Other western acts have attempted to crack country’s music scene since singer’s breakout success in 2018
One week after announcing she was “cancer free”, the British pop star Jessie J did what any recovering patient would do and travelled thousands of miles around the world to perform for an audience of more than a billion people.
On 29 May, the singer-songwriter, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, belted out a stage-rattling rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way on the stage of Singer, a hugely popular Chinese singing competition similar to The Voice. She also performed her new song, California, briefly adapting the lyrics to change California to Changsha, the Chinese city where Singer is hosted.
The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music at Monmouth University features exhibits dedicated to one of New Jersey's most famous sons while also exploring the broader story of American music. Geoff Bennett met with "The Boss" to discuss the center, his musical legacy, and how the outspoken artist is approaching this moment in civic life. It's part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
The Washington National Opera, which left the center amid the Trump administration’s takeover, says its efforts to retrieve its endowment and other assets have been blocked.
The Kennedy Center and the Washington National Opera are no longer affiliated, but they remained entangled in a dispute over what assets the opera might still be owed.
They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.
The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant machine to generate profit for corporations.
Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.
That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.
It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.
Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.
Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.
Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.
Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.
Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.
Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.
Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.
You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.
And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.
All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.
All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.
This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.
I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.
They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.
Grande is the latest in a series of pop musicians including Sabrina Carpenter and SZA who have been angered by Trump administration videos
Ariana Grande has rebuked Donald Trump’s White House over use of her music in a video documenting the detaining of immigrants.
Earlier this week, the White House posted a montage of ICE agents handcuffing and detaining people, with the caption “Bye-bye President Trump has delivered the most secure border in history”. It was soundtracked by Grande’s 2024 song Bye.
Across a career built on lyrical introspection, Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard has rarely shied away from emotional candour. The indie rocker speaks to Annabel Nugent about growing up, resisting the safety of nostalgia – and why he doesn’t like the term ‘divorce album’
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