Rhythm and Blues (Music)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.

      by

      The newspaper, which started in 1966 with a focus on R&B, funk and disco, shut down in 1982. But one of its founders’ grandsons is devoted to finding it a new online audience.The rock ’n’ roll bible Rolling Stone was founded in 1967. The renegade music magazine Creem started in 1969. But another publication predated them both: Soul.Motown, Stax and Phil Spector’s Philles Records were busting out (and Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label was on the horizon), but until Soul, no publication had been feeding the growing appetite for even the most basic information about Black artists like Marvin Gaye, Carla Thomas or the Isley Brothers. The world knew the names of the Beatles’ wives, but not of the Ikettes.With the smoke barely cleared from the Watts riots, two men saw an opening: Ken Jones, Los Angeles’s first Black television anchor, and Cecil Tuck, who revitalized KRLA Beat, an early rock title. But the face of Soul, the one who told record company bosses where to get off and had artists calling her at night with scoops, was Regina Jones, Ken’s wife. Fly, flinty and self-created, Regina was at one time both the paper’s publisher and editor in chief.Soul was groundbreaking, but it flamed out in 1982. Now Matt Jones, Ken and Regina’s grandson, is giving the publication a second life, creating an online archive of its issues for paying subscribers and uploading select audio from interviews. (Hard copies — dead stock — are also for sale.)“We have bound volumes of all the issues that have been in my grandmother’s home for as long as I can remember,” Jones, 39, said. He has digitalized 82 issues with 291 to go, and is leaning on Regina, now 80, for historical context. (The two talk every day; Ken died in 1993.)As the most granular source of news and images of soul, R&B, funk and disco artists in the Golden Age of those genres, Soul is a gold mine for Black history and pop culture scholars. It “documents an important turning point in U.S. race relations and the arts,” Susan D. Anderson, who stewarded Regina’s gift of Soul’s archive to the U.C.L.A. Library in 2010, wrote in an email.Few people, she added, know that Soul, “in its drive to document African Americans’ perspective in a self-representative way, was a pivotal vehicle” powering the shift from “race records” to America “becoming the locus of popular culture production,” with Black artists the prevailing force.Selling originally for 15 cents, the biweekly also covered jazz, television, Black Power, Hollywood and theater. Page Six-style columns delivered gossip in bites. Style was a de facto component: the Pointer Sisters in high-’40s drag, Al Green in hot pants and over-the-knee boots. A glossy sister was spawned, Soul! Illustrated.Soul threw down the gauntlet from the first issue. James Brown and Mick Jagger shared a split cover under the headline “White Artists Selling Negro ‘Soul.’” Daphne A. Brooks, professor of African American studies at Yale, singled it out for “the audacity of its critical focus,” stunned that in 1966 a music publication would lead with a piece on the politics of cultural appropriation. “Are you kidding me?!” she wrote over email. Other covers the first year featured Stevie Wonder, the Impressions and Sam Cooke. The website highlights major interviews with Aretha Franklin, Rick James and Bob Marley.Soul “helps to fill out and complicate our understanding of a seminal moment,” Gayle Wald, author of “It’s Been Beautiful: ‘Soul!’ and Black Power Television,” wrote in an email. “Soul!,” a variety show, was unrelated to the paper but had a similar mission. “Serious cultural journalism about pop music was just emerging,” Wald added.Regina and Ken bought out Tuck in 1967, producing Soul from their home near Watts while raising five children. Regina said she did not view Rolling Stone as competition but did “resent” it covering Black artists: her territory. In 1975, both publications printed Labelle covers; Jones enjoyed a measure of satisfaction when she beat Jann Wenner’s magazine to the newsstands by four months. Nona Hendryx, a member of Labelle, purveyors of a landmark mash-up of funk, rock, R&B and gospel, said that “for an African-American artist, Soul was definitely more important than Rolling Stone.” Fans approached her in public: “Hey, I saw you in Soul.”“You got your feedback directly from the people,” Hendryx added. “It had more weight than Rolling Stone because it kept us in the community.”In a novel marketing gambit, Soul partnered with 30 Black radio stations across the country, printing a different edition for each. Stations had their call letters on the cover and a spread inside for rotation charts and advertisers. Bruce W. Talamon, Soul’s star photographer, said that in turn, “D.J.s gave us on-air promotion — ‘Buy your Soul newspaper!’”Regina’s unfiltered access to artists could mean fielding a call from David Ruffin announcing he’d just been fired from the Temptations — and wanted to tell his story. “That speaks to how highly he felt about Soul,” she said. “It was almost like going to your parents.” Diana Ross kissed the Supremes goodbye in 1970 during their final performance at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, then slipped into a booth beside Berry Gordy, still in her Bob Mackie stage velvets, to spill tea with Soul.Sublime talent showed up on Regina’s doorstep unbidden, including Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and Talamon, whose book, “Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972-1982,” is a definitive visual record of artists in the idioms and period it covers.Before freelancing for Soul in 1976, Pitts said in a video interview from the 2000s, “I was there every day on the day” Soul came out, waiting for it to go on sale, to learn that the Temptations had suffered yet another personnel change, that King had been assassinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening? My world is crumbling.’”Pitts, who later held the top editorial position, said in the video that he admired Soul because it didn’t pander, printing that there was no love lost between Rick James and George Clinton. Nobody else, he noted, thought Black music warranted that kind of attention: “No one else was telling you, you know, ‘This is why Philippé Wynne left the Spinners.’ It wasn’t what the press releases say. It’s because they had a fight.”Nichelle Gainer, author of “Vintage Black Glamour,” noted in an email that Soul’s “coverage of hot-button topics” like the Motown star Tammi Terrell’s illness was “steadier,” with “consistent updates,” compared with general interest Black publications. But the paper’s quality was not always how alumni and scholars remember it. The writing could be crude; handout images were sometimes accepted as cover photos. And as the ’70s wound down, Soul lost its teeth. The Joneses’ marriage was unraveling. Regina admitted she was no longer minding the store. In 1980, ‌J. Randy Taraborrelli, who followed Pitts as editor in chief and would go on to write “Call Her Miss Ross,” a biography of the supreme Supreme, pushed successfully for a cover the publication’s readership could not abide: Barry Manilow.Matt Jones will dutifully digitalize the issue. But he won’t be sad if it goes unnoticed among firebombs like the Brown/Jagger story. Before Soul, he said, Jet and Ebony talked about soul music “as this weird kind of niche thing — they had trouble describing it. The press packets of many Black musicians in the ’60s consisted of a single one-page write-up: ‘Here’s who I am. Here’s this great interview on me in Soul newspaper.’” More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Charlie Thomas, a Drifter Nearly All His Life in Song, Dies at 85

