Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age

Yellow Music is a history of the emergence of Chinese popular music and the larger urban media culture with which it was closely associated in early 20th-century China. Centering his study around an account of the affinities between the genre derisively referred to by critics of the time as yellow or pornographic music - a decadent fusion of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms - and the anti-colonial mass music that challenged yellow music’s commercial and ideological dominance, Andrew F. Jones revises previous understandings of race, politics, popular culture, and technology in the making of modern Chinese culture. The personal and professional histories of three musicians in particular are the focus of Jones’s discussions of shifting gender roles, class inequality, the politics of national salvation, and emerging media technologies: the American jazz musician Buck Clayton; Li Jinhui, the creator of yellow music; and leftist Nie Er, a former student of Li’s whose musical idiom grew out of virulent opposition to this sinified jazz. In contemplating the emergence of global media cultures in the postcolonial world, Jones aims to undermine the parochialism of media studies in the West. He teaches us to hear not only the American influence in Chinese popular music but also the Chinese influence on American music and, in so doing, illuminates the ways in which both cultures were implicated in the unfolding of colonial modernity in the 20th century. Students and scholars of modern China, twentieth-century history, media studies, and jazz history should be informed and engaged by Yellow Music .