Popular music in Hong Kong (Kitty Fung)
Posted by kittyfung on October 28, 2007
The cantonpop music industry has turned into a “culture industry”, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno would say, it has the two elements of the discourse of mass culture. First, it produces lots of music that fits into the capitalist economy, the cultural homogeneity with all the standardized music, making songs with the same old familiar melodies, so that people can go to “sing K” which is for the karaoke business to make more profit with the music record companies. Second, the predictability can always be found, by using the formula of success, say by hiring the young EEG boy band to sing pop songs about love, that fulfuls the teenage market for the fans to buy into their images and fame. The mass consumption of marketing standardization has marked the alikeness of music we are buying into, the difference between songs are almost illusory.
Say for instance, the few big music corporations, such as Sony, BMI, Universal Music, they all tend to promote their products associated with their artists by conspicuous production of massive amount of cash investment. The budgets spent on promotion has proved beyond that the entertainment industry of the music culture is largely affected by fame and the high frequency of publicity. The more we get brainwash by the music in we hear on roadshow on the bus, on TV commercials, on the commercials we see on the platform’s screen in the MTR, all of these has yet created the so-called cultural trends of what is popular in the market. We as audience should be aware of the media, that is does not determine cultural trends, but has unconsciously but forcefully immerse the ideologies of what is “cool” and “hip” into our minds, and that such coersive penetration of cultural evolution is trapped by the industry’s methods of making profit.
The “new” form of entertainment has become a commodity, where culture itself is made into a commodity. This has to deal with capitalism, as its basic nature is of exploitation and the possibility of social change, the system only emphasized on profit making, and that propertyless class are oppressed by the propertied class. The ownership of the entertainment industry has to related to media and ideological control, as media is seen as reproducing and reinforcing notions of capitalism. As we always have social conflict between classes, the psuedo- individualization of music assembles songs that claims to be original, but in fact are only mass produced or with superficial differences only. Pop music standardization has turned culture into an empty and meaningless commodity to be bought and sold, and ultimately thrown away when it does not engaged with profit making at last. Such as the non mainstream music, the criticism of rock music does not challenge people to think and reflect upon the problems underlying the society, but offer an escape from reality through illusion and fantasy. The existence of social inequality has still remain unsolved, instead the mass media advance the habit of consumerism. To concude, pop music in Hong Kong has no class class revolution.
