Pop-rock screen in East Asia

In the 2000s a flurry of East Asian films, TV series and documentaries featuring singer/band characters began to hit the markets in Japan, South Korea (hereafter Korea) and Taiwan. In these sound-meet-screen commodities, local and domestic pop-rockFootnote ¹ music culture became the subject of the storytelling, asserted its identity-shaping aesthetics and marketed stars and utopian lifestyles. While guitar, bands and their accompanying aesthetics have not been so visible in the world of mainstream popular music in the region, they have become an important element in these screen products. How do we make sense of this phenomenon, occurring amid a regionalising traffic of popular culture as well as media convergence?

Let us contextualise these screen narratives from Japan, Korea and Taiwan in the regional market and cultural conditions. In all three East Asian locations, pop-rock screen products have targeted youth markets by making pop music activities the means through which young people seek revolt, dreams and romance. Despite the thematic similarity, the prolific 2000s was animated by dissimilar cultural conditions.

To start off, the energetic release of pop-rock films and TV drama in Japan was enabled by the gendered production and consumption of popular culture, particularly in pop music, mangaFootnote ² and TV. Films about the rise and fall of all-male rock bands – Rockers (2003), Iden & Tity (2003), The Brass Knuckle Boys (2008) and Bandage (2010) – strive to conjure up the radical spirit underwriting the punk and rock movements of the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ³ Unwilling to yield to the divulging J-pop industry, central band characters struggle to retain their authenticity. Detroit Metal City (2008) satirises this logic by featuring a successful death metal band hero whose true love is pop. Adapted from shonen manga (comic books marketed to a young male audience), Solanin (2008) and Beck (2010) also privilege the experience of young men playing the guitar and forming bands, though with less interest in referencing the history of Japanese pop music.

The mid-2000s saw a robust output of girl-centred pop-rock stories across film, TV and manga in Japan. Swing Girls (2004) and Linda! Linda! Linda! (2005) situate girls' music activities in the amateur, rural and everyday school setting, while Nana (2005), Tokyo Friends (2006) and A Song to the Sun (2006) cast real J-pop artists as aspiring musicians in urban settings. Products of heavy cross-marketing, the latter group was also informed by the feminine sensibility of J-pop, which has sustained the creative output and network of cultural workers across related media fields since the 1990s (Tsai Reference Tsai and Iwabuchi2004; Toth Reference Toth2008).

The relentless entertainment industries and the question of artist survival have been two recurring themes in Korean pop-rock films since the late 1990s: Jungle Story (1996), Rush (1999), Waikiki Brothers (2001), Radio Star (2006), 200 Pounds Beauty (2006), Happy Life (2007), Highway Star (2007) and Just Kidding (2010). Sunny (2008) and Gogo 70 (2008) offer spectacular interpretations of two key moments in the history of Korean rock/pop music: the Vietnam War and the repressive 1970s.Footnote ⁴ These mainstream productions were followed by a wave of independent feature and documentary films drawing on the intimacy of the indie music scene. The documentaries Worker's Band (2007) and Turning It Up to 11 (2010) illustrate the preferred work ethic required for bands to succeed in this seemingly all-inclusive scene. Nowhere to Turn (2007), Dancing Zoo (2010), Come, Closer (2010), Acoustic (2010) and Sogyumo Accacia Band's Story (2008) are the fruit of indie marketing and consumption. Casting successful female indie artists as ordinary heroines who ‘happen to be’ musicians, these films cater to a niche fan base consisting of Internet-savvy young women and male otaku Footnote ⁵ drawn to the feminine sensibilities of the indie artists.

Possibly due to Taiwan's pivotal role in the decentralised production and distribution of Chinese pop music, pop-rock screen narratives from Taiwan have acquired an elusive character. There was little interest in creating reflexive accounts of the music industry, fan communities and local popular music history.Footnote ⁶Love ‘til the End (2004)Footnote ⁷ – a TV series about the rise of a five-piece, self-starring pop band, Shin – could be regarded as an attempt to tell a story about the music industry. But the reality was that in order to survive, band musicians must invest their labour in the entertainment and promotional industries. The Secret (2007) and Love in Disguise (2010) exemplified star-branding vehicles for the two reigning Mandarin pop kings, Jay Chou and Leehom Wang.

