This is the first ambitious and systematic attempt to capture and document the history of Cantopop in an academic format. The book summarises all of the main research works written about Hong Kong's popular music. The author of the book, Stephen Chu, is a well-known scholar who studies Cantopop lyrics, which he uses to celebrate Hong Kong popular music studies, sometimes in conjunction with happenings in Hong Kong, including the return of Hong Kong's sovereignty to China in 1997, the post-handover period and the Umbrella Movement in 2014.

I share with the author an enthusiasm and dedication to preserve Cantopop and its history. I find the history provided in the book very comprehensive, accurate and empirically rich in content. In fact, Chu is probably the first Hong Kong scholar who has aptly selected the most memorable and important threads and pieces of Cantopop history and assembled them into a meaningful narrative. The book chronologically describes the history of Hong Kong's popular music, from the 1950s, a period in which local music was being marginalised, to the fall of Cantopop after the year 2000 to the current era of Cantopop in China. Lovers of Cantopop will find interesting anecdotes about the music and artists, memories of past gaiety in the lyrics, and an insightful analysis of the development of Cantopop.

Besides highlighting important historical moments of Cantopop, Chu boldly attempts to resolve some fundamental issues about Cantopop. Of those issues, ‘What are the reasons for the decline of Cantopop?’ is the most crucial question. Based on the facts and circumstantial evidence cited, I think the author has produced a very fair account of the interpretation of this history, from how it started to the turn of Cantopop, from its heyday to its decline.

First, Hong Kong's mass media, including the colonial government broadcaster and commercial television and radio stations, were incubators of Cantopop, but the ‘Localization Campaign’ in the 1990s, initiated by CR2 (Commercial Radio 2 of Hong Kong), was the reason for its decline, or at least the initial cause. The success of the campaign under an idealistic and populist banner of local identity operationally called for local production only – this approach was a sharp change of tack for Cantopop, which had always relied on hybridisation of music from the West and Asia. Chu argues that the sudden and sole reliance on local musicians aggravated the shortage of local music talent, a problem that eventually became a bottleneck of good quality music production.

Second, Chu developed James Wong's argument to evaluate the phenomenon of Four Heavenly Kings from the 1990s, of which he wisely captured the essence in the chapter titled, ‘The Best of Times, the Worst of Times’. This Four Heavenly Kings hype was the collective and deliberate effort of the media (most prominently Hong Kong's major television station TVB) and the government to promote four main male artists as the most popular and representative Cantopop artists of Hong Kong. While Chu spent long paragraphs summarising the popular works of Four Heavenly Kings, he made a reasonable claim that over-advertising the Kings significantly reduced the diversity of Hong Kong popular music. In retrospect, the previous ‘age of glory’ of Cantopop in the 1980s was a relatively diverse and mixed music scene, with two main protagonists (the first generation popular idols Alan Tam and Leslie Cheung) and a long list of other genres, from folk to love ballads. The shift to local production and the anti-diversification trend in the 1990s eventually drove away Hong Kong's music lovers, who then turned to other music genres and abandoned Cantopop. I think Chu's solid arguments indirectly refute the Hong Kong music industry's assertion that piracy of Hong Kong popular music and online file sharing are the chief culprits.

As a music scholar and lover of Cantopop, I concur deeply with Chu's analysis. To add to and further develop the argument, I would argue that the over-festivity of Four Heavenly Kings reveals the crude capitalism of Hong Kong – without too much involvement and support from the government, as Chu also said – that became the prominent drive for music taste and aesthetics. Because many of these songs were commissioned as advertisements to sell all kinds of commodities in Hong Kong, from mobile phone services to cola, Cantopop in this period was confined to ballads with a repeated commercial formula. The interwoven relationship among advertisers, record companies and commercial media further restricted where Cantopop could go. After the heyday in the 1990s, this Cantopop-commercial fixation was extended and reproduced in the karaoke-song format, and it further exploited the cultural value of Cantopop until its decline in the new millennium.

It might be true to say that this concise history puts more emphasis on the political economy of the record companies, the mass media and their production. If a more lengthy history of Cantopop could be written, the involvement of fans and fan clubs in the music circle should be an important part. Easily identifiable are the rivalry between Alan Tam's and Leslie Cheung's fan bases in the 1980s, the influential Andy World Club in the 1990s, and the well-managed fan activities by Emperor Music in the new millennium. Fandom and fan participation are not only about the popularity of the songs or singers. Fans’ interpretations and subsequent expressions of Cantopop are discursive formations responding to the sociopolitical context in Hong Kong. For example, ‘Boundless Ocean, Vast Skies’ (1993) from Hong Kong's rock band Beyond has become one of the thematic songs for various generations of Hong Kong youth involved in democratic movements since the Umbrella Movement in 2014. The latter is precisely what the author wants to convey in the last chapter, when Cantopop meets China. Chu explicates the predicament of Cantopop's role – a Hong Kong music genre performed in Cantonese – under its sovereign China that prioritises Putonghua as the lingua franca of all Chinese communities. At this juncture, Cantopop is more than a music genre, entertainment or music industry. As epitomised in the lyrics of C AllStar's song ‘Cantopopsibility’ (2013), the crisis of Cantopop, as Chu says, is simply that of Hong Kong's culture; among various external pressures or factors, the survival, if not the rejuvenation, of Hong Kong culture really depends on the audience and its people. The latter could then be a more important aspect of Cantopop studies.