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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

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      in Television

      Leslie Jordan, ‘Will & Grace’ Actor and Instagram Star, Dies at 67

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      Shows like “Will & Grace” made him a familiar face, then the pandemic brought new fame. He was killed in a car crash in Hollywood.Leslie Jordan, a comic actor who after a late start in his performing career became a recognizable face from roles on numerous television shows, most notably “Will & Grace,” then achieved even more fame during the pandemic when his quirky homemade videos attracted millions of Instagram followers, died on Monday in a car crash in Hollywood, Calif. He was 67.David Shaul of the BRS/Gage Talent Agency, which represented him, confirmed the death. News reports quoting the police said Mr. Jordan’s car crashed into the side of a building after he had apparently experienced a medical emergency. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that someone driving a BMW collided with a wall in Hollywood at 9:30 a.m. and died, but he declined to identify the victim.“Not only was he a mega-talent and joy to work with,” Mr. Shaul said of Mr. Jordan by email, “but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times.”That was a reference to Mr. Jordan’s surprising foray into viral videos during the pandemic. Sitting out Covid-19 in Tennessee, near his family, he began posting vignettes on Instagram — simple, amusing moments from his life — and was surprised to find his number of followers balloon into the millions. He had accumulated more than 130 television and film credits, so he hadn’t been exactly undiscovered, but the Instagram stardom at age 65 was an unexpected treat.“I’ve loved attention, wanted it my whole career,” he told The New York Times in 2020, “and I’ve never gotten this kind of attention.”He also found that he had become a sort of de facto comforter to those fans.“What I love, though,” he said, “are people that pull me aside and say: ‘Listen, I don’t want to bother you, but I’ve had a rough go. I’ve been locked down. I’ve got kids, and I looked forward to your posts and you really, really helped me through this tough time.’ When people tell you things like that, you realize comedy is important.”Mr. Jordan in 2020. The popular home videos he made during the Covid-19 pandemic “provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times,” his agent said.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesComedy came easily to Mr. Jordan, though it took him a while to find his way to a performing career. At under five feet tall, he was small enough that in his 20s he made a stab at becoming a jockey. But in his later 20s he gave up that idea, earned a theater degree and in 1982 took a bus to Hollywood.It was a difficult period for a gay actor like Mr. Jordan to find work, but he began getting jobs, first in commercials.“I was like Flo,” he said in the 2020 interview, a reference to the Progressive Insurance pitchwoman. “People would recognize me. I was the PIP Printing guy. I was the elevator operator to Hamburger Hell for Taco Bell, where you went if you didn’t eat tacos.”He began to get TV roles in 1986 — guests spots on “The Fall Guy,” “Murphy Brown,” “Newhart” and others, then recurring roles on “The People Next Door,” “Top of the Heap,” “Reasonable Doubts,” “Hearts Afire” and more.He made a particular impression on the sitcom “Will & Grace,” about the friendship between a gay lawyer and a straight interior designer sharing a New York City apartment. Mr. Jordan played the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie, appearing both in the original series beginning in 2001 and in the recent reboot.In 2006, he won an Emmy for the role, for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series.Leslie Allen Jordan was born on April 29, 1955, in Memphis to Allen and Peggy Ann Jordan and was raised in Chattanooga, Tenn. His Southern drawl was as distinctive a part of his résumé as his height.Mr. Jordan said he knew from early in life that he was gay — he liked to say that he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels and had been “on the prance ever since.”The household was conservative, and his father, who was in the Army and died in a plane crash when Leslie was 11, was concerned enough about Leslie’s effeminate qualities to send his son to an all-boys summer camp one year. As Mr. Jordan told the story to The Times in 2020, at the camp’s parents day, awards were handed out, with the moms and dads looking on.“So here’s one for the best archer, here’s for the best horseback rider, here’s for the best swim person,” he said, “and I didn’t win anything. And my mother said my dad was just sinking lower and lower.”But the staff eventually brought out a trophy, presented it to Leslie, and someone announced: “This is for the best all-around camper. We have this kid who wasn’t actually the best at anything, but boy, he sure did make us laugh.”He loved horses but realized he wasn’t suited to be a jockey.“People think it’s size, or something,” he told The Telegraph of Britain in 2021. “It has nothing to do with that. You have to weigh about 104 pounds, and honey, my ass alone weighs 104.”When he decided to try showbiz, he said, “I had $1,200 that mother pinned into my underpants,” and he had to decide which direction to go from Tennessee, to New York or Hollywood.“If I was going to starve, I wanted to starve with a tan,” he said. He headed west.Mr. Jordan in 2010. In recent years he was much in demand, with recurring roles on several TV series.Richard Perry/The New York TimesAs he wrote in his book “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” (2008), he knew that being gay might not help his prospects in Hollywood.“I decided I was going to make a real effort to ‘butch it up’ and hide any signs that I was a Big Homo,” he wrote. “The funny thing is, I am, without a doubt, the gayest man I know.”Once he began landing roles, they came quickly, but Mr. Jordan also had substance abuse problems.“I tell people: If you want to get sober, try 27 days in the L.A. men’s county jail,” he told The Guardian in 2021. At 42, he kicked his addictions to alcohol and crystal meth.Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Most of Mr. Jordan’s work was in television, but he also took the occasional film role, including in “The Help” (2011). He also had a one-man stage show that he performed frequently, titled, like his first book, “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet.” It was an autobiographical collection of stories.“I am a high school cheerleader stuck in a 55-year-old man’s body,” he confessed in one memorable line. “If you were to cut me open, Hannah Montana would jump out.”David Rooney reviewed it for The Times when the show was presented in New York in 2010.“Many gay rites-of-passage stories are echoed here: hostile small-town environment (Chattanooga, Tenn.); rigidly masculine father; humor as armor against bullies; unrequited loves; drug and alcohol dependency; internal homophobia; weakness for rough trade,” Mr. Rooney wrote. “But Mr. Jordan’s candor gives them a fresh spin.”In recent years Mr. Jordan was much in demand, with recurring roles in the TV series “American Horror Story,” “Call Me Kat,” “The Cool Kids” and “Living the Dream.” In 2021 he published another book, “How Y’All Doing? Misadventures and Mischief From a Life Well Lived.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      A New Taylor Swift LP? Metacritic Crunches the Reviews, as Fans Watch.

