Is there a Californian identity? California is the Golden State, Tinsel Town, Silicon Valley, the Wine Country, the mountains, the beaches, the desert, big cities, small towns, agriculture, industry, metropolis, communes, missions, sunshine, fog, snow, redwoods, malls, bears, whales, hippies, bikers, surfers, earthquakes – all depending on your guide book. There are ‘California Girls’, there's ‘California Dreamin’', there's ‘Californication’, there's ‘California Über Alles’; foreigners find themselves ‘Goin’ to California with an aching in [their] heart'; some claim that ‘It never rains in Southern California’; others get stuck in check-out at the Hotel California; Joni Mitchell's ‘heart cried out for’ California, but Rufus Wainwright found that ‘life is the longest death in California’; Woody Guthrie knew that California ‘is a garden of Eden / a paradise to live in or see’, but warned that ‘you won't find it so hot / if you ain't got the Do Re Mi’ – and he knew a thing or two about the fate of folk looking to move west. The mythology of the state is perpetuated by a multiplicity of images, from the Hollywood sign to the Golden Gate Bridge, from the majestic El Capitan to any number of generic sunsets that somehow still manage to speak to our collective presumptions about the place. But who are the people who call themselves Californian? And what does their music say about their subjective sense of place?

In California Polyphony Mina Yang, an assistant professor at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, has done an admirable job untangling some of the many threads in the musical tapestry of the state. She states at the outset that her book will not be ‘yet another self-congratulatory celebration of California's cultural diversity’ (4), but rather a loosely chronological series of case studies chosen ‘for their relevance to the outstanding concerns of non-white populations in general and to California culture specifically’ (5). As a result, this relatively slim volume traverses north and south, classical and popular, on frequently familiar but occasionally surprising terrain. The first chapter drafts a brief history of California and its waves of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Chapter 2 looks at four composers – Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Harry Partch – whose orientalist practices shaped the identity of new music in the West; Chapter 3 charts the decline of Central Avenue nightclubs in the wake of LAPD's racist suppression of African-American jazz and culture; Chapter 4 examines the use of jazz in film noir and the subtexts thereof; Chapter 5 considers rock and roll as an agent in the construction of a Chicano identity; and Chapter 6 explores the negotiations of Korean identity in the context of hip-hop. So far, so inclusive, but as with any discussion of California, the tendency to let the micro speak for the macro runs the risk of leaving readers, such as this one, whose personal history lies in the northern half of the state, occasionally worried about the use of that singular qualifier of culture, ‘California’.

The history of immigration into the state, and of the development of its two primary metropolitan areas – Los Angeles in the south, the San Francisco Bay Area in the north – serve as the basis for the first chapter of California Polyphony. Yang necessarily abbreviates her discussion of pre-US California,Footnote ¹ skipping straight to 1848 and the influx of prospectors in the wake of the discovery of gold late that year, for this is the point at which the populations of the two metropolitan centres grew exponentially, with an intensification of ‘the conflicts that naturally arose within a society founded on greed’ (12). These are the conflicts that are traced through subsequent chapters, and the basic binaries at issue – East/West, Europe/Asia, old/new – are gradually introduced with reference to the development of the cultural infrastructures of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and their particular, quite distinct ideologies. The notion of a dominant musical culture in these two metropolitan areas – the Bay Area with its orchestras, opera, and chamber groups and Los Angeles with its critical mass of professional musicians active in concert halls and movie studios – is important to establish at the outset, for the second chapter, subtitled ‘Orientalism, Queerness, and Californian Experimentalism’, provides a telling contrast.

Yang explores the work of Cowell, Cage, Harrison, and Partch in terms of their shared experience in ‘absorbing the transgressive sexual and racial sights and sounds surrounding them in San Francisco’ (37). In Yang's argument orientalism, not homosexuality, was the primary common link between these composers' works, and their relative marginality – their sexuality, but also their location in a region closer to Asia than to Europe – provided the basis for an experimentalism unique to California. Of particular interest is her discussion of the Cage/Harrison Double Music (1941), especially with regard to the paths the two composers subsequently took, into and out of New York. Drawing largely on representative studies,Footnote ² Yang nonetheless makes clear the distinctions in Harrison's and Cage's personal histories that allowed the former to embrace his sexuality and the latter to remain ambiguous. Whether this is enough to shed new light on the subject for readers well versed in the existing literature I could not say, but by including these composers in California Polyphony, Yang makes the important point that they ‘ultimately did not escape the larger contradiction of a society that stood to gain enormously from propagating the myth of cultural pluralism but came up short in actually empowering minority communities or integrating non-whites into the mainstream cultural life of California’ (59). Looking at the broader project of this book, I am not sure if Lou Harrison's name has ever been invoked in them same published breath as Korean hip-hop, but in retrospect it seems perfectly reasonable to do so.Footnote ³

