Theorizing East Asian Pop
Chair(s): Jacob Reed (University of Chicago, United States of America)
Despite increasing attention within music scholarship, East Asian pop has rarely been studied as music per se, instead receiving attention mostly from economic and sociological/anthropological perspectives. This panel proposes to remedy this gap by giving sustained analytic attention to East Asian pop. We argue that close study of the music can do more than just help to illuminate aspects of musical sound and structure: it can also counter misunderstandings and reveal interpretive angles that have previously been neglected.
For instance, this session's first paper analyzes J-pop songs that use Phrygian-type modal gestures but with different tonal—and cultural—connotations; it thus points a way toward a finer-grained understanding of such modal meanings in popular music more broadly. Similarly, the second paper discusses two J-pop vocal performances of the same song, showing how the singers mobilize a range of vocal types in the service of culturally-specific gendered expression; in doing so, it provides new tools and categories for the analysis of the popular singing voice in general. Finally, the third paper recontextualizes K-pop’s “Western sound,” decentering U.S. reception and instead using analyses of K-pop songs that “recompose” Western models to argue for the importance of songwriter/producer tastes and (East Asian) market forces as primary drivers of K-pop’s use of Western pop styles. In this case, analysis can help to counterbalance prevailing narratives surrounding K-pop by emphasizing the creative agency of its makers and regional consumers.
These papers show that not only have studies of East Asian pop suffered from neglect of music analysis, but analysis has suffered from the neglect of East Asian pop. Analysis of popular music has almost exclusively studied Anglo-American popular music, with an emphasis on rock and hip-hop. This narrow focus necessarily excludes techniques and materials used within the broader world of popular music. As these papers demonstrate, turning to East Asian pop can be an opportunity to explore practices of composition, performance, and listening that go beyond what has been broached in the scholarly literature to date.
Presentations of the Symposium
Influencers and Idols: The Two Phrygians of J-pop
Liam Hynes-Tawa
Harvard University
This paper presents several East Asian pop examples that have Phrygian elements, arguing that they fall into two classes with different associations. What I call the “Influencer” type, named after a song by the Nogizaka46, spends a long time on a chord that turns out to be the dominant, while what I call the “Idol” type, because of the Yoasobi song of that name, is Phrygian directly on the tonic. The way these songs frame the professions in their titles are emblematic of the differences between these Phrygian types: the Nogizaka46’s “influencer” is glamorized, with the song’s only dark emotions being those held by the narrator who one-sidedly admires the title character, whereas Yoasobi’s “idol” is herself quite plainly under immense pressure. “Idol” can be read as a critique of the idol world, whereas “Influencer” has no such intentions—it is a rather standard unrequited-love song that uses a modern-social-media word for extra currency. In this paper I argue that the different tonal orientations of these songs’ Phrygian-esque moments are no accident—that the two have stark affective differences despite their surface similarities.
The Phrygian mode’s affective link to exoticism has been well studied, especially when it has Arabo-Spanish resonances. But this paper argues that this is true mostly of the “Influencer” type of Phrygian, in which the Phrygian aspects occur on what Western European theory analyzes as the dominant. In Japan, this association can mix with that of the native Japanese miyakobushi mode, which calls to mind traditional Japanese music as well. Neither of these associations is strong in the “Idol” type of Phrygian, which usually has a minor third rather than a major third above the tonic, and whose semiotic referents are usually more in the domains of metal and hiphop than in “the exotic.” These sets of associations have been discussed but are also sometimes conflated with the “exotic” resonances of the “Influencer” type on the dominant, and Yoasobi’s “Idol” and other similar songs provide fertile ground for a discussion of it as a separate topic that should clarify the characteristics and meanings of both types.