As in Japan and South Korea, Taiwan experienced a parallel surge of films and TV featuring pop-rock protagonists in the late 2000s, notably Cape No.7 (2008), A Place of One's Own (2009) and Gangster Rock (2010). Their pop-rock component was contingent upon the absorption of musician labour into the small-scale, flexible screen industry sustained by state subsidy and regional co-production investment. As a result, reflection on music stories takes a back seat to the primary concerns of the film-makers. Yet it is also in this production situation that a compassionate female subjectivity – embodied in the girl-playing-guitar figure – could emerge in the feature film, Summer's Tail (2007), and two miniseries commissioned by the Public Television Station: Rock Baby (2010) and Days We Stared at the Sun (2010).

Pushing the inter-frame

Rather than a comparison between three East Asian locations, we hope the production contexts can help to further inter-referential discussion on recent pop-rock screen works in Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Clearly, the rise of pop-rock films and TV in the region was animated by the trans-border consumption, collaboration, marketing and distribution of popular culture commodities (Davis and Yeh Reference Davis and Yeh2008). Shunji Iwai's Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) and All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) are widely known to have drawn on Japan's integration with Asia in the 1990s. Love of May (2004), a youth romance set against the backdrop of pop band Mayday's popularity in Taiwan and China, and Love You for 10000 Years (2010), a romantic comedy casting former F4 idol Vic Chou as a rock band vocal/guitarist,Footnote ⁸ were both produced by Arc Light Pictures, a pan-Asian packager founded by Taiwanese producer/critic Peggy Hsiung-ping Chiao in 1996. Lastly, though not promoted as an inter-Asian co-production, the Japanese film Linda! Linda! Linda! and Taiwanese film Exit 6 both cast Korean actresses in major roles.

The dynamic reality of media culture and regional convergence prompted us to adopt the integrative term ‘screen products’ in this paper. However, we don't want to lose sight of the distinctive cultural-industrial arrangement and aesthetics behind each pop-rock screen product. The modes of production and promotion help to illuminate the nationalising desire, market forces and alternative spaces of inter-Asian dialogues. Examples of mutual referencing are still insubstantial in our sample. In light of Japan being a common cultural reference for Korean and Taiwanese cultural industries, Korean and Taiwanese pop-rock screen creators seem especially in need of interaction.Footnote ⁹ Hence, our paper is not about exemplary pop-rock stories embodying a coherent East Asian consciousness. We want to set a mutually referencing movement within persisting disjunctures.Footnote ¹⁰

For the rest of this paper, we would like to mobilise the gender inter-frame from our post-2000 sample of pop-rock screen narratives in Korea, Japan and Taiwan. We wish to explore some ‘his-stories’ and ‘her-stories’ to challenge the industrial and national definition of pop and rock. As performance, audiences, production principles and representation, pop and rock have provided a frame of gendered and sexual expression and control (McRobbie and Frith Reference McRobbie and Frith1991/2000, p. 139). In a similar vein, Sheila Whiteley has said that rock music that grew out of the 1960s counterculture positioned women's roles as ‘either romanticised fantasy figures, subservient earth mothers or easy lays’ (Whiteley Reference Whiteley2000, p. 23).

The problematic raised by McRobbie, Frith and Whiteley is relevant in the East Asian context, though in need of reconsideration. In the current cultural atmosphere in Korea, Japan and Taiwan, fluid expressions of gender and sexuality are met with a complex apparatus of social control operating along lines of class, family, generation and locality. We will examine the representations of male and female musician characters in terms of their experiences and stakes in music making and professionalisation. The relative modes of pop-rock production and consumption (e.g. major, indie) are also gendering signposts, yielding subtle and persistent notions of masculinities and femininities.

