The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Band A Novel By Christine Ma-Kellams

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

The Band A Novel By Christine Ma-Kellams https://amzn.to/4c1IzYY “This could very well be the first great K-Pop literary phenomenon.” —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2024 Perfect for fans of Mouth to Mouth and Black Buck, this whip-smart, darkly funny, and biting debut follows a psychologist with a savior complex who offers shelter to a recently cancelled K-pop idol on the run. Sang Duri is the eldest member and “visual” of a Korean boy band at the apex of global superstardom. But when his latest solo single accidentally leads to controversy, he’s abruptly cancelled. To spare the band from fallout with obsessive fans and overbearing management, Duri disappears from the public eye by hiding out in the McMansion of a Chinese American woman he meets in a Los Angeles H-Mart. But his rescuer is both unhappily married with children and a psychologist with a savior complex, a combination that makes their potential union both seductive and incredibly problematic. Meanwhile, Duri’s cancellation catapults not only a series of repressed memories from his music producer’s earlier years about the original girl group whose tragic disbanding preceded his current success, but also a spiral of violent interactions that culminates in an award show event with reverberations that forever change the fates of both the band members and the music industry. In its indicting portrayal of mental health and public obsession, fandom, and cancel culture, The Band considers the many ways in which love and celebrity can devolve into something far more sinister when their demands are unmet. Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and much more. The Band is her first novel. You can find her in person at one of California’s coastal cities or online at ChristineMa-Kellams.com.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show. Come on.

There you go, ladies. Welcome to the big show. Our latest thing that makes it official. Welcome, TheBrivolousPrivateShow.com and stories to life and to help enlighten you, entertain you, and all that great stuff. We have an amazing author on the show with us today. We're going to be talking about her newest book that comes out April 16th, 2024. It's called The Band. It's a novel by Christine McKellams. She joins us on the show. We'll be talking about all of the wonderful stuff that went into it. She is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and much more.

The band is her first novel, and you can find her in person at one of California's coastal cities or online. Welcome to the show, Christine. How are you? Pretty good. I'm super excited to be here. Super excited to have you as well. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot com.

Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? So my website is just my name. So Christine Ma-K-E-L-L-A-M-S. So MaKellams.com. So I have all my socials linked there and the stuff about the book, bio, everything. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of your new book and what's inside.

Yeah, so in a nutshell, my book is essentially about this K-pop boy bander who finds himself cancelled after he releases this viral song that judges old ethnic rivalries between East Asia's three superpowers, like China, Korea, and Japan.

So he ends up escaping to America to hide in the McMansion of an American therapist he meets at the grocery store. And essentially, it follows what all the sort of disruptions that happen afterwards as his band ends up confronting the fandom in these increasing violent interactions that end up changing the music industry.

Wow. This sounds like quite the adventure that it goes on and everything else. What rooted you in some of the plot to this? Where did you come up with it or what was the influence for it? Yeah, so I originally started writing this book a couple of years ago, right?

Around the same time that I discovered K... I mean, discovered is in quotes, right right because obviously k-pop has been around forever but i personally did not really know that much about k-pop until three years ago right around 2020 so when i discovered k-pop thanks to bts and like saturday night live and the james corden show it really just opened up this whole new world like i'd always been a music fan like growing up like every other teeny boppy girl like i followed all the like boy bands of the 90s and early aughts but I didn't know what k-pop was like and when I found out I realized they're like an entirely different animal than even the like American fandoms and like American music acts and a lot of sort of a lot of like things that

actually has happened in k-pop not necessarily like direct, but a lot of sort of the shenanigans have gone on in the world of K-pop, inspired different bits and pieces of the novel. There you go. And I guess you're a member of the BTS army as well. Yeah, I mean, at this rate, who isn't? But yeah, definitely, I love BTS. They're probably my gateway drug into the world of K-pop,

and they're probably what I follow the most. Wow, there you go. I'm a Metallica classic rock fan so i haven't i haven't i haven't breached over that bridge to kpop so maybe i'll i'll take a gander on your recommendation yeah there you go maybe we can get metallica to pair up with the the bts folks or the one of the k-pop groups and a lot of like collaborations yeah they do so far but you know i feel like there's always collaboration you know and crossover i think is what they call it when they go from one genre to another you know beyonce just put out an album that covered like most of the charts i don't think she made the k-pop charts so that's a

