Eight sexual assault cases added to Harvey Weinstein investigation
Prosecutors in Los Angeles are reviewing eight cases accusing disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, an official said Thursday.
The Los Angeles and Beverly Hills police departments each brought four investigations to prosecutors, according to Ricardo Santiago, a spokesman for the Los Angeles county district attorney’s Office.
The office will decide whether to move forward with prosecution. No charges have been filed, Santiago said. He did not know details about the allegations or when the cases were presented to prosecutors.
Juda Engelmayer, Weinstein’s publicist, said he had “nothing to add right now” in an email to the Associated Press.
The district attorney, Jackie Lacey, created a taskforce more than two years ago to handle the surge in sexual misconduct allegations against entertainment figures after the accusations against Weinstein launched the #MeToo movement. He has denied allegations of non-consensual sex.
No charges have been filed against 22 men – including Weinstein, the actor Kevin Spacey, the director James Toback and the former CBS CEO Leslie Moonves – who were the focus of the task force’s investigations. All of them have denied wrongdoing.
Charges have already been rejected for most, mainly because the statute of limitations had expired or there was insufficient evidence.
Dozens of women, including the actors Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Lupita Nyong’o and Ashley Judd, have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment, while the actors Asia Argento, Rose McGowan and others have accused the Oscar winner of raping them.
Weinstein is scheduled to stand trial in early January in New York on charges he raped a woman in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and performed a forcible sex act on a different woman in 2006. He has pleaded not guilty and says any sexual activity was consensual.
A tentative global settlement
reached this month would split $25m among more than two dozen of Weinstein’s accusers. The deal wouldn’t require him to pay anything out of his own pocket and he wouldn’t have to admit wrongdoing.
Last week, a former model who accused him of sexually abusing her when she was 16 filed a new lawsuit, saying the tentative settlement wasn’t “fair or just”. Kaja Sokola sued under New York’s Child Victims Act, which gives people a one-year window to sue over sexual abuse that they say they endured as children.
Beginning 1 January, California will suspend for three years the statute of limitations for victims of childhood sexual abuse to file lawsuits.
perform – as her hectic, exhilarating kaleidoscope of baile funk, techno and house. She’s set to release her debut album in 2020, promising a sound that is “good on the dancefloor, but also for crying in your bed”. LS
Pop Smoke
Drill originally filtered over from Chicago to the UK, but now, with British MCs having made it their own with an unmistakable taunting metre, the influence is moving back across the pond. Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke’s debut release was produced entirely by Londoner 808MeloBeats, Tottenham MC Skepta hopped on a remix of hit single Welcome to the Party, and tracks like Flexin could have come straight out of Loughborough Junction – but Smoke’s deep, beautiful, characterful voice has a grandeur than only comes from living in New York. BBT
100 Gecs
100 Gecs’ music starts out sounding more like noise than signal, as if Dylan Brady and Laura Les had hung an electromagnet over pop’s junkyard and lured the most vivid, violent parts into a mutant whole. But over repeat exposure, the St Louis-born duo’s assault of happy hardcore, dubstep and corrupted cartoon theme tunes takes on its own strangely soothing and endearing logic. Destined to be as influential as they are divisive. LS
Deli Girls
Shuttling around the Brooklyn underground for a couple of years, the duo Deli Girls broke through to a wider audience with the release of their 2019 album I Don’t Know How To Be Happy. Over lo-fi industrial beats that swing with reggaeton syncopation or bustle around with a raver’s energy, Danny Orlowski rants, raves, yelps and screams – a menagerie of startled vocals that places the whole endeavour in a glorious interzone of rap, metal, punk, no wave and techno. BBT
Shygirl
