This chapter examines the reconstruction of a number of western pop and rock songs in the Cantopop and Mandapop repertoire, with particular emphasis on the musical output of the Beijing-born, Hong Kong-based ‘empress’ of Cantopop and Mandapop, Faye Wong, who has generated more interest in the Western world than most of her peers, outside the relatively closed diasporic world of Mandarin and Cantonese-language pop music. She is known in the West mainly as an actress in Wong-kar Wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express, which included a ‘cinematic music video’ (Witzleben 2000) featuring her Cantonese version of the Irish group the Cranberries’ song ‘Dreams’, and to a lesser extent for her role in Wong kar-Wai’’s star-studded 2004 film 2046. Faye Wong has gradually amassed a significant body of Western fans, known generically as ‘Fayenatics’¹, despite only rarely performing or recording songs in English.

Wong has recorded and performed versions of songs in Cantonese and Mandarin by US, UK, Scottish and Irish artists such as the Cranberries, Tori Amos, the Sundays, Everything But the Girl, and the Cocteau Twins, in the process negotiating an ‘in-between’ position linking mainstream Cantopop and alternative rock music. Her incorporation of both mainstream and non-mainstream songs and musical elements into her repertoire led her to be referred to in the Chinese music industry press in 1994 as Faye Chu Lau Tze Yam, a term meaning ‘the voice of Faye’s mainstream’, but also ‘the voices of the non-mainstream’ in spoken Cantonese, which could also be translated as ‘Fayestream’². This indicaties that she could almost be said to occupy her own category in the Chinese pop music spectrum, and she has continued to combine mainstream pop songs with more ‘alternative’, even avant-garde oriented tracks throughout her career.

There are many examples of re-interpretations of western pop songs in Cantopop and Mandapop, drawing on what Witzleben (1998: 472) has called a ‘venerable and well-respected tradition in Chinese opera’ called tian ci, in which pre-existing melodies are set to new lyrics. Importantly, as Witzleben has observed, the adherence to the tian ci tradition of appropriating the tunes of western and foreign songs in Cantopop is a long-standing one, ‘and has never had the stigma which is attached to the term “cover version”’ (ibid.1998: 472). This is partly a by-product of the craft of song lyric writing in Cantopop, which is practiced independently by a large number of artists and generally considered as a quite separate art from musical song composition. Lin Xi, who has worked extensively with Faye Wong since her debut album Shirley in 1989, is considered to be one of the most distinctive Hong Kong-based lyric writers, and as Fung and Curtin have noted, his highly impressionistic and poetic lyrics ‘are charged with metaphors and allegories’ (2002: 281) which are often very difficult to translate. In a biography of Wong which appeared in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1998, Brave to Be Myself, Lin Xi’s lyrics were described as ‘‘‘’imagistic’”: like prose poems. Their language is not fixed, in places its meaning is vague. It takes you into an hallucinatory world of sensitive intelligence’ (Wong and Shue 1998: 102). The comparison to prose poems is noteworthy, given that two of the English song lyrics Wong has adapted, by Tori Amos and Ben Watt, were also written as prose poems.

Distinctive examples of tian ci in Cantopop include the late Cantopop actress and singing star Anita Mui Yim-Fong’s controversial song about seduction and the frustrations of sexual repression, ‘Bad Girl’ (‘Huai N’Thai’), first recorded in 1985, a Cantonese version of Scottish singer Sheena Easton’s song ‘Strut’. This song, which contained Chinese lyrics written by Lin Zhenquiang which are completely unrelated to Easton’’s original song, became an Anita Mui signature tune throughout the Chinese diaspora, although its English language source was completely unknown. ‘Bad Girl’ did contain a chorus in English, ‘why, why, tell me why’, which rhymed with the Cantonese title, and segued into the Cantonese for ‘Why can’t I let myself go?’, as well as incorporating other English words, ‘Help me’ and ‘Midnight’. ‘Bad Girl’ was banned in Mainland China in the 1990s for its perceived salacious content (see Witzleben 1999: 247), but remained in Mui’s concert repertoire as part of a medley, sometimes introduced in English as ‘Bad Girl’, until her death in 2003 (and was included in her final Sydney concert in that year). It even spawned a later song in Mui’s repertoire, with Cantonese lyrics by Terry Chan, and the title and chorus in English, called ‘Big Bad Girl’, recorded in 1995.³

Other notable examples of Cantopop songs being launched on the back of English language originals, although with a more guaranteed knowledge of the originals by Chinese audiences, include Taiwan-born and Canada-raised Sally Yeh’s 1985 version of Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ (retitled ‘Two Hundred Degrees’); Sarah Wong’s 1988 version of Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Should be So Lucky’ (which became ‘Please Don’t be So Clingy’); and Angela Pang’s 1992 version of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ (‘Make Me Shake My Body’). As Eric Chu (2003) has pointed out, many such cover versions remain very close, or even identical, to the originals in terms of their musical settings, and sometimes there are even affinities between the Cantonese lyrics and the sense of the original English lyrics. Chu also notes that up to ten Cantopop and Mandapop albums are released every week in Hong Kong, many incorporating a wide variety of different musical styles ranging from heavy metal to techno to pop ballads, and most spend no more than five weeks in the charts, so an extensive demand for available melodies leads to a widespread appropriation of western songs, including French, Spanish, German, and Italian originals, along with songs from Japan, Korea, other Asian countries and the Middle East. Appropriations of musical phrases, and snippets from sources ranging from classical to film and television themes to pop songs, are also common (one of Faye Wong’s music videos, for example, for the song ‘Stop Halfway’, directly cites Peter Gabriel’s music video ‘Sledgehammer’, with an aeroplane flying around Wong’s head). But as Chu (2003: 6) notes:

There has been no anxiety involved in Mandapop and Cantopop covers, the composers are always credited and the copyright fully paid for, although … when it comes to sounds and instruments that are country-specific, it’s a different matter (2003: 6).

Cantonese and Mandarin lyrics virtually ensure that the songs become ‘indigenised’ to the extent that the original source is frequently forgotten, or becomes a distant echo, as in the case of ‘Cold War’ and ‘Person in a Dream’, Faye Wong’s versions of Tori Amos’ ‘Silent All These Years’, and the Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’’, both of which she first recorded in 1993 and which she sang in identical versions to the originals in her 2004 ‘Live @Hong Kong’ concert, to rapturous applause. Recent concerts by Faye Wong have also included English language cover versions of Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Thank You For Hearing Me’ (an intriguing rendition in that it that effectively removes the scathingly ironic overtones of the original), Burt Bacharach’s Dusty Springfield evergreen ‘The Look of Love’, and Deborah Harry and Blondie’s hit ‘Heart of Glass’. But such examples of ‘straight’ cover versions of English-language songs are relatively rare in Wong’s repertoire, have not been included in any of her studio recordings, and occupy a different role to her Mandarin and Cantonese re-settings of English language songs.

Raised on Appropriation: The Emergence of Cantopop and Mandapop

In her article ‘Cantopop on Emigration from Hong Kong’, Joanna Ching-Yun Lee traces the origin of the English-language term ‘Cantopop’ (also used by Hong Kong writers, and sometimes referred to as ‘Canto-pop’) to a 1978 article in Billboard by Hans Ebert, revising the term ‘Cantorock’, which he had previously used in 1974 to describe Hong Kong’s locally produced rock music (1992b:14). The term ‘Mandapop’ (or Mando-pop) was later added to refer to Mandarin-language popular songs, which were often versions of Cantopop songs sung by the same singers with different lyrics ‘to fit the different rhyme and tonal patterns of Cantonese and Mandarin’ (Lee and Witzleben 2002: 355). Mandapop began to be marketed in Taiwan and the People’’s Republic of China in the 1990s, although both terms are confined to the English language.

The earliest Cantopop singing star was Sam Hui Koon-Kit (Xu Guanjie), who began his career in the English-language cover band Lotus, and who emerged as a solo artist singing in Cantonese in 1974, spearheading a Hong Kong native language song movement which led to the virtual extinction of the English language from Cantopop, a tendency which continues to the present. Hui sometimes combined topical Cantonese lyrics with western tunes, as in his version of Bill Haley and the Comets’ 1955 hit ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which was transformed into a satirical song about inflation and rising prices in Hong Kong (see Oi-Kuen Man 1997 for an analysis). Lee (1992:14)ref) describes Cantopop as ‘a new genre characterised by a distinctly British-American popular music style’, emerging after Mandarin language songs, which had evolved from Shanghai film songs, lost their popularity in Hong Kong in the early 1970s. As elsewhere, tThe Beatles’ visit to Hong Kong in 1964 was particularly influential on the local music scene, and Hong Kong pop music in the late 1960s and early 1970s frequently involved local artists ‘performing English-language cover versions’ (Lee and Witzleben 2002:, 354), with songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Joe Cocker and the Andrew Lloyd Weber/Tim Rice musical Jesus Christ Superstar proving particularly popular (Witzleben 1998: 470). Witzleben also notes that there is also an extensive repertoire in Cantopop drawn from Japanese pop songs, citing a boxed CD of 55 of the ‘most important’ songs by the singer Nakajima Miyuki which have been covered in Cantonese and Mandarin versions, including one of Faye Wong’s signature songs, ‘Fragile Woman’ (1998: 472).

