Yiu Fai Chow , Jeroen de Kloet , Leonie Schmidt, It’s My Party: Tat Ming Pair and the Postcolonial Politics of Popular Music in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
How do we write about Hong Kong at a time when repression, failure, and depression seem to dominate discussions and shape the imagination of the city, particularly after the passage of the National Security Law in June 2020 following China’s crackdown on the anti-extradition protests a year earlier? If Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance—a foundational text in Hong Kong studies—captures the ethos of anxiety surrounding the city’s imminent erasure after 1997, an anxiety that continues to grow, It’s My Party: Tat Ming Pair and the Postcolonial Politics of Popular Music in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) offers a departure from this long-standing anxiety by focusing on resilience and hope. Yiu Fai Chow, Jeroen De Kloet, and Leonie Schmidt argue that “the current geopolitical situation of Hong Kong asks for moments of hope, for rays of light, for ways to stay resilient” (8). They locate this hope not in explicitly political realms but in popular music, specifically in the iconic indie duo Tat Ming Pair. Formed in 1984 by Tats Lau and Anthony Wong, Tat Ming is renowned for their enduring engagement with Hong Kong’s society, politics, and history in their music. The duo has survived increasing pressure in Hong Kong and a de facto ban in mainland China due to their active participation in the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and the protests in 2019. The book approaches Tat Ming Pair as a method to unsettle hegemonic narratives of Hong Kong’s past, present, and future, as well as to decolonize popular music studies more broadly.
Tat Ming’s resilience in continuing to produce music challenges, first of all, as Chapter 2 argues, the clichéd claim of the death of Cantopop, often invoked in comparison to the genre’s commercial success during its “Golden Era” in the 1980s. Contrary to this nostalgic narrative, which serves as a reminder of colonial Hong Kong, the authors highlight the surge of indie pop music in the past decade. This music engages closely with the city’s social issues, in contrast to the easy-to-sing love songs that dominate the mainstream Cantopop scene. The vibrancy of indie music points to the possibility, as Anthony Wong envisions, of a future where Hong Kong pop music can thrive without being heavily reliant on mainland China’s market, which remains crucial for more mainstream music practitioners.
Chapter 3, a textual and comparative analysis of Tat Ming’s concerts in 2012 and 2017, vividly illustrates the duo’s resilience in experimenting with different ways of being political amid shifting geopolitical circumstances. Both concerts employed visuals that critiqued British colonial rule, Chinese capitalist authoritarianism, and global neoliberalism, thereby challenging the powerful narratives that shape Hong Kong under these forces. The authors note a shift from the overt political satire of geopolitics in the 2012 concert to a focus on collective remembrance of local history and the everyday life of the city in 2017, partly as a response to tightening censorship after 2014. This chapter effectively addresses one of the book’s central aims: rethinking the relationship between music and politics. While some prominent Western scholarship considers music political only when it inspires collective action and public deliberation, the authors confront this bias by showing how, in authoritarian contexts, Tat Ming formulates different approaches to music as a political project. Citing the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, the authors envision a future of possibilities found not necessarily in explicitly political street protests, but in the more mundane acts of being together at Tat Ming’s concerts.
However, Tat Ming is not without its internal contradictions. Although the authors state early in the book that their focus on finding hope in Tat Ming and Hong Kong’s popular music led them to distance themselves from critique as the default mode of academic writing, they still offer a bit of critical observation. For example, they note that Tat Ming’s 2012 concert presented the influx of mainlanders to Hong Kong as a risk, which “runs the danger of aligning uncomfortably with the rising anti-mainlander sentiments that characterize today’s Hong Kong” (102). In my opinion, however, this tension perhaps only adds to the complexity of Tat Ming, defying a hagiographic portrayal.
