ABSTRACT
Much has been written about pop music culture in Asia, both in the global diffusion of Western culture generally and in the emergence of popular music as a kind of public sphere1. The history of ICRT Radio (International Community Radio Taipei), which represents on the one hand the development of a typical Western language radio station, reflects on the other hand the peculiar transformation of a government subsidized non-profit radio station to a fully commercial station caught within the changing landscape of transnational mass media and the politicizing imperatives of indigenization2. The events affecting that transformation reflect the peculiar status of ICRT as an institution. But at a deeper level this transformation ultimately reflects the complex processes that underlie the changing semantics of popular culture in Taiwan, where ICRT has always played a seminal role in disseminating (through music) “Western” culture. It is easy to read at face value the changing nature of (musical) culture by viewing it purely in semantic terms as “program content” and by regarding the promotion of what is undoubtedly Western pop music simply as a process of “diffusion”. Both the semantics of culture and diffusion as cultural change overlook the embeddedness of culture in its institutional context of production, consumption and accommodation as well as the varied perceptions of meaning and complex strategies of power that drive and oppose different agencies within institutions. The negotiated quality of culture within the contest of meaning is best seen as the target of different vested interests. In this case, transnationalism is a conflict between cosmopolitanizing and indigenizing worldviews, and this conflict, albeit locally situated, can have in my opinion important ramifications for how one should view the emergence of transnational culture in other sociopolitical venues, as well as generally.
