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      Chaos and Creation: Inside the Making of Yeezy Gap

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      In 2020, two fashion brands announced an unusual alliance. Now that goods are finally hitting stores, is Yeezy Gap a corporate-creative cautionary tale, or a new model for fashion to come?It was almost 90 degrees in Times Square on Thursday morning when a scene began to play out on Broadway that was so unexpected it could have been a mirage: 100 people were wrapped around the block outside the Gap, waiting for its doors to open.Inside the store, which had been transformed into a kind of blackened cavern punctuated by digital screens, 24 industrial-size sacks were lined up in two long rows and stuffed with clothing from Yeezy Gap, the collaboration between the artist formerly known as Kanye West (now simply Ye) and the giant ur-American brand.For anyone following the partnership since its buzzy birth more than two years ago, this was a major development: the first time customers would be able to see and touch the clothes inside a store — albeit not hung from racks or folded on shelves, but piled into those huge bags.They would get to try on the unisex tees, double-layered hoodies and long-sleeve shirts in dark colors: tops with slightly skewed, look-again proportions, sometimes seamless or cropped, with dropped shoulders. When they swiveled in front of the fitting room mirrors, they would see images of doves in flight printed across their backs.

      .css-fg61ac{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;position:relative;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-fg61ac{margin-bottom:0;-webkit-flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);}}.css-1ga3qu9{-webkit-flex-basis:50%;-ms-flex-preferred-size:50%;flex-basis:50%;}.css-rrq38y{margin:1rem auto;max-width:945px;}.css-1wsofa1{margin-top:10px;color:var(–color-content-quaternary,#727272);font-family:nyt-imperial,georgia,’times new roman’,times,Songti TC,simsun,serif;font-weight:400;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1wsofa1{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;}}@media (max-width:600px){.css-1wsofa1{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}.css-1nnraid{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;margin:0 auto;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1nnraid{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;height:auto;gap:8px;}}.css-1yworrz{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row-reverse;-ms-flex-direction:row-reverse;flex-direction:row-reverse;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1yworrz{-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);gap:8px;}}Outside the Gap in Times Square, where the store’s design was “re-engineered” to mark the first time Yeezy Gap products would be sold in a physical store.

