Chord Overstreet: The Accidental Diplomat of Global Schmaltz Geneva, Wednesday. While the WHO debates monkeypox nomenclature and the IMF calculates how many Sri Lankan coconuts equal one IMF bailout, the planet’s collective unconscious has quietly agreed on a single emotional lingua franca: the plaintive falsetto of one Chord Overstreet. Yes, that Chord Overstreet—late of Glee’s…
Bryan Adams, a Canadian who once screamed into a studio microphone until it surrendered the riff for “Summer of ’69,” has become an unlikely UN-approved cultural export. While diplomats in Geneva haggle over carbon credits and pretend PowerPoints are binding treaties, Adams is quietly doing what soft-power theorists only fantasize about: getting entire continents to…
Yannick Noah: The Last Frenchman Who Could Still Make a Stadium Sing Without Setting It on Fire By Dave’s International Cynic-in-Residence Paris, France – In an age when most former athletes monetise nostalgia by hawking NFTs or launching their own line of artisanal beard oil, Yannick Noah remains a stubborn anomaly: a one-time tennis champion…
Riot Fest and the Global Art of Screaming Together Chicago, USA – If aliens ever bothered to decode our civilization from orbit, they could do worse than start with Riot Fest: a three-day ritual in which otherwise functional adults pay triple-digit sums to stand ankle-deep in Midwestern mud and scream “I’m not okay” in unison…
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE—For those of you who still think the planet’s gravest geopolitical flashpoints are in the South China Sea or somewhere along the Donbas, allow me to direct your attention to a modest recording studio off Music Row, where a man in a ten-gallon hat is quietly re-engineering global soft power. Yes, Billy Ray Cyrus—once…
Brett James and the Quiet Implosion of the American Song-Export Economy By Our Correspondent Who Has Spent Too Many Nights in Airport Lounges Listening to Country Mixes NASHVILLE—While the rest of the planet argues over whose naval drone gets to block whose grain freighter this week, Brett James is hunched over a Steinway in a…
The Killers: How a Vegas Quartet Became the World’s Guiltiest Export LAS VEGAS—Somewhere between the roulette wheel and the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet, four pasty Mormons from Nevada decided the planet needed more songs about jealousy, casinos, and the inexplicable sex appeal of Brandon Flowers’ leather jacket. Two decades later, The Killers have metastasized into a…
Luke Bryan: The Last American Cowboy in a World Running Out of Horses DAVE’S LOCKER, International Desk – Somewhere over the Atlantic, at 39,000 feet and counting, a Boeing 787 hums with the latest Luke Bryan single piped through the in-flight entertainment system. A German banker in 12C nods politely, a Lagos tech founder in…
NASHVILLE — Somewhere between the neon baptism of Lower Broadway and the algorithmic altar of Spotify, Lee Brice has become America’s most exportable baritone. To the uninitiated, he is merely another baseball-capped balladeer singing about tailgates and heartbreak; to the global listener, he is a soft-power Trojan horse wheeled into every airport lounge from Dubai…
Jennifer Hudson: The Weight of a Voice in a World That’s Already Tired of Singing By Diego “Dreadful” Delgado, Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent PARIS—On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where existentialists once chain-smoked their way through post-war dread, a busker croons “And I Am Telling You” in three languages and two broken hearts. No one drops coins….
From the Files of the Global Cultural Attaché: A Dispatch on Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar, A.K.A. Cardi B It is 2:07 a.m. in Dubai, the hour when the Burj Khalifa’s LED façade usually cycles through stock-market quotes and tourist selfies. Tonight, however, it flashes hot-pink lyrics in Comic Sans: “Okurrr.” Somewhere in Lagos, a danfo bus…
**The Swedish Death Metal Diplomat: How Tomas Lindberg Became an Accidental Ambassador for Global Chaos** In a world where traditional diplomacy has devolved into Twitter spats and trade wars, leave it to a Swedish death metal vocalist to accidentally unite continents through the universal language of incomprehensible screaming. Tomas Lindberg—frontman of At the Gates, collector…
