Andrew F. Jones, "Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

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And those who have suddenly found Si, Zhao Fangjing, or BTS bursting into their sonic experiences, might think of this trend as something completely new. However, as Andrew Jones shows in Circuit Listening, popular music from East Asia, and in this book, it's a variety of Chinese languages and musical styles that are focused on, has been moving around for a long time. And perhaps never more importantly, during that most epochle of musical decades, the 1960s. Jones's book plays close attention to the questions of genre, periodization, and style, which emerge from considering the astonishing range, popular music production, in the geopolitically divided spaces of Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong at this time. But the book is about a lot more than particular performers or songs, in order to understand the diffusion of different musical trends in these places, and the connections and disjunctures between them. The book argues that we must study the circuits, geographical, cultural, and electronic, around which music moves. From recording and broadcasting of sound enabled by transistors and vinyl presses, the networks of record smugglers, socialist propaganda speakers, and diasporic Chinese businesses in Southeast Asia. Jones tunes in to these technological, economic, social, and geopolitical currents, which propelled signifying popular music around East Asia and beyond. As a result, the book offers not only a rich compendium of research into megastiles such as Grace Chan and Theresa Teng, and Lessonone, genres of Taiwanese musical theatre and folk, but also a whole framework for understanding better the shifts in globalization and communication, which make it possible today, for example, for Ed Sheeran to have apparently written a song, for the new BTS album. But the author is here to tell us a lot more about all of this, although maybe not BTS, specifically. But I'll say then, Andrew Jones, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Ed. That's a pleasure to be here. I like it, it's a great pleasure to talk to you on a topic which, you know, I have, yeah, I would say, considerable amateur interest in. But before we dive into the kind of themes of the book and so on, perhaps I could begin by asking you how you got here, you've worked very extensively on Chinese music at large. So how did this particular project grow out of that long experience? Well, strangely enough, I was never trained in musicology or ethnic musicology. Instead, I did my doctorate in Chinese literature, focusing on modern Chinese literature. But I've always been really fascinated by sound, and especially recorded music as a kind of portal into understanding history, cultural history, linguistics, a whole panoply of different issues. So over my career, I've ended up doing quite a lot of work on Chinese popular music, starting from the sort of emergence of rock music in the 1980s in mainland China, to the origins of recorded music and popular music in Shanghai in the 1920s in the so-called Chinese jazz age. And then finally, this book, which in a way sort of sits in between those two earlier books, like a knife, which was about the 1980s and yellow music about the 1920s and 30s. This is sort of a mid-century book that maybe squares a circle and takes on the test of completing a trilogy of books about modern Chinese music in the 20th century. Gotcha. Well, I guess, I mean, it also does something, I don't know, not to reduce the projects that you mentioned the other two books, but it does something in some ways a good deal more complicated because perhaps this region on which you're focusing is so much more evenly driven by sort of divides and influences and moving in less clear directions, perhaps, than those first two books. Would you say that's the case that this is a more challenging project than those, or is that too simplistic? I think that makes sense. In one way, or I should say in two ways, this book came out of sort of a malgommation of two book projects I had in mind earlier. The first one was to write something not about yellow music, but about red music. That is the revolutionary music of Mao's China. So I had that in mind, but at the same time, I'm fairly, you know, white or I don't know, promiscuous music listener, I'm fascinated by the music of the 1960s globally. And I started to notice that really across the world, in places like Brazil or Jamaica or Nigeria or Cambodia, there's this kind of absurd of local folk music being kind of cross hybridized. And across hybridized with rock and roll or soul or globally circulating new popular music of that era. And you know, first I was really interested in the sort of cross pollination between music from the countryside and these new urban electrified music from the 1960s. And it starts with all sorts of folk revivals in many different countries, not just the UK and the US. And winds up kind of producing this afflorescence of amazing new genres in the period, you know, so not only folk rock again in the UK or in the United States with Bob Dylan, etc. And Russia and things like high life in Nigeria, God rock steady and reggae in Jamaica, for whole or tropicalia in Brazil. And one way I wanted to write this book to kind of grapple with the larger question of 1960s global pop music and what happened to kind of facilitate this flowering of to my mind and to my ears really beautiful and fascinating sonic textures and forms of musical expression worldwide. So I suppose I'm looking at the Chinese speaking world also as a portal or you know core sample of a larger global phenomena in that period. Well, you definitely weave through or weave together these different these different currents and I think maybe those original two book ideas or different kind of projects very art of area artistically here and very kind of convincingly into into a whole whilst also not, you know, I think it's always a bit it's almost a bit unsatisfying when books are too neatly sealed up and kind of hard to get in. And there are plenty of things to explore here which maybe continue to ask questions about what extent we can speak about the 1960s as this sort of coherent period and so on. But we'll jump into those questions I think as we go. So I'll start I mean you kind of take us into that moment. I think you know if someone were to say oh you know what was in some important global music from the 1960s it's a counter intuitive entry point to take this Maoist era song the East is