Failing male rocker in search of a happy life

If rock'n'roll in the West has largely been inscribed in gender division and identity politics, such as the male rocker vs. the female groupie, East Asian pop-rock screen in the 2000s has both upheld and reconfigured such gender mediation. We frequently encounter a tormented middle-aged male rocker, typically a band vocalist and guitarist. He faces the difficult consequences of living his dream and his belief in rock music. If he turns professional, he risks it all in the competitive entertainment industry. Should he choose the rebel lifestyle, the question of livelihood eventually catches up. If he joins the mundane world outside music, he longs to return to a utopian happy life.

Although his crisis of masculinity is usually explained in a back story, such a figure in Korean pop-rock films in the 2000s vividly defines a male subject position shaped by particular socio-political experiences and economic realities. The 1970s and 1980s were marked by harsh cultural control that gave rise to heroic rock artists. Along with the post-IMF crisis which had restructured the society since the late 1990s, they shaped a nostalgic good old time for male-centred rock'n'roll. For the predominantly male filmmakers and music directors, these periods resonated with their more agentive past. As they found themselves toiling on the frontline of neoliberal capitalism, the past became artistic inspiration.Footnote ¹¹ Below, we will consider the compassionate and contrasting representations of middle-aged rock musicians in two films.

In Soon-Rye Lim (a.k.a Sun-Rye Im)'s Waikiki Brothers (2001), our undramatic, middle-aged protagonist is the leader of a burnt-out band, the Waikiki Brothers. The band members live in miserable conditions, playing at any odd occasions where music is needed – a hotel nightclub, a sales event, a private party, etc. In flashback, we learn about the band leader's exuberant youth as a guitar player/singer in a high school boy band and his crush on the singer of a girl band from a neighbouring school. In an ambiance of decay (bygone youth, rural decay and illusion of rock), the reunion between the hero and the heroine, now a lone widow, triggers little sparks. The heroine eventually joins the thinning band and sings melancholic trot Footnote ¹² while the hero plays the guitar satisfyingly. By embracing the feminine and marginal power associated with trot (as opposed to rock), the film seems to question hegemonic masculine definitions of rock.

If Waikiki Brothers provides an ambiguous resolution for the crisis of masculinity – a signature quality often attributed to Soon-Rye Lim's compassionate treatment of marginal characters throughout her other films – the reference to trot is unlikely to appeal to the younger generation. Joon-Ik Lee's Happy Life (2007) has a better chance, given its metropolitan location (Seoul/Hongdae), the critical input of the young generation and satisfying depiction of middle-aged men's renewal of their rock religion. In a precarious employment and family relations situation, the men team up with the son of a dead member and try to break into various live performances including the indie scene. The film ends with a euphoric, family-friendly performance that evoked the boom of office worker's bands.

In this film, rock is rechristened as an outlet for frustrated men in the period of mass unemployment and social disintegration. Unfortunately, rock's liberating power in the film comes precisely from male bonding and the exclusion of women. While the wives of the band members dismiss the dream of their husbands, the son of the ex-member becomes an important link to the band's reunion and continuation. Such a close-knit homosocial world was already heavily thematised in director Joon-Ik Lee's and screenwriter Seok-hwan Choi's previous hit pop-rock film, Radio Star (2006).Footnote ¹³Sunny (2008), the last of Lee's pop-rock trilogy set in the Vietnam War, depicts a young rural woman's unlikely journey to becoming a rock band singer on the battlefield. However, her feminine desirability and virtues threaten to break up the male band members' camaraderie as well as Korean male solidarity in yet another treacherous engagement with the West.

