Dear Tats, dear Anthony, how are you?

We’ve been listening to the new CD of Tat Ming. With intense feelings. Different from the full, conceptual albums of Viva! Viva! Viva! released in 1996, and of The Party in 2005, the 2021 Decade has only five tracks. Also, the styles of the song have changed. From satire in “It’s My Party”,Footnote 1 to heaviness in “Memory Is a Crime 回憶有罪”Footnote 2 and “All Over the World 今天世上所有地方.”Footnote 3 And in Anthony’s solo number “Super-duper 誇啦啦,”Footnote 4 you can’t even say anything. What we can do is to chant “lalala”.Footnote 5 It’s like, if we follow the timeline of these songs, we can see clearly what has happened to Hong Kong, what has happened to Tat Ming, in the past ten years. On the backside of the lyrics sheet, we see Anthony’s photo, and an emergency stop. Sometimes, we just hope that Hong Kong has such an emergency stop.

This CD is titled Decade, we feel that it’s the best irony Tat Ming could give to this era. Within one decade, they could only release five songs. But we are still willing to call it Tat Ming’s decade, a difficult decade. Anthony said he would love to sing till he’s eighty. We wish Tat Ming could sing even when they are older than eighty.

Two fans from Guangzhou, mainland ChinaFootnote 6

We begin this book with a remarkable episode, in April 2022. Tat Ming Pair,Footnote 7 a Hong Kong electronic duo formed in 1985, was hosting an online screening of their two rounds of REPLAY concerts, in 2020 and 2021. After the screening, some fans were invited to join and welcome to chat with the duo’s members, Anthony Wong Yiu Ming and Tats Lau Yee Tat. This event, overcoming the stringent entry and quarantine measures on both sides of the borders, attracted many VPN-savvy fans from mainland China, who would have liked to, but could not possibly come to Hong Kong, to attend the concerts in person. In fact, they have been missing Tat Ming not only due to COVID-19 barriers, but, more fundamentally and for a much longer period of time, to political duress. In mainland China, Tat Ming has been effectively banned from performing, their music erased from Chinese online platforms, and any social media posts naming them readily censored. Notwithstanding the potential risk, these two fans from Guangzhou decided to write a letter—via a route as circuitous as it is indicative of the urge to express themselves. They managed to get in touch with someone, in Beijing, whom they learned was among the few fans selected to join the chatting session. They passed the letter to him. There he was, from Beijing, reading out this letter to Tat Ming in Hong Kong, not in the official Chinese language of Putonghua, but in the local tongue of Cantonese.

We find this episode remarkable, and we cited the letter in full, because we believe they are gesturing towards the three striated—distinct and yet intertwined, above all, living—attempts in our writing of this book. First, as the fans note in their letter, to follow what has happened to the music of Tat Ming is to trace “what has happened to Hong Kong” at large. In this book, we attempt not only to document and scrutinise the history of a particular music formation; we attempt to write the history of the city itself, from colonial times, through the Handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997, to the current tension under the National Security Law (NSL) enacted in 2020, when acts of remembering may indeed, to cite the song title “Memory Is a Crime,” be a sinful act, a crime. Indexing the complexity of Hong Kong’s postcoloniality, in September 2022, Hong Kong people were seen as queuing up outside the British Consulate to pay their last respects to Queen Elizabeth II, sparking off “neo-colonial” accusations and defence for anti-establishment sentiments (Magramo 2022). We attempt to write the history of the city through the prism of popular music, focusing on one band. Second, our writing of Tat Ming, given its political sensitivity, is at the same time an attempt to write the present of Hong Kong, or to put it more accurately, to write the present in order to ensure the present remains present, not obfuscated, not obliterated. In their letter, the two fans posit a linear analysis of the changing styles of Tat Ming in the last years, from satire, heaviness to “you can’t even say anything.” We do not need to agree entirely with their analysis; suffice it to note that the need to find ways to write the unspeakable and the unspoken in the present conjuncture has become more urgent than ever.Footnote 8 We, academics, are no exception as academic freedom is increasingly under duress (Davis 2022). The “lalala,” that part of the lyrics alluded by the fans, is hardly signifying nothing, definitely full of sound and fury. Third, while the fans have laid out a rather bleak scenario, bleakness alone does not do justice to the very act of writing the letter and the very eventuality that the fans have reached Tat Ming. Despite, or precisely because of, the “difficult decade,” the fans still urge Tat Ming to continue, as if their sadness in what politics has done to music evokes some kind of hope in what music can do to politics. We are reminded to write Tat Ming as an attempt to write the future, of themselves, of the city.

Writing the past, the present and the future—that will be our remit in writing popular music and politics. We use the word “attempt” precisely for its indecisiveness; we know what we ought to do, but we know much less how. Central to this exploration is the nagging question: Why does popular music matter? Why does Tat Ming matter? Why does a book about Tat Ming matter? What follows in this book will be an elaborate exegesis of our curt reply for now: it matters in/to the past, in/to the present, and in/to the future—it documents the past, it sustains the present, it makes the future. Indeed, the verbs in this sentence can be mingled. We are attempting a way of writing pop, that is tried and safe, as the pop we are writing is embedded in a city whose politics demands increasingly ingenuity, experimentation, and risk-taking. In fact, we consider this book’s relevance and resonance beyond the city; we take it primarily as a project of studying Tat Ming as a case and mobilising Hong Kong as method, 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. In other words, how (far) does music impact on politics, and how (far) does politics impact on music? Given the specific context of Hong Kong politics, we are at the same time probing: How (far) does writing on music impact on politics, and how (far) does politics impact on writing on music?

In the following, we will prepare readers who are not familiar with the pop scene in Hong Kong with a short biographical account of Tat Ming. We will then expand our ideas of writing pop and politics in tandem with writing the past, the present, and the future—interlaced with a colonial and postcolonial account of Hong Kong, a rally to resilience and activism, and a dialogue with hope and future, all very makeshift. We continue with situating the current inquiry in fields of popular music and cultural studies. We align the inquiry to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to de-Westernise popular music studies, a field of knowledge production persistently dominated by Anglo-Saxon experience and publications. Finally, this attempt to tease out the empirical and theoretical potentials of one single popular music formation in a book-length study, covering not only its creative output (music) but also the production and reception aspects, will be put forward as a methodological intervention, a possible alternative approach to study popular music. This introductory chapter ends with presenting the organisation logic of the book and the gist of the subsequent chapters.

