Verse

Verse 89.09.12.21 Munsang College, Kowloon City, 1989 Miss Man was our home room teacher at P. 3G She taught English and Phys Ed We thought she was the coolest One morning in June, she cried in front of the class And spoke a long time We were old enough to know what happened Back then, every once awhile, a classmate would vanish Then it was my turn, soon after this photo was taken Canada. The exodus is on again I write in English because my Chinese isn’t that good. Atom, 89.09.12.21

These are the verses that open a zine created by Atom, a self-proclaimed Tat Ming PairFootnote 1 fan (Atom 2021). In the afterword, Atom explains the background of the project. He went to all shows of the REPLAY concerts in 2020. He “scribbled a lot” during the six nights of performance, but left his notes behind before picking them up a year later. He realised he should do something about it. He decided to integrate his notes with his migration experiences into a zine publication. Primarily in black, the zine is supplemented with eight poems and short stories, each inspired by a Tat Ming song. The title of the zine, 89.09.12.21, came to Atom quickly, except the last number. The first, 89, refers to the year when his coolest teacher cried in front of her class, when he and many classmates “vanished” from Hong Kong; he was referring to one of the migration waves in the aftermath of Tiananmen. That year, he was nine years old—the second number of the title. Atom was in touch with Tat Ming’s music before he left the city, but it was not yet the digital age where the Hong Kong diaspora could easily keep track of popular music from the city. In 2009, Atom decided to go to Hong Kong, and in 2012, the third number of the title, he went to his first Tat Ming concert, and after that he attended every one of their concerts. For the last number, Atom decided on 21, as he notes in the afterword: “I first went with 20 to mark the REPLAY that triggered most of the writing here, but then a new REPLAY is happening in ’21, with tickets going on sale just days from now, and it could be ’22 by the time this book reaches anyone. But then, really, since the end of 2019, I’ve had no sense of time.” Atom, on the other hand, has a very vivid sense of place. During an interview, when his zine attracted attention after Tat Ming showed it on stage, Atom says, Tat Ming “makes me feel I belong to Hong Kong” (Ling 2022).

Now a radio presenter and podcast creator, Atom continues to write stories in Hong Kong, and of Hong Kong. We will explore further Tat Ming’s legacy through people like Atom in Chapter 6. For now, we are cued by Atom’s affection for Tat Ming and for Hong Kong, by the intimate way he weaves the music of Tat Ming into his biography in pre- and post-Handover Hong Kong; we are cued to a discussion of the electronic duo in the intersection of postcolonial studies and popular music (studies).

Post and Pop

“[P]ostcolonial studies has often ignored popular culture and particularly popular music” (Lovesey 2017, 1). It is with this weird lacuna in mind that a special issue has been organised in the journal Popular Music and Society, and later published as an anthology bearing the same title—as late as 2017 and 2018 (Lovesey 2017, 2018). This is weird in at least two senses: first, the emergence of popular music itself, in the 1950s and 1960s, precisely coincided with the era of decolonisation; second, the “popular” in popular music should suggest the importance of its connection to the popular, to the people, that should intrigue scholars interested in colonial and postcolonial issues, in power structures that shape how peoples long and belong. In this book, we use the unhyphenated term “postcolonial” to signal the continuation and the persistent effects of colonisation in our world today—instead of using the hyphenated “post-colonial,” which signifies a period that comes after colonialism.

Postcolonial studies, which theorises colonial logics, transnational disparities, and postcolonial rationalities, has made a name for itself in recent decades. One of its primary contributions has been to interfere with (Western-oriented) academia’s knowledge production in order to highlight “how many of its underlying logics of knowledge, established in various disciplines, have attempted to universalise themselves and their Eurocentric assumptions” (Shome 2016, 245). Despite being prominent in fields such as Anthropology, Geography, History, and English and Comparative Literature, postcolonial studies has paid minimal attention to the role played by popular culture in the context of nationalist, colonial, and transnational relations (245). It has given notably little consideration to the ways that popular music influences and intersects with many modern postcolonial sensibilities (245). Popular music can reflect, negotiate, and contest “racialised power relations, identity, belonging, the role of the nation-state, cultural imperialism and resistance” (Nayar 2015, x).

Oliver Lovesey nods to the founding thinkers of postcolonial studies, such as Franz Fanon and Edward Said, for a possible explanation of the scant attention postcolonial studies has paid to popular music. Their scholarly works focus on “literature, and yet more narrowly on late 20th-century Anglophone postmodern novels and a large handful of counter-canonical classics” (Lovesey 2017, 1). Said’s occasional and dismissive reflection on popular music, criticised as elitist, orientalistic and universalistic, “creates a powerful dissonance with other, particularly postcolonial themes in his writing” (Capitain 2017, 57). We venture another factor, namely popular music has long been framed as something related to youth, and popular music studies thus to youth studies. Popular music is more readily analysed as an age inflection rather than, say, an ethnic or racial one, thereby yielding resources for postcolonial studies.

The collection of articles in the special issue and the ensuing anthology addresses this lacuna on two fronts. One line of scholarship (e.g. Brunner 2017; Inyabri 2013; Nyamnjoh and Fokwang 2005) seeks to understand the uses of popular music in the historical and ongoing processes of decolonisation, in the resistance against colonial rule as well as the colonial legacy in the post-colony. They mostly focus on the former European colonies in the African continent. The other line of scholarship (e.g. Huq 2006; Kim 2014, 2017; Sieber 2005) turns to the persistent “post-colonialisms” in Europe itself, situating itself in the intersection between popular music and “internal colonisation” issues of migrants and refugees in Europe. The insertion of Tat Ming here serves two purposes. The first is, quite generally, the lack of research in the Asian experience in English-language scholarship—save for some notable exceptions, among which a study of the Japanese colonial legacy in postcolonial Korean popular music (Lee 2017), a study of postcolonial nostalgia in Taiwanese pop music (Taylor 2004), and a study of music as youth culture in Bangalore (Saldanha 2002).

Secondly, and more fundamentally, we see Tat Ming and its politics as an “anomaly”—as much as the decolonisation of Hong Kong itself. Put simply, Hong Kong’s decolonisation proceeds in tandem with its renationalisation. While the former colonies in postcolonial studies became nations in their own right, Hong Kong became part of China after its sovereignty was handed from London to Beijing in 1997. In other words, if the decolonisation process is primarily a process from the native, the indigenous, and the local shedding the imperial and evolving itself to the national, the decolonisation of Hong Kong is a different narrative altogether. It remains the local, previously embedded in the imperial, now in the national. Our inquiry of Tat Ming is to supplement postcolonial studies with a unique case of decolonisation, probing the local in the process.

This in-betweenness is always there, historically. As Stephen Chiu and Kaxton Siu remark: “Hong Kong was haunted by not just one spectre, but two since the early settlement years after the Unequal Treaties, as it has stood at the fringe of two empires, the British and the Chinese” (Chiu and Siu 2022, viii). This “double marginality,” in Klavier Wang’s words, is also one major source of its hybridity, the alleged signature of Hong Kong popular culture when it emerged and developed to its Golden Era during the 1970s and 1980s (Chu 2020; Wang 2020). Surviving the Sino-British Joint Declaration over its future, the Tiananmen protests, and finally the Handover, Hong Kong experiences the first two decades of post-Handover period, arguably and decreasingly, through the politics of “liberal exceptionalism,” understood as an exceptional degree of freedom in Hong Kong, indirect rule through agents and brokers, respect for professionalism, and dominance of liberal-democratic values in public discourses (Chan et al. 2022).

At the same time, in the context of renationalisation, and the attempt to reintegrate Hong Kong to the mainland, not only politically but also culturally, tension has been mounting between the local and the national. Almost like a defence mechanism, especially with the suppression of the Umbrella Movement, a strong force of localism, what Mirana Szeto called, as early as in 2006, a “petit-grandiose Hong Kongism” (2006, 269), is gaining grounds in the city that is caught in the multiple claims of its identity and affinity, its longing and belonging. With increasing Sino-Hong Kong contacts, the city has witnessed discriminatory practices that cast the mainlanders as primitive, predatory, and the term “locusts” was circulated to refer to immigrants, traders, and tourists from mainland China—what John Lowe and Eileen Tsang call “racialisation of Chinese mainlanders in Hong Kong” (2017, 137). In other words, sometimes, the nation and its nationals become coterminous, as a common reflector and receptor of local sentiments.

Such are the deep-seated conflicts that China will staunchly support the Special Administrative Region government of Hong Kong to solve, according to the speech President Xi Jinping delivered at the opening of the once-in-five-year Communist Party congress in Beijing, in 2022. In the wake of the social movement sparked off by the proposed extradition legislation, 2019, and its suppression, China, as pointed out by Xi, has achieved comprehensive control over Hong Kong, turning it from chaos to governance, and from governance to prosperity. This three-step trajectory is remarkably reminiscent of the simplified colonial narrative itself. The following incident is illustrative of the complexity of Hong Kong. It took place in the autumn of 2022. Dozens of Hong Kong people now residing in the United Kingdom were protesting the same congress outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester. A group of masked men came out of the consulate, destroying the protestors’ placards and a clash followed. One protestor was reported to be dragged to the consulate and beaten up. “As we tried to stop them, they dragged me inside, they beat me up,” he said. He was then pulled out by the UK police. Angry protesters shouted at the men from the Chinese consulate and the British police, arguing they could have done more. In a statement following the incident, the consulate said the protesters had “hung an insulting portrait of the Chinese president at the main entrance,” adding “[t]his would be intolerable and unacceptable for any diplomatic and consular missions of any country” (Lee and Maishman 2022). For such complexity of the local, the imperial, and the national—Hong Kong’s positionality vis-à-vis the United Kingdom and mainland China—we need to think beyond the usual parameters of modernisation, decolonisation, and colonial legacy when we think about the relationship between its music and politics (Chiu and Siu 2022).Footnote 2 This is what we are going to do in this chapter.

When we discuss the postcolonial and pop, it is not only about what pop can contribute to the postcolonial, but also what the postcolonial can contribute to pop—and the concomitant academic practices of knowledge production. We echo Anja Brunner and Hannes Liechti in their introduction to a collection of articles: “The (post)colonial heritage of popular music and the related need to decolonise the field have not been considered widely in popular music studies” (Brunner and Liechti 2021, 10). They are not the first, or the only ones (see for instance Born and Hesmondalgh 2000; Ewell 2021; Lovesey 2018; Radano and Olaniyan 2016), but their appeal to decolonise academic practices—to critically examine, through a postcolonial lens, the “hierarchies, asymmetries or restraints”—in popular music studies, remains poignant (Brunner and Liechti 2021, 14). Any casual observation of any popular music journal will suffice, to underline the stubborn dominance of studies based on Western experience employing Western approaches. Among the minority of inquiries on pop music outside the West, the paradigm does not necessarily shift (Lund 2019). Routledge’s Global Popular Music Series, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, is at once a response to and a confirmation of the hierarchies, asymmetries, and restraints in popular music studies. Since its first publication in 2019, the series has gathered 21 titles, guided by the series’ mission: “Written by those living and working in the countries about which they write, this series is devoted to popular music largely unknown to Anglo-American readers.”Footnote 3 This is also what we want to do in this chapter—although, we hasten to add, the three current authors are not always living and working in Hong Kong, and such living-cum-working prerequisite strikes us as nativist and essentialist. But first, we will explain our methodological choice, and sketch the scholarship on Hong Kong popular music this inquiry builds on.

Method

For this chapter, we have drawn primarily from the interviews with Anthony Wong and Tats Lau in 2022. One of the authors, Chow, has been writing lyrics for Tat Ming since 1988, and has also published academic work on Tat Ming. It is in his duality as long-term collaborator and pop music scholar that he initiated and conducted the interviews. The interview guide was a collective effort of the three authors. Chow met the two separately, to reduce the sociality of the occasion, to minimise the likelihood of them offering socially desirable answers, to maximise the chance for them to speak up freely. The venue was their choices. The interview with Anthony took place in the office-cum-studio of an indie music collective and label he set up called People Mountain People Sea. The one with Tats took place in his home that also serves as his studio and office, and was joined by Tats’ wife Agnes who also functions as his manager. The purpose of the interviews and the book project were explained and their explicit consent was obtained. Lasting roughly an hour, they were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Follow-up questions and replies were exchanged per mobile communication apps.

That we have privileged the subjective accounts of Anthony and Tats for this chapter on the history of Hong Kong and its popular music is informed conceptually and empirically. On the conceptual front, history, as we understand it, is always already a field of contestation, fragmented, and pending. To harvest from Tat Ming’s recollections and reflections of their own past and to trouble thereby certain colonial and postcolonial narratives is concomitantly an attempt to let singularity interrupt homogeneity, to let biography prevail over history, to weave a “somewhat humbler quilt of many voices and local hopes” (Pollock 1998, 18). Paradoxically, it is an act of singularity and humility that aspires more. We want to see if the personal accounts we collected from Anthony and Tats may open up alternative paths of knowing, of understanding something more general. In Lauren Berlant’s words, “the personal is the general” (Berlant 2011, 12). Our aim is to mobilise the subjective against the dominant for another, more tentative, general. This is also why we refrain from giving a general historical account of Hong Kong’s modern cultural and political history—others have done so already, and in a way much better than we ever could (see, for example, Carroll 2007; Ingham 2007; Ku and Pun 2004; Mathews et al. 2008).

