Sidra Mahmood Loves Bluegrass

About this episode

Sidra Mahmood discusses their passion for bluegrass music and its cultural implications.

Tune your banjo and join Sidra Mahmood, as they tell us about their unexpected passion for bluegrass music. Despite a musical journey through heavy metal, punk rock, and electronic music, they found a strong connection to bluegrass with its themes of labor solidarity, poverty, and anti-capitalism, being played with incredible speed and precision through improvisation. Sidra notes the genre's diversity problem, as 95% of bluegrass concert audiences are white and significantly older, despite contemporary bluegrass artists becoming more diverse, and recommends modern acts that blend punk and rock elements into the traditional sound. Guest Bio Sidra Mahmood (they/them) is a government product and service designer who currently builds data products at the federal government of Canada. Sidra knows we're not supposed to talk about work on this podcast but they can very happily talk about it all day. With a deep deep love of government transparency and civic tech, Sidra's been designing things people can use to make government suck less for over a decade. In their spare time, they can be found DJing, hanging out with their two senior retired greyhounds, and being mean to billionaires on…

People in this episode

Host: Guy Segal

Guest: Sidra Mahmood

Topics covered

• bluegrass music
• musical journey
• diversity in music
• labor solidarity
• government transparency

Keywords

• bluegrass
• music
• Sidra Mahmood
• government design
• civic tech
• diversity
• labor solidarity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: federal government of Canada

Books & works: bluegrass, heavy metal, punk rock, electronic music

Places: Toronto, Canada

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