• Is Music Sampling Plagiarism?

    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...
  • Painful Nostalgia: The Musical Memory of Mommy and 45 Years

    Though inherently an incredibly manipulative medium, film becomes doubly so when scores and soundtracks play a prominent role; the site of intersection between image and sound is by turns cynically prescriptive and sentimentally liberating. From the taut strings of Psycho (1960) to the exhilarating rush of Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’...