Latest in: Music Features

On 20 February 2019, the 39th edition of the Brit Awards took place. Since its conception, the Brits have been a heavyweight in the awards calendar. But in recent years accusations have piled up, claiming that the ceremony is nothing but an extravagant shindig for some of the industry’s...

The nature of hip-hop music’s creative culture is introspective: artists are always studying existing music for inspiration. Music samples are interwoven into most hip-hop tracks, enabling artists to create lyrical collages. Snippets of songs and beats are flipped, sped up, cut, pitched up and are subsequently used as fragments...

I’d dread to be a sales assistant at this time of year. Listening to the same jovial twenty songs in a shift is enough to make anyone want to cut their ears off. When I do brave up and take my earplugs out whilst doing the Christmas shopping, I...

‘Carol’ from the Old French ‘carole’, meaning to dance and sing in a circle, is defined as ‘a religious folk song or popular hymn, particularly one associated with Christmas’. This root in folk music and religion is especially pertinent, given the origin of carols in pagan tradition. Thousands of...

The popular 1987 classic song Fairytale of New York has entered headlines recently, and not just because it’s the Christmas season. The song’s use of the word ‘faggot’ in the lyrics (‘you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot’) has stirred controversy around whether the song should be banned or...

Following a growing trend of suicides amongst male musicians, serious questions have to be asked as to why this has occurred, what can be learnt from it and what can be done in the future to help people in difficulty receive the right support. Eighteen months ago, a trend...

In April of this year, Kanye West released the track ‘Lift Yourself’. The lyrics “Poopy-di-scoop / Scoop-diddy-whoop” soon became an internet meme. Kanye, a well-established musician with well over a decade of work up his sleeve, just risked humiliating himself for the sake of a comedic throwaway track. But...