Music and Society

The words of Din Qing in a letter to the band Heaven attest to the power of music; she turns to the band in search of alternative values and ideas about life, different from the ones she receives at school and, most likely, at home. It shows how music is integrated into the fabric of everyday life, simultaneously pointing at the agency of the listener – who, after all, uses music in her search for values – as well as the structural power of the sound – as she believes that music will provide her with the answers she is looking for. Music audiences generally receive less academic attention when compared to music scenes, probably even more so when it comes to Chinese rock culture. An understandable bias as the spectacular poses, provocative lyrics and subversive sounds all literally scream for attention, both academic and journalistic, whereas mundane and private listening practices are more difficult to grasp. The meanings of music proliferate in the dialogue between the work and the audience – and this is, I would argue, a two-way dialogue. The works speak to the audience, just like the audience speaks to the work (Bal 2002; Frith 1996). It is tempting to treat a musical text as though it were solely the expression of the artist, e.g. as though the anger in Zu Zhou's voice were just his anger, thereby ignoring the anger experienced by the listener. This chapter presents an attempt to explore how audiences use music as a technology of the self, showing how music consumption provides ‘a means for self-interpretation, for the articulation of self-image and for the adaptation of various emotional states associated with the self in social life.’