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      What to Watch This Weekend: Something Hot

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      Our TV critic recommends a wild and wide-ranging documentary series about the world of hot pepper enthusiasts.Johnny Scoville, a YouTube star and central figure in the documentary series “Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People.”HuluDocumentaries about niche subcultures abound: dog dancing, science fairs, yo-yos. Few if any include as much on-screen vomiting as the Hulu series “Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People,” but then, few cover quite as much ground.“Pepper” follows the overlapping pursuits of a handful of pepper enthusiasts, whose interests lie in the hottest of the hots, peppers that induce sweating, crying and retching within minutes. Some of the featured subjects are more into the horticultural side, while others are more into online public masochism. Many acknowledge the overlap between drug use and pepper-eating, that the thrill of spiciness has replaced more dangerous and illicit substances in their lives, that once they found peppers, capsaicin became their drug of choice.The try-hard glibness of a lot of the narration (voiced by Ben Schwartz) undercuts the show’s more intriguing ideas, as if “Pepper” didn’t always know what it has. This is, deeply, a show about social media, about being famous to 15 people, about the rush and reality of online connections. It is also about the ways in which consuming too much internet narrows your vision and imagination, until you forget that posting is not the same thing as existing. It’s a big world out there, filled almost entirely with people who have never heard of any of your heroes and never will.Much like the featured growers who combine strains to cultivate extreme heat, “Pepper” combines documentary and reality formats to keep its 10 episodes moving. Early on, the show’s most endearing heroine, a Chicago nurse, “comes out” to her co-worker pals about her pepper and hot sauce hobby. It’s a scene straight out of “Queer Eye” or any number of real estate shows, an awkward party where a teary sweetheart receives support. Another episode is knockoff “Top Chef,” with people vying for a chance to develop a hot sauce for a food chain. (I’m genuinely surprised this was not developed as its own stand-alone show.)The segments about competitive pepper-eating mirror every sport documentary, with sage champions eventually compensating for their relentlessness by turning to Buddhist philosophy to help with “managing desire.” When some growers become extra suspicious about thievery and back-stabbing, “Pepper” apes Netflix’s true crime aesthetics.“Pepper” opts for breadth instead of depth, and what it lacks in insight it makes up for in volume of people calling each other “brother.” This is a series with experts who joke about putting toilet paper in the freezer, so maybe it isn’t reasonable to expect some mention that humans have been fascinated by altered states and ritualized body mortification throughout history. Fair enough. There’s still more than enough heat here for a fun, edifying ride. (Again, though: lots and lots of throwing up.) More

