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      Bad Bunny’s Surprising Return and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ice Spice, Sleater-Kinney, Roy Hargrove and more.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Bad Bunny, ‘Mr. October’Bad Bunny surprise-released a new album, “Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana” (“Nobody Knows what’s Going to Happen Tomorrow”). Many of its 22 songs circle back toward the programmed trap beats that helped start Bad Bunny’s career, but now they’re just part of the sonic domain of a world-conquering star. In “Mr. October” he sings and raps about wealth, clothes, fame, sex and celebrity, comparing himself to Michael Jackson and Reggie Jackson and rightfully claiming, “Yo cambié el juego”: “I changed the game.” But the track is far from triumphal; with tolling piano notes, filmy minor chords and skittering electronic tones, the music laces every boast with anxiety. JON PARELESIce Spice and Rema, ‘Pretty Girl’The utterly unflappable Bronx rapper Ice Spice cannily connects with Afrobeats — and with the gentle-voiced, hook-making Nigerian songwriter Rema, who offers slick, robotic blandishments in what sounds like one repeating cut-and-pasted chorus. Ice Spice responds with encouraging, human-sounding specifics: “Think about my future, got you all in it.” But the track ends with Rema’s looped doubts — “Give me promise you ain’t gonna bail on me” — rather than her wholehearted welcome. Why give him the last word? PARELESDesire Marea, ‘The Only Way’The style-melting South African songwriter Desire Marea turns to funk and Afrobeat in “The Only Way.” His voice lofts a sustained melody and layered backup vocals over an arrangement that feels hand-played and organic: all staccato cross-rhythms — drums, bass, guitar, electric piano, horns — with a nervy, constantly shifting beat and one melodic peak topping another. The only lyrics in English are “It’s the only way” — and with such urgent music, there’s no need for more. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Não Ao Marco Temporal’If Esperanza Spalding has been in feeds this week for precisely the wrong reasons, consider this your cue to close that tab. Spalding’s mind has been elsewhere: specifically in Brazil, where the battle over the fate of the world’s largest rainforest is reaching a decisive point. On “Não Ao Marco Temporal,” recorded in Rio de Janeiro, Spalding and a small crew of musicians protest the Temporal Framework, a recent attempt to roll back Indigenous Brazilians’ land sovereignty that would have left the Amazon increasingly vulnerable to deforestation. (The Brazilian Supreme Court recently rejected the framework, but industry’s attempts to undermine that decision have continued.) Over strums on the cavaco and violão, the resounding of drums and the squeals of a cuica, Spalding sings of the “grabbing hands” that seek to violate the rainforest. “There are some men who stop at nothing to have their way with the body of a woman or a girl,” she and a small chorus of voices declare. “Right now they’re calling her Brazil.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBrittany Howard, ‘What Now’Brittany Howard, who led the Alabama Shakes, grapples with a disintegrating relationship in “What Now,” singing “If you want someone to hate, then blame it on me.” Over a fierce, choppy funk groove, Howard restrains her far-ranging voice to make her point about “learning lessons I don’t want to.” She is not happy about the breakup; she sings like she has no choice. PARELESMadi Diaz, ‘Same Risk’Madi Diaz sings about a high-stakes infatuation in “Same Risk,” spelling out both her physical passion and her misgivings. “Do you think this could ruin your life?/’Cause I could see it ruining mine,” she asks, then wonders, “Are you gonna throw me under the bus?” What starts with modest acoustic guitar strumming rises with an orchestral crescendo to match the urgency of her questions. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Hell’“Hell” will be the opening track on “Little Rope,” the album Sleater-Kinney will release in January and which was made in the wake of the sudden deaths of Carrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather. The song breaks wide open with anguish and inconsolable fury, as tolling, elegiac verses erupt into bitter power-chorded choruses. Corin Tucker unleashes her scream on the word “why.” PARELESJamila Woods featuring Saba, ‘Practice’Jamila Woods takes the pressure off a new relationship in “Practice,” the latest single from her excellent album “Water Made Us.” “We don’t gotta hurry up, you ain’t gotta be the one,” she sings in an airy, unburdened voice, carried along by an insistent beat. The Chicago rapper Saba sounds similarly breezy and wise on his verse — “learned from her, moved on, learned more” — and Woods’s lyrics extend the song’s playful basketball metaphor. After all, in the immortal words of Allen Iverson, we’re talking about practice. LINDSAY ZOLADZSen Morimoto, ‘Deeper’“I lost my senses like I’ve lost so many times/Why do the answers seem impossible to find?” sings Sen Morimoto, who plays most of the instruments on his tracks himself, in “Deeper.” A lurching beat, meandering chromatic harmonies and keyboard and guitar incursions that seem to have wafted in from other songs just add to the sense of disorientation. Morimoto’s saxophone solo sounds more sure of itself than he does, but he’s clearly not too perturbed. PARELESRoy Hargrove, ‘Young Daydreams (Beauteous Visions)’The trumpeter Roy Hargrove was just 23, but already near the top of New York’s jazz scene, when his friend and mentor Wynton Marsalis commissioned him to write “Love Suite in Mahogany.” The suite, which he performed with a septet at Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, in fall 1993, begins in a downward slide of moonlit harmony, gesturing