Flow of Thoughts – Episode 01
Transcript
[MUSIC INTRO]
JACKIE: Over the past few years, the Asian Canadian Asian Migration Studies program has facilitated a series of dialogues that have centered the collective learning experiences between students across different disciplines. Having emerged as a response to student interest around discussions on mental health and wellbeing, these community dialogues have offered students the opportunity to reflect on their personal experiences, listen to the stories of other participants, and engage in meaningful and critical discussions.
In the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic, though, we’ve had to rethink our original structures of engagement. While we’ve tried to make our community dialogues as accessible as possible, we recognize that in the past, these discussions have been limited to only those that were in attendance. Without intending to, we’ve excluded the possibility of continuing these important discussions beyond the limits of the event time and place itself.
As a response to this oversight, we’re piloting a new structure to our community dialogues, which you’re listening to right now. As it remains uncertain when it’ll be safe to hold in-person events again, we wanted to offer a space for students to still have these discussions, albeit digitally. By creating a podcast, we’re able to have our community dialogues be more accessible for everyone, to have it exist online and be shared with whomever, whenever.
Although we’re still learning as we go, we hope that you’ll continue to join us along this journey. My name is Jackie, and this is Flow of Thoughts.
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These past few months have been… hard, to say the least. As someone who finds comfort in having a schedule to follow and knowing what to expect, the global pandemic has made it difficult for me to not feel… lost. And hopeless. And angry. And, well, guilty. Although I eventually realized that I, like many others, was going through the many stages of grief, I couldn’t help but feel so consumed by the intensity of loss.
Yet what has kept my thoughts from spiraling out of control was… music.
[MUSIC PLAYS]
Listening to Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” (2003) and Neyo’s “So Sick” (2006) were among the many songs that I found myself happily humming along to, keeping me preoccupied from my own internalized doubts and fears. These songs, although sonically different, share one common detail: for my generation, they’ve since become a product of nostalgia.
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There’s a sense of comfort that I feel when I hear anything that sounds remotely nostalgic, and I don’t think I’m alone in this – rather than a specific memory, these songs bring to mind a yearning for an idealized past that evokes a sense of peace, warmth, and happiness that I wish to return to. However, I would argue that nostalgia is more than just an aching for the past – if done well, it could also be a reimagination of the future.
[AMBIENT MUSIC]
Especially for artists who sell nostalgia as a way to connect with their listeners, there’s an opportunity to not simply imitate a collection of sounds or beats for the sake of reference, because they run the risk of sounding repetitive, outdated, and bland. There’s a potential to take what’s familiar and blend it into our modern soundscape, to weave them together and to create something new.
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It’s through my longing for something old and my desire to discover something new that I stumbled upon Japanese British singer and songwriter Rina Sawayama and her self-titled debut album SAWAYAMA (2020). Described as a project of nostalgia, this album is not just a throwback.
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As mentioned by John Pascual from ABS-CBN, it canonizes the millennial sound, much of which was formerly snubbed and mocked by more traditional and overzealous music fans. Now an adult herself, Rina illustrates her work not as a mere shadow to the giants of the music industry, but as a love letter to the sounds responsible for her (and our) becoming. She weaves jarringly through these nostalgic odes to our childhood, creating a space for us to listen to this familiar soundscape with a new perspective: optimistic, but curious.
To me, the album itself is an eclectic work of art. Moving from genre to genre, SAWAYAMA is a story that speaks openly and honestly about the struggle to belong. A familiar tale to many who live in the diaspora, [MUSIC FADES] Rina complicates her personal relationships by unpacking the trauma of her personal upbringing. Having grown up in a society that has shunned her, a family that has hurt her, and a body that has felt foreign to her, Rina’s story unfolds as a personal exploration of finding rage (and later joy) in grief. Her songs became a medium for her to process her emotions and to embrace her identity as one that’s inseparable from her and her ancestral upbringing.
