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      How Atlanta History Shaped Lil Baby and Generations of Rappers

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      To hear his mother tell it, Dominique Jones always was a special child.Before he was Lil Baby, Atlanta’s latest international rap superstar — and even before he was known only locally on the southwest side of his city as a formidable gambler and precocious teenage hustler — Dominique tended to be a quick study.As a toddler, he was already helping his mother, Lashon, around the house, diligently folding laundry and straightening up the refrigerator without prompting. When Dominique was about 4, Lashon recalled when we spoke in 2019, she bought him a pair of in-line skates and was amazed when, without instruction or even a hand held for balance, her youngest child and only son had soon mastered his glide, tricks and all.“I look up, and he’s out there skating backward,” Lashon said. “He looks at it, he sees it and he can do it.”Dominique also revealed himself early on as a sponge for language. Before he could read, he was quoting the Bible, gaining a reputation as something of a local attraction among the Baptist preachers who visited the Black Southern hub of Atlanta to spread the word. “They would always look for him — ‘Where’s the young man that always gets so excited at church?’” Lashon has said. “Every time they came to town — ‘Where the little preacher man?’”After those verses came music. Once, when Dominique was still a small child, Lashon was driving with her younger sister while listening the local Atlanta bass rapper Kilo Ali. “Turn it up a little bit,” Dominique demanded from his car seat, according to his mother’s memory.After taking in the song for a moment, he called again toward the adults up front. “Turn it down now,” he said, considering what he had just heard. “That’s Kilo Ali?” Dominique asked, apparently knowing full well. “I went to school with him.”“It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV,” Lil Baby said of his hometown. “It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”Kevin Amato for The New York TimesLashon and her sister could only exchange confused glances. Dominique had never been to school a day in his life, and certainly not with an adult rapper from the nearby Bowen Homes projects. Yet somehow, the city’s sounds were already somewhere within him, as if through osmosis. “What’s your comeback after that?” Lashon said, reminiscing and still astonished. “We was blowed.”Some two decades later, the story of Lil Baby, 27, whose triumphant new album, “It’s Only Me,” was released last Friday, is both an individual tale of roundabout stardom by an idiosyncratic artist and also a recurring pattern. As the latest in a long line of Atlanta rappers to take a raw Southern sound to the top of the pop charts — from ’90s and early 2000s industry trailblazers like Outkast, T.I., Jeezy and Gucci Mane to the streaming stars Future, Migos, 21 Savage, Young Thug, Gunna and Playboi Carti — Lil Baby could only have come from one place.“Honestly, I think there’s something in the water,” he said in an interview over FaceTime last week. “It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV. It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”That he and his forebears all happen to share geographic roots with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan, Uncle Remus and Spike Lee, “Gone With the Wind” and the Black spring-break party Freaknik is not a coincidence. It could only have been Atlanta.Long a site of collision — politically, racially — and contradictory cultural history, Atlanta was called “south of the North, yet north of the South” by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903. In the decades since, the city has been “a bastion of both white supremacy and Black autonomy,” according to one historian, and often “on the brink of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline,” in the words of another.Building upon this confluence of tension and opportunity is Atlanta’s constantly regenerating rap scene, which has become, over the last 30 years, one of the most consistent and consequential musical ecosystems in the world. The generations (and micro-generations) of local artists who have emerged from it have routinely exploded the expectations of what a Black man from little or nothing — and they have, until recently, tended to be overwhelmingly men — could hope to achieve in the wider American consciousness.Largely through music, Atlanta has become a conveyor belt of exceptions.LIL BABY IS nothing if not a product of the city’s extensive rap lineage, but he has been equally influenced by Atlanta’s nonmusical history. Now a mainstream figure and the father of two sons, he grew up the unruly teenager of a single mother on government assistance.Baby’s eventual descent into what he and his friends refer to as “the streets” — an amorphous world of violence, drug-dealing, camaraderie, rivalry, risk and reward — would go on to inspire most of his music. But even beyond the effects of Atlanta’s vast income inequality, or the neglect and destruction of its public housing around the 1996 Olympic Games, the harsh realities he raps about in semi-autobiographical detail also stem from how he was raised, rooted in his mother’s own story.Lashon grew up in a strict Baptist family in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, an area that had once been an upper-class white suburb but was 86 percent Black by 1976, following waves of white flight. Her father worked for Delta, fixing planes for the Atlanta institution that helped to make the city a worldly concern.But Lashon’s otherwise placid youth was rattled by what came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, when more than 20 Black boys and girls were kidnapped and killed between 1979 and 1981. The sixth child to go missing, Jeffrey Lamar Mathis, 10, was one of Lashon’s best friends at J.C. Harris Elementary School. (The spelling of Mathis’s first name varies in the public record, from FBI files to news accounts, a detail perhaps indicative of the attention paid to the case.) She knew him as the class clown.In the neighborhoods directly affected, parents saw the lack of initial law-enforcement interest in the disappearances as neglect based on their racial and socioeconomic status. Children were no longer allowed to play outside, some were pulled from school altogether and the city eventually imposed a curfew.