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Jonathan “Hovain” Hylton, who was recently honored as one of Billboard’s 2022 R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players, has died.
“It is with deep regret that we message to all family, friends and colleagues that Jonathan ‘Hovain’ Hylton passed away while at his home on Friday, November 25. He was a beloved and devoted father, husband, son, brother and a proud Brooklyn representative,” read a statement posted Saturday (Nov. 26) on Hylton’s verified social media accounts.
The statement continued, “We’d like to thank all of his close friends for all of the love and support that you have shown during this difficult time. We ask that you all continue to keep his family in your prayers and respect their privacy at this time.”
A cause of death has not been disclosed.
On Friday morning, Hylton had last tweeted, “Good morning and thank GOD for another day,” a message he had been putting out into the world daily.
Hylton, a Brooklyn native who was a vp at Cinematic Music Group, was named alongside founder Jonnyshipes on this year’s R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players list.
“I’ve always prided myself on just being a good person and a hard worker. Never was big on awards. The way I came in this game was the independent route so I always knew caring too much about the politics wasn’t going to help me. But it feels good to be honored as one of Billboard’s Power Players alongside my brother and partner @jonnyshipes,” Hylton wrote on Instagram on Nov. 17. He added, “I think the biggest lesson is this is you don’t have to be a sucka or do corny s— to be recognized. Just be a good person and do your job and God will make the rest happen on his time.”
Throughout his career Hylton helmed projects for prominent New York rappers including Cam’ron, Styles P and Lloyd Banks, and alongside Jonnyshipes at Cinematic Music Group worked with artists including T-Pain and Flipp Dinero.
Hylton was also a professor at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, where he taught “The Business of Music,” an eight-week course offering students in-depth knowledge on publishing deals, business positions needed for an artist’s success and more.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to come from where I come from and to be asked to teach at such a fine institute,” Hylton told Billboard in 2021, when the course launched. “To share my love for music with the young minds who are looking to learn [will be a great experience].”
The music community mourned the death of Hylton on Saturday.
“Maaannnn we lost my brother in drip @hovain love you brother you always showed nothing but love and positivity. My condolences to your family,” Fat Joe wrote on Instagram. “Till we meet again RIP.”
“Damn Hov… Rest Up… Appreciate your knowledge & your positive energy… May God Bless your family with peace. Love & Light from my family to yours. Long Live Hovain,’ T.I. wrote on Twitter.
“Hovain had just hit me up about doing some music with lloyd banks,” Hit-Boy tweeted. “God bless his family.”
Charles Koppelman, former music executive and Martha Stewart chairman, died on Friday (Nov. 25). He was 82. A cause of death was not given at the time.
His son, showrunner Brian Koppelman, announced the loss on his social media, saying, “I’ll write more about my dad, Charles Koppelman, when I can. But the only thing that matters is how much I loved him. And how much he taught me about every single thing that matters.”
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The Billions co-creator continued, “He lived exactly the life he wanted to live. And he spent his last days surrounded by those he loved the most. Pop, thank you.”
Koppelman began his career in entertainment as a member of musical trio The Ivy Three, which had a Top 10 hit in 1960 called “Yogi.” Shortly after, the singer and his bandmate, Don Rubin, joined Aldon Music’s songwriting staff alongside Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.
From there, they went on to form Koppelman and Rubin Associates, an entertainment company that signed The Lovin’ Spoonful the same year it opened. When Commonwealth United purchased the company in 1968, the two business partners stayed on to run it, before Koppelman moved on to CBS Records where he held multiple positions. While there, Koppelman signed acts like Billy Joel, Dave Mason, Janis Ian, Journey and Phoebe Snow.
In 1975, he was ready for another change, creating The Entertainment Company with Martin Bandier and Bandier’s father-in-law, New York real estate developer Samuel LeFrak. Together, they administered and promoted song catalogs, as well as produced iconic artists like Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, Diana Ross and Cher. A few years later, his son, Brian, discovered Tracy Chapman in college and introduced her to his father, who then gave her a record deal.
Koppelman, Bandier and Stephen C. Swid took things to the next level in 1986 when they formed SBK Entertainment World, Inc., and bought 250,000 songs owned by CBS for $125 million. The company eventually became one of the biggest independent music publishers, playing a major role in the careers of Michael Bolton, Robbie Robertson, New Kids on the Block, Grayson Hugh, Icehouse and more.