Tat+Ming

I started trying to be a solo musician. But at that time in Hong Kong, no one could only live on instrumental music. I wanted to try instrumental, but I realized there was no market here. There must be songs. So, it became Tat Ming.

Tats Lau

It feels strange, we never thought it would become like this when we started. We are not always together. Occasionally we would reunite. But then thirty-six years later, we are still releasing new songs, we are still staging new concerts. I have never thought about it… To me, it’s already over-achievement.

Anthony Wong

It was in 1984, that the twenty-one-year-old Tats posted an ad in a music magazine looking for a partner. Anthony, two years older and working as a radio disc jockey, responded. Two years later, they signed with label Polygram and released their debut EP under the name Tat Ming Pair—a combination of Tats Lau Yee Tat and Anthony Wong Yiu Ming. While Tats would take better care of the musical side, Anthony would attend to concept, lyrics, and aesthetics of album cover and costumes. Their songs received critical acclaim and instant popularity. It was also the so-called Golden Era of Cantopop, abbreviation for Cantonese-language popular music produced in Hong Kong, where business was generally booming. “[I]n its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s … [Cantopop] defined the look, feel and – with its lush, ultra-refined reproduction values – even the sound of Chinese cool” (Burpee 1996), not only in Hong Kong but practically Chinese communities around the world. Partly due to their own creative doing, partly due to the commercial affordance of their times, Tat Ming was given quite a free hand to craft their music aspirations. Since then, they have built a repertoire and reputation with—numerous number one hits, three EPs, six studio albums, nine compilation albums, more than ten rounds of concerts, and five concert recordings—what we elsewhere epitomise as “extravagant aesthetics, electronic sounds, and engaged lyrics” (Chow et al. 2020, 168). In 1990, the duo held their first, and at the same time farewell, concert in the Hong Kong Coliseum, with a seating capacity of more than 10,000 audiences. Tats and Anthony decided to go solo. During this phase of intensive collaboration, they released a number of classics that evoke the pre-Handover sentiments of the city, appeal for gender and sexual diversity, and comment on popular music and culture itself. Their last album before splitting up was titled Nerves. Released in 1990, the album recorded a response to what took place in Tiananmen, Beijing, a year earlier.

Tats continued making music. For the larger public, Tats is best known for his comical portrayal of a monk in a series of, usually not related, local film productions. Anthony signed solo deals with a number of music labels, set up his own production house and label (named, after a Chinese proverb, People Mountain People Sea), and remains primarily active in making popular music. In 1996, Tats and Anthony reunited to host a series of 10th anniversary concerts. “For old time’s sake, for fun, we didn't think too much why,” explains Anthony. Such occasional collaboration became a regular feature of Tat Ming’s life, resulting in live performances as well as album releases. In 2012, during one of their reunion concerts, which we analyse further in Chapter 5, Anthony came out on stage, announcing “I am gay,” delivering an important act in his and the duo’s performance of queer politics. Their next anniversary concert was in 2017, a year too late. “This time, it’s like, to put it rather melodramatically, it’s like a response to the call of our times,” says Anthony. He was referring to the city struggling with the suppression of the massive pro-democracy protests known as Umbrella Movement, in 2014 (Chan 2014). As Tat Ming’s music has documented “our times, our history,” Anthony considers their reunion concerts a historical responsibility. This became their last concerts staged in the expansive Hong Kong Coliseum. The above-mentioned REPLAY series were housed in much smaller venues, and the duo fears if they would be able to hire a place at all, as most concert venues in the city happen to be in public management.

Indeed, it was the Umbrella Movement that marked Tat Ming’s tension with the market-state nexus in mainland China, and more recently, with the other wave of social protests in 2019, in Hong Kong itself. Tat Ming’s musical disappearance from mainland China, and their increasing difficulty, if not impossibility, to secure concert sponsors and venues in Hong Kong, is allegedly the consequence of Anthony’s support to the protests. In 2021, Anthony was arrested and charged with “corrupt conduct,” for performing at an election rally for a pro-democracy candidate three years ago. Seen as “the latest official move against those who had been pushing for greater democracy in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory,” the charge was later dropped. The prosecutor considered “a bind-over order – to prevent certain behaviour from occurring in future”—for eighteen months would suffice (Pang 2021; Staff and Agencies, the Guardian 2021). It was probably anticipated; in 2018 when the duo was presented with a lifetime achievement award from Radio Television Hong Kong, certain “sensitive parts” of their acceptance speech were censored. RTHK itself, a government-funded broadcaster but known for its artistic and political autonomy, experienced drastic changes since then, and has become, according to some critics, a pro-establishment propaganda apparatus (Chan et al. 2022b).

Tat Ming’s political engagement and social concerns have informed some academic attention. Most of the works focus on Tat Ming’s earlier music in a textual manner, analysing how it demonstrates the anxiety of Hong Kong people in anticipation of the Handover in 1997, and how it addresses social issues and raises social awareness such as gender and sexuality (Cheung 1997; Chu 2000; Lok 1995). The current authors have, in their earlier publications, extended the scope of inquiry, chronologically into Tat Ming’s more recent projects, and methodologically towards analyses of the production process of concerts (2020). This will be the first book-length treatise on Tat Ming. In a broader sense, it is our insertion to the research lacune in Chinese popular music in particular, and popular music studies as a whole. It is not exactly unexpected but nonetheless disappointing to note that our literature review confirms a stubborn power imbalance in knowledge production: this will be the first book dedicated to a single musical unit in the Chinese-language area in international, that is to say English-language, scholarship. In the introduction to an anthology on Hong Kong popular music, representation, or rather under-presentation, is foregrounded. The plea is to write more on Cantopop, not only as an under-represented stream in academic work, but also as under-represented voices in our midst (Fung and Chik 2000). This book seeks to redress this.

