Right from the beginning I find this article’s description of African American music and white music to be interesting. Ogawa said he grew up listening to African American music and within a year of UCLA he was listening to “white” music. What does he mean by that? That the composers/performers were African American vs. white, or the audience members, or both? Also the difference in labels between African American and White; How can music be colored? Wong later goes on to comment that the ethnicity of music isn’t any less complicated than the ethnicity of humans…what factors are used to characterize this?
Wong also comments that in this interview she is working in the other direction than she usually does by interviewing someone who was a friend before a subject. She also comments that this gives her an accountability that can only be useful. Is that true? Couldn’t it not be useful, if one is biased in the perspective they choose to view comments made, or the light they shed something in? Yes she will be more careful and maybe more invested in the interview and his personal story, but it might also lead her to not be entirely objective in her methods or conclusions.
She then comments that audiences listen to themselves in performances, and relating that to how Ogawa trying to hear himself through the types of music he listened to. And then later Wong says she thinks it’s never the music itself that attracts or compels. Find my taste doesn’t radically shift depending who I surround myself with. I’m very open about not conforming to popular musical tastes of those around me, and often argue with friends about what I prefer to listen to. How much of one’s taste can be influenced by those around them vs. what they genuinely enjoy listening to?
I also find it interesting that fashion/dialect and style and general are being equated with music. Why were the Beatles a nonevent to him? And that at home he was allowed to listen to this music but not speak in a different dialect- why were these things distinguishable. Did he pick this music because it’s what he enjoyed listening to the most or because it was the more comfortable option as he said the fashion sense and dialect was. Is it because he identified both as a minority and an American, and this was the closest way to resolve that?
As a sidenote, I also thought his comment about how a good Japanese American kid always took music lessons was really funny. I find the image of an army of clarinets to be very amusing. But it is sad that music making was a duty for him.
(My discussion questions are interspersed throughout the critical review…I thought it made more sense to leave them with the paragraphs that they pertain to rather than list them at the bottom of the post)
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