In 1989, Koppelman and Bandier create a partnership with EMI Music Worldwide and begin their own label, SBK Records. One year later, they landed their first platinum album with Technotronic’s Pump Up the Jam. They went on to sign talent like Jesus Jones, Wilson Phillips, Waterfront and Vanilla Ice, to name a few.
Koppelman remained in the music business for quite a few years before becoming the chairman of Steve Madden in 2000, leading the company while its founder served jail time for securities fraud. In 2005, Koppelman moved on to Marth Stewart Living Omnimedia, where he also served as chairman.
He’s survived by his son Brian, daughter Jenny Koppelman Hutt and his wife, Gerri Kyhill Koppelman.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Oscar, Golden Globe and two-time Grammy winning singer-actress Irene Cara, who starred and sang the title cut from the 1980 hit movie Fame and then belted out the era-defining hit “Flashdance … What a Feeling” from 1983′s Flashdance, has died. She was 63.
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Her publicist, Judith A. Moose, announced the news on social media, writing that a cause of death was “currently unknown.” Moose also confirmed the death to an Associated Press reporter on Saturday (Nov. 26). Cara died at her home in Florida. The exact day of her death was not disclosed.
“Irene’s family has requested privacy as they process their grief,” Moose wrote. “She was a beautifully gifted soul whose legacy will live forever through her music and films.”
This is the absolute worst part of being a publicist. I can’t believe I’ve had to write this, let alone release the news. Please share your thoughts and memories of Irene. I’ll be reading each and every one of them and know she’ll be smiling from Heaven. She adored her fans. – JM pic.twitter.com/TsC5BwZ3fh— Irene Cara (@Irene_Cara) November 26, 2022
During her career, Cara had three Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including “Breakdance,” “Out Here On My Own,” “Fame” and “Flashdance … What A Feeling,” which spent six weeks at No. 1. She was behind some of the most joyful, high-energy pop anthems of the early ’80s.
She first came to prominence among the young actors playing performing arts high schoolers in Alan Parker’s Fame, with co-stars Debbie Allen, Paul McCrane and Anne Mear. Cara played Coco Hernandez, a striving dancer who endures all manner of deprivations, including a creepy nude photo shoot.
“How bright our spirits go shooting out into space, depends on how much we contributed to the earthly brilliance of this world. And I mean to be a major contributor!” she says in the movie.
Cara sang on the soaring title song with the chorus — “Remember my name/I’m gonna live forever/I’m gonna learn how to fly/I feel it coming together/People will see me and cry” — which would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for best original song. She also sang on “Out Here on My Own,” “Hot Lunch Jam” and “I Sing the Body Electric.”
Three years later, she and the songwriting team of Flashdance — music by Giorgio Moroder, lyrics by Keith Forsey and Cara — was accepting the Oscar for best original song for “Flashdance … What a Feeling.”
The movie starred Jennifer Beals as a steel-town girl who dances in a bar at night and hopes to attend a prestigious dance conservatory. It included the hit song “Maniac,” featuring Beals’ character leaping, spinning, stomping her feet and the slow-burning theme song.
“There aren’t enough words to express my love and my gratitude,” Cara told the Oscar crowd in her thanks. “And last but not least, a very special gentlemen who I guess started it all for me many years ago. To Alan Parker, wherever you may be tonight, I thank him.”
The New York-born Cara began her career on Broadway, with small parts in short-lived shows, although a musical called The Me Nobody Knows ran over 300 performances. She toured in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar as Mary Magdalene in the mid-1990s and a tour of the musical Flashdance toured 2012-14 with her songs.
She also created the all-female band Irene Cara Presents Hot Caramel and put out a double CD with the single “How Can I Make You Luv Me.” Her movie credits include Sparkle and D.C. Cab.
Geoff Wonfor, a Grammy-winning British filmmaker who directed the Beatles’ acclaimed “Anthology” documentary series and worked on the 1980s music program “The Tube” as well as several projects with Paul McCartney, has died at age 73.
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His death was confirmed Tuesday by daughter Sam Wonfor, who said he died in Newcastle, where he grew up. Additional details were not immediately available.
Released in the mid-1990s, “The Beatles Anthology” was an authorized, multimedia project that included an eight-part documentary, three double albums and a coffee table book. Wonfor spent 4 1/2 years on the film, which combined archival footage with new interviews with the then-three surviving Beatles (McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, who died in 2001). Wonfor’s challenges included weaving in commentary from John Lennon, who had been murdered in 1980.
