From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular music, considering not just singers and musicians but their fans as well, showing how the music was intrinsically bound up with modern life and the societal changes that came with it. Reaching new audiences across national borders, popular music of the period helped push social change, and at times served as a medium for expressions of social or political discontent.

Popular Music in East and Southeast Asia: Sonic (under)Currents and Currencies presents contemporary perspectives of the music discipline in East and Southeast Asia. It considers global influences, national industries, and regional genres with examples from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. This book contains local perspectives on the conceptualisation of music genres, scenes, and industries, offering a comprehensive inter-Asia matrix for popular music studies. This book is suitable for educators and music enthusiasts.

The rock era is over, according to one pop music expert. Another laments that rock music is "metamorphosed into the musical wallpaper of ten thousand lifts, hotel foyers, shopping centers, airport lounges, and television advertisements that await us in the 1990s." Whatever its current role and significance in Anglo-American society, popular music has been and remains a tremendous social and cultural force in many parts of the world. This book explores the connections between popular music genres and politics in Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Birgit Abels is a cultural musicologist with a primary specialization in the music of the Pacific and Southeast Asian islands. --

The Garland Handbook of Southeast Asian Music is comprised of essays from The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: Volume 4, Southeast Asia (1998). Largely revised and updated, the essays offer detailed, regional studies of the different musical cultures of Southeast Asia and examine the ways in which music helps to define the identity of this particular area. Part one provides an in-depth introduction to the area of Southeast Asia and explores a series of issues and processes, such as colonialism, mass media, spirituality, and war. The articles in this section are important in gaining historical, political, and social perspective. Part two focuses on mainland Southeast Asia, with essays representing Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Peninsular Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, and the minority peoples of mainland Southeast Asia. Part three focuses on island Southeast Asia, dividing the area into three sections: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Borneo. In addition to offering a detailed study of the music of each area, it also offers recent perspectives on the gamelan and theater traditions of Indonesia. Questions for Critical Thinking at the end of each major section guide and focus attention on what issues – musical and cultural – arise when one studies the music of Southeast Asia – issues that might not occur in the study of other musics of the world. An accompanying compact disc offers musical examples from Southeast Asia.

This wide-ranging volume is the first to examine the characteristics, dynamics and wider implications of recently emerging regional production, dissemination, marketing and consumption systems of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia. Using tools based in a variety of disciplines - organizational analysis and sociology, cultural and media studies, and political science and history - it elucidates the underlying cultural economics and the processes of region-wide appropriation of cultural formulas and styles. Through discussions of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Philippine and Indonesian culture industries, the authors in the book describe a major shift in Asia's popular culture markets toward arrangements that transcend autonomous national economies by organizing and locating production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods on a regional scale. Specifically, the authors deal with patterns of co-production and collaboration in the making and marketing of cultural commodities such as movies, music, comics, and animation. The book uses case studies to explore the production and exploitation of cultural imaginaries within the context of intensive regional circulation of cultural commodities and images. Drawing on empirically-based accounts of co-production and collaboration in East and Southeast Asia's popular culture, it adopts a regional framework to analyze the complex interrelationships among cultural industries. This focus on a regional economy of transcultural production provides an important corrective to the limitations of previous studies that consider cultural products as text and use them to investigate the "meaning" of popular culture.