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      Devo’s Future Came True

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      Half a century after Devo began singing about cultural De-Evolution, the visionary new wave band would have preferred to be wrong.Devo isn’t overjoyed about being prescient. The band got started half a century ago as a satirical art statement. But by now, much of what Devo mocked has become inescapable. Gerald Casale, who founded Devo with Mark Mothersbaugh, said, “If somebody would have told you 50 years ago where we would be at as a culture now, you probably wouldn’t have believed it. Neither would I. But here we are.”Devo’s lone hit, “Whip It” in 1980, only reached No. 14 in the United States. But the influence of Devo’s buzzy, blippy synthesizer tones, its robotic moves and its re-contextualized retro graphics has grown ubiquitous, from commercials to cartoons and perhaps even into K-pop, where synthesizers, uniforms and tightly synced dance routines reign. This year, with a continuing world tour and a new, 50-song boxed set, “50 Years of De-Evolution” — a knowing assortment of hits and obscurities — Devo is savoring and reasserting its legacy.“I think they’re highly underrated in terms of the zeitgeist,” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said in a phone interview. “Devo challenged the idea of what a rock band could be. It felt like rock was mutating. It made me realize, ‘Oh, there aren’t any rules. You know, you can do anything.’”Devo’s ideas grew out of anger, political disillusionment, visual instincts, sonic ambitions, skepticism about rock and an absurdist sense of humor. Its abiding streak of outsider independence was forged in Akron, Ohio, where the band spent its formative years before finding a national audience on the early punk circuit. “It worked to our advantage to be in a cultural wasteland for years,” Mothersbaugh, 73, said from his Los Angeles studio, Mutato Muzika.“It was mostly, you know, a smartass college guy being clever,” Casale said of the band’s “de-evolution” conceit. What actually occurred in American culture, he said, “is beyond my worst dystopian nightmare.”-Devo envisioned American culture evolving in the wrong directions, or devolving: dumbing down, losing individuality, succumbing to corporate imperatives and treating people as machines while anesthetizing itself with consumption. Those trends, to put it mildly, have not reversed.“We were noticing an exponential increase in a certain kind of dysfunction going on. And we labeled it,” said Casale, who is 75. He was also in Los Angeles, sitting in front of a favorite interview backdrop: a sliced-up world map with the word “DE-EVOLUTION” emblazoned across it. “But it was mostly, you know, a smartass college guy being clever. I didn’t really think that we’d go where we went, because de-evolution is real. And this is beyond my worst dystopian nightmare.”Devo anticipated the ascent of music videos in the 1980s, conceiving its early songs as inseparable from surreal short films. (The band expected video Laserdiscs to replace albums; it didn’t happen. The “visual album” would arrive much later.) By the early 1980s, Devo’s concerts had the band interacting with video footage, despite the era’s primitive technology. And decades before social media or influencers, Devo foresaw that artists and other public figures would end up marketing themselves as brands.Yet Devo’s founders also went on to participate in the mainstream consumer culture they distrusted. “We understood that dichotomy and that duplicity from the beginning,” Casale said. “We were playing with it. You know, having your cake and eating it, too. Making fun of corporations and being one. You have to suck it up and be an adult about it.”Since the 1980s, in the increasingly long gaps between Devo’s albums and tours, both Casale and Mothersbaugh have had extensive careers in film and advertising. Casale has directed music videos for acts including the Cars, Soundgarden and Foo Fighters, and Mothersbaugh has composed music for more than 150 films, television shows and video games, among them “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Lego Movie” and “Cocaine Bear.” The closing song on “50 Years of De-Evolution,” “Watch Us Work It,” was initially commissioned for a Dell computer ad.Devo’s founders studied visual arts at Kent State University, where on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot dead four antiwar protesters. The school shut down the next day, and in the unexpected hiatus, Casale, Mothersbaugh and some friends began conceptualizing what would become Devo.“We learned from Kent State that rebellion is obsolete,” Mothersbaugh said. “If the government doesn’t agree with you, and you become too big of a pain in the butt for them, they just push you back down and shoot.“And I was thinking, well, who does change things in this world?” he continued. “Look at TV. It’s Madison Avenue. It’s commercials. It’s subversion. You get people to eat sugar that’s not good for them. You get them to buy cars that are stupid and not well-designed. And they’re happy when they do it. And we thought, what if you use those techniques for something else? What if you use those techniques to talk about de-evolution?”Casale was in a blues band; Mothersbaugh was in a prog-rock band. Neither was satisfied with what rock had become by the early 1970s. Arena-rock featured preening, strutting, self-indulgent stars. Early punk was developing its own orthodoxy. “You know, ‘You have to use these three chords and dress like this,’ and you had to a have certain kind of lyric that was anti-intellectual rage,” Casale said. “Devo was angry, but our anger was not misplaced, and it was certainly articulated, and it was not anti-intellectual. We were like punk scientists.”Devo coalesced as a band with Casale’s and Mothersbaugh’s brothers, both named Bob, on guitars, and the crisp, unswerving drummer Alan Myers. The band members’ backgrounds show up on early recordings included on the “50 Years” set, like the 1974 “I’m a Potato”; it’s a blues shuffle, but Casale was already singing about “De-evolution/Self execution/No solution.”Mothersbaugh was determined to change rock’s sonic vocabulary, and he got his hands on an early Mini-Moog synthesizer. “One of the Futurists had said that the contemporary orchestra does not have the instruments that are capable of creating the sound of an industrial society,” he said. “I wanted to know what the sounds were for 1972, 1973. I was thinking, ‘We’re watching the Vietnam War on television every night.’ And so I’m thinking V-2 rockets, mortar blasts, ray guns. And I felt like TV commercials were using synthesizers more successfully than bands. I was looking to create a new soundscape for the world.”Devo’s music quickly grew more dissonant and angular. Reznor described Devo’s first albums as “a rock band with electronics that sound like they’re from the TV repair shop thrown in,” he said. “That informed me a lot about what the role of a synthesizer and electronics could be.”Gerald Casale, left, and Mark Mothersbaugh performing at Lollapalooza in 1996. “Devo challenged the idea of what a rock band could be,” said Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesThe band’s early shows in Akron were largely greeted with indifference or hostility, a reception that only solidified the band’s sense of purpose and idiosyncratic showmanship. They performed in uniforms bearing corporate-style logos; they honed stiff-limbed dance routines. They sometimes wore masks, plastic hairpieces or their distinctive “energy domes”: tiered red plastic hats inspired by an Art Deco-era light fixture.By the time Devo started national and international touring, they were as tightly rehearsed as they were eccentric, a stark contrast to the anarchic punk bands playing the same clubs. Their homemade films and videos introduced recurring characters like the adult-sized, falsetto-voiced infant Booji Boy and the crass Big Entertainment executive Rod Rooter, whose dialogue, Casale said, was drawn entirely from actual meetings. On the coasts and abroad, Devo found a fan base among artists and musicians; Brian Eno produced Devo’s 1978 debut album, “Q: Are We Not Men? A:We are Devo!”“They found different ways of getting under people’s skin,” said Martyn Ware, a founding member of the English electropop bands Human League and Heaven 17; he first saw Devo in the late 1970s. “The artiness of it all, this idea of the interaction with film and presenting yourself as almost Dadaist, was something that just completely entranced us. It felt more like a Futurist manifesto than a rock band. And with de-evolution, there’s a little bit of Nostradamus there too.”Devo’s third album, “Freedom of Choice,” had Robert Margouleff, who had worked with Stevie Wonder, as associate producer. It brought out enough of a groove in the songs to yield a hit with “Whip It.” For Devo, that was a decidedly mixed blessing.Suddenly, its record company was paying attention. “When it finally was a hit, they were like, ‘Do another “Whip It”! Do another “Whip It”!,’” Casale recalled. “We couldn’t even imagine how to do that. We moved on. We were using different equipment, having different ideas, talking about different things, and we were incapable of making another ‘Whip It.’”Record-company pressures, self-consciousness and the temptations of new technology took a toll on Devo’s later albums. “Something went off the rails,” Casale said bluntly. “It got very intricate, very busy, with too many little sounds. So it started just sounding like ditties, trinkets and children’s music. Devo was always, like, humans playing like machines. Now suddenly it was machine music for real. So the interesting part of Devo — playing tightly like robots but really doing it — was buried.“Toys do run away with you,” he added. “We always cautioned about that, but there we were, including ourselves in the equation. We did say, ‘We’re all Devo.’ We didn’t exempt ourselves, and we proved it.”By the late 1980s, Devo’s principals were building their other careers, and after the 1990 album “Smooth Noodle Maps,” Devo didn’t make another studio album for 20 years. Casale was directing while amassing songs he’d eventually record as Jihad Jerry and the Evildoers. Mothersbaugh had taken on the prodigious job of scoring “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” composing for an entire show every week; it was the beginning of his prolific career writing soundtrack music. He’s had enough unused material from films to release full-length instrumental albums like the 2021 “Mutant Flora,” which began as additional music for “Thor: Ragnarok.”Devo in Copenhagen this year on its world tour. Is there hope for the future? “Even if it’s only greed, there has to be some human trait that’s going to avert total disaster,” Mothersbaugh said.Tom Little/ReutersMothersbaugh overcame ambivalence to start making commercials in the late 1980s. The first was for Hawaiian Punch, with dancing robots. “Yeah, I’m doing it — but I’m making a commercial for sugar,” he recalled thinking.A decade earlier, an audience member had accused Devo of placing subliminal messages — “submit and obey” — in its first film, “In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution.” There were none, but Mothersbaugh hadn’t forgotten the notion. He decided to add a subliminal message to the ad, intoning “Sugar is bad for you,” under a blast of drums. He went on to place other messages — “Question authority,” “Choose your mutations carefully” — in other ads. “I did about 30 commercials like that before I got caught,” he said.Devo also licensed its own songs to advertisers, sometimes with severe regrets afterward — a cringe-worthy Swiffer ad rewriting “Whip It” — and sometimes with a proud sense of subversion, like a beer ad using “Freedom of Choice,” a song that mocks the illusion of freedom.Through the decades, Devo has kept on touring, and its songs have continued to resonate with fans who can hear them as snarky predictions or present-day realities. Songs like “It’s a Beautiful World” can now describe the way glossy social media presentations spawn anxiety and depression.Yet Devo’s upbeat music and jokey visuals have always defied the songs’ more dire implications. “That’s the ironic thing about Devo,” Mothersbaugh said. “At the end of the day, we’ve always been hopelessly optimistic that even if it’s only greed, there has to be some human trait that’s going to avert total disaster. Because nobody wants total disaster, even though they do want to make a killing in the meantime. It’s like, you could trade a little bit of your killing for people staying around another hundred thousand years.”De-evolution doesn’t mean giving up hope. “I like the idea of the future,” Mothersbaugh said. “I like seeing what’s going to come. Sometimes you’re really disappointed. But sometimes something amazing happens that you really love.” More

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      This Is Not a Taylor Swift Profile