red as the entry point to that but that's where the introduction begins here. So you kind of line up the sort of discussion of this song the East is red by discussing its broadcast from China's first satellite and then draw towards a comparison of this song with the Beatles all you need is love. Could you tell us perhaps why that sort of what that captures about about where this project went as you say you've given us a bit of background as to how it kind of came together but what what what does the East is red do for us as an entry point here. So thanks for asking that I only kind of came up with that song and that satellite broadcast as an entry point as I was finished. finishing up the book and writing the introduction, which, you know, comes last, as it's trying to get a handle on the entirety of the book and the story it's telling. One of the starting points of the book is whether you can look at a historical era like the 1960s and identify anything coherent that brings it all together, right? And that's by no means an obvious yes. In fact, what we see in the 60s is a very fragmented world that's characterized by the Cold War, whether it's the Iron Curtain in Europe or the Ben Buu Curtain in East Asia by National Division, by the Vietnam War, by all kinds of conflicts. So is there any way that we could say that there's a coherent 1960s sound? And I think the gambit or the wager that the book takes is that we could look at underlying technology as a common denominator and an underlying kind of globalization of communication technologies. So the satellite example tries to work with that a little bit. Of course, eventually speaking, nothing could be more different ideologically, musically, formally, aesthetically than the Beatles, All You Need Is Love, and a song like The East's Red, which was kind of an endemic, massive, folk song made into a Malice anthem that kind of dominated the soundstake of Malice, China at that time. So I just start off by pointing out that actually both of these songs are characterized, yes, of course, by how they sound and what they do politically, but even more so that they're both created really for the widest possible to dissemination. And they were kind of inconceivable as they were heard and as they were produced without the technologies that supported them. So in China, that would be a massive loudspeaker network that kind of sounded out the passions and the propaganda of the Malist regime. And then I think these even to the point of being amplified into outer space when China launches in 1970, the Dongfang Hong satellite into space and broadcast back to Earth that melody, Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada. Well, I won't make the entire song, but it's basically a diode transistor playing that little melody back to Earth. And I guess out into the cosmos as a clarion call for international or I guess outer national revolution as well. But interestingly enough, the Beatles song All You Need Is Love, which also has its own global ambitions or global pretentions, was written and performed for the first global satellite television broadcast in 1967. So there's an odd parallelism between the two songs, despite their manifest differences. And I think that theme plays out throughout the book that we may have manifestly different pop music cultures in Taiwan or in Hong Kong or mainland China. But in fact, they're all supported by the same revolutionary new technology, which is the transistor circuit. And they play out in different ways, but the reach of the music, the way the music sounds, the way it's reproduced, the way that people are able to listen to it are all determined in part by that underlying technology. Although the application of the technology does differ according to different political conditions or political circuits as I use, as you know, using the phraseology from the book, as well as linguistic conditions and ideological imperatives of their period. Right. And yeah, as you say, that circuit kind of works analogously on a couple of different levels which come onto presently, I think. But I guess before that, you've already alluded to these kind of different geopolitical spaces. And I think another thing that we ask or we might ask about the 1960s as a coherent period globally is centered on the idea of revolution, for example, that kind of, of course, the Beatles represent a certain kind of revolution in one part of the world. Whilst, you know, Dong Fang Hong, East is red, is another sort of revolutionary, as you said, a sort of clarion call. So how much do you think we can speak or to what extent is this sort of role of revolution, of social revolution, as well as technological revolution, and the big social forces that drove, you know, everything from the 1960s experience of, for example, Britain or in these London, because I don't think even all of Britain got it, and North America. And also drove things like the Cultural Revolution act. So where the kind of revolutionary events fit into your understanding of this global 1960s or indeed otherwise? Yeah, it's hugely important and fascinating for when it does take place as in the Cultural Revolution in China, and also where in a decade that's characterized by revolution where it really doesn't seem to be taking place as in Taiwan, where you have a pretty firmly counter revolutionary, if I can put it that way, or authoritarian anti-communist regime under Shanghai Shaq. So there are a number of different kinds of revolutions that I was interested in here. And one of them is actually a little bit more perhaps economically or structurally fundamental than the outward trappings of say, a socialist revolution, and that's the green revolution. And I was inspired in this, in part by Frederick Jameson's analysis of the 1960s, called periodizing the 1960s, where he says that among other things, the 60s is characterized by a deepening of decolonization worldwide. But one of the things that's happening on the ground, and especially in rural areas, is green revolution, whereby new technologies, new fertilizers, new strains of rice cultivars are really kind of, well, here's the word again, revolutionizing agricultural production. And in many cases rendering labor and rural laborers extraneous. And so what you see all over the world in the 1960s is a kind of also growth of big cities, cities like Kuala or Kingston or Taipei, and a massive new lurch forward in terms of industrialization. So one of the premises of the book was that I wanted to look at the 1960s, not only from the metropolitan perspective of the London or San