We are not suggesting that these mainstream Korean films should have represented women's participation in pop-rock music in a more ‘just’ but unrealistic way. Rather, the desire to imagine a rock band in a more hegemonic position in the history of Korean popular music is a kind of ‘historytelling’ by certain cultural vanguards who have grown discontented with the transformation of the Korean music industry and the advent of K-pop. Their experiences and memories of state repression in the 1970s and 1980s are likely to have motivated them to favour a mythology of Korean rock, where women's roles are still ambivalent.

Sexually pent-up guitar boys and mysterious girls

In Japanese pop-rock films, we find a similar nostalgic projection of a more pristine past of popular music, particularly the 1980s. But rather than focusing on what remained 20 years after the boom – as was the case in Korean pop-rock films, Japanese pop-rock films featuring male rock heroes deal with what could have happened in those days. As a result, the male subject is a young, often adolescent person eager to prove his manhood. His desire to play the guitar and form rock bands directly impacts on the formation of his gender and sexual identity. We will comment on several relevant films, paying special attention to the mutual construction of the creative young man and mysterious and ‘useful’ girls.

Based on the manga of the multitalented Jun Miura, Iden & Tity (2003) and Shikisoku Generation (2009) are both coming-of-age stories in which the young male protagonist – in both cases a Bob Dylan follower – struggles to create his identity through guitar-playing and songwriting. Directed by Tomorowo Taguchi, a former singer of a punk band, Iden & Tity follows the career of a popular band whose guitarist (Kazunobu Mineta of the band Ging Nang Boyz) grew discontented with the over-commercialised rock music scene of the late 1980s, despite its plentiful sex. A ghostly Bob Dylan figure listens compassionately to his identity blues. However, it would be the hero's once-girlfriend – an ordinary office worker who introduced Bob Dylan to him in their college days – who helps him write ‘Iden & Tity’, a song that embodies his successful arrival at an authentic self. Within this gendered self, Tity (his muse and rescuer) keeps him real. According to him: ‘Tity is the artist here. So she's always free, owned by no one. The man cannot do anything without her approval.’

While the guitar as a phallic symbol has been discussed in Western scholarship on gender and rock'n'roll (McRobbie and Frith Reference McRobbie and Frith1991/2000), guitar-playing in many Japanese and other Asian pop-rock texts is more likely to be associated with romantic love. The young protagonists in Miura's work never hide their desire for sex with girls. Set in 1974 in an all-boys' high school run by Buddhists, Shikisoku Generation fully exploits the hormonal tension.Footnote ¹⁴ The protagonist – a shy boy who likes to play the guitar and write songs in private – is eager to lose his virginity during a trip to a rumoured sex paradise on an island. The trip is packed with sexual tension. First, his buddies accuse him of playing unfairly when he shows up with a guitar. Then upon meeting an older, full-figured girl on a boat, he throws up on her, yielding a visual pun with the ‘bodily fluid spill’.

However, our sex-obsessed boy hero – who becomes known as ‘free sex’ – is in for a more serious identity struggle. While not yet available, sex can be explored in his songs.Footnote ¹⁵ Love, however, is more unattainable. An older young man (played by Iden & Tity's protagonist) demonstrates how this dilemma can be resolved by playing the guitar, recording rock music and choosing love over sex. Once the boy becomes upfront about his own creative language by doing a one-man guitar show at the school cultural festival, he gets an unexpected response from his dream girl. The power of the girl's femininity continues to fascinate him. As he says in the film: ‘Why are girls full of mystery?’

In some ways, the nebulous fascination with girl power in certain male pop-rock narratives comes from placing women outside the ‘know’ – his art, his buddies and the pop music industry. If the woman becomes part of the pop music industry machine, she becomes a caricature, such as the dominatrix manager (Yasuko Matsuyuki) in Detroit Metal City. Of course, such male fantasy is but one kind of gender text in a highly segmented market of Japanese popular culture. For example, adapted from boys' comics by Harold Sakuishi, Beck (Reference Sakuishi and Liao2010) paints a boys' world (albeit with one girl) fascinated with canonical rock history, legendary guitar virtuosos and equipment specs. The Brass Knuckle Boys (2008) features a young female manager-employee (Aoi Miyazaki) who helps revive the career of an esoteric punk band. Unimpressed with the punk history or band boom and completely repulsed by the uncle-type band members who insist on remaining true to their unkempt and cynical lifestyle, she eventually becomes their ally. In the manga-based pop-rock film, Solanin (2010), Miyazaki (again) plays an ‘office lady’ who throws both economic and affective support behind her boyfriend's band dream. When her boyfriend dies in a traffic accident, she even learns to play the guitar and perform in his place.

