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      David Crosby, a King of Twitter

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      The musician relished sharing opinions big and small, sparring with fans and dispelling myths, often in sharp, hilarious quips. The vibe on the platform changed, but he posted until the end.On Wednesday, one day before the world learned of his death at 81, the musician David Crosby posted to Twitter over a dozen times.He picked his favorite Beatles song for a rainy day (“Eleanor Rigby”). He expressed support for the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and disdain for the Republican representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a bit of poignant foreshadowing, he shared some thoughts about heaven: “I heard the place is overrated,” he wrote, “cloudy.”Among his musical peers, Crosby lived out a unique series of American lives. He was a defining voice of the folk-rock music of the 1960s and ’70s. He was a boldfaced name for his brief prison stay on drug charges, his liver transplant and the revelation that he was the sperm donor for Melissa Etheridge’s two children with Julie Cypher.And there was his surprising ascent as Twitter pundit, cemented in 2017 when he appeared in a commercial for the social media service. There are no formal metrics, but it’s fair to say that no other Woodstock performer or double inductee in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tweeted as much as Crosby, or with such personable enthusiasm.Crosby was a true poster, a compliment handed out to those who seem to intuitively understand the unspoken rules for how to live an online life. He loved to interact with fans and haters; he never censored his thoughts or minced his words. He tweeted around 79,000 times in over a decade spent on the platform, a pace that dramatically eclipsed his contemporaries. Many musicians, and certainly those of his generation, exclusively use social media as a promotional service for tour announcements and new songs. Crosby, instead, treated Twitter as a walkie-talkie, a direct connection between himself and anyone who wanted to hear from him.This was one of Twitter’s initial appeals: The idea that you might actually interact with famous names like Ashton Kutcher or Shaquille O’Neal propelled thousands of newcomers to sign up in the platform’s early days. But numerous celebrities have quietly left in recent years, driven away by the increasingly combative dynamics that make sharing any opinion a risky proposition, or by Elon Musk’s messy takeover.Crosby did not care, and Crosby never quit. On any given day, he could be found opining on subjects like his distaste for Ted Nugent; his distaste for the Doors (which he eventually decided to tone down, though he never changed his mind about their lack of swing); his distaste for the songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’s attempted guitar-smashing on “Saturday Night Live”; his distaste for a not-so-bad painting of him drawn by a fan; his distaste for poorly rolled marijuana joints; his distaste for Donald Trump, always a subject on his mind.Possibly you notice a theme. But Crosby was no troll, complaining about every possible topic just to propel engagement. Many of his tweets were playful, and sweet. He loved to talk about his wife, and his appreciation for his family life. He never stopped praising his ex-girlfriend Joni Mitchell or his former bandmate Neil Young, even as his relationships with them were openly fraught.He advertised the sensual side of his discography. He solicited movie recommendations and promoted restaurants. He praised younger musicians like Jason Isbell and Jacob Collier. He really enjoyed the work of the director Alex Garland. He dispelled myths about his own life, regardless of whether the lie would have been more flattering.These posting tendencies evolved Crosby’s public persona for a new generation of music fans, in ways that felt both natural and genuine. As the music industry continues to change, its existing stars often attempt to latch onto emergent trends, through efforts that can easily seem forced or hatched by corporate fiat. (It’s hard to believe that Mick Jagger has anything to do with the Rolling Stones’ newly announced TikTok account.) But Crosby was right there, doing it himself. There was little doubt that he personally authored every tweet, because who else could post with such frequency, or idiosyncratic phrasing? His willingness to post so often and honestly did the work of several marketing budgets, and accompanied a late-career creative renaissance that saw the release of five solo albums in the last decade.This exposure didn’t suddenly transform Crosby into a commercial force. (His last album, “For Free” from 2021, did not chart in the United States.) Still, it was oddly reassuring to know that a public figure with such a varied and involved life, who had been present for some of the most consequential events in popular American music, could not resist the elemental pleasures of wasting time on Twitter like many of us, despite its myriad downsides.“I’m really trying to just have fun here,” he told Grammy.com in 2021. “I like people. I think they’re fascinating.” Celebrity is a fickle status, and surely there were moments in his career when Crosby wondered if people would ever care about him or his music. But here was evidence that they did. Even as Twitter frays and coarsens under Musk’s ownership, it’s still possible to have fun with others, one of the few things that keeps users from leaving. Crosby was right there until the very end.In his final weeks he was rating joints, once again advocating for the mood-setting capabilities of his own music and making plans to perform again. He was mad about George Santos and the environment, Spotify and Covid-19, as always, but the happy and the angry were intermingled for everyone to see.A few days ago, he posted his 1989 cover of the Noel Brazil song “Columbus,” with an opening verse espousing a philosophy he endorsed every day he spent on Twitter: “Better keep your distance from this whale/Better keep your boat from going astray/Find yourself a partner and treat them well/Try to give them shelter night and day.” More

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      Prosecutors Say Young Thug’s YSL Is Both Gang and Rap Label