“We definitely couldn’t go anywhere,” Lashon recalled. “We could hardly go out and play, and we weren’t even really allowed to before that. But after, we never gonna have a childhood.”The writer James Baldwin, who covered the case for “Playboy” and later in a book, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” tied the violence and tragedy of those years to the area’s history, dismantling the fantasy that Atlanta, only 100 years on from slavery, represented any sort of sanctuary for Black people. “There is absolutely nothing new in this city, this state or this nation about dead Black male bodies floating, finally, to the surface of the river,” he wrote.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Lil Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up. But he is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesIn 1982, Wayne Williams, a local aspiring music mogul, was convicted of killing two adults, and blamed also for the child murders, although no one was ever tried in those cases. In the years that followed, skepticism remained, especially in the Black community, about the scope of Williams’s overall guilt.This was the backdrop against which Atlanta rap was born, and the sounds, words and beats that would come to define the city bore more than a trace of the chaos and pain of this era.André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, who would become known as André 3000 and Big Boi of Outkast, were 4 years old when the first children disappeared. Jermaine Dupri, the mastermind behind So So Def Recordings, was 6. Jeezy and 2 Chainz were toddlers. T.I. and Gucci Mane were right behind them. All were raised among the paranoia, the skepticism of institutions and the two-sided coin of parenting options — shelter versus exposure to the cold world — only exacerbated at that time.“The music, storytelling, folklore and culture that emerge from the poor and marginalized communities of Atlanta — what we call ‘trap’ — are built on the generational, psychological, linguistic and ideological roots that grew from the traumas of the Atlanta Child Murders,” wrote Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, who has used hip-hop to teach social justice.FOR LASHON, THE crimes were decidedly local, close at hand. “The crazy part was, we knew Wayne Williams,” she said. He had worked with one of her aunts. “It took me a long time to get over it.”Yet it was only later that Lashon realized how directly she could trace that foundational thread of her life through the decades to the kind of mother she would become.As Dominique grew into a mischievous and independent teenager, earning the nickname Lil Baby from the older boys he hung around with in the nearby Oakland City neighborhood, her initial instinct was to smother him the way she had been smothered by her parents.But Lashon soon realized that this was futile — a mother’s desperate helplessness in the face of her son’s unwieldy ambitions. “Skipping school, smoking weed — I was rebellious,” Baby said. On “Shiest Talk,” from “It’s Only Me,” he raps, “Of all my mama’s children, I’m the bad one/I admit that.”But Baby knows now that his success in music may have rearranged those rankings, and finally being able to make his mother proud — and financially secure — is a sentiment that occurs over and over again in his new songs. “Mama, I got rich/look at your dropout,” he raps on another track.“I was the bad one, but now I’m the good one,” Baby said with a smirk during our recent interview. “Look how life changes.”Lashon had warned her son all along about “the streets,” to the extent that she could. “When you make the decision to get in them, know that it’s consequences for being out there,” she told him. But she knew he had to find out for himself.“At first, I didn’t let him do nothing or go nowhere,” she said. “But I felt guilty for keeping him in, ’cause he’s a boy — they supposed to get out, do stuff, have friends. I don’t know if that was because of my childhood — sheltered because of the Wayne Williams thing. But I knew that boys, once they get out there, they get out there.”Lashon was confident that her son was bright, self-possessed and excelling at the things he was putting his mind to, even when she was forced to confront what exactly that was. She realized that Baby’s drug-dealing and gambling money was serious when she heard him going up to the attic repeatedly. One day, unable to quell her curiosity, she went to see the gains for herself and found stacks of dirty bills, smoothed out and carefully rubber-banded.But by the time he was 20, following arrests for guns and marijuana possession, plus some failed diversion programs, Lil Baby found himself in a maximum-security prison.IT WAS WHILE incarcerated that he finally decided he would give rap a try. After his release in 2016, he started working with Quality Control, an Atlanta label that specialized in stories like his, joining the flock of the local executives Kevin Lee, or Coach K, and Pierre Thomas, who had shepherded acts like Migos and Lil Yachty to stardom.In his first two years as a rapper, Baby showed his commitment by releasing seven mixtapes and albums, ultimately leaving his old life behind. In 2020, his breakout LP “My Turn” became the most-listened-to release of the year in any genre, topping even Taylor Swift.