Still, the basic narratives of these screen texts are centred on ‘men making a scene’ (Cohen Reference Cohen and Whiteley1997). In addition, while punk was associated with the demystification of rock mythology, several studies have confirmed the persistence of homosociality and white masculinity in the indie rock scene followed by punk and post-punk in the UK and the US (Cohen Reference Cohen and Whiteley1997; Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh1999; Bannister Reference Bannister2006). Then where is an alternative place for girls in the rock scene? How is this place produced? On what division of labour is it based? How do narratives about girls playing the guitar, singing and forming bands reframe the pop-rock mythology? In the following sections, we will examine and inter-reference gender and sexual relations inscribed in girl-based pop-rock screen.

Disorienting desire under the glamorous sky

Of the three East Asian locations under focus, Japan has produced the most girl-centred and girl-targeted pop-rock media and cultural texts. Specifically, since the 1990s, J-pop's wide media application and tie-in businesses have brought together a network of Japanese cultural creators (e.g. manga artists, singers, scriptwriters, music producers, filmmakers and TV drama directors) whose work depends on tapping the feminine mystique and creating affinity with women.

Filmmaker Shunji Iwai and music producer Takeshi Kobayashi represent one such collaborative synergy that initiated intriguing feminine intervention in their pop-rock films: Swallowtail Butterfly, All About Lily Chou-chou and Bandage. In particular, Bandage (2010), a film set in the early 1990s, suggests complicated gender roles and relations. A high school girl who becomes a fan and later the girlfriend of a popular band's vocalist/guitarist, the heroine cannot be more stereotypical at first – especially when she becomes the cause of the band's breakup. But after a short stint as the band's interim manager, she works towards becoming the manager of an indie girl band fronted by the friend who introduced her to the band years ago. The film creates dynamic female-to-female relations and depicts the interaction between different pop music spheres (e.g. fandom, mainstream industry, indie scene). It also acknowledges girls' non-dramatic activities as musicians in the indie music scene through a roundabout, backgrounding technique.

In addition to film, TV and manga are important media platforms through which popular music themes have been routinely woven into the female-centred narratives and commodities. Featuring actual female musicians in band vocalist/guitarist roles, Nana (manga-turned-two-movies) and Tokyo Friends (miniseries and film) both present a similar paradox of young talented female musicians aspiring to become professional. The basic setup of the heroines' music background is almost identical in Nana and Tokyo Friends: she is in a band with the hero-guitarist in their rural hometown until he leaves for Tokyo and joins a major band in the industry. Both stories follow the heroine's aspiration to succeed in Tokyo. In both cases, her new band enters complicated personal and professional relationships with a rival band to which the hero-guitarist belongs. Despite the similar setup, the particular production culture and marketing consideration underwriting the small screen and manga industry yielded different gender representations.

By placing the vocal-heroine among three other female friends each pursuing their dreams in Tokyo, Tokyo Friends inherits the romantic narrative and aesthetics of the women-targeted trendy TV drama established in the 1990s (Tsai Reference Tsai and Iwabuchi2004). The confident heroine, played by pop singer Ai Ōtsuka, actually encounters few career problems in the niche indie scene. The career of the hero-guitarist under the major label, however, is interrupted due to other band members' drug use. The heroine chases after the self-exiled hero to New York, where he longs to return to the humble roots of indie music. Tokyo Friends offers a picture-perfect female pop musician who can have it all – friendship, romance and a successful career.

