This slim but exceptionally rich volume brings new perspectives to the history of Chinese popular music, and – somewhat rarely in the English-language literature – brings the study of popular music in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan into direct conversation. Chronologically Jones's new book bridges the gap between his earlier Yellow Music (2001) which covers Shanghai's jazz age, and his first book Like a Knife (1992) on 1980s Beijing rock. This new volume is more ambitious in scope, using a series of case studies to illuminate particular flows of music and circuits of listening, and the ways in which they are underpinned by the technological advances and the geopolitical landscape of the Cold War.
The cheap, portable transistorized electronics of the 1960s transformed ways of producing, disseminating and listening to music. This technology, Jones argues, was not only the common denominator between the Beatles’ worldwide popularity and the Maoist propaganda network but the very condition of possibility for both. Jones situates his study in wider context of the birth of post-colonial states across the world between the 1950s and 1970s, and the “Green Revolution” (Frederic Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s” Social Text 1984: 9-10 178–209), which introduced new forms of intensive agriculture and impelled new waves of migrants to the world's fast expanding cities. At the same time, a new wave of vernacular musics emerged across the world, driven by the spread of transistor radios and tape recorders.
Some of the ideas explored and material covered in the book has already been introduced in the English-language literature. Jones's approach to the Cold War circuits of culture and politics builds on Michael Denning's Noise Uprising (Verso, 2015) on early-20th-century recording technologies, colonial trade networks and the rise of vernacular musics across the globe. In some ways this book parallels Michael Bourdaghs's 2012 history of Japanese popular music, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon (Columbia University Press). Like David Novak (Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, Duke University Press, 2013), Jones explores electric circuits as metaphors for systems which not only expedite but also route and control flows of power and information. The discussion of Cultural Revolution listening practices and the affective impact of Teresa Teng's breathy intimate vocals is familiar from the work of Nimrod Baranovitch (China's New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997, University of California Press, 2003) and Barbara Mittler (A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, Harvard University Press, 2012). But Jones brings to light an array of original archival sources and Chinese-language academic literature, and he brings fresh theoretical perspectives and a broader scope to his analysis. The stories Jones unfolds and the writing style are highly engaging and bear repeated reading accompanied by pleasurable reference to YouTube to unearth the tracks under discussion. Any one of the chapters could serve as reading material for classes on East Asian popular culture or modern Chinese history.
Initially the individual chapters and selection of case studies may appear disjointed. What, the reader may ask, does Hong Kong's 1950s “Mambo Girl” Grace Chang, her appropriation of Afro-Caribbean-derived genres and popularity in the Chinese diaspora (chapter one), have to do with the intermediality of the Quotation Songs of Mao Zedong and China's vast rural network of loudspeakers (chapter two), or the eclectic soundtracks of Taiwanese language films and their sentimental reflection of the lives of Taiwan's rural–urban migrants (chapter three)? But as the book unfolds the parallels and intersections between the various circuits they describe become clear, as does the book's insistence on the exploration of the relations between local cultural production and global historical moment.
Perhaps the most original and distinctive chapters are those focused on Taiwan at the height of military rule. Chapter four documents the rise of Taiwanese pirate records of Anglo-American music and traces the circulation of this trade via the US military bases of East and Southeast Asia. Chapter five provides a poignant portrait of Taiwanese folk song collectors Hsu Tsang-Houei and Shih Wei-Liang, and their quest to discover and document an authentic Chinese folk music untouched by the curse of modern media and urban life. Jones reflects on their failed project to introduce the music of blind, itinerant musician Chen Da into Taiwan's folk song revival, arguing that such projects of preservation always exist in a mutually complicit relation with the culture of schizophonia (the separation of sounds from source) that threatens the object of preservation. In fact, a successful revival of one of Chen Da's songs was already deeply embedded in Taiwan's music industry, popularized by the Taiwan Peanuts and later sung by Teresa Teng.
Chapter six returns to the Cold War struggle between China and Taiwan, introducing the unforgettable image of sweet voice of Teresa Teng projected 25 km across the Taiwan Strait by a giant concrete loudspeaker perched on the cliff on Quemoy Island, part of an extensive sonic infrastructure of psychological warfare active between the mid-1950s and late 1960s. When transistor radios and cassette players rendered this infrastructure obsolete in the late 1970s, tens of thousands of young Chinese listening secretly in the privacy of their own rooms shivered in ecstasy and terror to the sound of her voice. Jones is very amusing on the official critiques of her music, notably the lovingly detailed and sexualized account of its seductive effects on the body and mind by Zhou Yinchang. The book ends with rather a jolt with the death of Teresa Teng, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Andrew Jones is not a musicologist by trade, but his writing betrays a keen ear for questions of musical style and sound quality. He is alert to the relationship between sound technologies, the specificities of the historical moment, and practices of listening. Mao's quotation songs, he argues, just like popular songs of the West, were designed for instant recognizability and promiscuous movement with their carefully crafted hooks and distinctive melodic figures (“ear worms”), and they represented the power of popular music to invade and transform our sensibilities; pop music in its purest and most politically effective form.
