Cross-cultural Re-use of Western Pop Songs in Asian Cinema

This book explores the synergetic cooperation and sometimes complex relationship between Western pop songs and East Asian films. While much research has examined the impact of songs in films, the nuances that emerge when films and songs come from different cultural contexts has not been as widely explored. Do English-language songs originating in Western cultures continue to carry specific meanings with them into films outside their original culture—or are they fully remade by their new context? Moreover, how do the same song recordings serve different films from different regions, and ones with significant cultural differences? Looking primarily at Chinese and South Korean films, this book first discusses the broader phenomenon of cross-cultural 'reuse', and the widespread acceptance of Western cultural products more generally in East Asia. It also addresses the 'Orientalisation' central to such cultural exchanges, an area of research which is currently scarce but urgently needed. Individual case studies of songs used cross-culturally in films—including Boney M's 'Sunny', Simon & Garfunkel's 'The Sound of Silence', and Carl Douglas's 'Kung Fu Fighting', among others—are then examined at length, breaking down specific aspects of each song and the different filmic contexts in which it exists in order to examine how these affect potential meanings. Cross-cultural communication and understanding in film music is considered from the perspectives of aesthetics, theory, history, and social context, addressing bigger-picture questions about what the relationship between song and film can tell us about regional and global culture.

 

Tianfang Lin holds a PhD in Film from the University of Southampton, UK, specializing in the use of music in film. She now teaches at Hainan Tropical Ocean University.