      Ultimately they would get to judge for themselves how the boxy silhouettes and thick cotton differed from Gap’s typical offering — and decide whether that was enough to shift the fortunes of the brand: to make people across the country line up in anticipation, spend with alacrity and see Gap once again as a defining, disruptive staple of American fashion.As opposed to viewing it as a corporation — Gap Inc. is the parent company of Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta — that is currently wrestling with the departure of its chief executive after only two years, along with diminishing profits (including a net $162 million loss in the first quarter of this year) and dwindling cultural relevance.It was that uncool factor that seemingly drove Gap to announce, in June 2020, a 10-year deal with the undeniably cool Ye and his fashion line Yeezy, with the option to renew at the five-year mark, at which point Gap hoped Yeezy Gap would be generating $1 billion in annual sales. Though mass-market brands have engaged in one-off collaborations with high-end designers and celebrities for years, Yeezy Gap was, in scope and ambition, unlike any the retail world had seen.Except that in its first 18 months, the partnership yielded just two products, both sold only online.It wasn’t until a third party, Balenciaga, the French luxury house, entered the collaboration that a full Yeezy Gap collection was finally released this year (though it was still relatively small, with 36 styles in total unveiled in May). This weekend, a portion of the collection is being rolled out in about 50 stores nationwide, in cities including Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco: a selection of eight styles, with more promised later in the year.It is a milestone in the much-watched collaboration, but one that raises the question: What took so long?The display inside the Times Square store: industrial-size sacks filled with Yeezy Gap clothing.via GapWhen Corporate Meets CreativeGoing into the Gap deal, Ye had a certain track record in the fashion-for-the-masses business; in 2020, the sneaker collaboration between Yeezy and Adidas brought in nearly $1.7 billion in revenue, according to Bloomberg.He had less success in building a ready-to-wear brand. An early attempt at a glitzy namesake luxury label in Paris had fizzled, and a comeback with the more minimal, conceptual athleisure Yeezy yielded unpredictable results (including one widely criticized show on Roosevelt Island at which models fainted in the heat). Still, there was no denying his cultural influence and compulsive watchability.Gap’s footing was less sure. In 2020, the brand’s net sales (about $3.4 billion) had been declining every year since 2013, largely in line with the demise of many traditional shopping malls (and not helped by the pandemic). That year, Gap Inc. said it would close 30 percent of its Gap and Banana Republic stores in North America, about 350 locations in total, by January 2024.Industry wisdom said the company needed something big to stop the downward spiral. Ye was about as big as they come.But he was not, as Mickey Drexler, who led Gap from 1983 to 2002, told Yahoo Finance in 2021, “a corporate person, and Gap is a big corporation,” with hierarchies, systems, calendars and fluency in SKUs. Mr. Drexler said he had advised Ye against the deal. “It doesn’t make any sense, in my opinion,” Mr. Drexler said at the time.Julie Gilhart, the president of Tomorrow Projects, agreed. “In my experience, Gap was all about risk management,” she said. “They didn’t want to disgruntle anyone. And if you go with Kanye, you have to know there is risk involved.”One week after the Yeezy Gap deal was announced, for example, he announced his run for president; a string of heated campaign remarks and tweets about his family compelled his wife at the time, Kim Kardashian West, to make a statement about his bipolar disorder.But the controversy did not deter either side. They had agreed to an arrangement in which Ye’s fortunes were tied to those of his products; he received stock warrants that would vest when certain sales goals — such as reaching $250 million in a fiscal year, — were met, as well as royalties. (Gap has not disclosed the line’s sales figures to date.)Ye — whose vision, according to Gap, was to create “modern, elevated basics for men, women and kids at accessible price points” — got to work, bringing on the Nigerian-British designer Mowalola Ogunlesi as design director and testing out pieces as early as the summer of 2020. (Ms. Ogunlesi left after a year, at the expiration of her contract.)According to two people who worked on the collaboration, the original goal was to have a collection ready by Singles Day, an annual Chinese shopping event, in November 2020. The garments were conceived to be relatively affordable, priced around $50.Images from that period shared with The New York Times showed brightly colored pants, shorts, shirts, hoodies and belts, all in line with the traditional casual clothing associated with Gap. (In a video shared on Twitter by Ye from a fitting in July 2020, at least one tie-dye-effect pink and purple bodysuit is visible.) At the time, there were numerous “style-ups” — a fashion term that means trying out samples of clothing on bodies to see how they look — photographed by Nick Knight, the SHOWStudio founder and longtime Yeezy collaborator, and paid for by Gap.But these designs were never put into production, despite what the two former employees described as long hours and mounting impatience from Gap over missed deadlines — and despite the fact that it is almost unheard-of in the industry to eliminate almost an entire collection once samples have been made.Taking the Yeezy Gap “round jacket” for a walk.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesAccording to Zac Posen, who has worked with Target, Brooks Brothers and David’s Bridal, as well as having his own fashion line, the “standard” ratio of sample garments that ultimately end up in stores was historically 2 to 1 (for every two samples, one was chosen and one discarded). Though Mr. Posen said he had “heard of 3 to 1 or even 4 to 1, that’s less common these days,” as brands, especially public brands like Gap, become more oriented to the bottom line.Ye, however, was widely known to be both a perfectionist and a nonconformist.“I don’t think his mentality is at all the mentality we see in more classic fashion houses,” said Mr. Knight, the photographer. “If he wants to spend a year looking into the color blue, we’ll spend a year looking into the color blue, which is extremely inspiring when so often schedules take priority over creativity. He doesn’t see himself in any way constrained by deadlines or seasons. I don’t think he would even use the word ‘collection’ for what he is doing.”Referring to the 2020 designs that weren’t put into production, a Gap spokeswoman said in an email that “a collection was not discarded; this was part of the creative process. The team was intentional about iterating until they were satisfied.” The broader goal was “product development, testing and learning.”One early product that survived the creative process was the “round jacket,” a puffy jacket with no closures made from recycled nylon and polyester fill.This was Yeezy Gap’s first piece, made available for purchase in June 2021, nearly one year after the partnership was announced. It was sold for $200 in three colors (first blue, then black and later red), and those who preordered received the jacket about five months later.Yeezy Gap’s second piece dropped online a few months later: a plain, heavy cotton hoodie in six colors for $90. Ye later claimed that after airing a commercial featuring the hoodie, Gap sold $14 million worth of the black version. (Gap would not confirm this figure, though previously said the hoodie broke its single-day online sales record.)Its name? The “perfect hoodie.”Avatars in a “virtual game experience” designed by Demna and released on Thursday.via Gapvia GapThe Balenciaga FactorBetween the puffer and the hoodie, Gap intervened, hiring Leonardo Lawson, the former chief executive of the British brand the Vampire’s Wife, to help drive strategy for Yeezy Gap — with Ye’s blessing, Mr. Lawson said. (Ye did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)Mr. Lawson’s directive has essentially been to build a conduit between Yeezy and Gap, acting as a translator of sorts. He helped opened a Los Angeles office for Yeezy Gap, whose operations had previously been spread out across several cities, depending on where Ye and his core team were at any given time. This “innovation studio” today houses about 20 employees, said Mr. Lawson, who was promoted to head of Yeezy Gap in March.“We’re constantly flexing, depending on the needs, and helping each side understand what the asks are, why things need to be done, what maybe we cannot do,” he said.Mr. Lawson was asked about the early structural difficulties of the partnership. “When I came here, to be honest, I saw it,” he said. “I think everyone knows and understands that Ye’s background and pedigree and fashion is really working with luxury houses and ateliers in Europe. Those systems and how those companies work and are set up are very different than how a company like Gap is set up. So it was really about bringing these two worlds together.”Meanwhile, Ye, who released his album “Donda” the same month Mr. Lawson was brought on board, had already asked Demna to get involved.The mononymous creative director of Balenciaga had worked with Ye on his first Yeezy collection, “Season 1,” in 2015, and the two men have maintained an ongoing creative conversation via WhatsApp and text — Ye’s preferred means of communication — ever since.“Ye called me in March 2021 telling me he was working on this project, and it was his dream for me to work together with him on it,” Demna said this month. “He said this is what he needs there: to bring this know-how to the brand, bring the structure; fittings, atelier, patternmaker. The way they were doing things was more trying them on and styling rather than constructing.”The Ye version of a checkout counter at the Gap in Times Square.via GapThough he was busy with several Balenciaga collections, Demna said he felt the need to “be there for him to help him create a solid foundation for Ye’s aesthetic on which they can now build. To accelerate the process.” Hence the name of the collaboration: “engineered by Balenciaga.” They were, Demna said, engineering the prototypes in the Balenciaga studios in Paris and Zurich after he and Ye talked (or texted) through the ideas.“Lots of talking, thousands of images shared,” he said of their exchanges. They talked about how Ye wanted a “fabric that is very light but also warm and makes no sound — kind of like nylon, but not nylon. Things that seemed to be impossible or very hard to make technically.“Ye’s not really interested in fashion at all,” Demna said. “He wants to know: ‘How can we make a new version of the hoodie? What’s next? What do we want to wear in 20 years?’”Then, Demna said, once “the shape was there, I would make a decision — OK, it’s ready, we launch it.” At that point, he would send the designs to Ye and the Gap teams in Los Angeles, after which they would “start the process on how to industrialize them.” (Ye also went to Paris, and Mr. Lawson said prototypes were also created by the Yeezy Gap team in Los Angeles, and characterized the work as a three-way partnership.)“Me being on board gave him reassurance,” Demna said, “so there could be a moment of letting go.”And the clothes, which included a catsuit ($300), cargo pants ($220) and thigh-high boots (coming later this year), could, with the help of the strengthened Los Angeles infrastructure, make it out of the experimental phase and into the public’s waiting hands.The first Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga (or YGEBB, as it’s called internally) designs were made available for purchase online in late February.A week later, Ye was in the news again, for a music video in which an animated version of himself buries Pete Davidson, Ms. Kardashian’s new boyfriend, alive.The “virtual game experience” playing on screens outside the Times Square store.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWhat Happens Now?Gap’s preferred word to explain the unconventional production timeline of Yeezy Gap is “fluid.”The work with Balenciaga “really has been a fluid collaboration,” Mr. Lawson said. The entire experience of building Yeezy Gap “has been about being fluid,” and “creating new ways of doing things, and understanding how these ways of doing things will impact the bigger Gap brand and help everything be a little bit more fluid.”But is fluidity enough to help Gap make a profit? This spring, before the largest Yeezy Gap drop to date (the Balenciaga collection in late May), analysts who spoke to The Times were skeptical of Ye’s long-term effect on Gap as a company.“Anyone who was excited about the Yeezy partnership when it was announced is disappointed with the amount of product that is coming out,” said Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets.The discussion around Yeezy Gap has largely morphed from focusing on sales to focusing on buzz. And Gap is investing considerably in that buzz: in addition to fees Ye has already been or will be paid for the collection — and the costs of maintaining the innovation studio, as well as its sampling and production — Gap also provides support for music videos and concerts that feature Yeezy Gap products.“The Yeezy line was never going to be big enough to change Gap’s fortunes,” Mr. Siegel said. “It needed to be powerful enough to elevate the rest of Gap’s brand, and we clearly have not seen that.”With the advent of the in-store product, however, that could change. Already 70 percent of Yeezy Gap’s customers are first-time Gap customers, the company said during an earnings call last year.Mr. Lawson said that Gap interim leadership is fully committed to the Yeezy Gap vision. Ye himself posted a recent statement on Instagram after a call with Gap management calling the executive chairman Bob Martin “one of the most inspiring people I’ve heard speak in business.”“Bob I need to meet with you as soon as possible,” he wrote. (This may not be the way Mr. Martin usually sets up meetings, but according to a Gap spokeswoman, the appointment was already in motion.)According to Demna, Balenciaga’s work on the project is now over, and he’s not sure what will happen next. But Yeezy Gap has its sights on other future partnerships, in addition to growing its core business. There is a structure in place to adapt and iterate for the future: Yeezy Gap engineered by … fill in the bank.As Demna said, when it comes to Ye: “This was just step No. 1. He needed a starting point, and that was my challenge: to give him the starting point. But he is still miles and miles away from where he wants this to go.” More

