Radio 1 Anthems Live: Britain’s Cheery Pop Megamix as the World Burns By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, now filing from a windowless press pen somewhere vaguely European They streamed in from every corner of the Commonwealth and beyond—Singaporean finance bros on “team-building” blowouts, Barcelona art students doing Erasmus on the cheap, two bewildered Canadians who thought…
The Strokes: How Five Rich Kids from Manhattan Accidentally Became the Soundtrack to a Planet That Forgot What It Was Rebelling Against By the time Is This It dropped in July 2001, the world was already busy stockpiling duct tape and rehearsing new lines about freedom fries. While NATO ministers huddled in Brussels drafting press…
**Nashville’s Favorite Kiwi: How Keith Urban Became the UN Secretary-General of Stadium Country** By the time Keith Urban strums his opening chord in Hamburg, São Paulo, or Singapore, the same ritual unfolds: 20,000 strangers who can’t agree on tax policy, carbon targets, or whether pineapple belongs on pizza suddenly achieve perfect four-part harmony on “Somebody…
George Strait, the man who once rhymed “ocean-front property” with “the good life”, has become an unlikely export commodity—like blue jeans, bourbon, or the quiet conviction that everything was better before the algorithm noticed you exist. While Washington debates tariff schedules and Brussels frets over methane ceilings, Strait’s catalog slips across borders smoother than a…
The Monkees: How Four Fake Americans Accidentally Invented Global Soft Power Before the Pentagon Could Spell “K-Pop” By our man in the cheap seats, Geneva—where even the statues look bored. In 1966, while the Cold War was busy stockpiling canned paranoia, a television producer in Los Angeles glued four vaguely musical actors together, named them…
From San Miguel de Allende to Stockholm: Charley Crockett’s Accidental Diplomacy in a World That Forgot How to Dance By the time Charley Crockett ambled onto the stage at the Roskilde Festival—slow-rolling like a man who had just sold the sheriff a counterfeit Rolex—Europe had already endured six currency crises, three prime-ministerial resignations and one…
Robert Plant Has Left the Building—But the Echoes Are Louder Than Ever By A. N. Correspondent-at-Large, filing from a hotel bar in Marrakech that still thinks “Stairway to Heaven” is a polite request for the elevator. When Robert Plant wandered onstage last month in Tangier to yelp “Immigrant Song” for the first time since Jimmy…
When Zach Bryan, Oklahoma’s favorite poet-in-flannel, tweeted a clipped video of Gavin Adcock performing a boot-stomping cover of “Something in the Orange,” the Internet’s attention span—roughly that of a fruit fly on espresso—pivoted from Gaza cease-fires and French pension riots to a Georgia lineman-turned-country-singer who looks like he could also re-wire your fuse box. Within…
Somewhere between a Spotify chill-pop playlist and the geopolitical fault lines of soft power, Russell Dickerson has become an unlikely export—Tennessee by way of TikTok, heartbreak by way of algorithm. To the average listener in Jakarta or Johannesburg, he is simply the guy who scored a wedding-song monopoly with “Yours.” To the rest of us—those…
A Ballad for the End Times: Calum Scott’s Global Sob-Fest and Why We’re All Still Crying in Economy By Dave’s International Bureau of Melodrama & Collateral Damage Somewhere over the Sea of Japan, a salaryman on his third highball queues up “Dancing On My Own” for the fourth straight flight. Half a world away, a…
Kali Uchis: America’s Newest Export in Soft-Focus Nostalgia and Hard-Edged Irony By Our Correspondent Who Has Spent Too Many Nights in Airport Lounges Listening to Elevator Bossa Nova Medellín → Los Angeles → Your Algorithm—The career arc of Karly-Marina Loaiza, better known as Kali Uchis, is a tidy parable for the age of planetary pop-on-demand….
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…
