‘foreign sounding’: asian racial stereotypes in popular music
October 22, 2008
“Plinky plunk, A Chinese Elopmement” sheet music from 1930s USA
The “Oriental Theme”
Sun Ra the black liberationist, spaceman and jazz musician in “Overtones Of China”(1957) unconsciously perhaps, repeats the old tradition of exotic stereotyping in defining musical Chineseness as wood blocks, gongs and pentatonic piano stabs. In essence the piece is an evolved jazz version of the ‘Oriental Theme’ that serves to evoke Orientalism in the western imagination. The tune, a nine note phrase, is found throughout modern popular music most famously in the introduction to Carl Douglas’s ‘Kung fu fighting‘ , The Vapour’s ‘Turning Japanese’, and David Bowie’s “China Girl”:
Oriental Theme MIDI File
Jesus ‘0’, Satan ‘1’
October 8, 2008
“Man will never be free until the last king is hanged with the entrails of the last priest.”
(attributed to) Denis Diderot
A group of Fundamentalist religious extremists have finally been evicted from St Mary’s in the Castle Arts Centre, Hastings, after a successful opposition campaign. The Sonrise Church which has occupied the Arts Centre will leave the building in january 2009 having endured years of “constant harassment from a minority of ‘nameless, faceless people” including death threats to the church members and congregation, egg throwing and vandalised cars: “we have been the subjects of a faith hate campaign. So extreme has this campaign against us as a family been that on several occasions we have had to involve the police” says Glen Khan head of the Church and Sky TV preacher.