February 25, 2008
When people tell me that Asian music has become "westernized," one counter-argument I toss out is the fact that so many instruments played by western musicians are made in the East. Particularly in the case of electronic instruments, in which potential sounds and rhythms are often predetermined by programmed "presets," I would argue that global pop music has been Asianized. For instance, entire genres of music have coalesced around the TR-808 drum machine, created by Japan's Roland Corporation.
The Asian manufacture of "western" instruments predates the synthpop era, however. For example, according to today's piece on NPR's Morning Edition, Taiwan began producing and exporting saxophones shortly after World War II. By the 1980s, the island was building roughly a third of the world's saxes, mostly lower-quality student models. Today, spurred on by Chinese competition for the low-end market, the Taiwanese sax is increasing in quality and global reputation. Says one American player:
"You would never have thought of Taiwanese instruments trying to inch into the pro territory. But they are. And they are making some really nice horns."
February 22, 2008
This isn't the sort of music I usually cover (how many times have I written that on this site?), but I was struck by something in the video below. In it, a huge and rapturous Chilean crowd thrills to the operatic, hard/soft, early 80s rock of Journey, a band that provided aural backdrop for many a sixth-grade love drama when I was at summer camp.
But it wasn't so much nostalgia for my youth that made this clip so affecting. Rather, this video gave me a momentary flash of popular music's astonishing reach through space-time and its emergent role as a sort of global connective tissue made of music, emotion and technology. How else could a Filipino club singer end up fronting this famed and aging North American rock band on a South American stage in 2008?
[Keep reading below the video.]
Marx and Buddha
Though I subscribe to neither of the religions that bear their names, two of my favorite thinkers are Karl Marx and Siddhārtha Gautama (aka the Buddha). Both men emphasized that what we perceive as stable and separate--things such as the history of a nation or the identity of an individual--are in reality enmeshed in, and dependent upon, the constantly changing material conditions from which they arise. Marx saw these changing material conditions the "means of production" and sought to reduce suffering by adapting social conditions to suit them. Buddha, on the other hand, thought suffering could be alleviated only through the total acceptance of the interconnectedness and impermanence of one's life and surroundings. Both would agree that trouble arises when we adopt an ideology that doesn't "go with the flow" or "change with the changing times."
On the political left and right, people in the United States are currently getting confused by just this sort of limiting ideology, reacting with xenophobia and protectionism to the sometimes frightening changes brought by globalization. These folks would do well to throw a little Marx and Buddha into their mix--to not fight change, but instead fight to make that change equitable.
Schon and Pineda
Journey guitarist Neal Schon saw Filipino singer Arnel Pineda fronting his Manila cover band on You Tube and--in an inspired act of musical outsourcing--hired him as the band's new singer this past December. A long-distance, high-profile connection like this draws a lot of attention, but it is only a single example of the kinds of connections that music constantly creates and draws upon.
This video is an object worthy of our contemplation. Consider the materials and relationships that went into its creation: African musical elements of rhythm and timbre, European harmonic sensibility, synthesizers and effects boxes developed in Japan and built in China, American technologies such as the electric guitar the internet, the food the performers ate the night of the show, the roads they traveled to get there... This just begins to tell the story of how a piece of culture such as this video reaches your eyes and ears.
Like it or not, everything local is global as well. A popular music performance both embodies and represents the journey culture makes through the world. Or put another way, it takes a planet to create a corny-ass love song. There are other more damaging ways to spread cultural forms, such as military imperialism and terrorism. We need to study and promote the types of cultural flow that make people happier. I'm not saying that there are no downsides to economic and media globalization, but there is no way to disconnect from the world. We should focus on making our connections as positive as possible.
On an aesthetic level, the positivity of Journey's musical contribution is certainly arguable. But hey, they sure dig it in Chile.
February 13, 2008
News | Happy Chinese New Year and Happy Birthday Radiodiffusion |
As we ring in the Rodential Lunar New Year, my friend Stuart celebrates a personal milestone--two years of posting obscure global oldies at his site Radiodiffusion Internasionaal. If you haven't been downloading his digitized found sounds, you've missed out on over 100 weeks' worth of 60s pop singles from Central, South, East and Southeast Asia.
This week the site features two tracks by the Stylers, an instrumental band from Singapore who dealt in "non-stop dancing music." Stuart asked me to lay down a little background on this rather obscure genre, as I'm a bit of an aficionado. Here's what I came up with:
Non-stop instrumental dancing records go at least as for back as the 1950s orchestral work of Germany's James Last. Non-stop ballroom has had a lasting influence in East and Southeast Asia. (In the mid-1990s, I purchased a wonderful cassette in the Philippines called "Non-Stop Cha Cha Extravaganza," for example.) However, it is the Asian version of the "A Go-Go" pop medley sound that has captured the imaginations of Western record collectors in recent years. Influenced by instrumental rock groups from the US and UK, the 60s teen scenes of Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore produced numerous dancing albums. These albums often retained the ballroom sensibility of listing the intended dance styles next to the track titles (A Go-Go, Blues, Fox Trot, Cha Cha, etc.), but relied on a rock line-up of bass, drums, guitar and organ. As for the songs performed, Western pop hits, regional pop hits and even traditional folk melodies were all fair game.
By the 1970s, surviving instrumental bands like The Stylers seem to have gotten more ambitious, incorporating into their albums film themes, sound effects, "hi-fi" production values, and musical elements of the emerging disco sound. By this point, non-stop instrumental albums were less a teen dance phenomenon than they were fodder for the high-end stereo equipment of Asian audiophiles.
To hear the music and get more information on the Stylers and Asian A Go-Go (including many informative links), go to this week's post. You only have until Sunday morning...