Postmodernism and Music

The postmodern sensibility is that anything can be considered cool in an ironic 'I know it's bad, but it's so bad it's good' kind of way.

I think that an example of this would be James Blunt and Your Beautiful. I would say this because it was a large hit yet popular consensus was that it was a terrible song.

Work that is created based (entirely or in part) on older material. This incorporates sampling and will take you from the realms of hip hop culture transporting you finally in today’s modern fragmented musical landscape. You will have to listen to some of the artists to fully appreciate them and their work.


Whilst this was not made by either The Kooks or Kanye it is still examples of sampling as the producer has drawn his work from to separate songs and put them together.

Audiences that are both niche and mainstream. E.g.: Radio 1, 1xtra, BBC6, XFM

I think bands such as the Fleet Foxes, Noah and the Whale or Mumford and Sons fulfil this catergory as whilst they play music that would be considered niche, they now present themselves to a mainstream audience

The ways in which people engage and listen to music e.g.: iPod, DAB, mobile phones etc


The iPhone is a perfect example of this, as it is seemingly universally widespread.

The legal issues surrounding sampling. (Led Zeppelin borrowed heavily from old bluesmen and it took years for the songwriters to be credited and paid royalties. The same group took a hard-line stance initially to be sampled by hip hop groups.)

It has been claimed that Coldplay used Joe Satriani's chord progression in the song Viva la Vida:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/joe-satriani-sues-coldplay-for-viva-la-vida-plagiarism-20081205

The state of the music industry incorporating any recent developments that change how we access/ interact with music e.g.: Spotify, X Factor, iTunes, illegal downloading, free cds with newspapers etc

Matt Cardle made a single out of Biffy Clyro's Many of Horror. Which then becamse a success due to his X-factor performance. Number 1 hits tend to be from X-factor winners.