Carrie Battan

Still, social media consistently manages to shine a light on unexpected corners of music history—mostly on TikTok, where old songs are just as likely to become hits as new ones. During the depths of the pandemic, in 2020, a British teen-ager named Victoria Walker started producing instrumentals for a friend’s music on her laptop; she also began recording her own songs using GarageBand. Eventually, she uploaded them, under the name PinkPantheress, to her TikTok, where they attracted an unusual am…

“Renaissance,” the superstar performer’s new concert film, which draws on footage of a global tour Beyoncé commenced in May this year and completed in October, shows the artist making good on that promise. The tour issues from her 2022 album of the same name, a dance record born out of a need to escape the ennui and claustrophobia of the pandemic’s prime time. As a paean to underground house and disco scenes and queer communities of the eighties and nineties, the album might have been Beyoncé’s…

Novak, who is prone to self-narration, doubled back: “But then I’m, like, why do I feel the audience is owed a separation of my breasts?” Novak is forty-one, but she has a girlish face and a long-standing interest in elaborate skin-care rituals that, to an audience member, might make her look like the high-school version of herself she explores in the performance. “Get on Your Knees” is a ninety-minute show about fellatio, a description that might make people assume that Novak is yet another rau…

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As with childbirth, the humdrum or unpleasant realities of pregnancy are often smoothed over in popular culture. “She runs to the bathroom, she throws up once, and then, in the next scene, she’s in overalls painting a barn, like, ‘Yay! I can’t wait to meet you!’ ” Amy Schumer joked in her Netflix special “Growing,” from 2019. That special was filmed when Schumer was pregnant and suffering from an extreme and poorly understood version of morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum. Though the…

These days, Carmichael is less interested in keeping secrets. In fact, he is building an entire phase of his career around obsessively dragging skeletons into the light. In 2022, he released a quiet, artful standup special called “Rothaniel,” in which he came out as gay and talked about the revelation that his father had kept a second family secret for decades. For the past two months, HBO has been airing “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” an invigorating and discomfiting new series about the per…

This spring, Oppenheim released “Spermworld,” a documentary adaptation of a Times story about the sperm-donation black market. This film, too, is a series of portraits, and one of “Spermworld” ’s subjects is a single sixtysomething sperm donor named Steve who gives women sperm out of some do-gooder instinct gone astray. He expects nothing in return—until he forges a connection with one of the recipients, Rachel, many decades his junior, who clings onto the hope that she will get pregnant in spit…

“Teenage Dream” was emblematic of an early Obama era of colorful, hedonistic pop music made by women. Long before TikTok became a social-media phenomenon, the pop singer Kesha made her début, in 2009, with a single of the same name, a blaring electro-pop hit that minted Kesha—who, at the time, stylized her stage name as Ke$ha—as a heroically sloppy party girl, whose sing-rap voice was filtered through Auto-Tune. With stringy, unwashed hair, a nose piercing, and an affinity for experimental makeu…

The twenty-eight-year-old relishes his status as a “cancelled” comic. He also happens to be one of the most popular acts in the country.

The artist sings with wry, petulant specificity, whether she’s addressing a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, or that ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend.