Maren Morris appeared to take a dig at fellow country artist Jason Aldean ― with whom she previously had a public disagreement ― this week while announcing plans for a new musical project.
On Thursday, Morris shared a short video on Instagram that showed a billboard that read: “Welcome to Our Perfect Small Town, From Sunrise to Sundown.” The post also featured a photo of the artist looking up at the sky with a puzzled expression.
“I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom,” she wrote in the caption.
The clip appears to be an allusion to Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which has drawn backlash for lyrics that evoke vigilantism and xenophobia.
The accompanying music video for “Try That in a Small Town” was just as politically charged, featuring footage of what appeared to be a Black Lives Matter protest intercut with scenes of Aldean performing on the steps of a Tennessee courthouse that was the site of a historic lynching. Less than a month after the video’s release, it appeared to have been reedited with the protest clips removed.
The controversy has had little impact on the song’s success. In July, “Try That in a Small Town” topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, which ranks the 100 most popular songs in the U.S.
“Any resistance movement is not done with kind words,” Maren Morris said in 2022.
Taylor Hill via Getty Images
As of Friday afternoon, Morris’ post had received more than 31,000 likes as well as praise from fans and other musicians, including Brandi Carlile and Shane McAnally.
“[Morris] is a boss and a hero who isn’t afraid to be a bigger human and stand up against senseless bullies!” one person wrote on Instagram.
Added another: “This small town is filled with shade. I love that for us.”
A representative for Morris did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
The Grammy winner is one of Nashville’s most outspoken advocates for LGBTQ+ rights. She traded barbs with Aldean and his wife, Brittany, on social media last year over the conservative couple’s comments about transgender children.
When asked about her exchange with Brittany Aldean, Morris later told the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t have feelings of kindness when it comes to humans being made fun of for questioning their identity, especially kids.”
“The whole ‘When they go low, we go high’ thing doesn’t work with these people,” she added. “Any resistance movement is not done with kind words.”
Deezer and UMG announced a major (in both senses of the word) shake up of streaming music royalties. This is arguably the biggest streaming market development in years, as it will set the tone for market-wide change. There is no doubt that streaming royalties require a revamp. The system built for the music business of 20 years ago was always going to struggle to be fit for purpose in today’s business. There are some really positive elements to this proposal, but it can be even better. Indeed there is a risk that as it stands it will break as much as it fixes.
The problems with today’s streaming market are well known, but for the record, a few of the key ones are:
Music listening is becoming commodified
The volume and velocity of music released is excessive
Cynical entities are able to game the royalty system
Most artists do not earn enough
Artists are building audiences rather than fanbases
Artists struggle to cut through the clutter
The full list, of course, is far longer, but the selection shows how pervasive and structural the challenges are. Royalties are an important part of the fix, but nonetheless, just one part. The UMG / Deezer initiative addresses the top three in the list, but not the bottom three. And crucially, it rewards success at the expense of emerging artists.
Among a raft of elements, the UMG / Deezer initiative:
Halves the royalty ‘weight’ of artists with less than 1,000 monthly streams and 500 unique monthly listeners, while doubling that of the rest
Further ‘double boosts’ music that has been actively searched for by a user
The second item is a very welcome and long overdue move. Streaming has thrown together two old business models (retail and radio) and thrown them into one pot, pretending lean-back and lean-forward consumption are the same. They are not. This move will go a long way to disincentivising the commodification of consumption by rewarding active listening. If you get your listeners to pay attention, to look for you, then you are rewarded with higher royalties. So, top marks for this move.
The first item, though, is an entirely different issue and far less welcome. Why? Because it does a reverse-Robin Hood. It is redistribution of wealth in reverse, taking income from struggling, emerging artists and sharing it among those who have already found success.
Between 2000 and 2022, artists direct (i.e., artists without record labels) grew streaming revenue by 60% while the majors grew streaming revenue by just 35%. As of 2022, artists direct represented 8% of global streaming revenue. This fastest-growing part of the streaming market accounts for the majority of the long tail of artists with less than 1,000 streams. Crucially, the number of artists in this group grows at the same rate as their revenue, so most are unlikely to ever break the 1,000 streams threshold.
Which means that the fastest-growing and most dynamic part of the music business could become a permanent funding mechanism for the biggest labels and stars. The way funding programmes usually work in the wider world is that the better advantaged fund the less well advantaged, not the other way round. The idea of a teenage, aspiring bedroom producer having half their royalties taken to pay the likes of Taylor Swift feels like an odd reward for effort and creativity.
The 1,000-stream threshold is not actually a bad idea in itself. In fact, it could actually be used in a dramatically different way that would truly help rebalance the streaming economy.
Artists with less than 1,000 streams represent roughly 80% of all artists. Most generate less than $100 a year of streaming royalties. So, taking away the income from these emerging and long-tail artists may be morally questionable, but it is not going to exactly affect their ability to pay the rent.
Roughly speaking, the total income from these artists accounts for about 1% of all streaming royalties. Which means that the impact on big artists is going to be pretty small.
Sidenote: it is difficult to see how >1,000-stream artists will get an over ‘double weight’ without more money being put in the royalty pot or being taken from somewhere else. The “500 monthly listeners” might actually ensure the pool of the <1,000-streams cohort is actually much bigger. Many smaller artists have very engaged fanbases, who may listen to their latest release many times over. In this model, 300 fans listening to a new artist’s song five times per month (thus generating 1,500 streams) would still not get paid the double weight. But an artist who gets a song in random playlist and has 1,000 people listen just once each, would get the double weight. Hopefully this is an unintended flaw rather than design.
Back to reconfiguring the model. If we take 100% (rather than half) of the royalties of <1,000-stream artists and apply it to ONLY the next tier up of artists (those who earn between $100 and $1,000) then the impact is truly significant, representing an increase of almost a third to these artists, rather than the 1% across all >1,000-stream artists. These are artists who are making the step up, beginning to get real traction, and need all the support they can get to kick on to the next level. The extra income would make a big difference to them. Supporting the next generation of artists is something that can truly be called ‘artist centric’.
Record labels are in the business of finding, nurturing, and investing in new talent. It is the single most important role the music business plays. A streaming royalty mechanism that takes from 80% of artists to redistribute to 20% does not feel very “artist centric”. But shift the equation slightly, and push all of the royalties of the <1,000-streams cohort to the next tier up, and then we have a truly artist-centric solution. One that invests in tomorrow’s stars. Who in the music business wouldn’t what to invest in tomorrow’s artists?
By the early 1990s, Lou Barlow was used to getting some weird fan mail. The lyrics he wrote for his band Sebadoh seemed to excavate the loneliest and weirdest secrets of his inner world — subject matter that invited Barlow’s listeners to form an unusually close relationship to its singer. He didn’t think much of it when one of those fans, a teenager named Harmony Korine, sent him the full-length script for a pretty out-there movie he’d written called “Kids.”
“It seemed kind of extreme, but I was used to it,” Barlow recalled in a video interview. He began corresponding with Korine, who wanted Barlow to write the music for his film, which was not some pipe dream but actually in an early state of production. Korine, he said, had a clear vision: “He obviously knew what he was talking about.”
Directed by the photographer Larry Clark, “Kids” would indeed become a cultural flashpoint upon its 1995 release for its colorful, and arguably exploitative, depiction of wayward New York City teenagers caught up in drugs and sex. It would serve as a launching pad for Korine’s own directorial ambitions, and the careers of the actresses Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson. And for many viewers, the “Kids” soundtrack was an introduction to some of the stranger artists in then-contemporary American independent music: the outsider singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston; the mysterious post-rock practitioners Slint; and the Folk Implosion, Barlow’s eclectic band with John Davis, who ended up scoring a good chunk of the movie.
An incomplete version of that soundtrack is available on some streaming platforms, but it cannot be heard as it was initially presented. (Multiple songs — different ones — are missing on Apple Music and Spotify; the LP isn’t on Tidal or Amazon Music.) A Domino publicist said in an email that Universal — the parent company of London Records, which first released the “Kids” soundtrack — no longer held the rights to any of the music, and that “a partial selection had become available erroneously.”
