"Finding an Asian-American Audience: The Problem of Listening" uses one man, Rod Ogawa, to tell a larger story about Asian-American musical consumption and how people's tastes are formed in general. Wong's focus is on listening, or where "considerable slippage occurs between agency and coercion."
The focus of her article is to present ideas on a seldom-explored topic: the consumption of American music by Americans who perceive themselves outside or in between the Black-White dichotomy of American "culture." I do not think that she ever pretends to present the musical tastes of Asian-Americans. I'm sure she is well aware that it would be impossible with only one person's life experiences to draw from. I personally found it a relaxed and compelling way of presenting the subject.
I found her choice of subject really interesting. Rod isn't "any more or less interesting than any other Asian-American listener," but he gives a very thoughtful picture of the listening habits of a Californian Japanese-American during the 50s and 60s. Most contemporary papers on Asian-American communities that I've read address immigrant enclaves of non-English speakers. Rod's experience as a post-internment Japanese American before the massive influx of Asian immigrants in the 60s was interesting for two reasons. The first is that Japanese Americans are now considered among the most "assimilated" of Asian ethnicities. The second is that he came of age and went to college during the civil rights movement, which probably gave him a different perspective on the place of Asian-Americans than someone growing up now.
It is also interesting because Deborah is also Asian-American, yet chooses someone else to write about. She is probably extremely aware of her own musical tastes and where they come from and could easily have written about herself. Is there a taboo to do this in an ethnography? As a participant in the group that "listens," she is as good a candidate as any. But interviewing Rod adds legitimacy to her arguments and in some bizarre way, allows her to find a narrative to compare hers to, which probably helped inform her conclusions.
I find her discussion of listening the most interesting. She claims that there is nothing inherent about music that makes it compelling--people make choices about what they listen to. She discusses the coercive aspect of listening later, which makes me think that your taste is really the combination of choice and coercion. I think is especially interesting when considering the unique place of Asian Americans in American society.
On a personal note, this article made me think more critically about the music I consume and the contexts I do that in as an Asian-American. The "otherness" ascribed to Asian Americans is something I'm constantly reminded of in a variety of contexts, whether it is in pop culture, the media, or in everyday social interactions.
My parents were avid listeners of "classical" music and I was encouraged to think that it was the only music I should consider "music." I'm a huge fan of it and listen to and participate in its production even now. To what extent was this a personal choice? My immediate social environment (my family) growing up put a high value on the appreciation and consumption of this kind of music. I wonder where and when this value was assigned.
Ultimately, I think it boiled down to the "immigrant mentality," a term I take issue with, but works in this particular case. To the Asian immigrant's mind, I think there exists some hazy conception of "American." Or, more accurately, "upper-class White American." Although its arguable the extent to which immigrants want themselves and their children to "assimilate," the particular community I grew up in placed a large emphasis on involvement in what were perceived to be "White" institutions like Ivy League universities and classical music ensembles.
However, a lot of my peers rejected their parents' musical tastes. Coming of age as an Asian-American in the United States was a bizarre and often confusing experience for me. Many New York Asian Americans live in or on the border of immigrant enclaves, where one sees signs in foreign languages as far as you can see. Therefore, there was a constant influx of immigrants, bringing the tastes they developed in their home countries with them. I had as much Korean pop music as I did American pop music on my computer. I spoke in English and had American friends, but participated in a variety of communities (mainly church), that consisted of a mixture of immigrants and their immigrant or American children.
The section on the "army of clarinets" was really interesting, because I had a similar experience with string instruments in high school. If you wanted to learn the definition of "AZN invasion," you would just have to look at our string orchestra. For some reason, all our parents made us learn an instrument. There were a variety of hypotheses--to get us into college was a particularly compelling one. I liked Wong's idea of the "imagination of social mobility." In the same way people around the world consider it a good investment to learn the language of the hegemon, I think people decide to participate in a musical culture.
What makes music "White" or "Black" or even "Asian?" In my particular case, it seemed that one small subsection of what my non-Asian peers deemed to be "music Asians listened to" was more than often not produced, performed, or composed by Asians at all.
1 comment:
That's interesting because I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in my entire family on both sides who actively listens to or studies classical music. I do have two aunts who play or played piano, but one is handicapped now and the other is probably more into Eminem. The way I became interested in classical music was by also wanting to play an instrument in school. So in 3rd grade I started piano and learned how to read music, then I played violin for a year, and then stopped. In 7th grade I took up violin again and played until 12th grade. In high school I hovered between being serious and not serious about it, but ultimately stopped playing. But my interest in classical music has done nothing but grow over the years, ESPECIALLY in college, where I was exposed to opera for the first time and absolutely love it.
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