ABSTRACT
This chapter conducts a case study on Chinese ethnic rock music (minzu yaogun) to illustrate how ethnic rock is a productive lens to break down the changing and intersectional concept of hegemony. This study expands Timothy Taylor’s idea of “voracious aesthetic” to encapsulate the uneven agency afforded to “authentic” rock music between Western and non-Western musicians when incorporating certain ethnic and traditional musical elements. To capture the current status of this hegemonic mechanism, the author considers ethnic rock in the post-globalization time as a co-constructed and multi-contextual discourse of cultural hegemony influenced by both Western and non-Western contextual factors. This chapter argues that the bands and aesthetic of ethnic rock are deployed by the Chinese party-state to perpetuate ideologies of ethno-nationalism and cultural hegemony, which ironically encourages the sounds and styles that satiate the ethnic gaze of White racial hegemony. Therefore, the voracious aesthetic of ethnic rock reveals how the same media texts can serve multiple and competing hegemonic powers at the same time. By taking a transcultural approach to exploring the development and deployment of Chinese ethnic rock, this study also contributes to the decentering of Western discourses in the conceptualization and pedological focus of hegemony.
