Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyses what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal … The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years and, like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.

Amazon’s introduction of The Philosophy of Modern Song, by Bob Dylan

This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music. It's also the story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in L.A. to become Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain and one of the most successful female record producers of all time. Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Rogers takes readers behind the scenes of record-making and leads us to musical self-awareness. She explains that everyone possesses a unique 'listener profile', shows how being musical can mean actively listening, and encourages us to think about the records that define us.

Penguin's summary of This Is What It Sounds Like, by Susan Rogers

Acclaimed music biographer James Gavin traces Michael’s metamorphosis from the shy and awkward Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou into the swaggering, dominant half of the leading British pop duo of the 1980s Wham!; he then details Michael’s sensational solo career and its subsequent unravelling. With deep analysis of the creative process behind Michael’s albums, tours, and music videos, as well as interviews with hundreds of his friends and colleagues, George Michael: A Life is a probing, definitive portrait of a pop legend.

Goodreads’ introduction of George Michael: A Life, by James GavinFootnote 1

Reviews of these three new books surrounding popular music were published on the same day in the Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad.Footnote 2 We read them during the time when we were preparing for this chapter, on Tat Ming Pair’sFootnote 3 legacy. We thought a book about Tat Ming would never be complete without zooming specifically in onto the influence and impact they might have. But how? This chapter concerns Tat Ming’s legacy as much as the more fundamental question of how to investigate legacy. The chapter title is not only an admittedly self-indulgent twist of a title of Tat Ming’s song “1 + 4 = 14”Footnote 4; it necessitates thinking on how to discuss the legacy of music practitioners in general. Shelving the titular reference to 2 + 2 = 5, the Orwellian dystopian caution of brainwashing and thought control, we are wondering how much Tats + Ming amounts to. 1 + 1 = ? The three books, not explicitly deliberating on popular music legacy, have dawned on us as pointing to three ways, three questions, to address this mysterious equation called legacy. What to study? Whom to study? Where to study?

What to Study?

Let us begin with the two books associated with the two legends: Bob Dylan and George Michael. Dylan’s own book collects his writings on what he considers good music, eventually condensing to become his “philosophy” not only on music but also on the human condition at large (Dylan 2022). Gavin tracks George Michael’s life and traces its imbrications to the creative process of Michael’s music. In these two publications, music and life are the key terms—also the two lynchpins for a handful of studies on legacy of major music practitioners (Gavin 2022). Some would have a stronger emphasis on the musical dimensions—even on one musical release, for instance, Russell Reising’s anthology on the legacy of Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon (Reising 2005). Just as Jennifer Shryane’s monograph on the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten explores their experiments with sound and music, and the ways they search for independence (Shryane 2016). Others explore music in conjunction with life—Brocken’s book-length study of the Beatles, or what the author calls “the Beatles story” (2016, 6), investigates the narratives surrounding their Mersey Sound and Cavern Club, and how they eventually feed into the Beatles’ heritage and popular music tourism in Liverpool (Brocken 2016). Stretching beyond the confines of popular music, works on legacy in the domain of classical music follow a similar framework. Jann Pasler’s overview of research on Debussy’s legacy distinguishes scholarship focussing on the man, and on the music (Pasler 2012).

While we orientate our study of Tat Ming’s legacy towards this music-life spectrum, the radically different route taken by Rogers in her study of musical impact lulls us to organise with an additional parameter (Rogers 2022). In her book, Rogers enters the brain to see what music does to us and tells about us. A music practitioner herself, Rogers’ inquiry seeks to explain why and how one falls in love with music, by way of neuroscience and what is commonly called emotion. Here we are reminded of the “bias” of legacy studies, in which the effective is highlighted—in the sense of how the “man” and/or the “music” have effected into something, the legacy. The analyses lean towards the rational. What Rogers persuades us to pay attention to is precisely the emotional, what we will call the affective, side of any influence and impact any music practitioners may exert, whether we are drawing from their music or from their biography. We do not have any training in neuroscience, and we gauge the affective legacy through what people experience, or more accurately, what they tell us how they experience.

Whom to Study?

We just wrote the word “people”—who are they? Dylan inserts his voice, not only through the music he makes, but also by way of prose writing, to elucidate his craft, and his ideas of living—his philosophy, from which we may draw inspirations, and thus part and parcel of his legacy. Throughout this book, we have made our own attempt to let Tat Ming speak for themselves. We should include some other people, perhaps like what Gavin does in his work on George Michael: to talk to Tat Ming’s colleagues. We do it in a very broad sense; that is to say, we include people who work with Tat Ming directly, and indirectly, or in our terms, tangibly and intangibly, as we explicate later in the chapter. There is another departure from Gavin’s biography—while his book, understandably as a biography, takes George Michael’s colleagues as some maelstrom whirling towards the spectacular centre sustaining the pop star, our book is imbued with an urgency to map out how the pop stars send out ripples to the world. This chapter on Tat Ming’s legacy may be seen as the culmination of such attempt, and we focus on the ripples to the cultural world.

We move our gaze towards cultural intermediaries, whose affinities with Tat Ming enable numerous afterlives and cultural translations of Tat Ming’s music and life—put differently, their aesthetics and politics—to send further, wider ripples to other localities, other people. By “cultural intermediaries,” we borrow loosely from the working definition offered by Julian Matthews and Jennifer Smith Maguire, in which two dimensions are highlighted. “First, cultural intermediaries are market actors who construct value by mediating how goods (or services, practices, people) are perceived and engaged by others … Second, cultural intermediaries must also be defined by their expert orientation and market contexts” (Matthews and Maguire 2014, 2). In that sense, one major function of cultural intermediaries is to construct legitimacy, through their own cultural works, for the cultural products. Phrased in Bourdieusian nomenclature, they are to distinguish good taste. Thus understood, the cultural intermediaries we have included are not limited to the “typical” practitioners, such as radio DJ’s, music writers, and event organisers; they are also music practitioners themselves. Throughout this chapter, we are mobilising this broader conception of “cultural intermediaries.”

In addition to, or perhaps in tandem with, defining good taste, our inquiry surrounding legacy puts into relief another function of cultural intermediaries, as we learn from their experiences of Tat Ming: defining good work. Amidst the body of critical scholarship on creative work (exploitation, precarity, and so forth), David Hesmondalgh and Sarah Baker foreground the need to pay attention not only to the bad side, but also to the good side, of creative work (2013). They question the “seeming impossibility of any hope of good work in capitalist modernity,” as contended in the critical scholarship of creative labour (Hesmondalgh and Baker 2013, 47). While the authors propose their conception of good work as involving “autonomy, interest and involvement, sociality, self-esteem, self-realisation, work-life balance and security” (Hesmondalgh and Baker 2013, 36), we will distil what the cultural intermediaries have adopted as good work through their effective and affective encounters with Tat Ming.

Where to Study?

