The Worst of Times, The Best of Music

Abstract

In September 2014, thousands of people started occupying different areas of Hong Kong, demanding “true democracy,” ushering in what was known as the “Umbrella Movement.” The popular protest might have taken the world by surprise; for us, it can be read 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 official versions. We therefore shift our eyes and ears from the tumultuous and politically explicit street protests to the aestheticised show of popular sentiments: the 2012 and 2017 Tat Ming Pair concerts. How does Tat Ming’s performance imagine the postcolonial city and its histories? How does it negotiate Hong Kong’s current socio-historical moment? And what kinds of futures does it fantasise for Hong Kong? And what differences can we distinguish between both concerts, one before and the other after the Umbrella Movement? For both concert series, we zoom in onto three songs: “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day 今天應該很高興,” “Tonight the Stars are Bright 今夜星光燦爛,” and “It’s My Party.” These three songs present different articulations of temporality; we start with reflecting on how the (colonial) history of Hong Kong is represented, then move on to analyse how Hong Kong’s present-day predicament is articulated, finally to probe into imaginations of the future in the concerts. These three temporalities, in conjunction with the two different moments the concerts took place, 2012 and 2017, are always already implicated with each other. Following our introduction in Chapter 1, they allow us to study how the constructs of the past, the present, and the possible futures of the city, are woven into the fibre of the concerts.

This chapter includes extensively revised excerpts from Leonie Schmidt, Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet, “From handover to leftover—Tatming, Umbrellas, and the postcolonial ruins of Hong Kong” in Situations 10.1 (2017).

We must vacate the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion.

José Esteban Muñoz (2009, 1865)

Allow us to start this chapter with a personal anecdote. One of the authors, Jeroen de Kloet, was having dinner with Anthony Wong on Sunday, September 28, 2014. Anthony was visiting Amsterdam. We were about to go to a concert of Sinead O’Connor in De Melkweg, a major music venue in the heart of the city. Anthony was incredibly restless. Just a couple of days ago a movement started gathering momentum in the streets of Hong Kong. Why stay in Europe, when something so unprecedented and indeed unexpected is unfolding in Hong Kong? He felt out of place in Amsterdam, and decided to rebook his ticket, and fly back to Hong Kong as soon as possible. The next day, after a rather mellow concert of Sinead O’Connor, he returned, and soon became a key player in the movement itself.

On September 26, thousands of people started occupying different areas of Hong Kong, demanding “true democracy,” ushering in what was known as the “Umbrella Movement.”¹ The popular protests might have taken the world by surprise; for us, as we have described in the previous chapter, they presented a logical outcome of a much longer process of postcolonial anxiety of which the rainy Tuesday of July 1, 1997 was just one turning point of a much longer trajectory that started in 1841, if not earlier. The protests were generally framed as pro-democracy in Western media. “A closer look reveals, however, that this framing ignores the multiple aims articulated during the protests; aims that were directed against, among others, the increased precarity of labour in Hong Kong, the unbridled power of real estate developers, and the increasing levels of inequality characterizing the city,” according to one of the authors (de Kloet 2018, 151).

These issues are not new, nor are they necessarily connected to Beijing’s rule. For decades, Hong Kong has been a city with serious class and income inequalities, staggering real estate prices, limited respect for cultural heritage sites, and a lack of democracy, to list the most contentious issues. In many ways, Hong Kong is a city that is ruled more by real estate developers and business tycoons than by politicians (Poon 2010). The Handover does, however, mark a crucial point in the history of the city; it propelled a fear of disappearance, a fear that paradoxically stimulated an appearance of a “local” Hong Kong culture in the decades prior to the handover.

Fig. 3.1

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, October 18, 2014

In his reflections on the cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong, Ackbar Abbas describes how in the period after the Joint Declaration, something called “Hong Kong culture” appeared. Hong Kong culture “was a hothouse plant that appeared at the moment when something was disappearing: a case of love at last sight, a culture of disappearance” (Abbas 2000, 777). This disappearance, however, does not signify the end of an appearance. In Hong Kong culture, attention was directed back to the city’s local peculiarities, in order to reinvent the city one last time even as it disappeared. Filmmakers, for instance, focused on local issues and settings, “but in such a way that the local was dislocated” (Abbas 2000, 777–78). Hence, rather than indicating the end of an appearance, Abbas’ notion of disappearance refers to a different appearance, a “dis-appearance,” i.e. a transformed, dislocated, and disfigured appearance of the city of Hong Kong. And indeed, the city did not disappear after the Handover. But the years after witnessed this continuous struggle over the identity of Hong Kong. As Stephen Chu argues, in the post-Handover period, Hong Kong’s culture is “lost in transition” as Hong Kong tried to affirm its international visibility and retain its status quo. According to Chu, this struggle is reflected in popular culture (Chu 2013, 15).

Let us briefly recap the events that took place after Tat Ming Pair’s² 2012 concert series which form the main part of our analysis in this chapter. Hong Kong’s struggle gained global attention with the “Umbrella” protests. On August 31, 2014, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) announced its decision on electoral reforms in Hong Kong. Disallowing civil nominations, the NPCSC stated that Beijing would vet candidates for the 2017 Chief Executive elections in the city before the general public can vote. Following this decision, thousands of students boycotted classes. Feeling deprived of “true democracy,” they protested outside the government headquarters and occupied several major city intersections. As other citizens joined them, massive protests claimed the streets of Admiralty, Central, Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Causeway Bay. Protestors demanded universal suffrage, the resignation of Chief Executive C.Y. Leung, the withdrawal of the NPCSC’s decision, and a new electoral reform plan that includes civil nominations. The Umbrella Movement lasted until December 15, when the last site was cleared. By then, the protests had outlasted the 1989 occupation of Tiananmen Square, Occupy Wall Street, and Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement of Spring 2014. Laikwan Pang reads the protests in a rather sanguine manner, observing a demos that is struggling to appear in Hong Kong, signifying a somewhat unexpected emergence of a strong and multivocal political consciousness (Pang 2020). In other words, the protests challenge the stereotype of Hong Kong as a highly commercialised and depoliticised place.

