Actualités

Barry Michael Cooper, the screenwriter behind the influential “Harlem Trilogy” of films New Jack City, Sugar Hill and Above the Rim and the man who coined the term New Jack Swing, has died. He was 66.

Cooper died in Baltimore, his friend the writer and filmmaker and former The Village Voice colleague Nelson George confirmed on his Substack. A cause of death was not immediately available.

After starting his career as a journalist in the 1980s, writing important pieces for The Village Voice and Spin Magazine, Cooper transitioned to penning screenplays drawing on the crime and culture of his native New York. His Harlem Trilogy of crime dramas were among the definitive Black films of the 1990s, and became hugely influential on hip hop music and culture.

Born in Harlem, Cooper grew up in the Little Washington Heights neighborhood and also lived in Esplanade Gardens. In interviews, he has spoken of Harlem’s rich literary,...

Please Allow This Asian American music writer to articulate this at the level it deserves: Egregious racism and misogyny have a long history in rock & roll — from those on the industry side who have appropriated Black artists’ work to those at the top of the publications who dictated what has been featured. The gatekeepers have always been a boys’ club — specifically a white boys’ club.

Among the earliest influential U.S. music magazines, Rolling Stone was helmed by Jann Wenner from 1967 to 2018; Barry Kramer launched Creem in 1969 and published it...

It took Guns N’ Roses less than a year to go from hard-rock paupers, targeted by L.A. street urchins with stuttering taunts of “Welcome to the jungle, you’re gonna die” (or, worse, “feel my serpentine?”), to become the Most Dangerous Band in the World. They were unprepared for fame. Their debut, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction, was crude and rude; its sci-fi cover illustration depicted a sexual assault, its lyrics reveled in misogyny and heroin abuse, one song (“Rocket Queen”) contained literal audio pornography, as a woman pants while...

The election is days away. No one knows if there will be an orderly turnover or the disorderly donut hole of malevolent maneuverings. The nation is divided and civil unrest is in the air. This follows a summer which was prophetically and perennially summed up in “Trouble Every Day,” a song from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s 1966 debut album Freak Out!

“Wednesday I watched the riot,” Zappa sings on the song he wrote after seeing the Watts Uprising of 1965. “I seen the cops out on the street. Watched ’em throwin’ rocks and stuff, and chokin’ in the heat. … Watched while everybody on his street would take a turn to stomp n’ smash n’ bash n’ crash n’ slash n’ bust n’ burn.”

These and similar scenes were repeated during the global George Floyd protests in 2020, along with charges of accompanying police brutality.

Long before the #BlackLivesMatter movement highlighted white privileged compliance,...

The former Epix executive who was indicted in 2016 for stealing nearly $8 million from the premium cabler will learn his fate Friday when he is sentenced by a federal judge in Manhattan.

Prosecutors are seeking a prison term of four to five years for Emil Rensing, the former chief digital officer of Epix. Rensing, 44, last year pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud.

Prosecutors described Rensing’s scheme as “a sophisticated and calculated fraud” that involved Rensing setting up phony vendors, submitting bogus invoices to Epix for work that was never performed and signing the names of some of his former business associates to invoices without their knowledge. He was originally charged in April 2016 with one count of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Rensing was fired from Epix in August 2015 after executives became suspicious of billing practices in his department.

Rensing’s attorneys have asked U.S. District Judge...