Hong Kong Cantopop: A Concise History

by Stephen Yiu-Wai Chu

Overview

Cantopop was once the leading pop genre of pan-Chinese popular music around the world. In this pioneering study of Cantopop in English, Yiu-Wai Chu shows how the rise of Cantopop is related to the emergence of a Hong Kong identity and consciousness. Chu charts the fortune of this important genre of twentieth-century Chinese music from its humble, lower-class origins in the 1950s to its rise to a multimillion-dollar business in the mid-1990s. As the voice of Hong Kong, Cantopop has given generations of people born in the city a sense of belonging. It was only in the late 1990s, when transformations in the music industry, and more importantly, changes in the geopolitical situation of Hong Kong, that Cantopop showed signs of decline. As such, Hong Kong Cantopop A Concise History is not only a brief history of Cantonese pop songs, but also of Hong Kong culture. The book concludes with a chapter on the eclipse of Cantopop by Mandapop (Mandarin popular music), and an analysis of the relevance of Cantopop to Hong Kong people in the age of a dominant China. Drawing extensively from Chinese-language sources, this work is a most informative introduction to Hong Kong popular music studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789888390588
Publisher:	Hong Kong University Press
Publication date:	01/05/2017
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Yiu-Wai Chu is professor and director of the Hong Kong Studies Programme in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

A Note on Romanization x

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Days of Being Marginalized: The 1950s to the Early 1970s 21

Chapter 3 The Rise of Cantopop: The Mid- to Late 1970s 40

Chapter 4 An Age of Glory: The 1980s 69

Chapter 5 The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: The 1990s 105

Chapter 6 After the Fail: The New Millennium 145

Chapter 7 Epilogue: Cantopop in the Age of China 184

Appendix: Chronology of Major Events 197

Selected Bibliography 218

Index 226

Editorial Reviews

Few scholars I know of have as thorough a knowledge of Cantopop as Yiu-Wai Chu. The account he provides here—of pop music as a nexus of creative talent, commoditized culture, and geopolitical change—is not only a story about postwar Hong Kong; it is also


“Yiu-Wai Chu’s book presents a remarkable accomplishment it is not only the first history of Cantopop published in English; it also manages to interweave the sound of Cantopop with the geopolitical changes taking place in East Asia. Combining a lucid theo

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