Music

Monday

Britt McHenry

The Super Bowl halftime show gets lost in translation

Bad Bunny strolled into a tropically transformed Levi’s Stadium for his first ever Super Bowl halftime show and kept his promise: He sang all of his songs as written, en Español. If a healthy swathe of English-speaking Americans stared blankly at their screens wondering, “what am I watching?” Bad Bunny was undeterred. The same man who boycotted the contiguous United States just eight months ago due to the perceived prospect of ICE raids at his concerts looked confident and ironically, smug, commanding America’s musical zeitgeist moment on the mainland. He began his show strolling through a quickly assembled Latin Margaritaville. Visually, the camera zoomed way too close to Bad Bunny’s

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The golden years of David Bowie

This year marks the anniversaries of two of David Bowie’s most compelling and powerful albums: 1976’s Station to Station and 2016’s Blackstar. Given that they are often – rightly – described as Bowie’s crowning artistic achievements, amid severe competition from his other releases, they also have the intriguing fillip that both were originally released in January: a fortunate time for the musician, who was born on January 8, 1947, even if it was also the month in which he finally departed this Earth. Yet the comparisons between Station to Station and Blackstar, which came out 40 years apart, are far more pervasive – and persuasive – than the serendipity of

david bowie

Monday

Alexander Larman

The predictable politics of the 2026 Grammys

When Billie Eilish declared, during her acceptance speech for song of the year with “Wildflower” at last night’s Grammy awards, that “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter,” she was speaking in the approved register. “Fuck ICE,” she added but it was more of the same. In contrast to the Golden Globes, where the neutral tenor of the event was made up of tame jokes about the age of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, the Grammys have turned into an opportunity for musicians to express political outrage. The awards themselves went as expected last night. Kendrick Lamar and Bad

Saturday

J. Scott Turner

How mediocrity took over the Grammys

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in

Thursday

Maia Roston

Kanye West’s anti-Semitism apology isn’t enough

When one of the 21st century’s most acclaimed music artists takes out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to apologize for his anti-Semitic behavior, deny that he is a Nazi and ask for understanding as he works on himself, what do we owe him? Mercy, punishment, or neither? In his letter, titled “To Those I’ve Hurt,” Kanye West, now legally known as “Ye,” writes that he is “not a Nazi or an anti-Semite” and that he “loves Jewish people.” He attributes his anti-Semitic remarks, offensive use of Nazi symbolism and erratic conduct to an undiagnosed frontal-lobe injury from a 2002 car accident and to bipolar type-1 disorder that

kanye

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

What is Travis Scott doing in The Odyssey?

As far as teaser trailers for summer blockbusters go, it takes quite a lot to make jaded audiences – or cynical critics – sit up and say, “What the hell?” But what’s exactly what the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s eagerly awaited The Odyssey has done. Not because it has featured a couple of new shots of Tom Holland’s Telemachus squaring off with Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous, or Matt Damon’s Odysseus participating in the bloody sack of Troy with his fellow Greeks, but because it introduces the most unexpected cameo of the year, possibly of the decade. Ladies and gentlemen, enter the latest feature of Nolan’s all-star cast: the hip-hop

travis scott

Friday

Bill Kauffman

The pros and cons of losing my hearing

Ah, the indignities of age. Over the past year I’ve suffered significant hearing loss. “Huh?” has become my favorite word and I’ve developed a strange new respect for the loonies who hear voices. Aspiring to stoicism, I informed Lucine, my wife, “When I hit 60 I figured that I was entering a stage in which the physical setbacks, some quite unexpected, would mount. So I told myself that I could either whine about it or I could accept all this with grace and good humor.” Lucine didn’t miss a beat. “Then why have you chosen to whine?” Thanks, dear! I mean no disrespect to the late Freddie Mercury when I

Tuesday

Sam Leith

Spotify wouldn’t exist without the musicians it exploits

It used to be said that you could walk from the west of Ireland to Nantucket on the backs of the cod, so thick was the Atlantic with the fish. But as readers of a certain age will remember, by the last decade of the last century, it was looking doubtful that the cod population would see this century out to the end. By 1992, the cod population was one 100th of its historic level.   We knew that the way we were fishing was, in that unappealing but apt vogue-word, unsustainable. The fishermen themselves knew that it was unsustainable – that they were destroying the very resource on which their

Tuesday

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