      by

      He was heard on hits like “There Goes My Baby,” “Under the Boardwalk” and “Up on the Roof.” He kept singing them for decades.Charlie Thomas, who recorded memorable songs like “There Goes My Baby” and “Under the Boardwalk” with the Drifters, the silken-voiced R&B group that had a long string of hits from 1959 to 1964 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Fame, died on Jan. 31 at his home in Bowie, Md. He was 85.The singer Peter Lemongello Jr., a close friend, said the cause was liver cancer.Mr. Thomas, a tenor, was a Drifter for more than 60 years, from the version of the group that had its first hits in the late 1950s to the version he led and toured with until the pandemic struck.“He was aging, but he was active almost every weekend,” Mr. Lemongello, a former lead singer of the Crests, which performed on bills with Mr. Thomas, said in a phone interview. “Unfortunately, he went from being active to being at home and he started going downhill.”Mr. Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were also on the bill.After one of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the promoter of the show, the music historian Marv Goldberg wrote, Mr. Treadwell, who owned the name, fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Mr. Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.Asked how it felt to suddenly become a Drifter, Mr. Thomas told Mr. Goldberg: “As a kid, I used to play hooky to see the Drifters at the Apollo. It felt good!”The new Drifters fulfilled the former group’s road obligations and began recording the next year for Atlantic Records, produced by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.Mr. King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Mr. Thomas to sing. But Mr. Thomas froze at the studio microphone, according to Billy Vera’s liner notes for “Rockin’ and Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (1996), and Mr. King took over. The song rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era. They followed “There Goes My Baby” with songs like “This Magic Moment,”“Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.Mr. Lewis in performance in Holmdel, N.J., in 2016. He performed for many years with a group billed as Charlie Thomas’s Drifters.Bobby Bank/Wireimage, via Getty ImagesCharles Nowlin Thomas was born on April 7, 1937, in Lynchburg, Va. His father, Willis, was a minister, and his mother, Lucinda (Nowlin) Thomas, was a homemaker whose singing voice Charlie admired.“My dad was a holy roller preacher down in Virginia,” Mr. Thomas said in an interview in 2013 with Craig Morrison, a musician and ethnomusicologist. “At my father’s church, I used to take the tambourine and do collection, and my mother used to sing in the choir. That’s where I really got my training from singing.”He moved to Harlem with his mother and a sister when he was 10 and eventually got a job pushing a hand truck in the garment district. He sang on street corners and came to the attention of Lover Patterson, the Crowns’ manager, who hired him in 1958. The group recorded “Kiss and Make Up” for the songwriters’ Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s short-lived RnB label before Mr. Treadwell turned them into the Drifters.The lead singers on most of the group’s hits were Mr. King and, after he left for a solo career in 1960, Rudy Lewis and Johnny Moore, who had been in the group’s first incarnation and rejoined it in 1964.But Mr. Thomas sang lead on “Sweets for My Sweet,” which reached No. 16 on the Hot 100 in 1961, and “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” which peaked at No. 28 the next year. Mr. Thomas also took over the lead on the ballad “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” a day after Mr. Lewis’s death in a hotel room in 1964.“When he died, I was the one who closed his eyes,” Mr. Thomas told Goldmine magazine in 2012. He added, “I really do love that song because that one, in particular, brings back a lot of memories.”The Drifters broke up in the late 1960s, but they didn’t disappear. Some members headed to England, where they performed as the Drifters and were managed by Mr. Treadwell’s widow, Faye, who vigorously defended her legal right to the name.Bill Pinkney, a member of the mid-1950s lineup fired by Mr. Treadwell, went on to form a group called the Original Drifters. He died in 2007, but the group continues to perform under that name.Mr. Thomas later joined them briefly before starting Charlie Thomas’s Drifters, which performed until 2020. Still other groups have claimed the Drifters name over the years as well.Mr. Thomas is survived by his wife, Rita Thomas; his daughters, Crystal Thomas Wilson and Victoria Green; his sons, Charlie Jr., Michael Sidbury and Brian Godfrey, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted seven of the Drifters in 1988, it recognized members of the 1953-58 lineup — Mr. Pinkney, Clyde McPhatter, Gerhart Thomas and Johnny Moore — as well as those from the later years: Mr. Thomas, Mr. King and Mr. Lewis.“Time has hardly made their work seem quaint,” Michael Hill wrote in the induction essay, “rather their work has withstood the ravages of the years to become even more special, more knowing.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      K-Pop Group Tomorrow X Together Ends SZA’s Seven-Week Run at No. 1

