In the Vox podcast In a Nutshell, hosts Jara Majerus and Antonia Leise take a deep dive into the university's most interesting, strange, and exciting research. Every two weeks, they invite Radboud researchers to talk about their favourite topics – explained in bite-sized episodes. In today's episode, Antonia talks about music reviews, guilty pleasures, and Frank Farian.

How prominent is the male gaze in music reviews? Why are there no guilty pleasure songs? And how authentic can artists in an industry like the music industry really be?

In this episode, Antonia delves into the world of music, more specifically, music reviews. With her guest, Alex van der Hulst, she explores the shift from rockism to popism, asks whether we can separate artists from their art, and remembers iconic and extremely inauthentic pop groups (yes, it’s Milli Vanilli and Boney M.).

Alex van der Hulst is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts, where he researches popular music. His research focuses on how music reviews have shaped popular music and how they were shaped by it. In addition to doing research, Alex also works as a journalist and writes music reviews himself.

If you want to know more about music reviews and popular music, make sure to follow Alex’s suggestion and read or watch High Fidelity.