“I moved on from slanging drugs and pistols/can’t be thinking simple,” he declares on “Real Spill,” the opening track from “It’s Only Me.”But first, in prison, Baby learned the extent of the Atlanta area’s small-town feel, the way that his mother’s life folded into his. “That’s one of the most craziest things she’s ever told me,” he said of her connection to the child murders. “But I actually ended up in prison with Wayne Williams. In the same dorm.” Williams worked around the facility, so they saw each other every day.“My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta,” Lil Baby said.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesThat, to Lil Baby, was the essence of Atlanta — his ties to the city’s darker side as omnipresent and relevant to his story as his pre-fame relationships with rappers. “There’s so much of a deep-rooted connection,” he said. “Even the artists. If it wasn’t for the Young Thugs, the Migos, the Peewee Longways — I was around a lot of people, and I’ve seen them come from where I come from. That gave me a lot of inspiration.”Today, Lil Baby has been nominated for eight Grammys, winning once, and earned corporate endorsement deals, an Amazon documentary and a spot performing at the 2022 World Cup.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up, something he expresses not just with boasts, but with survivor’s guilt and ambivalence.“Youngins out here wildin’ with no guidance/all they care about is who they kill,” he raps on “Heyy.” “I was tryna keep that [expletive] in order/it got harder ’cause I was never there/it’s a better life out here/I promise, brodie, I’mma keep it in they ear.”There is even a song called “California Breeze,” with lyrics about private dinners in Malibu.But Baby is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him, his roots there inseverable and his essence inextinguishable. “The main thing that I do still keep with me from Atlanta, when I go everywhere, is me,” he said. “My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta. No matter where I go, I’ll never be able to get distance from Atlanta.”“Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story” will be published on Oct. 18 by Simon & Schuster. More

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      Did Crush Snub Black Fans at a Concert in South Korea?

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      The singer Crush apologized for a “misunderstanding” after the exchange, which highlights what experts call K-pop’s uneasy relationship with Black culture.It happens so fast in the videos that you need to rewatch them to notice: As Crush, a South Korean R&B singer, high-fives fans during a recent performance, he avoids an area where some Black concertgoers have extended their hands.A fan on Twitter called the episode, at a music festival in Seoul this month, an act of discrimination. When others piled on, some of Crush’s supporters pushed back, saying that videos showed him skipping other parts of the packed audience and warning fans about overcrowding.Crush apologized last week for what he called a “misunderstanding,” telling his 2.7 million Instagram followers that he had avoided high-fiving some fans out of concern for their safety. He also told The New York Times that he loved and respected Black culture and had not meant to offend anyone.“I would never intentionally act in a way that would disrespect nor offend any individual,” he said.The debate over the episode has called attention to what experts call an old problem: the K-pop industry’s struggle to develop the level of cultural sensitivity that fans in the United States and elsewhere expect.The criticism also highlights resentment that has built up for years among many Black fans who feel that K-pop acts adopt their culture but do not respect them, just as earlier generations of white musicians appropriated Black music and reaped the riches.“There are Black fans who love K-pop so much,” said CedarBough T. Saeji, an expert on the K-pop industry at Pusan National University in South Korea. “But they also do have a bone to pick with the way that their fandom has been ignored, and the way that their concerns about things like cultural appropriation have also been ignored.”The Big PictureCrush, 30, whose real name is Shin Hyo-seob, is an A-list K-pop star at a time when South Korea’s cultural exports are winning legions of new fans abroad. As the K-pop industry becomes increasingly international, more of its lyrics are being written in English, and agencies that promote K-pop acts are opening offices abroad.Crush’s record label, P Nation, was founded in 2018 by the singer Psy, whose breakout 2012 hit, “Gangnam Style,” helped K-pop carve out an international profile.The label’s chief executive, Lionel Kim, said it had always tried aggressively to scrutinize its artists’ content for cultural sensitivity.“We want to reach as many fans as we can around the world,” Kim said in an interview. “We’re extremely cautious to ensure that our artists and music videos do not disrespect any ethnicity or culture.”The K-pop group Exo performing at the Winter Olympics in South Korea in 2018.Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto AgencyBut gaps in awareness have been frequent in South Korea, an ethnically homogeneous society that has generally been slow to welcome other cultures at home.