Barbra Streisand's New Album Features Historic First Duet With Bob Dylan
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Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan have teamed up to sing The Very Thought of You, which also marks their first duet together. They started their careers around the same time.
Barbra Streisand is set to release a new album on June 27. Called The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2, the album features the singer teaming up with talented musicians like Hozier, Paul Mccartney, Sam Smith, Laufey, Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande, Tim McGraw, James Taylor, Sting, Josh Groban and Seal. Among all the artists, fans are particularly excited about Streisand's duet with Bob Dylan. The two iconic artists have teamed up to sing The Very Thought of You, which marks their first duet together. Despite starting their careers around the same time, Dylan and Streisand never collaborated before this track. The Nobel Prize winner had once revealed that he wrote Lay Lady Lay with Barbra in mind.
Making the announcement on Instagram, Barbra wrote, 'I've always loved singing duets with gifted artists. They inspire me in unique and different ways…and make our time in the studio a joy! My new album, The Secret Of Life: Partners, Volume Two, gave me the chance to work and play with some of my old friends, label mates, and new artists, too. I admire all of them… and I hope that you'll enjoy listening to our collaborations as much as I enjoyed recording with all of my wonderful partners."
In some old interviews, Bob Dylan had confessed that he wanted Barbra Streisand to sing Lay Lady Lay. In a conversation back in 1971, Dylan's friend and blues musician Tony Glover had asked the singer, 'You said Father of Night was written for a play, and Lay Lady Lay was done for Midnight Cowboy." To this, Dylan replied, 'Actually it was written for Barbra Streisand."
Other than her duet with Bob Dylan on The Very Thought of You, Barbra Streisand has many other exciting collaborations on her new album The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2. She is collaborating with Hozier for a track called The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. The singer is working with Paul McCartney on My Valentine. With Sam Smith, she will perform To Lose You Again. Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande join Barbra for One Heart, One Voice, while Tim McGraw teams up with the singer for I Love Us. Secret O' Life with James Taylor, Fragile with Sting, Where Do I Go From You with Josh Groban and Love Will Survive with Seal are other tracks on Barbra Streisand's new album.
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Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Review: The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature
We might consider the Nobel Prize for Literature to be a holy pulpit that canonises a writer. It ordains the pantheon of all-time greats who have attained literary divinity and is where 'industrial money is gilded with royal glamour, scientific benefits, and cultural sophistication'. But the intimate connection between the 'the cultural capital of high-brow literature… dynamite money from the donor and…the feudally rooted status of the old Swedish monarchy' has meant that the Nobel Prize has always been under scrutiny. However, most of the books on the subject have been rich in myth but poor in scholarship. The process of the selection of laureates and how that has shaped the idea of 'universal' literary values and defined literary quality across languages and cultures has rarely, if ever, been discussed. But what mechanisms made it possible for 18 Swedish intellectuals – 'randomly chosen persons in the remote town of Stockholm' – to become the world's most influential literary critics with a power to exert an almost godlike influence on the literary world? Paul Tenngart's well-researched book The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature scours the history and future of the prize to explain the complex alchemy of how the Nobel Prize in Literature has shaped (and continues to shape) the world literary canon. Apart from fame, the Nobel Prize comes with a larger sum of money than most prizes. Alfred Nobel donated more than 30 million Swedish crowns, which is the approximate equivalent of 245 million US dollars in today's currency. Having money makes one earn more money, not only through interest and other capital gains, but also through the social and cultural attraction of economic success. This is how Nobel's generous donation empowered 'an outdated and elitist closed circle of cultural power' to judge the excellence of human endeavour. The cultish effect of the Nobel Prize for Literature has led other well-known prizes with a fundamentally international perspective on literature to be modelled on it – the Formentor, the Neustadt Prize, and the International Booker Prize, a spin-off of the Booker that, from 2005 onward, has awarded literature originally written in any language but available in English translation. That Rabindranath Tagore received the prize in 1913 because of the English translations of his Bengali poetry confirms Heilbron's notion of Anglophone hyper-centrality in literary traffic across markets and languages and accounts for English being the most awarded literary language. The book raises questions about what constitutes world literature that the donor, Nobel himself, probably had no means to answer. