Refashioning Pop Music in Asia

With its examination of the cultural, political, economic, technological and institutional aspects of popular music throughout Asia, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of Asian popular music and its cultural industries. Concentrating on the development of popular culture in its local socio-political context, the volume highlights how local appropriations of the pop music genre play an active rather than reactive role in manipulating global cultural and capital flows.

Unlike many studies on globalisation, which highlight functional disjunctures of ‘cultural imperialism’, Refashioning Pop Music in Asia stresses that it is the local context which imbues specific meanings for different audiences, in turn allowing a creative synthesis that makes pop music a unique channel through which cultural identity, political resistance, social expression and personal desire can be experienced. Popular musical expression in Asia — its meaning and its practice — cannot be reduced to the state, market, tradition or to a simple appropriation of Western forms. Rather, it is at the juncture of the local and global that an aesthetic refashioning of traditional and pop music genres emerge.

Broad in geographical sweep and rich in contemporary examples, this work will appeal to those interested in Asian popular culture from a variety of perspectives, including students of political economy, anthropology, communication studies, media studies and ethnomusicology.

Allen Chun is Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Ned Rossiter is Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Brian Shoesmith is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at Edith Cowan University, Australia and Head of the Centre for Asian Communication, Media and Cultural Studies.