Francisco Bay area or Paris, but from the peripheries of southern Taiwan or what's happening on the countryside in China. And what we see there is actually, in most areas outside of mainland China, you see urbanization and a new kind of traffic that's also facilitated by portable transistor radios and vinyl records between rural music and urban music, especially as rural migrants pour into cities like Taipei. So that's one revolution that I think is really important for this period. Another one is the transistor revolution that means that places that still don't have electrical mains now have access to media to, you know, transistor radios and to record players because transistors are light enough and cheap enough and demand less electricity than tube electronics, which means that you can have battery powered. Radios and battery powered wired radio networks in the case of China. So that's another kind of revolution that enables new sounds to circulate much more rapidly from the countryside to the city and vice versa. And then of course, yeah, there's the dominant fact of the socialist revolution or the ongoing Malice revolution in China that really deeply shapes the aesthetics of music in that period and daily life in that period and even the media system in that period, which is again characterized by a centralized system that then kind of in a capillary fashion moves out across the countryside through wired broadcasting networks that bring the voice of the party to even the remote hinterlands. So that's one kind of revolution. And then in Taiwan, as I mentioned, there's also kind of anti-communist regime that's involved in really on the front lines of the Cold War. So yeah, all those revolutions are present and I hope at least partly accounted for in the book. Another interesting notion that I play around with, especially in the chapter about Malice songs, is the way that Malice media also move not only within China but into a global circuit of young people, for instance, Malice revolutionaries in Paris or in Berkeley who kind of tune into radio peaking or tune into Malice quotation songs and other forms of Malice media. So that particular circuit is, you know, well largely based and are produced in a sort of closed media space of the people's Republic of China. There are ways in which it is also globalized through kind of media circuits that move across, move laterally across the world. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot you say that's very fascinating about how we might understand some of these, you know, pithy, very catchy, but also, yeah, sort of, I don't know haunting kind of rhythms or songs from the Marys period, how we think of those as pop or how we might think of those as pop. There's some very interesting things you say about that that I hope will come onto. There's also, you know, significant parts of the book dedicated specifically to Taiwan, which you've already raised and, and, you know, I think as a place that sits in opposition to that Maoist kind of paradigm also an awful lot to say about this broader picture. But you begin in chapter one with somewhere that isn't either of those places, I guess, or somewhere that sits under that still colonial kind of colonial domination and control by Britain, namely Hong Kong. So, how does this location tell us something about this idea, which you've already alluded to, circuits, circulation of musical styles and genres, and your focus here is on the personage of Grace Chan in particular. So, why is she significant and how does this help us understand this notion of circuits, which yeah, you've already brought up. So, I think the, the genesis of that particular notion about circuit listening actually arose out of my grappling with Grace Chan's music. And, I mean, one thing I can say about the book in general is each of the chapters really started with my encounter with an LP record or vinyl record. So, in this case, I had found a capital records release of Grace Chan's music that was, you know, put out in the United States as part of a kind of world music before we had the phrase world music series that capital music was doing. Several records coincidentally, but I think significantly was also the company in the US that promoted the Beatles or created the Beatles boom in the US. So, they did Grace Chan record. I should ask you, the cover of the book actually very beautiful and striking has these record covers on it. Are these, are these from your personal collection or are these other covers that feature on the book itself? Most of them are from a personal collection, yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. It's very, very striking. And some of the colored plates in the center of the book are also, yeah, personal collection or records that were particularly significant in, you know, surveying the musical terrain of the period. Right. So, Grace Chan is really interesting. She kind of is a remnant in some sense or a inheritor of the Shanghai modern songs or should I true tradition of, you know, modern pop music from the. 20s, 30s and 40s and then she was born in that region. I believe in Nenjing and then emigrated to Hong Kong after the, or maybe just before the communist revolution in 49. So, she carried on the torch of an earlier tradition of Shanghai popular music. But when you listen to that record, the capital music, capital records, some. Hong Kong's Grace Chan record. I found it really interesting because the traces of that earlier idiom of kind of jazz inflected Chinese Mandarin pop songs from the 30s and 40s. But also very conspicuously there's mumble music and Grace Chan kind of made a name for herself as the mumble girl in Hong Kong cinema. There were colipso songs and various other sorts of, you know, Hollywood inflected, so tuned style kind of music. And I was thinking Hong Kong's Grace Chan, but musically this is a real. You know, strange mix of styles and genres, and I was especially struck by the presence of mumble and colipso. So how is it that Afro Caribbean music becomes so important to Hong Kong's Grace Chan. So the idea hit upon us to kind of try to map that record. And to realize that Grace Chan couldn't really be captured by or encapsulated by Hong Kong itself or to put it in the obvious way, maybe Hong Kong itself is a space of movement or circulation or a node of circulation between really radically far from musical styles and ideologies. So if this star who represents Hong Kong is also the mumble girl, the colipso girl, also an avatar, Shanghai popular music, which itself was influenced by Hawaiian music and jazz