Being the person who created the term or genre or whatever it is and called it Canto Pop, I wish I hadn’t, because it stalled many moons ago and was never resuscitated and given the wings to become everything and more that it could have been.
Timing, it’s all about timing.
Canto Pop first saw the light of day in around 1975 as when I coined the term Canto Rock. This was when Sam Hui, who started out being the lead singer in local covers bands like The Lotus and recorded a few of my songs during the brief Hong Kong band scene years, took his vast knowledge of Western pop music and its different chord progressions into a different world.
Over this backdrop of jangly guitars, he laid down colloquial Cantonese lyrics about everything from water rationing in Hong Kong to the wiles of Tsimshatsui Susie and the city’s preoccupation with money, money, money.
It was catchy pop music, and Sam very quickly established himself as the city’s most popular singer-songwriter and actor in those movies he appeared in with his brothers.
Sadly, the Canto Pop-Rock that belonged only to Sam, quickly dissipated when he semi retired from the public eye and left for California.
Wheeled in during Sam’s time away was formulaic schlocky ballads by relatively new signings of solo artists, not unlike Chinese versions of balladeers Matt Munro, Engelbert Humperdinck and Steve Lawrence.
Unlike Sam, these were “crooners”, who very often didn’t write their own material, and relied on songwriters with ties to their music companies who churned out songs often built around the chords and even melody to the Eagles hit “Desperado”.
The sausage factory of copycats had started…
From here, the music took a backseat role to hairstyles, hairstylists, costume changes and designer coats of many colours.
None of this exactly gave Hong Kong its own Ziggy Stardust, but instead became a flaccid exercise in style over substance.
From a big business perspective, Canto Pop offered the big money players in entertainment an open door policy to own and reap the rewards of the concert business that were often, basically, reruns of HKTVB variety shows.
The profit margins to these concerts full of razzmatazz and smoke and mirrors were huge.
Repeat and rinse and quickly from this formula grew an audience for these types of shows with the music all but having disappeared. And if there, it didn’t matter because it was all about idol worship-and nothing wrong with this as it is how Beatlemania happened.
Though artists like Anita Mui and Faye Wong brought something slightly different to the dim sum table, the tried and true balladeers trumped musical experimentations and the efforts of bands like Beyond, below, The Tat Ming Pair, and a bit later Ramband, LMF, and Chyna.
It came down to having a regular series of concerts by the usual superstar suspects managed by the usual superstar suspects in the entertainment world and which paid for another new luxury apartment and the latest Ferrari model or starting up a side business like selling designer furniture.
Today’s Hong Kong music scene? Is there one? Or is what sells and still makes money being the usual oldies shows for the village elders with nothing much for those below the 30 year old threshold?
Sure, there’s Mirror, a twelve member turnip pie with readymade individual slices attracting sponsorship deals for its most popular members, supposedly branching out into films, and who appeal to a mainstream audience in a city of around seven million people.
The fact that the new head of tourism made the news for saying she is a fan of the group says something though I don’t know what.
From the makers of Mirror is the female equivalent in Collar and with the oddly named Error picking up the crumbs.
When speaking to some people born and raised in Hong Kong, what interests them- and they’re on the mature side of the road- are the “comeback” concerts of artists they were listening to over thirty years ago.
There are also the new, yet old, television singing competitions where there’s there’s the formula of finding 4-5 or even twelve twentysomethings and putting them together as one Canto Popping singing and dancing K-Pop type act- but without the humongous spending power, sponsorship appeal and international clout behind groups like BTS and Black Pink.
So, where is Hong Kong-made pop music heading?
Nowhere, except for going around in the same circles, and as Bob Dylan sang, with no direction of home, because there’s no one really helping music in Hong Kong to grow.
Maybe those who see themselves as renaissance people of the local music world are not good enough nor having any international experience?
Real change- and not cosmetic ones- in creating a genuine Hong Kong music product is long overdue.
Very probably, good career opportunities have been allowed to flit away through a deadly combination of procrastination, fear, arrogance, ignorance, zero A&R skills and no understanding of the pulling power of music.
A city without its own music culture is a city doing the waltz with Mephistopheles.
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