ABSTRACT
This chapter appraises the cultural imperialism framework that predicts the demise of local and indigenous genres of music and music-making as they are being homogenised or substituted with mass-mediated popular music from the United States and Europe. The interaction of different cultures in pre-World War II colonial Malaya resulted in a fusion that Bakhtin (2001) describes as an “organic hybridity” which led to the formation of a “new language” or “world view”. Musical blending illustrates the ambivalences in binary oppositions such as West/East, modern/tradition, and hegemony/resistance that dominate cultural imperialism discourses. Revisiting the post-imperialist framework, this chapter shows that British cultural imperialism in the pre-Independence period did not lead to the disappearance of local music and music-making. Rather, local agency was central in the production and reception of the Lagu Melayu in British Malaya. Comic songs often used bahasa pasar (market or colloquial Malay) which juxtaposed different languages spoken in the daily lives of ordinary urban folk.