“He was very vocal (in interviews),” Wonfor told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “I hit on the idea of listening to his interviews that were done … getting all the pertinent questions and answers to any year we were doing (in the documentary) and then pose the exact same question to the other three Beatles, so it looked like the four of them were answering the same questions, which of course they were.”
The Anthology helped renew worldwide obsession in a band that had hardly been forgotten and brought Wonfor and co-director Bob Smeaton a Grammy in 1997 for best long form music video.
Wonfor also directed the McCartney videos “In the World Tonight” and “Young Boy” and a McCartney concert video from the Cavern Club, the Liverpool venue where the Beatles played many of their early shows. He was on hand, too, for a Beatles “reunion” from the 1990s — a video of “Real Love,” a song left unfinished by Lennon that the remaining Beatles completed and recorded.
His other credits included “Band Aid 20,” a documentary about the anniversary re-recording of the British charity song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and “Sunday for Sammy,” a tribute to the late British actor Sammy Johnson.
Wonfor had been prominent in British entertainment since the 1980s, when he directed a handful of episodes of “The Tube” and made a documentary about “Shanghai Surprise,” a feature film produced by Harrison and starring Madonna and Sean Penn. His work with Harrison would unexpectedly lead to the biggest undertaking of his career.
“I was at my dad’s and it was Paul McCartney who rang up and he says, ‘Hello there, you’re alright’? And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’” Wonfor explained during a 2018 appearance at the Newcastle Film Festival.
“He said, ‘I was talking to a mate of yours last night.’ I went, ‘Who the hell does he know that I know?’ He says, ‘A little guy called George Harrison.’ … And he says, ‘Anyway,’ and we talked long into the night and he says, ‘We want to do a history of the Beatles and you are that man.’”
Wilko Johnson, the longtime guitarist for British blues rockers Dr. Feelgood has died at 75. Johnson’s family confirmed the news of his passing on Wednesday morning (Nov. 23), writing, “This is the announcement we never wanted to make, & we do so with a very heavy heart: Wilko Johnson has died. He passed away at home on Monday 21st November. Thank you for respecting the family’s privacy at this very sad time. RIP Wilko Johnson.”
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Johnson (born John Wilkinson) was born in 1947 and raised on Canvey Island, a bleak industrial oil town in England’s River Thames estuary and he worked as a schoolteacher before forming the long-running group with some hometown friends who’d been performing as The Pigboy Charlie Band. After changing their name — inspired by a beloved Johnny Kidd and the Pirates cover of a Piano Red blues standard — Dr. Feelgood began playing gigs in 1971, earning early praise for Johnson’s distinctive choppy, chugging fingerpicking guitar sound and singer Lee Brilleaux’s growly vocals on such favorites as “Roxette,” “Back in the Night” and covers of blues standards “Bonie Moronie” and Willie Dixon’s “You’ll Be Mine.”
Though they bristled at the term “pub rock,” the band were known for their raucous, energetic performances, best captured on their UK No. 1 live album 1976’s Stupidity. The group — whose albums were a mix of covers and blues standards along with originals largely written by Johnson during his tenure — has released more than a dozen albums to date; Johnson only appeared on their first three studio efforts (Down By the Jetty (1975), Malpractice (1975) and Sneakin’ Suspicion (1977) and Stupidity, before splitting from the group in 1977 amid reported conflicts with singer Brilleaux.
Johnson went on to form the bands the Solid Senders, as well as the Wilko Johnson Band, before briefly joining English pub punker Ian Dury’s band, the Blockheads, in 1980. He continued to perform and record with his eponymous band through the 2000s, releasing more a dozen albums and EPs, while also occasionally taking on acting roles, including a quirky slot as mute executioner Ser Ilyn Payne on four episodes of Game of Thrones. Between his signature slashing style and thousand-yard stare on stage, Johnson is credited with influencing a generation of performers in British punk and post-punk bands (Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, The Jam, The Clash) who sometimes mimicked his bug-eyed look and quirky style on stage.
After cancelling a show last minute in Nov. 2012 due to illness, Johnson shared that he was diagnosed with late stage pancreatic cancer in Jan. 2013, opting to skip chemotherapy after doctors told him he had less than a year to live. He released what was deemed his “final” album Going Back Home with the Who’s Roger Daltrey in March 2014 and then revealed that he had been misdiagnosed and was cancer-free later that year after undergoing a lengthy surgery to remove a massive tumor in his abdomen.