      by

      The boy band topped the Billboard album chart for the first time thanks to an array of collectible CDs for sale.Riding intense fan interest in its collectible CDs, the K-pop quintet Tomorrow X Together scored its first No. 1 album on the Billboard chart this week, ending a seven-week run on top for the R&B singer SZA.“The Name Chapter: Temptation,” a five-song EP by the South Korean boy band that clocks in under 15 minutes, sold a total of 161,500 equivalent units, including physical sales, downloads and streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Nearly all of that sales activity — 98 percent, Billboard reported — was on that quaint technology known as the CD. The group released 14 different editions, including autographed versions and some with mystery bonuses like photo books and postcards.The No. 1 debut marks the third Top 5 release for Tomorrow X Together — made up of the musicians Soobin, Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun and Hueningkai — after the group landed “Minisode 2: Thursday’s Child” at No. 4 last year and “The Chaos Chapter: Freeze” at No. 5 in 2021. Its pure sales numbers for “The Name Chapter: Temptation” were the highest on the chart since Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” in November, Billboard said.SZA’s “SOS,” a consistent hit on streaming services, falls to No. 2 for the first time, with another 100,000 units in its eighth week of release. Overall, the album has topped more than one billion streams and one million in equivalent sales.Swift’s “Midnights” comes in at No. 3 with 68,000 units; the rap producer Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains” is No. 4 with 47,000; and Drake and 21 Savage’s joint release, “Her Loss,” is No. 5 with 44,000.Further down in the Top 10 were debuts by Sam Smith, whose “Gloria” hit No. 7 (and took home a Grammy on Sunday night for the single “Unholy”), while Lil Yachty’s “Let’s Start Here,” a psychedelic foray that strays from rap music, lands at No. 9. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Beyoncé Has The Most Grammys Ever After Winning 32nd Award

      by

      Move over, Sir Georg Solti — Beyoncé reigns at the Grammy Awards.After 88 career nominations, the R&B singer and pop superstar won her 32nd Grammy on Sunday, for best dance/electronic music album, giving her the record for most Grammy victories. Solti, a Hungarian-born conductor who was the previous leader, won his last award in 1998, the year after his death.Beyoncé’s fourth win of the night — after taking home best R&B song for “Cuff It” and two awards at the preshow ceremony — came in a category that showed the breadth of her two-decade career: “Renaissance,” her tribute to Black and queer dance music, beat work by Bonobo, Diplo, Odesza and Rüfüs du Sol. Beyoncé became the first Black woman to win in the dance album category, which has been awarded since 2005.Earlier, her No. 1 single “Break My Soul” had won in best dance/electronic recording, while “Plastic Off the Sofa,” from the same genre-spanning album, won best traditional R&B performance.After the winner for dance/electronic album was announced by James Corden — “This is an honor, because we are witnessing history tonight!” — Beyoncé, who had not yet arrived at the ceremony when she won her first televised award of the night, took the stage to a standing ovation.“I’m trying not to be too emotional,” she said, “and I’m trying to just receive this night.” (Already, a post had been uploaded to Beyoncé’s official Instagram celebrating her wins so far: “We won 3 y’all,” the caption read, alongside a photo of the singer with a trio of trophies. “‘Plastic Off the Sofa’ is my favorite song on ‘Renaissance’ most days. It’s hard to pick though. Haaa.”)Beyoncé went on to thank her “Uncle Jonny,” whose battle with H.I.V. she has cited as an influence on her turn to dance music, with its historical ties to the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“I’d like to thank the queer community for your love and for inventing the genre,” the singer said.Nominated nine times overall on Sunday, mostly for “Renaissance” and its songs, Beyoncé will have a chance to add to her total with the top categories still to come: song, record and album of the year, a prize she has never won despite three previous chances. Of the singer’s 32 trophies, just her song of the year victory in 2010, for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” came in one of the Grammys’ major, all-genre fields.Beyoncé’s status as both a perennial, now-unmatched Grammy favorite and also a high-profile loser under the ceremony’s brightest lights — including album losses to both Adele and Taylor Swift, each of whom has won the category multiple times — has underlined the show’s complex relationship with contemporary Black music.While the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, has in recent years emphasized its commitment to showcasing hip-hop and R&B on the telecast, and to broadening its voter base, critics have contended that Black music has too often been overlooked in the top categories.Beyoncé had entered the night already the most awarded woman in Grammy history, and tied with the producer Quincy Jones, who has 28 wins, for second most overall trophies. Alison Krauss, the bluegrass singer and violinist who was nominated twice on Sunday but lost both awards, has 27, as does Chick Corea.Here’s Beyoncé’s entire speech:“I’m trying not to be too emotional, and I’m trying to just receive this night. I want to thank God for protecting me. Thank you, God. I’d like to thank my Uncle Jonny, who’s not here, but he’s here in spirit. I’d like to thank my parents — my father, my mother — for loving me and pushing me. I’d like to thank my beautiful husband, my beautiful three children, who are at home watching. I’d like to thank the queer community for your love and for inventing the genre. God bless you. Thank you so much to the Grammys. Thank you.” More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Grammys 2023: How to Watch and What to Expect