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.ATLANTA — Day after day, the young men came before a judge, handcuffed, clad in county jumpsuits and answering to their government names rather than their rap monikers: Slimelife Shawty, Unfoonk, Lil Duke and even the chart-topper Gunna, who is nominated for two Grammy Awards at next month’s ceremony in Los Angeles.Each pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge, some to other crimes. And each agreed, in open court, that the famed Atlanta rap crew they were associated with — YSL, headed by the enigmatic star Jeffery Williams, or Young Thug — was not only a renowned hip-hop collective, but also a criminal street gang.At the hearing for Slimelife Shawty, born Wunnie Lee, a prosecutor prompted him to acknowledge that his associates “have committed at least one of the following acts in the name of YSL: murder, aggravated assault, robbery, theft and/or illegal firearms possession.”“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Lee, 24, said.The case has pitted law enforcement officials who say they are determined to stamp out a violent gang problem against those who see it as yet another moral panic inspired by rap, in a city with one of the most vibrant scenes in the nation. And it has once again raised questions about whether lyrics should only be taken as artistic expressions meant to portray a harsh reality, or as evidence of crimes.The guilty pleas by the four Atlanta rappers and four other men associated with YSL, all of whom are now free after seven months in jail on probation or with requirements that they meet special conditions, may have bolstered prosecutors’ blockbuster case against 14 other alleged members of the group, who are accused of conspiracy to commit racketeering, gang statute violations and more. Jury selection began last week, and the judge estimates that the trial could last six to nine months.Most remarkable among the remaining defendants is Mr. Williams, 31, whose iconoclastic mystique and psychedelic flow have landed him on pop hits, the “Saturday Night Live” stage and in Vogue. With a maximum 120-year sentence hanging over his head, the man who fans worldwide have come to love as Young Thug — but whom prosecutors describe as a cutthroat gang leader — is now facing the prospect of growing old in prison.Young Thug performed with Gunna (seated on piano) on “Saturday Night Live” in 2021, the year two albums headlined by Young Thug hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.Will Heath/NBC, via Getty ImagesThe indictment charges Mr. Williams with participation in criminal street gang activity and of furthering the interest of a criminal conspiracy through a number of illegal acts; it does not charge him individually with most of those acts, which include accusations that he rented the car used in the murder of a rival gang leader and provided safe harbor for those responsible after the killing.Mr. Williams has denied everything. “Jeffery is a kind, intelligent, hard-working, moral and thoughtful person,” his lawyer, Brian Steel, said in a statement, arguing that the rapper had been wrongly targeted by law enforcement because of his fictional persona. “Despite the unthinkable oppressive, impoverished and cruel conditions of his upbringing, he has been able to cultivate his creative genius to lawfully and ethically attain phenomenal worldwide success.”The case has deeply shaken the pop culture universe, especially in Atlanta, Mr. Williams’s hometown, which can stake a claim as the hip-hop capital of the world. Fans, fellow artists, record executives and influential figures including Stacey Abrams, who was the Democratic nominee for governor last year, have sounded notes of concern, even outrage.Some have accused the prosecutor, Fani T. Willis — the aggressive district attorney for Fulton County, a Black Democrat who is best known for pursuing the criminal investigation into postelection meddling in Georgia by former President Donald J. Trump — of applying a “gang stereotype” to Atlanta’s rap community, and putting Black art on trial.The case has prompted an outcry, given how artists from the poorest parts of Atlanta have shaped global popular music. Young Thug’s nickname and YSL’s slang term of choice — slime — has gone international, its “wipe your nose” hand gesture a popular N.F.L. celebration.But the recent admissions in court point to a parallel reality: In Atlanta, law enforcement officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to discern the difference between some rap crews and street gangs, and to disentangle where exactly the credibility-obsessed art form overlaps with criminality.Ms. Willis contends that Atlanta is suffering from a plague of gang violence, estimating — with a hazy explanation for the figures — that up to 80 percent of violent crimes in the area are committed by gang members. She says that an eight-year war between YSL and a rival gang known as YFN, headed by another major-label rap artist, has accounted for more than 50 incidents.But in a city with a well-established path from the hardest streets to a world of fame, fortune and major awards shows — often via songs that chronicle, and some argue glorify, an outlaw life of drugs and guns — the nature of gang culture is also mutating, according to the authorities, with social media and music increasingly important to establishing dominance and influence.So while many young Black men in Atlanta see an escape in turning their dire circumstances in neglected communities into hard-edged rap music, investigators say some of it serves to establish clout, inspire fear, recruit members and fund illegal activity.“We believe that Mr. Williams doesn’t sing about random theoretical acts — he sings about gang acts he’s a part of,” Don Geary, then a lawyer for the district attorney’s office, said in court last year.Authenticity, an always slippery but foundational concept in hip-hop, has taken on even greater significance in the internet age. In places like Atlanta, it is a crucial selling point for the unflinching style of hip-hop known as trap music, which builds on earlier iterations of gangster rap and centers on the drug trade.And on social media, fans follow not just the music, but the lives of rappers and their associates, keeping scorecards of beefs and scores settled, even rooting them on.“It feels like they’re playing Grand Theft Auto in real life, and people are commenting on a video of them playing Grand Theft Auto,” said Gerald A. Griggs, president of Georgia’s conference of the N.A.A.C.P.Blurring the lines between gangs and musicAtlanta was not traditionally a stronghold of the major national gangs that took root in prisons and cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. But as a rapidly gentrifying city with some of the highest income inequality in the nation — and in a state with some of the laxest gun laws — gang culture has changed.Most common now, experts say, are what are known as “hybrid gangs”: looser constellations mixing members from various national sets, local crews and neighborhood cliques. These groups may have connections to the Bloods, Crips or Gangster Disciples, but often without their rules and hierarchies.While some traditional gangs, like the Mafia, are strict, top-down enterprises earning money through illicit business, the chief mission of today’s groups may be simply bolstering the brand.“That lack of structure makes it dangerous and unpredictable,” said Cara Convery, a former deputy district attorney for Fulton County who now runs a statewide unit targeting gangs. Money and territory remain important, she added, but “respect is still the primary currency of all of these gangs — it’s everything.”In places like Atlanta, law enforcement officials contend, it has become commonplace to align primarily with homegrown stars, who can offer aspirants prestige and money.“The new color lines,” said Marissa Viverito, a gang investigator in Ms. Willis’s office, “are the rappers.”The authorities say they are not targeting famous individuals or rap, a varied art form, writ large. Instead, they say, prosecutors hope to hold those at the top of the criminal food chain accountable, even when they overlap with a beloved, city-defining cultural product.Recent high-profile crimes said to be gang-related include the July 2020 killing of an 8-year-old girl; home break-ins targeting celebrities that have been tied to a recently indicted group called Drug Rich; and the December shooting deaths of two boys, ages 12 and 15, near the popular Atlantic Station mall.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, contends that Atlanta is suffering from a plague of gang violence.Ben Gray/Associated PressMs. Willis is a seasoned prosecutor who took office in January 2021, amid a spike in homicides and growing unease about violent crime. Her work investigating Mr. Trump, which could result in indictments this year, has earned plaudits from liberals. But her focus on gangs has also made her a de facto ally of conservative leaders who have raised alarms about a statewide problem.Ms. Willis has expanded her anti-gang team and promised to make vigorous use of the state’s Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act and its Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO. She charged Mr. Williams, or Young Thug, under both laws, and has done the same for his rival Rayshawn Bennett, the rapper known as YFN Lucci, and his associates.Her beefed-up focus on gangs stands in contrast to other prosecutors, like George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney, who in 2021 reduced, renamed and reorganized his office’s famous Hardcore Gang unit, moving away from a “purely prosecutorial model.”Ms. Willis has faced criticism for her hard-line approach to gangs, especially her office’s use of rap lyrics in indictments, which critics say raises First Amendment concerns.“People can continue to be angry about it,” Ms. Willis said at a news conference announcing the racketeering indictment against Drug Rich, which also included lyrics. “I have some legal advice: Don’t confess to crime on rap lyrics if you do not want them used. Or at least get out of my county.”Lawyers for Mr. Williams have called the practice unconstitutional, arguing it is “racist and discriminatory because the jury will be so poisoned and prejudiced.”Ms. Abrams, the prominent Democrat, said at a campaign appearance with the rapper 21 Savage last year that while “bad actors should be held accountable,” she did not believe that lyrics should be used as the basis for criminal charges. “The reality is we cannot thwart the entertainment industry in pursuit of justice,” she said.But the authorities argue that songs are no different than a text message or a confession, if the content can be tied to real-life events. (Prosecutors, for example, say that after YSL members fired on the home of YFN Lucci’s mother, Young Thug rapped, “I shot at his mommy, now he no longer mention me.”)“It’s a dangerous line,” said Ms. Convery, the gang prosecutor. “Art and expression and exaggeration surround all of this stuff.” However, she added: “If you are making music about the crime that you committed, I think it’s evidence. It would be crazy to leave that on the table.”Some critics are concerned that the justice system’s focus on young Black men seems to come at the expense of other issues, including Georgia’s white nationalist groups, and worry that Ms. Willis’s aggressive use of RICO statutes, which give prosecutors wide leeway, could wrap up innocent people.“When you blur the line between a criminal street gang and a music label, that could bring a lot of people into the net that don’t have anything to do with furthering criminal acts,” said Mr. Griggs, of the N.A.A.C.P.In a video interview from jail before his guilty plea, Mr. Lee, better known as Slimelife Shawty, said he had been wrongly ensnared by the scope of the case.Unlike other YSL defendants, some of whom were charged with murder, drug dealing and assault, he was accused of a single count: racketeering, or furthering YSL’s criminal enterprise by making music videos, posting online and rapping vague but threatening lyrics.At his Dec. 16 plea hearing, however, Mr. Lee confirmed that he had sent a message containing rat and brain emojis to a witness in a YSL-affiliated suspect’s murder case. Prosecutors interpreted this as a threat of violent retaliation.Mr. Lee was one of many young people who grew up along Cleveland Avenue, a desolate South Atlanta corridor, and were inspired by Mr. Williams and his transformation into the global star Young Thug.Rapping the often-violent content audiences wanted to hear, Mr. Lee said from jail, became “our main go-to to get out of this place.”A rap innovator on trialAccording to court documents, YSL was founded along Cleveland Avenue in late 2012 by Mr. Williams and two other men, both of whom have pleaded guilty in the case.But while the rapper’s defense team argues that he was repping Young Stoner Life, a fledgling record label and lifestyle brand, prosecutors say it was first Young Slime Life, an upstart criminal organization with ties to the national Blood offshoot Sex Money Murder.The battle with crosstown rivals YFN was sparked in 2015 with the murder of Donovan Thomas, known as Nut, a behind-the-scenes connector instrumental in the rap careers of YFN Lucci and Rich Homie Quan, a once-frequent collaborator of Young Thug.In the aftermath of the killing, the authorities say, many in the city picked sides as retaliatory shootings spilled across Atlanta.Prosecutors say Mr. Williams rented the car used during the fatal shooting of Mr. Thomas and then urged those involved to “lay low,” giving them cash and traveling with them to Miami, according to the guilty plea last month of a YSL founder charged in the case, Antonio Sledge.As law enforcement opened its investigation into the murder, Mr. Williams’s profile as a whimsical, genre-shifting musician — with attention-grabbing fashion sense that includes, in defiance of macho gangster stereotypes, wearing dresses — only grew.Last January, not long before the indictment, 300 Entertainment, the label that had signed Young Thug and his YSL imprint, sold to Warner Music for a reported $400 million.At a bail hearing last year, Kevin Liles, the chief executive of 300, was brought to tears on the stand describing Mr. Williams and “how good this guy is,” pointing to the rapper’s generosity and mentorship. He said in a statement on Wednesday: “Young Stoner Life Records is and always has been exclusively a recorded music partnership with Jeffery Williams. Nothing I’ve seen has changed my point of view.”But the authorities say Mr. Williams’s good deeds were a cover for his dark side. The case seeks to tie him to a spate of other violent crimes, including a 2015 tour bus shooting that targeted Lil Wayne, a one-time idol turned rival.Whether or not Young Thug is found to be YSL’s mastermind, there may be lasting consequences for members who publicly identified it as a gang. Artists who came up under him, like Mr. Lee and Gunna, born Sergio Kitchens, now face accusations of being snitches — a potentially fatal label for rappers who trade in toughness and loyalty.Mr. Kitchens, who like the others had agreed to testify as part of his plea deal, released a statement saying he would claim his Fifth Amendment privilege if called. And on Instagram, Mr. Lee said his plea did not tell the authorities anything they did not already know.“I admitted Young Slime Life was a gang ’cause it ain’t illegal for no group to be a gang,” he said, adding that he did not know anything about specific crimes. “Look it up.”As Slimelife Shawty, he teased, he would soon be rapping about all of it.Audio produced by More

