What Is This Music?! – Details, episodes & analysis

Sean Kelly is a longtime musician and the author of Don't Call It Hair Metal: Art in the Excess of '80s Rock (ECW Press, 2023). He joins me to talk about why people dismiss hair metal, Sean's "duality of mind" regarding problematic lyrics, Brian Vollmer of Helix, our shared love of Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen, metal's prejudice against keyboards, the lines between musical taste, identity and insecurity, and a whole bunch of 80s rock talk.

Check out Sean's Spotify playlist documenting the history of hair metal, one song per year from 1978-1991.

Psychologist, professor, writer, and metalhead Steve Byrne joins me for a big discussion about the psychology of extreme music fandom. We get into the weeds on how heavy music serves unmet needs, the distinctions (and similarities) between metal and punk, oppositional defiant disorder, musical and psychological dynamics, gatekeeping in extreme music communities, and more.

Read Steve's blog Metal Health Matters and his article on gatekeeping in metal for Loudwire.

Musician Marty Ballentyne has been revisiting his collection, one album a day, and sharing the experience for the past four years. We talk about this as well as the resentments of Captain Beefheart's band members, the joys of extreme metal, the pros and cons of genre, getting into the Ramones through the movie Rock n' Roll High School, the days when Metallica was heavy, 80s hardcore's sense of place and perspective, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the technical reasons that old guys have trouble appreciating contemporary pop, and more.

Read Marty's recent article connecting his musical journey with the recent residential school discoveries and the larger reconciliation project in general.

Montreal film critic and podcaster Alex Rose has spent the pandemic on a personal project: listening to, and sharing on Instagram, his entire 3,000-LP record collection. He joins me to talk about what he discovered while revisiting the collection, what to do with unclassifiable records, PouzzaFest, CHOMcore and salopette blues as musical genres, why prog is so popular in Quebec, getting into jazz as a mid-life crisis, the overlap between jazz fusion and doom metal, the musical starter pack for suburban white boys, and a whole bunch more.

Check out Alex's project, his film reviews on Cult MTL, and his French-language film podcast Les voyeurs de vues.

Robert Dayton and Stephen Hamm are living legends of the music scene in Vancouver and beyond. They join me to discuss the origins of their duo Canned Hamm, our shared history with Peaches, the importance of staying freaky, the value of originality, how music opens up new worlds, Christian children's records, and much more.

Check out their latest projects, Stephen Hamm: Theremin Man and Robert Dayton's latest solo EPs (produced by Hamm).

Alan Zweig's Vinyl (2000) is a dark and profound personal documentary on obsessive record collectors (particularly the filmmaker himself). Today, after nine other documentaries, he's completing a sequel of sorts entitled Records. He joins me to talk about the vinyl resurgence (and the lower-key CD resurgence), why making a film with a positive message has been his biggest challenge, why certain people become obsessive about music, and more.

Watch Alan Zweig's Vinyl on YouTube.

Photo of Alan from the Greetings From Isolation project.

Montreal-based singer-songwriter (and co-host of the Country Classics Hour on CKUT 90.3 FM) Katie Moore joins me for a deep dive into the mystifying mix of symbolism, history, racial and class divisions, marketing, and the slippery concept of authenticity that make up what we call "country music." All that, plus a lot of laughs along the way.

Check out this Spotify playlist of much of the music discussed plus other country and country-adjacent classics!

Peterborough, Ontario-based Karol Orzechowski has been making music and touring as garbageface for many years. He joins me to discuss his beginnings as a singer-songwriter and what turned him to louder and more confrontational music; Rage Against the Machine, Fugazi, and other case studies in the struggle between artistic practice, career ambition and personal ethics; and his own tastes - culminating in a major What Is This Music?! breakthrough in which he celebrates not one, but two of music's most widely derided genres.

Check out this playlist of music we discussed on the episode, plus a few personal garbageface faves.

Hear garbageface's music on Bandcamp.

Jace Lasek is known for his music with Montreal's The Besnard Lakes and Light Conductor as well as his role as co-owner of the Breakglass Studio. In addition to his own music he's mixed Wolf Parade's debut, engineered the latest godspeed you! black emperor record, and worked on countless other Montreal recordings of recent years. He joins me for a deep dive into the overlapping status and significance of post-rock, prog rock, punk rock and soft rock, with digressions on the Grateful Dead, new country, the early-2000s rock revival, noise concerts as mating rituals, and more.

See also Jace's Spotify playlist of music discussed in the episode.

Photo courtesy of The Besnard Lakes on Instagram.

DJ Tamika Bernard was born in Guyana, raised in New York City, and  currently lives in Toronto. She joins me to talk about cross-cultural connections, growing up amid hip-hop culture in Queens and Brooklyn, being a DJ during covid times, her brief career as a rapper, her unexpected tastes and musical roadblocks, mumble rap, the renaissance of Toronto, the shocking truth about what Canadians really mean when they say "sorry," and more.