What, Like It's Hard?

Dr. Sadie Hochman-Ruiz holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Music’s Integrative Studies program. Her dissertation, “The Social Politics of Queer Drag: A Study of San Diego’s Queer Community and Queercore Subculture,” foregrounds an intersectional approach to womanhood, addressing homeland narratives and diasporic identities within a multiracial drag scene. Researching the project, she performed as the drag queen Sadie Pins and engaged creative research methods such as performance ethnography, public humanities and research justice. Her current research focuses on trans studies and transnational queer communities.

In her article, "Why Political?" Sadie unpacks the heavy racial baggage attached to doing queer work as it is currently defined. By including an origin story for queerness within queercore subculture, Sadie uses queercore sound––the soundtrack of queercore co-founder Bruce LaBruce's first feature film No Skin Off My Ass (1991)––to analyze the race and class dynamics of doing queer work. Sadie offers observations from shifts in art-practice as a performance ethnographer in which she responds to the challenges of marrying queer drag with its anti-racist and anti-capitalist intentions. This article brings together music studies, queer of colour critique and critical university studies in a way which centres performance-based work as a privileged site of critical intervention. With this work, Sadie encourages artist-researchers to rethink the relationship between the political intentions of their performance practice and the critical theory with which we isolate and claim those politics 

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Dr Chris Inglis talks about electro swing, an increasingly prominent genre which fuses the music of the swing era with that of the age of electronic dance music. Largely overlooked throughout the academic world so far, this research examines the genre’s place in today's popular music landscape, asking key questions about what the rise of this style may tell us about contemporary popular music, and society at large.

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Brendan Lamb is a musicology PhD candidate at the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Tasmania. Brendan notes in his thesis that the numerous folk music revivals of the twentieth century have been key turning points in popular music, grassroots phenomena that paradoxically drove the industry they often strove to defy. Whilst the North American and English folk revivals were highly popular and influential movements, neither had quite the impact on revitalising culture as the Irish folk music revival in Ireland. Performers such as The Dubliners, The Chieftains, Planxty and The Bothy Band combined old and new, foreign and familiar in their performances in such a way that they drove Irish folk and traditional music into a new evolutionary phase. This evolution, unlike its North American and British counterparts, fundamentally redefined the musical landscape within Ireland and spawned an international phenomenon in the Pub Session.

Through studying the origins of this movement, Brendan highlights the complex relationship this period has had within the context of Irish traditional music and also evidenced the fundamental role the tradition played in this music’s performance. In analysing the recorded performances of these key ensembles and comparing their key musical elements to Irish music prior to the period, this thesis has identified the significant innovations and contributions to Irish music that these performers have provided.

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... with Laurence Tait, Tina Paterson,  Louise Bichan, Ivan Drever, and Ingirid Jolly.

What, Like It’s Hard? presents the special four-part series, Orkney Sessions. The Orkney Islands is an archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland that is rich with musical heritage. Each episode features a collection of Orcadian musicians who are from Orkney, some still here and others away, but undoubtedly Orkney has played a huge part, be it through influence, inspiration or community, for everyone.  

After each interview, there’s a track from each musician, so take this opportunity to listen to music that you might not have heard before, and support local musicians, here in Orkney, or wherever you are, by buying CDs and merchandise, commissions and supporting them online through social media and their websites. You can stay up to date with the next sessions by subscribing to the mailing list.

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Dilshan Weerasinghe holds an MA in Musicology from Dalhousie University. His research examines popular music, jazz, and hip-hop in relation to social and political topics.

Dilshan’s paper “We Gon’ Be Alright”: Racial Politics and Kendrick Lamar explores the expression of the experience of poverty, anti-establishment politics, and the diverse, complex narratives of black identity in Kendrick  Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. Such topics are typically associated with what has been labelled as “conscious” rap – characterized not just by its lyrical subject matter of socially relevant topics, but musically through jazz. As Dilshan suggests, historically, jazz in rap has been associated with at east coast, “boom-bap” style sound, whereas west coast hip-hop’s flashy, bass-heavy sound takes more from funk than jazz.

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Sean Steele is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities at York University (Toronto). He holds a diploma in music from Vancouver Island University, a BA in Philosophy and History from Concordia University, and an MA in the Humanities from York. Sean explores intersections between music, religion and popular culture, with a focus on popular music subcultures as alternative spiritual communities.

Through interview material and personal reflection, Sean investigates the extent to which Come Together can be viewed as a site of sacred-secular sonic space. Drawing on Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas, Mikhail Bahktin on festivals, and Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones, Sean explores the ways in which Come Together provides re-enchanted space for participants to experiment with non-ordinary patterns of behaviour and experiences that some describe as spiritual and/or sacred. Come Together forms a central node of a vibrant Canadian music scene, and as Sean discovers, the festival is fundamental to forms of personal and collective identity for many who gather twice a year to sing, dance and celebrate.

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Calder Hannan from Columbia University in New York City shares his research on progressive metal and topic theory. ⁠
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Hannan examines the ways of hearing genre borrowing in the music of the influential American progressive metal band Between the Buried and Me. This paper takes topic theory as a starting point, arguing that far from being an esoteric music theory tool useful only for expanding listening to the music of Mozart and his contemporaries, it reflects a mode of listening to Between the Buried and Me that is very common and accessible.⁠

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Welcome back for Season 2 of WLIH! Dr James Deaville from Carleton University (Ontario, Canada) discusses some of his ideas based around the concept of the sound of quarantine based around the nature of lockdown and media coverage of life-altering circumstances like covid-19. 

For listeners who aren’t familiar with Dr Deaville’s work, he is a Musicologist specializing in music, composers and musical practices and institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, having published and spoken about such diverse topics as Franz Liszt, music criticism, television news music, African-American entertainers in turn-of-the-century Vienna and “fascist” Nordic composers during the Third Reich.

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Dr Theodore Trost's paper "When You're In Trouble I Just Turn Away":  The American Way and Randy Newman's Good Old Boys (1974) discusses the satire in Newman's songwriting while talking about satire in the 21st century. 

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Donna is the founder of Bruce Funds, an initiative that helps Springsteen fans get tickets to live performances, and she talks about the global Springsteen community and the importance of giving. 

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