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Bruce Springsteen’s Exuberant Soul Cover, and 10 More New Songs
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Drake and 21 Savage’s ‘Her Loss’ Review: A Frisky Experiment
The rappers’ collaborative album is loose and untethered, a frisky experiment that’s intermittently successful.One of the grim inevitabilities of new pop star albums is how they are parsed, chewed through and cracked into gossipy bites the moment they arrive. Within minutes of the release of “Her Loss,” the new collaborative album by Drake and 21 Savage, Twitter and hip-hop news and gossip sites were aflame: a stray reference to Serena Williams’s husband, nods to old rap industry quarrels, an ambiguous multiple entendre referencing Megan Thee Stallion.Drake knows this will be chum, of course. It’s not fan service like Taylor Swift’s Easter eggs, but it reflects an understanding that for many listeners, and perhaps especially for those who may not bother to listen at all, the metanarrative matters.And yes, this is one way to measure an album’s success: how much chatter it engenders. Even the marketing strategy for “Her Loss” — which featured elaborate imitations of Vogue magazine and mock appearances on NPR’s Tiny Desk series and “The Howard Stern Show” — suggested an awareness of the utility of, and disdain for, the way information flows online these days.But somewhere underneath all of that lies the music itself, which, nowadays, ends up serving as a distraction from the chatter as much as the other way around.“Her Loss” is frisky and centerless, a mood more than a mode. Drake has done a full-length collaborative project before; “What a Time to Be Alive,” with Future, released in 2015, was an assertion of grimy gloss, adding fresh texture to Drake’s already formidable arsenal.But he and 21 Savage have a different sort of chemistry. Drake is endlessly malleable, a Zelig figure forever testing prevailing winds, while 21 Savage is a classic stoic, set in his thoughts. Often on this album — “More M’s,” “Privileged Rappers” — it feels as if they are ceding space to each other, side by side but not interwoven. Sometimes, like on “Spin Bout U,” they successfully melt into something greater than their parts.This is the lesser of Drake’s two projects this year, lacking the cohesion and unexpected ambition of “Honestly, Nevermind,” the dance floor-focused album he released in June. (The one outlier on that album was “Jimmy Cooks,” a collaboration with 21 Savage that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.)But the fact that these two albums live side by side reflects something about how one of the most potent pop stars of the decade intends to navigate a far less stable era: embracing quick-burn place holders in lieu of big transitional ideas.And so “Her Loss” is, in many ways, a playground for Drake. The exuberant “Circo Loco” riffs on Daft Punk’s “One More Time” in a concession to pop glimmer. There’s flow pattern and melodic experimentation on “Backoutsideboyz.” “Hours in Silence” is a master class in Drake’s self-eviscerations and recriminations: “There’s three sides to the story, girl/The one you subtweet, the one your group chat gets to read, the one you come and tell to me.” On “Rich Flex,” there’s a particularly cheeky run of acronym rhymes: CMB, CMG, B&B, PND, PTSD, TMZ, GMC, B&E, DMC, BRB.Because this album arrives with slightly lower stakes than a stand-alone Drake release, it also permits him to lean in to his deeply bawdy impulses. Part of Drake’s ongoing appeal is that there is still a bit of frisson in hearing him at his rawest, proof that the most dexterous artist of the last decade still wants to play in the mud. That tendency recurs through the album, especially on “On BS,” where he raps about the strip club with winking toxicity: “I’m a gentleman I’m generous/I’m blowing half a million on you hoes, I’m a feminist.”But “Her Loss” also features the other side of Drake, the one whose true subject is his own ascendance. “Middle of the Ocean,” a six-minute rumination late in the album, is a classic of that approach. The rapping is a little slow, as if he’s accessing the memories in real time: “For your birthday, your man got a table at hibachi/Last time I ate there, Wayne was doing numbers off the cup like Yahtzee/And Paris Hilton was steady ducking the paparazzi.”These are the most vivid lyrics on the album, and also the ones that ground it in Drake’s most familiar gestures without conceding to what it’s taken to make Drake as crucial a figure as he is. And perhaps as he moves through the middle section of his career, he’ll feel less tethered than ever.“Thought I was a pop star,” he raps on “More M’s.” “I baited ’em.”Drake and 21 Savage“Her Loss”(OVO/Republic/Slaughter Gang/Epic) More
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Selena Gomez’s Boldly Revealing Ballad, and 9 More New Songs
Hear tracks by Yves Tumor, Yo La Tengo, Sipho and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. 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.Selena Gomez, ‘My Mind & Me’Selena Gomez has spoken openly of her mental-health struggles — bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis — in recent years. Her new song, “My Mind & Me,” arrives as the title track of a documentary that reveals some of her low points. The music moves from fragility to determination, from lone, echoey piano notes to a supportive march and a mission statement, as she sings, “All of the crashing and burning and breaking I know now/If somebody sees me like this then they won’t feel alone.” It’s self-exposure in service of empathy, and it tapers back to the hesitant solitude of those piano notes. But the video squanders some of its good will by ending with a product endorsement. JON PARELESLucius, ‘Muse’“Muse,” a one-off single from the indie-pop group Lucius, pairs a cool, clarion arrangement with Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s impassioned vocals — a tension of opposites that gives the song its spark. “I’m calling out your name, a desert that needs the rain,” they sing together on the chorus, a kind of prayer for divine inspiration and, as they put it, “the wild and holy window to the truth.