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      in Movies

      Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the Big Shift in True Crime

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      Not long ago, true crime storytellers had little in the way of first-person footage captured in real time to rely on. Now, as much of our daily lives are documented, the genre is transforming.There’s a moment near the end of the 2017 documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” where Gypsy Rose Blanchard is filming her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, as he lies nude in a hotel room bed. A day earlier, Godejohn had stabbed to death Gypsy’s mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. The killing was part of a plot the couple hatched to free Gypsy, who was then 23, from her mother’s grip so they could be together. In the short video, we hear Gypsy make a playful sexual comment amid her copious, distinctive giggling.Dee Dee Blanchard had abused and controlled her daughter, mentally and physically, for decades. It was believed by many to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of child abuse in which a caregiver might induce illness to draw public sympathy, care, concern and material gifts — and the saga captured the collective interest.The snippet is the first time we see it unfolding through Gypsy’s eyes, and the point of view serves as a glimmer of what would become one of the biggest shifts in true crime storytelling.Stories like these were once conveyed through re-enactments, dramatizations and interviews with police officers, journalists, medical professionals, family and friends. If there were primary sources, those were typically scans of photos of happy families or of grisly crime scenes underpinned by voice-over narration, exemplified on shows like “20/20,” “Dateline,” “Snapped,” “Forensic Files” and “48 hours.” Home video cameras, which became popular in the 1980s, certainly changed the true crime landscape, but those recordings were generally sparse and supplemental. In rare instances, viewers might hear directly from the perpetrators or victims in interviews often conducted years after the fact.Dee Dee Blanchard, right, with her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who endured decades of physical and mental abuse by her mother. via The Blanchard Family/LifetimeNow we have reams of first-person digital footage, which means that viewers, more than ever, are privy to the perspectives of those directly involved, often during the period in which the crimes took place, closing the distance and making the intermediaries less essential. The case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard encapsulates the trajectory of this phenomenon. Her saga, for example, received the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a 2019 limited series on Hulu, for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. But those looking for a definitive, unvarnished, visceral take on the events now have options and direct channels, rendering that series as almost an afterthought.The rise of social media has, of course, accelerated this dynamic. Blanchard and Godejohn’s relationship was almost exclusively online before the murder, and Facebook posts and text messages between them were used in court by prosecutors to incriminate them. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison; Gypsy received 10 years, of which she served about seven.She was released on Dec. 28, 2023, and the following day she posted a selfie to Instagram with the caption “First selfie of freedom,” which has gotten more than 6.5 million likes. Online, she’s been promoting her new Lifetime series, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” “This docuseries chronicles my quest to expose the hidden parts of my life that have never been revealed until now,” we hear her say from prison.Blanchard and her husband married in 2022 while she was still in prison. via Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ryan AndersonShe has quickly become a social media celebrity, with more than eight million Instagram followers and nearly 10 million on TikTok. Since her release, she has shared lighthearted videos like one with her husband, Ryan Anderson (they married in 2022 while she was in prison), at “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway and more serious ones, like a video in which she explains Munchausen syndrome by proxy.Technology’s influence on modern criminal investigations has become foundational in many documentaries from recent years.In the two-part HBO documentary “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter” (2019), the story is largely told through the thousands of text messages exchanged between two teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014. The text messages led up to the exact moment of Roy’s suicide. Selfie videos that Roy had posted online are also shown. Carter spent about a year in prison for her role in his death. The documentary (by Erin Lee Carr, who also directed “Mommy Dead and Dearest”) left me “spinning in circles, turning over thoughts about accountability, coercion and the nebulous boundaries of technology,” as I wrote last year.One of the highest profile murder trials in the United States in recent years — that of the disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who shot and killed his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021 — ultimately rested on a staggering recording captured moments before the murders. That video, on Paul’s phone, placed the patriarch at the scene of the crime, sealing his fate: two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.Alex Murdaugh, center, as seen in the Netflix docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.” His murder trial was among the most talked about in recent years.NetflixThe use of that footage, along with abundant smartphone video that brought viewers into the world of the Murdaughs, in documentaries like Netflix’s two-season “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal,” would have been unimaginable not long ago.But perhaps no recent offering illustrates this shift like HBO’s docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.” Members of the group Love Has Won live-streamed their days and nights; they filmed and posted untold hours of preachments and online manifestoes to YouTube and Instagram Live. Much of the three-episode series comprises this footage, and in turn viewers watch Amy Carlson, who called herself “Mother God,” slowly deteriorate over the course of months from the perspective of the people who were worshiping her.It’s a vantage point so unnerving and haunting, it dissolves the line between storytelling and voyeurism. When the group films her corpse, which they cart across numerous state lines, camping with it along the way, we see all that, too, through the eyes of the devotees. Several of the followers continue to promote her teachings online.Amy Carlson, center, who led a group called Love Has Won, as seen in the HBO docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.”HBOIt was clear this month in the comments on Blanchard’s Instagram that many were uncomfortable with her re-emerging as a social media presence. Some found it odd that she would participate so heavily and publicly immediately after her release. Others thought it was in bad taste for her to celebrate her freedom while Godejohn serves a life sentence.The greatest criticism of the true crime genre is that horrors are being repackaged as guilty-pleasure entertainment, allowing viewers to get close — but not too close — to terrible things. And perhaps the best defense of true crime is that it allows viewers to process the scary underbelly of our world safely. It is a strange dance between knowledge, observation and entertainment.Either way, the fourth wall is cracking, and perhaps the discomfort this might cause has been a long time coming. More

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      in Music

      That Spotify Daylist That Really ‘Gets’ You? It Was Written by A.I.