In February 2016, on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a violent confrontation between police and protesters took place in Mong Kok. It prompted the police to fire shots in the air and led to the arrests of sixty-one people. Initial blame for the riots was placed on the radical localist group Hong Kong Indigenous. Although they themselves denied taking part in the protests, they suggested that Leung’s leadership style was the root cause behind the radicalism among people who felt frustrated (Lau et al. 2016). The last episode in this series of protest and resistance took place in 2019 following the announcement of the National Security Law. The protests became marked by blackness and ninja-like outfits—not yellow umbrellas—transforming the city into a grim battleground. For Pang, the escalation of violence during the 2019 protests should not be read as a failure of the movement. In her words, “As shown in the 2019 protests, it is not the unity of the Hong Kongers as such, but the multileveled yet uncoordinated collaborations across social sectors that demonstrate how this people is capable for co-rule” (Pang 2020, 5), which we would like to ponder if the actual implementation of the law in 2020 signifies its end. The crackdown of the movement, including the subsequent trial against the so-called Hong Kong forty-seven (a group of pro-democracy legislators, journalists, politicians, activists, and NGO workers), is proclaimed by some observers as a death warrant of the city’s civil society (see, for instance, Yu 2023). We contend, however, that with the movement itself in abeyance, there may be different afterlives, probably if not predominantly to emerge in the cultural rather than strictly political field. The future remains embodied by a generation that experienced the occupation of streets, the struggles with the police force, and the desire for social and political change.

Rather than looking at the future, we choose to move backwards in this chapter, at least chronologically. When going back to the Tat Ming concert series ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND 兜兜轉轉演演唱唱會 from 2012, we somehow saw, felt, and heard something tumultuous foretold. And five years later, and in the TAT MING PARTY 2017 達明卅一派對演唱會 2017 concerts, we witnessed an increased anxiety over the state of the city and the invasive technologies of surveillance. In both concerts, we also experienced, albeit temporarily, a utopian longing to jointly make and shape a different future. In this chapter, zooming in to both concerts, we analyse reflections on the past of Hong Kong, on its present condition, as well as articulations of hope in tandem with anxiety towards the future.

Rather than analysing the protests themselves see (Au 2020; de Kloet 2018; Pang 2020; Veg 2015), this chapter explores how the music, and in particular the performances and visuals of Tat Ming, serve as a domain for articulating not only a sense of discontent with Hong Kong’s political status quo, but also for exploring possible different futures. Tat Ming, we want to show in this chapter, constitutes a platform that has afforded imagination, iteration, and interpretation of possible street politics, the kind that took over Hong Kong in 2014 as well as of the events unfolding after the Umbrella Movement. To be clear, we are not trying to prove any causality here; nor can we. Our intention, on the other hand, is to acknowledge, and examine, the possible resonances between the concerts and the protests, and thus between music and politics at large. We draw on a Gramscian understanding of popular culture as dynamic and political, as a site of constant struggle between the resistance of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation that operate in the interests of dominant groups (Gramsci 1971). As John Frow and Meaghan Morris note, popular culture is not an imposed culture, nor a spontaneous oppositional culture of the people, but rather a terrain of negotiation and interaction between the two. It is “a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups” (Frow and Morris 1996, 356). The popular cultural field is marked by a struggle to “articulate and disarticulate” specific meanings, ideologies, and politics (Mouffe 1981, 231). For us, as we theorised in Chapter 1, popular culture is a political practice because it reflects and operates within broader socio-political conditions, transports political ideas that support or contest ideologies, and forms a space where identities are imagined, negotiated, and contested.

In 2012, two years before the Umbrella protests, Tat Ming vented their worries and frustrations over the future of the city. Two concerts, entitled ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND, were initially announced for April. When they sold out almost immediately, two more concerts were added, with equal commercial success. The concerts were lauded with critical acclaim. Calling the concerts “stunning,” two commentators noted that “from social media to newspaper columns, everyone is reading the concerts in their own ways. And what struck a common chord among us is that the songs miraculously correspond to what’s happening now” (Au and Ko 2012). Another columnist referred to the concerts as “the theme song of the city” (Leung 2012).

Pointing at the concerts’ “almost reckless way” of confronting the “collapses” in Hong Kong, a poet-writer described the “shocked” state in which he remained long after the concerts and concluded: “We don’t want to stay unchanged for fifty years. We must change, for the better” (Liu 2012). Tat Ming fans reacted similarly. Spark’s blog posting was typical of the kind of sentiments invoked by the concerts: “In this city where the principle of ‘one country, two systems’ no longer applies, where white terror and self-censorship reign, such a concert, especially in the mainstream music industry, is so precious” (Spark 2012). These post-concerts writings articulated a sense of empowerment amidst the fear of disappearance.

In 2017, Tat Ming performed another round of three reunion concerts in the Hong Kong Coliseum under the title TAT MING PARTY 2017. Compared to 2012, this reunion was (even) more dystopian. The concerts took the classic novel 1984 by George Orwell as the lynchpin, referencing to the increasing influence of authoritarianism in post-Handover Hong Kong and the world at large. The concert is structured into three themes and sections: surveillance, brainwashing, and suppression. From suppression, the performance morphs into resistance, then back to the harsh “reality” where the “failure of the Umbrella Movement” is featured, lamenting on the people who are defeated, ultimately leading to the evocation of David Bowie and his songs “Under Pressure” (1981[2017], performed with guest Denise Ho)³and “Heroes”⁴ (1977[2017]). Again, like in 2012, the concert series received critical acclaim from both critics and audiences.⁵ “This was probably the only Coliseum show that directly engaged with the Umbrella Movement,” writes Lam. In a lengthy essay built on interviews with crew members, the commentator offers a detailed analysis on how the concert series reconstructed the movement—“stripped of political symbolism, presenting the truest memories” (Lam 2017). Another critic Hui points at the sense of powerlessness in post-Umbrella Hong Kong. Compared with five years ago, Hui does not feel particularly empowered by the end of the show: “These days, with our injuries, it is not enough just to express ourselves, perhaps a performance that is reflective and sensitive is more inspirational” (Hui 2017). Poet-writer Liu updates his commentary published five years ago. While the earlier concerts started exposing the collapse of the city, Liu observes a full-scale revelation of the “utter darkness.” On the other hand, “all the friends who should be here are here”, he writes. “Under the current political climate, we have opted for Tat Ming, and Tat Ming has opted for reinterpreting 1984, it’s an act of courage, and wisdom” (Liu 2017). In the next chapter, we will analyse the production logic of the 2017 concert and explore how, in both concert series, Tat Ming’s sound and aesthetics are deeply political.