      by

      A guide to everything you need to know for the 65th annual awards on Sunday night.After two years of pandemic-related disruptions, the 65th annual Grammy Awards are returning on Sunday to their longtime home at the Crypto.com Arena (formerly the Staples Center) in Los Angeles.The night’s big story is Beyoncé. With 28 Grammy wins to her name, the star could become the most decorated Grammy artist ever. She needs three wins to tie, and four to beat the conductor Georg Solti, who holds the record for most overall wins.Her field-leading nine nominations this year include the three top categories — album, song and record of the year — where she has previously struggled to win. The Recording Academy, the institution behind the awards, has faced longstanding criticism that the show often fails to recognize Black talent with its biggest awards. Over the past few years, it has been trying to address that by eliminating nearly all of the nominating committees that determined the ballot and pushing to attract a younger and more diverse pool of voters.A bad night for Beyoncé, who enters the ceremony with an adored album in “Renaissance,” a famously vocal fan base known as the BeyHive and only one career win in an all-genre category, could mean more hard conversations for the Grammys.The awards on Sunday will recognize recordings released between Oct. 1, 2021 and Sept. 30, 2022. There were 16,741 eligible entries considered, and superstars including Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift will contend for top honors.The Grammy Awards 2023The 65th annual ceremony will be held on Feb. 5 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, after two years of delays and complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.Beyoncé: With a dominant new album and the chance to become the most awarded artist in Grammy history, all eyes are on the pop superstar ahead of the ceremony. What could go wrong?Bonnie Raitt: Long renowned as an interpreter of songs, the musician has quietly built a catalog of her own. Up for song of the year, she talked about her lifetime onstage in an interview with The Times.The-Dream and Muni Long: Ahead of the first-ever Grammy Award for songwriter of the year, the two musicians, who are both up for awards, trace their unique journeys to recognition.Here’s how to watch — and what to expect at — Sunday’s ceremony.What time does it all start?The ceremony will air live on Sunday, at 8 p.m. Eastern time (5 p.m. Pacific time) on CBS and stream live on Paramount+.Before the prime-time event, the premiere ceremony, where about 80 of the 91 prizes will be awarded, takes place at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. It begins at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time (12:30 p.m. Pacific time), and is available to watch in real time on live.Grammy.com and the Recording Academy’s YouTube page.The comedian Randy Rainbow will help host that event, and performers include Arooj Aftab, Blind Boys of Alabama, Madison Cunningham, Samara Joy, La Marisoul from La Santa Cecilia, Anoushka Shankar and Carlos Vives.How do I watch the red carpet?The parade of fashion and awkward interviews commences at 4 p.m. Eastern time on E!, and “Live From E!: Grammys” starts at 6 p.m. Celebrity arrivals will be streamed at grammy.com beginning at 6:30 p.m.Who is hosting?Trevor Noah, formerly of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, will do the honors for a third year.Who are the top contenders?Beyoncé, who this week announced a world tour supporting her latest album, “Renaissance,” has the most nominations, with nine, followed by Kendrick Lamar with eight and Adele and Brandi Carlie with seven each. Harry Styles, Mary J. Blige, Future, DJ Khaled and the producer and songwriter The-Dream all landed six apiece.What’s the breakdown of Beyoncé’s nominations?Beyoncé will go head-to-head with Adele once again in multiple categories, most notably album of the year, an award Beyoncé has yet to win. Adele cleaned up in all of the major contests in 2017, when “25” squared off against “Lemonade,” which led to Adele at first tearfully saying that she could not accept her album prize. Beyoncé’s losses in the show’s premier categories have also fueled wider complaints about how the Grammys have often failed to recognize Black artists in its all-genre categories. Only three Black women have ever taken home album of the year — the most recent was Lauryn Hill in 1999.In addition to album of the year (“Renaissance”), Beyoncé has nominations for record and song of the year (“Break My Soul”), best dance/electronic recording (“Break My Soul”), best dance/electronic album (“Renaissance”), best R&B performance (“Virgo’s Groove”), best traditional R&B performance (“Plastic Off the Sofa”), best R&B song (“Cuff It”) and best song written for visual media (“Be Alive” from the movie “King Richard”).Who will hit the stage?Bad Bunny (the most nominated artist at the Latin Grammys in November), Lizzo and Harry Styles will perform during the prime-time ceremony. The live lineup also includes Mary J. Blige, Brandi Carlile, Luke Combs, Sam Smith and Kim Petras, DJ Khaled, and Steve Lacy. Stevie Wonder will also perform with Smokey Robinson and Chris Stapleton.In celebration of 50 years of hip-hop, a special performance bringing together genre legends and contemporary stars will feature Busta Rhymes with Spliff Star, Missy Elliott, Future, GloRilla, Ice-T, Lil Baby, Lil Wayne, Queen Latifah, Run-DMC, Salt-N-Pepa and others. LL Cool J will introduce the segment, perform and share a few words.And as the show honors the artists we lost last year, Kacey Musgraves will perform for Loretta Lynn; Sheryl Crow, Mick Fleetwood and Bonnie Raitt will pay tribute to Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie; and the Migos rapper Quavo will be joined by Maverick City Music to celebrate Takeoff, who died at 28 in a shooting in November.Who will be handing out the awards?Jill Biden will take the stage on Sunday as a presenter, but she’s not the first-ever first lady to grace the Grammys. (Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance in a 2019 opening segment and won a Grammy the following year for best spoken word album.) Other presenters include Cardi B, James Corden, Billy Crystal, Viola Davis, Dwayne Johnson, Olivia Rodrigo and Shania Twain.What else is new this year?The Recording Academy introduced a new award for songwriter of the year, which will go to a single songwriter or a team of writers for a given body of work. Four other categories are arriving, too, for alternative music performance, Americana music performance, spoken word poetry album and score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media. In addition, a prize for best song for social change will be handed out the day before the ceremony.Who might make history?Beyoncé, of course, who could become the Grammys’ most awarded artist. The superstar, already recognized as the “winningest woman in Grammy history,” and her husband, Jay-Z, both have 88 total nominations each — a tie for most Grammy nods collected by any artist.Bad Bunny also has a chance to join the Grammy record book: An album of the year win for “Un Verano Sin Ti” would make it the first exclusively Spanish-language release to earn the honor. His nomination was historic, too, as “Un Verano Sin Ti” is the first album released entirely in Spanish to earn an album of the year nod. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      It’s Beyoncé’s Time to Shine at the Grammys … Right?

