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      Morgan Wallen’s Career Seemed Over. Now He’s Broken a Billboard Record.

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      The country singer was rebuked by the music industry after using a racial slur. Still, “Dangerous: The Double Album” has logged 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s 200 chart.Nineteen months ago, it seemed that the music career of Morgan Wallen — primed as Nashville’s next crossover star — might be dead. Instead, he is now playing to sold-out arenas and has broken chart records set by the likes of Adele and Bruce Springsteen, in a success story that highlights the power of fan loyalty and the challenges of cancel culture.“Dangerous: The Double Album,” Wallen’s second LP, came out at the beginning of 2021 and shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, with big streaming numbers that demonstrated his power among a new generation of country performers. The album was in its third week at the top when TMZ published a video of Wallen using a racial slur. The rebuke was immediate and strong, with Wallen’s songs removed from radio and streaming playlists, and Wallen’s label, Big Loud, saying it would “suspend” his recording contract “indefinitely.”Yet “Dangerous” would hold at No. 1 for a further seven weeks, and since then it has become an unusually enduring hit. The album has now spent 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s chart — dipping to No. 12 only once, when it was pushed out by holiday albums last December — and has been in the Top 5 for 65 of those times.“Dangerous” stands at No. 2 on the latest chart, beaten only by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” another streaming blockbuster that came out in May and has just matched Wallen’s 10-week run at No. 1.Wallen has now beaten the 1964 record set by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary for the longest Top 10 run for an album by a single artist. (In the 66 years of the Billboard 200 album chart, seven other titles have had longer stretches in the Top 10, but those are all movie soundtracks or Broadway cast albums; the longest run of all albums is 173 weeks for the cast album of “My Fair Lady,” which came out in 1956.)In the wake of the controversy last year, Wallen issued multiple apologies, but was otherwise largely unseen in the mainstream media — a rare test of the commercial appeal of an artist without the benefit of supportive TV interviews or magazine covers. But for many in Nashville, he remains a symbol of a pervasive racism that exists just below the surface of the country music business.To hear it from executives at Big Loud, which functions as Wallen’s label, management company and music publisher, the success of “Dangerous” is proof of Wallen’s broad cultural appeal and the quality of his music, which blends beer-soaked bro-countryisms with mellow melodies that at times recall classic rock like Eagles.“We’re having our Garth Brooks moment, our Taylor Swift emergent moment,” Seth England, the chief executive of Big Loud, said in an interview, “of just an artist so big, everyone is getting used to it. Pop is short for popular culture, and he just is popular culture.”When asked how “Dangerous” has managed such extraordinary success, Greg Thompson, the president of Big Loud Management, added simply: “There’s only one explanation. The music is that good.” (Wallen’s suspension from Big Loud, which continued to sell his music, was temporary. Through a representative, Wallen declined to answer questions for this article.)Yet from the beginning, Big Loud — and Republic Records, the division of the giant Universal Music Group that has a deal with Big Loud to promote its artists — has pursued smart strategies to make “Dangerous” a success in the streaming era. Most obvious is the album’s length; taking a page from hip-hop albums that have been exploiting this aspect of the streaming economy for years, “Dangerous” has 30 songs on its standard edition, each of which contributes to the album’s overall numbers each week.Second, Wallen stoked his fans by releasing batches of new songs ahead of the album’s release, sometimes a few at a time, which helped foster the fan loyalty that sustained him in his fallow months of promotion.With Republic’s help, Wallen has also had some success as a pop crossover act, though that process has been slow. Two of his songs, “7 Summers” and “You Proof,” his latest single, have gone as high as No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. According to data from the tracking service Luminate, a little more than half of Wallen’s radio airplay has been on country stations, with pop stations a distant second.In the wake of Wallen’s use of the slur, musicians and journalists debated the role of racism in country music. Wallen gave an interview to “Good Morning America” in which he characterized the incident as a mistake among close friends who “say dumb stuff together.” He added: “In our minds it’s playful. That sounds ignorant, but that’s really where it came from.”Gradually, the Nashville world, and beyond, has largely welcomed him back. In an interview with The New York Times published this month, the country singer Kane Brown, who is Black, said: “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” Late last year, Wallen appeared on Lil Durk’s track “Broadway Girls,” a hit on the rapper’s No. 1 album “7220.”Despite the intensity of the criticism levied against Wallen, fans remained loyal. According to Chartmetric, a company that tracks data from streaming and social media, Wallen’s followers on Facebook and Spotify increased at the height of his controversy.Within months, his songs were back in force on the official playlists of major streaming platforms. And according to Luminate, radio stations are now playing Wallen more than at any point since “Dangerous” was released, with his songs being played about 19,000 times a week this summer.Also on this week’s Billboard album chart, the veteran metal band Megadeth opens at No. 3 with its first studio release in six years, “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!” DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4, and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      ‘Jeopardy!’ Keeps Seeing Winning Streaks. Champions Ponder Why.