But now, the Folk Implosion’s contributions to that soundtrack will be reissued on Sept. 8 via Domino Records as “Music for Kids.” It contains all the original compositions the band made for the movie, many of which have never been available on streaming, as well as a grab bag of sonically similar Folk Implosion recordings from subsequent albums. “Music for Kids” also doubles as a flagship release for the duo’s reunion. Davis left the band in 1999 on unfavorable terms; today, they’re working on new Folk Implosion recordings, and making plans to perform together.
“There’s a core spark to it that feels almost genetic,” Davis said in a separate video interview.
Their collaboration as the Folk Implosion was, in fact, inspired by a fan letter that a teenage Davis wrote to Barlow in the late ’80s, when Barlow was living in Westfield, Mass. At the time, Barlow was beginning to gain attention for his work in Sebadoh, following his stint as the bassist in the alternative rock band Dinosaur Jr. His experience with the indie music scene had made him acutely aware of its limitations, and in Davis, he found a cerebral collaborator who wasn’t afraid to talk freely about the creative process.
“John, he’s an actual intellectual,” Barlow said. “Him being a fan of my work really made me feel safe — that I could just start talking.”
Their mutual openness led the Folk Implosion in a very different direction. Contrary to Dinosaur Jr.’s grungy guitar heroics, or Sebadoh’s homespun singer-songwriter recordings, Davis was more comfortable pushing Barlow to experiment with rap and R&B production methods. Most of their songs originated as drum and bass compositions before they layered in samples, loops and nontraditional instrumentation.
The Folk Implosion’s “Music for Kids” includes the group’s songs from the movie and additional tracks.Credit...Domino Records
“We were trying to poke fun at the pieties of this very white indie-rock world, and be open to other influences,” Davis said. He described a dynamic in the underground scene where white musicians, fearing accusations of cultural appropriation, stayed away from historically Black genres altogether. The Folk Implosion was inspired by groups like Devo and Public Image Ltd., who freely combined disparate styles into their own creations. As Barlow put it, “we really felt like everything should be melded together.”
Following a whirlwind trip to New York City, where Barlow got a firsthand look at the particular method of Korine and Clark’s madness, he and Davis convened at Boston’s Fort Apache Studios to work on the soundtrack. As the movie was being completed, they were mailed VHS tapes of scenes. The percussively frantic “Nasa Theme” was written for when Sevigny’s character, Jenny, ventures to N.A.S.A., an all-ages dance party at the once-thriving Club Shelter. The jaunty “Cabride” was meant to accompany Jenny as she rides in a taxi cab after learning she has tested positive for H.I.V.
Not all of these compositions made it into the film: “Cabride” was cut in favor of a jazz song that Clark preferred.Others, like the haunting “Raise the Bells,” which plays over a lonesome montage of early morning New York City, were pulled right from Barlow’s existing discography. “A lot of things they chose to actually put in the movie, we recorded on a four-track at my house,” Davis noted, including the melancholy yet ascendant “Jenny’s Theme,” which appeared multiple times in the film.
But the two never seemed to encounter much resistance as they worked on the soundtrack, which they made without a restrictive budget. (They were paid a flat fee: “I know our lawyer thought it was low, whatever it was,” the band wrote in an email.) The lack of guardrails led to its biggest single, “Natural One.” Conceived for a scene where a group of teenage girls talk frankly about their sex lives, the song was ultimately left out of the final cut. (In its place, Korine inserted a Beastie Boys track.) Nonetheless, the Folk Implosion refused to consign it to the archives.
“We didn’t know it would be popular, but we knew that we’d done something very good,” Davis said. After the movie was finished, they received some extra money from London Records that allowed them to add vocals and complete the song. Upon its release and promotion, “Natural One” reached an unlikely position of No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The surprise hit invited plenty of attention from curious labels, appropriate in a post-Nirvana era when plenty of big-money contracts were handed out to underground acts. The Folk Implosion signed with Interscope, but the ride wouldn’t last long. Barlow found himself in the untenable position of having to reassure his Sebadoh bandmates that his attentions weren’t divided, which became increasingly difficult.
“For all the success I was having, I still had a pretty remarkable lack of confidence,” he said. And Davis became conflicted about participating in mainstream entertainment, which exacerbated his own anxiety about becoming a public figure.
Slowly, their relationship started to fray. Davis ended up quitting the band after the release of “One Part Lullaby” in 1999, their only record for Interscope. They would not speak for over 20 years. But near the start of the pandemic, they became Facebook friends. “I started thinking to myself, ‘What if Lou died, and we never talked to each other again?’” Davis said. After a handful of online interactions, they reconnected over the phone, where they hashed out some of those longstanding issues. They raised the possibility of collaborating again, which led to the “Kids” reissue and their upcoming plans for the Folk Implosion.
In a joint interview, they displayed a lively and easygoing dynamic: lots of laughter, lots of smiles. Davis was a very deliberate and politically conscientious speaker on his own — he made frequent reference to writers such as bell hooks and Imani Perry — but he appeared lighter in Barlow’s company. The two freely completed each other’s thoughts, and made instant reference to what the other was more likely to remember about the past.
“It’s virtually the same,” Barlow said, of their resumed friendship. As Davis listened on, he explained he was “happy to change the ending” of what had been a sad conclusion to an otherwise fruitful experience.
“I don’t think anything’s actually finished until we’re gone,” he said. “I would like to think of us in terms of folk or jazz musicians — people who keep playing music until they dropped dead.” Working with Davis again, he said, had reminded him of the excitement of their initial collaboration. “I could never predict where those songs would end up,” he said. Now, as their new songs have taken shape, “they always surprise me.”
Wagner doesn’t mean what it used to. Google “Wagner” today and you’ll be up to speed with the Russian private army’s exploits well before you read about Hitler’s favourite composer. In fact “Wagner” is as likely to suggest the 2010 X Factor contestant as the maverick German genius who, after handing out grenades on the Dresden barricades in 1848, sought to liberate opera from its Italianate shackles by means of Gesamtkunstwerk – or “total works of art” – and thereby free humans from lives of spiritless toil and demeaning leisure.
Chief among Wagner’s total works of art is the 15-hour operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, which the Royal Opera House begins to roll out next week. The first instalment, Das Rheingold, will be conducted by Antonio Pappano in his final season as Covent Garden’s music director, and directed by self-described “gay Jewish kangaroo” and sometime hater of Wagner, Barrie Kosky.
There will be, as usual, gods, flying horses, dragons, dwarves, giants, magic helmets, sword-wielding men, babies, magic potions, incest, unpleasant family dramas, marital strife, betrayal and – let’s not forget – after about 14 hours and 40 minutes (spoiler alert), an apocalypse that exterminates the gods.
But why bother? Wagner has never felt more culturally marginal than today, even though, paradoxically, many leading cultural franchises, from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Game of Thrones, are unthinkable without his influence. On the face of it, 2023 needs nothing so little as bombastic white-male-supremacist art composed by an antisemitic megalomaniac whom even one-time superfan Nietzsche came to see as a kind of cultural Covid. “Is Wagner a human being at all?” Nietzsche asked. “Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.”
Martin Winkler (Alberich), Norbert Ernst (Loge) and Burkhard Ulrich (Mime) rehearsing Das Rhinegold for the 2013 Bayreuth festival. Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
London has already nixed one Ring cycle this year. In January the English National Opera cancelled Siegfried (the Ring’s third part) over funding worries. Perhaps, particularly in a cost-of-living crisis, we need not go to see multimillion-pound Ring cycles with hydraulic sets and mechanical dragons. Instead click on YouTube, where you can watch the drama played briefly out by Lego figurines. Or attend a Ring cycle with a postcolonial twist staged in a Putney church by small London-based arts collective Gafa, run by singers of Samoan heritage. Or maybe someone can ask maverick opera director Peter Sellars to update the puppet Ring cycle he did as an undergraduate?