The three books that we have appropriated as incidental index to our investigation of legacy do not specify where they are located; the contexts are assumed. The sixty-six songs Bob Dylan have selected to ponder are predominately from the United States (“spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone,” mostly male, for that matter). Gavin’s biography of George Michael covers the global reach of George Michael’s stardom, but essentially informed by the experience in the English-speaking pop music world. Rogers starts her book with a memory of a Led Zeppelin concert in Los Angeles, and stays in a specific, Western context, again claiming universal relevance, especially when she operates from another universally claiming field of neuroscience. Dylan does not call his book “the philosophy of modern songs in the United States.” This bias for the United States, for the English-speaking pop, for the West, permeates studies on legacy of music and music practitioners. Take another legend, the Sex Pistols. Their punk legacy is examined in terms of social and political impact as in the seminal work of Jon Savage (2011). It can also be calibrated in terms of cultural and economic impact as in Paula Guerra and Andy Bennett’s study (2015). Both works, however, take a certain context of state and market as granted, those operated in the West. To make it explicit, the music and music practitioners are often assumed to influence and impact in a context that can roughly be described as democratic and capitalistic, or in Hesmondalgh and Baker’s formulation, in “capitalist modernity” (2013, 47).

As an integral part of our project to decolonise popular music studies, this chapter on legacy challenges this assumption by way of Tat Ming and Hong Kong. We are no longer in the so-called Golden Era of Cantopop, where similar context as those in the West could be identified. The post-Handover Hong Kong may remain capitalistic, but the contemporary conjuncture of the postcolonial city is hardly democratic. As evidenced by the cultural intermediaries’ talk on Tat Ming, the specific geopolitical dimension must be taken into account when questions surrounding music legacy are posed. We interviewed eleven cultural intermediaries in 2022, two years after the National Security Law came to effect, and freedom of speech as cherished by creative workers can easily become a clear and present danger to the workers themselves. These cultural intermediaries we conversed with do creative work, and they speak of Tat Ming and their influence, explicitly or otherwise, in connection to this post-NSL political conjuncture. And for those who have been operating in mainland China, we learn how they have taken the political—and politically sensitive—context as given, and continue to meander their ways to sustain themselves, the music they love, and the future they believe in.

Introducing Them

In 2022, we invited eleven people to share with us Tat Ming’s influence and impact on them. Most of them are working in popular music, and a few in related fields of music and culture at large, such as podcast-making, DJing, writing, and music event organising. To probe into the border-crossing as well as diasporic dynamics, we have included two who grew up in mainland China and one who was born in Hong Kong and migrated to Canada, now based in Hong Kong again. For logistic reasons, these two intermediaries were approached by email and the interviews were conducted in written form. The rest of our interviewees would be considered locally Hong Kong. They were interviewed by a research assistant with our guidance, lasting from an hour to three, in a location chosen by them. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Given that Tat Ming is censored in mainland China, we have used pseudonyms for the two interviewees from mainland China as chosen by themselves. Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Atom Alicia C (Atom Cheung, b.1980), as we introduced in Chapter 2, migrated with his family from Hong Kong to Toronto, Canada when he was nine. Two decades later, in 2009 he returned to Hong Kong, initially planning to do some networking with the local indie music scene. Atom wanted to start a Hong Kong indie music programme for a Toronto-based radio station. His interest gradually morphed to creative writing, aspiring to write in and on the city he was born. He decided to move and stay in Hong Kong. Atom publishes works of fiction and poetry; his penname underwrites the gender fluidity he is experiencing. He is also hosting experimental podcasts. He is currently a radio presenter on Radio Television Hong Kong, a local public broadcasting service.

Chi Chung (Chi Chung Wong, b.1965) became a radio DJ when he was still a university student. His signature show Chi Chung’s Choice was celebrated as an important platform to introduce quality, alternative pop music to the Hong Kong audience. He also formed an indie music group in the 1990s. For more than three decades, Chi Chung worked in different media capacities and shared his passion for popular music to younger generations in the city. He still does. After obtaining his PhD in pop music culture in the digital era, Chi Chung took up a teaching job in a university. He then moved on and stayed in charge of a cultural literacy initiative in another university in Hong Kong.

Eman Lam (b.1982) formed the pop duo at17 with Ellen Loo in 2002. Signed by the indie production house People Mountain People Sea founded by Anthony Wong, at17 quickly established themselves in the local pop scene, gaining mainstream success, thanks to their refreshing electronic folk and all-female youthfulness. They also hosted television and radio shows and participated in musicals. In 2010, at17 announced their suspension; Eman and Ellen went solo. They continued, however, to stage anniversary reunion concerts in the years to follow. In 2018, Ellen was found dead at the age of thirty-two; she was known to be dealing with mental health issues for quite some time. Eman’s solo career reached new heights after joining a television show coaching new generation of music performers. She composes, arranges, produces, and writes lyrics. In 2021, she opened a music school for children. In the same year, her appearance in a pro-establishment television station sparked off heavy criticism. In 2022, on July 1, the Handover anniversary day, Eman released a song, that, in her words, was acknowledging her long-standing affection for Chinese music, but was seen as kowtowing to mainland China by some of her local fans. We will come back to this when we end this chapter.

Funkie (b.1979) describes himself as a collector and promoter of Cantonese-language culture. Growing up in Beijing, he has worked in various media platforms. Since 2018, Funkie, as a party DJ and promoter, has been curating dance parties featuring Cantopop. He is also hosting radio shows on online platforms, serving the same purpose of promoting popular music from Hong Kong. Extending from his passion for music, Funkie has developed events integrating electronic music with a diversity of sports, such as yoga, skiing and jogging. His “official” employment is a manager at a Beijing-based cultural investment company.

Gaybird (Keith Leung, b.1972) released his first album with his band Multiplex, produced by Tats Lau. It was during his undergraduate years at the Academy of Performing Arts in Hong Kong. Later, as composer, arranger, and producer, Gaybird joined Anthony’s indie production house People Mountain People Sea. Since then, he has collaborated with many mainstream artists in the Chinese-language pop world. In recent years, Gaybird has been experimenting music with technology, staging installations and performances usually regarded as artistic projects more than commercial undertakings.

Jason Choi (b.1968) started making music while following his legal training at the University of Hong Kong. For some years, Jason balanced himself between legal and musical practice, until 1999. It was the year Anthony set up People Mountain People Sea and Jason decided to quit his lawyer job to join the music company and become full-time music practitioner. Since then he has worked with many artists as composer, arranger, and producer. For a short span of time, Jason also formed his own duo called Pop Pop, and released their own songs.

