Language in the East Asian popular music market

The recent history of East Asian popular music is marked by the rise of genres, such as J-pop (Japan), K-pop (Korea), Cantopop (Hong Kong) and Mandapop (Taiwan), that are largely defined by the use of Asian languages in conjunction with international pop music styles. Although Anglo-American music is also popular in the region, there is a preference for music performed in the languages that artists and audiences know best. At the same time, artists have often successfully crossed language boundaries either by using a foreign language or by retaining their first language in foreign language markets. These language crossings are evidence of the emergence of a linguistically diverse market stretching from Japan and Korea in the north to Indonesia in the south, and including various East Asian diasporas around the world. To date, however, transnational flows have been uneven, multidirectional and unstable, with no strong overall pattern emerging. Instead, we see various cross-border and cross-language initiatives, which are not always entirely motivated by commercial considerations. This paper examines the role of English in these transnational initiatives and explores its implications for the projection and reception of artists’ identities, especially those of female singers, who have so far been more apt to adopt English than male singers.

In the context of wider discussion of transnational flows of popular culture in East Asia (Chua Reference Chua2004), language appears to present more of a challenge to the circulation of popular music than it does to the circulation of films, television dramas, animations and comics, which can be dubbed, subtitled or translated locally. Popular music flows are linguistically mediated in four ways: (1) Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Hong Kong recordings are exported in their original languages and heard by overseas audiences as foreign language recordings; (2) songs from these centres are re-recorded by local artists with lyrics in local languages; (3) artists record in the languages of their overseas markets and in some cases relocate to them (a process that Shin [Reference Shin2009], calls ‘transbordering’); (4) artists also occasionally record in English – a strategy that has the potential to reach transnational audiences both within and beyond East Asia.

The first and second strategies are most frequently adopted. Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese originals have all achieved some degree of transnational circulation within the region, although none of these languages has yet dominated a foreign language market. Beyond flows in the Chinese-speaking world (where Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese have tended to co-exist), there are accounts of Japanese pop in Hong Kong (Ogawa Reference Ogawa, Befu and Guichard-Anguis2001), Cantonese pop in Japan (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002) and Korean pop in Thailand (Siriyuvasak and Shin Reference Siriyuvasak and Shin2007). More significant penetration of foreign language markets has been achieved through re-recording in local languages. Ogawa (Reference Ogawa, Befu and Guichard-Anguis2001), for example, explains how Cantonese versions of Japanese songs came to dominate the production of Cantopop in the 1980s, and how the popularity of these covers created a local market for Japanese originals. The third strategy is discussed in Fung's (Reference Fung and Lee2003) paper on Cantopop singer Andy Lau's use of Mandarin Chinese in recordings aimed at the mainland Chinese market, while Fung and Curtin (Reference Fung and Curtin2002) discuss an interesting example of transbordering in the career of Faye Wong, a Mandarin Chinese speaker from northern China, who began her career in Hong Kong as a Cantopop singer but later reverted to Mandarin (see also Mitchell Reference Mitchell and Homan2006; Groenewegen Reference Groenewegen2011).

Space does not allow a full discussion of all of these strategies, which have to date only been touched upon in a literature that has largely viewed language as a peripheral aspect of East Asian popular music. But before discussing in more detail the use of English, which has received the least attention in academic work, it is worth emphasising that this is only one of several strategies that collectively constitute the linguistic conditions for the transnational circulation of popular music. In effect, in order to establish a transnational presence for an artist, the artist and the industry must tackle questions of language. The language strategies they use are also bidirectional, involving collaboration and compromise between artists and audiences. In some cases, the artist uses the language of the audience, while in others the audience uses the language of the artist. In each case, language identities must be negotiated between artists and audiences. English, which is widely used as a foreign language but rarely as a first language in the region, represents a particular kind of compromise that depends largely on audiences accepting singers’ ‘right’ to sing in English. This paper, therefore, discusses the use of English as a transnational strategy from the perspective of both artists and audience. It argues that this is a problematic strategy to the extent that it involves the renegotiation of identities that artists have already established through their Asian-language work.

