Pop Music
in
Asia
Special Theme Section Book Announcement
'Global Goes Local
Popular Culture in Asia'
Chinese punk
rocker He Yong's 1994 solo debut CD 'Garbage Dump' opens with a rant
against the rat race of the new Asian economy and the moralistic posturing
of a corrupt national leadership.
* By RICHARD KING
He Yong's accent locates him and his
garbage dump in his native city of Beijing, but the iconoclasm of
his music resonates with places and times remote from his own, most
strikingly the punk rock of 1970s London. The song quoted above ends
with the incantation, 'Is there any future?' recalling the closing
refrain of the Sex Pistols' classic 'God Save the Queen': 'No future
for you, No future for me'. He Yong fits comfortably into the history
of rock music as protest, the irony of his relative success in a system
he affects to disdain is no greater than was the case of his precursors
elsewhere.
|
The
world we live in
Is
just like a garbage dump
The
people like bugs
Fighting
and struggling with each other
What
they eat is conscience
What
they shit is ideology.
|
Of all the forms of popular culture, music is surely
the most immediate gauge of the reaction of cultures to the impact
of a predominantly Western and English-language global entertainment
industry. So, of the fourteen chapters of Global
Goes Local, more than half are concerned with pop music.
The case of He Yong raises many of the questions that the book addresses:
What happens when societies with a limited history of contact with
the outside world encounter tapes and CDs of Western popular music,
and are then exposed to the seductive images of MTV? Can the tradition
of rock as the voice of dissent accommodate authoritarian state ideologies
like Confucianism? Does the fusion of Western pop with indigenous
musical forms lead to the undermining or reassertion of local, regional,
and national identities? How authentic are the hybrid sounds that
result from Asian concerns sung heavy metal style or folk tunes with
synthysized disco accompaniment?
Mercedes DuJunco, in her discussion of hybridity and
disjuncture in mainland Chinese pop music, explores the way that disparate
political and cultural influences create hybrid forms. In a case study
of the Philippine Cordillera, Michiyo Yoneno Reyes looks at the different
technologies that brought music from the outside to a remote region.
Eric Thompson's account of Ella, Malaysia's Queen of Rock, presents
a more heartening example of the ways that cultures can reinvent themselves
in response to external influences. In his chapter on Korean popular
music in the 1990s, Keith Howard explores the tensions that exist
between an economically expansionist but ideologically conservative
state and a market-driven youth culture.
Other chapters examine political, ideological, and spiritual
issues in popular culture, revealing the strains that exist between
dominant and subordinate groups within states, and mainstream ideologies
and dissident opinion. Janet Upton's account of the politics and poetics
of Sister Drum
broaches the question of who has the rights to a culture. Sister
Drum, a hit CD by the Chinese singer Dadawa, drew heavily
for inspiration on Tibet, but was harshly criticized by the expatriate
Tibetan community for what they saw as an inaccurate and insensitive
incorporation of Tibet into the Chinese national narrative. Rachel
Harris' report on music in Xinjiang shows musicians of Uyghur nationality
using a vibrant musical culture to assert their difference from the
dominant Han majority.
Two chapters look back at the role of music in defining
and preserving shared identity associated with physical places and
historical moments. The melodies of wartime can resurface decades
later, as Junko Oba shows in her paper on the changing definition
of gunka (Japanese
military songs), songs now shared in an act of nostalgic self-affirmation
By veterans of a defeated army. Isabel Wong's study of incantation
in Shanghai shows how the haunting voice of the songstress Zhou Xuan
and other popular musicians helped create and reinforce the mystique
of the world's most exciting city in the later years of the Chinese
republic.
And there's more: WWF videos in the rainforest of Borneo,
Japanese manga comic
books as religious epics, Chinese TV serials, Malaysian commercials,
a Thai talkshow exposing spirit mediums, and wartime propaganda images
from opposing sides in the Pacific War. *
Craig, Tim & Richard King
(eds.), Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, Vancouver: University
of British Columbia Press (Autumn 2001).
Professor
Richard King is affiliated with the Department of Pacific
and Asian Studies, University of Victoria, Canada.
E-mail:
rking@univ.ca