Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s by Andrew F. Jones (review)

The experience of reading Andrew Jones’s new book is akin to visiting a magnificent multimedia museum. Circuit Listening not only takes the reader on a mesmerizing tour through Chinese-language popular music of the 1960s but also traces its interconnections with the global media environment of the Cold War era. Besides connoisseurial and critical encounters with its treasure trove of songs, films, artists, and technological artifacts, the reader might also take away an “ear-opening” souvenir: a versatile methodological tool kit with which to listen to any given historical epoch in more capacious and nuanced ways, to music and noise, to timbre and dynamics, to local inflections of global vernaculars, to entangled circuits and networks, to elusive historical sources and mute material remnants.

The book’s main title, Circuit Listening, brilliantly captures its content, concept, and methodology. Threading together its introduction and six chapters are the electronic circuits of transistor technology, which have facilitated the production and dissemination of a variety of new songs, including Maoist revolutionary anthems, Hong Kong mambo, and Taiwanese folk ballads. Making recorded music more portable and pervasive than ever before, the transistor, Jones argues, was a “revolution in miniature” that defined the global 1960s as a distinct musical and media epoch. Yet in addition to technological affordances, the book is also concerned with other types of circuits: “the particular linguistic, ideological and economic pathways, cut by the passage of historical time, along which particular genres of music could (or could not) travel” (7). Indeed, Jones contends that circuits not only enable and expedite but also delimit and even prevent flows of music, information, and affect.

Beginning in outer space, the introduction compares the musical broadcasts of satellites launched by China in 1970 and the United States in 1967—the paean to Mao “The East Is Red” vs. the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”—and connects the worlds of these two songs across geopolitical and ideological divides by highlighting their unprecedented circulation through transistor technology. Chapter 1 listens to the soundtracks of sinophone musical cinema in the early 1960s to “trace the contours of a circuitous media network, extending from Havana and Mexico to Manhattan and Hollywood and linking Hong Kong to Taiwan and its diasporic Chinese hinterlands in Southeast Asia” (12). Analyzing the mambo and calypso numbers of songstress Grace Chang (Ge Lan 葛蘭 1933–) and also Latin music in postwar Taiwan, Jones argues that such global genres functioned as “musical vernaculars”: their transcultural circulation shed the specificities of their origins and took on new local articulations.

Moving on from “open circuits” that connected transnational communities, chapter 2 examines the “closed circuit” of socialist media infrastructure by listening to “quotation songs” adapted from Mao’s Little Red Book. Jones not only reinterprets those repetitive and catchy propaganda tunes as a highly portable, promiscuous, and “viral” form of popular music but also unpacks their cross-platform interactivity through the socialist media system. In particular, he focuses on their dissemination through the noisy broadcasting network of wired loudspeakers in the countryside, some powered by livestock in the absence of rural electrification. Through ubiquitous mediation and constant citation as text and image, Mao himself, this chapter provocatively argues, becomes a “media effect.” [End Page E-11]

The next three chapters constitute a trilogy on Taiwanese music and media. Chapter 3 focuses on Taiwanese musical cinema in symbiosis with a live performance circuit. Singing stars like Kang Ding (康丁 1936–2011) and Wen Shia (文夏 1928–) playfully took on the personas of itinerant workers for an audience of rural migrants whose labor paved the way for Taiwan’s industrialization. This musical film genre featured old-fashioned visual tropes and relied on “mixed-blood music”—cover versions of Japanese pop records rewritten with Taiwanese lyrics. Rather than dismissing such derivative aesthetics as backward, Jones deftly shows how this cinema’s chase scenes and “fugitive soundscapes” were highly self-reflexive about its imminent eclipse by a new...