John Erni (1998: 62) has suggested that due to its predominantly surface orientation, Cantopop, succeeds in capturing ‘the permanent in-betweenness of our existence and our desire’ (1998: 62) through three prominent and prevalent features, all of which could be applied to the re-contextualisation of western pop songs: its lack of concern with differentiating the original from the copy; its commitment to ‘endless repetition and recombinance’ (ibid.: 60); and its ready combination with karaoke as a means of representing ‘the cultural condition of surface belongingness’ (ibid.: 61,60). Often derided as bland, middle of the road, shallow and consumerist by both western and eastern commentators (see Cheung 1997, Tsang 1999, Chan 1999, Western 2001, Witzleben 1994:452), Cantopop nonetheless contains its musically and politically adventurous aspects, most notably in the 1980s output of the duo Tat Ming Pair (see Lee 1992), both of whom have worked with Faye Wong.

Faye Wong’’s tian ci

Fung and Curtin (2002) have provided a reasonably comprehensive overview of Faye Wong’s career up to 2001, although they overstress her contribution to gender politics and make misleading comparisons to the ‘Madonna phenomenon’ and the Spice Girls (2002: 265), as well as reproducing a number of inaccuracies in song and album titles. Wong’s first significant cover song occurs on her fourth album, No Regrets, released in 1993, with ‘Starting from Tomorrow’, a Cantonese version of British duo Everything But the Girl’s hauntingly melancholic ‘bedsit ballad’ ‘The Road’, the rather overlooked final track on their 1990 album The Language of Life, which had been written and sung by Ben Watt. This stood out from the relatively mediocre roster of Cantopop tracks on No Regrets for Wong’s strikingly pellucid rendition of its mournful melody, which on the EBTG original had Stan Getz playing a soaring tenor sax, over subdued piano and orchestra. Lin Xi’s lyrics are about a woman resolving to break up with her lover after recollecting her memories of him and ‘playing the role of a weak woman for one more day’,⁴ and although they fail to match the poetic qualities of Watt’s lyrics, and the musical setting is a rather lacklustre copy of the original, Wong’s lustrous, opera-trained soprano voice draws out qualities of emotion and coloratura from the melody in the vocal line which easily outdo Watt’s rather low-key rendition. The song, a highly unusual, ‘alternative’ choice for the Cantopop canon, remained in Wong’s repertoire for a few years, and was included on her 1995 Live in Concert album. A Mandarin version of the song entitled ‘Weak’, with lyrics by Pan Li Yu, also about a relationship breakup, was included on her 1994 album Mystery. It was a harbinger of change ahead in Wong’s repertoire.

Wong’s 100 Thousand Whys?, released in September 1993, marked a breakthrougha breakthrough in terms of her definition as a Cantopop artist, as she began to actively embody alternative western rock styles. The album included Cantonese versions of Sting and the Police’s well-known song ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da DaDo Do Da Da’, a Barry White song, ‘Rainy Days Without You’, and ‘Seduce Me’, a Miyuki Nakajima song, and two songs with English titles, Helen Hoffner’’s ‘Summer of Love’ (sung in Cantonese) and a ballad, ‘Do We Really Care’, sung in English. There were enough standard Cantopop songs, like the opening track, ‘Lau Fei Fei’, to placate her fans, and like its predecessor, the album sold more than 300,000 copies in Hong Kong, and was the best selling album of 1993. But the undoubted tour de force of the album was ‘Cold War’, Wong’s version of Tori Amos’s song ‘Silent All These Years’, in an identical musical setting, with insistent piano backing, spare orchestral embellishments and double-tracked choruses, with Wong’s vocal intonation and coloratura following Amos’s quite closely. Lin Xi’s lyrics, however, despite the political overtones of the song’s title, maintain little of the implicit sense of Amos’s rather surreal, poetic original, which since its appearance on the 1991 album Little Earthquakes, and its connection with ‘Me and a Gun’’, a song about being raped, has become an anthem of rape and child abuse, and was re-released as a single to raise funds for a charity organisation which Amos co-founded, RAINN (the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network). Wong’s ‘Cold War’, in contrast, is a relatively conventional ‘relationship song’ about the lack of communication between a couple, and a conflict of understanding that is never expressed. The chorus runs:

Facing each other not saying a word/ As if you and I have a rapport/ Never wanting any childish squabbles/ But our expressions silently hinting that this is a cold war/ How many years together without a word?

A vague trace of the ‘silence’ and the ‘years’ from the Amos song is maintained, and the lyrics even mention a metaphorical mime artist who becomes symbolic of the pretence and simulation sustaining the relationship, but there is no hint of any sexual violence, which would of course be inadmissible in a Chinese context. The sense of the Cantonese lyrics of ‘Cold War’ is in fact closer to the Tori Amos song ‘China’, also on Little Earthquakes, which uses the image of the Great Wall of China to embody distance, separation and conflict in a relationship. This suggests an unwitting element of cultural exchange between the two artists, although they have reportedly never made contact. ‘Cold War’ remains one of Wong’s most popular songs, and has remained in her repertoire for twelve years.⁵ According to Wang Fei: the Empress’’s Style:

‘Cold War’ was the first appearance of ‘Fayestream’ music. This was the beginning of her unique vocalisation. Her use of a nasal tone, very rich in its features, was a formal invocation of Amos’’ original vocal. There has always been a tradition of re-wording songs in Chinese in Hong Kong, and Wong was acting within this. What was different was the song she had re-worded was a little different in nature from the popular vogue. (Unattributed author 1999: p 33).

Wong’s 1994 album Random Thoughts, her first album under the name Wang Fei, consolidated the radical new departure of ‘Cold War’. Stefan Graman describes it as

probably one of the most important albums in Hong Kong music history … Even though it did not bring on a revolutionary change in the Hong Kong music scene, its contribution to the growth of the Hong Kong music industry is not to be underestimated. (Graman All About Ah Faye 2001)

At the time of this album Wong had begun to hang out on the Beijing rock scene with alternative, dissident punk-styled musicians such as Cui Jian, the Taiwanese rocker He Yong (famous for an angry punk anthem entitled ‘Garbage Dump’ before attempting to burn his hopuse down and becoming institutionalised) and Dou Wei, who were part of the new Beijing alternative rock movement of the 1990s. Dou Wei was a singer, guitarist, flautist and drummer who had played in the well-known Beijing heavy rock group Heibao (Black Panther), and had begun to embody the musical influence of the Cocteau Twins in his band Zuomeng (Dream the Dream), before starting a solo career in 1994, and later renouncing rock music entirely in favour of spiritual development. Wong married Dou Wei in July 1996, and the couple had a daughter, but were divorced in 1999. Nonetheless Dou had a lasting influence on the change in direction in Wong’s music, and played an active role as a producer in her work, as well as playing drums on some of her tracks and with her on tour. Random Thoughts was co-produced by Wong, Wei and Beijing rock artist Zhang Yatung, and was Faye’s first completely ‘alternative’ album, which also brought her new audiences on the mainland. As Mabel Cheung’s 2002 film Beijing Rocks (Mega Star/Media Asia) was to show almost a decade later, the Beijing rock scene of the 1990s was regarded by some Hong Kong musicians as an authentic source of vital, alternative, cutting edge rock music which exposed the bland commercialism and artificiality of the Hong Kong music scene, despite the common perception in Hong Kong of mainlanders as ‘country bumpkins’, which Faye had suffered from with her first album Shirley Wong (1989).

The title track of Random Thoughts and a song entitled ‘Know Oneself and Each Other’ were Cantonese re-settings of two songs by the Cocteau Twins, ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Know Who You Are At Every Age’, from their 1993 album Four-Calendar Café. The Cocteau Twins’ glossolalia vocals and dreamy, jangly, ethereal guitars - a constant feature of the Random Thoughts album - were a strong influence on Wong’s work for the next four years, and according to Max Woodworth (2004) in the Taipei Times:

Wong shares the same distant-sounding, high pitched siren voice of the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, and the gauzy aesthetic of the Twins’ album covers even made its way onto Wong’s album cover art (2004).

The cover of Random Thoughts was also something of a new departure for Cantopop. Instead of a photo of Faye, it consisted of Chinese characters in various different sizes and shades of black and grey, while the photo of Wong on the back cover featured her with short hair and tank top, a tomboy image which she later cultivated in Chungking Express and which led to her celebration as a gay icon (see Hsiao-Hung Chang, 1998: 291). Simon Reynolds has characterised the Cocteau Twin’s ‘wordless siren-songs’ appropriately as ‘oceanic rock’, comparing them to Helène Cixoux’s pre-Oedipal ‘écriture feminine’:

The baby-talk nonsense of their song titles and Liz Fraser’s vocals, which do without any hard consonants or fricatives, are all labial, take us back to the earliest love affair of all, that of mother and child. The Cocteaus are like mother’s song, all succour and softness, closeness without having to say anything at all. (Reynolds 1990: 130).

