What is Up with Musicians Looking at Sheet Music?!!
When I was a teenager, I wanted to become a musician. I didn’t practice enough to get good at anything, but in the process, I saw tons of musicians perform,…
Popular Music in Twentieth Century Southeast Asia: A New Book!!
One topic that has received very little attention by historians is twentieth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, especially popular culture in the 1950s-1980s. There is a new publication, however, that seeks to at least partially remedy this situation by providing an overview of popular music in Southeast Asia in the twentieth century.
The book is called Popular Music in Southeast Asia: Banal Beats, Muted Histories (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and was written by Bart Barendregt, Peter Keppy and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Further, there is an open access version of the book that is free to download and read.
The Vietnam War Through Thai Eyes
I just came across a recent video by the Thai band Cocktail called “You” (เธอ). It is about a Thai soldier who fell in love with a Vietnamese girl while…