Pop Music
Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet
A pop song can be transformed by use, or it can split the world open
Kneecap are the establishment’s idea of rebellion
The hip hop trio are more pathetic than iconoclastic
When I talked over Franz Ferdinand
The only band I’ve seen and wish I’d been paying attention to
Spotify Wrapped is good for the soul
On the joys of exploring a year in music
Charli’s carefree bratitude
This is music for people who are tired of being careful
One of the greats
Bathos, fatalism, heartbreak: these are the pillars of a MacColl song
Landfill indie remembered
A Golden Age? It was barely a Plastic Age
Their generation
How young rockers became venerable sages
The perversity of the Oasis reunion
The cultural optimism of the nineties has been lost
Swiftism’s role in saving the V&A Museum
The unconventional Englishness of the Taylor Swift phenomenon
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
Why must everything move to Manchester?
Northern England is being framed in patronising reductionist terms
Fisticuffs over the fourth movement
When did classical music become so disturbingly polite?
The sacrifice that changed Naipaul
The humiliation of his father, forced to slaughter a goat to atone for
angering Hindus, made the writer wary of insulting religion
Tony Blair cannot escape politics
And our politics cannot escape from Tony Blair
Peston’s Inbox
Keir has my complete backing – Wes
Nigel Farage, community leader
The logic of multiculturalism is turning on its architects
Knowingly crass and conflicted
This American culture is hegemonic because even to steal from it is to propel it
On travellers and trail hunting
Left-wingers have bizarrely irrational double standards when it comes to protecting culture
Averting irrational egalitarianism
How to stop ideological anti-racism damaging our institutions and our country
On Britain as a capitalist command economy
It is neither neoliberal nor socialist but a secret third thing
The hitch with the Hitch
How Christopher Hitchens brought me back to Christ