New Orleans celebrates "7th Ward Pope"
Catch up quick: Historic New Orleans Collection genealogist Jari Honora has shared research into Pope Leo's background, which showed he has maternal grandparents from New Orleans who once identified as people of color.
Between the lines: The pope himself has not commented on his origins, which appear to have been a surprise to his brother, who told The New York Times that his family did not identify as Black.
But they also don't seem to have discussed it much. "It was never an issue," John Prevost told the newspaper.
What they're saying: At a Thursday night gala honoring Xavier University's centennial, attendees were often overheard exclaiming that, "He's one of us!"
Xavier is the nation's only historically Black and Catholic college.
Local social media also reacted accordingly to celebrate a pope " out tha 7th Ward."
There were memes of Popeyes fried chicken becoming "Pope Yes" fried chicken, with Dirty Coast noting that "When the smoke is white, your order's ready!"
In one image, the smoke of the Sistine Chapel billowed out in purple, green and gold.
AI-generated imagery contributed to a lot of the glee, including a picture of Pope Leo enjoying some gumbo and a platter of boiled crawfish.
One of our favorites is an AI-generated video of the pope buckjumping at a second-line. (See it below.)
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USA Today
4 hours ago
- USA Today
Beyoncé's final 'Cowboy Carter' concert draws A-list celebrities to Las Vegas
Beyoncé Knowles-Carter concluded her "Cowboy Carter" tour with a final performance in Las Vegas, drawing some of Hollywood's biggest names to Sin City for the occasion. The Grammy-winning singer kicked off her final concert at Allegiant Stadium in Vegas on July 26. The concert marked her last of two back-to-back shows at the stadium on her Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin' Circuit Tour. It also served as the last of her 32 stadium concerts across the U.S. and Europe. While celebrities have been showing up all tour long, the Las Vegas closer brought out some of the biggest names in one star-studded night. Of course, Beyoncé's core circle, including her husband, Jay-Z, her mom, Tina Knowles, and her dad, Mathew Knowles, were among those to attend the final shows. However, other attendees included some of biggest power players in the industry. Gayle King, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Kris Jenner attend Beyoncé's final show Before the show began, Gayle King shared photos from the venue alongside some famous friends — including Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Kris Jenner and Khloe Kardashian. 'Grand opening, grand closing!' she captioned the post. 'Here in Las Vegas with the cowboy crew to watch Beyoncé close out her historic Cowboy Carter tour!!' King, Oprah and Perry were amongst those to attend opening night in Los Angeles on April 28. Kerry Washington, Maya Randolph, Paul Thomas Anderson, more attend night 2 in Vegas Kerry Washington, who also posed for photos with King's crew, was in attendance for the final show. Other special guests included Maya Rudolph and director Paul Thomas Anderson. Fans also spotted actor Daniel Kaluuya at the show — to name a few. There were also a number of celebrities who attended the tour and the final show who are not listed or pictured. Beyoncé also filed the stage with some very special guests. During the show, she reunited with her former Destiny's Child members Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams as they performed some of their classic hits. 'Cowboy Carter' collaborator Shaboozey also joined her to perform their song 'Sweet Honey Buckin'' Adding to the surprises, her husband Jay-Z made joined her once again for one last memorable performance. Of course, Beyoncé first debuted her tour at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on April 28 with 39 songs on the set list. Her shows have been filled with family, fashion, different music genres, and most notably country music and cultural commentary. As fans know, she released her eighth studio album, "Cowboy Carter," in March 2024. It has since made history and broken multiple records. As Beyoncé's first country album, she deliberately featured country legends and emerging Black country artists alike. Follow Caché McClay, the USA TODAY Network's Beyoncé Knowles-Carter reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @cachemcclay.
