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    Trump Seeks More Sway in Picking Kennedy Center Honorees

    When President Trump was criticized by some of the artists who were recognized at the annual Kennedy Center Honors program during his first term, he responded by boycotting the show, breaking with decades of precedent.Now, as he leads a sweeping takeover of the Kennedy Center in his second term, Mr. Trump is seeking changes that will allow him greater sway in the selection of honorees, according to two people briefed on the matter who were granted anonymity to describe confidential discussions.Mr. Trump, who is now the chairman of the Kennedy Center, is scheduled to speak at a meeting of its board on Monday afternoon, when proposed changes to the honors advisory committee will be on the agenda, according to the individuals and a copy of the agenda that was obtained by The New York Times.Since 1978, the Kennedy Center has named honorees to be recognized each year at a star-studded televised gala without interference from the White House. The center has honored a broad spectrum of artists and performers, including Lucille Ball, Dolly Parton, Clint Eastwood, Fred Astaire and the Grateful Dead.But Mr. Trump is seeking a more direct role. He replaced all the Biden appointees on the center’s once-bipartisan board, was elected chairman and installed a loyalist, Richard Grenell, as its president. The board is scheduled to meet Monday to consider a resolution, which has not been previously reported, that would give Mr. Trump more control over the selection of honorees.The resolution states that members of the committee responsible for selecting honorees “shall be appointed by the chairman of the board, and shall serve at the pleasure of the chairman,” according to a copy obtained by The Times. That would give Mr. Trump broad power to hire and fire those who help decide who will receive the honor, which recognizes people and institutions for lifetime artistic achievement. The committee will recommend a slate of honorees to the Kennedy Center’s president for approval, the resolution says.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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    Sony Gives N.Y.U. $7.5 Million for an Audio Institute

    A multifaceted new program at the university’s Steinhardt School will train students (on Sony equipment) for jobs in music and audio “that don’t exist yet.”Students at New York University who study the music industry and do research at the frontiers of audio have a new benefactor: Sony.A $7.5 million donation from the Japanese electronics and media giant, made through its personal entertainment business unit, will help establish the Sony Audio Institute, a multifaceted partnership at N.Y.U.’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. It is set to open this spring.N.Y.U. and Sony, which jointly announced their agreement on Tuesday, say that the institute is not a physical space. Rather, it’s an interdisciplinary approach to studying and researching the latest advances in consumer and pro-level audio tech — replete with Sony tools to facilitate. As part of the partnership, a studio space will be revamped with professional equipment from Sony and the institute will offer an array of internships, scholarships and programming, even letting students collaborate with Sony’s engineers and researchers.The institute will not, however, grant degrees. It will be part of Steinhardt’s degree programs in music business and music technology.“To have access to the researchers who are inventing the future of audio, as well as the businesspeople who are managing the introduction of those products, creates a great opportunity and a competitive advantage for our students,” Larry S. Miller, the director of Steinhardt’s music industry program, said in an interview.Miller, a former music executive, will step down from his leadership of the school’s music industry program in the fall to become director of the Sony Audio Institute, which has been established for an initial 10-year run. (It is unrelated to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a degree program under N.Y.U.’s Tisch School for the Arts.)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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    Khalil Fong, Hong Kong Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 41

    Singing in both Mandarin and English, he brought a soul and R&B sensibility to Chinese pop.Khalil Fong, a Hong Kong singer-songwriter who infused a soul and R&B sensibility into Chinese pop songs, died on Feb. 21. He was 41.His death was announced on Saturday by his record label, Fu Music. The announcement did not say where Mr. Fong had died or specify a cause of death, but it said he had battled a “relentless illness” for five years.Beloved for its soulful vocals and distinctive blend of soul and Mandarin pop, Mr. Fong’s music found an audience in Hong Kong, mainland China and much of the wider Chinese-speaking world.“Trying to introduce soul music, or soul R&B, was not the easiest thing,” he said in a 2016 interview with The South China Morning Post, noting that the genre was not widely embraced in the region. “One of the things I wanted to do was to introduce this type of music within the context of Chinese language.”He broke into the popular music scene in 2005, when Warner Music Hong Kong released his funky, syncopated debut album, “Soulboy.” In the following decade, he released eight albums and performed in stadiums and large concert halls around the world, wearing his signature thick black glasses.But Mr. Fong’s career was cut short by health problems, and in recent years he had largely retreated from the public eye. Inspiration never stopped flowing, however, and he sporadically released singles.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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    Chrisette Michelle sang for Trump in 2017. The backlash lasted years: ‘I thought they’d never stop hating me’

    The Grammy-winning singer Chrisette Michele keeps her phone switched off, a habit that stems from her long stint in cancellation purgatory. Her brother barely got through last month to relay the news that Snoop Dogg had been DJing at a party for Donald Trump’s second inaugural, and many in the Black community were irate. Longtime fans were calling Snoop a sellout, she learned, and were unfollowing him online by the hundreds of thousands.Snoop remained defiant in the face of this controversy, which really peeved the hordes who well remember when Snoop was regulating Maga support in the music industry. That defiance “was the thing that resonated with me”, says Michele when I initially reach her the week after Trump’s second inauguration. “We live in a different era where you can say what you think and not feel like you might die.”In 2017, Michele performed at a Trump inauguration in a shocking break from the music industry’s anti-Maga stance. She was met with considerable backlash from fans and from industry peers including Questlove, the Roots drummer and Tonight Show bandleader. Despite Michele’s extensive success working with rappers Nas and Jay-Z, the decision to perform for Trump cost her future gigs and more opportunities to collaborate with industry heavyweights.Now that some music stars have hopped on the Maga bandwagon, she can’t help reflecting on the price she paid for making the worst decision of her career. “I just remember sitting in a hotel lobby next to my manager, who was my husband of two years at the time, in tears, thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just become a professor,’” she recalls. “The constant gnawing and chewing and shouting at me was so difficult.”You wonder if the outcome might have been different if Michele had a catalog to rival Snoop’s, or even a song as big as Drop It Like It’s Hot. A native of Long Island, New York, Michele, now 42, came to prominence during the neo soul movement of the mid-noughties, following Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and India Arie. Michele’s satin voice, jazzy vibes and overall versatility made her a sought-after hip-hop balladeer by everyone from the Roots to Rick Ross – the latter of whom appeared at last month’s inaugural Crypto Ball alongside Snoop and Soulja Boy. In 2009, Michele earned a performance Grammy for her third single, Be OK, which also featured will.i.am. All the while Michele remained open about the pressures she felt around her body image, becoming a champion of the #BlackGirlMagic movement.View image in fullscreenMichele didn’t enter the political arena; it landed on her in 2014, when Michelle Obama turned up for one of her shows outside Washington DC. She was not Michelle Obama that night, Michele recalls, “she was my homegirl. She came backstage and asked for a selfie with her mom and her aunt. She wore pink lipstick – like, happy, girlie pink lipstick. She knew all the words. She was a fan.”In 2016 Barack Obama added If I Have My Way, a groovy ballad from Michele’s debut album, to his summer playlist. Michele sang for the president at that year’s Democratic national convention and at his final White House state dinner, when the Obamas hosted Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. She takes patriotic duty seriously and eagerly. “When it comes to singing overseas for the troops or at the DNC, I don’t take it for granted,” says Michele. “I’m proud to be an American, always have been since I was a kid – and that’s a very difficult thing to say as a Black woman.”When Trump’s team invited her to perform at a 2017 inauguration event, Michele accepted – somewhat naively, as it turns out. She doesn’t support or particularly like the guy and was aware of the potential career ramifications. But she saw the gig as an opportunity to confront Trump and see if he kept the same racist, misogynistic energy in person. Even though there seemed to be some cover on the inauguration event’s performance lineup, which also included the gospel music stars Travis Greene and Tina Campbell (of Mary Mary fame), Michele, because of her more mainstream appeal, became the focus. Michele’s longtime supporters begged her to reconsider the gig. In response to reports that she was receiving at least $250,000 for her appearance – the true fee was closer to $75,000 – Questlove and Talib Kweli, both former collaborators of Michele’s, volunteered to pay her not to perform – which hurt. “Honestly, I had to stop paying attention after a while,” she says.The music industry was in no mood to party with Trump when he ran in 2016. Eminem openly criticized his policies. Queen’s