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      The music-streaming platform’s new “daylist” feature serves users three personalized playlists a day, with titles ranging from quirky to bewildering.Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”?Those odd strings of words are titles of “daylists,” a newish offering from the music-streaming giant Spotify. The feature provides users three new algorithmically generated playlists a day, each with an ultra-specific title that practically begs to be screencapped and posted.The often baffling titles have recently captured the attention of social media, propelling the service to fresh popularity about four months after its September debut. In post after post, users seem amused by the feature’s ability to see right through them.“Spotify called me out a little bit with this daylist,” one X user wrote of her own playlist. Its title: “Midwest Emo Flannel Tuesday Early Morning.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Female Rappers in the Spotlight Make Room for Motherhood

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      As their influence and success continue to grow, artists including Sexyy Red and Cardi B are destigmatizing motherhood for hip-hop performers.When the rapper Sexyy Red realized she was pregnant with her second child this summer, just after her singles “Pound Town” and “SkeeYee” broke through on the charts and dominated TikTok, her excitement was met with hesitancy by some members of her team.She said some people in her camp were supportive. Others advised her to have an abortion, counsel she rejected. “I’m not never going to let nobody tell me what to do with my body,” she said during a video call in December.Sexyy, born Janae Wherry, publicly announced her pregnancy via an Instagram post on the heels of the release of “Rich Baby Daddy,” a hit collaboration with Drake and SZA. Now in her final trimester, she often performs in belly-hugging unitards as she twerks and raps her hits, taking her 3-year-old son, Chuckyy, on the road with help from her mother.Women in music, and particularly in the male-dominated battle zone of hip-hop, have long been advised to terminate pregnancies, or at least to recede from the spotlight until their babies were delivered, told that showcasing pregnancy and motherhood would make them seem weak, unappealing or unfocused on their highly competitive careers. Male-led rap crews and record labels have traditionally put their might behind one female M.C. at a time, creating pressure for women to not cede their moment for anything, including starting a family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      Marie Irvine, Makeup Artist to Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 99