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTiësto featuring Tate McRae, ‘10:35’On the sleek “10:35,” the rising Canadian pop star Tate McRae teams up with longtime EDM mainstay Tiësto (the D.J. whose remix of Calum Scott’s “Dancing on My Own” cover has turned into the Philadelphia Phillies’ victory anthem). McRae’s crystalline vocals are a fitting match for Tiësto’s gleaming, synthesized production, and the song is propelled by an effective push and pull between the anxieties of daily life and the blissful comforts of love. “The TV make you think the whole world’s about to end,” McRae sighs, before a lover’s embrace causes time to stop: “All I know, it’s 10:35 and I can feel your arms around me.” ZOLADZIbrahim Maalouf featuring De La Soul: ‘Quiet Culture’Ibrahim Maalouf, a Lebanese-French trumpeter, composer and producer, surrounds himself with guests — the Cuban musician Cimafunk, the New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas, the jazz singer Gregory Porter — on his new album, “Capacity to Love.” De La Soul makes its latest reappearance on “Quiet Culture,” counseling perseverance and relief from noise: “The quieter we become, the more that we can hear.” Maalouf’s track eases between a jazz ballad and unhurried funk, framing and counterpointing the rhymes with his Arab-inflected melodies. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘God Is a Circle’“Sometimes it feels like there’s places in my mind that I can’t go,” Sean Bowie, who records as the gothic glam-rocker Yves Tumor, begins on the haunting single “God Is a Circle.” Rhythmic, shallow breathing provides the percussive backbone of the track and adds a visceral chill to its nightmarish atmospherics. The song suddenly turns revealing, though, when it dredges up memories of a repressive past: “My mama said that God sees everything/My daddy always taught me to say ‘thank you,’ ‘yes ma’am,’ ’no, sir,’ ‘yes, please.’” The whole thing sounds like an exorcism, or maybe the antic, demonic moment just before one is deemed necessary. ZOLADZAlgiers featuring Zack de la Rocha, ‘Irreversible Damage’Irreversible Damage” is an exercise in seething, sputtering tension from the Atlanta-based rock-hip-hop-electro group Algiers. With a nagging electric guitar loop, a pullulating electronic bass, ominous synthesizer chords and programmed drums that keep disrupting their own beat, the song is an onslaught of abstract lyrics — “No rehab for my jihad/A rapture in a grief storm,” Zack de la Rocha (from Rage Against the Machine) raps — hurtling toward some dire but unknown outcome. When the words are done, the song shifts into a six-beat furor that feels both tribal and apocalyptic. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Fallout’In February, the New Jersey indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo will release their 16th album, “This Stupid World,” a place from which the calming, immersive first single “Fallout” offers a brief escape. “I wanna fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings on the chorus. “Reach back, unwind.” The band self-produced “This Stupid World” and recorded much of it while jamming together live; as a result, “Fallout” sounds as sumptuously shaggy and comfortingly loose as a favorite autumn sweater. This is the sort of timeless Yo La Tengo song that could have reasonably appeared on any of their albums across the last three decades, but something about its combination of prickly frustration and hard-won serenity feels especially appropriate right now. ZOLADZSipho, ‘Arms’The English songwriter and producer Sipho Ndhlovu revels in drama and desperation, with a voice that regularly leaps between grainy declamation and a tearful falsetto. “Arms” is one long crescendo of regrets overwhelmed by desire. He admits to being “led astray” and implores, “Can’t we share the blame?,” but by the end he’s unconditionally enthralled, brought to his knees by lust. Nearly the entire song uses just two chords but brings in massive reinforcements: strings, drums, voices, electronics and an arena-rock lead guitar, all pushing him closer to the brink. PARELESquinnie, ‘Itch’The 21-year-old songwriter Quinn Barnitt, who records as quinnie, has picked up the mixture of tentativeness and bold declaration, bedroom-pop intimacy and multitrack craftsmanship, that has paid off for Clairo and Olivia Rodrigo. In “Itch,” she juggles desire and fidelity, wondering, “What if I never scratched another itch for the rest of my life?/Would I die satisfied, knowing it can always get better than this?” The production often harks back to Simon and Garfunkel’s pristine guitars and the Beatles’ string ensembles, but her frank self-questioning is new. PARELESOld Fire featuring Bill Callahan, ‘Corpus’John Mark Lapham, a composer from Texas who records as Old Fire, called his 2016 album “Songs From the Haunted South,” a succinct self-description for his suspended-time blends of electronics and roots-rock instruments; his new album is “Voids.” On “Corpus.” he has the songwriter Bill Callahan, whose own extensive catalog is generally much folkier, intoning a few enigmatic lines — “I’ve got a child in Corpus/Hey Mac, can you bring that boat back” — in his somber baritone. Instruments and electronic tones gather around him like darkening storm clouds, and there’s no deliverance. PARELES More
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Takeoff, of Atlanta Rap Trio Migos, Shot Dead at 28 in Houston