Wagner at least thought he was issuing a deep, unified statement of cultural truths that could change how we live. “He felt there had to be some kind of drastic step taken in order to revolutionise the way people lived and their demands on life,” Wagner scholar Michael Tanner said. “Otherwise they would just sink to a level where they didn’t mind the fact that they were living so much less fully than they could do.”
Playwright George Bernard Shaw interpreted the Ring cycle as an allegory of the collapse of capitalism. But it is endlessly interpretable. It can serve not just as Marxist tract but as a Third Reich allegory; a sado-masochistic indictment of the have-yachts in the posh seats, or a Buddhist-inflected music drama in which the high body count suggests the death of the ego that Wagner thought, in line with his beloved philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, was desirable.
Richard Jones, director of two-fourths of ENO’s current Ring, favours something like the last account: “Ultimately it’s about the idea of self-renunciation. It’s like great Greek drama. Since it was first performed in 1876, there has never been a period when it wasn’t germane to the contemporary world,” he told the Guardian when his cycle opened in 2021.
Certainly, Wagner supposed his music drama would offer quasi-religious experience in the ancient Greek manner. “His idea was that a sufficiently potent new art form, such as he was perhaps uniquely able to write, would, by being experienced, communally change people’s consciousness,” said Tanner. “You would emerge a different person.” Wagner even built a temple to this cult in the form of Bayreuth’s opera house.
Robert Lepage’s elaborate staging of Das Rheingold for the Metropolitan Opera in 2010. Photograph: Redux/New York Times/eyevine
From what can be gleaned from the creatives (who may have signed NDAs threatening impaling by Wotan’s spear if they blab production details), Kosky has different ideas. “There’s a strong ecological theme,’ says Pappano. “Barrie’s worked through the antisemitism in the previous Ring cycle he staged. This will be quite different.” In Hanover in 2009, Kosky made Mime (the duplicitous brother of Alberich, the dwarf who steals the ring) personify what Wagner wrote about Jews and Jewish music, which the composer described as a “sense-and-sound-confounding gurgle, yodel and cackle.”
Baritone Christopher Maltman, who sings chief of the gods Wotan in the new production, argues that the Ring’s fundamental question is: what does power create? “In Wotan’s case, his quest ultimately is to seize the Earth for dominion.” Maltman tells me Kosky’s conceit is to conceive the drama as the dream of the Earth Mother, Erda, who gave birth to our home 4.6bn years ago and, when not bearing Wotan’s bastards, watched her first child’s despoliation.
Whatever Pappano and Kosky deliver, it’s bound to be very different from what audiences saw on 9 August 1876. The Guardian correspondent in Bayreuth described how at the premiere, control freak Wagner sat in the wings. “Suddenly he would shuffle across the stage, gesticulate violently to put more force into the orchestra, or rush up to a singer in the midst of his or her part and say, in a light sharp voice: “No, no, no; not so; sing it so –” He would then sing the part as it should be, or throw the necessary dramatic fire into the acting.
“The delighted audience sat in silence, and as they streamed out of the theatre on to the terrace and into the beer-room in their festal dress, the only word heard was ‘Herrlich’.” That means glorious.
One hundred years later, the Bayreuth reception for the Jahrhundert Ring cycle was less enthusiastic. Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez essentially targeted the bourgeois ticket holders, which, you have to admit, is a bold move. The production was booed and caused a near riot.
Wagner might have liked that. As Tanner wrote in his 2002 book Wagner, Das Rheingold depicts “a primal world which is corrupt from the start, thus producing something at odds with the central myth of western culture. Power and libido are what animates it.” If the Ring cycle is the pinnacle of bombastic patriarchal dead white supremacist art – and you will struggle to find many persons of colour or women who have directed the Ring, though some of its greatest singers have been black and/or female – it’s not one that flatters its demographic.
The Chéreau-Boulez Ring is now regarded as a classic. Robert Lepage’s 2010 New York production replaced it as a benchmark for the kind of interpretive travestythat Wagnerites such as the late social critic Roger Scruton regard as a systematic betrayal of the composer’s sacred text. “Pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history,” raged Alex Ross in the New Yorker.
The problem was the centrepiece of LePage’s set, a rack of 24 planks built out of fibreglass-covered aluminium that rose and fell powered by hydraulics that revolved through 360 degrees on a specially reinforced stage. Even as late as the 2019 revival, the contraption still squeaked above any passing Brünnhildes. Perhaps the squeaking machinery was ironic commentary: capitalist mechanisation had ruined us, and now it was ruining opera.
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of the cycle’s fourth opera, Götterdämmerung, for ENO at the London Coliseum in 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Not to be outdone, the 2010 Los Angeles Ring cycle had singers briefing against director Achim Freyer’s production even before it opened. Tenor John Treleaven, who sang Siegfried, and soprano Linda Watson (Brünnhilde) called the staging physically unsafe – “the most dangerous I’ve been on in my entire career,” said Watson. The problem was the angled stage that compelled singers to perform as if on the side of a slope. Hitchcock called his actors cattle; perhaps Freyer thought his singers were mountain goats.
As if singing Wagner wasn’t hard enough already. Maltman, at 53, feels only now is his voice mature enough for the role, which he describes as more physically demanding than Hamlet or Lear. He learned from previous Wotans, particularly the great John Tomlinson. “He helped me not just understand how to sing the role but how to interpret it.”
“You certainly need to bring your A-game,” says Pappano. “Phone it in at your peril.”
Back to the plot: having cursed love and stolen the gold which he forges into the ring, Alberich is tricked out of it by Wotan who needs cash sharpish to pay for his new Valhalla palace. But Wotan immediately loses it to two giants. We’ve all done that, right? Wotan attempts to get it back while noting the tragicomic consequences of having filled the cosmos with bastard children, such as the twins Sieglinde and Siegmund who, in the opening of the second opera, Die Walküre, have an incestuous relationship that results in Siegfried, the hero who in the third opera in the tetralogy kills the giant Fafner (in the form of a dragon) and retrieves the ring. In the last opera, Götterdämmerung, Siegfried (Wotan’s grandson) is married to Brünnhilde (Wotan’s daughter) but despite having a magic sword is stabbed in the back by Alberich’s son. Brünnhilde, after denouncing the gods (including Dad), takes the ring from her dead husband and returns it to the Rhinemaidens. Then, like some operatic approximation of Thelma and Louise, she jumps aboard her faithful steed Grane and rides into Siegfreid’s flaming funeral pyre. The Rhine overflows, consuming gods and Valhalla in water and flames.
Can we expect boos, riots, Walkyries in traction and backstage feuds from Covent Garden this September? There is hope. Announcing the production earlier this year, Kosky stressed that this is a family drama – not Dynasty with horned helmets, but more like Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Wagner’s favourite play. “In this appalling story of the House of Atreus, the Greeks created a microcosm of us,” says Kosky, and for him the Ring’s extended family of gods and mortal offspring is the same.
The Ring is an “existential drama”, says Kosky. Wagner asks the big questions. “What are we doing here? Who are we? It contains reality, it contains three-dimensional characters [but] it’s very important that the Ring is a metaphorical poetic dream world.” How excellent if Kosky, rather than making distracting pieces of conspicuous consumption for punters with more money than taste, made something that, like the magic sword of Nothung, cut through the guff and gave us a Ring cycle that told us something important about how we live now.
‘We pioneered line dancing with Bus Stop, hip-hop with Personality Jock, and house with Goin’ to See My Baby,” says Bill Curtis. “But Fatback still don’t get the respect we deserve.”
As founder, drummer and CEO of Fatback Band, Curtis may be forgiven for his outlandish claims about the role the band from Queens, New York City, played in shaping popular music. But the thing is, he’s not bragging. Fatback’s influence is everywhere, from disco-funk to 50 years of hip-hop: their 1979 B-side King Tim III (Personality Jock) is the first rap record, predating Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight by several months.
Not that Curtis expresses any bitterness. Instead, when I meet him and fellow Fatback founding member, keyboardist Gerry Thomas, at a Travelodge in Hounslow, west London – the band have been playing a residency at London’s Jazz Cafe – I find both men full of good cheer. They first met in 1967 while in a band playing “weddings, bar mitzvahs, parties” in Queens, says Thomas. “This was before the DJ era, so we played the hits that people liked to dance to.”