Among those paying tribute were fellow British rocker Billy Bragg, who said that Johnson was a “precursor of punk. His guitar playing was angry and angular, but his presence – twitchy, confrontational, out of control – was something we’d never beheld before in UK pop. Rotten, Strummer and Weller learned a lot from his edgy demeanour. He does it right RIP.” Blondie guitarist Chris Stein also weighed in, writing, “I frequently remind people how Dr Feelgood was an influence on the early New York and CBGBs music scene. Great guitarist and performer.”
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page also paid homage to the player whose unique style was beloved among his fellow six-stringers. “I’m sad to hear today of the passing of Wilko Johnson, the Dr Feelgood guitarist and singer/songwriter. I saw Wilko perform at Koko in Camden in May 2013 and the atmosphere was electric. This show was originally billed as his farewell tour, but, thankfully, he continued performing and thrilling crowds until recently. I really admired him and we’ll all miss him. RIP Wilko.”
Johnson continued playing shows until just weeks before his passing and at press time no cause of death had been revealed.
Read the family’s death announcement and see some tributes to Johnson an d aclassic 1975 performance below.
This is the announcement we never wanted to make, & we do so with a very heavy heart: Wilko Johnson has died. He passed away at home on Monday 21st November. Thank you for respecting the family’s privacy at this very sad time. RIP Wilko Johnson.(Image: Leif Laaksonen) pic.twitter.com/1cRqyi9b9X— Wilko Johnson (@wilkojohnson) November 23, 2022
I’m sad to hear today of the passing of Wilko Johnson, the Dr Feelgood guitarist and singer/songwriter.I saw Wilko perform at Koko in Camden in May 2013 and the atmosphere was electric. This show was originally billed as his farewell tour pic.twitter.com/M1sQIEe4mm— Jimmy Page (@JimmyPage) November 23, 2022
Wilko Johnson was a precursor of punk. His guitar playing was angry and angular, but his presence – twitchy, confrontational, out of control – was something we’d never beheld before in UK pop. Rotten, Strummer and Weller learned a lot from his edgy demeanour. He does it right RIP pic.twitter.com/ukoJ69r41h— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) November 23, 2022
Very sad to hear Wilko Johnson has died. His unique, wired playing & stage presence thrilled & inspired many guitarists, myself included. When I interviewed him a few years ago, he was bright, thoughtful & an astonishing story teller. His presence will be felt for many more years pic.twitter.com/x6ZzQWojXp— Alex Kapranos (@alkapranos) November 23, 2022
Throwback Wednesday: For obvious sad reasons, a day early this week. Following today’s awful news of the passing of the legendary RnB guitar hero Wilko Johnson, here he is with his old friend & flatmate JJ a few years ago. Fly straight Wilko, fond adieu RIP x pic.twitter.com/bKmbxNhmuM— The Stranglers (Official) (@StranglersSite) November 23, 2022
Rest in Power Mr Wilko Johnson – you fought the good fight, and had a damn good run. when they said it was over, you came back stronger. cheers mate 🍻 pic.twitter.com/3vXuT8ixtk— anton newcombe (@antonnewcombe) November 23, 2022
Sixty-six years ago, Jerry Lee Lewis, who died Oct. 28 at the age of 87, shook America’s nerves and rattled its brains. The Dec. 22, 1956, issue of Billboard savored his debut single, “Crazy Arms,” as a “flavor-packed disk,” and the magazine went on to track the rise of “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” both of which scored on the country, R&B and pop charts all at once. And as Elvis Presley turned his attention to Hollywood and then to the U.S. Army, Lewis seemed poised to vie for The King’s throne until a British journalist learned that the girl accompanying him on his U.K. tour was his third wife — as well as his 13-year-old cousin.
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‘Balls’ Out
Lewis raised hair as well as hell. The Oct. 28, 1957, Billboard noted that his EP The Great Ball of Fire sported “a photo of the cat with the wild hair flying in the breeze” and predicted it would “sell fast.” That fire didn’t fizzle: The May 5, 1958, issue reported that “Shakin’ ” had remained a jukebox hit for months thanks to “current teeners who still flip over the music with the big beat.”
‘An Open Letter’
In May 1958, after word had spread that he had married his 13-year-old cousin, Lewis, 22, was forced to cancel his U.K. tour. In the June 9, 1958, Billboard, the singer bought a full-page ad to pioneer a pop culture tradition: the half-apology. “I confess that my life has been stormy. I confess further that since I have become a public figure, I sincerely wanted to be worthy of the decent admiration of all the people, young and old, that admired or liked what talent (if any) I have,” he wrote. “I can’t control the press or the sensationalism that these people will go to to get a scandal started to sell papers.” One big DJ backed him up. “Jerry’s a Southern boy,” Alan Freed said, “and Tennessee boys get married quite young.”
