TIME HONG KONG WENT TO THE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF WESTERN POP!
What made Hong Kong “Asia’s world city” was its marketing strategy of being positioned as the international host to the world as opposed to going in Reverse and returning to the rather hackneyed “Only in Hong Kong”.
The Hong Kong that most of the world will always remember is “Asia’s world city, something, by the way, that the late Tung Chee Hwa, the finest and most popular Chief Executive that Hong Kong has had always emphasised starting in 1999.
On the subject of an international Hong Kong , the secondary school I attended- KGV- was somewhere that only now one realises how much it contributed to enjoying life for the younger generation trying to find our feet in truly international Hong Kong.
Forgetting woodwork and dissecting frogs and rabbits for biology, which was never something for the animal lover in me, KGV brought together many of young multicultural Hong Kong.
Corny as it might sound, We Were The World—different nationalities from different socio economic groups happily being one.
Many of those relationships that started in forms 4 and 5 at KGV are now happily being grandparents and is something that Hong Kong should celebrate with things like “KGV: The Musical” and “KGV: The Movie”. There’s so much more that can be done- but who’s going to do it?
What we at KGV were so fortunate to have makes me feel guilty when friends of mine who went to Chinese schools tell me how they wish they had our opportunities to know and learn English and become friends with so many other different nationalities.
As for Hong Kong today, I am often confused when I see the marketing of the city go full-blown Chinese and then makes a U-turn into how “international” the horse racing is or the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens are or the importance of the business sector having an international image.
There doesn’t seem to be any continuity or strategic thinking to what’s going on and it is all a bit of some furiously wok fried and meaningless concoctions thrown against the wall and hoping something sticks. It’s amateurs at work.
Musicians and filmmakers, meanwhile, from around the world want to come to Hong Kong for its international image, and here, the city is definitely losing out to Singapore.
Singapore continues to attract big name mainstream artists and their hundreds of thousands of English speaking fans of Western music from around the region.
As for Hong Kong, it continues to go to the same old well for its sixty and seventy year old Canto Pop idols. But aren’t these artists for Hong Kong’s aging local population?
Who outside of Hong Kong, and maybe certain cities in China or pockets of Hong Kong Chinese communities around the world have heard of them? And how old would this audience be?
Those Western artists who are a mainstay of Hong Kong these days have been in the city for eons and are still recycling embarrassingly rancid versions of “Celebration” and “We Are The Champions”. No one seems to care?
For how longer must we put up with this fifth rate rubbish?
Where is the new generation of international musicians in and from Hong Kong and who are in their twenties and making music in English?
This was one of the reasons I asked my longtime friend Simon Fuller, below, to visit Hong Kong last year along with his Academy Of Pop franchise to understand the lay of the land.
Whoever he met while here didn’t seem to have a clue how any of these Fullerisms could be used and how and why strategic music marketing can give a city like Hong Kong a vibrant new energy that needs to be created by those who know A&R, economics of scale and realise that the Seventies and Eighties were almost fifty years ago.
With my friend Norman Cheng, when with Universal Music and EMI, we transformed the face of music in Hong Kong and the region including Japan.
Think we can’t do it again- and with Simon Fuller and his wonderful plan to introduce Hong Kong and the world to his Academy of Pop and China’s first Pop Princess?
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