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      How Kanye West Is Using Fashion in the 'Donda' Era

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      Kanye West may or may not be imminently releasing “Donda,” his 10th solo album, but over the course of the past few weeks, this era in his career has already established its own signature aesthetic: all black, military, asceticism on an epic scale.It’s a now familiar part of West’s album rollout strategy: clothes to match, or make, the mood. Given that nowadays he spends as much time focused on his fashion enterprises as his music (likely more), it’s unsurprising that shifts in those two creative areas move in parallel.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about West’s use of fashion as a signifier for musical evolution, the ways he has been alternately embraced and rejected by the fashion industry, and how musicians like Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator are walking in the path he carved.Guests:Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic at GQSteff Yotka, senior fashion news editor at Vogue More

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      Shawn Mendes and Tainy’s Summer Breeze, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Circuit des Yeux, Cimafunk and George Clinton, Alice Longyu Gao 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.Shawn Mendes and Tainy, ‘Summer of Love’It’s amazing that more English-speaking pop songwriters haven’t latched on to Tainy, the Puerto Rican producer behind globe-spanning hits by Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, J Balvin and many others. Tainy puts a reggaeton beat, bachata-tinged guitar syncopations and deep sustained bass lines behind Shawn Mendes as he croons short, breathy, calculated phrases about a remembered season of sensual delights. The title has completely freed itself from the 1960s. JON PARELESThe Rolling Stones, ‘Living in the Heart of Love’Sure, it’s a leftover, and it’s obvious why it was shelved. “Living in the Heart of Love” is a vault track to be released on an expanded 40th-anniversary reissue of “Tattoo You,” something to promote when the Stones tour this fall (with Steve Jordan substituting for Charlie Watts on drums). The song is an obvious “Brown Sugar” knockoff, with Mick Jagger striking an uncommonly conciliatory pose as he woos someone: “I’ll play dirty, I’ll play clean/But I’ll be damned if I’ll be mean,” he contends. (Really?) It’s second- or third-tier Stones, and it nearly falls apart halfway through, but the way the band keeps charging ahead is more than enough fun. PARELESParquet Courts, ‘Walking at a Downtown Pace’Parquet Courts are back with a vibrant ode to New York City — and a chronicle of a busy mind traversing its streets. “Treasure the crowds that once made me act so annoyed,” Andrew Savage sings on the first single from the band’s forthcoming album, “Sympathy for Life,” “Sometimes I wonder how long till I’m a face in one.” As ever, his observations are peppered with the robotic banalities of modern existence (“pick out a movie, a sandwich from a screen”), but the song’s snaking groove, persistent beat and shout-along chorus are all teeming with life. LINDSAY ZOLADZLily Konigsberg, ‘That’s The Way I Like It’Lily Konigsberg is a member of the freewheeling art-rock trio Palberta, but over the past few years she’s also been releasing a steady stream of eclectic-yet-infectious solo material on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. (A compilation of that work, titled “The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now,” arrived earlier this year.) “That’s the Way I Like It,” from her forthcoming solo debut “Lily We Need to Talk Now,” is smoother around the edges than Palberta’s spiky grooves, but it’s still got ample personality to spare. “That’s the way I like it, you can’t do anything about it,” Konigsberg intones with a sugary defiance, addressing someone who’s been disrespecting her boundaries. As far as assertions of selfhood go, this one’s particularly catchy. ZOLADZCircuit des Yeux, ‘Dogma’Haley Fohr’s voice has an entrancing power. As Circuit des Yeux, she composes haunting atmospheres that augment its force. “Dogma,” the first offering from her sixth album, “-io” pulls the listener along with a steady, hypnotic beat, overtop of which her shape-shifting vocals move from a low drone to a keening croon with remarkable ease. “Tell me how to see the light,” she sings, as if yearning for salvation, but at other moments in the song she sounds like an eerily commanding cult leader. ZOLADZCimafunk and George Clinton, ‘Funk Aspirin’Cimafunk puts a heavy dash of classic Afro-Cuban rhythm into his throbbing dance music, but he’s also been a longtime fan of American funk, and he recently sought out George Clinton, an idol of his since childhood, for a hang and a recording session. The result is “Funk Aspirin,” a bilingual paean to the healing powers of rhythm, taken at a coolly grooving medium tempo and recorded at Clinton’s Tallahassee, Fla., home studio, where the music video was also shot. