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      Marvel’s ‘Shang-Chi’: How 88rising Crafted an Evocative Soundtrack

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      The Asian arts collective worked closely with the director Destin Daniel Cretton to put its imprint on the anticipated movie.One concert was all it took to spark the idea of the Asian arts collective 88rising overseeing the soundtrack for one of the most hotly watched action movies of the year.It happened in early 2019, when Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of the forthcoming Marvel Studios movie “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” caught an energetic Los Angeles gig by the Chinese hip-hop group Higher Brothers. “I’ve never been to a show that was primarily made up of Asian Americans who were all just owning themselves,” Cretton said in a recent interview. “Nobody felt like an outsider; I don’t know if you want to call it a punk rock mentality, but everybody was so pumped to be there.”Sean Miyashiro, the 40-year-old founder of 88rising (which includes Higher Brothers on its roster) was there, and when the two met backstage, Miyashiro didn’t need a formal pitch to convince the director of what his artists could do. Cretton “looked like he was hypnotized,” Miyashiro recalled. “He told me he’d never seen a bunch of Asian kids just wilding out like that — thrashing and jumping in the mosh pit. That really stuck with him.”Over the last few years, 88rising has steadily made inroads into the music industry. Its artists rack up millions of streams on listening services; it stages a festival, Head in the Clouds, which will return in November to Los Angeles (the pandemic foiled last year’s event). And the “Shang-Chi” soundtrack is an opportunity to showcase how Miyashiro’s mission for 88rising — to “provide and celebrate Asian creatives, especially in music, no matter where you’re from” — is part of a shift in available creative outlets for Asian Americans across the United States.Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé previously assembled albums that accompanied “Black Panther” and the remake of “The Lion King.” The 88rising roster doesn’t possess a generational megastar (yet), so “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: The Album,” which was executive produced by Miyashiro and 88rising and arrives Friday alongside the movie, functions as a sampler for the label’s offerings.“There’s this trust — that’s what makes the whole machine work,” Niki said.Natt LimRich Brian raps throughout the LP, including on “Run It.”Natt LimRich Brian, whose wry lyricism and laid-back persona made him the first 88rising artist to receive mainstream attention, raps throughout the record. DPR Ian and DPR Live, who Miyashiro calls “two of the most exciting artists coming from Korean R&B,” sound like smooth-voiced Daft Punk robots on “Diamond + and Pearls.” There are also contributions from artists outside of the 88rising universe, such as Anderson .Paak and Jhené Aiko, who serve as a bridge between musical worlds.While the typical orchestral palette — stirring strings, ethereal voices — is used to score “Shang-Chi,” the 88rising album is liberally incorporated throughout the film. The delirious party cut “Run It,” a collaboration between DJ Snake, Rich Brian and Rick Ross, is synced with the hero’s first fight scene, as he battles a group of villains on a city bus. “We were able to go back and forth with Sean and his artists to mold that track, so when you watch that scene, you’ll see very classic scoring techniques but through an electronic song,” Cretton said.In 2015, when 88rising was founded, a close collaboration with a director of a Marvel film might have sounded like an overly ambitious goal. Miyashiro, who was between jobs and “super broke,” as he put it, decided to take the plunge and break ground on his long-gestating dream of centering Asian creatives under one hub.“Nothing existed at the time, which is staggering to think about because this was only six years ago — there was not one media platform or YouTube channel dedicated to this type of creativity,” he said. “So I was like, ‘Man, we should do that.’ And it just took off.”A one-time employee of Vice, where he helped found the electronic music website Thump, Miyashiro had the instincts for identifying and packaging compelling content. After Rich Brian went unexpectedly viral in 2016 with his self-released song “Dat $tick,” Miyashiro signed him to 88rising. In an equally savvy move, he and his team filmed a video where established rappers reacted to the song. (21 Savage, a skeptic in that video, has since collaborated with Rich Brian and also appears on the “Shang-Chi” soundtrack.)Despite its ascendance onto a larger stage, those involved with 88rising stressed that it’s still an independent brand that’s learning how to operate in real-time. “It feels like a family; it’s very tight knit; it’s not like this major company with thousands of employees,” said the 88rising singer Niki, who appears on several songs