Documenting the Past, Sustaining the Present, Making the Future

Abstract

AbstractThis introductory chapter positions Hong Kong as a unique case to rethink the intricate relationships between politics and popular music in the wider context of the globalised times where collective collection and creative practices are increasingly connected and mutually constitutive. It does so by first presenting to the readers Tat Ming Pair, an electronic duo formed in 1980s, during the so-called Golden Era of Cantopop in colonial Hong Kong. Commercially successful and critically acclaimed—thus regularly and currently censored in mainland China—for their engagements with social and political issues, Tat Ming Pair remains active and relevant especially through their live concerts in the last decade. Chapter 1 will elucidate why an inquiry taking the duo as its lynchpin serves to address the central question: How (far) does music impact on politics, and how (far) does politics impact on music? We will then expand our ideas of writing pop and politics in tandem with writing the past, the present and the future—interlaced with a colonial and post-colonial account of Hong Kong, a rally to resilience and activism, and a dialogue with hope and future, all very makeshift. After outlining the theoretical underpinning, this introduction continues to align our inquiry to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to de-Westernise popular music studies, a field of knowledge production persistently dominated by Anglo-Saxon experience and publications. Finally, this unusual attempt to tease out the empirical and theoretical potentials of one single popular music formation in a book-length study, covering not only its creative output (music) but also the production and reception aspects, will be put forward as a methodological intervention, a possible alternative approach to study popular music. The introduction ends with presenting the organisation logic of the book and the gist of the subsequent chapters.