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    Olivia Rodrigo condemns Trump administration’s use of her music for ‘racist, hateful propaganda’

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    Olivia Rodrigo has criticized the Trump administration after one of her songs was featured in a government video promoting deportation efforts.A clip posted on the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram accounts encouraged undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US. The video used a segment of Rodrigo’s song all-american bitch as its soundtrack.Rodrigo, who is Filipino American, reportedly condemned the use of her music in a comment on the post, writing: “don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.” The comment was later taken down, but not before screenshots were captured and circulated widely.The video, uploaded Tuesday as Americans voted in several states, opens with the loud intro of the track as ICE agents are shown detaining people, accompanied by the caption: “IF ICE FINDS YOU.” It then transitions to scenes of immigrants seemingly choosing to self-deport, underscored by the song lyrics: “All the time/I’m grateful all the time/I’m sexy and I’m kind/I’m pretty when I cry.”The caption concludes with a warning: “LEAVE NOW and self-deport using the CBP Home app. If you don’t, you will face the consequences.”After Rodrigo’s response went viral on Friday, Instagram removed the soundtrack from the clip. An error message, reading “This song is currently unavailable”, is currently displayed.In a statement shared with the Guardian, a DHS spokesperson said: “America is grateful all the time for our federal law enforcement officers who keep us safe. We suggest Ms. Rodrigo thank them for their service, not belittle their sacrifice.”The department did not confirm whether they had removed the original comment by Rodrigo from the post.Rodrigo joins a growing list of artists who have objected to Trump or his administration using their music without consent, with others including Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones and the singer Jess Glynne.Glynne voiced her anger when one of her songs was similarly used, writing on Instagram: “This post honestly makes me sick. My music is about love, unity, and spreading positivity – never about division or hate.”This isn’t the first time Rodrigo has spoken out against the Trump administration. She publicly condemned ICE raids that took place in Los Angeles earlier in the year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe singer, 22, wrote on Instagram: “I’ve lived in LA my whole life and I’m deeply upset about these violent deportations of my neighbors under the current administration. LA simply wouldn’t exist without immigrants. Treating hardworking community members with such little respect, empathy, and due process is awful.”Rodrigo previously collaborated with the federal government under very different circumstances. In 2021, she visited the White House wearing a vintage pink Chanel suit to meet then-president Joe Biden and Dr Anthony Fauci, recording a video to encourage youth vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic.From the White House podium, she said: “I am beyond honored and humbled to be here today to help spread the message about the importance of youth vaccination. I’m in awe of the work President Biden and Dr Fauci have done and was happy to help lend my support to this important initiative.” More

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      Washington National Opera may move out of Kennedy Center due to Trump ‘takeover’