Jan Curious (b.1984) was the lead vocalist of indie rock band Chochukmo formed in 2005. After winning a competition organised by Time Out magazine, the band was offered the opportunity to produce and distribute an album, which became their debut in 2009 titled The King Lost His Pink. Highly experimental, the band released songs in the English language and participated in music festivals in and outside Hong Kong. Chochukmo decided to disband in 2010 after an intense tour in mainland China. The following year, however, band members regrouped themselves to record a song as part of a fund-raising project for tsunami victims in Japan. Jan Curious continued releasing music in the name of Chochukmo, as well as started collaborating with other artists, some mainstream. In 2016, he started another band R.O.O.T. (Running out of Time) experimenting with Cantonese-language songs. In 2019, Jan Curious and tombeats released two electronic EPs. In 2021, Jan Curious added solo releases, with the artist name of Ah Sui, to his variety of music practices, with his debut single titled “Welcome to This City 歡迎嚟到呢座城市.”

Lam Ah P (Pang Lam, b.1981) formed the indie pop band My Little Airport with his journalism classmate Nicole Au and released their first album in 2004. While Ah P is responsible for the musical and lyrical sides of their songs, Nicole is the usual vocalist. Eclectic in styles, Ah P’s lyrics engage with politics, gender, and sexuality, as well as a host of issues confronting younger generations of Hong Kong people. In 2015, My Little Airport was invited to perform their song “Beautiful New Hong Kong 美麗新香港,” nominated at a film award presentation ceremony. When Ah P added, in an improvising and discordant manner, the British anthem to the end of the song, the live broadcast in Hong Kong was curiously interrupted with a commercial break. Since 2019, their music has been banned in mainland China, allegedly for their involvement with the social movements in Hong Kong.

Number 6 (Hou Cheong Mau, b.1980) was born in Macau and moved with his family to Hong Kong in 1988 when he was eight. He is the lead singer of the four-member rock band RubberBand, formed in 2005 and debuted with a major label in 2008. Since 2016, RubberBand has operated as an indie band, with increasing popularity and critical acclaim, above all, for their resonance with social developments. Number 6 is involved with musical production and occasionally the lyrical contents of their music. Tim Lui, the lyricist of RubberBand, was Number 6’s girlfriend and later his wife. In addition to music, Number 6 is also working for film, television, and theatre projects. With training in film making, he also (co-)directs many of the band’s MV’s. The latest award-winning hit “Ciao” is inspired by the current migration wave, with a six-minute-and-a-half MV that functions as a short film narrating the struggles of a young family about to move out of the city. “We say, till we meet again, then we will meet again,” write Number 6 and Tim Lui.

Passer-by (b.1974) started listening to popular music from Hong Kong while growing up in Guangzhou. He built up a circle of friends on online forums, sharing and co-constructing their passion for Cantopop. Later, he tried to create his own music with—in his own words—no success. Passer-by took up music-related work at various media institutions, including writing music reviews and features. He was also responsible for curating special issues on Tat Ming, and organising their concerts in Guangzhou and thereabouts. More recently, he also started his own music label. While Passer-by has engaged himself with a diversity of cultural projects and enterprises, his career, as he sees it, is to promote Cantonese-language popular music.

Serrini (Ka Yan Leung, b.1990) is one of the most iconic indie singer-songwriters in the past decade of Hong Kong popular music. Debuted in 2012, Serrini has enabled a spectacular rise in popularity with her performance as a fearless, down-to-earth, at the same time larger-than-life diva. Always outlandish in her stage attire, Serrini was seen flying on a giant tampon during one of her concerts. Conversing with what is going on in the society, Serrini’s music is peppered with local slang and phenomena. In 2019, when Serrini received a music award in Taiwan, she mentioned the social movement then unfurling in Hong Kong. She was attacked by some online users in mainland China and had to cancel her mainland tour. In addition to her music career, Serrini has obtained a PhD degree devoted to the study of popular music. For her experimental writing on the music award experience, see Leung (2022).

Encounters

As expected, these eleven cultural intermediaries had their first encounter with Tat Ming’s music through what would now be called legacy (pun not intended) media: on radio, on television. Most of them were growing up when Tat Ming was making a name for themselves, thus enjoying good airplay. Even when they did not choose to listen to their music, they would be exposed. For those born later (for instance Serrini), or somehow not particularly drawn to Tat Ming’s songs on radio or television, they would recall more vividly other forms of encounters, illustrating the convergence affordance for the circulation of music (Jenkins 2004). For such convergence occasions, Tat Ming’s music was played for purposes beyond music, and the duo was not even present. Some of our interviewees gathered their first memories of Tat Ming’s music not when they performed in music shows; specifically, they refer to appropriation of their music, for fun, and more. For their striking image when Tat Ming started (Anthony wore long—unusually long for a man—hair and Tats short, with distinct sartorial coupling), they were imitated for caricature, comical, and generally amusement effects in variety shows. The other often cited way of encountering Tat Ming is the long-running show Headliner; a television programme that delivered social and political critique and occasionally appropriated Tat Ming’s songs, among others, for their satirical clips. “They always used the song, what’s the title? The one with Deng Xiaoping,” Serrini recalls. Produced by Radio Television Hong Kong, the city’s public broadcaster, the show started in 1989 and stopped in 2020, presumably due to political pressure and government intervention.

Music promotes itself, and at the same time, we learn from our interviewees that music appropriation, for fun or otherwise, is also an important way to gain more exposure and encounters. In addition to such mediated forms of music encounter, a personal, human thread must be woven into our understanding of how people get to listen to certain music. Indeed, people: either people who knew Tat Ming and would introduce our interviewees to Tat Ming personally, or people who liked Tat Ming and would continue listening to Tat Ming together with them. For instance, a church friend of Chi Chung’s was involved in the same radio show, Breakthrough Hours, as Anthony. She connected Chi Chung to join the show, eventually leading to his intimate acquaintance with Tat Ming’s music, starting from the very first single. “Anthony would bring their demos back to the station and let us listen to them,” Chi Chung remembers fondly. Apart from friends, classmate is the other category that is often mentioned as instrumental to musical exposure and affirmation of musical taste. Ah P started listening to Tat Ming when he was a teenager. “I was already interested, and then I found out a classmate sitting next to me was also listening to Tat Ming,” Ah P says. It was incidentally the year when Tat Ming held their 10th anniversary concert, and they went together. Jason was introduced by a classmate to Tat Ming’s debut release, then “it was a path of no return,” he jokes. Jason tells us he met this classmate not so long ago, and they recalled this connection to Tat Ming, “We both found it so amazing.”

Whether mediated or personalised, such encounters might not have ushered in and sustained a more enduring relationship with Tat Ming, should there be no further occasions to intensify the encounters. For those working in the music industry, one common way was collaboration. Jan Curious and Eman both explain how they came to appreciate Tat Ming’s music much better when they performed backing vocals at Tat Ming’s concerts. They needed to learn the songs word by word, note by note. “I had to study the two albums we were performing [at the first REPLAY concerts] – I guess I was too young when I first listened to those songs, I didn't know they were doing such things so many years ago,” says Jan Curious. Passer-by, not a music practitioner but a cultural worker, then for a news medium in mainland China, became more involved with the duo when he was editing an anniversary feature. Later, he helped organise gigs for Tat Ming. During such collaboration, it was not always only about music, but also the personal. Jan Curious: “I could study him [Anthony] so closely, not only his works, but also himself.”