“Some people don’t even know what counts as racist or not — and that includes artists,” said Gyu Tag Lee, a professor of cultural studies at George Mason University’s South Korea campus.Members of Exo, a boy band in Seoul, have been accused of making racist remarks during a live broadcast in which they applied makeup that resembled blackface. And last year, the Korean American rapper Jay Park removed the music video for his song “DNA Remix” after fans noted that some of the performers, who were not Black, wore hairstyles that included Afros, braids and dreadlocks.A Rising StarCrush has explored R&B, hip-hop, soul, jazz and other genres in his decade-long career. He began writing rap lyrics in middle school and listened to Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, James Ingram and other Black musicians in high school, he has told the South Korean news media. In 2018, he released a song that paid homage to Stevie Wonder.Last month, Crush released “Rush Hour,” a hit single with the rapper J-Hope of BTS. The lyrics are a mix of English and Korean, the style riffs on funk and hip-hop, and the music video was filmed on a New York City-inspired set.But frustration toward Crush has been building among Black K-pop fans since 2016, when he performed on a Korean television show wearing a mask with dark skin, big lips and frizzy hair — and did not apologize after the backlash that followed.Some fans were also disappointed when Crush removed an Instagram post two years ago about his donation to a George Floyd memorial fund in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Crush’s label, P Nation, told The Times last week that Crush had archived that post, along with dozens of others that were not related to music, later that year. The FalloutAfter the high-fiving episode at the 2022 Someday Pleroma festival this month, some Crush allies seemed to backtrack on their initial support.J-Hope “liked” Crush’s apology on Instagram. Devin Morrison, a Black singer in Los Angeles who has also collaborated with Crush, wrote on Twitter that he had been astounded to see criticism of “an artist who has treated me and my (Black) friends with nothing but respect and kindness.”But J-Hope’s like and Morrison’s tweet later disappeared. Neither artist responded to requests for comment.Some Black fans took a nuanced view of the episode, saying that they were frustrated less with Crush than with the culture of racial bias that they feel pervades the K-pop industry.Videos of Crush “skipping over the Black fans seemed unlike him, but it didn’t seem like it was unlike K-pop,” said Akeyla Vincent, 32, an African American public-school teacher in South Korea. Melissa Limenyande, 29, a Black South African who also teaches in South Korea, said she believed Crush’s explanation that he had acted out of concern for fans’ safety.At the same time, she said, she has struggled to reconcile her enjoyment of K-pop with what she sees as its creators’ insensitivity toward other cultures.“I like these artists so much and I love their music and their personalities,” she said. “But if I can take my time to learn about their culture or where they come from, why can’t they do the same?” More

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      K-Pop’s Stray Kids Land Second No. 1 Album This Year

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      “Maxident” is the latest release to top Billboard’s album chart on the strength of CD or vinyl sales, rather than streams.Week after week, the Billboard album chart is a tale of two formats.Most of the time, the titles that reach No. 1 are the ones that are most popular on streaming services. So far in 2022, that has included Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack, various rap records (by Drake, Lil Durk, Future) and this year’s biggest hit, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which has held the top spot for 13 weeks.The rest of the time, the top position belongs to the records that make a splash with physical versions, like vinyl LPs, CDs and collectible boxed sets packed with goodies like posters and T-shirts. Some of the most skilled marketers of physical media these days have been K-pop groups, like BTS and Blackpink.This week, the eight-member Stray Kids, from South Korea, opens at No. 1 for a second time this year with “Maxident,” which had the equivalent of 117,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. As with its last release, “Oddinary,” which topped the chart back in March, most of the sales of “Maxident” were on CD, with the band releasing the album in as many as 10 different packages, including exclusive versions for retailers like Target and Barnes & Noble.Of its total, 107,000 were for CDs. “Maxident,” like “Oddinary” before it, is officially a “mini album,” with just under 27 minutes of play time on its standard versions. The eight tracks on “Maxident” — by comparison, “Un Verano” has 23 — collected a little less than 10 million streams in the United States, or about 6 percent of the total consumption of the release in its opening week.The success of “Maxident” bumps “Un Verano” to No. 2 with the equivalent of 76,000 sales. Now in its 23rd week out, “Un Verano” still has never dipped lower than second place, and it has racked up about 3.7 billion U.S. streams alone.Bad Bunny’s reign at the top may soon be coming to an end, however, with the arrival of two new albums: Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” which came out on Friday and is already a major streaming hit, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights.”Swift, whose ingenuity as a marketer may be unsurpassed in the industry, has been paying close attention to physical media in recent years, and for “Midnights,” which comes out this Friday, she has a clever offering. The four variant vinyl editions, when turned around and placed in a grid, contain numbers that form the hours of a clock.“It’s a clock,” she said when showing it off on Instagram. “It can help you tell time.”The popularity of physical media can be surprising, since streaming now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States. But vinyl has been growing at double digits for years, and in 2021 had just over $1 billion in sales, for the first time since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.For artists, CDs and LPs can be especially appealing when it comes to climbing the charts — according to the formulas used by Billboard and Luminate to determine chart positions, it takes as many 1,250 track streams on paid services, or 3,750 on free ones, to count as much as a single album sale.Also on this week’s album chart, Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” rises two spots to No. 3, after its vinyl version became widely available. (Perhaps you caught Beyoncé’s retail takeover on TikTok, featuring the queen gamely signing LPs in jeans, cowboy boots and a Rolling Stones T-shirt?)Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is in fifth place. More

