When British magazine Monocle came calling this year, asking me to write about Canto-pop’s revival in Hong Kong, I nearly dropped my phone. Years of orbiting this subject, dozens of off-the-record questions after interviews, and discussions with industry insiders, and finally, my chance was coming. How exciting.
To understand why I was so excited—and why I rewrote my first draft three times, because too many angles kept flooding in—we need to go back seven years.
Music and politics in a new city
I arrived in Hong Kong in August 2019, after working for half a year as a music journalist at Les Inrockuptibles, one of France’s largest cultural magazines. I was here for my master’s in journalism, which happened to coincide with Hong Kong making global headlines for the 2019 protests. My music journalism reflexes kicked in fast: up and down Nathan Road, where clashes with the police happened almost every night for 4 months, young people were playing the same songs on repeat—hip-hop tracks that would now get flagged for their seditious lyrics. It became obvious that the protests had shaken down more than the political system and had trickled down to the music scene. Especially hip-hop, a genre with a long history of standing up to institutions.
It felt natural to start my Hong Kong journalistic experience there, and I covered it for Slate France. This led me to an internship at a now-defunct local video platform called GoldFish TV that extensively covered youth culture during those turbulent times, including music. Through it, I found myself in places someone so new to the city wouldn’t naturally have been invited to: gigs in industrial buildings, jam sessions in hidden bars, open-air debates where local artists talked late into the night.
This is to say: my introduction to Hong Kong and its music scenes wasn’t the most common. Instead of starting with the territory’s flagship genre, Canto-pop, I discovered it much later. And I think that backward entry helped me understand Hong Kong’s musical ecosystem before I heard its most popular melodies. In many ways, it shaped how I covered the genre later on.
Living the Canto-pop revival in Hong Kong
In 2020, I realized I had some catching up to do on Canto-pop knowledge, specifically. A new wave of the genre—one I’d barely heard of until then—was apparently taking over the city, led by a boy band called Mirror, formed after a TV survival show, X-factor style.
In the indie circles, people weren’t particularly impressed. It was described to me as a “K-popified” revival of a tragically forgotten genre that “peaked in the ‘80s-90s”. In other words, it was cool to scream your heart out to Anita Mui’s The Song Of Sunset 夕陽之歌 (1989), drunk in karaoke at 4 a.m., but it wasn’t cool to follow what the scene has to offer today.
While I wasn’t particularly vibing with Mirror’s music, the effect the twelve-member band had on the city was staggering. For its hundreds of thousands of fans—queuing for hours at concerts and fan meetings—it seemed to ease the tensions and soothe the scars the city had carried since the protests, through the lockdowns. Their popularity was often framed as a symptom of the city’s turbulent times, not a reflection of their talent.
This seemingly direct link between music trends and socio-political context sparked only one thought in me: I wanted to dig deeper. Which I kind of did.
In the following years, I covered the genre through profiles for the South China Morning Post, and Tatler Asia. The underlying trends didn’t really interest the media at the time. They covered it through the Mirror phenomenon angle, which allowed them to tap into Mirror’s massive fan base for readership. But analyzing it more vertically, looking at the comeback on the DJ sets, the cover and remixes that transcended the pop music industry, didn’t seem to be a priority at the time. (To be fair, delivering substantial cultural analyses hasn’t been a priority in the city for a while. But that’s another discussion). So, my itch wasn’t satisfied.
But that was until earlier this year, when Monocle asked me to cover it for a special print edition they were producing about the city, called The Hong Kong Correspondent.
For this particular Canto-pop article, titled “Pop goes the industry”, I interviewed veteran DJ, music journalist, and lecturer at the Hong Kong Design Institute Dr. Wong Chi Chung, program host and executive music director at Commercial Radio 2 Jessica Ho, and Canto-pop singer, songwriter, and producer Kiri T. I’ve known and followed Kiri for years now, both personally and professionally, and I cherish this interview particularly. I’ve rarely seen her so vulnerable about her personal history with Canto-pop. And how could she be? Being a public figure makes that complicated sometimes.
So, in the spirit of Yapppism, I wanted to share my favourite part of the interview that didn’t make the article: the correlation between Canto-pop’s popularity, the weight of British post-colonial legacies and American cultural supremacy.
(Re)Learning to love Canto-pop
As soon as I asked whether Canto-pop—the very genre that fuels her fame today—played a significant role in her musical growth, Kiri’s answer revealed how deeply her artistic journey has been entwined with personal and social struggles.
“Growing up in the 2010s, Canto-pop wasn’t considered ‘cool,’” she told me, eating a bolo bao (Hong Kong’s famous pineapple bun) minutes before recording a new song in her studio. Obviously, the appellation “cool” is subjective. Is anything mainstream really considered cool these days? But there was something else at play. “American pop-culture and the English language held such cachet that I felt almost ashamed to claim the Canto-pop label—or even to sing in my native language.”
It was a striking admission from an award-winning artist celebrated for her work in the genre. One who was celebrating the success of her first Cantonese album A Kiridiculous Distance (2025), with a sold-out show in Macau. One who wrote Hong Kong’s fifth most played song of 2024, You gotta screw up at least once (至少做一件離譜的事). One who, while still in high school, signed a Canto-pop label deal as a songwriter. It is all the more surprising coming from someone primarily educated in a local school, raised on the sounds of icons like Sam Hui, Anita Mui, and Law Man, and who spoke Cantonese at home. Yet her confessional speaks to a systemic, generational reality: coming of age in a city where cultural value was still implicitly shaped by British postcolonial legacies and the primacy of American soft power.