      by

      With a dominant new album, “Renaissance,” and the chance to become the most awarded artist in Grammy history, all eyes are on the pop superstar ahead of Sunday’s show. What could go wrong?Beyoncé enters the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday in rarefied air — a pop deity festooned with trophies, supported by one of the music world’s most ardent fan bases and on the precipice of Grammy immortality. So why does she also feel like an underdog?Already the winningest woman in Grammy history, with 28 victories, Beyoncé has a field-leading nine nominations this year. She is tied with her husband, Jay-Z, for the most nods collected by any artist, with 88.In what could make for dramatic television, Beyoncé needs just three more Grammys to match — and four to beat — the record for most overall wins, a position currently held by the conductor Georg Solti, who died in 1997. And for the third time in her career, Beyoncé, 41, is nominated in all three top categories — record, song and album of the year — raising the possibility that her crowning moment could come at the climax of a show that in recent years has struggled to find an audience and generate positive headlines.And yet.While many Grammy watchers believe Beyoncé will enter from a position of strength, with “Renaissance,” her dance-infused album, garnering both commercial and critical success, the singer’s coronation is far from assured, thanks to her own complicated history with the awards. Despite Beyoncé’s oodles of wins, she is just 1 for 13 in the major, all-genre categories for releases on which she was a lead artist.As the ceremony approaches — with stars like Adele, Harry Styles, Lizzo, Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny also in contention for the premier prizes — the key question for fans and industry insiders isn’t how big she will win, but rather: What if she loses, again?Harry Styles, who is slated to perform at the Grammys, has six nominations, including album, record and song of the year.The New York TimesThis year more than most, public perception of the Grammys’ relevance may come down to the fate of a single artist. A prominent win for Beyoncé could be seen as an overdue make-good, which is something of a Grammy specialty. But a notable loss could call into question the redemption narrative that the Recording Academy, the institution behind the awards, has been carefully tending for years, as it has tried to address longstanding criticism that the show too often fails to recognize Black talent with top awards.The Grammy Awards 2023The 65th annual ceremony will be held on Feb. 5 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, after two years of delays and complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.Beyoncé: With a dominant new album and the chance to become the most awarded artist in Grammy history, all eyes are on the pop superstar ahead of the ceremony. What could go wrong?Bonnie Raitt: Long renowned as an interpreter of songs, the musician has quietly built a catalog of her own. Up for song of the year, she talked about her lifetime onstage in an interview with The Times.The-Dream and Muni Long: Ahead of the first-ever Grammy Award for songwriter of the year, the two musicians, who are both up for awards, trace their unique journeys to recognition.That complaint, along with suspicions about the voting process, has led some high-profile Black artists to abandon the Grammys in recent years, like Drake, Frank Ocean and the Weeknd. But there are also some signs that the awards may be changing. Last year, Jon Batiste, the Black jazz bandleader, took home album of the year, and in 2021 a Black Lives Matter protest anthem by H.E.R. won song of the year. A push to attract a younger and more diverse voting pool has resulted in 19 percent more women and 38 percent more members of “traditionally underrepresented communities” since 2019, the academy says.Those numbers would seem favorable for Beyoncé. But her track record in album of the year, traditionally the most coveted prize, is especially wrenching. In 2010, her “I Am … Sasha Fierce” lost to Taylor Swift’s “Fearless.” In 2015, Beck’s mellow “Morning Phase” was the upset winner, beating out Beyoncé’s internet-breaking, self-titled surprise LP. Two years later, when Beyoncé’s paradigm-shifting visual album “Lemonade” lost to Adele’s “25,” Adele seemed almost embarrassed to accept the award, calling Beyoncé the “artist of my life.”Should Adele win a third album of the year trophy on Sunday, with “30” — or if Styles, Abba, Coldplay or Brandi Carlile comes out on top — it would be the fourth time that Beyoncé has lost that prize to a white artist, noted Paul Grein, the awards editor at Billboard. “The Grammys would get beat up,” he said. But, he added, “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”After two years of disruption by Covid-19, the Grammys are finally back in Los Angeles, on their home court, the Crypto.com Arena (formerly known as the Staples Center).Bad Bunny, Lamar, Lizzo and Mary J. Blige round out the competition for album of the year, and besides Beyoncé, the night holds some potential buzzy moments. Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” a streaming juggernaut, is the first release entirely in Spanish up for album of the year. After five failed nominations in song of the year, Swift could finally win for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” an extended remake of a track she first released in 2012.The performers on Sunday will include Styles, Bad Bunny, Lizzo, Sam Smith and Kim Petras, Steve Lacy, Blige, Luke Combs and Carlile. Fan cults and industry gossips have been speculating for weeks over whether Beyoncé, Swift, Lamar or Adele will also perform.Lizzo is also nominated in the top three categories, for her album “Special” and single “About Damn Time.”Scott Legato/Getty Images For SiriusXMBut the story line that has drawn by far the most attention is Beyoncé’s. And as much as fans desire a triumph, pessimists have history on their side. Only three Black women have ever won album of the year — Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill, all in the 1990s — and of Beyoncé’s 28 wins, only one has been in a top category, song of the year. That was more than a decade ago, when she was recognized as a songwriter for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”“The fact that she has not won a major award since 2010 is insane,” said Brandon Katamara, a student in Cardiff, Wales, who has run @rumiyonce, a Beyoncé fan account with more than 400,000 followers on Instagram, since he was 13.Katamara, now 20, said that even if Beyoncé’s No. 1 hit “Break My Soul” came away with wins in song or record of the year, it wouldn’t lessen the sting. “We don’t care if she just takes one award,” he said. “We just want her to win album of the year.”And should she lose? Katamara predicted a “9.5 out of 10” on the social-media backlash scale. (The nightmare scenario for the BeyHive: a shutout that results in their heroine being passed by the Americana artist Alison Krauss, who has two nominations in genre categories this year and trails Beyoncé by only one win as the most-awarded woman.)Harvey Mason Jr., a producer who is the chief executive of the Recording Academy, said it would be unfair to look to a Beyoncé victory or loss in any single contest as a test of changes to the voting membership, which numbers about 11,000.“If voters are more diverse,” he said, “my hope is that the results would be more diverse across the entire field, not in just one category.”According to figures provided by the Recording Academy, the largest voting blocs by genre are pop at 23 percent and jazz at 16 percent. Rock and alternative are counted separately but, if combined, would make up 25 percent of voters; R&B sits at 15 percent.In 2018, the academy also expanded the number of nominees in the top categories to eight from five, and increased that number again to 10 nominees in a last-minute change in 2021, potentially adding more unpredictability to the results.Yet for many Grammy observers, Beyoncé is indeed a barometer of the awards’ complex treatment of Black musicians overall.“It’s always rocky,” said Cipha Sounds, a veteran radio personality now with 94.7 The Block, a throwback hip-hop and R&B station in New York. “It feels like they don’t give the same amount of love that they do to other genres, but when they do it feels kind of forced,” as if the academy has to “check the diversity boxes,” he added.Still, he said, Black artists and fans crave the affirmation that comes with winning a Grammy. “We just want regular credit,” he said.For the academy, a nonprofit group that draws the bulk of its revenue from fees related to the television broadcast, attracting eyeballs to the annual show is vital. Those numbers have been sliding for years. In 2021, 8.8 million viewers watched the show, an all-time low; last year, it was 8.9 million.At the same time, the Super Bowl halftime show has emerged as perhaps the most gargantuan media event in music — last year an average of 103.4 million people watched a nostalgic hip-hop segment with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and others — and this year’s show, on Feb. 12, featuring Rihanna, has been bubbling for weeks as a huge pop-culture moment. Recently, an email bounced around the offices of Billboard magazine. “Music’s Biggest Night is coming up,” it read. “And a week earlier, there’s the Grammys!”In recent years, the Grammys have been buffeted by a series of controversies over nominations, performances and even the power struggles within the academy. As unpleasant as those may have been for the organization, they did drive a certain amount of interest. This year, there has been much less buzz, good or bad. Is the Beyoncé question enough to make it a successful show?“I’m OK with there not being controversy before the show,” Mason, the academy chief, said diplomatically. “I like to think it’s going to be about the music.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      How the R&B Innovator Kelela Unlocked a New Level