With Wong herself giving birth to a daughter at the end of 1996 and appearing pregnant on the cover of her 1997 album Toys, the resonances with motherhood are appropriate, especially as she appeared to take these aspects of the Scottish duo to heart, and has been quoted as saying ‘I like the Cocteau Twins’ music because I feel that in their musical thinking I have something in common with them’.⁶ While the title track ‘Random Thoughts’ contained lyrics by Lin Xi which describe the intoxication, emotional conflict and turbulence of being in love, and ‘Know Oneself and Each Other’ also contained lyrics by Lin Xi, both songs were almost identical musical settings of the Cocteau Twins originals, and a number of the other songs on the album, including ‘Pledge’, also had a Cocteau Twins-like ‘band sound’. But ‘Person in a Dream’, a faithful rendition of the musical setting of the Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’ from their 1992 Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? album, remains the stand-out track on Random Thoughts, with its driving, jangling rhythm guitar and skittering drum patterns. Faye even managed to adapt the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan’s distinctively Irish, high-pitched, lilting intonation, especially on the abruptly-ending long stresses of the ‘’la ah la’’s in the song’’s chorus, which are rendered in the Chinese lyrics as ‘Ah-la-ha, la-ya-ha, ya-ha-ah’, and which Faye subsequently incorporated into other songs, suggesting that both O’Riordan’s and Fraser’s Celtic intonations may have had a lasting impact on her singing style, along with Sinead O’Connor’s.⁷

In her 1994 album Please Myself, in many ways a less radical collection of songs, Wong experiments with a shorter lyrical form, clearly influenced by the Cocteau Twins, in both the title track, where she sings a wordless refrain, and the slow, sweet, melodic ‘Float’, which has lyrics by Lin Xi and a refrain of ‘la la’s. The stand-out track is ‘Being Criminal’, a version of British independent group tThe Sundays’ song ‘Here’’s Where the Story Ends’, from their 1990 album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. This is somewhat in the vein of the Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’, with a jangling guitar pulse, and Faye’s vocals follow Harriet Wheeler’s soaring, lilting choruses. 1995’s Di-Dar continues Wong’s independent orientation, with the influence of the Cocteau Twins and Dou Wei apparent in some of the songs, and the title track, a self-composed piece with lyrics by Lin Xi, featuring a video strongly influenced by the ‘goth’ style of tThe Cure, with Faye wearing dark make-up. The Decadent Sound of Faye (1995) was a collection of cover songs in tribute to Taiwanese singer Teresa Tang, who had died tragically in 1995 of an asthma attack while on tour in Thailand. The word ‘decadent’ was an ironic echo of the epithet used by PRC apparatchiks to condemn Tang’s music. Wong’s association with Dou Wei and the Beijing rock scene, as well as her new-found penchant for trip hop and independent rock, was clearly influencing her musical orientation as well as her rebellious attitude to the music industry, albeit in a subdued and subtle way.

Wong continued to absorb the vocal influence of Liz Fraser (with a touch of Dolores O’’Riordan), to the point of recording two indecipherable, wordless songs, ‘Where?’ and ‘Imagine’, along with an instrumental by Dou Wei, on her 1996 album Restless (also known as ‘Impatience’). This album, arguably her most radically independent and experimental to date, also contained two Cocteau Twins songs, which they were specially invited to write for her, although they never met up in person. ‘Fracture’ and ‘Killjoy’, both with lyrics by Lin Xi, were Cantonese versions of songs the Cocteau Twins later released as ‘Tranquil Eye’ and ‘Touch Upon Touch’. Both songs have an abstract, opaquely poetic quality, with ‘Fracture’ dealing with the results of a ‘fatigue of love’ and a ‘tragic embrace’. The lyrics of ‘Killjoy’ (also known as ‘Repressing Happiness’) are confusingly opaque (and not helped by the virtual indecipherability of the only available English translation on Graman’s website). The rest of the album is suffused with the influence of the Cocteau Twins, and uniquely the music and lyrics of almost all the songs are composed by Faye, giving it an unusual coherence of style and content which contrasts with the standard stylistic ‘scattergun’ approach of most of her albums and Cantopop in general. The production and arrangements of Zhang Yatung and the inclusion of an instrumental track with input from Dou Wei give the album a much more rock-oriented focus than any of Faye’s albums before or since. It is also noteworthy that despite its musical innovations and unconventional style, Restless maintained Faye’s position as the most popular and successful female artist in Hong Kong. As recently as 2005, Faye stated in an interview:

Impatience [aka ‘Restless’] is the album I am most satisfied with. That was the first time I completed an album I liked. I worked with great producers and I loved every song on it. I do things according to feelings and I do them when I think they feel right. For me, Impatience is an album that just feels right. (Tsui 2005: 21).

Notoriously reticent in interviews, Faye here indicates that Restless was the culmination of her independent, western experimental rock inclinations, and implies that she had a degree of control over the album which she has not succeeded in achieving to the same extent in subsequent recordings. In 1995 Faye’s continued association and identification with the Cocteau Twins extended to her contributing to the vocals of an ‘Asian version’ of ‘Serpentskirt’, a song on the Cocteau Twins’ album Milk and Kisses. The song was, however, only included on the Hong Kong release of the album, and is otherwise only available on a very rare compilation of Cocteau Twins B Sides.⁸ This gave rise to speculation that her admiration for the Cocteau Twins was rather one-sided, and her renditions of their songs have gained little or no recognition in the West outside their respective Cocteau Twins and Faye Wong fan groups.

The 1997 self-titled Faye Wong was predominantly more low-key and spare in its arrangements than Restless, and, as with future albums, all the tracks were in Mandarin, in keeping with a strong involvement by Zhang Yatung as arranger and guitarist, and Dou Wei on drums on two tracks. Lin Xi’s lyrics are also present on seven of the ten tracks, and Faye’s ‘la la’s (or ‘dar dar’s - the ‘r’ is actually sounded in Mandarin) predominate in a number of the vocals. The album contained another two Cocteau Twins tracks, one of which, ‘Amusement Park’, is credited as being ‘performed by Simon Raymonde and Robin Guthrie’, who provide a typically ethereal, swirling guitar-based instrumental mix, recorded at the September Sound studio in London, for Faye’s double-tracked, harmonising vocals. ‘Reminiscence’ was a version of ‘Rilkean Heart’ from Milk and Kisses arranged by Zhang Yadotung, a Hong Kong- based musician who has been an important influence on Wong as a producer, with lyrics supplied by Wynan Wong. It is a low key song, with acoustic guitar backing provided by Yadotung, and not recognisably a Cocteau Twins song at all, with none of the jangling guitars and ethereal vocals of their trademark sound. Indeed, almost all the tracks on the album, with the possible exception of the final two tracks, which seem aimed at a more mainstream Cantopop market, are in a minimalist folk-rock vein which highlights Faye’’s vocals, to the extent that the Cocteau Twins’ contributions are barely noticeable. The simplicity and coherency of the album in terms of a blending of Cantopop and ‘indie’ rock styles suggested that Faye may have absorbed the Cocteau Twins’ influence to the point of no longer needing their contributions. She has no longer had any recourse to English language songs in any of her subsequent studio albums, relying almost exclusively on contributions from Hong Kong, Beijing and Singapore-based composers along with her own compositions on Sing and Play (1998), Only Love Strangers (1999), Fable (2000) Faye Wong (2001) and To Love (2003).

Copycat or Reinterpreter?

The ‘Faye Wong In Comparison with …’ web site⁹ contains text and illustrations assembled to provide evidence that throughout her career, Faye Wong has imitated a number of US and European artists, both visually and sonically. Four Cocteau Twins tracks are listed, with reproductions of appropriate album covers, followed by references to the Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’ and Tori Amos’s ‘Silent All These Years’, complete with a visual comparison of the album covers for Amos’s Little Earthquakes and Faye’s 1993 album 100 Thousand Whys?, both of which feature boxes and a shared use of squared images and white background designs. There are also visual comparisons of the album cover portraits on Bjork’s 1996 Post and Wong’s 1998 Sing and Play, and various other visual poses comparing Faye’s costumes and hairstyles with Bjork (explained by the fact that both employed the same designer).¹⁰ There is also photographic evidence to suggest (rather unconvincingly) that Wong copied Madonna’s hands-in-the-air album cover pose with hands in the air from her 1998 album Ray of Light (which contains a song entitled ‘Beautiful Strangers’) on her album, Only Love Strangers. ‘Die-hard fans’ of Faye Wong are addressed, and expressions such as ‘desperate’, ‘weaker’ (than the original) and ‘nice try’ are used to describe these alleged copycat gestures by Wong. Implications are made of plagiarism or at the least imitation, and Wong is portrayed as derivative of these supposed western models.

