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"Around the world and across time, singers and their songs stand at the crossroads of differing politics and perspectives. Levi S. Gibbs edits a collection built around the idea of listening as a political act that produces meaning. Contributors explore a wide range of issues by examining artists like Romani icon Esma Redžepova, Indian legend Lata Mangeshkar, and pop superstar Teresa Teng. Topics include gendered performances and the negotiation of race and class identities; the class-related contradictions exposed by the divide between highbrow and pop culture; links between narratives of overcoming struggle and the distinction between privileged and marginalized identities; singers' ability to adapt to shifting notions of history, borders, gender, and memory in order to connect with listeners; how the meanings we read into a singer's life and art build on one another; and technology's ability to challenge our ideas about what constitutes music. Cutting-edge and original, Social Voices reveals how singers and their songs equip us to process social change and divergent opinions"--

"Around the world and across time, singers and their songs stand at the crossroads of differing politics and perspectives. Levi S. Gibbs edits a collection built around the idea of listening as a political act that produces meaning. Contributors explore a wide range of issues by examining artists like Romani icon Esma Redžepova, Indian legend Lata Mangeshkar, and pop superstar Teresa Teng. Topics include gendered performances and the negotiation of race and class identities; the class-related contradictions exposed by the divide between highbrow and pop culture; links between narratives of overcoming struggle and the distinction between privileged and marginalized identities; singers' ability to adapt to shifting notions of history, borders, gender, and memory in order to connect with listeners; how the meanings we read into a singer's life and art build on one another; and technology's ability to challenge our ideas about what constitutes music. Cutting-edge and original, Social Voices reveals how singers and their songs equip us to process social change and divergent opinions"--

Shortly after a push to promote China's 1950 Marriage Law in 1953, scholars from the Chinese Music Research Institute on a collection trip to a small locality in northern China encountered a large number of folksongs about extramarital affairs. They interpreted this as evidence of the need for marriage reform. The folksong lyrics highlighted controversial aspects of the Marriage Law by espousing one of the law's central tenets - free love - while also expressing women's desires to leave their husbands. In this article, I explore how the researchers placed the song lyrics in a liminal moral-temporal category between "feudal" arranged marriage and the new marriage system before declaring the songs to be relics of the victimization of women in a "feudal" past. I argue that additional light-hearted elements complicate the researchers' conclusion and suggest that when the promotion of social agendas in the 1940s and 1950s cast songs about illicit affairs as morally ambiguous, Chinese scholars chose to ascribe the songs' "roots" to other groups or to the "feudal" past of the people they sought to praise and/or transform. (China Q/GIGA)

AbstractShortly after a push to promote China's 1950 Marriage Law in 1953, scholars from the Chinese Music Research Institute on a collection trip to a small locality in northern China encountered a large number of folksongs about extramarital affairs. They interpreted this as evidence of the need for marriage reform. The folksong lyrics highlighted controversial aspects of the Marriage Law by espousing one of the law's central tenets – free love – while also expressing women's desires to leave their husbands. In this article, I explore how the researchers placed the song lyrics in a liminal moral-temporal category between "feudal" arranged marriage and the new marriage system before declaring the songs to be relics of the victimization of women in a "feudal" past. I argue that additional light-hearted elements complicate the researchers' conclusion and suggest that when the promotion of social agendas in the 1940s and 1950s cast songs about illicit affairs as morally ambiguous, Chinese scholars chose to ascribe the songs' "roots" to other groups or to the "feudal" past of the people they sought to praise and/or transform.