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    2024 Met Gala After-Parties: Usher, Serena Williams and Other Celebs

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    One reason the Met Gala after-parties are nearly as famous as the Met Gala itself has to do with an incident that took place 10 years ago at the Standard Hotel in the West Village of Manhattan.On that night, Beyoncé was a star of the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with her husband, Jay-Z, and her sister Solange Knowles. Afterward, in an elevator car headed to the Boom Boom Room, the club on the top floor of the Standard, Solange attacked her brother-in-law while Beyoncé stood watching and a bodyguard tried to restore order. The security-cam footage leaked to TMZ and the internet, and a family fight became the stuff of New York social lore.Things were less dramatic this year and less star studded at the annual Standard after-party. Just past midnight, the most famous person at Boom was the designer Christian Siriano, who had arrived with his date for the evening, the model Coca Rocha. Connie Fleming, the hotel’s longtime doorwoman, reflected on the changes in the social atmosphere since the heady days of 2014.“I think the Met Gala has peaked in its base of being about real fashion and real fashion people,” said Ms. Fleming, who became one of the trans community’s first stars in the 1990s, when she walked runways for Thierry Mugler.Christian Siriano and Coco Rocha at the party at Boom. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesLil Nas X and Camila Cabello at Boom.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesPedro Oberto and Marc Bouwer.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWe 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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      Ye Has a No. 1 Album for the 11th Time With ‘Vultures 1’

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      The rapper’s collaboration LP with Ty Dolla Sign debuted atop the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 148,000 in sales.A year and a half ago, the career of Ye — the rapper, producer and controversy generator formerly known as Kanye West — seemed all but dead. After a series of antisemitic remarks in late 2022, Ye lost his major-label record deal and booking agent, along with lucrative fashion partnerships with Adidas, Balenciaga and other brands.But he was never quite abandoned by many of his fans. And now Ye has the 11th No. 1 album of his career with “Vultures 1,” a joint LP with the singer Ty Dolla Sign that Ye released on his own, after previewing it this month with arena events in Chicago and Long Island where tickets went for $140 and up. Ye and Ty Dolla Sign’s new LP beats “Coming Home,” the comeback release by Usher, who had perhaps the greatest platform available to any performer: the Super Bowl halftime show.Ye had been teasing “Vultures 1” since late last year, and, fitting a pattern that long preceded his recent industry-pariah status, the album’s rollout was stumbling and chaotic. After its release to digital services following a listening event on Feb. 9, the LP’s availability briefly flickered, and Ye was quickly accused of borrowing music by Black Sabbath and Donna Summer without permission.Last week, “Vultures 1” again disappeared for a short time from Apple Music and was made unavailable as a download, while behind the scenes there was a switch in the distribution platform that Ye’s brand YZY used to supply the album to digital services. The song “Good (Don’t Die),” which appears to borrow a melody from Summer’s hit “I Feel Love,” was also removed from online versions of the album.“Vultures 1” ended its first week with the equivalent of 148,000 sales in the United States, which includes 168 million streams and 18,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. It is Ye’s first No. 1 album since “Donda” in 2021.Usher scores his highest-charting album in 12 years, with “Coming Home” arriving at No. 2 after the R&B veteran’s performance at the Super Bowl on Feb. 11, with guests including Alicia Keys, Lil Jon and Ludacris. “Coming Home,” also released independently, had the equivalent of 91,000 sales, including 46 million streams and 53,000 traditional sales. Usher’s last studio album, “Hard II Love,” went to No. 5 in 2016, and “Looking 4 Myself” reached No. 1 in 2012.Also this week, Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 and SZA’s “SOS” is No. 5. More

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      Taylor Swift, Usher and a Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl Win in Las Vegas

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      Take America’s biggest game, add Taylor Swift and Usher, and put it all in Las Vegas, and Kansas City’s repeat as Super Bowl champion makes perfect sense.At some point, the Super Bowl stopped being entirely about football and evolved — or is it devolved — into a corporate carnival with lavish parties, halftime extravaganzas and commercials whose budgets seemed to rival a blockbuster movie.The apex of that transformation arrived with the N.F.L. planting this year’s event in Las Vegas, where the prevailing ethos might well be that a bellyful of anything is barely enough.But Super Bowl LVIII, with its attendant flash — and America’s favorite football fan, Taylor Swift, chugging a beer in a private box — demonstrated on Sunday night how sports stands apart from other types of entertainment.If the Kansas City Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers was as tightly scripted as Usher’s elaborate choreography, the teams might have been pelted with rotten tomatoes or booed off the stage by halftime. It was mostly an evening of stumbles and bumbles: two fumbles, an interception, a muffed punt, a blocked extra point, a raft of untimely penalties — and for the 49ers enough regrets to last a lifetime.But all the mistakes and all those field goals — seven in all — would eventually be subsumed by the tension that unfolded in the fourth quarter and continued on into overtime of what became the longest game in Super Bowl history.Kansas City receiver Mecole Hardman caught the winning touchdown with three seconds left in the first overtime period.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesWe 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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      How Usher Arrived at the Super Bowl Halftime Show

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn a 30-year career, Usher has been many things — an R&B prodigy, a history-minded technician, a legitimate crossover pop star, an EDM experimenter and lately, a consummate showman with a Las Vegas residency that prompted untold viral videos of a performer extraordinarily at ease with his gifts.And yet Usher, 45, has long felt curiously undervalued, which perhaps explains why it is only now that he has been offered what might be music’s biggest stage: the 2024 Super Bowl halftime show. (He was a guest during the 2011 show.)On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Usher’s long career path through several generations of R&B, how he was received at his pop peak, and what he might do on the halftime stage.Guests:Thomas Hobbs, who writes about music for The Evening Standard, The Telegraph and othersDanielle Amir Jackson, editor in chief of The Oxford AmericanConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More