The rapper was killed in a shooting at a bowling alley in Houston overnight.The 28-year-old rapper, whose real name is Kirsnick Khari Ball, was killed in a shooting at a bowling alley in Houston.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global CitizenThe rapper known as Takeoff, a subtle vocal technician and one-third of the chart-topping group Migos, whose singsong flow helped define Atlanta’s ever-evolving, influential rap sound, was shot and killed overnight outside a Houston bowling alley, the authorities said. He was 28.Chief Troy Finner of the Houston Police Department confirmed the rapper’s death at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon. A 24-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man were taken to local hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, the police said.The police said the shooting occurred after a private party had ended at 810 Billiards & Bowling, as a large group of about 40 people gathered near the front door on the third level. An argument ensued and shots were fired from at least two weapons, they said, leading to many people fleeing.“We have no reason to believe that he was involved in anything criminal at the time,” Chief Finner said of Takeoff.No suspects have been arrested, the authorities said, and they requested that any witnesses who left the scene come forward with additional information.“Sometimes the hip-hop community gets a bad name,” Chief Finner said. “I’m calling up on everybody — our hip-hop artists in Houston and around the nation — we’ve got to police ourselves. There are so many talented individuals, men and women, in that community, who again I love and I respect, and we all need to stand together and make sure no one tears down that industry.”The commercial area where Takeoff was killed was quiet on a rainy Tuesday evening, with some young fans trickling past a few bouquets of roses and lit candles.“When I heard the news it got me to tears,” Tatiana Battle, 23, said. “Migos’s music got me through breakups, graduation, celebrations. And now I can’t listen to them anymore because it will never be the same.”It was Takeoff’s childhood obsession with Southern hip-hop that first inspired Migos as young teenagers in the Atlanta suburbs of Gwinnett County, on its way to becoming one of the biggest rap acts of the last decade, known for hits like “Versace” and “Bad and Boujee.”Even as he dodged celebrity and maintained almost no public profile, Takeoff became a connoisseur’s fan favorite of the trio, and was credited with initiating the stuttering, triplet delivery that came to infiltrate hip-hop and trickle into the pop sphere.Drew Findling, a lawyer for Takeoff and confidant to many rap stars, called his death “a devastating loss, particularly for Atlanta.”“When you’re around Takeoff, there’s a sense of peacefulness about his aura,” Mr. Findling said. “He listens to you, he looks at you, he’s more focused on what you have to say than what he has to say. The world was starting to learn about Takeoff. It was his time to shine.”Before becoming international rap superstars — and ushering in a new period of dominance for Atlanta music in the streaming era — Migos, which also included the rappers Offset and Quavo, was founded as a family bedroom act northeast of the city, in an area that Migos came to brand as the “Nawfside.”After releasing its first independent mixtape as Migos, “Juug Season,” in 2011, and then gaining local buzz and tastemaker attention with the track “Bando,” the trio rose to national prominence with the single “Versace” in 2013. The remix, though never commercially released, featured an appearance by Drake, who mimicked the group’s burgeoning signature pattern of rapid-fire, rollicking raps, known as a triplet flow, in which three syllables are piled rhythmically onto one beat to hypnotic effect.A New York Times review of Migos’s 2013 mixtape, “Y.R.N.,” called the group “insistent, noisy and chaotic” and “perpetually in fifth gear.”Pairing a punchy rap style that could sound broody or elated with sticky, repetitive hooks — like Takeoff’s defining choruses on “Fight Night” and “T-Shirt” — Migos’s trademark delivery would go on to become a go-to mode for popular music throughout the 2010s, as used by artists including Travis Scott and Ariana Grande. In 2021, former President Barack Obama put “Straightenin,” from Migos’s album “Culture III,” on his summer playlist, alongside songs by Rihanna, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder.In late 2016 and early 2017, the group soared to A-list fame around the world thanks to “Bad and Boujee,” a spare, uncompromising track featuring Lil Uzi Vert — but not Takeoff, who was absent from the song — that spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.In what may be Takeoff’s defining moment outside of the recording studio, he was once asked in a red carpet interview about being left off the track, drawing the visible ire of the entire group.“Do it look like I’m left off ‘Bad and Boujee’?” Takeoff responded, referring to sharing the financial windfall and fame with Quavo and Offset.The track became one of the first megahits of the streaming era, and has been streamed more than 1.5 billion times in the United States alone. The group’s subsequent 2017 album, “Culture,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart and earned Migos one of its two Grammy nominations.In an interview with The New York Times ahead of the album’s release, Takeoff compared the moment to Christmas Eve. “You just know that everything you asked for is going to be there up under that Christmas tree,” he said, his often-downcast eyes lighting up. “It’s our time now.”In the years since, Migos has released two sequels to “Culture,” and singles including “MotorSport,” “I Get the Bag” and “Walk It Talk It,” also with Drake. Takeoff’s solo album, “The Last Rocket,” came out in 2018, and debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Last month, Takeoff and Quavo — without the third Migos member, Offset — released the album “Only Built for Infinity Links,” which went to No. 7.Takeoff, whose real name is Kirsnick Khari Ball, was born on June 18, 1994, and grew up in Lawrenceville, Ga. He “always wanted to rap,” he told The Fader, a music magazine, in a 2013 interview, and found his group mates close to home: Takeoff and Quavo, his uncle, were raised by Quavo’s mother, Edna, a hairstylist. She is frequently shouted out in Migos songs as “Mama!”The first of the group to fall hard for rap music while the others played football, Takeoff soaked up music that he discovered online and bought at the flea market, particularly Southern rappers like Gucci Mane, T.I., Lil Wayne and his early group the Hot Boys, which provided a blueprint for Migos’s later success.As a duo initially called