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    Digging Into Kendrick Lamar’s Samples

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    Listen to some of the most notable sonic references on “GNX,” from SWV, Luther Vandross and Debbie Deb.Kendrick LamarAJ Mast/The New York TimesDear listeners,On Friday, the rap superstar Kendrick Lamar surprised everyone by releasing his sixth studio album, “GNX,” without warning. It is a fitting finale to a triumphant year for Lamar, who emerged victorious by just about every measure from a high-profile beef with hip-hop’s pre-eminent hitmaker Drake and scored one of the biggest smashes of his career with the caustic diss track, “Not Like Us.” The Compton rapper’s victory lap will continue into new year, too: On Feb. 2, he’s up for seven Grammys. A week later, he is set to headline the Super Bowl halftime show.On his intricately layered 2012 breakthrough “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” and its grand 2015 follow-up, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” Lamar established himself as an artist capable of epic statements and sweeping concept albums. He also proved to be a musician who takes his time between releases, tinkering with his bars and polishing sonic worlds until they are as close to perfect as he can make them. “GNX,” though, is a different kind of Lamar album: It’s lean, mean and immediate. The beef with Drake, as my colleague Jon Caramanica suggests in his sharp review of “GNX,” seems to have made Lamar more reactive and nimble, bringing him into the present tense.Accordingly, “GNX” carries its sense of history more lightly than some of Lamar’s denser releases — though it is still an album in deep conversation with the past and present sounds of West Coast rap. In order to evoke that history, Lamar often turns to one of hip-hop’s signature arts: sampling.Today’s playlist compiles the sources of some of the most notable sonic references on “GNX” — from SWV, Luther Vandross and Debbie Deb — and follows up on them with Lamar’s own tracks, so you can hear the ways he and his producers flip them into something new. It also features a few samples from earlier Lamar hits.This playlist is just a brief introduction to the samples in Lamar’s discography — “GNX” alone is overflowing with them. But I hope it’s an invitation to listen more deeply to all the references, homages and historical conversations happening between the lines of his music.Also, a programming note: I won’t be sending out a new edition of the newsletter this Friday, because of the holiday. If you need a Thanksgiving playlist, might I suggest revisiting this one from last year?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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Bizarre Love Triangle Playlist

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      Sabrina Carpenter, Loretta Lynn and SZA sing about all the points on a love triangle.Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste” was the most successful of this year’s triangular tunes.Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersDear listeners,Today’s playlist is all about one of popular music’s favorite shapes: the love triangle.Full of drama, secrets and passion, songs about love triangles have never exactly gone out of style. But as I’ve been considering some of the patterns and trends in this past year of pop music, I’ve noticed that they’re more popular — and in some cases, subversive — than ever.This year has specifically been full of songs in which the singer is unusually fixated on “the other woman.” The most successful is “Taste,” a sassy, innuendo-stuffed pop-country smash by one of the year’s breakout stars, Sabrina Carpenter. “I’ve heard you’re back together,” she sings to her love interest’s former and current squeeze. “And if that’s true, you’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you.” That refrain has more than a hint of queer subtext, which Carpenter makes explicit in the campy, surprisingly gory music video, which ends with her kissing her female rival (played by Jenna Ortega) and the two accidentally killing their shared beau. In a twist, they’re not terribly bothered by it.But “Taste” wasn’t the only 2024 song with an eye on the other point of the triangle. Released in March, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Obsessed” — a track from the deluxe edition of “Guts” — finds the singer haunted by the imagined perfection of her current partner’s ex-girlfriend: “If I told you how much I think about her, you’d think I was in love,” she sings. Another prominent triangular tune, Billie Eilish’s “Wildflower,” from “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” has become such a beloved fan favorite that it has spent 26 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. “I see her in the back of my mind, all the time,” Eilish sings of a partner’s ex — whom Eilish comforted when they first broke up, causing her to wonder, “Did I cross the line?”These songs all suggest some sort of transference and, at times, even a flirtation with both opposing points on the love triangle. Pop songs about same-sex desire are not nearly as taboo as they once were, and I suspect the surge in these sorts of songs reflect that shift.But in another sense, they’re telling a tale as old as time, a point I wanted to underscore by putting them in conversation with some older tracks. On today’s playlist, you’ll hear all the aforementioned songs, along with classics from the Cars, Loretta Lynn and Robyn, among other artists. It also features a certain global superstar’s 2024 remake of the ultimate “other woman” song, “Jolene.” No matter how you slice it, it seems, three’s a crowd.I know I’ve been known to share,LindsayWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Viral Choreographer Changing the Way Women Move

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      In February 2023, Rihanna took the field during the Super Bowl LVII halftime show for her first performance in five years. As the opening notes of “Rude Boy” played, a group of dancers in identical puffy white suits and sunglasses gathered in the middle of the stage, moving with forceful precision, gathering speed as the […] More

