Popular Music in East and Southeast Asia: Sonic (under)Currents and Currencies presents contemporary perspectives of the music discipline in East and Southeast Asia. It considers global influences, national industries, and regional genres with examples from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. This book contains local perspectives on the conceptualisation of music genres, scenes, and industries, offering a comprehensive inter-Asia matrix for popular music studies. This book is suitable for educators and music enthusiasts.

From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular music, considering not just singers and musicians but their fans as well, showing how the music was intrinsically bound up with modern life and the societal changes that came with it. Reaching new audiences across national borders, popular music of the period helped push social change, and at times served as a medium for expressions of social or political discontent.

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.

Popular Music in Southeast Asia offers a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the original vantage point of popular music. It features singers and musicians - many of whom are no longer remembered today - as well as their fans as a social force of importance. By creatively connecting indigenous musical styles with alien musical genres, Southeast Asians created hybrid musical genres that drew a mass public from the 1920s onward. The vibrant music was intrinsically wound up with modern life and the societal changes that came with it. It yielded new audiences across national borders and at times served as a medium to voice social or political discontent. Popular Music in Southeast Asia familiarizes the public with several of these popular musical genres and artists from countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

The purpose of this book is to survey the basic kinds of music and musical instruments found in the major oriental civilizations and in the island cultures of the Eastern Hemisphere. It is also intended as an introduction to the basic attitudes, techniques, and nomenclature of the discipline of ethnomusicology. Presents a romanization of the book of vocal examples along with a translation or explanation of their meaning. A sonic glossary index at the end of each chapter shows all non-western terms in alphabetical order including a unique prononciation audio cassette. The inclusion of human figures in all new drawings add information about playing positions as well as instrument designs. Contains a unique cassette of pronunciations by noted and qualified speakers.

Mainland Southeast Asia is a culturally diverse and musically intriguing area, yet the ethnomusicological record lacks coverage of many of its musical and cultural traditions. Placing the music of this region within a social, cultural, and historical context, Music in Mainland Southeast Asia is the first brief, stand-alone volume to profile the under-represented musical traditions of Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. It also contains the first introduction to Burmese music ever presented in a music textbook.

Popular Music in East and Southeast Asia: Sonic (under) Currents and Currencies presents contemporary perspectives of the music discipline in East and Southeast Asia. It considers global influences, national industries, and regional genres with examples from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States.

This wide-ranging volume is the first to examine the characteristics, dynamics and wider implications of recently emerging regional production, dissemination, marketing and consumption systems of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia. Using tools based in a variety of disciplines - organizational analysis and sociology, cultural and media studies, and political science and history - it elucidates the underlying cultural economics and the processes of region-wide appropriation of cultural formulas and styles. Through discussions of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Philippine and Indonesian culture industries, the authors in the book describe a major shift in Asia's popular culture markets toward arrangements that transcend autonomous national economies by organizing and locating production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods on a regional scale. Specifically, the authors deal with patterns of co-production and collaboration in the making and marketing of cultural commodities such as movies, music, comics, and animation. The book uses case studies to explore the production and exploitation of cultural imaginaries within the context of intensive regional circulation of cultural commodities and images. Drawing on empirically-based accounts of co-production and collaboration in East and Southeast Asia's popular culture, it adopts a regional framework to analyze the complex interrelationships among cultural industries. This focus on a regional economy of transcultural production provides an important corrective to the limitations of previous studies that consider cultural products as text and use them to investigate the "meaning" of popular culture.

The critical importance of past for the present--of music histories in local and global forms--asserts itself. The history of world music, as each chapter makes clear, is one of critical moments and paradigm shifts.