| Summary: | "Homesick Blues explores how artists, fans, amateur practitioners, and others have used music to tell stories of everyday life in Japan from the late 1940s to 2018, a practice that the book calls "musical storytelling." At its core, musical storytelling is a political practice, presenting potent--if ambiguous--world-producing potentials as social actors generate and share stories of themselves and others in ways that intersect with and inform social and political life. Sometimes, musical storytelling is used by powerful entities to reinforce dominant geopolitical, cultural, or economic visions. More often, it is deployed as a means of interfering in or redirecting those visions. The author pushes beyond the upheavals of the 1960s and early 70s, challenging well-established characterization of these years as fleeting moments when critical politics in Japan--especially in music--reached an apex, and an end. Instead, Aalgaard asserts that musical storytelling is robust and ongoing, and proposes more nuanced and comprehensive understandings of critical political and cultural engagement in modern Japan. From postwar jazz to contemporary rock, from 1960s "anti-war folk" to Japanese pops (enka) and the "girls' rock" of the 1980s, the book explores the political uses of music, reassesses so-called "protest music," and grapples with the complex political-ness of artists themselves, many of whom have continued to interrogate conditions of everyday life in Japan well into the contemporary moment. An equally diverse selection of scholarship and methodology, from ethnomusicology to literary studies, from philosophy to history, creates a richly interdisciplinary and accessible analysis of musical modes of politics"--
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