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      The Washington National Opera (WNO) is considering moving out of the Kennedy Center, the company’s home since the US’s national performing arts center opened in 1971.The possibility has been forced on the company as a result of the “takeover” of the center by Donald Trump, according to WNO’s artistic director, Francesca Zambello. The president declared himself chair of the institution in February, sacking and replacing its board and leadership.Leaving the Kennedy Center is a possible scenario after a collapse in box office revenue and “shattered” donor confidence in the wake of Trump’s takeover, said Zambello.“It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” she said. “But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options.“The two things that support a company financially, because of the takeover, have been severely compromised,” she said.Ticket sales were about 40% unsold compared with before Trump declared himself chair, said Zambello. Many have decided to boycott the center. Every day she receives messages of protest from formerly loyal members of the audience, she says.“They say things like: ‘I’m never setting foot in there until the “orange menace” is gone.’ Or: ‘Don’t you know history? Don’t you know what Hitler did? I refuse to give you a penny,’” she said.“People send me back their the season brochure shredded in an envelope and say: ‘Never, never, will I return: while he’s in power.’”Before February’s coup, the opera performances were running at 80%-90% of capacity. Now, Zambello said, they were at 60%, with at times the appearance of fuller houses created by the distribution of complimentary tickets.Philanthropic giving to the company – an important source of its funding – was down, she said. “Donor confidence has been shattered because many people feel: ‘If I give to the Kennedy Center, I’m supporting Donald Trump,’” she said.“The building is tainted,” she said. It had been “politicized by the current management”.Previously, the board of trustees “was always a mix of Republicans and Democrats. It did not matter that someone was a Republican or a Democrat. What mattered was that they were leading a big, important institution.”She said that the new management of the institution “do not have experience in the arts”. Richard Grenell, the Trump-appointed president of the center, has previously served in various foreign policy roles, including US ambassador to Germany.In addition, staffing in key areas such as marketing and development had been hollowed out, both in terms of experience and numbers, she said. “There was a promise from the new management that they would help us find new donors, increase contributions – which they have not done for our benefit,” she said.The new management of the center had not vetoed any of Zambello’s programming choices, but “they have suggested that we produce more popular operas”, she said. “This season, we are producing The Marriage of Figaro, Aida and West Side Story … I don’t see how we can get more popular than that.”Zambello said that when she joined the company in 2012, she committed to 50% non-white casting.“The management has questioned some aspects of it, and we have explained these are the best people for the roles,” she said, adding: “America is an incredibly diverse country, and so we want to represent every part of this country on our stage.”They had also questioned, she said, singers’ fees: “They have said: ‘Could we consider less expensive artists?’ We’re a feeding ground for bigger companies in this country. So we’re already hiring people who are on the rise and whose fees will get a lot more expensive later.”Grenell had, said Zambello, issued an edict requiring all shows to be “net neutral”, that is, with costs fully covered by box-office returns and donor contributions. But, she said, “We’re at the point where now we can’t present a net-neutral budget without an epic amount of outside funding, or knowing that our patrons would come back.”The slump in ticket sales was reflected across the board at the center, including for its concert seasons and theater, according to an analysis published by the Washington Post last week, which showed the box office down by 40% compared with a 2018 baseline.According to Zambello, box-office figures have now ceased to be internally circulated among the center’s creative teams as part of the standard system of daily show reports.The president declared his intention to become chair of the institution on 7 February, firing its bipartisan board of trustees. He replaced them with those of his own choosing; they elected him unanimously to the position days later. The president of the center was removed and replaced with Grenell.The moves were widely condemned. Weeks later, when JD Vance and the second lady, Usha Vance, who was inserted on to the Kennedy Center board by Trump, attended a concert given by the National Symphony Orchestra in March, patrons booed them.Usha Vance was already a trustee of the WNO, which has an independent board and its own endowment. “She was a supportive board member when she was a senator’s wife, and she has been a supportive board member as second lady, and we are grateful to have her patronage,” said Zambello.“I believe that she is someone who is an equalizer,” she said. “We can’t turn our backs on half this country. We have to find a way to all communicate and function together. I don’t believe in ‘us’ and ‘them’.”Artists have by and large remained loyal to WNO, Zambello says. However, in March, the creative team behind the opera Fellow Travelers, a love story set amid Eisenhower’s purge of gay employees from federal jobs in the 1950s, withdrew their work from the programme.The show was replaced by a production of Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s allegory on the anti-communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism.WNO is an independent company, but it has an affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center, meaning that it agrees to produce a certain number of shows in the building; shares back office functions such as marketing and development; and receives a subsidy from the center of about $2m-$3m per year.The affiliation agreement was made in 2011, soon before Zambello became artistic director, in order to stabilise the finances of the company. It was renewed shortly before Trump declared himself chair of the Kennedy Center.WNO is understood to be looking at alternative venues in DC for its forthcoming season, which runs from October 2026 to May the following year. Theaters of the scale required to produce main-stage opera are scarce, though auditoriums used by the city’s Shakespeare Theater Company could potentially be taken from time to time for smaller-scale works.The Kennedy Center declined to comment. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘This country’s gonna fall on its face. There’s nobody coming to save us’: Boston punks Dropkick Murphys take on Maga

