnian War.On Sept. 23, 1997, the rock band U2 performed to thousands of fans in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the year after the 1,425-day siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces ended.“Kiss the Future,” Nenad Cicin-Sain’s smoothly calibrated documentary, is partly a timeline of how this concert came to be and partly a sketch of life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. This is history told through emotions as much as through well-documented events, conveying both the resilience of Sarajevans and the power of pop music (without falling into too much celebrity self-regard).People who lived through that time, especially cultural figures, recount how unthinkable the war and siege felt to their diverse, vibrant city. Snipers meant death was always near; a Miss Sarajevo pageant and an underground music scene helped express the city’s defiance.In the early 1990s, U2’s “Zoo TV Tour” concerts featured Sarajevans via satellite, beamed onto giant screens. (Bill S. Carter, who is credited with the film’s screenplay, figures prominently here first as an aid worker, and then as a U2 whisperer.) These guest appearances began to feel like a stunt — but not so for U2’s 1997 Sarajevo show, which Bono recalls as uplifting.That concert comes across as a true catch-in-the-throat moment of symbolic celebration, opening with a Muslim choir and a local punk band. In a way, it’s U2 playing the emotional role of its classics, where Bono’s yearning voice and an echoing guitar can sound as though they’re reaching out to us across troubled waters.Kiss the FutureNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jennifer Lopez and ‘This Is Me … Now’: Is She for Real?

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      “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a movie built on her latest album, is a showcase for the exhausting, never-ending, hazardous work of being Jennifer Lopez.Nobody who winds up at a “what’s the strangest moment in this new J. Lo thingy” contest should worry. There are no wrong answers.The parts in which Fat Joe plays Dr. Melfi to Jennifer Lopez’s Tony Soprano bewilder as intensely as the too-many scenes in which Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Kim Petras and Neil deGrasse Tyson (to pick merely six of a dozen names) bickeringly represent the astrological signs. None of these people appears to have been on the set at the same time. The only performers persuasively sharing the screen are Jenifer Lewis and Jenifer Lewis, and that’s only because she’s doing Gemini.A number about a quickie wedding is called “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but the groom has already hand-delivered Lopez’s invitation. It’s “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” but first with a stop at what could be Westeros or Themyscira or “The Cell.” Least forgettable is the sight of our star, in a tank top and up to her neck in elbow warmers, riding a headache ball to squelch a power-plant disaster.Lopez has titled these 53 minutes (and an additional 10-minute-plus credits sequence) “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.” She’s released it, on Amazon, alongside an album of new songs, a few of which provide grist for the visual component. The album is a so-so buffet of sounds that get called contemporary or urban: music that could have been produced at any point in the last 25 years, which isn’t the same as calling it timeless. Lopez has been never on any sort of cutting edge. She’s often where music just was; and that can leave her stranded the way she is here.For “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” she gives “just was” both frenetic cinematic accompaniment and her physical all. In addition cowriting, Lopez goes out on a limb and takes the role of what can rightly be called “Me,” a husband-hunter jailed in such metaphorical music-video scenarios as “glass house” and “love factory.” In that second one, she and two dozen coveralled co-workers bang out some electrocuted, hydraulic choreography while the operation’s giant, once-malfunctioning heart sputters back to life and spews radioactive positivity. These are the only vaguely satisfying numbers. If the wishy-washy, parable-making and haywire everything else won’t cohere into true beauty or credible horror, then camp it is. Ladies and gentlemen: Jennifer Lopez and her Oppenheimer Dancers!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