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      Late in Ms. Monroe’s life, Ms. Irvine was her go-to makeup artist in New York City. Earlier this month, she became a TikTok sensation.Marie Irvine was 99 years old when a chapter in her long-ago career became a TikTok sensation. During a crucial period late in Marilyn Monroe’s life, Ms. Irvine had been her makeup artist in New York City. When a TikTok star learned her story, it blew up the internet.In 1958, Life magazine commissioned Richard Avedon to reimagine Ms. Monroe as the screen and stage sirens Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Theda Bara, Jean Harlow and Lillian Russell. It was Ms. Irvine who assisted with her makeup — turning her into Ms. Russell’s candy-box pinup, and Ms. Dietrich’s steamy Lola Lola from the film “The Blue Angel.”It ran in the Dec. 22 issue of the magazine, with a piece written by Ms. Monroe’s husband at the time, the playwright Arthur Miller, with the headline, “My Wife Marilyn.” He described the photos “as a kind of history of our mass fantasy, so far as seductresses are concerned.”And when Ms. Monroe, having been sewn into her skintight sequined gown, sang a breathless “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at a Democratic fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden in May of 1962, it was Ms. Irvine who prepared her beforehand in Ms. Monroe’s apartment on East 57th Street, and then rushed to the Garden later with the star’s drop earrings, because she had left them behind.Erin Parsons, a 45-year-old makeup artist and TikTok star with a passion for vintage makeup and Ms. Monroe, had read of Ms. Irvine’s small part in these iconic moments, and she tracked her down to learn more. And when she posted about her search on Jan. 8, her video went viral.More than a million people have viewed it, and it has accrued more than 1,600 comments. One woman was particularly moved by the $125 fee Ms. Irvine had charged for her services on the night of the Garden event, the equivalent of more than $1,200 today. (Ms. Parsons had a photo of the bill, an artifact which sold at auction for $1,152, and showed it in her video.)“We stan a queen that knows what her skills were worth!” the commenter wrote. “I bow down.”Ms. Irvine circa 1967. She helped transform Marilyn Monroe into stars like Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow for Richard Avedon’s famous Life magazine shoot in 1958.Courtesy Horan family, via Charlotte BentleyMs. Irvine died a week after Ms. Parsons’ post, on Jan. 15, at a care facility in Sarasota, Fla. Her daughter, Jane Bentley Sullivan, announced her death.Ms. Irvine was not the architect of Ms. Monroe’s signature look. Her sleepy, bedroom gaze, articulated by the swoop of her liquid eyeliner; her bright red moue; and that beauty mark were the star’s own creations, conceived with her longtime West Coast-based makeup artist, Whitey Snyder. Her fans and fetishists, from Norman Mailer to Ms. Parsons’ audience, knew that she used a secret blend of three shades of lipstick and a gloss made with Vaseline. Mr. Mailer spends a page describing it in his 1973 biography, “Marilyn.”Ms. Irvine met Ms. Monroe because she was an on-call makeup artist to Mr. Avedon in the 1950s, and he hired Ms. Irvine to help with the Life magazine project. It took three months to complete, largely because of Ms. Monroe’s erratic schedule.“We could shoot it only when Marilyn felt like it,” Ms. Irvine told an interviewer in 2014. “Sometimes it was in the middle of the night with a short notice. One time it was such a short notice, that I couldn’t find a babysitter so Marilyn said, ‘Bring your baby to the set.’”(That was Ms. Sullivan, who was 9 months old at the time.)“So it was like a family atmosphere,” Ms. Irvine added. “She told me how much she wanted a baby.”Ms. Irvine was self-effacing and discreet. Her earliest clients were society figures, like Thelma Foy, the daughter of Walter Chrysler, the automobile magnate, a swan who often appeared in Vogue and on an annual list of the 10 best-dressed women in the United States. When Ms. Foy became ill with leukemia, Ms. Irvine’s role shifted from preparing her for photo shoots to helping her hide the ravages of cancer. Ms. Foy died of the disease in 1957, in her early 50s.Marie Irvine was born on Dec. 16, 1924, in Pawling, N.Y., in Dutchess County, the only child of William and Theresa (Brendlin) Irvine. She attended a one-room schoolhouse through grade school. She moved to New York City in her late teens and trained to be a secretary at the Katharine Gibbs School — otherwise known as Katie Gibbs to generations of white-gloved young women — but found the prospect of secretarial work too boring.She found a job at Elizabeth Arden, at the flagship salon with the distinctive red door at 691 Fifth Avenue that served the ladies of the carriage trade, where she became a beauty adviser and color specialist for the company.Toward the end of World War II, Ms. Irvine met a naval officer at Delmonico’s restaurant when he was on leave; they married in 1947. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Sullivan, Ms. Irvine is survived by a son, who requested anonymity for himself and his father, whose name he shares, and two grandchildren. Ms. Irvine’s husband died in 1994.When her daughter was born in 1957, Ms. Irvine left Elizabeth Arden and became a freelance makeup artist, working for photographers like Mr. Avedon, Irving Penn, John Rawlings and Harold Krieger. She did commercial work, too, notably coating the actors who played the Jolly Green Giant, the mascot created to sell canned vegetables, in layers of green greasepaint.In the late ’60s, Ms. Irvine and her family moved from Queens to Essex County, N.J. Her husband, general counsel for a security firm, did not want his wife to continue working, so she retired — and learned to drive at 44.Once she left the fashion world behind, she rarely spoke of it.Ms. Parsons, the TikTok star, had many questions for Ms. Irvine that she was unable to answer before her death. She hoped the former makeup artist could illuminate the histories of the sort of esoterica that transfix Monroe obsessives: For instance, did Robert Champion, a hairdresser who was at the Garden when Ms. Monroe sang, really touch up her makeup and blot her lips with a tissue (an artifact that belongs to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum in Orlando, Fla.)? Did Ms. Irvine recognize a gold lipstick tube that once belonged to Ms. Monroe that Ms. Parsons had won at auction for $15,625?Ms. Irvine was pleased she’d had her own moment of fame, though she wished, as she told her daughter, that the attention came when she had more energy to pursue it.“I told her that the important thing was that it had happened at all,” Ms. Sullivan said. “She was an original and one of a kind laboring in obscurity to create many beautiful images with the pioneering photographers of the 20th century. After all, how many 99-year-olds who attended one-room schoolhouses go on to be TikTok stars?” More

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      in Television

      Hickory Dickory Dock. It’s Andrew Dice Clay on TikTok.

