In Sonic Mobilities. Producing Worlds in Southern China, Adam Kielman offers a captivating and much-needed ethnography of two Guangzhou-based bands, Mabang 马帮 and Wanju Chuanzhang 玩具船长 (also known as Toy Captain). While studies of Chinese popular music have been traditionally centred on Beijing's rock and roll subculture and tended to put ‘an emphasis on hegemony/resistance models and approaches from cultural studies in understanding music's relationship to state power’ (p. 164), Kielman provides in contrast a very detailed and comprehensive account of these two Southern China bands who sing in ‘dialects no one understands’ (p. 68).
Himself a ‘jazz saxophonist by training’ (p. 19), Kielman collaborated for years with a wide variety of musicians in Guangzhou, before completing a PhD in ethnomusicology ‘during which time [he] started playing regularly with the two bands at the center of this book’ (p. 20). His unique position allowed him to participate in the recording of music albums, share the stage with the bands and collect their life stories. Using short ethnographic vignettes, Kielman shows how the musical creative process – following in the footsteps of Howard Becker (Reference Becker1983) – is in fact a collaboration and a negotiation between a plurality of actors: musicians, managers, sound designers, etc. The genre of each band is also a negotiation and an assemblage of various elements: Mabang rebranded themselves as a ‘Southern Chinese fusion world music’ (p. 31) band under the influence of their label, while Wanju Chuanzhang consider themselves as an ‘ocean folk’ band.
Kielman's most innovative contribution involves the various ‘dialects’ – or ‘local languages’, a better translation of the Chinese fangyan 方言 – used by the two bands in their songs. Indeed, Mabang sings in Guiliuhua, a local variety of Pinghua spoken in the singer's hometown of Liuzhou in Guangxi province, while Wanju Chuanzhang sings in a southern Min dialect spoken on the band's hometown of Nan'ao island in Guangzhou province, similar to Hokkien or Taiwanese (Taiyu). These different local languages connect southern Chinese bands to a larger network of Sinophone music consumers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the wider diaspora. Yet it is also at odds with the Chinese state language policy, which ‘has not only promoted Mandarin use in the service of national integration historically but also continues in the present to restrict the use of dialects in a way that directly affects musical production’ (p. 74). Kielman's work here interestingly echoes Gina Ann Tam's excellent scholarship on dialect and nationalism in China (Reference Tam2020). The presence of Kielman during Wanju Chuanzhang's rehearsal allows him to show how the band's songs are phonetically transcribed for the backing vocalists, and how ‘feelings’ – as opposed to ‘understanding’ – are nonetheless transmitted to the audience during concerts (p. 78). The author's exclusive focus on these two southern bands, however, prevents him from looking at other successful artists who recently rose to fame singing in their own languages, such as Wutiaoren 五条人 (in Haifenghua) or Jiulian Zhenren 九连真人 (in Hakka), two indie-folk bands from Guangdong with similar backgrounds. While the discussion, at the end of the book, of the Guangzhou label Xingwaixing helps us understand the state of folk and popular music in southern China, the lack of analysis of the larger media environment in Guangdong deprives us of the complexity of the relationship between artists and local media, and between local media and the state's cultural and linguistic policies – which can take various forms, like the recent participation of Wanju Chuanzhang in the talent TV show (in Cantonese) ‘Storm of the bands’ (Yuedui fengbao 乐队风暴) broadcast by China Guangdong TV Variety Channel in 2021.
Following Helen Rees’ seminal edited volume (Reference Rees2009) on individual Chinese musicians’ lives, Kielman provides a very useful and precise account of each musician ‘musical life’. It allows the author to discover the various musical influences of this generation of Chinese musicians, born between the end of the 1970s and the mid-1980s, and socialised during the reform and opening era initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Contrary to the vast majority of scholarship centred on Beijing which puts too much emphasis on dakou 打口 records (literally ‘cut-out’ CDs and tapes, unsold albums sent by Western countries to China in order to be recycled but sold on the black market instead; see De Kloet Reference De Kloet2010), Kielman shows that virtually all the musicians he interviewed were heavily influenced by the famous Hong Kong rock band Beyond, and by pirate tapes of popular musicians from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The impact of Beyond's influence would require a chapter (or a book) by itself, and not only for southern China and the Cantonese-speaking world, as mentioned by the author. As skilfully pointed out by Kielman, ‘the centrality of a popular band from Hong Kong in all of these individuals’ musical developments draws attention to South China as a transborder region where connections to Hong Kong and Taiwan are as important, if not more important, than connection to Beijing’ (p. 136). While the circulation of music between the various centres of the Sinophone world, as well as mutual influences, are rightfully celebrated in this book, there is however no discussion of the two bands’ reception in these different places – which is unfortunate since Mabang and Wanju Chuanzhang are fairly well known in Taiwan, Mabang having released an album through the Taiwanese label Wind Music in 2018, including new musical arrangement and songs.
Kielman's book provides an innovative and fascinating account of popular music in China, but it becomes somewhat less convincing when the author moves away from his ethnographic fieldwork and mobilises the concept of tianxia 天下 (usually translated as ‘all under heaven’), here understood as ‘musical cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics’ (p. 162). The short section related to China's ‘sonic infrastructures’ (p. 140), whether it is Maoist wired radio – analysed in more detail in Andrew Jones's recent work (Reference Jones2020) – or dakou records, might also appear detached from the brilliant ethnographic work undertaken by the author. Sonic Mobilities is nonetheless a ground-breaking work in the field of Chinese and Sinophone popular music studies, stressing the importance of multi-sited ethnography and the exploration of cultural productions in minor Sinitic languages. Breaking away from a Beijing-centric approach and the hegemony/resistance framework, Sonic Mobilities pays attention to the actual production of songs and music worlds by bands too often neglected by the scientific literature.
