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      How the Cowbell Gave Latin Music Its Swing

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      When life gets loud, let the rhythm get louder.Ran-kan-kan: Long before I could name the source of my excitement, my body responded to the strident signature of Latin dance music. The cowbell strikes like a drum but rings like a horn, the high pitch piercing through salsa’s dense thicket of overlapping patterns. Just when I feel myself drifting from the dance-floor herd, the cowbell summons me back to the rhythm’s raw nerve. Musicians call this function el amarre, from the Spanish amarrar — to fasten, to moor, to seal the deal. A paradox, maybe, that the instrument that brings all the others in line should incite the most euphoric feelings of freedom. I’m already sweating through my silk, so why resist the cowbell’s erotic revelation? When the fever reaches a certain pitch, complexity must give way to relentless repetition — one just-right note, catechized precisely like a prayer. Eso es. Just like that.Prayer, I learned recently, might be the right metaphor: The cowbell we know today is a direct descendant of instruments that spread through West Africa with the early iron-making technology of the Bantu migrations, and that continue to structure the diaspora’s ritual music, from the double-mouthed agogô of Yoruba bembé ceremonies to the triangular ekón of the secret brotherhood known as Abakuá. Like a god, the bell lays down our shared timeline. The sharp attack puts you in your place — enter here, act now — amid the din of drums and dancers. The job of the bell, I’ve been told, is to stay steady.Maybe that’s how these timelines survived the apocalyptic chaos of the Middle Passage. When diverse captives converged on the Caribbean, they sought out substitutes for the instruments they no longer had the freedom to craft. In Puerto Rico, they fashioned bomba drums from rum barrels; in Cuba, they turned the humble wooden crate, used to pack salt cod, into the cajón, whose special resonance later found a place in Spanish flamenco. Soon enough, free people of color gained access to forges for smithing bells from scratch, so I sometimes wonder if it was not only necessity but sheer virtuosity that compelled musicians to play most anything: hoe blades, machetes, paint cans and, yes, ranchland cowbells, struck with the handles of decapitated hammers.In New York City, the improvisations continued: Fania’s Johnny Pacheco stalked the carts in Central Park to steal the copper cowbells hanging from the horses’ necks. Eddie Palmieri, salsa’s founding father, told me how the drummer Manny Oquendo would take his cracked cowbell to a body shop for repair: “What is it with the cowbell?” the welder, used to mending fenders, finally asked. “Well,” Oquendo grunted, “that’s what gives the swing to the band.” By the 1950s, Latin music had become big business, so it’s no surprise the cowbell was perfected and mass-produced right here in the Bronx, by a Puerto Rican auto mechanic named Calixto Rivera: first in his apartment, then, after noise complaints, in a workshop behind Yankee Stadium. If you don’t make the cowbell by hand, Rivera once told The Times, “it doesn’t go coo-coo — it goes blegh-blegh.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Up Next at the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial: Dawn Richard and Former Employees

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      After four days with Casandra Ventura, known as Cassie, on the stand, prosecutors will be seeking to corroborate her testimony with additional witnesses.As the second week of Sean Combs’s racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking trial begins, the first witness is set to be Dawn Richard, a singer in two music groups backed by Mr. Combs who says she saw him physically abuse his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura.A performer in the now-defunct groups Danity Kane and Diddy — Dirty Money, Ms. Richard began her testimony on Friday, recalling an incident from 2009 in which she said Mr. Combs attempted to hit Ms. Ventura, known as the singer Cassie, with a skillet, then punched and kicked her.“She went into fetal position — you could see she was literally trying to hide her face or her head,” Ms. Richard testified. She also said that Mr. Combs threatened her and a bandmate to keep silent about the event, saying he told them that “where he comes from, people go missing if they say things like that, if they talk.”Ms. Richard filed a lawsuit against Mr. Combs last year, shortly before he was arrested. She accused him in the suit of threatening her, groping her and flying into “frenzied, unpredictable rages” while he oversaw her career. The girl group Danity Kane was formed during the third iteration of Mr. Combs’s MTV reality show “Making the Band.”After the jury had been dismissed on Friday, a lawyer for Mr. Combs called Ms. Richard’s accusation of abuse from 2009 a “drop-dead lie,” noting that Ms. Ventura had not mentioned it during her four days on the witness stand.Ms. Richard is the first of a series of government witnesses scheduled for this week who are expected to testify about what they saw of Ms. Ventura’s 11-year on-and-off relationship with Mr. Combs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Billy Woods Is Scary Good at Rapping