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLONaujawanan Baidar, ‘Shola-e Jawed’Thinking about Afghanistan this week? Here’s a traditional Afghan melody in modern guise: distorted, multitracked and surrounded in effects, yet still speaking from its home. PARELESPieri, ‘Quien Paga’Born in Mexico and now based in New York City, Pieri chant-rap-sings over a cranked-up, swooping synthesizer bass line with ratcheting drum machines at its peaks in “Quien Paga” (“Who Pays”). It’s a brash, assaultive kiss-off with electronic muscle as she multitracks her voice to announce, rightly, “They tell me that I’m pretty, and I also have a flow that kills.” PARELESAlice Longyu Gao, ‘Kanpai’For the uninitiated: Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Alice Longyu Gao, a glitchy hyperpop paradise full of killer hooks and knowing, oddball humor. A D.J. and producer who was born in China and later moved to New York, then Los Angeles, Gao has recently worked with such similarly brash kindred spirits as Alice Glass and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady (who produced her deliriously fun 2020 single “Rich Bitch Juice”). “Kanpai” — “cheers” in Chinese, Japanese and Korean — is a total sugar rush, blending the pop excess of Rina Sawayama with the electro-freneticism of Sophie. “My name on your lips like liquor lipstick, everybody’s talking about me,” Gao intones, a semi-absurd but self-evident declaration from someone who’s clearly already a global superstar in her own mind. ZOLADZTopdown Dialectic, ‘B1’The taciturn electronic musician who records as Topdown Dialectic previews “Vol. 3,” an album due in October, with “B1,” a rhythm-forward track that surrounds a roboticized samba beat with sporadic cross-rhythms and chords that bubble up from below, then vanish before leading anywhere. It’s simultaneously propulsive and evasive. PARELESMaggie Rose, ‘For Your Consideration’On her third album, “Have a Seat,” the Nashville-based songwriter Maggie Rose seeks reconciliation and balance: between friends, between lovers, between ideologies. She recorded, like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with session musicians rooted in soul. The slow-rolling “For Your Consideration” chides a judgmental companion — “Doesn’t mean it’s all my fault ’cause you say it’s so,” she observes — but also, in a swelling chorus, announces, “I wish that I could borrow your eyes/Maybe that would open my mind.” She’s only calling for fairness, not domination. PARELESOrla Gartland, ‘Things That I’ve Learned’The meter, mostly, is a syncopated and eccentric 5/4, though it shifts at whim; the attitude is terse and businesslike, but sisterly. The Irish-born, England-based songwriter Orla Gartland, 26, an online presence for more than a decade, dispenses advice in “Things That I’ve Learned” on her long-burgeoning debut album, “Woman on the Internet.” She warns against consumerism, comparisons and artificial peer pressure; she gradually stacks up electric guitar riffs and then breaks them down to a little percussion and a lone, undaunted voice. PARELESLee Morgan, ‘Absolutions (July 10, 1970; Set 2)’Starting on the night of his 32nd birthday, not long before his flare-like career would come to an abrupt end, the trumpeter Lee Morgan played a three-day engagement at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, Calif. A live album drawn from these performances became the last LP released during Morgan’s life; its four lengthy tracks are part of the jazz canon. But there was plenty more where those came from, and on Friday Blue Note Records released a mammoth box containing the full recordings: a dozen separate live sets, performed over the course of three nights. It’s dizzying to hear how little the quintet flags, knowing it was playing four sets a night; the unrepentant tension and synced-up control that made “Live at the Lighthouse” a classic is maintained basically throughout the boxed set. A nearly 20-minute version of “Absolutions,” a perilously seesawing, skittering tune written by the group’s bassist, Jymie Merritt, opened the original album. This newly released take, from Set 2 of Night 1, lasts even longer. As Morgan, the tenor saxophonist Bennie Maupin and the pianist Harold Mabern each take lengthy solos, Mickey Roker’s cross-stitched drumming keeps the friction high. RUSSONELLO More

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      Jimothy’s Flex Looks a Little Different