This book is dear to us, for different reasons. Yiu Fai has been involved with the band since 1988 as a lyric writer and continues to work with them to this date (Chow 2009). For Jeroen, during his PhD in the mid to late 1990s, Tat Ming’s music opened a new perspective for his writings on rock music in Beijing. This inspired him to further deconstruct the persistent pop-rock dichotomy and the related rock mythology (de Kloet 2010). For Leonie, the live concert of Tat Ming in 2012 was a unique entry into Hong Kong culture, and inspired her writings on Asian pop culture (Schmidt 2017). Such positionality, one may argue, potentially clouds our writing. We are sure it does. We, like their fans, are fascinated by the music, the aesthetics, the performances, and the politics of Tat Ming. More poignantly, we also want to steer away from critique as the dominant modus operandi of academic writing. First, the current geopolitical situation of Hong Kong asks for moments of hope, for rays of light, for ways to stay resilient, and we aim to analyse some of these rays in this book. Second, we have become over the years increasingly sceptical about the academic virtue of critique.

Here we like to align ourselves with the work of Rita Felski; in her book The Limits of Critique, she wonders: “Why is critique such a charismatic mode of thought? Why is it so hard to get outside its orbit?” (2015, 3). Like her, we do not argue against critique. Like her, we are deeply influenced as well as inspired by the work of Foucault. Like her, we do believe: there is more than critique, there is more than a suspicion towards the texts we analyse, there is more that we can do. Critique may not be the best approach, at least not always. Felski is searching for a more open, empathetic, and appreciative mode; in her words, “works of art cannot help being social, sociable, connected, worldly, immanent—and yet they can also be felt, without contradiction, to be incandescent, extraordinary, sublime, utterly special. Their singularity and their sociability are interconnected, not opposed” (2015, 11). We thus engage with Tat Ming in what can be termed, again in her words, a post-critical way, in which we focus on what the duo and their music affords us and its audiences to do, to feel, to become, in how they are entangled with the city of Hong Kong, with mainland China, and with the world at large. “Rather than looking behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives—we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible” (Felski 2015, 12). It is such ethics of possibility we are invested in at the current geopolitical conjuncture of Hong Kong.

Documenting the Past

Fellow scholars in the so-called non-West, or more accurately non-US-UK-centric, fields of popular music studies are “catching up.” Admittedly championed by a metropolitan-based publishing house Routledge, the “made in” book series have released anthologies on popular music made in, among others, Spain, Japan, Korea, and Germany (2013; 2015; 2018; 2021). Regarding the Chinese-language area, the year 2020 saw the publication of two anthologies: one, as just cited, on popular music made in Hong Kong (Fung and Chik 2020), one on Taiwan (Tsai et al. 2019). At least one is in the pipeline, concerning Indonesian popular music. And “made in China” is also under preparation.

In terms of harvesting local or indigenous experiences and expertise, these anthologies can be considered acts of “musical nativism” (Ho 2020). At the same time, they share the urgency of remembering, documenting, and claiming their versions of history—claiming in the twin senses of appropriating and articulating. “Made in Hong Kong is perhaps the first project where local and international scholars have systematically documented and narrated the history of Hong Kong popular music and largely Cantopop,” write the editors at the very beginning of the book (Fung and Chik 2020, 1). They continue to note how this local brand of pop demonstrates its conspicuous presence by being absent in academic work, or governmental documentation, despite the so-called Golden Era of Cantopop and its persistent relevance to local audiences, cultural or otherwise. The editors also point out the marginalised position of Cantopop in local music education. Writing Tat Ming, for us, is the attempt to write the popular music history of Hong Kong, not systematic, not comprehensive, not definitive, but at least or above all, the versions we want to remember, document and claim.

It is of course not only about popular music history, but also popular music and history. In a manner reminiscent of Taiwan studies—that has somehow eclipsed with the Rise of China and the popular and academic attention thereby captivated (Shih and Liao 2014)—Hong Kong has long been kept on the sideline, after the Handover in 1997, the more dramatic historic event played out on global mediascape. It is almost ironic, if not tragic, that only with the turmoil in the last decade, that Hong Kong returns to the limelight, and the field of Hong Kong studies has grown and wedged open its space in international scholarship. The field remains, compared to say China studies, small, but the speed of its publications and development is impressive. The recent protests have inspired what Ching-Kwan Lee calls “an academic cottage industry,” connecting social movement theories to Hong Kong (Cheng and Yuen 2018; Lee and Chan 2010, 2018; Ma and Cheng 2019). Lee herself has written a short monograph musing on recent developments in Hong Kong in the wider context of China (Lee 2022). Two years earlier, Loong-yu Au published a book examining the protest movement and China’s future (Au 2020).

The publisher of this book Palgrave Macmillan commenced a Hong Kong Studies Reader Series in 2020. So far, five books have been out in the market, another one is scheduled for 2024. One of the books, on Hong Kong popular culture, by Klavier J. Wang, has two chapters on Cantopop. Her remit is to document the “origin” of the genre, and its overseas reach both commercially and culturally especially during the booming decades (Wang 2020). Taken together, these five publications, while assuming different foci of Hong Kong as a central subject of analysis, share what we feel as the same urgency to write Hong Kong, to write down what they want to—not (only) because they fear a certain future would wipe out a certain past, but, more importantly, to ensure the past does not pass, to ward off a future of fear. In the latest publication of the said series, on Hong Kong media, the editors employ military language to describe the local mediascape—“there is enough evidence and signs showing that the fundamentals of the politics of liberal exceptionalism have been under siege since the establishment of NSL” (Chan et al. 2022a, 31). They caution of a “paradigm shift” going on in the city. While they state that it is too early to say what this paradigm shift is, the very act of writing indexes their urge to add their weight to make, at least part of, the shift.

To us, this book on Tat Ming is our claiming and makeshift tactic. Almost a decade ago, two authors of this book published a collection of case studies troubling the dominant narrative of so-called death of Cantopop, arguing for the complexity demanded by the local music practitioners and industries’ “vibrancy to survive, to trick and ultimately to continue producing good music” (Chow and de Kloet 2013, 6). Now, perhaps we are writing Tat Ming to update this understanding of Hong Kong popular music as eagerly as to trouble the dominant anxiety of the disappearance of the city itself and argue for its vibrancy to survive, to trick, by the long-term persistence to continue producing good music, by Tat Ming and many others. This is also the theoretical and empirical insight posited by Ackbar Abbas in his influential work Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance, published in the same year as the Handover (Abbas 1997). There, he argues how the city appears precisely at the moment of imminent disappearance, how its culture and identity morph into being precisely under erasure. Hong Kong has just witnessed its 25th anniversary of changing from British to Chinese rule. It is under very different circumstances from then. If we can talk of a re-appearance, is it moving towards a re-disappearance? And how would this time go?

