Volume 8, Issue 1 – December 2024

We are pleased to announce the publication of Riffs Volume 8, Issue 1: Asian Popular Music.

Asian pop music has experienced a spectacular rise in markets globally and outside of the Asian continent, yet its popularity and relevance in academia, content creation, media, and editorial pieces are often still narrowly defined within a prevailing narrative: Asian popular music’s “mainstream” ideation has been contingent upon the Global North’s acknowledgment of Asian music as something that is popular. In continuing to entrench this hegemonic narrative, existing power structures that cast Global North music and media as arbiters of what is popular ignore narratives which place these Global South sounds/songs/compositions/cultures at the centre. In the same way “Squid Games” actor Lee Jung-jae was asked by an American reporter “what was the biggest change” in his life now that he was famous – the reporter unaware of his incredible stardom in Asia for two decades –, the Global North treats the Global South as part of the periphery working inward, rather than at the centre of its own story.

In this special issue of Riffs, we place Asian popular music at the core of our focus, rather than solely exploring its intersections with “the west”.

To download your free PDF of this issue, click here.

Each of the articles in this issue are listed below. Follow the links to view and download individual PDFs.

Design work by Iain A. Taylor. Riffs front cover design by Adam Williams.

Sharon Kong-Perring and Mathieu Berbiguier – Editorial

Tiara Wilson – ’The Name We Gave to Struggle and Pain’: Racialised space and authenticity in Tablo’s ‘Hood’

Haoran Jiang – Charting the Course: Taiwanese popular music studies in retrospect and prospect

Mayako Liu – Performing Japaneseness, Playing With Koreanness?: Female Japanese K-Pop artists and strategies of identity construction

Júlia Szivák – Raja Kumari: The Bridge?

Robert Dahlberg-Sears – Listening to What Is/n’t: Fieldwork contradictions in Japanese punk scene

Sneha Ganguly – ‘Namaste Hallyu!’: K-Culture and the Rise of BTS-Army in India

Clementine Vania – The ‘Kwangya’ Paradox: A Study on K-Pop Fandom’s Perception of Authenticity