as well as local Chinese folk tunes. And then how do we kind of understand her is representing a singular place. We can't really see represents a network or a node of a network of global musical circulations. So that's kind of the one of the directions or trajectories that I was launched on by by Grace Chan and her wonderful, her wonderful singing voice as well as her role in Hong Kong cinema, especially Hong Kong musical cinema at that time, which had its own network of distribution across Southeast Asia and the Chinese diaspora. And she sings in Mandarin as well, which you notice significant. What is sort of important about that in the Hong Kong context and then in that sort of broader world within which her productions circulated. Right. So since the 19 20s and 30s Hong Kong of course had its own Cantonese language film industry and pop music industry. But after the revolution and the kind of widespread immigration of capital expertise and media companies from Shanghai to Hong Kong in the 1950s, the kind of Mandarin film industry and a Mandarin pop music industry springs up and become really dominant. In Hong Kong space and also uses that vision of a national language and coherent national Chinese identity to project outwards to the Chinese diaspora as well. So the height of that is companies like NP and GI, which was a Singapore based kind of movie making conglomerate as well as the shop brothers, which is of course a very famous film studio on the kind of Hollywood model that flourished in Hong Kong in the 60s and both of them relied on Mandarin as a kind of lingua franca. And I think actually probably a lot of the executives and filmmakers and creatives involved in that industry were very much shaped by a notion of projecting a unified Chinese national language and identity out to the world. Even out into a space it was still and remains of course now fractured by linguistic difference even in the so-called sign of the world right. So yeah, Mandarin at that moment did become a very powerful passport to move across national borders or to create a unifying voice across a fractured to a political landscape. And Grace Chang was very much part of that and relied on that for her musical identity. Right, and I think you convey very well that sort of almost paradoxical relationship between that effort to to to unify to kind of forge some sort of coherent cultural, you know, if not political space whilst also, you know, with using a product or that is of an extremely heterogeneous musical form or selection of musical forms as well as, you know, cinematic output and stuff which I should say, you know, you play extremely close attention to in the book itself so the way that you marry together this sort of textual attention to the actual music, the listening, you talk a lot about your work as an act of listening, I think that certainly holds up as something which is very close to the ground and yet also, yeah, attuned. If that's not too weak upon to the broader currents of circulation and geopolitics. I think that's right in the chapter on Grace Chang, I talk a lot about a film called Air Hostess, Condom Xiaojia from 1959, which is kind of a vehicle as it were an aviation vehicle for for Grace Chang's own popularity. But it also traces very closely the network, the business network or the business infrastructure for both the MP and GI, the film company that made the film as well as pathway records. It was by then based in Hong Kong that was projecting the music for the film out to its markets and they visit precisely the places that are markets for the film and for the film. Grace Chang's music, which would be Bangkok Singapore, Taiwan. So this air hostess that is played by Grace Chang visits and kind of replicates and reproduces and promotes her own fame throughout the film. And the songs themselves, well, there's again, Colipso, Nambo, and a variety of different styles, but they are all sort of assimilated to this task of projecting a project, a product, as well as I think a project of an ideology of free China, as opposed to China. Free China is a space of commerce and capitalism. Right, which suits that, I guess, Southeast Asian maritime world quite well too. But from there you move on to the red China, as we write, call it, and more red music, if you like. The space from which Grace Chang left to go to Hong Kong. And you take us into what, at least as you say, as we've already mentioned briefly, seems like an extremely different kind of cultural and social space. So could you talk about the particular songs that you chose to focus on here, these quotation songs, these songs that lift directly from the little red book and mouse kind of quotations and why it is that those are helpful in understanding this alternative circuit, I suppose, that existed in the mainland during this period. Yeah, so this was also a case where finding a used record and a record chart here in Berkeley kind of launched a chapter. I came across a 10 inch vinyl record of German malcoation songs. Of course I was aware of Malice music and the red song tradition. That seems like a very, it seems like a very Berkeley record shop find. I don't know where else he would come across that in a used record store. Yeah, Berkeley is actually a very good place for great digging because there are a lot of radicals and student radicals here in the 60s. Those records are pretty easy to find here as well as record of pirate records that circulated from Taiwan and were bought by US GIs, military men in Taiwan who brought them back here because this was a port of embarkation and debarcation for soldiers in Vietnam. So yeah, a lot of the kind of material base for the book came from record stores here. So a shout out to Amoeba Records on Telegraph Avenue that really helped the project along. That particular record of quotation songs just, part of me was appalled by it because the songs are really shrill and really loud and really deeply kind of insanely repetitive. And to my ear, they were very grating. And yet after one listen, I was hooked. They're unbelievably effective earworms. You just cannot get them out of your head. Right? And after listening for a while, one, I started to ask myself, why do these records sound this way? Why are they so candid up towards the mid-range and upper mid-range? Why are there so squeaky, why is there no base? But also by the same token, why are they so formally brilliant as pop songs? Like, I'd never heard songs that could stick so well in my head. And of course, part of the answer is that their songs reduced to the sort of degree zero of