pop culture & media

Lo Sirong (羅思容) — Exploring Hakka Womanhood

October 9, 2011 – 11:58 pm

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.

[audio:http://beingwendyhsu.info/music/For%20One%20Coin%2C%20Make%2024%20Knots.mp3]

“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.”

[audio:http://beingwendyhsu.info/music/Everyday.mp3]

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.”

[audio:http://beingwendyhsu.info/music/The%20Vine%20Entwining%20the%20Tree.mp3]

[This post is instigated by an email I wrote my (Mermaid) friend Catherine Monnes whose wild musical explorations are ever inspiring.]

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pop culture & media

A Brief Note on Luo Dayou & Chang Chen-Yue: From Folk Music, Taike to Superband in Taiwan

September 15, 2011 – 5:17 pm

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.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N98Q6Cm6B3I

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.

————————————————————————————————–

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.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjlrJl1OlfY

I’m not sure if there’s much written in the English language about the Taike movement. I did attend a paper presentation about Taike at the last Asia chapter meeting of the International Association for the Studies of Popular Music (IASPM) in Hong Kong. Also Taiwanese pop music studies scholar Ho Tung-Hung has a paper abstract on Taike rock.

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.

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pop culture & media research

Locating LA Punk in Chinatown

June 2, 2011 – 5:07 pm

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.

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performance research

Shivers. Glows. Bows.: Reflexive Performance as Public Scholarship

March 9, 2011 – 7:14 pm

[Disclaimer: I wrote a paper abstract for a panel on “Theorizing the Personal in Musical Ethnography” for the SEM (Society of Ethnomusicology) annual meeting in November 2011. I see this paper as the beginning of my #alt-ac or #indie-ac career as a scholar-performer and performer-scholar. Feedback is welcome!]

What is the relationship between scholarship and performance? What is the difference between scholar-performer and performer-scholar? This paper explores my experiences with practicing—in performance—intellectual ideas developed in my dissertation about Asian American participation in independent rock music. Compelled by the sounds and stories shared by the musician-colleagues during my 24-month close ethnographic engagement with members of two dozen bands of partial or whole Asian American membership, I started my band Dzian!. In this band, I work alongside my band mates to adapt and perform rock music from 1960s and 1970s Asia. With a mission to challenge the Anglo-American hegemony of rock music, and to inscribe Asia and Asian America into the rock music discourses, we introduce and make visible this obscure body of music to the local and regional popular music scenes.

I consider Dzian! a post-fieldwork, post-academic project of public scholarship. The band is a playground for me to experiment with the critical concepts related to race, ethnicity, and the postcolonial conditions that I formulated in my dissertation. In my presentation, I will offer a set of narratives that highlight my performative engagement with my dynamic and ambivalent (dis)identification as one-point-five-generation Taiwanese American. In a deeply reflexive manner, I will reflect on how I perform music to negotiate my struggle with orientalism and racial melancholia, as a constant minority outsider in the scene. I will describe how performing music has generated personal and collective reparations for the Asian American loss of cultural heritage and national belonging. Privileging the act of performing and music-making in the public, I argue for a fruitful manifesto for the role a scholar-performer, rather than a performer-scholar, enacting the ethics of scholarship as a social practice.

Is this scholarship?
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pop culture & media research

A Digital Experiment: Monitoring the Visitor Geography of Vicki Leekx

February 28, 2011 – 12:19 pm

Locations of visitors to this page

Monitoring the location of the IP addresses of viewers of http://VickiLeekx.com [M.I.A.’s cyberpunk alter-ego]

Starting date: February 28, 2011, regretfully 2 months after Vicki Leekx was launched

Tool: ClusterMaps

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pop culture & media research