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      In his feed on the app, the stand-up offers to help bewildered passers-by or pose for a photo. It’s an approach to fame and persona that puts his comedy in a new light.The first shot is a crooked view of a sparse Christmas tree on a narrow median in Manhattan traffic. The second is a confused man walking his dog. Then the camera swivels to show us none other than Andrew Dice Clay, tentatively muttering in a “Guys and Dolls” accent, “You wanted a picture in front of the tree with me?”The man with the dog doesn’t recognize him, his glance shifting from discomfort to pity. “I’ll take a picture of you,” he says condescendingly. Then we return to Clay stammering: “I thought you wanted one? No?”This 14-second-long video is a disarming slice of life, a minor comic humiliation staged with impromptu precision. It’s part of an oddly delightful project undertaken by Clay, the notorious comedian, now in his 60s. He still performs blustery leather-jacketed stand-up (he plays Carnegie Hall on Feb. 15), but he’s portrayed in a very different light in his social media posts: a self-deprecating series of vignettes that clash with his image while also bringing him back to his forgotten roots.

      @andrewdiceclay What Just Happened. #andrewdiceclay #comedian #comedy #newyork #christmas #tree ♬ original sound – Andrew Dice Clay We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Music

      Is ‘J Christ’ Lil Nas X’s Final Troll?