But to dismiss Wong’s recordings and performances of songs by Tori Amos, the Cranberries, the Cocteau Twins, and others as a mere copycat ‘karaoke effect’ is to misrepresent the enormous impact she has made on Cantopop and Mandapop throughout the Chinese diaspora. These songs represent only a tiny portion of her complete repertoire, and while they may have provided a considerable boost to her credibility as an alternative artist in Hong Kong, the PRC and elsewhere, they have arguably made little contribution to her success in the Chinese diaspora, where the alternative credibility of these US and European artists has little or no currency. Indeed Wong’s almost perfect vocal imitation, appropriation and re-contextualisation of these songs into what is arguably a highly original, distinctive and idiosyncratic musical oeuvre could be said to have opened up new areas of experimentation and musical innovation in Cantopop and Mandapop. In the West, where due to the language barrier, Wong has only ever appealed to the relatively separate world of Chinese migrants and small clusters of western ‘Fayenatics’, her re-contextualisation of these songs is not a recognisable issue for the first group, and arguably only provides further incentive to her appreciation by the second. Undoubtedly the musical direction of Wong’s career has been strongly influenced by her (albeit vicarious) involvement in the mid-1990s with the alternative musical ethos and vocal and musical styles of the Cocteau Twins, the Cranberries, the Sundays, EBTG and Tori Amos, which she effectively absorbed into the musical styles of her later output (evident in the up-tempo, rock oriented opening title track of her 2003 Sony album, To Love, where her presence as a composer is also particularly strong). But her re-interpretations of English language songs in the much broader context of tian-ci serve only to highlight the way in which western artists have generally been completely re-contextualised in Cantopop and Mandapop as sources for a new creative output based, like most forms of popular music, on recombinative cross-fertilisation, adaptation, sampling and quotation. They also demonstrate that far from being an ‘unoriginal and repetitive’ local phenomenon, Cantopop and Mandapop, complete with its tradition of tian ci, represent, in Witzeleben’s expression, ‘a border-crossing and dialect-crossing popular music culture, which is an explicitly Hong Kong adaptation of a primarily Western musical language, with a growing pan-Chinese component’ (Witzleben 2001: 417). Most Anglophone listeners who hear Wong’s versions of Tori Amos’ ’silent All These Years’ or The Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’ are struck by their resemblance to the originals in terms of vocal inflection, tonal emphasis and ‘grain of the voice’, as well as instrumental backing, yet are usually unaware that she is singing completely different lyrics from the originals. This suggests that tian-ci can be deceptive; it can also operate as a mode of incorporating a perfect ‘copy’ into an original repertoire, in a similar manner to that by which the Australian lyre bird performs perfect copies of the sounds of a kookaburra, a magpie, a rosella, and even a camera shutter, a chainsaw and a car alarm. And no one would question the lyre bird’s originality.

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John Erni, J. (1998) ‘Like A Culture: Notes on Pop Music and Ppopular Sensibility in Ddecolonized Hong Kong’, Hong Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin no.8-9:, Spring/Summer, 55-63.

Joanna Ching-Yun Lee, J. (1992) ‘All for Freedom: The Rise of Patriotic/Pro-Democratic Popular Music in Hong Kong in Response to the Chinese Student Movement’, in R.eebee Garofalo, (ed.) Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements. Boston: South End Press.

Ching-Yun Lee, J. (1992) ‘Cantopop on Emigration from Hong Kong’ Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol. 24, 14-23.

Joanna Ching-Yun Lee, J. and J. Lawrence Witzelben, J.L. (2002) ‘Hong Kong,’, in R.obert C. Provine et al (eds.) The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Volume and: East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea. London: Routledge.

Graman, S (1999) All About Ah Faye: http:www.graman.net/faye/htm (accessed 8 October 2001)

Ivy O-Kuen Man, I. (1997) ‘Cantonese Popular Song: Hybridization of the east and west in the 1970s’, in T.oru Mitsui (ed.) Popular Music: Intercultural Interpretations, Graduate program in Music, Kanazawa University: Kanazawa, Japan:, 51-55.

Simon Reynolds, S. (1990) Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, London: Serpent’’s Tail.

Anthony Spaeth, A. (1996) ‘She Did It her Way: canto-pop princess Faye Wong broadens her appeal with a quirkier sound’, Time International, vol. 148(, no. 16), 14 October 14.

Ann Tsang, A.. (1999) ‘The Cantopop Drop’, Billboard, vol. 111( no. 9), 27 February 27, Asia Pacific Quarterly, 1.

Clarence Tsui, C. (2005) ‘Walking Tall’, Post Magazine (Hong Kong), 6 March 6, 16-21.

Unattributed editorial (2001), ‘Catching the stars,’. (2001) South China Morning Post, 11 May 11,19.

Neil Western, N. (2001) ‘Everywhere but Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 11 May 11, Features, 1-2.

J. Lawrence Witzelben, J.L. (2002) ‘Music in the Hong Kong Handover Ceremonies: A Community Re-Imagines Itself’, Ethnomusicology, vol.46( no.1):, Winter, 120-134.

J. Lawrence Witzelben, J.L. (2001) ‘Film Songs, Film Singers, and Intertextuality in Hong Kong Popular Song: Some Preliminary Observations’, in Peter Doyle and Tony Mitchell (eds.) Changing Sounds: New Directions and Configurations in Popular Music. Sydney: University of Technology: Sydney, 416-417.

J. Lawrence Witzelben, J.L. (1999) ‘Cantopop and Mandapop in pre-postcolonial Hong Kong: identity negotiation in the performances of Anita Mui Yim-Ffong’, Popular Music, vol 18( no 2): 241-257 .

J. Lawrence Witzelben, J.L. (1998) ‘Localism, nationalism, and transnationalism in pre-postcolonial Hong Kong popular song’, in T. Mitsui (ed.) Popular Music: Intercultural Interpretations. Kanazawa University: Kanazawa: Mitsui, 469-475.

Wong Kei-kwok, W. and Shue Lan, S. (1998), (eds.) Brave to Be Myself: Faye Wong. Guangzhou: Guangzhou Travel Publishing (in Chinese version).

Unattributed (2003) ‘Faye Wong In Comparison with … [http://www. Angelfire.com/sd/pianophillic/faye.compare.htm] (accessed 8 October 2001)

Unattributed (2001) ‘Parallel’ [http://statiq.net/suffix/parallel/] (accessed 8 October 2001)

Unattributed (2003) [http://www.lajabour.com/article/simon.html] (accessed 24 March 2003)

Unattributed (1999) Wang Fei: the Empress’s Style, Taipei.

Max Woodworth, M. (2004) ‘Faye Wong is All Woman’, Taipei Times, 26 November.

Discography

Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes, EastWest/WEA International, 1992.

Cocteau Twins, Four-Calendar Café, Capitol Records 1993.

Cocteau Twins, Milk & Kisses, Mercury Records, 1995.

The Cranberries, Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? Polygram 1992.

Everything But the Girl, The Language of Life, WEA/Blanco Y Negro, 1990.

Anita Mui, Anita, Capital 1995.

The Sundays, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade Records, 1990. Faye Wong, 100,000 Whys? Hong Kong: Cinepoly, 1993.

Faye Wong, No Regrets, Hong Kong: Cinepoly, 1993.

Faye Wong, Mystery, Hong Kong: Decca/Cinepoly, 1994.

Faye Wong, Random Thoughts, Hong Kong: Cinepoly, 1994.

Faye Wong, Please Myself, Hong Kong: Cinepoly, 1994.

Faye Wong, Sky, Hong Kong: Decca/Cinepoly, 1994.

Faye Wong, The Decadent Sound of Faye, Hong Kong: Cinepoly, 1995.

Faye Wong, Di-Dar, Hong Kong: Cinepoly, 1995.

Faye Wong, Restless, Hong Kong: Cinepoly, 1996.

Faye Wong, Faye Wong, Hong Kong: EMI/A Production House, 1997.

Fare Wong, To Love, Hong Kong: Sony, 2003.

I ‘split Enz’ at the end of 1972, around the time that Split Enz were getting into gear, and one of my friends at the time was Miles Golding, a prodigious violinist who jammed with the Enz in the early days, and by the time I saw him again in London he was already a member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I avoided Split Enz like the plague when they were in London – their art school costumes and hokey cabaret antics always embarrassed me – and I’ve never been a fan, although Crowded House is a different matter. I remember being moved to tears at a conference in Bologna in the early 1990s after hearing Roman singer-songwriter Antonello Venditti’s re-setting of ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’, ‘Alta Marea’ (High Tide). The Italian lyrics are about driving down a coastal highway, smoking endless cigarettes, watching the sun rise and feeling your woman inside you like a high tide as you drive to see her (well, I could certainly relate to that!). No relation at all to Neil Finn’s original lyrics, but it was a wondrous moment to hear a Kiwi musician’s song transformed so poignantly into the European musical mainstream.