For those who did not have the chance to collaborate so intimately, or so intensively, they cherish their special moments shared with Tat Ming. Atom remembers how, after moving to Toronto and forgetting the pop songs he listened earlier in his life in Hong Kong, he came across Cantopop in a local public library. He also remembers the moment when Tat Ming was acknowledging his fanzine on stage, “for me, an emotional moment, seeing my writing struggles and my diasporic English voice validated.” Funkie tells us a similar moment. He brought a special, vinyl edition of Tat Ming’s to a concert; he managed to bring it to the front and hand it to Anthony. “He raised it up to let the entire audience see, and he was very surprised how someone would have this record.”

Caveats

Before we move on to discuss the legacy of Tat Ming, a few notes are in place to prepare readers for the following analyses of the cultural intermediaries we have talked with. We are sieving through the interview transcripts and attempting an account of their legacy that does justice to Tats and Anthony as well as to these people who talked about their influence, impact, and legacy. We realise that we run and take the risk not necessarily of erring, but probably in the nature of simplifying, flattening, amplifying, and, above all, wanting. We will make it explicit by way of four caveats.

First, as mundane as it sounds, life is complicated. It is difficult, if not at all impossible, or even desirable, to filter out other factors at play in one’s life. It is perhaps not how one lives out one’s life in real. We are referring to what the cultural intermediaries mention as Tat Ming’s impact on them, and one wonders at the same time if this is Tat Ming alone that enables it. For instance, when Jan Curious speaks on the close relationship between politics, life, and popular music and his “hard core” attitude towards music practice, how far is it inspired by Tat Ming and how far is it an inflection of his class background (which he occasionally alludes to in the interview)? We need to shelf this vexing question for another inquiry over, say, class, and pop; for the current purpose, we are investigating how Tat Ming’s effect and affect are embodied in Jan Curious, with all the biography he has brought with him. But we do want to acknowledge the complexity of legacy, and the very impossibility to single out Tat Ming’s influence in anyone’s life, musical, or otherwise.

This brings us to the second caveat. While biographical categories—class, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth—should nuance our recuperation of Tat Ming’s legacy, we must also acknowledge the daunting task of combing the musical pasts of our cultural intermediaries and identify the running threads, for our purposes, those of Tat Ming. We have invited these interviewees as guided by their connections with Tat Ming. We presupposed their legacy, and we confirm it by and large. We hasten to add, however, that these people working with culture have inherited much more. Serrini cites Paul Wong of Beyond, a popular rock band contemporaneous to Tat Ming. Jason recalls how he was also inspired by Kubert Leung, of another contemporary electronic formation Ukiyo-e.

Relatedly, the third note we insert concerns Tat Ming themselves. Put it simply, even when we could trace any articulations in the interviews to a single source of influence, namely Tat Ming, we are occasionally not sure if they mean the duo as a duo, or about Anthony, or about Tats. Or, as Number 6 points out, sometimes it is the group of music practitioners under the indie production house People Mountain People Sea founded by Anthony that has impacted on him as a whole.Footnote 5 Given the higher profile Anthony has been enjoying whether as the front person of the duo, as the more articulate member, or as the one who came out as a homosexual, who has been activating his politics in a public manner, our interviewees refer more often to Anthony. We will explicate in the subsequent account as clearly as the interviews allow us, but the conflation of the two music practitioners is unavoidable.

Finally, we thank the trust of these eleven people who conversed with us. They have been telling us how they experience Tat Ming, at the time Tat Ming was releasing their major hits, and how they themselves work as culture workers and makers, in the current conjuncture they are situated. In the following account, we need to omit certain utterances, examples, and stories that we consider “better” not to cite in details, if at all. When a music practitioner is inspired by Tat Ming and creates a song that has coded in some items too sensitive to be done otherwise, we do not see the point of spelling out the coding, and the coded message. We draw attention to the coding practice, as it were, as part and parcel of Tat Ming’s legacy. We must be forgiven that if we are sometimes less specific than we would like to, we do so for the sake of those who put their trust on us, and for ourselves too.

Legacy

Effect

We have talked to eleven people about Tat Ming—eleven people who work, like Tat Ming, in music creation, or who do cultural work, such as radio programmes, cultural events, and creative writing. They have similar and different experiences when they mention Tat Ming’s influence, with similar and different intensity—some claim a more opaque, circuitous, messy affinity, while some say very specifically, explicitly, and emphatically how Tat Ming has left a mark on them. Gaybird and Jason agree: “Tat Ming is in our blood.” In this section, we will first discuss Tat Ming’s legacy in terms of effect, of how Tat Ming as music makers have effected—entailed, enabled, brought about—cultural productions in music and wider cultural scenes. We borrow—perhaps more accurately, paraphrase—the nomenclature from cultural heritage discussion to frame our analysis, into tangible and intangible effect, essentially to distinguish between the more concrete and the more abstract.

Tangibly

The most palpable of which is the role Tat Ming plays in the very burgeoning of an interest, a passion, and a dedication to a career in music. Gaybird embodies this form of musical influence the most dramatically. Referring to his enrolment in the music department of the Academy of Performing Arts, in Hong Kong, he says: “It’s because of Tat Ming that I wanted to study music.” Gaybird recalls watching Tat Ming perform in a television show, in the 1980s, when Hong Kong popular music was churning up a wave of band sound. “It’s probably their first TV appearance, and I saw Tats play out everything a band did, just with his keyboard. It’s simply amazing!” He told himself one day he would become like Tats. That’s how he started learning electronic keyboard himself, then composing and music theories, finally to the Academy of Performing Arts. It is therefore as anticipated as it is miraculous that the debut album of his band Multiplex was produced by Tats, introduced to him by someone who knew both, alluding again to the importance of the personal in cultural work (Konrad 2013).

There are a few other less dramatic cases, but equally effectual in launching them into a music career. Jason, like Gaybird, was invited to join Tat Ming shows, and later People Mountain People Sea.Jason was already preparing for this rather radical step of leaving his lawyer job to practice music on a full-time basis. At the time when Anthony was setting up the production house, Jason believed he had saved enough money. “It was timing,” so he quit. Serrini, before she was known as Serrini, participated in the first summer camp, in 2013, organised by Renaissance Foundation Hong Kong, an NGO co-founded by Anthony in nurturing new generations of creative talents. The same year she joined a trip RFHK organised and performed in Yunnan, mainland China. During her earlier musical life, Serrini continued to join music events hosted by RFHK. Serrini received the Renaissance Award in 2018 and joined a mainland China tour in 2019 sponsored by RFHK.Footnote 6 Eman’s music career commenced when she formed the duo at17 with Ellen Loo, she at the age of eighteen, and Ellen fourteen. They were signed by People Mountain People Sea in 2002. “Anthony was there very early, on the signing day. He wanted to get to know us, and he chatted with us, telling us what music release means, and about our aspirations for a music career,” Eman recalls. Her first commissioning as a composer was through Anthony, when he asked her to write a song for a theatre project. “Ok, I will give it a try,” thus marked a significant milestone in Eman’s musical life.