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      Celebrities Remember Lisa Marie Presley

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      On social media, they recalled her talent, her kindness and her struggles.Celebrities expressed shock and heartbreak on social media over the death of Lisa Marie Presley, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis Presley.“There is heartbreak and then there is sorrow. This would be sorrow and on more levels than I can count,” the Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan said late Thursday on Instagram, where he also shared a photograph of himself with Ms. Presley. “I truly cannot find the words to express how sad this truly is.”“Lisa baby girl, I’m so sorry,” the actor John Travolta said on Instagram. “I’ll miss you but I know I’ll see you again.”The songwriter Linda Thompson, who dated Elvis in the 1970s, also took to Instagram. “My heart is too heavy for words,” she said.The fashion designer Donatella Versace said on Instagram that she would never forget the times they spent together, adding: “Your beauty and your kindness shone so bright.”“So sad that we’ve lost another bright star in Lisa Marie Presley,” the actress Octavia Spencer said on Twitter. “My condolences to her loved ones and multitude of fans.”The Twitter account of the Golden Globes awards said “We are incredibly saddened” by the news of her death. Ms. Presley’s last public appearance was on Tuesday at the awards ceremony to celebrate Austin Butler, who won Best Actor for the title role in the Baz Luhrmann biopic “Elvis.”“Lisa Marie Presley … how heartbreaking,” singer LeAnn Rimes Cibrian said on Twitter. “I hope she is at peace in her dad’s arms.”Some celebrities also remembered the difficulties that she had faced.“Lisa did not have an easy life,” the actress Leah Remini said on Twitter, adding that she was heartbroken by the news. “May she be at peace, resting with her son and father now.”Ms. Presley lost her father when she was 9. Married and divorced four times, she had also struggled with opioid addiction. Her son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020. Less than six months before her own death, she wrote about grieving his loss.Corey Feldman, an actor and singer, said that he had spent hours on the phone with Ms. Presley when she was divorcing the singer Michael Jackson. Benjamin Keough was “like a little brother” to him, Mr. Feldman said.“So much loss, so much tragedy,” he said on Twitter, adding that “She was a beautiful, powerful woman” who wanted to “make her own rules.”“A sweet and gentle soul,” the actor Cary Elwes said on Twitter. “We send our deepest, heartfelt condolences to Priscilla, Riley and her family and friends.” More

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      in Movies

      Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?

