The Canto-pop comeback: Hong Kong’s beloved brand of music returns with a bang
- Canto-pop’s once ‘hopeless’ outlook after age of Four Heavenly Kings is gone
- New fans are upbeat about diversity of themes in today’s songs
Eclipsed by the rise of K-pop and Mandopop, Canto-pop’s popularity went dark for many years, until it found its voice again.
For decades, it felt as if the historical performance on July 1, 1997, at Hong Kong’s handover, also immortalised the peak for Canto-pop: when superstars the “Four Heavenly Kings” and George Lam Tsz-cheung, Alan Tam Wing-lun, Sally Yeh, and Faye Wong delivered a rare hand-in-hand performance.
That night, fans screamed with excitement at a celebration that was internationally televised. After all, they had been headliners in the entertainment industry, icons of Canto-pop’s golden age who made Hongkongers swell with hometown pride.
Their songs, which centred on saccharine romances and love fantasies, had dominated Hong Kong pop culture for more than two decades, providing the backing track to the city’s prosperity and stability.
Their glamour alone was able to mask the genre’s decline. In fact, by the mid-1990s, record sales for top acts in Canto-pop had begun to fall. Over the next three years, those numbers would plummet by more than half, from HK$1.853 billion (US$236 million) in 1995 to HK$0.916 billion in 1998, according to the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (Hong Kong Group).
It would take more than two decades for that pride to re-emerge, through the voices of a whole new generation of artists.