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      Mavis Staples and Levon Helm’s Last Show, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Pusha T, Laura Veirs, Helado Negro and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. 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.Mavis Staples and Levon Helm, ‘You Got to Move’Back in 2011, Mavis Staples and her band visited Woodstock, N.Y., to perform at the barn-studio-theater of the Band’s drummer Levon Helm; they had appeared together at the Band’s “The Last Waltz,” in 1976. Helm’s band joined hers, which included her sister Yvonne Staples on backup vocals, and they recorded the show. More than a decade later, an album, “Carry Me Home,” is due May 20. Staples gave “You Got to Move,” a gospel standard, her full contralto commitment; the guitarists Rick Holmstrom and Larry Campbell traded blues twang and bluegrassy runs. It was just another good-timey show in two long careers, but it would be their last together; Helm died in 2012. JON PARELESPusha T featuring Ye, ‘Dreamin of the Past’Nostalgia is not a concept often associated with Pusha T; even when he’s mining his coke-dealing past for material (and best believe, he usually is), his rhymes have the vivid immediacy of the present tense. But the classic, Old-Kanye production heard on “Dreamin of the Past” — revolving around a sped-up sample of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” — gives the song a halcyon glow that’s playfully at odds with his unrepentant flow. As ever, on this highlight from his latest solo album “It’s Almost Dry,” Push’s lyrics pop with poetic detail (“We hollowed the walls in back of bodegas”) and riotous cleverness: At one point, he boasts of keeping people “on the bikes like Amblin.” LINDSAY ZOLADZShakira and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Te Felicito’​​Robot love, funky bass lines, Rauw Alejandro’s head in a refrigerator: Welcome to Shakira and the Puerto Rican reggaeton star’s first collaboration. “Te Felicito” is a bitter send-off to a paramour whose love has been a charade that marries some of the superstars’ signature gifts: the Colombian singer’s eccentric choreography and Rauw’s penchant for funk-infused reggaeton. The Shak stamp of approval is a sought-after trophy for young artists ascending the ranks of the industry — just another sign that Alejandro is here to stay in all his freaky glory. ISABELIA HERRERAMidas the Jagaban featuring Liya, ‘420’Marijuana anthems abound on April 20. Here’s a lighter-than-smoke one from Nigeria, sung by the always-masked female songwriter Midas the Jagaban and a guest, Liya. The tapping, airborne polyrhythms of Afrobeats, topped by labyrinthine echoed vocals, provide just enough propulsion and haze as the women declare, “Whatever I do/I do it better when I smoke my marijuana.” PARELESPinkPantheress featuring Willow, ‘Where You Are’To capture the way a breakup can upend everything, PinkPantheress enlisted two beat experts — Skrillex and Mura Masa — to share production on “Where You Are,” along with Willow (Smith), who delivers full-throated hooks. They sing about the limbo between wanting to move on and longing to stay together: “I know it will never be the same,” Willow wails. The song is a vortex of obsession, with a brisk beat, a fingerpicking pattern (sampled from Paramore’s “Never Let This Go”) and vocals that diffuse into echoes and wordless syllables as PinkPantheress (breathy) and Willow (desperate and dramatic) toss around all the possibilities of separation, confrontation and wishing for a reunion. PARELESLaura Veirs, ‘Winter Windows’Laura Veirs has been a folk-rock fixture since the early aughts, but over the past few years she’s experienced a great deal of personal and professional change. Shortly before the pandemic, she divorced her longtime collaborator Tucker Martine, who had produced many of her albums — including “My Echo” from 2020, which was partially about their split. Her forthcoming album “Found Light,” due July 8, is her first album without Martine and the first she co-produced herself. Veirs sounds fittingly reinvigorated and inspired on the lead single “Winter Windows,” an antsy, guitar-driven meditation on motherhood and moving on. “I used to watch them watch you light up every room,” she sings, a gritty resilience in her voice. “Now it’s up to me, the lighting I can do.” ZOLADZSorry, ‘There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved’On the London group Sorry’s charming “There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved,” Asha Lorenz sings with the sort of sweet, earnest guilelessness that Mo Tucker brought to the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” “See them in the nightclubs, barking up the walls, head in their hands in the bathroom stalls,” she notes of all the lonely people she observes. But as the song gradually builds from unassuming to epic, “There’s So Many People” becomes less a lament and more a celebration of communal human longing — a feeling to be cherished, and, ironically, shared. ZOLADZRavyn Lenae, ‘M.I.A.’It’s been four years since the Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae dropped her “Crush” EP, a Steve Lacy-produced release that stitched her sky-high vocals with funky bass lines and delicious electro-soul textures. For “M.I.A.,” her first single from her debut album “Hypnos,” Lenae pairs with the producer Sango for something a little more breezy. Over a buoyant, syncopated Afrobeats production, a gleaming synth expands and contracts under Lenae’s airy falsetto, as she coos about finally making it: “I’m gonna run the town, ain’t nothing in my way.” HERRERARuth Radelet, ‘Crimes’“Is it easy to start over?” Ruth Radelet wonders on the chorus of her debut solo single, and it’s safe to assume that’s an autobiographical sentiment. For nearly two decades, Radelet was the frontwoman of the moody electro-pop group Chromatics, who disbanded last summer amid drama surrounding a mysterious (and possibly nonexistent) final album. On the glassy, synth-driven “Crimes,” though, Radelet sounds ready to wipe the slate clean. The verses have a bit of a steely bite (“I know what they’re telling me is true/I know I could never be like you”), but the lush chorus is awash in her signature, dreamy melancholy. ZOLADZHelado Negro, ‘Ya No Estoy Aquí’Helado Negro’s music may be dreamlike and crepuscular, but don’t confuse his songs for simple lullabies. “Ya No Estoy Aquí,” his latest single, revisits the celestial meanderings that have defined his work: soft, pulsing drum loops and wobbling, echoing synths. The Ecuadorean-American artist sings about isolation and melancholy alongside harmonic melodies from the Chicago singer-songwriter Kaina. “Ojalá me estoy volviendo loco/Por lo menos tengo con quien puedo hablar/alucinaciones,” he intones (“Hopefully I’m going crazy/At least I have someone to talk to/Hallucinations”). Underneath that soothing exterior, Helado Negro’s music holds a special power: the capacity to engage difficult feelings. HERRERALou Roy, ‘U.D.I.D.’The Los Angeles songwriter Lou Roy regularly juggles euphoria and disillusionment. Her debut album, “Pure Chaos,” is due April 29, and in “U.D.I.D.” — “You don’t I don’t” — she probes a relationship that seems about to fissure. “I always want you here/but I’m starting to get the deal,” she sings. The track, which she co-produced with Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, has an upbeat 4/4 pop thump, but some sonic elements — vocals, keyboards, guitar chords — linger like contrails, hinting that the romance may already be a memory. PARELESCharles Mingus, ‘The Man Who Never Sleeps’One heavy day in 1973, Columbia Records dropped every jazz musician on its roster besides Miles Davis. The bassist and composer Charles Mingus (whose 100th birthday would have been on Friday) was among them. So were Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. But just months before that, the label had arranged to have a performance by Mingus’s new sextet recorded at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. The tapes were ultimately shelved. They’ll finally be released on Saturday, Record Store Day, as the triple-disc set “The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott’s.” On “The Man Who Never Sleeps,” Mingus is lit up by the antic virtuosity of the young trumpeter and Dizzy Gillespie protégé Jon Faddis, barely 19, who had just joined the band. Just before Columbia would press a final symbolic seal on an entire jazz generation, you can hear a torch being passed. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOFred Moten, Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, ‘The Abolition of Art, the Abolition of Freedom, the Abolition of You and Me’“Freedom is too close to slavery for us to be easy with that jailed imagining,” the poet and theorist Fred Moten says in a coolly controlled voice, speaking over the rustle of Gerald Cleaver’s drums and the dark pull of Brandon López’s open bass strings. There’s a doom-metal energy here, and Sun Ra’s relationship to darkness — as a substance. López hangs on the high strings for a moment at the end of Moten’s phrase, aware that the thought needs time to settle and land, then comes home to the root of the minor key. In the past 20 years Moten has become perhaps the leading thinker on Black performance, writing volumes of poetry and theory that dance with the ways in which Diasporic expression resists definition and capture. “The Abolition of Art” is the first track from a new album, “Moten/López/Cleaver,” putting that engagement directly to music and sacrificing none of its complexity or wit. RUSSONELLO More