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      It has become a social credential to be in therapy. It’s also incredibly difficult to access.About 30 minutes into “Stutz,” a new Netflix documentary from Jonah Hill, the movie’s slick veneer cracks open to expose a deeper artifice. We see Hill and his therapist, the 70-something Phil Stutz, shot in crisp black and white, sitting side by side in what appears to be Stutz’s Los Angeles office. Hill has long hair and a scraggly beard; he says he’s going to use one of Stutz’s treasured “tools,” and he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Then he makes a confession: “I’ve been lying to you in our private therapy sessions.” As he reveals this, the film flips into color and lays bare that they are actually on a set, in front of a green-screen simulation of Stutz’s office. Hill removes the wig he has been wearing to hide a haircut. The film’s initial premise was that we were seeing a single session unfold, but we now learn that it has been filmed over the course of two years — and Hill, in his real sessions, has been hiding his feeling that the project is stuck.Hill’s mission, announced early in the film, is to spread the healing power of therapy and share Stutz’s psychological tools with Netflix’s enormous audience. But the whole endeavor, he now tells Stutz, has felt “weird and false.” For half an hour, Hill has played the role of a distanced documentarian, interviewing Stutz while dodging any personal questions he received in return — like one about being an overweight kid and the conflict that generated with his mother. “I’m not going to go into it because this film is about you, not me,” Hill says. But the film, he eventually comes to realize, is like therapy itself: It can’t work unless he is willing to be vulnerable and share his own grief, fear and insecurity. The movie’s breakdown, however contrived, is meant to replicate a breakthrough — an opportunity to take a risk, connect with others and move forward.In today’s therapy-saturated culture, you hear countless messages about what therapy is and what it is for, many of them starkly different from Hill’s. Back in 1979, the historian and critic Christopher Lasch wrote that the New Left had retreated from politics and turned inward, focusing on personal psychological well-being instead of external collective struggles. These days that is funnily reversed: Psychology is often used, especially online, as a way to collectively press others. In some corners therapy has become a kind of social imperative, something anyone can urge strangers to engage in — not so they can explore their own experiences, but so their psychic toxicity can be contained before it spills onto others. Social media is filled with memes and jokes in which people “beg” men to get therapy, or deploy variations of the formula that “men will literally do anything but go to therapy.” On dating apps, being in therapy can vouch for your emotional soundness, while not being in therapy may be considered a red flag. Articles suggest, in the words of one writer, that “therapy could be the secret to a flourishing love life.”Hill had to confront the fact that therapy is irreducible to a set of abstract tools.These competing images of therapy — one personal, the other social — each stem from the basic assumption that therapy can do a lot of people a lot of good, and from the impulse to share it widely. The version we see in “Stutz” is based largely on self-exploration; by revealing the parts of ourselves we often hide, it suggests, we come to know ourselves more deeply and live our lives more fully. (Hill says he originally came to Stutz “out of desperation to get happier,” having “no healthy self-esteem” despite his wild success in Hollywood.) Therapy as a kind of social credential, meanwhile, is more about proving to others that you are safe to engage — that your projections, defenses and unresolved traumas won’t hurt those around you. One is akin to cleaning up roadside litter because you think it’s the right thing to do; the other is like slipping on a fluorescent vest and picking up garbage because a court so ordered.It did not take long for therapy to go from a social taboo to something very much out in the open. The pandemic only furthered this shift, leaving countless Americans alone (meaning, for some, in bad company) amid incessant talk of mental health and an ever-growing bombardment of content taking therapy to the masses. Young people have been especially hard hit: In 2021, 44 percent of high schoolers reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless. No wonder that young people have also seemed especially receptive to absorbing the ideas of therapy into their lives and their lexicons — speaking with casual familiarity about triggers and traumas and diagnoses.On “therapy TikTok,” therapists amass millions of followers, to whom they offer tidbits and buzzwords about things like attachment styles. Pop stars like Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato serve as spokespeople for teletherapy companies. Other celebrities incorporate mental-health awareness into their work. The singer-actor Selena Gomez has released a documentary, “My Mind & Me,” about her own mental illness; in September, the rapper Megan Thee Stallion introduced a mental-health website linked to her album “Traumazine,” which features a song called “Anxiety” (“I’m a bad bitch, and I got bad anxiety”). Divulging mental-health struggles has become routine among pop figures, a way of both connecting with young fans and offering a message that it’s OK to seek help.And yet high-quality psychotherapy remains staggeringly expensive and hard to find. According to the American Psychological Association, six in 10 psychologists say they don’t have openings for new patients. (My own therapist’s website says there’s a waiting list for teletherapy.) Reading about therapy on social media, I came across a popular post from the writer Casey Johnston, who summed up the search for a therapist like this: “Finding a therapist is simple, just contact 50 people, 25 are no longer in network, 15 don’t answer, 5 have switched to $600/hr life coaching, 2 don’t like your vibe, one now only does pets.” The shortage is especially acute for professionals who work with children and teenagers.In lieu of access to actual therapy, we seem to be inundated with content about therapy, as though its material scarcity creates an urge to spread the gospel by other means. You can devour never-ending media feeds promising tools to help process trauma, techniques to regulate emotions, tips for setting healthful boundaries. But something crucial to therapy feels missing when we’re absorbing these ideas passively, in solitude.What Hill came to realize while making “Stutz,” after all, is that his true subject isn’t his therapist or the tools he has learned. The real action is found in the sui generis nature of the patient-therapist relationship itself — one that is vulnerable, endearing and genuinely moving to watch. Those of us doing the watching are mere viewers engaged in a risk-free parasocial relationship, connecting to someone else’s connection. Hill had to confront the fact that therapy is irreducible to a set of abstract tools. This is something different from any of the millions of articles or TikTok videos offering, say, nine tips for handling a narcissist. All the therapy content online helps to demystify something that long operated behind closed doors, but it also underlines a new problem — that many of us are facing these challenges alone.Source photographs: Netflix More

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      ‘Gangnam Style’ Brought K-Pop to the World, but Haunted Its Creator