toward Gil Evans and Billy Strayhorn (this was the Young Lions era; a direct address to the masters was encouraged). It finds its way gradually into a slowly creeping groove before a false ending gives way to a coda of driving post-bop. The track cuts off as he cues the band into the suite’s next movement. You can hear the rest of the suite’s debut performance, which has just been released as an LP on J.A.L.C.’s Blue Engine Records. RUSSONELLOMendoza Hoff Revels, ‘New Ghosts’There’s gristle and bone in every last satisfying bite of “Echolocation,” the debut album from Mendoza Hoff Revels, a four-piece band co-led by the guitarist Ava Mendoza and the bassist Devin Hoff. There is also a delightfully wide range of musical shapes at play. One moment, they’re descending straight from the slow drag of doom metal and stoner-rock; later, Mendoza’s wily, spiral-bound melodies have more to do with the tactics of John Zorn (both she and Hoff have played on Zorn projects). Her acid-soaked electric guitar rarely leaves center stage here. On “New Ghosts,” Mendoza, Hoff and the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis hover around a heavy minor chord, occasionally repainting it in an uncanny major. Then Hoff and the drummer Ches Smith join, and the improvisation ascends into a gray cloud of swirling saxophone and bludgeoning guitar. RUSSONELLOboygenius, ‘Afraid of Heights’Lucy Dacus regrets confessing her fear of heights on this wry highlight from boygenius’s new four-song EP, “The Rest”: “It made you want to test my courage, you made me climb a cliff at night.” Though, like all boygenius songs, it’s a collaboration with her singer-songwriter peers Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, here Dacus takes the lead, bringing complexity to a simple chord progression through the specificity of her lyricism. “I never rode a motorcycle, I never smoked a cigarette,” she sings, balancing poignancy with dry humor. “I wanna live a vibrant life, but I wanna die a boring death.” ZOLADZAllegra Krieger, ‘Impasse’The folky, deceptively understated songwriter Allegra Krieger released her album “I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane” in July; now she extends it with “Fragile Plane — B-Sides.” In “Impasse,” she calmly confronts someone who’s been “building quite a big brand,” touting “family values, patriot song” in a culture where “Everyone here is trying to win/Power or paper or recognition.” Over an unhurried modal guitar line, she warns how it could suddenly come crashing down, and she sings like she won’t mind if it does. PARELESNdox Électrique, ‘Lëk Ndau Mbay’Gianna Greco and François R. Cambuzat, who have worked with post-punk artists including Lydia Lunch, have spent recent years traveling the world, documenting and collaborating with musicians who play traditional trance rituals. For their latest project, Ndox Électrique, they collaborated with Senegalese drummers and singers who perform spirit-possession healing rituals called n’doep, layering drones and assaultive noise-rock guitars atop the fiercely propulsive beat, translating and transmuting the music’s incantatory power. PARELES More

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      Review: Arca Struts the Catwalk Between Diva and Meta Diva

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      In “Mutant;Destrudo,” her show at the Park Avenue Armory, the experimental musician delivers what is essentially a traditional concert.Amid the boundaries that the musician Arca has explored over the past decade — between technology and nature, male and female, vulnerability and aggression — another has arisen recently: the line between a pop diva and an artist commenting on pop divas.As with those other binaries, Arca hovers somewhere in the blurry, ever-evolving middle of this one: a Schrödinger’s diva, simultaneously performing stardom and deconstructing it.“Mutant;Destrudo,” her four-performance show that opened on Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, is essentially a traditional concert. There is a stage, a large screen behind it that shows a mixture of live and premade video, and a catwalk protruding into the crowd.Regularly during the two-hour show, a camera at the end of the runway relays a thighs-down view of Arca strutting in spike heels as she sings, à la Beyoncé. There’s a piano on one side of the stage, at which she sits for some quieter moments, à la Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift. There are reggaeton beats overlaid with flowing, easygoing raps, à la Rosalía or Bad Bunny. She takes selfies with phones handed up to her.If you squint, this is pop.That is a world in which Arca, the pseudonym of the Venezuelan-born Alejandra Ghersi, has spent time. She started as a producer for Kanye West, FKA twigs, Björk and others as she built a following for her own music, including the kaleidoscopic five-album cycle “Kick,” released in a flurry in 2020 and 2021.But if parts of “Kick” and “Mutant;Destrudo” seem like plays for mainstream eyes and ears, Arca stubbornly resists being too digestible. The Armory show, like Swift’s touring behemoth, picks and chooses from a catalog that is, after only 10 or so years, widely varied. But unlike Swift, Arca’s eras are spiky and hard to define; she doesn’t do anthems. “Destrudo” is billed as being structured in three acts, but the divisions between them are murky.This is restless, unsettled music, evoking both exhilaration and anxiety that a single person can produce — and can be — so many different things. Wednesday’s set began with murmured lullaby torch songs, in the airy yet sultry, prayerful, sometimes crooning voice of “Arca” (2017) and the fifth “Kick” album. The evening’s climax — long, seething, groaning, grinding synthesizer instrumentals — could hardly have been more different.Arca at the synthesizer where she made the kinds of sounds she specialized in at the beginning of her career: glitches, explosions, video-game-style machine-gun rounds, spacily stretched tones.