But one of the dangers in being regarded as a visible minority is the threat of tokenism. In an industry that’s known for blatantly ignoring and appropriating the significance of the culture its borrowing from, [AMBIENT MUSIC FADES IN] visual representation in music is a fine line to tread upon. For Rina, this meant that she needed to challenge what was expected of her by those that held the power to dictate the style and direction of her music. Instead of becoming a mirrored image of her Japanese pop and rock predecessors, she chose to cultivate her own sense of identity by borrowing elements from artists whom she grew up listening to between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Included in her list of inspirations is none other than Britney Spears – an American pop icon whose career had laid the foundations for many aspiring artists over the years.
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[SOUNDBITE, RADIO STATIC, STATIONS CHANGING]
And I guess I was an aspiring artist, too. When I was five years old, my mom had given me my first CD: a copy of Britney Spears’ second studio album …Oops! I Did It Again (2001). As far as I was concerned, this album was just as much of an essential piece to my childhood as were the Cheetah Girls and Lizzie McGuire movies. Looking back, I’m reminded of the hours that I spent not only listening to this album, but also performing hour-long renditions to her songs in front of my bedroom mirror. I imagined myself on a large stage, singing and dancing to her greatest hits while the cheering crowd enthusiastically chanted my name over and over again.
[SOUND EFFECTS OF OLD TELEVISION SET TURNING ON, CROWD CHEERING, MUSIC]
But dramatics aside, this is all to say that it’s difficult to discuss American pop music and culture without mentioning the ongoing presence and legacy of Britney Spears. At the age of 18, she arguably defined a new era of American pop music, one that yearned for the purity of teenage innocence, the thrill of sexual appeal, and the message of female empowerment. Without missing a beat, Britney seamlessly weaved in between the demands and imaginations of her listeners – both sonically and visually. Her distinct sound and dramatic stage presence attracted and captured her audience’s attention, many of whom were caught up in her immense popularity. With the successful back-to-back releases of…Baby One More Time and Oops!… I Did It Again, Britney was sensationalized as the next ‘it’ girl of the decade. Touring around the world and performing at sold out venues, she was propped up as the perfect feminine icon, one that not only personified the growing popularity of bubble-gum and dance pop, but who was also set to be remembered as a legend in the years to come.
Combined with her lucrative partnership with Pepsi, Britney capitalized on her mainstream success by representing the youth and the future, both of which were emblematic by the changes of consumer culture. Unlike companies who value tradition as a way to relate to their audience, Britney’s “for those who think young” slogan separated herself from the ‘virtuous images’ of nostalgia that the older generation (namely parents) had grown up believing in and listening to. Instead, she became the voice of the younger generation, many of whom readily embraced her provocative ideals as not only a desire to know her, but as a desire to be her. Through the accessibility of her music videos, concert tours, magazine subscriptions, clothing line, and collectable dolls, Britney Spears quickly became a household name and the face of an entire generation.
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In recognizing the influence of Britney Spears upon her modern-day contemporaries, though, we need to ask ourselves how she was marketed, especially in the earlier stages of her career.
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For her to have become the face of an entire generation requires us to unpack the underlying legacies of systematic racism, particularly in the opportunities for artists to create and later reinvent their onstage identities within the so-called international music scene. For record labels and producers to have readily invested in the image of Britney Spears as a ‘global artist’ meant that they trusted she would be recognized not only as the face of an entire generation, but of a genre as well.
As the pop industry evolved over time, Britney also grew out and into whatever role her listeners expected to see and hear from her. As the bubbly teen pop trend that she became famous for began to fade, she released Britney (2001),
[MUSIC FADES]
a more mature-sounding self-titled album that was directly influenced by the increasingly popular blend of rock, hip-hop, and pop. Since then, she’s been defined as the ‘Princess of Pop’ to celebrate her ‘ground-breaking’ contributions to the genre. ‘Ground-breaking’ in quotation marks, because much of her career (as is the case for her other white contemporaries) has been afforded to her as a result of her own privileges as a white woman whose artistic capacity and reach has never been limited to the colour of her skin.
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In her book The Sonic Color Line, Jennifer Lynn Stoever explains that “certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds.” This has especially been the case for Black artists, whose contributions to creating and innovating music have largely been ignored in white mainstream media. Rather than being able to simply perform their music, Black bodies and voices are micromanaged to fit within a limited scope of what they’re allowed to perform, specifically within hip-hop, R&B, and urban genres. By choosing to accept the status quo and not challenge its racial implications, we inevitably uphold a history that prizes black contributions only when they align with our larger notions of blackness.
