In contemporary cultural industries, Hong Kong shows its significance not only as an important producer of popular music but also as a city with the multiple identities of the Chineseness and the West. Adding to several earlier studies on Chinese popular music (Baranovich 2003; de Kloet Reference de Kloet2010; Moscowitz 2010), the central aim of this book is to further understand the role Hong Kong plays in the global flow of sounds, images and people via a comprehensive investigation of the city's popular music praxis. The volume is relatively loosely structured on seven separate chapters contributed by two authors, namely Yiu Fai Chow, a local scholar and lyric writer in Hong Kong, and Jeroen de Kloet, an expert on Chinese popular culture from University of Amsterdam.
The book begins with an autobiographical enquiry by Chow (Chapter 1), in which the issues of Chineseness are discussed through the author's experience and lyrical analysis of the nationalistic songs created during the re-nationalisation process of Hong Kong. The central question is ‘what does it mean by being Chinese’ (p. 16), after the crucial ideological shift during the 1990s, when the Chinese Communist Party changed its legitimising ideology from communism to a market-driven nationalism. By analysing 14 lyrical samples selected from the period 1978–2004, the author illustrates an account of the personal-artistic-political matrix wrapping around an idea of resistance (defined as the micro politics of resistance), instead of the more macro scenario of political struggles (p. 36). In other words, the author offers a singularising claim of ‘Chineseness’ through his critical but personal self-reflexivity.
Chapter 2 turns to examining the production of locality in the global context, via a comparative study of two local stars and their fans from The Netherlands (Marco Borsato) and Hong Kong (Leon Lai). The comparison covers four aspects (linguistic boundaries, community, charity and character) and demonstrates striking differences between the fans of different localities. While Marco is seen as an ordinary person by Dutch fans, Leon is considered by Hong Kong fans to be an extraordinary worker. Chapter 3 focuses on a recently unprecedented phenomenon named ‘China Wind’. This genre is featured by its juxtaposition of traditional Chinese elements with trendy global pop styles, musically or lyrically. By textual analyses (mainly the musical videos), the author argues that Hong Kong's China Wind pop evokes Chineseness, but also undermines it in two ways: ‘first, it renders Chineseness as distant gaze, as ambiguous space and as ongoing struggles; and second, it feminizes Chineseness, opening up a space for questions on history and gender performance’ (p. 77). At the same time, the author calls for more research from other locations involving mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore in order to understand the whole phenomenon of China Wind.
Chapter 4 shifts the attention from music to more in-depth moral concerns with a case study of the high-profile ‘Sex Photo Gate’ in 2008. In this scandal, the private pictures of Edison Chen, a Hong Kong-based singer-actor celebrity, with a range of famous and less famous female stars, became public after Chen brought his laptop to a repair shop. The event can be interpreted from many perspectives, such as sexual rights, the privacy of celebrities and the market value of the scandal. Essentially, it reveals an innate contradiction of Confucian and Victorian ethics of Hong Kong in the context of global capitalism and commercialism (pp. 88–93), which also represents the city's in-between status.
Pop music serves as a marker of time, which may not only be heard but also seen. In this sense, popular music venues play an important role in forming the entire pop culture. In Chapter 5, the authors embark on a survey of the most famous performing venues and argue that these buildings per se are landscapes of the city, and more significantly the material and stable embodiment of the sound of Cantopop. In particular, as emotive landmarks they preserve the history and memory of the emotion of the citizens and further help to shape the identity of the city.
Chapter 6 is a case study, in which a close analysis of the theme songs and clips of the Olympic Games in Beijing in August 2008 is presented, especially those involving factors from Hong Kong (such as the lyricists, producers and stars). In doing so, the authors show what kind of Chineseness is being celebrated and how the involvement of Hong Kong interferes with any univocal celebration of Chineseness. More specifically, Hong Kong's productions endow new performative meanings (which allow for continuous mutations of meaning, propelling the proliferation of new and different meanings, some clearly oppositional, others parodic or simply funny and light-hearted) to the songs' originally constative meanings (p. 134). Meanwhile Hong Kong also plays a key role in the de-territorialisation of the songs from their original meanings. In addition, Chapter 7 presents another case study of ‘following the object’ (p. 139), focusing on a Netherlands-born Chinese singer, Diana Zhu. She relocated and started her career in Shanghai, after winning a Chinese singing contest in Amsterdam in 2006. This empirical study of Diana illustrates the cultural differences between The Netherlands, mainland China and Hong Kong in the aspects of language, music and body, which also help to understand the ‘Chineseness’.
Finally, the volume ends with a methodological reflection. In fact, the methods employed in this book are multiple and even promiscuous, classified as ‘the flow’, ‘the bodily’, ‘the political’ and ‘the personal’ (pp. 151–4). More specifically, they involve the autobiographical approach, textual analysis, social science methods (such as interviews, focus groups and participant observation) and visual analysis.
In summary, the seven separate chapters all point to the same conclusion – that Hong Kong's pop music praxis has embodied the city's in-betweenness. Furthermore, the question of how to identify the complex meaning of Chineseness in late socialism is raised. The most significant values of the book may be that: (1) it is pioneering and a basis for further studies on Chinese pop culture; and (2) it brings methodological innovations. However, the weakness might be that of ‘breadth versus depth’, as it might have been useful to do fewer than seven subjects, with each subject covered in more depth. In addition, it might be better to clarify the internal logics between the topics rather than a simple juxtaposition. Nevertheless, this is a very useful addition to the field.
