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    Drake’s Tentative Comeback, Plus: New Music From the Weeknd and More

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeLast week saw the release of “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” the collaborative album from Drake and the Toronto R&B singer and songwriter PartyNextDoor, a longtime collaborator. For the most part, the sound is a vintage one for Drake, feeling something like a retreat to a comfort zone: moody heartbreak soul bathed in self-loathing and suspicion.It’s an album that, from a distance, appears to exist in a space totally parallel to the dominant narrative of his last year, which is the toxic and very popular beef he’s had with Kendrick Lamar, which seemed to culminate this month with Lamar’s five Grammy wins for “Not Like Us,” followed by his performance of the song at the Super Bowl halftime show.But there are a handful of songs on this new album that suggest Drake is already looking at musical pathways forward, or away, from that bumpy stretch.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Drake’s post-Kendrick predicament and the ways he might move on. Plus: a host of promising new albums that have brightened up the beginning of the year from artists like the Weeknd, Central Cee, Oklou, Skaiwater and OsamaSon.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect 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.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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    The Weeknd Hits No. 1 for a Fifth Time With ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’

    Boosted by physical sales and a Grammy performance, the album had the biggest week since Taylor Swift’s huge opening last year.The Weeknd has scored his fifth No. 1 album with “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” posting the biggest overall numbers on the Billboard chart since Taylor Swift nearly a year ago.The release of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which the poppy-yet-creepy Canadian star announced at a livestreamed concert in São Paulo in September, was delayed by a week to Jan. 31 because of the Los Angeles wildfires. But then it got a prominent boost when the Weeknd performed a two-song medley on the Grammy Awards broadcast last week, revealing that he had quashed his four-year boycott over the show’s voting process.“Hurry Up Tomorrow,” the Weeknd’s sixth studio album, had the equivalent of 490,500 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. Although the Weeknd is a streaming heavyweight — more than 20 of his tracks have garnered at least a billion clicks on Spotify — the album’s opening-week numbers were driven by unit sales. It sold 183,000 digital downloads, 99,000 CDs and 77,000 copies on vinyl, the Weeknd’s best week in that format. (There were even 1,000 on cassette.) Its 22 tracks were streamed 172 million times.The album’s total number of 490,500 — a composite derived from a formula used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various music formats — was the biggest weekly take since last April, when Swift’s “Tortured Poets” burst out of the gate with 2.6 million.Also this week, Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”) fell to second place after three weeks at the top and SZA’s “SOS” dropped one spot to No. 3.The Grammys offered a modest boost to some of the night’s big winners and nominees. Kendrick Lamar, who took record and song of the year (“Not Like Us”), fell one spot to No. 4 with “GNX,” though its numbers were slightly up. Billie Eilish, who performed but went home empty-handed, saw her LP “Hit Me Hard and Soft” rise five spots to No. 5. And Chappell Roan, who performed and won best new artist, jumped eight spots to No. 6 with “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.” More

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    The Weeknd, FKA twigs, Soccer Mommy and More New Music

    Hear tracks by Soccer Mommy, FKA twigs, Reyna Tropical 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 at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.The Weeknd, ‘Dancing in the Flames’It’s back to the mid-1980s synth-pop of Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson and Eurythmics in the new song by the Weeknd, abetted by the symmetry-loving production of two more producers, Max Martin and Oscar Holter. Pointillistic keyboard notes bounce in stereo over programmed drums, full of major-key optimism, as the Weeknd sings about a romance that’s like fast, reckless driving: “I can’t wait to see your face/crash when we’re switching lanes,” he sings in his sweetest falsetto. A tolling keyboard coda suggests an unfortunate outcome — made explicit in the video — no matter how catchy things were. JON PARELESSoccer Mommy, ‘Driver’The grungy chug of Sophie Allison’s guitar brushes up against a lilting vocal melody on “Driver,” the third single from “Evergreen,” the upcoming album from the singer-songwriter who records as Soccer Mommy. “I’m a test of his patience with all that I do,” Allison sings of a lover who calms her clanging neuroses. “’Cause I’m hot and he stays cool, I don’t know why.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFKA twigs, ‘Eusexua’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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    Popcast (Deluxe): The Kid Mero on the Viral Characters of 2023