on the “Shang-Chi” album. “The same people that I’ve worked with four years ago are the same people that I’m still on a text thread with today.”Though 88rising has steadily grown from those early days, the “Shang-Chi” album represented a very different kind of assignment. Miyashiro and Cretton said Marvel was mostly hands-off with the music. However, there were some ground rules. None of the songs could include cursing, and Miyashiro had to install a bank vault’s worth of security programs on his computer before he could see any material from the movie.The pandemic threw the process for a loop, too. After the Covid-19 lockdowns began, Miyashiro didn’t hear from Cretton for months. “Frankly speaking, I forgot about it,” he said. The conversation picked back up over the summer, with Miyashiro and Cretton hashing out the loose thematic framework for the album, which parallels the movie: a young Asian American, beholden to his family lineage and expectations, must grow into his own person.Miyashiro’s mission for 88rising is to “provide and celebrate Asian creatives, especially in music, no matter where you’re from.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesWarren Hue appears on “Always Rising” (alongside Niki and Rich Brian), “Lazy Susan” (with 21 Savage, Rich Brian and Masiwei) and “Foolish” (with Rich Brian and Guapdad 4000).Natt Lim“We didn’t want to make music about a superhero,” Miyashiro said. Instead, he wanted to depict what it’s like to absorb a particular environment while growing up, citing Kendrick Lamar’s album “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” and the film “Goodfellas” as references. The movie begins in San Francisco, and Miyashiro, who was raised in San Jose, said the Bay Area was a big inspiration: “I took a lot about what I saw and what life at home was like: life with my friends, getting into trouble, mischief, all these different themes wrapped around growing up as an Asian American kid in California.”Beyond that initial template, and the demands of whatever particular scene Cretton happened to be scoring, Miyashiro let his artists have free rein. “There’s this trust — that’s what makes the whole machine work,” Niki said. “He doesn’t really micromanage or anything; he’s very much allowing us to find ourselves, and just be completely what we want to be.”The realities of recording during a pandemic, with a roster that splits time between Asia and America, introduced additional pressures. Warren Hue, a Indonesian-born rapper who’s featured on multiple tracks, recorded in both Jakarta and Los Angeles; Niki said she tracked her vocals with a USB microphone in her guest room in Los Angeles. “We had to take Zoom calls super late at night, into 4 a.m.,” said Miyashiro, who noted that they did rapid testing for every in-person studio session.But sleeplessness has long been a demand of Miyashiro’s quest to expand 88rising and further a musical dialogue between Asian, American and Asian American audiences. It’s exceedingly rare to find a company that puts out pan-Asian music, he pointed out: Korean labels tend to stick with Korean artists, and so forth. “When we’re growing up in America, it’s all Asian homies — we’re kicking it with everybody,” he said. “So naturally, we’ll work with creatives from a lot of different countries, and we’re really proud of that, too.”Cretton, who was born and raised in Hawaii, said he never listened to any Asian American musicians growing up, simply because he wasn’t aware that any existed. “As a kid, you don’t really think you’re missing anything until your brain develops enough to realize, ‘Oh, that’s kind of weak,’” he said.“When I go to an 88rising show, I’m seeing a reflection of myself not only up onstage, but also in those giant crowds of Asian faces,” he added. “There’s an exhilaration and a release that almost feels like a buildup of generations who’d lacked that. It’s very exciting to be at a point where new artists are being celebrated across all cultures.” More

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      Little Simz’s Big Moment

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      The British rapper’s laser focus has been trained on fame since she was a child. Now, she’s ready to take it to the next level.LONDON — Long before she was famous here as the rapper Little Simz, Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo, known as Simbi, made her debut performance at a local youth club showcase. Ten years old and wearing a red Ecko tracksuit, her hair parted in two bunches, she lunged to the edge of the stage, almost collapsing into her classmates in the front row, and rapped: “In 10 years, I want to be a performer that can entertain, and still remain, to do good things in life.”More than a decade has passed, and Little Simz, now 27, is living up to her ambitions. Her fourth album, “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert,” is due on Sept. 3. As an actor, she has starred in British TV shows, including Ronan Bennet’s breakout hit, “Top Boy.” She is an active member of