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      Kanye West Replaced by Swedish House Mafia and the Weeknd at Coachella

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      A little over a week before the music festival’s first weekend, West, now known as Ye, dropped out of his headlining slot.Nine days before the return of Coachella, the festival has confirmed reports that Kanye West has dropped out as one of the event’s three headliners, and has been replaced by Swedish House Mafia with the Weeknd.No explanation was officially given about the departure of West, who was booked as the top performer for the third night of the festival, which repeats its lineup over two successive weekends. (Harry Styles and Billie Eilish lead the first two nights.) But the change, noted only in a revised lineup flier posted to the festival’s social media accounts on Wednesday, followed West’s ban from performing at the Grammy Awards, after weeks of unpredictable and troubling behavior online.The news of West’s apparent withdrawal was first reported on Monday by TMZ, and was quickly followed up by reports in the music press that the festival was seeking a replacement. Swedish House Mafia had been announced months ago as being part of the festival, though the group’s position in the lineup was left unclear. In October, the group released a track, “Moth to a Flame,” featuring the Weeknd on vocals.The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which was one of the first major events to be canceled by the spread of the coronavirus in 2020 — and was then postponed multiple times as the pandemic continued — will be held April 15-17 and April 22-24 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. It is being closely watched by the music industry as a symbolic moment for the full-scale return of the multibillion-dollar touring business. In February, the festival announced that attendees would not have to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination or a negative test to enter; masks are not required.West, who now goes by Ye, was nominated for five Grammys at Sunday’s ceremony, including album of the year for “Donda.” He won two nontelevised rap categories, bringing his career total to 24, but did not attend the show.The subject of a new Netflix documentary that coincided with the release of a new album-in-progress exclusively on a proprietary $200 speaker device, West had taken to posting extensively and combatively online about his divorce from Kim Kardashian, her dating life and their ongoing child custody battle.When Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show,” who was set to host the Grammys, said in a segment last month that West’s behavior was tipping into harassment and abuse, West responded in a post that referred to Noah with a racial slur. West was subsequently banned from Instagram for 24 hours and has not posted online since.Coachella’s 2020 event would have featured headlining performances by Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean. A crowd surge at Scott’s own Astroworld festival last October left 10 people dead and many more injured, leading the rapper to withdraw from most public appearances. West indicated in an Instagram post in February that he planned to bring Scott, his onetime protégé and erstwhile brother-in-law, to the Coachella stage as a special guest during his set.Coachella is expected to welcome up to 125,000 attendees per day. More

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      The Psychic Contortions of the Black Billionaire

