For roughly three decades since the mid-1970s, the success of Cantopop and the so-called Hong Kong-produced movies (Mandarin: gangchanpian) had positioned Hong Kong as arguably the most important site of Sinophone media production that catered to one of the largest transnational listening and viewing publics worldwide. Nonetheless, in Anglophone scholarship, not only has Cantopop (or more broadly, popular music from Hong Kong) been far less a research topic than its cinematic counterpart in media and cultural studies, but it has also been remarkedly underrepresented in popular music studies, a field that the authors of this book ‘attempt to decolonise’ (p. 22) in light of ‘knowledge production [being] persistently dominated by Anglo-Saxon experience and publications’ (p. 4). This book is therefore forthright about foregrounding the social and political contexts of postcolonial Hong Kong while demonstrating a continuing commitment to ‘(re)claim more space for Hong Kong in the field of popular music studies, which is increasingly and understandably occupied by studies privileging mainland China, reflecting and contributing to the so-called Rise of China at large’ (Reference Chow and de Kloet2012, p. 4). Guided by the ethics and politics of possibility that Arjun Appadurai articulated in The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Reference Appadurai2013, pp. 1, 295), this book presents an important perspective on popular music from Hong Kong that, by focusing on ‘the tactics of resilience’ (p. 13) within the context of ‘creative freedom and creative policies’ (p. 49), attempts ‘to steer away from critique as the dominant modus operandi of academic writing’ (p. 8).
Through the lens of Tat Ming Pair – a Hong Kong-based male duo that has been known for their flamboyant performance, politically conscious song lyrics, and stylistic inclination toward synth-pop and new wave – this book documents and discusses how ‘a kind of minor music that deterritorialises not only Anglo-American sounds but also those from mainland China’ (p. 56) could ‘surviv[e] more than three decades of music market competition and specific political challenges’ (p. 17). Its inquiry into popular music from Hong Kong aims not only to deviate from a conventionalised ‘qualitative narrative of splendour, legacy, and success [that] is intricately woven in the quantifiable framework of magnitude, number, and money’ (p. 49), but also to think beyond critiques that are premised on ‘the end of Cantopop or the decline of its commercial performance’ (p. 50). It provides a cultural analysis of how Tat Ming Pair deploys music creatively and expressively as a means to identify with and empower the disenfranchised and the marginalised in Hong Kong (and to a lesser extent, in the People’s Republic of China). It explicates the politics of Tat Ming Pair’s concert production in light of the freedom of expression. It tells of the influence of Tat Ming Pair on Hong Kong’s pop scene based on interviews with personnel and professionals who are close to the duo in different capacities. This is how the authors insist ‘on the political potentials of both popular music and writing on popular music’ (p. 23) so as to ‘write the present [of Hong Kong] in order to ensure the present remains present, not obfuscated, not obliterated’ (p. 3).
Knowing that this book is written by scholars who acknowledge that their ‘lack of music or musicology training’ (p. 181) is causal to their focus on aspects of Tat Ming Pair ‘[other] than the strictly technical and musical’ (p. 182), it has made clear that a book that gives full recognition to the musical trajectory, achievement, and contribution of Tat Ming Pair is yet to be written. It claims to be primarily a project ‘to rethink the intricate relationships between politics and popular music in the wider context of the globalised times where collective action and creative practices are increasingly connected and mutually constitutive’ (p. 4), even though it is emphatic that ‘local practices from the peripheries of the pop world must be acknowledged and included if pop[ular] music studies is to be decolonised’ (p. 52). For instance, when it points to the cross-media engagement of Tat Ming Pair as a manifestation of ‘a distinctly Hong Kong mode of practice’ (ibid.), it refers to two recent books on Hong Kong media culture (Leung Reference Leung2015; Wang Reference Wang2020) and contends that Tat Ming Pair exemplifies how, ‘outside the metropolitan centres of pop production, particularly in the United States and in the United Kingdom[,] […] there are other ways of doing things’ (p. 52). It could have investigated the role of ‘intermediaries’ (Hennion Reference Hennion1983, Reference Hennion1989; Hennion and Meadel Reference Hennion and Meadel1986) in characterizing cross-media cultural production in Hong Kong (Ha Reference Ha2016) in addition to defining good taste and good work in the field of cultural production (pp. 168–70). It could have remarked on the similarities or even interconnections between the music/media industries across East Asia by comparing Tat Ming Pair with examples of cross-media stardom such as Japanese idols (aidoru) Yamaguchi Momoe and Sakai Noriko who were very popular in Hong Kong for a long time. Accordingly, one may ask to what extent the United States and the United Kingdom remain central to the global music/media industry, such that a centre-periphery framework for understanding popular music from Hong Kong would still be fruitful. One may also wonder how a study of Tat Ming Pair could contribute more than a thick description of local practices to decolonising popular music studies.
Overall, this book is a timely and uplifting addition to both popular music studies and Hong Kong studies in the current age of precarity. Hopefully, as it is available in open access, it will inspire a wide range of readers from academia and beyond to take popular music, Hong Kong, and popular music from Hong Kong seriously.