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      New Music From Blink-182, the 1975 and Queen’s Unheard Song With Freddie Mercury

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      Hear tracks by Blink-182, Lil Baby featuring EST Gee, Sevdaliza 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.Queen, ‘Face It Alone’Freddie Mercury packed drama into every syllable when he sang “Face It Alone,” a track Queen rediscovered in 1988 session archives while preparing a much-expanded reissue of its 1989 album, “The Miracle,” and has now rebuilt. It’s a dirge about inevitable, existential loneliness, set to slow, bare-bones arpeggios and funereal drum thuds, and Mercury’s voice expands it to arena scale as he moves between confidential croon and balcony-rattling rasp. JON PARELESThe 1975, ‘Oh Caroline’The 1975 regularly goes roving through rock and pop’s back catalog, trying on styles. “Oh Caroline” doesn’t go for the obvious musical reference — the incomparably vulnerable “Caroline, No” by the Beach Boys — but instead to the era when Michael McDonald led the Doobie Brothers, with electronic percussion, scrubbing guitars and burbling keyboard chords. “Caroline, I want to get it right this time,” Matty Healy sings, making abundant romantic promises, as he travels among eras with the freedom of the internet. PARELESNessa Barrett, ‘Tired of California’Nessa Barrett, 20, established herself on TikTok with songs about pain, self-doubt and thoughts of death. The comic relief on her new debut album, “Young Forever,” is “Tired of California,” a sweet-voiced summation of the attractions, superficiality and ennui of aspiring to stardom in Los Angeles. “I get sick of sunshine on my perfect skin,” she lilts, to a tune reminiscent of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega; then she contemplates death as a career move that would leave her “young forever”: “You get more famous when you die.” The production riffles through Los Angeles specialties: crunching EDM, orchestral bombast, hair-metal guitars and confessional piano chords. It’s supremely self-conscious. PARELESLil Baby featuring EST Gee, ‘Back and Forth’As Lil Baby eases into rap superstardom, he tends to lean on his melodic side, a combination of savvy and conciliation. But “Back and Forth,” from his new album “It’s Only Me,” is something slightly more pure — just a pair of icy verses from Lil Baby and the Kentucky firebrand EST Gee about all the various sorts of conquest. JON CARAMANICABlink-182, ‘Edging’The pop-punk-reunion Mount Rushmore is finally complete — the essential (but not original) lineup of Blink-182 has reunited (again). Tom DeLonge is rejoining Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker for a tour next year; the announcement came with a new song, “Edging,” which marks the first time this lineup has been in the studio together in a decade. It’s familiar but uncanny, Botoxed tight but with none of the puerile joy that marked the group’s breakout hits. Part of Blink’s charm was the sense that it might unravel at any moment; this suggests it is content to remain contained. CARAMANICASevdaliza, ‘Woman Life Freedom’Sevdaliza, who was born in Iran and grew up in the Netherlands, confronts the repression of women in “Woman Life Freedom,” a song that begins with stark intimacy — just vocals — and builds into a somberly devastating orchestral march. Sevdaliza sings, “I was taught compliance in the name of the sword/That stabbed every dream I could be.” The title is taken from the watchwords of current women’s protests in Iran, and the track mixes in spoken words calling for an end to Iran’s dictatorship. But the music’s impact and ambition are not only topical. PARELESLucrecia Dalt, ‘Atemporal’“Atemporal” (“Timeless”) is from “Ay!,” the latest high-concept album by Lucrecia Dalt, a Colombian composer and songwriter who has lately moved into film (“The Seed”) and television (“The Baby”) scores. “Ay!” is about an alien entity, Preta, who first experiences linear time and physicality on a visit to Earth; for Dalt, it’s also about memories and warpages — sonic, spatial and durational — of the music she grew up on. “Atemporal” is more or less a bolero, disassembled and rebuilt in ways that can sound vintage or computer-tweaked, with plenty of clanky percussion; it’s wayward with a purpose. PARELES More

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      Bad Bunny and Steve Lacy Spend Another Week Atop the Charts

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      “Un Verano Sin Ti” and “Bad Habit” remain Billboard’s No. 1 album and song in the United States.The champions on Billboard magazine’s two most important music charts remain unchanged this week, with Bad Bunny holding the No. 1 album position and Steve Lacy the No. 1 single.“Un Verano Sin Ti,” the streaming juggernaut by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny — a.k.a. Benito Martínez — logs its 13th time as the top album, with the equivalent of 84,000 sales in the United States, including 116 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since it came out 22 weeks ago, Bad Bunny’s album, an international blockbuster, has racked up 3.6 billion streams in the United States alone and bounced in and out of Billboard’s top spot, never dipping lower than No. 2.“Un Verano” now ties Drake’s “Views” (2016) and Disney’s “Frozen” soundtrack (2013) for the longest stays in the chart’s penthouse in a decade, since Adele’s “21” (remember “Someone Like You”?) notched 24 weeks at No. 1 back in 2011 and 2012.Lacy’s song “Bad Habit,” which since midsummer has been inescapable on streaming services — and in TikTok memes — is No. 1 on the Hot 100 singles chart for a second week, with 20.6 million streams and 41.5 million “audience impressions” from radio play, according to Luminate.Back on the album chart, Slipknot, the Iowa metal band that has been dressing up in Halloween-like masks — and selling millions of records — for more than two decades, reaches No. 2 with “The End, So Far,” the group’s seventh studio LP. It had the equivalent of 59,000 sales, including 11 million streams and 50,500 copies sold as a complete package.