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      As pop fandoms go to battle on social media wielding data about their favorite stars, Metascores averaging critical opinions have become ammunition, much to the site’s chagrin.For Metacritic, a website that collects and quantifies reviews of music, movies, TV shows and video games, a Taylor Swift album drop is one of the best days of the year.“There’s nothing quite like Taylor Swift,” Marc Doyle, 51, one of the site’s founders, said in an interview last week. “We get a great deal of traffic and user participation, a lot of people sharing it on social media.” In 2020, when Swift released “Folklore,” her eighth studio album, traffic swelled by “roughly a half million page views,” including user review pages, he said.Metacritic, as its name suggests, aggregates entertainment criticism using a principle of meta-analysis, stripping reviews of their qualitative assessments and assigning them a value between 0 and 100. And it has helped turn pop culture into a game of sabermetrics.Its tallies, known as Metascores, started off simply as a consumer guide. But over the past decade, as music superfans have gone to battle on social media wielding data — sales and streaming figures, Billboard chart positions, tour grosses, number of Grammys won — Metascores have increasingly become ammunition. Passionate fan armies keep careful track of the scoreboard, and one of the most fervent is devoted to Swift, who will release her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” on Friday.But who is behind Metacritic, and how does it tabulate its figures?In 1999, Jason Dietz, like Doyle, a graduate from the U.S.C. Gould School of Law, had the idea for a website that applied meta-analysis to a range of media, and asked Doyle to join his effort to build one. (The movie aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes went live that year, but Dietz was unaware of it.) Dietz, the site’s current features editor, had learned how to code HTML, creating websites including one called List of Possible Band Names.In late 1999, Doyle’s sister and her husband contributed the majority of Metacritic’s start-up fund. (Earlier this month, Metacritic and six other sites were acquired by Fandom, a developer of entertainment platforms dedicated to superfans, in a deal estimated at $50 million; Doyle declined to comment on the sale.) Together, they began poring over thousands of print and online reviews, compiling them into an Excel spreadsheet and organizing them according to their own schematics — what would soon become their trademark Metascores.Doyle said the group started making daily visits to publications that run reviews. “Every time they publish a review, you throw it in the system,” he said. “Once you get to four reviews, then you generate the Metascore, which is an average score.” For the games section, the site sends outlets a list of questions “so you can really get to know their scoring philosophy,” he added, a process it has only recently started “for potential movies section partners.”Metacritic went live in January 2001 with a film vertical and a rundown of how its staff calculated Metascores. For letter grades (used by publications like Entertainment Weekly), an A represents 100, while an F corresponds to zero. For reviews that aren’t assigned an alphanumeric value, the site’s staff — Metacritic currently has five full-time employees who work remotely from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and Portland, Ore. — will assess the tone of the review before assigning a value themselves.Metacritic’s page for Swift’s 2017 album “Reputation,” which divided critics. The website Consequence of Sound recently said it regretted its D+ rating. “We get comments all the time like, ‘This review seems so much better than a 3/10,’ so then I’ll take that comment to another editor, ask what they think, and we’ll give it a reread,” Doyle wrote over email. “Over the years, we’ve also been lobbied to either de-publish a review or drop a publication from our system for a variety of reasons. If it’s