her community in Islington, North London, doing good through charitable acts she “doesn’t feel the need to be loud about,” she said.A master storyteller who raps with wisdom and heart, Little Simz has a narrative style that’s been likened to Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, both fans of her work. Where she was once just “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper,” she is becoming a household name here in her own right.In 2019, the grime star Stormzy shouted out Little Simz as an up-and-comer to watch during his headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival. That same year, her third studio LP, “Grey Area,” a grooving and eclectic rumination on her early 20s, was named best British album at the NME Awards.But now, poised to release her latest album, she feels on the cusp of something really big, she said in a recent interview, as she lounged gracefully on a restaurant sofa in King’s Cross, London, as though it were her own. “Everyone has their moment,” she said, “and I think ‘Sometimes I Might Be Introvert’ will be mine.”“I’m still young, innit?” she added. “But I know that’s where I’m heading.”Kadeem Clarke, a frequent collaborator who directs Little Simz’s live performances, said her determination was unshakable. “She has a vision, and we don’t even know where it comes from, or how it’s going to get done, but she does it,” he said. “She will not take her eye off it.”That laser focus has been a hallmark since Little Simz’s North London childhood. Her house was crowded, noisy and alive, she recalled: Her mother played Afrobeats and reggae, her sisters garage and grime, her brothers rap and hip-hop.In her bedroom, Little Simz listened to Busta Rhymes, Nas and Biggie Smalls, and dreamed of being like them, she said: a rap legend who spoke to their listener, not at them. She wrote their lyrics out in notebooks, trying to work out how the artists turned stubborn words into something slick and percussive. The natural and chatty approach of Biggie Smalls, in particular, drew her in: “If you took away his flow and instrumental, he could just be talking to you.”She said that she had “struggled to articulate myself in conversation,” but that her own rapping, which she thought of as a dialogue with herself, helped make sense of her thoughts. “And then, I even question it — like, why do I think that?”In rapping, she said, she found the thing that set her apart from her peers. “Everyone knew me as that girl who rapped,” she explained. “I’m the youngest of four, and my older siblings knew everyone, so I was always, ‘T’s little sister,’ or ‘Fem’s little sister.’ Then other people would find out that I did music, and it’d be another layer, like, ‘Aw, you know T’s sister raps?’”Claire Hough and Little Simz shooting the video for her new song “Introvert.”Tamiym CaderAt 14, Little Simz began making sacrifices for the hobby she was determined to turn into a career: She stayed in when her friends went out together on weekends, saving her pocket money for studio equipment. Her bedroom became a shrine to her musical idols, with posters of Lauryn Hill, Nas and Jay-Z, and a photo of herself placed above them. On a piece of cardboard, she wrote an affirmation in all caps: “Dream big! Family is everything! God is love! Be great!”That same year, she landed an acting role on a BBC children’s adventure show, “Spirit Warriors.” Later, at 17, Little Simz was cast in “Youngers,” a children’s drama depicting a group of London teenagers hoping to make it big in music. Life began to imitate art when she formed a group called Space Age with other young musicians and artists she met at EC1 Music Project, another London community program. The crew became a kind of extended family, Little Simz said, playing instruments, adding vocals and producing visual art for the mixtapes she began recording.Tilla Arcé, a close friend who also rapped in Space Age, said, “Simz always surrounded herself with real people,” but noted she was more inclined to open up in her music than in social settings. “When she’s performing, it’s her space to let go and be immersed in pure emotion and expression,” he said. “Simbi the person is a lot more to herself, but because I’ve known her as a virtuoso, I understand the moments she taps into Little Simz.”Space Age’s members joined in on Little Simz’s debut album “A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons,” which she released when she was 20: Arcé recorded additional vocals, and his brother, Josh, helmed the production on several tracks. The album is a reflection on fame and its effects on the human spirit, with Little Simz adopting new personas on different songs, each one a character at a different stage of their journey to celebrity. How about that as a statement of intent?With the release of “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert,” Little Simz said she was ready to move to the next level: “There’s just something in the air.” Featuring interludes voiced by Emma Corrin, who played Princess Diana in “The Crown,” the 19-track album is an odyssey through Little Simz’s inner conflicts and joys. Bringing together influences including lackadaisical neo-soul and ’80s electro funk, it has the scope and spectacle of a West End production.Little Simz recorded the album in Los Angeles, working with Dean Josiah Cover, 33, who produces under the name InFlo. He is, like the members of Space Age, both a childhood friend and a persistent influence on her music. The two have been collaborating since Little Simz was a dream-driven teen, in 2008.