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesBetween those extremes were hip-swaying bits of reggaeton, from the second “Kick,” and explosive electronics; in one number, smooth vocals and a low-slung beat were disrupted by metallic squeals. Songs seemed to end almost arbitrarily, as if Arca were simply ready to move on to something else. The mood was twitchy, fractured, a perpetual transformation.For all the arresting high-tech video imagery — psychedelic layers superimposed until they took on hologram-like pseudoreality — there was a studiedly rough, decidedly non-stadium aspect to the show.Arca’s first costume change — out of a slinky, shimmering black dress into a plastic breastplate with lights at the nipples and a patchwork miniskirt — took place in full view of the audience, without much rushing or showmanship. The awkwardness of how long it took, the lack of spectacle, seemed intentional: This, she seemed to be saying, is the glamorous drudgery we put female artists through. We sometimes saw Arca on video as she lay on an examining chair, as if our perspective was that of her surgeon.Her piano — unlike Swift’s or Lady Gaga’s — is prepared with magnets that turn it into an electroacoustic machine of woozy, otherworldly lyricism, tinged with buzz. And unlike most pop divas, Arca had a synthesizer setup on the other side of the stage, at which she grinned maniacally and made the kind of noise that she specialized in at the beginning of her career: harsh shards in wet earth, glitches, explosions, video-game-style machine-gun rounds, roars, spacily stretched tones.It was the kind of soundscape that fit the show’s title: “Destrudo” is a term relating to the Freudian death drive, a theme in keeping with Arca’s gothy-cyborg self-styling. But while the music occasionally got loud on Wednesday, there was little of the heavy, disorienting, oozingly morphing melancholy of her early work. Lacking the encompassing (if changeable) moods of the albums, this was a performance more endearing than emotional; even the dancey parts were too brief to build up much joy.“Destrudo” follows “Mutant;Faith,” her 2019 production at the Shed. In that period, when she began identifying as a nonbinary trans woman, pre-“Kick,” it landed more squarely on the side of experimental performance art. Arca did the show in a dirt pit, wore hoofed stilts, used a stripper-pole synthesizer and rode a mechanical bull.Now, trying more than ever to have it both pop and not, she is still fascinating, but — maybe inevitably — not fully satisfying.At the Armory, she was charming, game, sweetly grateful to the crowd. “This is fun, right?” she said, sincerely, as she paused to correct something wrong with the technology in her high heels that seemed meant to translate her steps into sounds. And it was fun — sort of.ArcaThrough Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org More

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

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      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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      ‘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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      Drake Releases ‘For All the Dogs’ Album, With Assists From Bad Bunny and Kevin Durant

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      The album features appearances by SZA, 21 Savage and J. Cole, plus a surprise role for an NBA star. After its release, the rapper said he would consider a temporary break from music.After a summer of teasing, various delays, dozens of arena concerts and eventually another No. 1 single, the rapper Drake released his fourth album in barely two years on Friday morning, ahead of a tour-ending, two-night run of shows in his hometown, Toronto.“For All the Dogs,” Drake’s eighth solo studio album, not counting those he considers mixtapes, includes 23 tracks and features past collaborators like J. Cole, 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, SZA and the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny, plus artists from the hip-hop vanguard like Chief Keef, Yeat, Teezo Touchdown and Sexyy Red.The credits also list a role for Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns basketball player, who is given the title of A&R on “For All the Dogs,” a role that, in the modern music business, refers to a collaborator who helps to organize an album. Tracks include “Bahamas Promises,” “What Would Pluto Do,” “7969 Santa” and “Virginia Beach,” a song that immediately raised eyebrows because it is named for the hometown of Drake’s longtime rap rival, Pusha-T.The album was released at the unorthodox hour of 6 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, breaking from the industry standard. “Sorry to all my streamers,” Drake wrote on Instagram in his announcement, a reference to the fact that new albums are typically released to services like Spotify and Apple Music at midnight.It was the latest — and shortest — delay for a long-expected album. Drake, a perpetual chart-topper who prides himself on relentless productivity, began promising a new release even before the opening of his “It’s All A Blur” arena tour, which debuted in July, and he provided updates on his recording progress most nights onstage.