Back then, Thomas was a rookie trumpeter while Curtis was an R&B veteran, having worked the chitlin’ circuit – venues for black Americans during mid-century racial segregation – as drummer for dozens of acts, including Jimmy Reed and Sam Cooke. Today they share a brotherly camaraderie: Thomas, 75, is full of energy and enthusiasm while Curtis, a remarkably well preserved 91, is droll and nonchalant.
“Bill’s unstoppable,” says Thomas with an admiring chuckle. Curtis raises an eyebrow and notes that he now plays percussion on stage as “drumming for Fatback is hard work”, but adds: “I’m from that school where you work till you drop.”
(Do the) Spanish Hustle spent seven weeks in the UK charts, peaking at No 10 in 1976.
Hard work has been a constant in Curtis’s life, ever since he started out as a professional musician in his mid-teens playing with local blues outfits in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Although he grew up under Jim Crow-era apartheid, Curtis doesn’t recall those years as particularly onerous. “There was segregation but I had white neighbours,” he says, “and white friends.
“OK, once we got to high school, things were segregated – but that didn’t stop me doing what I wanted to do.”
Thomas grew up in the Bronx, “surrounded by all kinds of people”, and he didn’t experience racial discrimination until he went on the road as a musician. “One of the band went into a gas station’s restroom in the south, oblivious to the fact that it was for whites only,” he recalls, “and the owner pulled a shotgun on him. That woke us up.”
After completing his military service, Curtis settled in New York where he worked in the Apollo theatre’s house band: “We backed Marvin Gaye on his Apollo debut. He was very humble, really talented.” And he worked dates with many rising stars, drumming for Aretha Franklin’s first New York appearance, in Greenwich Village. While touring with Clyde McPhatter, he once stayed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. “I saw Martin Luther King speaking from his balcony and I waved at him and he waved back. Later that day, on the way to our gig, we heard the news of his murder on the radio.”
Determined to run his own operation, in the late 1960s Curtis set up House of Fatback, a booking agency and record label he ran from Queens until 1992. There you could hire a funk, jazz or steel pan band, alongside ordering soul food and go-go dancers for your party. The Fatback Band formed from musicians in its orbit. The loose-limbed street funk of their first three albums from 1972-74 turned heads, and would provide a blueprint for later developments in rap and house. “Bill would invite his friends to our recording sessions,” says Thomas, “and that’s why it sounds like a party is under way – because they were partying while we were playing.”
Founding member Bill Curtis is now 91 and has no plans to retire. Photograph: Echoes/Redferns
Curtis describes his distinctive drumming as “a mix of my style with a New Orleans beat I learned in the military and West Indian [steel pan] rhythms I heard when I shifted to New York”. Nicknamed Fatback – a word used in the US for the back fat of a pig – after a bandleader requested “gimme some of your greasy, fatback drums”, Curtis is one of popular music’s finest funky drummers. “We made raw music for dancers,” he replies when I ask how he developed his distinctive rhythms. “Too raw for most record labels.”
Signing to Spring Records, Fatback released the album Keep On Steppin’ in 1974, and the album’s huge beats, shuffling rhythms and chanted choruses broke Fatback beyond New York. Thomas, then playing with the Jimmy Castor Bunch, was taken to a club after a performance in Liverpool in 1975, where he witnessed Fatback’s song Wicky Wacky (from Keep On Steppin’) pack the dancefloor. Thomas mentioned he played on Wicky Wacky and was mobbed. “I called Bill and said: organise some dates in England, they love Fatback.” So began a relationship that continues to this day.
“We got in the van and played every pub, club and cowshed,” says Curtis, “and the people came to dance and have a good time. That built us a loyal following – Britain and Fatback, we got a good thing goin’ on!”
Fatback would score six UK Top 40 hits in the 70s and 80s, the biggest being (Do the) Spanish Hustle in 1976 and a rerelease of the anthemic I Found Lovin’ in 1987. Thomas says of Spanish Hustle: “I was exposed to lots of Puerto Rican music and I decided to fuse their sound with our sound.” British DJ Steve Walsh recorded a version of I Found Lovin’ in 1987 in which he sings (atrociously) while adding chants. Despite being released on a tiny label, it managed to reach No 9 in the charts. Walsh, then an embryonic superstar DJ, held club nights that regularly drew 5,000 people, but he died in 1988 due to complications after a car crash in Ibiza, Spain.
“Steve was a good guy,” says Curtis. “He used to tour with us, warm up the crowd before we came on. Back then the BBC didn’t play black music – DJs like Steve played our records. They introduced British audiences to Fatback.”
Indeed, Walsh was the foremost DJ for a soul/funk/jazz-funk underground which, like Fatback, was ignored by a rock-obsessed music press but developed into the UK’s biggest dance scene prior to rave. The youths who once flocked to Walsh’s nights continue to attend Fatback concerts, dancing to the Bus Stop and chanting to I Found Lovin’. “British audiences are the best,” says Curtis. “They’re loyal.”
I Found Lovin’ was the band’s biggest UK single, peaking at No 7 in 1987
“In the US there’s a form of cultural amnesia,” adds Thomas. “People forget, and embrace the new. Over here we get different generations of fans – they keep Fatback’s music alive.”
Being overlooked at home may irk these funk icons, but being sampled by Kendrick Lamar, Björk and many more artists demonstrates the high regard Fatback are still held in. “I wish everyone who sampled Fatback paid us,” says Curtis, “but plenty don’t.” Lawyers get called: “Beastie Boys were the first we went after. Dr Dre was another.”
Taking control of business means the band’s early albums on Perception Records will finally join their Spring LPs as reissues on Ace Records in the coming months, and Personality Jock features prominently on Dollar Bill Y’All, a new compilation of early NYC rap. “Being from the Bronx, I heard cats rapping on street corners so suggested we record with one,” says Thomas on how Fatback made the first rap record.
“We were in the studio finishing our new album but I didn’t hear a hit,” recalls Curtis, “and Gerry had this tune we’d recorded called Catch the Beat that he thought a rapper could rhyme over.” Harlem’s King Tim III stepped up with high-speed rap promising “we’re strong as an ox and tall as a tree / We can rock you so viciously”, but their label, Spring, wasn’t so sure about him. “Back then, black radio DJs liked to talk a lot – big personalities,” says Thomas, “and Spring said they’d hate Personality Jock. So it ended up a B-side.”
But one DJ from Los Angeles who warmed to it reportedly told Joe Robinson, who co-founded Sugarhill Records with his wife, Sylvia, “that Fatback have the new sound,” Curtis says. “Joe told Sylvia and they went out and found the Sugarhill Gang.” Curtis still appears aggrieved at missing out on a hit. “We were first but Spring messed up. I’ve been in this game a long time and it hurts when your label stands in the way of chart success.”
His frustration is understandable: Fatback released 16 albums and scored 26 US R&B chart hits without ever once touching the pop Top 40. Spring messing up with Personality Jock was part of a chain of record label mishaps that befell the band.
“We had Street Dance and Goin’ to See My Baby and Dance Girl all hitting at the same time, and then Perception Records declared bankruptcy. In 1983, our album Is This the Future? had just been released on Polydor and the president of promotion for R&B ups and dies, and that killed it. Then, in 1985, Fatback signed to [Atlantic Records subsidiary] Cotillion and we figured now we were with a label that was going to promote and get us out of there. Well, we just released So Delicious, then Atlantic shut down Cotillion Records and out goes Fatback.”
Active since the 70s, Fatback Band are still going strong today.
In 1993, Curtis put Fatback on ice, returning to North Carolina to care for his ailing mother, but he reformed the band in 2002. “I felt like I still had a few more hits in me,” he says, and the band have since played Glastonbury, Love Supreme and other leading festivals amid a completely different music scene. “When I was coming up, you only heard what the record company wanted you to hear,” Curtis says. “Now, you have so many alternatives for finding music, and now any musician can record and even distribute. The downside is everybody wants to be a musician – the field is so crowded with wannabes that the real thing can’t come through.”