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      Section 301, In the second-to-highest tier of Levi’s Stadium, floats 105 feet above Santa Clara, Calif. It comprises 251 seats — a mere hamlet in the vast 64,000-seat general kingdom of the place, but it was our hamlet, and on the last Saturday in July, we took up each one of those seats and watched, our collective breath held, as Taylor Swift emerged from a bevy of billowing pastel parachutes and rose up on a platform to perform the 47th show of her Eras Tour. A few songs in, she announced, laughing, that her father told her that Santa Clara had named her its honorary mayor during her two-night stay there and that the entire town had been renamed Swiftie Clara. On the way in, we saw the Police Department cheerfully exchanging friendship bracelets with legions of Swifties. The microcosm of Section 301 offered this same sense of sorority. What a nice neighborhood we had moved into, my 15-year-old son, Ezra, and I. Within minutes of sitting down, we were already a community with a shared, ardent sense of purpose. Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The mood was solemn — spiritual, even. I have prayed at dawn at the Temple Mount. I have stood among quivering supplicants at the graves of biblical forefathers. I have walked in trembling silence as I entered farther and farther into the inner sanctums of the Vatican. This was like that, except for girls. The young women to Ezra’s left wore moody black “Reputation”-era dress and could not have been more than 16. They were speechless and breathless and did not move or sit down once the entire night because they were afraid they might miss something. Three rows back sat a line of tweens in pink sundresses, white cowgirl hats and sparkling cowgirl boots — Taylor Swift’s debut era for her self-titled album. To my right were two men wearing matching T-shirts that said: “IT’S ME, HI. I’M THE HUSBAND. IT’S ME.” Their wives, who were friends, chose (smartly) to sit together on one side. During songs they didn’t know, which were most of them, they talked to one another, using words like “reps” and “C.E.O.” and “acquisition.” But listen: Over my right shoulder, just above the HUSBANDs and their wives, stood a young man with a glitter heart around his eye, like the one Taylor wears on the pastel cover of the “Lover” album, accompanied by a young woman, I guess his girlfriend, who wore a sparkly purple dress, like the one Taylor wears on the cover of “Speak Now.” If our kingdom was also our high school and our hamlet our homeroom, they were our prom king and queen. On the stage below, Taylor made her way from her “Lover” era to her “Fearless” one, and suddenly she was singing “Love Story,” one of her many early songs in which a girl loves a boy but he doesn’t love her back, or he doesn’t know to love her back because of some other girl who has unjustly commandeered his love. Or, in the case of “Love Story,” she’s Juliet, and there’s so much drama with Romeo’s family, and we all know what’s going to happen if they can’t be together.But then we get to the bridge, and the story changes. In “Love Story,” just as Juliet is despairing and hopeless, Romeo drops to his knees and tells her he has talked to her father and asks her to marry him. And here, in 301, on our very own balcony, something crazy happens. Over my and Ezra’s right shoulders, just behind the HUSBANDs, THE PROM KING ASKS THE PROM QUEEN TO MARRY HIM! AND THE PROM QUEEN SAYS YES!!!Does Section 301 go wild! We take pictures and congratulate them. We ask to see the ring. We shake our heads with our mouths open because this night is sparkling and young love is amazing.“Did you see that?” one of the HUSBANDs asked. I told him I did.“What are you writing down?” he asked. I told him that I’m a writer for this magazine and that I was writing about Taylor Swift.“Huh,” he said. “I would think that they’d give The New York Times better seats.”“You and me both,” I answered. The truth is, I bought these seats on my own.“Are you talking to her?” he asked. I told him no. I told him I had made my requests but was turned down. My boss, too. Her publicist had politely told us that she was too busy to do an interview. And that’s probably true. Or maybe she has an exclusive somewhere else. Or — and this was what I’d been thinking lately — maybe we were in entirely new territory. She hasn’t done a traditional magazine profile since 2019. She announced this tour on “Good Morning America” and her very own social-media accounts. She released two pandemic albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” by dropping them into the world with a day’s notice. For “folklore,” she released a full-length film in which she expounds on each song; it was called “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions,” and it was directed and produced by Ms. Taylor Alison Swift and needed no intermediary to explain it to her audience.She has become one of a new breed of postmedia celebrities who have set new rules of engagement with both the media and the fans. Technology has risen to meet these new rules, and perhaps there really is nothing I can offer her, that we the media can offer her, that would help her sell more albums or become better known or more successful or more beloved than she already is. Witness this historic cultural event: this no-signs-of-stopping, local-economy-upending tour. Eras is its own news cycle, its own tabloid, its own Tumblr, its own news release and, as we would find out in a few weeks, its own movie set.And we in Section 301 were enthralled by her, even though we couldn’t actually see her from where we were sitting. All we could really see was a tiny figure in an angelic dress, running across the stage down below. Our only proof that she was actually in the stadium was that the people close to the stage seemed to believe that she was, and we chose to believe them. But it didn’t even matter that we couldn’t see her. Our devotion is maximal; her engagement is total. We were in a trance. “That’s crazy,” said the HUSBAND, who turned back to the other HUSBAND to discuss, I think, baseball.Now, below, the mayor of Swiftie Clara was sitting at a moss-covered piano for a song called “Champagne Problems.” It’s a song about a woman who turns down a man’s proposal. Some of us in Section 301 shared a knowing laugh-nod because we knew that our prom queen’s rejecting the king’s proposal had been a possible outcome of what we just saw, and we were all very happy that we didn’t have to sit in that particular awkwardness. I looked up over my shoulder at the prom queen again. Her attention was burrowed toward the stage, as she mouthed the words to all the songs in deep concentration. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThe HUSBAND was talking to me again. He was saying he’d heard that Taylor Swift stood to make a billion dollars by the time this tour was through, and was asking if I had, too, but I needed him to repeat the question. I was still thinking about our prom queen, in her purple dress, about the way your life could change in the middle of a song you’d been listening to for years. I was thinking about the notion of dividing a life into befores and afters — into eras; I was thinking about the way that it feels as if you’re always leaving things behind. Ezra and I had arrived hours before showtime, to a stadium that was already almost completely full. The sun was still bright when we went to take our spots on the merch line, which — how can I describe it? Have you ever seen old pictures of Ellis Island? I told Ezra to stay close.We thought we were beating the system by ascending to the third level, but the joke was on us. We saw two merch stands, advertising $70 hoodies and $35 T-shirts. We had been warned that the sheer numbers would create the kind of chaos that exhausts a concertgoer before the opening act. I’d read savage stories about fans’ fainting in line or wearing adult diapers. But our line was peaceful; what nobody talked about when they posted crowd photos on social media was how gentle the experience was, an atmospheric sage-burning in time for the season of this football stadium’s normal, violent uses. Around us, stranger approached stranger and held out a wrist full of beaded bracelets that named various Taylor Swift albums, which were here doing business as “eras,” to choose from; stranger took another era off her own wrist and traded it back, a wordless ritual that everyone understood. Stranger was no longer stranger but friend. They were dressed as circus ringleaders and fully rendered mirrorballs. They were swamp creatures and zombies. They wore bustled strapless petticoated gowns; they donned black velvet hooded capes. They were girls in the bleachers; they were enchanted to meet you.The organizing principle of the Eras Tour is that it is a celebration of Taylor Swift’s own eras — how, at 33, she has already cycled through so many periods of identity on her public journey from girl to woman. Her life story is one that you could read about in the reams of magazine profiles that have been written about her over the years, one that even the least Swift-engaged young women across at least two generations have learned by sheer internet use and osmosis: She grew up on a Christmas-tree farm in Wyomissing, Pa., where she would listen to Shania Twain and Faith Hill and LeAnn Rimes and watch VH1’s “Behind the Music” and record demo tapes to send to Nashville. At 12, she sang the national anthem at a 76ers game. Soon after, she called her friends to see if they wanted to go shopping with her, but they all said they were busy. So her mother took her to the mall instead, and there were her friends, hanging out together. Her mother turned her around and took her to a different mall, but you can imagine that Taylor Swift died a little that day, and what she was reborn as was someone for whom there was not enough love and approval in the whole world. She would write a song about the experience, and she would feel better. She would realize that this new person she had become was someone whose best work would come from her reactions to the world, her urgent metabolization of her pain into poetry.The Swifts moved to Nashville to help support Taylor’s career, and one night, at a talent showcase at the Bluebird Cafe, she caught the eye of a Universal executive named Scott Borchetta. In 2005, Borchetta started his own label, Big Machine, and signed her immediately. It soon became clear that her music could serve the audience segment that country music had long neglected — teenage girls.“Which era are you?” one of three young women behind us in line asked. Have I mentioned the glitter? It was everywhere, and these three were covered in it. They were 18 or 19, and the one who asked me was wearing a gold, fringey dress, which connotes the “Fearless” era. “You Belong With Me,” off Swift’s second album, won a Video Music Award for best female video. During her speech, Kanye West stormed the stage and announced that it was actually Beyoncé who had made the best video of the year, leaving Taylor standing there, frozen, stunned and confused for too long a period. You could see in the ensuing years, as she talked about it in the press, that she was slowly coming to understand what really happened on that stage, which was that she had been murdered again, right there in front of everyone she knew and respected.“Oh,” I said to the young woman who posed the question, looking down at my outfit. I was wearing a bootleg gray T-shirt with a design of Taylor’s face wearing sunglasses. The sunglasses reflected back the numbers 1989. “I guess I’m ‘1989’? That was the first album I liked, but ‘Reputation’ is my favorite.”Her friends were in different eras, too. One was wearing a variation on a fluffy purple dress that a lot of them were wearing — the “Speak Now” era — and the other was wearing a black fedora and black sequin hot pants and a T-shirt that said: “WHO’S TAYLOR SWIFT ANYWAY? EW,” from the “Red” era. Part of the Swiftian ethos is learning how to take something that seems like a diss and turn it into a last laugh.“The era isn’t the album you like,” the “Red” one said. “It’s the one you are.”“Like, it’s where you’re at these days, you know?” the “Speak Now” one said.I nodded. Made sense. Ezra had to go to the bathroom, but so many of the men’s rooms had been turned into women’s rooms for the event that we hadn’t seen one from the line so far. I sent him off.Taylor released “Speak Now” the year after the Kanye incident. They had become something like friends; they even had dinner sometimes. By then, she seemed to feel bad for him. The world had judged him harshly for his behavior. The literal president, Barack Obama, had called him a jackass. Taylor wrote a song that is almost certainly about Kanye, called “Innocent.” “Who you are is not what you did,” it goes. On a visit to her Nashville apartment, a journalist noticed a framed photo of the moment Kanye interrupted her on the V.M.A. stage, a twisted reminder of either the fact that you can triumph over your own repeated murder or the fact that at any moment of triumph someone will be there to kneecap you. Ezra returned from the bathroom. “Wow,” he said. “The men’s room was emp-ty.” We’d been in the line for what seemed like hours by then. He’d grown a little bit of beard while he was gone. “It was really nice, actually. Peaceful.