Empirically, our preference for interviews gestures towards the importance, or perhaps urgency, of obtaining oral histories from practitioners who have accumulated first-hand experience through the decades of the city and its culture making. To put it bluntly, research into Hong Kong popular music, and Hong Kong history at large, is confronted with the passing away of people and their subjective accounts, who may be the only voices to question what is preserved in official annals and archives. To collect is to recollect. What they remember at present shapes constructions of the past, as its participants and witnesses, as its texts and authors (Bornat and Tetley 2010). A reminder at hand is the massive exhibition Hong Kong Pop 60+, held at the Hong Kong Hermitage Museum in 2021. Focusing on the development of Hong Kong popular culture from the end of the Second World War to the early 2000s, the exhibition features more than 1,000 exhibits with introductory texts regarding their social backgrounds and artistic features. In the section on music, there was merely one small screen showing “oral histories” by older generation of practitioners. According to one of the researcher-cum-producers of the project, these recordings would not be put to further use.Footnote 4According to latest media reports, the Hong Kong government is planning to shut down the Heritage Museum to make way for the existing Science Museum, whose prime site in the city would be repurposed to house a new museum “celebrating national achievements” (Li 2023). The future of the Heritage Museum remains uncertain. Our interviews with Tat Ming serve as a call to collect oral histories while we can.

Hong Kong Pop

Given the “general neglect, if not marginalisation, of pop music in Hong Kong’s academies,” Anthony Fung and Alice Chik note a dearth of systematic works on Cantopop (2020). As far as book-length treatises are concerned, Fung and Chik’s list includes a cultural, historical inquiry on the relationship between South China culture and the early formation of pop music in Hong Kong (Wong 2018); a comprehensive study of Cantopop lyrics (Chu 2017); and two books on selected histories of Cantopop (Fung 2009; Fung and Shum 2012). In the anthology edited by Fung and Chik, sixteen contributions are gathered into four sections—ranging from studies of celebrated artists to language use in local pop—concluded with an interview with a veteran radio presenter reminiscing the heyday of Hong Kong pop serving as coda to the book. In its first section, dedicated to “Cantopop, History, and Legacy,” the two editors point out the significance of tracing pop music history as an act of recuperating the voices of Hong Kong people. According to them, this is “particularly meaningful for Hong Kong because according to official records, its history usually consists of colonialism and the consequences of China’s Opium War” (Fung and Chik 2020, 5). This is also a departure from a number of publications that seek to construct a historical account of how Hong Kong’s popular music has originated and developed, often in connection with the alleged demise of Cantopop (Wong 1990; Wong 2003; Wong 2007). Two of the current authors, Chow and de Kloet, have chosen in their book to revisit Hong Kong pop not so much in its historical or cultural context, but as an important nodal point in the global flow of sound and image (Chow and de Kloet 2013).

In a similar but more historically oriented manner, Klavier Wang presents her “worlding” accounts of Hong Kong film, television drama, and popular music, mapping out “a historical and sociological development of Cantonese popular music in Hong Kong and beyond” (Wang 2020, 27). Wang, similar to Stephen Chu and Eve Leung (2013), attributes the Golden Era of Cantopop to the genre’s and the city’s unique brand of hybridity. Unlike the other authors, Wang does not consider the hybridity “contemporary” (1970s and 1980s). Instead, she traces the “continuous inbound and outbound flux of resources, staff and values”—often shorthanded into the cliché “east-meets-west”—to the post-Second World War years that enlivened the city and its music with migration influx and global economic and cultural flows (Wang 2020, 23). In terms of Chinese-language studies on Hong Kong pop music, publications usually follow the tradition of Chinese literature studies and take lyrics as its main paradigm of inquiry, sometimes in the context of a specific period of pop history in the city (see for instance Chu 2004; Chu and Leung 2011; Chu et al. 2010). Stephen Chu, a prolific writer on Hong Kong popular music and culture, has enabled a series of Chinese-language books, each devoted to a selected lyricist.

Our lyrical engagements will appear in ensuing chapters. What follows is our supplement to the line of scholarship that connects Hong Kong popular music to Hong Kong history. We do it by way of Tat Ming’s subjective accounts of more than three decades of music-making in a city that went through its colonial period to the contemporary post-Handover conjuncture. In addition to what we can learn about the post-colony of Hong Kong, we will tease out what Tat Ming can contribute to decolonising popular music studies.

Hong Kong

“[Tat Ming] makes me feel I belong to Hong Kong”—this is how Atom, someone who left Hong Kong together with his family when he was nine and returned to the city a decade later, summarises his fan experience. Cited at the start of this chapter, this remark, from a member of Hong Kong diaspora in Canada, indexes the intimate relationship between popular music and the city. Especially in the so-called Golden Era of Cantopop (which we will discuss later in this chapter), where easy-to-sing-along love songs dominated, Tat Ming’s repertoire in colonial Hong Kong, to use an analogy we used earlier, is a reservoir collecting, keeping afloat, replenishing memories of the city, sounding out some collective murmur when confronted with the city’s imminent disappearance, sending ripples or even waves interrogating the city’s affinity. The six studio albums released from 1986 to 1990, arguably the most influential of their music, contain songs that document the urban and the cosmopolitan (where are we), that questions history (what are we left with), that ponders identity (who are we) during this colonial phase of Hong Kong. It should be noted that following the release of their latest, 1990, album, including politically sensitive songs in response to what happened in Beijing in 1989, that Tat Ming was not invited to perform in the mainland in the coming years (Chow 2009).

We are surely not the first to take note of Tat Ming’s engagement with the city’s longing and belonging. Fung Lok, in her book on Hong Kong popular culture (1995), devoted one chapter to Tat Ming’s “social consciousness,” foregrounding the sense of uncertainty and melancholia in their music as evocative of living in the pre-Handover Hong Kong, “the fin de siècle city,” in the author’s formulation. Similarly, Esther Cheung (1997) deploys the term “end of the world” to refer to the feelings of anxiety in Tat Ming’s music. Stephen Chu (2000) discusses how Tat Ming connects to local culture. Placing their music in the larger historical context, Chu points out that songs concerning Hong Kong’s future started to appear and their number increased substantially, when the Sino-British negotiations over the colonial city’s future began (Chu 2000, 238). Aside from our already published pieces, academic treatises discussing Tat Ming—and Hong Kong popular music at large—in the post-Handover context are lacking (Fung and Chik 2020).