songiness. This, they are all chorus and nothing else. You'll take a quotation from the little red book and repeat it at Infinite Item for about a minute and a half. Wedded to a pretty catchy little melody, and that's it. Then it's over. And then it repeats. Or, you know, rinse and repeat and replay. So yeah, I started to kind of do some deeper into research into how these songs came about. And they were indeed part of a political campaign to promote the little red book that had been begun by Lin Biao, Chairman Malz-Wright Han Man and at the time, the head of the PLA, to kind of set the quotations in the little red book or the quotations from Chairman Malz-Wright Han, to music methodically from number one, the first quotation all the way through. But one thing that happened is that these songs really started to catch on, especially among red guards, and they became popular as songs to perform and re-perform with groups of friends, either, you know, with accordion accompaniment or just simply sound quarterly. And between 1966 and 1969, they were really quite ubiquitous across the Chinese soundscape. And partly because they're so catchy, but of course also they expressed the tenor and something of the political sense of emergency and of passion that were prevalent in that period. Right. So it was fascinating and interesting to also get a hand on why they sound it the way they did in recorded versions. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that they were being engineered to sound good or to travel well over the kind of outdoor, very somewhat rudimentary loud speaker network that was part of the Chinese media escape at that time. So those speakers really couldn't accommodate bass at all. They're quite loud. They're engineered to, so that the sound could travel well. And basically that tinny or high pitched, often kind of overdriven, grainy quality of the sound actually is a kind of product of or an artifact of the media system through which it was disseminated and broadcast. So yeah, that's kind of an example I suppose of using listening or close listening as a way to grapple with how the media system was set up or what the technological basis of the media system was. So those things leave their traces on the music itself. Absolutely. Yeah, so we've got, there's a kind of social dimension there which wedge the presence of a certain kind of music to a certain kind of, I guess, countercultural or revolutionary movement. If we're looking for parallels there with global 1960s phenomena, I suppose that that marriage of these little ditties or tunes with red guard activity is one area, but exactly as you say, another is this, exactly this technological kind of aspect to why it is that music ends up sounding like it does. And so one of the sort of, I guess, purposes of this or one of the kind of extraordinary achievements in a way which I think mirrors a sort of Chinese communist party achievement was reaching, you know, the Chinese peasantry probably, you know, more deeply, more extensively than any government ever in history of China had. And by, you know, I guess, wiring up village loudspeakers, that there was a kind of level of penetration there that was quite extraordinary. But you've already mentioned that this was a kind of two-way relationship in some respects between, you know, the countryside in this broader frame and and the urban, the urbanizing spaces. So where did the tunes, I mean, you mentioned in the introduction about Dong Fang Hong, the original tune for that Easter's Red Song is a shambay, right? They're kind of up on the North China Plain kind of folk song. So where were the actual tunes for these quotation songs sourced from? Do you have much sense of that? Yeah, so that's a great question. Many of them were composed by sort of party musicians or people in the kind of upper echelons of the music musical enterprise of the communist regime. But as you just brought up and implied, their basis was often in folk music. So Dong Fang Hong quite famously was a sort of the product of a long evolution and long kind of upgrading or cultivation of a shambay folk song. And that's also the case with a lot of the quotation songs that they, as it were quoted from earlier folk melodies, cut them down to size, made them intensely repetitive, and then married them to terminate their own words. Occasionally, there were funny and interesting emendations. Apparently, the composers who were involved were enjoying, for instance, to always use high pitches for certain, certain keywords like Communist Party. So that changed the melody sometimes. And often they tried to adapt the melodies to the prosody of Chairman Mao's own words. So for instance, if the quotation used Kiasmus, a kind of rhetorical reversal, then the melody itself would mirror that shape. So if it's pitch distribution, it's very fun actually to- That's amazing, yeah. It's really interesting to look at the songs themselves and look at the notation and how the pitches are distributed. But yeah, a lot of the materials based on folk music, and later on in 1969, when Jung Xing termed "Mouse of Wife" sort of gained the upper hand along with the gang of four as part of the gang of four. She eventually became disillusioned with this form of music because she felt it was too kinetic. That is, it promoted dancing, and dancing for her was tantamount to the kind of swing dancing she would have known in the 1930s back in Shanghai. And she was also bothered that the music was a little bit too foxy. She, as well known, had interests in other forms, such as ballet. So in 1969, this particular genre of quotation songs was prescribed and banned and remains there for the rest of the culture revolution period. But I suppose nevertheless, what it represents is still a pretty tight marriage of central priorities or urban elite production, and the world of the peasantry, the kind of wider Chinese countryside, the formalism of that relationship is still quite tight, I think, relative to the dynamics you describe in the following three chapters, Richard take us to Taiwan, where I guess at least at the time at least a different kind of chaos and flux is a foot with regard to the sort of broader Taiwan music scene. So, and I should say as well, I sense, you know, actually for the chapter of affection and deep involvement with Taiwan, which I think I gather goes back a fair way with you, with personal relationships, with the various musical figures there too. So that's also very kind of, you know, very convincing and powerful components of this section of the book. But yes, you take us