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” holds at No. 3, the Weeknd’s hits compilation “The Highlights” is No. 4 and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is No. 5.“Dangerous,” released at the beginning of 2021, has now spent 90 weeks in the Top 10, matching “South Pacific” — the soundtrack to a 1958 film whose songs go back to a 1949 Broadway production. In the 66-year history of the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship album chart, only five other releases have logged more weeks in the Top 10, all soundtracks and cast albums from the 1950s and ’60s. More

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      There Is No Excuse for Ye’s ‘White Lives Matter’ Shirt

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      Not from Ye. And not from his new YZY collection.PARIS — Yeezy is dead. Long live YZY. Stage three of the ambitions of Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — to dress the world has begun.Presumably that was supposed to be the takeaway from the surprise show of Paris Fashion Week, held off-schedule in an empty office tower just down the road from the Arc de Triomphe.Though it turned out to be only nominally a fashion show and more like “The YZY Experience”: a chaotic mess of self-justification, confessional, bone-picking and messianic ambition, with a “White Lives Matter” shot of shock and provocation that overshadowed the clothes on the runway.The rumors began during the weekend, just a day or so before the Balenciaga mud show. Ye was in Paris and was going to stage a fashion show — a little more than two weeks after ending his much-ballyhooed partnership with Gap.Maybe it would happen Monday? Maybe not; Ye had just fired his PR agency. No wait, it was happening; he had found another agency. Then, Sunday night, a digital invite arrived. For the next evening. Guests were asked not to share the address.Monday at 5:45 p.m., the Avenue de la Grande Armée was heaving with screaming fans and photographers. So much for secrecy. They outnumbered the show’s actual attendees by what seemed like 100 to one.Still, Anna Wintour came. So did John Galliano. Demna, the Balenciaga designer, and Cédric Charbit, its chief executive. Alexandre Arnault, the chief marketing officer of Tiffany & Company and a son of the LVMH chieftain Bernard Arnault. Then they all sat, playing with the soap-on-rope that looked like three granite blocks and had been left on every seat, waiting an hour and a half for the show to begin. (Well, OK, Anna and John left before the whole thing ended, but that was because they had another appointment, Ms. Wintour said.)It was as good a reflection as anything this week of just how the culture and power structure of fashion and entertainment has changed in the past decade. Because it was 11 years ago, in early October 2011, that Ye held his first fashion show in Paris.The line at that time was called “Kanye West.” Heavy on the luxury frills — leather and fur and gold hardware — it was widely dismissed by its audience. But this time there they were, the powers that be of the industry, jumping at the last minute to see what Ye had to deliver.Which involved a live choir featuring a host of children from Ye’s new Donda Academy in California as well as his daughter, North, and began with his rambling speech about critics who complained about his shows being late; his former manager, Scooter Braun; his hospitalization (Ye has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder); the pain of being called “crazy”; critics who complained that his clothes might not be well made; the people at Gap who didn’t get his vision; Bernard Arnault, whom he called “his new Drake”; and the news that he was establishing yet another version of his own fashion house and it started now.Because “we changed the look of fashion over the last 10 years. We are the streets. We are the culture.” And when it comes to the culture, “I am Ye, and everyone knows I am the leader.”Except this leader was wearing an oversize shirt with a photo of Pope John Paul II and the words “Seguiremos tu ejemplo” (“We will follow your example”) on the front, and “White Lives Matter” on the back — a phrase that the Anti-Defamation League has called hate speech and attributed to white supremacists (including the Ku Klux Klan), who began using it in 2015 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.The shirt was impossible to miss because, as he spoke, Ye’s image was projected behind him on a wall four stories high.Besides, Candace Owens, the conservative commentator, was in the audience and wearing one, too. Later the shirt appeared as part of the collection, modeled by Selah Marley, the daughter of Lauryn Hill and granddaughter of Bob Marley. (Matthew M. Williams, the Givenchy designer who worked with Mr. West earlier in his career; Michéle Lamy, Rick Owen’s wife; and Naomi Campbell also walked in the show.)It was the only message garment in the line, which was called SZN9 in reference to the Yeezy shows that had come before, created in conjunction with Shayne Oliver, the former designer of Hood By Air (Ye is nothing if not a great spotter and cultivator of talent). Which made it stand out even more in a show otherwise focused on garments that could simply be pulled onto the body, with no hardware — buttons or zips or snaps — involved, an idea that Ye first began talking about in the context of his work with Gap.As it happened, a lot of this line looked like that line, especially that part of that line engineered with Balenciaga’s Demna, including the full-body catsuits that opened the show, the duvet-like puffer ponchos, the blouson jackets and sweats that made the torso into a sort of steroid-filled G.I. Joe triangle, the lack of seams and the semi-apocalyptic palette.It has potential, but the import got swamped by the shirt, what it symbolized, and how its endorsement by a figure such as Ye — even one with a track record of wearing MAGA hats and toying with Confederate imagery — could be used as a rallying cry by those who already buy into its message.