Introduction: Problematizing and contextualizing taiwanese popular music

The postwar transformation of Taiwanese aboriginal music illustrates a different ethnic embeddedness in the postwar hegemonic culture. Recording culture for commercial purposes revealed rich and diverse sounds resulting from fluid genre crossovers and musical innovations. Yamauchi Fumitaka studied the ways recording culture mediated colonial modernity in Korea under Japanese colonization. The musical connections and disconnections in the development of Taiwanese popular music under Japanese rule were similarly informed by the imperial industrial culture. In the post-World War II era, popular music in Taiwan took many paths as it evolved during the disjunctions of everyday life under a repressive regime. The assimilation and dissemination of aboriginal music in Taiwan during the Cold War is an appropriate context for a different historiographical intervention. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.