first into this genre of Taiwanese musical cinema, and particularly a musical called "Goodbye Taipei" starring an actor Wen Xia. Could you tell us about this musical and its action and its audience, and I guess, you know, relating it to these questions of, I guess, town and country or, you know, globalization and the shifting kind of political currents to what that, what light that sheds on what was going on in Taiwan sort of roughly at this period? Yeah, absolutely. So it's true that I think in some ways the heart of the book or the core of the book are a series of chapters on Taiwan music. For a number of reasons, I think one, since the book is very deeply concerned with transistor technology, Taiwan's a great test case. It actually became one of the world's leading manufacturers of transistorized electronics in the late 1960s. So both materially and in terms of its kind of musical culture, it reflects that the themes of the book well. It's also a place it went through, as we all know, a radical economic takeoff in the 60s that was based on rural to urban migration and rapid industrialization. So all these convulsive changes are reflected in the music. And Wen Sha, who was one of the great stars of so-called Taiwanese, musical cinema as well as pop music, is a wonderful example of all of that. He's from Taiwan, Southern Taiwan. And his persona, at least in his films, was of a rural or a southern Taiwanese wonder, Liu Long-han, who tries to move from the countryside to the city and make it big in a place like Tai Bay. And a lot of the culture in Taiwanese, which was the local majority language, which was very actively suppressed and marginalized by the KMT or nationalist government in favor of Mandarin. So this kind of marginalized majority culture that was represented by Wen Sha is very much portrayed in this wonderful film, "Side-Dand Tai Bay," or "Goodbye Tai Bay" from 1969, which features Wen Sha and his sidekick, kind of walking down a country road and walking right into Tai Bay and then having a series of kind of pick-resk adventures. They're all accompanied by some of Wen Sha's originals as well as his covers of then globally circulating pop music, both from Japan as well as from the West. So you have like, you know, blue tears, psychedelia, or covers of the Beatles, but also covers of really interesting gender-bending Japanese pop songs from the period. And one thing that interests me about this whole milieu is that for the Taiwanese music and cinema of the period, which was really undercapitalized, these are black and white films. They often have a kind of slapstick, low-budget charm to them. But their cultural reference points are very, very different, I think, from either the mainstream Mandarin culture that was circulating through the Chinese diaspora at this time, or from, you know, of course, mainland Chinese Maoist culture. And that point of reference was really strongly Japanese. And of course, this is a remnant of the suppress, but still really rather vital connection that Taiwan had to Japan after 50 years of colonialism. So Wen Shan, a lot of his colleagues in the Taiwanese music scene, like Hongi Fong, were known for taking Japanese melodies, pop melodies, and then adapting them with Taiwanese lyrics. And this sort of music was often called "Hodushia Gochuu" or "Mix Blood Music." Yeah, so in a way, I would say that Wen Shan, his case, you know, beyond the fact that the film is delightful and his music is wonderful, also helped to situate Taiwan in a very different kind of linguistic, ideological, and historical circuit. And that's part of what interested me here, that within the same historical period, even in a film that kind of quotes the Beatles or quotes Blutier or quotes Otis Redding, you still have an incredibly distinctive and quite disparate cultural formation, but emerges beautifully in the music. Yeah, and you have some really touching reflections on that by a figure that I think will come back to you in a second, Xu Changhui, kind of prominent, I guess, a critic and scholar of Chinese music. If I've understood correctly, in the appendix to the book, a sort of almost psychogiographical or musical psychogiographical exploration of Taipei at this time, where he's walking around and hearing some of these, as you put it, these Hunshui, these sort of Taiwanese language, but Japanese clones or music kind of borrowed from Japan as well as Japanese originals, as well as some of these sort of Beatles and other Western music. I think he's sort of amusingly appalled by all of it in the appendix, which he recludes. But I think you document very well there that kind of very different sort of milieu set of influences and things that feed into the Taiwanese music scene as embodied by Wenxia. But I guess, yeah, on the kind of broader scale, you've mentioned already there that the significance of Taiwan is this place where transistors is a key industry and where embedded in certain circulations, technological circulations is important. You mentioned that vinyl becomes a kind of key, I guess, a pirated vinyl becomes a key industry if not, if not, I guess, promoted by the government, but it becomes something that is very significant to the way that music moves around this region at the time. So could you say something a little bit about why it was that Taiwan became this center, this ontropo of records and pirate production of music? Yeah, so this, in some sense, I suppose, in the book, I framed this pirate music industry or the vinyl industry in Taiwan as part of a military circuit. And I think not only in my book, but in work by other scholars looking at, say, South Korea in particular, we see that the presence of US military bases, especially in the 1960s, that really starting from the Korean War as well, became a driver of the importation and the sort of jumping or the leap of Anglo-American pop music into East Asian media circuits. So one of the condos for that was the US Armed Forces Radio that brought the Billboard top 40 sounds of the US into East Asian airspace. But another really important driver that I have a chapter about was pirate records. Pire records and also pirate books at the time in Taiwan were really driven by huge declivity between the poverty, the still pretty serious poverty of Taiwan and the wealth of the United States. So if you wanted to say even by a record by Beethoven, let alone the Beatles, it would cost anywhere from 10 to 50 times as much. if you got the official copy imported from the US. So what's brought up in particular in response to the very large population of US service