ViCKi LEEKX, Cyberpunk, and Me – A Digital Postcolonial Critique

January 18, 2011 – 12:57 pm

At a coffee shop in downtown Dover, New Hampshire, I get a tweet from The Kominas about M.I.A.’s latest mixtape Vicki Leekx. I follow hyperlink included in the tweet and land on a blog post on MTVDesi that ruthlessly critiques M.I.A.’s mixtape (this post has been removed for some reason). The author claims that Vicki Leekx is the beginning of the end of MIA’s career. Meanwhile, The Kominas carries on a short conversation with its friend @bdvz in Sydney, both expressing support for M.I.A.’s politico-musical agenda. Quickly pointing at another link, I jump to M.I.A.’s mixtape site, created exclusively for her listeners to download her mixtape. A simple website, Vickleekx.com is presented with a design scheme reminiscent of web pages of the early to mid 1990s. A mash up of low-tech-looking images includes on the right, a large spinning globe, and the left, two identical overlapping screenshots of a browser window, a large “ViCKi LEEKX” banner in a shiny visually loud golden font. After downloading and zooming on the “clip art” graphics below the banner, hacking my way through the visual scheme of the website, I discover further graphical details, for instance, the text “United States Federal Reserve System” the embalm superimposed over an image of a globe. Other textual and image iconography of the Internet, I think, represents the polemics regarding freedom of speech and global communication in the so-called Internet age [image below]. Finally I click on the giant red “DOWNLOAD” button on the bottom of the page to download the mixtape file. Now listening to M.I.A. rapping about media freedom and Sri Lankan shoutouts over thirty-something-minute continuous mashup comprised of digital blips and samples of media cliche, I continue to browse the web.

Figure xx: Screenshot of Vickileekx.com, captured on January 12, 2011.

Born Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, M.I.A. is a British rapper of Sri Lankan descent whose claim to fame worldwide was her song “Paper Planes” on the soundtrack of blockbuster hit Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle 2008). Daughter of a Tamil political activist, M.I.A.’s music centralizes political themes, especially toward immigrant rights, and expresses an audacity to challenge governmental and corporate authorities. Around the time she released her third album Maya in spring 2010, M.I.A. began to speak up about information politics and Internet censorship. In the midst of the heated discussions about WikiLeaks, over the exposing of confidential governmental and corporate documents via the Internet, the rapper expressed a public support for WikiLeaks. Last November, M.I.A. made an announcement of her (Internet) alter ego dubbed as Vicki Leekx.

Vicki Leekx is not a direct endorsement of, but a project perhaps inspired by WikiLeaks. Similar to WikiLeaks, M.I.A.’s alter ego (and mixtape) characterizes a possibility for social changes through disseminating cultural content on the Internet. WikiLeaks has posed a threat to national security; the U.S., China, Iceland, and Australia have filed lawsuits against the website. It has challenged the internatinoal financial infrastructures maintained by corporate power and control. Similarly, M.I.A.’s “Vicki Leekx” project targets those of media, cultural, and political power. Perhaps her penchant for conceiving of the Internet as a free space is affirmed by her recent battle with media censorship. After finding out that Youtube had pulled her controversial music video of “Born Free”, M.I.A. self-released the video by hosting the video on her website and announcing the link, along with a disparaging remark on YouTube.

More explicitly than WikiLeakx, Vicki Leekx is positioned within a postcolonialist, pro-minoritarian struggle, a political context that M.I.A. has articulated in her music and social media. The term “Vicki Leekx” is a phonetic play on “Wiki Leaks.” The phonetic substitution of a V for a W inflects with a South Asian accent within English pronunciation. In ethnicizing the English pronunciation of WikiLeaks, M.I.A. evokes the less heard colonized subject position of the desi in her project.