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      In 2012, the song took over the internet, and it helped pave the way for the global success of Korean pop. But Psy, the artist behind it, spent years trying and failing to replicate the phenomenon.SEOUL — He may not look it, in a spiffy double-breasted suit and a coiffure secured with enough hair gel to reflect the ceiling lights, but the 45-year-old music executive confides a secret as he rubs his temples: He’s hung over.But he doesn’t mind nursing this headache, at well past 2 p.m. on a Thursday in Seoul. Some of his best songwriting ideas come to him, he said, in the malaise that follows a night of hard drinking.The man doing the creative suffering is Psy, the onetime global internet sensation whose 2012 viral music video and earworm of a song, “Gangnam Style,” became the first-ever YouTube offering to surpass one billion views and had the world galloping along with him.The outlandish but irresistibly catchy song and accompanying video — which has Psy doing the tune’s signature horseback dance move in and around Gangnam, an upscale Seoul neighborhood — achieved the breakthrough, worldwide success that had mostly eluded Korean pop acts, or K-pop, before then.The video, which now has some 4.6 billion views, was so culturally pervasive in 2012 that Barack Obama was asked about it on Election Day. NASA astronauts recorded a parody, and a North Korean state propaganda site evoked the dance move to mock a South Korean politician. But for several years in the aftermath of all his viral fame, Psy said, the song’s success haunted him. Even as he was thrust overnight into a Hollywood existence, getting chased around New York City by paparazzi, signing with Justin Bieber’s manager and releasing a single with Snoop Dogg, internally he felt the pressure mounting for another hit.Psy performing “Gangnam Style” live on NBC’s “Today” show in New York, in 2012. At the time, the video for the song had more than 200 million YouTube views; it now has more than 4.6 billion.Jason Decrow/Invision, via Associated Press“Let’s make just one more,” he says he kept telling himself.He moved to Los Angeles in an effort to get a global career going in earnest, an ocean away from his native South Korea, where he was both a fixture of the music charts and a source of comic relief on silly television variety shows. But none of the attempts came close to replicating the formula that made “Gangnam Style” a global success.Psy wasn’t alone in trying to figure out how to reproduce the phenomenon. In South Korea, not only the music industry but government officials and economists, too, were studying just what it was about the tune, the lyrics, the video, the dancing or the man that had vaulted the song to such singular levels of ubiquity.And in the decade since the song and video first put South Korea’s pop music on the map for many around the world, K-pop has become a cultural juggernaut, expanding out from markets in East and Southeast Asia to permeate all corners of the world.Artists like BTS and Blackpink command devoted fans numbering in the tens of millions, and the bands wield an economic impact that rivals a small nation’s G.D.P. The fervor has spilled over beyond music into politics, education and even Broadway.Some say Psy deserves much of the credit.“Psy single-handedly placed K-pop on a different level,” said Kim Young-dae, a music critic who has written extensively about the industry. The song was a “game changer” for the Korean music scene and paved the way for the groundswell of interest and commercial success that the South Korean stars who came after him experienced, Mr. Kim said.Now, 10 years on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, is back home in South Korea, where he has started his own music label and management company and is trying to recreate the magic with the next generation of K-pop talent as one of the industry’s tastemakers.“Let’s make just one more,” Psy said he kept telling himself after “Gangnam Style” became a phenomenon.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“One of the things I love most about this job is that it’s unpredictable. We say among ourselves we’re in the ‘lid business’ — because you don’t know what you’ve got until you open it,” Psy said in an interview at the offices of his music label headquartered in — where else? — the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. “You don’t know which cloud will bring the rain.” With 10 artists under his wing, including a newly minted six-member boy band, TNX, Psy says he feels immensely more pressure shaping and stewarding other people’s careers compared to when he was responsible for his alone.And while he can give his budding stars advice based on decades of industry experience, what he can’t do is offer them surefire instructions on making a hit record.For all the years he has spent thinking and talking about “Gangnam Style,” he remains just as mystified as anyone by its success.“The songs are written by the same person, the dance moves are by the same person and they’re performed by the same person. Everything’s the same, but what was so special about that one song?” Psy said. “I still don’t know, to this day.”Psy performing on the grounds of Korea University in Seoul in May.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn global terms, Psy and his “Gangnam Style” are the epitome of a one-hit wonder. But in South Korea, he had been well-known as a rapper and musician for a decade before, carving out a path that differed from many of his fellow performers, in that he didn’t count on a boost from his physical appearance or shy away from courting controversy.He never had the chiseled look sought after in South Korea’s pop music industry, and from the release of his first album in 2001, he became notorious for his blunt, profane and at times ribald lyrics. “I Love Sex” was one of the tracks on his debut album, “Psy from the Psycho World!” which was slapped with a ban on sale to minors at the urging of the country’s Christian Ethics Movement.Despite — or perhaps because of — his unapologetic, iconoclastic ways, over the past two decades at home in South Korea, the college dropout has consistently logged chart toppers, best-selling albums and sold-out concerts.“It’s kinda sorta ironic he became so iconic — he went from being occasionally censored to widely celebrated,” said Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based creative services agency that offers marketing and distribution solutions to Korean music artists and their labels. “He irreverently winked his way from being the bad boy of K-pop to the golden boy of K-pop.”For a pop song, “Gangnam Style” also unleashed an avalanche of deep think pieces and analyses on the various aspects of South Korea and Seoul it was said to be lampooning: the hypocrisy of the nouveau riche, the superficiality of its social standards and the inequality exemplified by the opulent Gangnam neighborhood.Psy insists the song never intended to deliver any profound social commentary — he was just looking to give people a few minutes of mindless hilarity and a reprieve from reality.If anything, he said, he was poking fun at himself, because he doesn’t aesthetically fit the bill of a posh Gangnam local.A decade on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy has started a music label and talent management company. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“It’s funny because someone who doesn’t look like he’s ‘Gangnam style’ says he is,” he said.Initially targeted for development in the 1970s to expand Seoul south of the Han River, Gangnam has became a coveted address where many of the capital’s wealthy congregate and the best schools are concentrated, an educational disparity likely to ensure that the inequalities symbolized by the neighborhood continue into the next generation.In the years since Psy made Gangnam a globally recognized, if oft-mispronounced, proper noun (“Gang” sounds closest to the latter half of Hong Kong; “nam” like Vietnam), the neighborhood has gotten ever more unattainable for the average South Korean. Nowhere have runaway real estate prices risen as steeply as in the Gangnam area.“If you say you live in Gangnam, people look at you differently,” said Jin Hee-seon, a former vice mayor of Seoul and professor of urban planning at Yonsei University. “It’s an object of desire and envy.”Psy, raised in the greater Gangnam area in a family running a semiconductor business, now lives north of the river with his wife and twin daughters and says he spends little time thinking about the place.A bronze sculpture in Gangnam by the artist Hwang Man-seok, modeled after the signature “Gangnam Style” horse-riding hand motion.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat he has recently returned to is his signature live performances.His concerts are legendary in South Korea for raucous good fun. His music — loud and energetic — is often accompanied by dance moves just as outrageous, requiring him to jump, kick and wave his arms wildly in the air. During his six-city tour this year, his first since the pandemic, he said he was surprised to find his joints and limbs as nimble as ever in middle age.In his latest album released this April, his ninth, he collaborated with the rapper Suga of BTS on a single titled “That That.” In the music video, Suga comically duels — and kills — the blue tuxedo-wearing Psy of the 2012 video. (That video has accrued 369 million views.)As for the chase of global fame that once drove him nearly mad, he says he’s made his peace with its absence.“If another good song comes along and if that thing happens again, great. If not, so be it,” he said. “For now, I’ll do what I do in my rightful place.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Mood’ Is a Genre-Bending Show About Social Media and Sex Work