Thus, as mentioned in Briana Younger’s Pitchfork article, racialized artists are scrutinized under certain parameters that define how they ought to be “packaged, presented, and received publicly” to assure them and their respective labels commercial success. Yet appealing to the demands of the consumers to avoid any potential ‘risks’ isn’t enough to justify the lack of representation of racially marginalized groups in the so-called international music industry, especially in genres that have historically been dominated (and defined) by white artists. As listeners, we need to ask ourselves:
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Why’re record labels and producers unwilling to invest in the talent and image of aspiring racialized artists? What are the implications of promoting white or white-passing artists as ‘international’ or ‘global’ and what does that say of our internalized biases? How is the rhetoric of ‘risk’ harmful when such music profits off of the innovations of racialized artists? And second: How does our process of remembering and memorializing artists’ contributions to music inextricably tie itself to modes of forgetting? How does this impact our ways of measuring legacies in the music industry and who do we leave behind in these stories of memory?
In asking these questions, though, I don’t mean to imply that the cultural impact of artists like Britney Spears should no longer be relevant –
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besides discrediting their own contributions, doing so would also invalidate the sense of nostalgia that fans have grown to relate with. Speaking for myself, I think there’s enough space for me to fondly listen to their songs while also remaining critical of the systems that have leveraged these artists’ voices above others. Before we blindly celebrate their success, we ought to be mindful of those left in the margins of history, whose formative contributions to these genres have later been popularized and rebranded by our white mainstream media.
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By acknowledging some of the obstacles of being a person of colour in the music industry, Rina’s calls for representation become even clearer. In an interview with Michel Martin from NPR, she notes how in the beginning of her career, she was initially fixated on what she represented to other people. Having been raised in the diaspora, she struggled to identify a single Asian artist that was not only a recognizable name among the public, but who also embraced their Asian heritage with pride and vulnerability. Wanting to pursue her passion in music and become the inspiration that her younger self had yearned for, Rina would eventually release her self-titled debut album SAWAYAMA, a personal collection of songs that channeled her everyday frustrations and love through the influence and blend of nu-metal and dance pop.
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Unlike her mini album RINA (2017) which primarily focused on the abstract relationships with other people, SAWAYAMA delves deeper into the visibility of identity, representation, and family. Not meant to simply capitalize on her growing fame, SAWAYAMA is a personal portrait that describes the challenges that Rina faces while living in the diaspora as a racialized Other, a chasm that’s further complicated by feelings of loneliness (and later) acceptance.
When asked by Eda Yu from Paper Mag what the reason was behind using her last name as the album title,
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Rina explained that it’s meant to represent her complex origin story. Growing up, she expressed her anger and frustration behind the racist microaggressions that were omnipresent throughout her life. To her, her name represented everything opposite to what British society considered to be acceptable; she was resentful of its foreignness and how she was alienated on the basis of her last name alone. However, it has since become a source of empowerment and pride for Rina, one that she’s chosen to illustrate and illuminate throughout the album.
Whiplashing from genre to genre, Rina uses her lyrics to decide which genre would work best to compliment (and at times, contrast) its story.
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For example, the vast orchestral notes in the beginning of “Dynasty” complements the gritty pop-rock/nu-metal tones heard throughout the song. Each genre follows the legacies of intergenerational trauma and personal conflicts that Rina has faced between her parents, ending with a promise that this chain of silence will be broken to set the hereditary of pain that she and her ancestors have carried free.
Comparatively, “STFU!” takes the nu-metal that was used earlier and integrates avant pop as a way to approach the topics of racial microaggressions and fetishisms with the furious tone that it deserves. Accompanied by a background of occasional whispers and screams, the song moves in multiple directions and occasionally contrasts itself. For a few seconds, Rina politely (almost sweetly) rages against those who have belittled her; soon after, she bristles and thrashes against the pent-up anger that she’s felt over a lifetime of objectification, demoralization, and marginalization.