Fiery Voices, Cool Sound: Four Vocal Types in J-pop
Yiqing Mitty Ma
University of Michigan
In popular music, voice is the most influential element in shaping singers’ branding, musical character, and timbral signature (Malawey 2020). Scholars have explored associations between vocal performance and gendered expressions from the perspectives of lyrical expression (Burns 2004), vocal production (Heidemann 2014), vocal quality (Malawey 2020), and technological mediation (Duguay 2021). In this paper, I examine the interrelation between vocal timbre and gendered expression in Japanese Popular Music (J-pop) using Shiina Ringo’s “Suberidai [slide]” (1998) and Miura Daichi’s cover version (2018) as case studies. I argue that Shiina’s bright and harsh vocal timbre expresses feminine traits of adorableness, innocence, and dependence (amae); on the other hand, Miura’s clean and mellow vocal timbre expresses masculine traits of cool-headedness and tenderness (yasashisa).
Expanding on Malawey’s and Heidemann’s methodology, I theorize four vocal types in J-pop: jigoe, uragoe, edge voice, and sob voice, used in various sections of “Suberidai”. I argue that Shiina’s voice presents a type of sonic femininity that is shaped by her throaty voice, use of pressed phonation, and open vowels. Specifically, I hear Shiina apply jigoe by extensively incorporating nasal voice and vocal vibrato. Her pre-chorus employs a sob voice that is characterized by its mellow, soft, and breathy tone.
By comparison, Miura’s voice presents a type of sonic masculinity that is shaped by his breathy voice, use of lax phonation, and rounded vowels. Miura applies a “clean” voice throughout the song as a whole. I map Miura’s clear and breathy vocal timbre with a performance of cool-headed, gentle masculinity (sōshoku-kei danshi). While Miura incorporates glottal stops and uragoe that reinforce his masculine vocal expressions, he significantly modifies his vowel articulation to project a “cool” sound. Specifically, he modifies the front middle vowel /e/ to the close back vowel /ɯ/ for a duller and hollower timbre than Shiina’s. Miura’s vowel modification effectively resulted in a dull and mellow timbre that has a robust middle frequency but nearly imperceivable upper frequency in the spectrogram.
K-pop’s Western Sound and Korean Musical Agency
Jacob Reed
University of Chicago
Recent incidents of purported plagiarism have brought to the fore a longstanding issue in the reception of K-pop: its image as a copycat industry of “derivative” songs that “sound Western” (Seabrook 2012/2015). Given the typical focus of Anglophone journalists and scholars (e.g. Anderson 2020, Oh 2023) on American K-pop reception, these borrowings have often been construed as a bid for U.S. popularity. While this may be true for some groups, I argue in this paper that a more comprehensive understanding of K-pop's musical debts can be garnered by recentering its domestic and regional agents and contexts. To this end, I focus on some of K-pop’s most blatant “copycats”: songs that overtly recompose and interpolate Western models. Rather than simply targeting Western audiences, these direct borrowings can be understood in multiple other ways: as "culturally odorless" (Iwabuchi 1998) products for regional (East Asian) export, or as acts of homage and/or creative subversion akin to borrowing in Western hip-hop (Schloss 2004; Williams 2013).
To establish the dissociation between such borrowings and U.S.-oriented marketing, I first examine two "Western soundalikes" that received almost no global promotion: Dalshabet's "Big Big Baby" (2014; rewrites the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams") and FIESTAR's "Sea of Moonlight" (2012; rewrites A-ha's "Take On Me"). The latter (American member Cheska notwithstanding) made China their major international market, highlighting how "Western borrowings" can be mobilized to regional (not global) ends. I then explore acts of creative homage via musical borrowings, via songs that use paratexts to flaunt their musical borrowings from The Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive”: BIGBANG’s “Alive” (2012) and T-ARA’s “Roly-Poly” (2011).
To conclude, I analyze a different kind of borrowing, in which K-pop producers showcase their creativity by reworking Western Classical models. Thus, SNSD’s “Into the New World” (2007) forms a kind of riddle by sneaking in pitch content from the New World Symphony. Meanwhile, Red Velvet’s “Feel My Rhythm” (2022), shows off creativity in how it chops and flips Bach’s “Air on the G String." Finally, GFRIEND’s “Summer Rain” (2017) exhibits its songwriters’ ingenuity by inverting the harmonic logic of the interpolated song (Robert Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”).
|
