D’Angelo, the Grammy-winning R&B singer recognized by his raspy yet smooth voice and for garnering mainstream attention with the shirtless “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” music video, has died. He was 51.

The singer, whose real name was Michael Eugene Archer, died Tuesday, according to a statement from the family.

The singer’s family confirmed in a statement Tuesday that he died after a prolonged battle with cancer. They called him “a shining star of our family and has dimmed his light for us in this life,” adding that they are “eternally grateful for the legacy of extraordinarily moving music he leaves behind.”

In his music, D’Angelo blended hip-hop grit, emphatic soul and gospel-rooted emotion into a sound that helped spearhead the neo-soul movement of the 1990s. Earlier this year, the Virginia native celebrated the 30th anniversary of his debut studio album “Brown Sugar,” a platinum-selling offering that produced signature hits like “Lady” and the title track. The 1995 album earned him multiple Grammy nominations and cemented him as one of R&B’s most original new voices.

D’Angelo’s sultry vocal style — a mix of raspy texture and church-bred fluidity — set him apart from his peers. That voice became inseparable from the striking visuals of his 2000 single “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” The minimalist, shirtless music video became a cultural touchstone, igniting conversations around artistry, sexuality and vulnerability in Black male representation. The song earned him a Grammy for best male R&B vocal performance and propelled his sophomore album “Voodoo.” topping the Billboard 200 chart and winning the Grammy for best R&B album.

Beyond his own catalog, D’Angelo’s artistry shined in collaborations. He memorably duetted with Lauryn Hill on the soulful ballad “Nothing Even Matters,” a highlight of her landmark 1998 album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” He also contributed to The Roots’ 1996 album “Illadelph Halflife” and was part of the supergroup Black Men United, which yielded one song: “U Will Know,” which D’Angelo wrote and co-produced, for the film “Jason’s Lyric” in 1994.

D’Angelo was partnered to Grammy-nominated R&B singer Angie Stone in the ’90s. The pair met while he was finishing “Brown Sugar” and bonded over their similar backgrounds: Both are from the South and both grew up in the church. Stone worked on the album with D’Angelo and the pair co-wrote the song “Everyday” for her 1999 debut album, “Black Diamond.”

Stone described D’Angelo as her “musical soul mate,” to The Associated Press in 1999, adding that their working relationship was “’like milk and cereal …. Musically, it was magic. It’s something that I have not been able to do with any other producer or musician.”

They had a son together, the artist Swayvo Twain, born Michael Archer Jr.

Stone died earlier this year in a car crash. She was 63.

D’Angelo also has a daughter, Imani Archer.

This Associated Press story originally published on the MPR News website.

Carbon Sound’s DJ sessions started back in late December of 2023. We’ve invited DJs from the Twin Cities and beyond to share their unique style in our studio. New mixes air Wednesday at 8 PM Central. We’re happy to announce that mixes will now be made available for playback online and in the Carbon Sound app for 24/7 listening. Check out the full collection of DJ mixes here.

Carbon Sound stands as a platform to highlight past and present generations of DJs, the tastemakers in the community that get us moving, introduce new tracks, and lead events. There’s so much talent based in the Twin Cities and coming through here on a monthly basis. It’s an honor to be able to highlight that.

There’s a rich history of electronic music and hip-hop in the Twin Cities, and it’s still being made today.

Stay tuned for new mixes on Carbon Sound. If you’re a DJ and want to be considered for the series, email a mix of yours to carbondigital@mpr.org.

Download the Carbon Sound app on iOS and Google Play.

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The Mayor (2/4/26)

Sophia Eris (11/7/25)

Kwey (10/31/25)

Angel Beloved (9/3/25)

UNBOTHERED Presents: Yasmeenah (6/25/25)

echo's final mix (6/18/25)

Büttäh (6/11/25)

Truly Humble Under God (6/4/25)

UNBOTHERED Presents: D Untethered (5/28/25)

BYZARRA (5/21/25)

Urban Lights Presents: Big Reece (5/14/25)

Tekk Nikk (5/7/25)

DJ Advance (4/30/25)

UNBOTHERED Presents: Yasmeenah (4/23/25)

Lonefront (4/16/25)

Urban Lights Presents: DJ IntenZ (4/9/25)

Omari Eternal (4/2/25)

UNBOTHERED Presents: Yasmeenah (3/26/25)

DJ Sci-Fi (3/19/25)

Urban Lights Presents: DJ Layz T (3/12/25)

Ori The Ghost (3/5/25)

Rimarkable (2/26/25)

DJ Slugo (2/19/25)

Urban Lights Presents: Mickey Breeze (2/12/25)

Girl Blunt (2/5/25)

echo (1/15/25)

DJ TNA (12/11/24)

kaya (11/27/24)

DJ McShellen (11/20/24)

echo (11/13/24)

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Sasha Bangz (8/28/24)

echo (8/21/24)

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Jeff Swiff (7/24/24)

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Entrañas (6/12/24)

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DJ JEN-E (5/15/24)

DJ Etta (5/1/24)

Alexis Rose (4/17/24)

Kwey (4/3/24)

Sophia Eris (3/20/24)

Yasmeenah (3/6/24)

Dazegxd (2/21/24)

Dazzle (2/7/24)

echo (12/29/23, 1/10/24, 1/24/24)

Tyla's mission is clear. She's setting out to change the geography of pop stardom.

"It's something I feel like the industry is lacking," the singer declares. "An African pop star."

Fresh off a year of social media virality with her breakout single, a fashion campaign with Gap and her first Grammy win in the inaugural presentation of the best African Music Performance category, Tyla has just released her self-titled debut album. It's a 14-track stunner that positions the 22-year-old as the African pop star she's always wanted to see and be.

For many listeners, Tyla's 2023 hit song "Water" was their first taste of the sound of her homeland that's now taking over the music world. Amapiano is a new musical movement that started in the townships of South Africa in the 2010s. Roughly translated from Zulu to mean "the pianos" or "piano people," amapiano is a mash-up of a few different genres: deep house, jazz, kwaito and log drum percussives. Together it all creates entrancing, mid-tempo music that's a cultural staple of South Africa's party scene.

"Amapiano is a lifestyle. You're not supposed to sweat," says DJ Moma, a Sudanese-American DJ. "That's why amapiano is at this cool tempo. You can bust out a dance move or two .... But you're not constantly chasing a 125 bpm tempo."

Moma first got put on to amapiano in 2016 when he hopped in a Johannesburg taxi. Moma tipped his driver 50 U.S. dollars to let him download the music playing on the car's stereo from a jump stick straight to his laptop and took the sounds back to the states to start playing them at Everyday People, a recurring day party he co-created for the Black diaspora.

As the music started to move, South African DJs and producers like Kabza De Small, Kelvin Momo and Uncle Waffles emerged as leaders.

But the richness of the music goes beyond the party. "It's so much deeper than music, you know," Tyla says. "It's not just a cool sound. It's culture. It's struggle music. It's music that brought us through a lot." The slowed tempo of amapiano — elements borne from the kwaito and house lineage in its sonic DNA — connect the music to the country's historical periods of political uprisings and change in 1990s South Africa post-apartheid.

"As far as struggle music that's related to history," DJ Moma explains, "I'm not South African, you know, but what it does have is these ... really dark, melancholic, minor chords that, when you put them together, there's this mood of melancholy that permeates the music. That's something that has been [part of] South African music throughout the years. There's a lot of minor chords. There's a sadness to it. But in a weird way, it's also uplifting because minor chords, when you put them together, they're the most beautiful."

While DJs were moving the sound of amapiano around the world in the 2010s, Tyla was perfecting her own version of it back home in Johannesburg. She started off singing covers on TikTok and dropped her first song, "Getting Late" in 2019, to show her parents she was serious about pursuing a career in music after high school. Based on the track, they agreed to give her one year to make it happen.

The timing wasn't great.

"And it was actually worse because COVID happened in that year so I was like really, out of all years, it had to happen in this year," Tyla says.

Because of pandemic lockdowns, it took a year for Tyla and her team to shoot the video for "Getting Late," with "no backing, no budget." But when they finally dropped it in early 2021, labels noticed.

Years after her first video, Tyla's taken the building blocks of Amapiano and added elements of pop made by stars she grew up idolizing like Rihanna (to whom critics and fans are now comparing her) and Justin Bieber. Her signature sound has been dubbed "pop-iano."

In 2023, her formula finally got noticed on a global scale thanks to TikTok. After dropping "Water" in July 2023 and noticing it had become a piece of trending audio on the app, Tyla and her choreographer, Litchi, created a dance challenge. Tyla's performance of the challenge in August really made a splash on the app and introduced her to a wider audience than she ever imagined. "It literally changed my life."

"The pop and R&B mainly sits in the melody choices, you know, and song structure. And then obviously the beat is where home really shows," she notes.

It's a formula that's working. On her debut, Tyla's star quality shines. Simmered acoustics on tracks like "On and On" and "Butterflies" let her vocals hypnotize. The signature sound that she developed is flexible enough to allow her to show off next to stars from the Latin, reggae and hip-hop worlds: Features on the album include South African stalwart Kelvin Momo, Latin pop star Becky G, Atlanta rapper Gunna and Jamaican dancehall finesser Skillibeng. One of the most powerful tracks is "No. 1," featuring Nigerian R&B star Tems. Tyla even pushed back the deadline to turn in the album so she could lock in the collab.

"Of our generation, she's like the example," Tyla says of Tems. "She's been killing it and she's been opening so many doors for us."

With the recent attempts to ban TikTok in the U.S. — the same platform that's opened doors for Tyla and many other artists on the continent — the South African singer does wonder about the future of other African artists being able to break through. "People are making amazing music right now and it's not getting the same recognition."

But DJ Moma isn't too worried yet. Even if the virality of a song isn't at the level of Tyla's tracks, the options for discovery are only a few low-data clicks away. "WhatsApp is probably the number one medium for sharing amapiano music that's fresh off the press."

Tyla, along with her fellow African music Grammy nominees Davido, Musa Keys, Ayra Starr, Burna Boy, Asake and Olamide represent a Pan-African musical takeover for a new generation. Besides charting the course of her own pop stardom, Tyla's goals are to spread the pride of her country and keep the people who created amapiano at the forefront of the movement.

"We've obviously had African artists that have pushed boundaries, but I feel like now is a time when people are actually paying attention to us properly and actually latching on to the music and the culture and showing interest beyond the trends," she says. "And we have African artists leading it."

Thanks to her strong debut, Tyla has proven that she is one of those leaders.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Hey!

I’m happy to announce that Carbon Sound will begin airing mixes from DJs across the Twin Cities starting tonight, Friday, Dec. 29 at 8 PM. Tune in on the website, the app, or on 89.3 HD2 if you’re in the Twin Cities.

I’ll be kicking off this series with mixes that will drop every two weeks. From there, we’ll start introducing folks from the Twin Cities and beyond. Mixes will air every Wednesday and Friday at 8 PM Central. New mixes will drop on Wednesdays and air that Friday and the following Wednesday and Friday before a new one comes out.

All of these mixes are recorded in our new studio in St. Paul. We have a Pioneer XDJ-RX3 that works with USB, Rekordbox, and Serato. If you’re interested in coming in to record a mix, email me at jgreen@mpr.org for more info!

If you like what you hear tonight and these next few weeks, check out my SoundCloud.

Thanks for tuning in! See you at 8 PM on Wednesdays and Fridays.

- Julian

At a certain point in the winding lifespan of André 3000's musical journey, there came a time when we as fans began to worry less about his lack of creative output and more about his general well-being. He'd ascended pop's mountaintop as the outrageous half of OutKast, the best-selling hip-hop duo of all time. Then, without much explanation, he bowed out. He grieved the loss of three parents (mom, dad and stepdad) in a decade's time. And, for years, the only glimpse we got into his state of mind were the random guest verses he'd kill at will or the doubly random social media sightings of him inexplicably playing flute while wandering the Earth solo.

Catching him in the act became a game overzealous fans played — like some hip-hop version of Where's Waldo? — almost against his wishes. But he was also "in on the joke," he assures me. "I laugh at it because my homies in Atlanta, we'll talk and they'll be like, 'Man, you know n***** think you crazy to f*** around with this flute."

Maybe he was preparing us for what was to come all along.

For the first time in over 17 years, André 3000 is releasing an album of new music. New Blue Sun — announced today and set to be released this Friday, Nov. 17 — is a stunning 87-minute mind-bender, minimalist and experimental, tribal and transcendent.

One thing it is not, however, is a rap record: No bars, no beats, no sub-bass. André doesn't sing on this joint, either. What he does do is play flute, and plenty of it — contrabass flute, Mayan flutes, bamboo flutes — along with other digital wind instruments. In place of lyrics, he offers eight provocative song titles, the first of which almost reads like a lowkey apology, with a wink of irony: "I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A 'Rap' Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time."

The painstaking standard André 3000 set may have made it harder to entertain himself in the years post-OutKast, but so has the thought of chasing his tail. Even without a solo rap album in his catalog, he's consistently ranked among the greatest of all time. Like Coltrane reaching for new heights, he mastered rap's rigidity, pushed it past its limits and eventually reconfigured the entire landscape alongside Big Boi. He granted a lineage of ATLiens permission to run amok with melodic, sing-songy rhyme styles that would earn them the same early derision and eventual mass following he'd gained.

Aging gracefully is not a luxury afforded most rappers. Even 50 years in, hip-hop is still no country for old men. But what of the rapper who comes to see rap itself as old hat? How should we, as fans, react when the poet laureate of our collective psyche trades in his pen for a woodwind?