M.I.A.’s postcolonialist cyberpunk mission of VickiLeekx should not have come as surprise. The rapper began a music leakage project by hosting un-released tracks on one-off websites with provocative domain names, and then sharing the links on Twitter. She set off this leaking rampage by announcing yesthelittlepeoplewillneverwinbuttheycanfuckshitup.com during her North American tour in September 2010. Equally actively, M.I.A. shares news stories about politics around immigration, war crimes, and refugees from Sri Lanka on Twitter. She sometimes couples news story links with web leakage of un-released tracks. Along with a link to a news story about the asylum seekers in Australia, M.I.A. announced a newly created website called 4THEPEOPLEONTHEBOAT.com. Upon visit, the website automatically streams M.I.A.’s song “You Can Have My Money, But You Can’t Have Me”, and displays 8-bit moving graphics of a suspended spinning globe targeted by four rotating firing guns. In an earlier tweet, M.I.A. explains, “I PUT THIS OUT! I KNOW THE MEDIA GIVES CREDIT TO WHITE DUDES! that white dude playin poker gif is literal.” With this music video site, M.I.A. has crystallized a connection between her network music project and her interest in engaging a new digital cultural warfare for “the boat” people. In December 2010, she provoked her digital mission in explicit terms: “WE GROWIN UP IN MIDDLE OF A DIGITAL RUKUS! THEY CAN TRY TO FUCK US, I AINT PUTTIN ON THE STOPPERS WE GO BE HACKERS.. meds+feds+ in bed !” M.I.A. screams, in all caps, in order to advocate for a cyberpunk revolution among immigrants, refugees, and other subaltern groups that she has shown alliance for in the past (Powers 2010). M.I.A. dropped the mixtape online making the file downloadable after midnight on January 1, 2011. Ten days after she self-released her mixtape, M.I.A. tweeted a picture of children of South Asian descent (Sri Lankan?) huddling around four desktop computers. She dubbed the image as “!V!I!C!K!I!L!E!E!K!X! STREET TEAM ! 11/1/11”.

In a way, leaking a national security document is similar to immigration, a leakage of citizenry. Both instances challenge the borders of a nation-state. Both are symbolic infractions of the integrity of nation-states. Foregrounding a “leaky” logic, M.I.A. has created an immigrant frontier on the Internet via Vicki Leekx and her other music websites. In this cyberpunk space, the figure of the immigrant is spotlighted. It no longer lives in threat or on fringes of illegality. It lives in comfort, legalistically and existentially. M.I.A. is the mastermind gamer-architect behind the design of this space between fiction and reality; in it, the immigrant makes up the legitimate citizenry. More than 160,000 of her followers on Twitter, including me, happily wander within and around it.

This cyberpunk frontier is unlike the Orientliast one as characterized by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in her contribution to edited volume AsianAmeric.Net (2003). Commenting on cyberpunk fiction and films of the 1980s to 1990s, Chun notes the racializing and engendering movements within the cyberspace. She highlights the dynamic of “high-tech Orientalism” in which an American (white) cowboy enters, through an act of penetration, into a disembodied, virtual space of erotic fantasies of the Orient. High-tech Orientalism enables the cowboy to “erase his body in orgasmic ecstasy…such sexual fantasies and conquest, for this orgasmic ecstasy constructs cyberspace…as a solipsistic space” (2003: 15). M.I.A. is not an “Imperial console cowboy” (203:18). Playfully and performatively, M.I.A. identifies herself as a post-national immigrant orphan-child while stating a cyberpunk mission to tear down the imperialist structures.

In Cybertypes, Lisa Nakamura offers a critique of the discourses that characterize, overly optimistically, the Internet as a borderless space in which users, like tourists, can easily consume the culture and image of the distant Other. In this new media terrain, Asians, especially immigrants, are digitally type-casted or “cybertyped” as “exemplary information workers” (2002: 24). “The presence of black and brown faces from other countries, notably Asian ones, encourages white workers to inhabit a virtually diverse world, one where local racial problems are shuffled aside by a global and diasporic diversity created by talented immigrants as opposed to ‘hyphenated Americans.’ This is a form of tourism, benefiting from difference in order to make the American/Western self feel well-rounded, cosmopolitan, postracial” (2002: 22-3).