not a case of plagiarism or fraud (which usually is self-reported from a member publication), such appeals are generally unsuccessful.”Before they are averaged, the scores are weighted according to the critic’s perceived prestige and volume of reviews. “From the very beginning we’ve believed there are so many critics out there who are so incredible at what they do — why should they be treated exactly the same as a brand-new critic at a regional paper?” Doyle said.But Metacritic declined to explain more about which publications and critics are given priority status. “That’s really the secret sauce,” Doyle said. So, how do they avoid biases? “You just have to trust us,” he added. “We’re a professional outfit.” The site makes money from advertising, licensing Metascores and affiliate revenue.Metacritic’s music section began in March 2001 with a scoreboard of recent album releases. Pulling data from 30 publications — today, that number has expanded to 49 — on launch day, Aimee Mann’s “Bachelor No. 2” ranked highest with a Metascore of 90, while Juliana Hatfield’s “Pony: Total System Failure” landed lowest with a Metascore of 25. (The site has tracked reviews from 131 sites in its history.)For almost a decade, the section didn’t gain much online traction. Attention remained mostly fixed on the site’s games vertical, which has had the “greatest notoriety and impact,” Doyle explained; its metrics have affected game design, marketing strategies, even employee compensation.In an interview, the game designer Chris Avellone said that in 2010, Bethesda, the publisher of the game Fallout: New Vegas, “chose to include a clause in the contract that said if you deliver a title with a Metacritic score above 84, we’ll give you a bonus.” The game missed by one point.Metacritic began playing a larger role in music around the same time. In December 2009, after collating 7,000 reviews, the site released its first top artists of the decade list. Its No. 1 came as a surprise: Spoon, the indie-rock band.Before long, users began posting Metascores on Twitter as empirical proof that an artist had succeeded or failed. “Kanye got 93 on Metacritic, Taylor Swift got 75. Yeezy Forever!” one fan tweeted in 2010.“People used Metascores as an argument settler, a metric to put in each other’s faces,” Doyle said. “That really was not the intention of the site, and we hate to see it used as a sword or shield to go into battle with different pop fandoms.”Critics themselves got caught in the crossfire. In 2016, an anonymous Ariana Grande fan started a petition against Christopher R. Weingarten, a writer who had reviewed Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” for Rolling Stone. In June 2020, a Pitchfork editor was doxxed and threatened after writing what fans perceived as an unjust review of Swift’s “Folklore” that would lower its Metascore.“I’ve heard from critics whose inboxes have been slammed with complaints,” Doyle said, noting that low scores are often equated with bias. “Despite this, we certainly want to encourage critics to tell it like it is.”Swift, who has a particularly active online fan base, has been the spark for other Metacritic dust-ups. The music site Consequence of Sound announced last month that one of its biggest regrets was giving her 2017 album, “Reputation,” a D+ and “screwing up the Metacritic score.”The idea of scoring artists may seem unnecessary or make some critics uncomfortable — Rolling Stone recently abolished its star rankings — but there’s a strong appetite among listeners to have numbers at their fingertips. Perkins Miller, the chief executive of Fandom Inc., compared Metacritic to the N.F.L. — where he previously worked — and its Next Gen stats platform, noting, “There is a greater crossover between sports fans and music fans today.”Among very online pop fans, data capital is tied to social capital. “Metacritic is always brought up on Taylor Swift Twitter,” said PJ Medina, a 21-year-old fan from the Philippines. “If she gets a high score, it means that she’s critically acclaimed. It means that more people will care.” More