“For All the Dogs” had previously been scheduled for release on Sept. 22, but fan anticipation stretched back further, to the beginning of summer.Drake first teased the album in June, with the surprise announcement of a book of poetry via full page newspaper advertisements in major publications. The ads and the book, “Titles Ruin Everything,” written with Kenza Samir, contained a QR code atop an image of two puppies that linked to a website revealing the existence of new music.It did not include a release date, but did come with a cheeky Drake lyric from “Headlines,” a song released in 2011: “They say they miss the old Drake, girl, don’t tempt me.”On Thursday, he called the new album “one of my best ever,” marking the release of the video for “8am in Charlotte,” the latest in his long-running time stamp series, which co-stars his young son, Adonis. The child also contributed the scrawled rendering of a goat — not a dog, according to the artist — that serves as the “For All the Dogs” album cover.The album was preceded earlier by the release of the singles “Search & Rescue,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April (but is not included on “For All the Dogs”), and “Slime You Out,” featuring SZA, which debuted at No. 1 last month, marking Drake’s 12th chart-topping song. That achievement tied him with Madonna and the Supremes for the fifth-most No. 1s of all time, Billboard said.This year, Drake has also appeared on tracks by the rappers J Hus, Central Cee, Young Thug and Travis Scott.Drake has 12 Billboard No. 1 albums in all, including two from last year — the dance music-inspired “Honestly, Nevermind,” released in June, and the more rap-focused “Her Loss,” with 21 Savage, from November.The “It’s All a Blur” tour, which also features 21 Savage, concludes on Friday and Saturday, at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. With more than 50 arena dates, Drake’s tour was one of many by music’s biggest stars this summer in which intense post-pandemic demand and ticket competition led to high prices, jarring some fans.Drake said on Friday that he would likely take a break following the tour and album, citing a persistent stomach problem. “I probably won’t make music for a little bit,” the rapper told listeners of his Sirius XM radio show, Table for One. “I need to focus on my health.”“I don’t even know what a little bit is,” he added. “Maybe a year or so, maybe a little longer.” More

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      Testimony in Tupac Shakur Murder Case Gives New Details

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      Grand jury witness testimony describes how hyperlocal clashes between warring gang factions spilled into a fatal dispute that would alter the course of hip-hop history.In the adrenalized aftermath of a Mike Tyson prizefight in 1996, a black BMW carrying the rapper Tupac Shakur pulled up to a red light just off the Las Vegas Strip, thrilling the women in the car next to him.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.As Mr. Shakur hung out of his passenger-side window, his friends in the Lexus behind him assumed that he was inviting the women to his record label’s new nightspot, Club 662 — its numeric name a barely disguised telephone code for “MOB.”The women pulled away and a white Cadillac took their place. A large, muscular arm emerged from its rear window and fired a barrage of shots from a .40-caliber Glock pistol into the BMW. Mr. Shakur was hit four times.The driver of the BMW, the Death Row Records impresario Marion Knight, better known as Suge, was grazed by the gunfire. But he managed to take off, making a U-turn over a traffic median and driving the wounded Mr. Shakur in the opposite direction before pulling over.Malcolm Greenidge, a rapper and close friend of Mr. Shakur’s who had been following them in the Lexus, rushed out of the car to check on Mr. Shakur, he testified this summer to a Las Vegas grand jury. Mr. Shakur seemed less concerned with his wounds than with Greenidge’s safety as armed police officers approached the chaotic scene, he recalled.“Get on the ground, they’re going to shoot you,” Mr. Shakur told him, Mr. Greenidge testified. Mr. Shakur would die less than a week later, at 25.In the 27 years since, accounts of what happened on Sept. 7, 1996, have existed in an unwieldy tangle of news reports, true crime specials, street gossip, internet innuendo and dubious self-mythologizing. The case went cold.But with last week’s indictment of Duane Keith Davis, a former Compton gang leader known as Keffe D, who has been saying publicly for years that he was in the white Cadillac when the fatal shots were fired, prosecutors have begun to map out the most detailed narrative yet of the chain of events they say led to Mr. Shakur’s death, one that will be tested in court.While the broad outlines of Mr. Shakur’s killing and its possible motive have long been known, hundreds of pages of grand jury witness testimony reviewed by The New York Times — given under oath and with surprisingly vivid descriptions for a decades-old case — offer new details of how hyperlocal disputes between warring gang factions had spilled into an ultimately fatal rap beef that would alter the course of hip-hop history.The son of Black Panther parents and a onetime performing arts student turned hip-hop backup dancer, Mr. Shakur had broken out as a solo artist in the early 1990s with a unique blend of introspective street poetry and young man’s fury. A proud antihero whose popularity only grew as he became mired in violence and rivalries, Mr. Shakur transformed in death into a hip-hop icon and pop culture martyr.Duane Keith Davis, 60, a former Compton gang leader known as Keffe D, during a court appearance on Wednesday after he was arrested in Mr. Shakur’s killing. Pool photo by Bizuayehu TesfayeOn Wednesday, Mr. Davis made his first appearance in Clark County District Court for a scheduled arraignment, which the judge postponed because Mr. Davis did not have a lawyer present, saying that his longtime California-based lawyer, Edi Faal, could not be there. In a brief phone interview, Mr. Faal said Mr. Davis, 60, intended to plead not guilty; he declined to discuss specifics about the case, saying he was in the process of getting Mr. Davis a Nevada lawyer.