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      “Mood,” a BBC America series created by Nicôle Lecky, blends music, comedy and gritty realism to explore the opportunities and risks for young women online.LONDON — A few years ago, Nicôle Lecky was shown a website that attempted to expose the personal details of women on Instagram because of their involvement in sex work. Lecky’s reaction was “instinctive,” she said in a recent interview, adding that it was one of those things that, as a writer, “you just feel compelled to write about.”She briefly thought about the dramatic potential of looking at who built the site, Lecky said, but her mind quickly turned to the subjects of their disdain — the women themselves. “That’s whose story I really want to engage with,” she noted.In a flurry, Lecky, now 32, wrote the first draft of “Superhoe,” an 85-minute one-woman show that she performed at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2019. That story has made its way onscreen with “Mood,” a sleek six-episode series that premieres Sunday on BBC America.Lecky plays the 25-year-old Sasha, brokenhearted and struggling, both financially and psychologically. She is soon drawn into the orbit of Carly (Lara Peake), a seemingly archetypal influencer, clad in athleisure and flush with cash, before falling into the dopamine loop of social media and, ultimately, sex work — first through videos on DailyFans, the show’s version of OnlyFans, and eventually through escorting.Carly (Lara Peake), left, invites Sasha (Nicôle Lecky) into her apparently glamorous world.Natalie Seery/BBC StudiosThrough Sasha’s trajectory, Lecky — who, as well as writing and executive producing the show, also helped create music for it — explores the gray area between empowerment and exploitation. As part of the production process, she spoke to women about their experiences of sex work, which produced complex feelings in her, she said.“If you are financially secure, and you’re happy and healthy, and you want to go and be a sex worker, go for it,” Lecky said, before underlining that some of the women she had spoken to wanted a different life. “I talk a lot about choice and if you have the choice,” she added. “And if you don’t, I think you should be able to live in a world where you don’t have to make money solely from having sex.”F., a 29-year-old who works in the sex industry, was among those who spoke to Lecky. She requested to be identified only by her first initial to protect her privacy. In a phone interview, she said that she appreciated the show’s depiction of “elements of the good and bad” of the industry, while showing that sex work attracted a variety of people. “You’ve got some of the girls that are lawyers and have fantastic professions,” F. said. “Everyone does this.”“A lot of people don’t understand or don’t want to understand why girls do it,” she added.Sex work is a central tenet of the show, but so too is a study of how that industry intersects with race and class. Sasha is often fetishized — her alias is “Lexi Caramel,” the “Caramel” a racialized addition by Carly. While on a job, another Black escort warns Sasha that they have to play by different rules than their white counterparts, adding that Sasha needs to be careful not to end up “damaged or dead.”Again and again, Sasha is shown operating in a world that ends up hardening her. Lecky likens Sasha to “someone you might see at a bus stop screaming on the phone and you think, ‘Oh my God, they’re a handful,’ but you don’t know their story.”“Sasha, to me, was very much based on the girls I went to school with,” she added.Lecky in a London studio last month. As well as writing and executive producing “Mood,” she also helped create music for the show.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesLecky grew up in East London, the daughter of a mental-health nurse and an electrician who formerly worked as a D.J. She loved performing and attended weekend acting classes, she said, and that led to small acting roles and writing jobs as a teenager.She also enjoyed history and politics, she added, and had aspirations to work for the United Nations. She enrolled in a multidisciplinary course at King’s College London to study global conflict, but found it tough to balance her university obligations with her auditions. A producer then suggested that she go to drama school, something that she said she had not considered before. She left college and headed to the Mountview Academy of Theater Arts in London.After graduating, she took jobs as a restaurant hostess and, at one point, retrained in event management, all while continuing to cut her teeth in TV writers’ rooms, onscreen and with places on writer-training initiatives. Those experiences, she said, made her realize that she needed to keep writing, and “Superhoe” came out of that desire to create.Lisa Walters, a producer on “Mood,” recalled being sent “Superhoe” when she was working at Channel 4, one of Britain’s public broadcasters. “I’d read lots of scripts in my role, and it’s always really exciting when you pick one up and you just feel instantly drawn to it,” she said. “Nicôle does have a sort of unapologetic style in her writing where it’s very raw, very real, and it’s authentic.”“Mood,” so called because Sasha expresses her mood, or vibe, through song throughout the show, is also unusual in being a mix of drama, musical and comedy. In one moment, viewers are taken into the depths of gritty realism; in the next, glimpses of Sasha’s internal world emerge through songs and surreal transformations to the world around her, like a family home suddenly turning into a jazz lounge.Lecky has performed songs from the show on radio in Britain. The soundtrack is available to stream.Natalie Seery/BBC StudiosDespite this singular feel, the similarity between Lecky’s rise and that of other female British writers has drawn comparisons. When “Mood” premiered this year in Britain, the news media cited Michaela Coel and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also rose to prominence with buzzy one-woman plays, as reference points.Lecky, however, said that she tried to be “blinkered” and to stay focused on her own career. Coel and Waller-Bridge have been supportive, but “I just think everyone’s in their own lane,” she said.In attracting the BBC to adapt “Superhoe” for the screen, it helped that the play had already enjoyed success. As Fiona Campbell, a commissioner at the broadcaster, acknowledged: “We knew it was a very fresh, very well received” piece.Walters, the producer, said that the BBC had “wholeheartedly put their trust in Nicôle in order to realize her vision. They believed in what she had to say.” Walters added that it was “huge” for the broadcaster to allow a new talent to realize her vision exactly how she wanted it to be.Praise for Lecky’s drive is common among those she’s worked with. “Her work ethic is like none I’ve ever seen,” Walters noted. “She worked very, very hard and didn’t leave anything to chance.”“I talk a lot about choice and if you have the choice,” Lecky said. “And if you don’t, I think you should be able to live in a world where you don’t have to make money solely from having sex.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesLecky frames her ambition as one of contours rather than specifics. “I don’t know if I know exactly where I want to go, but maybe I know where I don’t want to go,” she said.In the spirit of Sasha, she added: “I kind of do think that if you grow up without very much, you get very used to being like, ‘Well, I’ll just do it.’ You kind of make things work.” More

