Abstract
While the decline of Cantopop and the shrinking of Hong Kong’s music market share are irrefutable, the starting point of this book is a desire to show that this is not the full story, and that the consequent marginalisation of Hong Kong popular music needs to be offset by turning against the tide of attention that has moved towards mainland China, Jeroen de Kloet’s (2010) own China with a Cut being part of that shift. This book, instead, takes Hong Kong as its point of entry into Chinese-language popular music, attending to the city and its popular culture as a centre of intercultural global flows of sounds, images and people, and in this way contesting the post-1997 narrative of decline and death. Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet begin with nationalistic songs or minzugequ and issues of Chineseness, and then move from the construction of nationality to the construction of locality in global pop via a comparative study of Hong Kong’s Leon Lai and his Dutch counterpart, Marco Borsato. Following this, the book turns to further case studies: the recent pop phenomenon of China Wind or zhonggvofeng, the Sex Photos Scandal involving the illegal distribution of private photos of Hong Kong entertainer Edison Chen, a history of HK music venues, theme songs associated with the Beijing Olympic Games in August 2008 and Diana Zhu, a Dutch girl who at the age of 15 won a Chinese singing contest in Amsterdam and was subsequently signed to Warner. The range covered in these case studies is a clear indication of the rich array of topics covered by the book. Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet have produced a newly angled analysis of Hong Kong popular music. Their book is full of fascinating detail, but its importance lies most of all in its resistance to the ascendancy of discourse centred around the allegedly irrevocable rise of China.