General Catalog 2024-25

Lecture, four hours. Pop music is key part of contemporary Tibet, emerging in 1980s in Tibet and exile, and even earlier if mass-disseminated socialist songs of Tibet as compulsory, state-produced popular music is considered. Exploration of multifaceted world of pop music in and of Tibet and Tibet within China of Mao Zedong and socialism, and that of market socialists from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. Exploration of ways in which Tibetan pop music is voice for Tibetans in Tibet, numerically small minority in China, and in small exile population. Focus on Tibetan pop music exposes students to plethora of issues relevant to musics of small, minority, and stateless people, and of myriad political dimensions of pop music—turbulent, crude, subtle, social, and economic. Concurrently scheduled with course C221. P/NP or letter grading.