It’s 3 a.m. in Singapore, 9 p.m. in Lagos, and somewhere over the mid-Atlantic a red-eye cabin is vibrating to the tinny leakage of a teenager’s AirPods: “I’m so Julia, I’m so Julia…” Charli XCX—born Charlotte Aitchison in Cambridge, raised on dial-up and the death rattles of Cool Britannia—has become the unofficial soundtrack to a…
The Hollywood Bowl, that half-domed amphitheater squatting on a Hollywood hill like a crashed UFO made of redwood and stucco, is supposedly just another music venue. Yet to the rest of the planet it remains a shorthand for America’s most profitable export: the illusion that everyone, everywhere, is invited to the party—provided they can afford…
The World According to Billy Strings: How a Bluegrass Shredder Became the UN’s Unofficial Soundtrack By the time the Ukrainian bartender in Kraków queued up “Dust in a Baggie” at 3 a.m., nobody in the room had slept in 36 hours. Jet-lagged Canadians, shell-shocked Poles, and a lone Kiwi who swore he was only passing…
Olivia Rodrigo and the Global Export of Heartbreak Diplomacy By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—While the United Nations Security Council was busy vetoing itself into irrelevance last week, a 20-year-old from Temecula, California, quietly achieved what seasoned envoys have failed to do for decades: unite the planet in shared, slightly masochistic misery. Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore…
Lenny Kravitz Is Still Wearing That Scarf, and the Planet Has Noticed From Montreux to Montevideo, the man once photographed exiting a Parisian hotel in eleven different shades of leather has become a low-grade global barometer—equal parts fashion Rorschach test and sonic nostalgia export. Thirty-five years after “Let Love Rule” tried (and failed) to) topple…
Across the planet, in airport lounges where the cappuccino foam is as thin as the local cease-fire and in karaoke bars where hope goes to be strangled by a C-major, one sonic passport keeps getting stamped: David Gray. The Welsh-born, Cheshire-raised troubadour has become the unofficial background hum of late-capitalist displacement—piped into duty-free shops from…
THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF HEARTBREAK, NOW WITH BETTER LABS Dispatch from the Bureau of Cosmic Irony, somewhere above the Atlantic If you’ve flown from Lagos to London lately, scrolled TikTok in São Paulo, or queued for ramen in Shibuya at 2 a.m., odds are the same ghostly falsetto floated through the earbuds of the stranger…
PARIS—On a rain-slick afternoon outside the Olympia, the queue stretches from the brasserie awnings all the way to the Seine, as if the river itself decided to form an orderly line for once. Inside, a 51-year-old Mancunian in a khaki parka is sound-checking the same four chords the planet has been hearing since 1994, and…
**Whiskey, Heartbreak, and the Global Village: Chris Stapleton as Accidental Diplomat** *By Our Correspondent Who’s Watched Empires Fall but Never Missed a Good Guitar Solo* NASHVILLE—While the world busies itself weaponizing trade routes and TikTok trends, a bearded Kentucky export named Chris Stapleton has been quietly achieving what the State Department gave up on sometime…
Brett Anderson and the Curious Case of the Global Everyman By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere between the duty-free cigarette counter and Gate C-19, the name “Brett Anderson” flashed across a hundred screens like a low-budget prophecy. In São Paulo it was spelled “Bret,” in Seoul “Buretteu,” and in the fluorescent corridors of…
Jessica Sanchez, the Filipino-Mexican-American vocal firecracker who once turned American Idol’s stage into an emergency-room triage for eardrums, has resurfaced—this time not as a contestant, but as a geopolitical Rorschach test. From Manila’s karaoke bars to Mexico City’s plaza loudspeakers to the algorithmic void of global streaming, Sanchez is less a singer now and more…
From the Ruins of the American Empire, a Six-Stringed Consolation Prize Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk | 12 June 2025 Paris—It is 2 a.m. on the Rive Gauche and the bistros have finally run out of rosé. Somewhere between a tab of questionable MDMA and a heated debate on whether NATO still exists, a busker breaks…
