Listening to the Scrap: Contested Materialities of Music in 1990s China

This chapter demonstrates the dynamics and interactions between music’s entangled dimensions of materialities in the subculture of the “cut-out generation” in 1990s China. The chapter investigates the contested materialities of the Chinese cut-outs, that is, overproduced Western music records imported as scrap into China, and presents two types of pre-music, or extra-music, materiality coexisting with the “musicness” of the cut-outs: one as plastic scrap defined by a concrete and raw quality of “thingness,” the other as defective records marked by its physical incompleteness. The chapter nuances the theoretical debates between music as sound and music as a “thing,” and demonstrates how music’s various dimensions of materialities can shape and be shaped by the media ecosystem in which they inhabit.