Brian May condemned his use of We Are the Champions at the Republican national convention. Elton John turned down an invitation to perform at his 2017 inauguration. But few artists were as stridently anti-Trump as Snoop, a social justice advocate who once characterized the gang violence he grew up around in Los Angeles as a trickle-down effect of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Snoop set the rules of engagement, pre-emptively denouncing the Black artists who would perform for Trump’s inaugural as “Uncle Toms” and “jigaboos” – derogatory terms that insinuate a deeper racial betrayal. His 2017 music video for the song Lavender, a heavy-handed Trump allegory, features a society of clowns that is ruled by a character named Ronald Klump, whom he shoots with a toy gun. The video outraged Marco Rubio and other Maga Republicans and had Trump musing about the reaction Snoop might have gotten if he had made a similar video about Barack Obama.View image in fullscreenBut Snoop’s tune changed in 2021 after Trump pardoned Michael “Harry-O” Harris, co-founder of the Death Row Records label that launched Snoop’s music career. (Harris had been serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for drug trafficking and attempted murder.) “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” Snoop said last year. “He has done only great things for me.”At the Crypto Ball, Snoop was photographed throwing up hand signs with Bo Loudon, a young Maga influencer who is close with Barron Trump; Loudon captioned the picture: “Welcome to Maga, Snoop!” The endorsement effectively consolidated Snoop’s metamorphosis from Murder Was the Case gangsta rapper to ubiquitous pitchman to all-American mascot. Reacting to the Crypto Ball gig, The View’s Ana Navarro likened Snoop to a “trained seal”. Other rappers who have performed for Trump have suffered backlash even as Carrie Underwood and other music industry standard-bearers have capitulated to Maga. (After Nelly performed at a separate inauguration event, the administrator of a popular Instagram page dedicated to his wife, the R&B singer Ashanti, stepped down, citing disappointment with the Hot in Herre rapper – who is also unapologetic.)Michele processed the scenes of Snoop with Rick Ross and Soulja Boy at last month’s inauguration ball with wonder. “My initial reaction was, ‘Isn’t it nice to see Black men dancing in America so unapologetically?’” she says. When she faced criticism for her own performance, “I guess I wasn’t so masculine in my way of saying, ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’” she adds. “I just did what I thought was right. I didn’t shout at anybody and tell them not to say what they think.”In the main, the reputational damage to these men has been mostly cosmetic. For Snoop, the controversy has simply presented yet another occasion for him to play the part of America’s lovable scamp. Weeks after raising hackles at the inauguration event, he was back on stage for the NFL’s year-end awards show and for a television PSA that ran during the Super Bowl calling on viewers to “stand up to hate,” reigniting criticism of his inauguration appearance. Michele remembers arriving at a Super Bowl party at the Fountainebleau resort in Las Vegas as the ad was airing. “I’m still processing that commercial,” she jokes.Sometimes Michele thinks an overtly militant defense might have shortened her time in purgatory. “That was the most uncomfortable realization,” she says. “Like, if I’m not shouting and throwing my fist in the air, then it’s quite possible that I get ignored because I’m Black and soft. Look at Amber Rose. She spoke at the RNC, people were hard on her – and she just said, ‘Screw you,’ with that big, beautiful smile on her face. And people just backed up. The funny thing is: I don’t agree with her! I just watched it like, ‘OK, girl …’”Michele hoped to make a statement through the inauguration performance itself, but her messages were mixed. She sang a gospel song called Intentional, which calls for an unwavering belief in a divine plan – an argument evangelicals use to justify Trump support. She wore a maxi skirt replete with images of Black torture and subjugation by Jean-Michele Basquiat. In the end Trump didn’t make the performance, and she never got to meet him. By the time she walked off stage after the four-minute gig, “the death threats were starting,” Michele says. “I was afraid.”She thought she could make them stop if she just took a moment to explain herself – although, she admits, her first instinct was “to be completely silent and just go somewhere and mind my business for