SASAMI | INDIE | IASPM

I’m super excited about this year’s IASPM conference, not only because it’s being held in Philly (<3) but also because three of my most revered colleagues have graciously agreed to participate in an “indie/alternative” music panel with me. With my co-organizer Morgan Bimm, the inimitable Robin James and Theo Cateforis, will join to discuss various aspects of the indie/alternative split, focusing in particular on how gender figures into each. 

For my part, I’ll be presenting material from the fourth chapter of Big Feelings on Asian diasporic musicians in contemporary indie. In particular, I’ll discuss SASAMI’s shift from quintessential indie rock in the Big Feelings tradition (2019’s eponymous debut), to a second record that embraces self-consciously masculinized and orientalized aesthetics from the heavy metal genre (2022’s Squeeze). Reading Squeeze through the “monstrous feminine,” I connect SASAMI’s work to other Asian diasporic artists using the abject as a site of critical contestation, which reclaims and disrupts that which society constitutionally disavows. To do this, I draw on Barry Shank and Shelina Brown’s theorizations of Yoko Ono, as well as feminist critiques of horror and popular writing in queer astrology. Together, SASAMI’s music evinces a sensibility that Summer Kim Lee calls “minoritarian listening practices,” which “stubbornly move against the grain” of harmful majoritarian expectations (Kim Lee 2020, 9).

In concert with artists like Fazerdaze, Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Jay Som, beabadoobee, The Linda Lindas, Mei Semones, Pictoria Vark, and innumerable others, SASAMI ultimately demonstrates the fiction that has always undergirded common-sense associations between indie rock and whiteness; in kinship with others, her work demonstrates the central contributions that Asian diasporic musicians have long made to both this genre and to popular music writ-large. 

References

Brown, Shelina. 2014. “Scream from the Heart: Yoko Ono’s Rock and Roll Revolution.” In Countercultures and Popular Music, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Dedediah Sklower, 171–186. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.

Brown, Shelina. 2018. “Yoko Ono’s Experimental Vocality as Matrixial Borderspace: Theorizing Yoko Ono’s Extended Vocal Technique and her Contributions to the Development of Underground and Popular Vocal Repertoires, 1968–Present.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 

Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Dumas, Raechel. 2018. The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Huang, Vivian L. and Summer Kim Lee. 2020. “Contingency Plans: An Introduction.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory vol. 30, no. 1: 1–19.

Hung, Eric. 2022. “Recovering Early Asian American Voices In American Popular Music: Two Girl Groups.” American Musicological Society/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Lecture Series. YouTube, March 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTcR-7Srf04.

Ishii, Douglas. 2016. “‘Did You Think When I Opened My Mouth?’: Asian American Indie Rock and the Middling Noise of Racialization.” In Global Asian American Popular Cultures, edited by Shilpa Davé, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha Oren, 214–227. New York: New York University Press.

Kim Lee, Summer. 2020. “Asian Americanist Critique and Listening Practices of Contemporary Popular Music.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Liu, Runchao. 2019. “Visions of China: Avant-Orientalism, Art Rock, and Conflicted Otherness.” Cinéma & Cie vol. XIX, no. 33 (Fall): 107–120.

Liu, Runchao. 2021. “Sounding Orientalism: Radical Sounds and Affects of Asian American Women Who Rock.” PhD Dissertation, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Momii, Toru. 2021. “Music Analysis and the Politics of Knowledge Production: Interculturality in the Music of Honjoh Hidejirō, Miyata Mayumi, and Mitski.” PhD Dissertation, Columbia University.

Shank, Barry. 2014. The Political Force of Musical Beauty. Durham: Duke University Press.