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    John Peck, Underground Cartoonist Known as The Mad Peck, Dies at 82

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    Among many other accomplishments, he illustrated a scholarly work on the history of comic books and wrote record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.John Peck, a cultural omnivore known as The Mad Peck whose dryly humorous style as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey and record collector was accompanied by an ornate eccentricity, died on March 15 in Providence, R.I. He was 82.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a ruptured aneurysm in his aorta, said his sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber.Mr. Peck was not as well known or acclaimed as underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman. That was perhaps in part because his interests were so broad, Gary Kenton, who edited him at Fusion and Creem magazines from the late 1960s into the ’70s, said in an interview.“To me, he would be a Top 10 cartoonist, a Top 10 D.J., a Top 10 rock critic,” Mr. Kenton said.Mr. Peck illustrated one of the first scholarly works on the importance of comic books. And he was perhaps the first cartoonist to write record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.He also wrote an academic paper in 1983 with the literary commentator Michael Macrone about the evolution of television; its title, “How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,” playfully referenced phallic symbolism in the oil-soaked prime-time soap opera “Dallas.” Mr. Peck once called it his “crowning achievement.”His comic-strip music critiques appeared in Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone and other music publications, and in The Village Voice. He worked in a retro style repurposed from the 1940s and ’50s and wrote with sardonic humor (“Is There Life After Meatloaf?”), while offering trustworthy criticism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Betty Bonney, 100, Dies; Her Song for a Yankee Star Was a Big-Band Hit

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      “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” which she sang with the Les Brown band, celebrated DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. She also sang on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.”Betty Bonney was already a veteran big-band vocalist at 17 when she joined Les Brown and His Orchestra in 1941 — in time to sing the praises of the New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio as he was racking up his major-league-record 56-game hitting streak.While performing that summer at a club in Armonk, N.Y., in Westchester County, the band “got caught up in the streak,” Mr. Brown told Newsday in 1990, and “would announce it from the bandstand every night if Joe had gotten another hit, or if he was coming to bat late in the game still without a hit.”As DiMaggio piled up hits — from mid-May to mid-July — a New York City disc jockey, Alan Courtney, and the band’s arranger, Ben Homer, wrote a jaunty tune, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” which Ms. Bonney sang in her smooth, elegant style at the Armonk club while band members goofed around with baseball gloves, bats and caps, Mr. Brown said.The song was also heard regularly on the band’s radio show and released in September as a 78 r.p.m. record; according to Billboard magazine, it was the 93rd-best-selling single of 1941.The Les Brown band’s 78 r.p.m. recording of “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” was released in September 1941, two months after DiMaggio’s record-setting 56-game hitting streak ended.Diamond Images/Getty ImagesThe song starts off with Ms. Bonney asking, “Hello, Joe, whaddaya know?” to which the clarinetist Ben Most, playing the part of DiMaggio, replies, “We need a hit, so here I go.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Ruth Westheimer, the Sex Therapist Known as Dr. Ruth, Dies at 96

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      Frank and funny, the taboo-breaking psychologist said things on television and radio that would have been shocking coming from almost anyone else.Ruth Westheimer, the grandmotherly psychologist who as “Dr. Ruth” became America’s best-known sex counselor with her frank, funny radio and television programs, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96. Her death was announced by a spokesman, Pierre Lehu.Dr. Westheimer was in her 50s when she first went on the air in 1980, answering listeners’ mailed-in questions about sex and relationships on the radio station WYNY in New York. The show, called “Sexually Speaking,” was only a 15-minute segment heard after midnight on Sundays. But it was such a hit that she quickly became a national media celebrity and a one-woman business conglomerate.At her most popular, in the 1980s, she had syndicated live call-in shows on radio and television, wrote a column for Playgirl magazine, lent her name to a board game and its computer version, and began rolling out guidebooks on sexuality that covered the field from educating the young to recharging the old. College students loved her; campus speaking appearances alone brought in a substantial income. She appeared in ads for cars, soft drinks, shampoo, typewriters and condoms.She even landed a role in the 1985 French film “One Woman or Two,” starring Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver and released in the United States in 1987. (“Dr. Ruth will never be mistaken for an actress,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, “but she does have pep.”)Dr. Westheimer with Gérard Depardieu, left, and Michel Aumont in the 1985 movie “One Woman or Two.” “Dr. Ruth will never be mistaken for an actress,” one critic wrote of her performance, “but she does have pep.”Moune Jamet/Orion Pictures Corp., via Everett CollectionThese days, some effort may be needed to recall that Ruth Westheimer had a radical formula and considerable influence on social mores. Talk shows abounded in the 1980s, but until she came along none had dealt so exclusively and clinically with sex. Nor could anyone have anticipated that the messenger of Eros would be a 4-foot-7 middle-aged teacher with a delivery that The Wall Street Journal described as “something like a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Online Radio Station Where Everything Is Eclectic

