Just Finished Reading: My Cantopop Nights: A Memoir in Songs
Once upon a time, I was puzzled by people who were asking what is a podcast. All along, I thought it was pretty clear: just go read the specs and see if that thing conforms to it. After a while, I realized these people are talking about podcasts as a genre, not a technology. This is not about RSS and enclosures. This is not about following and downloading. It is about the style of an audio program, about people talking to each other with microphones.
And that is why there are people who claimed they have been making podcasts in the 1990s, before podcasts were invented. That's why there are people who insisted that videos cannot be podcasts, even though I have been watching podcasts such as Sesame Street's Word on the Street and NBC Nightly News on my iPod as podcasts in the 2000s. These people are wrong, obviously. :-)
Sometimes, we get angry for very nerdy reasons.
What is Cantopop, then? Is it songs from Hong Kong? Or perhaps also songs in the Cantonese language? Maybe it can be both. After all, Hong Kong as a city and Cantonese as a language are both tightly wound identities. You think of one, and you get the other, and vice versa. Even though Hong Kong is more than the Cantonese language, and vice versa.
But then, in Apple Music, Cantopop is a label in the Genre field, alongside with pop and jazz and blues. How does that even work? Sure, there are a lot of Cantonese pop, but there are also genres from the city and in the language. Okay, classifying any songs to one single style is already problematic. Lumping all the songs from one city and all the songs from one language into a single 'style' is even worse. Perhaps love ballads is a genre, a popular representative that is, of course, just a representation and by no means complete?
Cantopop is a strange identity for a song. Half city, half language, and half musical style.
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Emma-Lee Moss' memoir is about identities, of people, of homes, and of a city. And, of course, Cantopop.
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Link:
- My Cantopop Nights: A Memoir in Songs, by Emma-Lee Moss
- ‘The Story of Hong Kong is the Sound of It’: The Cross-Cultural Joy of the City’s Cantopop Music, by Emma-Lee Moss, as told to Katie Goh, The Guardian
- Emma-Lee Moss: ‘Hong Kong Ceased to Exist as I’d Known it’, by Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Observer
- “Hong Kong, Cantopop and the Memory of Home: Emma-Lee Moss’s My Cantopop Nights”, by Susan Blumberg-Kason, Cha