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    Yuval Raphael, Israel’s Eurovision Entrant, Survived the Hamas Attacks of Oct. 7

    Not long after the attacks, Yuval Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.When Hamas attacked the Nova music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Yuval Raphael went from dancing with friends to hiding in a bomb shelter.After attackers broke into the shelter and started shooting partygoers, Raphael played dead, then lay beneath bodies for eight hours until she was rescued.That experience, Raphael told the Israel Hayom newspaper earlier this year, changed her outlook on life. “When I was there, I realized that everything could be over in a moment, and you don’t want your life to end without experiencing it,” she said. Not long after the attacks, Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.Now, Raphael, 24, is representing Israel at Eurovision with “New Day Will Rise,” a ballad in which she sings, over twinkling piano, “New day will rise / Life will go on / Everyone cries / Don’t cry alone.”As Israel’s retaliation to the Oct. 7 attacks grinds on, some Eurovision fans have called on the competition organizers to expel Israel from the contest over the country’s conduct in the war.At last year’s final, some audience members booed Israel’s singer as she performed, though others cheered her. Raphael told the BBC this week that she was expecting a hostile reception during her performance and that she had been rehearsing with distracting sounds playing in the background. Indeed, on Thursday in Basel, a small group of protesters blew whistles and waved flags to disrupt one of Raphael’s public rehearsals.But, she told the broadcaster, she was trying to avoid the furor and stay focused on winning. Eurovision’s slogan is “United by music,” she said, adding, “That’s what we are here for.” More

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    Estonia’s entry, ‘Espresso Macchiato,’ brewed trouble in Italy.

    When Tommy Cash, a rapper and singer from Estonia, won his country’s Eurovision selection with “Espresso Macchiato,” he barely had time to celebrate before a backlash began.In the song, Cash sings in a cheesy Italian accent that he is “sweating like a Mafioso” from working so hard, and just wants a coffee. “Me like mi coffee,” he says: “Very importante.”Cash’s riff on Italian clichés did not go down well in some parts of Italy. Gian Marco Centinaio, a lawmaker with Italy’s far-right League Party, posted on Instagram that Eurovision should ban the song. “Is this the idea of ​​European brotherhood that the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest have in mind?” he wrote.The flap also made headlines because Codacons, an Italian consumer rights organization, complained that the song “conveys a message of a population tied to organized crime.”In a recent interview, Cash said that he found the reaction over the top. He hadn’t meant to insult Italians, he said: “I love Italy. I love the people. I’m drawn to them because they’re so passionate.”In earlier songs, he rapped in English with his own heavy Eastern European accent, he said, and he also made a track with a German-accented chorus. His comedic Italian voice in “Espresso Macchiato” was no different than those, he said.Cash — who has made several tracks with Charli XCX — has many fans in Europe who love his left-field vibe and provocative videos, but he’s never been close to a household name. But in Italy, at least, he is now a star. Cash said that he had performed on Italian TV many times since “Espresso Macchiato” blew up. On a recent trip to Milan, he added, fans chased him down the street.He had a simple message for anyone who still felt insulted. “Drink a coffee,” he said: “Chill!” More

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    Michael Flynn, a Trump Ally, Sponsors Beethoven at the Kennedy Center

    Following the president’s overhaul of the center, Mr. Flynn, the former national security adviser, has made a substantial gift to the National Symphony Orchestra.The list of donors to the National Symphony Orchestra, one of the Kennedy Center’s flagship ensembles, is usually filled with financiers, socialites, corporations and foundations.But the name of a sponsor of this week’s performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” stood out. It was Michael T. Flynn, the general and former national security adviser during President Trump’s first term. He was listed, along with his nonprofit, America’s Future Inc., as “performance sponsors” for the National Symphony Orchestra’s concerts from May 15 to 17.Mr. Flynn said on social media that his nonprofit was “thrilled to sponsor a spectacular three-night performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts!”“This performance is filled with a vibrant celebration of music, culture, and the unyielding spirit uniting all Americans,” he wrote in a post on X. “The Kennedy Center shines as a proud symbol of our nation’s legacy!”Mr. Flynn’s gift to the National Symphony Orchestra totaled $300,000, according to two people familiar with the donation who were granted anonymity because details of the gift were not publicized.Officials at the Kennedy Center said they did not have details of the gift.“We didn’t know how much but we welcome all sponsorships,” the center said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Chris Brown Arrested in Connection With 2023 Assault, British Authorities Say