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      in Music

      The Young Women Who Make TikTok Weep

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod recorded a verse of an unfinished song called “Complex” and posted it to TikTok in August, she was tapping into the app’s penchant for confessional storytelling, and demonstrating its ease of distribution and repurposing.Overnight, the snippet propelled her into viral success, leading to a recording contract and placing her in a lineage of young women who have found success on the app via emotional catharsis — sad, mad or both. That includes Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” first gained traction there, and also Lauren Spencer-Smith, Sadie Jean, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, Gayle and many more.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the evolution of TikTok’s musical ambitions and the expansion of its emotional range, how the music business has tried to capitalize on the app’s intimacy, and the speed with which a bedroom-recording confessional can become a universal story line.Guest:Rachel Brodsky, who writes about pop music for StereogumConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      in Theater

      Why Did Instagram Pause This Play? Its Creators Still Don’t Know.

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      Marion Siéfert’s “_jeanne_dark_,” about a shy teenager beginning to express her sexuality, contains no nudity yet still ran afoul of Instagram’s opaque policies.PARIS — It was hailed as France’s first “Instagram play.” In Marion Siéfert’s “_jeanne_dark_,” a 16-year-old character, Jeanne, goes live on the app to tell the world about her private frustrations — and as she films herself with a smartphone onstage, Instagram users can watch, too, and weigh in.Yet in early 2021, a few months into the production’s run, Instagram started cutting off these live streams, citing “nudity or sexual acts.” Then the account tied to the play disappeared from the platform’s search results. For months, Siéfert and her team scrambled to understand why their work — which will have its New York premiere on Sept. 14, as part of the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival — was being repeatedly targeted.“People thought what we were doing was great, the future of creation,” Siéfert said in Paris earlier this month. “But for me, it’s been more like a nightmare.”Siéfert joins a long list of artists and activists who have locked horns with Instagram in recent years over its community guidelines, which ban content the company deems inappropriate. That includes nudity, and especially photos and videos showing women’s nipples (outside of breastfeeding and health-related issues, like a mastectomy), a policy that has prompted an online campaign, “Free the Nipple.”But “_jeanne_dark_” doesn’t fall into this category: Siéfert, who was aware of the policy, steered clear of nudity from the start. When the automated interruptions started, the artistic team filed appeals through Instagram’s in-app system, yet received no response or clarification. They said their attempts to contact employees of Instagram also went nowhere.Only after a series of mock performances on a private account did Siéfert pinpoint the gesture that apparently triggered Instagram’s detection algorithm. At that point, Helena de Laurens, 33, who plays Jeanne, cupped her covered breasts from the sides and moved them up and down.The scene, which Siéfert cut in the spring of 2021, may have fallen foul of Instagram and Facebook’s infamous policy on “breast squeezing,” which was clarified in 2020 to state that hugging, cupping or holding breasts is allowed, but not squeezing in a grabbing motion, because of a surmised association with pornography. (According to Instagram, no such issue was identified with the account _jeanne_dark_. A spokeswoman declined to answer further questions about the company’s moderation policies.)Helena de Laurens, who plays Jeanne. “I had found something that was very funny, I was quite proud of it,” she said of the play.Matthieu BareyreAccording to research conducted by Dr. Carolina Are, a fellow at Northumbria University’s Center for Digital Citizens in Britain, very few appeals to Instagram trigger a response from a human moderator. “It’s an incredibly murky system,” she said in a recent video interview.She traces the increase in heavy-handed moderation on Instagram and Facebook (both owned by Meta) to two bills that passed in 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. Their stated purpose — to hold tech companies accountable for sex-trafficking schemes on their platforms — has led, she said, to bans on a wide range of material Instagram’s algorithm classifies as risqué, not just in the U.S. but around the world. (It has regularly flagged Dr. Are’s own videos, too, since she is also a pole dance instructor.)