Music at the Borders: Not Drowning, Waving and Their Engagement with Papua New Guinean Culture (1986-96), and: Sound Alliances: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Politics and Popular Music in the Pacific (review)

Music at the Borders: Not Drowning, Waving and Their Engagement with Papua New Guinean Culture (1986-96), by Philip Hayward. Sydney: John Libbey, 1998. ISBN 1-86462-012-9; vii + 216 pages, photographs, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, A$29.95.

Sound Alliances: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Politics and Popular Music in the Pacific, edited by Philip Hayward. London and New York: Cassell, 1998. ISBN 0-304-70055-X, cloth; 0-304-70050-9, paper; x + 220 pages, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, discographies, index. Cloth, US$79.50; paper, US$21.95.

Throughout the 1990s, Philip Hayward has been the driving force behind popular music studies in Australia, founding Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture in 1992, continuing to edit that journal until 1998, the year in which the Centre for Contemporary Music Studies (at Macquarie University, Sydney) was established under his directorship. These two publications--the first the result of Hayward's own PhD research, and the second an anthology of significant publications from the first five years of Perfect Beat--are, together, a significant milestone and achievement. Hayward's scholarship elegantly combines the (often divergent, if not mutually exclusive) ethnographic and musicological streams of contemporary music studies to create a convincing, sophisticated and eminently readable postcolonial analysis of the engagement of the Melbourne band Not Drowning, Waving with Papua Guinean culture. As well, these volumes mark the vigor and rigorousness of the burgeoning popular music studies scene in Australia.

The Sound Alliances anthology (and indeed, the Perfect Beat project in total), as Hayward observes in the collection's introduction, responds to the limits of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music's supposedly global purview: the association's graphics, circulated in 1993, depicted the (musical) world as "two spheres, overlapping around the mid-Atlantic," from which the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia had been "[f]illeted out" (3). Seeking to redress this marginalization, Sound Alliances makes no claim to "overarching hypothesis about the complex interaction of Western, (post)colonial cultures and indigenous peoples," instead bringing together thematically linked contributions to the early phase of an ongoing research project: that of "mapping diversity and documenting and/or reconstructing a largely unrecorded history" (5-6). Similarly, Hayward positions his own book as "a corrective to perceptions processed through the lens of the North Atlantic" (199).

It would not be fair to single out any particular contribution to Sound Alliances for comment: the strength of the collection lies in the layering up of a sense of a community of inquiry, and the fostering of an intertextual head of steam, grounded in a set of empirical, rather than theoretical, concerns. The first section of the book comprises a series of historical analyses of particular music cultures, with a focus on the role of music in the construction, retrieval, and certainly maintenance of cultural identities, from Koori music in Melbourne to Kanaké music in New Caledonia, to surveys of Hawaiian popular musics. The second contextualizes this historiographic project within the field of music as an industry, weighing the tensions between the articulation of indigenous identities and the syncretizing (if not colonializing) vicissitudes of global commercial, media, and cultural flows. The four concluding contributions are organized as a case study of the Australian Aboriginal rock group Yothu Yindi. Taken together, these essays lay out a field of research that will both benefit from the directions indicated by this substantial empirical groundwork, and, over time, build more sophisticated theoretical and methodological models with which to address the exchange of local and transnational musical culture into the twenty-first century.

Hayward's own book makes a weightier contribution to the field of...