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    Secretary of State Blinken Plays the Guitar to Launch “Music Diplomacy” Initiative

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    A viral video of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken introduced Americans to the guitar geek hidden within.It’s usually not a good sign when video of a senior government official singing goes viral on social media, where the crowds are as tough as they come.But when Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken picked up a black Fender guitar at a State Department event on Wednesday night and joined a band for Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” the response on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, where the video has been watched more than eight million times, drew positive reviews — and more than a little shock.“I had. NO. Idea,” said one X user, who used an expletive to express her amazement, in the video’s most-viewed reply.To be sure, there was also snark of the don’t-quit-your-day-job variety, and some tut-tutting about decorum (“Ukraine is on fire and Blinken is playing the guitar,” one user said). But on the whole, Mr. Blinken’s soulful baritone and crunchy blues chords, showcased at an event promoting a State Department “music diplomacy” initiative that was attended by the Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, escaped the dreaded label of cringecore.Perhaps more interesting was the understandable surprise that America’s top diplomat has a rock ’n’ roll bone in his body. Mr. Blinken, 61, is unfailingly soft-spoken and so formal that he wore his suit jacket — buttoned, no less — for the jam.Music is Mr. Blinken’s greatest nonpolitical passion. He once told Rolling Stone magazine that “the thread that runs throughout my life is probably music,” and said that hearing his parents play “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles as a child was a thunderbolt that has defined him ever since. “I remember being absolutely hooked,” Mr. Blinken said in an interview last week.His great guitar love is Eric Clapton, whom Mr. Blinken reports having seen live about 75 times.Mr. Clapton’s bluesy style and frequent covers led Mr. Blinken to discover the electric blues greats like B.B. King, Otis Rush and Luther Allison. One of them discovered him back: While living in Paris with his family at the age of 16, Mr. Blinken worked his way to the front of the stage during a performance by Mr. King, singing along with the lyrics he had memorized completely.“He sees me, I guess, and at the end he comes to the edge of the stage and bends down, and gives me his guitar pick,” Mr. Blinken said, sounding as though his mind remains slightly blown.As a young man, well before people called him “Mr. Secretary” and bodyguards followed him everywhere, Mr. Blinken played in bands and collected at least a half dozen guitars, including a high-end Martin acoustic “that I don’t deserve,” he said. Years of noodling at home with a four-track culminated in his release of three singles on Spotify, under the moniker Ablinken. (Say that out loud slowly for dad-joke effect.)The Spotify songs, which have collectively been streamed about 150,000 times — watch out, Harry Styles — show off a blues-rock sound with Everyman lyrics that bear no relation to the government official who talks about multilateral engagement and “diplomatic variable geometry.” (“And then I came home to you/But you said, ‘Let’s just be friends, yeah’” he sings over staccato electric chords in “Lip Service.”)Mr. Blinken noted that he had recorded and uploaded the songs between 2018 and 2020, during the Trump era, when he was out of government and unsure whether he would return. “I had little idea that there would be another run at government, or a public career of any kind,” he said. “And so when the president put me forward for this job, there they were.”The songs, which he has labeled “wonk rock,” occasionally pop up in his official life. They have been blared from speakers at overseas events, including before he addressed embassy employees in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, in June 2021. A Finnish radio station broadcast one when Mr. Blinken visited Helsinki in June to deliver a speech about the war in Ukraine.Mr. Blinken’s former band, which has played under the name of Cash Bar Wedding, was pretty cool, at least by the standards of Washington. His bandmates included Eli Attie, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore who went on to be a writer for “The West Wing,” and Jay Carney, a onetime spokesman for President Biden when Mr. Biden was vice president.Mr. Carney called the band mostly “an excuse to hang out and talk about music.” But the group was serious enough to take semiregular trips to music meccas like New Orleans, booking studios for a day of writing and recording songs.“As to the quality of the songs we created, let’s just say, mistakes were made!” said Mr. Carney, now head of policy and communications for Airbnb. They have jammed with indie-rock legends like Alex Chilton of Big Star, Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü and Aimee Mann.“Tony is actually a fine guitarist and songwriter,” Mr. Carney said. “We’re worried his State Department gig is a sign that he’s ditching us to launch a solo career.”Many foreign diplomats and leaders have clearly done their homework: No fewer than eight have given Mr. Blinken guitars or accessories like guitar straps as customary gifts (which he must purchase if he wants to keep). From Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, came a blue acoustic guitar with an engraving of U.S. and Israeli flags. Another guitar was offered by Qin Gang, the Chinese foreign minister who mysteriously disappeared this summer.In an interview, Mr. Blinken recalled a special rapport with Japan’s former foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi, a skilled pianist, guitar player and Beatles nut. “We totally bonded over music,” Mr. Blinken said, calling it “a constant refrain in our diplomatic discourse.”Mr. Blinken with Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan’s former foreign minister, left, and Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, during the Group of 7 meeting in April.Pool photo by Andrew HarnikThat discourse could get nerdy. Invoking a famous Beatles track, Mr. Blinken recalled “bad pun references like, ‘This policy’s going to be a long and winding road.’”In April, Mr. Hayashi hosted a meeting of the Group of 7 foreign ministers in Hiroshima, Japan. When the ministers convened one evening after official business was concluded, Mr. Blinken produced a small travel guitar he sometimes takes on foreign trips. Mr. Hayashi brought his own. With the help of a karaoke machine, they strummed chords as the other ministers, briefly forgetting matters like Ukraine and climate change, joyously sang along.“It’s a wonderfully bonding thing to forget about the weight of the world for a couple of hours and come together just as friends with a common passion for music,” Mr. Blinken said.He noted that the United States has used music as a diplomatic tool for decades. Amid competition with the Soviet Union for global influence in the 1950s, the State Department sponsored foreign tours for jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.Today’s version lacks that star power: Mr. Blinken’s new initiative includes a mentorship program for foreign music professionals that works in partnership with the Recording Academy, the organization that stages the Grammy Awards. English classes taught abroad by the State Department, which are hugely popular overseas, will now incorporate popular music lyrics.“Music is the most powerful connecter,” Mr. Blinken said. “It transcends virtually any kind of barrier you can think of.” More

