Street Sounds on Campus

Students on the BA (Hons) Entertainment Management had an exciting and energetic guest lecture from music industry mogul Morgan Khan (pictured left), owner of record label Street Sounds. Final year students on the BA (Hons) Entertainment Management have been working for Street Sounds since September as part of their ‘Entertainment Consultancy Project’ module. Morgan visited Leeds Met on Wednesday 23^rd February to meet the students who are working as consultants for Street Sounds and to give a guest lecture to them along with second year Entertainment Management students studying upon an entrepreneurship module.


Morgan has signed a string of successful artists and singles, including soul / dance band ‘Imagination’ who had numerous chart hits in the early 1980s. Morgan has also signed, worked with and developed many other artists including Dina Carroll, Barry White, Edwin Starr, Rose Royce, Gladys Knight, Al Green, Donna Summer, Dr Dre and Boogie Down Productions. Morgan also spoke about his music label Street Sounds which was largely responsible for bringing 1980s hip hop, electro and house music to a mass UK audience through many very successful series of compilation albums. In 1988 the Street Sounds label went into liquidation, but was re-launched in 2009 with a ‘Nu Electro’ series of compilations, which feature various sub-genres of electro music, and electro / hip hop fusion. Most recently Street Sounds are about to release an R&B compilation called ‘R&B Anthems, Vol. 1’, which Morgan described as his most exciting project to date.


Morgan’s guest lecture chartered his career in the music business, from being a teenage ‘post-boy’, through artists and repertoire (A&R), to a record label director, entrepreneur and record label owner. Morgan spoke extensively about the need to be passionate about what it is that you do if you want to be successful as an entrepreneur. Morgan’s intrinsic rewards through the satisfaction achieved by his work was self-evident, and left the audience feeling highly motivated, as well as giving them an exclusive insight as to the inner working of the music industry. We would like to thank Morgan for sparing us his very valuable time, and hope to see him again on campus in the not-too-distant future.

Students working on a 'new music' project meet Morgan

Students working on a marketing project pose with Morgan in front of the James Graham building

New Musical Edutainment?

An interesting article in yesterday’s Guardian Newspaper, mentions the planned combination of entertainment and education by former Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker, who lead the band for 24 years, from their origins on the underground UK ‘indie’ scene and through the rise of ‘Brit Pop’ and ‘cool Britannia’ in an era when New Labour rose to the fore, and ‘hip’ artists such as Oasis, Blur and Pulp suddenly found themselves in the commercially all important ‘top 40’. Cocker gained a certain degree of notoriety for his stage invasion during Michael Jackson’s 'Earth Song' at the BRIT Awards in 1996, which offended many corporate execs and sponsors (whose musical knowledge probably didn’t extend beyond Smash Hits magazine). Pulp later wound down their operations (although didn’t officially split) in 2002, and since Cocker has been involved in a variety of projects including an appearance in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, curating the 2007 Meltdown Festival and various solo and collaborative music projects including a cover of Heaven 17’s ‘Temptation’ with Beth Ditto.

Cocker is proposing to incorporate elements of education into his musical shows such as mini-lectures and spoken word. The Guardian article states ‘Oxbridge lecturers will doubtless be watching these gigs carefully, waiting to see if the lecture-disco format takes off’. Whilst Cocker’s proposal is interesting, it is nothing new, U.S. Industrial band Consolidated frequently punctuated their shows with lectures on a variety of subjects including racism, homophobia, over-fishing, and vegetarianism, as well as holding open debates and open mic sessions. Public Enemy produced entire musical shows around the themes of racism, equality and the ‘New World Order’, and Michael Franti when front man of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, would speak on similar subjects in-between songs. Former Bad Brains front-man Henry Rollins has also embarked on a number of spoken word tours.

The combination of education and entertainment is known as edutainment, and has been discussed extensively throughout this blog. The advantage that edutainment has over many other educational ‘formats’ is that it opens up education to those who may possibly have been ‘turned off’ by the notion of learning in their own recreation time. That said, it would be fair to assume that most people who are attracted to a Jarvis Cocker concert which incorporates a spoken word element, will probably have a certain degree of intellectuality about themselves in the first place….in which case the question is raised as to whether this is an effective educational format, or just another musical story-telling performance art hybrid? I’ll be interested to see what happens.