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      in Music

      How a Novelist Became a Pop Star

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      “I hope you fall in love, I hope it breaks your heart” is the refrain (in English translation) of “Pasoori,” Ali Sethi’s 2022 global hit. Is this a curse or a blessing? The song, performed as a duet with the Pakistani singer Shae Gill, defies such simple classifications — it’s a pop banger sung in Urdu and Punjabi, punctuated with flamenco handclaps and driven by a reggaeton beat. Sethi, a Pakistani-born artist who lives in Manhattan’s East Village, composed it in the wake of a thwarted collaboration with an Indian organization that feared reprisal (because of a 2016 ban on hiring Pakistani creatives). Drawing on themes from ghazals — sly courtesan poems about desire and betrayal that have doubled as political critiques, a genre that dates to seventh-century Arabia — “Pasoori” is at once “a love song, a bit of a flower bomb thrown at nationalism, a queer anthem, a protest song, a power ballad [and] a song of togetherness,” Sethi says. It’s now been viewed some 850 million times on YouTube, including by countless Indian fans.Sethi, 39, is a master of microtonal singing, gliding between the notes of the Western tempered scale. He’s been lauded for sounding like a vestige of another age — his supple, keening tenor the result of years of apprenticeship to the Pakistani artists Ustad Saami and Farida Khanum. Growing up in Lahore, where he was recognized at school for his academic and artistic abilities but also, he says, “taunted by both students and teachers for being part of a queer cohort,” he found in traditional music a way to be good but also fabulous, rooted without being fixed.Back then, he didn’t see the arts as offering a viable career path. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early aughts, he was expected to study economics. He instead took courses on South Asian history and world fiction, and first read Jane Austen at the behest of his teacher Zadie Smith. In 2009, he published “The Wish Maker,” a semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel set in his home city. The narrator navigates the wounds and thrills of adolescence, as well as a factionalized, globalizing country, alongside his female cousin: They watch an “Indiana Jones” film (“about an American man of the same name who wore hats and enjoyed the company of blonde women”) and are puzzled by its Indian villain; they fuel their crushes with love songs by Mariah Carey and the Pakistani artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.According to Sethi, his hit single “Pasoori” is at once “a love song, a bit of a flower bomb thrown at nationalism, a queer anthem, a protest song, a power ballad [and] a song of togetherness.”Philip CheungThe book was well received, though Sethi now thinks its realist form couldn’t fully accommodate Pakistan, a society in flux. As he was finishing the novel in Lahore in 2007, the country was besieged by sectarian violence. His father, Jugnu Mohsin — both he and Sethi’s mother, Najam Sethi, are prominent journalists and publishers — received death threats, and Sethi spent over a year in hiding, staying in the basements of friends. In 2011, he traveled to India to work as an adviser on Mira Nair’s 2012 film, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” adapted from Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel. One evening, when everyone was eating and singing, Nair was so moved by Sethi’s version of a ghazal famously sung by Khanum, “Dil Jalane Ki Baat,” that she urged him to record it. The song became part of the soundtrack and the first step toward Sethi’s recording career.Storytelling is still inherent to his work. Whether at concerts or on Instagram, Sethi often describes the inclusive nature of traditional South Asian music. Because it’s always been “anciently multiple” and cosmopolitan, it contains the “antibodies,” he says, to heal a divisive culture from within. But there are moments when he wishes to not represent but present for a while. He plans to write another novel, in the more experimental form of lyrical autofiction. Today, the burden of being an ambassador is lightened by the presence of other queer South Asian artists, including the writers Bushra Rehman and Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Sethi’s own partner, the painter Salman Toor. Last year, Sethi appeared at Coachella along with several other South Asian musicians, whose multilingual sets slotted right in alongside the Spanish artist Rosalía and Nigeria’s Burna Boy, who performed in English and their native languages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      By the Book Interview With Judi Dench

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      What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?That’s an impossible question. The best in 89 years? How do I know? I remember being given A.P. Wavell’s “Other Men’s Flowers” as a birthday present when I was young. It’s a collection of poetry, which opened my eyes to the power of verse. But then I also adored “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” by Patricia Highsmith. My husband, Michael [Williams], bought it for me as a holiday read. I devoured it and didn’t want it to end. I had to ration myself to a couple of pages a day.What’s the last great book you read?“Dormouse Has a Cold,” by Julia Donaldson. It’s a lift-the-flap children’s book, sent to me when I was recovering from a cold.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?After lights out at boarding school when I was 15. I was in bed under the covers with a torch reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”How do you organize your books?I don’t. I have so many books, but never enough shelves, so I have books everywhere — piled up on tables, chairs, running along window sills, books in every available nook and cranny. Because of my eyesight I can no longer read, but I love being surrounded by books — they’re snapshots of the past: first-night gifts, holidays abroad, memories of lost friends and loved ones. I still have my father’s individual copies of the Temple Shakespeare from 1903. They’re small, red-leather-bound copies with gilt lettering on the cover, and if I hold one I can be transported back to my childhood and family quizzes about Shakespeare.Shakespeare’s writing, you say in the new book, “has the capacity to make us feel less alone.” What other writing has done that for you?Oh so many — Iris Murdoch, Chekhov, Zoë Heller, J.D. Salinger — any writer who can reflect us back to ourselves and help us discover who we are.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better.