      by

      In mid-January, Kelela Mizanekristos emailed over the document she shares with everyone who plans to work with her. It’s a syllabus for the university of her mind, a guide to help the 39-year-old R&B musician’s collaborators understand the foundation on which she builds her art: her experiences, good, bad and in-between, as a queer Black woman.There are readings (“Decolonizing Love in a World Rigged for Black Women’s Loneliness,” by Shaadi Devereaux), audiobook recommendations (“Minor Feelings,” by Cathy Park Hong), films (“The Last Angel of History”) and websites (make techno black again).“You can’t be advocating for me properly unless you do some homework,” she said, adding an expletive, over lunch at Sisters Restaurant in Brooklyn a few weeks earlier.Six years have passed since Mizanekristos, who records simply as Kelela, released her debut album of intimate, intricate R&B, “Take Me Apart.” Fans have been clamoring for a follow-up, but Kelela has been taking her time and doing the work — researching, digesting, synthesizing, curing, living — accumulating experiences to write about, and finding the knowledge to process them.“I’m committed to understanding what’s at the bottom of things, and so I’m always wanting to engage in what’s really going on,” she said, half a Lambrusco in her hand. (Later, she admitted, “I’m a nerd.”) Dressed in black track pants and a Telfar sweatshirt, Kelela bloomed and drooped like a flower over our conversation, her hoodie alternately moving up and down to match her passionate and more contemplative moments.The result of those years of deep thinking is “Raven,” out Feb. 10. Building off the spacey synth beats from her previous work, Kelela’s second album explores textures and tempos that burrow deep into the listener’s core. Its single “Happy Ending,” a bass-heavy Euro-pop dance track, sounds like a missive from the future, or perhaps a soundtrack for an alluring life on Mars. The whole project is connected by an underlying vibe: “I really want to be sexy in a nuanced way,” she said. “We want our sexy moments to feel one of a kind, that’s why it feels sexy — because you don’t think that it’s run of the mill.”Conscious of — and often feeling isolated by — the dearth of Black women leading in the dance world, Kelela makes music she wants everyone to move to, but for certain groups to really feel. “She doesn’t even have to be saying a word, but you feel her,” said Asma Maroof, a longtime friend and collaborator. “Not many girls can do that. It doesn’t need to be spelled out.”KELELA WAS BORN in Washington, D.C., and grew up in nearby Gaithersburg, Md. Her parents immigrated from Ethiopia in the 1970s, and she still felt close to their culture, largely because her family rebuked the assimilation narratives of immigration.“My mom’s side was not buying that,” she said with a laugh. “They were just like, ‘You’re going to learn Amharic. If you want something from me right now, ask in Amharic.’”Her parents never married and instead co-parented from separate apartments in the same building. By the time Kelela was ready for kindergarten, she and her mother moved to the suburbs in hopes of finding a better school.Her mother’s record collection skewed jazzy, leading Kelela to discover the smooth vocalists Natalie Cole and Sarah Vaughan. At her father’s, she fell in love with Tracy Chapman’s first album when she was only 5. That same year, he took her to see “Sarafina!,” the South African musical set during the Soweto student uprising of 1976, introducing her to the powerful, political music of Miriam Makeba.“Even now, when I’m writing lyrics, I’m not, like, ‘This album is gonna be about this,’” Kelela said. “I am trying to fill in the blanks of the phrasing riddle that I’ve created.” Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesAt school, she took violin lessons and sang in the choir. While at home she indulged her love of pop goddesses like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, to fit in with her classmates, she listened to emo and punk. Over time, via file-sharing services like Napster, she was able to discover new genres, like grime.College proved unsatisfying and Kelela didn’t finish her degree, but during that time she decided to pursue music seriously. She was struck by the work of Amel Larrieux and began singing jazz standards at open-mic nights.Jazz started to feel too restrictive, all that emphasis on the standards. By chance, she met Yukimi Nagano, the lead singer of the Swedish band Little Dragon, who inspired her to start writing her own songs. Kelela began spending time in Mount Pleasant, a D.C. neighborhood with a strong punk scene, and formed the indie soul-rock band Dizzy Spells with Tim George, a guitarist.True inspiration came when she started to make music on her laptop: ripping a song she liked from Myspace, recording a verse over it and sending it back to producers in the hopes they could start working together. Eventually, she quit her job as a telemarketer and moved to Los Angeles to devote herself to music full-time.One of her demos ended up in the hands of Teengirl Fantasy, the dance-electronic duo Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi, and the three collaborated on the airy, percussive track “EFX.” From there, she met Ashland Mines, a D.J. and producer who performs under the name Total Freedom, who made a fateful introduction, connecting Kelela to producers from Fade to Mind and Night Slugs, two indie labels at the center of underground dance music.The rocket ship took off: Their collaborations resulted in “Cut 4 Me,” a glitchy, moody mixtape that mashed up make-out jams, booty-shakers and crooned love songs, all flecked with enough grime and synths to build a new kind of R&B. Finally, at 30, Kelela had arrived. She picked up famous fans like Björk and Solange and fielded offers from major record labels, ultimately signing with the indie Warp because it offered the most artistic freedom.Her next project, “Hallucinogen” from 2015, expanded her palette further, adding collaborations with DJ Dahi, a hip-hop producer, and Arca, an experimental artist and producer with a vast sense of what electronic music can be. Intensely personal, the roughly 20-minute EP featured the work of 12 producers alongside Kelela as she explored the wounds of romantic and existential heartbreak. “Take Me Apart,” her first full album, teamed her with Romy Madley Croft from the xx and the pop producer Ariel Rechtshaid alongside Night Slugs’ Jam City and Bok Bok, and others, as Kelela reveled in the space between the fringes and the mainstream.