disappointment but there's that it sounds like quite the adventure and a multi-international adventure so tell us a little bit about yourself how did you grow up when did you kind of first discover your panache for writing so i grew up in china i moved to america when i was like fairly young when i was five and it took me a long time to learn english i don't know if it's just a slow kid or whatever but i don't think i really spoke and was fluent in English until maybe it was the very end of elementary school, like early middle school. But pretty much ever since I could put two sentences together in the English language, I've liked writing and I wanted to write. And it wasn't until

fairly recently that I started writing fiction. My training is in like social sciences and psychology. And so most of my writing was just in empirical journals and academic. Stuff like that was way more boring. But when I started reading again as an adult, for fun, that's when I started remembering that I really like fiction probably more than I like anything else. And it really just one thing turned into another. And now I have a novel.

There you go. Congratulations. Yeah, I pulled up your book list. book list and i was like wait she's got a novel yeah and and i mean you're a harvard trained cultural psychologist and i i think most of your writing that you've done in and for a lot of these places who is in the field of psychology wasn't it and and now you're writing novels you know i i we have so many great novels that have been on the show like yourself and i've often wondered should i give up non-fiction and you know writing about business which is kind of boring i mean i feel like you totally should because i honestly i mean i'm a big fan of non-fiction

books too like i read non-fiction i feel like you can learn a lot from non-fiction but i also feel like the the skill set you have for writing non-fiction probably translates yeah it probably does yeah and like the expertise you have in like business and in your own background like in negotiation and all that like i feel would make for a really compelling thriller you know and like you have inside knowledge that maybe a lot of writers don't necessarily have. Yeah. Very compelling story. You want to know something funny? I just got a plot for a novel right in my head.

No way. And it's really good. Yeah. So thank you. I may have to credit you in the book for this. I'll mix notes after the show. But yeah, you just, it just pounded right into my head like a novel plot. I would tell it on air, but I'll tell you after.

Okay, yeah, I can't wait. After we go off air, I'll run it by you. But yeah, I think it's one of the genre I could write about. Oh. You helped cue it with the business you're in, et cetera, et cetera. With the band, what made you fill out the characters in here the protagonist was it was any was it just characters from your creation or did do you have any influence of maybe some of the people you've seen in the business yeah you know if you make it through the book and the book's

not long but if you make it to the very end you get to the knowledge then you might notice that like bts is one of the people i acknowledged very early on like before like my family and everything because you're absolutely right not necessarily i i don't mean it to be like a direct reflection of any particular like real world person um and it's it's not like a one-on-one like direct reflection but i think some of the just general like personas that i've sort of observed either among bts members themselves or just among like musicians more broadly like i i'm a big fan of just following celebrity culture i ever always have been ever since i was a kid and i don't think what we see as fans from the outside is necessarily a great reflection of you know who people are when no one's looking um but i

think it's interesting especially now in the world of like social media, where I feel like there's a lot more direct visibility into how people like the stuff they post. Like you don't always have to watch them through the guise of a journalist asking them a question. Right. Sometimes you see them posting their own content. And I feel like you get a lot better sense of what people how they think and what's going on in their mind. So definitely a lot of like actual musicians and celebrities inspire like different parts and bits of the novel and the characters in them. There you go. And one of the characters is a Chinese American woman.

He meets in Los Angeles, H-BAR. And so is there a bit of you maybe in the book or maybe just your experience as a Chinese American woman? I mean, there's bits of me in the sense that the references she makes about psychology and the stuff she talks about that's purely psychological. Oh, wow. I make references to psych studies and stuff about mental health and depression

and stuff like that. So those things, I obviously have direct access to myself. I teach on those things. I tell my students about them. Those things are probably the most direct reflections of me. Obviously I do live in LA. I'm, I love this particular area of the world.

I like, it's a bad rap, but like this particular, it's wonderful. I love LA too. I grew up in California. Yeah. Not with anybody who doesn't like LA.