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      in Music

      How Fred Again.. Turns Digital Bricolage Into Dance-Floor Weepers

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      The Brian Eno-mentored musician Fred Gibson is amassing a following with tracks built from social feeds and his iPhone. The intricate and emotional results can sometimes even start a party.On a recent Friday night in Manhattan, pandemonium surrounded a waffle truck parked on the corner of 56th Street and 11th Avenue, as thumping beats and the aroma of fresh batter poured from within. An enthusiastic young woman thrust an inflatable giraffe head festooned with a red glow stick through one of the truck’s windows, bopping it to the music. A security guard ripped it away.Inside the vehicle, holding court, stood a grinning Fred Gibson, the 29-year-old British songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist better known as Fred again.., who was following up a show at the Hell’s Kitchen venue Terminal 5 with an ad hoc after-party.“Chaotic,” he later happily proclaimed the impromptu event, where he previewed tracks from his third album, “Actual Life 3 (January 1 — September 9, 2022),” out Friday. “Just great.”“Actual Life 3” is the culmination of music that Gibson — a pop hitmaker for Ed Sheeran, BTS and the British grime star Stormzy — started releasing at the end of 2019, after his mentor Brian Eno urged him to forgo writing for others and prioritize his own work. The result is lush electronica-rooted piano balladry, wistful nu-disco anthems and the occasional U.K. garage firestarter, all threaded with samples culled from the far reaches of YouTube, Instagram and his iPhone camera roll — a sonic bricolage of digitally documented lives.A few days after the concert, Gibson — a smiley, ebullient, occasionally sheepish presence — rolled a cigarette on a West Village bar patio and recalled Eno needling him when he was experiencing a peak of commercial success but had a brewing fear of artistic complacency. He had met Eno at one of the artist’s occasionally star-studded a cappella gatherings as a teenager, and wowed him with his production talents, which led to Eno (“a wizened cliff-pusher,” as Gibson described him) bringing him on as a producer on some of his projects.“I know that Fred has sometimes referred to me as a mentor, but actually, it works both ways,” Eno said by phone. “What he’s doing is quite unfamiliar — I’ve actually never heard anything quite like this before. He always seems to be doing it in relation to a community of people around him — the bits of vocal and ambient sounds.”Eno was referring to the basic construction of a Fred again.. song. Many tracks start with Gibson using one of thousands of ambient drones Eno once gave him. From there, he’ll go into his digital scrapbook of found footage. While some samples employ familiar voices — the moaning rap of the Atlanta superstar Future, an Instagram Live freestyle of the rapper Kodak Black, vocals from a call with the Chicago house D.J. the Blessed Madonna — the vast majority are relatively obscure. They include a stadium worker Gibson joked around with after a Sheeran show, audio from a nightclub he recorded with his iPhone, spoken word poets and burgeoning bedroom pop singers he caught glimpses of while scrolling his various social media feeds.Brian Eno, Gibson’s mentor, described his music as “romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesGibson then cuts, distorts, pitch-shifts, stretches or compresses the samples into shimmering cinematic soundscapes, and sings atop them in his soft, pleading croon. Some are cavernous, others dense, but they all retain the deep warmth of something homespun — the ideal foundation for lyrics about feeling too much and not nearly enough that map thin fault lines demarcating love and loss. The result are tracks that leave listeners both laughing and weeping on the dance floor.Gibson estimated that he’s experimented with thousands of different ways to turn the speech of complete strangers into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. “But at the beginning it was very labored, quite tortured, if I’m honest,” he added. “It felt like I was distorting their spirit.”One track was crafted from footage of a young Toronto-based performance artist named Sabrina Benaim performing her piece “Explaining My Depression to My Mother,” which would go on to become the thumping dirge “Sabrina (I Am a Party).”The source material is a full-tilt confessional characterizing the vicissitudes of anxiety and depression — not exactly the kind of thing obviously complemented by beats from a successful pop producer. “I was anxious with everything I was putting onto these people,” Gibson said. “I felt like I was projecting onto them.”Speaking by phone from Toronto, Benaim remembered hearing the finished track for the first time, after Gibson reached out over Instagram. “It was the wildest thing,” she said and laughed. “It was like I left my body. He handled the emotional center of it so well — he just cared so much about not ruining or soiling the poem in any way. It’s coming from such a careful place.”Romy Croft — a singer-songwriter in the xx who tapped Gibson to produce her own debut solo single, “Lifetime” — worked with Gibson and Haai on “Lights Out,” a song released earlier this year, in nearly the same way. Croft had given Gibson an xx demo that never came to fruition; a year later, Gibson mentioned having done something with it.As she explained in a recent phone call, she was gobsmacked by the result, a dance track that mixes laser squelches, piano chords, a skittering beat and Croft’s wistful vocals. “He had just given it a new lease of life,” Croft said. To her, the record reflects a thematic link in his work: “A thread of emotion and vulnerability within it that ties it together, as well as a lot of joy.”Gibson continues to experiment with turning strangers’ speech into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. Peter Fisher for The New York TimesEno said he finds many of Gibson’s samples to be “tender and beautiful.” “To marry that with the kind of energetic chaos of the music he does is, I think, a beautiful combination,” he added. “It’s romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”The new album may be the apotheosis of this aesthetic. Gibson’s first two LPs, made during and immediately after the pandemic lockdown, concerned the illness of a close friend and its aftermath, and are often pensive affairs. “Actual Life 3” is an unfurling of sorts, a more cathartic, misty-eyed dance-floor moment. Its unlikely collaborators include Kieran Hebden, a.k.a. the electronic musician and producer Four Tet, known for the kind of dense, protean electronica compositions that rarely (if ever) abide anything close to a typical pop song’s structure.“He pulls me in a direction I wouldn’t normally be working in,” Hebden said on a recent FaceTime call. Gibson’s songs, he explained, are “great melodies and chord sequences, elegantly done. The work that has been done is considered. It doesn’t always sound ridiculously slick — there’s nothing very cynical about it. It’s quite direct, and honest; it just feels deeply refreshing, isn’t hidden away, and isn’t super mysterious.”“But,” Hebden paused, “the mystery of it is: How can anybody make it look so easy?” He laughed.At the waffle truck earlier this month, after playing the last in a series of then-unreleased songs to his increasingly hyped crowd, Gibson told Hebden — who was among his mischief-makers that night — to pick a final song. Hebden looked at him knowingly, and changed tracks. Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” blasted over the speakers. The crowd exploded into verse, and Gibson danced along, laughing. The musicians made their way out of the truck and back into the venue thronged by fans, another memory made in the night, soon to be posted for posterity — potentially, the start of another song. More