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesBy the time “Red” came out in 2012, Taylor was still holding on to who she wanted to be: a hardworking, songwriting-obsessed, fan-obsessed country-singing juggernaut. But if this story were one of Taylor’s beloved “Behind the Music” episodes, an ominous voice would come in and say that here was where things started to fray. People were starting to say that she dated too much. They said she cared too much. They accused her of being insincere. Some of the songs on her new album, “1989,” were about old relationships, but a lot of them featured this cartoon version of herself that she was hearing about — the version that stays out too late and goes on too many dates (“Shake It Off”), or the one that has a long list of ex-lovers who will tell you she’s insane (“Blank Space”). She stopped dating, and in the place of male romantic partners she formed a supergroup of famous female friends — everyone from Lena Dunham to the model Karlie Kloss to Lorde to Selena Gomez — and on the tour for “1989,” she marched those friends of hers out onto the stage for everyone to see. Take that, mallrat bitches of Wyomissing!Her music had changed by then. Suddenly, her slow creep from country sped into pure pop, leaving country behind, wishing it well and taking only its tradition of sinuous storytelling with her. Her voice changed, too. Gone was the yodelly vocal flip of the country singer. By then, we had endured a long moment of female artists whose voices seemed outsize for the body of a regular human: melismatic, with 10 notes to a syllable of a word, or a gravelly voice, where a woman sounds as if she is digging down, grinding something out. Consider Taylor’s approach: a voice so pure and pretty that it makes you wonder why so many of her musical peers and predecessors work so hard. It’s not an otherworldly voice, but a specifically worldly one. She sings how you would sing if you were talking and became so overcome with emotion that your voice was lifted and carried by it. It’s how I would sing if I could. Now Ezra wanted to check out the concession stand. I gave him some money and sent him off, noting a subtle balding that had begun around his temples. Two women wearing stuffed snakes around their necks came up, and one handed me her phone and asked if I could take their picture.The snake is Taylor’s biggest and best version of the diss-to-last-laugh boomerang, the “WHO’S TAYLOR SWIFT ANYWAY? EW” writ impossibly large and deadly. After the “1989” tour, in 2015, after the showboating of the friends onstage, after moving to New York and starting a new life, things got weird. In 2016, her friend Kanye resurfaced with a lyric in a new song called “Famous” that went: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous.” He made an accompanying video that featured what looked like Taylor Swift naked in bed with him (along with several other naked celebrities), though it was only a likeness of her. Taylor was appalled by it, but Kanye said he had her permission. His wife at the time, Kim Kardashian, released an edited video clip that appeared to support Kanye’s claim. Taylor continued to deny it, and later, when the full video surfaced, it was clear that Taylor was telling the truth. Now it was war. Kim Kardashian posted snake emojis, and everyone knew she was talking about you-know-who. A crowd at a Kanye show chanted, “[Expletive] Taylor Swift!” This came after a minor Twitter beef with Nicki Minaj and amid a falling-out with Calvin Harris. It seemed as though the entire world had turned on her. Now, they said, it was clear that she had always been a fraud. Now, they said, it was clear that even her feminism wasn’t real; it consisted of lining up her pretty, mostly white friends onstage to take pictures or wear matching bathing suits on the Fourth of July. And what kind of feminism was that video for “Bad Blood,” which features a bajillion famous women, when the song itself is said to be about a grudge Taylor had against Katy Perry?Taylor is a digital native. She watched this all play out and knew she couldn’t fight the tidal wave that had come for her. She nuked her social media and disappeared. Her website was nothing but a black page. When she re-emerged on social media, it was with a grainy video of — was that … ? It was a snake.“Reputation,” released a few months later, is an album full not of apology but of confession (real or performed). It is filled with ferocious songs of self-loathing, of admitted (ibid.) manipulations, of a self-awareness so minute that it is uncomfortable to look at directly. Witness “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” another song that is supposedly about Kanye, in which she begins laughing too hard to sing when she talks about forgiving him. Witness “End Game,” in which she sings, “Ooooh, I got some big enemies.” If you watch the Netflix special that documents the “Reputation” tour, you’ll see there’s a moment when she looks around at the stadium cheering for her. Much has been made about the Taylor Swift Surprise Face, an aw-shucks meme that might have been its own impetus for cancellation in the first place — you’re not allowed to show your surprise at your dominance during your dominance, even if you mean it. But what is the appropriate response to finding out that after your brutal death and your miraculous rebirth, you’re still so, so beloved? You can see in her eyes that she wasn’t just back in her fans’ embrace; she was realizing, night after night, that she never left it.Ezra returned with some nachos. I don’t want to brag, but he’s a doctor now! He had gotten married and bought a co-op downtown. They toasted me at the wedding, he said, me in this endless line for T-shirts.I saw someone draped in a sheet, and I wondered aloud if maybe it was someone who was afraid that her boss would see her skipping work for a concert. The young woman in front of me, a college student who had come in from Sacramento and was here for a second night in a row, said, “No, that’s all the people that she ghosted in the room” — a reference to “Anti-Hero,” a single from “Midnights.”The college student told me that the night before, she’d been “baptized” — her word. She’s in her 20s now, but she has been listening to Taylor Swift since she was a teenager. She used to sing her songs in front of a mirror, alone in her bedroom, and Taylor Swift was a part of her childhood, not just in the way you look back fondly, but in the ways you look back with embarrassment.“All the ways you’re so ashamed of the person you were right before this moment,” she said. “You could so easily be ashamed of singing Taylor Swift in your bedroom. You could leave it behind. But she doesn’t let you. She says, ‘Look, I’m getting older, too.’ You grow with her. What if we weren’t ashamed of our eras? What if we realized they were always with us, and you just didn’t have to feel shame about who you were?” She started crying; baby, I did, too.“Mom,” Ezra said, his aging eyes aglow. “Look!” I turned to see that we had arrived at the front of the line. It was 10 minutes to showtime. We had been in line for two and a half hours, but somehow there was still merch to be had — a miracle! Instead of the T-shirts we were planning to buy, I got us both hoodies. The air was warm, but we were old now, and we got cold more easily than we did before. The sky turned into smeared unicorn pastels; it was in its “Lover” era now. A perfect moon hung over the stadium, a beautiful satellite suspended over a limitless star. Below us, in a purple dress that looked like a cake topper, holding a blue guitar, Taylor pumped her fist and sang: “Long live the walls we crashed through. How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesI couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder at the prom queen. Was I imagining her middle-distance stare? Please keep in mind that the answer is a resolute maybe with a high probability of probably. But hear me out: I was thinking about what my new friend from Sacramento told me in the endless merch line. You could watch this concert — you could watch this entire phenomenon — through the eyes of the idea that Taylor Swift frees women to celebrate their girlhood, to understand that their womanhood is made up of these microchapters of change, that we’re not different people than we were then, that we shouldn’t disavow the earlier versions of ourselves, our earlier eras. If you do look at it that way, you can also imagine why a young woman who tried to share Taylor Swift, this seminal part of her childhood, with the man she loves might have some feelings (again, this is conjecture! I might be making this up based on nothing more than a whim and a projection!) about the fact that he took a song she sang in her childhood bedroom and essentially hijacked it, making it about him and their relationship instead.“There’s not a lot of sex in this show,” one of the HUSBANDs, the other one, said now. They had switched seats, and he was bored by the “Speak Now” era. “That’s because this isn’t for you,” I told him, and I found myself getting angry as I spoke. “She wasn’t created to please you like the other women pop stars. She created herself to please me. She escaped the machine where women are only allowed to be pop stars if they don’t anger or threaten men. This just isn’t for you.”He squinted his eyes and furrowed his brow and pursed his lips and nodded like he understood, but I didn’t care, and I turned away.The HUSBAND wasn’t exactly wrong, though. No matter how grindy or seductive Taylor’s dance moves can be, she is also making funny faces while she does them. During “Vigilante [Expletive],” where the choreography isn’t not like a burlesque show, she has a move where she puts one leg up on the seat of a chair. Sometimes, when she performs it, she puts her hand on her chest, fingers pointing south, and starts to slide it down as she sings, “Lately she’s been dressing for revenge.” But as her hand passes her solar plexus, she gives a scandalized “What? Me?” look and laughs with her audience. Her dancing is a combination of intricately executed choreography and the kind of literal-gesture dancing that has you put your thumb and pinkie to your head to indicate a phone call. It’s a form of dancing I haven’t done in front of anyone for years; it’s the kind of thing I used to do with a group of other young women or girls when there were no boys around, or at least no boys we cared to impress. That’s what this entire concert reminded me of — time I spent in my own teenage bedroom, singing songs and pinballing between sexy stripper moves and goofy square dancing. Maybe that’s what Eras really is: the acknowledgment of girls as people to memorialize, of who we are and who we were, all existing in the same body, on the same timeline. You are your sluttiest version, your silliest version, your most wholesome, your smartest, your dumbest, your saddest, your happiest — all at once. I looked back again at the prom king and queen. He meant well, the poor guy. He knew how much she loved Taylor Swift, probably, and that song in particular. I wonder if she’d seen that TikTok/Instagram Reel where the entire wedding is jump-singing “Love Story,” and maybe one night she turned to him and said: “Look at this. Isn’t this something?” Maybe a plan began to hatch in his head, and he stood over the computer during the Ticketmaster fiasco and figured out how to get two tickets. He landed in the republic of Section 301 knowing, just knowing, that this was going to be the moment. He was going to give her what she wanted. If you listen to Taylor Swift enough, you would think that this was what we wanted.But listen more carefully. Read the liner notes. Decipher the codes. Know your Taylor Swift history. Her songbook is really only minimally about romantic love, and the best part of romantic love, which is its moment of revelation. It’s maximally about the other things that happen to a person in life: about the sometimes-questionable, sometimes-great, sometimes-tragic aftermath of that revelation, but it’s also about loss and betrayal and friendship and revenge.Witness Taylor Swift, in a white dress with sleeves that became what appeared, from where I was sitting, to be wings whenever she ran or danced, singing “My Tears Ricochet” — a song that poses as a love song but is really about a different kind of devastation.She begins curled up on the floor, standing only as her backup dancers, dressed in funereal black, join her. She starts to walk slowly, and they follow her, looking down. In 2019, Scott Borchetta sold Big Machine — and, with it, her masters — to the talent manager Scooter Braun, a man she hated. According to a Tumblr post she wrote in June that year, Borchetta’s company did give her the opportunity to get the masters back, but also insisted that, in exchange, she had to make a commensurate number of new albums, a kind of indentured servitude. She refused, and later announced that she would be rerecording her albums. The originals would be available still, but the new ones, the kosher ones, would be demarcated as “(Taylor’s Version).”Philip Montgomery for The New York Times“My Tears Ricochet” is a heartbreaker. I cannot remember a song about business malfeasance that is so affecting, that would cause 64,000 people to scream on your behalf. It is one of the fiercest and best-crafted songs I’ve ever heard.Especially the bridge. Taylor Swift loves bridges: The internet is rife not just with lists of and debates about the best bridges of her songs, but with videos of people sing-screaming those bridges as they run alongside the mechanism that’s recording them. In particular, she loves the kind of bridge that changes the nature of the song, as in “Out of the Woods,” a song about a doomed relationship where the bridge returns to the perspective of not yet knowing it’s doomed, or “the 1,” where someone breezily catching an ex-lover up on her new life shifts to the tenser question beneath the interaction, about where exactly the relationship went wrong. The bridge in “My Tears Ricochet” goes like this:And I can go anywhere I wantAnywhere I want, just not homeAnd you can aim for my heart, go for bloodBut you would still miss me in your bonesAnd I still talk to you (when I’m screaming at the sky)And when you can’t sleep at night (you hear my stolen lullabies)Imagine an entire football stadium singing about what a jerk you are. Imagine dozens and dozens of entirely-sold-out football stadiums singing about what a jerk you are.She has so far released three rerecorded albums. Some people say that she sounds older, or that she has less of the original emotion that fueled the songs in the first place, but that doesn’t account for what an interesting postmodern experiment the whole enterprise is — Eras as proof of concept, a woman looking back on her youth to remember what she is made of, not with shame but with curiosity and even delight. It had never occurred to me to look back on even my most carefree and innocuous eras with anything but shame. One can enter Swiftiedom at any level: avocation or vocation, background music or full-time job. Being a Swiftie at the highest level means access to an all-consuming, all-absorbing empire of evidence, where all the questions have answers, all the mysteries are solved, where you get to feel excited and smart and involved with something bigger than yourself without ever looking up from your phone. Let’s go straight to that level. That’s the level where we read the codes she leaves in her liner notes with random capital letters to equal the name of the guy that the song is about or a secret message. The level where she seems to indicate to her fans which album is being recorded next via a series of hidden images in an Instagram post. The level where, as I began writing this, legions of fans were crunching and computing and tabulating data to determine if (and why and how) the number 112 is significant when it comes to predicting the releases of her rerecordings.Take the single “Karma,” off “Midnights.” In it, she sings, “Karma is my boyfriend, Karma is a god, Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend. … Spider Boy, king of thieves, weave your little webs of opacity.” As I write this, I have been glitter-pilled enough to not be able to see anything but this: “Boyfriend” is a song by Justin Bieber. “God is a woman” is one by Ariana Grande; so is “my hair.” Now: “sweet like justice,” a lyric in that same song. “Sweetener” is a Grande album; she has a perfume named Sweet Like Candy. “Justice” is a Bieber album. On to “Spider Boy”: Both Grande and Bieber were clients of one Scooter Braun, who also shares his initials with Scott Borchetta. The song is called “Karma”! By the way, Grande and Bieber were among the clients reported to have dropped Scooter Braun as their manager on the day I wrote this sentence, which was also the anniversary of the announcement of the “Reputation” album. (Additional reporting by 1,000 TikTok accounts and a million other sources I found on the internet, which was originally built for the military.)This is the kind of thing you need to understand before you can begin to parse what happened with Karlie Kloss.People had been telling Taylor Swift for years that she looked just like the model, that she reminded them of her, that they should meet. Her first public mention of Karlie Kloss is in a 2012 Vogue cover profile, where Taylor says that she loves Karlie Kloss and would like to bake cookies with her. Karlie tweeted in response to the Vogue quote: “Your kitchen or mine?”The two became inseparable, taking pictures, dressing alike, dancing at concerts. Taylor gave a journalist a tour of her apartment in TriBeCa that included a room where Karlie stayed when she was over. Taylor sang at two Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, the two of them sharing looks and holding hands at various points. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesBut then in 2016, Karlie Kloss punted on a press question about Kim Kardashian, saying that Kim had been “a lovely person to me in the past.” This was right after Snakegate; were things starting to fray? Then, in 2018, Karlie married Josh Kushner, and TAYLOR WAS NOT THERE. But you know who was? SCOOTER BRAUN! WHO IS KARLIE’S FORMER MANAGER! A theory surfaced (one that I will continue to believe no matter what you tell me) that in a supplementary photo in the “Reputation” album, Taylor’s left eye had been replaced with Karlie Kloss’s left eye. What is “Reputation” but an album of coded regrets? What is revenge but exchanging an eye for an eye? I am worried I will be fired for even printing a draft of this theory, but I have examined this from all sides. The evidence is overwhelming! Consider the song off “evermore” called “it’s time to go.”When the words of a sister Come back in whispersThat prove she was not In fact what she seemed,Not a twin from your dreamsShe’s a crook who was caughtThat’s proof enough for me!Then there’s “Maroon,” the beautiful second song on “Midnights.” It begins with the story of waking up the morning after a drunken night. But even before the first verse is up, it’s clear that the story is a sad memory: “I see you every day now” is that first verse’s wistful last line.It goes on to recount a breakup, and the various colors of those memories, the hues of residual anger and loss, but mostly the sadness that’s left when the blush of love colored pink fades: “I feel you no matter what,” it goes. Then, almost in a yell, “The rubies that I gave up!” Its bridge is a simple two lines repeated:And I wake with your memory over meThat’s a real [expletive]ing legacy.I can’t remember the first time I saw the hashtag #kaylor; it’s as if the fan theory that Taylor and Karlie were in a romantic relationship always existed, with all its half-clues and song codes and blurry video that asks if they’re kissing. And maybe, I don’t know, sure. But it’s too simplistic to think of “Maroon” as a traditional romantic breakup song. I do think it’s about Karlie Kloss, though. Like all of Taylor’s songs, even the ones that absolutely probably are about her masters being sold to Scooter Braun, it’s built like a love song. But I would submit that this isn’t for subterfuge, or even to make the song more traditionally relatable. Instead, if this song is about Karlie Kloss, it is about the devastation of losing a best friend. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesI’m not sure why it never occurred to me that there should be more songs about things that aren’t romantic love, why I never thought we deserved more examination of the complex emotionality of the parts of our lives that exist outside it. I’ll tell you, I never think about any of my ex-boyfriends, not ever. But I do think about the times I’ve been screwed over in business by the people who were supposed to be taking care of me. And I do think about the best friends I’ve lost in my lifetime — I wake with their memories over me. If I wrote songs, I’d write about that. You could say that Eras is cynical; you of course would discourage disavowing your past if you needed to remarket it to your audience. But look around this stadium. You don’t enrapture an audience like this unless you’re saying something real — something these legions of girls and women have been waiting to hear: that we are more than the moment on the balcony, where romance awaits. We are also everything before and after that. What Taylor Swift knows is that it’s fun to sing about boys and men and romance, but that those moments when we stand on a balcony as the person we desire gallops toward us, or the moment that we win the affection of a person despite his allegiance to another, are only the smallest parts of a woman’s life, no matter what the movies tell you. The ways that our trust and loyalty are weaponized against us is also the dominion of femaledom — the pain we feel over it, the way we can’t ever quite forget. Those things are worth singing about, too. It is probably true that Taylor Swift was too busy to talk to me. (It is also possible she didn’t like something I wrote about her in the past?) It is almost certainly true that she didn’t want to talk to me — celebrities rarely do. But what is definitely true is that she didn’t need to talk to me. On the day I wrote this, Taylor Swift had 468 million followers across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, whereas The New York Times had a mere 92 million. Absent the usual publicity contract obligation, I honestly can’t see a reason that someone who has revolutionized the relationship a singer can have with her fans should want an intermediary. Certainly she has sold enough albums without our help. But also? I don’t know if I could tell a story about Taylor Swift that’s better than the story she tells about herself, through every song, every dance, every video, every social transmission. She is a master not just at the revelation of information but the analysis of each revelation, the scrutiny of that analysis, the contextualization of it all. The way this concert has consumed the world is the living embodiment of one destabilizing question to me: How could I interpret Taylor Swift better than she does, better than her fans do online, every day, without my interference or input? They’re reading her codes, hunting down her clues, complying with her wishes, finding themselves in her world — a place that someone like me used to have the privilege of visiting alone. She is inventing all of this in real time, and like other great inventions that cut out middlemen, this one might catch on. I’ve watched in recent years as our biggest stars have forgone sitting for interviews in favor of Q. and A.s with an equally famous friend, with an agreed-upon set of softball questions, or, worse, an Instagram post. This isn’t a loss for them; for the most part, they’ll be happy when the entire profile format is eradicated. I know this because over the last couple of years, I was on a leave of absence from The Times, and I worked with the exact kind of people I’d written about for years — actors, directors, producers — and sometimes, when we got to chatting, they would tell me about the time they were profiled and it ruined their life, or a relationship, or caused an embarrassment that they carry with them still. Sometimes they told me about a lie they told an interviewer because they were scared or trying to misdirect the journalist. Not one person I ever interviewed seemed to understand why the public was so interested in them personally. They spent their time defensive, waiting for a sneaky question or worrying how I would subvert something innocent they were saying.So the loss isn’t theirs, but ours — or maybe it’s just mine. Because I like writing other things, but I love writing celebrity profiles. To me, there’s no better way to understand the culture, and to understand the culture is to understand the world — to learn about ourselves by learning about the people we chose to celebrate, the people we voted to represent us in our own imaginations. I don’t know, maybe I’m just too in my earnestness era. Maybe I’m trying to call something a cultural shift when really it’s just a personal one. And it’s not even a big one: If profiles are over, I could, I don’t know, cover whatever else it is that this magazine covers. I could go anywhere I want, just not home. What I’m really saying is that once you go deep-state on Taylor — on the theories, on the codes, on the meanings — once you allow yourself to start thinking of your life in terms of eras, you can’t help but find yourself in your very own Taylor Swift song. Far below us, Taylor Swift was singing about an affair. “Look at this idiotic fool that you made me,” the lyric goes, and I screamed it along with everyone else, but my voice cracked, and I found that I was crying again. “What’s wrong?” Ezra asked.“You wouldn’t understand!” I sneered at him. “You’re just an old man!”I stood up so that a woman dressed as the scarf that Taylor Swift left at probably Jake Gyllenhaal’s house during her “Red” era could pass me on her way back from the concession stand. If this place looks a little like a comic-book convention or a clown car, that’s because there are no transitions in eras. Eras end definitively and violently. They come while you’re just trying to do your job and live your life, and one day you’re sitting in Section 301, and you realize that the transition happened without you ever even realizing it. If I did write songs, that would be the bridge. A little after 11:30 that night, the mayor declared her term over. The stage turned dark, and she sent the moon home, and the sovereign state of Section 301 of Swiftie Clara dissolved into a diaspora. By the time she retired, the mayor had donated enough money to a local food bank to make a significant impact to the 500,000 people it feeds per month, as she did in every city she visited. She had increased tourism spending by an average of $3 million for each night she was there, relative to the nights when the stadium hosts a football game. She had made a material passive contribution to the economy of Santa Clara by selling out its hotel rooms and crashing its rideshare apps. It’s estimated that her mere presence contributed more than $30 million to the local economy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanted in on some of that action, so he tweeted at her to add some of that sweet Taylor Swift microeconomy to Canada; she complied by setting some dates in 2024. Autumn approached, and the wind picked up and blew all the glitter from the concert into the ocean, but just this once, the fish weren’t angry. The usher I saw trade bracelets went home and wondered why football fans couldn’t just enjoy themselves the way the Swifties did, why they had to get drunk and fight. Men with leaf blowers went out to extinguish all that the wind had left behind of the glitter, to transition the stadium back to its football era. And the police went back to arresting people. And a young woman lovingly hung a stuffed snake on her mirror. And the college student from Sacramento put Taylor back into her Spotify rotation, right there at the top. And the HUSBANDs, who I hope, along with everyone else in Section 301, will forgive me my hyperbole, went home and worked on their lats, and Ezra and I went home, too, but I still wear a beaded bracelet a woman gave me that says REPUTATION, and when I look at it I think: How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesAnd Taylor Swift arrived in Los Angeles, the next stop on her U.S. tour. She was to play the first of six shows on Aug. 3, which I hope by now you know is Karlie Kloss’s birthday, and what song that is not part of the regular Eras set list did she play as a surprise? SHE PLAYED “MAROON”! She played a song that we think is about Karlie Kloss ON KARLIE KLOSS’S BIRTHDAY, and we were expected to go to sleep that night and to work the next day and care for our children and generally function amid the legion of algebraic calculations we were making in our heads. And then, at her last Los Angeles show, two crazy things happened. One was that she wore a series of previously unseen blue outfits, and blue is associated with “1989” for some reason, and this indicated that SOMETHING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, and IT DID. She announced that since she was a teenager — I’ll say 19 — she has always wanted to own her own music, and that now, on this day in August (which is the eighth month of the year), and this is the ninth day of that month, she would be releasing the rerecorded “1989” in October.If that is not enough — and it is, it is — let me tell you the other thing that happened:KARLIE! KLOSS! HERSELF! SHOWED! UP!Yes, Karlie Kloss, who might not have been a romantic entanglement but could yes be called the love of her life, same as any of our best friends, came to the stadium and danced in the bleachers. The chaos this caused, the time I lost.And meanwhile, I saw on TikTok that a woman whose handle is @nikkiking23 solved the 112 thing, and by this far in the story I will declare it basically undeniable. (SHE IS RELEASING ALBUMS IN 112-DAY CYCLES BECAUSE 112 IS THE NUMBER OF SONGS THAT WERE SOLD TO SCOOTER BRAUN WITHOUT HER PERMISSION!!!!!!!!!!!) And I sat at home, trying my best to return to those feelings I had in the stadium. I sat in the bathroom, on the floor, going through TikToks every night that recounted the concert. I was in my “folklore” era by then, pensive and thinking about my life. I pitched an idea to my editor about the Real Housewives of New York trying to unionize. In the mornings, I waited till everyone was out of the house, and I sang songs from “Reputation” — dirty but also silly. I haven’t done that in years.And somewhere in Northern California, the prom queen of Section 301 of the kingdom of Swiftie Clara opens the closet door in her bedroom and touches the purple dress she was wearing the night she got engaged, but really the night she was at the Taylor Swift concert. She puts on the dress and picks up her hairbrush and puts on “Love Story,” and she sings the song that was playing when she got engaged, the song that was a little bit taken from her that day even as it became a monumental part of her own permanent history. But even as she sings, even as she finds the old pleasure in the song, she remembers her time on the balcony of Section 301. She understands for the first time that those balcony moments are more fun to wait for than to live. Because once you live them, there starts a backward-counting clock in which the bedroom is no longer yours alone, and singing “Love Story” in your purple dress will make less and less sense. And that’s when her pink landline phone rings. She answers it, and it’s Taylor and me, conference-bombing her. We tell her that we’re sorry that she has to move on. We tell her that it’s sad that you don’t get to decide to leave your eras, that the leaving is done for you. Time only moves forward, we say into the phone. You can’t be a girl forever — they won’t let you, and we all three have to grow and move on constantly. You will always have to leave a place before you’re ready. You can go anywhere you want, we tell her in a reprise, just not home. She cries into the phone, and we let her, me and Taylor — Taylor Swift, who sings the song of us all, who says all of this better than I ever could. I’ll tell you, I like being a woman OK, but long live being a girl. More