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, features a conversation with the comedian and podcast star the Kid Mero, dissecting the viral stars of the year, including:A conversation about The Kid Mero’s recent projects, including his Victory Light podcast and “7PM in Brooklyn,” his podcast with the basketball legend Carmelo AnthonyThe disgraced politician (and now Cameo star) George SantosThe popular Twitch streamer Kai CenatAbel Tesfaye, a.k.a. the Weeknd, a star and creator of the HBO drama “The Idol”The basketball firestarter Draymond GreenGerry Turner, a.k.a. the Golden BachelorThe pop-drill rapper Ice SpiceThe TikTok food critic Keith LeeSnack of the weekConnect 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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    A Thrilling, Rediscovered Nina Simone Set, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Snoh Aalegra, DeYarmond Edison, Explosions in the Sky and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Nina Simone, ‘Mississippi Goddam’Just a week after performing at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., supporting James Meredith’s March Against Fear, Nina Simone was on fire as she strode onstage to play for a very different audience at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1966. Her interactions with the bourgeois New Englanders at Newport were hardly warm: In the middle of an acid-rinsed version of “Blues for Mama,” she dismisses them — “I guess you ain’t ready for that” — and later she hushes them: “Shut up, shut up.” But she pours every ounce of vitriol she’s got into the performance, especially on “Mississippi Goddam.” She’d first released the song in 1964, and two years later it felt as topical as ever. Meredith had just been shot while marching across Mississippi, and unrest was overtaking redlined Black neighborhoods across the country. At Newport, she amends one of the verses to address the oppression of Los Angeles’s Black community: “Alabama’s got me so upset/And Watts has made me lose my rest/Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn!” The entire Newport performance is now available for the first time as an album titled “You’ve Got to Learn.” It’s spellbinding, heartbreaking stuff, reminding us just how much Simone would still be lamenting today. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSnoh Aalegra, ‘Be My Summer’Snoh Aalegra sings about not being able to let go in the forlorn, slowly undulating “Be My Summer.” She confesses, “I can’t change how I feel/Tried moving on but I’m right here where we left off.” The song arrives with a tangle of voices — some harmonizing, a few straying — and they return in choruses that are never quite unanimous, hinting at misgivings behind her pleas to “protect me from the rain.” JON PARELESAma Lou, ‘Silence’“Bring me silence till you start hearing sounds,” the English R&B songwriter Ama Lou instructs in a song that veers between sorrow and spite. The production isn’t silent but it feels sparse and hollow. Her vocals pour out over two chords implied by sustained bass notes and a hollow, stop-start drumbeat. With bursts of vocal melody that hint at prime Janet Jackson, Ama Lou mixes accusations and regrets, making it’s clear that she wasn’t the betrayer. “I believe I was convinced that you were actually all right,” she sings, quivering with disbelief. PARELESBlur, ‘The Ballad’“I just looked into my life and all I saw was that you’re not coming back,” an exquisitely mopey Damon Albarn sings at the beginning of “The Ballad,” a clear highlight from Blur’s new album, “The Ballad of Darren.” Lush backing vocals from the guitarist Graham Coxon and punchy percussion from the drummer Dave Rowntree provide a buoyancy, and layers of sonic details give “The Ballad” a kind of dreamy, weightless atmosphere. LINDSAY ZOLADZbeabadoobee, ‘The Way Things Go’The Filipino-English songwriter beabadoobee keeps a light touch as she whisper-sings about crumbling relationships like the one in “The Way Things Go.” Bouncy, folky guitar picking accompanies her as she claims the romance is only “a distant memory I used to know.” But later she gets down to accusations — “Didn’t think you’d ever stoop so low” — while a faraway orchestra with scurrying flutes floats in around her, a fantasy backdrop for her pointed