South Central Los Angeles is by now a familiar-sounding place to many people in tune with popular culture, if not quite yet a holiday destination. In Chapter 3 Yang outlines the rise and imposed fall of the area's nightclub and dance-hall cultures in the 1940s and 50s. She suggests that the police attempted to maintain a segregation between whites and non-whites, and for moral purposes ‘positioned themselves to safeguard the virtue of Hollywood icons such as Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner, regular patrons at the clubs, as well as the countless white middle-class women who ventured into the area looking for excitement and good music’ (70). About those starlets, more later. The larger tragedy, as Yang sees it, was that

It is an important point, but there were other urban areas of the state whose nightclubs remained open and vital in the post-war years, and I found myself thinking (admittedly, defensively) that the contemporary live music cultures of West Oakland and San Francisco, not generally lumped under the rubric ‘cool’, surely maintained an adherence to the type of ‘authentic’ live experience ultimately lost from South Central.Footnote ⁴

California Polyphony, from the third chapter onwards, is concerned with expressions of identity emerging from the metropolitan LA area which, while no doubt ringing true to the experience of minority cultures across the state, nonetheless suggests a centralized locus for the expression of ‘California culture’, which is difficult to sustain and, as I have suggested already, more than occasionally frustrating. The opening paragraph of Chapter 4 finally qualifies one important aspect of the last half of California Polyphony: ‘Throughout its checkered history, Hollywood has held up a mirror, as distorting and one-sided as it may be, that has captured in filmic images and sounds the vicissitudes of race relations in Southern California’ (80, emphasis mine). By focusing her gaze in Chapter 4 on Hollywood, exporter of image (that superficial thing) and reflector of popular cultural Zeitgeist in the golden age of film noir, Yang is able to follow up on the previous chapter's theme of sociomusical tension and show how the primary LA industry exploited the sound of jazz as suggestive of predatory sexuality, fallen women, and alterity in general. It seems that those errant starlets cruising South Central had a lot to answer for. It isn't clear whether Yang intended Chapters 2, 3, and 4 to work against each other, but in retrospect the chapter on California experimentalism, when contrasted with the chapter on film noir, perpetuates a sort of essentialized north/south ideological divide (Bay Area as bastion of liberal mores, Los Angeles as committed to the pursuit of the superficial) – unfair and untrue, but held by many, in the state and outside of it, to be self-evident.

The final two chapters return to the theme of musical expressions of otherness, not from outside a marginalized community (as in the soundtracks to film noir) but from within. These chapters warranted the most in the way of marginal scribbling in my copy of California Polyphony, not only because they echo earlier studies of similar musical experience,Footnote ⁵ but because they leave some questions tantalizingly unanswered. First is ‘From the Mission Myth to Chicano Nationalism: the Evolution of Mestizo Identities and Music’. This returns us initially to some of the broader issues raised in the first chapter: the romanticization of California's mission culture (the Mission Myth), the history of Mexican migration, much of which post-dated the arrival of Mexicans in the southern half of the state, and the ensuing tensions between Anglo and non-Anglo communities. Yang provides a brief overview of the history of the Mexican and Mexican-American community in Los Angeles and traces their musical representation, contrasting notably the romanticized songs collected and popularized by Charles Lummis in the early twentieth century with the political commentary of the contemporaneous corridos. The politicization of the Mexican-American community in the 1960s may have been inspired by the growth of black nationalism and the Watts riots of 1965; minority cultures certainly faced similarities in treatment by the mainstream Anglo population. Perhaps black nationalism serves as the more obvious, further-reaching problem of Californian identity, a microcosm of racial problems in the United States more generally. The familiarity with much of the music emerging from that movement, of course, is enough not to warrant a separate chapter in California Polyphony; but in the ensuing discussion of Chicano subculture and Chicano rock in the 1950s and 60s as markers of identity and separateness, and of hybridity and syncretism as ‘perhaps the only viable cultural strategy for a community undergoing constant change’ (117), I found myself wondering why Yang didn't venture further into the present before closing the chapter on Mexican-American musical life in LA, or offer an additional chapter to explore the ‘multiple linguistic and musical signifiers in hip-hop/rock hybrids that attest to the fluidity and porosity of the Chicano identity’ (117) in the music of Rage Against the Machine, for instance. Problematizing such examples as belonging ‘to a subculture that is at once bigger (in that they reach the mainstream) and smaller (in that they no longer represent an entire generation) than the East Los Angeles barrios’ (117) would have served to open California Polyphony to the idea of a California larger than just its southern metropolitan area. Bringing into the forefront LA bands such as Rage Against the Machine or, perhaps more strikingly, Ozomatli, would also have allowed Yang to tie the threads of 1960s black nationalism, hip-hop, salsa, and contemporary politics that were left dangling in Chapter 5 together with the themes of Chapter 6. Looking back now on Chapter 4, I feel that this is a missed opportunity.