We therefore shift our eyes and ears from the tumultuous and politically explicit street protests to the aestheticised show of popular sentiments: the 2012 and 2017 Tat Ming pop concerts. How does Tat Ming’s performance imagine the postcolonial city and its histories?⁶ How does it negotiate Hong Kong’s current socio-historical moment? And what kinds of futures does it fantasise for Hong Kong? And what differences can we distinguish between both concerts, one before and the other after the Umbrella Movement? For both concert series, rather than taking the entire performances on board, we zoom in onto three songs: “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day 今天應該很高興,”⁷ “Tonight the Stars Are Bright 今夜星光燦爛,”⁸and “It’s My Party.”⁹ These three songs present different articulations of temporality, we start with reflecting on how the (colonial) history of Hong Kong is represented, we then move on to analyse how Hong Kong’s present-day predicament is articulated, finally to probe into imaginations of the future in the concerts. These three temporalities, in conjunction with the two different moments the concerts took place, 2012 and 2017, are always already implicated with each another. Following our introduction in Chapter 1, they allow us to study how the constructs of the past, the present, and the possible futures of the city, are woven into the fibre of the concerts. The selected songs also occupy special positions in the duo’s repertoire; while the former two hit songs have become classics cherished for their sharp insights into pre-Handover Hong Kong, the third song was created specifically for the 2012 concert series, for the post-Handover Hong Kong of now. As if to underline their significance, they were staged during the concerts with very elaborately designed visual supports.

To analyse these three songs, we conduct a close reading of the song lyrics and a visual analysis of the graphics that were shown on a large screen behind Tat Ming during the performances (Mirzoeff 1999). Visual analysis takes the image as its primary object of study. It studies “the functions of a world […] through pictures, images, and visualisations, rather than through texts and words” (Mirzoeff 1999, 8). As a method, it lays bare how “the visual” constructs and conveys meaning. “The visual” is here always seen as polluted by “the non-visual”: by power structures, beliefs, cultural sensibilities, discourses, and ideologies. Visual analysis unpacks these processes, interrogates the image, and shows how the image is a socio-culturally specific construction enmeshed with power.

The Past: Geopolitics and the Everyday

The song “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day,” released in 1988, is drenched in nostalgia for a past when families and friends still lived in Hong Kong to celebrate Christmas together. That it is Christmas and not Chinese New Year already hints at a nostalgia written in colonial times, in 1988, when Hong Kong was on the verge of disappearance. Driven by an anxiety over Hong Kong’s post-Handover future, many people migrated. Or, as the lyrics, written by Calvin Poon, go, “Wai-yip is now in the USA, on his own, making many plans / Mary is living in Australia, where it is warm every day / When I look at our old photos, memories rush back / That particular cosy Christmas Eve reappears.” Consequently, families as well as friends became increasingly dispersed all over the globe, triggering even stronger feelings of anxiety and loneliness among those who stayed behind in Hong Kong. The above-cited lyrics and the song’s title refers to that anxiety. In a city that is on the verge of disappearance, we hear Anthony Wong sing: “Today could have been a happy day / Today could have been a cosy day / As long as we are willing to imagine that we are still together / I look at those old photos, on my own, remembering those years.”

In the 2012 concert, the personal narrative of the song is linked to a grander construction of the geopolitical history of Hong Kong. The version of history now inscribed in the song is a version that does not express an anxiety over the Handover as such, which, after all, is a fait accompli; instead, it articulates an anxiety over the rise of China. This anxiety, furthermore, is linked to a critique of the erstwhile imperialist expansion of the United Kingdom. In the opening scene of the video projected onto a huge screen at the back of the stage, the world is caught between two forces—on the one side, that of China, symbolised by the face of Mao Zedong onto which the sign for the Chinese currency, the Yuan, is projected; on the other side, that of Queen Elizabeth II, with the English pound sign. Slowly this world is taken over by the English pound, pointing at the imperialist expansion of the United Kingdom, and more generally of the West, in the nineteenth century (Fig. 3.2). Simultaneously, a brief historical account is projected, starting with the First Opium War in 1842. What follows is an abstract overview of numbers and years, in which the rise of China and the changes of Hong Kong are translated into numbers of people migrating to and from Hong Kong, numbers of babies from the mainland born in Hong Kong, and so forth (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.2

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The world as controlled by the British Pound

Fig. 3.3

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Numbers and flowcharts on the rise of China and the movements of Chinese people

The video showed that the population in Hong Kong increased from 1.86 million in 1949 to 5.1 million in 1980, that 300.000 mainland Chinese fled to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution, that 10% of its population migrated in the years around the Handover and that in 2012, almost half of the 48 million rich Chinese on the mainland planned to migrate and 27% have done so. The constant flow of figures performs, graphically and visually, the steady global rise of China. At the same time, it shows the rise of Hong Kong and the flows of its people in and out of the city since the 1980s. At one particular point, the flag of the United States morphs into the Chinese flag (Fig. 3.4). By the end of the song, Chairman Mao and Queen Elizabeth appear again, but now it is the Chinese Yuan that starts to take over the world (Fig. 3.5).