Sun Makes ‘Light’
A week later, Billboard reviewed Lewis’ New York club debut in less than glowing terms. “Showmanship is not simply a matter of banging a piano [and] stomping around stage,” griped the June 16, 1958, issue. The following edition (June 23, 1958) reported that Sun Records head Sam Phillips was servicing DJs a “cute” promotional disc, “The Return of Jerry Lee.” “It makes light of the whole British episode,” Phillips explained, “which is the way we think the whole thing should be treated anyway.”
The Killer Beats Death
Lewis found a second life in Nashville, scoring four country No. 1s between 1968 and 1972. His hard living caught up with him, however, and in 1981, he was put in intensive care and underwent stomach surgery in Memphis. Lewis pulled through and performed at the Grand Ole Opry on Dec. 3. Almost a quarter-century after Billboard panned his New York concert, the Dec. 25, 1981, issue called his return to action in Nashville “an occasion tinged with awe.” The verdict: “He’s nothing short of mesmerizing.”
Biopic Blues
A New York preview of the Dennis Quaid-starring biopic Great Balls of Fire! was followed by a midnight jam with punk purveyors John Doe and Mick Jones backing Lewis, according to the July 8, 1989, issue. Even as an elder statesman, though, Lewis stirred up trouble: In the June 24, 1989, Billboard, his own manager, Jerry Schilling, called him out for “negative and damaging” statements about Presley to another outlet.
Pablo Milanés, the Latin Grammy-winning balladeer who helped found Cuba’s “nueva trova” movement and toured the world as a cultural ambassador for Fidel Castro’s revolution, has died in Spain, where he had been under treatment for blood cancer. He was 79.
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One of the most internationally famous Cuban singer-songwriters, he recorded dozens of albums and hits like “Yolanda,” “Yo Me Quedo” (I’m Staying) and “Amo Esta Isla” (I Love This Island) during a career that lasted more than five decades.
“The culture in Cuba is in mourning for the death of Pablo Milanes,” Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz tweeted Monday night (Nov. 21). Milanés’ representatives issued a statement saying he had died early Tuesday in Madrid. In early November, he announced he was being hospitalized and canceled concerts.
Pablo Milanés was born Feb. 24, 1943, in the eastern city of Bayamo, in what was then Oriente province, the youngest of five siblings born to working-class parents. His musical career began with him singing in, and often winning, local TV and radio contests. His family moved to the capital and he studied for a time at the Havana Musical Conservatory during the 1950s, but he credited neighborhood musicians rather than formal training for his early inspiration, along with trends from the United States and other countries.
In the early ’60s he was in several groups including Cuarteto del Rey (the King’s Quartet), composing his first song in 1963: “Tu Mi Desengano,” (You, My Disillusion), which spoke of moving on from a lost love. “Your kisses don’t matter to me because I have a new love/to whom I promise you I will give my life,” the tune goes.
In 1970 he wrote the seminal Latin American love song “Yolanda,” which is still an enduring favorite everywhere from Old Havana’s tourist cafes to Mexico City cantinas. Spanish newspaper El Pais asked Milanés in 2003 how many women he had flirted with by saying they inspired the song. “None,” he responded, laughing. “But many have told me: ‘My child is the product of ‘Yolanda.’”
Milanés supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution but was nevertheless targeted by authorities during the early years of Fidel Castro’s government, when all manner of “alternative” expression was highly suspect. Milanés was reportedly harassed for wearing his hair in an afro, and was given compulsory work detail for his interest in foreign music.
Those experiences did not dampen his revolutionary fervor, however, and he began to incorporate politics into his songwriting, collaborating with musicians such as Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola. The three are considered the founders of the Cuban “nueva trova,” a usually guitar-based musical style tracing to the ballads that troubadours composed during the island’s wars of independence. Infused with the spirit of 1960s American protest songs, the nueva trova uses musical storytelling to highlight social problems.
Milanés and Rodríguez in particular became close, touring the world’s stages as cultural ambassadors for the Cuban Revolution, and bonding during boozy sessions. “If Silvio Rodríguez and I got together, the rum was always there,” Milanés told El Pais in 2003. “We were always three, not two.”