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      The British rapper doesn’t dress or sound like his peers — but that’s just how he likes it.LONDON — Like in every other aspect of his life, Jimothy dresses intuitively.On a recent afternoon at Camden Market in North London, the 22-year-old rapper wore a crisp button-down under a Ralph Lauren puffer jacket, boot-cut jeans and a white messenger bag.“I got my mum to tailor them,” he said, gesturing at the jeans.Browsing the stalls, he considered a rack of fake Gucci belts. “I’m buying fakes now,” he said. “Going broke to look rich is very embarrassing.”When Jimothy (real name Timothy Gonzalez) burst onto the London music scene in 2017 with his viral track “Getting Busy,” his nonconformist dress sense was only part of the reason people kept asking him if “Jimothy” was a comedy bit.“Getting Busy” is an unlikely ode to scheduling set over lo-fi beats, with Jimothy — then performing with the last name “Lacoste” as a nod to his preppy dress sense — rapping in his now-signature deadpan, singsong style. In the accompanying video, he dances atop a bus shelter, before hitching a ride on the outside of a London train.“Everyone needs to know,” he said, swinging his legs over the edge of a Camden canal, “is it a joke, is it a joke?” The question used to bother Jimothy when he was younger and “mad egotistic,” he said. Today, although he emphasizes “it’s me, truly,” the rapper accepts some people just won’t get his thing.“Have you ever heard anything like his music, specifically lyrically, ever?” said Poundland Bandit, the anonymous London-based meme-maker who is a fan. “It’s the purest form of someone genuinely being themselves and having the most fun possible with whatever they create, with no boundaries or fear of criticism.”There is also a vulnerability to Jimothy’s music that evokes the confessional style of other British artists like Mike Skinner (now a collaborator) and the playfulness of Dean Blunt. He either rejects the tropes of rap entirely or subverts them playfully. While other rappers brag about sex, drugs and expensive cars, Jimothy raps about his ambition to one day earn enough money to shop at upmarket supermarkets and listening to his mother’s advice.Jimothy shops with friends. His jeans were tailored by his mother. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesJimothy has come to embrace being unconventional. He grew up in public housing in the affluent London area of Primrose Hill, not far from Camden Market, and was raised by his Spanish mother, whom he still lives with. His father, who is of Caribbean heritage but was born in Britain, was not around much.Street-savvy and smart, Jimothy enjoyed unusual freedom as a child. “When I was 12,” he said, “I felt like a big man.” He would explore London on foot, walking to other boroughs up to four miles away. He would also meet and befriend older children online. “I’d message them on Facebook and say, ‘Yo, I like what you do, let’s chill,’” he said.This precociousness is evident to this day. Browsing the market stalls, Jimothy bartered good-naturedly with the sellers, purchasing a burgundy sweater vest and a counterfeit TikTok sweater. He was charming and thoughtful company, if a little inclined toward sermonizing, whether on the importance of cultivating “severe happiness,” eating healthily or not overthinking things.Jimothy has dyslexia and dyscalculia, which affects his ability to understand numbers — he wears a digital watch because he struggles to read a clock face — and went to a middle school for children with special educational needs.There, he was exempt from the pressure to conform to the social vagaries of his peers, he said, but he