Soundtracks of Asian America explores how a select few Asian Americans navigate race, class, selfhood and belonging across many spaces and places globally. Grace Wang investigates social and cultural aspects of Asian American musical experience in four case studies. She is emphatically not trying to ‘parse out what some might call the truth lodged behind stereotypes’ nor garnering the validity of discourses that have sought to replicate hegemonic narratives placed on Asian and Asian American music-makers (p. 7).

The first case looks at ‘music moms’ and ‘tiger mothers’ in the performance of ‘Asian difference’ within realms of high culture at prestigious music schools. Competition, advantage, expectations, exclusions and exceptions in classical music spaces are mentioned to show prominence of Asian Americans in these spheres and their treatment by others. Wang wonders, without Asian interest in classical music, would the genre lose currency and fizzle away? Her interviewees suggest that, without China's sustained interest in coming decades, things would look dire for this elite musical anachronism.

Chapter 2 discusses racialisation of musical performance, noting the positive outcomes of ‘blind auditions’ by which the talent and skill of performers are not ‘pre-marked’ by their physical appearance. Wang asserts that levelling the playing fields of race and gender biases by removing visibility in certain controlled circumstances is a luxury of artifice that cannot apply to the majority of music making because ‘most music-making does not occur behind a screen’ (p. 73). The problems of racism in music cannot be solved by artificial ‘blindness’ alone. Wang asks whether ‘Asians and Asian American classical musicians can [even] claim an experience akin to racism in a field of culture in which they enjoy success and are abundantly “over represented”’ (p. 76) and this is pitted with discussions of what it might mean to be ‘too Asian’ (p. 77). Does playing with a ‘Chinese accent’ mean ‘wooden’ or having ‘cookie-cutter’ technical brilliance? (p. 81).

Why do some performers return to the rhetoric of ‘world citizens’ while others accentuate their specialised, localised difference? Wang lets her informants’ voices guide the discussion, which feels both natural and haphazard. She drops in charged terms or phrases like ‘yellow peril’ equally for historical context and sexiness. Sequencing within her arguments seems consequential rather than deliberate, but overall Wang's conversational tone achieves a sense of ‘a situation’ even though pictures are not optimally drawn (logically or strategically); that is, unless this meandering approach is intended to generate effectual states in the reader like those uttered by her informants – those musical participants so ensconced in the field as to have evaded long views of their engagements. If so, it is an effective rhetoric in which to frame a broader discussion which, owing to the many angles of inquiry thus attempted by scholars and non-scholars, is murky.

Wang's informants elucidate a critical point about race and other social categories: ‘race impacts musical judgement’ and ‘[racialised] social relationships remain obscured not just through discourses of universalism and meritocracy but also though beliefs that musical feeling emerges from the depth of a musician's inner self’ (p. 83). Yet those tropes or idioms that sound so innately ‘Asian’ in the USA go unspoken owing to ‘racial etiquette’ – that grand discursive silencing of some types of difference (quoting Robin Hayes, pp. 85–6).

Chapter 3 explores fandom and the rise of celebrity among YouTube content-providers. It distinguishes the performance medium of ‘performing in front of nobody in a room in front of a camera’ (p. 102) and the screen cultures that permit these intimate and yet impersonal transactions, insisting that ‘authenticity’ and ‘being real’ are the most valued currencies of online offerings. These various authenticities are governed by recognition of ‘constructed images’ and the democratised space in which these videos are promoted and discovered. Wang draws out the bedroom antics of performers, singing ‘their taste’ to a viewing constituency who sees these performers ‘being Asian’ or singing ‘like a black woman’, for example. The ephemeral nature of virtual stardom finds these self-made artistic entrepreneurs on ‘unstable’ ground: their future commercial viability is never assured and this shapes their output (p. 115). These Asian-American YouTube stars are treated both as members and outsiders to the Asian-American community when they express themselves online, but ‘the feeling of empowerment that accompanies inclusion can simultaneously map the borders of exclusion’ (p. 122) whereby specific forms of Asian-American ‘youth’ are normalised and perpetuated beyond these individuals' contributions. By breaking norms, they pave new normativities.

‘Finding Sonic Belonging Abroad: Reimagining Chinese American Subjectivities through Diaspora’, Chapter 4, does what it says on the can. Leehom Wang – a multiplatinum singer/actor – is ‘just like Justin Timberlake, except JT has 2 solo albums and Leehom has 14’ (p. 143). He is the specific case of Grace Wang's argument that Asian-American artists tend to do best when they neutralise the distinguisher of ‘Asian-Americanness’ in their road to success. Leehom (I will use his first name to avoid confusion with author's name) does it by choosing to mount his career in the Mandopop industry (of Taiwan/China/Hong Kong/Malaysia/Singapore etc.), despite growing up in USA ‘with perfect English’ to a family of doctors and other professionals. Leehom has coined the concept of being ‘chinked out’ – embracing Chineseness and reconfiguring the term ‘chink’ from a static position of marginalised inferiority to empowered subjectivity – to overcome the all-too-common assumption that the only viable or desirable music career must spring from the American industry.

The chapter uses Leehom's phenomenal celebrity in Asia to analyse ways and conditions under which Asian-Americans reap success in their ‘perceived homelands’ abroad (p. 145). Rather than describe the American racism that precludes such stars from stardom in the States, Wang says that discourse tends to frame these ‘reverse migrations’ as kinds of ‘homecoming’ or ‘cultural return’ (p. 145). She also identifies political and geopolitical tensions that instead play out as inter-generational discrepancies, owing to neoliberal conceptions of individual agency. These messages are packaged and distributed by pop-stars, largely because these pop-stars are aware of their commercial fragility and are savvy in adapting to the markets of increasingly pirated and undervalued musical products/services.

The rolling stone of Leehom's celebrity gathers interest and identification from Chinese and Chinese-American listeners who search for ‘sonic belonging’ in Chinese pop regardless of their long-term engagements with this type of identification. While Leehom claims that by interacting within a Chinese music market his music can ‘speak for itself’ without racial configuration, Wang suggests that this ‘neutral career’ is an illusion of commercialism that binds and serves Leehom's artistic output and brand trajectory.

Noteworthy is how ‘the privileging of inherent capital “fosters the belief that no matter how much capital one acquires through active accumulation, the very fact of this acquired capital being an accumulation leads to its devaluing relative to those who posit themselves to have inherited it or to possess it innately without having to accumulate it … Only those who have the innate capacity to dominate can really be said to possess enough capital to dominate the field’” (Ghassan Hage, quoted on pp. 93–4).

Soundtracks of Asian America is an interesting accumulation of ideas and stories mostly derived from Wang's previously published articles, refashioned. Her introduction provides an adequate theoretical framework but the book lacks a strong conclusion that ties together the themes of the whole. Instead its conclusion takes Leehom's history as one (of many) definitive ends to the discussion of where current discourses lead Asian-American music careers. Overall it is an engaging and thought-provoking addition to cultural studies that uses music-making as a microcosm to draw out difficult racial themes.