The Worst of Times, The Best of Music

Abstract

In September 2014, thousands of people started occupying different areas of Hong Kong, demanding “true democracy,” ushering in what was known as the “Umbrella Movement.” The popular protest might have taken the world by surprise; for us, it can be read as a logical outcome of a much longer process of postcolonial anxiety. Popular culture, among which popular music, constitutes an important domain to narrate versions of the past, present, and future that present alternatives to official versions. We therefore shift our eyes and ears from the tumultuous and politically explicit street protests to the aestheticised show of popular sentiments: the 2012 and 2017 Tat Ming Pair concerts. How does Tat Ming’s performance imagine the postcolonial city and its histories? How does it negotiate Hong Kong’s current socio-historical moment? And what kinds of futures does it fantasise for Hong Kong? And what differences can we distinguish between both concerts, one before and the other after the Umbrella Movement? For both concert series, we zoom in onto three songs: “Today Could Have Been a Happy Day 今天應該很高興,” “Tonight the Stars are Bright 今夜星光燦爛,” and “It’s My Party.” These three songs present different articulations of temporality; we start with reflecting on how the (colonial) history of Hong Kong is represented, then move on to analyse how Hong Kong’s present-day predicament is articulated, finally to probe into imaginations of the future in the concerts. These three temporalities, in conjunction with the two different moments the concerts took place, 2012 and 2017, are always already implicated with each other. Following our introduction in Chapter 1, they allow us to study how the constructs of the past, the present, and the possible futures of the city, are woven into the fibre of the concerts.