My eclectic musical tastes encompassed indie, hip-hop, and modern classical. But it took a pandemic to make me love pop
This was the year I started listening to non-stop pop music. It could be something to do with everything seeming hard and sharp at the moment, like those morphing spikes on the coronavirus. Those jaggedy little ridges tearing through our day-to-day lives.
Growing up, pop was a dirty word and instead indie music was the soundtrack of my youth. I’ll probably never be as happy as I was stumbling around the Pavilion Tavern in Brighton drenched in lager, as the the Futureheads’ Hounds of Love blared from the speakers. Hip-hop figured heavily too. The crunchiness of Wu Tang Clan, like gravel underfoot. The ego of Kanye. The erudition of Kendrick. The melancholy of Frank. The swagger of Jay-Z. And latterly, the sheer hot-diggety of Skepta and the seductive hallucinatory quality of A$AP.
Oscar Quine is a writer and journalist based in Glasgow
