This week on the Pop Life Podcast: Robbie Robertson says his “personal big bang” came with the discovery of rock and roll. An even bigger bang came when the teenaged Robertson saw Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, a flamboyant, ex-pat Southern American rock-a-billy musician playing in Toronto. The music, a frenetic blend of rock and roll and hopped-up country music, expertly played by a band that included drummer Levon Helm, spoke to Robertson, revealing an aural passageway to a world he had only ever read about. Eventually, at age sixteen, he joined the band, a move that set on the path to helping to shake things up musically by taking Bob Dylan electric, and form a band that melded Hank Williams, Muddy Waters with roots music into something that had never been heard before. When The Band played together, fan Bruce Springsteen says, “something happened that couldn’t happen on their own. Something miraculous.”

Then the “Pop Life” panel, Kelsey Miller, author of “I’ll Be There For You: The One About Friends,” Steve Jordan, founder and Executive Director of the Polaris Music Prize and Wesley Williams (aka Maestro Fresh Wes), the “godfather of Canadian hip hop,” got together to discuss how to define a disruptor in the arts and what it is like to be a game changer.