Conference Agenda

This paper examines how the U.S. Eighth Army Show system structured the development of South Korean popular music in the postwar period. While previous scholarship has explored the broader cultural influence of the U.S. military presence, the formalized audition system and hierarchical ranking of performers within U.S. military clubs remain underexplored. The Eighth Army categorized Korean musicians into a ranking system from Double A to D, determining their access to higher-paying venues and shaping their artistic trajectories. This system not only functioned as a mechanism of musical labor discipline but also reinforced a cultural hierarchy where American musical preferences—particularly jazz, R&B, and rock’n’roll—became central to professional advancement. Unlike earlier informal engagements between Korean musicians and U.S. military personnel, the Eighth Army Show institutionalized a structured entertainment economy, integrating local musicians into the Cold War military-entertainment complex.

Additionally, the racial segregation of U.S. military clubs further conditioned Korean performers’ musical exposure—jazz, R&B, and blues in Black clubs; country, swing, and rock’n’roll in White clubs—creating distinct sonic networks that later influenced Korea’s emerging pop industry. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of cultural capital, this study explores how the Eighth Army’s ranking system operated as a gatekeeping structure, positioning Korean musicians within transnational circuits of artistic labor. Furthermore, informed by Stanyek’s (2011) theorization of transnational musicscapes, I examine how this system facilitated musical hybridization while simultaneously constraining performers within U.S.-oriented commercial aesthetics.

Through archival sources, press materials, and oral histories, this paper historicizes the sonic dimensions of Cold War military entertainment, tracing how U.S. military patronage shaped genre formation, performance aesthetics, and the structuring of Korea’s postwar popular music industry. By foregrounding the Eighth Army Show as both a site of cultural hegemony and musical negotiation, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how military-entertainment infrastructures shaped global music flows and professional music economies in Cold War Asia.

Research on Chinese red songs often highlights their representation of proletarian ideologies and Mao’s authoritarianism (Barme 1999, Baranovitch 2003, Ouyang 2022). However, little attention has been paid to how red songs reinforce the socialist legacy through music’s ties to Chinese traditions. This oversight largely stems from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which ignited debates about the decline of socialism in China and raised hopes that the country’s sociopolitical structure would shift toward adopting capitalism within the free-world system. As such, discussions about red songs decreased in global media coverage. It was not until the emergence of digital entertainment that international audiences began to recognize the ongoing popularity of red songs in the C-pop industry. Today, Chinese red music incorporates elements from folk, rock, rap, and Peking operas to enhance cultural products.

Unlike past red music that mainly functioned as political propaganda, the latest red songs focus on nurturing intimate connections by drawing from shared sociocultural memories. The cultural atmosphere surrounding red songs aligns with the sonic elements found in the video game Black Myth Wukong and the animated film NeZha; both stem from classic Chinese tales and have gained international acclaim. These creations have fostered a unified global Chinese cultural identity while enhancing China’s soft power on digital platforms. How can this new wave of red music, along with its related cultural productions rooted in socialist ideals, resonate with Chinese people around the globe? This paper explores popular red songs, including covers and original pieces (featuring artists like Faye Wong and Zhou Shen), highlighting the evolving musical styles and the insights those red songs provide into cultural identities. By examining the authenticity of sound and cultural sentiments, I reveal how nationalism is woven with themes of China's ancient greatness, classifying it as socialism with Chinese characteristics and ultimately emphasizing the longevity of the Chinese dynasty. The study shows that despite progress in musical innovation, sonic and visual works remain profoundly linked to historical recollections. Red songs have shifted from earlier socialist messages to honor Chinese culture, highlighting the lasting importance of Chinese traditions on the global stage.

What happens when visual technique eclipses the content of a music video? This paper analyzes virtuosic video remixes of the Japanese pop song “Bad Apple!!”. Since 2008, video creators have made increasingly complex recreations of a fanmade music video for this song: one of the most viewed recreations was made of a stop-motion animation using thousands of actual carved apples. I view these remixes through the anthropological lens developed by Alfred Gell (1992, 1998). Gell writes that artistic technique produces effects that are crucially culture-bound—in his words, “un-redeemably ethnocentric” (1992, 40). This paper adds to a critical musical literature on Gell’s theory, which has been applied in the realms of eighteenth-century vocal performance (Feldman 2007) and music notation (Schuiling 2019).

“Bad Apple!!” originally appeared on the soundtrack of the PC game Lotus Land Story (1998), but the song exploded in popularity after it was recorded by Masayoshi Minoshima in 2007. Fanmade music videos for this song proliferate, all featuring the same sequence of moving silhouettes originally modeled in 3D by Nico Nico user Anira. Early videos often used stop motion animation. More recent video creators, however, use the silhouette format as a springboard for technical virtuosity: there are recreations using user-made fluid dynamics computer modeling tools, and recreations using the Chess.com online chessboard. These recreations call upon realms of subculture-centric knowledge that fan away from the “ethnocentric” center represented by the original video.

I argue that the “enchantment of technology,” in Gell’s terms, must include some element of what I call semitransparency: this is to say that an enchanting technical skill is one that is partly intelligible, but partly opaque to the beholder. This semitransparency is implicit but not fully explored in Gell’s theory of artistic technology. In remix examples explored in this paper, I show how video creators achieve semitransparency by fanning out into an unexpected variety of technical domains. Ultimately, I position virtuosic technique—a technique that eclipses so-called content—as a borderline case, testing the limits not only of Gell’s stance on technique, but also on his theorization of artistic agency as a whole.