Polo Club, Takeoff and Quavo began performing music in their teens at the local skating rink, and released a mixtape when Takeoff was still middle-school age. Offset began spending time at Edna’s house and considered Takeoff and Quavo his cousins. Together, they started to map out a sound — waterfalls of rolling verses, ecstatic chanted phrases, jabbing background ad-libs — that was catchy and distinctive.The trio came to the notice of the local executives Pierre Thomas (known as P) and Kevin Lee (Coach K), who founded a label, Quality Control, around the trio in 2013. Already, Migos had fallen under the tutelage of the local rapper and talent scout Gucci Mane, who had heard the group’s early track “Bando,” and signed them to a cash deal.But with Gucci Mane in prison, P and Coach K became the group’s primary boosters, developing a grass-roots artist development strategy that they would later employ with other breakout acts like Lil Yachty and Lil Baby.Musically, it was Takeoff who first drew P’s attention with his bouncy, melodic triplet raps that the executive said reminded him of the ’90s group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. “The music was crazy,” P later said, “but what made me really want to go hard for them is that they packed all their clothes and moved into the studio — literally lived there, sleeping on reclining chairs and making music all day.”P had long heralded Takeoff as an unsung talent, given his reserved mien and lack of self-aggrandizing. “If he cared more about this rap game he would definitely be stepping on y’all,” the executive wrote on Twitter in May, “but unfortunately he don’t.”He added that he’d been that way since they first met. “Nothing has changed with him.”Describing Migos’s maximalist approach to music in The Fader, Takeoff said the group would make about “seven songs a day,” spending no more than 15 minutes on each track. Working on a song for any longer “kills the vibe,” Takeoff said. “You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh,” he added. “You gotta have character.”In the summer of 2020, Takeoff was accused of rape in a lawsuit by a woman who said she was assaulted at a house party in Encino, Calif. A lawyer representing the rapper called the claims “patently and provably false” and said Takeoff was known for his “quiet, reserved and peaceful personality.” The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the case because of a lack of evidence, according to Pitchfork.Recently, Migos had been coy about its future as a group as Offset battled in court with the trio’s label. But in interviews, Quavo emphasized familial loyalty and said that he and Takeoff would continue as a duo, which they sometimes referred to as Unc’ and ’Phew.“We don’t know all the answers,” Takeoff, always a man of few words, said last month on the “Big Facts” podcast. “God knows. And we pray, so only time will tell.”Reporting was contributed by More
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Hear How Takeoff and the Migos Flow Changed Atlanta Rap
Quick-jabbing triplets had been a staple of rap, but the trio made the style sound fresh, thanks in large part to Takeoff, its master of syncopation. The rapper was shot and killed at 28 on Tuesday.The Atlanta trio Migos’ 2013 breakout hit “Versace” represented a clear demarcation line between the city’s older generation of rappers and its new vanguard. The rapping — much of it delivered in triplets — was a glittery stomp. Tightly clustered syllables that landed like quick jabs.“Versace” was such an immediate sensation that Drake, at the time the genre’s most important ascendant superstar, volunteered his services for a remix, mimicking the group’s peppery flow and, by extension, introducing it to the rest of the world.By all accounts, Takeoff — who was shot and killed in Houston early Tuesday morning — was the primary engine of what came to be dubbed the Migos flow.The rapper, who was 28, was one of three people who were shot around 2:30 a.m. after a private gathering at 810 Billiards & Bowling ended in an argument. (The other two victims are expected to survive. No arrests have been made, the authorities said.)The triplet pattern that became a Migos signature wasn’t new to hip-hop: It was a fixture in Memphis rap for years, in the work of Three 6 Mafia and others, and it was part of the cadence-bending arsenal of the Cleveland sing-rap pioneers Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. But Migos made the style sound fresh, less performative and more glossy. It had a hurried urgency and also the briskness of rough-and-tumble triumph.Such is the nature of hip-hop innovation — sometimes it’s about what is said, but just as often, it’s about how it’s said. And the triplet flow that Migos popularized in the mid-2010s became a standard-bearer for the genre, setting a generation of Atlanta rap afloat.Atlanta was already the center of hip-hop innovation when Migos arrived, but the trio was primed for streaming-era success — pulsing with youthful energy, leaning heavily on catchy choruses, collaborating widely. After the viral success of its 2016 hit “Bad and Boujee,” Migos released a pair of albums, “Culture” and “Culture II,” that each debuted at the top of the Billboard albums chart and spawned several hits, including “MotorSport,” “Stir Fry” and “Walk It Talk It.”The prior wave of Atlanta stars like Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy captured ears with imagistic storytelling and signature vocal texture. By comparison, Migos sounded addled, anxious, pugnacious. They were untethered from earlier rap conventions. As the rest of Atlanta rap leaned toward the psychedelic — beginning with Future, then pivoting to Young Thug, and eventually the more commercially minded Gunna and Lil Baby — Migos, and Takeoff especially, held fast to its mechanistic idiosyncrasies.Takeoff was by far the most reserved figure in Migos, which also featured Quavo and Offset. But he was deeply technically gifted, a master of syncopation, with a deftness that could render even the toughest talk exuberantly.That talent shone on the group’s earliest songs, catching the ear of Pierre Thomas, known to most as P, one of the founders of Quality Control Music, the dominant Atlanta rap label of the past decade. In 2017, Thomas recalled to Rap Radar how Gucci Mane had introduced him to Migos’ music, and how Takeoff stood out.