Language choice and identity

Where English is a second language, its use in popular music often precedes the use of local languages. At first, admired overseas styles are adopted wholesale, the language of their lyrics included; later artists learn to compose and perform these styles in their first languages (Larkey Reference Larkey, Berger and Carroll2003; Wallach Reference Wallach, Berger and Carroll2003). Research with independent musicians in Hong Kong, however, points to three relatively stable motives for using English: (1) the difficulty of composing songs in the local language, Cantonese; (2) a feeling that English is the language of their preferred musical styles; and (3) a desire to reach beyond Cantonese-speaking audiences (Benson and Chik Reference Benson, Chik, Lee and Moody2011). For these musicians there is no sense of inauthenticity in using English. There is also evidence of locally based creativity in their English lyrics (Chik Reference Chik2010). English helps these artists to differentiate their music from mainstream Cantopop, although English is now increasingly present in the mainstream too (see de Kloet Reference de Kloet2010, on the use of English in independent music scenes in Beijing). For mainstream artists, who usually perform songs written by professional composer-lyricist teams, the second and third motives are likely to be more significant. Their desire to reach transnational audiences is also likely to be more commercially motivated, but both independent and mainstream artists appear to share an urge to affiliate with global communities of artists and audiences who enjoy certain styles of music that are mainly performed in English.

Berger (Reference Berger, Berger and Carroll2003, pp. xv–xvi) makes the point that ‘singers and songwriters use forms of talk from the social world around them to publicly think about, enact, or perform their identities’. Whenever singers use a particular language or language variety, they are ‘exploring, performing, or enacting a social identity rather than merely describing it’. In multilingual music scenes, therefore, language choice becomes a significant element through which artists enact identities, or project images of themselves and their music to audiences. Fung and Curtin (Reference Fung and Curtin2002) discuss how, for example, Faye Wong's transition from Cantonese to Mandarin in the 1990s was tied in with a radical change in her enactment of gender identities, while Fung (Reference Fung and Lee2003, p. 257) discusses how Andy Lau's transformation into ‘a pan-Chinese icon’ involved the projection of more conservative identities in his Mandarin Chinese performances for the mainland China market. A crucial question, however, concerns audience receptions of the identities projected when artists sing in a new language. Following a brief discussion of the role of English in mainstream East Asian popular music, this paper will explore this question by examining YouTube users’ comments on English-language music videos by two established Asian-language singers, in which the negotiation of identities with audiences is very much at issue.

English in East Asian popular music

The use of English in East Asian popular music dates back to the early 1930s in Japan (Stevens Reference Stevens2009) and the 1950s in Hong Kong (Benson and Chik, forthcoming) and Singapore (Pereira Reference Pereira1999). Artists who have used English include those who (1) exclusively or mainly use English, (2) include English songs in multilingual repertoires, and (3) mix English into Asian-language songs. Much of the research on English in Asian popular music has focused on language mixing, the third category (e.g. Pennycook Reference Pennycook2007). This paper is mainly concerned with artists in the second category, such as Utada Hikaru, who has made five Japanese and three English albums, and Tata Young, who has six Thai and three English albums. Other well-known artists who have released English albums include Jacky Cheung (Hong Kong), Coco Lee (Hong Kong) and Faith Yang (Taiwan). The Wonder Girls and Girls Generation (Korea) and Koda Kumi (Japan) have made English versions of some of their songs, while a number of Hong Kong singers have released original English album tracks, such as Eason Chan's ‘Aren't You Glad’ (Reference Chan2008). There have also been English-language collaborations between East Asian and Anglo-American artists, such as Koda Kumi and Fergie's recording of ‘That Ain't Cool’ (Reference Kumi2008) and Jolin Tsai's (Taiwan) collaboration on Kylie Minogue's Asian release of ‘In My Arms’ (Reference Minogue2007).

