Introduction: cultural imaginaries, musical communities, reflexive practices

Allen Chun and Ned Rossiter

There is little doubt that with the advent of new information and communication technologies there has been an intensification of global cultural and financial flows. New communication technologies such as the internet and satellite, in conjunction with residual cultural technologies such as radio and performance venues, create the potential for cultural forms such as pop music to undergo deterritorialisation.¹ MTV and Channel [V], for example, are media of virtual culture, seemingly divorced from any context and endlessly consumed by apparently compliant youth audiences. Paradoxically, these technologies also create the possibility of pop music culture reterritorialising itself in and as new communities transformed by market logistics as they pertain to informational economies characterised by flexible accumulation, production and consumption. One of the key techniques for regulating and ordering the flow of information and structuring the ‘New Economy’ consists of intellectual property regimes (May 2002). Unlike material property, intellectual property functions to inscribe a regime of scarcity upon that which is undiminished when it is circulated and exchanged. This is particularly the case when information has been encoded in digital form. The restrictive nature of intellectual property regimes has inspired decentralised socio-technical phenomena such as the ‘Napsterisation’ of MP3 music files. Such socio-technical practices can be seen as one instance of the mutable field of digital piracy challenging the hegemony of the recording industry and its regulated distribution system (Lovink 2002; Meikle 2002).

As a cultural form that brings together sonic and visual dimensions, popular music is clearly well suited to the modes of abstraction enabled by a range of communications media such as radio, television, satellite, CDs and DVDs, minidisc players, online file-swapping, and so forth. Indeed, everyday media technologies have been, and continue to be, a key condition of possibility for the emergence of pop music as a popular cultural form. While this is not a book about the ways in which new media technologies condition the production, distribution and reception of popular music, the tension between the local and the global that often characterises debates on the information society and new media technologies is one that carries over to this study of popular music in Asia.

Within such a context, it is no wonder that questions arise with regard to the status of national sovereignty and its capacity to define and control the formation of national cultures and industrial practices of commodity production, circulation and consumption. To what extent, for instance, do regimes of taste operate to fragment national cultures? And how easily do pop music genres translate not only from the West to Asia (and vice versa), but also at transnational and translocal levels across the Asian region? Even when popular music is produced in flexible, transnational modes, it still remains situated within local and national industries, material cultures and labour practices. Despite the especially mobile nature of popular music it nonetheless continues to be a localised phenomenon, embedded in socio-political practices, cultural systems and institutional realities. The situatedness of popular music and its distribution as a commodity form according to technical standards, international legal and industry agreements, and symbolic regimes give rise to the extra-territorialisation of state borders that comes into tension with the politics of location that attend the various forms of musical expression.

Taken as a whole, this book compares techniques of cultural production, sociopolitical formations, and transnational and subnational differences as they relate to the production, performance, consumption and exchange of pop music within China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. While these countries hold vast differences, they offer the book its comparative frame of analysis, which, it should be noted, in no way assumes to comprehensively map the myriad styles, audience formations and tastes, industry practices, and symbolic meanings that define the complexity of pop music in Asia. In a more modest and pragmatic vein, the essays in this book seek to address two issues: first, to look at popular music formations in an Asian context, and in so doing contribute an alternative to the domination of Anglo-American music cultures in the field of popular and rock music studies (see, for example, Bennett et al. 1993; Frith 1992, 1996; Grossberg 1992, 1997; Kaplan 1987); second, to examine the ways in which a focus on popular music formations can foreground operations of the state, commodity culture and its industries, and socio-political practices in such a way that prevailing assumptions of global cultures and economies come under review, if not scrutiny.

One of the central tasks of this collection of essays is to demonstrate how forms of cultural capital engendered by production, circulation and transformations of pop music in Asia are differentiated across what Arjun Appadurai (1996) terms ‘ethno-scapes’, ‘mediascapes’, ‘technoscapes’, ‘financescapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’. Uniform sets of cultural values cannot be attributed to pop music in terms of class distinctions. Nor can the relation between pop music and cultural values be understood solely by way of comparisons across nation-states. Instead, attention must be given to the ways in which cultural values are differentiated by the mode of communication in conjunction with the geopolitical and cultural sites from which expression emerges. The processes of articulation intrinsic to cultural differentiation ensures that pop music forms and genres themselves are transformed within cultural contexts, and through social practices. Such operations bring to bear the complex ways in which ‘Asia’ is constituted as a geopolitical and cultural imaginary.