Moving in her final chapter to ‘Korean American Hip-Hop Since the Rodney King Uprising’, Yang pursues some of the threads just mentioned, stating that ‘the future of race relations rests on the shoulders of the hip-hop generation, on those who have grown up taking for granted their fragmented and multihued environment and have devised new idioms with which to communicate across social and spatial boundaries’ (118–19).Footnote ⁶ The 1992 Rodney King trial sparked widespread violence in Los Angeles, which resulted in local Korean businesses incurring losses equivalent to over half the city's total property damages. Yang moves through a précis of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), to Ice Cube's track ‘Black Korea’, before settling on a discussion of rapper James Chang, known as Jamez. Jamez's particular type of fusion music – ‘Korean pansori, Indian, and Chinese music with hip-hop […] a polycultural musical scaffolding that supports his socially progressive texts’ (127) – is certainly intriguing, as are the examples of lyrics that Yang provides. In an interesting contrast to the Chicano music and cholo style of Chapter 5, deployed for the expression of otherness, Jamez deploys hip-hop and signifiers of Korean and Asian musical identity to address more broadly the concerns of immigrant communities in general. Yang's more general discussion of Korean hip-hop, and a dissection of some of the comments about the collective Drunken Tiger posted on a hip-hop website forum, slow the final pages somewhat, and the chapter ends with a conciliatory, hands-across-the-water kind of statement about hip-hop's ‘potentially rich site for further creative work across racial, ethnic, and class lines at a time when intercultural understanding, in and out of California, is needed more urgently than ever’ (136).

Justification for the inclusion of Chapter 4's film noir study comes in the conclusion, where Yang discusses two films released in the aftermath of 9/11: Crash (dir. Paul Haggis, 2004) and Collateral (dir. Michael Mann, 2004), each set in Los Angeles and dealing in its own way with race and difference. I was reminded of the much earlier film, Grand Canyon (dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 1991), a less multi-ethnic vision of Los Angeles in its pre-Rodney King days, though I must admit that its soundtrack has not stuck in my mind to the extent that the diegetic music of Collateral suggested the various ‘ethnically marked music[s]’ (137) of the neighbourhoods through which the later film's two main characters travel. Yang here reminds her readers of her book's common themes ‘of police and spatial control, leisure and work, myths and dreams, and identity and difference’ (138), but she could just as easily have mentioned film as one unifying theme: a Hollywood export, central to the exploitation of ‘California identity’ around the world, film is also used throughout the book, again and always Los Angeles based.Footnote ⁷

This brings me back to my central complaint about California Polyphony. In the final chapter Yang quite rightly states that her chosen case studies ‘do not, by any means, exhaust the possible topics on the convergence of music, race, and ethnicity in California’ (139). Invoking future research, she hopes that ‘future studies will help us to better comprehend not only the culture of this region but also, as an extension, the social relations of the United States at large’ (139, emphasis mine). Again, singular culture, singular region. As I suggested many paragraphs ago, there are a number of Californias, and a number of mythical Californias, not a singular ‘region’. Perhaps it is not intentional on Yang's part, but given the focus of her book, given the truths inherent in much of what she says, and given the insights she can offer into certain aspects of her chosen case studies, I really feel the more appropriate title for this collection would have been Southern California Polyphony. I applaud the inclusion of Cowell, Cage, Partch, and Harrison; I bemoan the exclusion of the post-ethnic groups that have emerged from unexpected places. This is a fine contribution to the literature of Californian musical life, but I fear it left me wanting a companion volume.