Ten famous songs about Hong Kong – but don’t expect them to make sense or describe life in the city
Over the years, Western pop music’s typical portrayals of Hong Kong have been ignorant, ridiculous and shallow. Here is a round-up of the best-known ones
However, the West’s fascination with Hong Kong has often been reductive. As interest in the place has grown, the more Hong Kong – as it appears in music, literature, television, works of art and video games – becomes less like a city actually populated by human beings. Nowhere is this more clear than in the portrayal of Hong Kong in Western pop music.
Even the expected Western stereotypes of Hong Kong – conical hats, rickshaws and junk boats – are mostly absent here. Sometimes, the only real allusion to Hong Kong identity comes in the form of imitation Chinese language; in these instances, it seems Hong Kong is a popular song topic thanks more to the sounds of the words “Hong” and “Kong” than for its identity and reputation.
Giorgio Biancorosso, associate professor of music at the University of Hong Kong, sums up Western pop music’s use of Hong Kong: “I think the references are tokenistic and wilfully superficial – as if parading their ignorance of the actual place [and its music] and treating it as a mere cipher or metaphor for an unknown, if reassuringly Westernised, faraway place.”
Even songs that deal with Hong Kong more literally, with actual words for example, still often only touch on the place tangentially.
To mark today’s handover anniversary, we’ve put together a collection of 10 songs featuring Hong Kong as seen through the eyes of Western musicians, as well as a few that show the city from the residents’ (both expat and local) perspective. They make for a thought-provoking, often enjoyable and sometimes just plain weird listen.