“When I listen to the stuff we made back then, it sounds almost like ‘Sometimes I Might Be Introvert,’” she said. Both artists’ tastes and sound palettes are far-ranging, taking in hip-hop, jazz, R&B, punk and soul. “We literally have a brother-sister relationship,” Little Simz said. “I annoy him, he annoys me. But we make great music together,” she said, describing their creative process as a safe space: “Whatever you feel, it’s between these four walls, and if it goes on the record then it does, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Shout, scream, cry, whatever it is.”With all that space for self-examination, Little Simz’s ambitions didn’t go without self- scrutiny: “Why the desperate need to be remembered? Everybody knowing what you’ve done, how far you’ve come?” Little Simz raps on “Standing Ovation,” one of the new album’s tracks.In the interview, she said she was willing to sacrifice a lot for the big time she saw coming, not least her privacy. “If I didn’t do music, no one would know who I am,” she said. The comfort of invisibility appealed to her introverted side, but she has struck a bargain: “I’m not going to be nameless. I want my music to be known, I want my music to be heard, I want to tell my story.”But fame isn’t the be-all and end-all, Little Simz added. “I’m trying to be my greatest self in all aspects of my life, and not just music,” she said. Echoing the song she performed as a 10-year-old, she reiterated her purpose: “Not only am I trying to be a great artist and performer, I’m trying to be a great sister, friend, daughter, auntie.” More

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      John Coltrane’s Unearthed Live ‘A Love Supreme,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by SZA, Fantastic Negrito, Mary Lattimore 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.John Coltrane, ‘A Love Supreme, Pt. IV — Psalm (Live in Seattle)’When John Coltrane recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” in late 1964, he was demanding an escape from the confines of modern jazz. He was improvising on the level of sound, as much as notes, and he’d already started bringing in new, more freewheeling collaborators to join his quartet. Partly because of that shift, and partly because of how intimate the piece felt to him, he barely played “A Love Supreme” live. But this week, Impulse! Records revealed the existence a 56-year-old tape of him performing the suite in Seattle, in fall 1965, with an expanded version of the quartet. It’s the only known recording of Coltrane playing it for a club audience, and it will be out as a full album on Oct. 8. “Psalm,” the suite’s serene finale and the only publicly released track so far, is the most personal part: Coltrane had set “Psalm’s” melody to the cadence of a praise poem he wrote, and in Seattle he played it without either of the two other saxophonists in that evening’s band. More than an hour in, with the energy of the set suffusing the stage, he turns pieces of the melody into little incantations, coaxing a deep-bellied cry from his horn. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSZA, ‘Nightbird’SZA released a trio of intimate songs on SoundCloud this week, perhaps as a place holder before her next album. On “Nightbird,” the mood is toxic and the singing is limber. SZA has a way of frankly and unflashily relating profoundly complex emotional experiences, building on the melodic structures of 1990s R&B, but also adding some of the sonic distance that’s been built into the genre over the last decade. “Nightbird,” both offhand and devastating, is among her best. JON CARAMANICAFantastic Negrito featuring Miko Marks, ‘Rolling Through California’“Rolling Through California” has a twangy, country-soul groove that harks back to the late-1960s San Francisco of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, all affable and gleaming. But Fantastic Negrito, with Miko Marks harmonizing above his bluesy cackle, sings about how the old California dream has given way to wildfires and pandemic; the foot-stomping chorus goes, “Can you hear the sound/It’s burning to the ground.” JON PARELESThe Felice Brothers, ‘To-Do List’This “To-Do List” starts with everyday chores — “Go to the bank and deposit checks” — but escalates quickly, casually and magnificently to greater goals: “Defy all natural laws,” “Proclaim a lasting peace,” “Discover a miracle drug.” True to the band’s upstate New York location, the Felice Brothers hark back to the Band, with hand-played instruments and a chugging beat; it’s