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      Can Usher Turn America On Again (to R.&B.)?

      by

      One Saturday evening in February, the night before the Grammys, Usher, Interscope Records and Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace repurposed the Hollywood Palladium into a skating rink. Usher has been an ambassador of Atlanta culture for nearly 30 years — as long as he has been in the public eye — but as of late, he is also an emissary of the roller rink. The night’s event was one of several pop-up skating parties he had helped to curate in recent months. Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Usher moves through the world with the bearing of a homecoming king. He didn’t walk so much as float into the room on a cloud of cool and smiles. He wore a burgundy-and-beige leather varsity jacket that recalled the colors and insignia of Morehouse College, the prestigious men’s school in Atlanta. He stands about 5-foot-8, with a small but solid build refined by years of dancing and athletic conditioning. Usher cares about his body. He has to. Performing shirtless — six-pack rippling with sweat and suggestion — has been part of his stage show since he started making teenagers scream in the 1990s. But Usher will turn 45 this month. Staying in performing shape takes weeks of meal prep, physical therapy, acupuncture, cupping, voice lessons and vocal rest. He had spent the day editing the footage he shot for “GLU,” a single from his upcoming album, but here he was, pulling double duty, making work look like play.We arrived at the Palladium’s parking lot, where a throng of at least 50 people waited at the entrance. Walking over, I felt many hands grabbing at Usher for photos and greetings. Someone elbowed me in the head by accident; Usher pulled me steadily along. I stepped through the metal detector, and he waited for me on the other side while still managing the folks who were approaching him. “Come on, you hanging tough,” he said encouragingly. Once inside, he changed into custom skates with light-up wheels.Usher is a confident, beautiful skater, coasting backward, gliding crisscross, side to side. He darted in and out of social groups, doing laps with Chris Brown and Jermaine Dupri, and greeted the music executive Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and Paul McCartney. Lil’ Kim came into his section with a gaggle of girlfriends and squealed when Usher stopped by to give her a hug. The singer, actress and choreographer Teyana Taylor and her mother rolled over before pausing to chat. Busta Rhymes arrived in all black just when we were leaving and told Usher, then in his third outfit of the night, that his “drip” was “disrespectful,” in the way that bad means good. Occasionally, Usher skated alone — at one point, I saw him take a moment to himself while Al Green moaned about “Love and Happiness.” He seems so embodied and levelheaded, so smooth and free.Usher is, to date, the last R.&B. artist, and the last Black artist of any genre, to release a diamond-certified album.Usher told me that skating has been therapeutic for him amid the pressure of the past few years. It was a way to “work things out energetically, physically, musically and spiritually.” I got a liberating feeling watching him skate. “I’m not 40 years old in that rink,” he said. “I don’t even know how old I am. I might be the 13-year-old kid that’s just having a good time. I might be the 25-year-old who just figured out how the bop goes. I can just be super fly and sexy.” The singer took a moment to reflect at the end of the night. “It’s a lot,” he sighed.Usher was very, very busy again. Booked within an inch of his life. Despite the care he takes with his body, he was barely getting a good night’s rest. (Usher is a night owl and a bit of an insomniac. “That is something I think I’ll never completely fix,” he told me.) He was a few weeks shy of beginning the next leg of his My Way Residency in Las Vegas, which for the better part of the past two years has been arguably the hottest show in America.It feels as if we’re in the middle of another creative peak for the musician — an Usher renaissance, if you will. It’s coming almost 30 years after his self-titled debut was released in 1994, when he was 15, and nearly 20 years after the release of “Confessions,” his tour de force, which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. His “Tiny Desk” performance last summer was one of NPR’s most viewed ever. He made much-discussed appearances at Paris men’s fashion week, Vanity Fair’s Oscar party and the Met Gala. And in late September, it was announced that Usher would perform during next year’s Super Bowl halftime show. The game will be in Vegas, his turf now.Usher’s renaissance has unfolded in a season of anxiety about the viability of R.&B., amid existential threats from hip-hop, pop and Afrobeats. “Coming Home,” his ninth album — slated for release in February, on the same day as the Super Bowl — will be a referendum on the genre’s future as much as it is a statement about how a legacy artist continues to stay relevant. The album has been gestating for years, its release delayed more than once. In 2019, Usher teased, on Instagram, that he was working on “Confessions 2.” Since then, he has scrapped the idea (“I want to be better than I was,” he told GQ). He and his team have listened to dozens of his best recordings, refining themes while tweaking their sequencing. Singles have been released and, in effect, real-life market-tested with audiences. Most were hits on R.&B. radio. But so far, only one song reached the Top 40 on the pop charts, a far cry from his commercial peak in the late 1990s and 2000s, when Usher earned nine No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. At present, few Black artists rise to the mainstream charts’ highest spots.If the album is a hit, he is back on top again and a savior of R.&B. If it’s less than a success, Usher could be seen as a nostalgia act we turn to like a jukebox, playing the old songs on demand. Jermaine Dupri, one of Usher’s collaborators since 1997, believes the singer is at a crossroads. “From this point, Usher can’t go backward,” he says. “This show is so fabulous. Now he has to figure out the music to make that makes people feel the same way those records that he’s performing does so that he can actually stay in that space.” After so much success, how does an artist continue to grow? “You’re fighting to not do what you’ve already done and try to give people something different,” Dupri continues. “And the fans sometimes don’t want different; they want exactly what they’ve heard.”Across its many iterations, R.&B. has pondered the intricacies of connection — to your flesh, desires and spirit, to family, community or a higher power. The My Way Residency reflects those connections many times over, like a hall of mirrors. A theatrical exploration of love, sex, ego death and rebirth, with nearly a dozen costume changes, elaborate set pieces and multiple jaunts into the audience, the show moves through various moods: a speakeasy-inspired opener with energetic yet sensuous up-tempos; strip-club anthems; skating-rink bops; lovesick ballads; euphoria-inducing electronic dance music. It lasts for close to three hours.The concert feels like a second-line parade, a kind of post-pandemic celebration for thousands of R.&B.-loving shut-ins. Usher’s 20-performance run at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in 2021 grossed nearly a million dollars every night. Last year’s residency ran from July through October and sold out. This year, the show has been extended several times, and a remixed version opened in Paris in late September. Clips of celebrities like Issa Rae, Taraji P. Henson, Zendaya, Tom Holland and the Kardashians attending the concerts frequently go viral.It’s one thing to see clips of the show; it’s another to witness it firsthand. On one of the nights I went, in March, the crowd seemed to be full of what R.&B. enthusiasts call the “grown and sexy,” fans 30 and older and nearly all Black — couples on a luxe date night, bachelorettes, sister-friends on a girls trip. The women were dressed: bare midriffs, stiletto pumps, long wefts of hair, thick black lashes. Leather pants and bodycon. Sequins and tiny, sparkling purses. “Adults go out to be entertained,” the critic Nelson George, who also attended the show, told me. “They want to hear hits. They want some sexiness. They want some glamour.” My section was on its feet for most of the night. The audience’s enthusiasm is underserved. “When Usher, Beyoncé and Maxwell debuted in the ’90s, there was still R.&B. radio,” George says. “There were R.&B.-based magazines.” He adds: “There were a lot of ways to get the word out about new music. The desire for that live experience has probably grown with time.”Usher getting on a plane in Los Angeles; during a rehearsal at the Park MGM Las Vegas; preshow stretching.Without question, the buzziest moments of the residency involve Usher’s seductive serenades. He brings a woman from the audience onto the stage or comes to her, ambling into the arena, looks into her eyes and sings. With that voice: a velvety, acrobatic, mellifluous, full-bodied tenor. The partners of the women being serenaded must be managing a host of complicated emotions. Some annoyance or jealousy, maybe even a little titillation. Of his sex-symbol persona, Usher told me, “I’ve always been there.” These audience interactions distill his unique appeal and the tension at the core of his public image: He presents as both a really nice guy and a Lothario. A courtly Southern gentleman and a rascal. In songs and interviews, he jokes about this perception, playfully warning the husbands and boyfriends of the world, by way of the Notorious B.I.G. — “Don’t leave your girl ’round me.” He is charming and wholesome, but he also harnesses a powerful carnality.For one night’s opener, Usher wore a white three-piece suit: slacks and a tailored shirt with a vest. He held a drink of dark liquor — the main stage took on the ambience of a cabaret. Like Frank Sinatra, that other Vegas icon, Usher sang the hits. A fuchsia-clad dancer bent over at the waist. Usher placed his drink on top of her behind. The gesture was flirtatious and naughty without seeming rakish. The crowd erupted. His moves were graceful and fiery, infused with the influence of Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Ben Vereen, Bob Fosse and James Brown — a kind of liquid movement that rivals the notes he sings.Part of Usher’s appeal has been his beguiling interpretation of manhood’s many transitions, from tween boy to hormonal adolescent to fresh-faced Adonis. Usher says he serves “a very specific purpose” in the public imagination, adding, “it involves sexuality, fantasy and masculinity.” In Vegas, he flaunted a kind of virility that made space for the devoted women who had come to watch him work. “And the only thing that’s coming beside me out this situation is you waiting to get some more,” he sang. The crowd objectified him, adored him. He spun, leaped, skated and played a patron at a strip club handing out dollar bills. During “Nice & Slow,” he mimed humping a mic stand and traced a trail down his abs that led to the inside of his leather pants. At one point, he drenched himself with water. In one libidinous set piece after another, he sighed, and cried, and fell to his knees, lying on his back in a fit of ecstasy. In the end, he was born again, closing the show with a frenetic E.D.M. set. The shrieks from the audience sustained him. “I need you to be excited,” he told me, of his reliance on this kind of nonverbal call-and-response. “I want you to scream.” And did they scream. Before he was a legacy artist, modeling Black masculinity for millions; before the accolades and the clamoring women; before the epic albums confessing his sins, Usher was a child prodigy born in Texas and raised in the hills of Tennessee. Usher Raymond IV began singing in the youth choir of the St. Elmo Missionary Baptist Church in Chattanooga as a very little kid. His mother, Jonnetta O’Neal Patton, who raised him largely on her own, was the choir’s director. “He would sit with his grandfather during devotion, and he would lead songs with the older deacons,” Patton told me. “And then he would sing in my choir. People would request for this little kid to sing.”She entered him into talent shows, which he won. She quit her job and moved them two hours southeast to Atlanta. It was just a few years after the producer Antonio Reid (who is known by the nickname L.A.) and Babyface started LaFace Records in a suburb just north of the city. Before long, Usher was auditioning for Reid.In his memoir, “Sing to Me: My Story of Making Music, Finding Magic and Searching for Who’s Next,” Reid writes that he was reluctant to audition a child performer. But Usher’s confidence and charisma were preternatural, and Reid liked the way he sang a well-known cut — Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” — but made it his own. Reid called in all the women in the office. The 13-year-old singer worked the room without a mic and focused in on one woman in particular. He “dropped to his knee in front of her, singing, placing his hand on her thigh, looking dead in her eyes,” Reid writes. “He was seducing her with the confidence of someone who had done it before.” Reid signed Usher on the spot.“Usher,” his namesake debut, premiered near the bottom of the album charts, though its handful of singles earned good airplay on Black radio. Usher’s second album, “My Way,” was a breakthrough. Soon there were magazine covers and a recurring role on Brandy’s sitcom, “Moesha.” “8701,” his much-anticipated third album, dropped in the summer of 2001 and entered the pop chart at No. 4. It earned Usher his first Grammy, for R.&B. vocal performance, and set the stage for his magnum opus, “Confessions.”Reid wanted Usher to shed his boy-next-door persona for the fourth album. He wanted him to show more of himself, to let the public in. When recording began, Usher was in a high-profile romance with Rozonda Thomas, also known as Chilli, of TLC. So the songs about infidelity, apologies and sultry encounters piqued the public’s appetite for gossip; they were also beautiful. The two performers broke up shortly before the album debuted.Usher with his band and dancers right before the show; fans during a show in February; onstage during the show.“Confessions” was released in spring 2004, buoyed by the lead single, “Yeah!” