Songs In The Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age

(Paperback)

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Description

It's 2013. You're a teenager squinting at your laptop in the dead of night, flicking between iTunes and YouTube and PirateBay.Endless reams of artists unspool at the click of a button. New forms of musical discovery open up before your very eyes. This evolving digital landscape exists beyond the radio, HMV and even the most extensive record collection. You've entered a whole new world and, suddenly, just about everything feels possible.

In Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, Liam Inscoe-Jones explores five contemporary artists who broke the old rules of sound, style and the music industry at large: Devonte Hynes (of Blood Orange), FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE. Each began their careers as obscure outsiders but, over time, they helped to re-shape pop culture in their image. Through these five extraordinary figures and an eclectic supporting cast of dozens more, Inscoe-Jones paints a picture of the sonic landscape of the last ten years, exploring the influence of their dazzling music on pop culture, the internet and ourselves.

An unorthodox mix of criticism, biography and music history - and featuring interviews with the likes of Caroline Polachek, Daniel Lopatin and Nicolas Jaar - Songs in the Key of MP3 is a book of endless curiosity and wonder; a salutary attempt to define pop culture in a fast and ephemeral age.

Reviews

Nothing sweets me more than a music book that breaks the mould. This vibrant read amplifies here-and-now talents, featuring some of my favourite artists, like Devonte Haynes and FKA Twigs. It defies categorisation and captures the essence of what makes these musicians so captivating. Impossible not to love it. * Jacqueline Crooks *

Author Bio

Liam Inscoe-Jones is a music and fiction writer who has written for The Quietus, The Social, Line of Best Fit and Spectrum Culture, and has interviewed members of Five Seconds of Summer and Tame Impala, alongside Lianne La Havas, Bartees Strange, Enter Shikari, Xenia Rubinos and Amber Mark, among others. He was music editor at IMPACT Magazine and runs his own site Sorry Scholar, where he has charted his 100 favourite albums of each year since 2015. Each month he produces playlists of the best songs released each month, every month, since 2018.