nonchalance. PARELESDeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’Before Bon Iver, Justin Vernon was a member of DeYarmond Edison, which also included Brad Cook, Phil Cook and Joe Westerlund, who would form the band Megafaun. “Epoch,” recorded in 2005 and 2006, is the title track of a boxed set due in August and a harbinger of Bon Iver. It’s a resigned, measured ballad, with cryptic lyrics contemplating mortality and technology: “Out with the new in with the old/The wavelength rests at its node.” And behind the stately melody, the folky acoustic instruments that open the song — a banjo, a tambourine — face surreal echoes and incursions of noise. PARELESThe Mountain Goats, ‘Clean Slate’In 2002, the Mountain Goats — then the solo project of John Darnielle — released one of the most beloved albums in its vast catalog, “All Hail West Texas,” a collection of wrenching character studies bleated into a boombox accompanied by just an urgently played acoustic guitar. More than two decades later, and now with a full band behind him, Darnielle will revisit those same characters on the forthcoming album “Jenny from Thebes.” The first single, the lively “Clean Slate,” suggests that he won’t be returning to the previous album’s lo-fi sound; the new track has a rock operatic grandeur and a ’70s AM radio brightness. The lyrics are full of closely observed desperation and stubborn glimmers of hope — which is to say they’re classic Darnielle. “It’s never light outside yet when they climb into the van,” he sings. “Remember at your peril, forget the ones you can.” ZOLADZGrupo Frontera and Ke Personajes, ‘Ojitos Rojos’There are worse misfortunes than having no space left on a cellphone because it’s filled with photos of an ex. But that’s the situation in “Ojitos Rojos” (“Little Red Eyes”), the latest collaboration by the well-connected Mexican American band Grupo Frontera, from Texas — this time with another cumbia band, Ke Personajes from Argentina. Over hooting accordion and a clip-clop cumbia beat, the singers trade plaints about maxed-out memory capacity and lingering, near-stalker-ish devotion: “Although you tell me no and deceive yourself with another baby/I know I’m the love of your life,” sings Emanuel Noir of Ke Personajes. Is it heartache, or would cloud storage help? PARELESTravis Scott, Bad Bunny, the Weeknd, ‘K-Pop’One beat, three big names and an SEO-optimized title are the makings of “K-Pop,” a calculated round of boasting and come-ons from Travis Scott, Bad Bunny and the Weeknd. The track, produced by behind-the-scenes hitmakers — Bynx, Boi-1da, Illangelo and Jahaan Sweet — hints at crisp Nigerian Afrobeats, and it spurs three distinct top-line strategies. Travis Scott is quick, percussive and melodically narrow; Big Bunny leaps and groans; the Weeknd is sustained, moody and on brand, crooning “Mix the drugs with the pain” and promising vigorous, alienated sex. As in K-pop, hooks are flaunted, then tossed aside when a new one arrives. PARELESExplosions in the Sky, ‘Ten Billion People’The Texas band Explosions in the Sky has been playing instrumental rock — “post-rock” — since the late 1990s, relying on patterns, textures and dynamics to make up for the absence of lyrics. “Ten Billion People” is one of its perfectly paced wordless narratives: clockwork and skeletal to start, swelling with keyboards and guitars, seesawing with stereo dueling drum kits, pausing the beat and then rebuilding toward something more majestic and reassuring. It’s both minimalist and dramatic. PARELES More

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    ‘The Idol’ Is Ending Sunday. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing.

    Three Times critics agree: The HBO pop fable is bad television. Ahead of Sunday night’s season finale, they break down its baffling missteps and occasional bright spots.Created by Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. the Weeknd) and Reza Fahim, “The Idol” arrived five weeks ago amid mostly negative buzz and ends Sunday on HBO. (A second season has not been announced.) Ahead of the season finale, three New York Times critics — James Poniewozik, chief TV critic; Wesley Morris, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic — compared notes on the story of the unstable pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), the grimy Svengali Tedros (Tesfaye) and their various handlers and hangers-on.JAMES PONIEWOZIK A confession: I was ready for “The Idol” to be good. Yeah, I saw the reports about the catastrophic production. But there’s a history of HBO series that followed big hits and were trashed because they were trying different, ambitious things. (I will defend “Tell Me You Love Me” and “John From Cincinnati” until death.)But indeed “The Idol” is bad. Impressively so! In this era of smoothed-out TV mediocrity, you need pull to make a show this bad. You need big names who have, to quote Tedros, “cart-ay blan-shay.” “The