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      in Television

      TikToker Lands the Role of a Lifetime: Playing Dead on TV

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      Every day for nearly a year, Josh Nalley posted TikToks of himself playing dead in the hopes of being cast in a television series or movie. Then “CSI: Vegas” reached out.The Otter Creek Outdoor Recreation Area, near Louisville, Ky., is Josh Nalley’s favorite place to play dead.This time of year is especially “creepy,” he said. The shuttered campground’s derelict buildings and the fallen leaves scattered on the ground make for an ideal filming location.Over the past year, Mr. Nalley has posted a daily TikTok of himself playing dead in the hopes of being cast as a corpse in a television series or movie. He’s lain prone along the banks of rivers and streams near his home in Kentucky; had his three dogs lick his face as he propped himself up against a tree; slumped in a car; floated in pools; draped himself over doorways and splattered himself across sidewalks.Mr. Nalley always included a caption tallying the number of days “of playing un-alive until I’m cast in a move or TV show as an un-alive body.”By mid-July, and about 200 videos later, “CSI: Vegas” took note. On Nov. 3, Mr. Nalley, 42, will appear on an episode of the forensic crime drama on CBS. The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported Mr. Nalley’s big, dead-guy break.“I was just having fun on the internet,” Mr. Nalley said. He never expected his campaign to actually catch on. He said he developed the concept “out of boredom.”

      @living_dead_josh #CloseYourRings #foryoupage #fyp ♬ Ruff Ryders’ Anthem (Re-Recorded / Remastered) – DMX “I was spending a lot of time on TikTok and trying to figure out what I could do to get on TikTok and maybe get in a movie with as little effort as I thought would be possible,” he said.Jason Tracey, the showrunner for “CSI: Vegas,” said Mr. Nalley was the perfect person to play “body in the background of the morgue.”“Nobody has done a more thorough job of auditioning for a nonspeaking role, maybe in the history of television,” Mr. Tracey said. “After 321 pictures or so, he hit his stride and it was time to get called up to the big leagues.”Mr. Nalley is not a big crime genre fan. In fact, he doesn’t watch much television at all. But he was a fan of the original “CSI.”He lives in Elizabethtown, Ky., and works as a restaurant manager in the next town over. He usually films multiple videos on his days off at nearby parks, like Bernheim Forest and Saunders Springs, or in his backyard, and posts them throughout the week. Sometimes he’ll even record outside the restaurant where he works.“A desolate, empty parking lot is always a good place to dump a big body,” he said.More often than not he films the videos using his phone and a tripod, but every once in a while he engages the help of friends of family. Mr. Nalley’s method is simple: He takes a couple of big breaths and then holds his breath for about 25 seconds and tries to stay as still as possible. That can prove difficult when a rock is digging into his side on the ground.“You want to move but you’re like, ‘No, just hold it for a little big longer,’” he said he tells himself.If he’s playing dead sitting up, Mr. Nalley will usually have his eyes open so viewers can see his face. If he’s lying down, his eyes are typically closed because “half my face is usually pressed into the ground.”While Mr. Nalley’s intentions are comedic in nature, TikTok does not always agree. He uses the term “un-alive” instead of “dead” and has moved away from gory makeup like fake blood and bullet wounds to avoid running afoul of the platform’s content moderators. (He’s been placed on probation with TikTok several times, he said.) Even Mr. Nalley’s handle, living_dead_josh, was crafted with TikTok’s algorithms in mind.He tries to capture TikTok trends of the moment and adds music to lighten the mood, including Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and the “Peanuts” theme song for a Thanksgiving post. One of his favorite videos is from Christmas, when he usually gets together with friends for pizza and beer. Last year, they all played dead together.

      @living_dead_josh #fyp #foryoupage ♬ It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas – Michael Bublé “I love that one because they’re family to me, they were all in it.” Mr. Nalley said.More than 200 videos later, producers at CBS emailed him about a role on “CSI: Vegas.” He didn’t believe it at first, but after an exchange of several emails, the studio flew him to Los Angeles over the summer. Mr. Nalley announced his new gig on Sept. 15, in video No. 321, in a caption over footage of him splayed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next to the star of Marg Helgenberger, a longtime “CSI” actress.

      @living_dead_josh Tune in to the Season 2 premiere September 29th @csicbs #csivegas #cbs #dreamcometrue #goals #fyp #foryoupage ♬ Who Are You – The Who The job required him to sit through two hours of makeup to make it appear as if an autopsy had been completed on his character. Over the course of five hours of filming, Mr. Nalley’s instructions were simple and familiar: “Take a deep breath and look dead,” he recalled.Mr. Tracey, the “CSI” showrunner, said the show and the job of a crime scene investigator “can be unrelentingly grim,” and producers try to find “gallows humor in the profession and in the history of the franchise.”Mr. Nalley’s quiet presence “was a nice way to keep it light on set that day.”“We often have dummies down in the morgue,” Mr. Tracey said. “The cast was as surprised as anyone else to have a breathing corpse next to them.”But he did have some half-serious notes for the aspiring dead body.“Honestly I would have liked to see a little less breathing, but we can fix that in post,” Mr. Tracey said. He offered an insider tip: “Most people don’t know you’re not supposed to move your eyes at all. The trick is to find a spot and focus even though they’re closed.”Mr. Nalley said he wasn’t sure what would be next for his career — perhaps another television show or a movie, maybe even one with the filmmaker and actor Kevin Smith, he mused. “I always like his movies and I think we have the same sense of humor,” Mr. Nalley said. “That would be awesome, even just a cameo.”But for now, he’ll keep posting his daily TikToks for his about 120,000 followers.“I hope they laugh, honestly,” he said. “I hope they chuckle, and I hope that inspires somebody to be perseverant.” More