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      Amy Schneider isn’t the only one on a roll. Just a dozen players have won 10 or more games, half of those in the past five years, and a quarter in this season alone.When Amy Schneider became the fourth contestant in the history of “Jeopardy!” to surpass $1 million in winnings in regular-season play on Friday, she extended her winning streak to 28 games.It was a remarkable milestone for Schneider, who last month became the woman with the most consecutive wins on the program.Her victory came as long winning streaks have grown more common on “Jeopardy!” — there even seem to be streaks of streaks. Earlier this season Matt Amodio won 38 consecutive games, the second-longest run in the show’s history. The player who beat him, Jonathan Fisher, ended up winning 11 games in a row, a rare feat in itself.Since “Jeopardy!” got rid of a rule in 2003 that had limited contestants to no more than five wins in a row, only a dozen contestants have managed to win 10 or more games in a row. Half of the dozen, or six streaks, have occurred in the past five years, while half of those six have been this season.The winning streaks have provided some welcome excitement, and ratings boosts, for a show that has struggled to choose a permanent replacement for Alex Trebek, its beloved longtime host, who died in November 2020. But they have also raised new questions.Is this trend simply a result of chance? Are contestants getting better at prepping — have they learned to game the game? Is this a case of improvement over time, much in the same way that top runners and swimmers are able to best the records set by their predecessors? Could the clues possibly be getting easier?Earlier this season Jonathan Fisher won 11 games in a row.Jeopardy ProductionsHe beat Matt Amodio, who won 38 consecutive games.Jeopardy Productions“Behind the scenes we’ve spent a lot of time discussing whether this is some kind of ‘new normal’ or whether we’ve just had an unusual windfall of brilliant ‘Jeopardy!’ players,” Michael Davies, the show’s executive producer, wrote in an email.He discounted the notion that the clues could be getting easier.“I actually think the show may be getting harder,” Davies wrote, noting that the subject matter covers an ever-wider range of material. “Let’s face it, so few people read the same books anymore or watch the same TV shows. And we have massively diversified the history, cultural and pop cultural material we expect our players to compete over.”Theories abound about the show’s recent run of big winners. In interviews and emails, several recent champions and people who write about “Jeopardy!” and study it obsessively offered their thoughts.The show’s longtime host, Alex Trebek, left, posed with Ken Jennings after his earnings from his record breaking-streak surpassed $1 million in 2004.Jeopardy Productions, via Getty ImagesThe writers and producers behind the show have talked about several possible explanations, Davies wrote, including that contestants now have access to a wealth of online resources (including a fan-generated website called J! Archive, which Schneider relied on to prepare, that includes clues dating back to the 1980s).Andy Saunders, who runs the website ​​ The Jeopardy! Fan, has started to run the numbers and believes the trend may be significant beyond this particular moment. In a blog post on Friday, Saunders wrote that the average streak length started increasing in the season spanning 2010 and 2011, which he suggested could be the result of more intensive preparation on the part of contestants.Some point to the influence of one star player: James Holzhauer, a professional sports bettor who won 32 games in 2019 and continues to hold the record for the most money won in a single game.Holzhauer’s strategy — to start with the high-value clues, hunt for the Daily Doubles and make risky wagers — proved to be a winning one for him, and some contestants took note. Amodio, for example, said he copied Holzhauer’s approach of starting with the large money clues at the bottom of the board. But Schneider has done the opposite, taking a more traditional approach that she called a “reaction against James Holzhauer.”James Holzhauer, a sports bettor who won 32 games in 2019, influenced the strategy of some contestants who followed. John Locher/Associated PressHolzhauer’s take on the current trend? A product of chance.