In his essay ‘Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global’, Leo Ching unequivocally states that the role of mass culture is a central condition for the discursive and ideological formation of Asia as it shifts from an aggregate of national geopolitical configurations to a supranational regional imaginary. Moreover, Ching argues, the ideological formation of Asia as a regionalist imaginary ‘in the last instance signals the impossibility of the thing (the Asia of Asianism) itself’ (2000: 235). Put another way, the imaginary construction of Asia remains antagonistically locked in what the West may consider a Kantian paradigm rooted in the modern Enlightenment. Such a paradigm or episteme confers upon ‘Asia’ the status of a transcendental entity whose materiality or plurality of differences or non-discursivity constantly evades Western sensibility, hence the ‘impossibility’ of comprehending the ‘thing-in-itself’. Ching imputes there is a ‘real’ Asia to be found beyond myths of identity and the material practices that sustain the imaginary terrains of nations and regions. Slavoj Zizek terms this ‘the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency’ (cited in Ching 1998: 82).

This introduction is not the place to undertake the long-winded rigour necessary to engage with the philosophical legacies of such an argument; instead, we will cut to the following assertions: an imaginary construction signals that there can be no essence, but multiple imaginary terrains that contest, support or ignore one another. Each imaginary formation is articulated with a series of material preconditions. A genealogy of any imaginary formation would involve examining the constellation of material forms and practices and symbolic dimensions that distinguish one imaginary formation from another. So the imaginary does not forgo the possibility of the real, but actively inculcates the real or non-discursive entity as a necessary condition of its own formation. Such a process is evident in the genre of love songs, which through their romantic, imaginary constructions are harking back to rituals of true love, commitment, loyalty, spiritual harmony, and so forth.

While Asia remains irreducible to essences, including that of a transcendent imaginary, the task of examining the interrelationships between Asia's cultural forms, the conditions of their emergence, the social uses that attribute meaning to their distribution as symbolic forms, and the politics of consumption is not inconceivable. If there is a fundamental lesson to be gained from Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1971), it is this: ideology consists of lived relations or social practices organised in part by a logic of sensibility found in symbolic realms. The imaginary, as such, is constituted by material practices located within institutional settings. The work of cultural industries, which circulate images of pop music stars and performers, evinces the relationship between the imaginary and materiality. The latter is not to be confused with ‘the Real’, whose surplus resists integration into the symbolic order (see Zizek 1989). Despite the significant conceptual distinctions between ‘the Real’ and ‘the material’, the supposition by Ching that the imaginary of Asia is the a priori of its incomprehensibility in that it occludes its conditions of emergence is most limited when it comes to analysing the ways in which cultural imaginaries are always intimately bound with material circumstances. Ching's play on Althusser's infamous economic determinist line ‘in the last instance …’ suggests a point of finitude whereby a distinction of mutual exclusion or incommensurability exists between the realm of the imaginary and that of the Real; we would maintain, however, that the imaginary is intricately linked with and plays an active role in both constructing and being constructed by the Real. In other words, while the imaginary may appear to be violated by the presence of the Real, for our purposes this does not mean the Real resides irrevocably in a space of alterity, impossible to locate within either the imaginary or the symbolic order (see Grosz 1989; Lacan 1994).

For Zizek's Marxian reading of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, ‘the Real’ is inscribed within spectral dimensions. As Zizek argues, the ‘resistant kernel’ of ‘the Real’ is always present ‘within the symbolic process itself’ (Zizek 2000: 311), often in the form of some antagonism that is played out in the cultural domain. In this respect there is a materiality that attends the interplay between the Real, the imaginary and the symbolic. While the authors in this book do not ground their analyses within the conceptual schema of Zizek or Lacan, they nevertheless explore many instances of social, cultural and political antagonisms and tensions that emerge from the very resistance of cultural meanings, sensibilities and aesthetic regimes that articulate pop music to the so-called totalising logic of transnational capital. Even attempts at the level of the nation to stabilise and contain musical cultures for the purpose of advancing the ‘national principle’, as noted by Adorno, are met with underlying antagonisms of gender, class, ethnicity and culture that challenge political ideologies. Often such contests are going to be right off the political radar, persisting as ‘differences that make a difference’, to draw on a phrase coined by anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972). The economic survival of musical industries depends on tuning into these differences that register the mutable ground of musical taste, fashion and genre. Yet the battle over commodifying emergent tastes and performative modes constitutes a problematic of competing interests, which in turn can bring about tensions between governments, corporations, musicians and audiences.