people and administrators and military men in Taiwan was local pressings of imported records that were then sold around the military bases. But what happens is that initial pirate industry selling to US servicemen mostly starts to scale up and starts to find an audience, especially among young people in a city like Taipei in the around the Dongtan Road area where there were a lot of US military installations but also a lot of kind of hipster bars and cafes. It becomes a kind of a subculture whereby young people get turned on to what's called real money or hip music or hot music, however you want to translate it through these pirate records. And by the late '60s and early '70s, this was a pretty big industry and it was of course, loud and copyright conventions are tacitly allowed to do so. But it started to also be an export industry whereby Taiwan was exporting records to Hong Kong throughout Southeast Asia. A lot of these records are coming back to the US, as I mentioned before, as a harassment by them there and then take them back. You can still come across them a lot in the US because there are hundreds of thousands of records produced. And I look at the industry in the chapter and it has pretty interesting roots. Some of the expertise that went into making vinyl locally in Taiwan actually came from people have been trained in mining and with making bakelite out of mining tailings under Japanese colonialism and then parlay that into this new kind of media industry in the '60s and '70s. And what's also quite fascinating about it is that I do a kind of case study of one company called D. Tong Tian Gong Su, the first records which was the kind of major pirate company. And the money they made in pirate records in the '60s and '70s and then into the early '80s when the industry kind of tails off as copyrights are applied is then, I don't want to say laundry, but that's essentially what happens. Money is then reinvested in optical media and the same company that was a pirate record company in the '60s and '70s becomes the world's largest producer of CD-ROMs and CDs in the 1990s and early 2000s before that industry as well goes away because of the internet and digitalization. So yeah, it's kind of an interesting industrial story but it's also really compelling, I think, cultural and musical story because pirate records especially enabled the influx of music like rock and roll but also things like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez into Taiwanese campus life and our direct generator of one of the major genres that emerges out of Taiwan in the '70s and '80s which is campus folk. The folk also generates the emergence of a legitimate local pop music industry in Taiwan that produces su rei and all the teaching and all the kind of great pop rock singers so then take the mainland by storm once the cassette industry gears up in the 1980s after reform and opening. So there's kind of a direct brow between US military bases, pirate records, the later sort of anti-colonial campus folk and then finally the conquering of the mainland by Taiwanese pop music. Yeah, and I think that's another reason why I had to focus a lot on Taiwan in this book because Taiwan has had a hugely outsized role also in mainland musical history and of course Theresa Tang or Dung Lee doing this the great sort of avatar of that history. Absolutely, yeah, and I mean in some ways it's extraordinary to think of anything much surviving this kind of onslaught of militarized and industrialized sort of processes that unfold around this whole region over the period you've been talking about even stretching beyond the 1960s, your description of that when Sha musical film goodbye Taipei is exactly a sort of monument to something which is going because that was the his last Taiwani's language film. And equally as you said, there's a kind of huge complex of things that are driving these changes towards urbanization and towards of course the influx as you've said of global currents of I guess western pop music and you know, then spawning folk and so on. You do document really fascinating and important case too though of sort of indigenous folk revival in the persona of Chanda, this folk musician who I think you suggest has sort of came to prominence as a result of a meeting with Shu Changhui person who wrote the author of the appendix that you include. Perhaps we don't have time to delve into that too deeply but I'd say just to reinforce what you've said about sort of extraordinary kind of multiplicity of influences on Taiwani's music and then the outward sort of profusion of it into Chinese language pop space is really reinforced still further by talk by discussion of that sort of native Taiwanese musical tradition. But we might move on then finally to figure you've already alluded to here to Rizateng, a figure perhaps best known, I don't know if this is true but among most of the stars that you or the persona that you focus on maybe the most famous I don't know. What does her kind of emergence, it's exactly this period you've just mentioned there when the sort of air waves are open and Taiwani's music can sort of cross the straits and land in what we've already suggested is a very different sort of musical, technological and of course geopolitical realm. What does that sort of process tell us about about the P.R.C. and Taiwani's music and this broader question of connections across this era? Right, so Tui Satang and Taini is done these during really is a pivotal figure and I think she is very much the best known or most iconic figure that the book tries to understand better, understand in a new light. And in some ways her emergence in the late 1960s does have a dialectical and quite melancholy relationship with people like Wen Sha or Tendah, the great Taiwanese folk, troubadour. Because as her star rises, it's rising through the kind of expansion of the television industry and of consumer electronics in Taiwan. And that rise of color TV and Mandarin language media really puts paid to an ends the career of Wen Sha in that period. So Taiwiri, cinema is basically destroyed by the rise of television in the early 70s and a really distinctive local folk musician like Tendah just doesn't really travel across the gating mechanism that's created by TV and modern media. But at the same time, you have a new ascended Mandarin pop music that's really represented by, definitely during in her Mandarin songs. So in the context of Taiwan, she represents a new mobility and a new kind of Mandarin elite in the popular culture space. What's really distinctive about her story, of