The duo suspended themselves after the six albums and their first major concert, in 1990. Going through the relatively calm transition, with the Handover being fait accompli, Tat Ming released two more albums in 1996 and 2005, as well as staged two concerts, to mark their 10th and 20th anniversary. Illustrative of the more relaxed manner the city was finding its way in the new configuration with the nation, 2006 saw Tat Ming host their first ticket-selling concert in mainland China, in the city of Shanghai. Their 2012 concerts, on the other hand, took place amidst turmoil. As the post-Handover Hong Kong found itself increasingly wrestling with the new political reality, the concerts were staged to audiences when the government announced—and subsequently had to withdraw due to massive protests—its plans to introduce “national education” to local students.Footnote 5

A local commentary, written in the wake of the 2012 concerts, highlights the sensitivity of Tat Ming’s music. Released in the city that was counting the number of its colonial days, according to its author Shu Lan, their earlier popular songs express the collective anxiety and confusion of Hong Kong people—“they must acknowledge their identity as Hong Kong people, but will Hong Kong be the same Hong Kong as before?” (Lan 2014). The concerts, the commentary continues, are not merely an affair of nostalgia; the Tat Ming concerts baptise their classic numbers with new political meanings, sharing collective memories and expressions of longing (Lan 2014). A mainland Chinese weekly published a report on Tat Ming’s 2012 concerts. Describing them as “Hong Kong people who can think,” and “the legendary formation that sings the anxiety of Hong Kong people,” the report cites a Facebook post to summarise the concerts: “This is not a concert, this is a revolution” (Chai 2012). This series of concerts had a re-run in Guangzhou. Chapter 3 will present a detailed analysis of this concert series.

While the concerts and their media coverage were still possible at that point, the situation changed soon with the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and Anthony’s involvement. Remembering their 2017 concerts, Anthony says, “it’s like a response to the call of our times.” In fact, all the challenges Hong Kong have gone through have given Anthony inspiration to create; he considers this a historical mission. Tats expresses a related sense of gratitude; after all the ups and downs, he is happy that he is able to say what he wants to say. In their more recent music releases and concert performances, Tat Ming has continued to ponder and offer commentaries of Hong Kong living under the two larger power configurations. Especially in their shows, which often took on a theatrical format, the sense of urgency, of being in a predicament, of the need to re-articulate the local has been accentuating, as we will discuss further in later chapters. Writing on the 30th anniversary of Tat Ming, local essayist Rudi Leung recalls what their music means to him personally. In 1990, when the album Nerves was released as a response to what happened in Tiananmen, Leung was a bachelor student. “It offered an outlet for my own anxiety.” The review essay similarly refers Tat Ming’s music to collective memories of many generations of Hong Kong people. “If we take 1997 as a watershed, and if we want to write a history of Hong Kong pop music ten years before and ten years after the Handover, and of the city itself, Tat Ming is indispensable” (Leung, n.d.).

Another essay, published after the first series of REPLAY concerts, in 2020, bears a title “All the Hong Kong people, in the world, today” (Liu 2020). Paraphrasing Tat Ming’s latest single,Footnote 6 the writer Wai Tong Liu relays the decades of Tat Ming music to a historical recurrence: the sentiment enshrined in Tat Ming’s earlier music resurges in their new song. From Tat Ming’s music, Liu turns to the city, linking the current migration wave to the pre-Handover one, posing a question as rhetoric as it is melancholic: “Can we still find Hong Kong in Hong Kong?”Footnote 7 While the city is disappearing, the music remains; the writer still has Tat Ming, the concerts, and all the Hong Kong people wherever they are. At least, “that night we were all Hong Kong people.” Fung Lok, in a more recent publication focusing on the works by one of the long-term lyricists of Tat Ming, cites Simon Frith’s understanding of pop music experience as identity experience (2022). Lok analyses Tat Ming’s as well as Anthony’s music in terms of Hong Kong’s collective, cultural identity, as lived in the geopolitical context of 1989 and 1997. While Tat Ming should not be considered the exception in this wave of making politically engaging pop, the duo became exceptional in its persistence in doing so during their occasional reunion projects.Footnote 8

Spanning more than three decades from colonial Hong Kong to the current bewilderment, of searching for Hong Kong in Hong Kong, Tat Ming’s music continues to connect strenuously with the city. Arranged in sophisticated electronica and articulated with complex lyrics, they are not protest songs, as such; they project, they protect, they procrastinate—they project Hong Kong and its longing and sense of belonging as a dot, perhaps a stain, onto the larger, much larger map of geopolitical formations, they protect its identity, they procrastinate whatever seems to be coming. They are not protest songs, but they may well be protestant ones, spreading messages like a prayer, hoping. Perhaps between belonging and longing, it is “be,” their being there, Tat Ming’s being there all the time. As Fung Lok writes, “with the passing of time, thirty years, the performers and the audience age together, some have left, some continue” (Lok 2022, 28). It is not only what they sing, what they perform, what they mean to Hong Kong people at any point of time; above all, it is about the very fact that despite and because of all the vicissitudes during three decades of Hong Kong history and popular music, they are still singing, performing, meaning something.

To conclude this section on Tat Ming and Hong Kong, we underline their resilience and relevance with a recent piece of news, an update of the national education controversy in 2012. Ten years later, we are writing the day after a secondary school in Hong Kong suspended a group of students allegedly having breakfast, thus not showing respect, during a ceremony when the national Chinese flag was hoisted. The school authorities were applauded for defending the ceremonial and national dignity as well as criticised for imposing a penalty out of proportion to the offending act, let alone that they did not actually take the trouble to confirm the act. The students concerned claimed their innocence for not hearing the anthem, thus not being alerted to the start of the ceremony (Ming Pao 2022). This incident follows a controversial regulation presented by the Education Bureau a year earlier, that starting from the following academic year, Hong Kong schools must fly the Chinese flag daily and conduct weekly flag-raising ceremonies “to promote affection for the mainland’s people and a sense of belonging to the nation.” Hong Kong’s own city flag may be flown next to the national flag, that is if the schools have enough poles (Cheung 2021).

Golden Era

1984. A year impregnated with destiny and cacophony. This is the title of George Orwell’s novel depicting a dystopian near future, where totalitarian rule, omnipresent surveillance, and brain control threaten society and humanity. This is also the year when the destiny of Hong Kong was written in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, when the Chinese and British leaders put their signatures down to confirm their agreement to hand over Hong Kong from the colonial administration to Chinese sovereignty. In the anthology Made in Hong Kong, Stephen Chu pinpoints 1984 as a pivotal year for two reasons: the emergence of super venues, super industry infrastructure and ultimately superstars; heightened diversity of musical styles and song topics due to heightened hybridity of Hong Kong culture itself (Chu 2020). If a decade earlier, 1974, marked a watershed in the history of Cantopop (Wong 2003), 1984 saw “its spectacular surge in Asia” (Chu 2020, 22). In 1984, however, there was another occurrence largely undocumented, uncited when the city or its culture is discussed—it was the year Tats decided to look for a musical partner and thanks to a magazine advertisement, Tat Ming came to being two years later.

