INTRODUCING THE FDS PROJECT
This is not a love song.
This is not a celebration of The Flower Drum Song (FDS), nor a critique, nor a recuperation. It is, at its most basic, a collection of album scans and recording samples from different version of FDS that have come out since the original Broadway soundtrack debuted in 1958.
I started with a few versions of the LP I already owned and am hoping to build from there with reader contributions. According to Castalbums.com, there were approximately 20 FDS albums recorded (I could be wildly mistaken about that) but as far as I know, no one's ever bothered to collect/catalog them all.
So why now and here?
The FDS Project was inspired, first and foremost, by Roger Bennet and Josh Kun's And You Shall Know Us By the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past As Told By the Records We Have Loved and Lost. I contributed to that book and in looking through the finished product, I was very much struck by how innovative their approach was. I had long loved books about album covers, but Trail of Our Vinyl went beyond design and into the realm of community, culture and identity.
None of this is to say that The FDS Project seeks to remotely live up to that ideal or accomplishment. But their book did make me think about how something as simple as album covers can be portals into larger conversations. As someone with a deep interest in the history of Asian Americans and popular music, FDS seemed like as good a place as any to test the waters.
With FDS, I thought it was a small enough album phenom to document yet that doesn't mean there's a lack of things to ponder about it. For better or for worse (many would say "for worse"), FDS was one of the sole ways the rest of America in the 1960s knew anything about Chinese America (let alone the not-yet-created idea of Asian America).
Was it a distortion? Absolutely. Isn't there something terribly problematic about two White men (Rodgers and Hammerstein) adapting C.Y. Lee's tale of the generation/culture gap between Chinese immigrants and American-born Chinese? Probably. At best, shouldn't FDS fill us with ambivalence? Yup.
But none of this negates the ways in which the book/musical/movie - or as I'm arguing specifically in this project, the soundtrack - is a representation of Chinese/Asian America and one of the very few circulating in popular culture of its era. And so I'm drawn to the FDS as a way through which to view the past and its ideas about Chinese culture and Chinese American society.
It's not as if I expect these albums to exist as prime sociological data but as artifacts from the era, it's intriguing to think about what they may or may not say about American society's larger ideas about Asian-ness in their midst, not the least of which is addressing the question: what does Chinese America sound like?
I don't know if FDS was meant to answer that question but it at least gives us some place to start. Listen in.
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