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      in Music

      The Beatbox House to Travel Abroad for the State Dept. 

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      The trip will mark the first time that the government officially recognizes the genre in its American Music Abroad program.Members of the Beatbox House, a group of five vocal percussive artists from Brooklyn, will follow in the footsteps of American music legends Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong when they travel abroad later this month to serve as cultural ambassadors for the United States.Chris Celiz, Gene Shinozaki, Amit Bhowmick, Kenny Urban, and Neil Meadows (better known as NaPoM), all beatboxing champions, will visit Indonesia and Singapore with the State Department for three weeks of beatbox competitions, workshops and collaborations with local musicians as part of American Music Abroad, an outreach program sponsored by the department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.The Beatbox House, a group that has tens of thousands of fans, creates drum and instrument sounds with accented speech, distorted singing and lip oscillations. The music covers many genres, including hip-hop, EDM, grime, trap and rock. The group is also known for its popular cover of the Rednex song “Cotton Eye Joe.”Members of the Beatbox House have won competitions individually, in pairs and as a group, and they are active in music education efforts around New York City. In the group’s workshops, students are introduced to basic beatbox sounds, as well as to the endless possibilities that the human voice offers for musical expression. Now, the group has the chance to share the same lessons abroad.Known for holding inclusive, community-oriented competitions — known as battles — around the city, the Beatbox House has an itinerary that will include visits to plenty of community centers abroad. Alison Bassi, a cultural affairs officer for the U.S. Embassy in Singapore, hopes that the locations beyond bars and concert halls will make the music “accessible to lots of different people and a slightly different audience,” not just beatbox devotees.Dancers recently performed in a collaboration with members of the Beatbox House at the Guggenheim Museum.Jordan Macy for The New York TimesOriginally one of the five pillars of hip-hop, beatbox made its way to Europe in the late 1980s by way of American soldiers. Since then, the appetite for the art form in Europe and Asia has grown. The international beatbox community now numbers in the millions, with Asia representing many of the recent gains in support and participation. For the State Department, sending the Beatbox House musicians abroad — the first time it will recognize the musical genre in the cultural program — presents an opportunity to share an art form that is both specifically American and quite popular overseas.“We depend upon our American artists to join in our country’s diplomacy,” Lee Satterfield, the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, wrote in an email. In recent years, this mission has led American Music Abroad to partner with fewer chart-topping artists and more mission-driven performers like the Beatbox House, a shift that reflects what Mr. Satterfield said was the department’s goal to “expand the reach of music diplomacy.”Of course, security issues, on a smaller and more intimate scale, might crop up in Indonesia, where the group is already popular. “They love us out there,” Mr. Shinozaki said. Last time some of its members performed in the country, he said, they had to be escorted out of the venue.Mr. Shinozaki, Mr. Celiz and Mr. Bhowmick are all first-generation Americans whose families came from Japan, the Philippines and Bangladesh, respectively. For the five band members, performing an American style of music, in a diverse group, sums up the spirit of hip-hop, the spirit of democracy and the best of what this country has to offer.“My parents wanted the American dream,” Mr. Celiz said. “I feel like I’m getting to live it. But we’re also redefining what that means. This is our version of it.”Mike Quinlan, the spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia, wrote in an email that the Beatbox House was the Embassy’s “top choice” for the visiting artists program.