Revisiting Hong Kong Pop: The Political and Global Nature of Local Popular Music since the 1970s

Abstract

In 1977 the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry started presenting the Gold Disc Awards to music albums which attained a high sales volume in Hong Kong. Sixteen local albums received the honour that year, while only two of them featured Cantopop. This situation contradicts with the common view that Cantopop became hugely popular in Hong Kong in 1974. This paper re-assesses existing views on the history of Hong Kong’s popular music. It first argues that Hong Kong people widely embraced Cantopop only in the late 1970s and this was partly a result of government intervention. From the early 1960s on, the colonial government hoped to integrate different local Chinese groups into a coherent community for easier control. It thus attempted to make Cantonese the common tongue of the local Chinese population. Entering the 1970s, the government also had to stabilise Hong Kong and promote a sense of belonging for the younger generation. These circumstances prompted the government to promote Cantopop as a popular culture for Hong Kong people. This paper also aims to place the history of local popular music within a global framework. Most of the existing works view this history within a local or Chinese framework. They also over-emphasise the “glory days” of Cantopop. However, local popular music was never only Cantonese. Local English, Mandarin, and other languages all played important roles. Moreover, the definition of popular music in the West does not fully apply to Hong Kong. The background of local musicians shaped Hong Kong’s popular music into a product that combined musical features from different parts of the world. Finally, this paper also considers how the history of local popular music entered the global history of music in the twentieth century.