Another tangible effect Tat Ming has is their own music; we are referring to two specific manners. On the one hand, quite a few of the music practitioners have covered Tat Ming songs, in that sense a clear continuation and consolidation of Tat Ming’s musical legacy. Number 6 mentions a performance of his RubberBand at an official Handover show in 2013. While the show was supposed to celebrate the return of Hong Kong from colonial rule to Beijing, they sang “Don’t Ask the Sky 天問,” a Tat Ming classic that, as cited earlier in this book, was released in 1990 as a critical response to what happened in Tiananmen the year before. In addition to such individual projects of Tat Ming covers, some of them have taken part in the two compilation albums with covers contributed by various musical units as a tribute to Tat Ming. On the other hand, there have been new creations directly inspired by Tat Ming’s earlier numbers. Number 6 quotes a RubberBand song titled “Black Chicken 黑雞,” intended as a musical and lyrical response to Tat Ming’s hit “The Ten Young Firemen 十個救火的少年,”Footnote 7 also released in 1990. In the latter song, the ten kids disappear one after the other while the fire is raging on, alluding to the dire political situation and the urgent need for perseverance. In the RubberBand recreation, the “chicken” is the local slang term for whistle, and a football game is evoked to articulate social injustice when the footballers disappear one by one from the field.

Crossing the borders to mainland China, Funkie and Passer-by supplement our research, noting that many of the mainland music makers listen fervently to Tat Ming and would draw reference from their music. They cite a few well-known Chinese bands, mainly the generation right after Tat Ming. As for themselves, they are inspired in their own ways to partake in the world of music production. Passer-by has created his own music label and has organised throughout the years events connected with Tat Ming. Funkie, as DJ and radio host, plays their music as much as he can in such public spaces as party venues and online shows. “I will also mash up and mix their music with others, and upload covers of their songs to online platforms,” adds Funkie. Like Passer-by, he does what he can hoping more people will be able to listen to Tat Ming’s music, albeit in recent years his podcasts have been facing increasing surveillance and censorship. Referring to his experience as part of the Hong Kong diaspora, Atom has been publishing creative writing inspired by Tat Ming. Atom has also published flash fiction pieces and other poems, as well as curated an exhibition in Toronto, inspired by individual Tat Ming songs. At the point of our writing, he is about to complete a collection of prose poems, in English, mobilising as their starting point the song “Don’t Wait 別等”Footnote 8 he saw Tat Ming perform in the 2021 REPLAY concerts. “The sheer beats and momentum … the words and imagery of the song.” To Atom, “Tat Ming provides the imagery that fuels my creative output.”

Intangibly

Sometimes, the music practitioners who talked to us draw a specific, tangible link from their own creation to Tat Ming’s songs, like RubberBand’s cover of “Don't Ask the Sky” and their original number titled “Black Chicken.” More often, they attribute their music indirectly to Tat Ming, nodding to what we call Tat Ming’s intangible effect. We are referring to the effect Tat Ming has on the yardstick these later generations of music makers employ to evaluate their own music: Tat Ming’s impact on what counts as good pop. They mention a host of qualities—innovative (Jason: “The sound of the songs must excite the audience, must be provoking their usual way of hearing”; Gaybird: “It's like it didn't exist in the world, and then all of a sudden, it’s there, for instance, their Chinese version of electronic music”), aesthetics (Passer-by: “The way they bring the old and the new, the Chinese and the West together … and the literariness of their lyrics”; Ah P: “I listened to quite a few bands and singers when I was young, and they were all influenced by the aesthetics of Tat Ming, rather dark”), showmanship (Serrini: “I won’t usually loop their music, but I will always watch their live shows”); Eman: “I am always amazed, how can someone become such a totally different person on stage?”). There should be a research project on Tat Ming’s music, as suggested by Eman, to give full recognition to their musical trajectory, achievement, and contribution. We agree; however, given our lack of music or musicology training, and the general thrust of this book, we must confine ourselves to the above sketchy remarks regarding Tat Ming’s musical impact. Instead, we turn to other parameters, than the strictly technical and musical, that the eleven people also mention when they talk about the musical influence of Tat Ming. In fact, these parameters are what they elaborate the most, and the most passionately: popular music has to be relevant and urgent, subtle and nuanced, honest, and alternative.

Let us begin with a song written by Jan Curious released under his band R.O.O.T.: “Sixty Seconds in Africa 非洲的60秒.” After stressing Tat Ming’s and Anthony’s impact, especially after his collaboration as backing vocalist at the Tat Ming concerts, Jan Curious cites this song to illustrate the connection. Unlike RubberBand’s “Black Chicken,” this song does not claim to be a continuation of any specific Tat Ming song. In Jan Curious’ own explication, “Hong Kong is small, and densely populated. Farms are very small too. You will find chickens being crammed to such an extent that they can’t even move. It’s like they can’t even have the fantasy of flying.” Jan Curious extrapolates the Hong Kong spatial politics to that of a different locality, the African continent, with the well-nigh cliché imaginary of vastness, and spatial possibility. “Probably the song is saying even in Africa, chickens want to fly, and they can try, and they won’t give up trying.” In the end “Sixty Seconds in Africa” is about freedom, the insistence on as well as the persistence of imagining freedom.

Which guides us to the first term often cited during our interviews: relevant. In Jan Curious’ sharp formulation: “We have a lot of musical products in Hong Kong, but what Tat Ming has done is art, it’s relevant.” All of the eleven people we talked with foreground this particular quality of Tat Ming’s songs; they refer primarily to the lyrical contents, but also to their concert renditions, occasionally in connection with musical arrangements. Many of Tat Ming’s hits are retrieved in their articulation of what matters in pop, such as their earlier songs about being young in the fast-changing, consumerist, and nihilistic society; about the shock of 1989 and the anxiety of pre-Handover Hong Kong; about choices to leave or stay; about gender and sexual equality; about life itself. Ah P calls it “a Tat Ming way of making music,” always combining something apparently private with societal issues. In their earlier years of making music, Tat Ming was releasing songs with a “concern about our future,” which, to Ah P, remains as relevant as ever. “They really use their heart in connecting with what is happening,” thus summarises Number 6 Tat Ming’s social, political, and humanitarian relevance. Such relevance is, however, always already intertwined with a sense of urgency in the post-National Security Law Hong Kong. As Gaybird reflects, as creator, as artist, one has to deal with issues that matter, that concern life and living, “but that may get you imprisoned.” They feel, at the same time, a stronger sense of vying for time, for what they cherish, and believe to be a better city, a better life. Tat Ming’s music is, in that sense, not only influential for its relevance, but for the urgent mission of, in both Jan Curious’ and Number 6’s words: “against forgetting.”