was also understimulated and overlooked by teachers.Instead, he taught himself what he needed to know via YouTube. He learned to dance by watching videos of body-poppers and hip-hop, which led to his jerky-fluid dance style. “That was my school,” he said. “Oh, my gosh. I learned more on YouTube than anything. Cooking, how to make friends, how to be confident, how to talk to girls, how to kiss. Everything.”Jimothy’s lifelong fluency in digital culture manifests itself as a hypersensitivity toward his image and a hatred of visual cliché. When he waves a wad of cash in the video for “Make Money,” he does so because he knows that “with the way I’m dressed,” in a black turtleneck and gold rimmed glasses, “it looks interesting,” he said. But if he’s wearing baggy jeans and a chain, “I’m not flexing no cash, because I don’t look different,” he said.“I literally just wear what I like,” Jimothy said of his dress sense.Suzie Howell for The New York Times“It’s called anti-drip. When you’re doing anti-fashion, anti-clothes,” he said of his new counterfeit TikTok sweater. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesAfter leaving school at 16, Jimothy considered becoming a massage therapist. He posted his first two tracks, “T.I.M.M.Y.” and “Getting Busy,” online in 2016 and 2017. He’d only wanted to make music to “play at house parties,” he said. His sister encouraged him to take it seriously.Following the success of “Getting Busy,” in 2018 Jimothy signed to Black Butter Records, the Sony imprint, although he subsequently parted ways with the label. His fans range in age from millennials to Gen Z teens, but they all share one thing: “They relate to me,” Jimothy said. “I think they relate to me more than they like my music.”As his profile has grown, his videos have become more high-concept and slick. Last year, he released his well-reviewed debut album “The Safeway” and he has a tour of midsize British venues planned for the coming months. He’s modeled for Acne Studios and Ralph Lauren, and his bedroom in his mother’s flat is full of gifted swag from fashion labels.Jimothy recently branched into house music and now will use other musician’s beats, something he formerly refused to do. But he maintains that he has kept his bedroom pop ethos, uploading videos to an anonymous YouTube channel, while holding on to control over all parts of his music production.He refuses to write with external songwriters, apart from his friend Joss Ryan, a writer and producer who first worked with Jimothy on his debut album. “His approach to making music is unique,” Ryan said, “because he was, and still is, very self-sufficient.”“I am myself,” Jimothy said. “I try my best, anyway. It’s hard not to be yourself.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesJimothy defends his uncompromising approach. “If I get in the studio with some random songwriter that some label has put me on, it’s not going to work,” he said, “because they don’t know my life.”His latest challenge in resisting the pressure to conform, he said, is his fans, and their opinions on his music.“You’re going to listen to them and think, maybe they’re right,” he said. Sitting by the canal, tourists thronged the footpath behind, and he strained to be heard over the melee. “But as soon as you get into that mind-set,” he said, suddenly animated, the music you’re making changes, and “you’re no longer making it for yourself.”Jimothy paused. “Obviously, they are your customers,” he said, of his fans. “Customer is always right. But is this a business I’m doing? Because I don’t think it is.”After all, “business and feelings and emotions don’t work,” he said. “I’m not doing formula music. I’m doing feeling music.” More