While the abstraction of imaginary terrains from social conditions is part of an economic process in which the mobility and deterritorialisation of signifiers of culture may be attributed to what Manuel Castells and others note as a ‘transition’ in the mode of production from ‘mass production to flexible accumulation, or from “Fordism” to “post-Fordism”’ (Castells 1996: 154; see also Harvey 1989; Lash and Urry 1994; Papastergiadis 2000; Tomlinson 1999), ultimately, we think, there remains the ineradicable fact of socio-political contexts in which cultural imaginaries are made intelligible. Such contexts do not necessarily lead to a valorisation of the local; rather, they are more properly understood in terms of what Roland Robertson calls processes of ‘glocalisation’ (1992). Ungainly as this word may be, it does usefully signal the idea of a heterogeneous third space: one that is constituted by material and immaterial forces and one that mediates the competing interests between the local and the global. It is at the juncture of the local and global that an aesthetic refashioning of traditional and pop music genres emerges, cultivating a local appeal and articulating cultural values that pertain, in a number of cases, to virtues of love and life.

Ching goes on to write that:

as soon as the commodity-image-sound of mass culture becomes the fundamental form in which the putative unity of Asia is imagined and regulated, the internal contradictions of Asianism are suppressed for the sake of commensurability and compatibility with the global distribution of cultural power.

(2000: 235)

In assuming capitalism to hold a totalising logic, Ching forsakes the ‘internal contradictions’ present in the dialectical relation between the commodity object and its conditions of possibility. Indeed, the spectre of such contradictions is at once a phenomenological given, and it is precisely this conjuncture that we seek to address in this book. In terms of providing a foundation for this wide-ranging collection of essays, all of which share popular music in Asia as an object of study, it is useful to signal right from the start the seeming impossibility of such an undertaking. How, one might ask, can popular music be taken to be representative of an Asia that is a heterogeneous cultural, social, political and economic entity? As Ching argues, the material features that distinguish its peoples and places seemingly disappear under the arbitrary sign of a transnationally or globally distributed commodity form which occludes culture and society, or the world of matter, sense and sensation and their techniques of organisation. While no single theoretical position or methodological approach unifies the essays in this collection — to do so would be to participate in the very construction of an imaginary of regional unity that Ching seeks to deconstruct — the various national and ethnic musics analysed here are shown to hold a distinctiveness special to the social needs and conditions, institutional practices, political interests and economic networks that do indeed contribute to Asia as a discursive, geopolitical entity.

Nevertheless, this is not an Asia whose cultural forms and practices are victim to the imaginary of global capital encapsulated, for instance, in what Immanuel Wallerstein terms the ‘modern world-system’ (1987; 1990). In Wallerstein's words, world-systems analysis consists of ‘a “single set of rules” or a single “set of constraints” within which these various structures [the economic, the political and the social or sociocultural] operate’ (1987: 313). To analyse cultural forms and social practices in such terms would disavow the differentiated socio-political temporalities and spaces in which traditional, modern, and postmodern musical forms emerge and syncretise. Reebee Garofalo succinctly outlines the implications of such a model for the analysis of musical cultures as follows:

the transnational flow of music is often envisaged as a vertical flow from more powerful nations to less powerful ones, or as a centre-periphery model with music moving from more dominant cultures to marginal ones, from developed countries — particularly the United States — to the rest of the world, with accompanying images of overpowering, displacing, and/or destroying local cultures.