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The story is so good it hurts to hear. In an era of stupefying inequality, one of the most famous members of the upper class is a former drug dealer from a notorious public-housing project. He switched the product and rode CD sales to a new ZIP code. He went from nobody to somebody to a fixture in public consciousness who hangs out with a former president. If you’ve been rapping along with Jay-Z since “Reasonable Doubt,” or maybe even his feature on the early Jaz-O single “Hawaiian Sophie,” you’d be forgiven for seeing that star scream across the sky and thinking his song was right: There’s nothing you can’t do.But when the force of his flow isn’t in your ears, what he did seems impossible once again. He is not just rich; he is, according to Forbes, a billionaire. Rappers aren’t supposed to make that much money. For starters, part of the job is knowing how to spend it, and Jay-Z has done plenty of that. But also, rappers, like athletes, tend to have short careers — the genre reinvents itself too quickly for elder statesmen to hang on. And it is a cutthroat business. Get rich or die trying is the injunction for this heady mix of the mostly male, mostly Black, cocksure young musicians rehearsing punch lines in the nation’s ghettos, where making it very well might be a matter of survival. It is a dreamer’s music, by necessity. But more than four decades into the genre’s reign, there are levels now. Some artists get paid. Others acquire capital.This is an uncomfortable situation. According to a recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve, the median family wealth for Black households is $24,100. (The median white household has nearly eight times that.) Somewhere in that data set are eight Black American billionaires, at least according to the Forbes list. Whether your politics lead you to believe that these eight are inspirations or a problem, the last several centuries of history might lead you to ask how it is even possible they exist. Four of them — Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Tyler Perry and Kanye West — made their names as entertainers. (There’s also Rihanna, who is a resident of the U.S. but not a citizen.) Rapper, as an occupation, appears more frequently on this short list than an Ivy League education does.Photo illustration by Ryan HaskinsIt is a strange fact of this country’s economic system that the most common way for Black people to become obscenely wealthy is to first become obscenely famous. Among other things, this means that much of their net worth is tied to the value of their public personas in ways that do not hold true for other billionaires. Whatever you think of Stephen A. Schwarzman, Miriam Adelson or even Bill Gates, their wealth is untethered to their Q Scores. Of course there are outliers. Elon Musk does relish playing to the crowd as the enfant terrible of auto manufacturing, generating an insulating admiration from his fans, but Kanye and Jay-Z are truly in a bind.For as long as it has existed, rap was, or was supposed to be, the crafted but splenetic outpouring of the dispossessed. At the same time, it has been about a life that most of its listeners cannot lead, but it held on, however tenuously, to its lower-class roots. Jay-Z always rapped as if he had the planet in his palm, even when it was really just a few blocks in Brooklyn. Over the years, he really did gain the whole world. And now a globally popular form of working-class youth music has, as its most powerful representatives, a pair of billionaires in their 40s and 50s. It has not been an easy balance to strike.Entertainers occupy a curious position where the lines between worker and owner sometimes blur. Rappers are signed to labels and then often open their own. Some of these labels collapse, often in a wave of recriminations about shady business practices. The contracts can control artists’ entire output, leaving them almost entirely dependent on the label to actually make something of their labor. Maximize revenue, cut labor costs. That, more than all the drug dealing said to take place, is the business world that produces many of these rappers. And they have, as often as not, leaned into this ethos. When they promise you that they’re reciting what they know, it is not really a reference to some social truth ripped from the depths of poor, Black neighborhoods. What they know is capital: What it is to have none, what it is to get a taste, what it takes to try to make peace with winding up on the other side of that divide.From the beginning, Jay-Z was a businessman. His debut album was released on the auspiciously named Roc-A-Fella Records, which he founded with two friends, Kareem Burke and Damon Dash. It made sense to have a piece of the action, because he helped popularize Mafioso rap, which took the bleak air of street-corner hustling and gave it the baroque mystique of gangster films. If there had not been a Black James Cagney or Francis Ford Coppola, there was at least a Shawn Carter. But the business world is brutal, inside and outside the law.At its peak in the ’00s, Roc-A-Fella featured a stacked cast: Just Blaze on production; the Philadelphia icons Beanie Sigel, Peedi Crakk and Freeway; the sprawling Dipset crew in Harlem; a young producer from Chicago named Kanye West. When Cam’ron appeared on the show “Rap City” in an oversize pink T-shirt, counting off a large pile of bills while freestyling that he’d “seen all islands, Cayman to Rikers,” it seemed unfathomable that the Roc era would ever end. But in a few years, Def Jam bought out the label’s founding partners and appointed Jay as the umbrella corporation’s president. Fights over shelved albums, loyalty, blocked promotions and due credit broke up what had looked like a street family.This led to a peculiar situation in which boardroom drama spilled out in the form of diss tracks by Def Jam artists aimed at their employer’s lead executive. Roc-A-Fella eventually folded. But still, to this day, Jay-Z owes much of his image as a business magnate to the dynastic sheen his labelmates gave “the Roc,” not to mention the marketers, graphic designers and interns that made them icons of New York street swagger.Jay diversified his portfolio in the years after that. He has a stake in Oatly, two separate highly valued liquor companies — Armand de Brignac Champagne and D’Ussé Cognac — several homes, the streaming platform Tidal, a club near Madison Square and an expansive art collection. If on his debut he spoke a little beyond his means when he said he was “well connected,” he has made it true. It is hard to think of a door he cannot open. Even as he has outgrown what made him Jay-Z, that project remains central to his business. He is the best rapper alive, the entrepreneur who made it out of the projects, the kingpin. The albums remind you why the Cognac is worth so much money.‘What’s better than one billionaire? Two. Especially if they from the same hue as you.’This situation is not unique. In the entertainment world, people must become corporations if they want to become truly wealthy. High-profile singers, athletes, actors and so on often make their real money from endorsement deals rather than their day jobs. What separates the billionaires from their peers is that they turned endorsements into equity. Michael Jordan gets a percentage of Nike’s Jordan brand revenue. Kanye, who owns the Yeezy brand outright, has major deals with Adidas and Gap. Winfrey and Perry have sprawling media concerns. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty is a subsidiary of the LVMH luxury conglomerate.Many of these businesses could keep running without their famed figureheads, but the sheen would dissipate somewhat. Dell does not sell its computers by trading on the fact that it and its founder share a name. But without Kanye’s imprimatur, it’s hard to imagine Yeezy’s moon-boot look becoming a default sneaker silhouette. Fenty, by contrast, seems to have capitalized on a real gap in the market by broadening the available shades for foundation and concealer. Still, the entertainer-billionaire is as much the product as the shoe or concealer up for sale. From the outside looking in, this seems like a shaky foundation for a fortune so vast. Stars lose their luster all the time. It’s part of their appeal.On “The Story of O.J.,” from his latest album, “4:44,” Jay-Z raps about the psychic drama of successful Black Americans. In the animated video, his character tells his therapist that he failed to invest in Dumbo real estate early and missed out on a 1,250 percent return. Later he explains that art he bought for $1 million appreciated in value and is now worth 8. The song weaves back and forth between an examination of racial stereotypes and a guidebook to gaining freedom through asset ownership.You could hear Jay-Z, over time, growing more comfortable with his newfound status. On “The Black Album,” he rapped, “I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them, so I got rich and gave back, to me that’s the win-win.” It’s a defensive sentiment. The poor do help one another; there is often no other choice. That song is called “Moment of Clarity” — but nothing seems very clear at all. All the old signifiers, the ones linking public prominence and political progress, are slipping. They have to be reasserted from the top down. “What’s better than one billionaire? Two. Especially if they from the same hue as you,” Jay-Z rhymed on “4:44.” The ghetto’s music is starting to sound like prosperity gospel. Rap is relatable because the fan embodies the rapper. The “you” is rarely the listener, rather an invitation to adopt a new “I.” That “I” might get high, duck, dive, sling, get shot at and shoot back. But who is this “I” who accumulates such an immense sum of money, he starts to see things from the other side while insisting we’re still the same? The hue tells me nothing about what you’ve become.For once, through drive and circumstance, a few Black artists actually stand to be the main beneficiaries of the popularity of Black culture. On paper that might be progress. But two things remain clear: Black art sells, and wealth collects. Money pools in rooms that remain hard to get into. Years ago, Forbes magazine organized a meeting between Jay-Z and Warren Buffett, treating the rapper like the heir apparent. They both spoke about the role of chance. Buffett talked at length about being white, male and born in the U.S. at the right time. It was the discourse of what we would now call “privilege,” which feels like an understatement when talking about one of the wealthiest men alive. When Jay-Z spoke, he told a story about a nearly inseparable friend of his who was arrested during a sting operation. Jay-Z happened to be out of the country for an early recording date. His friend was incarcerated for over a decade. That’s luck, the vicious kind that fortunes are made of.Blair McClendon is a writer, an editor and a filmmaker in New York. His writing has appeared in n+1, The New Republic and The New Yorker. More