The motivations behind these English-language recordings are varied and cannot be reduced to a desire to break out of East Asian markets. Even where this is a motive, recordings have been more successful in East Asian markets. Utada's Exodus (2004), made for the North American market, reached only #169 on the US Billboard album chart, but topped the Japanese Oricon chart and was successful across East Asia. Tata Young's I Believe (Reference Young2004) was also targeted at non-Asian markets, but was more successful in East Asia, reaching the Oricon top ten, selling more than 250,000 copies in Japan. In many cases, however, the commercial motives are less obvious. Dick Lee (Singapore) achieved some degree of transnational success in the region in the 1990s, with a series of multilingual albums that included a good deal of English and enacted pan-Asian identities through artfully constructed pastiches of Asian and Anglo-American musical styles (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2001; Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002). Working in collaboration with Dick Lee, Sandy Lam (Hong Kong) also released English albums in Japan. In 1999 Faye Wong's ‘Eyes On Me’, made for the popular Japanese video game Final Fantasy VIII, sold 400,000 copies in Japan and was voted ‘song of the year’ in the Western music category at the annual Japan Gold Disc Awards. More recently, Koda Kumi's collaboration with Fergie served as the occasion for TV appearances and magazine photoshoots with Fergie that promoted her ‘international’ image in Japan. Some releases seem to lack a strong commercial motive and stem more from the artists’ desire to record covers of their favourite English songs (e.g. Jacky Cheung's Touch of Love and Faith Yang's Self-Selected albums). Jolin Tsai's collection of English cover songs was released as part of a self-produced English-language learning package.Footnote ¹ Eason Chan's ‘Aren't You Glad’ was reportedly a demo for a Mandarin song, prepared by its English-speaking composer, which was eventually preferred to the Mandarin version because it better conveyed the emotion of the song.Footnote ²

Viewed from the artist/industry perspective, the contribution of English-language recordings to transnational flows is evidently complex. Yet as no recent English-language East Asian recording has achieved commercial success beyond East Asia, it is within this region that we should look for their significance. Some English recordings have carried their singers across language barriers in East Asia, while others have not. The artists to whom we now turn, Utada Hikaru and Tata Young, are among the most successful in East Asia in recent years. If they target an English release at non-Asian markets, their record companies know that the costs will be more than recovered from sales domestically, throughout East Asia and in the diaspora. This may also entail some renegotiation of the artists’ identities, however, as their use of English is likely to involve the projection of new identities, which may place their established Asian-language identities at risk.

The following sections illustrate this by discussing audience responses to two English-language music videos that have attracted attention on YouTube over a period of several years: Tata Young's ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’ (Reference Young2004) and Utada Hikaru's ‘Easy Breezy’ (2004). These videos are among the most frequently viewed East Asian English-language videos of the past decade. They also involved the projection of very different identities from these artists’ earlier Asian language work. The analysis focuses, therefore, both on the videos themselves and on YouTube users’ comments on them, in which issues of identity are often evident. As the methodology used here is relatively new, I will briefly discuss its theoretical underpinnings.

The videos

Tata Young, the daughter of a Thai mother and an American father, released her first, million-selling Thai album, Amita Tata Young (Reference Young1995) at the age of 15. After three more Thai albums, she released an English album, I Believe, in Reference Young2004, which included ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’. Utada Hikaru, the daughter of Japanese parents, grew up in New York and had already released an English album, under the name Cubic U, in the United States (Precious, 1998). Precious received little attention and Utada relocated to Japan, where she released a Japanese album (First Love, Reference Hikaru1999) at the age of 16, which remains the all-time bestselling album in Japan. After two more Japanese albums, she released her second English album, Exodus (2004) (as Utada), which included ‘Easy Breezy’. Therefore, although they are both fluent English speakers, Tata Young and Utada Hikaru were better known as Asian-language singers at the time I Believe and Exodus were released, which led some YouTube users to question their ‘right’ to sing in English. In addition, their music videos projected more sexually assertive identities than those found in their earlier Thai and Japanese work. This was perhaps a necessary move, if they were to compete as female R&B-style artists on a global stage, but some viewers saw it as inappropriate for Asian female singers. Language, ethnicity and gender thus became the grounds on which identities were explored and contested in comments.

‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’ and ‘Easy Breezy’ are both first-person narrative songs, in which the singers act out sexually assertive identities. In ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’, this is evident from the title and lyrics, which describe the narrator as ‘the kind of girl boys fantasize’, who is ‘cool with her sexuality’, and ‘a 180 to the stereotype of girls like staying home and being innocent’. The original music video consists mostly of head-and-shoulders shots of Tata Young singing and adopting a variety of provocative poses. A second video, released in Japan, is similar except that Tata Young appears mainly in long shots, dancing on a nightclub set. In both videos, she is mainly filmed alone, singing directly to the camera.

