Examining 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. 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, political economy, anthropology, communication studies, media studies and ethnomusicology.

This collection of thirteen essays examines cultural, political, economic, technological and institutional aspects of popular music across Asia, from India to Japan.

Korean popular music has in the last decade become a significant model for youth culture throughout Asia. Yet, although the Korean music industry is both vibrant and massive, this is the first book-length work devoted to the subject to appear in English.

In its incipient stages, Korean pop music was strongly influenced by Western pop music, diversifying through many stages of copying, translation, and interpretation from the early 20th century. Those unique creations by experimental and creative Korean artists are now being received by international audiences in the form of “K-Pop,” an abbreviation for “Korean pop.” It is spreading beyond the regions of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia and into Europe and the United States. It is increasingly gaining recognition as something more than just a fad?as a phenomenon that has staying power with global audiences. K-Pop Beyond Asia Background of the Growth of Hallyu Growth of the Entertainment Agencies at the Center of Hallyu Ballads and Dance Music Hallyu’s Expansion into Asian Markets The 100-Year History of Korean Pop Music The First Korean Pop Music Overseas: “Arirang” Unstable Beginning after 1945 The Rise of the Eighth US Army Show The Vietnam War and Expansion into Southeast Asia Stepping Stone of Korean Pop Music’s Overseas Expansion The Beginning of Hallyu and K-Pop Contemporary Korean Pop Music 2000: Rise of the First Generation of Idol Groups 2001: From Emotional Ballads to Hip Hop 2002: Dance and Vocal Artists 2003: Hyori Syndrome 2004: Korea’s Three Major Record Companies and Their Artists 2005: Chart-topping Ballads 2006: The New Generation of Idol Boy Groups 2007: The New Generation of Idol Girl Groups 2008: Wonder Girls and Other Top Female Singing Groups 2009: The Meteoric Rise of Idol Groups in Korea 2010: The Korean Wave in the Asian Music Market 2011: The Growing Influence of Girl Groups with each Major Record Company 2012: PSY Syndrome 2013: Competition between Old K-Pop Artists and Idol Groups 2014: Hit Collaborations K-Pop: Evaluation and Prospects Export-driven K-Pop, Going Beyond Korea, China, and Japan The Spread of K-Pop through Social Media The Global Appeal of K-Pop K-Pop’s Star-Making System Benefits of Global Cultural Exchange beyond Asia k pop,korean pop music,Hallyu,SHINee,SUPER JUNIOR,GIRLS' GENERATION,2NE1

The rock era is over, according to one pop music expert. Another laments that rock music is "metamorphosed into the musical wallpaper of ten thousand lifts, hotel foyers, shopping centers, airport lounges, and television advertisements that await us in the 1990s." Whatever its current role and significance in Anglo-American society, popular music has been and remains a tremendous social and cultural force in many parts of the world. This book explores the connections between popular music genres and politics in Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Explores the memories generated and histories constructed by the transnational circulation of popular media texts amongst East Asia and between East and Southeast Asia. It looks at the impact of nostalgia and heritage within popular culture over the decades.

Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese–language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow explores Mandopop’s surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years. In his early chapters, Marc L. Moskowitz provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary Mandopop scene, beginning with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz Mecca of 1920s Shanghai. A brief overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC such as Beijing rock and revolutionary opera is included. The section concludes with a look at the manner in which Taiwan’s musical ethos has influenced the mainland’s music industry and how Mandopop has brought Western music and cultural values to the PRC. This leads to a discussion of Taiwan pop’s exceptional hybridity, beginning with foreign influences during the colonial period under the Dutch and Japanese and continuing with the country’s political, cultural, and economic alliance with the U.S. Moskowitz addresses the resulting wealth of transnational musical influences from the rest of East Asia and the U.S. and Taiwan pop’s appeal to audiences in both the PRC and Taiwan. In doing so, he explores how Mandopop’s "songs of sorrow," with their ubiquitous themes of loneliness and isolation, engage a range of emotional expression that resonates strongly in the PRC. Later chapters examine the construction of male and female identities in Mandopop and look at the widespread condemnation of the genre by critics. Drawing on analyses and data from earlier chapters (including interviews with dozens of performers, song writers, and lay people in Taipei and Shanghai), Moskowitz attempts to answer the question: Why, if the music is as bad as some assert, is it so central to the lives of the largest population in the world? To answer, he highlights Mandopop’s important contribution as a poetic lament that simultaneously embraces and protests modern life. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow is a highly readable introduction to an important but understudied East Asian phenomenon. It will find a ready audience among scholars and students of Chinese and Taiwanese popular culture as well as musicologists studying transnational music flows and non-Western popular music.

Cantopop was once the leading pop genre of pan-Chinese popular music around the world. In this pioneering study of Cantopop in English, Yiu-Wai Chu shows how the rise of Cantopop is related to the emergence of a Hong Kong identity and consciousness. Chu charts the fortune of this important genre of twentieth-century Chinese music from its humble, lower-class origins in the 1950s to its rise to a multimillion-dollar business in the mid-1990s. As the voice of Hong Kong, Cantopop has given generations of people born in the city a sense of belonging. It was only in the late 1990s, when transformations in the music industry, and more importantly, changes in the geopolitical situation of Hong Kong, that Cantopop showed signs of decline. As such, Hong Kong Cantopop: A Concise History is not only a brief history of Cantonese pop songs, but also of Hong Kong culture. The book concludes with a chapter on the eclipse of Cantopop by Mandapop (Mandarin popular music), and an analysis of the relevance of Cantopop to Hong Kong people in the age of a dominant China. Drawing extensively from Chinese-language sources, this work is a most informative introduction to Hong Kong popular music studies. “Few scholars I know of have as thorough a knowledge of Cantopop as Yiu-Wai Chu. The account he provides here—of pop music as a nexus of creative talent, commoditized culture, and geopolitical change—is not only a story about postwar Hong Kong; it is also a resource for understanding the term ‘localism’ in the era of globalization.” —Rey Chow, Duke University “Yiu-Wai Chu’s book presents a remarkable accomplishment: it is not only the first history of Cantopop published in English; it also manages to interweave the sound of Cantopop with the geopolitical changes taking place in East Asia. Combining a lucid theoretical approach with rich empirical insights, this book will be a milestone in the study of East Asian popular cultures.” —Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam

In Sound Alignments, a transnational group of scholars explores the myriad forms of popular music that circulated across Asia during the Cold War. Challenging the conventional alignments and periodizations of Western cultural histories of the Cold War, they trace the routes of popular music, examining how it took on new meanings and significance as it traveled across Asia, from India to Indonesia, Hong Kong to South Korea, China to Japan. From studies of how popular musical styles from the Americas and Europe were adapted to meet local exigencies to how socialist-bloc and nonaligned Cold War organizations facilitated the circulation of popular music throughout the region, the contributors outline how music forged and challenged alliances, revolutions, and countercultures. They also show how the Cold War's legacy shapes contemporary culture, particularly in the ways 1990s and 2000s J-pop and K-pop are rooted in American attempts to foster economic exchange in East Asia in the 1960s.Throughout, Sound Alignments demonstrates that the experiences of the Cold War in Asia were as diverse and dynamic as the music heard and performed in it. Contributors. Marié Abe, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene, Nisha Kommattam, Jennifer Lindsay, Kaley Mason, Anna Schultz, Hyunjoon Shin, C. J. W.-L. Wee, Hon-Lun (Helan) Yang, Christine R. Yano, Qian Zhang

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary volume exploring the phenomenon of the "Westernization" of contemporary Chinese music