|
 
Pop Music in
Asia
Keith Howard
On the Social Phenomenon
of Asian pop
* By KOEN DE CEUSTER
Talking to this issue's Guest Editor, Keith Howard,
on a sunny early autumn afternoon in his office in the SOAS building,
I was struck by the almost inevitable pull in his research towards popular
music.
Although he indicated that, music-wise, Asian pop was sometimes little
more than a boring replica of Western styles of pop music, he stressed
that as a social phenomenon it decidedly deserved scholarly attention.
For too long, musicology in the West has been concentrating almost exclusively
on 'classical' music, despite dwindling interest from the public. Although
he willingly admits that such research has undeniable scholarly merits,
he personally is more interested in the social uses of music.
He was already 'cheesed out' when, during and after his MA training
as a Western musicologist/composer, he could get a commission to write
new academic-style music, but that the composition would be performed
once to an audience of perhaps forty people,
COURTESY OF KEITH HOWARD.
never to be played again. He stresses:
'that doesn't seem to me the way that music should be.' A similar frustration
gripped him when he began teaching music. Forced by the school curriculum
to teach major and minor scales, he saw pupils donning their Walkmans
outside the classroom, but hating their music classes, 'a situation still
all too common throughout schools in Britain today.'
After his MA, he wanted to look at how people used music
and trained in anthropology, and embarked on a PhD at Queens University,
Belfast. Korea became his preferred terrain for research. The country
proved an excellent example of a modernizing society where remnants of
pre-industrial life coexisted with a modern, contemporary, global society.
'You could still find people who sang folksongs that they had sung until
the 1950s in the fields, and you could go into Seoul and watch people
buying pop music.' With regard to folk music, he was most interested in
the connections between the past and the present. Rather than concentrating
on what it had been like, he was fascinated by the present, and looked
at preservation movements, change and standardization; at political and
popular uses, and at how folk music was being taught.
'The standard way of conducting ethnomusicological fieldwork
is to look at the soundscape. You do not just look at the small area you
want to study, but at everything that is out there.' So, although he concentrated
on folk music during a nearly eighteen-month stay in the countryside,
he also collected samples of virtually everything -- TV shows, pop, court,
folk, and Western music. Commissioned in 1992 to produce the in-flight
Korean pop music programs for Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, he began
taking a closer look at the pop scene in Asia. Unlike the late 1980s,
when Asian pop was dominated by a 'star-system' of singers excelling in
formulaic 'Eurovision'-type ballads, 'the nineties were when a lot more
variety came in. You can call it globalization, but you could also see
fragmentation in the market, and fragmentation allowed people to hear
what they wanted. It allowed underground music to become more mainstream.
It allowed dedicated markets to emerge for musical subcultures.'
These rapid changes were in part a consequence of the globalized
pop video culture brought to the region by satellite TV. 'Videos moved
the market to a vision of pop based on visuals, based on action and dance.
Ideas move very quickly from country to country, because everyone follows
the visual information, and styles change very quickly. Satellite TV allows
local cultures to appropriate music styles very quickly. So you see each
country taking elements of rap, garage, jungle, and hip hop and combining
these with more local styles. You get appropriation, but in mixes you
would never hear in the West, that are no longer just rap, no longer street
music, no longer Jamaican reggae, but fusions that are very Asian.'
Although Keith's future research will remain focused on
folk music and issues of preservation (notably in projects in Buryatia
and Thailand), he will remain a keen observer of pop music, if only because:
'Popular culture and popular music show us how the world is changing.
We are moving from a world where you could look at single music cultures
isolated from the rest of the world with very clear and neat power structures,
government down, authority down, landowners down. We're moving to a more
global market where influences in music come and go all the time, and
where the powerful forces tend to be companies, or the media, or ideas.'
* (KDC)
|