Nana, on the other hand, leaves the musician-heroine's agency more open-ended, even chaotic. Central to this chaos is the ambiguous relationship between her band, Blackstone, and her boyfriend's band, Trapnest. The two bands have worked rivalry and romance rumour to the benefit of mutual promotion. Moreover, Nana's relationship with a twin character of the same name is crucial. Renamed Hachi after the most faithful dog in Japanese culture, she symbolises a loyal fan and typifies an ordinary girl who dreams of living the trendy, romantic and fashionable Tokyo life. Nana and Hachi form a homoerotic bond in which each has struggled with their possessive desire. Hachi, for instance, competes with other female fans who know more about Blackstone's history. Nana expresses jealousy when Hachi becomes pregnant by Trapnest's bass player, protesting that Trapnest took away the two most important people in her life.

Packed with glamorous and trendy fashion details, the manga and the subsequent films constitute a glittering visual world. It facilitated numerous cross-promotional opportunities for the singer Mika Nakashima and other visual-kei bands.Footnote ¹⁶ Although visual-kei fandom has allowed fluid gender performances by young women, front-women in visual-kei bands are still rare (Koizumi Reference Koizumi2002; Hashimoto Reference Hashimoto2007). Thus, what sort of gendered and pop-rock reality can we take away from Nana?

The heroine's identity seems forever fragmenting and collapsing with the desires flowing between different spheres – the professional, the sexual and the biological. Unlike the patriarchal resolution mentioned in the previous section – ‘you-complete-me’ – her identity-formation is contingent with no guarantee. Nana's ‘all fluxed-up’ state resonates with a classical conundrum facing girls and women in contemporary societies:Footnote ¹⁷ Can she have it all?Footnote ¹⁸ Or is the ‘glamorous sky’ – Nana's title song and dominant imagery – too dazzling to look at? Manga artist Ai Yazawa's discipline in serialising Nana and her suffering health – which caused the series to be on a hiatus since 2009 (Yazawa Reference Yazawa2008) – suggests that this is a common problem facing independent women stimulated by creative and productive labour.

Of course, the reality in the professional scene of East Asian popular music cannot be overlooked. Monique Bourdage has argued that aspiring female electric guitarists face a scarcity of role models, lack of access to music, and the masculinisation of prestigious technologies (Bourdage Reference Bourdage2010, p. 12). The barriers are not that different in East Asian societies despite the construction of indie as a ‘separate-but-equal’ feminine space in Tokyo Friends.Footnote ¹⁹ The rise of indie pop-rock in Korea around 2010 will allow further dialogue on the subject.

‘Just an indie girl?’ Stabilising femininity and the chemistry of everyday life

If Japanese pop-rock storytelling suggests that rock is an extraordinary escape for girls, the burgeoning South Korean indie scene suggests that indie-pop and indie-rock storytelling help settle people into the mundane everyday life. Since the mid-2000s, indie artists from the clustered Hongdae area in Seoul have found new opportunities to take on key acting roles in pop-rock feature films and documentaries. Among them, girl(s)-with-acoustic-guitar(s) have been the most welcome personae and can be seen in films such as Dancing Zoo (2010), Acoustic (2010), Come, Closer (2010), Café Noir (2010) as well as a documentary, Sogyumo Accacia Band's Story (2008). The niche role of girl-with-acoustic-guitar evolved with the ‘Hongdae goddesses’ fandom, initiated by otaku fans and later capitalised on by indie labels such as Pastel Music and Happy Robot. Since then, the soft and folk-tinged sound of artists like Heejeong Han, Yozoh and Taru could be heard not only on the internet and mobile phones, but also in commercial, TV drama and film soundtracks. Thanks to the vibrant indie film screenings at cinema houses and film festivals all year long and in different parts of the country, the indie pop-rock films featuring the goddess icons or heroines are becoming tie-in strategies for some of the indie music artists. In Dancing Zoo and the omnibus film, Come, Closer, respectively, the heroines are both independent-minded women committed to making pop music and meaningful personal relationships in everyday life. Unlike the mainstream Korean pop-rock films or Japanese girl pop-rock screen narratives mentioned in previous sections, the movies do not showcase dramatic storytelling of hard-working pop-star wannabes or miserable has-beens. The stories unfold along the heroines' stream of consciousness. For example, in Come, Closer, Yozoh is seen mostly walking and talking – sometimes quarrelling like lovers – with her music partner, a male guitarist, about their opinions on love and passion. In one instance, she yells at him: ‘How foolish you are! For women, feeling stability itself is the passion.’

