In this first book-length study of chindon-ya, Marié Abe investigates the intersection of sound, public space, and sociality in contemporary Japan. Chindon-ya, dating back to the 1840s, are ostentatiously costumed street musicians who publicize a business by parading through neighborhood streets. Historically not considered music, but part of the everyday soundscape, this vernacular performing art provides a window into shifting notions of musical labor, the politics of everyday listening and sounding, and street music at social protest in Japan. Against the background of long-term economic downturn, growing social precarity, and the visually and sonically saturated urban streets of Japan, this book examines how this seemingly outdated means of advertisement has recently gained traction as an aesthetic, economic, and political practice after decades of inactivity. Resonances of Chindon-ya challenges Western conceptions of listening that have normalized the way we think about the relationship between sound, space, and listening subjects, and advances a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the ways social fragmentation is experienced and negotiated in post-industrial societies. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

An investigation of music, sound, and public space in contemporary Japan

An investigation of music, sound, and public space in contemporary Japan

Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities. While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."

Music has long been an avenue for protest, seen as a way to promote freedom and equality, instill hope, and fight for change. Popular music, in particular, is considered to be an effective form of subversion and resistance under oppressive circumstances. But, as Nomi Dave shows us in The Revolution’s Echoes, the opposite is also true: music can often support, rather than challenge, the powers that be. Dave introduces readers to the music supporting the authoritarian regime of former Guinean president Sékou Touré, and the musicians who, even long after his death, have continued to praise dictators and avoid dissent. Dave shows that this isn’t just the result of state manipulation; even in the absence of coercion, musicians and their audiences take real pleasure in musical praise of leaders. Time and again, whether in traditional music or in newer genres such as rap, Guinean musicians have celebrated state power and authority. With The Revolution’s Echoes, Dave insists that we must grapple with the uncomfortable truth that some forms of music choose to support authoritarianism, generating new pleasures and new politics in the process.

How popular music structures Indonesians' social and political subjectivities Genre Publics is a cultural history showing how new notions of 'the local' were produced in context of the Indonesian 'local music boom' of the late 1990s. Drawing on industry records and interviews, media scholar Emma Baulch traces the institutional and technological conditions that enabled the boom, and their links with the expansion of consumerism in Asia, and the specific context of Indonesian democratization. Baulch shows how this music helped reshape distinct Indonesian senses of the modern, especially as 'Asia' plays an ever more influential role in defining what it means to be modern.

A fascinating study of subcultural musics and their cultural identities.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Louder and Faster is a cultural study of the phenomenon of Asian American taiko, the thundering, athletic drumming tradition that originated in Japan. Immersed in the taiko scene for twenty years, Deborah Wong has witnessed cultural and demographic changes and the exponential growth and expansion of taiko particularly in Southern California. Through her participatory ethnographic work, she reveals a complicated story embedded in memories of Japanese American internment and legacies of imperialism, Asian American identity and politics, a desire to be seen and heard, and the intersection of culture and global capitalism. Exploring the materialities of the drums, costumes, and bodies that make sound, analyzing the relationship of these to capitalist multiculturalism, and investigating the gender politics of taiko, Louder and Faster considers both the promises and pitfalls of music and performance as an antiracist practice. The result is a vivid glimpse of an Asian American presence that is both loud and fragile.

A wide-ranging look at the role of music in film.

Discordant Democracy: Noise, Affect, Populism, and the Presidential Campaign paints a portrait of the political experience at a pivotal time in American political and social history. The modern political campaign is aestheticized and assimilated into mass culture, divorced from fact and policy, and nakedly tethered to emotional appeal. Through a multi-modal comparative examination of the sonic and emotional cultures of the 2008 and 2016 campaigns, Justin Patch raises critical queries about our affective relationship to modern politics and the impact of emotional campaigning on democracy. Discordant Democracy asks: how do campaign sounds affect us; what role do we the electorate play in creating and sustaining these sounds and affects; and what actions do they generate? Theories from anthropology, cognitive science, sound studies and philosophy are engaged to grapple with these questions and connect bombastic mass-mediated political events, campaign media and individual sonic experience. The analyses complicate notions of top-down campaigning, political spin, and enthusiastic millennial populism by examining our role in producing and animating political sounds through conversation, applause, laughter, media, and music.