We are inserting this occurrence less because of its historical importance, more for its possibility to question how certain history is bestowed with certain importance, and how certain occurrences, meanings, and readings remain excluded to enable one narrative. We are thinking of the Golden Era narrative. It remains amazing to us, perhaps with hindsight, how the Orwellian scenario, the Joint Declaration, the popular music that took place outside super venues and beyond the superstars—how all of these do not prevent the emergence and persistence of the Golden Era narrative of Hong Kong popular music, from its resounding birth in 1974, culminating to a new chapter in 1984, and expanding its global dominance through the early 1990s. Three decades later, this narrative dated in the colonial time of Hong Kong remains very much alive, perhaps even more when the good old days are evoked to offer both consolation and condemnation. It is in popular as much as in academic discourse that this particular period was defined with and as success. Stephen Chu, for instance, builds on the pivotal year of 1984 into a book discussing the popular culture of Hong Kong of the 1980s. He calls it, in the subtitle of the book, “a decade of splendour” (Chu 2023). While Chu “aims to show how the 1980s was a critical and transitional decade for Hong Kong, in terms of not just politics and economics but also culture and lifestyle,” he explicitly declares his personal belonging, and his affinity as a veteran fan of Hong Kong popular culture.

This qualitative narrative of splendour, legacy, and success is intricately woven in the quantifiable framework of magnitude, number, and money. The Golden Era, like many other golden eras in histories, is primarily defined by its commercial success. Thus its flip narrative, the demise of Cantopop, is also sketched with business performance. Late lyricist and composer James Wong, in his doctoral thesis, marks 1997, the year Hong Kong was handed over from London to Beijing, as the end of the Cantopop era (Wong 2003). His argument is supported quantitatively: in 1995, Cantopop sales reached HK$1.863 billion; in merely three years’ time, in 1998, it dropped by half, to HK$0.916 billion (Wong 2003, 169). We want to trouble this narrative of success in pre-Handover Hong Kong by way of Tat Ming, at least on two accounts: creative freedom, and creative policies.

While Tat Ming, especially in its early days, benefitted from the Golden Era and enjoyed the space opened up by the generally booming industry, they also underlined the less desirable facets, certain articulations and issues not readily included in the more harmonious, successful narrative. If we recall how Tats, more interested in becoming a solo artist making instrumental music, had to change his mind as he saw no future should he pursue, the Golden Era might be much less golden for many music genres and practitioners. The decade of splendour was also the decade of many possible creative outputs being overshadowed or simply pre-empted. For Tat Ming who decided to follow the dominant practices, signing a major label Polygram, producing songs rather than instrumental music, they needed to embrace an arrangement not always conducive to creativity. Talking about Tat Ming’s latest CD, an independent release as they no longer belong to any major label, Anthony expresses a process of deliberation and decision between the two of them, with a high degree of control and autonomy, not only creatively but also accentuated by technological affordances. “Our mode of operation now is very different from that of the 1980s. To begin with, we don't have any contractual restrictions. We don't have to fulfil certain duties.”

If the good old days might have been less exemplary or celebratory in terms of generic diversity and label practices, of creative freedom at large, we want to draw attention to another lacune in popular and academic discourse surrounding the Golden Era: what the colonial administration failed to do. When the pre-Handover days of Hong Kong popular music continue to be told and retold as a narrative of splendour, legacy, and success, when the Handover year itself is alluded as the end of Cantopop or the decline of its commercial performance, we are essentially hearing a reiteration of the story about colonial Hong Kong, that of an economic miracle. It is a story that is depoliticising and politicising at the same time; depoliticising when it eclipses political critique with economic success, and politicising when it highlights achievements during colonial Hong Kong over its inadequacies. We are nodding towards the absence of creative policies, directives, planning, not only to promote popular music but also to take care of its practitioners, not only to ensure continual commercials success but also to deal with issues of diversity, precarity, and true sustainability. We echo Klavier Wang’s critical remark, when she writes “public policies in this domain were barely included on the governmental agenda despite the global influence Hong Kong popular culture” (Wang 2020, 27). That it was consistent with the generally laissez-faire way of running Hong Kong lays bare precisely the radical question posed to colonial administration: What does it care? It was only in 2009, more than a decade after the Handover, that CreateHK, a culture-specific department, was set up, ironically, as Wang points out, under the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau (Wang 2020, 27–28).

In that sense, one wonders if the post-Handover government is equally mystified by the very problematic idea of the Golden Era. The difficulty, or perhaps refusal, to look beyond and through the Golden Era narrative and to recuperate alternative histories and creativities is underlined by the maiden policy address of John Lee, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. Evoking similar logic of splendour and good old days, Lee proposes to organise an annual “popular culture festival” with the stars from the 1960s to the 1990s as its theme (Lee 2022). “Again the same old stars,” sighs Anthony in hearing the news. While he does not deny the contribution and significance of the Golden Era, Anthony considers the current government’s take on Hong Kong pop “ironic.” The postcolonial government seems to pay more, if not exclusive, attention to what took place during the colonial time of Hong Kong, while ignoring the continued liveliness of local popular music after the Handover. Although local pop was increasingly marginalised with the Rise of China, Anthony notes the emergence of new stars in the decades after 1997. In particular, the last ten years witnessed, in Anthony’s words, a diversity of genres and new music makers, that were unheard of in the Golden Era. The readiness to reiterate and reify the achievement during the colonial period is not only indicative of the complexity of post-Handover culture and politics; it fails to acknowledge what Anthony calls a “renaissance” of Cantopop in precisely the time when culture is threatened by politics. “Just take this year [2022], concerts keep coming up, and mostly by new artists. It’s not only pop music, but also film, I think this year’s box office of Hong Kong films is the best in the past two decades.” Resounding the pre-Handover past, Anthony reminds us, may be one way to silence the post-Handover present.

Multiple-Media Practices

Given the inclination of academic and popular attention to the Golden Era, it is hardly surprising how Cantopop stars remain in the centre stage even when they have receded from the limelight. They continue to shine in policy directives, in public imaginary.Footnote 9 In the few major exhibitions involving local popular music, we see primarily representations of pop stars in their magnificent performances in films, in television shows, in music. This understanding of multimedia practices as embedded in stardom is itself historically grounded. As illustrated by Klavier Wang’s book, the emergence and increasing dominance of Hong Kong popular culture in the global Chinese communities facilitated not only the circulation of Hong Kong stars or superstars, but also the production of a distinct mode of practice: the crisscrossing and imbrication of genres and generic work (Wang 2020). To contextualise the “extraordinarily shiny part of the city’s signature,” that is the good old days—and stars—of the 1970s and 1980s colonial Hong Kong, Wang posits two historical developments. “First, [Hong Kong film, television drama and popular song] are strongly interrelated in terms of exchange of talents and cultural symbols… Second, the interchange of talents across these three industries and the mutual reliance among these cultural forms contribute to the synergy effect of Hong Kong popular culture” (Wang 2020, 48).