Milanés was friendly with Castro, critical of U.S. foreign policy and for a time even a member of the communist government’s parliament. He considered himself loyal to the revolution and spoke of his pride at serving Cuba.
“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker,” Milanés once said, according to The New York Times. “I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”
In 1973, Milanés recorded “Versos Sencillos,” which turned poems by Cuban Independence hero José Martí into songs. Another composition became a kind of rallying call for the political left of the Americas: “Song for Latin American Unity,” which praised Castro as the heir of Martí and South American liberation hero Simon Bolívar, and cast the Cuban Revolution as a model for other nations.
In 2006, when Castro stepped down as president due to a life-threatening illness, Milanés joined other prominent artists and intellectuals in voicing their support for the government. He promised to represent Castro and Cuba “as this moment deserves: with unity and courage in the presence of any threat or provocation.”
Yet he was unafraid to speak his mind and occasionally advocated publicly for more freedom on the island. In 2010 he backed a dissident hunger striker who was demanding the release of political prisoners. Cuba’s aging leaders “are stuck in time,” Milanés told Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “History should advance with new ideas and new men.”
The following year, as the island was enacting economic changes that would allow greater free-market activity, he lobbied for President Raul Castro to do more. “These freedoms have been seen in small doses, and we hope that with time they will grow,” Milanés told The Associated Press.
Milanés disagreed without dissenting, prodded without pushing, hewing to Fidel Castro’s notorious 1961 warning to Cuba’s intellectual class: “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.”
“I disagree with many things in Cuba, and everyone knows it,” Milanés once said.
Ever political even when his bushy afro had given way to more conservatively trimmed, gray, thinning locks, in 2006 he contributed the song “Exodo” (Exodus), about missing friends who have departed for other lands, to the album “Somos Americans” (We Are Americans), a compilation of U.S. and Latin American artists’ songs about immigration.
Rodríguez and Milanés had a falling out in the 1980s for reasons that were unclear and were barely on speaking terms, though they maintained a mutual respect and Rodríguez collaborated musically with Milanés’ daughter. Milanés sang in the 1980′s album Amo esta isla that “I am from the Caribbean and could never walk on terra firma;” nevertheless, he divided most of his time between Spain and Mexico in later years.
By his own count he underwent more than 20 leg surgeries.
Milanés won two Latin Grammys in 2006 — best singer-songwriter album for “Como un Campo de Maiz” (Like a Cornfield) and best traditional tropical album for AM/PM, Lineas Paralelas (AM/PM, Parallel lines), a collaboration with Puerto Rican salsa singer Andy Montanez.
He also won numerous Cuban honors including the Alejo Carpentier medal in 1982 and the National Music Prize in 2005, and the 2007 Haydee Santamaria medal from the Casa de las Americas for his contributions to Latin American culture.
George Lois, the hard-selling, charismatic advertising man and designer who fashioned some of the most daring magazine images of the 1960s and popularized such catchphrases and brand names as “I Want My MTV” and “Lean Cuisine,” has died. He was 91.
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Lois’ son, the photographer Luke Lois, said he died “peacefully” Friday (Nov. 18) at his home in Manhattan.
Nicknamed the “Golden Greek” and later (to his displeasure) an “Original Mad Man,” George Lois was among a wave of advertisers who launched the “Creative Revolution” that jolted Madison Avenue and the world beyond in the late 1950s and ’60s. He was boastful and provocative, willing and able to offend, and was a master of finding just the right image or words to capture a moment or create a demand.
His Esquire magazine covers, from Muhammad Ali posing as the martyr Saint Sebastian to Andy Warhol sinking in a sea of Campbell’s tomato soup, defined the hyper spirit of the ’60s as much as Norman Rockwell’s idealized drawings for the Saturday Evening Post summoned an earlier era. As an ad man, he devised breakthrough strategies for Xerox and Stouffer’s and helped an emerging music video channel in the 1980s by suggesting ads featuring Mick Jagger and other rock stars demanding, with mock-petulance, “I Want My MTV!”
Lois boiled it down to what he called the “Big Idea,” crystallizing “the unique virtues of a product and searing it into people’s minds.” He was inducted into numerous advertising and visual arts halls of fame, and in 2008 his Esquire work was added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Martin Scorsese, Tina Brown and Graydon Carter were among his admirers.
His legacy was vast, although the actual dimensions are disputed. His claims to developing the 1960s “I Want My Maypo” breakfast ads and to inspiring the creation of New York magazine have been widely contradicted. Some former Esquire colleagues would allege that he exaggerated his role at the expense of other contributors, such as Carl Fischer, who photographed many of the magazine’s famous covers. But his overpowering energy and confidence were well recorded.
