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      in Music

      Insooni Breaks Racial Barrier to Become Beloved Singer in South Korea

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      Born to a South Korean mother and a Black American soldier, she rose to a pioneering stardom in a country that has long discriminated against biracial children.When she took the stage to perform at Carnegie Hall in front of 107 Korean War veterans, the singer Kim Insoon was thinking of her father, an American soldier stationed in South Korea during the postwar decades whom she had never met or even seen.“You are my fathers,” she told the soldiers in the audience before singing “Father,” one of her Korean-language hits.“To me, the United States has always been my father’s country,” Ms. Kim said in a recent interview, recalling that 2010 performance. “It was also the first place where I wanted to show how successful I had become — without him and in spite of him.”Ms. Kim, born in 1957, is better known as Insooni in South Korea, where she is a household name. For over four decades, she has won fans across generations with her passionate and powerful singing style and genre-crossing performances. Fathered by a Black American soldier, she also broke the racial barrier in a country deeply prejudiced against biracial people, especially those born to Korean women and African-American G.I.s.Insooni at a concert in Seoul in March.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesHer enduring and pioneering presence in South Korea’s pop scene helped pave the way for future K-pop groups to globalize with multiethnic lineups.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

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Radu Jude Brings TikTok’s Chaos to the Movies

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      Radu Jude’s films are messy mash-ups of art, literature, advertising and social media, with some dirty jokes thrown in.Halfway through a recent Zoom interview with Radu Jude, the acclaimed Romanian director of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” he offered a glimpse into his creative process. He pulled out one of the books he’s reading, an illustrated tome about commedia dell’arte. Then he shared his screen to reveal a collection of texts and images — Van Gogh still lifes, Giacometti sculptures, Japanese haikus — saved in folders on his computer. Jude stopped scrolling at a picture he took of a sign posted on an apartment building entrance.“It says ‘Please have oral sex so as not to disturb the other tenants,’” Jude explained, translating from the Romanian with a grin on his face.The autodidact Jude is not above a dirty joke. His work melds tragedy and farce, drawing promiscuously from art, literature, street ads and social media to fuel his brazen visions of Romanian history and contemporary life.Jude’s previous film, the Golden Bear-winner “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” starts out with the making of a humorously sloppy sex tape and concludes with a witch trial against one of the tape’s participants. His latest, “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday.The black comedy follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, shuttling clients and equipment around Bucharest, Romania’s capital. One of Angela’s gigs entails interviewing former factory employees who were injured on the clock for a chance to feature in a corporate safety video. Scenes from the present-day, shot in black-and-white, are interwoven with colorful clips of another woman named Angela: a taxi driver in the 1980s also chained to a thankless job that involves navigating the streets of Bucharest.Ilinca Manolache as Angela, a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, in “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.”4 Proof FilmWe 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 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Vampire Weekend Did Not Make a ‘Doom and Gloom Record’