Another NZ epiphany occurred when I was visiting my old home in a remote part of Southern Italy in the mid 1990s – not far from Locorotondo in Apulia, where Fat Freddy’s Drop recorded the ‘Italian Reprise’ version of their 2005 single ‘Wandering Eye’ - and heard OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’ on the radio. I excitedly pointed out to my local friends that this guy was a Polynesian, from my home country, and this was the biggest global hit we’d ever had. So somewhere between London in 1973 and Italy in the early 1990s my attitude to New Zealand music underwent a drastic reversal, and it has never relented since. I have never lived in Aotearoa again since 1972, but I have a huge collection of NZ music on vinyl and CD, including scores of rare Flying Nun releases, and somewhere around 1992, largely at Perfect Beat’s bidding, I think, I began writing about New Zealand music, focusing in particular on its relation to place. I’ve become a staunch musical patriot, which goes to prove that you don’t have to be born (although I was) or live in Aotearoa to appreciate its music, as most of the writers in this volume exemplify. One of the distinctive features about New Zealand music that is most powerful for me is how it has always been rooted in the songlines and mystiques of Aotearoa landscape and countryside, from Crowded House’s Kare Kare to OMC’s Otara to the Upper Hutt Posse, to the Pacific dub ‘Wellington sound’ of Trinity Roots, Fat Freddy’s Drop, the Black Seeds, Fly My Pretties and Little Bushman, from David Lloyd and Dark Tower and the Bats’ Canterbury Plains, the Clean and the Chills’ evocations of Otago, and Chris Knox’s slewed renditions of Invercargill. Don McGlashan and the Muttonbirds have specialised most outstandingly in eerie divinings of the terrestrial spirits of the North Island in songs like ‘White Valiant’, ‘Dominion Road’, ‘Envy of Angels’, ‘Miracle Sun’ and ‘Passenger No.26’. It’s a pity that Matthew Bannister’s analysis in a previous Perfect Beat of some of the songs of McGlashan– surely the most important New Zealand singer-songwriter after Neil Finn – couldn’t have found a place in this volume.

One of the major disappointments of the recent volume Gothic NZ, a collection of essays from an Auckland conference in 2002 dealing with ‘The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture’, is that there is nothing about music in it (Kavka et al. 2006). Here are analyses of the films of Peter Jackson, Vincent Ward, Jane Campion and Alison McLean, examples of gothic poetry by Bill Manhire, Jack Ross and Olivia Macassay, the prose of Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Ian Wedde and Martin Edmond, and numerous accounts of evocative visual art from abandoned houses and ‘corrugated iron gothic’ to TV advertising, Saskia Leek’s ghost paintings, Misery’s graffiti art and Otis Frizzell’s tattoos. But apart from Frizzell’s long-standing connections to the Aotearoa hip hop scene, which aren’t mentioned, I can’t find a single reference to NZ music, in which surely gothic sensibilities have always run rampant. Where are the accounts of expressions of NZ gothic in Douglas Lilburn, Gillian Whitehead, Jack Body, not to mention Max Merritt, the Avengers, the La De Das, the Underdogs, Split Enz, Dragon, Blam Blam Blam, the Mockers, Dave Dobbyn, The Windy City Strugglers, The Chills, Bailter Space, Headless Chickens, Trasch, the Bats, MaryRose Crook and the Renderers, and innumerable others? Enough to fill an entire volume, surely.

And a pity, too, that there is still so little accessible academic writing about the importance of waiata and Maori music in Aotearoa. Mervyn McLean’s weighty 400 page tome Maori Music (1996), which I picked up a few years ago for a song at a sale in Cambridge, UK, remains a relatively lonely exception. The importance of the work of the late and lamented Hirini Melbourne and his pakeha cohort Richard Nunns in reconstructing and rediscovering the Taongo Pûoro, the pre-European musical instruments of the Maori (see Flintoff 2004) is still under-acknowledged, not least for its impact on a wide range of Maori popular music from Moana to the Upper Hutt Posse. The recent remix album Te Whaiao, reconstructed from Melbourne and Nunns’ 1994 album Te Ku Te Whe by prominent NZ ‘dance’ musicians such as Epsilon Blue, Warren Maxwell, Salmonella Dub, SJD and Sola Rosa, was one of the most thrilling albums from anywhere in the world that I heard in 2006, along with Tuwhare, the compilation of songs from Maori poet Hone Tuwhare by Strawpeople, Te Kupu, Whirimako Black and others, Don McGlashan’s solo album Warm Hand and Little Bushman’s eponymous debut. Surely this is the music that most defines Aotearoa now – where is the writing about it?

This issue of Perfect Beat is the first to be dedicated to music in Aotearoa/New Zealand since the volume North Meets South appeared in 1994. Only one of the writers from that issue, Roy Shuker, appears here, which is a positive sign that a new generation of academic music writers have been representing the country’s music under new transnational paradigms. This is immediately apparent in Nabeel Zuberi’s piece ‘Sounds Like Us’, which takes to task those of us who have tended to over-emphasise the importance of national identity in NZ music. From a South Asian background, and having spent considerable periods of time in the UK and the USA, Zuberi embodies a form of transcultural music writing which is emerging with considerable force, and his book on transnational British music, Sounds English (2001), is a landmark in recent popular music writing. His astute breakdown of nationalist marketing rhetoric in NZ music is followed by an equally astute account of the sometimes uncritical championing of local music by both music journalists and academics. As Zuberi points out in relation to production and consumption practices in the Auckland music industry, the local is often displaced by the translocal. Zuberi is himself a radio DJ at the Auckland independent station BASE FM 107.3, which is owned by prominent Polynesian hip hop DJ and producer Manuel Bundy, where ‘New Zealanders and residents from a wide array of national and ethnic origins are involved in both playing records on the station and DJing at central Auckland clubs and bars’.

Situated a few metres along Ponsonby Road from Conch Records, which is run by a Brazilian-New Zealander who provides music and newsletters for the local Auckland Brazilian community, BASE FM is part of a multicultural music network that crosses between Maori and Pasifikan participants (such as Maori DJ Manoia Toa) and musicians and consumers of Asian, European and Latin American origin. In the studio with Nabeel a couple of years ago, I remember being struck by a block of writing on the wall in Japanese, signed by a young woman who referred to herself as ‘da Jap bitch’. Specialising in funk, reggae, soul, R’n’B and hip hop, BASE FM represents a niche market which overlaps and interacts with numerous other translocal music scenes in Aotearoa. Last time I did a guest spot there at the end of 2006, Nabeel was playing wall-to-wall James Brown records, mostly on vinyl, in commemoration of the death of the Godfather of Soul. Conch Records had a cinema-style billboard which read ‘RIP James Brown: Thanks for the Music’. I didn’t see or hear any more heartfelt or moving JB mementos anywhere else in my travels. Living proof of Zuberi’s point that the ‘audiotopias’ of music stretch to all corners of the world and displace national constructions of the local.

Following on from Zuberi’s observation that ‘New Zealand hip hop culture continues to be deeply enmeshed in contemporary American and other hip hop cultures’, Kirsten Zemke-White prefaces ‘“This Is My Life”: Biography, Identity and Narrative in New Zealand Rap Songs’ with a quotation from Tupac Shakur. ‘Life story’ MCing has always been a prominent feature in global hip hop, and Aotearoa hip hop’s strong connections with traditional Maori and Pacific Island forms of oral history and story telling make it no exception. One of the tracks I played on Nabeel’s radio show was by Maori group Four Corners – a group who has since performed in Laos and whose debut album The Foundations has been released on new Sydney-based label Grindin’. The track was entitled ‘Urban Maori’, an autobiographical account of the displacement of young Maori in Auckland who are trying to keep in touch with their native roots while being immersed in the US-dominated street culture of NZ’s largest city. One of the curiously paradoxical features of this track is that the MCs rap in assumed US accents. While to most US listeners – who regrettably will probably never get the opportunity to hear this group – their Polynesian-Kiwi inflections would be uppermost, to Australasian listeners they sound as if they are fake wannabe Americans; as Samoan-NZ MC Mareko put it in one of his tracks, addressed to local listeners: ‘You probably aren’t even listening to me because of my fake American accent’. Zemke-White addresses this issue briefly in her piece, pointing out that it is

a continual challenge for New Zealand rappers who especially find themselves accused of this by Australian rap artists. As many of the New Zealand rap artists are of Pacific or Maori descent, and many archetypal rap words and phrases are American, it is difficult to prove this allegation, which ultimately is an attack on artists’ authenticity.

There is always the argument, which Zuberi refers to, that plenty of local artists in other musical genres assume American accents, but it remains a contentious issue, especially when pakeha hip hop artists like Dark Tower, who use emphatic Kiwi accents, find themselves getting appreciated more in the Sydney hip hop scene than Dawn Raid artists like the Deceptikons, who were booed at a gig I saw them play at in Sydney (but then so was Kool Keith, so maybe they saw themselves as being in good company). Zemke-White’s article contains some valuable quotations from the life stories of a wide range of MCs who are interestingly mainly of Samoan and Tongan extraction, which suggests a strong engagement with traditional Pacific Island culture, a subject which has been explored in depth by two other important women writers on Aotearoa hip hop, Sarina Pearson (2004) and April Henderson (2006). Zemke-White’s essay does beg the question of how a ludicrously derivative gangsta rap fantasy like Mareko’s ‘Freestyle’ can be linked to Decker’s attempts to argue that African-American MCs can be seen as ‘organic cultural intellectuals’ in Gramsci’s sense of the term, simply by dint of being involved with ‘the everyday struggles of black folks’. This also invokes the intellectually threadbare argument that gangsta, ‘bling’ and misogynist MCs are merely engaging in a form of ironic, parodic role play. But there is enough genuine testimony of the struggles of Polynesian youth and the importance of hip hop in providing a voice for marginalised and disadvantaged youth in the examples provided here from PNC, Frontline, Cyphanetic, The Usual Suspects and even Scribe to make a strong case for Aotearoa hip hop’s distinctive representation of local biographies, identities and narratives.

