Preface
In the late 1980s Pico Iyer (1988) commented on the ubiquity of popular music in Asia. He bases his view on his experiences in the Philippines and assumes that the rest of Asia similarly shares a deep and abiding affinity with popular music. Norman Lewis commented on this in the 1950s according to Iyer. So this is a long-standing phenomenon and the question arises why then has it taken so long for popular music in Asia to become a respectable object of academic study? Various responses can be constructed to answer such a simple question, which range from the commercial nature of the medium to its ephemeral status. None of these answers is adequate. Popular music in Asia has been ignored by academics because it does not fit the classic research agenda. Despite the enthusiasm underpinned by a carefully wrought critical apparatus it remains hard work for young academics to convince programme chairs and others who control the research budgets that the detailed study of contemporary Asian popular music is worthwhile. In a sense the status of pop music is like that of film in the 1960s and latterly television in academia; it is necessary for a younger generation of academics to come along with different enthusiasms and a different cultural baggage, without the deeply ingrained prejudices of their predecessors, for the medium to become the focus of rigorous critical discussion. This lack of status for popular music studies becomes even more puzzling when we think of our collective experiences of Asia since the widespread introduction of the new electronic cultural technologies. Popular music has become inescapable. It is no longer a purely urban phenomenon. It resonates through every market, every street, every high-rise building and every school ground. For some of us Asia is popular music. Four experiences over two decades — a wedding in Pune, following the Master Band around nightclubs in Surabaya, a party in Wuhan and karaoke singing in restaurants and canteens, also in Wuhan — illustrate the deep relationship between popular music and my understanding of Asia.
In 1977 Y. B. Chavan's niece married in the grounds of the Turf Club House, Pune, Maharashtra. Chavan was the most important Congress politician in the state at this time, having been premier of Maharashtra as well as a major figure at the national level where he was Minister of Defence in the first Indira Gandhi Congress government. Chavan had no children of his own, which made the marriage even more significant as a family and political event.
Turf Club House is a legacy of the Raj. Originally built by Lord Willingdon, then governor of Bombay Presidency, as a rest house for British soldiers, it has become a weekend resort for the Bollywood glitterati. It is situated adjacent to Pune racecourse and comprises a two-storey building with an attached ballroom, which together enclose a large lawned area. The Chavan traditional Hindu wedding took place on a dais at the far end of the lawn facing the main building. In the far-left corner of the lawn was a traditional Hindu group playing the appropriate ragas on sitar, harmonium and tabla. Diagonally opposite the traditional Hindu group were the fifes, drums and bagpipes of Western Command (Pune remains an important military centre). Immediately opposite the traditional group, in the bottom left-hand corner, was a pop group brought up from Bombay, to entertain the young, one suspects. This group specialised in disco — the music style that dominated the Western pop charts at the time. All three groups played simultaneously, achieving a curious synthesis of sound and culture that embodies post-Independence India. Here was a finely balanced expression of the religious and the secular, only the secular came to dominate as the night wore on and the guests partied. The evening throbbed with the sound of disco to such an extent that even now when I hear disco music my mind is immediately taken back to that evening. A form of pop music has become the marker not just of an evening but a total experience.
Music in India permeates every aspect of everyday life from the Bombay bustee (slum) to remote rural villages. At the core of this efflorescence of sound is the Hindi fillum music that is endlessly relayed via radio, television, cassette players and travelling minstrels. The cultural technologies of sound have created a vast audience for music that does not seem to abate. There is an unparalleled dynamic interrelationship between the sound, the technology and the audience in India at the national and local levels. Increasingly these music forms are becoming globalised by the bands formed by the Indian diaspora in England and North America. There are also dynamic local music scenes elsewhere in Asia that synthesise the local and the global through music.
Indonesia has the cover band phenomenon. In part this has grown up to service the tourist market, especially in Bali where every hotel provides at least one or two bands in their respective lounges each evening. Cover bands also have their local followings. The Master Band, a very popular Surabaya cover group, will play up to three locations in an evening and fans follow them around. The group specialises in Gypsy King and Liza Minnelli covers that it intersperses with its own work and well-known Indonesian romantic ballads. These latter works are very popular, but it is the cover work that is most requested by an almost exclusively Indonesian middle-class audience.