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      From the first seconds of Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” it’s clear that something has changed. “Ice Cream Piano” starts with hiss, buzz, feedback and a hovering, distorted guitar note — the opposite of the clean pop tones that have been the band’s hallmark. It’s the beginning of an album full of startling changes and wild sonic upheavals, all packed into 10 songs.The new album, like all of Vampire Weekend’s work, is meticulous, self-conscious and awash in musical and verbal allusions — sometimes direct, sometimes cryptic. But it’s also a broad pendulum swing from its 2019 release, “Father of the Bride,” a leisurely, jam-band-influenced sprawl that ran nearly 58 minutes. “Only God Was Above Us,” the group’s fifth album, due April 5, is eight songs and 10 minutes shorter.“With every album we have to push in two directions at once,” Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend’s singer and primary songwriter, said in a recent interview. “Sometimes that means we have to be poppier and weirder. Maybe with this record, it’s about both pushing into true maturity, in terms of worldview and attitude, but also pushing back further into playfulness. There’s a youthful amateurishness along with some of our most ambitious swings ever.”Koenig, 40, described the new album’s sequence of songs as “a journey from questioning to acceptance, maybe to surrender. From a kind of negative worldview to something a little deeper.” Ultimately, he said, the LP is optimistic. “It’s not a doom and gloom record. And even if there’s songs where the narrator is trying to figure something out or feels confused, that’s not all. That’s part of the story — it’s not the thesis of the album that the world is dark and horrible.”The album also exults in musical zingers, non sequiturs and startling off-grid eruptions. The songs often morph through multiple changes of tempo and texture, riffling unpredictably through indie-rock austerity, orchestral lushness, pop perkiness and hallucinatory electronic studio concoctions, like the cascade of wavery, overlapping piano lines in “Connect.” Where “Father of the Bride” had a folky openness, “Only God Was Above Us” is crammed with ideas that gleefully collide.Ever analytical, Koenig mused that Vampire Weekend’s albums each reflected patron saints. He named Paul Simon for the band’s self-titled 2007 debut, Joe Strummer and Sublime for “Contra” from 2010, Leonard Cohen for “Modern Vampires of the City,” and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, along with Phish, for “Father of the Bride.” The new album, he said, may reflect a short-lived tour he didn’t get to see: the 1997 pairing of Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan, which reached the cover of Rolling Stone.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 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Ramy Youssef Mixes Vibes and Politics in His New Special ‘More Feelings’

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      In “More Feelings” on HBO, the comic takes a nuanced look at his own role as a Muslim celebrity and at the American response to conflict in the Mideast.In his new special, “More Feelings,” a captivating comedy that speaks fiercely to this political moment, Ramy Youssef maintains a mannered tentativeness, tiptoeing from setup to punchline, becoming quieter as the laughs grow. Underneath his gentle cadence hides a firm conviction, one fed up not just with the horrific tragedy in Gaza, but also with the conversation in America in response to it.Because this is an election year, he can feel the pressure coming his way. “I know Biden is going to call me,” he says in the special, debuting Saturday on HBO. He means the campaign will be asking for help, but he makes it sound more intimate, like an annoying friend checking in.The comic Hasan Minhaj told a similar story on his recent tour about the peculiar anguish of being a Muslim celebrity asked to help get out the vote. They both mock their own momentary vanity of thinking a comic could save the country, but Youssef is a different kind of performer. He approaches his subject more indirectly, leaning into confusion and abstraction. His stories blur into and echo off one another. He describes himself as being at a loss in an argument, because while others have facts, “I just have vibes.”This sounds overly modest, the old comedian trick of playing dumb, but it’s not only that. The most effective tools of political art are different from those of an op-ed. And artfully expressed vibes can be a powerful thing.Youssef, the child of Egyptian immigrants, grew up in New Jersey where he filmed this intimate special. He begins by saying the proceeds from his shows will go to humanitarian aid for Gaza, before complaining about supporting charities. Then he describes the unrealistic expectations put on him, including knowing the right way to speak out on Instagram (it’s trickier than you think) and finding a way to convert Taylor Swift to Islam. (Her attendance at Youssef’s show in Brooklyn led to a minor right-wing controversy.)Then there are the appeals from establishment contingents like the Biden campaign looking to win Muslim and Arab votes in Michigan. The emotional turning point of the special comes when Youssef remembers a call three days after the Oct. 7 attack from a friend casually asking where he stands on Hamas.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

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Sarah Shook & the Disarmers Took the Hard Path. The Music Kept Coming.