“Facebook in particular censored female bodies before, but nothing on this scale,” she said. “It creates a chilling effect on expression.”The gesture at issue in Siéfert’s play came with a narrative context. Jeanne, initially a shy teenager who is bullied at school and feels stifled by her Roman Catholic family — her Instagram handle (_jeanne_dark_) is a pun on the French styling of Joan of Arc — has grown emboldened, and begins a pastiche of sexualized music videos.“I had found something that was very funny, I was quite proud of it,” de Laurens said recently in Paris. “There was something a little grotesque and excessive about it. She parodies people, but she also wants to be like them.”Performing “_jeanne_dark_,” de Laurens said, has proved stressful for other reasons, too. Since she is constantly focused on her character’s smartphone, she sees many of the live — and unscripted — Instagram comments. (The stream is also relayed on screens on both sides of the stage, for the theater audience.) While many comments have been funny, and the production team is quick to ban trolls, some have crossed lines and targeted her body.“I don’t want to think about a comment that says I have terrible teeth while I’m onstage,” de Laurens said. “It takes you out of the performance, and it grates.”This Instagram play wasn’t Siéfert’s first artistic brush with social media. The 35-year-old director, whose own sheltered, Catholic upbringing in the French city of Orléans inspired the character of Jeanne, mined Facebook for information about her audience in her first professional production, “2 or 3 Things I Know About You,” from 2016.Once people responded on Facebook that they were attending the show, Siéfert would study their public profiles to create a script based on them. Onstage, she’d comment on screenshots as her character, a naïve alien looking to make human friends. “I would find out about their holidays, but also intimate things, like a bereavement,” Siéfert said. Some people laughed; others were moved or shocked to see themselves through that lens. “Sometimes the information was very beautiful, but at the same time, it was a lot of power.”“People thought what we were doing was great, the future of creation,” Siéfert said of the play. “But for me, it’s been more like a nightmare.”Julien Mignot for The New York TimesSiéfert’s experimental approach to audience interaction was shaped, she said, by the years she spent in Germany — first as an exchange student in Berlin, where she discovered the local performance scene, and later at Giessen’s Institute for Applied Theatre Studies. With “_jeanne_dark_,” she was “interested in bringing theater to a place that isn’t really made for it, that is part of the fabric of people’s daily lives. What we didn’t know was: Are there actually people who will want to watch us on Instagram?”There were — not least because “_jeanne_dark_” had its premiere in the fall of 2020, between the first two waves of the Covid-19 pandemic in France, as the entire theater industry wondered how to effectively harness digital formats. Between 200 and 600 viewers tuned in for the live streams throughout that first season, and the play was honored with a special “digital award” by France’s Critics’ Union in 2021.Yet as the production met with acclaim, new issues kept arising behind the scenes with Instagram, even after the breast-cupping gesture was removed. According to screenshots provided by Siéfert, “_jeanne_dark_” was cut off a total of four times throughout 2021, twice with two-week bans on further live streams, forcing the team to resort to an alternative account. Ironically, Siéfert said, the theater audience often thought the ban notification was “part of the show.”In addition to “nudity or sexual acts,” the final ban, in November 2021, cited “violence and incitation.”“The rules change constantly, you never know where you stand,” Siéfert said. She alleges that starting in May 2021, the account was also “shadow banned” for weeks — meaning that it became nearly impossible to find through the app’s search engine, and existing followers no longer received live notifications. (According to Instagram, the account _jeanne_dark_ wasn’t flagged in a manner that might have led to such issues.)While Siéfert’s next play, “Daddy,” set to premiere at the Odéon playhouse in Paris in 2023, will delve into another virtual world — a video game — it will involve no screens or live digital element. Her experience with Instagram, which she describes as a “hostile space” for artists, has been enough.“It has often been sold as the app for creativity, but it’s just publicity,” she said. “When you actually put a work of art on Instagram, this is what happens.” More

