WHENEVER music and scholarship are mentioned in the same breath, learning an instrument and attending classes comes to mind.

The picture of helicopter parents dropping off their kids to their piano/violin lessons – it’s always some ancient Western instrument – is probably driven by the misguided conception that playing a musical instrument “increases” intelligence.

I’ve had friends who formally studied a musical instrument all the way to only stop playing music altogether because they were forced to study it (and completely lost their interest in music and playing).

My personal experience of music classes in school was no less dour. We’ve all been forced to learn the recorder  for whatever reason (whose bright idea was this anyway?), yet how come we haven’t produced a Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix of the recorder?

The only time I looked forward to music class was the end when we were allowed to leave our classroom and wash the recorder at the communal pipe downstairs (and check out the girls from the other classes).

The significance of music and songs isn’t the sole domain of instrument virtuosos and crowd-pleasing pop singers. The entire landscape of popular music is littered with much more, beyond the imagination of the average person in spite of music being the more pervasive art form in our daily lives (you can turn away from a bad movie or TV show, but it’s harder to shut out a bad song blaring away in public).

Broadening the scope further, it becomes evident that the entire ecology of music making itself is in fact a loaded political landscape – “political” being the broader economic, social and cultural contexts.

In Malaysia, whenever the word “politics” is mentioned, a Pavlovian response most people would have is the picture of upstanding/bumbling/corrupt politicians and their political parties.

Such is how the word “politics” has been hijacked in Malaysia that most Malaysians fail to see the forest for the trees when it comes to the discourse of “everyday politics” and the broader spectrum of “politics”.

I’ve been part of an Asian academic “fraternity” called the Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies IAPMS Group for the past decade or so. What is interesting about this loose coalition of Asian academics of popular music studies is that most of the researchers explore these broader discourses of music and everyday politics amongst others.

Another interesting thing is that most of these researchers and academics are also musicians who are interested in researching music beyond the narrow confines of instrumental virtuosity.

The 7th IAPMS Conference convenes this week (December 3-6) for the first time in Malaysia (hosted by Sunway University). It would’ve been a milestone if it had happened physically as planned in July, but the show must go on.

As a “dua alam” (“dual realm”) creature – a musician and scholar – more interested in the broader impact of music on society rather than how fast I could play a guitar solo, first discovering this group more than a decade ago was a boon as the paradigm about music and music-making in Malaysia is still very narrow.

My own field in media studies and cultural studies are journalism, and film and television production in university, not music . It was through the regional and international conferences in this field that I stumbled upon the core figures of the IAPMS.

Formed in August 2007 by scholars around Asia who were working on the issues of the popular music in and around Asia, IAPMS members now include scholars from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines (who may also be researching topics or areas outside of their national origins).

Some of the topics presented at the conference this year include K-Pop, DIY culture, DJs, film music, punk subcultures, music videos, national anthems, digital media and music, masculinity, feminism, political parody, Americanisation, patriotic songs, post-colonialism, popular music education, musical authenticity, Asian heavy metal bands, indie rock, gender and sexuality, hip-hip and Bollywood, music archiving, and busking amongst others.

To the uninitiated, popular music studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that marries the usual field suspects of music education and research, such as ethnomusicology and music studies with the broader scope of sociology, psychology, media studies, cultural studies, economics, and even political science and more.

This is the field of studies that is often missing from formal music education in Malaysia (maybe the world, I don’t know, I never formally studied music further beyond Grade 3 as a kid).

Most of the members are also involved in two other intellectual communities: the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (IACSS), a “regional” society for cultural studies, and the other is the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), the global association for popular music studies.

There is still a broad gap in the paradigm and knowledge that separates popular music studies and music studies, but what groups and conferences like these hope to achieve is to make learning about music a more holistic and nuanced endeavour in understanding ourselves and others.

I’ll be serenading this year’s participants and the group at 8pm tonight for a free online concert on my Facebook page on top of moderating a few presentation sessions.

I’m looking forward to getting my music research fix and also updating them about all things Malaysian in concert banter and conversations – although nothing beats a live show or conference for that’s how music and discussions are supposed to be done: together in the same room or space. – December 4, 2020.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.