Had Peaches come up through grime and garage rather than electroclash, you would have something like Shygirl, AKA Blane Muise, whose nom de disque is probably misleading enough to get her done by Trading Standards. Her sound is deeply malevolent – Uckers pairs a sample of the scream from Psycho with a haunted dancehall beat – and she unspools her unruffled bars like a sadistic bully whispering in your ear about exactly what they plan to do to you in the graveyard after school. LS
James Massiah
The London performance poet is moving into music, and his first step was perfect. His endlessly replayable track Natural Born Killers (Ride For Me) was like Dean Blunt going in on a Chicago house jam: distorted free-flowing poetry over a slowing vogueing bassline, and an enormously exciting harbinger of things to come. BBT
Dolphin Midwives
Liminal Garden, the debut album proper by Portland composer Sage Fisher, tingles the upper registers of human hearing: she plays the highest notes of her harp, processing and fracturing the results in search of an effect that she likens to how it feels to experience trauma. Dolphin Midwives are unabashedly new age – right down to the purposefully “gross” name, which references the apparently real practice of giving birth surrounded by dolphins. One for fans of Holly Herndon and Mary Lattimore. LS
Asagraum
This all-female satanic black metal band from Holland have a terrific sense of theatre. Fake (we assume) blood pours from their mouths over white greasepaint and black leather; videos feature priests getting roughed up and pentagrams aplenty. But this is no mere cabaret – their recently released second album Dawn of Infinite Fire is a totally exhilarating blast of permanently crescendoing metal majesty. BBT
Bossy Love
Bossy Love are Amandah Wilkinson and John Baillie Jr and they’re the best Scottish pop act since Chvrches. Released in October, their debut album Me + U is the stuff that fantasies are made of: Girlfriend brings to mind Carly Rae Jepsen’s passing collaborations with Danny L Harle, while Foreign Lover could be post-breakdown Britney singing classic Erasure. Plus, they have a taste for bludgeoning arpeggiated synths straight out of Robyn’s playbook. Their live shows have been inspiring cultish adoration at home in Glasgow. LS
Darkoo
Born in Nigeria and raised in London, Darkoo sits at the subtle, delicate end of the Afro-pop spectrum. The teenager’s androgynous alto allows her to be both braggadocious and coy, sometimes almost in the same line, and has already netted millions of streams for breakout hit Gangsta. Some of her peers can end up letting charisma do the heavy lifting, but with her melancholic yet swaggering chorus lines, she has the songs to match her considerable charm. BBT
Eli Winter
As a teenager in Houston, Eli Winter had his mind blown by footage of guitarist Steve Gunn performing in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series. It prompted his own excursion into American primitive guitar music and a move to Chicago, as much for college as for the lineage of cross-pollinated weirdo music that came out of local labels Drag City and Thrill Jockey. His gorgeous debut album, The Time to Come, channels late local forebear Jack Rose and finds the 22-year-old considering the death of a friend and the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Read our interview with him here. LS
Celeste
As the winner of the Brit Rising Star award – previous winners include Adele, Sam Smith, and Rag’n’Bone Man
– Celeste is the artist in this list most likely to cross into genuine stardom. The industry excitement is justified: her voice, which has the same scuffed melancholy as Amy Winehouse or Billie Holiday, gives such vivid life to a breakup song Strange or a moody midnight crooner such as Both Sides of the Moon. BBT
Victoria Monét
Best known for her long-term writing partnership with Ariana Grande (their skittish collab Monopoly was a 2019 highlight), Monét has been releasing solo material for five years but looks set to break out properly in 2020. Her upcoming EP moves away from her cutting-edge productions with Grande in favour of more luscious instrumentation indebted to Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Frank Ocean’s dreamy Blonde. Her ambition to be a Pharrell-type double threat looks eminently likely to pay off. Read our interview with her here. LS
Sidhu Moose Wala
South Asian music rarely crosses over into the UK charts, but Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala managed it in October with blockbuster track 47, flanked by British rappers Mist and Stefflon Don. Can he keep up the momentum? Even if he struggles in the bhangra-resistent quarters of the UK, it won’t be down to his voice, which is delicately mellifluous even with its power maxed out. BBT
