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Refiguring American Music
Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America
Duke University Press
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7514-2
Publication date:
2016
Book Chapter
The Serious Work of Karaoke
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Published:April 2016
In journalistic accounts, the Filipino singing voice has been figured as unthinking yet brilliant in its reproduction of U.S. popular songs, a sad attempt to move closer to American-ness and modernity. These characteristics have been naturalized through the historical fact of Filipino overseas performing artists and transformed into cultural givens of Filipino and Filipino American music-making as derivative. This chapter disobediently begins from the point of view of Filipino mimicry as musical labor in order to demonstrate how karaoke—as practice, object, and event—is able to produce new meanings for visual artists, everyday people, and child star performers such as Charice Pempengco.
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