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      Backstage at the Rock la Cauze festival in Victoriaville, Canada, where Boston punk-rock institution Dropkick Murphys are headlining, founding bassist/singer Ken Casey is experiencing an uncharacteristic moment of anxiety.“We have concerns about going back over the border tonight,” he says, gravely – not for the illicit reasons touring musicians usually fear border crossings, but because Casey’s regular on stage rants against Donald Trump have gone viral. “We’re not worried about being arrested,” he adds. “But we have a show in New York tomorrow. Are we gonna get harassed or held up? We used to come over that border and they’d be, ‘Dropkicks! Come right through!’ But what’s it going to be like now?”By “now”, Casey means during the second Trump presidency, which has brought the political element always present within Dropkick Murphys’ bolshie, Pogues and Clash-influenced bruisers to the fore. The group’s resistance has found its sharpest expression at their shows, where their anthem First Class Loser is accompanied by videos depicting Trump and former chum Jeffrey Epstein, while Casey’s skirmishes with a vocal minority of Maga Dropkicks fans in the mosh pit have lit up social media. He admits these fans often provoke the worst in him. “How do you know if someone’s in a cult? They hold up a hat all fuckin’ night,” he rages in one clip.“People tell me, ‘You didn’t use-ta soapbox like this’,” he says on our video call, gathering steam. “Well, we didn’t use-ta be in the midst of an authoritarian takeover!”Dropkick Murphys are still commanding big blue-collar crowds as they approach their 30th anniversary in 2026. Over the years they’ve scored numerous US Top 10 albums, Bruce Springsteen collaborations and a platinum-seller in the form of civic anthem I’m Shipping Up to Boston, boosted by its appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. But their value system, Casey says, hasn’t changed since the now seven-strong band formed with the aim “to be a voice for working people”. Class and the labour movement are key to the 56-year-old’s identity. “My father died when I was very young. I was raised by my grandfather, a labour organiser who instilled in me the value of a union. In the Boston suburb where I was raised, everyone owed their lives to a union job. It put a roof over our head.”View image in fullscreenThe Boston of Casey’s youth was heavily Irish-American. “The English love to call us ‘plastic paddies’, but I’ve never thought of myself as Irish – I’m Boston Irish, the people that fought against the most Wasp-y, keep-the-Irish-down place that ever existed,” he says, referring to how Irish refugees fleeing the great famine of 19th-century were targeted by anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant groups and scorned by the English Protestant Puritans who had settled America. “To go from those trenches to positions of power in city hall, on the railroad and in the utility companies led to my generation being able to have the middle-class life.”He pauses for a second, but he’s not finished: Casey would make a great labour organiser himself. “When that’s your story, you need to be willing to aid the culture that’s coming next. One immigrant culture can’t close the door behind them, especially not in America. We’re all immigrants here.”A tearaway in his youth, Casey quit drink and drugs before he reached 21, “because otherwise I’d be in prison,” he says. “I had a big problem as a teen.” He ploughed his energies into the hardcore punk scene surrounding Boston venue the Rathskeller, AKA the Rat. “Punk-rock was the soundtrack to my friggin’ mayhem. I was a rebellious kid, I liked the underdog vibe.” In 1996, now booking shows at the Rat, a co-worker bet him $30 he “didn’t have the balls to start a band on three weeks’ notice”. Never one to back down from a wager, Casey formed Dropkick Murphys.His identity was stamped all over the group. Before they even used Celtic instrumentation – the Dropkicks are the rare punk band to field a bagpiper – he says the embryonic Dropkicks “sounded like [1960s Irish folk group] the Clancy Brothers meets the Ramones – the delivery, the melodies, the lyrical content. It just naturally poured out of me.”Their beginnings were hardscrabble: pressing their own singles, booking their own shows and touring in an old Boston transit bus, for reasons of poverty and pride. “We peeled the roof off under a low bypass,” he grins. “We toured for two more years with that roof open like a convertible. When it rained, I held an umbrella over the driver.”By the 21st century, they had become staples of the US punk-rock circuit, their annual St Patrick’s Day shows among Boston’s hottest tickets, performing and recording with their heroes. “We play Billy Bragg’s There Is Power in a Union over the PA every night before we go on stage,” Casey says. “He opened our St Patrick’s show last year with it and then played Worker’s Song with us. Afterwards, he said, ‘I felt like I was in the fuckin’ Clash for three minutes!’” Springsteen, another member of the Dropkicks’ extended family, recorded their Rose Tattoo for a charity single after the Boston Marathon bombing, and sang Peg O’ My Heart with Dropkicks in Boston, “back when my grandmother Peg was still alive”, says Casey. “He came on with her for the encore – we had to pry her off Bruce’s arm to get her off the stage. I’m almost shocked a guy of that level was so down-to-earth. But he’s always had an affinity with punk. Bruce still walks the talk.”