CIRCUIT LISTENING: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s
By Andrew F. Jones
University of Minnesota Press | 288 pages | March 2020
ISBN 978-1-5179-0207-0 | paper | $28.00
ISBN 978-1-5179-0206-3 | cloth | $112.00
What did Mao’s China have to do with the music of youth revolt in the 1960s, and how did the Beatles and Bob Dylan sound on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia? Andrew F. Jones listens in on the 1960s beyond the West, suggesting how transistor technology, decolonization, and the Green Revolution transformed the sound of music globally.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Andrew F. Jones, professor and Louis B. Agassiz Chair in Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture. He is author of Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, and Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. He has also translated two books of fiction by Yu Hua, and a volume of literary essays by Eileen Chang.
PRAISE FOR CIRCUIT LISTENING:
“Circuit Listening challenges our understanding of popular music as a Euro-American hegemony by demonstrating how the Sinophone music industries and markets partook of this global circuit through corporate expansion, as well as through local resistance and piracy. It is a long-awaited book on the way global popular music, in all its diversity, circularity, and promiscuity, should be re-historicized and reconceptualized.” —Victor Fan, author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory
“Andrew F. Jones presents a complex transnational circuit with care and panache, explaining why mambo travels, how the Vietnam War created a demand for pirated recordings, and what Mao quotation songs had in common with British rock-and-roll hits. He guides the reader from transistor technology to rural electrification, from voice timbre to smuggling routes. Circuit Listening is cultural history at its richest.” —Gail Hershatter, author of The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past
For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/circuit-listening
Please email me if you have any questions.
Anne Wrenn, Publicist
University of Minnesota Press
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