This “multi-media stardom,” as Wing Fai Leung calls and argues in his book, is a distinctly Hong Kong mode of practice (Leung 2015). Leung, similar to Wang, attributes this multimedia stardom to historical and cultural traces in the colonial time and place, a local way of making stars. By local, Leung means that it does not find any counterpart, in the major star-making machine in the world, Hollywood—at least not in the same manner and to the same extent. It is here that we want to insert a note to popular music studies—outside the metropolitan centres of pop production, particularly in the United States and in the United Kingdom: quite simply, there are other ways of doing things. Put differently, while knowledge on popular music continues to be produced and claimed to be globally relevant, local practices from the peripheries of the pop world must be acknowledged and included if pop music studies is to be decolonised. In this case, multimedia practices of pop music practitioners. We dropped the word “stardom” deliberately as we want to borrow from the experiences of Tat Ming to complicate the narrative of lubricative and lucrative convergence termed “multimedia stardom.”

It is not our intention to disqualify the duo as stars; what we want to do is refocus on the first part of the term “multimedia stardom,” to take multimedia work, as more mundane practices, necessary and perhaps precarious. Before Tat Ming, Anthony was a graduate of a talent training programme operated by a major television station and worked for some time as radio DJ. It was not unexpected that following his musical popularity, thanks to Tat Ming, he acted in a number of television dramas and feature films, not always in major roles or productions. His last acting involvement dated 1995. Since then, Anthony has been focusing on music. Tats’ multimedia trajectory, on the other hand, commenced arguably in 1996 when he was invited to play a comical side role. While we will elaborate on his entry into the film industry in the following section, we confine ourselves here to remark on Tats’ prolific film career—since 1996, Tats was cast in at least one release per year, reaching the height of eight films in the year 2004.

It was in 1996 that Tats realised he had problems with his mental health. While later we will note Tats’ allusion to the cultural difference between Hong Kong and mainland China when his other music partner Lu, an artist from Guangzhou, could not cope with the stressful way of Hong Kong life and pop music industry, Tats explains his breakdown in 1996 not differently: “The pressure was too much.” Instead of, or in addition to, a geocultural consequence, the challenge may well be a work- or industry-related one. The demand to perform so much, so well, takes its toll. That year, Tats was preparing his own album, involved in the Tat Ming reunion concerts, and acting in the film that ushered many more to come. It was a dramatic evening, and since then Tats has been managing his mental health with the help of medication. “The worst was whenever I needed to see people, to join meeting or to work, I must take meds. If not, I would be very depressed.”

The reframing of multimedia engagement from stardom to practise is precisely to take such experience seriously. They may be celebrities, adored by fans, stars, but they are also workers. In that sense, we may find a rich array of scholarship on creative workers relevant, and our understanding of stardom enriched. Immediately, we think of the important inquiries explicating the lives of creative workers as “precariat,” Guy Standing’s neologism integrating “precarity” and “proletariat” to foreground the experience of exploitation and the possibility of a new subjectivity (Standing 2011). Creative workers, for their passion in their work, for presumably “doing what I love,” are often sacrificing the security and stability offered by “regular” jobs, confronted with more risks, struggles, demands, easily demoralised and exploited (see for instance Miller 2009; Ross 2009). This urgency to be creative, to do creative work, is as beautiful as it is ugly, “a potent and highly appealing mode of new governmentality,” and “a general and widespread mode of precarisation” (McRobbie 2016, 14).

If we are to decolonise popular music studies in the sense of learning from experience from outside the West, or even more pointedly the Anglo-American context, we may learn from Tat Ming, two multimedia stars in the Chinese-language world, to study pop stars not only as stars, but as workers wrestling with multiple demands and with multiple challenges to the intricate and delicate mix of financial and mental health, through their multimedia practices. Popular music researchers may, for instance, not only study the impact of a singer-songwriter’s melancholia on the music, but also locate such mental issue “back” in problems of the music industry and larger society. This can also be placed in the contemporary “convergence” context that practitioners in different popular culture sectors are increasingly taking on a multiplicity of roles. Multimedia stardom might be something unique to Hong Kong (Leung 2015); multimedia practice is becoming increasingly common in other localities.

Nancy Baym has shown how social media demand a lot of what she calls relational labour on the shoulders of the musicians, as they have to spend a lot of energy not only making and performing music, but also maintaining a good contact with their fanbase, more so than before the time of social media. In Baym’s words, “musicians are engaging in a sort of labour that the many terms used to modify contemporary labour—immaterial, affective, emotional, venture, cultural, creative—speak to but do not quite capture. In addition to all of these things, musicians are involved in relational labour, by which I mean regular, ongoing communication with audiences over time to build social relationships that foster paid work” (2015, 16; see also Baym 2018). What Tat Ming tells us, is that this form of labour is not confined to, or new in, the digital era, before which musicians also had to juggle with multiple roles and multiple demands. Furthermore, the kind of stardom commonly associated with either the United States and Britain, or, more recently, Japan and South Korea, may work very differently in other contexts, where stars may remain creative workers, struggling to survive.

Rise of China

Whether as stars or as creative workers, practitioners in popular music must stay alert to what is happening around them. We are shifting our attention from the micro to the macro—in Hong Kong’s case, it coincides with the radical change of its political destiny, from a colonial city to be realigned to the nation—a nation quickly on the rise, to be specific. In fact, it is not only Hong Kong, but the world at large, that needs to deal with a new global distribution of power, what is loosely called the Rise of China. In 1993, Nicholas D. Kristof, Beijing correspondent for the New York Times between 1988 and 1993, posited the term “rise of China,” as probably the most important global trend in the century to come (Kristof 1993). At that point, Kristof observes shrewdly and with a sense of disbelief and perhaps caution, that only the business community seems to be paying serious attention to the mounting economic power of China. Since then, many publications, academic or otherwise, devote themselves to various implications of this seismic shift in world order to the extent that China Studies now stands in tandem with Global China Studies—an investigation of what is happening in China is never sufficient without examining its global practices and impact. The latest academic treatise is contributed by Frank Dikötter who chronicles “the rise of a superpower”—the subtitle of his book—and concludes with a new “ideological cold war” between China and the democratic part of the world (2022, 292). To revert to the early 1990s, after China and the world, i.e. by and large the Western capitalistic world, survived the initial shock of what transpired in Tiananmen, it was its staggering economic growth that captured attention and delivered opportunities.