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks. Tongues wagged at seemingly revealing lyrics like “my chick on the side said she got one on the way.” In The Village Voice, Amy Linden wrote, “He can sing his cheating ass off.” The LP sold 1.1 million copies in its first week, a record at the time for a Black artist. Four singles from “Confessions” went to No. 1 pop; deep cuts charted, too. “His ‘Confessions’ album is still his masterpiece because it had a beautiful combination of vocals, songs and emotional commitment,” George says. By 2012, it had become one of the best-selling American albums of all time, going diamond with sales of 10 million copies in the United States alone. That certification put “Confessions” in the company of albums like “Thriller,” “Abbey Road” and “Tapestry.” Usher is, to date, the last R.&B. artist, and the last Black artist of any genre, to release a diamond-certified album.In 2007, Usher married Tameka Foster, a stylist and design expert seven years his senior. Public outcry ensued; the main tenor of the criticism was that Usher, at 28, was still too young to become a family man. The marriage was seen as a threat to his bachelor image. His next album, “Here I Stand,” debuted at No. 1, but sales showed a decline from “Confessions.” The artist had continued his tradition of drawing from his personal life and chronicled newlywed bliss and new fatherhood. By 2009, the couple had divorced. Usher began to shift his sound, experimenting with E.D.M. In the years after, he introduced the public to Justin Bieber and became a judge on “The Voice.”Billboard changed the way it calculates its main Black music chart to account for streaming in 2012. By then, Black radio and retail outlets had been in decline for years. The shifts meant the popularity of an R.&B. song would be determined by anyone — not just specialized fans of the genre. The R.&B. and mainstream charts became whiter. In 2013, no Black artists earned pop No. 1 singles, a first since 1958, when the chart began. Usher’s eighth LP, “Hard II Love,” was released in 2016 as a TIDAL exclusive and sold just 38,000 album-equivalent units in its first week.Dupri told me, “He’s haunted by the ‘Confessions’ record.” I thought of this later, on the set of an Uber commercial Usher filmed to promote the residency. He had taken a break from shooting a scene and was talking to me offstage. He briefly held up the production to articulate a question he had about where he fits in the pop-culture landscape, in light of his past work. “Now that I’ve given people all those things,” he said, with some urgency, “at this age, what do I give them?”Usher’s 30-year career has been an elegant synthesis of the entire history of R.&B. In many ways, he stands alone. He is a bridge between the bygone era of earnest, harmonizing boy bands and the new generation working in the genre, like Chris Brown, Tory Lanez and Bryson Tiller, who all sing but focus less on vocal virtuosity than on the sonics of trap and hip-hop. This influence seems to rankle many who love R.&B. — some see this cross-pollination as a pernicious threat to its future. Others feel that the rise of melodic rappers like Drake, Gunna and Young Thug has eroded the public’s desire for lush, technically sophisticated vocals. Usher has also leaned into hip-hop, singing in raplike cadences. In some cases, like his first pop No. 1, “Nice & Slow,” he even raps himself. In recent years, he’s delved deeper into rap aesthetics; he released “A” in 2018, a collaboration with the producer Zaytoven, who is known for melding trap sounds and piano. The second version of the new album I heard had more rap features than the first.Rap and R.&B. overlap often, and influence each other. R.&B. has certainly borrowed a straightforwardness from rap that it didn’t always possess. Consider the different approaches of two R.&B. men: On his 1979 single “Turn Off the Lights,” Teddy Pendergrass asks his lover, “Would you mind if I asked you to?” and proceeds to softly entreat her to come closer. On “No Bullshit,” Chris Brown’s single from 2010, Brown tells his paramour, “You already know what time it is/Reach up in that dresser where them condoms is.”R&B’s sound is one of willful, defiant humanity. An insistence on the right to stretch out, breathe, rage, make love.Last August, the artist and music executive Diddy formalized these ambient fears by tweeting, “Who killed R.&B.?” In subsequent conversations, he doubled down on the statement, insisting that the genre’s excellence had been in decline. “I ain’t feeling no emotions,” he said on Instagram, before elaborating on the ways the old songs made the body awaken to all the sensations enfolded in them; the new records were sterile in comparison.Talk of R.&B.’s demise has been cyclical and insistent since at least 1988, when Nelson George wrote “The Death of Rhythm and Blues,” a book-length exploration of the idea. George supposed that the corporate imperative to cross over — to create songs specifically designed to break on mainstream radio — is how the music lost its way. Diddy’s declaration led to a new round of impassioned debate among R.&B. aficionados and artists. Mary J. Blige weighed in, saying, “You can’t kill something that’s in our DNA.” Yet she conceded that radio stations no longer play R.&B. as frequently as they did in years past. Brent Faiyaz, an emerging R.&B. singer — his second album, “Wasteland,” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 last summer — insinuated that Diddy was simply out of touch. “Don’t nobody care about music genres anymore,” Faiyaz tweeted, calling them “primitive.”“All genres of music were routed in R.&B.,” Usher told me when I asked his thoughts on the state of the genre. “That was what started it all, in my opinion. It was more like soulful gospel music that then became jazz, that then became R.&B., and then all these other expressions of rhythm and blues became the next thing.” The sound is one of willful, defiant humanity. An insistence on the right to stretch out, breathe, rage, make love. The records unleash your feelings and your body because they’re freedom cries from a people with a precarious relationship to being free.In her book “The Meaning of Soul,” the scholar Emily J. Lordi explained that R.&B. singers enacted feats of “virtuosic survivorship” in their performances and recordings. James Brown’s grunts and dramatic drops to the ground; Jackie Wilson’s dive, legs akimbo, onto his knees. The way it seems as if he sprang back up in the blink of an eye. Love men, beginning with Sam Cooke but extending on to Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Teddy Pendergrass, brought an urbane sensuality to the music. It was all a dream. These artists are masters of the sublime and conjure pleasurable fictions that “channel the erotic fantasies of their audience through their words, movement and voice,” George says. “It’s a heavy burden to be the center of so much erotic energy night after night, song after song.” Marvin Gaye “both resented and required” the adoration, his biographer David Ritz wrote in “Divided Soul.” And now, in a post-#MeToo world, the sexual politics of R.&B. — especially given the abuses of R. Kelly, the prolific songsmith and convicted sex trafficker — are under even more scrutiny. Women and girls are often collateral damage. Several R.&B. figures, across generations, including Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Chris Brown, Trey Songz and Tory Lanez, have been accused or convicted of violent acts against women.On his podcast, the broadcaster and former rapper Joe Budden spoke with the singer Mario — best known for “Let Me Love You,” a No. 1 single from 2004 — about the fantasy of R.&B. “Writing songs is like shooting movies,” Mario said. “In real life, [expletive] never goes that way. It’s a song. It’s exaggerated.” He continued: “Women want to believe what you’re saying is true.” It’s easy to become swept up in the honeyed sweetness of a classic R.&B. record. We believe so wholeheartedly that romantic love exists. We prioritize this love, imbue it with religious fervor and purpose, centralizing it in the narratives of our lives as if we’re all halves of a perfect pair like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. As if we’re all heroes on epic quests for the one who will harmonize with us for life. Hip-hop’s realism splits the veil, piercing the romantic reverie as it makes space for the actual complication of being together with another person. With his two younger children, Sire and Sovereign, who were born to his partner, Jennifer Goicoechea.Usher has always sold cool, unflappability, a certain kind of perfection (even on a breakup record like “U Don’t Have to Call,” he rises above). The truth is much more interesting. “I’m like an actor, and as an actor I embody a character,” he says. “If I’m instigating sexuality in my music, that might not necessarily have anything to do with who I am as a person.” That statement echoes Mario’s admission from the podcast: “We’re selling energy. We’re selling ideas.” R.&B. comes with a polished sweetness that can sound like lies, false notes. People flock to see Usher in Vegas because they want to believe in the vision of love and romance that lives in the songs he performs there; others may have turned away from these kinds of messages because the ideals are too unbelievable.R.&B. is nothing if not a marriage of opposing energies. A dance between hard and soft. Real life versus fantasy; vulnerability and force; Holy Ghost and heaving flesh. A thin line between love and hate. Traditional R.&B. men were complicated, and they weren’t always truthful about it. Yet the music’s expansiveness and range — topics like climate change, war and political disappointment were all fair game — gave us a pathway toward understanding the conditions of the day. Some contemporary R.&B. men ceded ground to hip-hop in storytelling about the world and in relaying broad truths. Similarly, Usher exists at the threshold of contradictory ideas. His persona gleams with sheen and shine, but he is often tightly coiled, a bundle of nerves underneath glistening skin. It was 11:30 on a late-winter night in North Hollywood. The kind of night when lovers toss and turn and palm trees rustle in the moonlight. An unmarked storefront is home to a recording studio built by a son of Hal David, who, with Burt Bacharach, wrote aching, romantic pop ballads for Dionne Warwick.Usher had just arrived to lay down vocals. He lit a candle, and soon we were inhaling wafts of gardenia. He wondered what I thought about the new songs I’d heard and told me how he kept changing their sequencing. Just as kinetic in real life as he is onstage, he zipped between the cloth-covered control room, where I sat with Anthony Smith, the audio engineer, and the cavernous live room’s booth, which was colder than Usher usually likes it when he records. His new personal assistant, Kojo Littles, hunted down two space heaters in the studio’s spacious lounge. In the control room, the lights were low. Tiffany-style lamps with purple-and-red stained-glass shades and thick velvet tassels cast shadows on the walls.Before long, Usher was ready to sing. The engineer queued up an up-tempo track with synthy flourishes and staccato lyrics on the demo. A collaboration with the Colombian hitmaker J Balvin, the track sampled Usher’s “Yeah!” On the original, the singer delivered his lead vocal in an anxious frenzy, telling the story of an illicit flirtation in a nightclub. The new rendition elaborates the original by layering dembow rhythms, lyrics about smiling at a new paramour’s advances and a new verse by Usher.Though Usher was fresh off 12 hours of dance and music rehearsal a half-hour away at a soundstage in Burbank, he was full of energy and ideas about how he would like to be heard. In the booth, he gestured with his hands, closed his eyes. His body sometimes bounced, keeping time with the song’s groove. There was no party in the studio — no flowing libations, no room full of hangers-on. Usher was at work.He recorded, line by line, bass, baritone and tenor parts — multitracking himself. In industry parlance, he “punched in” his vocals, recording multiple takes of each lyric, listening as the engineer played the takes back to him. Then he rerecorded the parts of each line that he didn’t like. I heard Usher ask Smith, “Let me get that last one again,” at least three dozen times over the next five hours.Usher is anxious for everything to look good, feel good and smell good. He especially wants the music to sound good. He recorded numerous songs in the years leading up to “Coming Home.” “My creative process is kind of trial and error,” he told me. “I’m always trying to figure out what fits.” To that end, the album’s title has changed several times, going from “Naked” to “A.D.A.M” (a nod to the biblical figure) to “Coming Home,” a reference to reigniting his professional relationships with his producers in Atlanta.Usher in his pool in Los Angeles. “I’m like an actor,” he says. “As an actor I embody a character.”When we spoke on the phone, Marvin Gaye’s biographer David Ritz told me he felt hopeful about R.&B. as a lasting mode of Black expression. “The roots are deep, deep, deep in the ground. It celebrates vocal virtuosity, it celebrates groove. It’s all spirit, it’s all church and worship. If you’re praising a woman or praising God, you’re still praising.” And other signs point to the genre itself experiencing a renaissance, alongside Usher’s. According to Spotify, streaming numbers for R.&B. are up 25 percent from last year. Women like Jazmine Sullivan, Ari Lennox and Summer Walker write honest and sensual songs that provide counterpoint and balance the punishing sexual politics that have made listening to some of the old records fraught.Usher’s new music will most likely continue his forays into new forms — one of the best among the songs I heard was laced with the rhythmic propulsion of Afrobeats. But fundamentally, he told me, “my music offering will always be routed in R.&B.” I wonder if he’ll let some of his imperfections show. Audiences want more honesty, more “confessing.” When the album was still called “A.D.A.M,” it was inspired by the temptations and ups and downs of human life. Usher related the themes of the project to the challenges of his own stardom. “I’ve been designated to do something, to be on my best behavior and be perfect,” Usher admits. “You gonna go through [expletive],” he says, of the impossibility of perfection in this world. “As you work through that, what’s the result? It’s in the music. That journey is in the music.”In the booth, he traced the air with his fingers; he seemed to find the harmonies he would sing with his hands. He wouldn’t be able to record as much when he got to Vegas, he said, when he would need to balance the nightly performance schedule with preserving his voice. The hour crept closer to dawn, and still Usher remained in the booth, working and reworking his lines.Danielle Amir Jackson is a writer based in Little Rock, Ark., and the editor in chief of The Oxford American. She is writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about her grandmother’s restaurant in North Memphis and the role of women-owned juke joints in the incubation of the blues. More