But Fatback keep on coming nonetheless. “The last five or six years have been some of our best years,” he says, “people discovering us and our music.” Even at 91, he hopes they can tour the world before he finally retires. “We just keep doing what we do.”
Jimmy Buffett, whose death at the age of 76 was announced Saturday, died of complications from Merkel cell skin cancer, according to a statement published on the singer’s website.
The celebrated singer had been diagnosed with skin cancer four years ago, and he continued to perform during treatment, according to the site. His last performance was a surprise appearance in Rhode Island in early July.
“He lived his life in the sun, literally and figuratively,” a close friend told TMZ.
Jimmy Buffett performs at his sister's restaurant in Gulf Shores, Alabama, in 2010.
The remark echoed the statement initially published on the singer’s website Saturday, which was later updated with details on the cause of death.
“Jimmy passed away peacefully on the night of September 1st surrounded by his family, friends, music and dogs,” the statement said. “He lived his life like a song till the very last breath and will be missed beyond measure by so many.”
Merkel cell carcinoma is a rare, aggressive form of skin cancer that has a high risk of returning and spreading, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. There are about 3,000 new cases diagnosed annually in the U.S.
Known for 1970s hits like “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” Buffett maintained an almost-constant touring schedule nearly until his death. His distinctive “tropical rock” style and the laid-back party atmosphere of his concerts won him numerous devoted fans, known as “Parrotheads.”
In May, he had rescheduled a show in South Carolina, citing health problems.
“Growing old is not for sissies, I promise you,” he said at the time.
Rain is hardly a deterrent in Paris. It’s opening night for a new staging of the John Adams warhorse “Nixon in China,” and the imposing stone walls of the Opéra Bastille are framed by a quickly-brewing storm. Under trickling March skies, the house bears an uncanny resemblance to the military stronghold from which it gets its name, with an austere shadow that throws the square below into a gloomy semi-darkness. But down on the street, the entryway is awash in color. From casual to haute-couture, throngs of ticket holders are chattering amiably and waving with happy shouts of recognition through the drizzle: The city is squeezing in one last cigarette before the curtain. This unphased ambivalence to the darkening skies reads like a classic scene of old Parisian theater-going, stubbornly insistent on the right to cultural experiences come hell or high water or a heavy spring rain. But this time, there’s a catch: not a grey hair in sight. The opening of “Nixon” has been billed as an exclusive Under-30’s experience, a new marketing tactic that has worked wonders for the box office (at ten euros a piece the tickets routinely sell out). This is the opera’s first trip to Paris, and for all the critical anxiety that the American humor of Alice Goodman’s libretto would fall flat on French audiences, the room is electric, hollering its approval for Gustavo Dudamel and his orchestra at the top of the second act and bubbling with laughter at the sight of a 20-foot Chinese dragon playing hide-and-seek with Renée Fleming. Paris has proved once again that young audiences can and will turn out in droves for contemporary opera—even foreign-language operas written before they were born—if given the opportunity to do so. Tonight is as gleeful as first nights come, and the exchange of opinions pouring back into the damp, smoke-filled street at 11:30 is unmistakably warm.
“Young audiences can and will turn out in droves for contemporary opera—even foreign-language operas written before they were born—if given the opportunity to do so.”
The Paris Opera wasn’t always this progressive. Plagued by decades of government mismanagement through the dark years of the Fourth Republic, the Palais Garnier of the early 1960s was a dusty relic of its former glory. The same five pieces of tourist fodder played year in and year out, and the quiet consensus among Parisians was that the institution of French opera was utterly unsalvageable. It wasn’t until de Gaulle’s first ascension to the presidency that hope raised a weary head. Well aware of the financial ruin wrought on the arts sector by the decades-long campaign in Algeria, the new president had the good sense to assign a specially appointed Minister of Culture to sort things out. That Minister, writer André Malraux, in turn suggested that the opera’s best chance at survival was to finally have a composer (rather than a government-approved henchman) at the helm. In a last-ditch attempt to save a ship halfway under water, the position of Administrator of the Opera was offered to Georges Auric, a composer who had come to prominence as a member of the French musical supergroup Les Six. In a muted speech to the press in the summer of 1962, Auric dutifully and against his better judgment announced his intention to accept—on one condition: he would get a production of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” on its feet within a year, or he would quit.
In those days, Berg’s expressionist tragedywas still considered the extreme of operatic modernism, and after Rudolf Bing delivered a production to New York in 1959, the Paris Opera was the last major company to have neglected it. Auric wagered his tenure on the belief that catching Paris up with the international modernist scene was the only way to ensure opera’s survival in the modern world. In his mind, Paris just needed to see “Wozzeck” to know that the genre of opera was still a fertile and worthwhile ground, and though it took him a little longer than his promised year to get there, “Wozzeck” reached the Palais Garnier in November of 1963 with all the stops pulled out. Pierre Boulez returned from self-imposed exile in Baden-Baden, Germany to make his operatic debut, with a staging by the father of modern French theater Jean-Louis Barrault and sets by the Surrealist giant André Masson. The production was sung in German—a scandal at the time, as government oversight required all operas to be sung in French—and headlined by an international cast, blowing the yearly quota for non-native singers on a single show.
“In his mind, Paris just needed to see ‘Wozzeck’ to know that the genre of opera was still a fertile and worthwhile ground.”
The opening night audience was a spectacle equal of its object: the French Prime Minister, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Administrative Reforms, and, because it was the Cold War, the High Commissioner for Atomic Energy all crammed into the Presidential Box seats, while below in the stalls one of the starriest collections of artists ever assembled in Paris rubbed shoulders: reporters sighted Rubinstein, Vilar, Achard, Adamov, Jauve, Chauviré, Aragon, Messiaen, Clair, César, and Cocteau among a host of fan-favorite musicians. “Wozzeck” was a hit, selling every seat for ten straight shows, and making Boulez an overnight opera celebrity. The New York Times followed up with Auric the next summer and found him and his opera in nothing but good spirits: “PARIS OPERA IS ‘IN’” ran the headline, and Auric practically beamed off the page: “At last people are talking again about the Paris opera… and not just here, but all over Europe. My friends in America are writing to me about it. You know, it’s been a long time since people have talked about this house in the same breath with the other great operas of the world…. It brought us a new public, a young and interested public.”
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Late last December, New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced plans to withdraw $23 million from their endowment to produce more contemporary opera per season. This is, objectively, a good thing—interest in modern opera has been on the rise for many years now, with new works routinely outselling the repertory, and the company badly needs the attention of a younger, more progressive audience to make up for their aging demographic. The move, if handled properly, has the potential to put New York back on the operatic map after several decades in the proverbial shadows. But Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Director, seems to have other ideas. In April, Gelb gave a joint interview with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin to the New York Times that made it abundantly clear what kind of future he has in mind:
It’s not contemporary opera. It’s the right contemporary opera… One of the challenges is the fact that for many decades, with a few exceptions of composers like Philip Glass and John Adams, a large proportion of new operas were inaccessible to a broader public. They may have been works of great artistic merit, but by composers who were appealing more to the intellect than hearts of listeners.
It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this thinking is. What Gelb’s subtext implies is a thinly-veiled aesthetic censorship: The Met will give preference to works that toe the line. Operas tailored to the tastes of a wealthy, conservative demographic—like “The Hours,” with an inoffensive score, delineated arias, a well-known story, and silver-screen allure—will get priority over works that challenge, oppose, or experiment with the form (Anthony Davis and Kaija Saariaho are the most “out” composers in future seasons). Gelb is telegraphing to composers that stylistic conformity within the boundaries of a populist musical means is the only possible route to success in New York, offering rewards in exchange for lack of risk. This mindset would be unthinkable in any other discipline: imagine a museum saying they’ll only hang “the right contemporary art,” or a cinema playing only “the right contemporary cinema”: but opera, so long in bondage to a bourgeois class comfort, seems to think it can get away with it.