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      After a tumultuous childhood in an ultraconservative family, River Shook finally heard country music at 23. It prompted a long journey of self-discovery.River Shook warned their father: If the family left western New York for North Carolina, something awful would happen.Living at home at 19, Shook was the introverted middle child who had relocated to so many new towns, they’d given up on making friends. Their parents, Robert and Rita, had led rough and wild early lives, Robert playing lead guitar in lascivious bands and Rita escaping an abusive first marriage and descending into hard drugs. The couple met through church, married and vowed to shelter their kids — home-schooled and raised on classical and Christian music, with boys, booze and bad behaviors verboten. Whenever God told Robert to move, everyone obeyed.This, though, was different. At 9, Shook realized they were bisexual and began questioning the family faith. They hid both from their parents, living a Janus-like life of two faces for a decade. But Shook had found confidants at the Wegmans where they worked, friends who supplied secret mix CDs featuring the Gorillaz and Elliott Smith. They were interning at a local dance studio, teaching yoga to kids and unsteadily emerging from a miasma of childhood depression. And then, in 2005, the family headed South.“I went from 0 to 100, from having been kissed once to having sex to having a threesome the next night,” the singer and guitarist said during a series of video interviews in early February, grinning wryly from the porch of their rural North Carolina home. (Yes, they stayed.) “And then I married a guy I met on Myspace three weeks later and got pregnant two months later. Upending everything my parents held dear was an act of self-preservation, because their belief system taught me I could not be myself.”During the last 20 years, Shook, now 38, has slowly discovered who they are — a nonbinary, atheist, vegan single parent using incisive and honest country songs to unpack past baggage. The process has been arduous, even life-threatening. When their band, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, played 150 shows a year, they would drink until they blacked out almost every night. But in July 2019, following a Canadian bacchanalia, Shook accepted their own ultimatum: Sober up or die trying.That epiphany led to therapy, daily walks in the woods, a new name, and, ultimately, the Disarmers’ new album, “Revelations,” due March 29. A stirring country-rock record that two-steps between Waxahatchee’s incisive beauties and Tom Petty’s winking classics, “Revelations” is the work of a songwriter relishing newfound clarity and confidence.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 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      ‘Game of Thrones’ Star Liam Cunningham Is Now in ‘3 Body Problem’

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      Born and raised in Dublin, Liam Cunningham speaks in Joycean streams of consciousness that often have no discernible beginning, middle or end. He talks with his hands and taps his feet, salting his anecdotes with friendly F-bombs, catching his breath only long enough to take a puff of his distinctively scented e-cigarettes. They aren’t very popular on the set.“They smell like if you took the cardboard that comes with a dry cleaned shirt and held it over a burner,” said D.B. Weiss, who, with his production partner David Benioff, has given Cunningham choice roles in “Game of Thrones” and now “3 Body Problem.” A heady new science-fiction series, based on a trilogy of novels by the Chinese author Liu Cixin, “3 Body Problem” premieres Thursday on Netflix.In it, Cunningham plays Thomas Wade, the no-nonsense spy master who leads a team of physicists chosen to save the world from a very slow-moving but ominous alien invasion. Unlike Davos Seaworth, the emotionally vulnerable knight Cunningham played in “Thrones,” Wade is gruff, bellicose and secretive, an enigmatic authority figure whose back story left even Cunningham with questions.With Benedict Wong, right, on “3 Body Problem,” Cunningham plays a no-nonsense spy master who leads a team of physicists.Ed Miller/Netflix“So little about him is known, and everybody you talk to that’s seen this thing is like, ‘What’s his story?’” Cunningham said on an Austin hotel patio during the South by Southwest Film Festival, where the series had its world premiere. “He’s got the U.N. Secretary General on the end of the phone, and people do what he tells them to, and you go, ‘Who’s giving him this authority?’ And the funny thing is, I never felt the need to talk to the boys” — Weiss and Benioff, that is — “they never offered, and I never asked, which probably is not a good thing to say, I should probably say to everybody, ‘Oh, I know everything about him, but I’m not telling you.’”Breath. Puff.Cunningham, 62 with salt-and-pepper hair and bright blue eyes, came to acting relatively late in life. He worked as an electrician until he was 29, spending a chunk of his 20s in Zimbabwe bringing electricity to rural communities. “You know the song ‘Wichita Lineman’?” he asks, referring to the ’60s country hit by Glen Campbell. “That was me, except I was the Zimbabwe lineman. For an Irish, pale-skinned elf from Dublin, it was mind-blowing.” For a time he worked in a national park, “the size of Belgium and with 16,000 elephants.”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 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Stepping Out From Hillary Clinton’s Onscreen Shadow