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      Music played by D.J.s like Flo Dill on NTS encompasses obscure ambient tracks and timeworn dad rock. The approach has won it fans far beyond its London home.On a gloomy Tuesday this past March, a cohort of trendy young Britons was waking up to the sounds of underground ’80s R&B. And Swedish space disco. And the folk singer John Martyn.Flo Dill, host of “The Breakfast Show” on the online radio station NTS, was floating around in a small East London studio, quietly back-announcing those tracks and laughing at messages in the station’s lively online chat room. Like most morning radio hosts, she tries to ease listeners into their day, slowly bringing up the tempo. But unlike most morning radio hosts, Dill plays tracks in a mixture of styles that can run the gamut from obscure ambient music to timeworn dad rock.The NTS studios in the Dalston neighborhood of London.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The Breakfast Show” encapsulates the spirit of NTS, an eclectic revamp of traditional radio that draws listeners — and on-air talent — from across the globe. Since it was founded in 2011, NTS has grown into a big fish in underground music’s small pond: You could maybe go for an entire day listening to NTS and not recognize a single artist, and, even in Britain, the average person on the street would never have heard of it.But the station’s devoted fans are drawn to its shows, most of which are structured like D.J. mixes, with no talking between tracks; others play like Dill’s: modern, casual updates on classic radio formats, with genre-agnostic programming.Dill said in an interview that NTS works because, unlike traditional radio, which “spoon feeds” its audience, it doesn’t patronize or treat the listener as “a moron.” (NTS’s tagline is “Don’t Assume.”) She started volunteering at NTS in 2016, at a time when there were hardly any full-time staff members. Now, there are around 45 working across the station and its related businesses, which include putting on festivals and events and creating marketing campaigns for brands like Carhartt, Netflix and Sonos.“The Breakfast Show” should be a respite from the “relentless pursuit of beige stuff” in today’s culture, Dill said. The program is broadly accessible — she sees it as a portal into the broader NTS ecosystem, which can be “so specialist” — but considered and particular in its tastes.That spirit has thrived since NTS’s beginning, when the London D.J. and blogger Femi Adeyemi spun it off from a music blog he was writing called “Nuts to Soup.” In an interview, Adeyemi said he conceived of NTS as a cross between U.K. pirate radio — a fixture of the country’s music scene that he admired, but found “very restrictive” — and American college radio, which “had that free-form approach that I hadn’t really heard much of in the U.K.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning,” Dill said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIn 2015, NTS expanded, opening a studio in Manchester and one in Los Angeles the following year. Currently, NTS hosts around 700 shows a month — roughly 600 from residents, who host weekly, biweekly or monthly shows, and 100 or so from guest D.J.s — which come in from cities across the world, including Beirut, Lebanon; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Melbourne, Australia. NTS broadcasts without advertising, instead relying on income from its commercial activities and a membership program called “NTS Supporters” to keep the station afloat. In March, the station averaged 360,000 listeners a day, according to its chief executive, Sean McAuliffe.Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura, the director of music and programming at NTS, said that the station “was the first platform in London that really reflected the breadth” of her taste as a young Black music fan with a genre-agnostic mind-set. It was that boundary-dissolving character that brings people to the station, she added.Dill said the station could also act as a bulwark against the idea that listening to music is a passive experience. “I want people to not think that music is just a background thing that’s on Spotify, that rolls into the next song and they all sound vaguely the same,” she said. (Around 40 percent of the music played on NTS is not available on the streaming service, McAuliffe noted.) “I want people to think that music is a really valuable, amazing art form, like a painting or a sculpture,” Dill added.Although it is based in London, NTS has global appeal. Nabihah Iqbal, who has been broadcasting on NTS for over a decade, said that she once received a message from a man in the Nubian Desert who listened to her show from the one spot in his Sudanese village where he could get cell signal.“What NTS reflects is the way that music consumption and connecting through music has changed because of the internet,” she said. “Listening to the station live, and being part of the chat room and connecting to people that way is a very real way of feeling like you’re part of a community.”The station’s listenership ballooned during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and McAuliffe said there were now plans to “amplify NTS more.” It has never spent any money on marketing, for example, but plans to in the future. McAuliffe also said NTS would roll out a new feature of its app and website that “will enable more people to have a better music discovery experience” and “will get a lot more musicians and music rights holders paid at a time when they’re not getting paid enough.” He declined to give further details.With the platform getting bigger, Dill said she didn’t want its core identity to get lost. Adeyemi recently sold part of his stake in the company to Universal Music Group, the major label conglomerate that releases music by Taylor Swift and Drake, among others. (McAuliffe, Dill and Adeyemi all said that the company has no influence on the music that’s played on NTS, and has no seats on the company’s board.) The money from Universal would mean that NTS won’t get subsumed into a streaming service like Apple Music, Dill said, as happened to other independent radio operations, including “Beats in Space,” the beloved radio show hosted by the D.J. Tim Sweeney, which moved from WNYU-FM to Apple Music in 2021.“I have seen, over the course of my time, many things I loved go away because they can’t continue,” Dill said. “If someone wants to give us money, I’m fine with that.”Dill said that if the station were to professionalize too much, or stray too far from its intended goals, then it wouldn’t be for her anymore. “I get satisfaction from representing the station that I really believe in and I’m proud of,” she said. “I guess it comes back to trust. I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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      The Sean Combs Saga Is Catnip for Pop Culture Podcasts