A departure album in the classic sense, New Blue Sun also feels like André has arrived. Its making came about organically, once he relocated from New York to LA. Instead of the OutKast origin story that started at Headland and Delowe, where Big Boi and Dre met their future Dungeon Family producers Organized Noize back in the day, this remix began with an unassuming trip to Erewhon — the chic LA health food chain where André bumped into percussionist and experimental jazz heavy, Carlos Niño.

Before long, André started showing up, flute in hand, to Niño's crib where they'd jam in the basement the same way he did in the early Dungeon days. Their impromptu meeting introduced André to a community of collaborators who contribute to New Blue Sun — from keyboardist and Alice Coltrane acolyte Surya Botofasina to guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau.

With no intention of making an album, they began recording about a year ago. Each song was pure improvisation, with musicians responding to each other in real time.

The result is subtle but daring. Mainly because it flies in the face of everything we've come to expect, and selfishly demand, as André 3000 fans. Yet, somehow, the purely instrumental New Blue Sun exposes his unrefined soul — and the delicate nature of his creative process — in ways the Gemini wordsmith's fine-tuned verses tend to conceal.

When we talked a few weeks before the album's release, he was equally transparent and tangible, whether laughing about Tyler, the Creator's funny response to his new music, detailing the wild ayahuasca trip that had him purring like a panther in Hawaii or sharing the reason why he gets so many requests to play flute at funerals now.

The man may not owe us anything, but he's finally ready to share.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rodney Carmichael: There's obviously been a lot of pressure from fans for you to release a new album for years now. I'm sure you've felt it. But from what I've heard you say in past interviews, it seems like maybe the greatest pressure you felt was the pressure you were putting on yourself at times.

André 3000: Yeah, for sure. It's always been that way. Even in our height of what people know of what I've done before, I was always like a slow writer. I'm not a freestyler. I don't be freestyling. I just wasn't blessed with that.

I'm a writer, and not necessarily a pen and pad writer, but I construct and architect verses in a way. That's what I've been doing all my life. So I look at it in that way, and if I'm not satisfied with what it is I just don't put it out. Even during the earlier times, Big Boi, he just kind of got down, like, he's so fast and efficient with what he does. And it'll take me a minute to throw them down. So I've always kind of been analyzing it or figuring out how I wanted to approach it.

So, in these times, it just comes harder for me to do it and I don't know why. I mean I try it all the time. It's not like I don't try or it's not like I have a lot of these songs just sitting — I have songs but it's not like rap things that I really feel happy about sharing. And really, that's the most important part. I have to feel happy about sharing it.

That's why New Blue Sun was something that I realized, whoa, I really want people to hear it. I really want to share it. That's my only gauge. I have to like it as a person, as an artist myself, because if I don't like it I can't expect nobody else to like it. I can't pretend in that way. That's always been hard for me.

Once we started recording New Blue Sun, I think like three songs in I was like, Oh, we got something. I remember I had maybe four songs and I was just kind of testing it out 'cause I wanted to see how a younger audience would perceive it. I live in Cali now, so I reached out to Tyler for him to check it out and I went to his house.

Tyler, the Creator.

Yeah. So we're sitting there and Frank [Ocean] just happened to drop by. So it's us three sitting there listening to these three songs and I just kind of wanted to get an opinion. And it was just good for me to hear with somebody else. Because sometimes you can be in your own thing and think it's a certain thing and you just want to have some outside... not that it really matters, because once you believe in it enough — I mean, I take criticism all the time, but it's not like, 'Hey, do you like it or not?' It's, 'How can we help it?' So at that point, I felt like we had something because we had a nice day just enjoying it in a way. And I started just playing it for friends and playing it for artists and playing it for people I respect or people who I felt would get it.

And what kind of feedback would they give you?

Oh, [laughs] Tyler was staring at this thing that he has in his house. Like, he's a fan of travel suitcases and so he has a wall of like travel suitcases. And he was like, "Man, I've been trying to figure out how to configure these like Louis suitcases." And he was listening to one of the songs and he was like, "It sounds like you're chasing a butterfly through a garden and I figured it out. It helped me to figure out how to do this." And I think Frank pointed out one of his favorite tracks out of the three.

And I was just happy to hear that, 'cause I respect them as musicians. Like new energy; they're going for it, man. So I really respect their opinions. I play it for my homies. I play it for friends, play it for artists, directors — just to see their reaction more than anything. So I was just happy with what I was getting.

It feels like you're taking us to other realms — or definitely other realms of André.

Yeah, it took me to other realms, to be completely honest. Like, I've been playing flute for years. It got to a point where it's kind of Instagram-worthy, where people were kind of sneaking and filming me play — in space, in the public. I might be at Starbucks getting a coffee. I might just start playing. And people would just film it and post it. That started to happen a lot. One person actually came up to me on the street and he was like, "Man, it's a thing, it's a game almost like we're trying to find you and trying to film you play a flute." And that kind of was sucky because it was like a Where's Waldo? kind of thing.

And I didn't like that because they just kept getting little nicks of me, just kind of messing around, you know.

So I just felt like I'd really like to play but it was really for me. I would just walk for hours and I'm a walker. I love to walk. So I would just walk and play for hours. I did that for years and it got to a point where, okay, I want to share. And so going into New Blue Sun, it was kind of like trying to figure out, well, how do I share it? And I had all these ideas and all these influences of how I wanted it to sound. And I think moving to Venice definitely helped introduce me to people I would be playing with.

I actually met Carlos Niño in Erewhon. Everybody know we call it Club Erewhon because it's a fashionable place to be. So I'm in Erewhon and we meet and he was like, "Everybody has been telling me that you were in town playing flute and they were telling me that we should meet." He invited me to an event that he was throwing — this Alice Coltrane tribute event. And I brought my flute. It was a few hours after we met. And we actually just hooked up and I would go to his house, go to his basement and we'd just be playing.

So when I started to say, Hey, I really want to make an effort to make this album, he said, I know players that could help. And we sat around. We tried a few different configurations to figure out what works best for me and in producing the album. We nailed it down and we experimented and we found a sound and it ended up being the core four of us — me on different woodwind instruments and digital flutes; Carlos Niño on percussion; Nate Mercereau on guitar, and he hardly ever sounds like he's playing guitar, but he's an awesome guitarist, he's kind of like a magician in a way; and then Surya Botofasina, he's a keyboardist. And that was the core four. But I would have never met the people that were really important to what I'm doing now if I wouldn't have moved to Venice and it was happenstance how I moved to Venice.

I know I'm going a long way around it, but the way we recorded it, I think it's important to know. When I say it transcended me, it took me to different places to play. Like we don't sit around and say, okay, we're going to play these chords. 'Cause I don't know chords. I don't know keys. I don't know notes. I've always produced in that way, just kind of doing it. And so in this situation, we have the engineer set up and we just press record and find ourselves and listen to each other. So everything you're hearing on New Blue Sun was spontaneous compositions. We made it up on the spot.

You mentioned Carlos Niño, whom you produced the album with. He's a heavy hitter and kind of what almost feels like a spiritual guru of sorts in the LA alt-jazz world.

[Laughs] We laugh at the "guru" cause he's like, 'I'm not no guru.' But I understand what you mean, man. He's a great connector, great person, great musician.

He's worked with everybody from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson to Madlib. And I know you played flute on his most recent Carlos Niño & Friends album [(I'm just) Chillin', on Fire] on a song called "Conversations."

Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. .

And the way you talk about this community of artists that you got linked up with, it kind of makes me think about your beginnings with the Dungeon [Family].

Definitely. I'm glad you said that because even like the last song on the album, it mentions the Dungeon. And that's on purpose. Because, in the same way, when you talk about Carlos Niño and Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina and this whole community of players, it gives you an opportunity and support system to be as free as you can be. And you need to feel comfortable in a situation to be really free. And that's why I really champion crews, like even rap crews. It's important for your crew to be supportive of you because you can be the best you can be.

I wouldn't be able to play flute or any of this stuff. I wouldn't have produced any of this if it wasn't for the Dungeon. So the Dungeon was the dirt. That's the ground that we planted everything in and all of those members in the Dungeon Family — Goodie Mob, Organized Noize, Big Boi, everybody — created an environment for me to be able to, like, just go.

You've talked in recent years about having social anxiety disorder and how the need for isolation compounded that even further. Which, first of all, I want to say is so refreshing to me that we, as Black men, especially, are starting to be just more transparent with each other about mental health. But the fact that this album wasn't made in isolation and was a very collaborative process, can you talk more about how that gave you that sense of freedom and helped you get unstuck a little bit?

Yeah, totally. The environment was really important. And we're listening to each other, we're responding to each other, we're supporting each other at certain times. And that's the sound, so it's kind of mirroring real life. That's why I say when I describe it, which is hard to really describe, it's a full living, breathing album because it's fully alive.We didn't sketch it out.

And as far as anxiety and that kind of thing, yes, I have been diagnosed with that. But I realized that, like, life is life, man. Our grandparents didn't have these terms to describe these things, you know? They didn't have these diagnoses to describe these things. They may have been going through similar things, but they just had to live through it. That's what it is. Life is life and life will come at you in different ways, and it's for you to pay attention to what's happening. I don't feel worse or better than anybody else. I feel like what comes to you is for you.

I just use it as an instrument, just like it uses me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for these, what they call "ailments" and all this kind of stuff. I don't want to lean on it. And a lot of times, because now we have a name for it, we're starting to lean on these names and kind of like really dig into these names and really just try to just figure yourself out. And I'm not sure if sometimes you may give yourself a disservice once you start calling the boogeyman, the boogeyman. Then you start looking for it. So it's like, just live and take it day by day, man. Everything won't be great. The only thing I can say: Learn how to ride the roller coaster. The best thing you can do is learn how to ride the roller coaster with your hands up.

Well, to a lot of people, it really has to be said that this might feel like a bit of a musical diversion because it's not a rap album. There's no rapping on the album at all. But I think that one thing that any true André 3000 fan has hopefully learned over the years is to always expect the unexpected. So in some ways, I feel like you've been preparing us for a new direction for decades. But I'm wondering what kind of work it took for you to prepare yourself. Even before you got with the tribe and the community and clique that you made this album with. What was that process like for you, in terms of getting to this point?

Living. It's not even like a magical thing. My training was living. My direction was living. And what I mean by that is, like you said, I've been kind of preparing you to always be expecting the unexpected from me. That's what's been given to me. When I was a kid, I liked to draw and paint. My mom thought I was going to go to art school. I was supposed to go to Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. And that just didn't happen. I discovered rap. I didn't know I'd be rapping. I didn't know I'd start producing. I didn't know I'd start singing. I didn't know my style would go a certain way. I didn't know I'd put a wig on. Like, I didn't know none of this. So I'm on the ride with y'all. I'm expecting anything just like y'all. I didn't know I'd be playing a flute.

I laugh at it because my homies in Atlanta, we'll talk and they'll be like, man, you know n***** think you crazy to f*** around with this flute.

[Laughs]

And I'm always in on the joke. So don't ever think that I don't know how people think or look at me in a certain way. I understand. If I was on the outside, I would feel the same way. So, for me, I don't know what I'm going to do. But that's the cool and scary thing about it. And I think, as an artist, you kind of got to put yourself out there to be prepared to respond. I'm a responding person. That's what I am. I'm responding to what's given to me. It's responding to my contemporaries. It's responding to what I love. It's responding to what I don't like. It's responding to all of that.

As an artist, you got to have really strong antennas. And that's really what it's about. So where I am now is where I'm supposed to be. I couldn't plan it. And here's the cool thing. Yes, we can plan it, our limited human brains can plan it. But it's always greater and more magical when you're surprised by these things... I've seen artists transcend themselves and I get emotional about it.

When I see rappers go to a certain level, I'm sure they didn't know. Because I didn't know. So I know they ain't know. But that's the magic. So y'all just looking at the magic show, and it's nothing special. I'm not special. Everybody has a certain kind of magic show.

New Blue Sun track list:

1. I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A "Rap" Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time 

2. The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina . Do You Agree?

3. That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn't Control ... Sh¥t Was Wild

4. BuyPoloDisorder's Daughter Wears A 3000™ Button Down Embroidered

5. Ninety Three 'Til Infinity And Beyoncé

6. Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, And John Wayne Gacy

7. Ants To You, Gods To Who ?

8. Dreams Once Buried Beneath The Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens

The album is titled New Blue Sun. It feels like there's a double meaning at play.

Double, maybe triple. New Blue Sun, for me, it means ... Right now, if you look up in the sky, the sun that we've been living under for ages, even the Egyptian times, it's the same sun. And it's this kind of whitish, light, brightish kind of yellow. When people draw it or paint it, it's usually this whitish or yellowish kind of sun. And unfortunately, that sun is gonna burn out. At some point, that sun will die just like all stars.

And New Blue Sun, for me, was like, I guess in a sci-fi way, the next world or the next beings will be under a bluer, cooler burning sun. It will burn cooler, but it will be larger. So when you look up at the sky in these times, there'll be this larger globe of bluish, still bright but bluish because it's cooler. It's kind of like this whole album and this whole direction is a new world for me. New Blue Sun is like a new direction.

You got some real clever wordplay going on with these song titles. They feel part confessional, ironic, mind-altering — and all like super humorous. But also really lyrical and literary. And long. [Laughs]

Yeah, they were long on purpose because I knew if this album has no lyrics that I would try to give as much thought or information in the titles. And I been going through a phase where I love these really long titles. I was trying to find fun and I think that when people think of flutes, they think of cymbals and chimes or meditation or this kind of ethereal kind of sound. They forget that we're human, too.