Fig. 3.4

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The Chinese flag supplanting the US flag

Fig. 3.5

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The world as controlled by the Chinese Yuan

We are thus presented with an arguably modernist construction of the history of Hong Kong, from imperialism to the (alleged) rise of China. The modernism of this construction is further accentuated through the abundant use of numbers and figures. The numbers project a world in flux, in which fears over the loss of the postcolonial city are reflected. The fears as expressed through numbers are related not only to a global rise of China, but also to the takeover of Hong Kong by China, invoking a fear of Sinification. The latter does run the danger of conflating with the increasingly anti-mainlander sentiments that we witness in Hong Kong over the 2010s and 20s, resulting at times in clashes in the online and offline worlds. This influx does cause real problems for Hong Kong, as Veg remarks, “with over 50 million visitors a year in 2013, comparable to 29 million for a city like Paris, Hong Kong’s infrastructure is stretched to breaking point” (2015, 68). But these infrastructural problems are mapped onto a civilisational discourse in which the mainlander is portrayed as the Other that lacks manners.

What is more interesting than the actual numbers being on display is the juxtaposition of a nostalgic, personal song about migration with crude facts, years, numbers, and flow charts. The history as constructed during the show tells a story of both Western colonial aggression and Chinese regional and global expansion. It does so in a modernist, neoliberal, quantitative language, in which people are reduced to numbers and historical changes are projected as flow charts and fancy moving figures. This is a language of global capitalism, in which people are abstracted into numbers, and inequalities are transformed into neat and colourful graphs.

What the audience is confronted with is nostalgic, melancholic musings over lost friendships as vividly as reflections on, and, above all, a performance of global geopolitics. In combining the histories of nineteenth-century colonial expansion and twenty-first century global Sinification, and translating both to the abstracted lingua franca of global capitalism—numbers—the song forges a connection between everyday life and the rise and fall of Empire—be it British or Chinese. It contrasts the global geopolitics with a much smaller, more personal story of loneliness in a time when people are always on the move. Rather than condemning a century of humiliation and celebrating the subsequent rise of China, “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day” interrogates any claim on global hegemony and directs our gaze back to the lived, everyday implications of such geopolitics. The schism between a nostalgic song—nostalgic in its lyrics as well as its sound—and the question of imperialism and expansion not only poses questions concerning the current rise of China, but also refuses to univocally celebrate its colonial past. The nostalgia is as cosy as ambivalent, when situated in the wider context of British imperialism, acknowledging that the Christmas tree is after all a hegemonic object.

Five years later, the larger geopolitical references are not that conspicuous anymore. It is now Tats, instead of Anthony, who starts singing the song with a somewhat broken, shaky, and vulnerable voice. The audience members hold their phones with the lights on, creating an atmosphere of intimacy and community, an atmosphere that is sustained throughout the whole song. For most of the time, the screens present live images of Tat Ming on stage, dressed in spectacular outfits, seemingly made from newspaper clippings, both in English and Chinese. The outfits make it look as if they are literally wrapped in history (see Fig. 3.6). Sustaining the motif of historicity, the musicians are dressed in army-like uniforms that are reminiscent of the Communist Youth League, or of its popular representations. Such outfits correspond with the central theme of 1984, that of authoritarian politics, as does the whole show in itself—as explained earlier in this chapter when summarising the main thrust of the concert (see Fig. 3.7). At the start of the concert, the musicians enter the show marching, as if they were an army.

Fig. 3.6

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Tat Ming in newspaper outfit

Fig. 3.7

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Musician’s outfits

However, aside from the outfits, the performance of the song itself is much more intimate and much less political when compared to that of 2012. It becomes a song to sing together, more than a moment to reflect upon global geopolitics. The togetherness is further enhanced by Anthony who moves towards the audiences, touches them, and accepts a bunch of flowers. Towards the end of the song, we observe some change: the screens start depicting streets of Hong Kong, with cars, and an empty footbridge, all in black and white. In our reading—and we refrain deliberately here from connecting this reading to the intention of the artist, as we want to read the performance as a text in itself—these were the places in Central that were occupied in 2014. Places that at that time were turned from a matter of fact—a highway denoting high capitalism—to a matter of concern—a highway as a place to camp, to sleep, to fall in love, and to protest (cf. Latour 2005; Fig. 3.8). Instead of the Grand History evoked in the 2012 rendition of the song, we are confronted here with the local history of Hong Kong, albeit in an opaque, indirect way. The images of the streets of Hong Kong morph into old photos of Tat Ming, from their early days in the late 1980s. These images evoke a sense of nostalgia, of a colonial time past, a moment when the Handover was approaching, and the future unclear and undecided.

Fig. 3.8

(Screenshot from concert recording)

The non-occupied streets of Hong Kong

We read these images of the old Tat Ming as a form of nostalgia. But what kind of nostalgia is this? Svetlana Boym distinguishes two forms of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia refers to a desire towards the past, a restoration of a real home, a purer and more innocent culture. Reflective nostalgia “explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholies” (Boym 2001, 30). As Boym concludes, “restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, just as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection” (200, 141). The compilation of past images ends with an old photo of Tat Ming sitting on an empty highway. It is here that the past connects to the present—there may be no occupation of the streets anymore, but there they are: Tats and Ming are still sitting on the streets, claiming their sonic right to the city (Fig. 3.9). It is thus an act of reflective nostalgia, in Boym’s terms, as the past is connected to critically reflect upon the present status of Hong Kong.

Fig. 3.9

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Tat Ming on the street

The old photo, like the past, is not static; it morphs. Here, we see the disappearance of the highway, the context, leaving behind the duo, persistently present. With the disappearance of the highway, the poem “Slightly Bright, the Sky” by the celebrated Hong Kong literary figure Xi Xi is presented on screen.¹⁰ There we can read:

Verse

Verse So clean, so clean as if nothing has ever happened we hear your crying we fall down together then we stand up, holding again the hands that got lost igniting a torch hoisted up even higher […] All the injuries let them stay on the surface of the skin we are so beautiful nothing could ever hurt us.