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      Billie Eilish, Lorde and More Are Singing Out About Body Image

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      Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and Lorde are among a group of young women who are revealing, in their music, the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taken together, the first two song titles on Billie Eilish’s third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” form a provocative pair: “Skinny” and “Lunch.”“People say I look happy/Just because I got skinny,” Eilish sings on the opener, her melancholic croon accompanied by a single, murky guitar. “But the old me is still me and maybe the real me,” she adds, “and I think she’s pretty.”That lyric is a gut punch. It’s also indicative of a subtle shift among the current generation of female pop stars, who have recently been acknowledging — often in stark, striking and possibly triggering language — the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taylor Swift, who first opened up about her past struggles with disordered eating in a powerful sequence in her 2020 documentary, “Miss Americana,” sings about it on her 2022 track “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” a compassionate ode to her younger self: “I hosted parties and starved my body, like I’d be saved by the perfect kiss.” Last month, in a guest appearance on the remix of Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” Lorde confessed that fluctuations in her weight had led her to stay out of the public eye. “For the last couple years, I’ve been at war in my body,” she sings, heartbreakingly. “I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back.”For several years, conversations about weight in mainstream pop have centered around an artist bold enough to speak up about it and absorb the stinging backlash: Lizzo. In her lyrics, on social media, and in her shapewear line, the singer and rapper has played up self-love, becoming a face of the body positivity movement. Earlier this year, however, she told The New York Times that she had “evolved into body neutrality.” “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.Part of the vitriol Lizzo has faced is rooted in racism, and it is impossible to divorce a dialogue about body image from race, and the different ways Black, brown and white bodies are dissected, denigrated and idolized. Latto recently spoke out about how online criticism led her to have plastic surgery at 21 to enhance her buttocks. Last year the rapper, who is biracial, said, “When I didn’t have my surgery, they’re like, ‘Oh, she shaped like her white side.’” SZA, speaking to Elle about her own, similar, procedure (which she sang about on her hit 2022 album, “SOS”), said, “I didn’t succumb to industry pressure. I succumbed to my own eyes in the mirror.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Brief Tour of Pop Music’s Caffeine Addiction

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      Hear songs by Sabrina Carpenter, Squeeze, SZA and more.Sabrina Carpenter’s perky bop “Espresso” is … a bit addictive. (We’re sorry.)Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,A few weeks ago in our Friday feature the Playlist, I recommended a bubbly new single by the pop artist Sabrina Carpenter and made a bold prediction: “Get ready to hear this one everywhere.” Even more quickly than I imagined, the prophecy has come true. Last week, “Espresso” debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Carpenter’s highest charting hit yet. More important, it has taken over the nation’s psyche. You can hardly go anywhere these days without hearing someone quoting the song’s infectious hook “That’s that me espresso” or wondering aloud, “what is a ‘me espresso?’”That’s a profound philosophical question for another day. Today, we are simply honoring the absurdist joy of “Espresso” with a playlist of songs about caffeinated beverages.Coffee has been a consistently evocative theme throughout pop musical history, so this mix travels from 1940 right up to the present moment. That trusty beverage is often used to describe a sophisticated kind of romance (as it does on Otis Redding’s swooning ballad “Cigarettes and Coffee”) or perhaps the idle hours waiting around for said romance to occur (see Peggy Lee’s sultry take on the 1948 standard “Black Coffee”). Chappell Roan tries to use it as a shield against romance on a track from her 2023 album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” reasoning with a former flame, “I’ll meet you for coffee, ’cause if we have wine/You’ll say that you want me, I know that’s a lie.”In “Espresso,” Carpenter uses the caffeine metaphor to suggest how restless she makes a guy she has wrapped around her finger: “Say you can’t sleep? Baby, I know.” Also, crucially, she understands that “espresso” rhymes with “I guess so.” That’s poetry.It’s time for the percolator,LindsayListen along while you read.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      SZA’s ‘Saturn,’ and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Rhiannon Giddens, Norah Jones, Les Amazones d’Afrique and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.SZA, ‘Saturn’The song SZA introduced in a commercial during the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and released to streaming services in multiple versions; one, the sped-up version, brings out its clear pop structure. But the real-time version is better. The song is about a longing for the better place that her karma has earned: “Stuck in this paradigm/Don’t believe in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer around her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal lines argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, looking beyond Earth and insisting, “There’s got to be more.” JON PARELESLes Amazones d’Afrique, ‘Musow Danse’“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title track of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to dance floors. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and traditional drumming; it features Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the chorus, “Rise up African woman!” PARELESA.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2024 Grammys, Dissected: Taylor, Miley, SZA, Tracy, Joni and More