Reverting to the song “Sixty Seconds in Africa,” Jan Curious points to another feature of Tat Ming’s songs: nuance and subtlety. That the song is written in the form of a political parable, a twisted fairy tale, a piece of text open to multiple readings, is paradigmatic of the aesthetics of Tat Ming’s own creations, both their lyrical contents and other manifestations. It has become Jan Curious’ own thinking of good music: “I never like making things very explicit.” Funkie is equally impressed by what he calls the “spatial affordance” of Tat Ming’s music, that their songs would always give him and other audiences space to think, to feel, to respond in their own ways. The preference for nuance and subtlety is, however, not only an aesthetic goal in itself; it may also be a tactic to survive political interference, in Tat Ming’s early days, and particularly now. Gaybird continues, after explicating the danger of creative work in contemporary Hong Kong, “So how to express yourself and don't get yourself into prison, that requires wisdom.” This wisdom, according to what the cultural intermediaries talk about Tat Ming, is writing in a more nuanced, more subtle way. “A circuitous route,” summarises Jan Curious. Which is perhaps not only the better, but also the richer route, for this conjuncture of Hong Kong. It is the politics and aesthetics of speaking the unspeakable. Serrini says: “If I don't spell things out clearly, they need to guess. The more they guess, they may get something. But then if I say it directly, they may become lazy, they don't think and they may get it wrong.” Believing in nuances and subtlety is also believing in the audience. Serrini has noted a sense of maturity among the audiences in Hong Kong—despite of and because of the challenging situation in the last years. “They are looking for deeper sentiments and reflections.” Jan Curious goes further and thanks the current political stringency. He comments, half sarcastically, half seriously, “Our creative space has become bigger, because the audience is getting smarter, they think more. We may get less physical space to present ourselves … but now people pay more attention.”

It is a long-term affair. That is how Jan Curious talks about his music, about Tat Ming’s music. In this temporal perspective, what matters is honesty, or the courage to speak honestly. When talking about “Sixty Seconds in Africa,” Jan Curious mentions the pleasure of writing nuances and subtlety in his song, and above all, his admiration of Tat Ming’s honesty. “They spoke a lot of truth in the 1980s and 1990s,” comments Jan Curious. “Even when you were born after that, or after the turn of the century, and when you realise there is not much honesty going on in the world, you will look for it.” That is why, according to him, younger generations of audience keep on listening to Tat Ming. Many of the interviewees place their honesty against a backdrop where the opposite may well be safer, or smarter. “Speaking up is extra important in a place like Hong Kong,” remarks Atom, when he observes mainstream artists usually do not have the courage to speak up, in a society that is biased for the status quo, for the established order. Relatedly, Ah P extends the parameter of honesty to a very concrete question he poses to himself before creating a new song: does the world need such a song? Ah P stresses that any music practitioner must have something that he truly wants to express. This something is, for almost all of the cultural intermediaries we talked with, the readiness to use music and other cultural productions to challenge mainstream ways of thinking and doing things, “something rebellious,” thus says Atom.

Words like “honesty” and “authenticity” have a long and complicated history in popular music studies. In his earlier work on rock music from China, co-author Jeroen de Kloet goes at length to explain how different music scenes in Beijing use different tactics to create a genre-specific construction of authenticity (2010). This ranges from the boy-next-door aesthetics in folk music, to the spectacular exaggerations of masculine aesthetics in heavy metal. Such studies follow in the slipstream of a move towards poststructuralist theory, in which notions like honesty, authenticity, or alternative, are by default being placed between parentheses. The key question is not whether they are, but how they are constructed, with what kinds of effects, and what is being left out, or ignored, or excluded. In de Kloet's case study of rock music in Beijing, it was pop music from Hong Kong that served as an important constitutive outside that was looked down upon as too commercial and too slick.

We are living in different times now; as Bruno Latour already observed in 2004, the critical tools of deconstruction have somehow run out of steam, now that they have been appropriated by the far right (Latour 2004). It is predominantly from the far right that the “truth” of climate change is being questioned, just as the harm done by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas his solution to this problem is, unsurprisingly, a move towards his Actor Network Theory, and, thereby, a promotion of a paradigmatic shift from Foucault to Latour, we are less keen to position ourselves firmly in specific schools of thought. But we do acknowledge that to question and deconstruct the vocabulary used by our cultural intermediaries is not the way we want to go in this chapter. In other words, while we are aware that notions like honesty and authenticity are ideological constructs, we prefer to read them in this chapter, instead, as ideological anchor points through which the intermediaries make sense of their work as well as of their life. In a time and place when work and life has come under so much pressure, such as contemporary Hong Kong, to question the construction of, say, authenticity, or hope, seems like a much less urgent task than to look for the affordances of authenticity or hope. It is the latter we are interested in.

Another keyword, equally prone to deconstruction, they often use to describe Tat Ming’s music is alternative. The term is applied to the manner the duo has been making music, as much as to the attitude such music embodies. Gaybird epitomises Tat Ming’s music—how they present it, how they visualise it, how they stage it—with this sense of epiphany: “They tell me, the world is more than it is.” In almost identical wording, Chi Chung recalls his DJ years, still bewildered by the world view, the possibility to look at things with alternative perspectives that Tat Ming enabled. “You would start wondering why their music is arranged like this, how do they use their lyrics, why do they appear like that?” The concrete instances Jason gives to illustrate how Tat Ming offers alternatives include his own biography. He refers to Tat Ming’s invitation to him, an inexperienced musician, to collaborate, underlining their refusal to follow established industry practices. In Serrini’s words, “They never please.” Citing his mainland Chinese background, Funkie notes his conservative upbringing, both in terms of education and family. “We would start having more and more doubts about things, but we are not supposed to talk about it.” By bringing, for instance, homosexuality, Tiananmen, and the Handover into their music, Tat Ming, to Funkie and many other interviewees, holds up honesty as the fundamental alternative in the world, to the world, and from the world.

Affect

If we take the people we interviewed—whether as music practitioners, radio DJs, writers, and other forms of cultural producers—first and foremost as audience, of Tat Ming in our case, then we are acknowledging and building on the line of audience studies that has long been taking affect seriously (see for instance Papacharissi 2014; Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). Put differently, we contend for the necessity to recuperate and include the personal, affective experiences of cultural intermediaries into any investigation of influence, impact, and legacy. It would be tempting, indeed, to focus on the strictly speaking musical, professional influences of Tat Ming as deserved by their musical and professional contribution. We have documented an abundance of evidence in the last section surrounding what they have effected. However, it will be inadequate, especially when we try to do justice to the interviews—they talk enthusiastically about Tat Ming’s music, but they talk even more poignantly, passionately, and personally about the way they experience them as persons. Their narratives could have resourced so much more, but we follow three protagonists: as good mentors, as good Hong Kongers, and as good human beings.