The song’s performance, as well as the poem, evoke an intense sense of melancholia; things are scattered, it is hard to stay up, but in togetherness there may still be resilience. Geopolitics is replaced by local history.

The Present: City of Postcolonial Ruins

The song “Tonight the Stars Are Bright,” written by Keith Chan and composed by Tats Lau, was first released in 1987, three years after the signing of the Joint Declaration, at a moment when life in pre-Handover Hong Kong was marked by fears of disappearance and feelings of uncertainty, powerlessness, and melancholia. The annual protests on the anniversary of the Handover and the Umbrella demonstrations of 2014 show that these narratives were still present in Hong Kong. In what follows, we suggest that in Tat Ming’s 2012 performance of “Tonight the Stars Are Bright,” these past but persistent (post)colonial narratives of the city are resituated in the present, questioning and (re)constructing the postcolonial city. In doing so, the performance alludes to Walter Benjamin’s idea of history as fragmented. In the 2017 concert, as we will show later, the song is visually less embedded in the cityscape of Hong Kong than in the global brands that occupy its shopping malls, indexing less local politics than global capitalism, as it were.

In the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin analyses the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris to critique the bourgeois experience and reveal the history hidden under its ideological mask (Benjamin 1999). Benjamin’s aim 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). For Benjamin, it is dangerous to see the past as a narrative that is whole. Instead, we should see the past as fragmented. Fragments of the past must be resituated within the present.

The first fragment is embodied by the song itself. The song, produced in the late 1980s, inevitably carries traces of that historical moment. In Tat Ming’s 2012 performance, the meanings that the song constructed in the past are rearranged in the present. In the performance, the pre-Handover narrative of the fear of disappearance and the desire to reinvent the city—through which the city ultimately “dis-appears”—is first constructed through its lyrics. The song tells the story of an electrifying nocturnal exploration of Hong Kong. As Tat Ming sings in the opening lines: “Neon lights have made a bright night, a bright city / Hesitating on the road, we just want to find a new way to go, in this midnight / In the park where the Queen’s statue stands, lights gather / On the other side of the harbour, thousands of lights, beautiful and tragic.” In the song, this encounter with the city is constructed as if it were a passionate encounter with a lover, as Tat Ming continues: “Following the street lights, she is getting closer to me / No need to ask her name, I just want her to abandon herself, with me, in the starry night.” This encounter is marked by a zealous desire to love and take in the city, coupled to the fear that Hong Kong is disappearing, as Tat Ming sings: “Dashing through the bright lights are the lost children / Please take a look at this bright city / Dash again, and I wonder, I fear, that the brightness of this city stops, now.” Tat Ming’s nocturnal venture through Hong Kong is thus an attempt not only to take in, but also to reinvent the city one last time before it disappears.

As suggested earlier, this narrative of the fear of disappearance is still present in postcolonial Hong Kong. Hence, this fragment of the past is (still) part of the construct(ion) of the present and as such defines how the history of the present (city) is written. Tat Ming’s 2012 performance, however, takes up this narrative of the fear of disappearance and ends it remorselessly. In this endeavour, the performance also imagines taking down two other powerful and dominant narratives underwriting Hong Kong’s present: Chinese capitalist authoritarianism and global neoliberalism. Under British rule, Hong Kong was recognised not simply as a neoliberal capitalist economy, but as one of the freest market economies in the world. The Joint Declaration called for Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region to retain its capitalist system and a measure of political autonomy for a period of fifty years (Ren 2010, 5). Today, within this special zone where a private market is endorsed, the Chinese government operates effectively through state enterprises. Major state-owned companies, such as the Bank of China and China Travel Service, have appropriated Hong Kong’s free-market system to enhance their status as super firms exactly as neoliberals expected them to (Ren 2010, 15). Global neoliberalism and Chinese capitalist authoritarianism are in effect heavily entangled with each other.

“Tonight the Stars Are Bright” imagines ruining these three narratives through the use of the large video screen behind Tat Ming. The visuals shown on this screen construct a bipartite tale of the city. At the start of the performance, Hong Kong’s iconic skyline as seen by night from across Victoria Harbour appears on the screen (Fig. 3.10). Anthony Wong holds up his hand as if to cover his eyes from the city’s brightness (Fig. 3.11). The skyscrapers’ contours are demarcated by colourful lights that cheerfully start to dance to the song’s tunes while laser beams light up the sky, creating a visual spectacle that resembles Hong Kong’s touristic Symphony of Lights show. Simultaneously, with animation effects, the city is flying towards a bright light as stars from a vivid centre-point are passing by at high speed (Fig. 3.12). In this way, an optimistic tale of the city is constructed. This part of the performance must then be read as representing the period before the declaration when Hong Kong’s population was enjoying increasing economic growth and self-confidence. What is ignored or downplayed in this imagery are the grave income inequalities that characterise the Hong Kong of past decades.

Fig. 3.10

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

A video screen displaying Hong Kong’s skyline

Fig. 3.11

(Screenshot from concert recording)

Anthony Wong’s pose at the beginning of the performance

Fig. 3.12

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The Backdrop to the performance

The optimistic tale is challenged, however, by the second half in which Hong Kong turns dystopian. On-screen fireworks start to light up the sky (Fig. 3.13). Although the fireworks seem to add to the celebratory atmosphere, it soon transpires that Hong Kong’s skyscrapers are starting, one by one, to collapse (Fig. 3.14). At the end of the performance, what remain are the ruins of the city (Fig. 3.15). These leftovers are then blown towards the audience (Figs. 3.16 and 3.17). It is here that the performance ends the narrative of “the fear of the disappearance of the city”; it finishes this past but persistent narrative by finally letting the city disappear in its totality.