I guess the rapper in me, like, I'm trying to humanize it or punkatize or, like, make it less precious. It is precious, but at the same time, we're human, so we laugh. I was trying to really inject some type of humanness because I'm a full-rounded person. I'm a Gemini. So you may think it's one side, but I got this whole other, like, devilish kind of side, too. And I think every human has it in them. I was trying to show some balance in it. It's not all incense burning, you know what I mean?

It's funny 'cause I listened to the album first before having the titles. And then, once I got the titles, it really forced me to listen with new ears. The first song title really addresses the elephant in the room right off top.

I don't want to troll people. I don't want people to think, Oh, this André 3000 album is coming! And you play it and like, Oh man, no verses. So even actually on the packaging, you'll see it says, "Warning: no bars."

It's letting you know what it is off the top. But also, I love rap music because it was a part of my youth. So I would love to be out here with everybody rapping, because it's almost like fun and being on the playground. I would love to be out here playing with everybody, but it's just not happening for me. This is the realest thing that's coming right now. Not to say that I would never do it again, but those are not the things that are coming right now. And I have to present what's given to me at the time.

So the title, "I Really Wanted To Make A Rap Album, But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time" [is] because this album is about wind and breathing. In that way, it is true. It is literally blowing me this way and I'm blowing flutes and I'm blowing digital instruments.

I also imagine that the legacy of OutKast, as great as it is, has maybe in some ways also weighed you down at times or blanketed your creativity?

Nah, nah, nah. It catapulted me, man. OutKast was just an incubator to explore.

I couldn't have done a lot of the things if Big Boi didn't support it. If I was on my own, it may have been taken a different way.

But even now, 20 years out almost, post-OutKast, did it still feel like a catapult or did it ever feel like something you had to live up to in terms of whatever you were going to do next?

If I'm a fan, yeah. I do understand how you would want it to live up to what was before. So in that way, it's kind of sucky that people judge you for what was before. But that's life, you know, and OutKast was a part of my life. And of course there are certain standards that we set. We've created certain standards that people's ears have gotten accustomed to. People are going to expect a thing, but I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. It's kind of a good thing in a way, 'cause you hope to create an art piece that people enjoy and they've enjoyed it for years. So they kind of want to hold you to that.

When you talk about your relationship with rap, it makes me curious: Is it the art form itself or the current state of rap that you feel most disconnected from?

No, no, it's all of it. Where the world dictates how you come. So all of it is a factor. I mean, I get beats from producers — even, like, current producers now — all the time. And I still produce myself, but I just haven't found anything that's pleasing enough to me to want to present.

And not from any of the producers or anything, because I be loving when I hear somebody else do it. But it's kind of like, I don't know how to rock on that, really, in a way that I feel great about it. So if I can't find a way to rock on it, I kind of leave it there.

Is that why you've said instrumental music feels more rebellious to you? Talk about your passion for it, how it started and how you kind of got off into that bag.

What's really funny: As a youngster, when I heard jazz music, I associated jazz music with old people.

I'm just being honest. As a rapper, I associated jazz music with old people and elevator music — because it had become that. And here's what's hilarious, too: Every generation will do that. What's funny is at some point in the future, people are going to listen to trap music and be like, Oh, that's nice.

It happens. Because society moves forward and it always does. But I remember when I was about 20 and I got into producing... I always liked some songs, the pop songs like "Take Five" or Chuck Mangione ["Feels So Good"] — I remember that playing on the radio as a kid and humming the melodies. So I'm getting affected by these instrumental cats. And once I started really getting into it, I'm like, hold up: Jazz was the rap of that time. These dudes, they were smoking. They were doing heroin. They were in clubs. We trade verses; they [were] trading solos. [When] you really get into it and you really understand what they were doing — and how rebellious what they were doing [was] — you're like, man, this is the ultimate.

Once I discovered and got deep into it — loving Eric Dolphy and Coltrane and Yusef Lateef, you know, Pharoah Sanders — like, these are some of my favorites. And as a child, I'm like, Whoa, they can actually say something, or make me feel something, without saying something.

Yeah. That's hard.

Think about it, man. And it's so universal, too. Because you don't have to be American. You don't have to be Japanese. You don't have to be from Israel. You don't have to be from South America. But it affects everybody because they're tones. It's just sounds and tones that can be translated in any way, and that was really, really attractive to me. So I always looked up to those cats more than anybody.

I've always messed around with instruments and I was trying to figure out how can I do it in my own way? And so when I got to this point, it was just fun. And I felt like if someone is transported or they're feeling a thing or feeling a way, I'm sharing something in a different way.

I know from watching my heroes grow older that your rhythm ages you in a certain way and your vocals age you in a certain way. So I was always trying to figure out a way that I can continue. You can continue rapping for the rest of your life till you're 90 years old, but I've always tried to find a way that was ageless. And when you're listening to a player, a lot of times you may not know their age. I kind of love that in a way. Not that there's anything wrong with age. I think we have a thing where we kind of run away from age; I love that I'm 48 now. If I could go back to being 21, I would not. And that's just the truth. Sometimes I look in the mirror. I'm like, Man, you have silver hair. And I'm like, that's so awesome, you know what I mean? It's like I'm a silverback gorilla. You have to earn that. You have to really earn it. I've had silver hair since I was 17, to be honest. But now it's more prominent.

Do you find that you're able to say things through the music that you can't with words?

Yes. Now that people are finally hearing it, everybody has their own translation. And that's kind of cool, because it's for you. It's your thing. You can have your own thoughts with it. I have my own thoughts. One cool thing about flute — or any kind of instrumental music, but for me the focus is flute and wind instruments — like, whatever mood I'm in, if I'm playing, I can be saying anything. I can be saying, I hate that p**** n****. I can be saying that with my flute. Or I can be saying, Oh, you're really attractive. I can be saying those things in my mind and translating them in my way. It's funny: Some things in society you can't say out loud, especially now. Everybody's really sensitive about things, but you can say them with an instrument. It's kind of cool. It's kind of like a sub-talk.

How many flutes do you own?

Uh, maybe about 30, 40 flutes.

Wow. Okay. I did not expect that.

It's because I started with one style of flute. The style that I started with was introduced to me by Kassia. She's a world-class surfer and she was playing this flute at this breathwork class. As soon as she started playing, my ears popped up. I'm like, what is that sound? I had to go up to her and ask her. And she introduced me to my flute master, the guy that makes my flutes, Guillermo Martinez. And that style of flute that he makes was my intro into flutes.

I was living in New York at that point and when I get into an Uber, get into a taxi, I always play. And depending on the taxi driver, whatever nationality they were — if they were Chinese or if they were African or Indian — they would always turn around and be like, 'Oh, that reminds me of my country.' Even though I'm playing one flute. At that point, they would start to have a conversation with me, like, Oh man, have you ever heard of the Bansuri flute? Which is an Indian flute. Or, Oh, have you heard of the Ney flute? That's, like, an Egyptian or Turkish flute.

I'm kind of getting schooled by different cultures on different flutes. So when I say I have a lot of flutes, I have mostly my style of flutes made by Guillermo. But I started to just collect a lot of different flutes from a lot of different countries. So I have flutes from Thailand. I have flutes from China. I have flutes from Korea. Flutes from Africa.

It's just being excited about wind and flutes, and every culture has a flute. The flute is the first instrument where we actually heard a musical tone or note. And one thing I like about flutes, and wooden flutes in particular, is it's the closest to the human voice out of all the instruments. I think that's why I kind of gravitated towards it. When you're hearing a flute player or saxophonist, you're actually hearing the wind of that human. You hear it more in wood, because I think sometimes the metal may color it more. But it's something about the wood and the human voice. It's closest to the human voice. I think I was really attracted to that.

You talked about the random André sightings and how it became like a game of Where's Waldo? But the thing, to me, that's interesting about those sightings is they started happening at a time when we weren't seeing or hearing much from you. And when we would see you, you would look at peace. You were playing this flute and it was reassuring that whatever was going on with you, you seemed like you were in a good place. And with artists that we care about, when we're not hearing output from them, that's always a question. Are they in a good place?

I'm happy. I'm happy when I'm playing. I'm exploring when I'm playing. I'm thinking when I'm playing. I wouldn't say that it's a set-out meditation, but I do think you get into a meditative practice for staying in the moment and doing a repetition of something. Actually, every time when I'm playing, I'm making it up as I'm going along.

So I have to force myself to pay attention to what I'm doing. Sometimes I may find a pattern that I like or a melody that I like that I kind of go back to, but for the most I'm responding to what's happening. So yeah, I'm very in the moment when I'm playing.

And it's funny you say that because if I was on the corner and somebody said, "Oh man, that's André 3000. Man, rap!" It would feel so weird for me to just start rapping. But if somebody said, "Hey, play! What does that sound like?" I'm so gung-ho to play. I love to play it. So yeah, it's completely different. Maybe because it's completely free. Like, I love when rappers can freestyle. Maybe they feel that feeling too when someone asks them to rap, but for me, that's like if someone asked you to build a house right here on the spot, you know what I mean? That may be fun for some people, but it's actually work for me.

Now, I ain't gonna lie, this [song, "That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn't Control Sh¥t Was Wild.,"] sounds like a straight-up ayahuasca trip or something like that.

That is exactly what I was talking about.

[Laughs] Okay, well you gotta tell me the story behind this night.

I was actually in Hawaii and it was my second night of the first time I'd ever taken ayahuasca. We did it like a three-night kind of phase. The first night was inviting and beautiful and the most powerful love and connection with all things I've ever felt in my life. The second night was different and everybody knows that aya will do you that way. The second night my stomach was hurting, my mouth contorted like a panther and I actually turned into a panther. And I was doing like GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR — like, that kind of thing.

I actually turned into a panther. It was doing this thing called toning. Toning is another way of purging. And toning is where you make these vibrational noises that you can't control. It started playing me like an instrument. I started as a panther and then it would make me do these long kind of tones and started changing the notes.

So, on the album I'm mimicking [it], but the funny thing in the aya session, I was like, Damn, I wish I had my phone so I can record this 'cause, like, it'd be so dope. I'm witnessing it and I'm watching it and it holds you for so long. I'm like, where's this breath coming from? And then you end off and you go and do it again. And I'm like, whoa, what is happening right now? So that's what I'm talking about in that title.

Was it scary at the time? How did it make you feel?

It was kind of intriguing at the time because, the sound listener in me, I'm digging the sound. But at the same time, the shaman is coming over and he's fanning me. And he's saying, "Oh, that's like 20 years of therapy happening right now."

I guess I had to get through that moment. But yeah, it was just interesting because my mouth actually shaped like a panther.

And this lasted hours or how long was it?

Most aya sessions last about six hours. But it don't feel like six hours. It feels like maybe two or three.

Has it been, overall, even after the fact — as eye-opening an experience as they say it?

Yeah, man, I was a changed person when I left Hawaii.

Really?

Yeah, I have to say, man, it is legit, you know? I won't say it's, like, a fix-all kind of thing, but at the time, when I went to do it, I was in a very, very low place. A friend of mine told me about it and he was like, "You got to check it out. Read this book first." So I read about it before I went in, because I was like, man, y'all n***** just like to do drugs and I'm not into it like that. And it just so happened that I ran into a person that was going to Hawaii the next day. And I was like, well, why are you going to Hawaii? He's like, yeah, I'm going to do this thing with the sham. So, usually, it comes to you when you need it.

So I would tell anybody, don't let anybody force you into doing ayahuasca or nothing like that. You'll know if you want to do it or when you need to do it because it calls you. And I know it sounds bigger than what it is, but it actually is bigger than what it is. But it's so natural. The plants have been here way before we were human. So it's like you're having a conversation with your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers.

It's one thing to talk about your evolution as an artist, but even as a person, you've been through a lot that, honestly, I don't know if fans always remember to take into account when we make these selfish demands for more music from artists that we love.

In the last decade, you've lost both your mom and your dad and, more recently, your stepdad — who I know you've said was really an anchoring person in your life. That's a lot of grief for anybody to hold, especially back to back. How did managing all of that change you as a person?

Yes, it's a lot ... in the order that it happened. But it's life too, man. The worst thing about it is you don't expect it. It wasn't anything that I could prepare for. But yeah, I'm happy to know that my parents and my stepfather are in their next phase of what's happening, you know.

At the time, it was a lot. It was really, really heavy for me, but you get through it and you keep living. They exchange energy with you, so you kind of feel a boost in your back at the same time as if, you know, when they pass, they give it to you. So I can say, death makes you think about living. Death makes you push.

The unfortunate thing is the older you get, the more funerals you have to go to.

Yeah, I hear that often. Did it make music, or your art and craft, feel any less essential or more essential in any kind of way?

No, I wouldn't say that. It just kind of makes you just remember things. It makes you remember the times that you and your mom had. Or the times you and your dad had. Or the times that your stepdad told you certain things.

Yeah, it just kinda reiterates what was given to you when they were here, you know... I just had a conversation with Guillermo, my flute maker, and he was telling me that there's a responsibility that comes with flute playing. Maybe two years after I had my flute, I went back to Guillermo to kind of get a checkup on my flute and get it tuned and clean. And he pulls me to the side and he's like, "Hey, I noticed that you're really into these flutes. I have to tell you ... that there will come a time when you play and people will cry."

And it's happened to me like a few times now. Grown men, like crying. One time, I'm in a taxi — and once I get in I usually start playing — and this guy turns around crying. He was like, "My mother died last night. And when you play, it makes it feel like she's right here in the seat with me."

We were having this conversation, me and Guillermo, and he was like, "I get asked to play at funerals now." And I was like, whoa, that's crazy, because I was recently asked to play at a funeral. And I denied it.