“Like in all cases, I think we should allow things to play out in the courtroom,” Mr. Faal said.Some of the new evidence challenges the conventional wisdom that had formed around the killing. While Mr. Davis had previously told law enforcement officials that the gun had been fired by his nephew, Orlando Anderson, who was killed in a gang-related shooting in 1998, two witnesses shared accounts with the grand jury casting doubt on the widely believed narrative.Those close to the case have reacted to news of Mr. Davis’s arrest with a mixture of shock and relief.Allen Hughes, who directed two of Mr. Shakur’s early music videos and worked with his estate on “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” a documentary series about the rapper and his mother that was released this year, said the family had wondered if there would ever be accountability for his death.“All these years, we all knew what it was,” he said. “Just because law enforcement didn’t close the case, doesn’t mean we didn’t feel we knew who the true culprits were.”Now someone has been indicted in his death. And Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police detective who began to reinvestigate the killing in 2006, said, “Tupac Shakur’s murder will never again go down as an unsolved mystery.”Mr. Shakur performing in 1994 in Chicago.Raymond Boyd/Getty ImagesBrawls and RetaliationMr. Shakur’s music and public persona had taken on a darker edge following his 1993 arrest and subsequent conviction for sexual abuse, as he aligned himself with the gangster rap label Death Row Records and its leader, Suge Knight, who orchestrated his $1.4 million bond pending appeal.While still awaiting the verdict in the case, Mr. Shakur had been ambushed, robbed and shot in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, an attack he later blamed on his former friend the Notorious B.I.G. and affiliates of the New York-based label Bad Boy Records, including Sean Combs, known then as Puff Daddy. (They denied involvement, with the Notorious B.I.G. claiming that his taunting track “Who Shot Ya?” had been written before the incident.)After Mr. Shakur responded with the furious, personal diss “Hit ’Em Up” in June 1996, what was once a simmering competition between the hip-hop vanguard on the East and West Coasts became a boiling feud, with each side relying on support from sworn enemies in the gang underworld for protection and street credibility.Those rising tensions began to boil over as players from each side prepared to travel to Las Vegas to watch Mr. Tyson fight Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.Not long before the fight, a brawl at the Lakewood Mall in Southern California set off a sequence of retaliation.Denvonta Lee, who said he was an affiliate of Compton’s South Side Crips, told the Las Vegas grand jury this summer that Mr. Davis — who called himself “the five-star general” of the local Crip set — had given a local football player $4,000 to shop for clothes before heading to college and told other gang members to accompany him to the mall.There, the group of young Crips collided with a Death Row-affiliated group of Mob Piru Bloods, their nearby rivals, resulting in a struggle over a Death Row chain. “That’s like taking somebody’s crown,” Mr. Lee testified. “It means something.” Within 24 hours, he added, “a war” had broken out locally. “There was shootings everywhere,” he said.One of the participants in the mall fight, witnesses said, was Orlando Anderson, a nephew of Mr. Davis’s known as Baby Lane. That September, Mr. Anderson traveled to Las Vegas with his uncle and other Crips for a weekend of boxing, gambling and revelry.The heavyweight fight ended in less than two minutes with a first-round Tyson knockout. Some ticket holders hadn’t even made it to their seats before it was over.As those gathered plotted their next moves for the evening, Mr. Anderson, brushing off the need for backup, found himself alone near the MGM hotel elevators and face to face with Mr. Shakur and his entourage of Bloods, including the same man whose Death Row chain had been targeted at the mall in California.In a scuffle that was captured by security cameras at about 9 p.m. that night, the group began to punch and kick Mr. Anderson, who declined to cooperate with the police and hotel security after his assailants scattered.Now, it was Mr. Anderson who was looking to exact revenge. “He wasn’t coming back to Compton with nothing being done,” Lee told the grand jury.A Fatal EncounterMr. Davis, a successful drug dealer and “shot caller” for the Crips at the time of Mr. Shakur’s death, wrote in a 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” that on the night of the shooting he obtained a Glock pistol from a drug associate from Harlem before setting out with Mr. Anderson to find Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight.A childhood friend of Mr. Knight’s — the two played Pop Warner football together — Mr. Davis had found himself enmeshed throughout the 1990s in the growing gangster rap nightlife scene, but his relationship with Death Row soured as the label became more closely associated with the Bloods. Mr. Davis instead aligned himself with their cross-country rivals at Bad Boy, supplying his Crip soldiers as West Coast security for the label’s artists and executives, in exchange for access to concerts and parties.Following a failed stakeout targeting Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight at Club 662, the white Cadillac that Mr. Davis and Mr. Anderson were riding in came upon Mr. Shakur’s BMW by chance, spotting him as he leaned out from the passenger side.