Gelb’s suggestion that most modern opera is “inaccessible to a broader public” is a dog-whistle. Experimental opera continues to draw huge crowds around the world, especially in cities like Paris and Berlin, where audiences are given consistent and repeated opportunities to engage with it on a critical and meaningful level. Continuous access and accurate information are always the first bridges to appreciation, and one of the hallmarks of a healthy democracy is an unrestricted flow of art which is permitted to scrutinize, negotiate, and challenge the conventions and perceptions of its time. But when leaders make blanket dictums about the “right” and “wrong” kinds of art, the public loses the freedom to make informed decisions. The pruning of opera to prioritize what is “acceptable,” “accessible,” and “appealing” threatens to have the devastating artistic consequences historically associated with totalitarian regimes. In some ways this kind of propaganda-style work has already begun: Gelb cheerfully mentioned future plans to stage a fluffy adaptation of the Cher rom-com “Moonstruck,” quietly leaving out a more sinister commission about drone-era warfare whose main sponsor is the arms manufacturer and U.S. defense contractor General Dynamics. (The company has said it was not involved in the content of the work.)
When leaders make blanket dictums about the “right” and “wrong” kinds of art, the public loses the freedom to make informed decisions.
If the Met wants to make serious headway in wooing younger American audiences to modern opera, it first need to catch them up with the rest of the world. There have been dozens of epoch-defining works since the end of World War II that Lincoln Center has ignored, and even factoring in the logistical restrictions of the Met’s enormous size and its predilection for grand spectacle, the list of worthy candidates is long: Harrison Birtwistle’s “Gawain,” revived in London and Salzburg, raises classic English mythology to a mammoth scale and has a lead lyric baritone role almost begging for Gerald Finley; Helmut Lachenmann’s “Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern” turns the whole opera house into a flaming match-strike and was so popular at its 2001 Stuttgart run that they added performances because it kept selling out; Meredith Monk’s “Atlas,” writtenfor Houston in the early ‘90s, follows one of history’s most famous female explorers on a journey through the cosmos to music by one of America’s living legends; Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten” (widely considered the natural descendent of “Wozzeck”), a sprawling work played out on multiple stages that paints a timely and devastating picture of the abuse of women in wartime (all the more prescient in the wake of Ukraine); Olivier Messiaen’s four-hour epic “Saint François d’Assise,” a ready-made spectacle of “Parsifal” dimensions with some of the composer-ornithologist’s most arresting melodies; or, since film adaptations have been such a hot commodity, Olga Neuwirth’s uncanny, unsettling, and deeply engrossing take on David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” (in 2019, Neuwirth became the first woman ever commissioned by the Vienna Staatsoper). Any one of these in New York would be an international affair; none of them have seen the inside of the Met.
In the Met’s conspicuous absence, other New York performing organizations have picked up the slack. Over on the East Side, the Park Avenue Armory has hosted “Die Soldaten,” Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s “De Materie,” and Michel van der Aa’s hologram-opera “Upload” (there were once plans by former City Opera director Gerard Mortier to bring “Saint François”there too, but those never materialized). Further south, the Brooklyn Academy of Music staged“Atlas,” while the now-defunct Lincoln Center Festival made a habit of programming Salvatore Sciarrino’s breathtaking theaters of obsession; in 2018, Carnegie Hall brought Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza,” the piece that broke the barrier between the avant-garde and the opera.
Even the neighbors are starting to get suspicious. Next door at Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic has had to do some serious heavy lifting to keep contemporary opera afloat. In 2010, they mounted a semi-staged production of Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s infamous “anti-anti-opera” “Le Grand Macabre” that (notice a theme here?) sold out every night. The piece is a modernist classic with everything an opera fan could ask for: stratospheric sopranos, bodily humor, drunken brawls, love duets, curse words, naked goddesses, and a baritone who rides a tenor like a rocking horse and proclaims the end of the world. A bold and brassy comedy traditionally sung in the native language of the presenting country, “Le Grand Macabre” ought to be a shoo-in for the Met, but came to New York through its orchestra instead. (2023 is the Ligeti centenary; both Munich and Vienna saw the opportunity and will mount new productions of the opera next season.) More recently, the Phil was slated to host the American premiere of György Kurtag’s late-life masterpiece, an operatic adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s “Fin de partie” that has already rocked Paris, La Scala, and Amsterdam, and just made a triumphant London premiere at the BBC Proms earlier this month. And next season the orchestra will play a new work by Chaya Czernowin, the current matriarch of modern composition and head of the department at Harvard University—but New Yorkers shouldn’t hold their breath to see either of her large-scale stage works (“Heart Chamber” and “Infinite Now,” both of which won big at the Opera World awards) at the Met anytime soon. Put another way: When your neighbors feel responsible for watering your flowers, it’s probably time to reassess your relationship to the garden.
“The Met cannot simultaneously promise to be an international opera house dedicated to the future of the form and then stage only safe, coddling, inoffensive operas reliant on big-screen adaptations or celebrity star-power to sell tickets.”
For better or for worse, the Metropolitan Opera sets the standard for the American opera landscape. As one of the few institutions in the country with the finances to mount major undertakings, it has a responsibility to keep the U.S. plugged in to its European counterparts, who, for their part, have done the same for us (remember that the three operas in Philip Glass’s beloved trilogy which Gelb cites as positive exceptions—“Einstein,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten”—were all European commissions). The Met cannot simultaneously promise to be an international opera house dedicated to the future of the form and then stage only safe, coddling, inoffensive operas reliant on big-screen adaptations or celebrity star-power to sell tickets. Gelb has made the assumption that American opera-goers will reject truly cutting-edge opera without ever giving them the chance to hear it.
Since the start of his tenure in 2006, Gelb’s aesthetic censorship has gatekept major developments in opera from the New York landscape, leaving the city trailing far behind the rest of the world. New American opera doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but U.S. audiences are routinely asked to assess their national scene without any knowledge of the global context in which to situate it. If Paris in 2023 can sell out John Adams to an under-30 audience, the Met should have no problem doing the same with Neuwirth or Kurtág—they’ve just never bothered to try. It’s time Peter Gelb stopped telling American audiences what the “right contemporary opera” is and let them decide for themselves. ¶
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Jimmy Buffett’s life evokes images of boozy chill-outs by the beach and a certain carefree calm, but in 1996 the singer’s seaplane came under a hail of gunfire in a dramatic encounter with the Jamaican authorities that inspired a song.
Buffett’s song “Jamaica Mistaica” is a laid-back account of a dramatic near-death experience in which his plane, Hemisphere Dancer, was mistaken by the Jamaican authorities for a drug-smuggling aircraft.
While on tour on Jan. 16, 1996, Buffett, an avid pilot, had just landed at an airport in Negril, Jamaica, accompanied by Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, of the band U2, when a sudden burst of shots rang out, according to one of Buffett’s Margaritaville websites.
“We flew the plane in, got off, and as the plane took off to go get fuel, we were surrounded by a Jamaican S.W.A.T. team,” Buffett said in a 1996 Rolling Stone interview. “I thought it was a joke until I heard the gunfire.”
As Bono recalled, according to Radio Margaritaville: “These boys were shooting all over the place. I felt as if we were in the middle of a James Bond movie.”
“I honestly thought we were all going to die,” he added.
Later that year, Buffett released his album “Banana Wind,” in which he recounts the story on “Jamaica Mistaica”:
Just about to lose my temper as I endeavored to explain We had only come for chicken we were not a ganja plane Well, you should have seen their faces when they finally realized We were not some coked-up cowboy sporting guns and alibis.
“Like all things, it made for a good song,” Buffett told The Spokesman-Review in a 1996 interview.
“I know that there are times in my life where I probably should have been shot at for a lot worse behavior,” he added. “But on this particular instance, I was innocent. Not even a spliff.”
The plane, now an artifact of the Buffett universe, was struck by bullets but nobody was hurt.
“Some people said, ‘God, you could have sued them, you could have sued the government,’” Buffett said in The Spokesman-Review interview. “But I went, ‘No, it’s probably karma. We’re even now.’”