“RAVEN” IS ONCE again a feat of elaborate collaboration, featuring contributions from 15 producers, including Yo van Lenz, LSDXOXO and Florian T M Zeisig. Maroof, who was also involved, said work in the studio evolved in layers: Kelela would tinker with an idea, Maroof would add to it, then additional producers like Bambii or Kaytranada would sprinkle more on top.“Looking back on it, you’re like, how did we do that?” Maroof said.Racism, sexism and misogyny have always been at the forefront of Kelela’s mind, but not always reflected in her music. As she was building up to “Raven,” her primary goal was expanding the canon of Black female emotional art. The album delves into the existential heartbreak of a marginalized identity: betrayal from inside the house. “White supremacy isn’t just operating through white people,” Kelela said. “And patriarchal women can do the most damaging things to your spirit because you let your guard down.”Setting and breaking boundaries was a priority, after decades of learning how to establish them. The social justice uprisings of the summer of 2020, spurred by the murder of George Floyd, resulted in an atmosphere in which the singer’s community, particularly white people, were anxious and clamoring to have the hard conversations.On songs like the sparse, ethereal “Holier,” she declares that Black women can depend most on themselves, and in our conversation she cited the writer Amber J. Phillips’s “choose the Blackest option” — a conscious choice to avoid the sanitized, commercialized delivery of Blackness often employed to help those still becoming comfortable with race.Kelela said she supposed there are three or four musicians, whom she didn’t name, who really uphold the theory. “Everyone else is like, ‘I gotta make this coin,’” she said. “It feels like so few people are willing to put something on the line at all.”She had other plans, focusing on lyrics that “help Black femmes heal,” she said. “It’s gotta be a lyric that Black and brown women and nonbinary people, marginalized people, can scream in their cars on the way to work a job that they actually don’t want to do.”Kelela said “Raven” is connected by an underlying vibe: “I really want to be sexy in a nuanced way.”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesKelela’s lyrics arrive rhythm first, the words coming later. She compared her writing style to how her mother and her friends would try to approximate English when they were growing up in Ethiopia — trying to speak in a language you don’t yet know, wading through the feelings anyway.She avoided listening to any of the initial tracks before entering the studio, to maintain the purity of her impulses, and recorded her improvisations. “Even now, when I’m writing lyrics, I’m not, like, this album is gonna be about this,” she said. “I am trying to fill in the blanks of the phrasing riddle that I’ve created.” Playing her improvisations back, she asked herself what it sounded like she was saying: “What is real for me? What’s the relationship to the feeling that I have about the sound? And how does that relate to anything that I’m actually experiencing?”Water, as a theme, runs through the album in various permutations: lust, ebbing as slowly as a waning ice cube; isolation as vast as the sea; anticipation dotted on the brow like sweat. The album’s first and last songs, “Washed Away” and “Far Away,” flow into each other, giving the album the effect of a full sonic circle. “I want to convey, melodically, this wonder and discovery,” Kelela said. “I’m finding my way, as you are when you’re here for the first time.”Maroof, who collaborated on the record from Zurich, praised “the sonic world” that Kelela builds with each album. “She can bring all sorts of different sounds together,” she said, “and you can even hear how they mix, as one fluid thing as an album, and in that way you have a deeper understanding of the music.”The issues Kelela sought to explore on the record — justice, safety, the value of Black life — are ones she’s been grappling with for years. The difference now is the conversation is leaping from the Google doc to her listeners’ ears.She doesn’t want anyone to think that her work was in response to anything but her own experiences, though she appreciated the tangible changes that were brought forth. “I’ve been wanting to engage critically about all these things within my friend groups,” she said, “and there wasn’t a culture to support that.”Though those appetites lessened, in recent years, she’s noticed a newfound ability for people from marginalized communities to be able to draw boundaries and voice their social discomfort — her included. Black people “were able to be like, ‘I don’t like that anymore,’” she said. “And for those Black people, it had lasting effects.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      SZA’s ‘SOS’ Holds Strong With Seven Weeks at No. 1

