Reviewed by: Western Rock Artists, Madame Butterfly, and the Allure of Japan: Dancing in an Eastern Dream by Christopher T. Keaveney Rebecca Suter (bio) Western Rock Artists, Madame Butterfly, and the Allure of Japan: Dancing in an Eastern Dream. By Christopher T. Keaveney. Lexington Books, 2020. x, 229 pages. $105.00, cloth; $39.99, paper; $38.00, E-book. Christopher Keaveney's monograph is a very welcome addition to the field of transnational and comparative Japan studies, and by extension contemporary cultural studies. Examining the history of Western rock music's engagement with Japan as a form of Orientalist discourse, the book is in conversation with a growing body of scholarship that, ever since Richard Minear's 1980 review of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) for the Journal of Asian Studies, has reflected critically on the applicability of the notion of Orientalism, initially developed by Said in relation to the European discourse on the Middle East, to Anglo-American discourse on East Asia. The book fills an important gap in this debate by examining an understudied area of cultural and creative production, namely rock music. It focuses primarily on rock music of the golden age of the long-playing album, that is to say the decades between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s, but it extends its scope to also consider early twentieth-century and early twenty-firstcentury musical genres such as opera, jazz, and pop. The title of the book is slightly misleading, since the objects of analysis are not so much "Western" artists as British and North American ones. Except for a couple of Australian artists, such as Crowded House and Kylie Minogue, and a couple of "honorary English" groups such as the Swedish band ABBA, the analysis centers almost exclusively on musicians from the United Kingdom and the United States. It could have been interesting to examine a few more examples of Western European musicians who made a career in Japan, such as Claude Ciari, who left the French rock group Les Champions in 1964 to pursue a highly successful career as a solo singer popular with Japanese audiences, or Rosanna Zambon, who after traveling to Tokyo as a vocalist for a rock group as a teenager remained in the country and rose to popularity in the 1970s as part of the duo Hide and Rosanna. Another rich and unexplored object of inquiry potentially very relevant to the book would have been Western European musicians who deployed Japanesque imagery in their lyrics, music videos, or band names, like the 1984 album Rita Mitsouko, by the eponymous French pop rock duo Les Rita Mitsouko, or Italian singer-songwriter Francesco Gabbani's kimono-clad performance of his award-winning "Occidentali's karma" song at the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, to name only two. [End Page 248] As a study of British and North American rock artists' encounters with Japan, and of their contribution to Orientalist discourse, Dancing in an Eastern Dream is a brilliant interdisciplinary endeavor, combining a sophisticated close reading of lyrics, sound, and visual imagery deployed in the songs, the albums, and the related promotional videos with an in-depth analysis of the British, North American, and Japanese music industries. The study of the context of reception is equally thorough and persuasive. Particularly convincing is the investigation of the impact of Japanese rock journalism—and of locally specific cultural practices such as the production and distribution of visually striking flyers advertising concerts and albums—on the formation of a distinctive Western rock fan culture in Japan, and the impact of this fan culture, in turn, on the "Budōkan concert" and "live in Japan album" phenomena. Given the focus on the importance of fandom, readers might be curious to learn a little more about actual fan responses and the phenomenon of "gaijin akogare" that could have been gathered for example by examining information drawn from fan letters in rock magazines or from interviews with fans. This, however, would probably be the subject of a different book. The book is based on an impressive number of English- and Japaneselanguage primary and secondary sources in a variety of disciplinary fields. The best part of the study is undoubtedly...
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Dec 31, 2022
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