Tat Ming, to us, embodies the vibrancy, what we later would explain in terms of resilience that does not guarantee anything for the future, but insists on something from the past. When we trace the music career of the duo, we aim at tracking the memories, the histories, the alternatives—precisely as no alternative seems to be presented. In the words of Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “devoid of any political possibility of an alternative nationalist claim, Hong Kong’s self-narrative of difference is far more nebulous: it is often perceptible only as an undertow of unease that refuses to allow the surface calm to settle” (Leung 2008, 5). We are indebted to the thinking of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault on history, or in their refusal to allow things to settle, to accept history as it is. In his analysis of shopping arcades in 19th-century Paris and critique of bourgeois experience, Benjamin points at the ideological nature of history (1982/1999). His appeal, as we learn, is to “destroy the mythic immediacy of the present, not by inserting it into a cultural continuum that affirms the present as its culmination, but by discovering that constellation of historical origins which has the power to explode history’s continuum” (Buck-Morss 1989: 10). Benjamin’s history is a past with a narrative not whole, but with holes.

Indeed, rupture, refusal to see continuity, stability, inevitability, characterises Foucault’s take on history, or archaeology of knowledge, to use his favoured term (2013). Rejecting any wholistic version of history, understood as long, continuous stretches of a given period, Foucault calls upon us to look for and reveal “several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies” (Foucault 2013, 5). Knowledge thus produced in the present may transform how we describe the past, how history is written. In Foucault’s remarkable formulation, “how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given” (6). It is our hope that popular music, and in our case, Tat Ming, can be a site for exploring different pasts of Hong Kong, and to acknowledge the intertwinement of past, present, and future. Striated, the word we used earlier, to underline not only the crisscrossing, complex nature of time, but also the liveliness of such. To us, that should be the politics of writing on popular music. Repertoires are reservoirs; we will use Tat Ming’s repertoire as reservoir, to tap, to fish out narratives of the colonial and postcolonial past, with the present city in our mind, feeding some future we are unable to name.

One note on disappearance before we end this section. When Abbas was observing and commenting, the city and the world were much less digitalised, virtualised. We want to revert to the digital, virtual disappearance of Tat Ming and their music in mainland China. In the field of popular music studies, processes of digitisation engender key concerns over platformisation, marketisation, aesthetic and stylistic impact, creative labour, gender politics and politics at large (see, for instance, Barna 2020; Brusila et al. 2021; Hanrahan 2018; Skoro and Roncevic 2019). These are important areas for inquiry. What we want to flag up is the music that is excluded in digital space, when part of musical history can be, and is erased with a simple technological procedure. Some popular music studies scholars share the concern of archiving, for instance, of analogue materials (Pretto et al. 2020). Our archiving concern is perhaps of a different order: how to archive music not allowed to be archived. For this brief discussion, we used the word “virtual” deliberately, as the digital erasure of Tat Ming, at least for now, is not complete. Our writing of Tat Ming, and of history, is to be done in this context.

Sustaining the Present

In 2014, many parts of Hong Kong were occupied by the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, for seventy-nine days. In 2019, the first of a series of demonstrations took place to raise objections to the extradition law, culminating to a peak of two million people taking to the streets. What is left at the present moment? Perhaps silence? Or at best, chanting “Super-duper”? Or rather the silence as analysed by Eva Meijer when the premise or core business of democracy is usually understood to be speech, or speaking up (Meijer 2022)? In her book, Meijer distinguishes four kinds of political silence, and one of which points the act of not speaking to the act of hearing—when it is silent, we may hear new things. Placed to the Hong Kong context, the new things may not exactly be new things, but things that are, that must be, articulated and circulated, in a new way, the unspoken and the unspeakable. Our study of Tat Ming is a study of such new ways.

We are indebted to the line of scholarship that seeks to grapple with how activism or political advocacy can survive and sustain itself in increasingly harsh circumstances. James Scott introduced the term “infrapolitics,” which refers to “low-profile forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name” (Scott 1990, 19). The term draws attention to the cautious, subtle manner in which struggles continue to be waged when public, confrontational forms of resistance become impossible. His keywords are adaptation, flexibility, adjustment, and the attributes we will foreground in writing Tat Ming, thereby foregrounding the relationship between popular music and infrapolitics in general. Just as how these tactics of resilience could be located in the past—Tat Ming’s practices in the past three decades, particularly the last—their immediate concern is the present. Our aim is to write Tat Ming for their tactics to sustain their presence.

Here, we understand tactics in the way Michel de Certeau (1984) conceptualised them. He distinguishes between strategy and tactics. He writes: “I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power […] can be isolated” (35–36). By contrast, “a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (36–37).

According to de Certeau, strategy is the purview of power, while tactics are the domain of the non-powerful. Tactics are then not a subset of strategy, but an adaptation to the environment that the powerful’s strategies have produced. A city planning commission may, for example, determine where the streets will be, but the local taxi driver will figure out how best to navigate the lived reality of those streets (Boyd and Mitchell 2013). Unlike in strategy, there is no assumption made about how things will turn out. For de Certeau, tactics “must play on and with the terrain imposed on it and organised by the law of a […] power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuver ‘within the enemy’s field of vision’ […] and within enemy territory” (1984: 37). At the same time, tactics are marked by a kind of mobility “that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them” (37). Significantly, for de Certeau, cultural products are “part of the repertory with which users carry out operations of their own,” they are “the lexicon of users’ practices” (30–31). What tactics are mobilised by Tat Ming to sustain their presence in the current conjuncture? What tactics can be identified in their attempts to write the unspeakable and the unspoken? And how are Tat Ming’s cultural practices becoming a “tactical” lexicon for collaborators and (fans as) cultural intermediaries?

In Margaret Hillebrand’s study on China’s turbulent past and the persistent disavowal of that very past (2020), she singles out two dominant ways of thinking: first, the state and the (self-)censorship apparatus are efficient and effective in managing and controlling historical expressions; second, a corollary of the first, a discourse of collective amnesia has been in construction and circulation. Hillebrand calls this a “two-step story about why certain histories have such scant traction in China’s present” (15).