It’s a long stretch from South Auckland, NZ hip hop capital and the setting of Lee Tamahori’s contentious 1994 film about Maori domestic violence and redemption, Once Were Warriors, to Gore, the country music capital of New Zealand on the southernmost tip of the country’s South Island. Nonetheless it’s important that the marginal ‘micromusic’ of New Zealand country music, pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s by Tex Morton and the Tumbleweeds, is at last being represented in academic writing. And perhaps not so much a stretch, given Dan Bendrups and Henry Johnson’s reference to ‘a young hip hop duo called “Aotearoa Village’ who beat-boxed their way into second place in the unplugged competition’ at the 2006 Gore Country Music Festival. While reading this piece, I was listening to the visceral, haunting Southern Gothic alt-country sounds of Maryrose Crook and the Renderers’ chilling rendition of ‘Storm from the East’, which contains samples of a ‘rainy night and strange birds … downtown Invercargill, Burlington House’, not far away from Gore. It’s a curious location for NZ country music, a sister city to Tamworth in Australia, in a spooky and desolate area of Aotearoa countryside made famous by the brooding writings of Janet Frame, and by the 1990 Aramoana massacre, when David Gray killed thirteen of his neighbours in a small town on the tip of the Otago Peninsula. The subject of Robert Sarkies’ controversial 2006 film Out of the Blue, this event has also been referred to in a number of NZ popular songs. No wonder, then, perhaps, given its gothic setting, that the Gore Country Music Club was destroyed in a string of fires lit throughout the town by a local arsonist, Paul Black, in May 2004, but as Bendrups and Johnson point out, this important NZ country music festival has been running for 33 years ‘despite the tyranny of distance and the ravages of fire’. Nearby the recent NZ films In My Father’s Den (Brad McGann 2004) and The World’s Fastest Indian (Roger Donaldson 2005) were made, both of which explored the gothic aspects of this cold, dark bleak region on the edge of the world.

In December 1988 John Dix’s epic study of more than three decades of New Zealand popular music, Stranded in Paradise, was launched to an audience of music industry insiders and musicians at the late and lamented Gluepot, a music venue in Ponsonby, Auckland. For the occasion Chris Knox sang his diatribe against the NZ music industry, ‘Statement of Intent’, and prefaced it with a comment aimed at the industry reps present: ‘You people will never get your act together’. The second and third verses of the song go like this:

The New Zealand Music Industry’s just Watties seeking songs If they’ve got exclusive rights they don’t care about the wrongs A shot of coke in L.A. with the parent company Makes a little boy quite happy in the music industry … The New Zealand Music Industry gets its products overseas ‘Cos it can’t believe in quality till it gets a U.S. release And its well trained radio stations pump out what it wants to hear The musical equivalent of epidemic diarrhoea …

But as Dix is quick to point out in the 2005 reissue of Stranded in Paradise, ‘[Knox] was wrong, but it took a while’ (2005:9). In 1988 an ongoing battle to get a quota for NZ music on radio began, and in 1989 the NZ On Air funding scheme was initiated for NZ musicians to make videos and recordings and get radio airplay. When Helen Clark’s Labour Government came to power in the late 1990s, they gave the local music industry a considerable financial boost in the form of recording and export incentives and showcase events. By 2005, without a compulsory quota, it was estimated that NZ radio was playing twenty percent local content, nearly 60 local singles had topped the charts, local music television had increased to a 24 hour service, Maori and Polynesian music had increased tenfold, and numerous books had appeared about different aspects of New Zealand popular music. The degree of government support for NZ music has been the envy of Australia and most other countries in the world. Roy Shuker’s article ‘That Was Then, This Is Now’, surveys the past two decades of NZ music from an industrial perspective, providing statistics and surveying the country’s music media and government policies, concluding that ‘the interaction and synergy of various contextual players, policies, and influences … have enabled local music to flourish’. While Campbell Smith may not agree with this diagnosis, it is undeniable that there is a lot of ‘world class’ music issuing forth to the world from the songlines of Aotearoa, and there is always going to be far more of it than academics can poke a stick at.

Bibliography

Dix, J (1988) Stranded in Paradise: New Zealand Rock’n’ Roll, 1955-1988, Wellington: paradise Publications

Dix, J (2005) Stranded in Paradise: New Zealand Rock And Roll 1955 to the Modern Era, Auckland: Penguin Books.

Flintoff, B (2004) Taonga Pûoro Singing Treasures: The Musical Instruments of the Maori, Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing

Henderson, A.K.(2006) ‘Dancing Between Islands: Hip Hop and the Samoan Diaspora’, in Dipannata Basu and Sidney J.Lamelle (eds) The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Culture, London: Pluto Press, 2006.

Hayward, P., Mitchell, T, Shuker R. (1994 eds) North Meets South: Popular Music in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Sydney: Perfect Beat Publications

Kavka, M, Lawn, J, Paul M (2006) Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture, Dunedin: Otago University Press.

McLean, M (1996) Maori Music, Auckland University Press

Pearson, S (2004) ‘Pasifik/NZ Frontiers-New Zealand-Samoan Hip Hop, Music Video and Diasporic Space’, Perfect Beat v6 n4, January, 55-66

Stax, M, Neill, A and Baker, J (2006) Don’t Bring me Down … Under: The Pretty Things in New Zealand, La Mesa Ca.:Ugly Things.

Zuberi, N (2001) Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music, Illinois University Press.

Discography

Chris Knox, Seizure, Flying Nun Records., 1990.

Webography

Fat Freddy’s Drop Score a Century, Amplifier Magazine (accessed 8/4/07).

Downloads Force Music Stars to Seek Second Job, NZ Herald (accessed 8/4/07).

Macau-born and Melbourne-based film maker Clara Law and her screenwriter-producer-director husband Eddie Fong have produced an idiosyncratically transnational output of films which are beginning to receive critical recognition as major contributions to a contemporary cinema of Chinese migration which explores what Gina Marchetti has encapsulated as ‘the Chinese experience of dislocation, relocation, emigration, immigration, cultural hybridity, migrancy, exile, and nomadism – together termed the “Chinese diaspora”.¹ Their own self-imposed ‘relocation’ in Australia since 1994 was the result of increasing frustration with the rampantly commercial imperatives of Hong Kong cinema and its lack of appreciation for the auteur cinema they wanted to pursue. As David Bordwell noted of the Hong Kong cinema scene in the 1990s in his book Planet Hong Kong:

Until very recently … local moviemaking has been unsubsidised, so internationally prestigious directors like Clara Law, Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan depend on mainstream styles, stars and genres. In comparison to their contemporaries – say, the austere Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang – Hong Kong’s ‘festival’ filmmakers look decidedly pop.²

It is no coincidence that Law and Fong identify more strongly with the two arthouse Taiwanese directors Bordwell cites than with most of their peers in Hong Kong, and they have expressed their appreciation of both Taiwanese directors’ ‘use of film to explore their own culture’, in a more meaningful way than the entertainment-based films of Hong Kong film industry, ‘where we don’t feel like we belong.’³ Law’s contribution to Hong Kong ‘pop’ cinema is largely confined to two films, her debut The Other Half and the Other Half (1989), a romantic comedy set in Hong Kong about the relationship which develops between two young people whose respective partners are living in Canada, and Fruit Punch (1992), a Leon Lai star vehicle, a madcap comedy about a group of young men trying out a business venture and eventually deciding to emigrate to Australia. Both these films nonetheless manage to work in themes of migration, with the former exploring the taikongren (‘flying immigrant’ or ‘astronaut’) phenomenon, in which wealthy Hong Kong Chinese professional people emigrate ‘temporarily’ to other countries such as Canada, Australia and the USA.

Law’s oeuvre to date is highly eclectic, ranging from historically-based films like The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (1989) and Temptations of a Monk (1993) which deal with events situated in Mainland China, to studies of migration, relocation, exile and the search for home in contemporary contexts, be it London, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Sydney or Munich. They Say the Moon is Fuller Here (1985), her graduation film from the National Film School in London, dealt with political aspects of Chinese migration, charting the relationship between a Hong Kong fine arts student (played by Law) living in London who is choreographing a ballet based on a Chinese legend, and a mainland Chinese engineering student who is also a dancer, but who is kidnapped by Chinese embassy officials and sent back to China. Farewell China (1990) continues the contentious PRC migration focus, in the form of a powerful melodrama about a young mainland Chinese woman (played by Maggie Cheung) who emigrates to the USA - leaving her husband (Tony Leung Kar-fai) and baby behind in China - and subsequently disappears. Her husband enters the USA as an illegal immigrant to search for her, and after a fruitless quest through the lower depths of New York destitution eventually meets up with her with tragic consequences.⁴ Law was later banned from making films in the PRC as a result of Temptations of a Monk, which, as Zhang Jin-Zhong has pointed out, also evokes themes of migration relating to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China: ‘though based in the ancient Chinese Tang dynasty, the central story is still about someone being sent into exile, forced to leave their homeland after a handover of political power’.⁵ Floating Life (1996), made in Cantonese, English and German, has been widely discussed as her first ‘Australian’ film, alternating in its focus between Hong Kong, Sydney and Germany in its pursuit of the fortunes of different members of a Hong Kong-Chinese family who emigrate to Sydney as a result of their anxieties about the 1997 handover and their struggles to settle harmoniously in their adopted countries.⁶ Law’s most recent film, The Goddess of 1967 (2000), while not dealing directly with migration, is set in the Australian outback, with some flashback scenes set in Tokyo. It follows a young Japanese man’s quest for a 1967 Citroen DS (Déesse = Goddess) car, which he drives across the Australian outback with a young blind woman, and shares important aspects of its central ‘nomadic’ inter-cultural encounter with the subject of this study, Autumn Moon (Qiuyue, 1992).⁷