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      Jay-Z’s ‘Black Album’ Reconsidered

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      Tally Abecassis and Phyllis Fletcher and Jay-Z at his studio in Manhattan in 2003.Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesIn 2003, Jay-Z announced he was retiring at 33 years old. He had several platinum records under his belt and a budding relationship with Beyoncé. Then, he released the album intended to be his last: “The Black Album.”Reggie Ugwu, a Culture reporter for The New York Times, was a senior in high school when “The Black Album” came out, and it became the soundtrack of his life. He loved not just the music, but the message: that being indisputably excellent was the only way to make it.But after the summer of 2020, as a global Black Lives Matter movement took off in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Reggie started to revisit the lessons of the album.“There was something that was missing from my understanding of how the world worked and my place in it,” Reggie said in this episode.Nearly 18 years later, Reggie reflects on “The Black Album” with Dodai Stewart, a deputy editor. Listen to their conversation.In this podcast episode:Dodai Stewart, a deputy editor for Narrative Projects at The New York Times.Reggie Ugwu, a pop culture reporter for The Times. More

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      Chucky Thompson, Hitmaking Producer, Is Dead at 53

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      He brought a range of musical influences to bear on the tracks he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and many others.“My mind is always on ‘Record,’” the producer Chucky Thompson once told an interviewer, explaining how he was able to bring such a wide range of musical influences to the hits he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and other stars.For any particular track, he might draw on the soul records his parents used to play, or his time as a conga player in Chuck Brown’s go-go band, or some other style in his mental archive, as he sought to realize the vision the performer was after, or perhaps take him or her in a whole different direction.Mr. Thompson helped forge the hip-hop and R&B sound of the 1990s while in his mid-20s. He showed his versatility with his work on Ms. Blige’s second album, “My Life,” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die,” both released in 1994. The next year he was a producer on almost all the tracks on Faith Evans’s debut, “Faith,” another hit.In this period he was working for Bad Boy Entertainment, the influential label Sean “Diddy” Combs founded in 1993, as part of the producing team known as the Hitmen. But he continued to produce for a range of artists after the Hitmen dissolved later in the 1990s. If he — unlike some other producers in those years — defied categorization, that was deliberate.“In my brain, as a producer, I never wanted a sound,” he said in a 2013 video interview with Rahaman Kilpatrick. “That’s why you hear me on so many different records.”Mr. Thompson died on Aug. 9 in a hospital in the Los Angeles area. He was 53.His publicist, Tamar Juda, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Thompson was different from many of his contemporaries in that he was a multi-instrumentalist, often contributing guitar, piano, trombone or other flourishes to the tracks he produced. To get a particular effect for the 2002 Nas track “One Mic,” he flipped a guitar over and banged on the back of it.“He’s a true musician and doesn’t like to program heavily — just like me,” Mr. Combs told Billboard in 1995, when that publication included Mr. Thompson in an article on “the next crop of hotshot producers.” “Chucky has so many melodies in his head and produces from the heart.”Carl Edward Thompson Jr. was born on July 12, 1968, in Washington to Carl and Charlotte Thompson. In the 2013 interview, he said that his mother recognized his innate musical ability early.“She used to sit me in the kitchen and — you know how kids would just be banging and making noise? I was actually on beat with it,” he said. “She knew from there that something was different.”At 16 he was touring with Mr. Brown and his band, the Soul Searchers, playing the funk variant known as go-go, which was popular in and around Washington. It was a time when traditional live performances by bands were losing ground to D.J.s, who could keep the music constant rather than breaking between songs and thus keep people on the dance floor. Mr. Brown had his young conga player try to compensate.“He decided, ‘I’ll put a percussion break in between songs,’” Mr. Thompson told Rolling Stone in June. “So we would finish a song, then I’d do a percussion break, and I’d do a call and response — ask the crowd, ‘Y’all tired yet?’”The year 1994 was a big one for Mr. Thompson. Among the albums he worked on that year was the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die.”Bad Boy AristaThat same year, he co-produced much of Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” the Grammy-nominated follow-up to her successful debut, “What’s the 4-1-1?,” with Ms. Blige and Sean Combs.Uptown RecordsBy the early 1990s he was in New York trying to market himself as a producer, and Mr. Combs and Ms. Blige were looking for material for the follow-up to her successful first album, “What’s the 4-1-1?” (1992).“She picked my song out of a ton of tracks from new and previous producers,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with the website StupidDope.com in June. “I was truly honored. That track was ‘Be With You,’ and at that time it was very different for her and her sound. I felt at that moment we were onto something that would be special.”He ended up co-producing much of the album with Ms. Blige and Mr. Combs. Ms. Blige had a tough hip-hop image that defied female-singer stereotypes, and some people didn’t care for it. Mr. Thompson took that reaction into account as he helped her create the songs for her second album.“I didn’t like people throwing stones at something they didn’t understand,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I was like, on this record, people are gonna know you’re a singer. You’re the real deal.”“My Life,” full of confessional songs exploring Ms. Blige’s personal struggles, received a Grammy nomination for best R&B album and helped establish her as a star. In June, Amazon Prime unveiled a documentary about her career and the record, “Mary J. Blige’s My Life.”Over the years Mr. Thompson also produced for Usher, Raheem DeVaughn, Total and many others. He produced some of the final tracks for his early mentor, Mr. Brown, who died in 2012 at 75.Mr. Thompson’s survivors include five children, Ashley, Emille, Myles, Quincey and Trey Thompson. More

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      Pink Siifu Releases 'Gumbo'!,' a Nod to Southern Rap

