Refiguring American Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. xviii, 230 pp. (Illustrations.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6001-8.
A key motif of Christine Bacareza Balance’s excellent new book, Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, is a practice she generatively calls “disobedient listening.” To set up this theme, she takes us to the cold opening of Marlon Fuentes’s experimental film, Bontoc Eulogy (1995). In the scene, Fuentes sits on the floor in a spare room facing a Victrola, presumably listening to music and voice recordings made of Filipinos at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Bontoc Eulogy plays on and with familiar tropes of the documentary genre, dramatizing Fuentes’s investigation to find traces of his exhibited grandfather Markod. Balance’s analysis helps us to appreciate how Fuentes can be appreciated as a kind of DJ who, as Balance puts it, “flips the beat … to revise, rework, and adapt it” (28). In that opening image, what Fuentes is doing is uncannily akin to what DJs might call digging, or searching through archives of recordings to find anything that could help them DJ that much better. But instead of garage sales and record store basements, Fuentes is digging through World’s Fair archives and anthropology museums. What DJs and Fuentes share is their capacity to make musical scenes in Filipino America. And with such a parallel established, Balance’s notions of “disobedient listening” and “renditions” can link agency and affect for appreciating legacies of colonialism, resistance, and diaspora, from 1898 to today. As Balance writes, “into the familiar sound tracks of historical violence, there are breaks in the record, imaginative spaces that provide room to improvise new movements and gestures across the seemingly smooth surfaces of historical time” (23). And with such a framework and its “phonographic approach,” Tropical Renditions examines cultural practices ranging from DJing and karaoke to performance art and indie rock, not only to account for the making of musical scenes in Filipino America, but also the making of Filipino America through musical scenes.
Balance’s book is a major contribution to a flowering of contemporary scholarship on the Filipino diaspora and musical performance written and/or edited by such scholars and artists as Roderick Labrador, DJ Kuttin’ Kandy, Mark Villegas, Antonio Tiongson, Theo Gonzalves, Lucy Burns, Sarita See, Jeff Chang, Michael Viola, Lorenzo Perillo, and others.
In her discussion, Balance usefully situates DJing in the history of musical performance in Filipino America. Balance’s notion of “renditions” functions as a way of connecting dots so that when DJ QBert and other champions of the form do what they do with recordings, technology, and performance, they can be seen as participating in and extending critical engagements that have marked the dynamic relationship between Filipinos and the US empire. DJs are then understood as giving form to affirming manifestations of difference that are both alien and musical. As Balance writes, “Through our disobedient listening to the ‘weirdest sounds’ and styles of DJ QBert and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, we can and should take seriously the political and aesthetic alliances made possible by the identity category of alien, as both recuperation of previous histories and a signaling toward other forms of extraterrestrial intelligence” (42). Turntablist-DJing, rather than being a maligned substitute for traditional instrumental virtuosity, is then a medium of transformative creative expression precisely because of its remixing capacities for disobedient listening and renditions.
Balance fittingly then turns to the “serious” significance of karaoke for Filipino America. She writes, “Where in other contexts karaoke is merely seen as entertainment or diversion, in Filipino America, musical voices regard karaoke as something more serious” (77). With an extended focus on the case of the rise of Charice Pempengco, Balance explores the formative and critical role of karaoke technology in the development of talent for Filipinos and the diaspora. Balance examines karaoke singing as a form of “secondary orality,” drawing on Walter Ong’s concept. As with DJing, she takes what might potentially be seen as a devalued practice of musical performance and shows how that devaluation creates conditions for creative agency in Filipino America.
Her third chapter is an extended consideration of the musical performance work of multi-disciplinary artist Jessica Hagedorn. Balance provides welcome and needed attention to a figure who has mostly been appreciated for her brilliant literary and dramatic work. By focusing the analysis on Hagedorn’s collaborations with her Gangster Choirs, Balance compellingly asserts a relationship between the creative strategies of the Gangster Choir musical collectives and those of Hagedorn’s poetry, prose, and drama. Importantly, Balance provides useful reframing of Hagedorn’s life and career, not merely as a form of literary biography, but as a way of critically rethinking the relationship between authenticity and intelligibility, between the “disobedient listening” and “renditions” that made and remade Filipino America through Hagedorn’s diverse work in literature, performance, and indeed music. Balance writes, “Filled with scenes of concert-going and radio listening in cities like Manila, San Francisco, and New York, [Hagedorn’s] early poems, today, serve as a soundtrack for the ‘counter-assimilationist immigrant narrative’ in her work and acknowledges U.S. pop culture and music’s influence as beginning in the Philippines” (99–100).
Balance’s book culminates by focusing on what may be its most pathbreaking research: indie Pinoise rock and its infrastructures of production and consumption for Filipino America. Balance shows how the convergence of “indie” and “translocal” is a site where the meaning of the global can, and perhaps must, be critically understood. In characterizing how these underappreciated performers demand wider recognition, scholarly and otherwise, Balance writes, “accounts of analog media forms, and the ways in which they helped original Pilipino musical (OPM) forms such as classic, punk, and indie rock flourish, fly in the face of the cultural imperialist view that non-Western cultures passively consume U.S. and European popular music. Instead,” Balance goes on to note, in an observation that could characterize all of the cultural practices she illuminates, “these stories show how Filipino rock musicians have flipped the beat on Western pop musical objects and media in the service of developing local scenes and sounds” (154). From DJing and karaoke to performance art and indie Pinoise rock, Balance’s book draws out the rich implications of such musical scenes, and in doing so, shows how Filipino America has been made, and made uniquely meaningful, through music.
Victor Bascara
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
pp. 198-200