ABSTRACT
Made in Hong Kong examines, centrally but not solely, the materialization of Cantonese-language pop in the 1970s through its halcyon days in the 1980s and 1990s, and ends with music linked to issues that concerned the Umbrella Movement of 2014. If the argument that Cantopop is a distinct local hybrid construction is taken by some critics to be a potentially bland and, by, unrevealing truism, a number of the volume’s authors try to nuance or otherwise reiterate the existing value of this analytical approach. Cheng’s invocation of a “Translational Sinophone Identity” returns us to the question of singular Chineseness and Hong Kong’s particularized identity. The cultural aesthetic that Hong Kong popular music represented from the 1970s was a popular cultural assertion from “below,” which becomes an inter-Asian pop phenomenon avant la lettre that could support the larger development of regional consumption desires, with its burgeoning middle class.