When Virgil [Abloh] passed, his family asked would I play at the funeral and I denied it, but only because I felt like I would be a distraction. I don't know, I just felt like it would have taken away from the moment and I only knew Virgil through texts and a few conversations. So I couldn't pretend like I knew him that well. I was honored that the family asked me to play at the funeral, but I couldn't. And so when I told Guillermo, he was like, "Yeah, sometimes you have to look at it now as a responsibility to play. They asked you to play for a reason."

When my mom passed, I had this urge to play. But I wasn't even playing flute back then. I think I was more on guitar at that point. And I just didn't. I don't think I could go through with it. But yeah, there's something about it ... playing at funerals. I think New Orleans has it best. Like, I think the way we do funerals, I think it's really antiquated and sad. I think we need to party more.

One thing about people who acquire a certain amount of fame is you don't always necessarily have a lot of control over your legacy or how you are remembered or the parts that people choose to gloss over or the parts they obsess about forever. But if you could choose, how would you summarize this first half-century of your life?

I've noticed that I'm a catalyst kind of artist. And what I mean by that is I think I'm being used in ways to be watched, to be inspiring to people. And to me, that's the best thing ever, man. To inspire someone else to do something else.

I see it now. I see the inspiration and other people and, to me, it's validation of me being here as a human. I think all humans just want validation. If I got to go through this life, I at least want people to know that I did something or that I was valuable to somebody. So I've kind of had time to sit and look back — from rap to musicians to the new generation to new artists — that I'm so happy that I was a part of a lineage and a legacy and kind of food for the next generation. Because I've noticed that you're only as good as the people that were before you.

What is it that you hope this generation, this hip-hop generation, takes from this particular project and this moment in your creative arc?

Explore, man. Explore. That's what it's about. Like, keep pushing. That's really what it is. I mean, the same way you explore words, you don't have to let it stick to words. Explore. Whatever you pay attention to, pay attention to what you're paying attention to and go for it. That's really what it is. Like, I couldn't have planned this. I just started paying attention to a thing and just went for it. So you don't have to stay in a certain way. And they know it now; like, they got it, man.

I'm seeing that whole no categories kind of thing. We're in a world now where we have so many influences coming from so many different directions that you don't have to be one thing. I do find it noble and I find it awesome when someone can focus on one thing. But a lot of different practices, or bringing in a lot of different things, is interesting, too. So if it calls you, test it. I just really want to be inspiring for people and to look at it and be like, yeah, I want to explore.

I haven't really changed my formula at all. It's just, this is further out. Like I've always kind of just been exploring what I can do and just kind of riding the ride. When me and Big Boi got together, we didn't really know where we were going. We had human intentions. We knew we wanted to rap. And I never knew that rapping would even take me to producing and producing would take me to playing instruments and instruments would get me here. So I've just been on the ride and people have been on a ride with us and with me. I see this as just [being] further down the road.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Hip-hop is turning 50. Minneapolis organization TruArtSpeaks is celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop with a three-part event on Friday, August 11 at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. 

Part one of the event will start off with some tunes by DJ JUST NINE, followed by a  panel discussion. Each have all made a name for themselves in Minnesota’s hip-hop culture and represents one of the four core elements of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, B-boy or breakdancing, and graffiti. 

Panelists include DJ Kool Akiem, David Staller, Jr., BDotCroc, Timothy Wilson, and St. Paul Slim. DJ Kool Akiem is a DJ and music producer in the Twin Cities who has shared stages with Atmosphere and Public Enemy. David Stalter Jr. is a dancer from Minneapolis, who specializes in hip-pop, animation, popping and more. In 2022, Stalter was awarded the champion of the Red Bull Dance Your Style World Finals. BdotCroc is a lyrical musician who uses her music to help mentor at-risk youth in the Twin Cities. Timothy Wilson is the owner of the only Black-owned record store in Minnesota, Urban Lights Music. St. Paul Slim is an artist that has shared stages with MC Lyte, Wiz Khalifa and Cee-Lo Green. Slim is now focused painting and has completed several projects in the Twin Cities and hosted three successful art shows.

Hip-hop culture and storytelling influences many across the world today, TruArtSpeaks co-founder Tish Jones says Friday's discussion will explore Minnesota's hip-hip history and what the future could look like.

“We have such a great opportunity for narrative shift, narrative change and social impact through Hip-Hop culture. So, the questions that these artists are going to be grappling with have to do with that; really thinking about ourselves as responsible stewards of the culture and to the future into the next 50 years in Minnesota,” said Jones.

Part two will be a space for networking and community discussion over a shared meal catered by K’s Revolutionary Catering. Some prompt questions include, “What does queer representation in hip-hop look like?” And, “How is hip-hop pedagogy related to cultural relevance?” Jones says hip-hop education will close the achievement gap.

“How do we stop smothering our students that have hip-hip perspectives who are fully immersed in hip-hop culture? How do we see them as full human beings? How do we honor their cannon, their lexicon, their vernacular, their presentation in their space and give them space to tell stories in their first language and arguably that language is hip-hop,” said Jones.

Jones believes that hip-hop is one of the most powerful genres of music.

“Hip-hop has the power to shift perspective to rally a community to action and to really emphasize a moment in time. Whether that's eulogizing something, or commemorating something, or celebrating something.”

The night will conclude with a dance party with DJ NeekaSoDope and performances by Yoni Light, a multidisciplinary artist, and dancer Cecil “Virgo” Neal. Myc Daz, a Twin Cities-based artist, will be completing a mural throughout the event.  

Jones says she’s looking forward to seeing several hip-hop practitioners all together in one space.

“I’m so excited for the positive energy conversations, ideas, and possibilities that are gonna come from this experience.”

Learn more on TruArtSpeaks’ website.

Tina Turner, a soul and rock powerhouse known for her octave-defying voice and mesmerizing stage moves, has died at the age of 83.

She died Wednesday in her home in Switzerland after a long period of illness, according to a statement from her publicist. In her 2018 memoir, Tina Turner: My Love Story, Turner detailed a litany of health issues she had dealt with since 2013, including a stroke, intestinal cancer and kidney failure. Her second husband, Erwin Bach, donated a kidney to her in 2017, saving her life.

In a recording career that spanned six decades, Turner found fame both as a solo artist and in a duo with her first husband, Ike Turner. With the latter, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and became a staple of the U.S. pop and R&B charts in the 1960s and '70s. The duo's high-energy soul and rock was informed by Tina's disparate vocal influences. She grew up listening to country music, but had many idols: '50s R&B singers LaVern Baker and Faye Adams; gospel great Mahalia Jackson and rock pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe; blues legend B.B. King; and soul greats Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. Accordingly, she had a malleable and versatile voice, and could unleash a scalding rock growl, or dip into her lower register and sing the smoky blues or velvety R&B numbers. One of Ike & Tina's most well-known songs, "River Deep, Mountain High," was even a Phil Spector-produced, orchestral-gospel triumph.

An agile vocal interpreter, Turner also made other people's iconic songs her own — adding a tone of yearning and desperation to The Beatles' already-pleading "Come Together," and layering on more of a country twang to The Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women." Her signature tune, a fiery transformation of Creedence Clearwater Revival's laid-back "Proud Mary," became a showcase for her sultry soul drawl and raspy rock 'n' roll yelp. The latter song won Turner her first Grammy Award, for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocal. She would win eight Grammys overall — including best female rock vocal performance for three years in a row during the '80s.

In addition to her vocal prowess, Turner had a commanding stage presence that was often characterized as "electrifying." This descriptor somehow always seemed like an understatement: At the microphone, Turner vibrated with energy, like a simmering pot about to boil over, and she possessed natural athleticism that translated to lithe but powerful onstage dancing. "Someone once called Tina 'the female Mick Jagger,'" Rolling Stone's Ben Fong-Torres wrote in 1971. "In fact, to be more accurate, one should call Mick 'the male Tina Turner.'" (This is no mere critical hyperbole: In the same Rolling Stone feature, Turner herself insinuated that Jagger studied her moves rather closely when she and Ike toured with the Rolling Stones in 1969.) Naturally, when the pair teamed up for a barnburning cover of the Jacksons' "State of Shock" at Live Aid in 1985, the combination was incendiary.

Born Anna Mae Bullock on Nov. 26, 1939, Turner grew up in rural Nutbush, Tenn., but also spent time in Knoxville, as her parents moved there for work. Growing up, she had a distant relationship with both her father, who abandoned the family when she was 13, and mother. But performing came naturally, and became her solace. In Tina Turner: My Love Story, she describes music-filled shopping excursions — being 4 or 5 years old and being paid by salesgirls to sing radio hits she had memorized — and the exhilaration of leading her cousins, half-sister Evelyn, and sister Alline in pretend stage shows. Later, she honed her performing presence further by singing at picnics with a regionally famous trombonist named Mr. Bootsy Whitelaw.

Turner moved to St. Louis at age 16 to live with Alline and her mother, and began going to the famed East St. Louis venue Club Manhattan, where she first saw Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm. In 1957, she ended up joining the group after her impromptu performance of B.B. King's "You Know I Love You" wowed the bandleader. The troupe was eventually rechristened the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, highlighting her elevated role.

By all accounts, Ike was excessively cruel toward Tina, both personally and professionally. "Looking back, I realize that my relationship with Ike was doomed the day he figured out that I was going to be his meal ticket, his moneymaker," Turner wrote in My Love Story. She then described how she was a last-minute replacement to sing on "A Fool In Love" — which became the duo's first hit, reaching No. 2 on the R&B charts in 1960 — and was impressive enough that a label head told Ike to make Tina the group's centerpiece. "What went through Ike's head when he heard that advice?" she continued. "He had to find a way to protect his interests, and that's when the trouble began."

Over the years, Turner has been open about certain aspects of their time together, although she told the New York Times in 2019 that she's never divulged all: "I think I'm ashamed. I feel I told enough." But Ike was mentally controlling — for example, he rechristened her "Tina Turner" and then trademarked the name, both without her consent — and physically abusive. She was nearly penniless when she left him in 1976, while the pair were on tour in Dallas. "I walked out without anything and had to make it on my own for my family and everyone so I just went back to work for myself," she said during a 2017 appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show.

Turner had released two solo albums while still performing with Ike, 1974's Tina Turns the Country On! — a stripped-down LP featuring her take on songs by Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton and Kris Kristofferson — and 1975's rock-oriented covers album Acid Queen. Her first entertainment forays post-split geared toward mainstream fare — the game show Hollywood Squares and Cher's variety TV series — and cabaret-style live concerts, as well as two albums that didn't chart. She also recorded a sleek, electro-pop take on the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" on Music Of Quality & Distinction, Volume One, an album released by Heaven 17 members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh under the name B.E.F.

The year 1984 would be pivotal for Turner. She dueted with David Bowie on the reggae-influenced title track of his Tonight LP, and finally achieved widespread mainstream success on her own thanks to the blockbuster Private Dancer. As with "Ball of Confusion," the album embraced the decade's slicker, cutting-edge production values — in fact, two songs were co-produced by Ware — while still highlighting Turner's muscular voice and eclectic influences.

The album's tracklisting included the Mark Knopfler-penned title track, as well as covers of tunes by David Bowie ("1984"), the Beatles ("Help!"), and Ann Peebles ("I Can't Stand the Rain"). Private Dancer also featured her first and only solo No. 1 hit, the vulnerable and luxurious "What's Love Got to Do With It." The single, which also won Grammy Awards for record of the year and best female pop vocal performance, boasted a cathartic, lived-in vocal performance that ushered in her sophisticated second act and cemented her reputation as a survivor, a tag and aesthetic she embraced.

Turner's commercial renaissance continued as the decade progressed. She co-starred in the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which spawned the dramatic power ballad "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)" and the Grammy-winning "One of the Living," and racked up more hits with the Bryan Adams duet "It's Only Love," breezy seduction "Typical Male," and the empowerment anthem "The Best." With her spiky wig and power miniskirts that showed off her legendary legs, Turner also became an early MTV icon: She performed at the first-ever MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, and won best female video the following year for "What's Love Got to Do With It."

Turner continued to be a commercial force into the '90s, notably thanks to the 1993 biopic, What's Love Got to Do With It. Based on her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, the movie starred Laurence Fishburne as Ike and Angela Bassett as Tina. Both actors were nominated for Oscars, while Bassett won a Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a comedy or musical. Turner herself also received a career boost, as the soundtrack song "I Don't Wanna Fight" became a worldwide hit, cracking the top 10 in the U.S. In 1995, she landed another prestigious honor, singing the slinky, elegant James Bond theme song "GoldenEye" for the titular film.

Turner, who moved to Switzerland in 1995, started easing up on her workload in the late '90s and '00s, and ended up retiring after a 50th anniversary tour in 2009. However, she was still an active steward of her own legacy; in fact she also worked closely on the development of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which opened on Broadway in fall 2019. And at the 2008 Grammy Awards, she performed a showstopping version of "Proud Mary" with Beyoncé. With hindsight, it's easy to interpret the moment as Turner passing the torch to a younger musician. However, the performance also once again reaffirmed that she was squarely in control of her rich musical legacy.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Updated December 2, 2022 at 3:57 PM ET

HOUSTON — Police have arrested a 33-year-old man on a murder charge in the fatal shooting of rapper Takeoff, who they said was a "innocent bystander" to gunfire last month outside a bowling alley in Houston.

Patrick Xavier Clark was taken into custody peacefully Thursday night, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said Friday. Clark is the second person arrested in connection with the shooting that wounded two other people.

Born Kirsnick Khari Ball, Takeoff was the youngest member of Migos, the Grammy-nominated rap trio from suburban Atlanta that also featured his uncle Quavo and cousin Offset.

The 28-year-old musician was one of three people police said were shot outside the downtown bowling alley around 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 1, when a dispute erupted as about 40 people were leaving a private party at the alley. Police have said another man and a woman suffered non-life-threatening gunshot injuries during the shooting, in which at least two people opened fired.