    The R&B singer is charged with grievous bodily harm.British prosecutors on Thursday arrested and charged Chris Brown, the R&B singer, with grievous bodily harm and are holding him in custody.Brown, 36, was charged over an assault that reportedly took place at a venue in Hanover Square in London, on Feb. 19, 2023, according to the Metropolitan Police. He remains in custody and will appear at Manchester Magistrates’ Court at 10 a.m. on Friday, the police said.A news release from prosecutors gave no further details. Under British law, news outlets are not allowed to publish details of an incident that may prejudice any trial once someone has been charged.“It is extremely important that there should be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings,” the prosecution service said.A lawyer and a talent agency that represents Brown did not immediately respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Thursday night.Brown is known for his impeccable dancing skills, sultry love songs and catchy hooks that have landed him 17 Billboard Top 10 hits. Most of them were released between 2005 and 2015.Hank Sanders More

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    Lord Buffalo drummer removed from plane and detained by US border control

    The Texas-based rock band Lord Buffalo has cancelled its European tour after its drummer, Yamal Said, was detained by US Customs and Border Protection on Monday.Said was removed from a plane en route to the band’s summer tour and has had no contact with his bandmates for two days, according to a message posted to the band’s Instagram account. Said is a Mexican citizen but a legal permanent resident of the United States, holder of a green card and resident of Austin since the 1980s, according to the Austin Chronicle.“We are heartbroken to announce we have to cancel our upcoming European tour,” the band wrote on Instagram on Wednesday. “Our drummer, Yamal Said, who is a Mexican citizen and lawful permanent resident of the United States (green card holder) was forcibly removed from our flight to Europe by Customs and Border Patrol [sic] at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Monday May 12. He has not been released, and we have been unable to contact him. We are currently working with an immigration lawyer to find out more information and to attempt to secure his release.“We are devastated to cancel this tour,” the statement continued, “but we are focusing all of our energy and resources on Yamal’s safety and freedom.”An update to the statement on Wednesday afternoon thanked fans for their support, and said Said had “secured the legal representation he needs”.“We are waiting to hear what comes next,” they added. “We want to reiterate that we truly don’t know what’s going on. We have more questions than answers, but we will keep you posted as much as we can. At this time the family asks for privacy as they navigate the situation.”According to the Chronicle, Said is a longtime staple of the music scene in Austin. He formerly played with the band the Black and works as a music instructor for the Texas School for the Blind.The heavy psychedelic-Americana quartet were to embark on an eight-date European tour in support of their latest album Holus Bolus. The tour, alongside the Swedish band Orsak:Oslo, was scheduled to begin on 15 May in the Netherlands and wrap the following Friday in Iceland.In their own statement, Orsak:Oslo, who will continue with the tour, wrote: “No one should be pulled off a plane and jailed for simply trying to travel and make art with their band. We won’t pretend to understand the full complexity of the situation, but this should not happen anywhere.”Said’s arrest comes amid a broader crackdown on immigration and border entry from the Trump administration, which has included searching phones for text messages critical of Donald Trump. In the four months since the US president took office, several professional musicians have had issues leaving or entering the US.In March, members of the British punk band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US, reportedly due to incorrect visas and a reason agents were unwilling to disclose. Bassist Alan Gibbs, who was sent back to the UK along with bandmates Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein, speculated on social media “whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president and his administration played a role – or perhaps I’m simply succumbing to paranoia”.Additionally Bells Larsen, a trans singer-songwriter based in Montreal, told the Guardian that he was canceling a tour because he could not apply for a visa under new US citizenship and immigration services policies that do not recognize transgender identities. The British singer FKA twigs cancelled several North American dates of her Eusexa tour because of unspecified visa issues. And Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, of the Polish rock band Trupa Trupa told NPR that visa delays forced him and his band to miss out on several North American performance opportunities.The Guardian has reached out to Lord Buffalo’s representatives for comment. More