Not true. Not entirely. The Internet is not one giant blob of space. In fact, there is not one single cyber space, as there are multiple cyber spaces. And there are borders and boundaries—software- and hardware-dependent—that bind and separate these cyber spaces. During my digital field research, I discovered a hard server divide when I was harvesting locale data of the Myspace friends of The Hsu-nami, a New-Jersey-based band. The “bot” (program) that I wrote “broke” in the process of web-mining. In troubleshooting, I found that Myspace is in fact, not as global as it has promised itself to be. The Myspace user networks of all countries in the world exist in a server located in U.S., with the exception of the users of Myspace China. Hosted by a server in China, Myspace China is itself own space apart from the rest of Myspace networks in “the world.”[1]

In my research, I follow Nakamura’s critical race perspective, except that I, as a cybernetic investigator, place my investigative focus on a cultural process, more reparative than hers. I concentrate on the exploration of the alternative terrains and their associated borders reconfigured by individuals of Asian descent. As described in my last post, I have worked, through a set of digital tools, to highlight both global and diasporic particularity, centralizing the perspective of in-between subjectivity of both “hyphenated Americans” and their immigrant friends. What I’m after is not a postracial, but a post-national network built by musicians of various Asian affiliations.

Like M.I.A., I’m an immigrant child who relishes in the post-national space proffered by the Internet. Less a rapper/punk-diva figure than M.I.A., I’m a cyberpunk ethnographer. Or better yet, I’m a cyberpunk cartographer working to reconfigure this space however susceptible to sexual fantasy and imperial conquest. In a way, I am working to reorient the existing fantasies and desires projected by imperial and corporate cowboys. I am taking pleasures in navigating within and mapping a world created and occupied by people like me: marked by category of “Asian,” “immigrant,” or lost somewhere in the cracks between other geographical and social boundaries.

[1] The software disconnection between China and the United States (and the rest of the world) on Myspace is maybe a product of the financial and political relationship between the countries. In order to follow up this inquiry, one could search news stories about company structure and changes of Myspace. For more detail, read David Barboza’s article “Murdoch Is Taking MySpace to China”, April 27, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/business/worldbusiness/27myspace.html (accessed on January 13, 2011).

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research

Mapping an Asian American Indie Rock Digital Diaspora

January 5, 2011 – 4:32 pm

My dissertation project investigates the musical and social life of current independent rock musicians of Asian descent. This research looks at the music, interviews, and social interactions of these musicians. How do I do this?

Prior to working with UVa’s Scholars Lab, my method of field research had been participant observation: attending concerts, doing formal and informal interviews, interacting with the musicians’ friends and fans, listening to their recorded music, organizing local performances on their tours…an immersion in these musicians’ multi-faceted musical life. As soon as I began my field research, I discovered that the notion of “the field” has changed because of the prevalent usage of digital social media among the musicians of my study. The Internet, is no longer just a means of communication between me and my informants. Digital social media make up an important site of social interactions and creative expressions. Not only that, it is the key to social networking and community building for these musicians. Thus the “field” of my investigation came to include the digital social terrain that I navigate within the scope of dissertation research.

This post focuses on the map of one of the bands that I study: The Kominas. The Kominas is a South Asian American punk band that spawned in Boston, now based in Philadelphia. Recombining sounds from the Boston ska-and-crust-punk scene with 1970s Bollywood movies and Bhangra music from their parents’ dusty tape collection, The Kominas evokes a radically transnational sonic landscape. [Example “Par Desi”] Since 2006, the band has been vigorously creating a translocal social terrain via face-to-face interactions through touring and online social networking. The Kominas’ do-it-yourself network is comprised of Muslim-, South-Asian-identified, and other taqwacore-inspired musicians, listeners, artists, filmmakers, and bloggers.

In this post, I ask:  What does The Kominas’ “digital diaspora” look like geographically and spatially? First, I will describe the digital methods I used to map this community.