Police Sgt. Michael Burrow said during a Friday news conference that the shooting followed a dispute over a game of dice, but that Takeoff was not involved and was "an innocent bystander."

On Wednesday, police announced the arrest of Cameron Joshua in connection to the shooting. The 22-year-old was charged with illegally having a gun at the time Takeoff was shot, but Burrow said investigators believe it was Clark's gunfire that killed the rapper.

Fans and other performers, including Drake and Justin Bieber, celebrated Takeoff's musical legacy in a memorial service last month in Atlanta.

Migos' record label, Quality Control, mourned Takeoff's death in a statement posted on Instagram that attributed it to "senseless violence."

Migos first broke through with the massive hit "Versace" in 2013. They had four Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, though Takeoff was not on their multi-week No. 1 hit "Bad and Boujee," featuring Lil Uzi Vert. They put out a trilogy of albums called "Culture," "Culture II" and "Culture III," with the first two hitting No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart.

Takeoff and Quavo released a joint album "Only Built for Infinity Links" just weeks before his death.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Beyoncé is the top artist nominated in the 65th annual Grammy Awards, set for Feb. 5 at the Crypto.com center in Los Angeles. The full list of nominees is on Grammy.com.

She is now tied with her husband Jay-Z for the most Grammy nominations by any musician. If she wins three more awards, she will match classical conductor Georg Solti for the most Grammy wins.

Beyoncé's nine nominations were scattered across several different categories. One is for "Be Alive," from the film King Richard, in the Best Song Written For Visual Media category, and the rest are for tracks from Renaissance, which is up for album of the year. "Break My Soul" is a nominee for Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Dance/ Electronic Recording; "Virgo's Groove" is up for Best R&B Performance; and "Plastic Off the Sofa" is up for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

Other notable Grammy contenders are Kendrick Lamar, with eight nominations; Adele and Brandi Carlile, each with seven; as well as Harry Styles, Mary J. Blige, Future, DJ Khaled and the producer and songwriter The-Dream, each with six Grammy nominations.

The Best New Artist category has entries from a mix of genres: 22-year-old TikTok phenomenon Samara Joy, bluegrass singer Molly Tuttle, jazz duo
Domi & JD Beck, rapper Latto, conceptual artist Tobe Nwigwe, R&B singer Omar Apollo, Brazilian singer Anitta, British indie rock band Wet Leg, Italian rock band Maneskin, and singer Muni Long, who formerly went by the name Priscilla Renae.

The 2023 Grammys will feature several new awards categories, including Best Spoken Word Poetry Album and Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

He was the quiet Migo. With Quavo as the frontman and Offset as the wild card, it was Takeoff who laid the foundation upon which the best rap group of a generation was built. He was the youngest of the trio, just 18 when their breakthrough hit "Versace" blew up, but his voice was always the deepest — the baritone of an old bluesman, time-worn beyond his years. Labelmates at Atlanta's Quality Control Music had nicknamed Takeoff "the Silent Killer," frequently lost in his own zone in the studio until it was time to unleash in the booth. He had a thing for the cosmic. His only solo album, 2018's The Last Rocket, sampled the broadcast of a record-breaking space jump; "I'ma ghost-ride the Wraith, I wanna look at the stars today," he rapped on the song "Casper." From the beginning, he had an air of gravitas. Senseless is the only way to describe his death early Tuesday morning, when he was reportedly shot and killed outside a Houston bowling alley at 28.

There would be no Migos without any one of its members — an uncle (Quavo), nephew (Takeoff) and cousin (Offset) who thought of themselves like brothers — but literally speaking, there would be no Migos without Takeoff. Back when Quavo was the high school quarterback and Offset was in and out of trouble in their hometown of Lawrenceville, Ga., a suburb north of Atlanta, it was Takeoff assembling a makeshift studio in the basement of his aunt's house, where all three boys lived: a sock-covered Walmart microphone, a free software program meant for making slideshows. Songs had to be recorded in perfect start-to-finish bursts, which wasn't a problem for Takeoff, hence the name. Later, while Quavo and Offset shopped their demos around Atlanta strip clubs, Takeoff — single-minded, baby-faced, without a fake ID — would be up all night, making songs to play for them when they got home.

It's clearer in hindsight how rare the Migos were. Upon crash-landing a decade ago into the twilight of the digital mixtape era, if not fully formed then pretty damn close, the trio had a sound and style that was fully, immediately its own. The style you can probably picture (Versace, Versace, Versace). The sound was where it got interesting, gesturing subtly back toward history (tight triplet flows echoing Bone Thugs or Three 6 Mafia, wordplay noir à la Gucci Mane or Lil Wayne, wisps of crispy late-aughts snap music) and ahead toward a glorious new era in Atlanta. Migos were famous early on for party raps with hooks that functioned like mantras, and compared with the city's more expressionistic fare, the members were sometimes painted as highly efficient but lowbrow mercenaries. Really, they were craftsmen, masters of rhythmic precision. In their own way, they were hip-hop classicists, a reminder of the format's power to elevate language that might not look like much on a page to something joyful, cool, spectacular. To that end, Takeoff, with his endlessly evolving flow, was the Migos' ultimate ambassador.

There was something beautiful in the shyest Migo's slow embrace of the spotlight. Takeoff never seemed much interested in being the guy in the front, but through his pure enjoyment of rapping, he found a reason to endure it and eventually, to own it. He was at his most charismatic and comfortable going back and forth with his family, doing what they'd always done. The acclaim met Takeoff where he was; the harder he worked, the sharper his skills — it became impossible not to notice. In knowing his role, he flourished in it: He wasn't Michael Jordan, he was Dennis Rodman. He never needed to be Quavo, who fed off the attention. In embodying his greatness, he never had to step outside himself.

Just before the release of their best album, 2017's Culture, I interviewed the Migos in Los Angeles. It was the last week of Barack Obama's presidency, "Bad and Boujee" was the #1 song in the country, and Quavo, Offset and Takeoff could barely sit still, bursting into giddy performances of their own songs every 20 minutes or so. To wrangle them on camera was a bit like herding cats; they'd much rather have entertained each other all day. At one point, I asked what each member of the trio brought to the equation. In their mischievous way, they let me know that was a question they had no interest in answering, instead joining one another in a rowdy chorus of ad-libs that led into another unplugged rendition of their No. 1 hit — a perfect response. But the Migos did have their own unique roles: Quavo floated out wavy auto-tuned melodies; Offset cut through beats like an adventurer with a machete. As for Takeoff, he was the group's gravitational force — he could hold it down for his partners, grounding their punchlines with blustery ad-libs, or he could flip a song on its head at will. In the typical arrangement of a Migos song, the Takeoff verse went last, for obvious reasons. In a 2018 radio interview, Quavo conceded the title of "best rapper in the group," handing it off to his three-years-younger nephew. "[Takeoff] just masterminded his craft," the leader admitted in awe.

Two songs stand out as turning points in Migos' decade-long career; Takeoff helmed both of them. In the lull after their gate-crashing Y.R.N. mixtape (the definitive rap tape of 2013, straight down to the Trinidad James and Riff Raff features), some wrote the group off as a passing trend. Then came 2014's "Fight Night." Lots of songs at the time had a similarly springy West Coast beat, but nothing sounded half as dynamic as Takeoff did exploding into the hook — his authority was arresting. ("Broke n***** stand to the LEFT!") The performance felt like catharsis but was secretly about control, each inflection optimized for impact. "Fight Night" became the trio's biggest hit to that point; it felt like they'd broken free of a formula, arriving on the threshold of something bigger.

With 2016's "Bad and Boujee" (ironically, a rush job, hence the famous lack of a verse from Takeoff) the trio proved its staying power — but it was "T-Shirt," Culture's second single, that cemented its greatness. By no coincidence, it was another Takeoff showcase, a minute-long masterclass in rhythmic command. It feels practically pointless to type out the lyrics — "Young n**** poppin' with a pocket full of cottage / Whoa, kemosabe, chopper aiming at your noggin" — which are nothing compared to the way Takeoff says them, his voice its own percussion section and bass line. In a video that Chance the Rapper dubbed Oscar-worthy, Takeoff's round face peeks out from beneath a bear pelt, iced in gold and diamonds in the tundra. They'd never been cooler.

It's possible to spend all day in a rabbit hole of great Takeoff moments. (I recommend it.) There's "Cross the Country," a solid choice for best Takeoff verse ever, where he switches up his flow more times than I care to count, or the time he stole the show in a 2021 radio freestyle session, cracking up Offset by raising a double cup as he coolly spits, "They talking 'bout COVID — when I heard the news, I started sipping the remedy." He rapped on his solo album about his visceral early stage fright, but as his shyness dissipated, you realized he was funny, with a dry wit he'd break the fourth wall to convey to you through his eyes.

Nothing captures the Takeoff experience better than the time in 2015 when he and Quavo performed some of their hits with a small orchestra, holding down the fort while Offset was locked up — a piece of content with great potential for corniness, which nevertheless still moves me. This was unfamiliar territory for the pair; you can almost sense some nerves. But Takeoff grounds the performance with quiet confidence, hyping his uncle with battle-cry ad-libs, keeping the whole thing in motion. And then — you can see it — he starts having fun, a smile building at the corners of his mouth as he meets the camera's gaze.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year will induct Eminem, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon and two guys in sunglasses who have scored more No. 1s on the Billboard Hot 100 than all of those other acts combined.

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis are the rare songwriting and producing team to get into the prestigious hall, and they hope it will lead to more artists like them being inducted.

“Songwriters are like farmers,” said Jam. “When you go to a nice restaurant, the chef is like the artist and you thank him for the meal. But where did he get the food from? Without the farmer, he doesn’t have any food to cook. And that’s the way songwriters are to me.”

The duo’s chart-topping pop hits include Janet Jackson’s “When I Think of You;” Mariah Carey’s “Thank God I Found You;” George Michael’s “Monkey;” Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee;” Janet and Michael Jackson’s “Scream;” and Mary J. Blige’s “No More Drama.” They have five Grammys and went into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2017.

“I don’t know if you could ever recognize songwriters enough. I mean, they are the fuel that fuels everything,” said Lewis. “There are great songwriters out there that never get the shine that they deserve.”

One song in particular might typify the Jam and Lewis range — “Got ’Til It’s Gone,” which combines a folk sample from Joni Mitchell, the hip-hop of Q-Tip and Janet Jackson’s R&B voice. “We’re kind of at a crossroads or an intersection of a lot of different music,” said Jam.

Jam and Lewis started out in competing bands and became part of Prince’s band, The Time, in Minneapolis. After parting ways with The Purple One, the duo established a recording studio and production company. Their collaboration with Janet Jackson on her monster albums “Control” and “Rhythm Nation 1814” solidified them as hitmakers.

The Rock Hall on Saturday will also induct Eurythmics, Duran Duran, Judas Priest, Harry Belafonte, Elizabeth Cotten and Pat Benatar. Jam anticipated that one act closely associated with the duo would be the one who inducts them but didn’t go into specifics, raising speculation that it will be Janet Jackson.

They credit music executive Clarence Avant and an earlier songwriting powerhouse duo, Gamble & Huff, for showing the way forward. They hope to do the same with their induction: “It’s wonderful and hopefully shines a spotlight on other people like us who do what we do that are deserving.”

They grew up listening to different genres. Jam was a pop fan, soaking in Seals and Crofts, America and Chicago. Lewis leaned more toward Parliament-Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire. “Terry liked the funky bottom. I like the pretty top,” said Jam. You can hear that combo throughout their career, starting with their first hit, S.O.S. Band’s “Just Be Good to Me.”

They’re responsible for more than 50 Billboard No. 1 songs on the pop, R&B and dance charts for everyone from Rod Stewart and Sting to Patti LaBelle. They tailor the song to the artist and choose for themselves a non-nonsense wardrobe of black suits and sunglasses. Next year, they celebrate their partnership hitting its 50th anniversary.

“We’re kind of at a point of our careers where we don’t have anything to prove, but we still have a lot to say,” said Jam. “We just want to leave music in a better place, whether it’s through technology, whether it’s through the songs we make, whether it’s the people we influence that are making music now.”

Turn on the radio and you will likely immediately hear the influence of Jam and Lewis. Famed Swedish producer Max Martin channeled the duo while crafting hits for Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. Charlie Puth is a fan, and Bruno Mars gave the pair a shout-out on the Grammy stage for paving the way when he won album of the year for “24K Magic.”

One thing Jam and Lewis would like to see change is more recognition for the folks behind the tunes. Lewis worries that music today is often seen like a utility, a faceless service like water or electricity that’s taken for granted. Jam misses the days when a record sleeve included tons of information about the music makers, like the name of the engineer and mixer.

“The reason we’re writers and producers now is because we could look at records back in the day and instantly see who produced it and who wrote it,” said Jam.

These days, it’s hard to find credits on streaming sites and the duo think that’s a problem. “What it does is it devalues the music because it communicates the idea that music just comes out of nowhere. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. There’s people in this,” Jam said.

After decades of making music for other people, Jam and Lewis last year made their debut album as artists, “Jam and Lewis, Volume One” featuring Babyface, Toni Braxton and Mariah Carey. They plan on more such albums and hope to perform live next year, too.

The goal then — as it always has been for these men who push the sonic envelope — is to build a musical bridge in this time of divisions.

“It’s all about taking people — young, old, white, Black, straight, gay, Democrat or Republican, whatever — and for the time we’re on stage, bring all of them together,” said Jam. “If you could do that, that to me is the magic of music.”

This article first published on the MPR News website.