In line with scholars who acknowledge the power of the state, but caution against its omnipotence, Hillebrand appeals to pay attention to what escapes such censorship, surveillance, and public secrecy, to what people, at least some of them, still remember. She argues that aesthetic works are perfect sites to listen to the unspoken and the unspeakable, not unlike Abbas who argues, in the case of Hong Kong, that cultural practices are key to avoid disappearance (1997). To our purposes, we do not only argue how the realm of activism, of political advocacy, crisscrosses with the realm of popular music; we want to learn more how such crisscrossing is done. At a present characterised by silence, secrecy, and disappearance, we are attracted to resilience. When it is not exactly realistic to talk about resistance, we find it more infrapolitically urgent and productive to look to resilience, “as emergent (not emergency), iterative (not rebound) and transformative (not back to normal)” (Yue 2022, 14). To us, if resistance is about against something, resilience is about against all odds. It relates to the multiple afterlives and traces of cultures of discontent. As Marchart argues, “popular uprisings do not end when most people think they end. Struggles continue on a latent, subterranean plane, and it is impossible to foretell their long-term effects” (2015, 108).

Resilient and non-confrontational cultures are not new, they have always played an important role in illiberal contexts. For example, in the former Eastern Bloc, samizdat publications were circulated illegally to critique the government while evading Soviet censorship, just as the writings of Vaclav Havel continued to find their readers through underground circuits (Haraszti 1987; Kind-Kovács 2014). In Syria, citizens developed a language to operate within the official rhetoric of the system, yet also always sought ways to undermine it (Wedeen 1998). In China, even during the Cultural Revolution, people managed to compose for and play the violin—an instrument deemed bourgeois by the authorities (Kraus 1989). That is, in addition to the photographs and memories surviving collective amnesia and political censorship surrounding Nanjing Massacre, Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests (Hillebrand 2020). Despite the appearance of tight and solid control, cultural forces continue to exist and advance. What is unique in Hong Kong, at the present conjuncture, is the speed with which illiberal practices are unfolding. In the latest Human Freedom Index, Hong Kong continues to slide in its global ranking. Highlighted alarmingly in the report, “Hong Kong’s descent into tyranny is a tragedy” (Vásquez et al. 2022, 33). Putting aside the speed of change, Hong Kong’s case is hardly exceptional; it resonates globally. According to the latest annual report compiled by democracy watchdog Freedom House, 2021 marks a strong “anti-democratic turn,” the 17th consecutive year of overall decline in democracy, leaving the number of countries designated as democracies at its lowest point in the history of the report (Freedom House 2021). While scholars observe the changing styles of dictatorship or authoritarian governance (Guriev and Treisman 2022), analytical attention needs to be redirected to the changing styles of activism and political advocacy—the tactics of resilience.

Over the past decade, Hong Kong has witnessed an appearing demos (Pang 2021). And since the National Security Law was enacted, this demos—already engaged in creative practices (de Kloet 2017; Veg 2020; Wong and Liu 2018)—increasingly and resiliently appears in the realm of the cultural rather than the explicitly or strictly political. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, resilience has gained prominence in developmental circles. The term “was used to warn of a series of looming crises: ecological, demographic, technological, and pandemic. If our systems can and will fail, the warnings went, we better be prepared” (de Valck 2020, 9). Cities and people, as well as the ecology, are to become resilient, yet “in the realm of art and culture a similarly enthusiastic embrace of the term is yet to come” (ibid.). Resilience can be defined as “the active ability to rebound and spring back from deforming cultural, material, and economic forces” (Ieven et al. 2020, 3). The term thus refers to a cultural elasticity, also in the face of deforming authoritative forces. It comes as no surprise that the Hong Kong movement adopted Bruce Lee’s famous saying “Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend,” as its slogan, stressing the elasticity of the movement. The same slogan holds true for cultural practices (Deng 2020).

A note of clarification is required here, as the notion of resilience has been critiqued for its neoliberal and conservative undercurrents. It has rightly been scrutinised for being part of a neoliberal logic in which the individual is being held responsible for their own fate (Rose and Lentzos 2017). For McRobbie (2020, 3), resilience is a mode of governmentality through which responsibilities are individualised; she connects this to the “loss of a compassionate welfare ethos.” What is more, the idea of “rebounding,” as part and parcel of resilience, runs the risk of promoting a return to a previous status quo (Scott 2013), which marks disruption, change, and vulnerability as being negative and something to be overcome (McGreavy 2015). Instead of linking it to the individual and the personal, we think of it as social and political resilience, with which Tat Ming tries to sustain and advance, in and in spite of a hostile context, their music and aspirations (cf. Hall and Lamont 2013).

It is of course not Tat Ming alone. There are other practitioners in Hong Kong popular music who are trying their ways to stay resilient. And it is not Hong Kong alone, either. A 2023 cultural studies conference in Taipei coined resilience as its central theme. After listing its psychological meanings and implications—risk avoidance and related choices, coordinating capabilities, self-protection, and self-recovery skills, the conference introduction draws on a linguistic pun—the Chinese equivalent of resilience sounds the same as the word denoting wilfulness, both pronounced as renxing. The introduction appeals for contributions that do not only study resilience in the sense of adapting to and protecting from structural hegemony and exploitation, but also examine the wilfulness to clash, to hit. We are intrigued by this playful extension of the word resilience into wilfulness, and we are tempted to do something similar. In our case, it is Cantonese. Renxing is the pronunciation under standard Chinese, whether Putonghua or mandarin Chinese as known, respectively, across the straits; but in Hong Kong the word resilience sounds like “un.”

We flag this Cantonese linguistic play to underline two features of our understanding of resilience. First, semantically, “un” needs something to refer to, to act on—to unsettle, unwind, undo, or un-what? The absence after the epithet “un” is precisely the presence of the unspoken and the unspeakable. The subtle and multiple ways to keep on resisting without appearing so is what resilience means and does, unto different times, different circumstances. Unto is perhaps the other layer of “un.” Second, the pronunciation of “un” also alludes to another Cantonese word denoting “move.” Resilience, in this sense, is about constant moving, exercising, practising, keeping in condition, and ultimately keeping a movement. For surviving more than three decades of music market competition and specific political challenges, Tat Ming seems to us exemplary candidate for a study on resilience. Our study is to understand how they keep on opposing, keep on moving; by doing this, this book, ultimately, is to become as part and parcel of keeping it in the present, in the present tense.

