Refashioning Pop Music in Asia

Cosmopolitan Flows, Political Tempos, and Aesthetic Industries

Allen Chun, Ned Rossiter, Brian Shoesmith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135791506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Examining the cultural, political, economic, technological and institutional aspects of popular music throughout Asia, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of Asian popular music and its cultural industries. Concentrating on the development of popular culture in its local socio-political context, the volume highlights how local appropriations of the pop music genre play an active rather than reactive role in manipulating global cultural and capital flows.

Broad in geographical sweep and rich in contemporary examples, this work will appeal to those interested in Asian popular culture from a variety of perspectives including, political economy, anthropology, communication studies, media studies and ethnomusicology.

Part I

Musical cultures and culture industries

1 Capitalism and cultural relativity

The Thai pop industry, capitalism and Western cultural values

Michael Hayes

In 1997 one of Thailand's more popular soap operas was Saam Num Saam Mum (‘three boys, three points of view’), televised weekly on Sunday night to a large Thai audience. In one particular episode, aired on 7 September 1997, there was a scene where one of the main female characters, Nat, cooked a Thai meal for her husband and her husband's two younger brothers. During this cooking sequence a government announcement flashed across the bottom of the screen: Thai people should help Thai people: eat Thai food, buy Thai goods, holiday in Thailand and be thrifty’.¹ The onset of the Asian financial crisis, starting with the fall of the baht on 2 July 1997, leading to the closing of 50 finance companies by the government and a slump in the economic growth rate, forced Thailand's once booming economy into recession. Never before having faced a recession quite on this scale, the government, media and people of Thailand were quite justifiably nervous. The ‘buy Thai’ promotion campaign by the government intending to stimulate the local economy was the first programme in relation to the financial crisis. It was also the first of a wave of crisis-related promotion campaigns which relied heavily on nationalistic pride.² With this government announcement, Thai food is written and acted simultaneously on screen, the actions of the Thai soap opera demonstrating what the government directive desires — Thais to support their country by eating local food. Irrespective of this caption appearing at this precise moment of the programme, in numerous ways television dramas tend to be closely associated with nationalistic aims.³ Hardly unique to Thailand, soap operas in many countries articulate middle-class, familial values and reproduce nationalist discourses that agree with government policy. However, what distinguishes this section of Saam Num Saam Mum, and one issue I wish to examine here, is the proximity between nationalism as entertainment and nationalism as a governmental discourse.

In the episode Nat is learning how to cook Thai food so she can feed the three brothers. Pee, the youngest brother, is learning how to dance because he wants to take a girl to his high school graduation ball. At the beginning of the show Nat cooks a terrible meal in which certain dishes which should be thick are watery, and other items are overcooked. At the same time Pee loses his dance partner because he stands on her toes too often. In response, Nat gets cooking lessons and also teaches Pee how to dance. She eventually accompanies him to the ball since he has no partner, and all is resolved. The concerns of the episode are quite clearly about pedagogy: what it means to be a good teacher, how to be a good teacher or student, and why learning and respect for knowledge is good for both oneself and others. Indeed, the moral of this episode can be contextualised with the government's promotion of self-education and teaching others as acts that benefit the nation. Listening to people who know, and learning from them, are valuable qualities — as Nat learns to cook or Pee to dance, it is not difficult to transpose these values to the audience reading the government's message.⁴

This may appear a tangential approach to introducing a discussion of Thai pop, for neither government propaganda nor television drama are overtly associated with pop music in Western countries. Yet, in relation to Thai pop, I consider it is these discourses and media that need to be analysed. I open with Saam Num Saam Mum since I wish to explore the connection between national identity, the government, the media and popular music. Primarily I seek this line of argument because I want to discuss some of the ramifications of the tendency in much Western cultural studies to see popular music as transgressive.⁵ Repeatedly there is an assumption that pop music, before commercialisation and popularisation, was a revolutionary and dissident form of cultural expression. Thus there is an implication that this form of music is inherently a radical tool which has either been sold out or has been appropriated by corporate forces.