Really? I mean, I feel like maybe just people I know, I know a lot of people from like the Bay area, for example, who like, well, screw the Bay area. Give me a break. lot of people from the Bay Area, for example, who hate me. Well, screw the Bay Area. Give me a break.

Screw those people. Those aren't real people. They're like New Yorkers who despise. Yeah, they're just jealous they don't have sun, I don't know what, 363 days of the year and warm weather and beautiful beaches. I mean, what kind of beaches are there in New York? Screw those people. That's true.

You probably have to, I don't know, go to the Hamptons or something. Yeah, so like, you know, the parts of like my hometown or like the area where I live now that, you know, make cameos in the novel. Those are obviously, you know, firsthand experiences. And those things definitely, you know, I think a lot of fiction, whether people admit it or not, auto fiction right like you you unless you are just the world's best researcher which you know a lot of artists are really good at research i feel like a lot of people are drawing not necessarily in exact events but in terms of like locations or feelings or character profiles they're drawing from their own lives well the old saying is what you write what you know basically yeah i don't know maybe i just made it up maybe no but i'm pretty sure someone

said that you're right what you know you know a lot of novels we have on this show though they'll secretly admit to me in the green room they'll be like yeah i set this in france so that we could have a budget to go to france and do research so i'm helping you with your next book you know or you know we had to go to germany and you know see all the expensive places because research i'm like i see what see what's going on with them budgets there it does simon schuster and stuff so there you go now it you you mentioned in the the book is portrayed as a portrayal of a mental health public accession fandom and canceled culture and i imagine a lot of that's interwoven with your experiences as psychologists and stuff do you ever do any self-reflection to to go maybe i maybe i'm a

little too into k-pop i mean a little bit like one of the things that you know that i think psychologists are becoming more aware of now that i don't because here's the i don't i don't mean to on like psychology but i i want to admit that I feel like social science is always a couple of years behind what's actually happening like by the time like academics know about it like it's been around a long time right like for a long time psychologists were still primarily studying like Facebook and Twitter and not realizing that like the social media landscape has changed so fast so that if you're still studying Facebook and Twitter I'm not saying that's not useful but I'm saying that's just like a very tiny portion of what's all the action happening so absolutely I think you know one

of the things that I do hear a lot of conversation about not so much in psychology but just in you know public discussion is like how people's parasocial relationships like relationships with people don't actually know can become like delusional. The Lulu is like a very popular phrase thrown around in like social media. And I do think that's super interesting and I would love to see more studies on it

because I think you're absolutely right. It's something, I mean, fundamentally it is delusional, right? To say anything about a famous person you've never met. But I do think it's so pervasive now that we should probably pay more attention to it. And we have to ask like,

why, what is the, maybe the undercurrent behind this? What's the, are there consequences to being like, sometimes, I mean, for years at events,

we've had people run up to me at shows and be like the Christmas show. And you're like security. I mean, they come up to you and they, they think that they know you because they've seen you on air. And I've experienced a little bit of that. But since you're a psychologist, someone in our Facebook groups has posted this. Do you have any idea whether this person is mentally stable or not? Rick Craft.

What the hell? I can't make sense of this guy. So I'm just going to leave it. Anyway, I had to give him a tease. So, yeah, I mean, there's, you know, political, there's a sense of this. So I'm just going to leave it. Anyway, I had to give him a tease. So, yeah, I mean, there's,

you know, political, there's a lot of fandom, you know, people worship, you know, these individuals, sometimes it gets dangerous or has been dangerous to some stars or movie or,

or things, you know, there's something that I think, I think a little bit of healthy fandom is, is good. You know, I, I tend to buy a lot of Metallica crap.

And I'm a huge collector of my favorite band. Have you met them in person ever? What? Have you met them? No, I've always wanted to. But, you know, I just, the stars never aligned, I guess. But it would be fun. But, you know, I guess I'm kind of a lazy fan. I haven't quite reached the psychotic level of fandom where I'm following them.