(1993: 17)

Such unidimensional positions as Wallerstein's are ones this book seeks to actively mitigate on a case-by-case basis. Certainly the effects of economic hegemony impact upon people's daily lives and shape practices within the cultural industries, but not in any universally integrated and systematically coherent sense. The Marxist principle of ‘uneven development’, for instance, can be usefully drawn upon to describe the differentiated global modernities experienced across the industrially developing world and the processes by which newly industrialised countries (NICs), since the 1970s financial crises in Europe and North America, have become ‘partially integrated into the global circuits of production as well as exchange’ (N. Smith 1997: 174). More recently, one commonly reads in print and electronic media of various Asian nation-states engaged in their own culturally idiosyncratic ‘styles’ of capitalism — Asian Tigers' and ‘Dragons’, ‘Confucian capitalism’, ‘crony capitalism’ and so forth are demonstration enough of a rhetoric that registers the historically transforming and geopolitical specificity of national and regional capitalist economies that have apparently ‘deviated’ in their restructuring from supposedly more secure, rational and less corrupt systems of capital organisation and management in the West (see Ching 2000: 239; Dirlik 1995).

Cultural inflections and political and economic distinctions such as these within Asia enable us to claim that the materiality in which pop music is always embedded gives rise to cosmopolitan flows, political temporalities, and aesthetic industries that are not translatable as arbitrary signifiers of a unified regionalism or universal globality. Frequently the battle of hegemony over cultural identity remains one played out amongst actors situated in multiple institutional spheres and social settings constitutive of an ‘abstract community’ of the nation-state or geopolitical form (James 1996; see also Chun 1996; Sharp 1985; A. D. Smith 1995). In this respect the ‘internal contradictions’ of cultural imaginaries are not so much ‘suppressed’, as claimed by Ching, but rather play a substantive role in identity formation and the habitus of individuals and communities.

One way of overcoming the supposed homogenisation of culture in the age of globality is to attend to the historically and culturally specific ways in which the otherwise ungrounded signifiers of capital flows are always and necessarily socially embedded. For unless cultural forms are recognised in terms of their situatedness — be it in theoretical frameworks, and in terms of institutional realities and academic interests, as much as the locations of the social practices attending the field of pop music — then it would be impossible to identify commodity forms as a sign of violence in the first instance. That is to say, in order for a signifier to be made intelligible it has to hold a symbolic potential which, in turn, is only possible according to specific material conditions (physical, social, economic, institutional, political, geographical) that register the commodity form with social resonance. For the student of culture this entails a reflexive mode of analysis whereby academic interests, institutional positions, media of communication and theoretical frameworks are addressed as agents contributing to the discursive formation and social organisation of particular objects of study and their disjunctural networks of constitution, property ownership, regulation, symbolic affiliation, exploitation, racism, sexism and consumption (Beck 1992; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Giddens 1990; Lash and Urry 1994; Negri and Hardt 2000; Sharma et al. 1996).

While Anglo-American pop music industries hold a dominant purchase on representations of music cultures and economies in the West, it is crucial, we believe, to keep in mind that there is no necessarily unifying impulse in these global times. Appadurai's notion of ‘disjunctural global cultural economies’ (1996), for instance, further brings into question the idea of a ‘world-system’ based on a core-periphery model in which all actors are integrated. Koichi Iwabuchi's recent book, Recentering Globalization (2002), is another important antidote to such totalising views. Iwabuchi foregrounds the strategies by which Western popular cultural forms are incorporated into local Japanese contexts and examines how Japanese pop music, along with other popular cultural forms, have been distributed on an intra-Asian scale conditioned by shared cultural resonances and further cultural mixing at local levels. Such a process, argues Iwabuchi,

precipitates (asymmetrical) connections between people in Japan and those in modernized (or rapidly modernizing) ‘Asia’, not through reified notions of ‘traditional, authentic culture’ or ‘Asian values’, but through popular cultural forms which embody people's skillful negotiation with the symbolic power of West-dominated global capitalism.

(2002: 18)

In other words, the seeming dominance of Anglo-American pop music in terms of representation and market economies begins to appear considerably less so in relative terms. Keith Negus reproduces a dominant assumption in his observation that:

The global production and consumption of popular music in the 1990s is defined by the North Atlantic Anglo-American cultural movements of sounds and images, and European, USA and Japanese dominance of finance capital and hardware on which to record and reproduce these sounds and images.

(cited in Mitchell 1996: 263)

It is the contention of this book that such a perspective greatly underestimates the positionality of actors within cultural geographies and the variability of modes of expression that conform more often to local, national, transnational, and interregional frameworks than they do to a hegemonic world-system. Moreover, such a view as Negus's of the culture of popular music and its industrial structure is remiss for its privileging of the North and subsuming the complexity of Asian musical cultures into the totalising figure of ‘Japan’. The tendency of popular music studies to focus on Anglo-American phenomena is symptomatic of the complex relations between the cultural identities of researchers, academic publishing industries and readerships, university curricula and the emergence of cultural studies as a legitimate field of study, and the peculiarities of music industries within the national and regional settings in which researchers are located. This book itself is evidence of these conditions, albeit ones distinguished by geopolitical and cultural coordinates that span Australasian and Asian regional imaginaries.

