For SEM 2012, I plan to form a panel on the theme of digital/computational explorations within and around the disciplines of ethnomusicology, musicology, amd music theory. The panel would be titled “Digital (Ethno)Musicology.” In this session, the panelists would address the ways in which, via an engagement with digital media and technology, they have extended and transformed the conventional modes of music research and inquiries: archival and sonic analysis, fieldwork, and ethnographic representation. Since this is a combined meeting with AMS and SMT, I welcome panelists with predominantly musicological inquiries as well.
I plan to present some work that I did in my dissertation on the Asian American experiences of playing independent rock music, using my Myspace scraping/mapping project as a case study of digital ethnography to discuss the implications of computational field research methods in the study of contemporary music-culture. Theoretically, this paper will revisit the notion of of cyberpunk in the context of the racial politics related to Asian identities on the Internet.
Any takers? Anyone interested in being a part of this panel? Abstracts are due January 17. In order get the submission ready in time, I would need to have a draft of your paper abstract by January 15 or so. Contact me via email (hsuw [at] oxy.edu) or Twitter (@wendyfhsu) if you are interested!
For amusement, here’s a video of my early attempt at becoming a cyborg:
This 3-part video addresses the issues of (in)visibility, Asian American identities, and reflexive performance as public scholarship. This video is based on a paper that would have been given at the Society of Ethnomusicology meeting in Philadelphia in 2011. In lieu of my physical presence at the conference, I have made a video to share my work in a form of a mass video.
I’m making a video in lieu of my physical presence at the Society of Ethnomusicology meeting in Philadelphia this weekend. My intention is to insert this video — on performance = public scholarship — into the (virtual) mix at the conference. I plan to release this video on Youtube and on this blog by the time of my scheduled presentation at SEM tomorrow morning at 10AM EST. I’m bummed that I will not be able to join you in person. But my sound and body will be with you in a virtual and hopefully meaningful way this weekend. Here I’m leaking a couple of pictures from the making of this video:
Taiwanese singer-songwriter Lo Sirong (羅思容) is one of the few female musicians who have written and recorded original/traditional tunes in Hakka, a dialect of a group of migrant people who originated in central China. [Hakka is a melodic language but I regret that I don't understand it. My father's parents are both Hakka and they would speak Hakka to each other only when they wanted to communicate something incognito in front of their children.]
Lo Sirong sings about Hakka womanhood in contemporary Taiwan. Her music engenders a meditation on somber, chilling, and playful aspects of life. She rejoices her deep connections with her daughters, mourns the death of those who lost their lives during the White Terror period, and contemplates on domestic life, autonomy, work, homesickness, etc. Lo’s music straddles the worlds of both Hakka folk music and American blues.
“For One Coin, Make 24 Knots” explores the conditions of modern womanhood from the notions of independence to marriage. I’m drawn to the interplay of the lonesome harmonica, voice, and guitar. Her voice freewheels out of the conventional metrical temporality, a quality I hear in traditional Hakka tunes and country blues (Robert Johnson or Son House). In her liner notes, Lo writes the following:
‘Be realistic,’ ‘achieve,’ ‘fall in love,’ ‘get married’–a cacophony of expectations heard by women today. This song tells of a modern woman who, despite her personal and economic independence, struggles with pressure of marriage.
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“Everyday” opens with a melancholy passage by a Yehu (a two-string spike fiddle made of a coconut shell, similar to the erhu). Her liner notes indicate that this song “voices the thoughts of a woman struggling to break free of the structured constraints of gender discrimination in traditional society.” The call and response between Lo’s voice and the yehu animates an internal dialog reflecting on the meanings of life from the perspective of a mother looking at her child. Her lyrics talk about how her observations of her daughter’s sweetness during her sleep instigates her to day dream like a child. She improvises her vocal part and attributes the song to “the Hakka mountain song genre, the source of of all Hakka folk music.”
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In “The Vine Entwining the Tree,” Lo’s chilling voice hovers like spirits. The bass erhu creeps in and out of the foreground of the song. This song is titled after a historical novel about the tragedy of the White Terror in Taiwan written by Lan Bozhou. Based on the stage adaptation of this novel, this song cites a Tibetan mantra of Green Tara to console “the spirits of the people who, lovingly and without regret, sacrificed their lives.”
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[This post is instigated by an email I wrote my (Mermaid) friend Catherine Monnes whose wild musical explorations are ever inspiring.]
A couple days ago, I had a phone conversation with Jonathan Bing, a producer who’s working on a film about Taiwanese folk and popular music with director Wayne Wang. We began a conversation about the transformations of folk music in Taiwanese popular music. In his followup email, Jonathan sent me the biography of Chang Chen-Yue and Luo Dayou (or Lo Ta Yu) as key figures in this musical movement. In particular, Chang and Luo’s work intersects and is highlighted in the Superband, a group that brings together four of the most iconic Mandopop artists in the last decade or two.
