October 2010

Someone showed me a photograph she’d had taken with a well-known local singer. She was clearly disappointed as she was unable to post this picture on her Facebook page. I wondered what was exactly preventing her from doing what most people would immediately do without a moment’s thought.
   Many celebrities in Hong Kong have to multitask in a number of entertainment-related disciplines. Agents and managers seek to maximise any
artiste’s earning potential by ensuring every possible opportunity for wringing money out of the public is fully utilised. So it happens that quite a few end up doing things at which they are notably untalented. So film actors who can’t really sing may well have to hold two hour pop concerts and singers give awkwardly wooden performances in movies.
   The actor on this woman’s photograph has what we can call ‘modest’ singing talents even though his acting abilities are indisputable. His most famous song comprises a kind of kung fu anthem, mostly tuneless shouting over a stereotypical, rehashed pastiche of ‘quasi-oriental’ riffs. This artist writes a few of his own tunes, but mostly deals with the endless mediocrity extruded by stables of songwriters.
   The vacant insipidity cranked out by the local music industry is the artistic equivalent of an endless stream of processed sludge laced with Valium. Audiences lap up this contrived manufactured drivel of the lowest order. Youthful spontaneity and angst are entirely absent, as are passion and cutting invectives on society’s injustice; meditations on love lapse no further into profundity than banal observations on occasional pain or the twee romanticising of some idealistic prepubescent delusion of love that’s so vacuous and trite it would not cause a ripple in the aesthetic torpor that necessarily imbues a typical karaoke night. In Cantopop you won’t find sedition, rebellion, anarchy or trenchant social observation, or any depth of emotion. This is surprising as discontent at the lousy local education system and lack of youth-parent communication certainly gives the local youth plenty to complain about.
   Taiwan commonly hosts open air multi-stage rock festivals, and has a burgeoning independent music scene. The few festivals that Hong Kong hosted were partial washouts and ultimately evaporated because of lack of interest or public spirited harpies who complained about the news. Hong Kongers sometimes travel to Taiwan’s music festivals, and Taipei has half a dozen venues which stage punk, rock and other acts. Taiwan has a number of indie artists who write their own songs and play their own instruments. It is a rarity to find talented individuals singing their own compositions in the Hong Kong entertainment field, and for songs to feature anything except dirges of overpowering blandness with sentimental lyrics of a type one would expect from a infatuated form four girl articulating her puppy love in a diary. The few brave artists who do struggle with the local taste for banality are sidelined Indie artists with small but loyal followings. The mass-produced local mush ships locally in craploads.
   If in the highly unlikely event that the communists are still in power in 2046, they will delight in finding a local music industry that requires only the smallest of tweaks to the manufacturing process to adjust it so that the saccharine emoting of Chase Infinity, Table for Two and Break up Club become This Party is Red, For the Motherland and Thank our Chairman for the Harvest.
   What I found odd was this singer’s request to the woman after she had taken the photo, which she was excitedly anticipating putting on a social networking site and her friends’ reaction. But the singer poured cold water on this plan. He said ‘Don’t put this on Facebook.’ Her disappointment was great. It would have been a great conversation piece for her page. So what was the reason for this request? The first thing that comes to mind is how we should guard our personal data, and every individual should have the right to ask that a photo of themselves should not be put on the internet. This is a normal request.
   However with the understanding that that when someone chooses to be a celebrity, normal rights such as ‘privacy’ become somewhat quaint, as celebrity status exchanges the notion of a private individual for that one of an individual who is now public property.
   A quick Google image search using this singer’s name English promptly turned up 624,000 images of the idol already floating around in the lawless swamp of cyberspace, free for anyone to copy. So it is extremely difficult to understand how the posting of one innocent picture of Facebook could constitute any kind of invasion of privacy or fear of one’s image being stolen or misused. Anyone wanting to ‘abuse’ the singer’s image could take their pick from the plethora of pictures already online from the half a million plus already available.
   So I can only conclude this singer’s request was yet another example of the hauteur and hubris of which celebrities are often guilty. They have no trouble pocketing the money that fans shell out for disks and concerts, yet when it comes to the tiniest of gestures of goodwill that would bring a fan considerable pleasure and delight, it’s ‘I’m too high and mighty to have my illustrious image on your grubby social network page.’