It’s very rare I usually do an essay/commentary on my blog. For those who know me, I’m a total Cantopop fan/lover when I combined that genre with Canadian indie music when I had a weekly radio show.
Being as a Chinese-Canadian, my mom used to rent videotapes from Hong Kong’s TVB. Ranging from dramas to music shows, it’s been ingrained since I was young.
How did I become hooked on Cantopop? I would say that the Hong Kong Handover in 1997 affected me because I had relatives living there and my parents were from there. I didn’t want to lose that part of my cultural heritage. It wasn’t until towards the end of high school where I was listening to Hong Kong radio on the Internet and my love of radio came back in a different approach.
In my University phase, I still kept listening to the classic Cantopop songs and some newer music. 2003 struck when Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui died and the Cantopop industry was never the same since. In the mid-2000s, I was not able to listen to one of the popular Hong Kong radio stations because of the audio streaming and switching to the Mac computers.
An article published on July 22, 2017 from SCMP explained the decline of Cantopop and who can be the next star to regain the footing. The link can be read here.
In 2019, a New York article writes about Denise Ho being face of Cantopop’s fight against mainland China. The link can be read here. CBC Q also has the interview with the New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan on Denise Ho, you can go here.
Getting into Beyond
Aside from the tragedies, one impact that still hits the mark among Cantopop fans has been the death of Beyond’s frontman, Wong Ka Kui. I’ve been entrenched with their music because their range can soft, slow, fast and heavy. They were mainly a rock band unlike the conventional singers in Cantopop.
Their popular tracks were often love songs towards the end of 1980s and into 1990s, it was getting into the political message. Continue reading
