Rocco Ritchie, 21, has been selling his paintings for up to five figures under the mysterious pseudonym Rhed
He is a mysterious, up-and-coming artist whose work has been championed by the likes of Madonna and sells for up to five figures.
But there were raised eyebrows when it was revealed that “Rhed” was none other than the singer’s eldest son, Rocco Ritchie.
Continue reading...Ukrainian Oksana Lyniv makes history with three-year posting at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale
A female conductor will take the helm at an Italian opera house for the first time in January.
The Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv said she was surprised to learn she was making history after receiving the offer from the Teatro Comunale opera house in Bologna. The 43-year-old begins the three-year posting as musical director on 22 January.
Continue reading...The singer-songwriter on Balenciaga’s visions, the mountains of North Carolina, and the haunting power of Eve’s Bayou
Singer-songwriter Moses Sumney, 29, grew up between Ghana and California and studied creative writing and poetry at UCLA. His piercing falsetto and genre-defying music have brought him critical acclaim, starting with his self-recorded 2014 EP Mid-City Island, followed in 2017 by his debut album, Aromanticism, and the 2020 double album Græ. Sumney has collaborated with musicians including Bon Iver and James Blake and toured with Solange and Sufjan Stevens. His latest project is Blackalachia, a self-directed concert film created in association with WePresent, shot over two days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, where he lives.
Continue reading...I’ve spent 12 months of the pandemic obsessively listening to the song Uwrongo, with its line: “This is not working, go home.” I’m very grateful to its singer
I was born on a farm in northern South Africa. My parents moved nearer to Johannesburg when I was still a baby. They have a photograph of me at maybe six months old, asleep inside my dad’s guitar case. Just picturing it in my mind makes me feel safe. I can hear my dad playing.
When I feel overwhelmed, I need something I can listen to on loop. Not just for hours, but for days, sometimes weeks. I think of these tracks as an aural hood. They hold my head together.
Continue reading...From a Somali love story to a deep dive into Congolese rumba, Guardian writers pick their favourite recent world cinema releases
The Great Indian Kitchen
Continue reading...Lawyers describe Spencer Elden’s claim of child exploitation as ‘not serious’ and says it fails to meet statute of limitations
Lawyers working on behalf of Nirvana have filed to dismiss a lawsuit made against the band by Spencer Elden, who appeared as a baby on the cover of their album Nevermind.
In the lawsuit filed in August, Elden claimed he was the victim of child sexual exploitation and that the cover artwork was a child sexual abuse image. “Defendants knowingly produced, possessed and advertised commercial child pornography depicting Spencer,” the lawsuit read.
Continue reading...Band’s management says singer self-isolating at home and is not showing any symptoms
Suga, songwriter and rapper for the K-pop sensation BTS, has tested positive for the coronavirus after returning from concerts in the US, the group’s management has said.
The 24-year-old, whose real name is Min Yoon-gi, was confirmed to have contracted the virus on Friday during his self quarantine after returning home to South Korea on Thursday, according to Big Hit Music.
Continue reading...The films’ heroes look like they’ve just stepped off the Berghain dancefloor – and the connection isn’t merely aesthetic. The series shares the genre’s philosophy of liberation
“We can’t see it,” says a character in The Matrix Resurrections, “but we’re all trapped inside these strange repeating loops.” Small surprise techno producer Marcel Dettmann was commissioned to write music for this latest film in the franchise. It’s a natural fit. Its director, Lana Wachowski, goes clubbing at Berghain, the Berlin techno club where Dettmann is resident and where, cut off from the everyday world, people have surreal, liberating experiences. Techno continues to inspire the franchise’s aesthetics.
When club techno arose in 1980s Detroit, African American producers were reimagining the deindustrialised city as a site of futurist fantasies. Cybotron’s dystopian 1984 track Techno City was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Tokyo of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s track Technopolis. “I extrapolated the necessity of interfacing the spirituality of human beings into the cybernetic matrix,” said Cybotron’s Rik Davis (using the word “matrix” before the film existed), “between the brain, the soul and the mechanisms of cyberspace.”