I saw a video one day where they said they met some fans that say they go to every concert and follow them all around all the concerts. I don't know who's got that kind of money or time, but there you go. I probably would if I had the money. I don't know. I'm a fan. But, you know, I kind of get it. But, man, you see those BTS screaming fans, and they remind me I, you know, I, I kind of get it, but man, you see those BTS screaming fans and they remind me of, you know,

I grew up with the Beatles. And so you would see the girls screaming, the Beatles audience, and they would just overwhelm whatever audience they were in. And of course, you know, girls chasing down the street, the videos,

you know, just this, ah, you're just like, hold on crap. Yeah. I see a lot of, or I've heard a lot of comparisons

to beetle mania um that's what i originally assumed as well before i really got into k-pop i just thought oh it must just be a really popular fandom in the way that like beatles in 60s and 70s or you know backstreet boys and instinct in the 90s and early aughts but i think one thing you mentioned like political fandoms too I think one of the things that is distinctive about K-pop fandoms and like armies and I don't know. Nowadays, I've noticed it's not just K-pop. I think it might be expanding to like even like Swifties and other kinds of like they're surprisingly organized and strategic. Oh, yeah. They do band together to promote causes.

Right. Like, it's not just we love these particular people and we admire their music if we know that these particular people are also supporting causes like the fandoms will get together and donate masses of money towards like their band's favorite causes they'll come together you know during the last presidential election they like trump's like campaign right by buying up and not showing up so i feel like one of the things that may be unique about more modern day fandoms is that they're not just banding together over love of these particular people they're banding together over like geopolitical or ideological causes and that's super interesting to me like I could see it going so many different ways

did you watch that during the the swifties in the the NFL and the weird conspiracy things, that got crazy. Yes, I was really intrigued by all the surrounding the Super Bowl and leading up to it. I was like, oh my God, I didn't realize there could be this much extra on top of it. It's a football game. I mean, she's a very talented singer. But man, I tell you, there's a lot of people afraid of them Swifties. You'll see announcers and stuff talk very nicely about them and like you don't go against the swifties because they will come at you as an army and uh and and they love their band i mean i mean she's she is a great

talented artist i remember watching her when she first started out and just seeing her play solo with an acoustic guitar without you know all this crap that people have nowadays with auto tune and stuff. And I'm like, damn, she's okay. She's, she's got talent. And I think in her early YouTube videos, she's definitely a power force, but yeah, seeing the, seeing the, you know, the whole thing, well, she could throw in a whole election in the U S and you look at, you know, she can fill a stadium, but I mean, she could run for president.

She can fill a stadium better than can run for president. She can fill a stadium better than any presidential can. Yeah, exactly. She can just take over, and we'd probably all have to wear her glam outfits. That might be one of the executive orders. We'd all have to wear tassels and pink. I don't know. I'd probably go along with it for fun because I think she's a good artist. But yeah, it's interesting to study.

Maybe your next book could be studying the fandom of everything else. What is your, do you have anything else you're working on? Anything next in the queue yet? Are you going to roll with this and see how it goes? I always have other stuff that I'm working on. Like before I even wrote this novel, I had a whole nother novel that I had written. And I'm like showing stuff to my editor and to my agent and seeing what they like. So yeah, I write a lot of short stories too.

And those are mostly for lit magazines. But I do want to put them together in a collection. I'm told that people don't like short stories as much as novels do. This apparently is a thing in the publishing industry where commercially, people just don't eat up short story collections as much as novels do. This apparently is a thing in the publishing industry where like commercially, like people just don't eat up for story collections as much as novels, which bothers my mind because like social media, I feel like shorten all our attention spans. So I'm like,

if we have anything we should read. Yeah. You would think, Oh, women really love novels. You know, we have a lot of people on that, right?

Beach reads. And I guess, you know, beach reads are huge, but they're still kind of thick enough that you can, know give you something to do over a vacation when you're ignoring your husband and the kids and they when they're drowning in the water that's not what happens chris don't be dark it's always comedy but you know i mean women love beach read novels they love novels you know it seems to be the consumption that we see on

the show and and um you know they just they just eat them up people love you know that's why people watch tv movies um entertainment to be entertained their stories you know chris fosh show we always say stories are the owners of annual life and just people love them they need to be entertained because real life is really boring. A little bit. And, you know, I've always wondered about that, the whole, like, the people who read. I've been told this, too. It probably depends on the genre. So I'm sure, like, genres like, I don't know, sci-fi or fantasy, there's probably more male readers.