  1. 1.

    Good Mentor

Serrini mentions the first time she met Tats, at a music festival. She did one of the acts, and Tats was the guest performer. She took the occasion and gave him her CD. He returned the favour with his. “It’s heart-warming,” she says. This affective reference resonates in the interviews when they talk about Tat Ming; they are affected not only by the musical practices, but also, if not more so, by the various ways Tat Ming relate to them on a personal level—in this case, as mentors, as someone more senior in the profession, taking care of the younger ones, affectionately, and engagingly. When Serrini first met Anthony, at the summer camp organised by Renaissance Foundation, she witnessed how Anthony, “already a successful artist, dedicates himself to grooming the younger generation.” This pleasant surprise underlines hierarchical and generational distance as often experienced by more junior practitioners; it also betrays the fierce competition and the sense of precarity in the creative industries. Put bluntly, why should someone help you at all? To Serrini, these personal anecdotes, their readiness to teach the young people, evokes confidence in younger creators. It may not be the teaching itself, but the act thereof that touches her, and them. “We all need a nice uncle or auntie along the way,” says Serrini with a smile.

“Uncle” is also the term of endearment used by Eman when she refers to Tat Ming’s long-term collaborators. It was Anthony who introduced this group of experienced practitioners to her, and to her they felt like family, a form of kinship. Passer-by describes Tat Ming as “my brothers and sisters who hold up a torch in front of me.” A mentor, an uncle, a family member, rather than a didactic teacher; a spring of care and attention, rather than a source of authority. So it works, affectively. Number 6 feels Anthony’s affection, when he received “Add oil!” messages from Anthony before his performance started. Jan Curious exudes a sense of admiration and gratitude when he recalls how Anthony would always tell him: “Let me know if I can be of help.” Expressing her resistance to a more authoritarian way of coaching—“I don't like someone holding my hand and teaching me how to write”—Eman recalls that she and her partner Ellen, of at17, would receive a pile of CDs from Anthony every two to three months; the playlists of which were compiled by him for the young duo to listen and get inspired. “This gesture left a big impact on me,” she says.

  1. 2.

    Good Hong Konger

What we are about to tease out from the interviews can be read in tandem with the intangible effect they have inherited from Tat Ming, the parameters to what constitutes good music, especially that of relevance, that good music must be relevant. Supplementing this musical side of legacy, the following analysis zooms in on the affective dimension. Placed under the specific circumstances that these cultural intermediaries are producing culture, they often accentuate the Hong Kongness of Tat Ming, as affective bonding, support, and empowerment. That Tat Ming continues to release songs and stage concerts relevant to the city and its politics, particularly in the post-National Security Law time, attests to their affinity with Hong Kong, their identifications, their sense of belonging and longing. Some of the people we talked to experience this continual engagement, warmly and movingly, as in the presence of some good Hong Kongers.

What Tat Ming and their music mean to Number 6, if he must summarise, is this: don't forget which city you are from. Number 6 would hesitate to call his RubberBand a successor of Tat Ming, but the “sense of mission” transpired from their decades of work should continue to empower him not to leave Hong Kong behind. “To continue writing stories about the city is to continue breathing with the people here.” Jan Curious’ linguistic choice for his music underlines his earnestness to connect with Hong Kong, to stay relevant, just like Tat Ming. When he started, in 2005, creating music with the rock band Chochukmo, English was the medium, and the message was: English should continue to exist in Hong Kong. Later, in 2016, when Jan Curious began another band R.O.O.T., the songs became Cantonese, the native tongue of Hong Kong. “We have already lost the battle regarding English, now what I am trying my utmost is to protect Cantonese.”

For Atom, a diasporic Hong Konger: “Tat Ming reminds me of how lucky I am to have lived the Hong Kong 80s.” He was quick to distance himself from the trite simplification of the decade as the “Golden Era.” Tat Ming’s music embodies the “real” Hong Kong, and this sense of realness is cultivated by the feelings Tat Ming invest in their creative work, the feelings for the city, for the society, for the people living here. Tat Ming speaks to Hong Kong people, according to Atom. “Tat Ming’s music reminds me that there were lots of social issues that were not addressed by the mainstream artists of the day.” That is the reason why Atom was, and still is, deeply moved by the occasion when Tat Ming took a moment on the Christmas show of the 2021 REPLAY to acknowledge his work in 89. 09. 12. 21. “While on stage, Ming Gor [Anthony] said to me, ‘Thank you for loving Hong Kong.’” It was an utterance, a linguistic hug, by someone intimately bonded with the city, someone who has been singing the city’s destiny through the decades, by a good Hong Konger. “Hearing this ‘thank you’ made me feel that my efforts were validated – my efforts in cultivating this near-and-far relationship with Hong Kong by way of writing in an expat tongue,” says Atom.

For Funkie and Passer-by, Tat Ming is Hong Kong, and increasingly, the defiance of Hong Kong that defines the city. They speak in the context of Tat Ming, their favourite music makers, being banned in mainland China. Many of the interviewees partake in this chorus of defiance. Gaybird feels sorry for the mainland audience. Jason believes the ban speaks volumes about the impact of their music. Serrini recalls a remark by a mainland Chinese writer: don't call yourself a writer if you don't have at least a couple of works banned. Chi Chung is sure it will only make people more curious. The political cancellation of Tat Ming’s music in mainland China, according to Funkie, is in effect a “rite of coronation”; many of the younger generation of Tat Ming audiences in the mainland, those born after 1995 or 2000, started searching for their music only after it was banned. Another manifestation of such defiant attitude is not so much about the audience, but about the cultural intermediaries themselves.

“Limitation is another creation,” is Gaybird’s motto, gesturing to Tat Ming’s decades of music making. For him and many others, they experience Hong Kong at a very difficult time of its history. What they have learned from Tat Ming is to turn all the limitation into sources of creative energy, not only in making music, but also in how to continue being able to make music. “We will find a solution when we see a problem,” thus characterises Gaybird a way of working and living in the city shared by many of other people we talked with. In any case, he cannot just lie down there and do nothing. They are worried, they may do adjustments, but they will continue, like good Hong Kongers. Referring to the Golden Era of the 1980s, which we discussed in Chapter 2, Jan Curious echoes Atom’s reflection and contextualises the dominance of love songs in Cantopop in the spectacular economic growth in Hong Kong. “What Tat Ming has been doing all the time is tell us: don't become a pig,” Jan Curious says. As a Hong Konger, Jan Curious’ aspiration is to write some songs, and survive this difficult time with his fellow Hong Kongers.

  1. 3.