Digital Methods – Web-scraping and Visualization

To create such a map, I designed and executed out a two-phase method. Phase 1 is web-scraping, the process of mining data from the Internet. This process entails first, locating a source of useful geographic data, and then harvesting this information programmatically. I was interested in two sets of data, specifically: the physical location of the band’s performance tours; and the self-reported (physical) location of the friends in an online community. The first set of data, regarding performance locations, was found on The Kominas’ official website. The information regarding friend locations was found in its most complete form on the social networking site Myspace.

To extract and process these data sets, with the help of Joe Gilbert, I wrote a program using Ruby to parse out the relevant information in the source code of the profile pages of The Kominas’ Myspace friends. The Kominas [as of April 2010] had close to 3,000 friends on Myspace. These are all Myspace users who have requested to become friends with The Kominas, or vice versa. Using Mechanize, a Ruby gem, the program extracted all the geographically related text from the Myspace profile pages of 2,867 friends. Using the Geokit, a ruby gem that implements the Google Geocoder, the program translated this information into a set of spatial coordinates, specifically, latitude and longitude.

Phase 2 – geospatial visualization – is the process of turning the harvested data into a meaningful visualization. Using OpenLayers, an open-source mapping program, I created a dynamic map containing all the points of the physical locations of the band’s Myspace friends and performance tours. To contextualize the reading of the physical points, I added various map layers. For example, I added a Google street map layer to label the visualization with the proper name of countries and cities. The rest of my efforts were spent to refine the map, to make it readable and meaningful.

The Kominas’ Digital Diaspora Map: GO!

To interact with the map, click on the above image. This screenshot shows the global distribution of The Kominas’ Myspace friends. The reddish pink clusters represent the friend density in the respective locales. The size of the cluster is an approximate representation of the number of friends in one location.

A baselayer of the world’s regions – marked by various shades of green in the background – helps contextualize the friend distribution across continental boundaries. At a macro level, this map articulates a radically transnational and inter-continental distribution of friends. Areas of high friend density include: North America, Europe, and Asia. The story of translocality becomes more complex as we zoom in on the map to get more geographic detail. In my dissertation, combining maps, music analysis, and interviews, I examine how the members of The Kominas position themselves geographically and ethnically vis a vis this vastly transnational world.

Questions and Concerns

These maps tell a story, a particular kind of story that situates a humanist study of a music-culture within a particular geographic context. In the context of my dissertation, these maps add a spatial texture to the understanding of the translocal social terrain of a U.S.-based musicians of Asian descent. And the visualization process helps me to analyze the musicians’ questioning of their sense of ethnic and national belonging and to situate the ethnographic details of my 24-month field research within a global context.

Here are some more general questions and concerns that I’ve encountered in creating and using these dynamic maps. To express density using a clustering pattern, I used an algorithm that balances point density and readability, so that the contrast between the smallest and the largest clusters is adjusted. In this case, a single-point cluster can be seen and the largest concentration of the friends of the northeast of the United States doesn’t dominate the entire map. This presents the question, am I interested in representing the mathematical reality of this friend community? Or is there some part of the story that I was more interested in telling? Which level of detail is most useful?

I’ve discovered that these maps do not provide any answers to my research questions. They, in fact, present an interpreted reality that generate further useful questions. A map is certainly not a dissertation chapter; but it provides a spatial and geographical context for the musical and social experiences of the musicians in my study.

How I use these maps, of course, depends on the narrative that I want to tell. At a very macro, global level, zoomed all the way out, these maps can look very similar across bands: with large clusters in the North American region, some clustering in Europe, and some but less in other regions of the world. NOT SO INTERESTING…

Of interest to me, in my dissertation, are the patterns of the band’s transnational connections to musicians and fans in Asia. What is the band’s friend distribution in Asia? Is it useful to compare the Asia-based friend distribution across band? I have shown two screenshots of two bands’ friend distribution in Asia. On the top is The Kominas. On the bottom is Kite Operations, a New-York-based noise rock band.

