IHT: Cantopop -- Lauding Hong Kong's homegrown music

By Alexandra A. Seno
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

HONG KONG: Beyond the carefully styled public personas of Hong Kong's major singing idols, under the smoke machine effects and the glittering concert outfits, behind the catchy melodies and sugary lyrics, the heart of modern Hong Kong beats steadily in Cantonese-language pop music.

"Cantopop is indispensable in our lives. It plays a part in the formation of Hong Kong's identity and culture," said Professor Clement So York-kee in a speech at the opening of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum show "Riding a Melodic Tide." So, the head of the Chinese University of Hong Kong's School of Journalism and Communication, helped organize the exhibition, which opened on Nov. 11 and runs until Aug. 4, four days before the Beijing Olympics begin.

The ambitious exhibition, a year and a half in the making, occupies an entire top-floor wing of the museum in Shatin, a middle class suburb. Despite Cantopop's domination of the Chinese entertainment world for more than three decades, "Riding a Melodic Tide" marks the first time the city has honored the industry in this way. It documents the development of one of Asia's most commercially successful music industries, focusing on the "Golden Age" of the 1970s and 1980s.

Tunes matched Western pop melodies, with ancient Chinese poetry or plain-spoken Cantonese language, and icons of the period like Roman Tam Pak-sin and Sam Hui Koon-kit - both well-represented in the exhibit - spoke to a generation who for the first time took pride in being modern, prosperous Chinese. They were the children of people who left China after the Communist victory in 1949 or recent immigrants from the mainland who had fled in the early 1970s, the last difficult years of Mao Zedong's rule.

Tam's "Beneath the Lion Rock," the theme song of a TV soap opera that began in 1974, became Hong Kong's unofficial anthem with lyrics like: "Hand in hand to the ends of the earth/ Rough terrain no respite/ Side by side we overcome ills/ As the Hong Kong story we write."

Terence Ng Tak-cheong, the museum's assistant curator and a key member of the team that assembled the exhibition, said that "at the time, Hong Kong enjoyed an economic boom and a relatively stable political environment." While its Asian neighbors were recovering from recent wars and revolutions, the British territory thrived and so did its pop music. "There started to be a local identity and the music played a part in creating that," said Angelina Law Yuen-fai of the Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong.

The exhibition faithfully tells the overall story. There are facts and figures in English and Chinese, rare music and video samples as well as hundreds of objects: costumes, fan kitsch, posters, pictures, hand-written music scores. There is even a special corner that pays tribute to Teresa Teng Li-chun, the Taiwanese singer known for "The Moon Represents My Heart" and "Tian Mi Mi," some of the best-known Chinese pop songs of all time. Though she became famous for recording in Mandarin, in the mid-1980s Teng decamped to Hong Kong, where she bought a house and carved out a Cantopop career, a recognition of the industry's premier position in Chinese entertainment.

"Riding a Melodic Tide" has plenty of things from Tam's estate. His sisters donated 3,000 items to the museum after he died in 2002. However, save some reproduced photographs, there isn't enough from Joseph Koo (also known as Gu Gaa-fai) and James Wong, the "Lion Rock" composers who were pivotal to the success of the industry. Also noticeably absent are important memorabilia from Anita Mui Yim-fong and Leslie Cheung Kok-wing, two 1980s greats. Their deaths in recent years were perceived to mark the passing of an era. And aside from a few images and posters, what about "The Four Heavenly Kings?" The biggest individual acts of the 1990s remain masters of the Chinese pop music universe.

What makes Cantopop like no other genre is extreme showmanship, something that doesn't quite come across clearly in the exhibition. The Hong Kong industry took the Japanese pop sensibility and unapologetically amplified it. More than the singing and music, Cantopop concert audiences want their money's worth with dancing, lasers, mini-plays and outfits.

There are hints of Cantostyle in Hui's suits, created from typical Hong Kong red, white and blue plastic carrier bags emblazoned with a bauhinia flower, the city's symbol. Tam's classic performance-wear includes a fur-trimmed, hand-beaded and mirrored jacket with matching black lace-and-sequins trousers, and another glittery outfit worn with a cape of peacock feathers.

Cantopop got its start when the Shanghai entertainment industry was forced to move to Hong Kong after the 1949 Communist victory on the mainland. Mandarin, spoken by China's educated classes, became the language of choice for quality films and songs. Meanwhile, music in Cantonese, the dialect of Southern China's Guangdong Province and the mother tongue of most Hong Kongers, languished as low-class fodder with an export market targeted at homesick Chinese laborers and household help in Southeast Asia.

The status of Cantonese songs, until then primarily traditional ditties and Chinese operas, was rewritten in the 1970s when Hong Kong went from business backwater to powerhouse. Joseph Koo, then the music maestro at one of the local TV stations, took what was then a radical move by using Cantonese lyrics instead of the usual Mandarin for the theme song of "Fatal Irony," a 1973 drama series starring a young Chow Yun-fat. It was a hit. By 1976, when decent young Chinese men in the British colony only played Western music, Sam Hui, a good-looking graduate of Hong Kong University, ditched his Elvis Presley repertoire and English-language covers to sing "The Private Eyes" in Cantonese. Suddenly, crooning in the local Chinese dialect was cool.

For everything that Cantopop stands for, the Hong Kong music business now appears destined to follow the familiar melancholy narratives of the ephemeral loves enshrined in its songs. Cantopop is having to move on. Walking through the cases full of memorabilia at the Shatin exhibit, Ng, the curator, stopped to declare in a theatrical whisper, hands cupped around his mouth: "The market changed."

A decade ago, tastes changed thanks to greater exposure to Western pop culture. As demand from Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan shrank, music piracy spread. The International Federation of Phonographic Industry estimates annual Hong Kong Music sales to have plunged from 1.7 billion Hong Kong dollars ($217.8 million) in 1997 to 560 million Hong Kong dollars ($71.8 million) in 2006.

The economic pressures have led to an over-dependence on big stars and a small group of proven lyricists and composers.

The future for Cantopop singers (home market: 7 million) hinges on its mastery of Mandopop, the business of entertaining the 1.4 billion Chinese who speak Mandarin. In the past decade and a half, more Hong Kong singers have warbled in Mandarin or recorded translations of Cantonese songs for the mainland market.

As the weather has cooled and new wealth continues to rise in China, Cantopop concert season is in full swing and the Heavenly Kings have hit the road. Jacky Cheung Hok-yau plays Shanghai in December. Andy Lau Tak-wah's "Wonderful World" tour hits Hong Kong at the end of the year. He kicked off the series two months ago in Inner Mongolia - one of dozens of concert venues in mainland China.

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