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    Michelle Obama 2.0 – the reinvention of the former first lady

    Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I review Michelle Obama’s new podcast, IMO, which is surprising in the ways it breaks with the Michelle of the past.I came to sneer – and stayed to cheerView image in fullscreenFirst, a disclaimer: I had never fully bought into the Michelle Obama hype. I felt her now legendary line “When they go low, we go high” encapsulated a troubling and complacent form of respectability politics, in which Black people have to maintain coolness and grace under fire to be taken seriously. As the first lady, Michelle often seemed like a sanitising presence, wheeled out so that her national treasure status could serve as a smokescreen to obscure more honest and damning assessments of Barack Obama’s political record.Also, I am not a huge fan of the celebrity podcast genre, which is a vehicle for high-profile figures to chat to their friends in return for huge pay packets. So I was sceptical when Michelle’s podcast was launched in March. Yet when I listened to it, I was immediately charmed and hooked. In truth, I came to sneer and stayed to cheer. She is honest, reflective and vulnerable in ways that are profoundly resonant of a universal Black female experience, something that her icon status had rarely spoken to previously. The irony is that just as Michelle is finding her voice, her popularity appears to be falling – the podcast received poor ratings on launch, though it’s arguably the best thing she’s ever done.A great orator has the conversation of her lifeView image in fullscreenThe most arresting thing about IMO, despite the genuinely interesting high-profile Black guests such as Keke Palmer and the Wayans brothers, is Obama herself. She has always been one of the great orators in US politics – one of the superpowers that made her and Barack, another impressive public speaker, such a compelling couple on the world stage. In her podcast, Michelle uses this talent to reflect on her life and the challenges of ageing, losing her parents and the constant demands placed upon her.The fact that she co-hosts the show with her brother, Craig Robinson – a genial and down-to-earth foil for her confessions – gives the podcast such an intimate air that you feel like you’re in the presence of everyday people, not celebrities. I found myself listening not to hear any snippets of political gossip or insight into the Obamas’ lifestyle, but to receive some exceptionally articulated wisdom from an older Black woman who has seen a lot and gone through milestones we will all experience.She is also funny. Her account of how differently men and women socialise is familiar and hilarious. Michelle describes catching up with her female friends as a “multiday event”, something that leaves Barack perplexed as to why it takes two days for a basic meetup.There is pathos and uncertainty, too. In a recent episode, Michelle talks about the death of her mother, who lived in the White House during the Obamas’ tenure. Michelle says that, at 61, only now does she feel that she has finally become an adult, having had to reckon with her own mortality after the loss of her parents. The former first lady has revealed that she is in therapy, and that she is still trying to navigate this phase of her life.And, in a striking segment, she speaks with barely restrained annoyance about her reasons for not attending Trump’s inauguration, an absence that triggered divorce rumours that have been swirling for months. She says “it took everything in [her] power” to choose what was right for her in that moment. Yet that decision was met with “ridicule” because people couldn’t believe she was saying no to the inauguration for any other reason than she just did not want to be there – they had to “assume my marriage was falling apart”. Oof. It caught my breath.Beyond Black Girl Magicskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThis Michelle is worlds away from the Michelle of the 2010s. The publishing juggernaut and icon of Black social mobility, who rose to first lady from a bungalow in the south side of Chicago, was the product of a particular moment in feminist and racial discourse.The start of that decade brought the rise of Black Girl Magic, a cultural movement that focused on the exceptional achievements and power of Black women. It intersected with Black Joy, which moved away from defining the Black experience primarily through racism and struggle. Both unfolded against the backdrop of “lean in” feminism, which glorified hard graft, corporate success and having it all. The result was the marketing of women such as Michelle to promote popular narratives of inspiration and empowerment.That energy has since dissipated, losing steam culturally and overtaken by more urgent battles. The gains of the Black Lives Matter movement triggered a rightwing backlash against diversity and inclusion that is spearheaded by Trump. Now the Obamas seem like relics of a naively optimistic and complacent time.‘We got out of the White House alive – but what happened to me?’View image in fullscreenBut all that change and disappointment seems to have freed Michelle from the expectation that she should project graceful power and guru-like wisdom at all times. The podcast may not be the runaway hit it might have been 10 years ago, but that speaks to its authenticity and refreshing lack of a cynical big marketing campaign. Michelle is not trying to catch a moment – she even looks different. Gone is the silk-pressed hair, the minimalist jewellery and the pencil dresses. She now embraces boho braids, long colourful nails and bold gold jewellery. In an episode of IMO, she asks herself: “What happened that eight years that we were in the White House? We got out alive; I hope we made the country proud. But what happened to me?” There is so much urgency in her voice. And though her high-octane political experience may not be relatable to the average person, that question is one that I and many women of a certain age are asking as we emerge, blinking into the light, from the tunnel of navigating racism, establishing careers against the odds and having families. What happened to me?To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here. More