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      Trevor Noah Returns to Host the Grammys After a Dust-Up With Kanye West

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      Trevor Noah, the comedian and face of “The Daily Show,” is returning to host the Grammy Awards for the second year in a row. For the 2021 show, Noah was front and center at an unconventional Grammys, with some performances pretaped and the bulk of the ceremony held outside the Staples Center (now known as the Crypto.com Arena) in Los Angeles. “On the whole, Noah made something that could have felt like several competing shows feel like one,” The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote.This year, for another pandemic-delayed show, the coronavirus is one of a few delicate topics Noah may broach in his monologue. In the weeks before the event, he had a highly publicized clash with Kanye West, who is up for five awards and until recently was slated to perform at Sunday night’s ceremony.Noah devoted a segment of his March 15 show to a nearly 10-minute long, reportedly unscripted monologue on what he characterized as West’s harassment of his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. West had released a Claymation video in which he appeared to kidnap and bury a figure resembling Pete Davidson, the “Saturday Night Live” comedian who has been dating Kardashian.“What she’s going through is terrifying to watch, and it shines a spotlight on what so many women go through when they choose to leave,” Noah said in the segment, comparing West’s behavior to the abuse he witnessed as a child. (Noah said from when he was 9 to 16 he witnessed his stepfather mistreat his mother; he later shot her.)Days after Noah’s monologue, West posted an image of Noah on his Instagram alongside a racial slur. Meta, which owns Instagram, soon banned West — who had also been posting long videos criticizing Kardashian and others — for 24 hours. Then, just two weeks before West was set to perform at the awards, organizers informed his team that he would not be allowed to take the stage.Noah appeared to object to the ban. “I said counsel Kanye, not cancel Kanye,” he tweeted.Noah is a Grammy nominee himself. His standup special “Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia” was nominated for best comedy album at the 2020 Grammys. He lost to Dave Chappelle’s “Sticks and Stones.” More

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      Grammys 2022: How to Watch, Time and Streaming