Atlantic
4 hours ago
- Atlantic
Why No One Knows What's Happening Tonight
About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled due to an approaching nor'easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show's cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town? This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark's Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman's mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case's bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she'd recorded them. But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: 'New York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus' reads the top headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker 's Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month. From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves. As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today's critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise 'discovery,' they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we're missing. The listings were my lodestar. And that star's orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith. Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He'd gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation. Time Out 'was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,' Smith told me. 'Nobody said, 'Oh, that obscure thing that's happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that's too weird.' I was basically told, 'List what's interesting; list what people will want to know about.'' A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic's pick. 'I had the privilege,' he said, 'of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.' One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith. These listings weren't just a boon for artists like me—they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: 'Funny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.' In its heyday, the Voice 's newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance. Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile. The demise of listings is 'tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,' the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that 'the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out' to see a gig: 'The immediate danger is that artists play and people don't know about it.' Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it's harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great. The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward 'poptimism,' a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough! But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism. In the 21 years since Sanneh's essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today 's hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down— 501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it's easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices. Indeed, much of today's cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people's contributions to the common good solely by 'the market value of the goods or services they sell.' In other words, covering what's popular doesn't just serve journalism's economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it's no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities. A reader might object: Aren't you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can't hack it in today's algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles' White Album without Karlheinz Stockhausen's tape music, no Rosalía's Motomami without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support. To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith's great gifts as an editor. 'He crafted listings,' Giovetti told me, 'in such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.' You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire's founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and you've probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018. The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times. 'On any given day,' Chinen told me, 'there would be a review of a New York–based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe's Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That's the garden. That's the plant mix that existed.' How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life? In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. 'The phone has stopped ringing,' he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams–inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it's important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too. Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context. Spencer Kornhaber: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues What's to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren't left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders. The other solution—plausible or not—is for outlets such as the Times and The New Yorker to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can't be readily calculated on a balance sheet. For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He's now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, 'I never really stopped.' Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out does not exist, The New Yorker is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.
NBC News
5 hours ago
- NBC News
The dance sensation of the summer has people asking, 'Where them fans at?'
Black America's 2025 summer anthem may actually be a line dance steeped in African history and tradition. The catchy 'Boots on the Ground' song by South Carolina rapper 803Fresh seems to be everywhere — at picnics, reunions, front lawns, block parties, cruise ships and festivals — with droves of African Americans waving fans and chanting the viral phrase, 'Where them fans at?' The signature Southern Soul line dance song was released in December. It recently surged in popularity after everyday people and celebrities alike began donning cowboy outfits and performing the choreography for a TikTok challenge. The momentum has only continued building. 'Southern Soul music has been underground for years but this particular song brings the cowboy culture into a place where everyone can participate,' said Ramal 'The Hometown Heat' Brown, a former hip-hop disc jockey at 105.3 KJAMZ in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 'It brings a country feel to city life.' Some of those who participated in the viral 'Boots on the Ground' challenge, which got millions of views on social media, are former NBA star Shaquille O'Neal and first lady Michelle Obama. The official music video for the song, posted on YouTube two months ago, has been seen 12 million times. During an intermission at the Winter Park Jazz Festival in Colorado last weekend, a disc jockey joked that someone paid him $100 to play the song. And when he did, hundreds in attendance, regardless of race, found whatever little space was available on the vast, crowded lawn to take a spin. Others stood up to watch and learn it. Culture critic Blue Telusma credits the success of Beyoncé's 2024 album 'Cowboy Carter' with paving the way for 'Boots on the Ground.' 'Carter' won the Grammy Awards for album of the year and best country album by exploring and highlighting the overlooked contributions of Black people to music and culture. While some balked at Beyoncè's formal entry into country, Telusma said it was an instrumental step toward reclaiming the genre for people of color. 'Blacks, Mexicans and Latinos have a deep history in cowboy culture that we often don't get credit for, and the same ancestral DNA that I suspect that Beyoncé tapped into by doing 'Cowboy Carter' is what line dancing means in the Black community,' Telusma said. Traditionally, for the ancestors and enslaved Africans who built America, line dancing was a form of spiritual communal dancing. 'It was a way for people during really nasty times to get together in a barn or a speakeasy and dance as a collective,' Telusma said. Some say the way 'Boots' sounds allows for an intergenerational appreciation of the song. Part of the song is derived from trail-ride culture, where Black Southerners would have cookouts before mounting their horses while dressed in vests and colorful cowboy attire and ride through different neighborhoods to show off their livestock, said 37-year-old Denver resident China Scroggins. She also agrees the song is tied to African ancestral traditions. 'There's something very culturally and historically sound about the way Black Americans and their ancestors moved in order to overcome,' said Scroggins, who taught herself the dance after watching several viral videos earlier this year. 'The song came out when people needed to hear it coming off of a presidential election — being in step with each other. And the song and dance was easy to adapt, and it was fun.' Radio-friendly line dances like the 'Electric Slide' in the 1980s and later the 'Cupid Shuffle' and 'The Wobble' have long been a part of Black culture.