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    Johnny Rodriguez, Country Music Star, Dies at 73

    He was best known for the 1970s hits “I Just Can’t Get Her Out of My Mind” and “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico,” and as the first popular Mexican American country artist.Johnny Rodriguez, who became the first Mexican American country music star with a string of hits, died on Friday. He was 73.His daughter, Aubry Rodriguez, announced his death on social media on Saturday. The post did not cite a cause of death.Mr. Rodriguez rose to fame in the 1970s and was best known for the hits “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico” and “You Always Come Back (to Hurting Me).” He released six singles that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, and nine others reached the Top 10.In 2007, Mr. Rodriguez was inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, which described him as the “greatest and most memorable Chicano Country singer of all time.”Juan Raoul Davis Rodriguez was born to Andres Rodriguez and Isabel Davis on Dec. 10, 1951, in Sabinal, Texas, around 65 miles west of San Antonio. Mr. Rodriguez, the second youngest of 10 children, started playing guitar at the age of 7 when his older brother, Andres, bought him one.Their father died of cancer when Mr. Rodriguez was 16, around the time Mr. Rodriguez formed a band, and the younger Andres died the next year in a car crash. The losses sent Mr. Rodriguez “spiraling,” according to the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Maren Morris: ‘I never said I’m leaving country music’

    The year 2023 was a tough one for Maren Morris. The country singer, then 33, reached the end of her tour for her third studio album, Humble Quest, and the end of her rope with the conservative politics of country music industry. Her marriage to fellow country singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd, with whom she shares a young son, fell apart. That summer, her future professional life in question and her personal life imploding, she found herself in the UK touring with the Chicks – three fellow trailblazing, outspoken female artists in a male-oriented music scene who, 20 years earlier, got infamously blacklisted from country radio for daring to criticize George W Bush during a concert at Shepherd’s Bush.“It couldn’t have been a better musical hero backdrop for everything in my life crumbling,” Morris, a five-time Country Music Association Awards winner for such hits as The Bones, tells me in early April. The Chicks, of course, spun the hard-earned wisdom of the outsider’s high road into Grammy gold with 2006’s Taking the Long Way, an album of righteous anger burned to peace. “Any woman who has faced any sort of professional adversity or feeling that betrayal from a community – they just have the perfect album and attitude for it,” says Morris, with typical forthrightness.Morris, too, went her own way that summer. By September, the Texas native – one of the few big country stars willing to call out peers for, say, anti-trans comments, excusing away a video of Morgan Wallen saying the N-word, or general refusal to reckon with racism, homophobia and sexism in Nashville – publicly distanced herself from the industry where she started a decade earlier as a scrappy songwriter. “I thought I’d like to burn it to the ground and start over,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But it’s burning itself down without my help.” She released the two-track EP The Bridge, signifying her move to Columbia from the label’s Nashville division, with a music video that seemed to call out the racial vigilantism suggested by country star Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town. A month later, she filed for divorce from Hurd after five years of marriage.Two years of turmoil later, at 35, Morris can see a clearer picture. “I tried everything I could to make that part of myself work,” she says of her marriage. “I tried everything I could to make the part of myself within mainstream country work. And I think I was just growing apart from all of it.”Things are much brighter these days, though we have escaped the scorching afternoon sun at Coachella’s record-hot first weekend for an air-conditioned trailer to discuss what emerged from the ashes: Dreamsicle, a honey-hued album of reckoning and healing, out this week. In person, Morris is poised and thoughtful, more circumspect than her past burn-it-down comments would suggest. True to her decade-plus career blurring the line between country and pop, she is dressed somewhere between Nashville and California – crochet halter top, denim cut-offs, cowboy boots, multicolor silk headscarf set. She’s in town for some coveted Coachella guest spots – revisiting her breakout country hit My Church with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing her feature on Zedd’s inescapable 2018 party staple The Middle. And also, of course, to take in some wide-ranging sets, from Clairo to Charli xcx – with whom she shares, if nothing else, a career-long interest in the catharsis that is being loud while driving fast; her Grammy-winning single My Church, released in 2016, likened belting in the car to a religious experience, neatly twisting Nashville’s penchant for nostalgic faith into secular gospel.As a debut, My Church evinced Morris’s independent streak, though she came up through the country music system. Raised on 90s female country-pop stars such as Shania Twain, the Chicks and LeAnn Rimes, she had no other plan than to become a singer. Relentless touring as a teen around the state, plus failed auditions for nearly every talent show – American Idol, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, Nashville Star – cemented her country-pop sensibility and vocal chops, if not a route out of Texas. On the advice of Kacey Musgraves, a friend from the Texas honky-tonk circuit, Morris moved to Nashville in 2013 to work as a songwriter for the likes of Kelly Clarkson; she met Hurd the same year, when they co-wrote Last Turn Home for Tim McGraw.This was the height of so-called “bro country”, the prevalent sound of Solo cups, tailgates, cut-off jeans and nameless girls, almost all performed by white male artists occasionally inflected by hip-hop. As an aspiring solo artist, Morris was “deeply respectful to the machine” of Nashville, she told the New York Times Popcast in 2023. Her 2016 debut, Hero, emerged out of a period of questioning who she was writing for, then penning tracks for herself and posting them on Spotify, where she gained enough traction that country’s gatekeepers scrambled to sign her.View image in fullscreenHero immediately shot to No 1 on the country charts and solidified Morris’s precarious outsider-insider status as a new type of Nashville artist – musically voracious, open-minded and social media-literate, where she was unwilling to mince words on racial justice, abortion rights or respect for queer people. With a chameleonic and expansive voice, able to sustain torrential belt, delicate falsetto and a sharp turn of phrase, Morris moved seamlessly between genres and savvy collaborations, duetting with Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys, Hozier, Brothers Osborne and EDM artist Zedd – not