“People always assume everything is a paradigm shift,” Holzhauer wrote in an email, “when it’s actually fairly normal for results to occasionally cluster.”One theory holds that the pandemic may have played a role, causing delays that increased the lead time — and potentially the study time — contestants had after they had been invited to compete on the show.“You had a whole bunch of people who knew they were going to be on the show and could spend a whole bunch of extra time preparing,” Saunders noted.Amodio and Schneider were two of those people. Amodio, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Yale, was initially scheduled to compete in April 2020 but because of pandemic cancellations, started taping a year later than originally planned.In that time, Amodio said in an interview, he focused on boning up on pop culture, a weak area of knowledge for him. He listened to pop music he had not heard before (discovering Dua Lipa in the process) and watched samples of a broad swath of current television (including “The Good Place,” which earned him the correct response to a $1000 clue in his 13th game).Schneider was invited onto the show in fall 2020, but the taping was delayed and she didn’t compete until about a year later, giving her more time to practice with the clues from previous games and correct gaps in her knowledge (“like forgetting which Brontë sister was which,” she said).But she said in an interview that she was skeptical that the extra study time was a significant factor. She views a well-prepared contestant as someone who has long been an intellectually curious person — not someone who crams before the test. “You just have to live a life where you’re learning stuff all the time,” she said.Fisher, who beat Amodio, had little time to prepare: There was only about a week between his getting the call inviting him to appear on the show and his arrival at the studio.Still another explanation being considered is the recent increase in applicants. Shortly before the pandemic hit, the show introduced a new entrance test that would-be contestants can take at any time, rather than limiting it to particular times. In a recent article for The Ringer exploring the trend in streaks, Claire McNear reported that before the new exam was introduced, “Jeopardy!” had about 70,000 applicants each year; with the new exam, it gets an average of about 125,000 a year.The show has also replaced regional in-person follow-up rounds with virtual rounds, a change that Cory Anotado, a game-show journalist who will appear on the show as a contestant this week, views as an important factor.“When you lower the barrier of entry, a lot of times you get better results,” he said.The string of successes comes at a time of upheaval for “Jeopardy!” The search for someone to succeed Trebek devolved into controversy after McNear reported that the chosen successor, Mike Richards, had made offensive comments about women on his podcast several years earlier (Richards stepped down from the hosting role then left the show entirely). Ken Jennings — who holds the record for the longest streak since winning 74 games in 2004 — and the sitcom actress Mayim Bialik have shared hosting duties since, but the show has put off officially naming a permanent host for the regular season.McNear, the author of a 2020 history of the show called “Answers in the Form of Questions,” wrote in the article that the elimination of the five-day cap in 2003 had been “an explicit ploy by then-executive producer Harry Friedman to drum up interest in the show,” and noted that the show’s ratings have been up this season compared to last season.Asked if it was possible for the show to try to engineer streaks by, say, pitting champions against weaker opponents, Davies said, “I can assure you that that isn’t the case.”He said that a diverse pool of contestants is selected for every taping and that an outside compliance agency randomly selects which games they will play in and in which order.It is also hard to predict how well a contestant might do based on what’s on paper. One element that is critical to a “Jeopardy!” streak is not related to knowledge or information recall but skill at using the buzzer in the specific environment of the studio.As a defending champion, Schneider said she quickly learned that she had a significant advantage over newcomers because she was already comfortable and quick with the device.“Now that I’ve been on a streak of my own,” she said, “I’m almost surprised that it hasn’t happened more often.” More

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      Matt Amodio Beats James Holzhauer’s Streak on ‘Jeopardy!’