This comparison presents interesting results: These two maps show that The Kominas, a South Asian American punk band has created a social geography much more concentrated in South and Southeast Asia; whereas Kite Operations, with 3/4 of the members being of Korean descent, has stronger friend presence in East Asia, specifically in South Korea. The difference in friend distribution shown by these images can provide a sketch for illustrating a different “Asia” as created through the cultural practice of “friending” on Myspace by American artists of Asian descent.

Combining Digital Methods with “Conventional Methods”

These digital methods seem to have an orthogonal relation to more conventional ethnographic methods. Until these new digital methods become accepted in ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology, I must find a way to integrate the new with the old. [Yes, I have thought-experimented with a set of digitally engaged ethnographic methods.] Here are some ideas for this integration:

  • Showing the map to the musician-informants: Asking them if they are surprised by the results of my study. Asking them questions about how they feel about these places in the world? Personal or musical connections to these places?
  • Toward a Geospatial Music Analysis: Many musicians that I study are pre-occupied with geography. In their lyrics, they often discuss being trapped or living in a limbo between two worlds. They talk about their feelings regarding certain meaningful place and space in their music. It’d be potentially fruitful to juxtapose the musical and social geographies of a single band.
  • Mapping genre/sonic differences: Here I suggest the possibility of incorporating sonic qualities such as tempo, timbre, volume, studio effects, and language/dialect into geospatial information technology and system. Such a tool would be immensely powerful for the study of the world’s music-cultures at the local and global level. For example, the World Musical Map project by Ozan Aksoy based at the New Media Lab at the Graduate Center of CUNY explores the rupture between audio boundaries and actual national borders. Another example is Lee Byron’s visualization of the listening history on Last.FM.

Here’s my attempt to start a digital (ethno)musicology. Are there any other takers?

The Kominas’ Digital Diaspora Map: It’s Your Turn. GO!

Tips:

  • Double-click to zoom in on the map
  • Upper-left: turn on/off various layers: Google Street/Satellite; world’s regions; Muslim-majority countries; clusters (friend density); friends (individual points); gigs.
  • Scroll on the map by clicking + holding + moving the cursor
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pop culture & media research

Auf Deutsch? My Taqwacore Documentary Program Notes at Norient Festival

December 23, 2010 – 5:53 pm

Back in October, Thomas Burkhalter sent out a call for music documentaries to be screened at the second annual Norient Music & film Festival on the Society of Ethnomusicology Listserv (SEM-L). I wrote back with an enthusiastic recommendation for Omar Majeed’s 2009 documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam. Thomas immediately responded explaining that the festival programming committee had already booked the film. In the same email, he invited me to contribute a one-page program note to introduce the film and the bands covered in the documentary. I happily agreed.

Several weeks ago, after I came back from SEM (at which I presented my paper about mapping The Kominas’ digital diaspora), I composed a short essay based on some of my notes used in an introductory remark about The Taqwacores (Eyad Zahra’s feature length based on Mike Knight’s book The Taqwacores) screening at the Virginia Film Festival. I wrote my program note in English; and Thomas translated it into German. The essay is now posted. Here’s the article (auf Deutsch!) for those of you German readers out there. And for those you are fluent more so in English than in German. [And if you live anywhere near Switzerland, you should go check out the film at the Festival in January 2011!]

Having had the opportunity to get to know Omar Waqar and the members of The Kominas, I’ve come to feel a collective urgency in writing responsibly as a way to undo some of the earlier bad journalistic coverage of the bands involved in the nascent taqwacore scene. Academic writing takes centuries to move forward. Besides my analysis of The Kominas’ musical works in my dissertation, I have engaged myself in various non-academic taqwacore-related projects.