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      The prolific 29-year-old rapper, singer and producer returned this month with “Gumbo’!,” a hat tip to the soulful Southern rap that inspired him.In 2018, Livingston Matthews landed in New York for a series of gigs and was low on money after having to unexpectedly check a bag on his flight. So he hopped a subway turnstile, only to be detained by a police officer who wanted to put him in his place.“He was just O.D. extra, bruh,” Matthews said in a relaxed Southern drawl between bites of cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal in a Brooklyn cafe recently, visiting from Baltimore. “He was like, ‘You’re dead meat, I can do anything I want with you.’” The incident led him to write “Deadmeat,” the fiercest track from his 2020 album, “Negro,” which scolded racism and police brutality through an aggressive mix of rap, punk and free jazz.The album arrived just as Covid-19 cases surged globally and a month before protests arose following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. For Matthews, a 29-year-old rapper, singer and producer who records under several names, mainly Pink Siifu, “Negro” was the most fearless album in his vast catalog of equally experimental music. It was also the most intense.“That record? It was Allah and my ancestors,” he said. “I was damn near crying after each track.”His most recent album, “Gumbo’!,” came out at the top of this month and flashes back to an even earlier musical moment: the trunk-rattling bass and downtempo Southern rap that Atlanta’s Dungeon Family crafted in the 1990s.“Their records sounded like everything,” Matthews said of the cornerstone collective that has counted Outkast and Goodie Mob as members.The poet Ruben Bailey, known as Big Rube, a Dungeon Family member who appears on “Gumbo’!,” said he hears the group’s influence in Matthews’s sound. “He’s got a Southern type of style, but at the same he’s lyrical,” Bailey said in a phone interview. “When I first saw his name, that tripped me out because it sounded like he was really creative, and it turned out he was.”Wearing a white sweatshirt, denim coveralls, glitter-gold-painted fingernails, beaded braids and a white durag beneath a brimmed leather kufi hat, Matthews looked like his influences all at once: Sly Stone, Andre 3000, Sun Ra. He spoke with the same laid-back cadence that he employs in his music, and he lit up when talking about his upbringing.He’s not always so chill, though: His live shows are filled with perpetual movement. Sometimes he’ll hop on speakers, and at other moments he’ll walk in a nonstop loop onstage or occasionally through the crowd. It’s as if all the music he has taken in over the years were trying to come through concurrently.Matthews grew up between Birmingham, Ala., and Cincinnati in a family that exposed him to all kinds of music. His mother loved ’90s R&B, and his father, a saxophonist, played old records by Charlie Parker. He got into rap through his older brother, Hardy, who liked the New Orleans-based Cash Money Records — Lil Wayne, especially — and decided to follow suit.“I always wanted to be like my brother, so I was like, ‘Wayne’s my favorite rapper, too,’” Matthews said.“You can lump me in with anybody you want to, but my music is everything,” Matthews said. Schaun Champion for The New York TimesHe took up the trumpet, then the drums, and he played in marching bands from fifth grade through high school. (The cover art for “Gumbo’!” is a caricature drawing of Matthews in a marching band uniform.) He didn’t get serious about music until he got to college where, as a theater major at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, he started performing poetry while quietly honing his image as a Cash Money acolyte who sang like the R&B vocalist Macy Gray — “I really want to work with her,” he said — but also admired the balladry of conscious rap.“I heard what they were saying, and I thought, ‘They’re just rapping poems!’” Matthews said. “Then I was like, ‘Oh nah, I can rap my poems.’”Featuring a who’s who of experimental musicians, including the soul vocalists Liv.e, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Nick Hakim, “Gumbo’!” is a comedown from the raw emotion of last year’s LP, designed to showcase the full breadth of Matthews’ artistry. The sound is bigger and more bass-heavy, but the focus remains his deep admiration for family and the companionship of friends, full of voice mail messages from relatives and recorded conversations with pals. On a run of tracks near the end of the album, songs like “Living Proof” and “Smile (Wit Yo Gold)” slow the tempo to a stroll that feels like summertime barbecues when the sun starts to dip and the temperature cools to perfection.“I didn’t want people to box me in,” Matthews said. “I was trying to make something that reminded me of those drives from Birmingham to Cincinnati.”His overall goal is to keep working to try to reach the heights of two of his idols: Prince and George Clinton. “You can lump me in with anybody you want to, but my music is everything,” he said. “It’s a slow meal. You at grandma’s house, you ain’t gotta rush.” More

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      The Lox, Triumphant at Verzuz

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      In early August, Verzuz — the pandemic-era staple that began on Instagram Live and within a year morphed into a multi-platform content powerhouse with artists “battling” hit for hit — held its first live, ticketed, in-person event. The night featured two of New York’s most historically vital hip-hop crews, the Lox and Dipset, facing off at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.From a distance, it seemed like a light mismatch — Dipset, Cam’ron and his extended crew, are flashy and theatrical, and the Lox are workmanlike and relentless. But the battle took place in a boxing ring, and that set the tone: The Lox emerged triumphant.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about New York rap in the 1990s and early 2000s, the long-forgotten tension of pop crossover, and a night that brought the spirit of battle back to Verzuz, which had begun to turn into a lovefest.Guests:Jayson Rodriguez, a longtime hip-hop journalist and writer of the Backseat Freestyle newsletterJayson Buford, who writes about music for Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and others More

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      Nicki Minaj and Husband Sued, Accused of Harassing Sexual Assault Victim