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      The rapper and singer has always been a master of the internet, not of music. But with his latest release, “J Christ,” he’s lost his grip on virality, too.More than any working pop star, Lil Nas X understands how music is consumed in the contemporary landscape: in pieces, in memes, in reaction videos, in snippets of audio used to soundtrack get-ready-with-me clips on social media. In intimations and nudges. In discourse that may or may not have much to do with said music at all.And so for Lil Nas X, a song is a pretense. He is less a rapper or a singer than a meme maker with a seven-figure budget. Music is the fourth or fifth most important part of his presentation, the foundation for missives on X (formerly Twitter), TikToks and Instagram posts that matter as much, and probably more.Or, as the hook of his new single “J Christ” muses: “Is he ’bout to give ’em something viral?”That would be the goal, of course, but the best viral content bubbles up unpolished from the ether, slightly awkward and just novel enough to astound. That’s what Lil Nas X made his name with. It is the story of “Old Town Road,” his breakout song, which went from TikTok curiosity to bar mitzvah anthem in just a few months in early 2019.The vexatious “J Christ” tries to reverse engineer that kind of success. It is planned virality, mood-boarded and line-itemed. First, it is a concept — Lil Nas X is returning — and only then, a visual narrative and a song to animate it. The result is stylish but not artistic, glossy but without shine, hyperstylized but lazy. Being the most clever pop star is much easier than being the most clever online comedian, and his tropes are wearing thin.In the video, which vividly and sometimes beautifully riffs on cheap shock, he is a Christ-ish figure — another comeback king! — dancing his way through various fields of evil in a lumpy sequel to a beloved original: “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” Lil Nas X’s comically baroque single and video from 2021. In that playful and bizarre clip, he theatrically tussles with the temptations of new fame, culminating in giving a lap dance to Satan. It was refreshing, winking bacchanal — a whole idea.“J Christ,” to the extent that it functions at all, works in bits. The video is merely a string of micro-shock vignettes, many of them a callback to his greatest hits (of two years ago): the Satan Shoes containing a drop of blood, the stripper pole to hell from the “Montero” video. He remakes the “Jesus crossing up Satan on a basketball court” meme. He ushers a flock of animals to a big boat. (That was Noah, but whatever.) In a promotional clip, he pounds his staff onto the ground and parts a huge body of water. (Moses, but who’s counting.)The video opens, for unclear reasons, with celebrity impersonators of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Ed Sheeran, Kanye West and more lined up at heaven’s gate. This conceit, too, is recycled — either from the nearest Madame Tussauds, or from West’s 2016 “Famous” video, a far more titillating and genuine transgression.Each of these micro jokes functions like a jump scare — just unexpected enough to elicit a tiny gasp. But underneath, there’s little scaffolding. They’re punchlines designed to be clipped and denatured of meaning. The lyrics are empty, too — only the grating, nasal, syllable-extending assonance rhyming “vi-i-i-ral”/“hi-i-i-gh” has any stickiness. (It should be said that the video is a small triumph of wardrobe: striped sweat socks under cowboy boots paired with a sheer wrap, a pink cheerleader outfit, a bejeweled headpiece that bisects the face vertically. The haute-camp styling is the most conceptually rigorous thing here.)Record labels are increasingly in the content business, and by that metric, Lil Nas X is the platonic ideal of a star. Imagine the meetings involving artists who are less comfortable with the camera, less self-aware, less fluent with algorithmic distribution. Imagine musicians who simply wish to play music.Lil Nas X cannot. “yall mind if i enter my christian era?” he asked on Instagram a few weeks ago, in a caption to a video in which he sang a folk-gospel song more elegant than anything he’s thus far released.On TikTok, he wolfed down communion crackers. He posted a mock acceptance letter from Liberty University, the evangelical institution, signed by Jerry Falwell (who died in 2007).Lil Nas X even weaponized, meekly, the media outlets that would have given him breathless coverage regardless. The @PopCrave X account shared staged red carpet footage of the celebrity doppelgängers from his video shouting his praises as if it were real. Official Spotify accounts posted “LNX is back with more mid-music 🤷‍♂️” — he’s trolling the critics in advance.Call it what you want: a statement of fact, a statement of defiance, a statement of indifference. But really it’s just a cheap LOL, and a place for Lil Nas X defenders to aggregate.But all this attention farming must be tiring. During his last rollout, Lil Nas X spent loads of time on Twitter dunking on adversaries. Now, he’s doing much less of that, while sprinkling in the exasperation of the misunderstood: “since i’m a troll y’all discount my art as just ‘pissing ppl off,’” he wrote before “J Christ” was released.In a self-filmed four-minute video posted across all his social media on Monday, he paced and spoke seemingly extemporaneously about some of the backlash he’s received for his playful manipulation of religious imagery and themes. The Grammy-winning Christian rapper Lecrae said on X, “if God can transform King Neb, murders, slave masters, sex workers, etc. he can add another Blasphemer to the list.” And the antic Twitch streamer Kai Cenat fumed, “God gonna handle you, bro.”These are deep-sigh, predictable responses to deep-sigh, predictable jokes. But in his response video, it would seem Lil Nas X is taking critiques like these seriously. At one point, he apologizes for some of his specific bits, even while confessing that he doesn’t fully understand the imagery he was referencing.That said, the most powerful aspect of the clip is the anticipation that he might break character at any moment. Is this simply part of the bit, a setup for the next meme? Is he going to end up sitting down with Cenat for a debate about God, or do a saint-sinner duet with Lecrae?As he’s walking, Lil Nas X’s selfie camera returns again and again to a shelf with a pair of goofy yellow boots, a collaboration between Crocs and the unbearable meme brand MSCHF (his partner on last cycle’s Satan Shoes). Even in what’s meant to be his most earnest moment, the jester is just around the corner — it’s almost impossible to convey gravity when your sincerest form of expression is mockery. More

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      in Music

      Tales of the Black Underworld Fuel Rap. ValTown Recounts Them.