Idol” is gross and leering in the way the set reports suggested, but it’s also inept in a way that Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria” would not suggest. The tone lurches erratically. Motivations are inexplicable. It features the least mesmerizing cult leader in screen history. Characters and story lines seem to exist only to express the makers’ gripes about the music industry or intimacy coordinators, like a porny, torture-y “The Newsroom.”I am open to arguments to the contrary, though! Or, at least, is “The Idol” saying anything about celebrity or pop music that’s worth a closer listen?WESLEY MORRIS I’m with you, Jim. Through four episodes, it’s a baffler. I think it suffers from that pull you identified. This is a 90-minute movie that doesn’t have the bonkers ideas, imagery or attitude to justify the five-plus hours it asks us to pay.But you know, that first episode seemed like it was really up to and onto something. As TV, it ran tight and focused while being busy and, in its lewd way, suspenseful. It was funny, strange, knowingly acted and — as ensemble comedy and because of that erotic choreography — enticingly physical. We’re taken inside the hothouse of American celebrity to watch as it wilts beneath the California sun. We meet an army of competing personalities and competing interests, all trying to figure out what then seemed to be a question of murder-mystery proportions: How did that image of Jocelyn’s semen-stained face get all over the internet? And who is its owner? Turns out, the leak is a white herring.An important joke is that the horror filmmaker Eli Roth is here, jittering in a small, pretty decent part. That’s because everything after the first episode, which ends with Tedros Tedros (yes, “Lolita” lovers) turning Jocelyn into a Magritte painting (tying her head up in a scarlet scarf) and then telling her to sing, is indeed a soulless trip to Ye Olde Torture-Porn Dungeon, albeit a bank-bustingly chic one.LINDSAY ZOLADZ Hello, fellow world-class sinners. Jim, I agree that there is something rare about a show this chaotically messy in our age of middle-of-the-road prestige, but I’m not sure that it’s compellingly bad enough that I would recommend it to anyone for rubbernecking purposes. Life’s too short. As attempted commentary about pop stardom, I find the show to be repellently smug — it really thinks it has something profound to say about celebrity and even (help us) female empowerment, but its big ideas all ring disappointingly hollow.And dramaturgically speaking — to quote Jeremy Strong, an actor I’d rather be watching on Sunday nights — “The Idol” is curiously inert. The story is muddled, the pacing is all over the place, the writing and performances can’t get me to care about the fates of any of the major characters. The best thing about the show by far is its stellar supporting cast: Rachel Sennott is hilarious as Leia, a kind of skittishly basic, Gen-Z Marnie Michaels who finds herself plopped down uncomfortably in the middle of this den of sin. But my favorite member of the entourage is Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who brings a knowingness and a killer sense of comic timing to the role of Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers. Cast her in everything, please.The flip-side of the supporting actors’ strengths, though, is also one of the show’s main weaknesses: “The Idol” is at its worst when its main characters are onscreen. Which, of course, is most of the time.Da’Vine Joy Randolph has brought excellent comic timing to the part of Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers.Eddy Chen/HBOThe question I keep asking myself: Why is the Weeknd doing this? (Excuse me: Why is Abel Tesfaye doing this?) Over the past decade, the Toronto-born crooner has ascended to a level of pop stardom more stratospheric than even the fictional Jocelyn’s; “Blinding Lights,” his glisteningly paranoid 2019 single, is now the longest charting song by a solo artist ever on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as the most-streamed song in Spotify history. That makes him successful in a way that even a misguided passion project like “The Idol” is unlikely to put too large a dent in, though I can’t help but wonder if this tarnishes his reputation just a bit moving forward. Jim, as someone less familiar with the Weeknd’s music, what impression is Tesfaye’s performance here making on you?PONIEWOZIK To my eye (and ear), Tesfaye is reading the role rather than acting it. His performance is flat, except when he overcorrects into outbursts. It’s the actorly equivalent of wearing sunglasses indoors; it doesn’t look cool, it just keeps us from seeing your eyes. And his “I meant to do that” defenses in his interviews don’t help matters. Why is he doing this? Search me, but maybe the answer is in the credits: Maybe he feels that there is an “Abel Tesfaye” side to