Geeky Things

Last week I had attended the Symposium on - ‘Reimagining “Chinese” Pop Music: A Dialogue between Pop Artists and Researchers’ by Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme of Lingnan University. It is a very special forum in Hong Kong because panelist includes Pop artist like Anthony Yiu-ming Wong, Chow Yiu Fai, and also consist of professors from University like Li Siu Leung. It is a great chance to see how these two very different background people join together and exchange their idea on Pop Music and Culture.

Anthony Wong expresses his dissatisfaction in current music production mode, saying that the current mode of music production limits the diversity of music. Since those “Big Music Record Labels” have already got a “ideal model” for every artists, artists can not choose and develop their own music style, audience are then suffered from a limited choice of music.

Mini Choi (DJ of Commercial Radio 2) suggests that Web 2.0 and Long-tail can solve this problem, as good music can be shared by individuals and records labels cannot continue their monopolize in the market in this digital age. I agreed that there is opportunities but obviously it is still quite far away from reality — it seems Internet is still not playing major role as a media, compare with Radio, TV and other mainstream media as they are still the main way people learn about new music.

In the talk it seems “Chineseness” is the most “heated” topics, but I feel really disappointed as no one tried to be really serious about explaining what is it. Some panelists seems think that it is equals to “the modern China country” (But many of us don’t buy the agenda of modern China), or some symbols like “Kung Fu” (Orientalism?), or traditional Chinese culture.

We can even question — is there really one “Chineseness”? Chinese speaking population have very different culture, there are also different dialogues in Chinese, one may even think that there are no “Chinese” but a lot of different similar languages. Another problem is — It seems many of the speakers believe that Hong Kong is still leading the culture of “Chinese-Language Speaking Population”…??? BUT How can we explain that Hong Kong culture industry today is deeply influence by China market?

At the end, Anthony Wong made a funny point that the mainland China government today, is censoring the “sound of music” besides lyrics. He gave us an example: one of his song begin with some distorted guitar sound, was banned in mainland China’s TV programme because similar guitar sound was played in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989