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      For the past two decades, female presidential candidates on TV have been made in her image. Finally, that’s beginning to change.“The Girls on the Bus” is a fizzy recasting of the campaign-trail memoir “Chasing Hillary” by Amy Chozick, who covered the 2016 election for The New York Times. But it is not a show about Hillary Clinton. Immediately, it takes pains to banish her persona from the screen. The Democratic front-runner of the pilot episode is a governor named Caroline Bennett (Joanna Gleason), and though she is a baby boomer (check) in a pantsuit (check), she also writes romance novels under a pseudonym.It’s a very un-Hillary detail, and it foretells a very un-Hillary downfall. Shortly after Chozick’s reporter stand-in, Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), eagerly hops onto Bennett’s bus, she finds her candidate sidelined by a sex scandal (and not her husband’s).These are silly choices, and savvy ones. Only when Clinton’s baggage has been dumped is “The Girls on the Bus” free to repave the trail into an escapist romp. For the better part of two decades, Clinton has gripped the cultural imagination around the idea of a first female president. Hundreds of millions of Americans, of several generations, both supporters and critics, imagined it would be her. Screenwriters foresaw it, too. “The Girls on the Bus,” now streaming on Max, is one of the first shows about presidential politics that is forced to contend with her absence. But it can’t quite quit her.As Clinton ran and lost and ran and lost in the real world, television universes selected a succession of fictionalized Hillarys to occupy their replica Oval Offices. Clinton’s politics, her path, her bearing, her wardrobe, her haircut — these character details could be mirrored or mocked or refuted onscreen, but they could not be ignored. When Cherry Jones played the first female president on “24,” beginning in 2008, she told a reporter, unprompted: “She’s not Hillary. She has nothing to do with Hillary.” But when Lynda Carter played an (alien!) president on “Supergirl” in 2016, she said, “I used Hillary to prepare.”Caroline Bennett (Joanna Gleason) and Felicity Walker (Hettienne Park) on the campaign trail in “The Girls on the Bus.”HBOWe 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 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      The American Tenor Jonathan Tetelman, a Puccini Specialist, Arrives at the Met

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      Jonathan Tetelman will sing in “La Rondine” and “Madama Butterfly” in New York. He trained as a baritone and worked as a D.J. before finding his “authentic voice” as a tenor.In the middle of last summer’s production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” at the Salzburg Festival, the American tenor Jonathan Tetelman brought down the house. As Macduff, Tetelman gave a searing rendition of “Ah, la paterna mano,” the heartbreaking aria after his character learns that the bloodthirsty monarch has slaughtered his wife and children.Tetelman’s performance in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s monumentally gloomy production was one of the festival’s highlights. Later this month, the 35-year-old tenor will make his Metropolitan Opera debut in Puccini’s “La Rondine.” He’ll also be heard at the Met as Pinkerton in a revival of the composer’s better-known “Madama Butterfly” that reunites him with his “Macbeth” co-star, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, in April and May. (There are planned Met Live in HD broadcasts of both productions.)In an email, the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, wrote that Tetelman had a “beautiful and big voice that is perfectly suited to the generous size of the Met’s auditorium, which is much larger than most European opera houses, and to these soaring Puccini roles.”Tetelman has swiftly risen to become one of his generation’s most in-demand lyric tenors and is particularly sought after for his Puccini. After singing Rodolfo in “La Bohème” for the first time in 2017 in Fujian, China, he reprised the role a year later at Tanglewood (replacing the Polish star tenor Piotr Beczala) and then on opening night of Barrie Kosky’s production at the Komische Oper Berlin in January 2019.Tetelman played Macduff in a performance of “Macbeth” at the 2023 Salzburg Festival.Bernd Uhlig/SFBut Tetelman’s path to the Met’s stage was anything but typical. Born in Chile, Tetelman was adopted by an American couple when he was 6 months old and grew up in Princeton, N.J. As an undergraduate at the Manhattan School of Music, he trained as a baritone but felt frustrated.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