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Among all of the songs featured in the album, both “Dynasty” and “STFU!” explicitly honours the different shades of everyday grief. As noted by Jennifer Irving from Consequence of Sound, each track bounces from sound to sound, “never settling down long enough to be labeled.” Whether it’s celebrating the joys of love in “Chosen Family” or processing personal emotions in “Love Me 4 Me”, each song in the album gives listeners a moment to reminisce on the sounds of their youth and also validates their struggles to belong. In this case, SAWAYAMA becomes an experience, as though Rina herself is there to hold our hand and guide us through her (and our) story.
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All of this is to say: I absolutely love SAWAYAMA: it carefully balances the new and the old – from start to finish, it embodies a hundred different things all at once and yet leaves enough room for listeners to want more. As I mentioned in the beginning, the success of nostalgia is dependent upon its ability to adapt. It’s not enough for record labels and producers to insist that consumers are only looking for the dazzling sounds of the past; when done well, artists can use nostalgia as a way to beckon their listeners forward and illustrate how the past can manifest itself today in our modern pop soundscape.
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But as listeners, we also need to open ourselves up to the potential and reality of pop music. We live in a time where technology has given artists the opportunity to experiment with their sound, where they’re able to challenge the stereotypes that otherwise define the genre. While there’s certainly no shame in wanting to continue to create music that fits within the mainstream aesthetic, there are enough avenues for artists to be able to explore their passion and release whatever feels true to them. Authenticity in music, like nostalgia, shouldn’t simply define a genre in its entirety – it needs to be open to change and interpretation, though still be held accountable when culturally appropriated.
Pop music specifically (and pop culture in general) is predicated upon an ongoing history of oppression. It has stolen the innovations of racialized (namely Black) artists, claimed ownership of its popularity, culturally appropriated its artistic styles for profit, and avoided any sense of shame or justice for decades, if not centuries. As artists and as listeners, we need to hold ourselves and others accountable when confronted by histories that have otherwise been obscured by our white mainstream media platforms. We need to be mindful of our own internalized biases when listening to racialized artists, challenging the assumptions we carry while also supporting the direction that they choose to take with their music.
In conclusion, nostalgia is a powerful tool, especially in music. Inspiration is arguably the foundation of music, but contemporary artists could easily begin to imitate their influences rather than question them.
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Pop music has the potential to do and be more, and Rina Sawayama proves this by simultaneously playing around with and pushing beyond what’s familiar to the listener. As an artist whose diasporic experience is represented in the beats of nu-metal and dance pop, she represents her art in the direction that she chooses and reclaims what’s rightfully hers: her body, her voice, and her story.
Although SAWAYAMA’s lack of cohesion may take some listeners aback, it’s hard not to ask: why? Why did Rina choose to share this particular story? Why does it resonate with this particular genre? Rina makes a conscious effort to represent her Japanese ancestry and experience under her own terms rather than the direction posed to her by music critics. Through nostalgia, she’s able to look back and use the different soundscape layers from the late 1990s and early 2000s as sonic cues to her story. By doing so, she adds herself onto a list of critically acclaimed artists who’re continually pushing whatever boundaries stand in their way, illustrating herself as a force to be reckoned with. As herself. As Rina Sawayama.
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Thank you for listening to this episode.
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As mentioned in the beginning, we’re currently piloting this podcast to offer a space for our peers to come together and discuss what they feel is relevant to the discussions around wellness and wellbeing in the Asian Canadian community. If you have an idea, please let us know by emailing us at acam.program@ubc.ca! We’d love to hear from you.
I would like to thank everyone on the ACAM team (Amanda, Chris, Leilan, Moses, Olivia, and Szu) for providing their utmost love and support throughout the making of this podcast.
Following the release of this podcast episode, we’ll be facilitating a Community Dialogue to discuss more about what was mentioned in this episode (and go into further detail of things that were either skimmed over or hardly mentioned). Please be on the lookout for our upcoming event by following us on Twitter and Instagram @UBCACAM and like us on Facebook at ‘Asian Canadian & Asian Migration Studies UBC’.
Thank you again and hope to hear from you soon!
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