External Links

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis - official site

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - official site

TMZ and Rolling Stone report that Takeoff, one-third of Migos, was shot and killed in Houston, Texas.

According to TMZ, Takeoff and Quavo were playing dice when an altercation broke out and someone opened fire, shooting Takeoff. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Erica Ponder of KPRC 2 Houston reported that officers initially said they would not be releasing the victim’s identity until his family was notified and his identification was verified by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. Police did confirm the victim is a Black male in his 20′s. A representative for the group confirmed the victim was Takeoff.

Takeoff, who's real name is Kirsnik Khari Ball, was the youngest member of Migos. Quavo was his uncle, and Offset his cousin. He was 28 years old.

Migos are known for their hits like “Versace,” “Bad and Boujee,” and “Stir Fry.” Takeoff released his only solo project, The Last Rocket, in 2018 and had recently released his collaboration with fellow Migos member Quavo, Only Built For Infinity Links, under the name Unc & Phew in October of 2022.

The music video for “Messy” had just released on Monday afternoon.

This is a developing story. We will add more details as they are available.

The family of George Floyd announced Tuesday that they will file a $250 million lawsuit against Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, following comments he made about Floyd's death on the podcast Drink Champs.

Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office ruled that George Floyd's death was a homicide, caused by Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes. But Ye — who was a guest on last weekend's episode of the podcast hosted by rapper N.O.R.E and DJ EFN — put forth the idea that it wasn't Chauvin who caused Floyd's death, but that he died from fentanyl use.

The family seeks damages for defamation, harassment and more

The lawsuit will be filed by Roxie Washington, the mother of Gianna Floyd: George Floyd's only daughter and the sole beneficiary of his estate. Washington plans to sue Ye, his business partners and associates for "harassment, misappropriation, defamation and infliction of emotional distress seeking $250 million dollars in damages," according to a statement from Washington's attorneys.

"Kanye's comments are a repugnant attempt to discount George Floyd's life and to profit from his inhumane death," said Attorney Pat D. Dixon III. "We will hold Mr. West accountable for his flagrant remarks against Mr. Floyd's legacy."

Attorneys for the family have also issued a cease-and-desist letter to Ye for his comments.

"Free Speech Rights do not include harassment, lies, misrepresentation, and the misappropriation of George Floyd's legacy. Some words have consequences and Mr. West will be made to understand that," said Kay Harper Williams, another of Washington's attorneys.

Ye's First Amendment rights will be a factor in this case, expert says

On the matter of First Amendment rights, however, the family may have an uphill legal battle against Ye, said Roy S. Gutterman, the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at the University of Syracuse.

"First off, there is no possibility of a defamation action here, because there would be no living plaintiff whose reputation has been damaged," Gutterman told NPR. "Libel and slander require a live plaintiff, and family members or surviving family members do not have standing to sue for defamation."

One possible path for this lawsuit, though, would be the the allegation of intentional infliction of emotional distress, Gutterman said — although it will be difficult to claim. "This requires the plaintiff to prove that the statements were intentional or reckless, outside the bounds of accepted decency and morality and causally-connected to some viable harm," he said. "This tort is often a difficult claim to collect on, especially with a media defendant."

However, proving this claim is not impossible; notably, Sandy Hook families successfully sued Alex Jones on this secondary tort in a recent civil trial in Connecticut.

Drink Champs has issued apologies for the episode

Ye's episode of Drink Champs was pulled earlier this week.

"Drink Champs prides itself on its ability to allow a free flow of ideas within the hip hop community," a representative for the program told The Hollywood Reporter." That being said, unfortunately, the recent interview with Kanye West contained false and hurtful information regarding the circumstances surrounding the murder of George Floyd."

Host N.O.R.E called into Hot 97's Ebro in the Morning to talk about the episode and issued an apology.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I can sit there and say, 'That's only Kanye West, it's only what he said.' But I have a responsibility when I have an audience. When I watched myself, I was embarrassed. I was like, 'Wait a minute? You just let him say that?' I'm irresponsible for letting it go."

Representatives for Kanye West did not immediately return messages for comment.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

In an upstairs studio in his south Minneapolis home, Douglas R. Ewart demonstrates one of his many creations. The one he calls the People’s Idiophone, a large metal contraption clangs in various tones as he plays.

“[It’s made of] lots of cooking utensils, pot covers, trays, hubcaps, old symbols,” Ewart said.

The metallic items hang on a frame that almost takes up an entire wall in the main room of the studio. It is part of a larger collection Ewart has dubbed his “crepuscular instruments” because as the term means twilight, the instruments are fashioned from household items near the end of their original use.

“I can take that item and transform it into a stamping stick or a drum or a picture frame,” Ewart said. “It's left to my imagination.”

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He also plays more familiar instruments, such as flutes and the didgeridoo, a wooden wind instrument.

Jeff Bailey, a professor of practice in music at Hamline University, has known Ewart for years. He said Ewart comes from a musical tradition that isn’t concerned with labels but could be generally described as improvisational jazz.

“Some might call it avant-guarde” Bailey said, “part of it is a willingness to be very present in the moment and reactive, instead of falling back to overly systematic approaches to music.”

Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Ewart studied to be a tailor in high school before coming to the U.S. in 1963. While in his 20s, he picked up a saxophone. By late 1967, he decided to pursue music and continued to work as a tailor.

“There's this notion that you can only do one thing well,” Ewart said, “I disagree with that philosophy. And, in fact, I try to impart to my students to do several things.”

Along with his musical prowess, Ewart also creates visual arts and continues to tailor and design clothes. Ewart also taught at the Chicago Art Institute School.

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Even as his reputation in music and visual art grew, friends and fellow musicians also know Ewart for his ability as a collaborator and teacher.

“He's a community artist who works, and he teaches, supports, includes, encourages, stands up for, and participates in art and creation,” said Mankwe Ndosi, a Minneapolis-based musician.

Ndosi also credits Ewart with helping her develop as a multidisciplinary artist.

“One of the things that he did, which was most influential to me, is showing me how many different ways you can live as an artist and ways that you can support yourself,” she said.

The McKnight Foundation honored Ewart’s years of community engagement and artistry with this year’s Distinguished Artist Award, which carries with it a $100,000 prize.

Ewart hopes to use the money and recognition he’s received from McKnight to continue his community education and to create.

“The things that it will enable me to do are the things that I'm already engaged in on maybe a easier level” Ewart said, “wherever I go, I’m always trying to do positive work.” 

This story originally published on the MPR News website.

LOS ANGELES — Coolio, the rapper who was among hip-hop's biggest names of the 1990s with hits including "Gangsta's Paradise" and "Fantastic Voyage," died Wednesday at age 59, his manager said.

Coolio died at the Los Angeles home of a friend, longtime manager Jarez Posey told The Associated Press. The cause was not immediately clear.

Coolio won a Grammy for best solo rap performance for "Gangsta's Paradise," the 1995 hit from the soundtrack of the Michelle Pfeiffer film "Dangerous Minds" that sampled Stevie Wonder's 1976 song "Pastime Paradise" and was played constantly on MTV.

The Grammy, and the height of his popularity, came in 1996, amid a fierce feud between the hip-hop communities of the two coasts, which would take the lives of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. soon after.

Coolio managed to stay mostly above the conflict.

"I'd like to claim this Grammy on behalf of the whole hip-hop nation, West Coast, East Coast, and worldwide, united we stand, divided we fall," he said from the stage as he accepted the award.

Born in Monessen, Pennsylvania south of Pittsburgh, Coolio moved to Compton, California. He spent some time as a teen in Northern California, where his mother sent him because she felt the city was too dangerous.

He said in interviews that he started rapping at 15 and knew by 18 it was what he wanted to do with his life, but would go to community college and work as a volunteer firefighter and in airport security before devoting himself full-time to the hip-hop scene.

His career took off with the 1994 release of his debut album on Tommy Boy Records, "It Takes a Thief." It's opening track, "Fantastic Voyage," would reach No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.

A year later, "Gangsta's Paradise" would become a No. 1 single, with its dark opening lyrics:

"As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there's not much left, 'cause I've been blastin' and laughin' so long, that even my mama thinks that my mind is gone."

Social media lit up with reactions to the unexpected death.

"This is sad news," Ice Cube said on Twitter. "I witness first hand this man's grind to the top of the industry. Rest In Peace, @Coolio."

"Weird Al" Yankovic tweeted "RIP Coolio" along with a picture of the two men hugging.

Coolio had said in an interview at the time it was released that he wasn't cool with Yankovic's 1996 "Gangsta's Paradise" parody, "Amish Paradise." But the two later made peace.

The rapper would never again have a song nearly as big as "Gangsta's Paradise," but had subsequent hits with 1996's "1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin' New)" (1996), and 1997's "C U When U Get There."

His career album sales totaled 4.8 million, with 978 million on-demand streams of his songs, according to Luminate. He would be nominated for six Grammys overall.

And with his distinctive persona he would become a cultural staple, acting occasionally, starring in a reality show about parenting called "Coolio's Rules," providing a voice for an episode of the animated show "Gravity Falls" and providing the theme music for the Nickelodeon sitcom "Kenan & Kel."

He had occasional legal troubles, including a 1998 conviction in Stuttgart, Germany, where an boutique shop owner said he punched her when she tried to stop him from taking merchandise without paying. He was sentenced to six months probation and fined $30,000.

He was married to Josefa Salinas from 1996 to 2000. They had four children together.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

NEW YORK — Rihanna will take center stage at February's Super Bowl halftime show.

The singer, who declined to perform in the 2019 Super Bowl halftime show out of solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, will headline the 2023 Super Bowl, the NFL announced Sunday along with Jay-Z's Roc Nation and Apple Music. Rihanna posted an image on Instagram of an arm outstretched holding an NFL football.

"Rihanna is a generational talent, a woman of humble beginnings who has surpassed expectations at every turn," Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, whose Roc Nation is an executive producer of the show, said in a statement. "A person born on the small island of Barbados who became one of the most prominent artists ever. Self-made in business and entertainment."

The Super Bowl will take place at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on Feb. 12. After years of Pepsi's sponsorship, the upcoming halftime show will be sponsored by Apple Music.

Rihanna earlier said she turned down a similar opportunity for the 2019 Super Bowl that was ultimately headlined by Maroon 5. At the time, many artists voiced support for Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback whose 2016 national anthem protests sparked debate throughout football.

"I couldn't dare do that. For what?" Rihanna told Vogue in 2019. "Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn't be a sellout. I couldn't be an enabler. There's things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way," she said of the league.

With sales of more than 250 million records worldwide, Rihanna ranks as one of the best-selling female artists ever. Her last album was 2016's "Anti."

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Pharoah Sanders, the revered and influential tenor saxophonist who explored and extended the boundaries of his instrument, notably alongside John Coltrane in the 1960s, died on Saturday morning in Los Angeles. His death was announced in a post on social media by the record label Luaka Bop, which had released his celebrated 2021 album Promises and confirmed by a publicist who worked on the release. Sanders was 81 years old.

Spirit was the overwhelming force in Sanders' music: It emanated from his tenor and soprano saxophones in fiery blasts or a murmuring flicker, and it suffused his ensembles, which featured several generations of improvisers equally willing to dig in or soar free. "Sanders has consistently had bands that could not only create a lyrical near-mystical Afro-Eastern world," wrote one champion, the poet-critic Amiri Baraka, "but [also] sweat hot fire music in continuing display of the so-called 'energy music' of the '60s."

That combination of traits characterized Sanders' defining solo work of the '70s on Impulse! Records, which had been Coltrane's label home, and was still a welcoming harbor for experimentalism. Among these albums are Black Unity, consisting of one album-length improvisation, and Thembi, which nudges a post-Coltrane language into the realm of Afrocentric groove.

Sanders' single best-known piece of music is "The Creator Has a Master Plan," an expansive performance from 1969 that peaks in wailing cacophony but ends with a buoyant, soulful vocal refrain. Originally split across two sides of the 1969 LP Karma, the track was later issued on CD as a single track, nearly 33 minutes long.

Pharoah was born Ferrell Sanders on Oct. 13, 1940, in Little Rock, Ark. His love of music began at home, through his choir-leading grandfather. After high school — and a switch from the clarinet to the alto saxophone, before finally settling into the tenor sax — Sanders moved to the West Coast around 1959, attending Oakland Junior College, expanding his musical palette and pursuing the horizon, sitting in with avant-garde saxophonists like Sonny Simmons and Dewey Redman. While there, Sanders first met and befriended John Coltrane, though they wouldn't work together until many years later.

In 1961, Sanders relocated to New York, looking to join the city's fecund jazz scene, where Coltrane was a reigning figure. Sanders' landing in New York was rocky, however, resulting in intermittent homelessness as he practiced, sporadically, with Sun Ra and his Arkestra. (Sun Ra, it's said, was the one who encouraged him to take the name Pharoah.) Eventually, he was forced to pawn his horn.

Sanders' fortunes in New York slowly but surely turned around as he established a solo career, and by 1965 he was a member of what would be Coltrane's final quartet. Ascension, recorded in 1965 and released the following year, was a late-in-life turning point for Coltrane and, by extension, Sanders, who would become known for using his instrument in novel — anarchic and atonal — ways. Last year, Impulse! released the archival recording A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle, recorded a few months after Ascension; it features Sanders as a vital addition to Coltrane's quartet, expanding on his most heralded musical statement. (Live in Seattle, a separate album recorded during the same engagement, had long been a touchstone for an avant-garde left to forge the path ahead after Coltrane's death in '67.)

Even given his pioneering work, Sanders downplayed his technical achievements in favor of the emotional resonance he was seeking. "I'm not so much of a technical player myself," Sanders explained in a 1995 interview. "I'm probably not that much of an intellectual player, as some other musicians. What I do is... express. That's what I do."