      by

      The R&B star’s “SOS” has racked up more than 1.4 billion streams and had the equivalent of 1.1 million sales since its December release.When SZA released her latest album, in early December, it was sure to be a hit. “SOS” was the R&B singer-songwriter’s first LP in five years, and arrived with oodles of fan anticipation following a string of Grammy nominations and featured spots with Doja Cat, Kendrick Lamar and Summer Walker.But “SOS” has ended up a steady streaming hit and a chart blockbuster, spending its first seven weeks of release at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It is the first album by a woman to have at least seven weeks at the top since Taylor Swift’s “Folklore,” which racked up a total of eight over a 13-week period in 2020. It is also the first album by any artist to spend its first seven weeks at No. 1 since Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which sat atop the list for its initial 10 weeks out at the start of 2021.In its seventh week out, “SOS” had the equivalent of 111,000 sales in the United States, including 149 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since the album was released, it has generated more than 1.4 billion streams, and had the equivalent of 1.1 million sales.Also this week, Swift’s latest LP, “Midnights,” holds strong at No. 2. Since that album came out in October, it has notched a total of five weeks at No. 1 and never fallen lower than second place.The Ohio-born rapper Trippie Redd opens at No. 3 with his latest album, “Mansion Musik,” which had the equivalent of 56,000 sales, including 68 million streams. Hardy, a buzzy country-rock singer and songwriter, opens at No. 4 with a double LP, “The Mockingbird & the Crow,” which had the equivalent of 55,000 sales, including about 45 million streams.“Heroes & Villains,” by the producer Metro Boomin, is No. 5. More