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      Onstage with her group the Mamas & the Papas at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, Cass Elliot, the grand doyenne of the Laurel Canyon scene, bantered with the timing of a vaudeville comedian. “Somebody asked me today when I was going to have the baby, that’s funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. The unspoken punchline — if you could call it that — was that she had already given birth to a daughter six weeks earlier.“One of the things that appeals to so many people about my mom is that there’s a certain level of triumph over adversity,” that daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, said over lunch at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles on a recent afternoon. “She had to prove herself over and over again.”Elliot was a charismatic performer who exuded infectious joy and a magnificent vocalist with acting chops she did not live to fully explore. July 29 is the 50th anniversary of her untimely death at 32, a tragedy that still spurs unanswerable questions. Might Elliot, who was one of Johnny Carson’s most beloved substitutes, have become the first female late-night talk show host? Would she have achieved EGOT status?Half a century after her death, her underdog appeal continues to inspire. Last year, “Make Your Own Kind of Music” — a relatively minor 1969 solo hit that has nonetheless had cultural staying power — became such a sensation on TikTok that “Saturday Night Live” spoofed it, in a hilariously over-the-top sketch in which the host Emma Stone plays a strangely clairvoyant record producer. “This song is gonna be everywhere, Mama,” she tells Elliot, played by Chloe Troast. “Then everybody’s gonna forget about it for a long, long time, but in about 40, 50 years, I think it’s gonna start showing up in a bunch of movies, because it’s a perfect song to go under a slow-mo montage where the main character snaps and goes on a rampage.”Cass Elliot performing on her television special “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore” in September 1973. After she went solo, she found it hard to shake her nickname.CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images“S.N.L.” didn’t make a single joke about Elliot’s weight — something that was unthinkable half a century ago. During the height of her fame, Elliot seemed to co-sign some of the jabs at her expense with a shrugging grin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      He Sang ‘What a Fool Believes.’ But Michael McDonald Is in on the Joke.

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      The voice of Michael McDonald has been compared to velvet, silk and sandpaper, melted chocolate and last year, by a besotted 11-year-old girl, an angel. He has harmonized with the best in the business. But his latest duet might cause even the most Botoxed foreheads of Hollywood to furrow.“How you like us so far?” joked Paul Reiser, the actor and comedian, from one corner of a squishy sofa in McDonald’s Santa Barbara, Calif., aerie on a recent Tuesday morning. He was there to talk about the singer’s memoir, which they wrote together and will be published by Dey Street Books on May 21.In the other corner, emanating the equanimity that’s as beloved as his baritone, was the man whose 50-plus-year career has included backup vocals for Steely Dan, Elton John, El DeBarge, Toto, Bonnie Raitt and on and on — backup so extensive and distinctive it’s inspired playlists on Apple Music and Spotify. He was wearing a paisley-patterned shirt, black trousers and, as one might expect of an angel who must tread this cursed Earth, puffy Hoka sneakers.McDonald, 72, has also spent decades in the spotlight, albeit sidlingly, often with his famous blue eyes shut. (“Singing is such an intimate act,” he explains in the book, “and like kissing, it does no real good to see what the other person is doing.”) He led the Doobie Brothers in various iterations with his gospel-inflected keyboard style; released nine solo studio albums traversing multiple genres and continues to make live appearances at venues from Coachella to the Carlyle.Paul Reiser, left, with McDonald. The actor, known for “Mad About You,” said his musical collaborator is “very introspective.”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesThe book is titled “What a Fool Believes,” after the Grammy-winning hit McDonald wrote in 1978 with Kenny Loggins, though with some hesitation. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s just too obvious,’” he said. “I wanted it to be something clever and mind-provoking, and I couldn’t really think of anything because, you know, I have a problem provoking my own mind.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Is ‘The Idea of You’ Harry Styles Fan Fiction?

