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What, Like It's Hard?
What, Like It’s Hard? is the digital initiative and podcast that celebrates and explores the academic study of popular music. Conferences can be expensive to attend, especially for students, so this platform allows for a digital space to be created for students to discuss and share their research topics and interests while building a digital network of like-minded people. The podcast opens with a keynote series from professors in different faculties, from different universities around the world. The podcast is available for streaming over Spotify, ApplePodcasts, Anchor, or wherever you listen to your podcasts!
Episodes
29 episodes
Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter” in Pop Culture.
Emily McConkey is a graduate student in English at the University of Ottawa. Over the last two years, she has served as the student researcher for the Christina Rossetti in Music digital archive and runs the archive’s Twitter account @CGRossett...
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Season 3
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Episode 27
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1:10:26
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I've Got A Babe, but Shall I Keep Him: Rhiannon Giddens and Modernist Nightmares of History.
Kevin Farrell is Associate Professor of English at Radford University, where he teaches courses in both composition and literature. His research interests include popular music, modernism, postmodernism, and Irish literature, particularly the f...
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Season 3
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Episode 26
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1:02:27
Get Up and Go: DC Music, Youth Culture, and Community Formation, 1980-1983.
Alan Parkes is a PhD student in US history at the University of Delaware. He studies the impact of neo-liberalization on late-twentieth-century youth cultures. He is a member of California’s hardcore punk band Empty Eyes. In the early 1...
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Season 3
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Episode 25
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59:13
Después de mis Nueve Noches: Bullerengue Song as Historical Evidence of the 1940s Maroon Caribbean in Colombia.
Manuel Garcia Orozco is a GRAMMY® and Latin GRAMMY®-award winner who has dedicated his career to producing musical documents that preserve cultures in resistance under his label Chaco World Music. As a composer/performer, he has been featured i...
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Season 3
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Episode 24
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1:20:39
This One Tape Had All These Memories: Pop Music, Mixtapes and Young-Adult Fiction.
Dr Ben Screech is a Lecturer in English and Education at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, UK. His research specializes primarily on YA fiction, as well as pop culture for young people more generally. Prior to his current role, B...
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Season 3
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Episode 23
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1:08:19
Same Old Thing: The Streets and The Importance of the Everyday
Glenn Fosbraey is the Head of English, Creative Writing, and American Studies at The University of Winchester where he specialises in the academic study of song lyrics. His publications include the book Writing Song Lyrics: Creative and Cri...
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Season 3
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Episode 22
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45:57
Hits for HIIT!
Dr. Sophie Stévance (PhD) and Dr. Serge Lacasse (PhD) are full professors of musicology at Laval University (Quebec City). Dr. Stévance is an athlete, opera singer and violist who has practised professionally. She is also the Canada Research Ch...
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Season 3
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Episode 21
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1:02:44
Thoughts on Traditional Music, Performance and Arrangement in Rural Communities.
With a wealth of knowledge in playing and teaching traditional accordion music, Karen Tweed shares her experience and thoughts on traditional music and it's performance and arrangement in rural communities. Karen Tweed started to p...
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45:01
A Soundscape Theory of Donkey Kong — A Musical Framework of Beeps.
Barnabas Smith is an Australian musician, teacher, and independent researcher. He holds a PhD from the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide, with a thesis focusing on the construction and application of a research model to stud...
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Season 2
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Episode 19
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1:05:30
The Search For The Blues
Diego Pani is the manager of the musical patrimony of the Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico (ISRE) and a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research focuses on the dynamics of music performance...
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Season 2
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Episode 18
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1:06:57
Why “Political”?: Blackness and Queer Urban Geographies in Toronto and San Diego.
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...
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Season 2
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Episode 17
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1:25:45
Electro Swing's Place in Today's Popular Music Landscape.
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 th...
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Season 2
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Episode 16
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55:02
The Irish Folk Music Revival - Culture, History and Perspective.
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, g...
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Season 2
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Episode 15
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55:29
ORKNEY SUMMER SESSIONS: Part One.
... 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 o...
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Season 2
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Episode 15
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1:36:34
“We Gon’ Be Alright": Racial Politics and Kendrick Lamar.
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 Kendri...
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Season 2
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Episode 14
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52:53
Come Together, Right Now.
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 e...
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Season 2
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Episode 13
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1:06:35
Between the Buried and Me.
Calder Hannan from Columbia University in New York City shares his research on progressive metal and topic theory. Hannan examines the ways of hearing genre borrowing in the music of the influential American progressive metal band Bet...
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Season 2
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Episode 12
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1:07:21
Sounds of Quarantine.
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-alter...
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Season 2
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Episode 11
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53:45
Good Old Bad Boys.
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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Season 1
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Episode 10
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1:11:14
Walk It Like Donna Talks It.
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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Season 1
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Episode 9
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45:24
Growing Old In The Promised Land.
Dr Michael Kobre from Queens University of Charlotte talks about the theme of time in Springtseen's music and how this is reflected in his performance of The Promised Land on the 1996 Tom Joad tour.
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Season 1
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Episode 8
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56:06
Blacked Out in Brantford.
Founder of Blackout Fest, Jamie Mittendorf, talks about the origins of the festival and the metal/punk community. Jamie started Blackout when he was just 15, and for this episode he runs over the highlights of the past 13 years, as well as what...
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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33:15
The Adapt or Die Episode.
Grad school is an 'adapt or die' situation, apparently, and this (adapting) is what we're doing for this episode. The complete interview with Dr. James Carter, from Drew University, failed in download, and as such we're veering away from the us...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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50:01
The Boats That Rocked: Return of the Pirates of the Airwaves.
The 2nd episode of the Freshman series looks at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's annual conference. Host, Kirstin, reads her own paper that she presented at the 49th PCA/ACA conference in Washington D.C in April. “...
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Season 1
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Episode 5
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24:04
This Is Etta Moten, Saying, Stay Well.
Dr. Katherine Karlin of Kansas State University gives us a look into her research on Etta Moten's radio show 'I Remember When', on WAMQ Chicago. Etta Moten was an American actress and contralto vocalist who created new roles for African-America...
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Season 1
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Episode 4
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1:00:46