Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. vi, 295 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1067-8.
Sound Alignments brings together 10 chapters, including the Introduction and Afterword, to discuss music and the Cold War. This is a highly informative and intellectually stimulating book, but the high level of writing makes most chapters unsuitable for undergraduates. Considering the abundant interest in popular music, it is unfortunate the book is not more approachable.
The Introduction, a group project of all three editors, masterfully sets the stage for the volume while introducing key concepts. First, the Introduction and subsequent chapters challenge assumptions about the Cold War (when it started, if it was cold, if it has ended). To the editors, this is the “long fade-out of the Cold War” (2), positing that it may linger still in parts of Asia. Second, the book emphasizes that the Cold War and how it is seen in Asia has been coloured by a Europe-focused perspective. Because Asia’s Cold War soundtrack was popular music, and therefore “Asian popular music provides an opportunity for mapping out a different version of the Cold War” (4), the book uses music to re-centre narratives. Third, the editors and authors discuss how Westernization and ideas of cosmopolitanism intersected in the field of popular music using music—whether the music of rallies, films, or live bands—to illustrate the way ideas entered, often as part of a Cold War framework, but then shifted as performed and adapted by locals.
The first section of the book addresses the routes through which popular music travelled. Different countries in Asia were receiving musical models from different areas—music arriving in China was often influenced by the Soviet Union and made into state-sponsored ideologically oriented performances, for example. Official popular culture might not have always emerged through the same routes as a pop song in a country like Japan, but nevertheless reached large enthusiastic audiences. Meanwhile Western music reached Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan often with the US military.
Jennifer Lindsay’s chapter begins this section with an examination of “Rayuan Pulau Kelapa,” a song from Indonesia, which she uses to illustrate how youth from Third World countries became involved in (Soviet-influenced) events including song contests like the World Festivals of Youth and Students. The chapter discusses the seriousness with which the appropriate musical numbers were debated, such as the suitability of “Payuan Pulau Kelapa” to represent Indonesia. After a festival performance the song became popular in Russia. An Indonesian pop song circulating in Russia provides an excellent illustration of the way this book pushes back against conventional Cold War cultural narratives.
Nisha Kommattam’s chapter examines three songs from two movies to discuss how film songs from Kerala were part of both “Communist ideologies” (Keralan voters elected many Communist leaders) and “cosmopolitan aspirations” (69). The chapter is able to demonstrate how in a Western-aligned non-communist country communism was part of literacy and success combating barriers based on gender and caste. C.J.W.L. Wee’s chapter addresses the development and spread of J-Pop and then K-pop. Wee’s chapter uses recent flows of pop music in his understanding of the development of “debordering of pop culture consumption” in Asia (108).
The second section of the book tackles cover songs—following the paths of specific covers makes visible the complexity of relationships between a country and the song’s source country, as well as between different countries within Asia. Here the editors use the example of Japanese duo The Peanuts, who covered countless songs, including Spanish and French songs—something that allowed them new identifications beyond the United States. Hyunjoon Shin’s chapter begins the section, addressing the meaning of folk song in Korea—the type of song equated with a Dylan-esque singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar, rather than the traditional genre of folk song, or minyo. While briefly mentioning performances for US troops, Shin explains how folk songs entered South Korea through Christian organizations and carved out an early space in locations like the downtown Seoul YMCA. Later folk song divided into activist songs and campus songs—the latter more commercialized, the former tied to student groups who circulated illegal recordings on cassettes. Korea-watchers today are well aware that Christian activists seek to preserve a conservative past, so it is fascinating to read how Korean Christianity once nourished progressivism.
In the book’s fifth chapter Hon-Lun Yang tackles covers in Hong Kong in the 1960s when Hong Kong served as a node in spreading pop culture and ideas of cosmopolitanism. The period of active covering was followed by the rise of Canto-pop. Although it still drew on conventions of pop and rock, “While the music might appear as family to Western earns in sonority, its success lies in its ‘localness’” (164).
The last section, fronts, intentionally uses a term that evokes a battle because some popular artists were challenging state authority, and through song, fighting for new versions of cosmopolitan modernity. The section begins with Marie Abe’s fascinating account of Daiku Tetsuhiro and the relationship between the Ryukyu Archipelago and Japan. Daiku himself is from Yaeyama, at the south end of the island chain, and is a singer for the heritage traditions of both Yaeyama and Okinawa; but Abe’s chapter details how Daiku also appropriated Japanese songs of his youth and indigenized them, as well as his inspiration and borrowings from Indonesia, Hawai‘i, and Brazil. Abe speculates that Daiku demonstrates a cosmopolitanism of the rural, reconfiguring Ryukyu at the center instead of the periphery of the region.
Chapter 7 by Anna Schultz returns the reader to India, but this time to examine Sant Tukdoji Maharaj, a singer-saint and compatriot of Gandhi who supported non-violence and land reform, but also the nuclearization of the Indian state. The influential leader was even turned to by the Indian state to provide a conduit for ideas from the government to his rural followers. In chapter 8, Qian Zhang discusses the ways the Chinese state purified the cultural sphere of Western-influenced music—this “yellow music” was pushed out (making Hong Kong the centre of pop music)—“asserting ideological political control” (233) in the process.
In the afterward, Christine Yano likens the Cold War to a multiplex, where different theatres show a different narrative, but sound leaks through the walls so that the experience in Japan becomes periodically audible in Indonesia. This is in part, Yano explains, due to the jet age—as airplanes carried people they also transported their cultures—allowing countries in Asia to approach each other directly. The “geopolitics of the musical encounter” (256) are changing, Yano explains. Today, Chinese “red songs” and Japanese nationalist anthems become the nostalgic pop music of the older generation, and once-frightening sites like the DMZ become a place for tourist encounters where, as Shin relates at the start of his chapter, we can now imagine soldiers from both sides enjoying the music of folk singer Kim Kwang-seok.
CedarBough T. Saeji
Pusan National University, Busan