course, is she's also the figure who brings Mandarin pop music in the Shanghai tradition or the pre-revolutionary tradition back into mainland China. And as is well known, this happens really not only because of her personal magnetism or her skills as a performer, but really because of a changing media landscape. So I analyze her and her music not so much in terms of her persona, but in terms of her status as a domestic appliance that is once people get personal domestic access to cassette radio players and in their homes, the entire status and situation of listening changes radically. And with that comes cassettes of her music coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan. And with that comes a new kind of attention to the voice and especially to her female voice and to a different kind of soundscape that wasn't really available in the era of communal, loudspeaker listening that we alluded to earlier in the conversation. So she has a kind of media effect, she really transforms listening and transforms the soundscape, high-volt soundscapes of ordinary, tiny citizens starting in the 1970s. First through what's called a team detail or listening to enemy radio and then through the kind of cassette revolution that brings a certain new agency of listening to mainland Chinese music fans. So the last chapter in the book kind of traces another interesting dialectic because Deng Li Dui was from a military a KMT military family and she was often called upon as a voice of Taiwan or Republic of China propaganda. In fact on at least two occasions she went to Jinhuan, the island of Jinhuan and broadcast on these like high volume military loudspeaker installations across the straits to the Futean coast. But what I argue is that those kinds of military networks, fixed military networks were really feeble compared to the more capillary, more thoroughgoing transformation of the media environment that was created by cassettes and cassette players as they you know become widespread and easily available in China and it's really through that medium that her voice actually travels not only across the six miles between Jinhuan and the coast of the Shaman coast in Fultian but deep deep deep into the Chinese countryside and and you know widely disseminated through Chinese cities and that really takes place in the late 70s and early 80s and then opens up again the mainland Chinese market to what we're called in China, Guang Tai, go through or you know Hong Kong and Taiwan pop. And we might wonder I suppose whether the audiences were particularly attuned to these particularities of voice that you mentioned by the fact that their sort of previous to that their listening experiences had been also through you know very kind of oral only or oral only medium you know this kind of authorless broadcasting of of some of the red songs that you all and their quotation songs that you mentioned you mentioned that you know for her early sort of career in China if you call it a career but her appearance in China was as a as a voice not as a people didn't know what she looked like they heard. They're hard but not seen. Yeah but this really fascinates me that those are kind of um spectral quality to her voice in China especially first when people really would tune in surreptitiously to listen to her voice and what we find in accounts of that early and intense close listening to her voice you know in private in you know with the curtains drawn and and often with the sound very low so that you had to kind of put your ear next to the radio or maybe use an earpiece to listen because it was still forbidden to do so. We actually hear a really intense attention to timbre to the tonal quality of her voice and it stands in such powerful contrasts of the kinds of timbres and the kind of tonal qualities that were prevalent in revolutionary music and I think that that that's part an interesting part of the story is um um the way the situation of listening kind of spurs people to close listening and they're kind of emotionally abusive kind of listening in that transition between media regimes. Right and it's for that reason that I think for all that people wouldn't necessarily want to be called an appliance or an energy and acoustic effect as you put it in the book I think it makes that a way of understanding the figure of Thuita Teng or Dung Lee-Jun very persuasive because of exactly the background you trace and I think adds to this convincing portrayal of this era as one which well wherein it is as important to consider the kind of the connections the coherence as well as the as well as the disjunctures and the decuities all of which you've documented extremely well here um but Andrew um we've had a good chat here and I have to say this plenty more in the book that we haven't covered so of course I'd urge listeners to get out and get hold of a copy in order to delve deeper into all of these topics um but before we close up completely I'd ask you where your uh kind of years or or any other I guess senses have taken you and what your next projects have been after this book. Well currently it seems that I've stumbled into perhaps writing a new book about to make in popular music that relies perhaps in part on the methodologies or the trains of thought that I developed in circuit listening um so I've already written a couple essays about the development of reggae um and part of the point of entry which may interest listeners to this podcast is um the really quite remarkable role that Haka Chinese migrants to Jamaica played in the production and even the aesthetic development of that um you know really powerful half-row Jamaican musical form so that's one project I'm working on musically and beyond that well I just continue to um write about modern Chinese literary topics and work on literary translations some of my favorite uh Chinese stylists fantastic fantastic well uh yeah I think we'll look forward to to tuning in uh indeed to those uh there's other there's other future projects um and and I think if there's one thing you've shown here it's that um it's hard to understand any of these uh musical sort of trajectories or histories in isolation so um certainly people I think should be interested in reaching out to Jamaica and beyond um thank you very much Andrew though uh it's been wonderful talking to you today and I'm really grateful for you appearing on the show thank you so much it was a pleasure listeners thank you too as ever for listening to new books in East Asian studies it's a podcast on the new books network and it will be back with you again very soon goodbye