Continue reading...Premiered in Cairo 150 years ago, set in an exoticised ancient Egypt and written by a man who refused to visit the country for fear of ‘being mummified’, the beloved opera has left a complex legacy in the country its drama is set
In the middle of downtown Cairo is an anonymous-looking concrete building that stretches along one side of a huge landscaped roundabout. If you peer upwards, you’ll see it labelled, between rows of air-con units, in Arabic and English: “Opera office building and garage.” As monuments to past cultural glories go, it’s not a thing of beauty. But this block marks the site of the Khedivial Opera House – a venue erected in 1869 – and which, on 24 December 1871, staged the first performance of a new opera by the world’s then most famous composer: Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.
Today, Aida is one of the most regularly performed operas across the globe. Its just-add-pyramids ancient Egypt setting is as beloved by directors and audiences as Carmen’s Spain or Madama Butterfly’s Japan, almost always preserved as a spectacular backdrop for its conventional Italian-opera love story. Yet in recent decades Aida’s overt exoticism has attracted controversy. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said argued that it was just another product of European imperialism – an opera that has had, he wrote in 1993, “an anaesthetic as well as informative effect on European audiences”.
Continue reading...Chris Martin says band will continue to tour in interview with Jo Whiley on BBC Radio 2
Fans have reacted with dismay to the news that Coldplay will stop recording music as a band in 2025, although quiet glee was also detected among some detractors.
The band’s frontman, Chris Martin, shared the “huge revelation” with the BBC Radio 2 presenter Jo Whiley on a special show to be broadcast on Friday from 7pm.
Continue reading...The artist’s management have issued a clarifying statement after the singer attracted criticism over the David v Goliath win
Eric Clapton has waived the legal costs that a German court ordered a 55-year-old woman to pay, over a single CD containing a bootleg copy of a 1980s concert she attempted to sell.
The musician’s management has also issued a clarifying statement in response to widespread social media criticism over Clapton’s decision to take legal action in the first place, saying Clapton was not involved in the specifics of the case and she “is not the type of person Eric Clapton, or his record company, wish to target”.
Continue reading...I had plumbing problems and his radio show transported me from the faecal hellscape in my garden. It became the ideal soundtrack for my pandemic reality
It was spring, and human excrement was pumping into our garden. I watched through the window as a perplexed young plumber with a long metal pole excavated the dark, gurgling drain. As if lockdown hadn’t been bad enough, our kitchen was now heavy with the stench of a thousand flushes. No one knew how to stop it. There was only one thing to do: brew weapons-grade black coffee and switch on the radio. That’s how I discovered Huey Morgan’s Saturday morning breakfast show on BBC 6 Music. It made everything feel a little more right in the world.
What started as a way to distract from the tide of hot, liquid excrement on our patio quickly became the highlight of the week for my girlfriend and me. Huey – of Fun Lovin’ Criminals fame – thumbing you through his records: early 90s rap, early 80s disco, and early 70s soul to blow away the cobwebs, with choice modern selections marbling the retro soundscape.
Continue reading...In this extract from his new memoir Devil in a Coma, the alt-rocker recalls how Covid-19 put him in hospital for months this year – and gave him a series of hallucinogenic visions
I had been feeling weak and sick for a few days and then woke up one morning completely deaf. My equilibrium shaky, and my mind in a surreal, psychedelic dream state, I lost my footing at the top of the stairs. Head over heels over head, I knocked myself out on the windowsill as I crashed down the narrow staircase at my house. Bang. My wife was out horseback riding for the day, and I came to hours later still unable to hear a thing, unable to move, two huge opened welts on my head and my knee not supporting any weight.
For two days I tried to get from stairwell to couch, with no success. I could not move, nor could my wife support my 200lb body, so I lay suffering on some blankets on the hard floor. My ribs were cracked, my spine bruised, battered and sore, and my already chronically messed-up knee gone again, as if some tendons were ripped or a ligament severed. My leg was useless. Every attempted breath was a battle, no matter how hard I tried to take a natural one. Though I refused to go to hospital my wife finally called an ambulance behind my back and I was wheeled out of my yard on a gurney. I eventually ended up in intensive care, unable to draw oxygen, and was diagnosed with some exotic new strain of the coronavirus for which there was no cure, of course. I was put into a medically induced coma, none of which I remembered.
