Popular Music, Cultural Politics and Music Education in China

Wai-Chung Ho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317078005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

While attention has been paid to various aspects of music education in China, to date no single publication has systematically addressed the complex interplay of sociopolitical transformations underlying the development of popular music and music education in the multilevel culture of China. Before the implementation of the new curriculum reforms in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was neither Chinese nor Western popular music in textbook materials. Popular culture had long been prohibited in school music education by China's strong revolutionary orientation, which feared 'spiritual pollution' by Western cultures. However, since the early twenty-first century, education reform has attempted to help students deal with experiences in their daily lives and has officially included learning the canon of popular music in the music curriculum. In relation to this topic, this book analyses how social transformation and cultural politics have affected community relations and the transmission of popular music through school music education. Ho presents music and music education as sociopolitical constructions of nationalism and globalization. Moreover, how popular music is received in national and global contexts and how it affects the construction of social and musical meanings in school music education, as well as the reformation of music education in mainland China, is discussed. Based on the perspectives of school music teachers and students, the findings of the empirical studies in this book address the power and potential use of popular music in school music education as a producer and reproducer of cultural politics in the music curriculum in the mainland.

1Introduction

Cultural politics, music, and social change in education

Culture, which is one of the primary components of preparing for life in society, is of significance to cities economically, socially, and politically. For Raymond Williams (1961, 2011), the word “culture” depicted “a whole way of life” in an anthropological sense, where the forms of signification, including films, novels, advertising, and television, circulate within a society. Williams (1961, 1981, 1983) viewed culture as not just the arts and other forms of intellectual production, but, rather, as a network of shared and contested meanings that are a part of all human activities. Furthermore, he argued that most of these meanings are not of our own making but are instead generated by dominant groups and dominant institutions (Williams, 1981).

Interaction between cultures can happen at any level, including individual, group, societal, and global levels. Cultural interaction is a dynamic process whereby the cultural patterns can be changed by both internal forces within a group of people and external forces of their environment. This process occurs within Western cultures, non-Western cultures, indigenous cultures, and other world cultures. Many countries worldwide experienced a shift from traditional or classical culture to urban culture in the twentieth century. The shift of values in these cultural interactions is part of a much broader process of cultural change that is gradually transforming political, economic, and social life in these societies, and such changes form coherent and, to some extent, predictable patterns (Inglehart, 1990, 1997). Since the industrialization and modernization of the twentieth century and the subsequent implications of transnational politics and economics, cultural processes have taken center stage in addressing issues central to twenty-first-century development. The most influential proponents of modernization theory, such as Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Max Weber (1864–1920), have much in common in terms of their understanding of modern capitalism, in that economic development brings pervasive cultural changes.

Culture, politics, and power

Within the past few decades, a number of critical and cultural studies theorists (such as Tony Bennett, Henry Giroux, Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Douglas Kellner, and John Storey) have provided valuable contributions to our understanding of how culture deploys power and is shaped by and organized within diverse systems of representation, production, consumption, and distribution. Culture is a learned pattern of behavior, and the culture of power represents a set of beliefs, values, and ways of acting and is based on sociopolitical factors.

Throughout history, mankind has struggled to balance politics, power, and culture to ensure collective socialization. Hobsbawm (1990) described culture as an intellectual instrument fashioned by a political agenda; Bourdieu (1977, 1983), however, saw power as culturally and symbolically created, and constantly relegitimized through the interplay of agency and structure. Giroux (2004) argued for a politicized notion of culture, where the social practices of a culture are invested with various meanings and ideologies implicated in the generation of political effects. Like Giroux, Freire defined culture not as “an all-embracing neutral category of social science” but in terms of its essentially political function (cited in Giroux, 2001, p. 226). As Hall (2009) indicated, those with power often seek to regulate the impact of meanings on practice in an attempt to create “collective social understandings” (p. 123). While every nation reifies its own national culture as a form of collective representation, none quantifies what percentage of the population must partake of this culture in order for it to be so considered (Sperber, 1996; Strauss, 1992). When one interrogates the elusive concept of “culture” from a global perspective, it becomes apparent that strong state apparatuses often impose a national culture, and that the notion that every nation has its own distinctive, homogenous culture is no more than a myth (Wallerstein, 1976, 1990).