Jack Name
A stalwart of the LA psychedelic scene who has played with musicians including Ariel Pink and Tim Presley, Jack Name’s own music is eerier than that of his energetic peers. He prefers close moods and chicken-scratch guitars, and shares Bradford Cox’s knack for weird and lovely melodies that sparkle like specks of flint in the dirt. LS
Ashnikko
Her fairly generic breakthrough song Hi, It’s Me had us fearing a Billie Eilish knockoff, but then Ashnikko – US-born, Baltics-raised, London-based – brought out Stupid. With its wild mood swings – maniacal laughter into monotone lyric recital – it was tailor made for miming on TikTok and became an unlikely divorce anthem, plus a massive streaming hit. Here and elsewhere, her central lyrical focus is the teasing and withholding of sex: one minute she’ll be comparing the taste of a certain male organ to a scented candle, the next she’ll decide her vibrator is a much better option. BBT
Galen Tipton
Not a million miles from the 100 Gecs nexus, this Ohio producer’s music sometimes evinces the deranged energy of a Ryan Trecartin film, yet at others channels the soothing wonder of strolling your video game avatar through a pixellated rainforest. Their music is vivid and playful, qualities they share with the Japanese footwork scene: “To me, the music these artists make sounds like pure freedom and play, and that’s the space I like to create from,” Tipton told Mixmag. “One of unrestricted expression and emotion.” LS
Mortimer
As traditional roots reggae continues to flourish, someone well placed to cross over to an audience returning to its easygoing charms is Jamaican singer Mortimer. His voice is handsdown gorgeous, the sort of thing that reduces even the most pursed-lip muso to blissful sighs at 100 paces: rich and robust in its depths, flinty and feathery in his lovely top range. Recent EP Fight the Fight is a good place to start. BBT
Cazzu
The 26-year-old Argentinian-born Julieta Cazzucheli spent a decade trying her luck with a variety of sounds from reggaeton to rock, but finally broke out with her melancholy, emotinged trap (Bad Bunny jumping on a remix of her 2017 single Loca helped, too). While she is hyper-prolific, releasing more than 24 singles in two years, her 2019 album, Error 93, shares its immersive, focused insularity with Rihanna’s Anti. She’s as iconoclastic as the Bajan star, too: her lyrics extol female empowerment in a male-dominated scene, and she often performs with a green handkerchief in support of the movement to legalise abortion in Argentina. LS
Cashh
With the much larkier moniker Cashtastic, things were looking good for this rapper, with a healthy buzz and a Universal contract. But despite growing up in Peckham, London, and a protest led by Kano, he was deported to Jamaica in 2014 on murky immigration grounds. Now back in the UK, all his legal woes have at least left him with a distinctive Jamaican-tinged accent, put to propulsive use on gleaming trap tracks such as the brand new Incognito.
BBT
India Jordan
London producer India Jordan is known for running New Atlantis, a monthly ambient Sunday session at London venue Rye Wax. Yet her debut EP, DNT STP MY LV, is a thumping rampage through rave, jungle and boogie (the title track samples Don’t Stop My Love by – there he is again – Kashif). She’s swiftly becoming indispensable for both the wee hours and the recovery the next day. LS
Disq
Not yet out of their teens, this band based around the duo of Isaac deBroux-Slone and Raina Bock are emerging from the absolute middle of nowhere in Wisconsin with startlingly accomplished songs. Like seemingly any young band at the moment, Pavement seem to be a touchstone, and there’s Parquet Courts’ blend of snot and soul. Keep an eye out for unreleased songs such as Loneliness and Daily Routine: genuine classics of newschool indie rock. BBT
L Devine
Olivia Devine moved from Newcastle to London, the idea being to write for other artists. Which she did (Icona Pop, of I Love It fame, recorded one of her songs), but when Warner offered her a solo deal, she thought: well, why not. The 22-year-old has swiftly developed her sound: where last year’s Peer Pressure EP channelled Haim and Devine’s labelmate Dua Lipa, her excellent recent singles are more idiosyncratic: the minimal, windscreen-washer funk of Naked Alone would have been a massive hit had Mark Ronson released it, while Peachy Keen is a trancey cyborg ballad. Charli XCX has called her “the motherfucking future” of pop.