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      The filmmakers do more to align star and character than the novel did. But somehow that doesn’t make the movie indebted to the musician.Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the new rom-com “The Idea of You,” has a bit in common with the mega pop star Harry Styles:In the movie, Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween girl fans. Styles was a member of a boy band called One Direction. You’ve probably heard of it.Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.Hayes eventually quits his band and starts making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.Hayes likes to date older women, and his relationship with a gallerist named Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is the backbone of the film. Harry, too, has been involved in tabloid-documented relationships with older women, most famously, the actress and director Olivia Wilde.So does “The Idea of You” come off as an act of fan fiction? Bizarrely, no, even if the shadow of Styles does loom large over the whole project.Plenty of headlines have already described the movie as “Harry Styles fan fiction,” though Robinne Lee, the author of the 2017 novel on which it is based, is typically coy in interviews about whether the pop star inspired her book.August Moon, the band in the film, above, resembles One Direction more than the band in the original novel does.Amazon Studios“Inspired is a strong word,” Lee has said. The author, who is also an actress with degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School and perhaps best known for her appearances in films like “Hitch” and “Fifty Shades Darker,” has described encountering “the face of a boy I’d never seen in a band I’d never paid attention to” and thinking it was “art.” After the novel became a viral sensation, Lee told Vogue in 2020, “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles.” In a piece for Time published this month, Lee argued that “assuming a novel with a fictional celebrity in a relationship must be based on an existing celebrity — in this case, the internet has decided, Harry Styles — is unimaginative at best and sexist at worst.”She is certainly less explicit about a pop star connection than Anna Todd, whose “After” series of novels started explicitly as Styles fan fiction on the platform Wattpad and have since been turned into a film franchise. (It’s a path that might be familiar to fans of “Fifty Shades,” which started as “Twilight” fan fiction.) However, unlike “The Idea of You,” the “After” series has nothing to do with a boy band. The Harry of “After” is a college student named Hardin, but when the first novel was published in 2014, the portrayal outraged some One Direction lovers with the way it turned Styles into a bad boy manipulating a young woman. One 14-year-old Styles fan told The New York Times then: “The way Harry in this book is portrayed is disgusting.”On the other hand, Styles fans have embraced “The Idea of You” as text that can feed their obsession. Kayla Kleinman, a social media manager at Bookshop.org, was not a Styles devotee when she first read the novel, but became one after finishing it during the pandemic. She felt “emotionally attached” to the book, and wanted the experience of reading it to continue, she said in an interview. So she sought out Styles’s music. “In my head it felt like a continuation of the story even though I very much knew that they were not,” she said. “But to me that next step was being like, ‘OK, I’m going to dive into this world as a thing to entertain myself.’” Now Kleinman has even gone to Harry Styles concerts with a friend she made from an “Idea of You” Facebook group.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      A Starry Cast Navigates ‘Uncle Vanya’ and ‘Every Emotion Under the Sun’

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      Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill and Anika Noni Rose discuss the new translation of Chekhov that brought them to the farm.Broadway shows usually come with a back story about the yearslong slog it took to get them there. Not so with Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which arrived at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater not even 12 months after its inception.Directed by Lila Neugebauer, it is Schreck’s first Broadway show since “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in 2019, and the ensemble is a starry one. Steve Carell is making his Broadway debut as Vanya, who believes he has wasted his life running a provincial estate and its farm alongside his niece, Sonia, played by Alison Pill, to support Sonia’s largely absentee father, portrayed by Alfred Molina.William Jackson Harper, best known for “The Good Place,” plays Astrov, the eco-nerd doctor whom Sonia loves. Anika Noni Rose, a Tony Award winner for “Caroline, or Change,” is the glamorous Elena, Sonia’s stepmother, for whom both Vanya and Astrov yearn.In mid-April, a week before the show’s opening on April 24, Schreck, Neugebauer, Carell, Harper, Pill and Rose gathered to talk over their dinner break in a room off the Beaumont lobby. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Along with Harper and Carell, both at left, the play also features Alfred Molina, Jayne Houdyshell and Mia Katigbak in supporting roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat was your relationship to “Uncle Vanya” and Chekhov before this show?HEIDI SCHRECK I lived in Russia right out of college for two years. When I moved back to Seattle, I started this theater company with my husband, and there was this Russian company who would come and perform Russian plays. They invited me to be the translator. Basically I would do live interpretation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Kathleen Hanna Reveals the Story of Her Life in ‘Rebel Girl’

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      The first draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” was 600 pages long. As she worked to cut the manuscript, Hanna found herself excising page after page of male violence. “It’s pretty sad, if you read the book, because there’s still a lot in there,” she told me. “I had a joke with my editor about it.” Like, she’d already removed a rape and a kidnapping and a guy who threw a wine glass at her head! “What more do you want from me?”Hanna is super funny. When she takes the stage as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre or the Julie Ruin, she plays a kind of punk trickster, shifting her voice to resemble a bratty Valley Girl, a demonic cheerleader, an obnoxious male fan. She is always subverting femininity and disarming bad guys with her spiky and irreverent lyrics. But when it came time to write her life story, she realized that she could not playfully twist away from her past.“I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t,” she writes in the book, which comes out on May 14.Kathleen Hanna at home with her dog, Terry. While writing her memoir, she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Rebel Girl” documents Hanna’s long career as an underground artist and musician, and its striking intersections with the mainstream. In the 1990s, she helped instigate the riot grrrl movement, calling girls to the front of punk venues and setting off a D.I.Y. feminist ethos that was later assimilated into a girl-power marketing trend. She was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s who scrawled the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall, inspiring the anthem that exploded into a global phenomenon.Nineties nostalgia applies an appealingly gritty filter to that era’s underground rock scene, but it could be punishing for those who stood in opposition to its white male standard. Hanna has sometimes worried that if she put it all out there, she would be disbelieved. “I’ve been told by men: Oh, you’re just the kind of woman these things happen to, as if I have some sort of smell I’m emanating,” she said. “But I knew that other women would understand.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      How Many Biographies on the Page and Screen Do You Know?

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about literature that has gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats. This week’s quiz highlights films that were adapted from the biographies or autobiographies of their notable subjects.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations. More