Remapping Hong Kong popular music: covers, localisation and the waning hybridity of Cantopop

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)

Articles

Introduction

Cantopop, the name given to the genre of popular songs whose lyrics are written in standard modern Chinese but sung in Cantonese, was once a major contributor to the music world in East Asia.¹From the mid-1970s, Hong Kong popular music as a whole became strongly identified with Cantopop. Its rise came about as the result of the huge growth in local audiences in Hong Kong in the 1970s; by the end of that decade, Cantopop had become a highly profitable industry with a rapidly expanding market. In the 1980s it expanded further into a multi-media industry, becoming so popular that it began to attract non-Cantonese speakers. Throughout that decade, superstars such as Leslie Cheung, Alan Tam and Anita Mui surpassed the achievements of their predecessors by developing Cantopop into a multi-media business that straddled the borders of neighbouring regions. They staged hundreds of concerts in the newly built Hong Kong Coliseum, with a seating capacity of over 10,000.²Cantopop helped Hong Kong establish a leading role in the multi-billion dollar business of popular culture and its idols: 'in its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, Cantopop defined the look, feel and - with its lush, ultra-refined production values - even the sound of Chinese cool' (Burpee 1996). Cantopop had a significant impact on Chinese popular music in general, and a profound influence on the music made in East Asian Chinese-speaking countries such as Taiwan, Singapore and mainland China itself. It also remained popular among Chinese diasporic communities, many of which are dominated by Hong Kong emigrants who left the Colony when it reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Hong Kong artists still perform regularly in North American cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Las Vegas, European cities such as London and Amsterdam, and also in Australia, as part of their regular world tours. Their target audience is made up of both first- and second-generation Hong Kong emigrants.

As noted in Baseline Study on Hong Kong's Creative Industries, conducted by the University of Hong Kong for the Central Policy Unit of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2003:

the music industry in Hong Kong is dominated by Cantopop in production and...