his talent that “the Weeknd” persona does not sufficiently express. But if he’s willing to stretch in a new direction, he’s not yet Abel.In general, to bring up another bad HBO memory, “The Idol” has what I think of as the “Entourage” problem. For most of that show’s run, I could never quite tell if I was meant to think Vinny Chase was talented or just a pretty face who believed his own P.R. That issue is everywhere here. Is Jocelyn’s single … good? Is the remix? Is Tedros smart? Musically savvy? Charismatic? Good at sex? I don’t know, and if “The Idol” does, it also seems willing to reverse things on a dime to make the story go where it needs to, as when Jocelyn swerves within the space of an episode from being totally in Tedros’s thrall to calling him out and calling the shots. I would love to know what either of you think we’re supposed to think about Jocelyn.MORRIS Let’s talk about it! First of all, that song … It’s what plays while you make returns at Uniqlo. There’s not much that Mike Dean, the producer who makes an embarrassingly gonzo appearance in Episode 4, could do to make it more interesting. It’s a banger that doesn’t bang.My favorite farcical detail in this show is that a major pop star exists whose stage name is Jocelyn. “Jocelyn” is how you can tell nobody knew how to stop this thing before it was too late. This isn’t something I’d be thinking much about with a show that worked (I love all the Jocelyns in my life!), if that show’s lead actor could do more than leak a river from one eye at a time. But Lily-Rose Depp is a single-tear sort of performer. And yet! She does appear to be acting something like pain and insecurity. Somehow, she’s convincing me that Jocelyn is more than Sam Levinson’s idea of pop star. Depp is better at line readings than the Weeknd. She knows how to hold a closeup.The producer Mike Dean, right, who has worked with the Weeknd in the past, appeared as himself in the penultimate episode.Eddy Chen/HBOBut the part itself is madness: a clash of motivations, lusts, self-doubt and ambitions. It’s cri-de-coeur Britney mixed with Elvis under Col. Tom Parker’s thumb. But the prevailing influence, to my eye anyway, is Depp’s own mother, the singer, actor and Frenchwoman Vanessa Paradis. Jocelyn’s skinny, mile-long cigarettes seem more like a tribute to that kind of European insouciance than to anything conventionally American.Anyway, Jocelyn has been written as a mess, this victim (her abusers include her recently deceased mom and the maw of showbiz) whose post-traumatic stress has led her, we’re asked to believe, to a Svengali’s cult whose M.O. is basically “let Tedros Tedros make you suffer for your art.” But is she any kind of artist? The most irritating part of the show is maybe its point: Much stronger, more original talent surrounds Jocelyn, but her white blondness overtakes any determination to coax it.The show is chronically offering much better stuff than Jocelyn’s potential hit “World Class Sinner.” In the first episode it is prolonged exposure to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”; in Episode 4 it’s the singing and songwriting of another of Tedros’s captives, a strawberry shortcake named Chloe (Suzanna Son) — in the show’s only feat of poignant emotional connection, she learns from Destiny how to use her tongue to produce stronger (perhaps Blacker) singing. But Destiny is supposed to be Jocelyn’s manager! Has she ever advised her client to do that?Lindsay, I like Destiny, too. Sometimes. But she spends a week watching an adult man do terrible stuff to all kinds of people, including her client, and says nothing of consequence. This isn’t management. It’s babysitting.ZOLADZ Jim, I am constantly coming back to the questions you asked: Are we supposed to think Jocelyn’s music is any good? And, more vexingly, are we supposed to think the music she’s making with Tedros is better than the music the label wants her to record? (Remember a few years ago when we were all arguing over whether or not the pop songs in “A Star Is Born” were supposed to be bad? “The Idol” has me desperately missing Ally and her alternate-universe banger “Hair Body Face.” Jocelyn could never.)I do think we’re supposed to find “World Class Sinner” to be cloying and superficial, but the music she’s making with Tedros is bad, too. Some of this is Depp’s performance: She’s a watchable screen presence, but she’s a weak vocalist, and it’s often hard to tell if the vacancy she projects when she’s singing these songs is written into the character or merely a limitation of her performance. Whether intentional or not, she’s certainly playing Jocelyn like a cipher, which can make for confusing and frustrating viewing.Is Jocelyn supposed to be good? Depp in “The Idol.”Eddy Chen/HBOWhat most gets on my nerves about the show’s philosophy about pop music, though, is that on some level it does feel like a self-aggrandizing commercial