Verwandte Artikel zu How to Fail As a Popstar

How to Fail As a Popstar - Softcover

Shraya, Vivek

 
9781551528427: How to Fail As a Popstar
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1551528428 ISBN 13: 9781551528427
Verlag: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Described as “cultural rocket fuel” by Vanity Fair, Vivek Shraya is a multi-media artist whose art, music, novels, and poetry and children’s books explore the beauty and the power of personal and cultural transformation. How to Fail as a Popstar is Vivek’s debut theatrical work, a one-person show that chronicles her journey from singing in shopping malls to “not quite” pop music superstardom with beguiling humor and insight. A reflection on the power of pop culture, dreams, disappointments, and self-determination, this astonishing work is a raw, honest, and hopeful depiction of the search to find one’s authentic voice.

The book includes color photographs from the show’s 2020 production in Toronto, and a foreword by its director Brendan Healy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vivek Shraya is the author of the young-adult collection God Loves Hair, the novels The Subtweet and She of the Mountains, the poetry book even this page is white, the graphic novel Death Threat, and the children's picture book (with Rajni Perera) The Boy & the Bindi (all published by Arsenal Pulp Press), as well as I'm Afraid of Men and What I Love About Being QUEER. Her first play How to Fail as a Popstar premiered at Canadian Stage in Toronto in 2020. She is editor of the Arsenal Pulp Press imprint VS. Books, dedicated to work by new and emerging Black or Indigenous writers, or writers of colour. Originally from Edmonton, she lives in Calgary, where she is an assistant professor in the University of Calgary's Department of English.

Brendan Healy is a theater director whose credits include the premiere production of Vivek Shraya’s How to Fail as a Popstar at Canadian Stage in Toronto in 2020. He is a regular instructor at the National Theatre School of Canada.

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Hi everyone! Sorry to interrupt. My name is Vivek Shraya. Before we get started I just want to clarify something. When I say that I failed as a popstar, this is what I mean:
I did not become God.
I did not become Madonna.
None of my music broke into the mainstream.
And I never got to perform on the world’s biggest stages—no offense, Canadian Stage.

Ok, that’s it!

THE POPSTAR

Music Ur the 1

I learned to sing to please my mother
I learned to sing to please God
I learned to sing to please the pretty girls

But along the way
I fell in love
With music—for music’s sake
With melody
Now every breath I take, I’m gonna make

Music, music, music, music, music
Cause music ur the 1

I tried to sing to please the people
I tried to win all their love
I tried to sing but no one stopped to hear

So I disappeared
And fell out of love
With music—for music’s sake
With melody
Until I find my way back, I’m gonna make

Music, music, music, music, music
Cause music ur the 1
Music ur the 1, ur the 1
Music ur the 1, ur the 1
Music ur the 1, ur the 1
Music ur the 1, ur the 1

Prologue

I am 27 years old.
In my hand is a first class ticket. I have never flown first class before.
Just a few months ago, I signed a record deal with a label in France.
And now they have paid for my plane ticket to play a string of shows in Paris.
After I settle into my window seat, I can feel the tears filling my eyes.
All of my hard work has paid off.
I’m finally crossing over.

THE MAIDEN

Early one morning, just as the sun was rising
I heard a maiden singing in the valley below

My earliest memory of music is this song. My mother used to sing it to wake up my brother and I in the morning, while she swung open our bedroom doors and drew our curtains.

Oh don't deceive me, Oh never leave me,
How could you use a poor maiden so?

Because I was too young to know what a maiden was, I often imagined my mother as the protagonist of this song. And yet, my mother was nothing like the tragic, desperate maiden. Instead, our relationship straddled the line between love and fear—where she was extremely caring to over compensate for the unreliability of my father, and perhaps for the very same reason, ever stirring a cauldron of anger that could erupt at any moment. I wanted to do whatever I could to win her love and keep her anger at bay because with anger came violence. Except we never called it that. Smacking your kid around is normal in a brown home.

Also normal in our home was my parents continuously arguing about money. My dad had an enormous debt which he had accrued, in part, from his extensive pop record collection.