Below is my email responding to our phone conversation and Jonathan’s followup email about Chang and Luo. Here I have set out to contextualize what I know of the historical folk music movement in Taiwan in the 1970s and its cultural remnants in the 1990s and 2000s. My knowledge of the subject is by no means comprehensive. But I’ve tried my best to point out the shifting politics surrounding “the folk” in pop music discourses and political contradictions of the Superband.
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I grew up as a huge fan of Luo Dayou. I especially love the earlier (1980s) part of his repertoire. I do think it’s interesting to consider Luo’s music in the context of pan-Chinese pop music, a musical bridge between Taiwan and the PRC. During the last presidential election, he came forward to express his opposition against the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) and, in a less explicit way, support for the KMT. In general, his musical successes in Taiwan and the PRC throughout the last few decades enabled him to navigate smoothly amidst the polemics regarding Taiwan and its status in relation to the People’s Republic of China and the United Nations. Luo, however, is not immediately tied to the folk music movement in Taiwan in the 1970s, though his contribution to the Folk Song movement is remembered to be more significant than it was at the time because of its commercial success.
I think the best source in English on the Taiwanese Folk Song Movement is actually Yeh Yueh-Yu’s dissertation on popular music and cinema in Taiwan. In it, Yeh traces the folk song movement in the 1970s to a group of leftist, Marx-reading youth intellectuals. These young intellectuals fueled the Modern Folk Song movement. The most iconic singer songwriters of this movement is perhaps Yang Hsuan. Yeh also distinguishes this movement from the genre known as “Campus Folk Song,” which was a product of the recording industry’s efforts to commodify this music. The politics of this modern folk song movement was mixed. Most parts of the movement were state- and KMT-sponsored. But there were other strands of dissent, for example Hu De Fu (Kimbo) who represented the Taiwanese Aboriginal groups and spoke up against the government. There were also musicians who advocated for the independence of Taiwan. These voices were generally repressed by the martial law of the KMT administration.
I have a feeling that this movement is way more complicated than it is remembered. Taiwanese scholars have produced quite a bit of literature on the topic. Chang Chao-Wei’s（張釗維） book is probably the most and substantive and definitive work on subject. But it’s in Mandarin. Moskowitz’s book Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow, has a tiny section on campus songs but he mostly frames this topic within the larger political environment of Taiwan’s exclusion from the United Nations, thus leaving the story rather uncomplicated.
I have always associated Chang Chen Yue with the Taike movement. People in Taiwan use the term “Taike” to refer to a kind of Taiwanese pride. It’s associated with rural, working-class masculinity. Specifically images of betel nuts and flip-flops come to mind. Taike became a pop culture chic in the late 1990s as youth started to fashion themselves, speaking in Taiwanese Holo dialect, wearing flashy outfits while signifying a rootsy, local identity apart from influences of Japanomania. Also Taike became associated with the Taiwanization movement and the DPP’s political agenda of Taiwanese independence from China.
Taike as a concept became culturally pronounced around the same time when many punk-inspired musicians and bands emerged in Taiwan, particularly in Taichung, a city known as a political and cultural underdog to Taipei. Taike artists and fans embraced a “local” Taiwanese spirit, apart from Western pop, Mandopop and Jpop. These artists wrote songs mostly in Taiwanese Holo and ushered in a punk, raw aesthetic in performance and recordings. Chang’s song “Ai Di Chu Ti Yen”-characterized by ska rhythm, punk raw vocals, blue notes, Nakashi feel — embodies a kind of roots-y style common among these bands. These artists spread the ethos of “independence” that ambiguously connotes both a political independence from China and a position of independence from mainstream pop music (Mandopop). In addition to Chang Chen Yue, artists labeled as “Taike rock” include Bobby Chen, Wu-Bai, MC HotDog, as well as the now mainstream May Day and Soda Green. These artists were featured on the Taike Rock concert in 2007. The documentary concert video of this concert was put out by Rock Records, which ironically is one of the two major record labels of popular music in Taiwan.
Given Chang Chen-Yue’s aboriginal heritage and affiliation with Taike (DPP-leaning) and Luo’s support of the KMT (particularly during the last presidential election in Taiwan), their “collaboration” in the Superband is worth a closer look. My sense is that the creation of the Superband is a commercial move. But it may also be a move toward an international exposure, perhaps representing Taiwan to the Chinese diaspora and to the world in less politicized manner. The inclusion Chau Wakin, a Hong-Kong-born Mandopop star, furthers the pan-Chinese front of the band.
