MANDOPOP MUSIC

Mandopop Music

Mandopop Music

Introduction

The study of Chinese popular music began in the early 1990s with a focus on politics. Gradually, scholars came to address other issues including popular music and politics, authenticity, cultural identity, gender, fandom, and modernity, to name the few around which this brief overview is structured. These developments have also meant that music other than rock--initially guitar-based folk traditions and state-endorsed mass music, and recently mainstream pop--has been investigated.

Popular Music and Politics

Not long after the 1989 Tian'anmen massacre, Andrew Jones's Like a Knife and Andreas Steen's Der Lange Marsch des Rock n Roll were published. Both of these titles refer to the songs of Cui Jian, China's first rock star, which among other things performed in the square during the student protests. Cui Jian also features prominently in Barme and Capdeville-Zeng.

Like A Knife distinguishes "two broadly defined genres: officially-sanctioned popular music, and underground rock music" (Jones, 1992). The gist of this pioneering study is that since "genre is a function of ideology, not musical style," pop and rock both claim to give voice to "people," with pop appealing to hegemony, and rock to authenticity (Jones 1992).

Chinese popular music is less a mere adjunct to leisure than a battlefield on which ideological struggle is waged. Participants in this rock subculture share a coherent ideology of cultural opposition. Rock musicians and fans strive to release themselves from the oppression and hypocrisy that they believe is endemic to China's "feudal culture" by means of a faith in individualism and authenticity. (Jones, 1992)

Compared to the blossoming of Chinese film studies, research on contemporary popular music lagged behind in the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. This is partly because the fixation on rock's rebelliousness proved to be inadequate and unproductive. Andrew Jones and Andreas Steen have both published books on the advent of Chinese popular music in partly-colonized Shanghai, including its many ties with cinema. Researchers present a meticulous history of the emergence of the Shanghai record industry between 1878 and 1937. In Yellow Music, Jones (2001) remains sensitive to politics, presenting the composer Li Jinhui (1891-1967) as a pioneer who has been unrighteous censored and erased from history by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Sun 2007). At the same time, its engagement with colonial modernity leads Yellow Music beyond criticality to discuss cultural hybridize, technological innovations, and the presentation of female stars as representatives of the nation (Steen 2006).

Authenticity

Nimrod Baranovitch argues in China's New Voices that rock in China is a fad that quickly passed when popular frustration over the Tian'anmen massacre and the will to change things ebbed in 1994. By contrast, in China with a Cut de Kloet argues that the second half of the 1990s "marks the birth of a new generation of Chinese rock music" (De Kloet, 2010).

Part of the difference is related to temporal focus. Baranovitch describes the period between 1978 to 1997, whereas de Kloet covers three generations of urban youths, running from the hoodlums of the early 1990s, the saw-cut ...