by Homey81

Panel title: Asian Pop Music Culture I: The Emerging Subjectivities and Asian Identities

Music Consumption and Cultural Identity: a case study of Jay’s fandom in China

Anthony Fung
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

This paper attempts to investigate the fandom and fans of one the most famous Chinese music artist Jay Chou, the interaction among which has reflected significant changes of the youth culture and cultural identity. Based on an ethnographic study of the fandom, we found that youth crystallized a new identity, very much Chinese but a modern one with Jay Chou’s imagination. Popular culture produced out of Jay’s fandom have provided resources for fans to articulate and explore their identity, which is an emergence of subjective and expressive individualism in response to the ideological frame of communist regime. However, such formation of identity is not entirely against the state, and on the contrary, the authorities took the advantage to co-opt the youth individualism into the state discourse to create a new national identity for the public.
Informal Cultural and Artistic Education in the New Media:

Communities of Independent On-line Musicians in Hong Kong

Angel Lin
Faculty of EducationChinese University of Hong Kong

King-Kui Cheung
City University of Hong Kong

In June 2005, an on-line Cantonese song 《他約我去迪士尼》(“He invites me to the Disneyland” ), composed and sung by a 19-year-old Hong Kong high school girl, Kellyjackie, became a hit song first on the Internet and then on all major Hong Kong radio channels.  Kellyjackie is one of the many young people in Hong Kong who have been participating in on-line communities of independent artists, who regularly upload their music, lyrics and songs onto these free-of-charge, music-sharing, Internet sites for publicizing and giving feedback to one another’s creative works.  Young musical talents are being groomed in such informal communities of practice spontaneously formed on the weblog sites. In this paper an ethnographic study of the music-making/sharing activities of these indie on-line communities will be presented.  Data from interviews of some of these indie artists will also be presented to explore both the potential impact of these communities on the creative media industries in Hong Kong as well as the implications for informal cultural and artistic education of young people in Hong Kong.

Shifting music technology, changing cultural identities: Internet and everyday music practices in Korea

Jung-yup Lee
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In this paper, I explore the recent changes in digital technology of music and its cultural implication. New consumer technology of music, especially the internet is enormously changing the everyday music experiences. In Korea, it has become everyday cultural practices for internet users to make their own personal web pages using web templets such as “mini hompy” and “blog” provided by various internet service companies. Music using on the web seems a new way of experiencing not only music but also self and others, and defining and redefining identities. The analytic focus will be on the way personal and collective identities are sought and constructed through internet music practices. By showing different ways the music is used to build identities on the web homepages, I also identify the way business practices of internet companies frame and restrict the homepage users’ music practices, and relate it to the different use of music and different cultural identities.

Panel Title: Asian Pop Music Culture II: The Asian Cultural Flow

Cosplay fans of visual J-rock: Beyond the boundaries
Kyoko Koizumi

Aichi University of Teacher Education (Japan)

Visual J-rock enjoyed its heyday in the 1990s in Japan. Though the boom of visual rock bands themselves is passé, ‘cosplay’, a fan’s practice of visual J-rock is still visible at comic markets or cosplay gatherings. Even in the West Coast in the US, an increasing number of cosplay fans are paying attention to visual J-rock and the Internet shows us how networks through websites on band cosplay fans are well expanded across Asian countries. Using the data collected from my fieldwork on cosplay gatherings in Japan and San Francisco, and from the websites as well as through exchanging emails with cosplay fans, I will analyse in what ways cosplay fans are successful in going beyond various existing boundaries – between countries, sexualities and cultural genres.

Music can break the language barrior?: J-pop translated by chinese

Motoko Yabuki
Osaka University (Japan)

Since the late 1990’s, Japanese popular culture has been exported to several countries and had a popularity among young people. Until then, Japan did nothing but import foreign culture from many countries, this phenomenon was a novel movement. Japanese popular music, so-called J-pop, also has been accepted in East Asian countries and regions,especially Taiwan and Hong Kong. It can be found the factors of that movement, for example, major CD shops, Karaoke, Japanese TV program, internet, etc.. This paper, however, focuses on analyzing cover songs to explain the background of Japanese popular music in Mailand China and Taiwan. The cover songs, that Chinese words add to Japanese melody, have continued existing after WWⅡ until now. I will mention the change of the meaning of cover songs and the present state of affairs.

Regionalizing Local Popular Music: K-pop in Pop Asianism

Hyunjoon Shin
Sungkonghoe University (Korea)

Asian pop is a recent category, designating popular music produced and consumed across Asian Region. K-pop, standing for ‘Korean pop’ is the latest hot trend of Asian pop coming out of Korea. Korean pop which had been basically local or national in many senses, has begun to cross the borders and be integrated to Asian pop or pop Asianism since mid-1990s. As one component of so-called ‘Korean Wave’, K-pop has been popularized in different Asian societies. This paper attempts to analyze different meanings of K-pop in different local contexts. Focusing on the strategies of music industry and the imaginations of audiences, this paper will try to map out how far the integration of Asian pop has progressed and reveal the cultural transformation of Asian popular culture by combined effects of Asianization(globalization) and digitalization. In doing so, it will approach the problem of new emerging subjectivity of Asians.