In view of the existing literature on popular music and culture, the papers included herein are remarkable not so much for their expertise on musicological issues per se than for their sensitivity to the cultural, social and political contexts that have foregrounded the emergence and development of popular music in Asia. The evolution and growth of modern popular music, especially in ‘non-Western’ countries, is, perhaps, at first glance prone to simplistic reductionism of all kinds. The diffusion of Western music and its influence upon local forms can be viewed easily as a unidimensional phenomenon or imposition of ‘global’ upon local. To say the least, this raises obvious questions of form and content. Yet regardless of whether one views such ‘travelling music’ as mindless mimicry, inventions of tradition or creative hybridity, these ongoing cross-cultural flows and aesthetic negotiations must not just be seen as pure instances of aesthetic borrowing and creation, as though isolated from their acceptability by specific niches of people or vested interests and their institutionalisation either as state intervention or rampant commercialisation. Far from being a socially autonomous phenomenon, music always seems, on the contrary, to be embedded in something else.

Concert megashows and the advent of MTV videos can demonstrate easily enough that music is only one aspect of a total ‘performance’, but the magnitude of its reception and its potentiality for development are always the product first of its meaning for specific groups and interests and the ways in which underlying musical cultures become strategic foci for representation, desire and identity in a multivocal if not politically contested social arena. The papers by Hayes, Stokes and Chun show that pop music must be seen not for what it appears to be on the surface, but rather the embodiment in the first instance of corporate and other interests. The situation being described here is not unlike the movie culture of Hollywood. One is on the surface of things led to believe that film stars (as if by their own creation) ‘personify’ movies, when these personalities are moulded on the contrary by the vested interests of studios. These movie stars were not even independent artists, but instead contractually belonged to studios and were part of the corporate structure that produced them. Hayes' paper thus overturns the emancipatory image that is ingrained in cultural studies' analyses of music by showing how the Thai pop music industry is a complex web of institutional and cultural practices that promotes pop music in a particular light. Stokes' paper, on the other hand, shows how difficult it is to separate the role of media in the cultural construction of music. More than just a sub-culture, the mass-mediated commodification of rock music in China was to a large extent dependent on the role of print media. Criticising reductionist analyses of Chinese popular music that have tended to dualise the relationship between the state and youth culture to the extent of characterising pop-rock music as a form of subversive resistance, Stokes extends Thornton's (1995) study of ‘club cultures’ by arguing for a more institutionally embedded view of music and musical cultures. In a similar vein, Chun's paper shows how the development of a cosmopolitan popular culture in Taiwan has been an ambivalent enterprise that can have different meanings for different vested interests. In this era of ‘disorganised capitalism’ (Lash and Urry 1987), which has in a musical arena given rise to the cosmopolitan tastes of ‘international hit radio’ and increasingly hybridised forms of music, the struggle to determine the course of ‘cosmopolitan culture’ (see Brennan 1997; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Harvey 2000; James 1999/2000; Neilson 1999), at least in Taiwan, seems to be inseparable from varying perceptions of those ‘local’ interests as well as control over power and capital.

Globalisation appears frequently in most if not all of the following papers. The diversity by which Western pop-rock genres have been appropriated in local venues in effect brings into question the oversimplistic emphasis on functional disjunctures by scholars of transnationalism and the knee-jerk reactions attributed to non-Western countries by core-periphery models of a modern world-system by shifting attention instead to the diverse cultural perceptions of music and its institutional mobilisation in different societal settings. None of the latter can be predicted by a single theory of globalisation and in essence gives priority to understanding the cultural and socio-political ground of that ‘local’ context.