In her memoir Basic Black, former USA Today publisher Cathie Black recalled bringing in Lois in the early 1980s to propose a new advertising approach for a publication that struggled at first over how to identify itself. Lois’ idea was to champion USA Today’s dual appeal as a newspaper and magazine, proposing the slogan, “A lot of people are saying USA Today is neither fish nor fowl. They’re right!” Before a gathering of the publication’s, including founder Al Neuharth, Lois gave an Oscar-worthy performance, Black wrote, “bounding in like a 6-foot-3 teenager hopped up on Red Bull.”
“He flung his jacket to the floor, tore off his tie, then flashed one prototype ad after another, prancing around the room and keeping up a running monologue sprinkled with jokes and profanity. It was epic, almost scary. I was thrilled. When he was finished, the room sat absolutely silent.” All eyes turned to Neuharth, who sat “absolutely still, his expression hidden behind his dark aviator glasses.” Neuharth paused, removed his glasses and smiled. “We’ve got it,” he said.
Lois’ longtime wife, Rosemary Lewandowski Lois, died in September. A son, Harry Joseph Lois, died in 1978.
Lois, the son of Greek immigrants, was born in New York City in 1931 and would cite the racism of his Irish neighborhood for his drive “to awaken, to disturb, to protest.” He liked to say that a successful advertiser absorbed as many influences as possible, and he prided himself on his knowledge of everything from sports to ballet. He was a compulsive drawer and for much of his life made weekly visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He enrolled in Pratt Institute, soon met his future wife and eloped with her before either had graduated. After serving in the Army during the Korean War, he joined the advertising and promotion department of CBS and in 1960 helped found the advertising agency Papert Koenig Lois. Two years later he was recruited by Esquire editor Harold Hayes and remained until 1972, the same year Hayes left.
Esquire was a prime venue for the so-called New Journalism of the 1960s, nonfiction stories with a literary approach, and the magazine would publish such celebrated pieces as Gay Talese’s portrait of Frank Sinatra and Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” But to read the words, you had to buy the magazine, and Lois’ covers launched countless conversations.
For a cover story on “The New American Woman,” he featured a naked model folded into a garbage can. A notorious 1970 cover showed a grinning Lt. William Calley, the serviceman later found guilty of murdering unarmed civilians in the My Lai Massacre, with his arms around a pair of Vietnamese children, two other kids behind him.
In the mid-1970s, Lois was among the public figures who led efforts to free the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter from prison. Carter’s conviction for murder was later overturned, and he was released in 1985. Lois also wrote several books and was featured in the 2014 documentary about Esquire titled Smiling Through the Apocalypse.
Interest in Lois was renewed through the popularity of the AMC series Mad Men, but he was not flattered, writing in his book Damn Good Advice that the show was “nothing more than a soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up martinis, and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising.”
“Besides,” he added, “when I was in my 30s, I was better-looking than Don Draper.”
Ned Rorem, the prolific Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning musician known for his vast output of compositions and for his barbed and sometimes scandalous prose, died Friday (Nov. 18) at 99.
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The news was confirmed by a publicist for his longtime music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, who said he died of natural causes at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The handsome, energetic artist produced a thousand-work catalog ranging from symphonies and operas to solo instrumental, chamber and vocal music, in addition to 16 books. He also contributed to the score for the Al Pacino-starring film Panic in Needle Park.
Time magazine once called Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs,” and he was notable for his hundreds of compositions for the solo human voice. The poet and librettist J.D. McClatchy, writing in The Paris Review, described him as “an untortured artist and dashing narcissist.”
His music was mostly tonal, though very much modern, and Rorem didn’t hesitate to aim his printed words at other prominent contemporaries who espoused the dissonant avant-garde, like Pierre Boulez.
“If Russia had Stalin and Germany had Hitler, France still has Pierre Boulez,” Rorem once wrote.
He had a basic motto for songwriting: “Write gracefully for the voice — that is, make the voice line as seen on paper have the arched flow which singers like to interpret.”
Rorem won the 1976 Pulitzer for his “Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra.” The 1989 Grammy for outstanding orchestral recording went to The Atlanta Symphony for Rorem’s “String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles.”