for the Weeknd. When Tedros wants to impress Jocelyn with his industry connections, he books a session with — cue the impressed gasps from basically everyone in Joc’s entourage — Mike Dean, a producer with whom the Weeknd often works.I mean, the show takes place in Tesfaye’s own Beverly Hills mansion and features innumerable characters telling Joc how dope her house is. Tesfaye has taken great pains to point out that Tedros is not a self-portrait, and of course it’s not: For one thing, Tedros isn’t a musician. But no amount of gauche rattail wigs and zipped-up wind-breakers can make this show the artistic risk or the expression of vulnerability that Tesfaye seems to think it is. The Weeknd’s songs tint the show’s atmosphere — Episode 4 centered, right on the nose, on his too-languid cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” — ultimately perfuming the show with an ever-present whiff of self-satisfaction.PONIEWOZIK So what is this show trying to say, from behind its red-fabric gag? It seems to buy big into the idea that authenticity in art comes from suffering. And it’s full of provocations about how carnality is the soul of music. These two concepts come together in the show’s S&M fixation: Rough sex, in its vision (or at least Tedros’s), is the hairbrush for the frozen sea within us. On top of that, there’s a lot of something-something about how the corporate music money machine wants to repress the artist’s wildest urges.It’s hard to see these themes play out in “The Idol” without thinking of the criticisms of how Levinson sexualizes his young female characters in “Euphoria.” Most of the first episode is about Jocelyn’s handlers trying to rein in her sexuality and using the language of “wellness” and “slut-shaming” and “revenge porn” as P.R. tools. It all feels like a straw-diva rebuttal: “You call it exploitation, but look, this fictional woman I created wants to show her nipples on camera! Woke capitalism won’t let her express herself!”Suffering for their art: clockwise, from top left, Mitch Modes, Tesfaye, Suzanna Son, Rachel Sennott, Moses Sumney and Troye Sivan.Eddy Chen/HBOThe stressed-out suits, however, are easily the best part of the show. Half of it is a caustic, “Veep”-style industry satire about the star-maker machinery, with strong work from Randolph, Hank Azaria and Jane Adams (the best part of “Hung,” that raunchy HBO train wreck of yesteryear). Say you gave the show a Jocelyn-ectomy; say she and Tedros and the entire Spahn Mansion high jinks were this offscreen problem that they had to talk about and manage (but also try to profit from). That could be brutally effective. But then what would the Weeknd do?MORRIS I love the idea of a starless “Idol.” It’s funny: There is no shortage of recent television about either famous artists or our obsession with them — “Dave,” Paper Boi in “Atlanta,” “Daisy Jones & the Six,” “The Swarm” — and not many of them are terribly enlightening about how fame feels. Mass culture enhanced and exacerbated its modern incarnation yet continues to be lousy at illuminating critiques of it.Not even the Weeknd really seems to have an answer for what celebrity is, what makes someone a star. (So many times in this show we hear someone say that so-and-so is a star, but it’s definitely not Jocelyn.) The one character who approximates the requirements is Tedros — in the world of the show, the outsize magnetism belongs to him. Of course, that fame is artificial; his worshipers are more afraid than admiring. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover his heroes are Ike Turner and Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest in “Super Fly.” At some point, Tedros looks at up, searchingly, at an almost life-size photo of Prince, a star who is known to have had his own moments of Tedrosity.The show is strange about Black men and sex. And no one in the show talks about it. A funny intergenerational fender-bender happens when Azaria’s Chaim implores Leia to describe Tedros and she keeps identifying him as a person of color, and Chaim keeps asking whether she’s trying to say he’s Black. The whole show is like that about Tedros and Moses Sumney’s Izaak, its two Black male characters: tentative. It doesn’t know what more to do with a scenario that’s freighted with this country’s long history of racialized sex than to be a troll about it.I’m with you two: For all the sex and vulgarity we see and hear about, the show has no idea how to convey what’s pleasurable about it, about what we come to certain pop music to experience.I know we don’t know where this going, how it’s going to end. I don’t know whether anyone should care, or even what would be a satisfying outcome for Tedros in Sunday’s finale. All I know is that when Destiny proposed murder, I clapped. More

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    Can HBO’s ‘The Idol’ Revive 1980s Erotic Thriller Sleaze?