“If Pac had not been hanging out of the window, we would have never seen them,” Mr. Davis wrote. “Like two rams locking horns, Suge and I looked each other dead in the eye.”The police displayed a graphic showing who they believe was in the white Cadillac that opened fire on Mr. Shakur, and where they sat.Las Vegas Metropolitan PoliceAccording to witness testimony and law enforcement accounts, Terrence Brown was driving the white Cadillac that night; Mr. Davis rode in the front passenger seat, with Mr. Anderson behind him and Deandrae Smith, known as Big Dre, also sitting in the back. (Mr. Davis is the only person in the vehicle who is still alive, the police said.)In describing the shooting, Mr. Davis wrote in his memoir that he had tossed the Glock into the back seat before the encounter at the traffic light. While he has sometimes refused to say who fired the shots that night, he told law enforcement officials in interviews about 15 years ago that it had been Mr. Anderson.But new testimony in the case suggests a different version of events.Mr. Lee, the grand jury witness, was Mr. Smith’s roommate at the time, and told the court in July that Mr. Smith had admitted at the time that he fired the shots that killed Mr. Shakur and injured Mr. Knight. “Orlando didn’t have a clear shot,” he said, adding, “Dre said, ‘Hey, give me the pistol,’ got the pistol, boom, did his thing.”In the aftermath, however, speculation spread in Compton and beyond that Mr. Anderson had pulled the trigger as retribution for his beating at the MGM. Mr. Smith let Mr. Anderson have the “glory,” Mr. Lee testified. “He didn’t want to take the credit for Orlando.”The indictment of Mr. Davis does not identify the shooter, stating that Mr. Davis provided the gun to Mr. Smith “and/or” Mr. Anderson “with the intent that said co-conspirators commit said crime.” Mr. Kading, the former Los Angeles detective, said in an interview that he believed that the “overriding evidence is Keffe D’s own admissions within his law enforcement interviews that he handed the gun to Orlando Anderson and Orlando Anderson pulled the trigger.”Mr. Anderson, his friend said, often stopped short of claiming the murder. “‘You all crazy, man, don’t believe everything you hear,’” Mr. Lee recalled him saying.Sharing His StoryImmediately after the killing, as a related gang war broke out in Compton, the police there arranged what Robert Ladd, a former Compton Police Department detective, described to the grand jury as a “massive multi-gang search warrant,” arresting known gang members to try to reduce the violence in the streets and searching the homes of Mr. Davis and the others from the white Cadillac.But the initial investigation stalled, with the police blaming a lack of cooperation from witnesses. It was revived in 2006 when the Los Angeles Police Department opened a task force into the still-unsolved 1997 killing of the Notorious B.I.G. in a shooting long thought to be related to Mr. Shakur’s death.It was during that inquiry that Mr. Kading, the Los Angeles police detective, persuaded Mr. Davis to speak with him after dangling the threat of a drug trafficking prosecution.In 2008, Mr. Davis agreed to what is called a proffer agreement, in which Mr. Kading promised to not prosecute Mr. Davis using what he told him about Tupac and Biggie, so long as nothing he said proved to be a lie.Mr. Kading taped Mr. Davis’s interview, and after retiring from the Police Department, the detective used the contents of the confession in a 2011 book called “Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations.” In 2015, the recording was included in a documentary based on the book.Mr. Davis was irritated by Mr. Kading’s disclosures. Eager to share his story after recovering from colon cancer, he began talking publicly about the case. It was a risky step. Although Mr. Davis — who has spent a quarter of his life in prison, partly on drug trafficking charges — would have been protected from prosecution for what he told Mr. Kading during their meeting, his later public disclosures were not protected, legal experts said.Mr. Davis gave his first public interview on the subject of Mr. Shakur’s death for a 2018 docu-series called “Death Row Chronicles.”“He was trying to word things careful enough to walk a tightrope between taking credit, but not getting arrested,” said Mike Dorsey, the director of “Murder Rap,” who consulted on “Death Row Chronicles.” He said Mr. Davis arrived with a lawyer.After the series aired without leading to charges, Mr. Davis wrote about the case in his memoir; his interviews on the subject, including with prominent YouTubers, grew “looser and looser,” Mr. Dorsey said.Police officials and prosecutors in Las Vegas were watching Mr. Davis’s interviews closely.“Since 2019, he has appeared at least eight separate times in promotion of this book and repeated various versions of these events, all of which he acknowledges that he is in fact the person that ordered the death of Mr. Shakur,” Marc DiGiacomo, a prosecutor on the case, said in court on Friday.In his memoir, Mr. Davis at times softened toward Mr. Shakur and his family, writing that he had a “deep sense of remorse” for the pain his death caused.Still, he held firm that revenge was necessary for the beating of his nephew, going as far as to say that for some of the Crips involved, the killing earned them “some stripes.”“But it generated too much attention,” Mr. Davis went on, “and put us under a microscope by law enforcement that would not cease and eventually brought us down. It was a big-time loss for everybody involved.”Lynnette Curtis More

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      After Viral Beef, Robert Glasper Returns to the Blue Note