This stuff is so complex. Most of what I’ve said comes from my own experiences with the music. Other parts come from my not-so-systematic research on the topic from the perspective of an ethnomusicologist and a musician-advocate for Taiwanese music (in the context of my band Dzian!). I hope that I will continue to delve into this topic. Maybe I will write a paper on this topic to present at the IASPM Asia chapter meeting in Taipei next summer.
Watching The Decline of the Western Civilization today (on Youtube), I learned about the importance of the venues in Chinatown in the emerging punk and hardcore music scene in east LA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many bands performed at these two Chinatown venues: Hong Kong Cafe and Madame Wong. Both restaurants/clubs are no longer in business. The competition between the two venues was dubbed as the “Chinatown punk wars” by the LA Times in 1979.
After a quick search on Google, I found a few blog posts on this interesting historical moments, most of which are documented on a blog about The Go-Go’s, an all-girl punk / new wave band that emerged around that time. These blog posts include current (circa late 2000s) narratives around the venues and pictures of the buildings where the restaurants and clubs existed. I also found a short, pointed interactive piece (consisting of map, text, and audio interview) on this historical moment created by KCET as a part of the Restoring Chinatown series. Facebook has a group dedicated for individual users to post media related to each of the venues (Madame Wong | Hong Kong Cafe). Also on Myspace, there is a page dedicating to the memorializing of the Hong Kong Cafe. On the academic side, I found a paper abstract written by a film and media studies PhD candiate at UCLA named Laurel Westrup. She gave the paper at EMP Pop Conference earlier this year.
I’m strangely attracted to this topic. But I’m not sure what my attraction entails. I know that it’s definitely related to my fascination with LA and excitement for moving to LA. I also think that this could be a seed for a new digital project. The KCET’s project can be a start of what I conceived as an in-depth interactive investigation of the interconnections between music of the “underground,” immigrant communities, and place, to unfurl the hidden discourses behind the often-times white-centered punk rock narratives.
Also, I’m interested in unraveling the immigrant restaurateur’s side of the story. The LA article depicts Esther Wong, the proprietor of Madame Wong, as an uptight club owner who was interested in booking bands that wouldn’t draw a rowdy crowd. Specifically, Wong was known to book bands identified as “new wave,” a term used to describe a version of punk rock sound catering to the mass. Wong had a policy of excluding bands who have played at the competing venue Hong Kong Cafe. In the 1979 article in the LA Times, Wong was quoted for saying, “If a band plays the Hong Kong one night then comes to me the next, no – I wouldn’t book them because that would be bad business.” The booking agent Barry Seidel at the Hong Kong Cafe appeared to have a more populist attitude. In response, Seidel expressed that a good band would draw an audience regardless of where they played the night before. The opposition between Wong and Seidel seems racialized as Wong was portrayed as the Dragon Lady [part 2 of Summa and Spurrier’s video series]; and Seidel seems liberal, “reasonable,” and “punk-rock,” resonating with the punk ethos of embracing the abject. The Hong Kong Cafe explicitly welcomes the bands rejected by Madame Wong. This opposition puts Wong on the money side, and Seidel on the music/punk side of the ideological binary upheld by many punk rockers.
Going beyond a white-centered narrative, the Latino presence in LA punk scene has been recognized. Michelle Habell-Pallán has researched the Latino/a experience of LA punk rock. [Read about Latino punk in the 1990s.]
I wonder what the Asian American experience of punk rock in LA might have been? In light of the Chinatown as an important site of the punk emergence, how does this factor into the relationship between punk rockers (disenfranchised youth, white, Latino, black, and Asian Americans) to the Chinese club owners? Even in Virginia, from my experiences of interacting with local music scenes in Richmond and Charlottesville, I’ve noticed that many of the music venues are Chinese-owned, for example, Nancy Raygun in Richmond and the Outback Lodge in Charlottesville.
Also, how does playing in Chinatown affect the sound and ideologies of these punk rock bands? There are lots of songs about the food, culture, and people of Chinatown in rock music history. The Siouxsie and the Banshees have a song — “Hong Kong Garden” — about a restaurant in Chinatown. According to Wikipedia, Siouxsie Sioux has mentioned that the song is a tribute to a Chinese restaurant that the band used to frequent. The song is also a reaction to skinhead punks’ terrorizing of the Chinese workers at the restaurant. David Bowie sings a song about “China Girl” and the official music video of the song is set in a Chinatown. In both instances, the song enlists orientalist musical references including gongs, pentatonic modes, and dotted rhythm to contrive a shallow Chineseness for the non-Chinese audience. These musical tokens, especially when infused with the power chords, omnipresent in songs with punk sensibility, have made a unique sonic space in rock music history.
When I get to LA, I will be in the field with the GPS tracking device on my phone turned on, exploring Chinatown with a set of new intentions. I will bring my digital audio recording device with the hope to collect some stories from the Chinese business owners in the area.