    Over-the-top locations and characters bathed in red light recall an all but dead genre that was once a staple of late-night cable: the erotic thriller.A slick executive drives a cherry red convertible.A nightclub owner carries a coke spoon and wears his hair in a rat tail.A troubled pop star masturbates while choking herself.Those images might have come from an erotic thriller made by Brian De Palma, Paul Verhoeven or Adrian Lyne, directors who were prominent in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to movies like “Body Double” (Mr. De Palma), “Basic Instinct” (Mr. Verhoeven) and “9 ½ Weeks” (Mr. Lyne).But those scenes were actually part of “The Idol,” the HBO series that made its debut on Sunday with the apparent intention of reviving an all but dead genre.Filled with close-up shots of luxury goods and body parts, “The Idol” also recalled the works of lesser filmmakers whose R-rated creations populated the late-night lineups of HBO and its rivals long before the advent of prestige television.It was a style that died out over the years — the death blow might have been Mr. Verhoeven’s infamous “Showgirls,” an expensive 1995 flop — and seemed highly unlikely to make a return to the cultural stage amid the #MeToo movement.As Karina Longworth, the creator of the film-history podcast “You Must Remember This,” recently observed, today’s films are so devoid of steamy sex scenes that they “would pass the sexual standard set by the strict censorship of the Production Code of the 1930s.”Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley, who is in the cast of “The Idol,” in the much-maligned 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsSharon Stone in “Basic Instinct,” a film referred to in “The Idol.”Rialto PicturesThe old aesthetic was on full display in the first moments of “The Idol,” a series created by Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye (known as the Weeknd) and Reza Fahim, three men who came of age when flipping through cable channels late at night was a frequent pastime for adolescent boys.The first episode begins with the pop star Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, baring her breasts during a photo shoot as a team of handlers, crew members and an ineffectual intimacy coordinator look on.Later, Ms. Depp’s character smokes in a sauna, rides in the back of a Rolls-Royce convertible and rubs up against a man she has just met (a club owner portrayed by Mr. Tesfaye) on a dance floor bathed in smoky red light. There will be no flannel PJs for Joss; a pair of wake-up scenes make it clear to viewers that she sleeps in a thong.It isn’t only the show’s gratuitous nudity that harks back to Mr. Lyne and company, but the overall look and mood, which recall a louche glamour from the time of boxy Armani suits and cocaine nights. A main setting is a $70 million mansion in Bel Air that looks like something out of Mr. De Palma’s “Scarface” but is in fact Mr. Tesfaye’s real-life home.A number of young viewers have said they find sex scenes embarrassing, but Mr. Levinson, who created the HBO drama “Euphoria,” and his fellow producers have made no secret of their desire to pay homage to the heyday of Cinemax (when it had the nickname Skinemax).A wink to viewers comes when Joss, in the darkness of her private screening room, watches “Basic Instinct.” And then there is the pulsating score, which seems to conjure Tangerine Dream, the German electronic group who scored the sex scene on a train in “Risky Business.” In another nod to the show’s influences, the cast includes Elizabeth Berkley, the star of “Showgirls.”While it may seem like an outlier, “The Idol” has seemingly tapped into a cultural moment that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago: Ms. Longworth recently devoted a season of her film-history podcast to the “Erotic ’80s”; no less a tastemaker than the Criterion Channel has recently presented a series on erotic thrillers from the same time period; and last month in Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque held a screening of “Basic Instinct.”“The Idol” also has a close competitor in the world of streaming: “Fatal Attraction,” a 1987 hit for Mr. Lyne, has been rebooted as a series on Paramount+.Mr. Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp in a scene from the first episode of “The Idol.”Eddy Chen/HBOStephanie Zacharek, the film critic for Time, suggested that the return of such fare may have arisen from the yearslong glut of comic book movies, along with the lack of a certain kind of R-rated film that was once all the rage for adult viewers.“In the ’80s, that’s almost all there was in the multiplex,” Ms. Zacharek said. “Grown-ups went to see those movies. Now we don’t even have that many movies for grown-ups, period.”Ms. Zacharek slammed “The Idol” in her review and in a phone interview — “It feels like it was made by someone who has never had sex,” she said — but she said she was a fan of “Body Double” (and even “Showgirls”) and laments the disappearance of that kind of thing.“I always enjoyed those films, even when I thought they were sexist or ridiculous,” Ms. Zacharek said. “They do have a certain element of glamour to them.”It is a distinct possibility that the idea of reviving this particular genre may appeal more to Mr. Levinson and his colleagues than audiences and critics.After a two-decade absence from big-budget productions, Mr. Lyne attempted a comeback last year with “Deep Water,” an erotic thriller starring Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck. Mr. Levinson was one of the film’s writers.“Deep Water,” which streamed on Hulu upon its release, was never shown in theaters. It drew a 36 percent approval score from critics and a 24 percent audience score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.“The Idol” has fared both better and worse: A mere 24 percent of critics have given it a thumbs-up, and 63 percent of audience members have weighed in favorably. More