Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow. Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations

Moskowitz, Marc L.: Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow. Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010. 165 pp. fig.

This book examines Chinese-language pop music in its specific socio-cultural and political contexts and is hereby an argument against the supposed homogenisation owing to globalisation and the proclaimed end of ethnomusicology. The author, Marc Moskowitz, is associate professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina and works as editor for American Anthropologist. In previous publications he already focused on Chinese and Taiwanese spiritual, sexual and popular culture traditions. The leading questions address the oscillation between transnational, local and political implications of Mandopop, a term which stands for Mandarin-Chinese language pop music. The book falls into seven chapters and focuses mainly on how gender specific experiences are reflected and presented in popular music. The results base on fieldwork, namely on 18 interviews carried out with both laymen and professionals in Shanghai and Taipei. Due to the major interest in female experiences, the persons interviewed are mostly women between the ages of 20 and 30. Nonetheless, concepts of masculinity are not neglected in this gender-dialogical perspective. The statements of the interviewed persons which illustrate the hypothesis in question are contextualized (age, profession), commented on and integrated in an appropriate, polyphon manner - a demanding task for postmodern ethnographers given the postulated reflection and transparency of the representation of the other. Textual (semantic, statistic), pictorial and video analyses of an array of songs and artists are an integral part of this work. Unfortunately, musicological analyses of specific songs are leftout.

The 1. chapter presents processes from the music industry as well as musical terms according to context and people applying them; e.g. some terms implying a distinction from the music of the o t...