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      The Yale Ph.D. student, who is studying computer science, has won 33 games in a row, making him No. 2 on the game show’s hall of fame roster for longest streaks.Two years ago, one “Jeopardy!” contestant, James Holzhauer, captured the imaginations of game-show fans who watched nightly to see his lightning-fast buzzer reflexes and risky bets.Holzhauer’s 32-game run put his face (with his trademark strained smile) all over the “Jeopardy!” hall of fame. But on Friday, another contestant, Matt Amodio, a Ph.D. student at Yale, won his 33rd game, smashing through Holzhauer’s streak and taking his place as No. 2 in the record book for most games won in a row. The first spot is held by Ken Jennings, who won 74 games and ultimately became a consulting producer on the show.Amodio’s victory brought him to $1.27 million in total winnings, and he has a long way to go to beat Holzhauer’s $2.46 million. With such an extraordinary total, Holzhauer was poised during his 33rd episode to possibly surpass Jennings’s record of $2.52 million won during the regular season, but he was bested by Emma Boettcher, a librarian who wrote her master’s paper on “Jeopardy!”The fanfare around Amodio — some on social media are calling it the “Amodio Rodeo”— is perhaps a relief to the people behind the game show, who have been struggling to find a replacement for Alex Trebek, the beloved host who died last year. The show’s former executive producer, Mike Richards, was announced as the new host, then swiftly stepped down after The Ringer reported on offensive comments he had made on a podcast he created several years ago. The actress Mayim Bialik and Jennings are hosting episodes until the end of the year.“Jeopardy!” superfans are also rejoicing at the shift in focus from behind-the-scenes drama to what’s actually playing out onstage.Andy Saunders, who runs the website The Jeopardy! Fan, said Amodio and Holzhauer have similar approaches to the game: In the first round, they both start by tackling all of the $1,000 clues, then try to find the Daily Double, to double their winnings and gain a significant lead over the other competitors. Where the two diverge, Saunders said, is in the next round, where Holzhauer tended to inflate his score by betting large sums on the Daily Double clues.“Where James might bet $13,000 or $14,000, Matt is betting $5,000 or $6,000,” he said in an interview. “And that’s pretty much the difference in their scores.”Saunders thinks that Holzhauer’s aggressive strategy comes from a higher level of confidence that he is going to give the correct response. Based on Saunders’s statistics, Holzhauer tended to get three or four more correct answers than Amodio does each episode, providing more of a foundation for that confidence. The willingness to bet big could also have come from Holzhauer’s background as a sports bettor, where he grew comfortable putting down large sums of money on games.That difference in strategy makes it unlikely that Amodio, who is studying computer science, will start to best Holzhauer in the category of single-game winnings, which Holzhauer completely dominates.However, if Amodio keeps up his dominance, he has a chance at beating Jennings’s 74-game streak from 2004 and setting a record for all-time winnings in regular-season play.Amodio tends to be humble about comparisons to the “Jeopardy!” all-stars, saying in a news release that it was “surreal” to be beside Jennings in the hall of fame and, on Twitter, writing that Holzhauer is better than him “in literally every way.”Amodio’s star turn, only two years after Holzhauer rose to fame, has raised the question: Is “Jeopardy!” getting easier, or are players just getting better?Saunders, who tracks the results of every game, thinks it’s that players are getting better. He said he doesn’t see substantial changes in the content of the clues but, instead, thinks that contestants have taken note of Holzhauer’s winning strategy and are taking advantage of a vast internet archive of past “Jeopardy!” clues to prepare.As for Jennings’s record, Amodio still has to double his streak, then win nine more games, to beat it.“Let’s look at that in another month,” Saunders said. “Then maybe Ken should start to get worried.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Kipchoge: The Last Milestone’ Review: Skipping Ahead