Hong Kong was no exception, but with an additional dimension of the postcolonial. The years surrounding its Handover exuded a sense of necessity, of acknowledging the process of renationalisation—many local people chose to migrate, many more stayed. Those years also exuded a sense of expectation, of confronting something big in the making. For the pop music industry in Hong Kong, and for the practitioners who stayed, it was a matter of acclimatising to, and hopefully benefiting from, a new economic landscape where the mainland market dominates. “Local pop idols could not rely on the older position of Hong Kong as the nodal point of global Chinese youth culture. They need to establish local popularity and extend it to the mainland to be real stars,” notes Chow out of his experience in the industry (Chow 2009, 555). In this context, we are not only talking about the unique experience of Hong Kong vis-à-vis China; we are also arguing for certain missing domains in popular music studies at large. We are referring to inquiries unpacking the dynamics between the local and the national, and perhaps more fundamentally between the minor and the major—not unlike the Deleuzian conceptualisations of minor literature, or minor cinema in literary and cinema studies. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 105). The minor is a movement that takes a major voice—here “Western pop music”—to articulate a preferred identity. “[A] minor movement is not dialectically related to a major movement: the minor does not arise ‘apart from’ or ‘outside’ the major but is the result of a movement produced within the major” (Frangville 2016, 107).

Tat Ming is a kind of minor music that deterritorialises not only Anglo-American sounds, but also those from mainland China. The case of Tat Ming, of Hong Kong pop music engaging with a much more powerful context, of China, should remind popular music studies of the specific struggles, issues, and challenges of many practitioners and practices that do not operate in the centres of pop and may have to formulate different tactics to survive and thrive. The centres can be Anglo-American; they can also be the regional capitals that provincial musicians have to meander their way in.

From the case of Hong Kong, we distil three dimensions: political, capital, and cultural. We must first insert a caveat: it was of course not only market expansion that was the motive; Anthony recalls fondly his encounters with fans in mainland China. “I felt that they needed me, and there was communication.” What our narration highlights is the historical conjuncture of the early 1990s, a new scenario where Hong Kong singers started releasing songs in putonghua, the national language, while many ventured northwards with varying degrees of success. Increasingly, however, the primarily economic move becomes a political challenge. While some Hong Kong pop artists start to concentrate their efforts on the Chinese market, others may aspire to manage their popularity and business opportunities in both Hong Kong and the mainland. For the latter group, it is always a balancing act. Particularly in the last decade when Sino-Hong Kong relationship becomes increasingly political and nervous, when local and national sentiments easily lead to fierce collision, when social media readily breed polemic and acts of mud-slinging, quite a number of Hong Kong singers are forced off balance; they must, or they must be seen to, choose sides. The demand to renationalise is seen, felt, and expressed as the command to delocalise. You are either Hong Konger or Chinese.

A recent case is superstar Eason Chan. After achieving his popularity as a Cantopop singer, Eason followed the footsteps of many local stars to further his market and career across the borders. He succeeded but he has continued to attend to his home base of Hong Kong. In 2021, a number of global brands were accused of using Xinjiang cotton in their products. For the cotton’s alleged association with coerced labour, the brands, including Adidas, issued statements and announced their decision to change their sourcing practices. As a counter-offensive to defend the “innocence” of Xinjiang cotton, more than forty Chinese celebrities declared the end of their commercial relationship with these global brands. Eason, a long-term ambassador for Adidas, also withdrew his collaboration. His act was seen as a sort of declaration of allegiance in the eyes of Hong Kong people; he was attacked maliciously online and had to stay out of public attention for an extended period of time (Up Media 2021). Another Hong Kong pop star Miriam Yeung posted on her IG account “R.I.P.” regarding the death of a protestor during the anti-Extradition Law demonstrations in 2019. Amidst allegation of her sympathy with the local demonstrations and thus antipathy to China, Miriam issued a statement announcing “I was born and grew up in Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong, but I also love my motherland” (TOPick 2019). Following some other similarly controversial acts, Miriam has lost most of her local fan support.Footnote 10 It is not only pop singers that are caught in such political whirlwind. In September 2022, well-known Cantonese opera singer Law Ka Ying went to the British consulate in Hong Kong to pay his respect for the late Queen Elizabeth II. His condolences were seen as colonial and attacked by mainland netizens. Law had to post a short video conveying his apology publicly (Ming Pao 2022).

Anthony and Tats, as a duo or as solo artists, also started cultivating their presence in mainland China, like many of their contemporaries. “For a long time before 2014, before the Umbrella Movement, I worked a lot in the mainland,” Anthony says. One of Tats’ tactics was to find a mainland partner; in 2006, he recruited a female artist to form a duo called Tats and Lu. The collaboration lasted for one album release, mostly songs in putonghua. Tat Ming itself, as mentioned earlier, made use of the timely mix of more relaxed political climate and booming music market, hosting their first major concert in Shanghai. For that concert, they needed to adjust their rundown at the last minute “just to play safe,” as advised by the organiser (Chow 2009). The duo managed to enhance their profile in the mainland market, despite and perhaps also because of songs that continued to deliberate on the dynamic between the local and the national. The coming out of Anthony—the first of its kind in the national context—was celebrated among the Chinese queer populations, and among young people who embraced counter-cultures as such. He performed with rainbow flags waving in the audience, in Beijing. It came to a halt in 2014. Following the Umbrella Movement, “me and Tat Ming are on the so-called ‘blacklist’,” Anthony says.

What would be considered political is often intertwined with capital. While Anthony might see his banishment as a response to the Umbrella Movement, Tats experienced a drop of film and commercial jobs. It could have been capitalistic decisions, but the “excuses” they were given for last-minute withdrawal of commissioning, or sudden cessation of communication, suggested to Tats and Agnes “it must be politics.” The difficulty, in fact impossibility, to find commercial sponsors for their 2017 concerts (which we will discuss further in Chapter 5) was another instance to affirm the operation of the state-market nexus. Particularly in China, where the state and the market are so intimately connected, popular culture does not need to be managed, controlled, censored directly by political organs; the nexus ensures what appears in the market is to serve the interests of not only the capitalistic, but also the political elite (Fung 2007). The clients who continue to invite Tats for their commercials are companies that focus on branding their products with local, Hong Kong favour.