‘Easy Breezy’ has a more complex narrative involving the development of Utada's character. Although the lyrics are less than explicit, the video indicates that they are addressed to her white American ex-lover and that despite her continued feelings for him, she is now moving on. The hook rests on the ambiguous lines, ‘You're Easy Breezy, and I'm Japaneesy. Soon you'll mean exactly nothing to me’, which appear to express the narrator's view of her ex-lover's attitude to their relationship. An opening scene shot in a swimming pool switches between Utada, alone and disconsolate, and her ex-lover, who is enjoying the company of two female friends. Utada then runs into him again in the changing room as he and his friends are leaving after a shower of rain. Night shots show Utada walking in the rain, trying to telephone her lover from a call box, and sitting alone in her apartment. The mood then changes as Utada leaves her apartment and drives away in a Ferrari sports car, singing ‘You got a new microphone!’ over the final chorus. As the song closes, Utada steps out of the car and approaches a dark-skinned man. In a second of silence after the end of the song, she brings her lips to his and the video ends just before they kiss. Although the song and video can be read in various ways, three contrasting images of Utada's character stand out: the awkward Asian woman at the pool, who wears shorts over her bathing costume while the others wear bikinis; the confident, assertive, sharply dressed Asian woman driving a Ferrari; and Utada the singer in close-up, wearing striking red lipstick and with her neck and shoulders unclothed.

There is a marked contrast between both videos and the artists’ earlier Thai and Japanese work, which cannot be fully explored here. In brief, their Asian language work projected (and continues to project) softer, more feminine and less sexually assertive identities. Tata Young's Thai productions, for example, typically project images of innocence – on one album cover she poses in a lacy white dress with a puppy in her lap – such that ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’ could almost be seen as a critique of this work. Although Utada Hikaru's Japanese image was certainly assertive, it was more that of a young star who is comfortable wearing casual, asexual outfits, and is often filmed in the studio working on her music. ‘Easy Breezy’ was her first video to tackle sexual issues in such a direct way. In these videos, therefore, both artists adopted new identities, which were encoded at a number of semiotic levels, but anchored in English-language lyrics that asserted their sexual independence.

YouTube comments

The statistics beneath YouTube videos include a world map that shows the geographical distribution of viewers. In June 2012, ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’ was the most viewed Tata Young video, with more than three million views for the Thai and Japanese versions combined. Most viewers came from Thailand and Japan, followed by the United States and the rest of Southeast Asia. The 2009 version of ‘Easy Breezy’ was the third most viewed Utada Hikaru video, with 1,320,402 views, mostly from Japan and Thailand, followed by the United States. Assuming that most viewers are fans of East Asian popular music, this suggests a broad market in the artists’ home countries, other parts of East Asia, and Asian diasporas around the world. The identities of those who make comments can only be inferred from the comments themselves. From this it is clear that the vast majority of commenters know English, as there were very few comments in any other language. The language of the comments also suggests that many are not native English speakers. Comments in which the users identified themselves suggest that they were of various nationalities and ethnicities, with Asian ethnicities predominating. Males and females were both well represented. The following analysis, however, addresses the themes and positions that emerged without attempting to tie them to assumed identities of the commenters.

The most remarkable feature of the comments on the two videos is their recurrent focus on language. The singers’ use of English is by no means taken for granted, but is instead treated as a point for evaluation, alongside other elements of their performances, and as a crucial dimension of their identities. On ‘Easy Breezy’ one viewer complains that Utada's ‘perfect voice is being americanized’, another that ‘i kinda like it when she mixes Japanese and English not full English’, while another says, more positively, that ‘I like her wether she sings japanese or english’. Contradictory language identities are ascribed to Utada here – she sings well when she sings in Japanese, English or both – leading to a variety of evaluative positions on her use of English. Evaluations are also made according to the viewers’ own language identities or knowledge of the singers’ language backgrounds. One viewer says of ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’, ‘im ½ thai and luv it cuz she sings english yeyey’, another that in ‘a country where people don't all speak fluent english’, it is ‘cool’ that Tata Young sings in English. There is also a persistent questioning of the right to use English: on Utada, ‘Why is she singing in english?’, ‘I was very disappointed in her english’, ‘She should really stick with the Japanese singing or a Japanesey voice singing in English’; on Tata Young, ‘does she speak english? cause it seems like some1 else sung it’. Others remind viewers that Tata Young and Utada are fluent English speakers.