The most popular piano concertos of the 20th century have never been short of outstanding interpreters, and the recorded history of Rachmaninov’s four concertos, together with the even more successful Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, is a hugely distinguished one. From the composer’s own recordings in the 1930s, to Daniil Trifonov’s cycle, completed in 2019, there’s no shortage of excellent complete surveys, as well as dazzling performances of individual concertos, such as Sviatoslav Richter’s account of the Second, Vladimir Horowitz or Martha Argerich’s performances of the Third, or Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s unsurpassed version of the Fourth.
Rachmaninov: The Piano Concertos; Paganini Rhapsody album cover Photograph: PR
So Yuja Wang faces some fierce competition in her survey of the five works, which is taken from concerts in Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Hall last February. It followed a series of performances of the concertos that Wang had given in North America, including an extraordinary marathon in New York’s Carnegie Hall, in which she played all five works in a single day with Yannick Nezet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. These performances with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were spread more sensibly across a fortnight, with one concerto in each concert.
Wang has recorded three of the works before – the second concerto and the Rhapsody with Claudio Abbado, and the Third with Dudamel, in 2011 and 2013 respectively. But however dazzling those performances are technically, she is a much more mature performer nowadays. While the flashy exuberance of the First Concerto and its quicksilver changes of mood suit both her and the slick reactions of Dudamel and his orchestra down to the ground, she equally teases out the lyricism of the Andante with great sensitivity. The famous opening chords of the Second are presented in a way that seems to prepare for a great drama, not just romantic indulgence, yet the slow movement seems a little brisk and prosaic. Other pianists find more depth there, though few dispatch the finale with quite the elan that Wang commands.
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The performance of the third concerto, the most complex and ambiguous of the four, is also the hardest to pin down; the opening theme lacks the sense of mystery and inwardness that some bring to it, though against that the tracery of the second theme is beautifully shaped, just as the slow movement is full of exquisite detail. For all its energy, too, the Fourth is a little uneven, the rapport between orchestra and soloist not as convincing as elsewhere, while the Rhapsody glitters as it should, even if Wang does milk the music’s lyrical moments a bit too much, particularly in the famous 18th variation. But perhaps no single pianist’s view of these works will ever be consistently convincing; picking and choosing between different interpreters for each concerto is still the way to go.
Strange to think there was a time when Auto-Tune was viewed as a controversial fad in hip-hop, the mark of lesser talents. It makes DOA something of a period piece. Still, you can’t deny the powerful ferocity of Jay-Z’s ire, nor the old-school crate-digging library music sample.
19. Dirt Off Your Shoulder (2003)
Peak-period out-there Timbaland production – minimal, funky, but psychedelic – inspires a lyric that prefaces Jay-Z’s “retirement” by claiming he is quitting because he has proved he is the greatest rapper alive. The video features a gesture later copied by Barack Obama, but it’s all about the beat and the beautifully framed boasts.
Watch the video for Dirt Off Your Shoulder.
18. 4:44 (2017)
According to the producer, No ID, Jay-Z had to be forced into recording the title track of his response to the accusations of infidelity on Beyoncé’s Lemonade. The music was, he said, designed to “box him into telling that story”. The result is a racked mea culpa, vulnerable in a way Jay-Z had never been before.
17. I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me) (2000)
From peak-period Timbaland to peak-period Neptunes, complete with an uncredited vocal from Pharrell on the Rick James-indebted chorus. This was Jay-Z’s first No 1 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart – and you can see why. There may be deeper songs in his oeuvre, but it’s unmatched as a party-starter.
16. Empire State of Mind (ft Alicia Keys) (2009)
Plenty of people have written paeans to New York, surely the most eulogised city in pop history, but coming up with something that became an unofficial anthem – up there with New York, New York – is another thing entirely. Empire State of Mind achieved it through an irresistible blend of grit and yearning splendour.
Watch the video for Empire State of Mind.
15. UDon’t Know (2001)
An amazing, overwhelming Just Blaze production – a head-turning cacophony made out of blaring synth fanfares, booming bass and an insanely sped-up Bobby Byrd sample – perfectly matches Jay-Z’s declaration of his imperious business sense: “Motherfucker, I … will … not … lose,” he declares. You don’t doubt it for a minute.
14. Can’t Knock the Hustle (ft Mary J Blige) (1996)
One rumour suggests Mary J Blige guested on Jay-Z’s debut album for old time’s sake: she dated Roc-A-Fella’s co-founder Damon Dash before she was famous. Her vocal is sublime, but Can’t Knock the Hustle’s most striking aspect might be Jay-Z’s sheer confidence on the mic as he bids goodbye to the streets.
13. Niggas In Paris (with Kanye West) (2011)
“This shit weird / We ain’t even ’posed to be here,” suggests Jay-Z during the pinnacle of his collaborative album with Kanye West, a depiction of the pair enjoying Paris fashion week. He suggests subsequently that, as black men, they are “supposed to be locked up”. The rhymes are crisp, the production – Kraftwerk-y synths, huge drums – superb.
In Antwerp during the Watch the Throne tour with Kanye West in 2012. Photograph: Photonews/Getty Images
12. Can I Live (1996)
A stunning study in contrasts, the sumptuous, slow-motion sound of Isaac Hayes’ The Look of Love up against Jay-Z’s anguished depiction of life dealing on the streets. The “tedious” repetition, paranoia, “hopelessness” and desperation – and the likelihood of early death suggested in the title – meant he wasn’t that different to the addicts he was serving.
11. Nigga What, Nigga Who (Originator 99) (ft Big Jaz) (1999)
Jay-Z perfected his craft rapping at high speed with his mentor Big Jaz; this is recalled on Nigga What, Nigga Who, which has the same rapid style and features a guest appearance from Big Jaz. Behind the desk, Timbaland comes up with a fabulously agitated, stop-start take on his late-90s style, only amplifying the power of their flow.
10. Big Pimpin’ (ft UGK) (1999)
The lyrics of Big Pimpin’ aren’t going to win any awards for their empathy towards women, something Jay-Z later acknowledged: “What kind of animal would say this sort of thing?” But the music is fabulous – Timbaland again, this time in Indian-flute mode – and UGK grab their guest verses with both pairs of hands.
9. D’Evils (1996)
The bleakest, darkest moment on Reasonable Doubt, a gloomy, gripping saga of murder and revenge exacted on a childhood friend – “we used to stay up all night at slumber parties”. D’Evils points to deprivation as the cause of crime, but it doesn’t do much to stem the self-loathing tone.
8. Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love) (2001)
Produced by West when he was still struggling to get his rap career off the ground, Heart of the City’s majestic sample from Bobby “Blue” Bland provoked an immediate, urgent response from Jay-Z: he recorded his rhyme – a riposte to haters that is weary yet blisteringly angry – in one unedited take.
At the 2021 premiere of the western The Harder They Fall, for which he wrote original music. Photograph: Leon Bennett/FilmMagic
7. Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) (1998)
This was controversial on release – it was taken in some quarters as a shameless crack at pop success. But Hard Knock Life has outrun the novelty factor conveyed by its sample from the musical Annie, perhaps because Jay-Z’s rap is impressively tough: a flint-eyed examination of his rise to fame that served only to make him more famous.
6. Dead Presidents II (1996)
A sequel to the single Dead Presidents that swaps some of its bragging for a more nuanced examination of Jay-Z’s pre-fame life – including the shooting of a friend. The Lonnie Liston Smith electric piano sample is incongruously beautiful. The track also samples Nas, a borrowing that ultimately led to long-running enmity.
5. 99 Problems (2003)
Rick Rubin reanimates the rock-guitar-heavy sound he pioneered with Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, while Jay-Z explores the perils of dealing with racist police, offloads on critics and the hip-hop press (“fuckers”), suggests his enemies “wouldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight” and quotes Ice-T on the earworm chorus.
Watch the video for 99 Problems.