When the Master Band plays and you close your eyes, you would swear Liza Minelli was in the room. The singer has the intonation, phrasing and timing to perfection, including the lisp in New York, New York. The male singer reproduces the different vocalists of the Gypsy Kings to perfection and the band (lead guitar, bass guitar, keyboards and drums) tweaks the sound perfectly. In the right circumstances listening to the Master Band can be an exhilarating experience because they play the audience as successfully as they play the music. This is a different music scene to that found in India. It draws more heavily on Western models and is more attuned to music fashion, although it eschews heavy metal and punk. Early Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel songs are probably the standards of most cover bands.
While it remains based on an intense form of mimicry, the cover band scene is also unequivocally Indonesian modern. Outside of Bali and the five-star urban hotels, the audience is Indonesian. It is youngish, middle-class, educated and wishing to be modern. This desire manifests itself in a lifestyle that includes a preference for Western dress, McDonalds and Dunkin' Donuts as well as music. The music associated with these developments commonly takes either of two paths: following Iwan Fals, an Indonesian rock musician who constructs his own music influenced by Western rock (the complexities of which are discussed in Chapter 5), or following the Master Band who are as derivative as a kretek cigarette.
Mainland China also has a burgeoning pop music scene that currently lacks the intensity of India and the range of Indonesia. Cui Jian and The Black Panthers embody a particular moment that is national rather than regional. The intent of these two groups when they emerged in the 1980s appeared much more oppositional to the gerontocracy that rules China than the Canto-pop of southern China. The Chinese pop music scene cannot be reduced to a simple north/south opposition but at this point it is clear that there are nodes where things are happening, such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing. Developments in these three key cultural centres filter through to the provinces and in turn influence the musical taste and habits among the young in the respective provinces.
At the conclusion of a semester-long master's course for journalists at Wuhan University it was decided to have a party and banquet. After eating we danced for a while to rock and roll but then settled down to the real purpose of the evening: singing. The range and diversity of songs was amazing. We moved from revolutionary songs sung with gravity to revolutionary songs sung to a beat. There were group songs and individual songs. Songs in English, Mandarin, Wuhan dialect and other dialects were sung. Taiwanese songs and Canto-pop, as well as Cui Jian, were also covered. The whole gamut of Chinese auditory culture was traversed in a short period of time. There was an expectation that Westerners would sing along and provide individual turns quite unselfconsciously, like the students.
The apparent love of singing I found amongst my students is mirrored in the popularity of karaoke. Virtually every restaurant in the major cities advertises its karaoke bar and many have special rooms set aside where diners may withdraw to sing. In others the main eating hall doubles as a karaoke lounge and there is frequently competition among the diners to capture the microphone and sing. In my experience karaoke was ubiquitous in China in the mid-1990s and yet little has been written about this significant cultural turn.
Karaoke rooms are also found in the canteens and restaurants attached to the industrial work communities that characterise Chinese industrial production. The work communities governed every aspect of Chinese life including entertainment until very recently. However, the karaoke rooms of the canteen seem to have become the preserve of management. Most Chinese workers have two-hour lunch breaks, and management in the work units I visited took the opportunity to indulge their taste for beer and song at lunchtime in these rooms. Like the students, managers also traverse the range of popular modern Chinese music in their lunchtime sojourns. ‘The East is Red’ sung to a Canto-pop beat seemed to be very popular. Management tended to commandeer the karaoke facilities for entertaining secretaries.
Pop music in China, then, is different to that of India and Indonesia in form and content, but it fulfils a similar function. Pop music not only entertains but bonds. At the same time differences are obvious. In China music provides the means whereby class may be distinguished, as the managers appropriate the karaoke rooms and the secretaries.
These anecdotes illustrate the way in which pop music in its different forms penetrates virtually all aspects of contemporary life in modern Asia. What they also demonstrate is how little we really know about the place of pop music in Asian cultures. There is no detailed study of cover bands in Indonesia or karaoke in China and these are the here-and-now, the observable and measurable. What then of the history? For example, the Anglo-Indian jazz bands of Calcutta, Bombay and other urban centres of the Raj, who played for the British rulers, also form an important influence on the dominant fillum music of today. And what of their counterparts in Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies who also began as cover bands meeting the needs of the rulers but then went on to form the bridge between the past and the present? In this vein there is also a study to be made of the Chinese jazz bands of Shanghai, evoked by Zhang Yimou in Shanghai Triad. (Since writing this preface, Andrew Field's (2001) important work on the role of popular music in pre-World War II Shanghai has appeared.) Hopefully by examining the cultural, economic, technological and institutional basis of contemporary pop music in Asia this volume will form the basis for some archaeological work that will make the importance of this cultural form even more transparent.