Quynh Dinh-week 9

Chapter about Popular Music: Sounds of Home Resistance and Change of Kieu-Linh Valverde's Transnationalizing Viet Nam describes how music style and subject has changed from the past to present and predicts how the future Vietnamese music may be. After the fall of Saigon 1975, there is a drastic change in music in the country itself and that of Vietnamese American diaspora. The communist Vietnamese government started to enforce and control the media system by promoting traditional and revolutionary music. Especially several years after 1975, they forbade and cut off any access to Western music. In another hand, Vietnamese American community has kept holding on to anticommunism spirit and promoted songs about military and love songs during wars. However, as information communication technology (ICT) has developed, people from both sides have found a way to reconnect. Vietnam communist government lessened their restriction in order to expand the economics and international relation. Nowadays, a lot oversea singers come back to Vietnam to perform. I agree with Kieu-Lind Valverde on "Once seen as two distinctive forms, oversees Vietnamese and homeland Vietnamese music are now increasingly melded by transnational culture flows" (Valverde, page 64). In the beginning, there was hard and dangerous for Vietnamese singers to perform in the U.S.because anticommunist people would not let them sing in peace (check out the youtube video attached below). However, thing gets easier and better now as long as it does not promote Communism and no politics involved.

Here is the clip about Vietnamese singer Dam Vinh Hung being attacked by pepper spray by an Anticommunist Ly Tong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a3sKG-rU4M