    Good People

One of the most powerful lessons Serrini has learned from Tat Ming is indeed the consistency, and their manner of surviving and thriving in both the music industry and the city itself. “They have been true to themselves, they are happy about it, and they have followers. They inspire me to try as well.” She calls Tats and Anthony a “beautiful team,” and their power “religious.” Jason also describes Tat Ming as a “religion,” while Atom’s word is “movement.” Whether as a religion or a movement, what the people we interviewed tell us about Tat Ming is fundamentally the story of staying human. Indeed, they often do so in connection with Tat Ming’s past, and Hong Kong’s present. In the current conjuncture, it is not only, or even no longer, about how to make music, but how to stay human. As expressed by Jason, what he takes from Tat Ming is their humanity, their awareness, and their preservation of certain values.

In almost identical wording, Jan Curious says: “This is more than music; this is a lifestyle, an attitude, a spirit.” Nodding towards Tat Ming’s decades-long musical career, Jan Curious asks a rhetorical question: “How many people have managed to stay faithful to their beliefs?” In particular, Anthony has become a role model for him, not merely as an artist, but more fundamentally, as a human being. At one point during the interview when the conversation hovers around Tat Ming’s music, Jan Curious narrates animatedly how he was touched when he saw Anthony cry: “He will let the world affect him, and he will cry for all its injustice.” After explaining in detail how his first album was heavily influenced by Tat Ming, Gaybird hastens to add that more often than not, the influence is less specific, more osmotic. “It is in your blood,” he says. So claims Jason. And Chi Chung shows similar respect for Tat Ming, especially when he has grown up to become a teacher, and a father. “Slowly and gradually, I realise that this duo, that featured prominently in the early part of my life, has supplied me so much blood and oxygen, enough for the rest of my life.” Nodding again to Tat Ming’s history, and their age, Atom admits the humanitarian impact they have on his life this way: “I believe they’re both in their 60 s. They’re my role models. They show me how to grow old with style and grace, while remaining on the human side of the fight against the system.”

Together

“You can kill a fucking person, but you can’t kill a fucking idea,” says Jan Curious, in English, during our interview. The idea of making music and culture, the idea of being a mentor, a Hong Konger, a human being, is what we have outlined as Tat Ming’s influence, impact, and legacy, both effectively and affectively. Some of the interviewees mention “religion,” or “movement”; we venture the term “community.” If a religion or a movement would predicate on certain sets of values and destinations, and certain forms of organisation and direction, Tat Ming afford a more open, spacious world of how to do and live—indeed, some ideas, that people may embrace as Tat Ming’s legacy to define and decide how do and live. The analogy with religion and movement is perhaps more indicative of one important manifestation of Tat Ming’s legacy: the collectivity, the togetherness that they do and live, with Tat Ming and with one another. To recall another analogy, “blood and oxygen,” they may be the nutrients Tat Ming supply to individuals, and it may also be the brick and mortar Tat Ming supply to give rise and shape to a community. A community of care (Lorey 2015).Footnote 9

We see correspondence with the notion of community Richard Sennett discusses in his book Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2013). Drawing from his childhood memories of living in a disenfranchised neighbourhood in Chicago, Sennett foregrounds three interwoven threads that sustain a community and that a community sustains: morale, conviction, and cooperation. We begin with cooperation. In the Chicago neighbourhood, Sennett describes how young people would need to find ways to stick together, to avoid being drawn to the bad side of the world. More concretely, he refers to a “place of refuge” where they can talk and work together. We see how Tat Ming have opened up and left behind such a place of refuge for the interviewees we talked to, mostly figuratively and sometimes literally. Then the conviction. In this connection, Sennett refers to the church affiliations of the neighbourhood residents. He hastens to add, however, that “rather than moralising, people think flexibly and adaptively about concrete behaviour” (2013, 249). To us, this is reminiscent of the conviction that Tat Ming inspires, both professionally and personally, and the equally open and individual manner for how to implement and actualise such conviction—the similar, religious dimension of Tat Ming that some of the interviewees articulate. Finally, and probably the most important when we discuss Tat Ming’s legacy, the issue of morale. Put simply, cooperation and conviction will collapse without morale, or in Sennett’s words, “the matter of keeping one’s spirits up in difficult circumstances” (2013, 248). Recalling how his ghetto neighbours would have every reason to succumb to low spirits, Sennett observes the necessity of “lifting the poor from dwelling on their weakness” (2013, 253). While Sennett’s point is essentially economic, we extrapolate it to the political, to contemporary Hong Kong and the demoralising effect recent political developments may have exerted. What we hear from the eleven people is how Tat Ming, and their more than three decades of music making, serve as a continuous and timely booster of morale when Hong Kong people and culture practitioners, like the ghetto dwellers in Sennett’s book, have every reason to succumb to low spirits.

Tat Ming’s effective and affective legacy can be understood in myriad ways; what we propose here is to consider it eventually as a community, a community of morale, conviction, and cooperation, and above all a community that should nurture its own resilience to go on, to sustain itself, to grow—even when the “pioneers” are gone. A community of care. That is also what Jan Curious loudly proclaims; it is what is left behind that matters. We are clearly not the first to heed the communal side of music practices. Veteran music professional Brian Eno, for instance, presents a neologism “scenius” as a response, a challenge, to the dominant celebration of “genius.” According to Eno, “All these people that we call genius actually sat in the middle of something that I call scenius. Just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community…. Intelligence is created by communities, by a cooperation of some kind” (Eno 2015). This conception rejects the “lone genius myth” or the “Great Man Theory,” namely that great works are delivered by great talents working in solitude.Footnote 10 Instead, the new term is meant to acknowledge the creativity groups, places, or scenes can generate.Footnote 11 Our discussion of Tat Ming’s legacy in terms of community, however, is not only interrogating the notion of individual genius, but more fundamentally a reversal of how we look at the influence of any individual creator. While “scenius” focusses on how community enables creativity, our discussion of legacy zooms in on how creativity enables community. The community thus enabled may go on enabling—more music, more culture, and more of itself.

We will end with a note of caution. In our discussion of Tat Ming’s legacy, we have included our interview with Eman, who started her music career as part of a duo at17 signed with Anthony’s production house People Mountain People Sea. As noted earlier, Eman released a song on July 1, 2022, the 25th Handover anniversary, that has churned up fierce controversy. She was attacked for currying favour with mainland China, craving for Chinese jobs and money, and betraying her mentor Anthony. We conducted our interview before the controversy, and we do not want to speculate on what is happening. Suffice it to note that our account of Tat Ming’s legacy is grounded in the set of interviews taking place by a certain point of time. In that sense, it remains an endeavour validated to that point of time. The sense of community is fragile at best, and who is included or excluded can change fast, especially in the current period where one is either yellow or blue, either pro-China or against China, rendering any space in-between nearly impossible. Our analysis is as tentative and fragile as the legacy we are presenting; it is contingency with its many faces. Nevertheless, we plead, it is the best we have.