Finally, culture. “They talk about guanxi. And we don't have guanxi there, because we are not big labels,” Tats says. Guanxi, understood as a peculiarly Chinese way of building and mobilising personal connections, becomes quite a different cultural challenge to people from Hong Kong who are, at least allegedly, more accustomed to systems, regulations, and a clear set of practices. It is supposed to be about how you do it, rather than who you know, meritocratic not cronyistic—occasionally extrapolated to Hong Kong’s colonial legacy, the rule of law cherished as the British way of doing things, presumably unlike the Chinese, especially their alleged cultural penchant for corruption.Footnote 11 Tats also acknowledges other related challenges of doing business outside his home base of Hong Kong. “You need to socialise a lot.” Tats recalls having late night supper after a gig in Shenzhen, “I really can’t drink it.” He is referring to a strong Chinese liquor with alcoholic content around fifty per cent. The different drinking culture indexes the basic challenge of cultural difference when Hong Kong practitioners need to socialise, to network, to work with their mainland counterparts. Agnes, wife and manager of Tats, comments on the unfortunate development of Tats and Lu, noting two issues: the artist management and contractual practices in the mainland that seem unusual to her; and Lu’s inability to adapt to the stressful way of Hong Kong life and pop music industry when she was required to do promotion stay in the city. In short, “the mainland Chinese culture and our culture are so different.” Whether such cultural framings are true or not is not our point here. While we acknowledge the possible problematic reification and stereotyping of cultural differences, it is through such narratives that the artists articulate their struggles with and in China, a rising China.

Contingency

In their study on the development and success of K-pop, Solee I. Shin and Lanu Kim examine the three decades (1980–2010) where this local-cum-national genre emerged and captured Asian and then global popularity (Shin and Kim 2013). In addition to cultural factors, government support, and technological development, the authors draw attention to the systemic strategies and organisational aspects of three big entertainment houses in Korea. In their study on singing contests and talent shows, Stefan Lalchev and Paul G. Oliver zoom in on their increasing importance in delivering new artists to the pop music industry (Lalchev and Oliver 2021). As the authors demonstrate, these contests and shows, driving on a synthetic approach (for instance between television, music, and online platforms), geared towards high exposure and instant fan base, have become music labels’ favourite strategy to minimise risk and to maximise marketing success. Formula and format. These are but two of the long lineage of inquiries that seek to find out the factors, the logic, the mechanism, to address one fundamental question: how the industry works.

It is in this context of seeking to explain that we make the final point informed by a sense of something unpredictable, inexplicable, shambolic, what we contingently called contingency. If we recall Tats and Anthony’s reflection on their music careers, as cited in Chapter 1, we need to admit another logic that operates in contradistinction from that of the two aforementioned studies: a logic of its own, a logic that makes one wonder how the industry works, at all. As Anthony recalls, “we never thought it would become like this when we started.” And Tats was planning to be a solo musician, to do instrumental music, but then “it became Tat Ming.” The very existence of the duo was an affair of contingency. It was an advertisement put up by Tats in a music magazine, in 1984, and among all the advertisements in all the magazines, this particular one caught Anthony’s attention. He responded. It was not a “love at first sight” incident; Anthony recalls “a matter of months” before he heard any update.

Anthony also recalls two more “interesting coincidences”—first, among those responding to the ad were those who later formed themselves into a formation called The Grasshopper (“What if they, instead of me, were selected”)Footnote 12; second, although Tats’ ad was posted in the name of “an electronic musician,” Anthony had an inkling of who the person was and if that was the case, Anthony, then a disc jockey, would have played two of his tracks from a compilation album whose title was uncannily telling or foretelling (“The album title is Xiang Gang”). Incidentally the following year was the 10th anniversary of Breakthrough Time, a radio programme created by Christian volunteers, among which was Anthony.Footnote 13 The need for a theme song to celebrate the occasion led to Tats’ first collaboration with Anthony—Tats wrote the melody and did the musical arrangement, Calvin Poon who became a long-term partner of Tat Ming wrote the lyrics, and Anthony was the vocalist. Such was the list of credits when the song “Keep on Searching 繼續追尋” premiered in public.Footnote 14 One year later, it became Tat Ming’s first single. No one knows what would have happened if Tats did not post the advertisement, if Anthony did not respond, if Breakthrough Time was not celebrating its 10th anniversary… As the cliché goes, the rest is history, or, shall we say, history is the rest, the remainder, the residue of something uncompleted, unsettled, chaotic. As much as Tats and Anthony seem inseparable, a solid entity to many of their fans and to the popular music history of Hong Kong, its solidity hinges on one chance encounter, one contingent act by Tats, then by Anthony.

Events that look well planned are not planned at all. That may be something we learn about the industry, listening to the memories of Tat Ming. Take Anthony’s on-stage coming out during Tat Ming’s concerts in 2012. The event that attracted much publicity and created much impact not only to Anthony, but also to Tats, the queer communities, and the public at large was a decision at the spur of the moment, prompted, impromptu. The concerts were employing LED visuals to, among other functions, pose questions and poke fun at the identity and identification of public figures in Hong Kong. When the final show was about to open, Anthony started thinking about his own identity and identification, in this case, sexuality. Without telling anyone but his manager and close friend Wallace Kwok, Anthony made his decision, and announced on stage “I am gay.” Tats confirmed the spontaneity of the coming out—he was backstage to change costume and heard Anthony come out on stage through the monitor. Tats knew he had to respond when he re-entered the stage. Agnes, sitting next to him during our interview, admired Tats’ quick wit: “He reacted real fast, that’s quite something.”

Tats’ latest project, an NFT-based memoire of his musical life, is another instance of contingency. While the project takes the current, clearly defined form of documenting Tats’ career as a music practitioner and the intention is—in Tats and Agnes’ formulation—to empower Hong Kong people who cannot leave, who do not want to leave, and yet are confronted with negative news when they stay, the project’s origin was anything but planned. “It was you,” Agnes pointed at Chow, one of the authors doing the interview, also Tat Ming’s long-term lyricist. Sometime before Tats and Agnes commenced the memoire project, Chow posted an image of a shopping mall in North Point where he visited for another project. Someone sent Tats and Agnes the image, asking if Tats was teaching music in the mall during his pre-Tat Ming life. Indeed, he was, “in shop number 57.” They brought this up to their team and started recalling “many beautiful stories in the shopping mall”—and the 1980s by and large. Thus was the incidental beginning of a series of essays culminating to the memoire project.

It is of course not only into music that we need to reassert contingency. Tats’ entrance into the film industry, in the mid-1990s, for instance, is emblematic—he was invited to create the sound track. During one of the meetings where the director also joined, the director looked at Tats and asked him to try one of the minor roles.Footnote 15 Little did Tats know it marked the first step to his widely recognised film career. This sense of uncertainty, of acknowledging the contingency of things, is summarised by Anthony when he reflects on his career and his life. He does not want to think too much of himself, of himself making big impact; reality itself does not allow him to think in that direction. “But then, even if we are not making big changes, does that mean we should stop doing things? No, however small the things we do, we should do them.” Because, one never knows.

We hasten to add that we have no intention to discredit all the scholarship that seeks to explain; what we try to do here is flag the notion of contingency, acknowledge something that may not be explained, and bear in mind its possible contribution to our understanding of popular music, and of politics—especially in the conjuncture where managerial, technological, meritocratic, and perhaps even political determinism seems to be more plausible and audible. We will come back to this later in the book.