“Walking the talk” matters to the Dropkicks; their merch is made in the US by union-approved manufacturers, while their Claddagh Fund supports non-profit organisations across Boston. “We were pretty beloved in our city, whether people liked our music or not, because we gave a lot back to the community,” Casey says. Not any more, however. “Now a lot of people in my circles say ‘Fuck Dropkick Murphys’,” he adds, lantern jaw clenching. “Although never to my face. They despise me and the band.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s clear that, for Casey, the political is personal. His sense of betrayal regarding “the many rank-and-file union members who are now Trump voters” is palpable. “They don’t think Trump’s coming for the unions, but he’s coming for the unions, trust me. I tell Maga friends of mine: Trump wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. It’s about total control for the rich. It’s class war.”What is the magic spell Trump has managed to cast over a demographic who were until recently, Casey says, “in lockstep with Dropkicks’ beliefs”? “Trump offered them a chance to say out loud things people used to have to whisper to their friends,” Casey spits. “Racism, cruelty, jokes about disabilities. A lot of white people in America believed whites will not be in control any more, especially after Obama. This is their last, desperate grasp to hold control.”The Dropkicks have met this grim moment with records that have transformed their previously cartoonish riot music into something more sober, biting and heartfelt. Two acoustic albums – 2022’s This Machine Still Kills Fascists and 2023’s Okemah Rising – set unrecorded Woody Guthrie polemics to their music. “Woody’s grandson Cole told his mom Nora, ‘Grandpa would’ve liked these guys’,” Casey beams proudly. “It made us better musicians, doing it all acoustic. But that left us with a hunger to go electric and be a punk-rock band again.” Which brings us to this year’s For the People, which opens with Who’ll Stand With Us? A key lyric: “The working people fuel the engine / While you yank the chain.”View image in fullscreenIn another viral clip from a recent show, Casey bets a fan in a Maga shirt $100 that it wasn’t manufactured in the US; it was, inevitably, manufactured in Nicaragua, and Casey swapped the offending garment for a union-made Dropkicks T-shirt.“If America is ever going to go back to some semblance of normal, we have to bring the temperature down, we need to be able to talk to each other,” Casey says, referencing that night. “I talked to that guy afterwards, and he said, ‘I don’t let politics get in the way of family, and I consider you family’. I could have jumped down his throat, but he seemed open to reason.” He pauses. “That’s rare for Maga, though. Other days, I’m like, ‘Fuck this, I don’t even want to know these people, if this is how they think and behave’. Do I want to have a dialogue with these people? No. I’m just hoping the fever will break. I don’t need them to have a ‘come to Jesus’ moment on the difference between right and wrong – I just need them not to support what’s happening.”Does he fear blowback for his outspokenness, like that suffered by Stephen Colbert – or worse?“Unlike Stephen, we have no parent company, so we can say what we want,” he says. “Regarding our safety … whatever,” he snarls, disdainfully. “I’ll never have a security guard or anything like that. But you gotta keep your head on a swivel a little bit. Back in the day, we always had a Nazi element gunning for us, but you could see them coming. Now you don’t know who’s who. I’m not sure what’s keeping other people quiet, though, especially in punk-rock. Where’d everyone go? They had the balls to speak out against Bush back in the day. But Bush didn’t have an army of trolls that come after you. Speaking out against Bush wasn’t going to cost you half your fanbase, potentially.”In his darker moments, Casey reckons “within a year, this country’s gonna fall on its face, and people are gonna feel the pain: recession, inflation, unemployment. There’s nobody coming to save us.” He says he feels “no excitement or happiness” in the group’s anti-Trump screeds winning them newfound fame. “But maybe there’s a slight sense of validation,” he adds. “I talk to the fans every night. One night, an immigrant told me, ‘I moved here, and my partner is American, we have children, and I live in fear of being deported. My own friends have turned on me, they say I’m taking American jobs.’ He was actually in tears at the end. But he said, ‘I feel like someone is speaking on my behalf’. From the earliest days of this band, we wanted to be involved in something that mattered. So we are. I wish it was a different subject and not quite so important, but …”He sighs. Maybe the border tonight will be a shitshow, but it won’t change how the Dropkicks operate in this darkest of moments. “We’re sticking our neck out and getting a lot of negative attention,” he adds. “But if we don’t do it now, it might be too late.” More