Norient is a collective of writers and ethnographers, loosely associated with academia, who contribute text and media documentation of the world’s fringe musical life beyond textbook terms and definitions. Thanks to Thomas for the opportunity to write on behalf of Norient. I look forward to collaborating with Norient in the future.

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research

A Digital(-Humanist) Ethnography – a re-post from THATCampVA

December 3, 2010 – 4:22 pm

I’m participating in the THATcampVA unconference hosted by UVa’s Scholars’ Lab in a few weeks. I wrote a session proposal in order to generate interest for my topic. I decided to write something rather abstract, imaginative and hopefully evocative. This is the beginning of my efforts to instigate a series of conversations about digital field research and ethnographic writing.

I’m an ethnographer of contemporary rock music-cultures. And I love the experimental spirits among digital humanists. At THATcampVA, I would like to re-imagine the possibility of a digital ethnography. My main question is: how can digital technology facilitate field research and ethnographic ‘writing’?

Rather than texts, ethnographers’ objects of intellectual interest are social interactions and cultural practices. Anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, whose primary mode of research has been participant-observation, have conventionally privileged the traditional, non-mediated, live, and experiential over the fixed, mediated, and textual, in their field participation. In the last decade or so, they have started to see the value in studying non-physical and mediated, and oftentimes software environments, thereby extending the notion of the ‘field.’ How may digital tools facilitate the processes of observing and participating in these newly defined “fields” that are now digitally mediated? Email and engagement with social media are becoming a normative mode of interaction for many individuals in many societies. Many ethnographers use digital communication methods to find, reach, and contact their informants. In my dissertation (on the Asian American experiences of indie rock music), I spent countless hours locating musicians online, using either Google or social network sites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Last.FM. How can we as ethnographers, besides hanging out in a chat room or on a discussion forum, take a snapshot of these digital social media interactions? What are the social, political, and institutional implications of such digital contacts, versus conventional methods of flying to a distant location and meeting someone face-to-face? Digitally mediated communication allows the user to reach far. It is a technology of horizontal expansion. What does “in-depth” fieldwork look like in the milieu where communication is often digitally mediated?

Ethnographic writing involves a set of processes distinct but related to field research. What technological extensions may further the tasks of documenting, analyzing, articulating, and representing field observations and interactions? In my dissertation, I leveraged a geo-spatial visualization tool to map the Myspace “friend” networks of the musicians in my dissertation. These visualizations enabled me see patterns of social linkage that I hadn’t anticipated. They also allowed me to generate more questions about ethnic belonging and transnational communities. So, what other digital methods could extend our capacities as ethnographic documentarians and analysts? What are the intellectual advantages (and disadvantages) of digitizing an otherwise live and non-mediated experience or interaction?

Digital humanists have developed an emerging set of sophisticated theories around the issues of texualization and archiving. To relate to these inquiries, I find that it may be useful to consider the act of ethnographic ‘writing’ as a form of textualization. So in the instance of articulating field data, we may be creating an archive of texts that interpret cultural practices. If that’s the case, my digital maps make up a cultural archive that documents and interprets the songs and performances of the musicians in my project. More flexible than conventional archive (a published journal article or book), a digital archive can be closer to life because it is akin to the performative practice of building a repertory from which agents draw scripts, meanings, and inspirations. I’m interested to hear what everyone thinks about the experimental possibility and pragmatic processes of the digital mapping of social and cultural practices. I’m also interested in exploring the notion of a digital archiving or mapping as a performative ethnographic “writing” process.

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research teaching

Passing or Covering? Social Transcendence through Music

March 4, 2010 – 9:36 pm

Today in my seminar Music in Asian America, a student presented a chapter from Deborah Wong’s book Speak It Louder. The issue of passing impressed deeply upon my students. This question refers to the practical invisibility, historical and current, of Asian American artists within the music industry.

