UC Irvine

Acoustics of Empire: Afro Filipino Intimacies and the Political Economies of U.S. Popular Music analyzes a cross-section of musical artists who engage place and mobility in their musical performances in ways that destabilize the racial, temporal, and geographic logics associated with popular music and its reception. The artists featured in this dissertation generate a set of historical and contemporary Afro Filipino intimacies that decenter the Black-white color line that governs the management and production of difference through popular music. Committed to an alternative politics of listening to and against what sound studies scholar Jennifer Lynn Stoever describes as the "sonic color line," I interrogate the ways in which uneven power relations, genre categories, and academic and popular discourses have shaped the careers and performances of Afro Filipino artists and narrowed and limited the understandings and possibilities of Black and Filipino musical and political expression. Spanning the 1960s to the present, and stretching across the genres of roots music, the blues, Latin soul, Chicano oldies, American Top 40, hyphy, and indie—Aireene Espiritu, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Joe Bataan, Bruno Mars, Saweetie, H.E.R., and Toro y Moi—constellate musical scenes in and through the San Francisco Bay Area, United Kingdom, New York City, Los Angeles, Hawai’i, Las Vegas, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Taken together, their genre and geographic diversity suggest that Afro Filipino intimacies, while braided together by U.S. empire, are also heterogeneous and inflected by particular cultural histories, commercial and ideological infrastructures, and local and regional aesthetics. These continuities and disjuncts become most vivid through a focus on their touring performances. Drawing on popular music studies, cultural geography, and political economy, I posit an “acoustics of empire” as a performative mode of listening to popular music that brings into relief the scales and textures of empire’s governance (from the home to the city, to the hemisphere) and the connections between music, place, mobility, and racialization. An "acoustics of empire" invites attention to the impact of histories of empire on how and where performers move, and takes seriously the interferences, distortions, echoes, and reverberations of U.S. imperialism that shape how we produce, listen to, and make meaning of the performing body. Their mobilities and immobilities on local, national, transatlantic, and transpacific tours invite us to look towards the political economies of popular music. As each artist navigates new places, audiences, genres, and musical support infrastructures, their creative responses challenge rigid racialized frameworks by presenting alternative narratives of race, place, labor, genre, and the question of authenticity. Through their transits, these musicians push our listening in new, more generative directions.