LS
Anz
Anz’s No Harm, a wriggling, squiggly slice of high-speed vintage boogie, was one of the most feted tracks in the electronic underground in 2019 – as was the rest of the Mancunian producer’s Invitation 2 Dance EP. Even better are her “dubs” mixes, where her own tracks are threaded through imaginative reworks, like a Kali Uchis vocal laid over harp-driven UKG to deliriously beautiful effect. BBT
Eve Owen
The cresting voice on Where Is Her Head, from the National’s 2019 album I Am Easy to Find, belonged to Eve Owen (daughter of the actor Clive). In 2020, the 19-year-old will release her debut album produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner. There’s something of early Sharon Van Etten (another Dessner collaborator) about her emphatic balladry and the way she holds her own against orchestral-tinged rock tumult. It’s not hard to fathom her finding mainstream appeal alongside the likes of Lewis Capaldi. LS
Life
It’s little wonder this Hull band supported Idles on their 2019 European tour, given they also rant anthemically over chugging indie-punk. They also have Idles’ anger at inequality in society – two of their number work with a social enterprise to help vulnerable young people make music – and raggedly brilliant tunes such as Half Pint Fatherhood will get circle pits instantly opening up. BBT
Kiko El Crazy
Kiko El Crazy joins El Alfa in helping dembow come to rival reggaeton in the global pop stakes – Rolling Stone reported that Spotify listening figures for the genre doubled between January 2018 and August 2019, while the New York Times proclaimed it the “secret ingredient in songs of summer”. The pink ’fro-sporting Dominican admitted that he once didn’t respect the genre because it seemed “too underground” to offer much potential for growth, but happily, since leaving the rap group El Army, he has disproven his own theory, pebbledashing his gritty bars all over the addictive rhythm. LS
• This article was amended on 27 December 2017 to correct the spelling of Lynks Afrikka.
forming in churches and other venues for months now. Whatever fans make of West’s transformation into a paragon of religious devotion, they can’t accuse him of failing to put in the time.
While Jesus Is King saw West absorb a heavy Christian influence into his singular hip-hop style, its follow-up trades solely in traditional gospel. Fans uninterested in his religious rebirth will find little to love here (most of the Sunday Service Choir’s vocals are a variant on this bar from More Than Anything: “I love you, Jesus / I worship and adore you / Just want to tell you / Lord, I love you more than anything.”) but the album certainly fulfils its prayerful remit. Though West’s fingerprints are harder to detect than ever before, Jesus Is Born is more full-bodied than its predecessor, which often felt like a collection of unfinished sketches. Sometimes it can sound less like a studio album than audio snatched from a publicly funded evangelical TV station, but the power of the choir is captured in these recordings and the live feel of the compositions place the listener in Kanye’s own house of prayer.
Most interesting to West fans will be the new versions of older songs. Ultralight Beam is whittled down to the choir section that helped power the original. The new version of Father
Stretch My Hands (simply titled Father Stretch) develops the rap song’s gospel overtures, while Follow Me – Faith reinterprets Fade. Most songs follow a similar pattern – the choir, led by a solo male voice, is backed up by a small number of live instruments – but still there are obvious highlights. Rain is one of the album’s quieter moments, led by a languid guitar line that would catch the ear of Frank Ocean. That’s How the Good Lord Works leans on a jazzy piano riff, and Souls Anchored is one of a few numbers to feature vocal leads reminiscent of 90s chart R&B.
Gospel isn’t for everyone but the excellent recent compilations World Spirituality Classics 2 and No Other Love revealed the power of Christian music when it’s driven by sober truths: that life can be a struggle, the will of man is frequently weak, sin is inescapable. The message of Jesus Is Born – that God is perfect and Christianity is the answer – will play well to the converted but its not going to move agnostics.
For all the album’s artistic successes, it’s hard to imagine non-believers listening and catching the holy spirit. Delivering the same message in the same style for 84 minutes, it sometimes feels like mass does to a six-yearold. Yet the Sunday Service Choir have helped West deliver a pretty well-executed genre album. Just don’t compare it to the rest of his mighty oeuvre. Should Kanye’s interest in gospel music prove temporary, this is likely to be remembered as an oddity rather than a baptism.