Introduction: Popular Music in Changing Asia

This special issue of Asian Music is motivated by a need for both teaching and research sources on Asian Popular Music in a single volume. Since embarking on my own journey in the study of Japanese popular music over a decade ago, popular music studies in general have exploded, with increasing interest in popular musics throughout Asia keeping pace. Courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels dealing with popular music theory, histories of popular music throughout the world, or specific genres and their related artists are now standard form. Though studies of North American and Northern European popular musics have long dominated academics, students and researchers alike are increasingly looking to Asia for rich topics of study.

Over the past decade, for example, Asian Music has offered a regular spattering of articles on popular musics of Asia. Ethnomusicology has had increasing numbers of articles on popular music in general, including on Asian forms, and both the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Popular Music and Society regularly feature articles on topics related to Asia, though no single volume has been devoted to Asian popular music in any of these journals to date. Several general introductory texts to Asian popular music, however, are readily available.

The Rough Guide to World Music Volume 2: Latin and North America, Caribbean, India, Asia and Pacific (2000) has long been a standard introductory reference to Asian popular musics, though not theoretical in its focus. The new Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume V Asia and Oceania (2005) offers a fairly exhaustive introduction to extensive regions and their respective popular musics throughout Asia and Oceania in a single work. And Stan Jeffries' Encyclopedia of World Pop Music 1980–2001 (2003) features biographies of significant bands and solo artists from around the world, including several popular artists in Asia—from Chinese rocker Cui Jian to the Thai trio, Bazoo. The coverage is by no means exhaustive, but it is valuable to see popular artists from North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and Asia receiving equal consideration in a single text—though the historical and cultural contextualization is at a minimum. There are, of course, several additional overviews of popular music and/or popular culture within more specific cultural areas of Asia (Chun, Rossiter, and Shoesmith 2004; Craig 2000; Howard 2006; Lockard 1998), though many more cultural areas could be covered in these types of concentrated monographs and edited volumes. All these sources are valuable in their own way for presenting the breadth of popular musics and unique cultural contexts throughout Asia.

Literature on popular music of the world has clearly expanded greatly since Peter Manuel's Popular Musics of the Non–Western World (1988), though there are still many areas of research to pursue. And if the number of recent and forth-coming Ph.D. dissertations and increasing conference papers on Asian popular musics delivered at recent meetings of the Society of Ethnomusicology or the International Association for the Study of Popular Music are any indication, the numbers of publications in journals and monograph form on a wide variety of topics in Asian popular music are likely to increase in the coming years.

These articles hope to speak to this growing interest in popular music of Asia by covering a breadth of geographical and cultural areas, while offering significant theoretical contributions to the study of popular music in general. Though the call for articles was open, in terms of theoretical focus, certain topics ultimately "fit" better with the authors' shared understanding of popular music. Though no single definition of popular music can or should be offered, as the editors of the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World remind us that "the terms 'popular,' 'classical,' and 'folk' are discursive in character, and changing products of historical, social, political and cultural forces rather than terms that designate easily distinguishable musics" (Shepherd, Horn, Laing, Oliver, and Wicke 2003, viii). Yet the articles here, in general, address musics that are mass produced and mass consumed, typically in a western vernacular, or a hybrid of western style and localized music as...