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      One Question for Taylor Swift’s Eras Concert Film: How Big Will It Be?

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      The pop star’s concert film, arriving in theaters on Friday, is expected to break box office records. “The fever and scale is unprecedented,” one analyst said.The world’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift, is about to become the world’s biggest movie star, at least for a weekend. The only question is whether turnout for her concert film will be enormous or truly colossal.Box office analysts keep raising opening-weekend estimates for “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which will arrive in cinemas on Friday evening amid a lightning storm of free publicity. (As you may have heard, Ms. Swift has lately been spending considerable time with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end.) The nearly three-hour film was initially expected to sell about $75 million in tickets this weekend in the United States and Canada, with analysts reaching that estimate by studying presales and moviegoer surveys. As of Tuesday, the domestic number was looking more like $125 million.Could it reach $150 million? “Yes, it could,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “The fever and scale is unprecedented.”“The Eras Tour,” which cost Ms. Swift roughly $15 million to make, is expected to collect an additional $60 million overseas — at a minimum — over the weekend.“We are wonder-struck,” said Wanda Gierhart Fearing, chief marketing and content officer for the Cinemark theater chain, which has a large presence in the southern United States and Latin America. In addition to standard screenings, Cinemark and other multiplex operators have been offering private viewing parties. (That’s $800 for 40 people. Dancing encouraged, but not on seats.)The domestic box office record for a concert film debut is held by “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” which Paramount Pictures released in 2011. It collected $41 million over its first three days in North American theaters, adjusted for inflation, and ultimately $101 million in the United States and Canada and $138 million worldwide.“Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” released by Sony Pictures in 2009, holds the record for total ticket sales. It generated $105 million over its entire North American run, and $380 million worldwide, adjusted for inflation.Box office analysts aren’t quite sure what to expect from “The Eras Tour,” in part because it comes only nine weeks after Ms. Swift concluded the six-month, 53-show initial leg of her sold-out North American tour. The trade publication Pollstar estimated that she had sold about $14 million in tickets each night.The initial leg of Ms. Swift’s tour wrapped up a few weeks ago after six months and 53 shows.Grace Smith/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesHas the thirst for Ms. Swift among casual fans been satisfied for the time being? To what degree did the cultural frenzy surrounding her Eras concerts pique the curiosity of a broader audience — people who would never pay hundreds of dollars to see her perform in a stadium but might shell out for movie tickets? (Most seats for the film cost $19.89, a nod to the name of Ms. Swift’s fifth album and her birth year.)Complicating predictions, Ms. Swift broke Hollywood norms in getting her film to theaters.Under the customary model, studios book movies into theaters and spend anywhere from $20 million to $100 million on marketing to turn out an audience. Theaters play movies and sell concessions. In return, studios collect as much as 70 percent of opening-weekend tickets sales, with theaters keeping the balance.Since she produced and financed “The Eras Tour” herself, Ms. Swift cut out the middle company (a studio) and made a distribution deal directly with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator. One reason involved marketing: Ms. Swift, with 369 million social media followers at her beck and call, barely needs to spend anything to advertise the film.Ms. Swift will keep about 57 percent of ticket revenue, with theater chains pocketing the rest, as first reported by a Puck newsletter. AMC will also receive a modest distribution fee.Box office forecasting, however, is based on moviegoer surveys that are designed to track the effectiveness of studio marketing campaigns — older women are not being persuaded by your ads, for example, but teenage boys are in the bag. “The Eras Tour” has had some paid advertising, including a commercial during a Chiefs prime-time game this month. But most movies arrive amid an advertising bombardment.“One of the questions involves staying power,” said Bruce Nash, founder of the Numbers, a box office tracking and analytics site. “Is ‘The Eras Tour’ going to do most of its business on opening weekend and then fall off a cliff? Or will people come back six times over the course of weeks? We have no idea.”Ms. Swift’s distribution choice made Hollywood gnash its teeth. Studio executives had to explain to their bosses why they missed a prime moneymaking opportunity and a chance to form a relationship with Ms. Swift, who has feature film directing ambitions. (She has also tinkered with acting, including in “Cats.”) Universal Pictures, fearing competition from “The Eras Tour,” scrambled to move “The Exorcist: Believer” to an earlier date; ticket sales were soft.Studios have also had to contend with an existential question: Does distribution for “The Eras Tour” mark the start of a paradigm shift? Are more movies going to bypass studios? Already, Beyoncé has followed Ms. Swift in making a deal with AMC to distribute her concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which will arrive in theaters on Dec. 1.Anything is possible. Mr. Nash noted that Fathom Events, an independent distributor that specializes in short-run screenings and simulcast opera performances, has found increasing success in taking faith-based projects (“The Chosen”) directly to theaters. Trafalgar Releasing found a studio-skipping hit in February with a concert film focused on BTS, the South Korean boy band.But most studio executives and entertainment industry analysts dismiss “The Eras Tour” as a one-off. When it comes to mobilizing a fan base, Ms. Swift, they say, is in a class by herself. Even Beyoncé has not shown the same selling power. First-day presales for “The Eras Tour” totaled an estimated $37 million, while “Renaissance” generated about $7 million.At the moment, theater chains aren’t thinking much beyond the weekend. The last two months have been quiet for theaters, with hits like “The Nun II” (Warner Bros.) offset by a string of duds, including “Dumb Money,” “Blue Beetle,” “The Creator” and “Expend4bles.”Two major movies originally expected this fall, “Kraven the Hunter” and “Dune: Part Two,” were pushed into next year because of the actors’ strike. (Until the strike is resolved, SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ union in known, has barred its members from engaging in any publicity efforts for films and TV shows that have already been completed.)Theater companies, of course, make most of their money at the concession counter, and AMC, for one, is counting on Ms. Swift’s fans to come hungry. Among other items, the chain plans to sell popcorn in collectible tubs for $20.Marketing line: “Swifties always snack in style.” More

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      Victor Jara Killing: Ex-Chilean Soldier Arrested in Florida

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      Pedro Barrientos, 74, is accused of killing the popular Chilean singer in 1973. In a civil case, Mr. Barrientos was accused of bragging about shooting Mr. Jara twice in the head.A former Chilean Army officer accused of torturing and killing the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara and others during the bloody aftermath of a 1973 military coup was arrested in Florida, officials announced Tuesday.The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 74, who moved to Florida in 1990, is wanted in Chile for the extrajudicial murder of Mr. Jara at a Chilean sports stadium. There, Mr. Jara and other dissidents had been detained after the coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled the country’s president, Salvador Allende, and thrust Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power.Federal immigration officials and local law enforcement officers arrested Mr. Barrientos on Oct. 5 during a traffic stop in Deltona, Fla., about 30 miles southwest of Daytona Beach, according to a news release published on Tuesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Mr. Barrientos is in ICE custody, officials said.“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” John Condon, a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division in Tampa, said in the news release.Mr. Jara, who has been described as the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a popular singer who hailed from the Chilean countryside and sang tales of poverty and injustice.He had supported the Allende government and was a member of Chile’s Communist Party when he was arrested at the State Technical University alongside hundreds of students and faculty members.Three days after his arrest, Mr. Jara’s bullet-riddled body was found outside a cemetery alongside those of four other victims. Before he was killed, soldiers smashed his fingers with their rifle butts and mockingly told him that he would never play guitar again.Mr. Barrientos’s arrest comes more than seven years after a federal jury in a civil case found him liable for Mr. Jara’s death and awarded $28 million in damages to the singer’s family, which had brought the case under a federal law that allows the victims of overseas human rights violations to seek redress.A former Chilean soldier testified in court that Mr. Barrientos had bragged about having shot Mr. Jara twice in the head.“He used to show his pistol and say, ‘I killed Víctor Jara with this,’” the soldier, José Navarrete, testified.A federal court revoked Mr. Barrientos’s U.S. citizenship in July based on a sealed complaint brought by the Department of Justice’s immigration litigation office.“The court found that Mr. Barrientos willfully concealed material facts related to his military service in his immigration applications,” the ICE news release said.It was unclear whether extradition proceedings for Mr. Barrientos were underway. The federal authorities could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday night, and it was unclear if Mr. Barrientos had retained a lawyer.Mr. Barrientos was the latest former Chilean official to be arrested in Mr. Jara’s killing. In 2018, eight retired military officers were each sentenced to more than 15 years in prison by a Chilean judge over Mr. Jara’s death. More

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      ‘For All the Dogs’ and Drake’s Latest Season of Discontent