Continue reading...Cult Los Angeles lyricist reportedly attacked by group of people at Once Upon a Time festival in his home city
Drakeo the Ruler, the critically acclaimed Los Angeles rapper, has died after a reported stabbing at a music festival. His press representative confirmed his death to the Guardian but did not give further details.
The 28-year-old, whose real name was Darrell Caldwell, had been scheduled to perform at the Once Upon a Time festival in Los Angeles. A source speaking to the LA Times said Caldwell had been attacked on the festival site by a group of people on Saturday evening. He was taken to hospital in a critical condition, where he later died.
Continue reading...The Pogues frontman on vanity, a horrible heckle and why he became a vegetarian
Born in Kent, MacGowan, 63, won a scholarship to Westminster school, but was later expelled. In 1982, he became frontman of the Pogues; the band’s albums include Rum Sodomy and the Lash and If I Should Fall from Grace with God. MacGowan co-wrote the song Fairytale of New York, which he performed with Kirsty MacColl; released in 1987, it remains a festive classic. He has launched his own line of merchandise on his website. He lives in Dublin with his wife, the writer Victoria Mary Clarke.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Myself – why not?
The singer entered the plea to ‘avoid the inconvenience’ of a high profile court trial. Neither will do jail time or pay any fines
British rock icon Rod Stewart and his son have pleaded guilty to battery in an assault case stemming from a New Year’s Eve 2019 altercation with a security guard at an exclusive Florida hotel.
Court records released on Friday show that the singer and his son, Sean Stewart, 41, entered guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges of simple battery.
Continue reading...Rock star wins case against German woman who says her late husband bought the disc at a popular department store in the 80s
Eric Clapton has won a legal case against a 55-year-old German woman selling a bootleg live CD for €9.95 (£8.45), Deutsche Welle reports.
The woman, known as Gabriele P, claimed she was unaware that she was committing copyright infringement by listing the CD titled Eric Clapton – Live USA, which contains recordings of performances from the 1980s, on eBay. She told the court that the listing was removed after one day.
Continue reading...Adele, Ed Sheeran, Abba, Lana Del Rey and Drake all found success in 2021 by delivering more of the same – a result of how our chaotic lives, on and offline, are informing our taste
The biggest album launch of 2021 began with a social media statement tacitly assuring fans that nothing had changed. Adele was once more in a state of heartbreak – “a maze of absolute mess and inner turmoil … consumed by my own grief” – and that the contents of her album 30 would reflect that, as mired in romantic misery as its predecessors, 25 and 21. It was the musical equivalent, she said, of a friend who comes over “with a bottle of wine and a takeaway” to discuss the disastrous state of your love life.
The second-biggest album launch of 2021 was preceded by its creators proudly announcing they had written it “absolutely trend-blind”. Abba had traversed a considerable musical distance over the course of their original career, buffeted by the shifting musical trends of the 70s and early 80s – from the clompy Europop of their debut album to the sophisticated, chilly electronics of The Visitors, by way of glam and sleek disco – but Voyage would offer them preserved in amber, exactly as they were in the late 70s, unspoiled by any musical trends from the 40 years since their split.
Continue reading...Guardian readers from Scandinavia, the Philippines, Morocco and beyond explain their fandom, which has helped rejuvenate them, heal racial trauma and understand their identity
K-pop boy band BTS swept the American Music Awards last month, making history as the first Asian act to win artist of the year; they were also nominated for a Grammy for best pop duo/group performance for their single Butter.
The seven-member band has a huge global following and their fans, known as Army, are known for their passion and loyalty. Here Guardian readers, who are BTS fans, speak about why the band means so much to them.
Continue reading...The pop star told Howard Stern that she had the virus in August: ‘I want it to be clear that it is because of the vaccine I’m fine’
Billie Eilish has revealed that she had Covid-19 in August, and said that she felt sure she “would have died” had she not been vaccinated.
Appearing on Howard Stern’s US radio show on Monday, Eilish said: “The vaccine is fucking amazing and it also saved [her brother/musical collaborator] Finneas from getting it; it saved my parents from getting it; it saved my friends from getting it.”
Continue reading...