4. Public Service Announcement (Interlude) (2003)
Don’t be fooled by the description in parenthesis, or the fact it was a last-minute addition to the Black Album: Public Serve Announcement is a highlight of Jay-Z’s oeuvre. Fired up by a contretemps with a journalist, he delivered a brilliant lyric split between swaggering assertion of his greatness and more complex self-examination.
3. Brooklyn’s Finest (ft The Notorious BIG) (1996)
The sound of one of hip-hop’s great what-ifs. Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls had plans to form a group – the Commission – that were scuppered by Biggie’s murder in 1997. Brooklyn’s Finest offers a thrilling glimpse of what might have been, the pair trading lines and continually ratcheting up the intensity.
2. Takeover (2001)
Jay-Z and West’s relationship has been turbulent, but they were never more in harmony than on this spectacular diss track. West’s beat turns the Doors’ Five to One into a relentless, growling menace; every lyrical punch thrown at Nas and Mobb Deep bruises in a way that suggests getting on Jay-Z’s bad side is a terrible idea.
Listen to Where I’m From.
1. Where I’m From (1997)
Sandwiched between his debut and the huge-selling Vol 2… Hard Knock Life, In My Lifetime, Vol 1 was slightly underwhelming as million-selling albums go, its production flashy, its lunges for pop success a little too obvious. But its penultimate track is something else, something you would turn to if you wanted to explain Jay-Z’s greatness as a rapper. His compelling depiction of life in Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects feels completely realistic. He sounds horrified by the day-to-day bleakness – “life expectancy so low we making out wills at 18” – but also affectionately nostalgic and defiantly proud.
Listen to a playlist of these songs on Spotify. Spotify
The comedian got some major pushback for telling followers “groove to some of the timeless music” Jackson created in an Instagram post honoring what would have been his 65th birthday on Tuesday.
While many fans were delighted by the nostalgic music videos Sedaris shared, others took issue with celebrating the controversial King of Pop.
A 13-time Grammy winner and perennial chart-topper, Jackson also faced multiple accusations of child sexual abuse in his later years.
He was acquitted of child molestation following a 2005 trial, but after his death, two accusers, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, made disturbing abuse allegations in the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland.”
The “Thriller” singer firmly denied all allegations during his life and his estate has maintained that stance since his death from an accidental drug overdose of the tranquilizer propofol in 2009 at the age of 50.
Michael Jackson onstage in Rotterdam in 1992.
“I love you, Amy, but this is not a man to be celebrated,” one fan shared.
“Amy I’ve loved you for a while but I don’t understand how you can endorse a person like MJ. I’m sad about this,” wrote another.
“Let’s not glorify him anymore,” someone else urged.
A more blunt Instagram user told the “Strangers With Candy” star, “Yikes... Hard pass.”
Others tried to separate the art from the artist.
“We can celebrate the music without condoning the human flaws/mistakes/crimes,” someone commented. “I don’t know anyone that didn’t grow up with Michael Jackson’s music.”
Many still chimed in to support the “Billie Jean” artist, however.
“Thank you @amysedaris for celebrating the greatest artist who has inspired generations,” someone posted. “Don’t pay no mind to the haters.”
After “Leaving Neverland” was nominated for several Emmy awards, Jackson’s estate called the reaction to the documentary a “complete farce.”
“For a film that is a complete fiction to be honored in a non-fiction Emmy category is a complete farce,” the estate said in a statement, which claimed there is “not one shred of proof” to support the accusers’ claims.
“What Vivek is doing is trying to align himself with the struggle of overcoming adversity. From what I know of Vivek’s policies, objectives and goals, they’re not in alignment with Eminem at all.” – BBC
Last weekend on Fire Island in New York, far from the bright lights of Broadway, Patti LuPone performed at the Ice Palace nightclub for some of her most adoring fans. These die-hards, sometimes called LuPonettes, included a man who had seen Ms. LuPone in the 1979 production of “Evita” and another who had a caricature of her tattooed on his back.
Ben Rimalower, who arrived hours before doors opened, stood at the front of the line. “I first fell in love with Patti when I saw the ‘Evita’ commercial,” he said. “I’ve now seen her live hundreds of times, but never on Fire Island. Nowhere else will Patti get an audience that understands her like here.”
Opened in the 1970s, the Ice Palace is an institution in Cherry Grove, a Fire Island hamlet known as a summer haven for New York’s gay community. In addition to its Friday night Underwear Party, its stage has hosted Chita Rivera, Liza Minnelli and Alan Cumming.
“Patti has played the greatest venues in the world, but for her to play here it’s about connecting with her most fervent fan base,” the club’s co-owner, Daniel Nardicio, said. “Her fans will scream and cry for her here.”
Ms. LuPone, 74, put on two sold-out performances of “Songs from a Hat,” in which she sings tunes plucked at random. Accompanied on a white piano by her musical director, Joseph Thalken, she gave her all to staples like “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Meadowlark.” When she did the Sondheim number “I Never Do Anything Twice,” she brandished a riding crop.
In the edited interviews below, her fans reflected on why they can never get enough LuPone.
Jack Swerdlin
Accountant
Why do you love her? I’m a fellow Long Island girl, just like Patti. Her power as a performer is so unattainable that you can’t help but be in awe.
When did you first see her live? It should have been when I was 12. I still hold a grudge against my family. My parents took my sister to see “Gypsy” for her Sweet 16, but they didn’t bring me because I was too small. My mom told me I have to get over it. I told her, “I will never get over it.”
Quinto Ott
Actor
Why do you love Patti? Because she’s an ally to us in a way others are not. Lots of celebrities are part of the battle, but she’s been with us a long time. For an artist like Patti to come out here and do a show for us at the Ice Palace, that says something about her allegiances.
If you could spend a day with Patti, what would you do? I’d love to sit and have cocktails with her and Mandy Patinkin. Just to listen to the two of them talk. About anything.
What’s the story behind your tattoo? Years ago, I decided I wanted to cover myself with the divas I love, and I’ve been adding Broadway legends to my back ever since. This Patti is from “The Baker’s Wife.” I’ve also got Liza Minnelli and Elaine Stritch.
How did this show come about? We basically wooed her to come out here and eventually she said yes. Sure, we have the famous Underwear Party, but we also have greats like Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera here. Gay men have a deep relationship with these women, so they’re always appreciative to see them, and that’s why these women are willing to come out here and do these shows at the Ice Palace.
Lynda Marchese
Retired astrophysicist
When did you first see her live? I saw her do “Evita” years ago and I was mesmerized. I don’t even like musicals. I’m not like the guys here.
What do you make of her performing here? This place started out as a sea shack for good times by the ocean. Everyone was doing poppers and having fun. But Cherry Grove has been changing. Lots of straight people from the city have been buying places here, changing our community’s culture.
Josh Prete
Whiskey salesman
Any song you’d like to hear? Anything from “Sunset Boulevard.” It holds a special place for LuPone fans because Patti was infamously fired from her role and replaced with Glenn Close. So hearing Patti sing anything from it would be special and rare.
Why do you love Patti? Her ferocity. Everyone throws that term around now but she’s the real thing. She’s a tiger. Patti would cut you. Whereas Minnelli is there to delight, Patti commands you and makes you afraid of what you might miss if you take your eyes off her for even one second.
If you could spend a day with Patti, what would you do? I wish a reality television show camera followed her. I would watch it all day.
Adam Feldman
Theater critic
Why do you love Patti? Because her voice is a unique musical instrument and she’s maintained it to an astonishing degree.When other stars do cabaret shows they can sound diminished, but not Patti. She’s also old-school in a way that Broadway doesn’t reward so much anymore. She plays by her own rules.
Yvonne LaViale
Retired property manager
Any tune you’d like to hear? “The Ladies Who Lunch.” There’s no one like Elaine Stritch, but Patti is the only one who can sing it with the same feel as Stritch.
You’re longtime Cherry Grove residents. What do you make of Patti’s playing here?
M.F.: The Ice Palace is where gay men used to come to discover their sexuality. It only makes sense for Patti to play here, to perform for her most devoted following.
G.S.: We love Patti and it’s beautiful to see her come to our community. I hope she sings “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” Because when she sings that, I want to cry.
