Music by the numbers The number one musical style in Hong Kong is Cantopop - Cantonese pop music. It's been around for a long time and will probably continue on for a bit longer. And I really don't like it. It reminds me of Japanese pop, Korean pop and Taiwanese pop. Aside from the difference in languages all of these styles are essentially interchangeable - they all sound like bad 80's music. The melodies are so obvious that I've often found myself humming along to a song I've never heard before and still being able to get the tune right with about 70% accuracy.

Today I realised why I don't like Cantopop - it reminds me of the music theory classes I had to take when I was in high school. Learning about music theory is learning about how music is put together - scales, key signatures, tempo, cadences, intervals and so on. It's quite dry and I wasn't that good at it. I didn't mind studying theory and some of what I learnt has certainly helped me, but there was a point at which I wasn't able to understand what I was doing. In a typical exercise we'd be given a melody and told to write the accompanying chords. There were a set of rules that we could follow - it was all quite mathematical, but I could never remember the rules. One thing I did notice though was that all of the exercises came out essentially the same. The same chord progressions would be used over and over, and everything sounded well-ordered and predictable.

And I think that's what Cantopop is - Cantopop is what you get when you have a number of songwriters all applying the rules they learnt when they were studying music theory. There are a lot of music schools here in Hong Kong and lots of students have to pass the various levels of music performance and theory exams that prove that they can ... pass music exams. In the West a lot of people take the same exams, but interestingly a lot of popular music is written by people who haven't studied any music theory at all. I find Western popular music is much more inventive than Cantopop, J-pop, or K-pop and I think a big part of that is due to so many musicians not learning any music theory - they are freer to try things because they don't have any rules to follow.

Now, comparisons can be odious and often are completely useless. So I'm not saying that Cantopop is better or worse than Western music - I'm just saying that I don't like it, and I think I've figured out why.

tags: music | cantopop | hongkong  ¶ 6:19 PM