Fig. 3.13

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The fireworks light up the dark sky

Fig. 3.14

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The skyscrapers begin to collapse

Fig. 3.15

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The city is left in ruins

Fig. 3.16

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

And the leftovers start to fragment

Fig. 3.17

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The fragments disappear as they are blown towards the spectators

In the way the city is disappearing, the performance manages to dismantle two other “truths” of Hong Kong’s present—global neoliberalism and Chinese capitalist authoritarianism. As Figs. 3.13 to 3.17 show, it is through the demolition of a myriad of skyscrapers—the ultimate symbols of both “truths”—that postcolonial Hong Kong collapses. What in the end is left over from the Handover are the city’s ruins. Although these leftovers point to an apocalyptic end for Hong Kong, they also clear the ground for some new and different beginnings. Tat Ming’s performance (re)constructs the history of Hong Kong. This history starts in optimistic pre-Declaration Hong Kong, moves to an anxious pre-Handover Hong Kong, and ends in a present dystopian postcolonial city. At the same time, the performance shatters this history; it ruins three powerful (post)colonial narratives that are part of the construct(ion) of Hong Kong’s present.

Whereas the (fear of) disappearance of Hong Kong is symbolised in 2012 by its ruinification, the city is absent in the 2017 performance of the song. Instead, for most of the time, we see the band performing, with Anthony walking restlessly on the stage. The stage consists of a big road, a passage, a bridge in the middle of the Coliseum, with the audience seated around it. Lights make patterns on the road, in red, yellow, blue, or white, as if the band is under constant surveillance. Anthony’s walking around can be read as an attempt to escape from that surveillance, but to no avail. Towards the end, the screens are filled with brand names, with recognisable logos but deliberate misspellings, like KIEA instead of IKEA or KENNO instead of KENZO, either to make fun of such naming and branding, or simply to avoid legal claims (Fig. 3.18). While a handful of emerging Chinese brands are alluded to (e.g. Taomo hinting at Taobao, a Chinese online shopping platform), most of the brands are not local ones but Western and Japanese brands—gesturing more clearly towards the surge of global neoliberalism and less towards Chinese capitalist power.

Fig. 3.18

Display of brands (Screenshot from concert recording)

Slowly the brands catch fire, being burnt away (Fig. 3.19), and finally taken over by a hellish fire. We are actually hesitant in using active or passive voice in describing the fire and the brands: are the brands burning, or are they being burnt, or does the visualisation hint at both scenarios? What we witness in the end is fire. This ending obviously resonates with the 2012 performance; back then it was the skyline of Hong Kong—symbolising not just locality but also global capitalism, or more precisely, global neoliberalism and Chinese capitalist power—that crumbled down, while this time global brands that occupy the numerous shopping malls and streets of Hong Kong, a city with the highest density of shopping malls in the world (Stefan 2016), that are burning and burnt. In both cases, it is global capitalism and its related conspicuous consumption that is smashed into pieces, an act of destruction to itself and to everything else. Towards the next song, the on-screen fire transforms into a giant real ball, burning like a sun, around which the band members play. Is it a new start, after the collapse of the system? But it can as well be read as the end of times, given the radiant light of the ball. What remains is a fragmented history and a precarious present of Hong Kong, which opens up the possibility for the performance to fantasise more histories and different futures for the postcolonial city.

Fig. 3.19

(Screenshot from concert recording)

Brands slowly burning down

The Future: It’s My Party

It is this insistence on the possibility of more histories and futures that Tat Ming iterates when Anthony Wong sings, repeatedly, the last couplet of another song: “Dust from the past is yet to settle, we must continue our party / For years and months, I dance what I dance, it’s called life.” If Hong Kong has become a dystopian postcolonial city, Tat Ming’s concert sends out not so much a call to arms, but a call to feet: the utopian act in town is to party, to dance in this landscape of ruins. Composed by Tats Lau and lyrics written by co-author Yiu Fai Chow, “It’s My Party” is the only single Tat Ming released before the 2012 concerts were staged.¹¹ While major parts of the lyrics are written in Cantonese Chinese, the title is in English and whenever the same line appears in the song, it is also performed in English. Playing on the double meaning of the English word “party,” the performance cues us to the politics and poetics of partying in Hong Kong’s current historical juncture—for all the enactments of the festive and the subversive in this popular performance, Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of one particular manifestation of folk culture is helpful: the carnival (Bakhtin 1984).

In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin connects Rabelais’ Renaissance novels to the attitude towards laughter in the Middle Ages—laughter as therapeutic power and as freedom of speech and freedom of spirit (Bakhtin 1984). Tracking this medieval tradition of folk humour, Bakhtin conceptualises the carnival and the carnivalesque literature as means to create a world upside-down where everyday hierarchies and official truths are, albeit temporarily, mocked, disrupted, and overturned by an eruption of laughter, of fun, of voices, of energy normally contained by fear and authority (Stallybas and White 1986). As a form of resistance admittedly licensed by that very fear and authority, the carnival actualises, according to Bakhtin, “a victory of laughter over fear […] a defeat of divine and human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and punishment after death” (Bakhtin 1984, 90–91).

Bakhtin’s work must be read in dialogue with the specific circumstances of his time. Bakhtin was writing in Stalin’s Russia where authoritarian commandments and prohibitions were imposed on writers. The satiric genres of fun and laughter were particularly rejected. In other words, if Rabelais’ novels enact the medieval carnival to initiate a power struggle with the state and the church, Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais is doing nothing less. As formulated by Michael Holquist, “Bakhtin, like Rabelais, explores throughout his book the interface between a stasis imposed from above and a desire for change from below, between old and new, official and unofficial” (Holquist in Bakhtin 1984, xvi).