to mention the Highwomen, a supergroup with Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires and Natalie Hemby that served as a triumphant, rootsy rebuttal to the country manosphere.Dreamsicle has that all in the rearview, instead preoccupied with present-tense mess given a rose-gold tint familiar to Morris’s ouevre. The album, named for the “perfectly fickle” sweet treat that definitionally cannot last, builds on her longstanding pop-lite sensibilities and stable of collaborators – Greg Kurstin, Jack Antonoff and Julia Michaels, among others – with the roving focus and intensity of someone in the thick of a breakup, broadly construed. “I’m not shying away from the elements of divorce on the record, but I think it’s so much bigger than that,” she says, lightly buffeted by the bass of Coachella’s early sets. “That’s a part of me and will be forever, but it’s not a defining characteristic of me. It’s how you put yourself back together.” Dreamsicle skips through those stops and starts – there is getting by with the help of your friends (grand bouquet), the awkwardness of the morning after with someone new (bed no breakfast), the moment of devastating clarity (this is how a woman leaves), the horniness of the newly liberated (push me over), and the overwhelmed freak-out (cut!).What there is not is any direct jab at Hurd, with whom she co-parents their five-year-old son, Hayes, in Nashville. “We had this amazing love and we do in a different way now,” she says with the tranquility of the therapized. “Now we’re partners in a different sense. We have to be really good, on the same page as much as we can, as co-parents.”Morris also seems intent on distancing herself from the story distancing herself from country music, describing the initial LA Times headline – “Maren Morris is getting the hell out of country music: ‘I’ve said everything I can say’” – as “really unfortunate”.“I never said I’m leaving country music, because that’s not really how I feel at all,” she explains calmly. “You hear country music on this album. You can’t just intentionally take the parts away. There would be nothing left of the sound of me. Because it’s just there. It’s in my bones and it’s in the way I write.”The story “caused a ton of unnecessary drama for me from that community because I was already sort of on the outs. I’m not backtracking what I said, I just never said that,” she adds, noting that she’s lived in Nashville for 12 years – “it’s not going to be some tussle that’s going to make me change my address.” Yes, she moved label divisions, no longer does the country radio circuit, nor submits her music to the CMA or ACM awards, but “I live in Nashville and I work with all my same friends,” she says. “It would be strange to be like: ‘This music isn’t me anymore.’ That makes me feel like I’m shitting on the music I’ve already put out, and that’s not how I feel at all.”“The fans that I’ve made and the communities those fans have made through being a fan of my music is so important to me,” she continues, “so to ever come out of my mouth saying: ‘I’m leaving you behind’ – I’d never be so reckless and stupid.” When I ask what she wished the conversation would have been, a representative interjects – the focus, it’s clear, is onwards and upwards. But Morris clarifies that that was just two years ago, “very much inside the storm that was still brewing” v the “more zoomed-out, healed phase” now. “If you dive deep enough, or if you just listen to the album, it’s very clear that I haven’t left anything behind.”View image in fullscreenMorris may not be up for directly challenging Nashville today, but she is clear on the values it should have, and what history is remembered. We’re in the Cowboy Carter era, where pre-existing mainstream stars from Beyoncé to Chappell Roan, Lana Del Rey to Post Malone, are taking on steel guitars and banjos. “It’s great when people come in and obviously have such a deep respect for the lore and the roots of country music, which people of color started,” Morris says. “Beyoncé telling the history of that in a correct way was so important.” Cowboy Carter’s collaborators, including Shaboozey, Rhiannon Giddens, Linda Martell, Brittney Spencer, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and others, “felt like this amazing melting pot of country music”, she adds. “That’s what it should be.”For a genre, and a country, often so focused on invoking a fictional past, Morris offers a different tradition – the many collaborations between Ray Charles and Nelson, a favorite of hers growing up in Texas and evidence of country music’s multi-racial, genre-porous past. “It’s like, do people remember that that happened? That listen to mainstream country music now?” she wonders. “We’ve been doing this for a very long time. Or at least, really badass artists have.”She offers others – Kris Kristofferson, an army man who advocated for veterans’ aid; Johnny Cash, performing for incarcerated people; Parton’s Imagination Library and status as a gay icon. “These people are famous for this long and this globally for a reason, and it’s not just because they’re from the south,” she says. “It’s because they have an identity and they stand up for the marginalized. They were real outlaws.“If there’s any crisis [in country music], I think it’s that the people that have an issue with any of that forget that their heroes were talking about that stuff before they were born.” And with that, along with one more nod to an album of past heartache – “I hope [audiences] hear themselves in it, whether it’s a past self or who they want to be,” she says – we’re out of trailer, back into the light.

    Dreamsicle is out now More