The episode of Saam Num Saam Mum outlines some of the distinct ideas of cultural values which I use to contextualise Thai pop, and the Thai pop industry, in its governmental, cultural and commercial spheres. That is, my interest is in how the capital of culture is administered in Thailand on macro levels (government and media corporations) and reproduced on micro levels (songs, artists and appreciation by fans). My second concern deals with exchange systems in this economy: how should we conceive the exchanges between Western and non-Western pop, music industries and cultural criticism? I do not want to argue that Thailand's music is exclusive and independent; neither do I wish to read it as a version, a copy, or repetition of Western music. Rather, through its interaction with Western culture, its interaction with other Asian music industries, and its unique political and media context, Thai pop produces a quite distinct form of popular music, audiences, industries and authorities. Finally, cultural value in pop music is significantly determined by the commercial context. While Western pop likes to downplay the importance of the industry and the commercial value, Thai music is overtly situated in the configurations of private industry: singers are known by the company they belong to and they rarely, if ever, switch companies.

The show Saam Num Saam Mum is closely connected, indeed is a crucial part of, the Thai pop industry. It is about three brothers, Tosapol (Tos), Ekapol (Ek), and Peerapol (Pee); respectively a banker, an advertising executive and a high school student. Their parents were killed in a car accident and so they live together in their family home, supporting each other in a number of ways. However, the actors playing the three brothers are individually all very successful Thai pop singers: Ek is played by Songsit Roongnophakunsri (Kob), Tos by Saksit Tangtong (Tang), and Pee by Patipan Pattaweekan (Mos). Combined, these singers have sold approximately 30 million records, with Mos probably the most well known, his records selling over five million copies per album. But the show features other personalities: Ek's wife Nat is played by ex- Miss Thailand World, Mathinee Kingpayom (Ked). Further, the show regularly features other well-known comedians and other singers. Most of the feature actors from the show have already gained fame elsewhere or in another entertainment field, and there is a basic reason for this cross-hatching of careers, which I will soon detail.

To understand something of, first, the links between nationalism and pop culture, I wish briefly to describe some historical precedents. After this I detail the Thai entertainment industry, the industry's structure and the audience it is marketed to. The cultural and institutional dissimilarity from the Western entertainment industry will explain something of the impossibility of using aspects of Western cultural studies to read Thai pop. However, by noting some of Lawrence Grossberg's arguments (1992), I want to detail the universalising strategies of some aspects of cultural studies, and the desire to mask the commercial underpinning of popular music.

Thai nationalism

In the wave of nationalist changes in Thailand during the 1930s after the fall of the absolute monarchy, the government initiated the National Cultural Maintenance Act, a government act which defined certain cultural practices which the Thai people should do, and others which were prohibited. Among these changes was the legislation that Western clothes were proper for Thai people, including hats and gloves for women. The changes were seen as excessive by some; for example, a minor recommendation was the decree that men should kiss their wives goodbye before they went to work (Reynolds 1991: 7). These cultural acts, called Ratthaniyom — for which the standard translation is ‘state conventions’, but which Thai social critic Sulak Sivaraksa playfully translates as ‘following the car (blindly)’ (1991: 50)⁶ — are historical artefacts of Thailand's incorporation, formalisation and categorisation of the West's culture in Thailand. The Ratthaniyom are examples of the level at which the Thai government has historically intervened and controlled cultural formations. While the first Ratthaniyom dealt with issues of national security (Stowe 1991: 123–4), and changed the nation's name from Siam to Thailand, later conventions focused on cultural issues. This is not to argue that Thailand is any more or less nationalistic than, say, Australia or the USA, but that when considering cultural values we must see a tendency in the West to favour implicit and seemingly autonomous practices of nationalism independent of government initiatives, as if patriotism wells up suddenly in romantic concepts such as the imagination (Anderson 1993). For there is a caution in the West about displaying the explicit ordering of cultural values by government institutions, even though these occur regularly (and we only need to think of flag-raising ceremonies or the Australian ‘Year of Federation’ promotion). Not that the explicitness is any better or worse; however, the explicit level of nationalism in some Thai pop is not a register of state control but an acknowledgement of the source of cultural values that the West would rather erase — the governmental manipulation of nationalist myths. Another important point is that cultural mandates, in Thailand and elsewhere, are largely a thing of the past and we are now dealing with their residue in terms of legislation, practices and dominant myths on cultural activities.