Like Bakhtin’s writing on Rabelais, Tat Ming’s 2012 concerts took place precisely in this interface between above and below, between heightened national control from Beijing and intensified local, popular longing to break free.¹² Mobilising the global form of entertainment called partying—note the use of the global tongue of English in the song—the Tat Ming concerts evoke, in Bakhtin’s terminology, a generally popular-festive atmosphere, during which the performance of “It’s My Party” is one of the loudest and queerest proclamations of laughter and freedom. In the song’s opening couplets, Tat Ming sings: “The mad makes a date with the mute / To take over the mission of the entire city / You dance a striptease, I dance naked / Come come come, let’s shout once more what we shouted then. […] Join the party with a different biography / You wear the costume of the big bird, I that of a rabbit / Let the grown-ups take control of all the beasts, but youth belongs to me.” Semantically, the song is thus a call to join the party—“Come come come”—and those who are called may be socially undesirable or morally dubious, but they share one thing in common: they are not the “grown-ups” who would spend their time and energy to control “the beasts.” Those who party are the young ones who would rather be beasts themselves, by wearing animal costumes or dancing naked. Or, they are “fairies” who look for each other to “continue the revolution,” as Tat Ming continues: “We continue to look for fairies to continue our revolution / Simply because we want to be happy / Jump into the empty city, and the streets will promise.” If the Beijing regime that seeks to intensify its control over the postcolonial city is a fact, the dancing party interrupts with a fantasy; if their identity is increasingly a top-down campaign, the party is a bottom-up invention of the people.

On stage, we see Anthony Wong and Tats Lau dressed in outlandish silver outfits with protrusions from their back resembling broken wings or multiple legs. Their eyes are adorned with large oval-shaped patches of heavy black mascara (Fig. 3.20). Such travesty is an indispensable element of the feast of fools described by Bakhtin. “The renewal of clothes and of social image,” is intimately connected to “a reversal of hierarchical levels” where jesters are proclaimed kings and clowns elected abbots (Bakhtin 1984, 81).

Fig. 3.20

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Anthony Wong in costume

Such an interruption of authority is not only semantic, sartorial, and symbolic; freedom is actualised, on at least two levels: freedom of speech and freedom of spirit. First, freedom of speech. During the entire performance of “It’s My Party,” short messages are projected behind the duo. Written in a satirical manner, these messages poke fun at institutions and persons in power, including political parties (“Communist Party, how are you?”), leaders (“Is C.Y. Leung a comrade?”—the then Chief Executive of Hong Kong was criticised as a puppet leader installed by the Beijing authorities), God (“God loves Hong Kong”— a sarcastic gesture to the colonial anthem “God Saves the Queen,” and a grim reference to the increasing influence of certain fundamental Christian faiths in the city), and Tat Ming themselves (“God loves Tats Lau”—Tats is a self-proclaimed Christian). While the Chinese characters continue flashing in red and white, what they are articulating becomes less spectacular than the performance of the very possibility of doing so. In the fifteenth year after the Handover, the postcolonial city was increasingly concerned about losing its freedom, and increasingly fearful of Beijing’s influence and intervention in local affairs. But there, despite all these doubts and fears, in demonstratively huge messages spanning the whole breadth of the stage like an electronic banner, Tat Ming and their fellow Hong Kong people are still able to express themselves, to assert once again the freedom of speech they were used to and guaranteed under the “one country two systems” principle (Fig. 3.21).

Fig. 3.21

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

“God loves Hong Kong”

Second, freedom of spirit. A party will never truly become a party if it is not a collective and collaborative affair. While Tat Ming is performing and the messages are flashing, the audience cheer and clap their hands. Among the messages that elicite the loudest response is: “Is Anthony Wong a comrade?” (Fig. 3.22). Given the Communist deployment of the term “comrade,” this is a question about the performer’s allegiance to the Beijing regime, a question constantly posed to the local population ever since the Handover in 1997. Next to its Communist deployment, the Chinese word “comrade”, or tongzhi in putonghua, has long been appropriated by the gay population to refer to themselves. The message is a queer allusion to Anthony’s political and personal connection with something revolutionary, subversive, but not exactly of the Communist kind. Although gay practices are legal in Hong Kong, the society remains by and large hostile towards homosexuality. The audience members, aware of the rumours, if not anticipation of Anthony’s homosexuality, obviously enjoy it; they applaud in high spirits. During the final concert, Anthony Wong came out. It was hardly coincidental that Helene Iswolsky actually used the English word “gay” in her translation of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque: for instance, “gay parody of truth” (Bakhtin 1984, 95). In a party, everyone should be gay, should be a comrade, should be joining a revolution to laugh at the authoritarian voice and set their spirits free—like the beasts or fairies.

Fig. 3.22

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

“Anthony Wong is tongzhi”

The performance of “It’s My Party” constitutes the quintessential carnivalesque moment, when those who answer the call and stand up to dance, to party, experience themselves in a collectivity that defy the dominant boundaries of the powerful and the powerless, above and below, national and local. At that moment in the Hong Kong Coliseum, they are ready to “take over the mission of the entire city” and occupy the Central District (where the Hong Kong administration is), the Western District (where the Beijing representative office is), and wherever else they want, as Tat Ming sings in the third couplet: “Central district is mine, Western district is mine / They are all mine, they are all I want.” It was during the party, as in the medieval feast, that “[f]or a short time life came out of its usual, legalised and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom” (Bakhtin 1984, 89). Such freedom, however ephemeral, is actualised and experienced by all those partying in the Coliseum; it is possible now and it must still be possible in the future.

However, when we move five years forward to the 2017 performance, the freedom of speech has become even more under duress. As we will explain in the next chapter, commercial sponsors did not dare to commit their names to the concerts anymore. The band had to walk on an even flimsier tightrope than in 2012, when so much more could still be articulated. It is hardly surprising that there are no slogans projected during the 2017 performance of the same song. Given the context and the general ambiance of the concerts as a whole, the song itself, however, serves as a moment of release. When this song is being performed, the audience has spent almost two hours as part of a spectacle in which surveillance, brainwashing, and suppression are the key ingredients. The sun described earlier becomes occasionally a huge eye ball, as if it were watching over both the band and the audience, indeed like the surveillance technologies and the censoring apparatus—just as multiple references are drawn to George Orwell’s 1984. This asks for a moment of release. An escape. This necessity of release, of escape, is further enhanced by the chronology of the song, itself being part of a musical sequence that has started earlier, that has used David Bowie’s slogan as its motto—“I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”