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      Jennifer Hough said in a lawsuit filed in New York that the couple pressured her to recant her account of the rapper’s husband, Kenneth Petty, sexually assaulting her in 1994.A woman who accused the rapper Nicki Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, of sexual assault during high school filed a lawsuit on Friday against the couple, alleging that they harassed and intimidated her while trying to convince her to recant her account.The case dates back to 1994, when Jennifer Hough, then 16, reported to the police that Mr. Petty — a 16-year-old she had known growing up in Jamaica, Queens — had raped her after leading her into a home at knife point, the lawsuit says. Mr. Petty was arrested that day and was charged with first-degree rape, and subsequently pleaded guilty to attempted rape, said Kim Livingston, a spokeswoman with the Queens district attorney’s office. He served about four and a half years in prison, according to inmate records.According to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Hough, 43, and her family members started to receive communications from people claiming to be connected with Ms. Minaj and Mr. Petty shortly after Mr. Petty was arrested last year for failing to register as a sex offender in California. The lawsuit alleges harassment and witness intimidation, as well as intentional infliction of emotional distress by Ms. Minaj and Mr. Petty, and seeks unspecified damages. It also alleges sexual assault and battery against Mr. Petty, referring to the mid-90s case.A representative for Ms. Minaj did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Petty, Michael Goldstein, declined to comment on the lawsuit.The lawsuit says that an intermediary offered Ms. Hough $20,000 in exchange for signing a prepared statement recanting the accusation. At one point last year, the lawsuit says, Ms. Minaj called Ms. Hough, saying that she had heard Ms. Hough was willing to “help out”; days later, it says, Ms. Hough and her family members received an “onslaught of harassing calls and unsolicited visits” from people she believed to be associated with the couple.Ms. Hough “has not worked since May of 2020 due to severe depression, paranoia, constant moving, harassment and threats from the defendants and their associates,” the lawsuit says. “She is currently living in isolation out of fear of retaliation.”According to the lawsuit, Ms. Hough was on her way to school on Sept. 16, 1994, when she ran into Mr. Petty, a boy she knew from the neighborhood. The lawsuit says that Mr. Petty held a knife at her back as he led her to a house around the corner, where Ms. Hough said he raped her. The suit says that Ms. Hough escaped, ran to her high school and told security guards, who called the police.In an interview, Ms. Hough said that as her case was prosecuted, she faced harassment and retaliation in the neighborhood, prompting her family to force her to attend a court hearing for Mr. Petty and request that the charges be dropped — a request that was denied. At the time, the suit says, Mr. Petty had already accepted a plea deal.Ms. Hough said in an interview that she left New York City after the ordeal, and for years, it remained in the past: “I didn’t think it would be something that would come back and slap me in the face 20-something years later.”But in 2018, Ms. Minaj — a chart-topping rapper with a fiercely loyal social media following — posted about her relationship with Mr. Petty on Instagram, and questions about his status as a sex offender surfaced.Ms. Hough said in an interview that she had spoken to YouTube bloggers to defend herself and respond to an Instagram comment from Ms. Minaj that stated that Ms. Hough and Mr. Petty had been in a relationship at the time of the assault and that Mr. Petty was younger than Ms. Hough. (They were never in a relationship, and they were the same age, according to the lawsuit.)After Mr. Petty was arrested in 2020, Ms. Hough reconnected with a childhood friend from Queens, the lawsuit says, and told him she “wished it could all just go away forever.” Ms. Hough said that the friend replied, “I can make that happen.”The suit says that a few days later, the friend told Ms. Hough that Ms. Minaj had asked for her phone number, and the rapper later called her and offered to fly Ms. Hough out to Los Angeles or fly her publicist out to Ms. Hough; Ms. Hough said she declined and told the rapper, “I need you to know woman to woman, that this happened.”The lawsuit says there were then a series of encounters where Ms. Hough or her family members were offered inducements if she would recant: $500,000 at one point, $20,000 at another, with a proposed bonus that Ms. Minaj would send birthday videos to Ms. Hough’s daughter. Ms. Hough said she declined.Ms. Hough said in the interview that she never expressed interest in a bribe and was adamantly against recanting her story.“If I lie now and say that I lied then, you know what that does?” she said. “Do you know what that’s going to say to my two little girls, or even my sons?”Ms. Hough said in the interview that at one point she told the intermediary that the $500,000 offer was “not good enough.” She said she had been trying to deflect the conversation, not to express interest in a bribe. Tyrone Blackburn, a lawyer representing Ms. Hough, said Ms. Hough’s comment was an effort to dissuade the intermediary from thinking she would accept anything.At one point last fall, the suit says, Ms. Hough was contacted by a lawyer for Mr. Petty, who asked her about a recantation letter. In response to threatening calls and her own growing paranoia, the suit says that Ms. Hough moved three times in one year.“I feel like I’m living in secret,” she said in the interview, “like I can’t tell people my exact location.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. Alain Delaqueriere contributed research. More