“Gucci sent me the song. He sent me the video. I was like, ‘Man, the dude with the long dreads’ — it was Takeoff — I was like, ‘That dude there is crazy.’ The way he was spitting it reminded me of Bone Thugs, like how they used to be rapping back in the day.”“Versace” appeared on the third Migos mixtape, “Y.R.N.,” which was released in 2013 and remains one of the decade’s defining rap albums. Over the next couple of years, which would see the ascendance of Migos to hip-hop superstardom, the Migos flow expanded past triplets to a broader umbrella that emphasized the staccato.Even as the group moved in a more melodic direction through the 2010s, Takeoff remained resolute in his commitment to innovative rhyme patterns. He set the tempo of “Fight Night,” one of the group’s signature early hits featuring perhaps its most pointedly rhythmic rapping. On “Cross the Country,” from 2014, he opened with a dizzying verse, switching patterns several times. And last year, on a punishing freestyle on the Los Angeles radio station Power 106, Takeoff delivered a verse that took the group’s classic triplet flow as a starting point and thickened it, demonstrating how on top of one novel idea, a whole mansion could be built. More
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Rihanna’s ‘Black Panther’ Ballad, and 8 More New Songs
Hear tracks by Ice Spice, Iggy Pop, SZA and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. 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.Rihanna, ‘Lift Me Up’Rihanna, who hasn’t released a solo song since her album “Anti” back in 2016, returns to music on the soundtrack for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” The title of “Lift Me Up” has a gospel resonance, and the song is a hymnlike call for intimacy and security: “Keep me close, safe and sound.” Harp plucking — perhaps from a West African kora — and a string section support Rihanna and an African duet partner, the Nigerian star Tems (Temilade Openiyi). For all its structural clarity, the song doesn’t try to be a banger; it’s a prayer and a plea. JON PARELESSZA, ‘Shirt’“In the dark right now, feeling lost but I like it,” SZA sings on the moody, mid-tempo “Shirt,” a long-awaited single produced by Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. Fans have been clamoring for a follow-up to SZA’s landmark 2017 album “Ctrl” with such intensity that a snippet of “Shirt” actually went viral on TikTok in 2020; last year SZA admitted that she followed fans’ lead in titling the song. The wildly cinematic, Dave-Meyers-directed music video features SZA and LaKeith Sanfield killing a bunch of people and a plot as jam-packed as an entire feature film, but perhaps the most exciting part is the wittily lyrical, acoustic-guitar-driven new song SZA previews over the clip’s credits. LINDSAY ZOLADZNakhane featuring Perfume Genius, ‘Do You Well’The South African crooner Nakhane and the American indie darling Perfume Genius have each crafted plenty of ballads that express the pathos of queer desire, but here, on the ecstatic “Do You Well,” they choose joy. “Stay in the light so I can see your face,” they sing together on the thumping disco number, that lyric serving as both a potent metaphor and a subtle joke about the deceptive lighting of the dance floor. Produced by Emre Türkmen with an assist from none other than Nile Rodgers, “Do You Well” is an immersive evocation of the mystery, romance and kinetic sweatiness of the club. ZOLADZIce Spice, ‘Bikini Bottom’The sub-two-minute “Bikini Bottom” is another brisk missive from the rising New York rap star Ice Spice, who sounds characteristically unbothered: “How can I lose if I’m already chose, like?” she raps in that already-signature flow that’s somewhere between a taunt and a whisper. RiotUSA’s beat is effectively minimalist; its only embellishment is a sped up, noodly riff that vaguely conjures — what else? — Squidward’s clarinet. ZOLADZIggy Pop, ‘Frenzy’At 75, Iggy Pop would be fully entitled to continue the kind of cranky, sepulchral, jazz-tinged musings he offered on his 2019 album, “Free.” Instead, he’s back to flat-out, buzz-bombing, hard-riffing rock with a new single, “Frenzy,” backed by a credentialed band including the producer Andrew Watt on guitar, Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses on bass and Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers on drums. Proudly foul-mouthed and convincingly irate, Pop lashes out in all directions, fully aware of his standing: “I’m sick of the freeze, I’m sick of disease/So gimme me a try before I [expletive] die.” PARELESFeeble Little Horse, ‘Chores’What’s up with all these young, equine-monikered bands totally nailing the sound and spirit of Gen X indie rock? Like Chicago’s precocious Horsegirl (who, true to form, released an endearingly reverent cover of the Minutemen classic “History Lesson Part 2” this week), the Pittsburgh quartet Feeble Little Horse know exactly how much noise belongs in their noise-pop, a balance they strike with ease on the shaggily infectious “Chores.” The vocalist Lydia Slocum sings, charismatically, of the in-house tensions of group living, like sparring over refrigerated leftovers and passive-aggressively asking roommates to pull their weight: “You need to do your chores, you need to clean the floors,” she sings on the chorus before adding, “Sorry.” The pigpen squall of guitars makes a gloriously greasy mess, but Slocum’s vocals cut through like vinegar. ZOLADZNatalia Lafourcade, ‘Mi Manera de Querer’The Mexican songwriter Natalia Lafourcade offers pure, innocent, gender-neutral love in “Mi Manera de Querer” (“My Way of Loving”) from her new album, “De Todas las Flores.” It’s a retro-flavored, big-band arrangement rooted in bossa nova and Cuban son, and she sings it with teasing confidence. Lafourcade promises love without makeup or filters, “as innocent as the chords of this song,” in a vintage setting that holds a modern