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      Mounting his fifth annual residency at the Blue Note (after a viral beef at the Grammys), the pianist, producer and composer is hungry for a challenge.In February, on the night of this year’s Grammy Awards, the pianist, producer and composer Robert Glasper was enjoying himself in the audience at the Microsoft Theater when he realized he didn’t have his phone. He had given it to his assistant earlier in the evening, before taking the stage to accept the award for best R&B album — his second win in that category and fifth career Grammy.When he retrieved the phone, Glasper saw that it was filled with messages about the R&B singer Chris Brown, who was among the nominees whom he had just bested. Brown had reacted to the loss with a discourteous post to his 131 million followers on Instagram: “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper,” appending a crying laughing emoji to the word “who.”The comment, which Brown followed with a video comparing his success on the record charts to Glasper’s, was an attempt to undercut his rival’s achievement. But Brown had fallen into a trap. Over the previous 10 years, Glasper had been methodically chipping away at the boundaries between jazz — the music for which he originally became known — hip-hop and R&B. In some ways, his winning album, “Black Radio III,” was designed to force precisely the kind of showdown with contemporary Black popular music that Brown’s intemperate posting had unwittingly supplied.Scrolling through his phone at the venue, Glasper was almost giddy.“Oh yeah,” he thought to himself. “This is going to be great.”Glasper, 45, whose long face and soft features are capped by closely trimmed hair, ascended the ranks of modern jazz nearly 20 years ago. Born and raised in Houston, he arrived in New York to study at the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in 1997, right as the neo-soul movement, pioneered by artists like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, was integrating jazz instrumentation and vocal performance into a chart-topping variant of R&B.At the New School, Glasper befriended the singer Bilal, a member of a loose musicians collective called the Soulquarians with D’Angelo, Badu, the producer J Dilla, and the rappers Common, Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) and Talib Kweli, among others. The group shared recording space at Electric Lady Studios and occasionally attended concerts together. At the same time, Glasper was getting an education in the world of straight-ahead jazz while playing piano in bands led by Christian McBride and Russell Malone — both took him on tour, at the expense of his attendance record — and forming his own acoustic trio.The Blue Note residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites Glasper’s extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHis first album, “Mood” (2004) and two follow-ups for Blue Note Records, “Canvas” (2005) and “In My Element” (2007), hewed largely traditional, with an occasional nod to hip-hop, as on the “In My Element” track “J Dillalude.” But by the release of his fourth album, “Double Booked” (2009) — half featuring the Robert Glasper Trio and half featuring a new electric fusion ensemble called “The Robert Glasper Experiment” — Glasper’s inner Soulquarian was edging into view.“Real jazz is supposed to reflect the times you’re in; that’s the true history and tradition of the music,” he said. “I’m not supposed to sound like Thelonious Monk did when I have so much more music to be influenced by.”The “Black Radio” series, which Glasper described as a distillation of his brand, made breathing room for those influences. The first album, released in 2012, featured several of his neo-soul compatriots — Badu, Bilal, Musiq Soulchild — as well as rapping from Lupe Fiasco and Bey, with covers of songs by David Bowie and Nirvana thrown in for good measure.“Black Radio” earned Glasper his first Grammy Award (for best R&B album) and set him on a collision course with popular culture not seen from a jazz musician this century. He played piano on several tracks of Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released a remix album with the house music producer Kaytranada and was recruited by the actor Don Cheadle to compose the score for “Miles Ahead,” a 2015 biopic of Miles Davis.“He has that desire to get to the next level,” said Common, who appeared on “Black Radio 2” (2013) and formed the group August Greene with Glasper and the drummer/producer Karriem Riggins. “He wants to be the one that people will look to and say, ‘Yeah, he was the greatest of that time.’”Last month, Glasper arrived at a recording studio in Downtown Brooklyn to work on his latest film score, for a documentary about Luther Vandross, one of his mother’s favorite artists. “The first time I fell in love with acoustic piano wasn’t Duke Ellington, or Monk, or Herbie — it was Luther,” he said, crediting Nat Adderley Jr., Vandross’s longtime pianist and arranger. His large frame was draped in a black T-shirt with a portrait of Dilla, whose idiosyncratic production style inspired a generation of hip-hop and jazz musicians before and after his death in 2006.“Watching him work changed the way I play,” Glasper said.A couple of days after the session, Glasper would fly to Johannesburg for nearly two weeks to play festival dates. He is also working on a Christmas EP and composing another film score, for a documentary about Billy Preston. On Wednesday, back in New York, he began his annual, monthlong residency at the Blue Note Jazz club, colloquially known as “Robtoberfest.” The residency (and a related festival in Napa Valley) unites his extended universe of friends and forebears in one setting. It has become known for drawing A-list surprise performers (Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock are fans) and, this year, will mix tributes to giants like Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey with featured performances from Bey, Norah Jones, Yebba, D Smoke, Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington, among others.Glasper finds scoring films a welcome challenge. “Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy,” he said.Jasmine Clarke for The New York Times“It’s a reflection of his unique