Law has been identified by Stephen Teo as part of a ‘second wave’ of Hong Kong directors, which ‘ushered in a more mature kind of experimentation’ and gained more international recognition than the ‘new wave’ of Ann Hui, Tsui Hark and others. The ‘second wave’, which also included Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai, emerged with a strong transnational, intercultural perspective from international film schools and completed their first features after 1988.⁸ Like Ann Hui and other emerging directors of the 1980s, Law began her career making television films for the government-funded Radio and Television Hong Kong (RTHK), most notably a 45 minute feature in the 1981 series ‘Faces and Places’ entitled Floating Clouds, about a rich woman (Cherie Cheng) and her Maoist photographer boyfriend, which was revived at the 23rd Hong Kong film festival in 1999. In an essay on Hui, Elaine Yee Lin Ho notes that from the 1970s, RTHK had attempted ‘to present itself as critical and pluralistic … [i]n its conscious, if not overt, inculcation of civic values and the concept of a Hong Kong identity and community’ and as a result presented ‘the simulacrum of a diversified public sphere’, but was nonetheless governed by government censorship restrictions which Hui was subject to. ⁹ One can only speculate as to how Law’s Maoist photographer measured up to these censorship restrictions, but it is an early signal of an abrasively critical edge in her output, as well as a concern with issues of Hong Kong identity, while the ‘floating’ half of the title sounds an obvious prelude to the migration themes of her most well known film in Australia, Floating Life.

As Ho indicates, Hui manged to build on her television documentary work and establish herself as a pioneering and idiosyncratic woman auteur in Hong Kong cinema, dealing with female-centred subjects while drawing on the European avant-garde film making tradition she had been exposed to at the London Film School in the early 1970s, as well as making popular entertainment genre films such as ghost stories and gangster movies. But despite some of her films’ engagement with Chinese history, Vietnamese boat people and the role of women in stories of transmigration such as Song of Exile (1990), and her ‘optic on women’s continuous struggle to unsettle and disrupt the orthodoxies that prescribe relations within the Chinese family as an inherited social institution’¹⁰, she has rejected the label feminist film maker, possibly for tactical reasons. Law, a decade later, has similarly defined herself as an auteur in the European tradition, citing the influence of Tarkovsky and Ozu on her work¹¹, and while no doubt benefiting from some of the doors opened by Hui, was even less interested in either working in the ‘public sphere’ of Hong Kong television or associating herself with feminism. In answer to a question as to whether she felt any affinity with Hui, Law stated ‘I don’t feel I have to be bound by territory, or sex … To say because you are a woman you have to feel affinity with certain women directors … is limiting yourself’.¹² It was to escape territorial limitations and the restrictions encountered by women directors in Hong Kong that she migrated to Australia, a decision abetted by the fact that Autumn Moon was very well received at the 1993 Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, ‘winning rave reviews from critics and a theatrical release’.¹³

Like Hui, Law is concerned in her work with the role of Chinese migrant women as bearers of homeland culture and identity, and this emerges strongly in the character of the Cantonese grandmother in Autumn Moon, who attempts to school her adolescent grand daughter Pui Wai in Chinese traditions of ancestor worship. Law’s own grandmother’s family left mainland China for Macao in 1948, and her family subsequently moved from Macao to Hong Kong in 1967 after the riots relating to the Cultural Revolution in the PRC, and then migrated to Australia in 1994.¹⁴ Her concern in her films with migration, transnationalism, and the search for home and identity also relates to Teo’s description of her as ‘belonging to the generation that probably has the most to lose in terms of a bona-fide “Hong Kong identity” as a result of the Chinese take-over in 1997’.¹⁵

In Ackbar Abbas’ view, ‘almost every [Hong Kong] film made since the mid-eighties, regardless of quality or seriousness of intention’, can sustain an allegorical reading of the anxieties of pre-1997 Hong Kong as a principal narrative impetus.¹⁶ But unlike most Hong Kong films made before 1997, Autumn Moon chooses to deal directly with the anxieties of migration, alienation and intercultural understanding prior to 1997 in a far more character-based way, portraying a city of migrants that is metaphorically emptied of people. The film’s highly idiosyncratic and uncharacteristic portrayal of a deserted and even dull Hong Kong contrasts sharply with the manic, chaotic and often frantically overlit ‘smudge’ cinematography of Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle which is a prominent feature of Wong-kar Wai’s films. Stephen Rowley has suggested that Law’s film focuses on barren, monolithic and featureless modernist architecture in order to represent the alienating aspects of contemporary Hong Kong in terms of a ‘widespread emotional malaise’. In contrast, Wong Kar-wai celebrates the seductive surfaces of a postmodern Hong Kong ‘through manipulation of camera speed, editing rhythms and other special effects that alter our perception of the rapidity of events: this is extremely successful at conveying the frenzied nature of life in Hong Kong’.¹⁷ The difference in pace between the two film makers could not be more marked, and Law has stated in relation to Wong Kar-wai, ‘I hate the busy and colourful and messy Hong Kong’. Fong added that in Autumn Moon that they wanted to make a film ‘that is something personal to us and close to us [and where] we want to deal with problems of alienation and the search for home’.¹⁸ Pui Wai, who goes through a rite of passage in more ways than one in Autumn Moon, can be seen as a reflecting aspects of Law’s own experience, which she echoes in her reference to her grandfather teaching her calligraphy, Chinese poetry of the Tang dynasty and Chinese painting.¹⁹ The film itself can be read as a ficto-critical essay on migration from Hong Kong, which is counterpointed with tourism, migration to Hong Kong, and the disappearing stable roots and traditional identity represented by Pui Wai’s grandmother. The deracinated, bleak and impersonal transitional urban spaces and the characters in transit which the film portrays offer a critical embodiment Abbas’s characterisation of Hong Kong as

a city of transients. Much of the population was made up of refugees or expatriates who thought of Hong Kong as a temporary stop, no matter how long they stayed. … The city is not so much a place as a space of transit … a port in the most literal sense - a doorway, a point in between.²⁰

Many of Abbas’ often-quoted reflections on the architecture and urban space of Hong Kong as an expression of what he refers to as ‘a problematic of disappearance … a sense of the elusiveness, the slipperiness, the ambivalences of Hong Kong’s cultural space’²¹ are eminently applicable to Autumn Moon, which can virtually be read as a direct embodiment of his central thesis of the ‘déjà disparu’.²² In their book about the architecture of Hong Kong, Cheung and Yeoh argue that ‘the special relationship that exists here between people and buildings arises from the lack of natural landmarks and the desperate need to find a sense of identity’.²³ Law’s film primarily explores its characters’ search for a sense of identity, but its scrutiny of a transient, depopulated built environment is closer to Cheung and Yeoh’s hypothetical suggestion that ‘if the many people who continue to apply for foreign passports … were to leave, they would leave behind those true “citizens” of Hong Kong who cannot leave – the buildings’.²⁴

Tourists, Migrants and Nomads: Autumn Moon’s Topography

Autumn Moon deals with the friendship between Tokio, a young Japanese tourist in Hong Kong, and Pui Wai, a fifteen year old Hong Kong Chinese girl about to join the rest of her family who have migrated to Canada. Law has referred to both characters as ‘modern nomads’, but this tends to reduce the significant differences that exist between them.²⁵ Ien Ang has cautioned against the ‘formalist, post-structuralist tendency to overgeneralise the global currency of so-called nomadic, fragmented and deterritorialised subjectivity’, suggesting that what Clifford (1992) has identified as ‘nomadology’ ‘only serves to decontextualise and flatten out “difference”, as if “we” were all in fundamentally similar ways always-already travellers in the same postmodern universe’.²⁶ What I want to argue here is that there is a considerably simpler, more modernist way of reading the migrant and travelling characters and the Hong Kong topography of Autumn Moon than Yue’s rather contorted, overly-theorised, postmodern lenses of a ‘pre-post 1997’ Hong Kong ‘heterotopia’, while still drawing on Abbas’s observations about the emergence of a Hong Kong identity at a juncture of disappearance. This is also in keeping with Law’s own distinctly modernist conception of her film making as an auteurist, arthouse cinema of opposition to the prevalent commercial ethos of Hong Kong cinema, which in the case of Wong Kar-wai and others includes more obviously the possibility of postmodern readings. As self-imposed exiles from the Hong Kong film industry, Law and Fong could not be further from the ‘travel of post-declaration Hong Kong cinema to Hollywood’ which Yue invokes as evidence of her reading of Autumn Moon’s account of ‘the mediation of displacement, the disruption of ontologies and the constitution of transnational diasporic identity’.²⁷