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      in Elections

      Dr. Demento Announces His Retirement After 55 Years on the Air

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      Barry Hansen, mostly known by his D.J. name, said he’d end his show’s run after 55 years of playing parody songs. His syndicated show was once heard on more than 150 radio stations.“Monster Mash.” “Another One Rides the Bus.” “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”The D.J. most responsible for lodging these earworms in listeners’ heads, Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, said last month that he would retire from the airwaves in October, on the 55th anniversary of his radio debut.Mr. Hansen, 84, started on KPPC-FM, a free form and progressive rock station in Pasadena, Calif., (now KROQ-FM) in 1970 and soon began focusing on what he called “funny music” because of listener requests for songs that made them laugh.After he played “Transfusion,” a song by Nervous Norvus, which had been banned on many radio stations in the 1950s, another D.J. at the station called Mr. Hansen demented.“Transfusion” — featuring the sound effects of vehicle crashes — is about a reckless driver who repeatedly gets seriously injured in car crashes by breaking traffic laws. In the lyrics, the driver gets a blood transfusion after each crash and vows to drive safely, before getting into another one.The novelty song struck a chord with Mr. Hansen, who would spin up similar parodies for his playlists for the next half century. The nickname Dr. Demento, which he adopted shortly afterward, also stuck.He referred to his fans as dementoids and dementites.“I have been doing this show for nearly 55 years, about two-thirds of my life,” Mr. Hansen said on his May 31 show, which broadcasts online. “It’s been a blast, but I have come to the decision that I need to hang up my top hat soon. The show you just heard is the last of my regular shows.”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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      in Elections

      Review: ‘The Comet/Poppea’ Merges Opera’s Past and Present

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      A Monteverdi masterpiece and a new work by George Lewis are played simultaneously in an American Modern Opera Company production at Lincoln Center.When you enter the David H. Koch Theater for “The Comet/Poppea,” you are directed not into the auditorium but through some passageways and onto the stage. It’s a rare perspective to be facing a hall full of empty seats, with the delightful, rebellious undercurrent of being where you’re not supposed to be.Being where you’re not supposed to be is one of the few threads tying together the two operas that are played more or less simultaneously over the following 90 minutes. Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” (1643) charts the improbable climb of Nero’s mistress to the throne of the Roman Empire. George Lewis’s “The Comet” (2024), set about a century ago, imagines a Black man who finds himself in a once segregated, now abandoned space after an apocalyptic event.The idea of intermingling these very different works came from the director Yuval Sharon, who is always cooking up half-mad ideas like this, and the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective exploring its capacious vision of the art form over the next month during a residency at Lincoln Center.The audience for “The Comet/Poppea,” which opened on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, sits in two sections facing each other across the stage. Between them is a large circular platform that has been divided in two. One side is the realistic, amber-lit restaurant of “The Comet”; the other, where “Poppea” plays, is a heavenly vision of a pristinely white Roman bath, the walls encrusted with white plaster flowers.This turntable is constantly rotating, in an effort to convey a sense of “a visual and aural spiral,” as Sharon writes in a program note. But while “The Comet/Poppea” tries to conjure a cyclone, whipping together past and present, Black and white, high class and low, naturalism and stylization, it ends up feeling more like a trudge.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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      in Elections

      Review: ‘The Counterfeit Opera’ on Little Island Falls Short

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      At Little Island, “The Counterfeit Opera” falls short of its wildly successful historical models.After weeks of rain that interrupted rehearsals, conditions seemed perfect at the start of “The Counterfeit Opera” Wednesday on Little Island, with balmy temperatures and zero chance of precipitation. As members of the cast swarmed the stage shouting questions into the steeply raked rows of the amphitheater, conditions also seemed ripe for some political rabble-rousing.After all, this show with a libretto by Kate Tarker and music by Dan Schlosberg was billed as a new take on John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” which punctured the cultural pretensions of 18th-century London and inspired Brecht’s darker indictment of social inequality in “The Threepenny Opera” (1928).“Can you afford your rent?”“No!” the audience shouted back.“Can you afford health insurance?”“No!”“Can you afford to support a lawless, self-serving government of con men?”This time, the “no” came out as a roar.At that point, it almost seemed possible that a revolution might start up right here on this artificial island developed by the billionaire Barry Diller. But as the sun set, the heat drained out of the day and with it the performance. With toothless satire, goofy humor and an absence of memorable tunes, “The Counterfeit Opera” falls short of its wildly successful historical models.The closing chorus — “Class wars repeat. Con men don’t sleep. Fight to break the dark spell of a world made of deceit!” — was met with mild-mannered applause and a version of a standing ovation that masks competition for the exits. The meteorological chance of political action breaking out was back to zero.More unforgivably, perhaps, the piece fails to infuse the material with a distinct New York flavor. Aside from a few quips at the expense of Boston and New Jersey, this self-declared “Beggar’s Opera for a Grifter’s City” feels like it could unfold anywhere.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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      in Elections

