A fascinating look at how the popular musical culture of Guangzhou expresses the city’s unique cosmopolitanism.
Guangzhou is a large Chinese city like many others. With a booming economy and abundant job opportunities, it has become a magnet for rural citizens seeking better job prospects as well as global corporations hoping to gain a foothold in one of the world’s largest economies. This openness and energy have led to a thriving popular music scene that is every bit the equal of Beijing’s. But the musical culture of Guangzhou expresses the city’s unique cosmopolitanism. A port city that once played a key role in China’s maritime Silk Road, Guangzhou has long been an international hub. Now, new migrants to the city are incorporating diverse Chinese folk traditions into the musical tapestry.
In Sonic Mobilities, ethnomusicologist Adam Kielman takes a deep dive into Guangzhou’s music scene through two bands, Wanju Chuanzhang (Toy Captain) and Mabang (Caravan), that express ties to their rural homelands and small-town roots while forging new cosmopolitan musical connections. These bands make music that captures the intersection of the global and local that has come to define Guangzhou, for example by writing songs with a popular Jamaican reggae beat and lyrics in their distinct regional dialects mostly incomprehensible to their audiences. These bands create a sound both instantly recognizable and totally foreign, international and hyper-local. This juxtaposition, Kielman argues, is an apt expression of the demographic, geographic, and political shifts underway in Guangzhou and across the country. Bridging ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural geography, and media studies, Kielman examines the cultural dimensions of shifts in conceptualizations of self, space, publics, and state in a rapidly transforming the People’s Republic of China.

During the 1990s illegally imported compact discs, known as dakou CDs, flooded into China, opening up the music world to Chinese youth and inspiring them to experiment with new sounds and new lifestyles. Quickly, dakou became the label for a new generation of Chinese, a vibrant generation no longer tied to the Maoist past. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, China with a Cut surveys the music that emerged in 1990s China and makes a case for its involvement in the rise of China as a cultural and economic global power.

This is the most comprehensive study to date of the rich popular music scene in contemporary China. Focusing on the city of Beijing and drawing upon extensive fieldwork, China's New Voices shows that during the 1980s and 1990s, rock and pop music, combined with new technologies and the new market economy, have enabled marginalized groups to achieve a new public voice that is often independent of the state. Nimrod Baranovitch analyzes this phenomenon by focusing on three important contexts: ethnicity, gender, and state politics. His study is a fascinating look at the relationship between popular music in China and broad cultural, social, and political changes that are taking place there.
Baranovitch's sources include formal interviews and conversations conducted with some of China's most prominent rock and pop musicians and music critics, with ordinary people who provide lay perspectives on popular music culture, and with others involved in the music industry and in academia. Baranovitch also observed recording sessions, concerts, and dance parties, and draws upon TV broadcasts and many publications in Chinese about popular music.
keywords: Ethnicity
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. China Diversified: An Overview of Popular Music in the Reform Era, 1978–1997
2. The Negotiation of Minority/Majority Identities and Representation in Popular Music Culture
3. Negotiating Gender in Post-Revolutionary Popular Music Culture: Reconstructing Manhood, Womanhood, and Sexuality
4. Popular Music and State Politics: Hegemony, Resistance, Symbiosis, and Unity
Notes
References
Index