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      The raids of Combs’s homes have been a primary topic on podcasts and radio shows that cover the Black entertainment world.In the sprawling world of Black pop culture podcasts, its own media ecosystem covering the story lines and people central to the hip-hop genre, the one topic that dominated conversation this week was, unsurprisingly, the latest in the saga of Sean Combs.On Monday, federal agents raided the Los Angeles and Miami homes of Combs, the hip-hop mogul who has been accused in several civil lawsuits of sexual assault. He has vehemently denied all the claims. The news spurred days of freewheeling and varied reactions from radio personalities and podcast hosts whose discourse veered toward humor, speculation and denial, far from the tone struck by traditional news outlets.The rapper Mase, who topped charts as an artist signed to Combs’s Bad Boy record label in the late ’90s before their relationship soured, avoided addressing him by name on the sports-centric “It Is What It Is” podcast a day after the raids, but laughed and said that “reparations is getting closer and closer.”The same day, hosts of the popular morning radio show “The Breakfast Club” criticized the actions of the authorities — which Combs’s lawyer called an “unprecedented ambush, paired with an advanced, coordinated media presence” — as unnecessary: Charlamagne Tha God said he was curious about what information they had to justify the raids. Jessica Moore, known as “Jess Hilarious,” implied that the federal action was reminiscent of a television show. The third host, DJ Envy, agreed, and said the authorities acted like “they were going for the mob.”The former N.B.A. player Gilbert Arenas, who hosts the “No Chill” podcast, posted a 10-minute special episode on YouTube on Thursday that discussed the raids.“It’s over, no, it’s done, they got you,” he said, while laughing.To provide context for his listeners, Arenas said he had been at the scene of more than a dozen raids while he was in “the weed game, the poker game.” He noted that those raids happened between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Does Country Radio’s Treehouse Have Room for Beyoncé?

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      The pop superstar’s new album, “Cowboy Carter,” could be a litmus test for a format that’s long been inhospitable to women and Black artists.When Beyoncé dropped two songs during the Super Bowl in February, it was almost pointless to ask whether they would become pop-culture phenomena. She’s Beyoncé; of course they would scale the charts and inspire a thousand memes.But another, trickier question soon took shape, highlighting music’s complex genre and racial fault lines: Would country radio stations support Beyoncé’s new direction, with its plucked banjos, foot stomps and lyrics rhyming Texas and Lexus? Or would one of the world’s most influential stars languish in the margins of a format so inhospitable to female artists that, as one radio consultant advised in 2015, songs by women should be minimized on country playlists to ensure that “the tomatoes of our salad are the females”? (Even now, Nashville progressives seethe in remembrance of “Tomato-gate.”)In the wider pop music world, radio has largely ceded its former star-making mojo to streaming and social media. But country stations still retain a significant gatekeeping power, elevating favored performers and mediating the genre’s metes and bounds for audiences and the industry at large.With her latest album, “Cowboy Carter” — its cover depicts the star on a horse’s saddle, holding an American flag and decked out in a cowboy hat and red-white-and-blue rodeo gear — Beyoncé could be a litmus test for the format’s openness and adaptability. As many commentators see it, that goes for Beyoncé’s own music as well as for Black female country performers like Mickey Guyton and Rissi Palmer, who have found solid fan bases but barely cracked radio playlists.“This could be a major turning point,” said Leslie Fram, the senior vice president of music and talent for Country Music Television and a former radio programmer and D.J.Yet a month and a half after the debut of those two first singles, “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” and on the eve of the release of “Cowboy Carter” on Friday, the results of that test are still murky.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Bill Jorgensen, Authoritative New York TV Newsman, Dies at 96