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      ValTown, an account on X and other social media platforms, spotlights gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and 1990s — and how crime and celebrity often intersect.Beginning in the late 2010s, Brian Valmond started shining a light on stories that are often shaded by secrecy, exaggeration, self-protection and self-aggrandizing.His subject matter is, by and large, the world of Black gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and ’90s — topics that have also long driven the aesthetics and narratives of hip-hop. Since 2017, Valmond, 25, has been using his @_ValTown_ account on Twitter, now known as X, to unravel these tales bit by bit in threads that become mini events. His stories are tantalizing and sometimes surprising, especially when he highlights the links between the criminal underworld and the realm of celebrity, underscoring the blurred lines between those two milieus.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said in an October interview at a Brooklyn park. “So, I wanted to show, not to glorify it, but say, we have our underworld legends as well.”On his accounts — he’s accumulated more than 180,000 followers on X, and over 100,000 on Instagram — Valmond has examined drug lords and gangsters from all over the country: well-known figures like Harlem’s Rich Porter and Azie Faison (whose stories shaped the film “Paid in Full,” starring Cam’ron); or Atlanta’s Black Mafia Family, crucial in the early career of Jeezy; or the original 50 Cent, from whom the rapper got his name. After he wrote about Freeway Rick Ross, the Los Angeles cocaine kingpin, Ross invited Valmond to spend time with him in California.Valmond also probes the places where crime and music have collided, detailing the sometimes unsavory pasts of well-known hip-hop executives like Suge Knight and Big U, or the story of Peter Shue, the club promoter, drug dealer and reported paramour of Madonna. He’s posted a detailed history of Sean Combs’s father, Melvin Combs, a purported associate of the 1970s Harlem crime boss Nicky Barnes. And sometimes, he simply unearths unexpected behind-the-scenes factoids, like a recent thread about the tough-guy exploits of the pioneering pop rapper MC Hammer.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSome of Valmond’s work, particularly about the intersection of hip-hop stars and street life, involves “the kind of things people talked about in hushed tones but never made it into print journalism, because they weren’t stories that could be sourced in a credible way, but they were common knowledge to people in the scene,” said the journalist Noah Callahan-Bever. Valmond’s threads, he said, “gave these stories the folklore, the grandeur they deserved.”Crucial to Valmond’s approach are old photographs, which he tracks down from various online sources, and sometimes from family members or associates of the figures he’s spotlighting. The photos are not simply nostalgia — they are also historical references of style and attitude presentations that have trickled out into the mainstream via hip-hop, which took those street reference points and made them into culture. The photos, which capture fleeting poses of chest-puffing celebration (think fresh-off-the-lot sports cars, ostentatiously large gold chains, ritzy nightclubs, spotless designer clothes) are often the most solid documentation of a moment that only tenuously documented itself.“That era is almost extinct, right?” said Shawn Hartwell, who served two decades on racketeering charges for crimes committed when he was a teenager. “And he’s keeping it alive so people could say, Yo, remember one time it was like this? Other than that, you gonna wipe a whole culture or a generation away.”But the excess on display, those photos reflect a complex and tragic reality. “When you see them old pictures, you barely see life. You see survival mode,” Hartwell said. “That’s survival, that’s not glamour. And some people don’t know that because they not in that mode.“Most of the people in those pictures have life sentences,” he added, “or died.”For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. “Somebody might watch a show like ‘Snowfall’ and be like, Oh wow, I want to be a drug dealer,” he said. “But it’s like, that’s not the story. Yeah, it might be glorious now, but it’s going to end up pretty bad.”Valmond is a humble and unassuming chronicler of a deeply chaotic time. Dressed quietly, in a black tracksuit, he asked as many questions as he answered, his demeanor bookish and focused.He was raised by strict Caribbean parents — his mother is from Haiti and his father is from Dominica — and spent his early years in Far Rockaway, Queens, then moved with his family to Delaware, where he still resides. He returned to New York during summers, and stayed close with friends who were being drawn into street life.At the suggestion of a high school English teacher, Valmond began to explore writing screenplays, but also took notice of the stories unfolding right before him.“In my neighborhood growing up, if you weren’t playing basketball or if you weren’t like a artsy type of kid, you sold drugs,” he said.For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIn 2017, he spent a fruitless summer in between his first two years of college calling Hollywood studio phone numbers he found online to pitch a script, to no avail.