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary theories and methods, this multifaceted history of the Nobel Prize questions how the Swedish Academy has managed to uphold the global status of the prize through all the violent international crises of the last 120 years. It also looks at the impact the prize has had on the distribution and significance of particular works, literatures and languages. Over the years, in its strenuous attempt to 'recognize true and durable literary quality', the Swedish Academy has often awarded writers who have soon become outdated. The weighing and ranking of the literary merits of contemporaries is an almost hopeless undertaking. As a result, the Swedish intellectuals have missed the chance to award literary giants like Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Looking at the back list of laureates, in 1951, Henri-René Lenormand concluded that 'it is disturbing to have witnessed the disregard for universal geniuses like Joseph Conrad of England, Ibsen and Strindberg for the Scandinavian countries' and 'Chekhov, Tolstoy, Andreiev and Gorky of Russia'. The subjectivity of the selection process, and its propensity to be run by high-minded literary cabals has raised questions, laying the prize open to criticism of oversight and bias. Admittedly, canonization points readers to authors whom they might not have cared to read without the Nobel tag. Tagore's literature prize sparked the most intense reactions in The New York Times to any single Nobel Prize until the outbreak of the First World War. But it did also lend widespread expediency to the act of reading him. Many writers have been 'discovered' by readers, not on account of the epiphany of their greatness, but because they had been awarded the Nobel. As many deserving writers have been ignored, the Nobel Committee has been accused of holding Eurocentric attitudes toward literatures produced in non-European and non-Western contexts, resulting in authors and texts from such 'remote parts' not being 'consecrated'. 'The academy is often reproached for thus neglecting the literatures of Asia and Afric. Artur Lundkvist, an influential member of the Academy, infamously said in Svenska Dagbladet in 1977, 'But I doubt if there is so far very much to find there.' It was a comment as prejudiced as Thomas Macaulay's statement that 'A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. Not that the Nobel committee is unaware of this, but diplomacy has a role to play amongst languages, cultures, and nations 'struggling for recognition and dominance'. From 1901 to 2022, of the 119 laureates, more than 80 have been born in or have been long-standing residents in European countries. Thirteen of the awarded authors have been US citizens, and nine of them have been born in Africa or have lived in African countries. Interestingly, sitting on the northern fringes of Europe, Stockholm and Sweden (its language is spoken by only 0.1 percent of the world's population) do not enjoy a central position in the world, either politically, economically, or culturally. Yet, in 'awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, the semi-peripheral Stockholm is the middle sibling of world literature, a space of compromises between self-sufficient firstborns and defiant lastborns,' writes Tenngart. He believes the Nobel will 'always' be a European prize that will never be able to 'balance out the hierarchy between cultures, languages, and literatures,' reinforced further by its 'international importance'. He adds that the Swedish Academy is fundamentally an 'elitist' and 'undemocratic' assembly. In its zeal to remain politically neutral, in the wake of the death-edict issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, the Swedish Academy decided not to condemn the fatwa and thereby not to officially and univocally support Rushdie. In protest, three Academy members – Kerstin Ekman, Werner Aspenström, and Lars Gyllensten – refused to continue their work in the Academy. It is impossible to officially resign so Aspenström's and Gyllensten's chairs remained empty until their deaths in 1997 and 2006. Kerstin Ekman's chair remained empty until the rules were changed in 2018. Interestingly, an intense political controversy ensued in 2019 when Peter Handke was awarded. The Austrian writer was accused of being sympathetic to Serbian nationalism, and denying the Srebrenica massacre and was strongly criticized for speaking at Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's funeral in 2006. Over the years, the Academy has also drawn flak over its selections of Gao Xingjian, VS Naipaul, Imre Kertész, Orhan Pamuk, Herta Müller, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Mo Yan – all of whom have been accused of painting a false picture of their home countries. Many believed that their consecration reinforced the authors' assumptions. And that's not all. Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was disqualified due to his 'negativity' in relation to traditional institutions; Ezra Pound's 'fascist' opinions during the Second World War disqualified him. It is clear that moral and political considerations often gained precedence over merit. Language often has been a barrier. During the first three decades of the prize, no Russian author was awarded, because none of the early twentieth-century members knew Russian. The book tries to prise open an institution that has been overshadowed by its cultish culture of secrecy ('a leftover from the cultural practice of closed circles of power'). One of its rules is that critics and scholars have to wait for 50 years until committee discussions of nominated authors are made public. Tenngart believes the origins of this great secrecy is firmly rooted in 18th-century Freemasonry. While it ushered in Rabindranath Tagore's Bengali, Sinclair Lewis' American, Gabriela Mistral's Chilean, and Yasunari Kawabata's Japanese moorings, besides including politically entrenched writers like Winston Churchill, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Gao Xingjian in the World Republic of Letters, the Republic was built, Tenngart reminds us, on western liberal ideology. Prasenjit Chowdhury is an independent writer. He lives in Kolkata.