At the start of the song, Anthony arises from the floor, in yet another spectacular outfit, this time white with many red stains. Referencing David Bowie’s makeup—a lightning bolt with his eye in the centre, both Anthony and Tats have a big star surrounding their eyes (Fig. 3.23). The screens are used to magnify the band and the many dancers on stage. These dancers are clothed in colourful hoodies with corresponding jogging trousers. Written on the front of their hoodies is the lyrical line taken from David Bowie's song—“We can be heroes”—an utterance alluding to an ethics of possibility, gesturing towards the future. The slogan can also be read as predicting Tat Ming’s later performance of that song “Heroes”, in what can be seen as a tribute to David Bowie who had passed away more than a year earlier, and with whom Anthony collaborated earlier. In addition to the dancers, there is a drum band, similarly dressed, turning the stage indeed into a youthful and highly carnivalesque space (Fig. 3.24). Everybody dances around cheerfully, free and unconstrained. The faces of the dancers remain invisible, as they all wear masks, consisting of extremely pixelated faces that render all of them unrecognisable and highly similar. While one could argue that the masks refer to the totalisation of power, turning people into masses, we may also read the same masks as a tactic of disguise and invisibility, a way to play with surveillance, necessary to become more free in the current situation. We can be heroes, indeed, provided we remain unseen, unnoticed, and barely recognisable. In such extraordinary times, the faceless, the anonymous have become the heroic. Then we can party, together. And, to paraphrase Holquist, Tat Ming’s performance, of the song both in 2012 as well as 2017, “carnivalises the present because it is a hope for the future” (in Bakhtin 1984, xxii).

Fig. 3.23

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Tat Ming performing “It’s My Party” in 2017

Fig. 3.24

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

The carnivalesque stage

Ruminating on the Ruins

In The Future As Cultural Fact, Arjun Appadurai moves from seeing the social world as an informational space towards a more pressing concern with time (2013). Appadurai’s book, and also our analysis, can be seen as replying to Jane Guyer’s call for an anthropology of the futures that people posit, fantasise, fear, await, or dissolve (2007, 410). Appadurai puts an “ethics of possibility” in stark contrast with an “ethics of probability.” In the former, a diversity of collective goods is imagined. The latter is the ethic of the contemporary financialised economy and its impulse is instead to control and manage risks. Both ethics work simultaneously in popular culture. On the one hand, popular cultural products give way to an ethics of possibility, providing tools to imagine, fantasise, and stimulate the coming into being of a desired future for Hong Kong. On the other hand, these constructions are never free from relations of power. They are subject to an “ethics of probability,” which works to diminish risks and which seeks to control what kinds of future are envisioned as right and wrong.

Tat Ming’s performance demonstrates how popular culture gives way to an “ethics of possibility” (Appadurai 2013, 188). But in their performance of numbers about the rise of China (in “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day”) and the influx of mainlanders coming to Hong Kong, in their quite uncritical celebration of the economic prosperity of Hong Kong before the Handover (in “Tonight the Stars Are Bright”), they also articulate an ethics of probability. They do so by mobilising numbers, graphs, and ideas of growth and prosperity, presenting the influx of mainlanders as a risk, a flow that demands control. This does not only attest to popular culture’s alliance with power; it also runs the danger of siding uncomfortably with rising anti-mainlander sentiments that characterise today’s Hong Kong.

The queerness of Tat Ming and the performance puts into sharper relief their articulation of an ethics of possibility. It is a queerness that resembles that of the Pet Shop Boys, with fluid gender and sexuality performances, spectacular visual aesthetics and a continuous change of costumes. In Chapter 4, we will further explore the queerness of Tat Ming. Following José Esteban Muñoz, such performances and aesthetics gesture towards a potentiality, a utopian longing (2009). In his words, “We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (Muñoz 2009, 1). When Tat Ming celebrates the banality of the everyday in “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day,” when they cheerfully turn the city into ruins in “Tonight the Stars Are Bright” and end up with a call to party beyond the regulations set by the authorities, what they do is, to paraphrase Muñoz, “dreaming and enacting better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately [imagining] new worlds” (Muñoz 2009, 1).

They did so in 2012, and in 2017. What we have witnessed, however, is that the words have become less explicit, just as the underlying narrative of the concert has become gloomier, darker. This is not surprising, given that the latter concerts took place after the end of the Umbrella Movement, and in a context of rapidly intensifying political pressure and control. This may explain why the geopolitics of “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day” have made way for a much more intimate, connective, and nostalgic approach. The fear for the disappearance of the city, its imminent reunification, remained present in the 2017 rendition of the song “Tonight the Stars Are Bright,” albeit more indirectly, through the prism of global capitalism. And it may explain why the critical wordings during “It’s My Party” have transformed themselves into a colourful carnivalesque performance of many young dancers, radiating whatever hope there is towards the future.

The queer aesthetic “frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (Muñoz 2009, 1). The performance of “It’s My Party” and the politics of Tat Ming were not only symbolic. During the concerts of 2012 and 2017, authority was interrupted and freedom of speech and freedom of spirit were momentarily actualised. The carnivalesque spirit remained, even if momentarily, in tandem with a politics of invisibility and disguise. Two years after the 2012 concerts, that potentiality transformed, if not exploded, into a carnivalesque street protest, when students, workers, and other Hong Kong citizens took over the streets. Their claim was a claim to the right of the city, of its present and above all its future. In its aesthetics with yellow umbrellas, protest songs, and street lectures, in its cheerful atmosphere, it is as if Tat Ming’s call for a party has been heard widely. The Umbrella Movement became history. A couple of years after the 2017 concerts, the streets of Hong Kong became the arena for another series of protests, another occasion of carnivalesque freedom and interruption. The protests were suppressed, soon to be overwhelmed by an intense concern over the COVID-19 pandemic. One wonders if Tat Ming may perform again in the Coliseum at all; if they do, and if they do perform these songs again, how would they?