“Indefensible behavior,” wrote Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the Vogue editor, on Instagram. Later adding, “there is no excuse, there is no art here.” Jaden Smith, in the audience, walked out. So did Lynette Nylander, the Dazed writer and editor.The next day, at the Chanel show, Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue and the most powerful Black man in fashion media, called the shirt “inappropriate” and “insensitive, given the state of the world.”Ms. Nylander had posted, “It doesn’t matter what the intention was … it’s perception to the masses out of context.”Indeed, in the end, it is the shirt out of context that made the news: not Ye’s theories about dress, or his allegations that Mr. Arnault promised to set him up in his own house and then reneged and now has become Ye’s biggest competition (an LVMH representative said Mr. Arnault had “no comment”); not even Ye’s assertion that, having disrupted the fashion week spotlight, he still felt “at war.” If so, this was a grenade that backfired.As to why he did it, backstage Ye declined to provide any theoretical framework. “It says it all,” he said, of the shirt. But what exactly does it say?That he truly believes he can appropriate the language of racial violence with irony? That someday the power structure of Black and white will be reversed, and since he says this collection is the future, that’s the world he envisions? That Ye gets a kick out of pushing everyone’s buttons? That he wants to see how far he can go and doesn’t really care about, or think about, the collateral damage in the meantime (including to those children singing at his feet), despite the violence this could feed?Or that, as he said in his speech, “You can’t manage me. This is an unmanageable situation.” More

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      Steve Lacy’s Streaming Smash ‘Bad Habit’ Climbs to No. 1

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      A left-field hit from a 24-year-old master of alternative R&B displaces Harry Styles’s “As It Was” as the top single, while Bad Bunny logs a 12th week atop the album chart.Steve Lacy, a 24-year-old guitarist and producer, started the year with a reputation as a gifted innovator on the fringes of alternative R&B, best known for a D.I.Y. approach in the studio. Now he has the No. 1 song in the country.“Bad Habit,” a spacey, pensive ballad driven by a slightly warped guitar, has been a monster streaming hit since its release three months ago. After gaining traction on pop radio it finally climbs to the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart this week, with 20 million streams and 40 million “airplay audience impressions,” a measurement of a song’s popularity on radio stations, according to the tracking service Luminate.The song, from Lacy’s second studio album, “Gemini Rights,” replaces Harry Styles’s “As It Was” at the top of the chart, after an on-and-off reign of 15 weeks since April.The ascent of “Bad Habit” has been one of the more surprising stories in the music business this year, but for those watching Lacy’s career it has not come out of nowhere. After emerging as a teenage member of the Internet, an offshoot from Odd Future — the boundary-pushing hip-hop ensemble that gave us Frank Ocean, Syd, Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator — Lacy collaborated with Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Vampire Weekend and others, developing a track record as an artist who could comfortably bridge R&B, hip-hop and alternative rock.How long “Bad Habit” will hold, however, is an open question — “Unholy,” the latest from the British singer Sam Smith featuring Kim Petras, is hot on its heels.The Billboard 200 album chart is once again dominated by a familiar face: Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose “Un Verano Sin Ti” is the year’s biggest album, with a gigantic stadium tour to match. This week, “Un Verano” is No. 1 for a 12th time.Bad Bunny’s album had the equivalent of 87,000 sales in the United States in its most recent week, including 120 million streams, according to Luminate. As far as No. 1 albums go, that total is modest. So far this year, the albums reaching the top each week have had an average equivalent sales number — a composite figure that incorporates streaming, individual track downloads and old-fashioned purchases of an album as a complete unit — of about 138,000. Even so, the numbers for “Verano” this week are still nearly twice as high as any of its competitors.The Australian pop-rock band 5 Seconds of Summer opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 48,000 sales of its latest, “5SOS5,” which includes 36,000 copies sold as a complete package and just 16 million streams. (By comparison, in recent weeks Bad Bunny’s “Me Porto Bonito” and “Titi Me Pregunto” — just two of the 23 tracks on “Un Verano” — have each been drawing as many clicks.)Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” a chart mainstay for 21 months and counting, is No. 3. Last week’s top seller, Blackpink’s “Born Pink,” falls to No. 4 with the equivalent of 40,000 sales, a 60 percent drop. Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      Coolio, ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ Rapper, Dies at 59