contribution to music,” said Alex Kurland, the director of programming at the Blue Note. “He enables everyone around him to sound great and to feel great.”Since the pandemic, Glasper has lived full time in Los Angeles. He got an apartment there in 2017 on the suggestion of Martin (with whom he, Washington and the producer 9th Wonder perform as Dinner Party) and to be closer to the film business. He composed the music for the 2020 film “The Photograph,” starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield, and for the television series “Run the World,” “The Best Man: The Final Chapters” and “Winning Time.” (He has also appeared in front of the camera, including in a small role on Showtime’s “Black Monday,” the since-canceled series Cheadle starred in and executive produced.)Of his many jobs, Glasper said he finds scoring the most challenging. It requires two acts of translation — from image to sound, and from director to composer — for which his background as an artist provided little preparation.“Directors will ask you to do weird things: ‘I need this to feel melancholy — but in a calypso way,’” he said, laughing. “But it’s good exercise. Ease can be a bad thing, and making my own music, a lot of times, is easy.”During the pandemic, he was inspired to make “Black Radio III” in part because his usual, “easy,” recording methods were unavailable to him. Instead of inviting musicians to jam live in a studio, he worked more like a hip-hop producer, crafting beats and soliciting vocal performances remotely. The result — featuring, among many others, H.E.R., Ty Dolla Sign and, on a special edition produced in partnership with the streetwear label Supreme, Mac Miller — is the most accessible and thoroughly modern music Glasper has released.Even Chris Brown eventually had to pay his respects. The day after his viral Grammys outburst, the singer posted a public apology: “After doing my research I actually think your amazing,” he wrote.Glasper gladly accepted — and quickly printed “Who the [expletive] is Robert Glasper?” on T-shirts. More

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      Krayzie Bone of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony Posts From Hospital Bed

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      “Never take life for granted enjoy it while you have it!” the rapper wrote on social media. He posted a picture from a hospital, saying he had been in a nine-day fight for his life.Krayzie Bone, a member of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, one of the most influential rap groups in history, has been fighting for his life for several days, he said in a post on social media on Monday that included a photo of him in a hospital.The cause of the hospitalization is unknown. The 50-year-old rapper, whose real name is Anthony Henderson, has for several years battled sarcoidosis, a rare autoimmune disease that can cause respiratory problems if it reaches the lungs. He was forced to postpone part of a 2016 tour as a result. The hip-hop news site All Hiphop reported that he had checked himself into a Los Angeles area hospital on Sept. 22 after coughing up blood.Krayzie Bone said on Instagram on Monday that he had just fought to stay alive for “9 days straight.” “Never take life for granted enjoy it while you have it!” he wrote.Known for its harmonies and buzzy hooks, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony is one of the pioneering groups of the melodic rap that dominates the genre today. Mr. Henderson is one of five members of the group, which was formed in Cleveland in the early 1990s. They received a lift from Eazy-E, a founding member of the rap group N.W.A., who signed the group to his label, Ruthless Records, in 1993. “Creepin on ah Come Up,” their debut album on the label, sold millions and made them the first hip-hop group from Cleveland to break into the mainstream.Bone Thugs-N-Harmony were nominated for three Grammys, and won one in 1997 for best rap performance by a duo or group. (Their Grammy-winning hit, “Tha Crossroads,” was in part a tribute to Eazy-E, who died from AIDS in 1995.) Members of the group have collaborated with some of the biggest names in pop music history, including Tupac Shakur and Mariah Carey.“When our management got a call about Mariah Carey wanting to do a record with us, at the time, we didn’t even really understand how big Mariah Carey was,” Mr. Henderson told The New York Times in an interview published in August as part of a project celebrating five decades of hip hop. Krayzie Bone appeared on Carey’s track “Breakdown” off her 1997 album.“We knew of her, but we were so wrapped up in our newfound fame, we were just in our own little world. So, like, we almost didn’t even go.”In 2011, Mr. Henderson left the group but eventually reunited with his former bandmates. The city of Cleveland renamed a street after the group this summer.“The Bone Thugs style developed by just basically being in cyphers together,” Mr. Henderson told The Times. “We would smoke weed either in my mother’s basement or at whoever’s house we was at, and we’d just start rhyming, working on our harmonies and everything. We knew each other and we knew we could rhyme but when the other four would say the ad-libs, it would sound like we was harmonizing. It’s nothing we did on purpose — we just started doing it and that was our style one day.”Mr. Henderson was born on June 17, 1973. Along with his work with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Mr. Henderson has released solo albums since 1999, including “QuickFix: Level 3: Level Up,” which came out earlier this year. He also founded the nonprofit Spread the Love Foundation, a Cleveland-based initiative aimed at music education.Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are in the midst of a national tour and had returned to Cleveland with Krayzie Bone in August. More