outlook: “It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a man or a woman,” she lilts. “I see you as a being of light.” PARELESHolly Humberstone, ‘Can You Afford to Lose Me?’With stately, reverential keyboard chords and a whispery voice, Holly Humberstone delivers an ultimatum: “Go ahead and pack your bags/But once you’re gone you can’t come back.” As a choir musters behind her, she enumerates her partner’s failings and points out all that she’s done — “I was always there to pick up the pieces when you were a full-blown catastrophe.” Then quietly — probably against her better judgment — she offers one last chance. PARELESCaroline Rose, ‘Love/Lover/Friend’Caroline Rose has traversed multiple styles since her 2012 debut album, from countryish roots-rock to gleaming electronic pop. None of them forecast the ghostly and then overwhelming “Love/Lover/Friend.” Her lyrics start by listing what she’s not — someone’s mother, keeper, debt collector, puppeteer, rag doll — in a diaphanous tangle of acoustic-guitar arpeggios. Then, as she announces “I am your love,” a string orchestra surges in, and further avowals — “I am your lover,” “I am your friend” — summon massed, Balkan-tinged vocals, as if that revelation is both ecstatic and humbling. PARELES More
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Kanye West, Dropped by CAA, Makes Adidas and Corporate Partners Squirm
The antisemitic outbursts and provocations by the artist now known as Ye have raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Update: Adidas said on Tuesday that it is cutting ties with Kanye West.Kanye West had already been burning bridges in the music industry. He was disinvited from performing at the Grammy Awards last spring after erratic behavior. He withdrew from headlining this year’s Coachella festival just over a week before it began. His last album was released not on streaming services, but exclusively on a proprietary $200 speaker device.This month Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, came under fire for making a series of antisemitic remarks and wearing a shirt with a slogan associated with white supremacists, putting some of his fashion-related businesses — which appear to be more lucrative these days than his musical ventures — in jeopardy.It has become a make-or-break moment for his career, and raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Adidas, the German sneaker giant whose collaboration with Ye’s company, Yeezy, has been estimated to be worth billions, has said that their partnership was “under review” — prompting the Anti-Defamation League to ask, “what more do you need to review?” It appeared that Adidas continued to sell his products, though. (On Tuesday, after this article was published, Adidas announced it would cut ties with Ye.) Ye ended his Yeezy Gap partnership last month, before the latest controversies erupted, but in recent days Gap sent out promotional emails for the Yeezy Gap hoodie.There have been some signs that the fashion industry is distancing itself from Ye, as the former halo effect of his celebrity turned into an Achilles’ heel after he appeared at Paris Fashion Week earlier this month in a shirt that read “White Lives Matter,” and then went on to make antisemitic remarks on social media and in a series of interviews, posting on Twitter that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”Balenciaga, whose fashion show Ye opened in Paris this month with a surprise modeling appearance, deleted him from its pictures and videos of the show. Similar images disappeared from Vogue Runway, the platform of record for fashion shows. And Skims, the shapewear brand started by Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, that he reportedly helped shape in design and aesthetic, described him as a “small minority shareholder” and said that he had “no active role at Skims.”And Ms. Kardashian condemned “hate speech” in a post on Twitter on Monday, which named no one but said: “I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end.”The designer Willy Chavarria, who last worked with Ye in 2020 on Yeezy Gap, said in an email, “I think it’s important for brands that use Ye for their gain like Balenciaga and Adidas to be forthcoming on their position on hate speech.”Ye has weathered crises before, especially since 2016, when he was hospitalized; he later said he had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In recent years he has been condemned for saying that Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves” and that centuries of slavery had been “a choice”; polarized fans with his embrace of right-wing politics and former President Donald J. Trump; launched a quixotic campaign for president in 2020; and split with Ms. Kardashian. He has continued to work amid it all.Much of the music industry, where an artist’s notoriety is often a key selling point, has appeared to take more of a wait-and-see attitude about his latest controversies.But there is uncertainty about his musical future, too. Ye is no longer represented by the Creative Artists Agency, one of the world’s major booking agencies, a representative of the company said. On Monday, the film and television studio MRC announced that it was shelving a completed documentary about Ye following his antisemitic outbursts. He is no longer signed to Def Jam, his longtime record company; his contract expired with his 2021 album, “Donda.” And Ye’s own label, G.O.O.D. Music, which has released music by other artists like the rapper Pusha T, is also no longer affiliated with Def Jam, according to a person briefed on the deals. A representative of Def Jam declined to comment, and Ye did not respond to questions sent to a representative.