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      A guide to everything you need to know for the 64th annual awards on Sunday night.It’s been a tumultuous few months for the Grammy Awards.First, at a meeting just 24 hours before the nominees were announced in November, the Recording Academy decided to expand the big four categories — album, record and song of the year, and best new artist — from eight to 10 slots, netting nominations for Taylor Swift and Kanye West. A few days later, Drake, without offering an explanation, dropped out of the two rap categories in which he was nominated.In mid-January, amid an uptick in coronavirus cases caused by the Omicron variant, the 64th annual Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, were postponed and then moved to Las Vegas for the first time.Last month, Kanye West, who is up for five awards, was told he is no longer welcome to perform at the ceremony following troubling behavior on social media. Then, two of the seven members of the K-pop group BTS, which is up for best pop duo/group performance for the second straight year, tested positive for the coronavirus, leaving their performance status in limbo. And this week, Foo Fighters, who are up for three awards this year, also bowed out after their 50-year-old drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died on tour on March 25.While producers were juggling lineup changes, Covid protocols and the usual stresses of preparing three and a half hours of live network television, something else happened at the Oscars on Sunday night that likely got their attention.Obstacles aside, Sunday’s ceremony at the MGM Grand Garden Arena is a return to a large-scale production with a big audience following last year’s bare-bones, intimate, largely outdoor affair. The contenders include Tony Bennett, 95, who is nominated for his collaboration with Lady Gaga on the Cole Porter tribute album “Love for Sale,” and Olivia Rodrigo, 19, who is up for all four of the biggest trophies; Jon Batiste, perhaps best known as the bandleader for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” leads all nominees with 11 nods.A Guide to the 2022 Grammy AwardsThe ceremony, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, was postponed for a second year in a row due to Covid and is now scheduled for April 3.Jon Batiste Leads the Way: The jazz pianist earned the most nominations with 11, including album and record of the year. Here’s his reaction.Performers: Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, BTS and Lil Nas X are among the first performers announced for the April 3 show, which will be available on CBS and Paramount+.Kanye West: The singer, who is nominated for five awards, was told he will not be allowed to perform during the ceremony due to his erratic public behavior. A Surprise Appearance: The Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who suffered an aneurysm in 2015 and has spoken in public infrequently since, will present an award at the ceremony.Here’s how to watch — and what to expect at — Sunday’s ceremony.What time do the festivities start?The ceremony, which will air live on CBS and the streaming service Paramount+, will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. You can also watch on CBS.com or through the CBS app if you have a cable subscription.Cord cutters can watch the show on any live TV streaming service that offers CBS, including FuboTV, Hulu + Live TV, Paramount+, YouTube TV and DirecTV Stream, many of which are offering free trials. It will also be available on demand on Paramount+.If you want to pregame, you can check out the premiere ceremony, when about 76 of the 86 awards are handed out. That begins at 3:30 Eastern, 12:30 Pacific and will be available to watch on grammy.com and the Recording Academy’s YouTube channel. LeVar Burton will host, and Allison Russell, Jimmie Allen, Ledisi and Mon Laferte will perform.Is there a red carpet?Yes. E! will have red carpet coverage beginning at 4 p.m., and “Live From E!: Grammys” starts at 6 p.m. Arrivals will be streamed at grammy.com beginning at 6:30 p.m.Who will be hosting?Trevor Noah, of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, is back for a second year.How is the competition shaping up?Batiste leads the pack with 11 nominations, covering American roots music, classical, jazz and R&B. He’s followed by Doja Cat, H.E.R. and Justin Bieber, all with eight nods. Billie Eilish (“Happier Than Ever”) and Rodrigo (“Sour”) earned seven nominations apiece, including for record, album and song of the year. (Rodrigo is also up for best new artist.)Joining Rodrigo in the best new artist category are the Kid Laroi, whose ubiquitous pop radio single “Stay” features Bieber; Saweetie (“Best Friend” featuring Doja Cat); and Finneas, Eilish’s producer brother. (Learn about all the best new artist nominees here.)Can we talk about Bruno?We regret to inform you that once again, we cannot. The Grammys, which are voted on by more than 11,000 members of the Recording Academy, recognize music released from Sept. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, meaning more recent smashes like Adele’s “30” or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” will have to wait until next year.Who’s going to perform?The lineup includes J Balvin with Maria Becerra, Batiste, Brothers Osborne, Brandi Carlile, Eilish, Lady Gaga, H.E.R., John Legend, Lil Nas X with Jack Harlow, Rodrigo, Silk Sonic, Chris Stapleton and Carrie Underwood. As of now, whether BTS will take the stage is unclear. While Foo Fighters are no longer performing, producers have said they’re working on a way to honor Hawkins during the ceremony. Something else to look forward to, especially if you’re a musical theater fan: a tribute to the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died in November at 91, featuring Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler.Who will be presenting?Joni Mitchell — who was honored at the MusiCares Person of the Year tribute show, an annual pre-Grammys event, Friday night in Las Vegas — is making a rare public appearance on the Grammys stage. Other presenters include Dua Lipa, Megan Thee Stallion, Questlove, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Urban, Kelsea Ballerini, Lenny Kravitz, Billy Porter, Avril Lavigne and Ludacris, as well as Jared Leto and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and the actor Anthony Mackie.What else is new this year?The expansion to 10 nominees in the big four categories isn’t the only change. The Grammys dropped nominating committees — expert panels that determined the ballot in many categories — after complaints from prominent artists, including the Weeknd, that they were unfair. The Grammys also removed the requirement for album of the year that writers play a role in at least a third of an LP to be recognized as contributors. Now, anyone who contributed to a single album, whether as a featured artist, engineer, producer or songwriter, is eligible — so if Bieber’s “Justice” wins, for instance, dozens of people will earn Grammys. There are also two new categories being awarded this year: best global music performance and best música urbana album.Who could make history?Rodrigo could become just the third artist, after Christopher Cross and Billie Eilish, to win all of the top four awards at a single ceremony. Taylor Swift could become the first artist to win album of the year four times, and BTS could become the first K-pop group to win a Grammy. Eilish, who won an Oscar with her brother, Finneas, for “No Time to Die” last week, could become the first person to win record of the year three times in a row.Who do we think will win?Our critics and pop music editor debated the 10 nominees up for record of the year … and didn’t come to much consensus. Grammys are famously hard to predict.Remind me again, what’s the difference between the record and song of the year categories?Record of the year, essentially the equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ best picture award and regarded as the top prize, recognizes the recording of a single track, focusing on both the artist’s performance and the efforts of audio engineers, mixers and producers. Song of the year also recognizes a single track, but it’s awarded solely for writing. (Think of it as the equivalent of the academy’s screenplay award.) More

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      Kanye West’s Stormy Relationship With the Grammys Erupts Again