Making the Future

I am pessimistic [toward the future]. Many friends of mine, especially those with children, have flown to the UK. We don't have children. Under the present economic circumstances, I don't have enough money to migrate. We have to stay in Hong Kong, to earn some more money.

Tats Lau

Sometimes I feel that the times are not with me. Do I belong to this era? But then I also tell myself, no need to think too much. Maybe the people of this era do not consider you part of them, but what you have done have impact, have made some changes. I think it’s enough.

Anthony Wong

In different words, and with probably different sentiments, Tats and Anthony articulate a shared sense of sadness regarding what is happening in Hong Kong, that the times are changing so fast that they are no longer theirs. And yet, Tats is mentioning, earlier in the interview, his plans to do more music talent grooming projects, but they were thwarted by the protest movements and then the pandemic. Right now, he is posting biographical essays online. The idea is to collect and publish them as an NFT-based package of memoire and mementoes. The first was published by the end of 2022. Part two is planned for 2024. In addition to making money, the project is also intended to salvage vibrant stories from Tats’ career development to empower those who cannot, or do not want to leave Hong Kong, like himself. Anthony complains about the lack of air play and mainstream media attention to his and their recent singles, wondering if it is worth the trouble at all. His articulation resonates with the “rumour” that the public-funded Radio Television Hong Kong—the same institution that presented Tat Ming a lifetime achievement award in 2018—has banned its DJs from playing music by allegedly pro-democracy artists (Tang 2022). Nevertheless, Anthony continues his music career both in terms of cultivating young talents, as well as making music. At one point of the interview, he sketches a scenario where local music practitioners would shift their attention from the mainland Chinese market towards the world. He envisages a possibility where Hong Kong popular music should make a future in the non-Chinese-language world.

They are speaking in a historical conjuncture where Hong Kong has entered a radically different phase of integration with mainland China. The last decade was often seen as when the paradigm shift took place. Since 2010, Cheng et al. note the central Chinese government has been tightening up control over the presumably autonomous Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong (Cheng et al. 2022). Au describes Hong Kong as de facto an extension of Beijing regime (Au 2020). The present moment is configured by the ending of two massive waves of protests, in 2014, and in 2019, where “mistrust, anger, and even apprehension among the population” constituted, according to Wu, characterised the “public structure of feelings” (Wu 2020). When such large-scale mobilisations failed to achieve what they struggled to, the following year, 2020, witnessed a society beset by a deadly virus and the associated stringent measures, as well as the legislation of the National Security Law, that “raised serious concerns about how it could suffocate the expression of political dissent because of the scope of its coverage and the vagueness of some of its stipulations, such as what could be considered as inciting and abetting people to commit an act” (Chan 2022, 29). Researchers have drawn attention to the decreasing press freedom and increasing media self-censorship in the post-NSL city (Lee and Chan 2022; Lee, Tang and Chan 2023).

They are, therefore, speaking in a historical conjuncture where perhaps only one future is probable. Yet, Tats and Anthony are still imagining something, still taking steps, hoping for changes, however small, as Anthony says. Here, Tat Ming points us to what Appadurai calls “the politics of possibility,” as in contradistinction to “the politics of probability” (2013). In his early work Modernity At Large (1996), Appadurai reacts to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and puts forward a new world of open borders, free markets, and young democracies. What happened in the world thereafter confirmed his critics who find his work too celebratory. Appadurai, observing the other new world not the one he predicted, published The Future As Cultural Fact, where he posits an “anthropology of the future” that should not be dictated by what is probable, but by what is possible. Knowledge production should be a driving force in reiterating that “the future is ours to design” (3). However improbable, it is not impossible. We learn from Appadurai’s act of academic resilience and take it upon ourselves to respond to our times, the historical conjuncture we are living in. We write Tat Ming to sustain this politics of possibility, the possibility not only of another future, but also of us being part of its making. Other thinkers have made similar calls. John Urry, in What Is the Future? (2016), urges us to reclaim the future, essentially a field of power contestation, as “a key element of power is thus power to determine – to produce – the future, out of the many ways it is imagined, organised, materialised and distributed” (2016, 17). Nick Montfort’s Future traverses the academic fields and business practices concerning the future, known variably as futures studies, futurology and scenario planning, to make a central argument: “The future is not something to be predicted, but to be made” (2017, xii). This may sound suspiciously upbeat, but Montfort’s point “is not because I believe things will necessarily get better, but because having any view that goes beyond stasis is necessary for getting to the idea of future-making” (2017, 27, emphasis in original). Marc Augé goes even further; while imaginations of a new world, a better future are vanishing, it may paradoxically offer us a real chance to devise changes based on concrete historical experience rather than some preconceived, ahistorical grand schemes. “Perhaps we are in the process of learning to change the world before imagining it”—that is, to do it, to take prudent steps into the unknown, according to Augé (2014, 83).

For many populations in the world, it is not so much a question of what future they are contemplating and making; the question is whether they can still be contemplating and making any future. In the late 1970s, Jean-Francois Lyotard announced the end of grand narratives, in the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history, and today, Amitav Ghosh even foretells the end of the world itself. How can we not rest in despair, or cynicism, and stay hopeful, that we can still be part of the future? Where do we harvest the resources for hope? If resilience is perhaps the best we can practise to sustain a certain past to a certain present to a certain future, hope is the other wing of the angel guarding the future. We put our hope on culture, or creative practices, we put our hope on the practices and social work of imagination. We want to locate hope in popular music, Tat Ming’s in our case. At the same time, we are aware of Ghassan Hage’s notion of hope distribution. In the context of rising “paranoid nationalism,” Hage cautions, “it is always useful to remember that society not only distributes hope unequally; it also distributes different kinds of hope” (2003, 12). Chow, one of the current authors, supplements with the idea of hope management, as the techniques of distribution are closely connected to processes of management. “If we need to examine how hopes are being produced and distributed, we also need to examine which hopes are being produced and distributed in the first place, in short, an issue of management,” he argues (Chow 2011).

