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Popular Music of Vietnam: The Politics of Remembering, the Economics of Forgetting. Dale A. Olsen. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. xviii + 286 pp., photos, illustrations, figures, notes, glossary, bibliography, indices. ISBN 978-0-415-98886-5 (Hardcover).
Current Vietnamese popular music has hitherto received little attention from scholars and this publication represents the first book-length study on the subject. Using the term popular music "in a general sense to incorporate all of the music genres loved by Vietnam's youth between 1990 and 2005" (3), Olsen argues that through memory politics, events such as the American/Vietnam War and the subsequent unification of Vietnam in 1975, along with dôi moi, the "renovation period" from 1986 when the Vietnamese government introduced a market economy system, and President Clinton's lifting of the trade embargo in 1994, "all subconsciously influence, affect, and drive the musical expressions and preferences of Vietnam's young people and the Vietnamese music industry" (2). This creates a dichotomy between the politics of remembering, or, conscious references to and remembrance of Vietnam's turbulent past, and the economics of forgetting, which refers to the use of music as an agent to look toward a brighter and more prosperous future, that is returned to throughout as evidence supporting his argument.
The book is organized into ten chapters. The first, a "Prelude," introduces the research. Chapter 2 provides necessary historical, cultural, and political background to the music. Chapter 3, "Vietnamese Pop Music Stars and the Bumpy Road to Stardom," focuses on the main female and male pop stars of the period with brief biographical sketches of each. Similarly, Chapter 4 provides an outline of the era's most famous rock, pop-rock, and pop music bands. Songwriters and their attempts at enhancing awareness and understanding of issues such as drug use, the handicapped, and HIV/AIDS are the subjects of Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, performance venues for small-scale concerts are discussed. Chapter 7, "Disseminating Popular Music: Pop and Rock Music Concerts, Festivals, and Shows," examines larger performance events. This is followed, in Chapter 8, by a discussion of the dissemination of audio and visual recordings, including issues of copyright and piracy. Karaoke establishments are dealt with in Chapter 9. Finally,...