Sanders' stature grew beyond the jazz avant-garde space as he became something of a spiritual elder, and his expressiveness survived in new contexts. In 2021, he released the album Promises in collaboration with the electronic musician Sam Shepherd, who records as Floating Points, and the London Symphony Orchestra that was widely and immediately hailed as one of the year's best. A patient and meditative album, it sometimes feels like a structure built for the sole purpose of allowing Sanders' voice and saxophone to levitate.

For many years, the jazz establishment lagged behind the African American community in appreciating Sanders' work, especially apart from his affiliation with Coltrane. But the power of his example and the sweep of his music helped set the framework for an ascendant class of artists like tenor saxophonists Kamasi Washington, James Brandon Lewis and Nubya Garcia, and multi-reedist Shabaka Hutchings.

"I find it difficult to regard Pharoah Sanders as an individual," wrote Hutchings in an appreciation of Black Unity for The Vinyl Factory. "I intuitively consider him as representational of a creative principle that centers communalism as the driving force from which spirit is manifested through sound."

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As Mariah Carey was recording her smash hit 1995 pop album Daydream, she and her fellow musicians were also secretly putting together a grunge album.

Carey first mentioned the existence of the secret album in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. A version of the record was quietly released at the time under the band name Chick, titled Someone's Ugly Daughter, with Carey singing backup vocals.

In a new interview with the podcast Rolling Stone Music Now, Carey has shared that recordings of the alt-rock album with her lead vocals have been found. And she hinted that the elusive project will finally be released.

"I think this unearthed version will become, yes, something we should hear," she told Rolling Stone. She suggested, without providing details, that she was even building on the record with an unnamed musician: "I'm working on a version of something where there'll be another artist working on this with me as well."

Carey described the project — recorded after long days in the studio while working on hits such as "Always Be My Baby" — as an outlet for herself during a period when she felt particularly constrained.

"I had no freedom during that time. That was my freedom, making that record," she told the podcast.

Carey told Rolling Stone she was inspired by bands such as Hole and Green Day at the time. She adopted an alter-ego, as she recalled in her book: "I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image."

At the time, she recalls that there was some unease about her grunge lyrics. "I honestly wanted to put the record out back then under, you know, the same pseudonym, just put it out and be like, you know whatever, let them discover that it's me," she told Rolling Stone. "But that idea was kind of stomped and squashed."

Carey said she even did the album art — a cockroach and some scrawled lipstick. She remembers driving around, shouting lyrics to songs she wrote that nobody knew.

Ultimately, she said that a friend of hers named Clarissa Dane recorded lead vocals and wrote a grunge song with Carey, and it was released with Carey on backup vocals. That version is no longer widely available.

But it seems like the version that Carey wants us to hear may be coming soon.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Updated September 14, 2022 at 5:42 PM ET

CHICAGO — A federal jury on Wednesday convicted R. Kelly of several child pornography and sex abuse charges in his hometown of Chicago, delivering another legal blow to a singer who used to be one of the biggest R&B stars in the world.

Kelly, 55, was found guilty on three counts of child pornography and three counts of child enticement.

But the jury acquitted him on a fourth pornography count as well as a conspiracy to obstruct justice charge accusing him fixing his state child pornography trial in 2008. He was found not guilty on all three counts of conspiring to receive child pornography and for two further enticement charges.

His two co-defendants were found not guilty on all charges.

Jurors wrote several questions to the judge on Wednesday, at least one indicating the panelists were grappling with some of the case's legal complexities.

One asked if they had to find Kelly both enticed and coerced minors, or that he either enticed or coerced them. Over objections from Kelly's lawyer, the judge said they only need to find one.

At trial, prosecutors sought to paint a picture of Kelly as a master manipulator who used his fame and wealth to reel in star-stuck fans, some of them minors, to sexually abuse then discard them.

Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, was desperate to recover child pornographic videos he made and lugged around in a gym bag, witnesses said. They said he offered up to $1 million to recover missing videos before his 2008 trial, knowing they would land him in legal peril. The conspiracy to hide his abuse ran from 2000 to 2020, prosecutors said.

Kelly associates Derrel McDavid and Milton Brown were co-defendants at the Chicago trial. Jurors acquitted McDavid, a longtime Kelly business manager, who was accused of conspiring with Kelly to rig the 2008 trial. Brown, a Kelly associate for years, was acquitted of receiving child pornography.

Kelly faced 13 counts. A conviction of just one count of child pornography carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, while receipt of child pornography carries a mandatory minimum of five years. Judges can order that defendants sentenced earlier in separate cases serve their new sentence simultaneously with or only after the first term is fully served. Federal inmates must serve at least 85% of their sentences.

During closing arguments Tuesday, Kelly attorney Jennifer Bonjean likened the government's testimony and evidence to a cockroach and its case to a bowl of soup.

If a cockroach falls into soup, she said, "you don't just pull out the cockroach and eat the rest of the soup. You throw out the whole soup," said told jurors.

"There are just too many cockroaches," she said of the prosecution's case.

The three defendants called only a handful of witnesses over four days. Co-defendant McDavid, who was on the stand for three days, may have damaged Kelly's hopes for acquittal by saying that he now doubts Kelly was truthful when he denied abusing anyone after hearing the superstar's accusers testify.

In her closing rebuttal, prosecutor Jeannice Appenteng cited testimony that Kelly's inner circle increasingly focused on doing what Kelly wanted as his fame boomed in the mid-1990s.

"And ladies and gentlemen, what R. Kelly wanted was to have sex with young girls," she said.

Four Kelly accusers testified, all referred to by pseudonyms or their first names: Jane, Nia, Pauline and Tracy. Some cried when describing the abuse but otherwise spoke calmly and with confidence. A fifth accuser, Brittany, did not testify.

Sitting nearby in a suit and face mask, Kelly often averted his eyes and looked down as his accusers spoke.

Some dozen die-hard Kelly fans regularly attended the trial. On at least one occasion during a break, several made hand signs of a heart at Kelly. He smiled back.

Jane, 37, was the government's star witness and pivotal to the fixing charge, which accused Kelly of using threats and payoffs to get her to lie to a grand jury before his 2008 trial and to ensure she and her parents wouldn't testify.

A single video, which state prosecutors said was Kelly abusing a girl of around 14, was the focal point of that trial.

On the witness stand for two days at the end of August, Jane paused, tugged at a necklace and dabbed her eyes with a tissue when she said publicly for the first time that the girl in the video was her aged 14 and that the man was Kelly, who would have been around 30.

Some jurors in the 2008 trial said they had to acquit Kelly because the girl in the video didn't testify. At the federal trial in Chicago, Jane said she lied to a state grand jury in 2002 when she said it was not her in the video, saying part of her reason for lying was that she cared for Kelly and didn't want to get him into trouble.

Jane told jurors she was 15 when they first had intercourse. Asked how many times they had sex before she turned 18, she answered quietly: "Uncountable times. ... Hundreds."

Jane, who belonged to a teenage singing group, first met Kelly in the late 1990s when she was in junior high school. She had visited Kelly's Chicago recording studio with her aunt, a professional singer. Soon after that meeting, Jane told her parents Kelly was going to be her godfather.

Jane testified that when her parents confronted Kelly in the early 2000s he dropped to his knees and begged them for forgiveness. She said she implored her parents not to take action against Kelly because she loved him.

Defense attorneys suggested a desire for money and fame drove some government witnesses to accuse Kelly, and they accused several people of trying to blackmail him. They also suggested that at least one of his accusers was 17 — the age of consent in Illinois — when Kelly began pursing her for sex.

Bonjean implored jurors not to accept the prosecution's portrayal of her client as "a monster," saying Kelly was forced to rely on others because of intellectual challenges, and that he was sometimes led astray.

"Mr. Kelly can also be a victim," she said in her opening statement.

Prosecutors played jurors excerpts from three videos that Jane said featured her. Court officials set up opaque screens around the jurors so journalists and spectators couldn't see the videos or the jurors' reactions.

But the sound was audible. In one video, the girl is heard repeatedly calling the man "daddy." At one point she asks: "Daddy, do you still love me?" The man gives her sexually explicit instructions.

Prosecutors have said Kelly shot the video that was also evidence in the 2008 trial in a log cabin-themed room at his North Side Chicago home around 1998.

Another accuser, Pauline, said Jane introduced her to Kelly when they were 14-year-old middle school classmates in 1998. At Kelly's Chicago home later that year, Pauline described her shock when she said she first walked in on Kelly and a naked Jane. She said Kelly told her that everyone has secrets. "This is our secret," she testified he said.

Pauline told jurors she still cares for Kelly. But, as a 37-year-old mom, she said she now has a different perspective.

"If somebody did something to my kids," she said, "I'm killing 'em. Period."

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JACKSON, Miss. — A small town in the Mississippi Delta that has ties to the civil rights movement will soon be home to the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame.

Project planners hope to finish building the facility in the town of Marks in two or three years, Velma Wilson, director of economic tourism and development for Quitman County, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. Marks is the county seat of Quitman County and has a population of fewer than 2,000 people.

The project is the culmination of a 50-year effort to build a hall of fame for R&B musicians such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin and B.B. King.

"There is no other hall of fame in the world that is primarily focused and dedicated to the history of R&B music on a national scale," LaMont Robinson, CEO of the NRBHF, said in a news release. "My vision to build a hall of fame to honor R&B and its contributions to civil rights, America, and the entire world is something that I don't take lightly."

Robinson founded the hall of fame in 2010. Since 2013, it has inducted more than 200 artists.

Marks appealed to Robinson due to its civil rights history. Martin Luther King Jr. chose the town in 1968 as the starting point for his Poor People's Campaign, which demanded economic justice for poor Americans of all backgrounds. On March 31, 1968, in what would be his final Sunday sermon before his assassination, King described the poverty-stricken families he encountered in Marks.

"I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Quitman County, the poorest county in the United States. And I tell you I saw hundreds of Black boys and Black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear," King said at the National Cathedral in Washington. "I saw their mothers and fathers ... They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something."

The conditions in the cotton fields of Quitman County and other parts of the Mississippi Delta were the environment in which early civil rights activists and field workers produced music that's now identified as blues, gospel and R&B, project planners said.

"It was this cultural and musical phenomenon that provided the basis for the prodigious economic success and profits of the U.S. music industry worldwide," planners wrote in a document outlining the project.

As of 2020, Quitman County had one of the 20 lowest median income levels of all counties in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"The Hall of Fame will be the catalyst to Delta tourism growth and opportunities, and a means to attract business and industry," said Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents Quitman County.

The city of Marks donated 5 acres (2 hectares) of land for the project.

According to an agreement reviewed by the AP, the Quitman County Economic Tourism and Development agency secured a $500,000 appropriation from the Mississippi Legislature for infrastructure related to the project. The agency also hopes to secure an $11 million federal grant through the U.S. Department of Transportation to beef up development around the hall of fame.

"While there is significant energy and excitement in the project, it is also daunting for the QTED staff and will require multiple partnerships to succeed," the agency wrote in the agreement.

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Rapper A$AP Rocky, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, was officially charged this week with two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm in connection with a shooting that occurred in Hollywood last November.

Mayers, 33, was initially arrested in April and later released on bond in relation to this case.

The Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced the charges on Monday, saying Mayers is facing allegations of personally using a firearm during this altercation with a former friend.

On Nov. 6, 2021, Mayers allegedly pointed a semiautomatic handgun at the victim. Later on during another confrontation with this person, Mayers allegedly drew the gun and fired twice in the direction of the victim, according to prosecutors.

The LAPD said the victim suffered a minor injury from the shooting.

Alan Jackson, an attorney for Mayers, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Discharging a gun in a public place is a serious offense that could have ended with tragic consequences not only for the person targeted but also for innocent bystanders visiting Hollywood," Gascón said in a statement. "My office conducted a thorough review of the evidence in this case and determined that the addition of a special firearm allegation was warranted."

Mayers' arraignment is set for Wednesday at a Los Angeles court.

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Three years after his murder, rapper Nipsey Hussle was honored posthumously Monday with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — on what would have been the late rapper's 37th birthday.

The star, which was unveiled in a ceremony Monday afternoon, is located in front of Amoeba Music on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The ceremony included speeches and remarks from members of the late rapper's family, including his sister, Samantha Smith; his grandmother Margaret Boutte; and his fiancée, actress Lauren London. Boutte accepted the star on behalf of the family.

"I think I speak for the entire city of LA when I say that we've always known Hussle was destined for greatness," London told local TV station NBC4. "This moment only amplifies this for us. Nip would've been honored by this moment."

The late rapper's star on the Walk of Fame is the 2,729th star since its completion in 1961 with the first 1,558 stars, NBC4 reported.

Hussle, born Airmiess Joseph Asghedom, was a Grammy-nominated rapper, entrepreneur and philanthropist who was fatally shot in 2019 outside the Marathon Clothing store he owned in South Los Angeles.

Prior to his murder, Hussle was scheduled to meet with both Los Angeles Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff and Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore about ways to stop gang violence across the city.

"Nipsey Hussle was more than just a creative genius, he was committed to helping his community through savvy business moves and charitable contributions," Ana Martinez, producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, said in a statement.

Hussle was also posthumously honored with two Grammy Awards in 2020 for Best Rap Performance and for Best Rap/Sung Performance.

In July, Los Angeles County jurors found 32-year-old Eric R. Holder Jr. guilty of the first-degree murder of Hussle.

Additionally, Holder was convicted of attempted voluntary manslaughter, as two other men were injured from the gunfire at the crime scene. Holder could face up to life in prison and will be sentenced next month.