four years”. In an open letter pushed on social media, she said she intended her performance to serve as a “bridge” between Trump supporters and opponents. During an appearance on the Breakfast Club, Michele emphasized her Basquiat skirt again while reviewing the other rebellious nuances of her performance. But her attempts at subtlety were ultimately lost on the masses. “That was me overanalyzing everything, overthinking everything,” she says. “Because my parents are teachers, I want everybody to understand all the angles. My shouting came from insecurity, from needing people to believe that I did this for the right reasons.”By then the blowback against Michele was already fierce and unrelenting. She was dropped by her record label and by Spike Lee – who had one of her songs, Black Girl Magic, slated for the Netflix reboot of She’s Gotta Have It. Industry friends kept their distance. Her marriage eventually fell apart under the strain. The sneaker preacher Jamal Bryant called for a boycott of her music. He’d later apologize, but Trump’s camp never reached out to check on her. “Can you put a note in there asking them to reach out to Chrisette?” she asks me, laughing. “My team is waiting on a follow-up phone call.”View image in fullscreenBut it was the constant stream of death threats coming through her phone that really pushed Michele into depression and suicidal ideation. “We had security guards at my hotel doors,” says Michele, who also recalls being heckled on stage. “I wasn’t going to the grocery store by myself for years.” In October 2017 she shared that the fallout from her inauguration performance had caused her to suffer a miscarriage – and was further vilified for punctuating the news with a picture that was not of her actual miscarriage. “That was me at my most panicked, the point where I came close to doing anything to get people just to be nice to me for one second,” she says. “I thought people were never going to stop hating me. I didn’t think this would go on for years.”In a 2018 Facebook post, a year into Trump’s first term and just before the midterm elections, Michele posted a picture of herself between the Obamas and the Singaporean prime minister at the state dinner while calling on voters to rebalance the scales. (“When I look back at this moment it reminds me of what this country’s leadership should look like,” she wrote. “Diplomacy. Civility. Compassion. Love. Integrity. Gangsters don’t run this country. The people do.”) But it just became a reason for critics to come at her harder.Michele started treating her phone like a landline, switching it on every now and then for friends and family. “As a person in the public space, you think it’s your job to be connected all the time,” she says. “But it’s incredibly easy to disconnect.”But even as Black America disavowed Michele, many industry peers rallied around her. “Anita Baker was very vocal about making sure I had her number and about calling her if I needed anything,” she recalls. “India Arie did an entire interview explaining how I should be spoken to as a person, pulled me backstage and shook [the sense back into] me. Kirk Franklin was like: ‘The Black community owes you an apology.’ But Stevie Wonder was the most adamant to me about continuing in this music space because he’s been through so many things himself. These are the people who really wanted to make sure that I knew they were there for me.”She carried on quietly for years – performing around the country and even launching a podcast called Inner Peace Examination, dedicated to self-reflection – until a curious thing happened: the political winds shifted. Trump stormed back from his 2020 defeat to win re-election, this time with backing from tech billionaires. Corporate America rushed to scrap its DEI programs in a fit of anticipatory obedience. Just last month Obama and Trump were observed chatting warmly to each other while sitting together at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral – as if they hadn’t been mortal enemies for the past 17 years.Ultimately, Michele wishes she could have been like Snoop and told her critics to kiss off, and she also wishes she had never taken the inauguration gig in the first place. It’s another nuanced position that could threaten her ongoing career recovery and land her in hot water all over again – but at least now Michele knows she’s built for tough times. “For about four or five years, I hated the word resilient,” she says, “because it meant I got cancelled and got back up. But now I embrace it because it means you kept going, and people stuck with you and you’re here now.” More