Chapter 4, an examination of Tat Ming’s (primarily Anthony Wong) engagement with queer politics disrupts the established narrative of queer culture and politics in postcolonial Hong Kong that is captured in Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s famous metaphor of “undercurrents.” Leung uses the metaphor to describe the opacity, ambiguity, and invisibility, as opposed to the confrontational identity politics in the West, that characterize Hong Kong’s queer culture. Notoriously known for his campy and often androgynous aesthetics on stage, as well as his experimentation with alternative gender and sexuality in music and his long-time reticence about his own sexuality, Wong’s queerness epitomized the queer politics of “undercurrents.” His coming out in 2012, followed by active involvement in local queer activism, however, marked a shift to a queer politics of being “out in the undercurrents.” The authors argue that Wong’s shift to identity politics must be understood in relation to the city’s broader political context. Specifically, Wong’s “coming out” as a gay man holds symbolic meaning as a form of disidentification with the hegemonic “coming home” narrative—Hong Kong’ return to Beijing’s rule—that China vigorously imposes on Hong Kong and its citizens.
What remains unaddressed, however, is the cost of this identity politics, which often involves categorizing those outside it as backward or politically incorrect. My curiosity lies in how Wong’s statement—“My coming out represents Hong Kong’s tolerance and freedom… Hong Kong always cherishes this: freedom,” which is factually problematic—interacts with or could be appropriated by right-wing localist positions. Sociologist Travis Kong’s recent work reveals that many younger gay men in Hong Kong align with a homocolonialist discourse that equates Hong Kong with civilization and mainland China with backwardness. Regardless of whether or not it stems from the authors’ intentional avoidance of critique in academic writing, I believe a more critical exploration of this tension would offer a more nuanced understanding of Tat Ming.
Chapter 5 provides a production analysis of Tat Ming’s 2017 concert, examining how the duo and their collaborators in the music industry navigated the tension between political considerations and commercial concerns. What is particularly commendable about the authors’ analysis is their illumination of the role of contingency in shaping Tat Ming’s concert performance and stage aesthetics. For instance, the arrangement of a boy and a girl walking in a uniform procession at the beginning of a sequence intended as a commentary on Beijing’s push for patriotic education was also influenced by the city’s policy regarding child labor, which requires children to finish their performances and leave the concert early. This chapter also reveals how Tat Ming and their collaborators recalibrated a straightforward articulation of politics in favor of a more opaque mode of performance.
Chapter 6 investigates Tat Ming’s legacy by presenting testimonials from cultural workers in the creative industry who have been influenced by the duo. This is followed by the final chapter, which features a collection of personal accounts from fans around the world sharing their encounters with Tat Ming’s music. Each fan’s heartfelt words are accompanied by an image one of the authors captured of Hong Kong. As the authors clarify, they intend this chapter to be a tribute “to the affective, evocative, and future-making potentials of popular music” (26).
It’s My Party’s treatment of Tat Ming, in my view, exemplifies a form of “reparative reading” as formulated by the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick distinguishes reparative reading from what she calls “paranoid reading,” which refers to a mode of interpretation that ceaselessly exposes, diagnoses, and critiques insidious forms of suffering and abjection, even in ostensibly welcoming environments, while investing in negative feelings. In contrast, “reparative reading” seeks pleasure and “wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (2003:149). Hong Kong, caught in political depression, is characterized by an excess of “paranoid reading,” an example of which is the politics of homocolonialism. A prevailing way of narrating Hong Kong in international media and popular discourse is predominantly mediated through a paranoid sensibility driven by hate, suspicion, and anxiety. One of the greatest merits of It’s My Party is that it provides a reparative reading of the Hong Kong Story in imagining a future not weighed down by depression but, as the authors repeatedly assert, sustained by hope. Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s astute observation from 16 years ago—that the most creative tales of postcolonial Hong Kong are told through a queer lens which plays with ambiguity and ambivalence—still holds true. This time, however, queer signals more of a hope for an alternative future, as Chow, De Kloet, and Schmidt powerfully demonstrate in the book and as its title suggests—a better future yet to come.
Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.