Download PDF by Michael Bourdaghs: Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory

From the start of the yank profession in 1945 to the post-bubble interval of the early Nineties, well known song supplied jap listeners with a much-needed unencumber, channeling their wants, fears, and frustrations over an ever-shifting geopolitical fact right into a pleasant and fluid paintings. Pop song allowed eastern artists and audiences to imagine a number of identities, reflecting the country's uncomfortable place lower than American hegemony. Michael Bourdaghs composes the 1st English-language research of this phenomenon, contemplating genres as assorted as boogie-woogie, rockabilly, enka, Nineteen Sixties rock and roll, Seventies New tune, folks, and technopop. interpreting those kinds and their cultural import via song, literary, and cultural idea, he introduces a variety of readers to the sensual moods and meanings of contemporary Japan.

As he unpacks the complexities of eastern pop creation and intake, Bourdaghs translates a rustic because it labored via (or attempted to disregard) its imperial previous. those efforts grew even murkier as jap pop migrated to the nation's former colonies. In postwar Japan, pop track either sped up and protested the commodification of daily life, challenged and reproduced gender hierarchies, and insisted at the strong point of a countrywide tradition, while it participated in an more and more built-in worldwide market. every one bankruptcy examines a unmarried style via a selected theoretical lens: the relation of song to liberation; the effect of cultural mapping on musical appreciation; the position of translation in transmitting musical genres around the globe; where of noise in tune and its relation to ancient switch; the tenuous connection among ideologies of authenticity and imitation; the hyperlink among advertisement good fortune and inventive integrity; and the functionality of melodrama. Bourdaghs concludes with a glance at contemporary jap pop tune culture.