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      The rapper’s new album, “For All the Dogs,” comes after a summer of live-show triumph and extra-musical boredom.The dominant preoccupation of the hip-hop internet in recent days has been the matter of what Drake — who remains, at 36, the most popular English-speaking rapper on the planet — should rap about.It is a curious preoccupation but not a new one: Since the beginning of his career a decade and a half ago, Drake has been confounding conventional expectations for rap success. What’s different now is that he is positioned resolutely at the center of the genre, not outside it, and the collective distress about his modes feels like a referendum on an elected leader no one can quite figure out how to unseat.On “For All the Dogs,” his eighth solo studio album, Drake shows that, in some ways, he, too, is wondering what remains of life at the top. So much so, in fact, that he revisits some of his oldest and most familiar tactics. “For All the Dogs” is an album full of caustic songs about heartbreak, which have added tension now that Drake is a world-beating pop star — there is incredulity cutting through the sadness. These 23 songs are less generally wounded than the early ones that marked him as a signature figure in hip-hop, as fluent in vulnerability as bombast, but they’re scarred nonetheless.At the Brooklyn stop of his tour, in July, Drake entered the arena by walking through the crowd like a boxer preparing for a championship fight.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe peak of that approach, “Tried Our Best,” is a surprisingly gentle and soothing catalog of frustration: “I swear that there’s a list of places that I been with you, I want to go without you/Just so I can know what it’s like to be there without having to argue.” Time and again on this album, Drake describes offering trust, only to have it violated (“Bahamas Promises,” “7969 Santa”) — it is, in that way, a return to classic form.Every so often, he delivers a line so packed with unexpected syllables — “Chinchilla ushanka, we skiin’ out in Courchevel” — that he reinforces the fact that he’s a devilishly nimble rapper when he chooses to be. He doesn’t choose that often on this album, though. “For All the Dogs” includes some of his least ambitious rapping, and whereas on prior albums, he sometimes balances out his complexity with melody, that’s rarely the case here.In places he’s being deliberate about these choices — where most rappers aim for the gasp, Drake sometimes pointedly goes for the groan: “Feel like I’m bi ’cause you’re one of the guys, girl” (“Members Only”);“Whipped and chained you like American slaves” (“Slime You Out”).On prior albums, Drake has sometimes balanced out his complexity with melody.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd as is Drake’s wont, there are also a handful of deeply modern, innovative and unexpected production choices — few rappers are as sonically flexible. “Rich Baby Daddy,” which features Sexyy Red and SZA, recalls the Atlanta bass music of INOJ and Ghost Town DJs. “Another Late Night,” a collaboration with Lil Yachty, is full of off-kilter bleeps that feel wobbly, while on “8 a.m. in Charlotte,” he raps over the smoky, soul-drenched minimalism of Conductor Williams, known for his work with the boom-bap revivalist Griselda collective.This is also standard Drake technique — taking in the whole of hip-hop, from oddballs to traditionalists, and hearing himself in it. Last year he released two albums: the dance-music quasi-experiment “Honestly, Nevermind,” and the 21 Savage collaboration album, “Her Loss.” Implicit in those vastly differing releases was a proposition — perhaps no Drake album had to be an omnibus anymore; instead, he could pursue genre or style experiments to their creative conclusions, pick up a few months later and do so again.“For All the Dogs” is less focused than either of those albums. It is not an essential Drake album, but it is also possible that the essential Drake cultural contributions are no longer albums, or at least albums of this length and variance.Onstage during the It’s All a Blur Tour, Drake was as energized as at any point in his career.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOr perhaps, the signature Drake innovations may no longer be musical at all — they may be delineating what a musician, a rapper, a pop star does with his scale of success.Much of what Drake has been engaged in this summer suggests the malaise of boredom, musical or otherwise. He released a book of poetry, or perhaps “poetry” — “Titles Ruin Everything,” written with Kenza Samir — really just an inventory of Instagram captions, some funny. Much funnier, if far stranger, was the interview he conducted with Bobbi Althoff, a kind of method actress/comedian who deploys her ignorance of her subjects (feigned or otherwise) as a weapon. Drake treated the interview like a chess match, seemingly gleeful at the opportunity for a new kind of banter.There is some of that exuberance in his recent takedown of the social media personality Joe Budden, too. Budden is a onetime rapper who has remade himself as a wildly popular, often acidic commentator. After some unkind comments about the new album, Drake wrote a strikingly long and strikingly mean response online, largely noting how unsuccessful Budden had been as a rapper. But the lengths to which Drake went in order to, in essence, punch down were notable, perhaps the mark of someone who has run out of worthwhile nemeses.There are enemies on this album, too — he seemingly taunts YoungBoy Never Broke Again, the rare time he takes aim at a younger star. But he also pointedly puts women in his cross hairs: “Fear of Heights,” a song that appears to reference Rihanna, a rumored ex; and offhand and silly shots at the jazz star Esperanza Spalding, who bested Drake for the best new artist Grammy Award in 2011. (Yes, 2011.)The 23 songs that make up “For All the Dogs” are less generally wounded than Drake’s early tracks, which marked him as a signature figure in hip-hop, as fluent in vulnerability as bombast.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Drake, as ever, the top is a fraught place. But there is plenty of joy there, too. That much was clear during Drake’s It’s All a Blur Tour this summer, his first since the pandemic. At its Brooklyn stop, in July, he entered the arena walking through the crowd like a boxer preparing for a championship fight, creating a corridor of adulation.Onstage, he was as energized as he’s been at any point in his career, whether performing early-career lo-fi classics or pop-peak thumpers. He wasn’t a salesman hawking his wares, but an orchestra conductor — the show had the feeling of a fait accompli.In between songs, he recalled some New York-specific stories from early in his career — an eventful night at the Spotted Pig, a since closed gastro pub, and the 2010 show at the South Street Seaport that turned into a riot before he ever took the stage. Even back then, 13 years ago, the loyalists were shouting down the doubters. More

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      9 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      Get caught up on new music from Maren Morris, Earl Sweatshirt and Remi Wolf’s bold Paramore remake.Maren Morris conjures the glorious grit of a fed-up woman on “The Tree.”Natasha Moustache/Getty ImagesDear listeners,It’s good to be back! Last week, I took a little staycation and spent most of my time reading, dog-sitting a very good boy, and seeing a bunch of movies at the New York Film Festival.* But now I’m recharged, caught up on all the new music I missed — and, of course, ready to share it with you.Today’s offering is a compilation of highlights from our last few new music Playlists (from the likes of the Rolling Stones and Maren Morris), plus a few songs I would have put on last week’s Playlist were I not on vacation (one of Earl Sweatshirt’s collaborations with the Alchemist; Remi Wolf’s bold remake of a Paramore song). And while it includes some familiar names, I hope it also opens your ears to some new ones, too.Also! You still have a few more days to send me suggestions for the ultimate fall playlist. What’s a song that feels like autumn to you? Tell me here. We may use your response in an upcoming Amplifier.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Atka: “Lenny”If haven’t yet heard of the German-born, London-based musician Atka (also known as Sarah Neumann), that’s perfectly understandable: This propulsive single is only the second she’s ever released. But “Lenny,” which will appear on her forthcoming debut EP “Eye Against the Ashen Sky,” is quite a calling card. Industrial noises clang and suddenly cohere into a driving melody as Neumann deadpans a series of striking lyrics, beginning with a particularly vivid image: “Men like gods throwing rocks around the room.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Maren Morris: “The Tree”“The rot at the roots is the root of the problem,” Maren Morris sings on her smoldering new song, “The Tree.” “But you wanna blame it on me.” She has long been an outspoken critic of the country music establishment — see: her recent appearance on The New York Times’s Popcast (Deluxe) — and in one sense “The Tree” could be read as her breakup song with Nashville. But the song works just as well as a defiant end-of-a-relationship anthem, as Morris’s impressive vocal performance conjures the glorious grit of a fed-up woman. (Listen on YouTube)3. PinkPantheress: “Mosquito”The English pop singer PinkPantheress makes sugary sweet tunes cut through with sudden pangs of sour. Her latest single, “Mosquito,” is a fluttery reverie interrupted by a nightmarish admission: “I just had a dream I was dead, and I only cared ’cause I was taken from you.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Earl Sweatshirt & the Alchemist: “Vin Skully”When the rapper Earl Sweatshirt locks into his signature flow, he has a way of making language sound viscous, as though the words are just dribbling out of his mouth. On this track from “Voir Dire,” a collaborative album made with the producer the Alchemist, he’s effortlessly dexterous; and yes, it features a sample from the late, great Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully. (The M.L.B. team could perhaps use his blessing right about now.) (Listen on YouTube)5. Becky G featuring Chiquis: “Cuidadito”The stylistically nimble pop artist Becky G leans into regional Mexican sounds on her latest album, “Esquinas,” and especially on this playful duet with the singer Chiquis (daughter of the venerable Jenni Rivera). The pair trade fiery verses, letting their respective men know exactly what to expect if they dare cheat. (Listen on YouTube)6. Holly Humberstone: “Into Your Room”This one’s been stuck in my head for days. From the British singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone’s debut album, “Paint My Bedroom Black,” which comes out this Friday, “Into Your Room” is a moody, pulsating synth-pop number personalized with Humberstone’s endearingly chatty lyricism. “You’re the center of this universe,” she sings pleadingly to the object of her obsession. “My sorry [expletive] revolves around you.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Paramore & Remi Wolf: “You First (Re: Remi Wolf)”Earlier this year, the rock band Paramore put out its angsty, knotty sixth album, “This Is Why.” On the recently released remix album, “Re: This Is Why,” Paramore asked an eclectic group of artists — including Wet Leg, Julien Baker and Panda Bear — to rework the album, track by track. For the most part, it’s a compelling and successful experiment, though this galvanizing reimagining of “You First,” helmed by the avant-pop provocateur Remi Wolf, is a clear highlight. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga: “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”In 2012, Lady Gaga appeared onstage with the Rolling Stones to lend her vocals to a live rendition of “Gimme Shelter.” “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” the bluesy, fireworks-display climax of the Stones’ upcoming album, “Hackney Diamonds,” seems to pick up right where that performance left off. A soulful and unhurried Mick Jagger leads his band — which on this track includes Stevie Wonder (!) on keyboards — from the ground right to the great beyond, while Gaga accompanies him in an airy, angelic voice, showing off yet another facet of her impressive register. (Listen on YouTube)9. Jenn Champion: “Jessica”A tough listen, but also a cathartic one. Jenn Champion — a former member of the indie band Carissa’s Wierd, who used to record under the name S — pours all the feelings that sprang up in the wake of an old friend’s overdose into this sparse, haunting piano ballad. “I still love you,” she sings in a trembling voice. “But it hurts now.” This song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it, and I still can’t shake its unsettling power. (Listen on YouTube)I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom,Lindsay* The best thing I saw so far at the N.Y.F.F.? “Poor Things,” the latest wild ride from the cinematic Greek Freak, Yorgos Lanthimos. Emma Stone is on another level.The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“9 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Atka, “Lenny”Track 2: Maren Morris, “The Tree”Track 3: PinkPantheress, “Mosquito”Track 4: Earl Sweatshirt & the Alchemist, “Vin Skully”Track 5: Becky G featuring Chiquis, “Cuidadito”Track 6: Holly Humberstone, “Into Your Room”Track 7: Paramore & Remi Wolf, “You First (Re: Remi Wolf)”Track 8: The Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”Track 9: Jenn Champion, “Jessica” More

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      Morgan Wallen Returns to No. 1 in a Slow Chart Week

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      With Drake’s “For All the Dogs” and Taylor Swift’s rerecording of “1989” waiting in the wings, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” has its 16th time at the peak.In a relatively slow week of music sales before the arrival of blockbusters by Drake and Taylor Swift, the country star Morgan Wallen returns to the top of the Billboard album chart, notching a 16th time at No. 1 for his newest album, “One Thing at a Time.”Wallen’s album returns with the equivalent of 74,500 sales in the United States, including nearly 98 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“One Thing at a Time,” stuffed with 36 tracks, has been a steady streaming hit since March; only in the last month has it dipped below 100 million streams a week, a benchmark that relatively few albums reach even in their debut week, let alone their 40th. Wallen’s 16 reps at No. 1 are the most for any album since Adele’s “21,” which logged 24 weeks at the top in 2011 and 2012.Still, Wallen’s 74,500 “equivalent album units” — a composite number that represents an album’s popularity on streaming platforms and in purchases of downloads and physical copies — is notably low. That is the least units to top the charts in almost a year and a half, since Pusha T’s “It’s Almost Dry” opened with 55,000 in April 2022.The music industry is bracing for boffo numbers from Drake, whose long-awaited “For All the Dogs” came out Friday and is already a smash online, and for Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which comes out Oct. 27 and is all but certain to be huge on streaming services and in sales of both CDs and vinyl LPs. (“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” her concert film, is set to open on Friday and has already surpassed $100 million in worldwide advance ticket sales.)Ed Sheeran’s surprise “Autumn Variations” opens at No. 4, his second Top 10 new LP this year. His “-” (a.k.a. “Subtract”) opened at No. 2 in May, though it quickly plunged from there, falling out of the Top 20 after two weeks and the Top 100 after nine — a rare flop for Sheeran, one of the giants of pop’s streaming age.Also this week, Rod Wave’s “Nostalgia” falls to No. 2 after two weeks at the top, with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts” at No. 3 and Zach Bryan’s self-titled album No. 5. More