The Ideal Idol

Hatsune Miku is immensely popular. Since debuting in 2007 over 10,000 songs have been produced for her and she has appeared in 250,000 videos on-line. 4000 professional recordings have been released of her songs and numerous dolls, games, and other seemingly unlimited forms of merchandise feature her big violet eyes, floor-grazing blue pigtails and futuristic schoolgirl uniform. Hatsune Miku is actually a type of vocal synthesizer software produced by Yamaha and marketed by Crypton known as “Vocaloid 2.” Other vocal synthesizer softwares with associated characters have come before, but none have enjoyed the same success as Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku’s performance – whether in amateur produced songs posted on Piapro or in multi-million-dollar live 3D productions – raises many questions about the potential effects of Vocaloid software on the future of making music in Japan. Through the technical production of songs, the quality of vocals, and her presence on stage, Hatsune Miku slides back and forth between a position of classic passivity to one of female empowerment and feminist approaches to equity. This chapter further explores Hatsune Miku’s complicated position as a performer who perpetuates an objectified position of women in popular music while at the same time promotes democratic music making.

Gendered and Censored Modernity

This chapter examines the ways in which a juxtaposition of two definitions of modernity are reflected in the two female singers, Yi Mi-ja and Patti Kim, who actively performed in postwar South Korea, particularly between the 1960s and the 1970s. While different social values and cultural practices constituted the modernity of South Korea, most scholarship on Korean popular music gives particular attention to the cultural products of modernity that have been influenced by the West, mostly by the U.S. This chapter, however, suggest that the different cultures from Korea, Japan, and the U.S. together constitute the modernity of Korea. Also, different collective memories from the Japanese colonial experience, the Korean War, and the Korean government-led economic development project shape the ideal form of modernization. Modernity in South Korean popular music shows that the periods between the 1960s and the 1970s juxtapose what the Korean society was facing and seeking at the time. Focusing on the Yi and Kim’s music and their performance styles, this chapter explores how different musical cultures and social values are reflected in their music as a way to construct gendered and censored modernity.

Malay Women Singers of Colonial Malaya

Popular Malay music developed in Malaya in tandem with socio-political transformations which took place as a result of British colonialism. It was at this time that a new type of local commodified urban popular music known as lagu Melayu (Malay song) emerged to entertain the multiethnic urban audiences from different social and class backgrounds. This new music was shaped by the convergence of the new social conditions, technology such as print, gramophone, radio, film, microphones, cultural forms, and performance sites that emerged. By examining the song styles and texts of 78 rpm recordings of Lagu Melayu, oral interviews with performers, and published texts of the colonial period, this chapter illustrates how the new popular music accorded women performing artists voice and agency to negotiate dominant discourses regarding modern colonial subjectivity and gender. Women singers promoted a type of vernacular modernity that was not defined solely in European terms butwas characterized by continuity, difference, and hybridity. The musical recordings and stories of their lives reveal the complex polyvocal and sometimes contradictory experiences of women performers in colonial Malaya.

Mainstreaming Dance Music and Articulating Femininity

Korean pop music, or K-pop, has emerged and taken its dominant place since the turn of this century, but its girl groups can trace their lineage back to the 1990s, while the dance music so characteristic of K-pop began in the dance music boom of the 1980s. This chapter examines the music, image, and performance styles of female dance divas from the 1980s into the 2000s. Its purpose is threefold: first, to properly historicize the female dance singers of Korean pop music within their socio-cultural contexts and trace how the image of sexuality has evolved from those early dance divas to the K-pop girl groups of today; second, to examine the ways in which multi-dimensional cultural meanings and voices are constructed through the music, performance styles, and images, atop discourses of body, gender, and sexuality; and third, to dispute earlier assumptions about Korean female dance singers as being merely innocent victims of the globalized commercial entertainment industry and patriarchal systems. This study seeks to reveal the female dance singers as major subjectivities in shaping modern Korean popular music, a role inevitably overshadowed by the strong critical discourse on K-pop girls that emphasizes their sexuality.

Enacting Modernity through Voice, Body, and Gender

For the Philippines in the twenty-first century strands of modernity, globalization, and nation are closely interwoven, the result of processes in play during the previous twentieth century. The time period under discussion has two important “bookends”—the close of the Philippine-American War in 1912 and the onset of martial law in 1972, six decades which in this chapter are referred to as the period of Developing Modernity, a duration of relative social and political stability enabling self-reflection upon identity and nation. Philippine commercial music during this time illustrates and informs these processes in play, which is examined through the careers of two female vocalists with national and international reputations, jazz singer Katy dela Cruz and chanteuse Pilita Corrales. Each singer, although part of the same commercial music industry, presents a distinctive trajectory of engagement with nation and culture during the Developing Modernity period. Regarding relevance for the present twenty-first century, each references alternative modernities relative to the international circulation of mediatized music and the globalization of vocalized and gendered bodies. Both argue for cultural continuities within environments of social change.

