John Fenn has been awarded a Global Scholars Program Grant for his project Rock Tradition: Mediating Cultural Influences in Chinese Contemporary Popular Music. Funding will permit John to study contemporary Chinese rock, “underground,” or “experimental” music. About this music John writes that it “emerges from a mix of cultural resources—indigenous and imported, old and new, familiar and far-out—that in many ways define Beijing as a cosmopolitan center of cultural production.” John will “examine key sites, individuals, and processes constituting Beijing’s urban experimental rock music scene. Employing ethnographic methods and an interdisciplinary mix of theoretical perspectives, the project will contextualize contemporary Chinese rock in relation to a range of “borders”—national, aesthetic, temporal, and technological. Seeking a nuanced analysis of Chinese rock music that accounts for artists’ intentions or goals (cultural and identity politics) and the reception of their musical output by fans/audience, media, the “public”, and various manifestations of “official” views, I intend this project to participate in emergent critical understandings of global/local intersections of media and culture in Chinese and transnational contexts.”