romping honky-tonk existentialism. PARELESRandy Travis, ‘Ain’t No Use’Listen to the mechanical beat of the drums and the ultraprecise mesh of the twin guitars in “Ain’t No Use,” an unrequited love song complaining, “It ain’t no use to talk to you about love.” It’s a track that was shelved from Randy Travis’s 1986 album “Storms of Life,” and even with Travis’s conversational vocal, it’s also a harbinger of the computerized country to come. PARELESDeerhoof, ‘Plant Thief’“Someone’s cooking with my spices!” Satomi Matsuzaki complains in “Plant Thief”: just one reason for the song’s pummeling drums and bass and guitar that wrangle in stereo with staggered, constantly shifting jabs. The song starts out frenetic and builds from there, assembling and discarding dissonant patterns, switching meters and coming to a fiercely open-ended conclusion: “They never weren’t!” she sings. PARELESTerence Blanchard, ‘Diana’No influence looms larger over the Grammy-winning pen of Terence Blanchard — an esteemed jazz trumpeter known for his Spike Lee film scores — than the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, with his terse yet seemingly horizon-less compositions. On “Absence,” a new album paying homage to Shorter, the trumpeter visits with a few rarely covered Shorter gems. Blanchard’s version of the cloud-dwelling ballad “Diana” opens with the strings of the Turtle Island Quartet (featured throughout “Absence”), entering one by one; eventually his quintet, the E-Collective, takes over. Swaddled in synthesizers and trumpet effects, avoiding a firm tempo, Blanchard savors each unorthodox harmonic payoff, feeling no need to take a solo. RUSSONELLOSelena Gomez and Camilo, ‘999’In “999,” Selena Gomez vies with Camilo for who can whisper-sing more quietly. Their voices, harmonizing and dialoguing, share a duet about infatuation, distance and anticipation: “I don’t have photos with you, but I have a space on the wall.” It’s set to a skulking bass line and percussion that wouldn’t wake the neighbors, enjoying the tease, the buildup and a nearly vanished 21st-century experience: privacy. PARELESIcewear Vezzo featuring Lil Baby, ‘Know The Difference’For Lil Baby, it’s new day, new flow on this collaboration with the Detroit favorite Icewear Vezzo. Rapping first, Lil Baby leans in on terse bars, tightening his flow until it’s taut: “I wasn’t ’posed to make it out/I stay by the governor house/I done found another route.” When Icewear Vezzo arrives, the fog lifts ever so slightly — his subject matter is the same, but his flow dances and shimmies. CARAMANICA​​Umu Obiligbo, ‘Zambololo’A duo of brothers from Nigeria, Umu Obiligbo shares close harmonies over their band’s dizzying six-beat, two-chord electroacoustic groove — Nigerian highlife — with constantly evolving tandem guitars and choral harmonies teasing and extending each other. Most of the lyrics are in the Nigerian language Igbo, but the glimpses of English are sharp: “What a man can do, a woman can do it better.” PARELESEsperanza Spalding: ‘Formwela 10’The bassist, singer and songwriter Esperanza Spalding convened not just musicians but also experts — in neuroscience and psychology, among other fields — as she wrote the therapeutic-minded songs for her album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” due Sept. 24. That that didn’t impair the virtuosic playfulness of her music. “Formwela 10” is an apology for mistreating a lover: “I put you through a living hell/This is a way to make the damages clear so I won’t do another that way”; it’s also a leaping, twisting, syncopated melody, a chromatic ramble, and a meter-shifting arrangement that dissolves and realigns around her as she makes peace with her regrets. PARELESMary Lattimore, ‘We Wave From Our Boats’Mary Lattimore’s music holds potent simplicity. The delicate plucks of a harp and the hum of a synth are all she employs on “We Wave from Our Boats,” a four-minute meditation with an arrangement that reflects the aquatic quality of its title: ripples of plucked strings stream over each other, like waves lapping on the shore. But there is also a kind of congenial intimacy to the song. Underneath its marine textures is the glow of closeness: maybe an after-dinner drink shared among friends, a tender embrace, a laugh that fills the belly with warmth. ISABELIA HERRERANite Jewel, ‘Anymore’There are breakup songs that express the profound heartache of a relationship’s end. And then there are songs that probe at the trickier feelings of its denouement, like Nite Jewel’s “Anymore,” from her new album, “No Sun.” Its bright synths and divine harmonies belie the song’s true content: “I can’t describe anything that I want,” sings the producer and vocalist Ramona Gonzalez. “I can’t rely on my desire anymore.” This is a song about the uncertainty and estrangement of a separation: the feeling of no longer recognizing yourself, of no longer trusting your own desires to find a way forward. HERRERA More

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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