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      From a bookish, asthmatic child to crack addict to mainstream hitmaker, the West Coast M.C. charted a unique path to hip-hop stardom.Coolio, the rapper whose gritty and sometimes playful takes on West Coast rap and anthemic hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” made him a hip-hop star in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 59.His longtime manager, Jarez Posey, confirmed his death.Mr. Posey, who worked with the rapper for more than 20 years, said he was told that Coolio died at about 5 p.m. at a friend’s house. No cause was given. Coolio, whose legal name was Artis Leon Ivey Jr., achieved mainstream superstardom and critical success with “Gangsta’s Paradise” in 1995. The track, which featured the singer L.V., spent three weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 and was later named the chart’s No. 1 song of the year. It won the Grammy for best rap solo performance in 1996.The song, later certified triple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, outshone the movie it was featured in, “Dangerous Minds.” Its music video won best rap video and best video from a film at the MTV Video Music Awards.“Coolio still builds his raps on recognizable 1970s oldies, and he delivers intricate, syncopated rhymes as if they were conversation,” Jon Pareles wrote in an album review in The New York Times, noting that “Gangsta’s Paradise” uses “the somber minor chords” of “Pastime Paradise,” by Stevie Wonder.The song nearly did not make it into “Dangerous Minds,” The Times critic Caryn James noted in 1996. She wrote that the late addition “turned a preachy Michelle Pfeiffer film about an inner-city teacher into a hit that sounded fresher than it really was.”Coolio’s other hits included “Fantastic Voyage” — the opening song on his debut album — and “1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin’ New),” which were both nominated for Grammys. “C U When U Get There,” which samples Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” was a standout track on his third album of the 1990s, “My Soul.”But nothing could match the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” a song that, with its piercing beat and ominous background vocals, became instantly distinguishable for millions of ’90s rap fans, especially with a memorable opening verse based on Psalm 23:“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left.”The song would expand the commercial possibilities of hip-hop, but Coolio would later say that he sometimes lamented how the track seemed to overshadow his other bodies of work, particularly follow-up albums.Still, he told PopkillerTV in 2018 that the song had taken him on “a great ride.” Its popularity has endured for decades, with the music video garnering a rare billion-plus views on YouTube.Artis Leon Ivey Jr. was born on Aug. 1, 1963. He grew up in Compton, Calif., a place known for producing some of hip-hop’s most successful artists, such as Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar.He told The Independent in 1997 that as a child, he would play board games with his single mother, to whom he later dedicated his success. After a turbulent youth — the bookish, asthmatic child became a teenage gang member, juvenile offender and drug addict — Coolio worked as a volunteer firefighter.In his 20s, he moved to San Jose to live with his father and fight fires with the California Department of Forestry, The Ringer reported. There, he became more spiritual. He later credited Christianity for helping him overcome his addiction to crack.When he embarked on his music career, he quickly gained a following among the rapidly growing audience of hip-hop fans, who had been enraptured by the music of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.After performing with the group WC and the Maad Circle alongside WC, Sir Jinx and DJ Crazy Toones, Coolio went solo. His debut album, “It Takes a Thief” (1994), garnered praise for clever lyrics infused with funky rhythms.“Gangsta’s Paradise” had a vast cultural imprint, even spawning a parody in Weird Al Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise” that replaced the streets with pastoral lyrics about churning butter and selling quilts.Reflecting on his career, and on the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Coolio told Rolling Stone in 2015 that he was on tour in Europe when the song went No. 1 on the charts and he realized: “I was No. 1 all over the entire planet — not just in the States. I was No. 1 everywhere that you can imagine.”On Wednesday, the rapper Ice Cube recalled the significance of Coolio’s music at the time, writing on Twitter that he had witnessed “first hand this man’s grind to the top of the industry.”Coolio, whose spindly and sprouting cornrows defined his look, went on to sell 4.8 million records throughout his career, according to Luminate, the tracking service formerly known as Nielsen Music.He expanded his influence by writing and performing the theme song for “Kenan & Kel,” a Nickelodeon staple in the late 1990s. Coolio later became a fixture on reality TV, starting with “Coolio’s Rules,” a 2008 series that focused on his personal life and his quest to find love in Los Angeles.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Coolio had four children with Josefa Salinas, whom he married in 1996 and later divorced.Years after he topped the charts and solidified himself as a mainstream artist, Coolio confronted legal trouble, pleading guilty to firearms and drug charges.The rapper, who struggled with asthma all his life, served as the spokesman for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, according to his official online biography. At a 2016 performance in Brooklyn, N.Y., Page Six reported, he had an asthma attack and was saved by a fan who had an inhaler.In recent years, Coolio had become aware of his indelible mark on hip-hop. He said in 2018 that after years of lamenting over his struggles in the music industry, he had realized that “people would kill to take my place.”“I’m sure after I’m long gone from this planet, and from this dimension,” he said, “people will come back and study my body of work.” More