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      His 12th solo album, “Golliwog,” arrives at a peak in his career as a verbally inventive, independent hip-hop artist. It’s also full of horror stories.When Billy Woods was a child, he was afraid of lots of things.Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Zimbabwe, where his father was a member of Robert Mugabe’s revolutionary government, the boy who would grow into one of his generation’s beloved underground rappers was frightened by a storage room under the stairs in his family’s house. At night, he imagined that something was beneath his bed, and if his closet door was ajar, that was cause for alarm too. He was scared of apartheid South Africa, which bordered Zimbabwe to the south, and the soldiers he encountered at roadblocks. Sometimes he was scared of his parents.“I didn’t grow up around reasonable people,” he said in a recent interview, a charged understatement about a childhood tumbled by history.Woods typically plans his solo projects around a particular conceit or theme, and “Golliwog,” his 12th, which was released last week, is a collection of horror stories. Some are darkly comic, others decidedly less so. They draw on his youthful experiences and contemporary geopolitical terrors, as well as more mundane adult concerns, like romance and renting in modern-day New York, where he has lived on and off since 1995.“Golliwog” arrives at a peak in his decades-long career as an independent artist, carrying on a local tradition of proudly trend-resistant, verbally inventive hip-hop that includes acts like MF Doom, the Juggaknots and Company Flow. All of Woods’s solo music is available through Backwoodz Studios, the label he founded in 2002, which also releases the work of like-minded artists including his frequent collaborator, Elucid; together the pair record as Armand Hammer.“Something that my mother always was stressing was that if you wanted to do art, you couldn’t expect to pay your bills with it,” Woods said. He is in his late 40s now, the father of two children, and noted that “for most of my adult life I have been hustling to make ends meet.” He refuses to own a car, and up until 2018, lived with roommates to save money.Woods started releasing solo LPs in 2003. Billy Woods, which he styles in lowercase letters, is not his real name; he avoids showing his face in photographs.Griffin Lotz/Rolling Stone, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cassie Testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Used Sex Videos as Blackmail

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      Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, said he threatened to use tapes of their sexual encounters, known as “freak-offs,” to control her behavior.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape.During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial, Ms. Ventura recounted how he had stomped on her in the back of his car and how she suffered a gash above her eye when he threw her against a bed frame.She also recounted how, after the pair had dinner in 2018, Mr. Combs raped her in her living room.“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she testified.At the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura said through tears that after she had broken up with Mr. Combs, the trauma remained and she enrolled in treatment for drug abuse. Even so, she said, she contemplated taking her life by walking into traffic. She said her husband stopped her.Ms. Ventura told the court she stayed with Mr. Combs despite beatings and other abuse partly because of the nagging, persistent fear that videos of their sexual encounters with male prostitutes, the hundreds of “freak-offs” that she said Mr. Combs enjoyed watching and recording, would be posted online.Hers was not idle anxiety based on what she viewed Mr. Combs might be capable of, she said, but the consequence of repeated threats he had made to use the material to damage her if she deviated from his wishes. In one case, she described sitting beside him on a flight when he displayed for her videos that she thought had been destroyed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Are the ‘Freak-Offs’ at the Core of the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Case?

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      Casandra Ventura, the mogul’s former girlfriend, has described them as marathon sexual encounters that he directed, involving drugs and hired male prostitutes.The term first came to public awareness in November 2023, when the singer Cassie filed a lawsuit accusing Sean Combs, her onetime boyfriend and record label boss, of years of sexual and physical abuse: “freak-off.”According to the suit by Cassie, who was born Casandra Ventura, this was what Mr. Combs called the highly choreographed sexual encounters that he directed “to engage in a fantasy of his called ‘voyeurism.’” They involved costumes, like masks and lingerie. “Copious amounts of drugs,” including Ecstasy and ketamine. The hiring of male prostitutes. Mr. Combs watching and recording the events on a phone while he masturbated.Freak-offs have become a central part of the government’s case, which charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual encounters with women were not consensual.In much-anticipated court testimony this week, Ms. Ventura — who is visibly pregnant with her third child — described the freak-offs in sometimes excruciating terms. During hours of testimony on Tuesday, she cried and occasionally dabbed her eyes with tissue.The first freak-off happened when she was 22, when Mr. Combs hired a male stripper from Las Vegas to come to a home that Mr. Combs was renting in Los Angeles, she testified. Ms. Ventura said she wore a masquerade-style mask and provocative clothing from a “sex store,” and that she and the man took Ecstasy and drank alcohol before they had sex and Mr. Combs watched.The freak-offs “made me feel worthless,” Ms. Ventura testified, “like I didn’t have anything else to offer” Mr. Combs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Trial, Cassie Is the Star Witness