“Will Kanye bounce back from this?” asked Randy Phillips, who was the promoter for a benefit concert Ye performed with Drake last December at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum that drew more than 60,000 fans and was streamed live by Amazon. “He could. He’s a musical genius. But it’s going to take time. It’s not going to be immediate.”Reaching a High Note, Then FallingYe, floating above it all during his 2016 Saint Pablo Tour. After a series of onstage monologues, the tour was cut short.A J Mast for The New York TimesIn 2016, as he performed on a spaceshiplike platform that hovered over sold-out arena crowds during his Saint Pablo Tour, Ye appeared to be at the peak of his creative powers.More on Kanye WestKanye West, the rapper and fashion designer who now goes by Ye, has been at the center of several controversies.Runway Scandal: Ye wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt during a Paris fashion show. The use of the phrase, which the Anti-Defamation League has attributed to white supremacists, was widely condemned.Corporate Partners: A series of antisemitic outbursts by the artist have raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Adidas Cuts Ties: The German sportswear giant, the most important partner in Ye’s fashion empire, ended its lucrative relationship with the rapper after his antisemitic remarks.Parler Deal: Parler, the social media service known for its right-wing audience, said that Ye would purchase its site, days after Instagram and Twitter restricted his accounts.His seventh studio album, “The Life of Pablo,” was his latest No. 1 hit and his show was received as an event. He was moving full-steam into the fashion world. His marriage to Ms. Kardashian, a reality-TV princess, had made him even more famous.But Ye never finished the tour.Shortly after he delivered a long, grievance-filled monologue at a concert in Sacramento that November, and abruptly ended the show after just a few songs, Ye was hospitalized, and the remainder of the tour was canceled.In some ways Ye’s music career has never quite recovered. In the six years since, his only performances have been scattered dates, with no proper tour befitting a major star. Once a frequent presence at the top of the Billboard charts, Ye has not had a huge hit in years. While his recent albums have usually opened at No. 1, they have then slid down the charts and been overshadowed by other releases.His career since has toggled between increasingly outrageous public controversies and sometimes remarkable creative achievements.On his 2021 album, “Donda,” he included industry pariahs like Marilyn Manson, who had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, and DaBaby, who had made homophobic remarks and waffled about apologies. He made attacks on the comedian Pete Davidson, who was dating Ms. Kardashian, including in a music video in which an animated figure closely resembling Mr. Davidson is kidnapped and buried.Yet Ye’s “Sunday Service” performances — intimate, spiritual events including one at the Coachella festival in 2019 — mesmerized audiences. And his earlier period remains so popular that his catalog has held strong on streaming services, with more than 90 million streams a week in the United States over the last month, and a total of nearly four billion streams so far this year, according to the tracking service Luminate. His audience on the radio, on the other hand, has fallen by about 22 percent over the last month, as some stations have cut back on playing his songs.A Lucrative Fashion Partnership JeopardizedAt New York Fashion Week in 2015. The following year, he drew a crowd to Madison Square Garden for a fashion show and album premiere.Lucas Jackson/ReutersAs his music career has stumbled, Ye’s work in fashion has taken on new importance. The most lucrative corner of his empire appeared to be Yeezy’s partnership with Adidas, which began in 2013 after he left a collaboration with Nike. The Adidas deal, which involved both shoes and clothing, became hugely successful.Even before his recent controversies, Ye had been sparring publicly with Adidas executives, but so far the company has not elaborated on its statement more than two weeks ago that the partnership is “under review.” (The company announced Tuesday, after this article was published, that it was over.) There had been increasing pressure on the company to take action. On Sunday, after a group hung a banner reading “Kanye is right about the Jews” over a Los Angeles freeway, Jeffrey I. Abrams, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director there, released a statement that concluded, “Decisive action against antisemitism by Adidas is long overdue.”It put Adidas in a difficult position. Its founder, Adi Dassler, belonged to the Nazi Party, and in Germany, where antisemitic statements made online can lead to prosecution, companies that played a role in the country’s dark history are often expected to uphold their responsibility to prevent the return of such sentiment.Ye has long been interested in fashion. In 2009, he interned at Fendi with Virgil Abloh, who went on to work with Ye’s Donda creative agency before starting his own brand. That year Ye also brought a group of collaborators and friends to “crash” Paris Fashion Week.A luxury debut (DW by Kanye West) at Paris Fashion Week in 2011 was critically savaged and lasted only two seasons, but his partnership with Adidas proved transformative. The company underwrote his clothing brand, Yeezy, which unveiled its first collection at New York Fashion Week in 2015, with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna and Diddy sitting in the front row.Within a few seasons Ye packed Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people for a fashion show and album premiere. While his Season 4 show on Roosevelt Island in September 2016 proved a debacle, his potent combination of reality-TV celebrity, music stardom, sneaker success and establishment disruption was impossible to resist for an industry that often felt stuck in the last century.It is also why partnering with Yeezy was so appealing to Gap, the mall brand whose sales and cultural relevance were floundering. Gap hoped the partnership, announced in 2020, would last 10 years and generate $1 billion in annual sales.Instead it lasted about two years, and produced only two products until a third party — Balenciaga — was brought in to accelerate the line. Lawyers for Ye argued that Gap broke “contractual obligations.” Gap said it was “deciding to wind down the partnership.” Ye has suggested that he may open his own line of retail shops.Then, last month, Ye went to Paris. He modeled for Balenciaga, and held his own show, where he proved he could still draw top industry names — including the Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful and the designer John Galliano, who attended, and the model Naomi Campbell, who walked in the show.Before the event began, Ye offered what turned out to be a preview of what was to come: “You can’t manage me,” he told the crowd. “This is an unmanageable situation.”He made good on his promise.Courting Controversy, and the RightYe meeting with Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office in 2018.