His 1962 “Poems of Love and the Rain” is a 17-song cycle set to texts by American poets; the same text is set twice, in a contrasting way.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem was the son of C. Rufus Rorem, whose ideas in the 1930s were the basis for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance plans and who turned to Quaker philosophy, raising his son as a pacifist.
The younger Rorem went to day school at the elite University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. By the time he was 10, his piano teacher introduced him to Debussy and Ravel, which “changed my life forever,” said the composer whose music was tinged with French lyricism.
He went on to study at the American Conservatory of Music in Hammond, Indiana, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, then the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York.
As a young composer in the 1950s, he lived abroad for eight years, mostly in Paris but with two years in Morocco.
The Paris Diary covers his stay there and is filled with famous names of people he met — Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Balthus, Salvador Dali, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Man Ray, and James Baldwin. The late writer Janet Flanner called it “worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet.” Rorem himself said his text was “filled with drunkenness, sex, and the talk of my betters.”
His literary self-portrait continued through 1985, contained in The New York Diary, The Later Diaries and The Nantucket Diary.
“His essays are composed like scores,” McClatchy once wrote of him. “The same hallmarks we listen for in Rorem’s music will be found in his essays a well: indirection, instinctive grace, intellectual aplomb, a lyrical line.”
Some were appalled by Rorem’s notorious accounting of his relationships with four big-name men in music: Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson. He also outed a few others.
But most of his private life was centered around James Holmes, an organist and choir director with whom he lived for three decades in New York City. Holmes died in 1999. A statement from Boosey & Hawkes said Rorem died surrounded by friends and family and is survived by six nieces and nephews and eleven grandnieces and grandnephews.
Drawing on his upbringing, Rorem based his Quaker Reader — a collection of pieces for organ — on Quaker texts.
As for his non-musical writings, he said: “My music is a diary no less compromising than my prose. A diary nevertheless differs from a musical composition in that it depicts the moment, the writer’s present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later, could emerge quite otherwise.”
Rorem’s essays on music appear in anthologies titled Setting the Tone, Music from the Inside Out, and Music and People.
“Why do I write music?” he once asked. “Because I want to hear it — it’s as simple as that.”
Keith Levene, the innovative guitarist who was a founding member of the Clash and Public Image Ltd, has died in Norfolk, U.K. He was 65.
His death was announced through social media on Saturday (Nov. 12) by former Public Image Ltd bandmates Martin Atkins and Jah Wobble. Levene passed away following a battle with liver cancer, The Guardian reports.
Billboard has reached out to Public Image Ltd’s representatives for comment.
“A sad time to learn of the passing of guitar giant Keith Levene,” Atkins wrote on Twitter. “We had our ups and downs that had mellowed over time. My respect for his unique talent never will.”
“RIP KEITH LEVENE,” Wobble said.
Author Adam Hammond, a friend of Levene, wrote on Twitter that he died on Friday (Nov. 11) and noted, “There is no doubt that Keith was one of the most innovative, audacious and influential guitarists of all time.”
Levene, who was born in London in 1957 and as a teenager was a roadie for Yes, was a co-founder of the Clash but left the band before their first album was even released.
He teamed up with guitarist Mick Jones in the mid-1970s to form an early version of the Clash. Along with the band’s manager Bernard Rhodes, Levene convinced Joe Strummer to join the group. Levene departed before the act started recording, but co-wrote the song “What’s My Name,” which appears on the Clash’s 1977 debut album.
After leaving the Clash, Levene briefly formed the band the Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious, who later left to join the Sex Pistols. When the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978, Levene and singer John Lydon joined forces with bass player John Wardle (aka Jah Wobble) and drummer Jim Walker to form Public Image Ltd.
Levene contributed to Public Image Ltd’s earliest albums — First Issue (1978), Metal Box (1979) and Flowers of Romance (1981) — and left the group in the mid-1983.
Later in his career, Levene worked on a handful of solo projects, including 1989’s Violent Opposition, featuring members of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“Music is important to me because I’m a composer. It turns out that I really am a good musician and composer. I can’t read music, I’m self-taught … I was never really enamoured with punk, it just came at the right time,” Levene said in an interview with the publication Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie Zine.
He recalled his early years as a musician: “When I came off tour with Yes I realized I wanted to be in a band. Having a band was a big f—ing thing for a 15-year-old. I’m looking at this cherry red guitar in my little bedroom, I remember like it was yesterday, I’m looking at this thing and thought I had to get a real Gibson. I knew me well enough by then to know that I wasn’t going to allow myself to have a Gibson unless I could play really, really well, proper.”