Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music) - Softcover

Hyder, Rehan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0754640647 ISBN 13: 9780754640646

Publisher: Routledge, 2004

Synopsis

During the 1990s, Asian pop artists began entering the mainstream of the British music industry for the first time. Bands such as Black Star Liner, Cornershop, Fun Da Mental and Voodoo Queens, led those within and without the industry to start asking questions such as what did it mean to be Asian? How did the bands' Asian background affect their music? What did their music say about Asians in Britain? In this book, Rehan Hyder draws on in-depth interviews with musicians from these bands and with critics and record producers, to examine the pressures associated with making music as a young Asian in today's multi-ethnic Britain. As the book reveals, these musicians wish to convey an authentic sense of creativity in their music, while at the same time wanting to assert a positive ethnic identity. Hyder explores these two impulses against the backdrop of a music industry and a society at large that hold a range of confining stereotypes about what it means to be Asian. The experiences of these bands add considerably to the wider debate about the nature of identity in the contemporary world.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr Rehan Hyder is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

Review:

Received the only Special Mention in the 2005 IASPM Book Award 'Read this book as a smartly conceived and adroitly completed rescue mission. Of all Britain's musical artists, Asian bands are the most ensnared and assaulted by journalistic, academic and political cliches. Rehan Hyder cuts his way through all this verbiage to get to the musicians themselves. In Brimful of Asia music is used to make sense of complicated lives and lives are examined to make sense of complicated music. An essential book for cultural and popular music studies alike.' Simon Frith, University of Stirling 'Brimful of Asia is filled to the brim with insight, analysis, and interpretation of some of the most important music being made in the world today. With deft mastery over a broad range of ideas and issues, Rehan Hyder locates the emergence of artists of Asian ancestry on the popular music charts in Britain as part of the global shake-up that is dramatically altering relationships between culture and place in many different ways all around the world. Brimful of Asia has much to say about artists, audiences, and artistry in a tumultuous time of transformation and change.' George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego; author of Dangerous Crossroads 'I found this an absolutely fascinating book, well-written and well-referenced to writers in the field - not simply the UK. The first section alone (chapters 1-4) provides some essential thinking about identity politics that would be useful to anyone studying ethnicities. Clearly its focus is on the UK and this may suggest that its appeal is limited. However, I would suggest that the issues confronted and discussed are relevant to a much wider-audience as they provide a thoughtful interrogation of the problems confronting young Asian bands that can be usefully applied to comparable research projects. In this case, it is not so much the substance (which is UK-based) but the approach and issues arising that will be useful to scholars and researchers.' Excerpt taken from the jury's report for the 2005 IASPM Book Award , in which the only Special Mention went to Rehan Hyder's 'Brimful of Asia'. '... this excellent book should become one of the standard texts on British popular musicianship at the end of the twentieth century.' Popular Music 'This [...] full-length study will undoubtedly be welcomed by Western academia...' Journal of Creative Communications

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0754640647
• ISBN 13: 9780754640646
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208