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      Getting his start in the Midwest, he was best known for leading the New York broadcast “The 10 O’Clock News.”Bill Jorgensen, a serious-minded broadcast journalist who for 12 years anchored the pioneering, street-smart 10 p.m. newscast on New York’s Channel 5, died on March 13 at his home in Franklin, N.C. He was 96.His daughter Rebekah Jorgensen confirmed the death.Mr. Jorgensen, who came to New York from Cleveland in 1967, had some of the traits of a veteran anchor: a mane of graying hair, a deep, measured baritone and a tendency to lean into the camera with an intense gaze, as if to meet viewers head-on.“He was kind of a giant, aloof, powerful figure,” Victor Neufeld, who rose from production assistant to producer of the program, said in an interview. “He was the model of the Walter Cronkite style of anchoring — he carried himself with deep authority.”“The 10 O’Clock News” on WNEW-TV (now Fox 5 New York) was a gamechanger. As an independent station owned by Metromedia, it is believed to have been the first news program in the New York market to compete in prime-time against the entertainment programs on network stations. (WPIX, Channel 11, a rival independent station that had long started its newscast at 11 p.m., moved it to 10 clock in late 1967.)When “The 10 O’Clock News” debuted in March 1979, Channel 5 ran a full-page newspaper ad that proclaimed, “Jorgensen Can’t Wait To Give You The News,” and promised, “This man is going to change TV viewing habits.”And it did. With hard-hitting tabloid stories, with a significant focus on crime, covered in just 30 minutes by savvy reporters like Bob O’Brien, Chris Jones and Bill McCreary, “The 10 O’Clock News” found a strong audience against network shows and eventually expanded to an hour.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyoncé Fan’s Radio Request Reignites Country Music Debate

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      A fan asked his Oklahoma radio station to play a new Beyoncé song. The request was rejected, spurring hundreds of calls and emails about the exclusion of Black musicians from the genre.In Oklahoma, a small country music station that refused a listener’s request to play a new song by Beyoncé was forced to change its tune after an uproar from fans who say that Black artists are too often excluded from the genre.On Tuesday morning, Justin McGowan requested that the D.J.s at KYKC, a country music radio station in Ada, play “Texas Hold ’Em,” one of two new songs Beyoncé released as announced in a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday.Beyoncé, who grew up in Houston, sings about hoedowns, and the twangy song also features a fellow Black Grammy winner, Rhiannon Giddens, on banjo and viola.The station manager, Roger Harris, emailed Mr. McGowan back with a concise rejection: “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.” In sending the email, Mr. Harris unwittingly ignited a new flame in a long-simmering debate over how Black artists fit into a genre that has Black music at its roots.In the Super Bowl ad, Beyoncé joked that her new release would “break the internet.” She wasn’t kidding.Mr. McGowan put a screenshot of the rejection on social media, tagging a Beyoncé fan group in a post that drew 3.4 million views on X and sparked conversations on Reddit and TikTok.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Radio Station’s Call Letters Announce Its Purpose: KGAY

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      KGAY in Palm Springs is geared toward Gen X and older gay men who enjoy Rihanna but still worship Donna Summer.Fog clouded the San Jacinto Mountains recently as Brad Fuhr approached the headquarters of KGAY, a radio station in an undistinguished Palm Springs, California, strip mall. Fuhr, the station’s chief executive, was tuned to KGAY in his all-electric Volvo, and the morning’s soundtrack included “Bad of the Heart,” George Lamond’s 1990 freestyle cri de coeur about getting dumped, and “Lucky Star,” Madonna’s 1983 dance hit of bouncy adoration.KGAY’s call letters aren’t a fluke but a savvy marketing tool. While there are streaming stations devoted to gay audiences (like iHeart’s Pride Radio and Gaydio out of Britain) and gay-themed talk shows and dance formats have thrived on commercial and nonprofit radio for decades, KGAY is still one of a kind. It’s the only terrestrial radio station in America geared toward L.G.B.T.Q. listeners and their allies, where gay personalities broadcast in person, “WKRP in Cincinnati”-style, at least part time. (There’s WGAY, a “party station” in the Florida Keys, but it doesn’t market itself as gay.)KGAY covers the Coachella Valley with its FM signal at 106.5 and is simulcast with KGAY AM 1270; it can be streamed globally at KGAYPalmSprings.com. Its two full-time D.J.s are Chris Shebel, the old-school, no-nonsense program director and weekday afternoon personality, and the wisecracking John Taylor, who covers mornings. Three other D.J.s — Eric Ornelas, Galaxy and ModGirl — provide the station with homemade mix shows that play around the clock.Born on Dec. 25, 2018, KGAY replaced KVGH, an oldies station, with a playlist that rotates over 900 pop songs, disco anthems and dance remixes from the ’70s through the latest releases.“It’s an entertaining, mass-appeal radio station first,” said Fuhr, 65.Shebel at work as a D.J. at KGAY.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesKGAY serves primarily the clubby slice of the queer music pie. There’s no Barbra or Bikini Kill, no American songbook showstoppers or lesbian breakup ballads. There’s no rap or country, although it does play Lil Nas X and dance versions of songs by Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and other country divas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More