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    Lessons for Elon Musk from the original Doge | Brief letters

    As Elon Musk’s unelected “Doge” troops slash and burn US federal departments (Elon Musk appears with Trump and tries to claim ‘Doge’ team is transparent, 12 February), it is ironic to note that the Doges of ancient Venice were always elected, and by a process that was designed to avoid wealthy families taking too much power.John JacobsAlton, Hampshire I agree with your correspondents about the difficulty of hearing the lyrics in musicals (Letters, 13 February), but there’s little mention of the problem in cinemas, where conversations are drowned out by background music. In the recent film about Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet perfectly captured the musician’s mumble. What words he actually said remain A Complete Unknown.Joanna RimmerNewcastle upon Tyne Re the letters on analogue photography (14 February), there is a good compromise. I use a digital camera, which means I can go “snap happy”. Then I can look at all the images, select what I want and get them printed.Peter ButlerRushden, Northamptonshire I’m not entirely convinced that the Guardian style guide does a lot for women’s rights in advising that actresses should always be called actors (Editorial, 14 February). Why not the other way around?John OwensStockport, Greater Manchester My school report read: “Angela has influence, unfortunately in the wrong direction.” I became a probation officer (Letters, 16 February).Angela GlendenningNewcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire More

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    Drake’s New Valentine’s Day Album Pivots From Kendrick Lamar Beef

    The Valentine’s Day release, a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, tries on different styles (acoustic pop, traditional Mexican) while only alluding to Kendrick Lamar.Following a Grammy Awards and a Super Bowl halftime show in which he featured heavily in absentia — at least as a punchline — life goes on for Drake, who released his first new album on Friday since his much-publicized beef with Kendrick Lamar.The album, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, a longtime Drake associate with success as an enigmatic R&B singer, pop songwriter and producer, was released via multiple record companies at a fraught moment: Drake is currently suing his own label, Universal Music Group, or UMG, for defamation and harassment.In a lawsuit filed last month, lawyers for the Toronto rapper, born Aubrey Graham, said that UMG’s release and promotion of Lamar’s diss track and No. 1 smash “Not Like Us,” which accuses Drake of pedophilia, was an example of valuing “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”Still, the release of “Some Sexy Songs 4 U” seemed to be business as usual, as UMG (and its Republic flagship) are credited with the release. The album is also credited to OVO Sound, Drake’s boutique label and the home of PartyNextDoor. OVO Sound is distributed by the Santa Anna Label Group, a subsidiary of UMG’s corporate rival, Sony Music.Representatives for Drake, who is on tour in Australia, and UMG did not respond to requests for comment.“Not Like Us” won five Grammys this month, including song and record of the year. A week later, it was the centerpiece of Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, in which Lamar rapped “Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young” but stopped short of performing the line calling Drake and his crew “certified pedophiles,” replacing the controversial designation with a prerecorded scream.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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    Harlem House Where Billie Holiday Lived Is Damaged in Fire

    The jazz legend lived in the five-story building on West 139th Street as a teenager with her mother.A four-alarm fire on Wednesday evening severely damaged a building in Harlem where the jazz legend Billie Holiday once lived.The Fire Department said it received the call at about 9 p.m. and extinguished the fire, which spread through all five floors of the building, shortly before 1 a.m. on Thursday morning. No civilians were injured, though four firefighters sustained minor injuries. The cause of the fire is under investigation.“Due to the structural stability of this building, as it was vacant for many years and the amount of fire, we had to pull our members out of the building and go to an exterior fire attack,” Kevin Woods, the Fire Department’s chief of operations, said in a news conference.A portrait of Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall in 1946.Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesThe building is owned by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is responsible for maintaining the quality and affordability of housing, among other duties.“Even before the fire, HPD had been actively working with our partners to plan the complete rehabilitation of this building through our preservation programs, relocating tenants to safer housing as part of that process,” Natasha Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said in an emailed statement to The Times.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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    Irv Gotti: Key Milestones in the Life of the Rap Mogul

    The producer, who died on Wednesday, built Murder Inc. into one of the most influential record labels of the early 2000s. His career was marred by a federal investigation and trial.Irv Gotti, who founded the record label Murder Inc. and helped shape the sound of hip-hop and R&B in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he shepherded the careers of Ja Rule and Ashanti, died on Wednesday at 54.Here is a brief look at how the rap entrepreneur and record executive worked his way from humble beginnings in Queens, N.Y., to the top of the charts before his momentum was marred by a federal investigation into the label in which he was charged with money laundering and acquitted.A Childhood in Queens, N.Y.Gotti was born Irving Domingo Lorenzo Jr. in Queens, N.Y., in 1970. He was the youngest of eight children, according to “The Murder Inc Story,” a documentary about his life that aired on BET in 2022. His family, which he described as one that didn’t have much money but had plenty of love, recalled him as a “clown” who loved performing, dancing and entertaining, sometimes even for small change.His foray into music began as a preteen, when he played for hours with a turntable and a mixer that his siblings had purchased for him. By the age of 15, he had begun to make a name for himself as a D.J. at local parties.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