The diverse consequences of globalisation in an Asian context has obvious ramifications for understanding Asian pop music and pop music cultures. Thus pop music takes on many faces in different Asian venues, but these differences cannot be compared cross-culturally at face value. For example, Stokes argues persuasively that Chinese rock music is not inherently subversive, contrary to a priori assumptions, but this does not detract from the dualistic tendencies found in Indonesian pop and rock cultures, as described by Hill and Sen, as well as the politically expressive uses to which Bengali folk music are put, which is the case of Suman Chatterjee's ‘irritating song’, described by Sudipto Chatterjee. Even hybridity can take many forms, as illustrated elegantly in the papers by Hutnyk, Stevens and Ogawa. Ultimately, globalisation must be seen really as a ‘local’ phenomenon, that is to say, in local terms. Distinctions of self and others are an inherent part of nationalistic music of the kind described by Chakravarty, even if they create unusual notions of desire and nostalgia that necessitate or imagine internalised others, as in the cases of Japan and Taiwan described by Yano and Taylor, respectively. The role of music in creating and maintaining identity is construed somewhat differently in the Balinese context described by Laskewicz, which must be seen in relation to Bali's long history of cultural interchange. Hayes and Chun, in their respective papers, seem to be make the strongest argument for viewing pop music cultures within a framework of institutional practice that can be a fulcrum for manipulation by hegemonic regimes and culture industries. Especially in Chun's case, conflict at the level of perceptions and strategies has had direct impact on influencing indigenous meanings of ‘cosmopolitan’ culture.

In short, globalisation can be seen as an a priori point of departure less for its effect on producing Western popular music everywhere (as a product of cultural imperialism) or global culture (the new cultural imperialism in ‘transnational’ form) than for the way the local cultural and socio-political ground plays a major role in appropriating, shaping and institutionalising external influences. It is important to see how what may be taken initially as internal-external dualisms becomes transformed, redefined and/or synthesised in a local context by diverse forces. The process can be both conscious and unconscious, politically explicit as well as psychologically subliminal, institutionally normalising or deliberately subversive. Moreover, in the context of such globalising influences, one can see various kinds of transnational flows, not just from West to East. The examples of Hayes, Ogawa, Yano, Taylor, and to a lesser extent Hill and Sen, show evidence of strong inter-Asian influences as well. Meanwhile, the case studies of Ogawa and Hutnyk in particular show that ‘Eastern’ influences can have a peculiar bearing on Western pop-rock music as well. All of the above papers demonstrate the importance of going beyond the materiality of the transnational flows per se to investigate the overt symbolic processes that shape these tendencies toward mimicry, exoticism and syncretism as well as to probe the underlying sociological processes that make music serve as a vehicle for evoking desire and resistance.

The papers by Chakravarty, Sen and Hill, and Chatterjee adopt different approaches to the politics of music that elucidate the various ways in which local popular music appropriates and synthesises then institutionalises the global to promote intended socio-political ends. Chakravarty's study of ‘Vande Mataram’ can perhaps be seen as a classic example of a state-sponsored culture industry that has attempted to mobilise a vast media industry to instil nationalist fervour and patriotic sentiment in the form of national music. The construction of this grand musical narrative was in the first instance a top-down hegemonic project that through commodification became a brand narrative. In content it utilised both anti-colonial and primordial essentialist metaphors; in form it was an elite, high-cultural project that aimed to define or invent a tradition to displace genres previously occupied by various folk cultures and premodern musical traditions. This venture into high modernity contrasts with other Asian experiences.

Hill and Sen's analysis of the Indonesian case shows, on the other hand, that the advent of Western popular music is unavoidably political. Sukarno's act of banning the Beatles in the early 1960s may have set the precedent for viewing rock and roll as politically subversive. The divergent paths taken by dangdut (upbeat pop music) and underground hard rock (with its sexual and otherwise alternative lyrics) illustrate the importance of their socio-political undertones. As Hill and Sen point out, it is difficult to ascertain whether the latter's anti-authority goals and its explicit disorderliness have engendered the verbal abuse of its lyrics or vice versa. On the other hand, dangdufs upbeat, feelgood style has made it amenable to mass popularisation as a new national music that has even been exploited by the ruling Golkar regime as a tool for its own promotion. Sudipto Chatterjee's analysis of Suman Chatterjee's modern Bengali song is an example of the way one artist in particular has been able to build on the appeal of the modern popular musical genre by incorporating styles from all over the world in the mould of the Latin American nueva cancion, infuse into the music a sense of poetic beauty and economy, then mobilise songs as a vehicle for social protest and critical political awareness, rather in the tradition of Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger. The popular appeal of his music, as well as a sense of socio-political consciousness built into its lyrics, has proved to be a subtle and powerful tool for public-intellectual expression that has at the same time created tension with the existing political order. Perhaps like Chakrabarty's Indian case, Chatterjee has been able to capitalise on an existing industry of popular music to tap into a mass culture market, while promoting it as a platform for political expression in a subtle and syncretic way that seems impossible in an Indonesian setting predicated by a different kind of socio-political ground.