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      The identity of the individual referred to in waves of dramatic legal filings as Victim-1 — the woman at the very center of the racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking case against the music mogul Sean Combs — was never much in question.But when she takes the witness stand at a Manhattan courthouse under her own name this week, there will be little doubt that there would not have been a criminal indictment against Mr. Combs without the testimony of Casandra Ventura.A singer and model known mononymously as Cassie, she was Mr. Combs’s on-and-off girlfriend — and employee — almost from the time they met in 2005 (when she was 19, he 37), until she finally severed ties from his storied record label, Bad Boy, in 2019.After months of preparation and anticipation, Ms. Ventura, now 38, is expected to recount for the jury how Mr. Combs instituted a system of abuse and control over her life and career for more than a decade. Prosecutors say the executive dangled ever-disappearing music opportunities; beat her when she stepped out of line; and plied her with drugs, forcing Ms. Ventura to have marathon sex sessions with male prostitutes while he taped the encounters.Lawyers for Mr. Combs have portrayed the relationship as loving but deeply toxic and complex, prone to infidelity and mutual abuse, while maintaining that any sexual arrangements were completely consensual. They depict Ms. Ventura as a bitter ex and extortionist who sought only a payday, not justice.What both sides cannot disagree about is that it was Ms. Ventura’s decision in late 2023, following extensive therapy, to pour her allegations into a federal lawsuit — and Mr. Combs’s choice not to settle the dispute before it became public — that led to this moment, in which Mr. Combs, 55, has fallen from a beloved billionaire celebrity to an inmate facing a potential life sentence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tory Lanez Is Attacked by Another Inmate in Prison

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      The rapper was hospitalized after being stabbed 14 times, his Instagram account said. He is serving a 10-year sentence for shooting the hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion. The Canadian rapper Tory Lanez was hospitalized on Monday after being attacked in the California prison where he is serving a 10-year sentence for shooting the hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion, the authorities said.Mr. Lanez, 32, whose real name is Daystar Peterson, was attacked by another prisoner on Monday morning at a prison in Tehachapi, near Bakersfield, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.Mr. Lanez was transported to a medical facility outside the prison, the department said. It did not provide further details about Mr. Lanez’s condition, but a statement posted on his Instagram account late Monday said that he had been stabbed 14 times.“Both of his lungs collapsed, and he was placed on a breathing apparatus,” the statement said. “He is now breathing on his own.” A representative for Mr. Lanez said on Monday night that he had no updates beyond the statement.In August 2023, a Los Angeles judge sentenced Mr. Lanez to 10 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of shooting Megan Thee Stallion in both her feet following an argument three years earlier. He was convicted on three felony counts, including assault with a semiautomatic handgun.At the time of the shooting, Megan Thee Stallion had been on a steep trajectory to stardom, thanks in large part to blockbuster collaborations with Beyoncé and Cardi B.Last year, Megan Thee Stallion asked for a restraining order against Mr. Lanez. In court filings, her lawyers accused him of waging a “campaign of harassment” against her from prison, including by employing bloggers to spread defamatory statements about her.A judge granted a restraining order against Mr. Lanez until 2030, The Associated Press reported.Neil Vigdor More

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      Kendrick Lamar and SZA Bring Storms and Celebrations to the Stadium Stage

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      The rapper and R&B star are taking victory laps for smash hits and albums. But their co-headlining tour is still threaded with angst and reflection.A little over a year ago, Kendrick Lamar had a comfortable perch as one of hip-hop’s most popular performers, and also the most pious. Then came his monthslong quarrel with Drake, which turned into a referendum on ethics in hip-hop (and life). That led to the emergence of Lamar as a maker of tsk-tsking anthems, which turned into his leanest and meanest album to date. Then came a valedictory performance at one of the biggest stages in the world: the Super Bowl halftime show in February.The outlier song on that album, “GNX,” is the SZA duet “Luther,” which has reigned atop the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks. It’s both sweet and dour, a love song that somehow romanticizes the obstacles that get in the way as much as the affection itself.Despite the success of “Luther,” Lamar and SZA aren’t necessarily natural duet partners; they’re two complementary but not overlapping styles of sentimentalist. Lamar treats remembrance as if it’s a moral act, and SZA expresses a kind of agitation about looking backward. They’ve shared a record label and collaborated several times over the past decade — some good songs, some great ones, all of them in slight tug of war with themselves.That added a layer of complexity to their current outing, the Grand National Tour, which came to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Thursday night for the first of two performances. Even if the overall song count tilted a bit in Lamar’s favor, it was in essence a co-headlining event: Lamar, his popularity at its peak, touring stadiums for the first time, while SZA takes a victory lap for “S.O.S.,” her beloved 2022 album.Lamar’s set list right-sized the role of the Drake beef in his career arc — important and perspective shifting, but not dominant.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesFor almost three hours, Lamar and SZA traded control of the stage, a few songs at a time, a conceit that gave the performance quickness and unpredictability. Sometimes they’d hand off the spotlight with a tender duet, little dollops of warmth amid the high-energy, boldly produced presentation. (Others have taken this trade-off approach before: Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Charli XCX and Troye Sivan.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More