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Taylor Swift has told a federal court that she wrote all of the lyrics to her 2014 hit "Shake It Off," and said she had never heard of the group 3LW or their 2001 song "Playas Gon' Play" before a lawsuit was filed against her.

Swift made these statements in a declaration this week over the case originally filed in 2017 by Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who wrote "Playas Gon' Play" and allege that Swift stole some of its lyrics for "Shake It Off."

The lawsuit focuses on Swift's chorus, which include the phrases, "'the players gonna play, play, play," and "the haters gonna hate, hate, hate." The 3LW songwriters point out that the 2001 song contains the lyrics, "playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate."

She said that the phrases "players gonna play" and "haters gonna hate" were part of popular culture as she was growing up, and often used "to express the idea that one can or should shrug off negativity."

Swift said her lyrics did not have any influence from 3LW and instead, is about "independence and 'shaking off' negative personal criticism through music and dance."

"In writing the lyrics, I drew partly on experiences in my life and, in particular, unrelenting public scrutiny of my personal life, 'clickbait' reporting, public manipulation, and other forms of negative personal criticism which I learned I just needed to shake off and focus on my music," Swift said.

In her declaration, Swift provides examples to illustrate her point that the phrases were widely used, including a 2013 performance by Eric Church at the Country Music Awards. Church performed his song "The Outsiders," which also includes the lyrics "the player's gonna play and a hater's gonna hate."

At one of her own performances in 2013, Swift says she wore a T-shirt with the phrase "haters gonna hate" on it, and added that she purchased the shirt from Urban Outfitters.

Swift concluded that she had "never heard the song Playas Gon' Play and had never heard of that song or the group 3LW," before the lawsuit by Hall and Butler in 2017.

"None of the CDs I listened to as a child, or after that, were by 3LW," Swift said. "I have never heard the song Playas Gon' Play on the radio, on television, or in any film. The first time I ever heard the song was after this claim was made."

Here's more from her declaration:

"I have never seen a Playas Gon' Play music video, never attended any concert where 3LW performed, and never attended any concert where the song Playas Gon' Play was performed. I do not own any 3LW  albums or singles, or any recording of Playas Gon' Play. I do not own and have never listened to the albums Now That's What I Call Music! 6 or Now That's What I Call Music! 7. I did not discuss Playas Gon' Play or 3LW with anyone prior to this lawsuit. I have never subscribed to Billboard magazine and had never read anything  in the magazine until after I moved to Nashville and became immersed in the music  business." 

Hall and Butler have said that they coined the phrase, and that while it "may seem like common parlance today," it was "completely original and unique" when they wrote the song.

The next hearing in this case is scheduled for Sept. 19.

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Updated August 9, 2022 at 11:36 AM ET

Songwriter Lamont Dozier has died at age 81. Along with Brian and Eddie Holland, Dozier co-wrote dozens hits for The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops and others. His death was announced by his son on Instagram.

"Heat Wave," "How Sweet It Is," "Stop In The Name of Love," "You Keep Me Hangin' On," "Nowhere To Run," "Bernadette"... Holland-Dozier-Holland were talented, prolific songwriters who were instrumental in making Motown "the home of Hitsville, U.S.A."

His family released a statement saying the "devoted father and legendary songwriter, producer and recording artist, died peacefully in his home on Monday, August 8. ... We love him dearly and will miss him always."

Dozier grew up in Detroit. In 2004, he told NPR it was an elementary school teacher who liked his writing and encouraged him to keep at it. "She thought it was very astute of me to have such a feel for words and stuff," Dozier said, "So I started to put these words to music by the time I was, like, 12 or 13."

By the time he was 15, Dozier had his own doo-wop group called The Romeos.

In the 1960s, the Motor City's most talented artists soon found their way to Berry Gordy's Motown. Gordy modeled his record label after a Ford assembly line with Holland-Dozier-Holland quickly becoming one of its finest song designers.

Earlier this year the Library of Congress named Holland-Dozier-Holland's "Reach Out, I'll Be There," recorded by The Four Tops in 1966, to its National Recording Registry.

Lamont Dozier "wanted to write 'a journey of emotions with sustained tension, like a bolero,'" according to The Library of Congress. "To achieve that, he 'alternated the keys, from a minor, Russian feel in the verse to a major, gospel feel in the chorus.' "

Dozier parted ways with the Holland brothers in the early 1970s but his creative output continued over the next several decades. He released a solo album and penned songs for Alison Moyet, Simply Red and Phil Collins.

In 2019, Dozier's memoir How Sweet It Is: A Songwriter's Reflections on Music, Motown and the Mystery of the Muse was published.

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DETROIT — The historic section of Detroit where Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr. built his music empire six decades ago is now looking better than ever.

Motown legend — and Gordy's best friend — Smokey Robinson was among those who visited the newly improved Motown Museum site on Monday night for an event celebrating the completion of the first two phases of the museum's expansion.

Robinson was joined by Otis Williams, Martha Reeves and other Motown luminaries in celebrating the grand opening of Hitsville NEXT, an educational programming and creative hub, and the newly established Rocket Plaza.

"Kids who aren't even born yet will be aware of Motown," Robinson told The Associated Press during an interview ahead of the event held near the entrance to the museum. "Some of their parents weren't even born when we started this. But it's a wonderful thing."

The festivities included comments from Robinson and Williams, an original founding member of The Temptations who gifted microphones to the museum from his personal collection.

And they concluded with a performance of the Temptations classic, "My Girl," performed by the cast of the musical "Ain't Too Proud," and introduced by Marcus Paul James, who portrays Williams in the show.

"I am very happy to be part of something — this here, Motown — (that will) outlast us all," Williams said.

The museum will continue to be housed in the famed "Hitsville, U.S.A" building at 2648 West Grand Boulevard.

But three nearby Motown-era buildings have been transformed into Hitsville NEXT, which will be home to camps, workshops, master classes and community events. It represents the first phase of the museum's expansion.

Phase two is Rocket Plaza, an outdoor plaza that will serve as a community gathering place and a welcome destination for museum visitors.

"This plaza is the new front porch to Motown," said Robin Terry, Motown Museum chairwoman and CEO.

Gordy launched Motown in 1959. His late sister, Esther Gordy Edwards, founded the museum in the former Hitsville headquarters in 1985. In addition to Robinson and The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and many others recorded hits there before Motown moved to California in 1972.

The museum is inviting the community to its Founder's Day celebration on Saturday in honor of Gordy Edwards, the reopening and the completed expansion phases.

And the museum on Sunday will welcome back visitors for tours of Hitsville, U.S.A. following pandemic- and construction-related closures.

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MINEOLA, N.Y. — The driver in a hit-and-run crash that killed the father of rapper Nicki Minaj last year was sentenced Wednesday to a year in jail, in keeping with a promise the judge made when the man pleaded guilty in May.

Charles Polevich, who pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and tampering with evidence in the crash on New York's Long Island that killed Robert Maraj, was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and had his driver's license suspended for six months.

Polevich's lawyer, Marc Gann, suggested his client may have had a medical issue at the time of the crash and that he wasn't fully aware of what had happened when he fled.

Polevich, 72, said in court that he's "been heartsick since realizing the extent of the tragedy" and that there was "no excuse" for his behavior.

Maraj's widow, Carol Maraj, said in court that Polevich had left her husband "like a dog on the street" and that sparing him a longer jail sentence was a "slap in the face for the family," Newsday reported.

Polevich struck Maraj, 64, while Maraj was walking along Roslyn Road in Mineola in February 2021. Polevich stopped briefly to ask Maraj if he was OK, but didn't call for help, prosecutors said.

Instead, Polevich went home, parked the car — a white, 1992 Volvo station wagon — in his garage and covered it with a tarp, prosecutors said. Maraj was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead the next day.

Prosecutors sought a sentence of one to three years behind bars, but Nassau County Judge Howard Sturim said in May, when Polevich pleaded guilty, that he would get "no more than one year in jail."

Brendan Brosh, a spokesperson for the Nassau County district attorney's office, said that "given the severity of the defendant's conduct," prosecutors felt a stiffer sentence was warranted.

"We continue to express our condolences to the family of Robert Maraj," Brosh said.

Gann asked for a 90-day jail sentence, arguing that other factors outside of Polevich's control were partially to blame for the crash, including road construction, street lights that weren't working and Maraj's physical condition.

Maraj's widow, Carol Maraj, is suing Polevich over the crash.

Polevich, who had been splitting time between Long Island and Guam, where he runs a drilling and water purification business, surrendered to police a few days after the crash.

Detectives said they used pieces of surveillance video to track the Volvo involved in the crash to Polevich's Mineola home.

Nicki Minaj, the platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated rapper of "Anaconda," "Super Bass" and other hits, was born Onika Tanya Maraj in Trinidad and was raised in Queens.

In a post on her website, Minaj, 39, called her father's death "the most devastating loss of my life."

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Beyoncé's long-awaited and highly anticipated seventh studio album, Renaissance, is now available for the world to hear. The 16-song LP marks her first solo album in 6 years, following the pivotal visual album Lemonade. Critics, including NPR Music's Sidney Madden and Ann Powers, have said of previews that Renaissance signifies a musical evolution for the global superstar.

Renaissance includes guest features from Grace Jones, Tems and BEAM, as well as a variety of credits from heavy hitters in the music industry, including several from The-Dream, a collaborator on the megahit "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" and producer Mike Dean, and features from Drake and Raphael Saadiq.

On her website, Beyoncé wrote of Renaissance, "This three act project was recorded over three years during the pandemic. A time to be still but also a time I found to be the most creative," an indication that the new release is the first of three parts.

Last month, she surprise dropped a single from the record, "BREAK MY SOUL," an energetic track rooted in dance music influences, featuring Big Freedia and sampling the 1990 diva house hit "Show Me Love" by Robin S.

"Thank you to all of the pioneers who originate culture, to all of the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized far too long," the statement on her website continues.

In typical Bey fashion, not too many details about the album were disclosed more than a week ahead of its release. She took to social media to update the world on the project, including its official announcement, which came after removing profile pictures across her social media pages.

Despite a proven ability to give the world exactly what Beyoncé wants when Beyoncé wants to, no more and no less, the new album was leaked online just two days before its release; some fans alleged that they'd seen the CD for sale early in media stores in France and the Netherlands.

She addressed the leak, and the backlash from patient fans it received on social media, in a post just ahead of the album's actual release, writing: "I appreciate you for calling out anyone that was trying to sneak into the club early ... we are going to take our time and enjoy the music." To that end, and the album is initially being released without videos, in contrast to the visual-heavy releases of Lemonade in 2016 and the self-titled album in 2013.

"My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment," Beyoncé's statement on her website reads. "A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom. It was a beautiful journey of exploration. I hope you find joy in this music. I hope it inspires you to release the wiggle. Ha! And to feel as unique, strong, and sexy as you are."

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A young cartoon girl wearing large headphones hunches over a softly lit desk. She's scribbling in a notebook. To her side, a striped orange cat gazes out on a beige cityscape.

The Lofi Girl is an internet icon. The animation plays on a loop on the "lofi hip hop radio — beats to relax/study to" YouTube stream.

It's a 24/7 live stream that plays low-fidelity hip hop music — or lofi for short.

"I would say lofi music is the synthesis of golden era rap aesthetic with the Japanese jazz aesthetics that is then put through this lens of nostalgia," says Hixon Foster, a student and lofi artist.

He describes listening to lofi as a way to escape. Some songs are lonely or melancholy, others remind him of his school years in Michigan and toiling away at homework while listening to tunes.

The genre has become increasingly popular in the last few years. There are countless people making lofi music, fan art, memes, spin-off streams, and Halloween costumes.

Basically, Lofi Girl is everywhere. And with nearly 11 million people subscribed to the channel, the Lofi Girl stream has been the go-to place to find this music.

But last weekend, she went missing. YouTube had taken down the stream due to a false copyright claim.

Fans were not happy.

"There were camps that were confused and camps that were angry," Foster said. "I mainly saw kind of, at least through the lofi Discord, various users being like, 'Oh my God what is this? What's really going on with this?'"

YouTube quickly apologized for the mistake, and the stream returned two days later. But this isn't the first time musicians have been wrongfully shut down on YouTube.

"There's been a lot of examples of copyright going against the ideas of art and artistic evolution," Foster said. "It feels like a lot of the legal practices are going towards stifling artists, which is interesting when the main idea of them is to be protecting them."

The rise of bogus copyright claims

Lofi Girl made it through the ordeal relatively unscathed, but smaller artists who don't have huge platforms may not be so lucky.

"They are at the mercy of people sending abusive takedowns and YouTube's ability to detect and screen for them," said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University.

He said false copyright claims were rampant.

"People can use them for extortion or harassment or in some cases to file claims to monetize somebody else's videos," he said.

YouTube gets so many copyright claims that they can't carefully evaluate whether each one is legitimate, Grimmelmann said.

They leave it up to the artist to prove the claims are wrong — sometimes in court — which can be a long process.

Grimmelmann said it's up to Congress to fix copyright law for it to work better for artists. The current laws incentivize YouTube to err on the side of removing artists' content, rather than being precise in their enforcement of copyright claims.

"We ended up with this system because in the 1990s, when the contours of the internet and copyright are still coming into view, this is the compromise that representatives of the copyright industries and the internet industries worked out," Grimmelmann said.

"It's a compromise that hasn't destroyed anybody's business and has made it possible for artists to put their stuff online," Grimmelmann said. "And there has not been the appetite to try to upend that compromise because somebody's ox will get gored if they do."

Luckily, Lofi Girl and her millions of subscribers were able to make a big enough stink to get YouTube's attention quickly and get the issue resolved.

For now, lofi fans can get back to relaxing and studying. Lofi Girl will be right there with you.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.