The hiphopification of pop: hip hop aesthetics in mainstream popular music

This is the script of a paper I gave at the Royal Musical Association 58th Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Durham, on 8 September 2022. Introduction Hip hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States, with a comparable lead in the UK and Europe. Since the mid-2010s, Nielsen Music, … Read more

Beats to Quarantine to: Lofi hip hop music and virtual community during the COVID-19 pandemic

This is the script of a paper I gave at the Challenge and Change in Popular Music IASPM UK/I Conference, hosted by the University of Liverpool on 31 August 2022. It is a more concise version of my longer data analysis in two parts on lofi hip hop during COVID-19 (part 1, part 2). Introduction … Read more

All the way up: hip hop’s global emergence as the leading popular music genre in the age of digital streaming

This is the script of a paper I gave at the Climates of Popular Music: IASPM 2022 Conference, hosted online by Daegu University on 9 July 2022. It makes reference to the research published in my data-driven analysis of annual top 100 albums, Hip hop’s hold over Top 100 albums, 2000–2020. Introduction When, in 2016, … Read more

One Fortnite Only: virtual hip hop concerts in video games

This is the script of an invited research seminar I gave at the University of Bristol on 1 February 2022. In April 2020, the video game platform Fortnite announced a special in-game event called Astronomical. Billed as a ‘virtual concert’ featuring hip hop artist Travis Scott, the event series broke records, reaching a global audience … Read more

Towards an ethical model of social media data analysis for internet music studies

This is the script of a paper I gave at the conference Information Overload? Music Studies in the Age of Abundance, hosted online by the University of Birmingham on 8 September 2021. For more info, see the UKRI AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship Music and the Internet: Towards a digital sociology of music. Introduction Scholars … Read more

‘London Calling’: IASPM UK&I 2020 Conference Presentation

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

Review of Metal Punk 2018, ISMMS and 5th Annual PSN Conference

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