Time of India
3 days ago
- Time of India
A voice for democracy: Thomas Mann's lasting literary legacy
Thomas Mann (Image credit: Nobel Prize website) One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Thomas Mann 's literary genius reflected a life spent wandering between diverse worlds, especially after escaping Germany in the early 1930s. Mann rose to global fame when in 1929 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature — primarily for for his great social novel, "Buddenbrooks" (1901), but also for his fiction masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain" (1924). But during and after the Nazi dictatorship from which he escaped, Mann wrote political essays and delivered radio speeches to his compatriots about the German "catastrophe" that led to the Holocaust. These strident views were often reflected in his work. Early rise to literary prominence: Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, northern Germany, to a merchant family. He was raised with four siblings, and as a schoolboy wrote his first prose sketches and essays — even if he once repeated a grade and was deemed as only a "satisfactory" student of German. His artistic aspirations did not fit in well in the middle-class mainstream, and his passion for literature saddened his merchant father. This sensitive bohemian's struggle to carry on the family's time-honored business partly inspired Mann's first work, "Buddenbrooks." by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Giao dịch vàng CFDs với mức chênh lệch giá thấp nhất IC Markets Đăng ký Undo When his father died in 1891, Mann left school before completing his A-levels and moved to Munich with his family. Living off his father's inheritance, he soon began to work as a freelance writer and had ambitions to become a journalist. At the age of 22, after spending time in Italy with his brother Heinrich, Mann started to pen "Buddenbrooks," which was subtitled "a family's decline" in German. The semi-autobiographical debut novel about the downfall of a wealthy merchant family was such a success that Mann was able to henceforth live off his writing. War and sibling rivalry: Other works soon followed, initially the novella collection "Tristan" (1903), which also includes "Tonio Kröger," a story about the contrast between artist and citizen, spirit and life. In 1905, the novelist married Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a wealthy Munich family of scholars. He was also attracted to young men, though this did not seem to bother Katia. The couple had six children. Some of them later followed in their father's footsteps and became writers. The First World War (1914-1918) began and Thomas fell out with his brother Heinrich, by then also a successful author, over Germany's role in the war. Heinrich published an anti-war pamphlet, while Thomas defended the empire and its war policy. It was not until 1922 — by which time Germany had lost the war and democracy arrived with the Weimar Republic — that Thomas Mann changed his stance and supported democratization. Mann's Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 was a huge success for the writer, but long before the outbreak of the following world war, Mann sensed danger. He expressed opposition to the rising Nazi party and made a fiery plea against authoritarianism and in favor of social democracy in 1930. Thus in the spring of 1933, barely a month after Adolf Hitler became German chancellor, Mann did not return to Germany from a lecture tour of Europe. He settled in Switzerland, his family following after the Nazis confiscated the Mann house in Munich along with the writer's bank accounts. The first volume of "Joseph and His Brothers" was subsequently published after it was smuggled out of Germany — the four-part novel describes the incarnation of the biblical figure Joseph. After Mann denounced Nazi policies in a public letter in 1936, his German citizenship was revoked, along with his honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn. The Nazis had robbed him of his fortune, and fame. Emigration to the US and return to Europe: Thomas and Katia Mann emigrated to the US in 1939, after Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Mann took up a guest professorship at a university in Princeton. When a reporter asked him on his arrival how he felt about going into exile, Mann replied: "Where I am is Germany! I carry my culture within me." From 1940 onwards, Thomas Mann called on the Germans to resist. The British radio station BBC broadcast his monthly radio speeches to his former homeland, bypassing German censorship. In over 60 broadcasts, he spoke to the conscience of his compatriots, and did not shy away from the mass murder of the Jews. Mann's public letter of 1945, "Why I will not return to Germany," held all Germans responsible for the atrocities of the Nazi era. But some critics denied him the right, as an exile, to pass judgment on life under Hitler. Some could not comprehend Mann's comment that the fire bombing of German cities was justified. "Everything must be paid for," he said. The writer continued this theme in his novel "Doctor Faustus," published in 1947. It tells of the composer Adrian Leverkühn's pact with the devil, and is a metaphor for the social conditions that made National Socialism possible. But not everything was going well in the USA either: as a "suspected communist," Mann had to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which called him "one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company." The writer left America again in 1952, but he was not drawn to either of the two German states and instead returned to Switzerland, where he died in Zurich Cantonal Hospital on August 12, 1955 at the age of 80. With his literature, but also with his steadfastness in the face of fascism, Thomas Mann set a courageous example and a legacy that remains.
Hans India
29-05-2025
- Hans India
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