Upon first glance, the transgressiveness of these indie music film heroines seems questionable. They do not challenge the dominant gender roles in the music industry. They often depend on male session players. Packed with references to mundane objects of daily life like caffè latte, crackers, chocolate, mint, cats and dogs, their music serves an aestheticising purpose which conforms to the traditional feminine role. Worse, their commercial affinity with the beauty industry as well as with the successful indie label sometimes attracts a criticism of selling out.

However, the Korean indie music films show that the rhetoric of rebellion endorsed by the rock protagonists until the early 2000s is in need of reworking. It can even be said that the Asian girls/women in these films stand in direct opposition to that of the conventional rock films where the desire and fantasy of male heroes dominate the scenes and the narratives.Footnote ²⁰ The indie heroines do not advocate escape from boring everyday life in collective ways (e.g. forming a band). They become musicians in full awareness of the difficulties of being independent. Sometimes, the experience is devastating, as in Nowhere to Turn (2008). The heroine, a keyboardist, opts to withdraw from an important contest even though she is prepared to showcase her repertoire, created from her everyday life with a boyfriend/musician. Yet the benevolent comment from a male guitarist/judge – who treats her as both a protégé and an easy lay – serves as a sober reminder that she could not take credit for ‘independence’.

With no climax in sight, everyday life is the destination where personal meanings crystallise. Aestheticising even facilitates new desiring subjectivities. In Acoustic, the indie musician heroine has a rare disease so that the only food she can have is cup noodles (ramen). This quirky setup and subsequent visual elaboration in the story provide solidarity with otaku young men as well as labouring musicians, whose very way of life and fantasies are often stigmatised. Looking sweet, innocent and uninterested in sex, the young female indie artists are in control of a subdued language of sexuality which is differentiated from an overt, in-your-face manipulation of sexuality and femininity in the K-pop scene. For example, Yozoh sings the lyrics, ‘Give me your banana, let me taste your banana’ and ends with ‘yum, yum, yum’, frankly acknowledging the reference to male genitalia and singing it in her usual infantile, cute voice.

If everyday life is neither utopian nor dystopian, does it signal a politics of heterotopia based on the microcosm of the everyday life?Footnote ²¹ We now turn to examine whether the same can be said about the girl-with-acoustic-guitar figures in Taiwan's pop-rock screen.

Ally on the outfield: girl-with-acoustic-guitar

While Taiwan has also produced many pop-rock films in the 2000s, the majority of products in this category are quite ‘accidental’ in the sense that they rarely reference local pop music histories, cultural industries practices or the fan communities. Cape No. 7, the most successful domestic film of 2008, is a case in point. It opens with an angry young man – a band vocalist/guitarist – returning home to the rural south after an unsuccessful bid at a pop music career in Taipei. The story revolves around how the local residents put together a rock band to perform at a hotel's opening ceremony. The guitarist, who becomes romantically involved with the Japanese booking agent, chances upon a bundle of undelivered love letters from a Japanese teacher living in colonial Taiwan to a local resident. The cast features numerous non-major, amateur as well as indie musicians.Footnote ²² Yet the overwhelming public debate in Taiwan focused on the film's colonial and postcolonial subtext, not on its pop music connection (Chen Reference Chen2008; Hsu Reference Hsu2008).