The student presenter asked her peers: Is it enough (for a formerly silenced ethnic minority) to “simply be there” in the music industry? Or should the artists address aspects of race and ethnicity in their musical output and image?

One student argued for the latter. She commented on the importance of contextualizing music with social meaning, ensuring that the right ethical messages are heard in the reception of music. Another student discussed the potential political work done by sheer visibility. She used the example of Obama: The iconicity of a minority president could empower minority individuals, especially among children.

In the chapter, Wong considers the Mountain Brothers’ (Philadelphia hip-hop group circa 1990s) methodical veiling of their names, pictures, and other indications of their Asian American ethnicity as a form of passing. The MB won a Coca-Cola-sponsored contest while concealing their ethnicity. She writes, “The Mountain Brothers passed that ultimate test, but they ‘passed’ (in at least two ways) because they knew the rules of hip-hop authenticity and were savvy enough to abide by them — on their own terms” (252).

So the MB passed and excelled within the musical standards of hip-hop. But what does this mean in terms of race and ethnicity? The word “passing” implies a hard line between betraying the minoritarian cause (of collective freedom) vs. assimilating to the majority. I think there’s a middle space between the two. Wong points out this space in her analysis, asserting that this passing is far from selling out. She gives the MB credit for creating a social space for themselves in the industry. “This social space is racialized in particular ways: as Chris Wang [of the MB] said, it’s Asian American because they are. Yet of course it is, and isn’t, that simple. This aural space is defined by Asian American voices making musical sounds that they are careful to claim as their own, through performance” (253).

Maybe because of Jim Crow segregation, “passing” is associated with upward social mobility. It implies a transcendence beyond a race-defined minority status into a majority status. I’m not interested in accessing whether the MB’s passing as a legitimate hip-hop act has earned for themselves an honorary membership within the culturally black community, in spite of their outside status.

What seems more useful in this example is perhaps the notion of musical passing – a form of aural expression that allows the sound-maker to be heard without being seen. Music allows the possibility of a colorblind reception: anyone can sound like anybody. Sound is not naturally bound to any race-related embodiment of phenotype, although artists make choices, deliberately or not, based on what they perceive as meaningful. While sound may be meaning-ful, it mediates meanings. This (moment of) semantic opacity is worthy of reflection.

I want to think deeply about this quality of opacity or mediation, allowing it develop into a theoretical apparatus that may help me articulate something that I’ve had a hard time conveying since the onset of my dissertation project: a (imagined) state of race-free liminality, or liberation, as described by many musicians that I’ve met in my field research. They often speak of their discomfort with the term “Asian American” as a designation for their music and/or ethnicity. In writing, I have interpreted it as a gesture of refusal to pigeonhole oneself. But I think there’s more to it than that.

A race-free sonority can be utopic for racial minorities. For minority artists, the cage built by racial meanings is still looming. This cage imprisons individuals of color in the reception of their image. To utilize this race-free sonority is to sell out. It is a worry-free presence in comfort. Perhaps this liminality suggests a moment of agency in face of a world where conversations about race mostly exist as a subtext – where people skirt around the topic of race, where people only talk about race in accusatory or threatening moments of outburst.

So, how progressive is this sonic race-free liminality? Is it liberatory for only the artists? How does this liberatory state translate itself in sonic reception? Is it merely a momentary state of self-indulgence considering the age-old fight for equality? Does an audio-scape create social change? I can’t answer these questions right now. But I think I will spend a long time trying to answer this question.

Rather than passing, maybe a more useful term is “covering,” as suggested by Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at Yale. In the preface of his book Covering, Yoshino writes “Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” Individuals cover their stigmatized traits in their daily life. “Covering is a hidden assault on our civil rights.”

The notion of passing seems insufficient in capturing the complexity of how my informing musician-colleagues relate to the world. Maybe they cover more so than pass. If that’s the case, then playing music is an ongoing struggle with the covering and dis-covering of one’s traits, construed as different or stigmatizing in this imperfect world.

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