Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow: Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations

Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan's unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese - language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. "Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow" explores Mandopop's surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years. In his early chapters, Marc L. Moskowitz provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary Mandopop scene. The section concludes with a look at the manner in which Taiwan's musical ethos has influenced the mainland's music industry and how Mandopop has brought Western music and cultural values to the PRC. This leads to a discussion of Taiwan pop's exceptional hybridity, beginning with foreign influences during the colonial period under the Dutch and Japanese and continuing with the country's political, cultural, and economic alliance with the U.S. Finally, Moskowitz examines the construction of male and female identities in Mandopop and looks at the widespread condemnation of the genre by critics.