The Ratthaniyom are categorisations which both promote and limit the influx of Western culture into Thailand. There is a willingness, I feel, by Western academics to read state intervention negatively for a couple of reasons. First, the valorisation of the rise of a civil society more willing to resist government powers, and a legacy of viewing non-Western and particularly South East Asian countries as authoritarian regimes, means that non-Western state power is more frequently articulated as dangerous power. Second, there is often a curious reproduction of colonialism specifically through the West's criticism of its own intervention. The Ratthaniyom are usually read as a signal that Thailand wanted to become Western, and that the West will prevail, both proof of the ‘inevitable march of colonialism’. These ideas emerge mainly in modernisation development theory which Michael R. Rhum described as the ‘great enthusiasm of the Third World elite’ to import the ‘technical’ and ‘cultural’ modernity of the West (Rhum 1996: 329). There is an implicit assumption that Western clothes, language and work practices are ‘modern’ and the related Thai practices are traditional — a very loaded cultural assumption. As a view which valorises the West as strong and unstoppable, this reading can similarly be made of Thai pop's relation to Western pop — that Thai pop is merely a copy and reflection of the significant Western entertainment industry and is a signal of Thailand's cultural mimicry of the West (and by Western pop I mean almost exclusively American and British music). However, there are numerous problems with this view of Western dependency: it reduces Thai nationalism to actions opposing the West, thus reducing Thai nationalism to a position of opposition to, and hence dependency on, Western nationalism. It would be simple to read Thai pop in this manner. There is an overt acknowledgement, even within the Thai music industry, of the use made of Western music — such as copying melodies or concept groups such as the Spice Girls and boy bands.⁷ I disagree that this signals the domineering power of Western culture, for cultural appropriation works all through Western and non-Western cultures (we only need to think of the Monkees as the American Beatles’ — this hardly means the United States was acknowledging their cultural defeat by the British). Rather, the relationship between Western pop and Thai pop fits into a much larger relationship with Thai traditional and folk music, other Asian pop music such as Canto- and J-pop, and the international pop music industry. For it seems there is a growing trend, not just in Thailand but in the region, that positions J-pop with an increasing, and perhaps greater, influence on the pop music industry than the West. A flick through any pop music or teenage magazine in Thailand will show that poster pin-ups now tend to be Thai or Japanese performers, whereas previously they were Westerners.

The second problem is that even in the Ratthaniyom, Field Marshal Phibun Songkhran, the co-author of many of the Ratthaniyom, did not see Western culture as a threat that could overpower Thai culture — which perhaps is the all too common view held by the West. He surely would not need to inaugurate the compulsory wearing of Western clothes if the West threatened to take over. Indeed, one aspect of the changes in clothes to an ‘international’ style was to help Thai people to differentiate themselves from the occupying Japanese forces.⁸ Phibun wished tactically to include aspects of the West into Thai culture, both to ‘impress on the world that they were civilised people’ (Stowe 1991: 187), and I suspect to make cultural interaction easier by ‘Westernising’ aspects of it. The edicts also functioned to normalise Bangkok culture as Thai national culture; minority groups in areas outside Bangkok, such as the Isaan in the north-east or Muslim groups in the south, were now legally required to participate in Bangkok culture. Also the edicts were a play for power with the mercantile Chinese middle class. It was Chinese clothes, mainly, that were banned and replaced by Western clothes (Reynolds 1991). Thai nationalism formally incorporated its Chinese mercantile section of society. While this vilification of the Chinese has mostly disappeared,⁹ the cultural edicts are examples of policies of assimilation which homogenise the society by situating the administrative centre and national culture both in the capital city. With the Ratthaniyom, Phibun and his supporters could construct a homogeneous Thai identity that closely supported the three foundations of culture: the monarchy, religion and the nation. I now want to turn to the operation of the Thai pop industry to demonstrate that the centralisation of culture continues to be reproduced in the production of pop music.

Grammy Records

There is little published work on Thai pop outside of the industry magazines, and almost nothing published in English. Virtually all of the research for this section was conducted by interviews with people in the industry: record company executives, music critics, fans and musicians.¹⁰ Thailand does not have official music charts, and the details and figures I provide are arbitrary. In order to understand how Thai pop operates at this stage I want to detail the operations of Grammy Records, the largest Thai pop label. Grammy was the first, and remains the biggest, Thai music company. It has diversified into many other areas of entertainment, which I will outline shortly. Started in 1983, one of the founders was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• ConsumAsiaN Book Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: cultural imaginaries, musical communities, reflexive practices
• PART I Musical cultures and culture industries
• PART II Local appropriations: from nation-building to happy pop and folk resistance
• PART III Travelling theories, syncretic exoticisms, or diffusion by any other name?
• PART IV Colonial desire, social memory and popular sensuality as performance genres
• References
• Index