“They have a good amount of people who are very excited about them being here,” Mr. Quinlan said, adding that “the Beatbox House is a living example” of the diversity of the United States, and of its music.Mr. Shinozaki, left, and Chris Celiz in their show, “The Missing Element.”Jordan Macy for The New York TimesSome Beatbox House members have experience in the region already, like Mr. Shinozaki in Indonesia. And four years ago, Mr. Bhowmick, Mr. Meadows and Mr. Shinozaki performed in Bangladesh, enjoying a warm reception, especially Mr. Bhowmick.“They look up to me,” he said of his fans in Bangladesh. “I’m a Bengali kid who changed his parents’ minds and broke the conventional path. So when we went there, the crowd was just amazing.” The trip with American Music Abroad, he said, “is going to be very similar in that way, if not even crazier.”Ms. Bassi pointed out that the biggest beatbox battle in Singapore is typically held in December. But when the organizers of the competition learned that the members of the Beatbox House would be in the country in February, they delayed the competition until then “to bring a bigger audience,” she said.After visiting Singapore, the group will continue its tour in the Philippines and Japan, doing the same community building, on their own time, that they are doing with the government program, simply because it matters to them. This will be the first trip to Asia that will involve all five members of the group, so they want to make it last as long as possible.Mr. Urban summed up the mood on behalf of the group, saying he was “just excited to be with my squad” and to “tour the world.”In addition to performing, the Beatbox House is dedicated to community outreach. Jordan Macy for The New York Times More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Corridors of Power’ Review: The Human Cost of Foreign Policy

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      This documentary illuminates America’s ever-shifting approach to conflicts abroad and how politics at home can even lead to inaction.Dror Moreh’s exhaustive documentary “The Corridors of Power” assembles several political heavyweights to survey the bedeviling issue of recent American military intervention abroad. Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Syria — the litany of deadly conflicts still triggers anguish as the film retraces the rationales to send troops or, more often, to steer clear of entanglement.Any one of these war-zone case studies could be the subject of a single movie, but by covering several, Moreh illuminates the patterns of behavior that lead to stalemate and inaction, even in the face of genocide. The fears of political blowback at home are familiar, and at times while watching, you feel trapped in an interminable, slow-motion tango of hand-wringing. But you also glean how each conflict can affect the responses to the next: In 1990s, after the United States did little to stop the massacre in Rwanda and acted belatedly in Bosnia, the film argues, NATO intervened more rapidly and forcefully in Kosovo.As edited, Moreh’s interviews prize policy analysis and haunting candor over gotcha moments or grandstanding. The interviewees span multiple presidential administrations, including several secretaries of state: James Baker (on Iraq: “Money’s worth fighting over, in my view”), Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as lesser-known insiders. Samantha Power, the genocide scholar and special adviser to former President Obama, emerges as the film’s lodestar. She repeatedly and skillfully frames human rights as a determining consideration in decisions to intervene (as she often did for the president).To a nearly horrifying extent, the director presents the civilian cost of unchecked wars and dictators: Images of corpses punctuate the words of the many talking heads. The film treats the United States as the sole moral standard-bearer of the globe, and in the face of such horrors, it’s a burden that begins to seem impossible to handle alone.The Corridors of PowerNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More