Cultural politics, as defined in the broadest sense, is the core of contemporary political struggle. It is a concept that is derived from the experiences of a nation state or group of people who maintain similar political philosophies and viewpoints. Most Asian nations have significant Confucian influences that are attached to the concept of “Asian values,” while the United States, Australia, and Canada are established Western democracies that may provide a necessary benchmark for comparing political culture in Asia with the Western phenomenon. Daniel Bell (2006), a Canadian political philosopher inspired by Chinese traditions and Confucian values who has taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing since 2004, has argued for morally legitimate alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy for East Asia societies and has proposed alternative justifications and practices that may be more appropriate for the region. In line with this argument, I consider politics to have the power to influence culture, the community, institutions, and social order, which together condition individual and collective action in both Western and non-Western nations, despite the different dimensions of individual cultural development. Processes of political socialization include political education, propaganda, marketing, and persuasion and their underlying and accompanying motivations in families, schools, mass media, social networks, politics, and other facets of one’s social environment. Thus, the term “authority” is often used when power is perceived to be legitimated by its political and social circumstances. This can be observed in literature, visual arts, dramatic performance, and music, the arts that exert a powerful influence on societal development, as well as provide a site for sociopolitical struggle.

Cultural changes and modern communication technology

In the last few decades, globalization has overtaken the world system, while modernization has remolded the cultural system into a new mode. Drawing from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of imagined communities, a number of scholars (e.g. Appadurai, 1996) concerned with identity and solidarity have posited the rise of transnational identities and have suggested that there is a need to study the ideologies, movements, organizations, and networks that comprise post-national social formations.

Modern communication technology has facilitated dynamic cultural changes and the ability to stay connected anywhere. Communication between regions has introduced different cultures to one another in unprecedented ways. Music, movies, video games, digital audio players, digital cable, mobile technology, television, and the internet dominate the lives of youths. Some call this development the information age; others prefer the terms “technoculture” (Robins & Webster, 1999), “digital cultures” (Hand, 2008), or global media culture or globalization, with reference to the dialectical process in which the global and local exist as “combined and mutually implicating principles” (Beck, 2002, p. 17) in terms of being “cosmopolitan” (Beck, 2002; Featherstone, 2002). Appadurai (1996) has more cautiously argued that the globalizing cultural forces of media and communications produce complex interactions, and the multiple dimensions of globalization highlight the uneven nature of cultural interaction, global flows, and the “production of locality” (pp. 178–199).

With the advances in communication technologies over the last few decades, traditional customs and indigenous cultural products have been replaced by the popular culture of the United Kingdom and the United States. Local communities are now likely to have fast food chains such as McDonald’s, KFC, and Pizza Hut, as well as the Starbucks coffeehouse chain. During the 1980s, the popular music industry greatly expanded with the development of popular music videos and the 24-hour music channel MTV, which has been acknowledged by many as the leading medium of global youth culture in America, Europe, and Asia. In light of these changes in traditional customs and cultures, it is evident that consumerism is an important feature of ongoing globalization (Thompson, 1992).

The relationships between mass media, society, popular music, and popular idols have been a major subject of inquiry within the fields of sociology, communications, cultural studies, and education. Theories on the role and objectives of popular culture in society show it to be inextricably bound up with rapidly changing cultures (Hall, 1992). Regional channels like MTV Asia and Channel V have adopted Western popular culture with Asian tastes in a process of assimilation that has been accelerated by the rise of English as a second language among many Asian nations. The Anglo-American popular forms of music, such as hip hop and rap, reggae, rock, and punk, have been imported to and localized in many Asian countries. Changes in the production and consumption of popular music have shown cultural globalization in its most effective form. As English is more essential than other languages for international communication (Matsuda & Friederich, 2011), the use of English in the lyrics of Japanese pop (J-pop) (Moody, 2006), Korean pop (K-pop) (Lee, 2004), and Thai pop (Likhitphongsathorn & Sappapan, 2013) is prevalent and varies from one single word to an entire phrase. Global K-pop is indebted to the rise of portable devices that have increased the focus on visual aspects. In addition to Asian countries, the spread of the Korean Wave (known as “Hallyu” in Korean) has reached the Middle East, North America, Latin America, Western and Eastern European nations, and North Africa. Exemplifying this trend, South Korean singer PSY’s comic music video “Gangnam Style” was the first clip ever to reach over one billion hits worldwide after it was posted on YouTube/Vevo. With developments in communication technology, international mass media, popular music, and other influences of popular culture and international corporations, the world is becoming more culturally globalized.