The institutional setting differs markedly in different venues, whether it is a function of the interventionist role of the state or capitalist interests in the making of a culture industry. This is probably a more accurate methodological point of departure for the study of modern Asian popular music, as it defines the basic parameters for the social and political uses to which the content and form of music are strategically invoked and the meaning which it conveys for people. This local setting explains music's ongoing diversity, despite its ‘global’ origin.

Stevens' paper shows the complexity by which Christian symbolism has pervaded the lyrics and songs of one prominent pop music group in Japan, the Alfee. The meaning and effectiveness of such symbolism transcends the sort of East-West, traditional-modern dichotomies that are typically used to characterise the nature and appeal of Japanese pop musicians. Often referred to as the Japanese Rolling Stones, the Alfee without doubt occupies a particular niche in the Japanese musical scene vis-à-vis other groups, but the use of Christian metaphors appears to be a systematic feature of its performance and message to evoke romance and nostalgia. But instead of being a mirror of the contemporary real, the deliberate use of Western symbols evokes a fantasy of modernity; cross-cultural dressing in this regard then enables modern escapism to travel through time and space. The fantastic modern invoked through the romantic nostalgia of the Alfee contrasts on the other hand with Hutnyk's description of British rock band Kula Shaker and its Orientalist appropriation of South Asian music and cultural forms. The use (in this case, abuse) of Asian music and culture by Kula Shaker was apparently not just the result of an attempt to embellish the pop-rock form through an adoption of Asian alterity but a blatantly Eurocentric objectification of Asian music or, as Hutnyk put it, a ‘souveniring of sound and culture’ that was made possible only on the basis of a ‘history of colonial power and theft transmuted into nostalgia for an idealised exotic India’. Instead of proselytising the essentialist values of a timeless India, which is what its music seems to be on the surface, Kula Shaker's rediscovery of the Asian sound is, in Hutnyk's view, ‘the operation of a business-as-usual colonial project. It is still about wanting to rule the world’, as though ‘covertly rehearsing a grand epic nostalgia for the days of the Raj’. As if music is not just music, Ogawa's study of Japanese popular music in Hong Kong shows that the adoption and growing appeal of Japanese music probably had complex roots in the development of Hong Kong's popular music as a whole. By providing a change from local Canto-pop, while at the same time sharing a compatible if not similar sense of melody, Japanese pop music began to have mass appeal. In fact, the diffusion of a single song ruju from Hong Kong to Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma and Turkey (and its local variations) is a typical case of travelling culture, reified also by the promotion of Japanese commercial culture.

The diversity of cross-cultural mixing and musical syncretism found in all these instances varies in each case and cannot be predicted by a single theory of globalisation or hybridity. To the contrary, it is evidence rather of the specificity of the local perceptual, socio-political ground that situates, if not conditions, the development of modern pop music and all its supporting cultural manifestations. Instead of being pure representational forms, they attest more importantly to the modernist fantasies, colonial projects and feelgood industries that they inscribe, which supplement the more explicit commercial and political uses to which they can be put. Even in terms of representation, there are myriad transformations that can alternatively evoke desire, nostalgia and rituality in ways that impinge on conscious notions of identity and bring about clashes between existing genres.

The role of foreign female singers in Japanese pop music, as epitomised by enka, a genre of Japanese sentimentalist music that has roots in the early twentieth century, is a peculiar case in point analysed by Yano. On the one hand, the pan-Asian popularity of enka attests to the broad appeal of an identifiably Japanese genre. On the other hand, the prominent role played by foreign singers of enka in Japan, sometimes even flaunting their foreignness, is a strange reaffirmation of the Japaneseness of the enka that may strike an unusual contrast with the Orientalising tendencies reported by others in different contexts. As Yano puts it,

enka is not internationalised, so much as these foreign females domesticated. These singers become a spectacle of Asian otherness, showcasing the lengths to which Asian foreigners may enact Japanese cultural forms before Japanese eyes … The presence of foreign singers in the Japanese enka world may be interpreted as a metaphor for controlling the Asian ‘others’.