“So, when I started making music, I avoided the Canto-pop label at all costs,” she admitted. “When I was in the United Kingdom for upper high school, I pretended I couldn’t speak and sing in Cantonese”.
Even her manager was surprised by this confession.
Associating your mother tongue with shame isn’t a light feeling. It can only be the result of an insidious process. The weight of being told, in a thousand small (and big) ways, that your native language and culture aren’t worthy enough. And Kiri continued to receive these messages for years, even from within the creative industry, which you’d think would be more progressive. But apparently not in the 2010s, where discussions around diversity and inclusion hadn’t hit the chat yet.
When studying at U.S.-based Berklee College of Music, she was left struggling to find her place in music as well. “Canto-pop deeply shaped me, and I realized it in jamming sessions,” she explains. “I perceived music melodically—the way Cantonese is structured. But Western music is built around rhythm, and that’s all they were willing to embrace at that point. So I had to unlearn my instincts and relearn a completely different approach.”
As she told me this, a musician she collaborates with passed through the recording studio where I was interviewing her. “Honestly, we all felt the same about Canto-pop and singing in Cantonese as young creatives,” he interjected, seemingly feeling strongly about the topic. “The golden era was over, and everything that seemed to be left from the genre were sad ballads. We didn’t want to be associated with it.”
And indeed, Kiri started her career singing in English, from 2017 to 2023, until she finally allowed herself to shine in Cantonese after the pandemic.
“For a long time, I sidelined my own language and heritage in my music,” she concluded. “This album, [the first Cantonese one] A Kiridiculous Distance, is me reclaiming it. I’d been holding that part of me back for so long. Returning to Cantonese, in my lyrics, my melodies, my sound, feels like finally closing that ridiculous distance between who I am and the music I make.”
The rest—the fans, the albums, the awards, the sold-out shows, the recognition she’d been denied—is history.
Pop music is never just about music
As you read these lines, an underlying narrative might have emerged in your minds. For a long time, Canto-pop wasn’t considered innovative. American-pop was. Similarly, Cantonese didn’t seem to be a socially desirable language to sing in. English was. Such tension between “local” and “global” culture is far from new—especially in places shaped by colonialism’s long history of cultural erasure. Hong Kong endured 156 years of it, until 1997.
“Until the 1960s, Cantonese artists could only find fame by singing English covers,” confirms Dr. Wong Chi Chung. “They covered the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and others. Cantonese was for traditional operas only. But early 1970s, a guy named Sam Hui felt the wind change and took a bold bet—he switched to original Cantonese music. That’s how he basically became the godfather of Canto-pop.”
There was, indeed, a wind of change sweeping through the world at that time. And I wonder if it would be a stretch to read the moment Canto-pop dominated the charts in the 1970s, alongside the third wave of decolonisation and the Soviet Union increasingly challenging Western hegemony? If it would be a stretch to interrogate the impact those years had on Hong Kong’s identity and representation, in the wake of a paradigm shift that challenged colonial authority, especially British imperialism?
Similarly, is it a stretch to understand this renewed interest in the genre, post-2019, as a way for the city to reaffirm its unique identity amid China’s looming presence? To look at the soft-power vacuum the United States has left in the past decade—a vacuum that has given way to the celebration of non-English genres such as reggaeton and K-pop—and see room for Hong Kong-born culture to breathe?
I wonder.
We’ve been theorizing about the globalization of local culture for years now. About the decentralization and demonopolization of music. It’s a shift arriving at a moment in history when the Western world, and particularly the English-speaking United States, no longer leads the charge in cultural cool or innovation.
While the English language still dominates the charts, its grip is loosening. Spotify revealed that in 2025, 16 different languages appeared in its Global Top 50. Rosalía sings in 14 languages on Lux. Bad Bunny, a Spanish-singing artist, is the most-streamed artist in the world. And those are just the obvious facts. I’m not even getting into the peripheral regional movements that are reshaping the industry from its outskirts, and that will probably never be credited.
But when it comes to Canto-pop, I’ll continue wondering.
First, because my understanding of the scene is far from complete—I am a foreigner in this city, after all, and Hong Kong’s history and identity are obviously much more complex than what I’m hinting here, in this little Substack. Second, because reducing music to a mere social reaction fails to recognise the many artistic souls that defied the odds and championed a blossoming industry—here, we mentioned the big stars, yes, but there are also the ones working in the shadows, the indie innovators and the ones who fought record labels from the inside.
On top of this, Canto-pop is certainly not a simple reaction to Western imperialism, nor is it politically neutral. Actually, many see this revival (supported by the government through new stadiums and concert series) as a way to neutralize and drown out the city’s independent and more politically charged creative scene, replacing it with a safer genre like Canto-pop (or Mando-pop)—something I explored in an interview I recently gave to Les Inrockuptibles (back to them!).
As incomplete as this presentation is, multiple realities can co-exist at the same time. Kiri’s personal relationship with her language and culture, which didn’t make the article, only gave me the occasion to dig a bit deeper here. Identity and cultural movements are complex to measure and theorize, and there is never a sole version of the truth. But Canto-pop, like any genre that becomes a cultural heartbeat, will never exist in a vacuum.