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesWith Ye in Paris, photographed in her own “White Lives Matter” shirt, was Candace Owens, a conservative activist and media personality who shares his love for the spotlight and taste for provocation.Ye has embraced conservative politics since 2016, when he announced his support for Mr. Trump, meeting him at Trump Tower while he was president-elect and later in the Oval Office when he was president.For several years he has associated with Ms. Owens, a fellow Trump supporter who has become one of the country’s most prominent Black critics of the Black Lives Matter movement. In April 2018, Ye tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” Ms. Owens accompanied him to an interview with TMZ Live the following month in which he called American slavery a “choice,” spurring outrage.“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years?” he said. “That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? We’re mentally in prison.”This month Ms. Owens posted on Twitter that Ye had been “officially kicked out of JP Morgan Chase bank,” which she described as “frightening.” In fact, Ye had decided to leave the bank, and he announced his intention to do in September on CNBC.Ye attended the Oct. 12 Nashville premiere of Ms. Owens’s documentary “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM.” Ye then went on the podcast Drink Champs and questioned the official account of Mr. Floyd’s death, for which a police officer was convicted of murder. His remarks prompted outrage from the Floyd family and an apology from the show’s host, N.O.R.E.After Twitter and Instagram restricted Ye’s accounts this month in response to antisemitic posts, the social media platform Parler, which bills itself as a platform for uncancelable free speech, announced that it would be sold to Ye. Its chief executive, George Farmer, is Ms. Owens’s husband.Struggles With Mental HealthYe’s recent antisemitic outbursts and other provocations have prompted some in the music industry to wonder whether his behavior was related to his mental health struggles.Ye has long alluded to mental health issues in lyrics — as early as 2005, in “Gossip Files,” he raps, “They told my mama I was bipolar, had A.D.D.” — but his psychiatric treatment did not become part of the public record until 2016, when he was hospitalized.He has acknowledged a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but at times, including during his 2018 meeting with Mr. Trump, questioned it and said that his problem might have been sleep deprivation. He told David Letterman the following year that he had been “hyper-paranoid” when he was hospitalized, convinced that people wanted to kill him.He continued to address mental illness over the years in interviews, on social media and in his work, often expressing reluctance to take psychiatric medications. In 2018 he tweeted, “6 months off meds I can feel me again.”During the summer of 2020, when he was often disjointed, emotional and meandering on social media and in public appearances, Ms. Kardashian, who was still married to him, issued a statement on Instagram asking for “compassion and empathy” as he managed his symptoms, suggesting his family had tried and failed to get him into treatment.For a person with bipolar disorder, a manic episode is “a very sped-up state,” said David Miklowitz, a clinical psychologist and the author of “The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide.” “They’re full of ideas, sometimes ideas that get grandiose and delusionally unrealistic.”It can be difficult for friends and family to disentangle whether a person in a manic episode is delusional, or expressing their true beliefs.Rwenshaun Miller, 35, a psychotherapist who has bipolar disorder, said he regretted that Ye “doesn’t have someone around to take his phone” and ensure that he receives treatment. But he said the rapper should be forced to reckon with the consequences of his behavior. “I know it can make you do certain things, but it is also up to me to take accountability for things that happen when I am in a manic episode,” he said.The Industry Watches, and WaitsYe brought a Sunday Service performance to Coachella in 2019.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesWhile people in the entertainment industry, including many who have worked with Ye in the past, privately express shock about his recent comments, few have spoken publicly.But the heads of two major talent agencies that do not represent Ye have called for people to stop working with him. Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of Endeavor, the parent company of the agency WME, wrote an opinion article for The Financial Times calling on entertainment companies — including Spotify, Apple and “whoever organizes West’s tours” — to cease working with Ye.Jeremy Zimmer, the chief executive of United Talent Agency, wrote in an internal email that “we’re seeing a surge in antisemitism in our communities, fueled by Kanye’s comments” and urged a boycott.Representatives of Spotify and Apple did not respond to requests for comment. Universal Music Group, the parent of Def Jam, and AEG Presents, the global concert company that puts on Coachella, declined to comment.Some of the industry’s silence may be strategic, as key players wait to see if Ye — still widely considered an immensely talented musician with a gift for seizing attention — will express contrition and begin a comeback cycle. A successful one could be lucrative for any partner.Melissa Eddy More