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      in Music

      Katie Gregson-MacLeod Sang About a ‘Complex’ Love. TikTok Responded.

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      The 21-year-old Scottish folk singer-songwriter found a sudden hit by tapping into the platform’s appetite for melancholy with a striking, sorrowful chorus.If TikTok has made you cry sometime this month, it’s likely thanks to Katie Gregson-MacLeod.On Aug. 4, the 21-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter posted a minute-long chorus to an unreleased song she’d written called “Complex” — an elegiac capturing of the hollow, zombielike experience of loving someone far more than they can, or will, love you back. Her voice is lovely and affecting, somewhere between wistful and determined as she sings about a relationship that’s ongoing, but already over:I’m wearing his boxersI’m being a good wifeWe won’t be togetherBut maybe the next lifeGregson-MacLeod had just written the song, and had no plans to release it. But by the following morning, TikTok had supersized it, finding the eyes and ears of several young female singer-songwriters who have been successful on the app, including Gracie Abrams, Lennon Stella and Maisie Peters.Suddenly, Gregson-MacLeod was a meme, embodying the app’s potential as an amplifier of melancholy. In just a couple of days, “Complex” became a trigger for what felt like a global group hug.“When the chorus did so well, I swore to myself, I am not changing one word of the rest of the song,” Gregson-MacLeod said of the full version of the song released to streaming services.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesTikTok is well-suited to this particular stripe of intimacy, because “people seem to love hearing going as in-depth of someone’s life as they can,” Gregson-MacLeod said last week in a video chat from her family’s home in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. “It’s a very online thing, but it’s also the same essence of what people love about people like Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell. There are so many serious songwriters on there, but the ones that I’ve noticed doing really well are super raw, emotional and very stripped back.”Vulnerability is contagious, and TikTok, which allows users to both imbibe and amplify at the same time, is an optimal accelerant. The success of “Complex” reflects the evolving priorities of TikTok, which in its first couple of years was best known as an accelerant for dance trends, novelty songs and meme-able comedy, but is now just as often a home for sorrow. The shift reflects a partial maturation of the medium somewhere beyond pure escape.With her song gaining so much traction so quickly — the original post currently has 6.9 million views — Gregson-MacLeod did what any savvy young musician would do: She TikToked through it, posting duets with singers covering her, answering fan questions, making new memes, taking note of the interest from people she looked up to (“fletcher and olivia o’brien now know I have an anxious attachment style I was tryna play hard to get”). On Friday, Gregson-MacLeod formally released the full song — now titled “Complex (Demo)” — to streaming platforms, a few days after she signed a deal with the British arm of Columbia Records.The full song is, apart from one small tweak, identical to what she’d already written before her TikTok eruption. “When the chorus did so well, I swore to myself, I am not changing one word of the rest of the song,” she said. “It worked because it was just a moment, and it was a moment that was very real and raw. And then I was kind of like, if I changed too much or anything, then I’m going to be writing reactively and I’m going to be trying to think of what other people are going to want. And actually, it worked because it’s just what happened to me.”She didn’t elaborate on the specific scenario that prompted the song, but said, “For the most part, I write completely autobiographically, pretty much 100 percent.” She continued, “With this song, it was very much just like a very emotional moment, as you can probably tell. Literally just a moment where it all kind of poured out.”Until now, Gregson-MacLeod has been splitting her time between home and college, where she is studying history at the University of Edinburgh. She’s been releasing music on her own for a couple of years, including a frisky indie-pop EP last year, “Games I Play,” and a recent song, “Second Single Bed,” that’s almost as emotionally laserlike as “Complex.” In the last year, she’s found a welcoming home in the Edinburgh folk music scene that congregates around Captains Bar. She is a student of classic folk singers like Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and also younger ones like Laura Marling, Lucy Dacus and, naturally, Phoebe Bridgers: “She’s a bit of a god.”Gregson-MacLeod began posting to TikTok in 2020, a few months into the pandemic. She has a natural way with humor in her posts — part sincere, part can-you-believe-we’re-all-doing-this. Before “Complex” took off, she was a barista at Perk Coffee & Doughnuts (“Inverness’s first doughnut shop,” she noted), and handled the shop’s social media posts. Perk was also where all the A&R representatives who traveled to Inverness to meet her this month ended up hanging out at different tables.“Complex” has allowed Gregson-MacLeod to take her place in an impressive lineage of female singer-songwriters who have used TikTok as an engine over the last two years: Lauren Spencer-Smith (“Fingers Crossed”), Sadie Jean (“WYD Now?”), Lizzy McAlpine (“You Ruined the 1975”), Jensen McRae, poppier singers like Gayle and Tate McRae. (The McRaes are not related.) And of course, the alpha of this phenomenon: Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” began life as an acoustic snippet on TikTok before becoming the defining pop song of 2021.Gregson-MacLeod began posting to TikTok in 2020, a few months into the pandemic, and had been studying at college and working in a coffee shop when her song took off.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesOne of the particular quirks of putting vulnerable sentiment into a song is that, if it becomes popular, it no longer truly belongs to you. To have that happen so quickly with “Complex” has been lightly head spinning for Gregson-MacLeod, who is still getting acclimated to the way her song is being absorbed out in the wild.Mostly, she finds it humorous. When someone covers it with a slightly different sentiment in their caption, “I always comment ‘me for real,’” she said. Some people are using her melody and adding different lyrics. “The trend is now to rewrite it, which is, like, mildly insulting,” she said, laughing. “It’s like mainly lovely but you’re like, ‘Hey guys, can the trend be to appreciate what I wrote?’” She participated in a TikTok duet chain with Gayle and Catie Turner, shouting absurdist ad-libs over her tender tune.There have also been a few versions written from a male point of view. “Whenever I hear ‘She’s wearing my boxers,’ I’m like, ‘No,’” she joked. “Read the room, man.”Gregson-MacLeod put “(Demo)” in the title of the finished song because she wanted to be clear that this is just a way station. “I knew that this version had to be first, it had to be the raw emotional moment that it was in the video,” she said. “But it also leaves room for whatever I want to do in a few weeks, a few months or whatever, because I think it’s going to have a long life.” The sentiment belongs to everybody, but the song remains hers. More