Dance, Dreams and Defiance: Asian Diasporic Music Cultures in Australia

Abstract

In the field of Asian Australian studies, questions recur around the production, reception, performance, resistance and negotiation of cultural identities. Implicit in these questions has been a concern with modes of sociability – how culturally marked groups have engaged with each other and how people have negotiated the strictures of racist histories to alter those histories’ frameworks and enable new, sociable forms of marking time and recording history. This article focuses on some of the modes of sociability and solidarity that emerge in contexts of Asian Australian music cultures. It concentrates especially on music cultures with Iranian Australian links and examines some diverse examples of music, attitudes and practices in this context.

Keywords:

• Asian Australian Music Cultures
• Iranian Diaspora
• Iranian Australian Music
• Migration
• Refugees
• Asian Popular Music

Notes

[1] I am grateful to Jodi Brooks for drawing my attention to Ellison's Invisible Man. Armstrong (1901–1971) was a New Orleans-born jazz musician, singer, writer, composer and actor. He specialised in the trumpet, also used throughout much of its history as a ‘military instrument’.

[2] There is a body of research on racialised ‘invisibility’ and its effects, possibilities and implications for forms of sociability. See, for example, Coombs et al. 2012.

[3] See Chill (Melbourne) talks at the Jay Park concert in Sydney to the AU review about Australian K-Pop! (n.d.)

[4] While beyond the scope of this article, a further, more problematic term of identification preferred by some people with Iranian ancestry is ‘Aryan’ (see Zia-Ebrahimi 2011). In my research with Iranian Australians over 10 years, I have come across very few people choosing to identify with ‘the Aryan discourse’. It is, however, evident in some Persian-language pop music, such as the unsubtle 2009 song cited by Zia-Ebrahimi, Ariyayi nezhad (‘The Aryan race’), by Iranian American singers Shakila and Shahryar (see Shakila and Shahryar n.d.). As Zia-Ebrahimi notes, supporting his argument that the ‘Aryan’ discourse emerged in the context of Iran's twentieth-century relations with Europe, the lyrics to this pop song come from poems by Mostafa Sarkhosh, published in Tehran in 1964, not from Iran's tenth-century epic poet Ferdowsi, as claimed on the website.

[5] From 2011 to 2013 I conducted extensive fieldwork with fans and performers of metal music in Iran and among Iranian Australians. Several research participants preferred to remain anonymous, in some cases to avoid potential conflicts with non-Asian Australian musicians in a section of the heavy music scene.

[6] On its website, Synthetic Breed, the band is described as ‘“Formulated Chaos”: the Australian four-piece Industrial Djent band combining a crushing and mechanizing soundscape. With a uniquely intense technical rhythmic complexity, SYNTHETIC BREED also ventures into chaotic poly-rhythmic passages with dynamic, emotive and eloquent melodic interludes’. Jamie Thomson (2011) defines Djent as metal's ‘onomatopoeic microgenre’.