Popular Music of Vietnam: The Politics of Remembering, the Economics of Forgetting (review)

Current Vietnamese popular music has hitherto received little attention from scholars and this publication represents the first book- length study on the subject. Using the term popular music “in a general sense to incorporate all of the music genres loved by Vietnam’s youth between 1990 and 2005” (3), Olsen argues that through memory politics, events such as the American/Vietnam War and the subsequent unification of Vietnam in 1975, along with đi m i, the “renovation period” from 1986 when the Vietnamese government introduced a market economy system, and President Clinton’s lifting of the trade embargo in 1994, “all subconsciously influence, affect, and drive the musical expressions and preferences of Vietnam’s young people and the Vietnamese music industry” (2). This creates a dichotomy between the politics of remembering, or, conscious references to and remembrance of Vietnam’s turbulent past, and the economics of forgetting, which refers to the use of music as an agent to look toward a brighter and more prosperous future, that is returned to throughout as evidence supporting his argument.

The book is organized into ten chapters. The first, a “Prelude,” introduces the research. Chapter 2 provides necessary historical, cultural, and political background to the music. Chapter 3, “Vietnamese Pop Music Stars and the Bumpy Road to Stardom,” focuses on the main female and male pop stars of the period with brief biographical sketches of each. Similarly, Chapter 4 provides an outline of the era’s most famous rock, pop- rock, and pop music bands. Songwriters and their attempts at enhancing awareness and understanding of issues such as drug use, the handicapped, and HIV/AIDS are the subjects of Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, performance venues for small- scale concerts are discussed. Chapter 7, “Disseminating Popular Music: Pop and Rock Music Concerts, Festivals, and Shows,” examines larger performance events. This is followed, in Chapter 8, by a discussion of the dissemination of audio and visual recordings, including issues of copyright and piracy. Karaoke establishments are dealt with in Chapter 9. Finally, Chapter 10 summarizes and concludes with some considerations for the future of popular music in Vietnam. There are no accompanying recordings due to copyright restrictions but, although not referred to in the book, readers can legally access recordings by most of the musicians and composers discussed on websites such as MySpace and YouTube.

Throughout the work, Olsen includes a number of insightful excerpts from his and his students’ field notes that serve as cultural translations for a foreign readership. The following illustrative example, written by Olsen, is from a concert at the Youth Culture House in Ho Chi Minh City:

Most of the audience seems to be made up of teenagers, although there are some people in their 20s. I’m certainly the only foreigner here. . . . Two hosts (a young man and a young woman) have appeared and the concert is beginning with a dance/singing group of twelve young people in blue and white clothes. The music track is prerecorded and the singers are lip- synching. Next two girls are singing, and it’s really loud—thank goodness I have some tissue paper to wad up and stick in my ears. Now a boy in a black suit dances with a school girl, accompanied by boy dancers in white pants and shirts with red ties—this is the cuteness factor, but for boys! The audience hardly claps at all.

(178)

In addition to these field notes, other sources include: interviews with some of the musicians in question, conducted either in English or in Vietnamese with a translator; excerpts from the Việt Nam News (a national government- run daily newspaper); analysis of audio and video recordings; and analysis of Vietnamese song texts translated into English.

In Chapter 1 Olsen proposes a theoretical framework entitled the “Popular Music Continuum (and Arc of Culturation)” (8...