Popular music and social forces

With the complex and dynamic nature of the processes of globalization, music has the power to change lives and has played an intricate role in shaping society around music. Throughout history, music and other arts have been used to build responsible, cohesive, and robust societies in both Western and non-Western regions (see Buchori, 2010; Denisoff, 1969; Kong, 1997; Madrid, 2006; Meizel, 2006; Ozgur, 2006). From Greek antiquity to the modern day, music has been seen as a potential source of power, with thinkers from Plato to Theodor W. Adorno recognizing how it affects mood, stimulates the senses, and generates social events (DeNora, 2000).

In modern society, music has been used successfully for cultural awareness and propaganda purposes, and in cultural dialogue, social and political movements, and other events, creating a voice for groups that may not have a voice in mainstream society. Even though music can be considered a universal language and a basic human function, music and songs are not created in a vacuum but rather in the contexts of their time. Anthropologists, cultural theorists, and sociologists, as well as those from entirely different academic disciplines, have regarded recorded music as a shared experience within a society’s collective cultural memory and identity (Connell & Gibson, 2003; Dijck, 2006; Trofanenko, 2006). The propositions that humans are innately social beings and that music is an essential part of life (Blacking, 1981; Blaukopf, 1982; Dissanayake, 2006) underpin this book. As Nettl (2005) remarked, songs, and music in general, reflect culture. Music is a powerful tool that often foreshadows future cultural shifts. Building on the precept that music is understood more fully if seen as a cultural and social practice, this section will add to current knowledge about songs as a form of meaning-making, communication, and culture (Eyerman, 2004; Martin, 1995; Middleton, Clayton, & Herbert, 2003).

The work of Grossberg (1992) and Frith (1996) on meaning, production, and consumption, particularly in the treatment of affect in popular music, argued that individuals and audiences interact with texts according to their particular sensibilities. Texts are seen as a type of “contested terrain” (Grossberg, 1986, pp. 67–68) and the nexus between the concept of culture, in general, as text, and the concept of culture being grounded in political ideology (Grossberg, 1996). In such a view, “culture is the struggle over meaning, a struggle that takes place over and within the sign” (Grossberg, 1996, p. 157). As Storey (1996) also explained, culture in this sense is “a terrain of conflict and contestation” and is “a key site for the production and reproduction of the social relations of everyday life” (p. 2).

Popular music can be understood as a field in which different social forces are active in the production of cultural goods. Numerous cultural and sociological studies on music in Western (particularly Anglo-American) societies have shown, as Norris (1989) pointed out, that cultural politics can affect musical compositions, which in turn can reflect their political and social contexts. Popular music, as Adorno (1973) contended, can operate as a mixed metaphor of “social cement” in the human world. In Frith’s (1996) view, popular music should not be understood only through the lens of political economy but also through technological developments and sociocultural changes. One of the most challenging questions answered by the application of Bourdieu’s (1983) theory of cultural capital is whether cultural goods are evaluated differently in different national contexts (also see Lamont & Thévenot, 2000). For example, the song “We Shall Overcome,” which was rooted in the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) and became a key anthem of other social movements after the Second World War, helped promote social movements and cultural change (see Eyerman, 2002; Eyerman & Jamison, 1998).

Consequently, the power of popular music as a platform for social change is undeniable. On the one hand, popular music can facilitate social change, and popular songs are central to modern culture. In Western countries, many popular singers and artists (such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown) have claimed to be agents of social change through music. In the late 1970s, the punk-rock movement and the youth subculture in Britain were and are, even today, the cause of much controversy. Punk music has a political orientation that is often associated with the left wing and, in particular, a strong anti-racist agenda. Besides the Rock Against Racism movement in the United Kingdom, the Peace movement in the United States was also adopted as an instrument for social campaigns (Corte & Edwards, 2008; Roberts & Moore, 2009). The punk-rock movement attracted the public consciousness with distinctly anti-authoritarian themes, particularly in light of retrospectives, such as the documentaries Punk: Attitude, officially released on April 25, 2005, at the Tribeca Film Festival in the US, and Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, which won the British Independent Film Award as the Best British Documentary in 2007.

Popular songs can also be a tool for social development and to inspire people to achieve their potential and make strong contributions to their community. In 1985, the supergroup USA performed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• Music examples
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Cultural politics, music, and social change in education
• 2 The power of popular songs in the development of nationalism, Communism, and globalization
• 3 Popular music and music education in the city of Beijing
• 4 Popular music and music education: East meets West in Shanghai
• 5 Popular music and music education in Changsha
• 6 Dynamics and dilemmas of introducing popular music into China’s school music education
• 7 Conclusions and implications: School music education, values, and cultural politics
• References
• Index