If hope is a matter of management, we pose the same question now: How do we manage ours successfully? When Mary Zournazi interviews Chantal Mouffe on the question of hope, Mouffe criticises “the Left” of being too right, or righteous, in the sense that their moralist and rationalist approach ignores passion: “we are clearly facing a difficulty in terms of the way passion can be mobilised” (Mouffe in Zournazi 2002, 129). This book aims to reiterate the importance of popular music in mobilising passion, in feeding and feeling hopefulness for a better future. The thinkers on future we cited above—Appadurai, Urry, Montfort, Augé—nod similarly to culture. In addition to its potentials in representing and constructing imaginations of the future, cultural productions are credited for their power to mobilise affectively, to provoke passion. Illustrating with popular music, Augé describes “the sudden bolt of instantaneous emotion, ephemeral but very real, which can pierce us on hearing one bar of a song we once liked but that now, far from awakening the past, liberates the faint, fleeting, tenacious suggestion that, whatever our age, whatever our problems, something is still possible; that life can be conjugated in the future sense” (Augé 2014, 26, emphasis in original). The pair of Guangzhou fans, in their letter, wishes Tat Ming to keep on singing, even when they are beyond the age of eighty. It is in their music as well as their lives that we will trace such dynamics of liberation, that something is still possible, that we remain hopeful, that we reiterate our place in the process of future-making.

Pop and Politics

Numerous scholars have published their works investigating the political potentials of popular music. In the past decade, two monographs dedicate themselves entirely to the topic of music and politics; in fact, both bear the title of Music and Politics, to be distinguished by the subtitle of A Critical Introduction in the later published book (Garratt 2019; Street 2013). Readers interested in music studies are advised to consult John Street’s and James Garratt’s systemic and rich accounts of various philosophical notions of politics. What we want to engage with is their response to the challenging issue: Is all music (potentially) political? While both may follow the Foucauldian or Deleuzian understanding of politics and reply affirmatively, they offer their own takes. For Street, “it is only when musical pleasure (or musical displeasure) spills over into the public realm and into the exercise of power within it that it becomes political” (2013, 8). His is a more focused understanding of music and politics, where only music that inspires collective action and public deliberation will be counted as political. In his words, “it must be able to do things in the world” (2013, 162). Garratt’s take is more, say, open and encompassing. In his general attempt to map out the field, Garratt finds it useful to make two specific distinctions to maintain some porous boundaries between music and politics. “The first makes a distinction between intra-musical politics (politics within rather than through culture) and direct interventions in the political field. The second distinguishes between art and music that is explicitly defined by its politics (whether interventive or intra-musical) and that which contains – or possibly conceals – more sedimented forms of politicality” (Garratt 2018, 36).

Our take on the politics of popular music is premised on the politics of the times. Put differently, we are guided not so much conceptually, as empirically. At this particular historical conjuncture of Hong Kong, Tat Ming and their musical life inspire, or perhaps interpellate, us to embrace both authors’ takes and weave them into what we cited earlier, Appadurai’s politics of possibility. Reverting to what we have written in the previous sections, we want to (re)formulate the relationship of music and politics, by way of a study on Tat Ming and Hong Kong, into pop’s capacities—within and through culture, directly and indirectly, personally and publicly—in rewriting the past, the present, and the future, and in allowing us to co-write the past, the present, and the future, to locate the makeshift, the resilience, and the hope in the pop we study.

To flag up our empirical-cum-theoretical embedding in Hong Kong is to prelude our other engagement with popular music studies: its Western bias. Street’s book includes studies primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom. Garratt acknowledges “the majority of examples and case studies are drawn from Western music or from cultures whose music and politics have been informed by Western practices” (2018, xiii). Our contribution is, in the first instance, to supplement experiences and reflections from a non-Western case to the field of popular music studies at large. We aspire more. It is an attempt to decolonise popular music studies, sharply aware of the temptation to recolonise it. We see this inquiry not only as a supplement, but again we do not want to posit as a new paradigm. Between the modesty of a supplement and the hegemony of a new paradigm, we want to question the relevance of Western experience and theorisation in popular music studies to the rest of the world. Recalling the Human Freedom Index and Freedom House report cited earlier, we wonder: in this world of waning democracy and increasing illiberalism, the Hong Kong case of music and politics may actually be more applicable when compared to, for example, the kind of politics centring on collective action and public deliberation as theorised by Street.

Indeed, in Hong Kong, traditional forms of activism and political advocacy need to be reconsidered or even forsaken (Poon and Tse 2022). There are many parts of the world closer to the political reality of Hong Kong, at any rate closer than to the Western model of democracy. Here, we want to engage with the final part of Garrett’s book. “We live in an age ‘after the future’,” Garratt writes in his postscript. He is referring to Franco Berardi’s disbelief in the possibility of change—the other end of the politics of possibility—and he quotes, “the future no longer appears as a choice or a collective conscious action,” but rather as an “unavoidable catastrophe that we cannot oppose in any way” (Berardi 2011). There is no alternative, as Garratt summarises the perspective of neoliberal theorists. With the last example of climate change, Garratt acknowledges the vitality of music in reinventing activism but is not exactly sanguine when he puts a question mark on academic writing itself: “Whether academic writing about music can usefully contribute to activism is a moot point” (199).

Perhaps there is no alternative. At the same time, we would rather paraphrase Stuart Hall: there is no guarantee of anything, of any political ideology, of any certainty including that there is no alternative (Hall 1986). If Tat Ming, the music and the lives we are studying, continues to reinvent their activism, to sustain their politics, we are encouraged to experiment with our form of “academic activism.” The least, or sometimes the most, we as academics can do, to cite another thinker in cultural studies Larry Grossberg, is to tell better stories about what is going on (Grossberg 2010). As Devon Powers contemplates on a “futurist cultural studies,” he stresses the discipline’s orientation towards the future, and the necessary instigation of change. According to Powers, “[t] he duty of cultural studies, for [Grossberg] and many others, is to effect change within and beyond the academy. To do otherwise is to become irrelevant or complicit” (Powers 2020, 452). While we understand or may even share Garratt’s hesitation towards academic activism, we conclude more affirmatively. To us, there is also no alternative, even when there is no guarantee. Earlier in his book, Garrett alludes to the present era as “post-political,” understood as no more confidence in progress and in the future. He asks: “how are the relationships between music and politics being reconfigured and reconceptualized” (2018, 15). In a place like Hong Kong, it is hard to frame it as post-political, without misconstruing the “post” as leaving politics behind, after politics. This is the city where a very mundane piece of music, the “Happy birthday” song, was mobilised during the Umbrella Movement politically.Footnote 9 We begin to address Garratt’s question by reframing our times more as “sub-political”—even when we can hardly believe in progress, in a better future, there is always something going on, lurking, in subtle, subterranean, subliminal ways, waiting for us to conjure to politics. This is also where our Tat Ming project, located in popular music studies, encounters cultural studies: to insist on the political potentials of both popular music, and writing on popular music. That is why pop matters, this is where pop matters.