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      The musician, nominated for five awards, was told he will not be able to perform at the ceremony on April 3. The decision came after weeks of erratic and troubling public behavior.When the latest Grammy nominations were announced in November, Kanye West picked up five nods, including album of the year, teeing up a potential reconciliation between one of pop music’s most mercurial stars and the institution he has spent much of the last two decades criticizing, challenging and sometimes outright insulting — even as West has yearned for its affirmation.But last Friday, a little more than two weeks before the 64th annual Grammy Awards ceremony, set for April 3 in Las Vegas — and weeks into negotiations over a planned performance at the show — organizers told West’s team that he would not be allowed to perform, according to a representative of the rapper and producer.The organizers cited West’s erratic and troubling public behavior in recent weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the decision, who was granted anonymity to discuss an internal matter.That behavior included the release of an animated music video that portrayed the kidnapping and burial of a figure who looked a lot like Pete Davidson — the comedian who has been dating Kim Kardashian, West’s former wife — and an Instagram post taunting Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show,” who is hosting this year’s Grammys, with a racial slur that resulted in West being banned from Instagram for 24 hours. (Noah said on Twitter that he had not called for West to be cut. “I said counsel Kanye not cancel Kanye,” he wrote.)For West, music’s perennial chaos agent, the episode may have been just the latest blur of sensational headlines. But for the Grammys, it is also a setback in a campaign to lure West back to the fold. He is perhaps the most vocal of a circle of high-profile Black creators — also including Jay-Z, Drake, the Weeknd and Frank Ocean — who have condemned the Grammys for often failing to recognize the work of creators of color, particularly in hip-hop, in its most high-profile categories.A Guide to the 2022 Grammy AwardsThe ceremony, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, was postponed for a second year in a row due to Covid and is now scheduled for April 3.Jon Batiste Leads the Way: The jazz pianist earned the most nominations with 11, including album and record of the year. Here’s his reaction.The Full List: Pop stars like Justin Bieber, Doja Cat and Billie Eilish were recognized in several categories. See all the nominees.Snubs and Surprises: From a big shock to smaller slights, The Times music team breaks it all down.Performers: Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, BTS and Lil Nas X are among the first performers announced for the April 3 show, which will be available on CBS and Paramount+.A Major Change: The awards will be the first since the Recording Academy ended its heavily criticized anonymous nominating committees.The Recording Academy, which presents the awards, has made extraordinary efforts to accommodate West, who has won 22 Grammys in his career. For the latest show, a last-minute rule change resulted in West being added to the ballot for album of the year.In an interview with Billboard, Harvey Mason Jr., the academy’s chief executive, said that when the initial slate of nominees was prepared with eight contenders in the major competitions, he noticed a dearth of rap in the top categories. Within days, a proposal to expand the ballot to 10 slots in those categories was approved by the academy’s board, bringing “Donda,” along with Taylor Swift’s “Evermore,” into consideration for best album.Since becoming the academy’s chief last year, Mason has made personal appeals to dissenting artists, including West. That outreach, and the album of the year nomination, stirred frustration and anger among some members of the academy, who have been appalled by West’s past antics, such as posting a video on social media in 2020 that shows a Grammy trophy apparently being defiled in a toilet bowl.“How vile and disrespectful,” Diane Warren, the Grammy-winning songwriter of hits like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” said at the time.West’s recent behavior on social media has made mending fences even riskier for the Recording Academy. Always an oversharer, West has lately used his Instagram account to air grievances over custody and child care issues amid his divorce from Kardashian. That dispute has coincided with West’s attacks on Davidson, as well as figures like Noah who have criticized the musician’s posts as verging on threats and harassment.Still, for the Recording Academy, reconciling with West could have symbolic power, suggesting that the institution’s efforts to revamp its voting membership and adapt to a faster-moving music business with a younger, more diverse listenership were working.West’s complaints about the Grammys go back at least 17 years. In 2005, even before that year’s nominations were announced, West was telling Grammy voters that if he did not win album of the year for “Late Registration,” his second LP, he would attribute the loss to a judgment on his personal behavior rather than his artistry.“I don’t care if I jumped up and down right now on the couch like Tom Cruise,” he told MTV News at the time. “I don’t care how much I stunt — you can never take away from the amount of work I put into it.” (He lost to U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.”)Since then, West’s criticisms of the Grammys have been sporadic but unrelenting. In 2015, for example, after Beck won album of the year for “Morning Phase,” West demanded that the alt-rock musician give the award to Beyoncé instead, in an echo of his infamous moment with Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. He warned that such choices by Grammy voters would alienate “real artists.”“Because what happens is,” West said, “when you keep on diminishing art and not respecting the craft and smacking people in the face after they deliver monumental feats of music — it’s disrespectful to inspiration.”While West will not perform at this year’s Grammys, he is still invited to attend as a nominee — which presents a tricky problem for the academy if West wins a major award like album of the year. Would he use the opportunity of a speech on live television to make more inflammatory comments, either about his personal life or about the Grammys itself?As a safeguard for producers of the show, and for CBS, the Grammys’ longtime broadcast network, standard editing delays are built into the show. In 2017, for example, the Grammy audience heard Adele blurt out a frustrated profanity after she flubbed the opening of a George Michael tribute; people watching at home just heard bleeps.Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. More

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      IMAX Looks Beyond Movies to Live Events

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      To combat the decline of theatergoing, the large-format cinema company will show events like concerts, stand-up comedy and e-sports tournaments.As Kanye West thundered through “Black Skinhead” at the Los Angeles Coliseum in December as part of a benefit concert, young fans in the front row threw their bodies around in wild abandon. Others pumped their fists in the air and shouted along to the lyrics: “Pardon, I’m getting my scream on!”Except these fans were nowhere near the Coliseum. They were inside a suburban movie theater. IMAX, the large-format cinema company, had teamed up with Mr. West to expand the concert’s live footprint by beaming his performance in real time to 35 IMAX theaters, adding more than 10,000 seats. Although the first-of-its-kind event was also available to stream live on Amazon Prime Video, IMAX sold out its shows.“It’s hard to beat a six-story Kanye standing in front of you,” Richard L. Gelfond, IMAX’s chief executive, said in a phone interview.Kanye X Drake Concert IMAX Reaction🔥👀 pic.twitter.com/1uwHgz0dM5— Rap301 (@_Rap301) December 12, 2021
      Mr. Gelfond needs a lot of ticket buyers to agree with him — and not just for events involving Mr. West, who did another live collaboration with IMAX on Tuesday night, this time in 60 theaters, with a near-sellout crowd of almost 18,000 and tickets costing $20 to $30. In the coming months, IMAX intends to expand its menu to include stand-up comedy and e-sports tournaments. A company spokesman said negotiations were underway with several pop stars for concerts. H.E.R., the R&B sensation, has already agreed to collaborate with IMAX on a project. (One challenge: artist punctuality. Mr. West started his Tuesday performance more than two hours late.)Other events will revolve around exclusive film screenings, with stars and filmmakers participating in live question-and-answer sessions. Frances McDormand and the director Joel Coen did one tied to “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” a film that was primarily distributed on Apple TV+. Peter Jackson fielded questions after an IMAX-only release of his Disney+ documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back.” Both streaming services were looking for ways to “eventize” the content — to focus attention on “Macbeth” and “Get Back” so they didn’t get lost in the torrent of streaming-service offerings.A discussion featuring the actor Frances McDormand and the filmmaker Joel Coen was shown at 17 IMAX theaters after a screening of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” in December.Loren Wohl for IMAXIn December, Gwen Stefani hosted an IMAX fan event live from her house, where she screened her favorite holiday film (“Elf,” which had never been shown in the IMAX format) and promoted her Christmas album. Steven Spielberg and members of his “West Side Story” cast also participated in an IMAX event.“If you don’t keep reinventing yourself, you’re not going to move your business forward,” Mr. Gelfond said. “So we’ve been working for the last few years on events, what we informally call IMAX 3.0. The world is changing, and the movie industry is changing.”Mr. Gelfond was referring to the ascendance of streaming services and the decline of traditional moviegoing. Both trends have been percolating for years, but they intensified during the pandemic, when many theaters were closed. Studios are now diverting most of their dramas, musicals, comedies and modestly budgeted action movies to affiliated streaming services. Leviathan fantasy franchises and sequels will continue to flow to theaters. But how will theater operators fill the gaps in their schedules?Megan Colligan, the president of IMAX Entertainment, noted that live events “often bring in audiences that haven’t been to an IMAX theater and, in many cases, have not been to a movie theater at all in a very long time, sometimes ever.”Ms. Colligan emphasized that IMAX events were not just about throwing content onto a really big screen, but would specifically make use of the company’s premium-format technology. Mr. West and his team, for instance, used 16 extra-high-resolution IMAX cameras to capture the December benefit performance (out of 20 cameras in total).“There was a lot of smoke and mist, and making sure we were capturing that correctly was something that was really important to them,” Ms. Colligan said. She added that the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Larry Sher was the project’s director of photography.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More