Sonic Sturdiness: The Globalization of “Chinese” Rock and Pop

To theorize further global and regional flows of popular culture, this article provides a critical analysis of “authentic” rock music from Beijing as well as “commercial” pop from Hong Kong. Following Appadurai, I theorize rock as a hard cultural form, which, under the scrutinizing eyes of the West, demands localization when it travels to places outside its perceived homeland, the West. By comparing hardcore punk from Beijing to Cantopop, I discuss whether the soft relates to the hard as pop does to rock. I conclude it does not. The transient, intertextual, and multivocal opaque voice of pop demands a different theorization. I therefore recast Appadurai's hard–soft distinction into a clear–opaque dualism as a more accurate theoretical tool for understanding cultural globalization.