ABSTRACT
Popular culture weaves events, imaginations, and inflections into a package simultaneously; music, for example, incorporates melody, rhythm, harmony, lyrics, and timbre. Each of these elements has a syntactical grammar of the art form, and is furthermore embedded in a semiotic meaning able to create a sense of community as well as to crystallize imaginary identities and sentimental adventures (McClary and Walser, 1990). Using Andy Lau as a case study, I shall highlight how these different components of pop music produce different meanings in different political, economic, and cultural contexts. Since popular culture is often thought to be merely entertaining, audiences do not feel they produce any meanings for themselves through engaging in various artistic, critical, and political contemplations in relation to the state and civic society (Modleski, 1986: ix). However, popular culture probably reveals ideological discourses about contemporary conditions more potently than other media forms. It tests political limits
when it produces and reproduces the social relations of everyday life outside the formal political system. It is a strong commercial entity with cultural power and political significance (Storey, 1996).