The Remarkable Career of L. R. Eswari

Song sequences in Indian popular cinema play a central role in organizing affect and desire through imagery and sound. These songs feature the voices of “playback” singers, so named because their voices are first recorded in the studio and then lip-synced by the actors and actresses on the set during the filming process. This chapter examines how playback singing, which emerged as a professional career possibility in the 1950s, produced new forms of stardom and opportunities for women to enter the public sphere, while serving as a key site for the creation and circulation of ideologies and aesthetics of gender and voice. In particular, it will examine the career and persona of L.R. Eswari, who, although she did not start out as such, came to be branded as a “vampy” singer in the late 1960s Tamil film industry, subsequently made a name for herself in devotional music in the 1970s and 80s, and has recently re-emerged as a playback singer in the last few years.

Titiek Puspa

Chanteuse and composer Titiek Puspa (1937-) vocalized the tensions and contradictions of gendered modernity in Indonesia during the socially turbulent 1960s and 1970s. This period of Indonesian history is divided politically by first president Sukarno’s anti-imperialist “Old Order” (Orde Lama, 1950-1965) and second president Suharto’s pro-Western “New Order” (Orde Baru, 1966-1998). Titiek Puspa (hereafter Titiek) cultivated a proximity to state power – to Sukarno, one of Indonesia’s founding fathers, and Suharto, the “Father of Development” (Bapak Pembangunan) – that amplified her voice and enabled it to circulate more widely and freely than other female singers. However, she was not a mouthpiece of these divergent political “orders”; that is, her relatively autonomous voice did not align neatly with either regime. Titiek’s voice and body were contested terrain in both presidential regimes; they patronized and celebrated her, but also wanted to control her. The patriarchal orders used her as a symbol of proper womanhood in her role as wife and mother, but she developed an image as an independent and successful modern woman who supported her husbands and other family members. Titiek Puspa played an important role in each regime’s ideology of modernity, but she also articulated the disjuncture between a woman’s voice and the reigning political order.

On Becoming Nora

Henrik Ibsen’s work Nora in A Doll’s House was a timely and influential inspiration to Chinese writers particularly in advocating gender equality and it offered a role model for many a Chinese woman to ‘walk out’ (of household/family bounds) during an era when China looked to the West to reform its society traditionally governed by Confucian principles. ‘To choose the path of Nora’ was a public statement the female singer Zhou Xuan made in 1941 when she announced her ‘walking out’ of her marriage with the famed composer husband Yan Hua. As China’s pop diva with a ‘golden voice’ in the late 1930s and the 40s, Zhou has been credited by cultural historians and musicologists to have popularized a music trend that fused Western jazz and Chinese folk tunes. Her stardom legitimized her role as a cultured, virtuous and sympathized female singer, a profession and public image that was no longer scrutinized as it had been in the 1920s. Highlighting Zhou’s cross-media performance and her ‘walking out’ as a female public figure in this case study, this paper aims to fill the gap between the readings of music and film experts by examining Zhou’s life and career as a performer.

Googoosh’s Voice

Born in 1950, Googoosh began her career as a child actor on stage, television and film; by her twenties, she was the country’s primary female interpreter of musiqi-yi pap (Western-influenced “pop music”). Following the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1980, Googoosh’s fame became a liability. The revolutionary project involved purifying Iran of its “colonized” culture; moral corruption and unveiled “lust-inciting” women. Then, in 2000 Googoosh left Iran to restart her career in exile, landing first in Toronto and then settling in Los Angeles. She embarked on a new phase of her career singing her prerevolutionary romantic repertoire but also with a declaration of her intention to “give voice” to herself, to Iran and Iranians around the world. This chapter argues that the metaphorical “voicing” Googoosh performed on behalf of “those inside Iran” was an extension of an already-established pattern in which she blurred the line between celebrity as exceptional individual and celebrity as medium for collective expression.

Acoustic Ladies

July 1935, a British newspaper reported, “China’s own most famous actress, Miss Butterfly Wu, of Shanghai, shook hands yesterday with Hollywood’s most famous Chinese star, Miss Anna May Wong,” at a reception in honor of both Wu and Mei Lan-fang, “China’s leading stage actor.” All three performers became involved in filmmaking as it was emerging into a new dominant entertainment industry. Interestingly, if Mei needed to foreground the visual choreography at the expense of his vocal performance in 1920 when some of his repertoire pieces were filmed as silent shorts, Wong and Wu played a key role in ushering in the talkie era with their singing voice. This chapter explores how the two instances of female singing voice were triangulated and intermediated with Mei Lanfang’s female impersonation derived from Peking Opera on the one hand, and on the other hand, remediated through new filming and recording technologies at the cusp the sound era. It thus unpacks the cultural phenomenon of the emerging female singing voice, using it as a lens to examine the reconfiguration of gendered performance and performative gender identity in relation to colonial modernity and cosmopolitanism, national identity and international aspirations.