The crux of the matter, however, may not be so much their ability to sing in English as perceptions of the inauthenticity of English in the context of East Asian popular music, which comes across strongly in one exchange, beginning with the comment, ‘I love it when artists make their OWN kind of music’. A viewer responds with a question, ‘I mean do you expect asians to be running around playing traditional asian instruments, really’, to which the first viewer replies, ‘the least they can do is speak in an asian language’. This last comment highlights that, for some viewers at least, the use of an Asian language is crucial to the authenticity of East Asian pop; once English is used, the music simply sounds American.

Ethnicity enters the picture mainly through the identification of the singers as Thai or Japanese, or more generally as ‘Asian’, a term often used in contrast to ‘American’. Alongside the view that Asian singers should use Asian languages is a view that calls these ethnic identifications into question when they use English. One viewer of ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’ ‘*shakes her head sadly*’ and comments that, ‘They're turning into Americans with this kind of crap’; another comments that Utada's music has ‘gone down hill since she went american’. Here the singers’ use of English appears to diminish their ‘Asianness’. The fact that Tata Young and Utada Hikaru are, in fact, both Asian and American is problematic for some viewers. Comments on Tata Young, for example, include, ‘IS she asian ? She looks european, behind that thick layer of makeup’ and ‘she doesnt even look like a thai’. Other comments point to the difficulty of matching the style and language of the songs with expectations of the singers’ ethnicities. One viewer, who had evidently heard but not seen Tata Young before, writes, ‘I expected Tata to look “Britney Spears” style – the usual long blonde hair, tight suit or miniskirt etc, I was so shocked when she was the total opposite of my assumption!’; another writes of Utada, ‘That does NOT sound like a japanese voice. Wow. Sounds like a black woman’. The blurring of distinctions between Utada the singer and her character in the ‘Easy Breezy’ video also creates particular difficulties of ethnic identification. These spill over into issues of gender identity, as her character role violates an expectation that Asian women should stick to Asian men: ‘A WHITE BOY?! EW! THAT JUST DOESN'T GO ALONG WITH UTADA’, or ‘i don't like this video … coz I they make her fall for White Boys. SHIT!!!!!’. One viewer even goes so far as to withdraw Utada's right to Asian ethnicity from her, writing, ‘You're easy breezy and I'm Japaneze’???? Oh hel no. Asian card REVOKED!!!!!!!’.

This last comment points to the way in which English problematises both ethnic and gender identities for female artists. On the one hand, there is an evident intention on the part of the artists to challenge stereotypical Asian female identities – in Tata Young's lyric, which describes her character (and for many viewers, Tata Young herself) as ‘180 to the stereotype’ and in the ‘Easy Breezy’ narrative, in which Utada's character makes the transition from this stereotype to a more assertive female identity in the course of the video. Some comments on ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’, however, challenge this intention by describing Tata Young as, for example, ‘a total nasty skank’ and ‘Bringing bad names to thai people’. Others suggest that she fails to live up to the claims of her song: ‘She does't look sexy and she doesn't wear revealing clothes that look sexy, naughty, and bitchy’, ‘singing about short skirt but wearing pants … next time she could try to match the video and song :)’. There are also numerous objections to Utada's use of bright red lipstick, to the apparent sexist/racist implications of her character's description of herself as ‘Japaneesy’ (often attributed to Utada herself as the writer of the lyrics), and more generally to what many viewers see as a demeaning self-portrayal in the opening section of the video. As two viewers comment: ‘this is a side of utada i'd never thought i'd see … she looks better without makeup (well, without the cheezy-japanesey lip gloss) … Her face is painted up like a whore’, and ‘OMG! Japanese girl … easy to fuck? and in English! if that is what she sings here, I am shocked as a Japanese man … sigh’. These comments are, however, only one side of a debate over the gender identities of Asian women that appear over and over again in the comments on the two videos. For every detractor, there are others who argue that Tata Young ‘isn't a slut shes just honest + confident with who she is’, ‘shes so iindependent’, or that the song ‘Makes me wana go out wiv my bitches! lol x’. There are also those who argue that Utada's detractors fail to understand that she is playing out a dramatic role, and that the deeper point of the song/video is that Asian women should not be subservient to American men.