“I tried to put it in this fictional world, but then those things started to actually happen in my real life,” he explained. “Like, my friends started to die, my friends started to go to jail and things started to get very real around the time that I started writing. So I was like, maybe it’s a bigger purpose. Maybe let me start telling the stories of people that actually been through this in real life.”Later that year, he saw a Twitter thread that spoke to him, and decided to make his own. Before long, he was posting prolifically.“I was going to school,” he recalled, “but I wasn’t going to class. I was checking into the library and I would stay there all day researching, getting pictures, putting threads together.”His first two threads tackled the Queens drug kingpin Lorenzo (Fat Cat) Nichols and the Los Angeles gangster Freeway Rick Ross. He soon posted about Robert Sandifer, who was murdered at 11 years old by members of his own gang, a gruesome and vivid crime that led to a Time magazine cover story in 1994.There are some precedents for Valmond’s coverage. In the 2000s, street magazines like F.E.D.S. and Don Diva emerged to document underworld figures, sometimes in their own words. Some YouTube channels trade in old street-life war stories. And in earlier phases of the internet, message boards and blogs touched on these subjects as well.Though Valmond begins with news reports and other published information, some facts are impossible to independently verify. Memories can be hazy, and reputations are sometimes built on bluster. His threads can sometimes land closer to apocrypha than unassailable truth. (There are a handful of other Twitter and Instagram accounts that stake out similar content, but Valmond’s have been the most in-depth and consistent.)The internet is both infinite and shortsighted — stories can be forever archived, and also forever forgotten. Many of these tales were known in their time, but lost to history. Valmond thrills in resurfacing them, and in the connectivity that social media allows: Not only researching and relaying these stories, but sometimes using them to connect with people involved, and unearthing even more information.Luc (Spoon) Stephen, a film producer and onetime associate of Fat Cat Nichols, took notice of Valmond’s 2017 thread on the drug dealer. Like Valmond, Stephen is from Queens, and of Haitian descent. He admired Valmond’s curiosity and dedication to the truth, and began sharing stories with him and making introductions.“A lot of the younger people don’t listen, but he soaks it up and he has to evaluate from there, he has to check it again,” Stephen said in an interview. “I could take a key and I can turn it in the lock and open the lock and then walk away, but now he has to open the door and explore.”In 2018, when Callahan-Bever was working as the executive vice president of brand strategy and content at Def Jam Records, he hired Valmond as an intern, once he found out how young he was: “I sort of assumed he was an older guy based on the topics and depth of knowledge, but he was still in college.”Valmond said the experience was eye-opening. “That was the first time for me that I’d seen that my skill set could put me in an environment beyond the neighborhood,” he said.Valmond’s ongoing work reflects shifting norms around public discussion of street tales. In recent years, a smattering of films and television programs have tackled these eras, including the documentary series “Hip Hop Uncovered” and “American Gangster,” the film “Paid in Full” and the TV dramas “BMF” and “Power,” both executive produced in part by 50 Cent.Today, many online hip-hop media sites and personalities focus heavily on criminal affiliations of musicians, or those close to them — a near unthinkable turn from a couple of decades ago when criminal records weren’t as available or easily disseminated, and when performers may have woven street tales into their songs but otherwise largely aimed to keep their nonmusical life private. Some outlets are also preoccupied with whether musicians involved in criminal cases cooperated with the authorities, aiming to make distinctions between artists with varying levels of street credibility.To Valmond, those are moot questions: “I post everybody, whether they cooperated, whether they were, quote-unquote, stand-up. That just puts everything on a level playing field. So people know, like, he’s not picking and choosing sides.”In recent months, Valmond has also expanded into longer video content, including “Rich in the Hood,” a podcast interview series and a six-part documentary series on YouTube more extensively covering some of the subjects of Valmond’s threads — “making it cinematic,” Valmond said — and “Blood Currency,” a show on his Patreon that looks at criminal enterprises from around the globe.“I still get pushback from my community where people would be like, ‘You’re glorifying drug dealers.’ Or, ‘How could you post these people that poison the neighborhood?’” Valmond said. “That’s because they’re so used to seeing it glamorized on television and in movies. It’s like, no, I’m not doing that. Just take the time, read it and you’ll see for yourself what it is I’m trying to convey.” More