Popular music researcher
I’m giving a prerecorded online presentation for the 15th IASPM UK&I conference. My paper is in Session 1: Multiculturalism and Diaspora., a session which features some excellent scholars. I highly recommend watching Mykaell Riley’s keynote, which details the Bass Culture project, as well as the other individual papers. My paper is titled “This is London … Read more
Today I received the first printing of On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements, published by Palgrave Macmillan at the very tail end of 2019. (Happy New Year!) Edited by Nick Braae and Kai Arne Hansen, the book includes eleven essays that explore the myriad ways popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks. My chapter … Read more
Metal Music Studies issue 5.3 has just been published, featuring my article ‘Breaking down the breakdown in twenty-first-century metal‘. In the article: I introduce the breakdown as a formal structure identified in certain styles of modern metal, especially metalcore. Breakdowns are widely considered to be distinct sections of a song, much like a verse or chorus: … Read more
I’m excited to announce that I’m joining the editorial advisory board of the Intellect journal Metal Music Studies. MMS is the official journal of the International Society of Metal Music Studies, and a wonderful hub of research activity spanning broad areas of metal music and culture. More information can be found on the journal’s official … Read more
Some good news to share: I’ve been offered a contract by Routledge to write a research monograph. The book is provisionally titled How Music Empowers: Listening to Modern Rap and Metal, and it will be part of the Music and Change series. I aim to submit the manuscript around the end of 2019, so given typical publication time you can expect to … Read more
Metal and punk are commonly received as separate domains of musical activity, but there are many crossovers and consistencies between them. This was the primary charge of ‘Doing metal, being punk, doing punk, being metal: hybridity, crossover and difference in punk and metal subcultures’, a two-day conference held at De Montfort University (DMU) Leicester in … Read more
How can music and the Internet be studied? The one-day conference ‘Music and the Internet’, held at the University of Oxford, attempted to grapple with this question. The event was situated as a response to the article by Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth (2017), recently published in Music and Letters, which won the Westrup Prize. … Read more
[TW: racism, anti-Semitism, suicide] How powerfully can music affect us? This week I was linked to an article, now a couple of years old, that argues the Swedish dance pop group Ace of Base were responsible for tricking millions of Americans into supporting Nazist beliefs. Okay, Cracked isn’t known for especially reliable and coherent writing, … Read more
I’ve migrated from my rather antiquated site to a new one hosted by WordPress, which I’m hoping will enable me to post more actively. I’m unsure about the precise nature of the content that will emerge: perhaps the occasional album review, media commentary, or informal conference report alongside career updates. This is a kind of … Read more