Enka's reaffirmation of the self through the transformation of the other contrasts interestingly with Taylor's study of Taiwanese pop songs and nakaxi women. Being in part an adaptation of enka into Taiwanese, the evolution of Taiwanese bar songs known as nakaxi forms an interesting contrast with the development of Mandarin Chinese songs that later becomes associated with the popular culture of ‘Greater China’ that is disseminated largely from Taiwan and Hong Kong to mainland China. Taylor's characterisation of nakaxi as ‘postcolonial’ evokes an association by the Taiwanese with their Japanese legacy; their nostalgia is also a throwback to sentiments of the past.

The transformations of enka described by Yano and Taylor in the context of Japan and Taiwan show how the social positionality of music can have diverse ramifications upon the kind of cultural identity invoked therein. But if the same music can be transposed elsewhere and given different form and social meaning, as was noted by Taylor in his discussion of Taiwanese bar culture, then it makes sense of Laskewicz's study of the peculiar Balinese appropriation of Western pop music in the context of traditional genres of performance. Given the long history of Bali's cultural interchange with the West, globalisation can hardly be viewed as a recent phenomenon either. As in all the other examples reported elsewhere, the development of pop music culture in Bali is not just a confrontation between different kinds of music but rather a synthesis created by social meanings placed on music as well as the result of institutional clashes that aim to promote music in ways that galvanise different vested interests. According to Laskewicz, the adoption of modern pop music in a Balinese context cannot be readily understood without viewing music within its traditional framework of performance. Notions of performance not only permeate art and aesthetics but the entire flow of social life. Thus music is part of a larger, more encompassing lifestyle in a way that the advent of MTV and media technology has elucidated the multiple dimensions of music as an art form and cultural practice. In other words, performance is the genre within which music serves a significant, albeit dependent function.

The development of pop music in Asia has important ramifications for the cultural studies literature on music, as well as for a deeper understanding of pop culture in contemporary Asia. As Hill and Sen, Hutnyk, Ogawa and Chun have already hinted in different ways, the term ‘world music’ is a misnomer that either hides a hegemonic project or is just symptomatic of a new Eurocentric vision of the global order. Seen from the ‘periphery’ (instead of the ‘core’), the local context is without doubt a creative ground for synthesis and resistance but must be seen in its own terms rather than as a function of (or reaction to) any single globalising influence or force. In other words, the development of every local pop music has always been the result of global influences, conscious or unconscious, prior to the advent of ‘world music’ in the West, which is on the other hand an essentialist, if not exotically Orientalist or crass commercialisation of local, traditional music.

Exploratory and cursory as the essays in this book may be, they should be seen as an initial attempt to view pop music and pop culture not simply as pure aesthetic creations, narrowly speaking, but as products of complex institutional and social interactions that must be understood in local cultural terms. Even in the West, despite the way scholars have tended to view pop music myopically as products of marginal or alternative sub-cultures, the emergence and relevance of such phenomena must be viewed instead as embedded in a larger socio-political whole (rather than isolated from it). Their specificity of development in each instance is really the function of these local (albeit holistic unto themselves) contexts. Their marginality is the consequence of dominant institutional forces, just as their prominence in mass culture is a magnification of market and other influences. Globalisation in an Asian context must thus be seen less as a result of common diffusionist origins than as a product of an a priori local, institutional context of meaning and power. Flows may be both global and regional, conscious and unconscious. Social value and cultural capital also intersect at many levels.

It is difficult to assess the Asian experience of pop music except to say that its diversity of representation reflects in part its complexity of socio-institutional setting. Not directly comparable at surface level, these experiences nonetheless can contribute to the study of pop music and pop culture transnationally and internationally. They also reflect indirectly on deeper processes of culture and state that epitomise the drastic changes taking place throughout Asian societies in ways that can complement other ongoing studies of Asian economy and polity.

Notes

Thanks to Jody Berland, Simon Cooper, Mike Hayes and two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their comments and criticisms. The usual disclaimers apply.

1 A fascinating account of the use of the internet in the Chinese rave scene can be read in von Seggern and STAFFER3 (2002).