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      This documentary about the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge takes a victory lap for an athletic feat.Never cut the course at a marathon, but you could probably skip the first half-hour of “Kipchoge: The Last Milestone” without missing much. A tribute to the pathbreaking Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge, this documentary sets out to show how, in 2019, he became the first person in history to run a marathon distance in less than two hours.The well-intentioned but bromide-laden first part of the film introduces us to Kipchoge the man, shown as a runner with a tireless work ethic, a contemplative attitude and a fundamental modesty. We hear about how he inspires colleagues and young athletes. There are so many slow-motion running clips, abrupt switches to black-and-white or scenes that appear staged for effect (e.g., as Kipchoge discusses how his mother instilled a sense of discipline, we see a woman awakening a boy for a morning routine) that you could cut the movie into Nike ads with minimal alteration. The director, Jake Scott, son of Ridley, has in fact made such commercials.But the documentary’s pulse quickens when it turns its attention to Kipchoge’s efforts to beat the two-hour mark. His 1:59:40 doesn’t count as an official world record because he didn’t run it under traditional marathon strictures. The film illustrates how a wide array of collaborators optimized conditions. Various participants describe the road surfacing, how laser guidance helped set the pace and how teams of fellow runners took turns making Y formations around Kipchoge to reduce air resistance. The athleticism, physics and what one person calls the “bit of ballet” of the event are all stirring to witness.Kipchoge: The Last MilestoneRated PG-13 for … strenuous running? Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Beyoncé Makes History With 28 Grammy Wins

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftBeyoncé not only came to the Grammys, she won four and made history.March 14, 2021, 11:20 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 11:20 p.m. ETBeyoncé had a record-breaking night and now holds the most Grammy wins by a female artist.Credit…CBSBeyoncé not only showed up at the Grammys (surprise!) — she won four, broke a record, and then got onstage to offer gracious remarks on a night when she was nominated nine times but did not perform.By the end of the night, Beyoncé had become the female artist with the most ever Grammy wins (28), a record previously held by Alison Krauss.More than two hours into the telecast, viewers were surprised to see a camera show Beyoncé seated at the award ceremony. Minutes later she would win best rap song with Megan Thee Stallion, who gushed about her collaborator in her acceptance speech.“I definitely want to say thank you to Beyoncé,” she said. “If you know me, you have to know that ever since I was little, I was like, ‘You know what, one day I’m going to grow up, I’m going to be like the rap Beyoncé.’ That was definitely my goal.”Then Beyoncé herself won another Grammy for best R&B performance for “Black Parade” and gave her own acceptance speech.“It’s been such a difficult time, so I wanted to uplift, encourage, celebrate all of the beautiful Black queens and kings that continue to inspire me and inspire the whole world,” she said. “This is so overwhelming. I’ve been working my whole life — since 9 years old — and I can’t believe this happened.”With those two awards under her belt, plus the awards for best rap song (again for “Savage”) and best music video that she earned before the broadcast, Beyoncé broke the record for most Grammy wins ever by a female artist, previously held by Alison Krauss.“History!” the host, Trevor Noah, exclaimed. “Give it up for Beyoncé. This is history right now!”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Taylor Swift Wins Album of the Year, Again

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftTaylor Swift takes album of the year, becoming the first woman to win three times.March 14, 2021, 11:37 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 11:37 p.m. ETTaylor Swift broke a record with her album of the year win for “Folklore.”Credit…Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressTaylor Swift’s “Folklore” won album of the year on Sunday, making the singer and songwriter the first woman to win the prize three times, following her victories for “Fearless” in 2010 and “1989” in 2016. Swift tied Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon as the only artists with three career best album trophies. (The mastering engineer Tom Coyne has won four, including one for “1989.”)“You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created,” Swift said during her acceptance speech, flanked by her collaborators Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, Laura Sisk and Jonathan Low. Dessner, who collaborated remotely with Swift on the pandemic album, called her “one the greatest living songwriters, who somehow put trust in me.”[embedded content]A surprise release in July, “Folklore” represented Swift’s foray into more acoustic sounds and indie-rock textures following years of pop bombast. She was nominated six times in all on Sunday, but lost in five other categories before taking home album of the year.“Evermore,” the “sister record” to “Folklore” and Swift’s second secret pandemic release, came out in December, meaning it could be nominated at next year’s Grammys and represents her fourth potential album win.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More