But I have heard over and over again that for a lot of, like, mainstream genres, just like commercial fiction, it's mostly women readers. Men don't read as much. Or, like, men will read non-fiction way more than they read fiction and that has always sort of bothered my mind i've never quite figured out why if you understand if you understand the penchant for women's romance and and the the guy who always got away or the guy they really wanted what's the old chris rocks saying the reason your wife's always angry your girlfriend's always angry at you is because the one she really wanted what's the old chris rock saying the reason your wife's always angry your girlfriend's always angry at you is because the one she really wanted got away and so if you

understand what a lot of novels are they're built on that premise of the guy who got away or the misconnection or the fantasy of what you know what she was an imprint of an alpha male or an alpha widow from when she was young and so a lot of them go back you know it's this it's the same plots of the lifetime movies right she goes back to the old small town she moved in out of after she went to new york and meets the high school guy who didn't give her the time of day back then but she had a crush on you know it's that sort of thing maybe it's like specific storylines or kind of like romance or. They're kind of, yeah. It's, it's always, it's always,

she meets the old guy that I don't know, should have worked out or didn't work out or she had a crush on or, you know, and sometimes they get along, you know, if you look at lifetime, it's every show is the same plot. Really when it comes down, it's just in a different scenario interesting okay that's why that's why women like it more than men because we just don't we just don't do that romance thing but women love it women love it they love reading all about it and

of course you know part of the novels too it takes and that's the reason they i used to come home to my girlfriends not my girlfriends at the same time the my girlfriend and her mom and they'd have the they'd have the the the they'd have an ottoman pulled up to the front the front of the tv the big tv and they both be i come in and they both be there crying no way yeah over you know or they want to be watching a lifetime, probably. Oh, okay. And I'd just be like, I'd just see the both of them crying and they'd turn to me and I'd be like, what's going on? He broke her heart!

And I would just leave. I'd just leave. Wow. And, you know, part of it is women love that emotional, it's emotional gymnastics, the Olympics that they go through when they watch, you know, when they read a great novel or they do the thing. So I think that's why they love it. It's basically exercising their emotions. That's why men don't get into it. But it makes it

nonetheless, you know, very popular and very attractive to women. And plus we get great novelists on the show like yourself. And so it makes for great content for us. So we're self-serving in that way. Any final thoughts you want to share out to the people to get them to pick up your book and check it all out? Not really.

Other than to say that I don't, I didn't actually write this book primarily for like K-pop fans. So I just wrote it because I think whether you engage in this music or not, like the fact of the matter is it is changing our cultural landscape in one way or another. And I think that's the most interesting thing about it. You don't have to know anything about BTS or any, any other K-pop band for the matter to realize that like the, the landscape of music is changing and like the globalization of what we listen to, what we consume, And also the nature of the music industry is changing. And like one of the side plots in my book

is about like how AI and ultimately sort of shift the way we consume music. And I think we're only starting to see that a little bit more now. We have a discussion about how AI generated content is going to be over some of the stuff that people are putting out there. So I think that's sort of like for me personally like i'm not a romance writer i don't really

write or read that much like chick lit so for me i think it's wait wait what did you call it chick what it's lit like women's fiction literature yeah okay you gotta say that slower faster i'm not sure that's true. It might just sound like I'm saying big time. So, yeah, I feel like bigger issues about where society is heading and the dystopian nature of society, I think, is one of the interesting reasons why I wrote this book and hopefully it comes through. There you go.

There you go. Well, it was wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you very much for coming on. It's been fun and insightful and then we covered some psychology lessons on novels and and bts fandom so there you go you got you got a psychology lesson folks and you got a great novel to order up so thank you very much for coming on christine thank you there you go thanks a lot for tuning in order up the book wherever fine books are sold you can pre-order it today so you can be the first one on your block to see you read it the band a novel comes out april 16th 2024 thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com for just christmas linkedin.com for just christmas youtube.com for

just christmas and all the places we are on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time