The absence of discussion from the pop music perspective is, in a sense, a lost opportunity to tell stories about smaller subjectivities, from marginal gender, youth or labour positions. Even the ‘diverse’ rock band in Cape No. 7 is mainly a men's game. In the Japanese and Korean pop-rock films, mutual referencing between pop music tastes in the storytelling has helped to create music culture identities. In Taiwan's pop-rock films, the resulting choice of pop music represented seems to serve the state and populist fantasy of reconciliation – between families, generations and ethnicities. Thus it is common to see an ideological juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary music in pop-rock performances in the film.Footnote ²³

In the Taiwanese pop-rock stories, gender and other cultural identities have been displaced consistently by the preoccupation with a national imagined community.Footnote ²⁴ Despite the reality, the representation of successful female musicians is rare.Footnote ²⁵ But outside the urban centre and the normative, professional world of adults, the girl-with-acoustic-guitar becomes a symbol of female agency.

In contrast to the semi-autonomous, self-supported everyday in the Korean indie music films, the girl-with-acoustic-guitar figure in Taiwan's pop-rock screen inhabits an everyday setting heavily intervened in by adults. In the film Summer's Tail, two high school heroines observe and accompany two boys in trouble – one gets expelled for falling in love with a female teacher, and the other, a soccer lover, is forever criticised for poor grades. The TV miniseries, Days We Stared at the Sun, also situates a guitar-girl heroine in the desperate lives of three peers – a ‘good student’ who grows disillusioned with his teacher and father, a ‘bad student’ with a juvenile record who struggles to be responsible in an unassisted world and a sexually confused girl who becomes further exploited by adults. In both works, guitar-playing is not so much a spectacular performance as a soothing daily practice. It not only allows young people a voice against adults' omnipresence, but also keeps the troubled boys and girls company.

Through different techniques, the two works construct compassionate female agency from the society's margin and underside. This is seen in the guitar heroine in Summer's Tail, who stays out of school because of a heart condition. Yet, precisely because she is an ‘exception’, she encounters other marginalised characters and provides unintended support at key moments. For example, while playing the guitar on a bridge over a creek day in and day out, she picks up origami boats from a motherless little boy who has been seen stealing food in the town. When the little boy and his younger sister seek shelter from their drunk father, the young heroine bands together with her grandmother and mother to protect them.

In keeping with the extracurricular culture in Taiwan, both films depict girls learning and practising the guitar as legitimate activities with adult support. In Days We Stared at the Sun, the heroine is president of re yin she (the popular music club). The hero also plays the guitar quite well – a ‘natural’ knowledge passed on from his unemployed father. Yet he is not encouraged to develop his musical interest. This representation seems to be a stark contrast to the boys-with-acoustic-guitar in Jun Miura's pop-rock texts, in which playing the acoustic guitar leads to an assured and independent definition of manhood. Free from this gendered expectation, the guitar heroines in the Taiwanese films constitute the hope of independent heterotopia.

Unlike utopia, which corresponds to ‘sites with no real place’, the Foucauldian use of heterotopias refers to sites that could animate reflection on the principle of social and individual existence (Foucault Reference Foucault and Miskowiec1986). Often in real geographical locations in society, heterotopias are founded on joint as well as partitioned experiences, temporalities and relations. Producing bard-like, transient, frail girl-with-acoustic-guitar, the Taiwan pop-rock tales reveal the allure of a heterotopic imagination based on the paradox of emplacement and place-making. On the one hand, the girl's ‘genuine’ relation with place is distrusted; the female indie musician's association with the politics of place in A Place of One's Own is constructed as a tainted branding ploy. On the other hand, the girl-with-acoustic-guitar in many pop-rock screen narratives is short-lived and on the verge of disappearing.Footnote ²⁶ Although connoting the ethos of individualism and self-expression, acoustic guitar heroines in Taiwanese pop-rock screen have been reinscribed in the discourses of nation and gender.