The Rest

To summarise, the rest of the book will be lynchpinned by a duality and a striation. Duality, in the sense that we see this book not only as academic project on popular music, perhaps an experiment in academic projects themselves. We experiment how to write on popular music, and a musical formation like Tat Ming, in our times. When we ask: How (far) does music impact on politics, and how (far) does politics impact on music?, we are also asking: How (far) does writing on music impact on politics, and how (far) does politics impact on writing on music? This duality is always there to guide our attempt. Indeed, attempt is also the keyword to our other thread of striation: the three striated traces of past, present, and future, when we are writing on Tat Ming, on popular music and politics. In the chapters to come, we may place more emphasis on the past, or the present, or the future, but they must be understood as emphasis for analytical convenience, not historical reality. They are as distinct as they are intertwined, and they are unstable, changing, living, like the music makers we write on, like us.

The whole book can be loosely grouped into three parts. This and the ensuing chapter are dedicated to contextualisation and theorisation, with the aim of mapping out the location of the current study in the field of pop music and its intersecting fields. The current, introductory chapter argues for the urgency of taking Tat Ming and Hong Kong pop music as a unique case study in itself and for critical reflection on pop music and politics in general, positioning itself as an experiment in writing on popular music. Chapter 2, through a mix of archive research, document analysis, and interviews, tracks and analyses the emergence and development of Tat Ming in the larger geopolitical and geocultural context. Their musical engagements with a host of issues including sexual autonomy, gender equality, freedom of thoughts and speech, Sino-Hong Kong relationships, and so forth will be highlighted to prelude the more detailed analyses in the following chapters. At the same time, Chapter 2 aims at mapping out a history of Hong Kong in its colonial entanglements with the British administration, and its postcolonial entanglements with the Beijing regime. It will also seek to retell a concomitant history of Hong Kong popular music that is not dictated by the “Golden Era” logic, that is from its popularity zenith as the “global cool” to its alleged post-Handover decline or even death, but informed and inspired by the vitality and complexity of Tat Ming’s music and politics.

The following two chapters will zoom in on two specific understandings of politics, one pro-democracy, the other pro-LGBTQ+ rights, and how Tat Ming contributes in articulating, configuring, and promoting the longing for a better future for disenfranchised populations in contemporary China. Chapter 3 premises itself on the waves of protests during the last decade as a logical outcome of a much longer process of postcolonial anxiety. Popular culture, among which popular music, constitutes an important domain to narrate versions of the past, present, and future that present alternatives to the dominant ones. The chapter zooms in on the politics as practised through Tat Ming’s music, and explores how the (post)colonial past, present, and future of Hong Kong is imagined, negotiated, and contested. We do it by way of a textual analysis of a selection of their music videos as well as their recent (2012 and 2017) concerts. Chapter 4 focuses on gender and sexuality. Since the beginning, Tat Ming has been famous, or, in some circles, notorious, for their gender and sexuality politics. In their campy, extravagant performances, the duo exudes a queer aesthetics, without ever coming out as such. This constant play with gender, with sexuality, this play with identity, of ambivalence and exuberance took a dramatic turn when Anthony came out on stage in 2012. Through an analysis of their songs, imageries, and performances, Chapter 4 probes into the politics performed by this male duo, and the possibility of a better kind of LGTBQ+, or queer politics.

The rest of the book will diverge to cover other components of pop music culture: concert production and (fans as) cultural intermediaries. Going beyond the more conventional, textual approach to studying pop music is at the same time our attempt of methodological intervention. The final two chapters will thus explore the complexity of pop and politics through production analysis and fan/cultural intermediaries studies. Chapter 5 investigates the considerations, negotiations, tensions, controversies, and compromises on the production side that underpin the narratives and aesthetics of Tat Ming’s 2017 concerts. As such, the chapter aims to unpack the making of a political pop spectacle in a city that is struggling to survive the present for its future. To do so, the chapter conducts a twofold production analysis. First, the chapter builds on a discourse analysis of the reports that have emerged in different media platforms before, during, and after the concerts. Second, we conducted interviews with Tat Ming and their close collaborators, ultimately reflecting on the tension between political motivations and commercial considerations, between engagement and entertainment. Chapter 6, on Tat Ming's legacy, is informed empirically by the field observation that substantial number of (some now rather senior) workers in creative industries were/are Tat Ming fans. Learning from interviews with ten of them (eight in Hong Kong, and two in mainland China), we will show how these actors help to further open up a space for Tat Ming’s politics, to continue articulating that what is not meant to be articulated. We argue that it is through these actors and their acts, and through the numerous afterlives and cultural translations, that Tat Ming survives and thrives in Hong Kong and beyond. We thus show how music is more than music, and how one musical unit in a rhizomatic way connects, lives on, has both effect and affect.

The book will conclude by giving a voice to Tat Ming fans worldwide. We quote from the fans who attended an online event with the duo during the pandemic. We let them speak and supplement their words with associative images we shot in Hong Kong. For us, this is an attempt to pay tribute to the affective, evocative, and future-making potentials of popular music. It is also an acknowledgement of the importance of fans for sustaining not only Tat Ming’s legacy but also their present and future.

December 2021. During their last concerts, Tat Ming performed a song released in the early phase of their musical life, in 1987. Titled “That afternoon I burnt my letters in my old home 那個下午我在舊居燒信,”Footnote 10 the song should be accompanied by a video, collaging historical moments of Hong Kong, including some recent images that eventually became too sensitive. The video did not get permission to be screened—in Hong Kong, any footage to be screened in concerts needs to be sent to censorship authorities for permission. In the absence of visual support, Tat Ming decided to dim the lights and perform the song in darkness. Audiences, after learning how and guessing why the video was made to disappear, responded to the darkness with a collective, resilient act of un-disappearing; they lit up their phones, raised their arms, and waved to the two performers on stage.Footnote 11

The show continues.