Theme:
Asia in the Mix: Places, Temporalities and Inter-Asian Entanglements of Popular Music
Statement:
Ranging from J-pop to Indonesian punk, from Chinese folk to Japanese Enka, from Bollywood songs to Thai heavy metal, music takes multiple forms and identities, allowing for complex negotiations of both time and place. These forms quickly travel, mostly regionally, and in some rare cases also globally. The circulation of sounds changes over time, for example, where in the 1990s Cantopop played an important role regionally, this role has now been taken over by both Mandapop and K-Pop. The sound of Bollywood, on the other hand, continues to fascinate the global imagination. Further down in South-east Asia, Indonesian and Malaysian boy bands merge their Islamic beliefs with the global sound of pop.
Amidst this cacophony of voices, sounds and images, we wonder: what are the sounds of that construct called “Asia”? How do sounds travel regionally, and globally, and why? How comes that certain sounds travel better than others? How does the music industry respond to the changes caused by globalization and digitization? What transnational fancultures do emerge? The entanglements we witness refer not only to place but also to time, for example, folk music often expresses an urban alienation and romanticizes a forgotten past, while other sounds from the past are brought back to life, or reassembled in a quite different form, or come from a different place. The nostalgia of Japanese Enka speaks to the longings of urban youth in Taiwan. And take for example the Chinese band RETROS and their reinterpretation of the 80s sound of Bauhaus from the UK, or a reinterpretation of the Shanghai sound of Zhou Xuan from the 1930s and 1940s in electronic music. At the same time, in India, old Bollywood classics are reworked into club house dance songs. These various music cultures and their social significance cannot be possible without the workings of the music industry, whether on a local, regional or international scale.
This conference aims to bring scholars together that work on the different popular musics of Asia, linking these to negotiations of both place and time, and paying special attention to the entanglements of sound with these two categories.