I want to be where the sun warms the sky

While my dad played this song on repeat, my brother and I would dance in our living room crammed with my mother’s collection of goods: bronze statues, an onyx chess board, and artificial flower arrangements. My mother’s logic seemed to be that if we filled our house with shiny things, maybe no one would notice that we weren’t rich.

It was here, in our ostentatious living room that I was inducted into singing. I’m five years old, crouched on the carpet, next to the polished coffee table. My mother is sitting on the velour couch which is protected by a bedsheet. She hands me a piece of paper with non-English words written on it. I know it’s her handwriting because she only writes in caps lock. She tells me that this is a bhajan, then sings a line, and instructs me to repeat after her. She sings another line and again, I repeat after her.

I don’t know why we’re doing this. I don’t know what these words mean. But I know from her dedication to teaching me that these words are important to her. That me singing them pleases her, soothes her.

THE GURU

Our religious organization centred around an Indian guru named Sai Baba. So the organization was neatly referred to as the Sai Centre. Except we weren’t really a centre. We were a nomadic group of fifty to one hundred people, who often rented high school gyms for our Sunday bhajan ceremonies. We would convert them by stretching white sheets on the floor, erecting a life size photo of Sai Baba under the basketball hoop, and placing a velvet chair beside the photo for him to telepathically sit on.

It was here that I learned that Sai Baba is god and he had come to remind us that we are God too. I also learned that we could remember our godliness by singing bhajans. This was pretty convenient because I was often asked to be a lead singer of one of the bhajans.

The person who decided who was allowed to be a lead singer at the Sai Centre was Aunty Jaya. She would point at you when you walked into the gym which meant: you were chosen. She was a towering woman, always in a sari, who looked like a football player. Her stature combined with her selecting power, and her gruff personality, made her a highly revered and equally disliked character at the centre. But my god, when she sang, you wouldn’t know that voice came out of that woman. She could make an actual football player weep with her smooth, crisp delivery. She was the one I looked up to the most, the one I wanted to sing like. Because when she did, I swear I could feel my own divinity.

I can’t think of a better Boot Camp for learning how to sing than the Sai Centre. When you’re singing a bhajan, the main objective is to reach god. Can you imagine the kind of feeling you would squeeze into every vowel and consonant when this is the goal?

Govinda Madhava Gopala Keshava

I loved the intention that was required when singing bhajans, along with their expansive melodies and melodramatic lyrics about being an orphan, a hopeless servant, a passionate seeker. In bhajan lyrics, something is always missing in you but the fix, the filling is clear: god.

Jaya Nanda Mukunda Nanda Govinda Radhey Gopala

Unlike math questions that were forever unsolvable, singing a bhajan was asking a question with an answer already embedded into it. And unlike math, not only was this something I could do, I was being told I could do it well. Not only by being chosen by Aunty Jaya, but from others in the congregation. Like the couple who told me that they would drive in from Sherwood Park, outside of Edmonton, just to hear me sing.

Giridhari Giridhari Jaya Radhey Gopala
Ghana Shyama Shyama Shyama Jaya Jaya Radhey Gopala

After the forty minutes of bhajan singing was over, a member of the community would stand up and give a speech on one of the 5 human values: Truth, Righteousness, Peace, Love and Non-Violence.

Because of how well I sang, I was soon offered the opportunity to give one of these speeches. Children were seldom asked to do this but when they were, it was beyond adorable hearing a preaching child. But I wasn’t interested in being adorable, I wanted to be different. I loved the element of surprise. So in my speeches I would include snippets of pop covers. For instance, when I spoke about god’s unwavering reliability, I also sang:

You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back
Where there is love—I'll be there

That was Mariah Carey’s version.

The adults were always impressed by my “creativity,” but mostly in that unspecific “wow good job” kind of way. But one night, one of the men in the organization said to me “I really loved that song you wrote.” Uncle Kamal was a reserved man so I was taken aback by his forwardness. “Oh, I didn’t write that song.”

I had never considered the possibility of...

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Verlag
Arsenal Pulp Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1551528428
ISBN 13 
9781551528427
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
110
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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