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicAt Sunday’s Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift won album of the year for “Midnights” and, for good measure, announced a new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” due in April. Other big winners included Victoria Monét, Phoebe Bridgers (and boygenius), Killer Mike, Miley Cyrus and Billie Eilish.The show featured several moving live performances from elders: Tracy Chapman duetting with Luke Combs on “Fast Car,” a striking Joni Mitchell singalong and a closing stomper from Billy Joel.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation on whether this was the year the Grammys got it correct, whether there was a gap between what the awards indicated and what the speeches were saying, and the grounded joy of seeing worthy stars brought back into the spotlight properly.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticLindsay Zoladz, a New York Times pop music criticConnect 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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      7 Grammy Winners Worth Another Spin

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      Hear songs by Laufey, Jason Isbell, Samara Joy and more.Laufey performing on the Grammys preshow on Sunday.Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but this year’s Grammys were … really good?The performances were almost uniformly excellent. Tracy Chapman, radiating joy and in fine voice, sang “Fast Car” publicly for the first time in ages, alongside a visibly reverent Luke Combs. (I wrote more about that moment here.) A regal Joni Mitchell sang “Both Sides Now” and made everybody cry. Billie Eilish and her collaborator brother, Finneas, absolutely nailed their performance of “What Was I Made For?” and showed everyone watching why their subsequent win in the song of the year category was so deserved.The wins were also pretty evenly spread. Yes, the universe’s current main character Taylor Swift took home the night’s top honor, album of the year, an award that she’s now won a record four times. But the person who took home the most Grammys this year (four) was someone who didn’t make it to the podium during the televised ceremony: Phoebe Bridgers, who during the preshow picked up three awards with her trio boygenius and one for a collaboration with SZA. The telecast also allowed some rising stars like Karol G, Lainey Wilson and Victoria Monét (who faithful Amplifier readers learned about in Friday’s rundown of the best new artist nominees) to make themselves known.For today’s playlist, we’re going to hear from some more of those slightly-less-than-household-name artists who took home Grammys this year. I chose two selections of my own, and I also asked my fellow Times pop critics Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica to send me a few of their picks — a mix of jazz, folk, pop, gospel and more. Listen below to tracks from Laufey, Peso Pluma and Samara Joy, and check out the Bonus Tracks for more of our Grammy coverage.Don’t wash the cast iron skillet,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Laufey: “From the Start”The Icelandic singer and songwriter Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay) won the traditional pop vocal album category with songs like “From the Start,” which she also performed on the preshow. It’s a bossa nova that confesses to “unrequited, terrifying love” with absolute poise. PARELESWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Grammys Aim for a Big Tent, but Not Everyone Feels at Home

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      The most awarded artists were diverse on Sunday night. How those winners received their honors, however, differed mightily.Sunday night at the 66th annual Grammy Awards, Jay-Z accepted the Dr. Dre global impact award, a sort of éminence grise prize. He’s previously won 24 Grammys, but he did not treat the moment like a homecoming.Instead, he used his speech to alternately nudge and excoriate the Recording Academy, the body that awards the Grammys, for its mistreatment and short-shrifting of Black artists: “We want y’all to get it right. At least get it close to right.” He mentioned his wife, Beyoncé, winner of the most Grammys ever, yet never a winner for album of the year. “Think about that,” he said, as he scrunched up his face with distaste.By this point, the room seemed to understand what was happening — Jay-Z was rinsing the Grammys on its own stage. Beyoncé, in the audience, appeared to be somewhere near tears. “When I get nervous,” Jay-Z said, “I tell the truth.” He reached out and grabbed the hand of his daughter Blue Ivy for support before urging those who have been overlooked and slighted to persevere “until they give you all those accolades you feel you deserve.”Jay-Z’s speech took a moment of acclaim and turned it into a moment for reflection, and maybe a lecture. Over the past few years, several Black artists have effectively been boycotting the Grammys by declining to submit their music for consideration, frustrated with how hip-hop and R&B are treated, particularly in the biggest all-genre categories.This year was no different — album, record and song of the year were won by white artists, though broadly speaking, the most awarded artists were diverse: three each for SZA, Killer Mike and Victoria Monét; four for Phoebe Bridgers (three of which came as part of boygenius) and two each for Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Miley Cyrus.How those artists received those honors, however, differed mightily.In their speeches, Monét and SZA emphasized how long and roundabout their paths to this moment had been. During her acceptance for best new artist, Monét called the prize the endpoint of “a 15-year pursuit.” She’s primarily been known for her songwriting, particularly her work with Ariana Grande. And while she’d released music independently through the 2010s, her 2023 album, “Jaguar II,” was her first major-label LP. “My roots have been growing underneath ground, unseen for so long,” she said. “And I feel like today, I’m sprouting.” More