      How “Pet Sounds” Became the Beach Boys Masterpiece

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      Brian Wilson’s 1966 masterpiece is now considered a crowning achievement of music. The album’s reputation grew over time.Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new (or newer; perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones’ blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.”And, of course, bursting into the top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: “Pet Sounds.”The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, “Pet Sounds” is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers.“When it was released in the United States,” said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, “it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.”Released in the spring of 1966, “Pet Sounds” represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was.The album peaked at No. 10 — low for one of the most popular acts at the time — and was the first Beach Boys album in three years not to reach gold status, Butler wrote in a chapter of an academic book. The Beach Boys’ record company, Capitol, rushed out a greatest-hits that outsold the album of original music.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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      in Elections

      Sly Stone Had a Whole New Look

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      In 1974, decades before Ye, then known as Kanye West, packed Madison Square Garden for a twin album-fashion spectacular, Sly Stone, the cosmically groovy singer-songwriter who died on June 9, offered his own extravaganza of dance, funk and flash on New York’s biggest stage.The occasion was a sold-out Sly & the Family Stone concert in front of more than 20,000 fans, and the centerpiece was Mr. Stone’s wedding to Kathy Silva — a gold and black display of fabulosity. The bride and groom (and the whole wedding party, band included) wore coordinated Halston looks. Mr. Stone wore a gleaming cape and jumpsuit, the waist cinched with a big gold belt buckle, so he looked like a cross between a disco superhero and a sci-fi lord come lightly down to earth. Behind them, a dozen models in black dresses carried gold palm fronds.It was, The New Yorker declared, “the biggest event this year.”Sly Stone and Kathy Silva during their wedding in June 1974.Oscar Abolafia/TPLP, via Getty ImagesMr. Stone in a signature crochet cap in Los Angeles, circa 1970 …Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images… and befringed at Woodstock, 1970.Warner Bros/Kobal, via ShutterstockMr. Stone in London, 1973.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesIt was also seven years after Mr. Stone arrived on the music scene promising “A Whole New Thing,” and boy, had he delivered. He introduced not just a whole new sound but a whole new kind of style to the stage. Like his music, it crossed genre, race, gender and audience, offering unity in a psychedelic stew of fringe, rhinestones and lamé that was sometimes celebratory and sometimes chaotic, often outrageous, but almost always impossible to forget — whether it was on “The Ed Sullivan Show” or the Woodstock stage.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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      in US Politics

      ‘So polarised’: Bruce Springsteen’s anti-Trump comments divide US fans

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      As the lead singer of a Bruce Springsteen cover band, Brad Hobicorn had been looking forward to performing at Riv’s Toms River Hub in New Jersey on Friday. Then came a text message from the bar’s owner, saying the gig was cancelled. Why? Because the real Bruce Springsteen had lambasted Donald Trump.“He said to me his customer base is redder than red and he wishes Springsteen would just shut his mouth,” Hobicorn recalls by phone. “It was clear that this guy was getting caught up in that and didn’t want to lose business. The reality is we would have brought a huge crowd out there: new customers that are Springsteen fans that want to see a band locally.”The culture wars have arrived in New Jersey, the state of Frank Sinatra, Jon Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, comedian Jon Stewart and TV hit The Sopranos. Springsteen – revered for songs such as Born In The USA, Glory Days, Dancing In The Dark and Born To Run – has long been a balladeer of the state’s blue-collar workers. But last year, many of those same workers voted for the president.Now their split loyalties are being put to the test. Opening a recent tour in Manchester in Britain, Springsteen told his audience: “The America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.” He repeated the criticisms at later concerts and released them on a surprise EP.Trump responded by calling Springsteen highly overrated. “Never liked him, never liked his music or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — just a pushy, obnoxious JERK,” he wrote on social media. “This dried out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back in the Country.”Trump, 78, also posted a video edited to make it seem as if he had hit 75-year-old Springsteen with a golf drive. Trump called for a “major investigation” into Springsteen, Beyoncé and other celebrities, alleging that they had been paid millions of dollars to endorse his Democratic opponent in the 2024 election, Kamala Harris.Harris beat Trump by six percentage points in New Jersey, significantly less than Joe Biden’s 16-point winning margin in 2020. In Toms River, a township along the Jersey Shore, Trump received twice as many votes as Harris, helping explain why Riv’s Toms River Hub got cold feet about hosting a Springsteen cover band.The bar and restaurant cancelled the 30 May gig by No Surrender, a nine-person band that has played Springsteen songs for more than two decades, despite it being scheduled months in advance. Contacted by the Guardian, owner Tony Rivoli declined to comment.Hobicorn, 59, from Livingston, New Jersey, says the band suggested a compromise of playing classic rock other than Springsteen’s but Rivoli rejected the idea. Hobicorn also received some criticism from Springsteen fans for offering the partial climbdown.But he explains: “That’s where I made the point that not everybody in the band is aligned with Bruce Springsteen’s politics. Everybody’s got a different point of view but that’s OK. You can still be in a Springsteen cover band and not 100% agree with everything he says.”He adds: “My band is split. We’re half red, half blue. We have civilised conversations and then we go and play the music and it’s never been about politics. This thing got made into a political situation.”Springsteen is not new to the political arena. When former president Ronald Reagan referenced the singer’s “message of hope” at a campaign stop, Springsteen wondered if Reagan had listened to his music and its references to those left behind in the 1980s economy. Later, he was a regular presence on Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign.He has also challenged his audience politically beyond presidential endorsements. Born in the USA told of a Vietnam war veteran who lost his brother in the war and came home to no job prospects and a bleak future. My Hometown described the kind of economic decline and discontent that Trump has exploited: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores / Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more.”Springsteen’s 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad bluntly documented the lives of struggling immigrants, including those from Mexico and Vietnam. His 2001 song American Skin (41 Shots), criticised the shooting by New York City police officers of an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo, angering some of the blue-collar segments of his fanbase.But taking on Trump is a cause of a different magnitude. His “Make America great again” (Maga) movement has proved uniquely polarising in US culture, forcing many people to choose whether they are on the blue team or red team. The clothes people wear, the food they eat and the music they listen to have become signifiers of Maga. Even some in New Jersey, where Springsteen grew up and now lives in the town of Colts Neck, are having doubts.Hobicorn reflects: “As the country has become more and more divided, there’s certainly a real disdain for Springsteen and his politics in New Jersey. Most New Jerseyans are supportive of who he is, what he’s done for the state, what he’s done for our culture, what he’s done for music.“I feel like it’s not a lot of stuff in the middle like, yeah, he’s OK. It’s one way or the other. In New Jersey it’s mostly in a positive way: people love and respect Bruce for everything. But some are going to paint the picture of him: he’s a billionaire and he doesn’t give a crap about anybody but himself. That’s what they do.”View image in fullscreenNo Surrender has found an alternative venue. After the cancellation of its Toms River gig, Randy Now’s Man Cave, a record shop in Hightstown, New Jersey, stepped in and will host the band on 20 June. The shop will producers flyers and T-shirts that say: “Free speech is live at Randy Now’s Man Cave.”Owner Randy Ellis, 68, says: “The state is proud of Bruce Springsteen. He should become the state bird for all I know.”But he admits: “In the last election, Harris won the state but there were many more people for Trump than I ever expected in New Jersey. It’s so polarised now. We may have people in front of my store saying Springsteen sucks and all that. Who knows?”At a time when many of Trump’s critics have kept quiet, Springsteen is arguably his leading cultural foe. In 2020 he said: “a good portion of our fine country, to my eye, has been thoroughly hypnotised, brainwashed by a conman from Queens” – knowing the outer-borough reference still stung a man who built his own tower in Manhattan.Dan DeLuca, who grew up in Ventnor, New Jersey, and is now a popular music critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, says: “The thing about Bruce that people love is this idea of being a truth teller. You see what you see and you need to speak on it. There’s a lot of people who are muttering things or speaking in private about what’s going on in America who are not speaking out for whatever reason. Maybe they don’t believe that politics and art should mix. Maybe they’re worried about their fanbase or something.“As he said, there’s a lot of crazy shit going on and it’s happened since he was last on the road. It’s good that he’s speaking his mind and he’s speaking what a lot of people want to hear but maybe are afraid to hear and it’s maybe giving some people courage.”But as the case of No Surrender demonstrated, there is a significant minority in New Jersey who see things differently in this hyper-partisan era. DeLuca reflects: “I grew up in south Jersey, which is less densely populated, less urban, and it’s Trump country now.“Springsteen has been true to what he sings about and the people he sings about and the blue collar concerns but then he’s open to target because he’s rich or hangs out with Obama. They probably think that Bruce has turned into a knucklehead socialist or something. I’m sure there are plenty of people who probably do have some divided loyalties.” More