Strictly speaking, neither Pui Wai nor Tokio are ‘nomads’; in the course of Autumn Moon, Tokio crosses the threshold between tourism (which Clifford notes is ‘a practice defined as incapable of producing serious knowledge’) and travel, in Clifford’s sense of ‘a figure for routes through a heterogeneous modernity’.²⁸ Pui Wai is in the transitional state of being about to join her family in Canada as a migrant, in Rey Chow’s reading of the term as ‘the involuntary passenger-in-transit between cultures, for whom homelessness is the only home “state”’.²⁹ Abbas has invoked Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the nomad and the migrant as ‘two very different forms of disappearance’ in which the migrant ‘leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile’, which is an apt characterisation of the Hong Kong Pui Wai still inhabits in the film. The nomad, on the other hand, ‘does not move … does not depart, does not want to depart’ - a curious description which also fits Pui Wai, in her limbo-like state, wishing she could stay in Hong Kong with her friends, most of whom are, however, also migrating. Tokio as a traveller represents ‘the hope of … entering the world in full cultural equality’³⁰ in his dissatisfaction with what Urry has called the ‘tourist gaze’, based on the desire ‘to experience “in reality” the pleasurable dramas they have already experienced in their imagination’.³¹ This accounts for the rather stark and brutal bathroom sex scene which takes place after his chance encounter with the aging Japanese emigrant Miki, the elder sister of his first girlfriend, who is working as a journalist in Hong Kong. After his encounter with Pui Wai and her grandmother, Tokio’s rapport with Miki becomes more tender and communicative, as he becomes more aware of his need to make connections with other people. Miki and the Grandmother are more stable, ‘rooted’ characters, from whom Tokio is able to gain a deeper sense of ‘heterogenous modernity’, while Pui Wai gains an incipient sense of self-ethnography from her encounter with Tokio and his fascination with her grandmother; as Clifford has noted, ‘Ethnographers, typically, are travellers who like to stay and dig in (for a time)’.³²

The topography that emerges from Autumn Moon is an austerely, lugubriously and predominantly flatly filmed wasteland of both opaque and reflective surfaces. These are sometimes startling in effect, consisting of empty, sometimes characterless facades of buildings, streets and a polluted harbour which arguably achieve considerable resonance through their affective and metaphorical overtones of a transitional zone of migration. In its avoidance of any depth of focus or colour, the film’s style offers a striking representation of what Abbas has called ‘non-descript space as that strange thing: an ordinary, everyday space that has somehow lost its usual systems of interconnectedness, a deregulated space’.³³ The film’s art director, Timmy Yip, specialises in transnational Chinese-American productions, having previously worked on Wayne Wang’s 1989 Chinese-American feature Eat a Bowl of Tea, and subsequently working as production designer and costume designer on Ang Lee’s US-financed Chinese epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), but in Autumn Moon he showcases a stark, minimalist and sparse Hong Kong which is almost bereft of people. Empty architectural surfaces are frequently lingered over in what Lizzie Francke described in Sight and Sound as an ‘exquisitely elliptical film’,³⁴ while the interiors of rooms and even the contents of Pui Wai’s grandmother’s refrigerator are mechanically recorded, by both the black and white video camcorder which Tokio uses to chronicle and catalogue his tourist adventures and by cinematographer Tony Leung Siu Hung’s predominantly blue, grey and monochrome representations of the city.

Autumn Moon provides a peripheral, detached, and often misty and obscure view of an anonymous Hong Kong in which there are few if any familiar or recognisable landmarks. As Yan Zhong Xian has pointed out, ‘from the beginning of the film the director refuses any stereotypical images of Hong Kong, avoiding the well-known views of the “pearl of the orient” ’s sparkling new skyscrapers (including the Bank of China and the Hang Seng bank with their progressive high-tech look)’.³⁵ The cityscape of Central, which Cheung and Yeoh describe as ‘the real backdrop of desire’ to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre,³⁶ is glimpsed only incidentally in the hazy distance from the waterfront promenade of Tsim Sha Tsui or from Kowloon, and we see high rise apartment blocks from an aerial perspective which flattens them out and homogenises them. Most of these aerial shots show the surfaces of some of the million or so apartments built in high rise blocks by the Housing Department Construction Branch before 2000.³⁷ The locations chosen in what Fore has called ‘the least densely populated Hong Kong ever captured on film’ – he identifies the apartment where Pui Wei and her grandmother live as being in the City One complex in Sha Tin in the New Territories³⁸ - are plain, empty and devoid of people; as Rowley has commented, ‘a city with an average density of forty thousand people per square mile is portrayed as a virtual ghost town’. Rowley has also argued that the use of the Hong Kong architecture and environment in the film functions ‘as a creative technique, as a vehicle for analytical observation and as a thematic subject in itself’ as well as being ‘implicated in creating the characters’ disaffected positions’ - notably Tokio’s sense of boredom and displacement and Pui Wai’s ‘dislocation from her home, family and friends’.³⁹ This metaphorically deserted Hong Kong of alienation and disconnectedness, in which everyone seems either to have migrated or be about to migrate, represents what Zhang Jin-Zhong has described as a city traditionally ‘synonymous with migration’, and a ‘borrowed land’ for diasporic Chinese from Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia as well as mainland Chinese and Vietnamese who were faced with the prospect of re-immigration after the 1984 post-colonial agreement to hand Hong Kong back to mainland China. As a result, Zhang argues, the ‘motherland’ has become the ‘other land’.⁴⁰

Japanese Intersections

Autumn Moon bears the traces of Fong’s interest in the impact of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong, which was expressed in his film Cherry Blossom (1987), about the relationship between Chinese writer Yu Dafu studying in Japan between 1910 and 1920, and a Chinese girl forced by her father to assimilate into Japanese culture. In The Last Princess of Manchuria (1990), he portrayed Kam Bik-fai (aka Kawashima Yoshiko), a Chinese Mata Hari who grew up in Japan, and who becomes part of a Japanese scheme to establish Mongolia and Manchuria as independent states before being executed in 1945 as a spy.⁴¹ Autumn Moon originated as a commission from a Japanese film production company as part of a project entitled ‘Asian Beat’ comprising six one-hour ‘home videos’ by different Asian directors, all featuring Japanese actor Masatoshe Nagase, who had previously come to international attention in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989). Nagase was cast to play a private detective who travels to six different Asian countries in order to solve a different crime. Law was skeptical of this project, as she thought the different directors with their different cultural backgrounds would make Nagase’s character ‘inconsistent and unbelievable’. (In an interview with Miles Wood, she states that the other ‘Asian Beat’ episodes filmed with Nagase in Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan were made but ‘have disappeared’.⁴²) Law and Fong also calculated that they could use the production money (about $US 200,000) to make a 90 minute feature film on 35mm as well as the 60 minute ‘home video’ the producers wanted (Wang and Mitchell). They negotiated the right to make the feature they wanted, edited and produced it themselves as well as directing it, and took it to international film festivals, something they had previously been denied them by Hong Kong commercial producers, who took little interest in film festivals, preferring to concentrate on commercial releases and video and DVD sales. (According to the Hong Kong Movie database, Autumn Moon’s box office return was $HK209, 679 for its theatrical run in Hong Kong between the 10th and 31sst December 1992. In contrast, the highly successful 1996 popular youth gangster film Young and Dangerous took almost 100 times more ($HK 21, 115,357)).

Consequently, Law and Fong had much more creative freedom on Autumn Moon than they had previously been given, and as Berry has pointed out, ‘The result is a slow, dreamy, meditative piece … With little plot or action, Autumn Moon is about as far from the commercial Hong Kong mainstream as one can get’.⁴³ Nagase’s character was the only ‘given’ they started from, and video footage from his camcorder was evidently incorporated into the film partly to provide the ‘home video’ component. The film is a Japanese-Hong Kong-Dutch co-production by Eizo Tanteisha, Right Staff Office Company and Trix Films, with Law and Fong also credited as producers. Yan Zhong Xian has described it as ‘an oddity in a crevice of the film industry ‘ - a status it shares with the liminal, Australian made Floating Life.⁴⁴

The ‘Asian Beat’ project captured and to some extent anticipated what Koichi Iwabuchi has identified as a growing, quasi-nostalgic and ‘oriental Orientalist’ fascination in Japan in the mid-1990s with the rest of Asia as ‘premodern’, and with pre-handover Hong Kong in particular, as a source of cultural capital and distinction, especially in relation to popular culture.⁴⁵ This accounts for the phenomenal success of Wong Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express in Japan in 1995 and a growing interest in Hong Kong Cantopop music in Japan. Other examples of this apparent fetishising of Hong Kong before its ‘cosmopolitan attraction’ became diminished by the Chinese handover, include the use of Hong Kong instead of Tokyo as a setting for films like Oshii Mamoru’s cult cyberpunk anime feature The Ghost in the Shell (1995), which includes a sequence with little or no narrative purpose which takes the spectactor on an animated guided tour of prominent Hong Kong topography, and Ho Yim’s 1997 film of Banana Yoshimoto’s cult novel Kitchen, which transposes the book’s Japanese characters to Hong Kong. Iwabuchi has described this Japanese yearning for Hong Kong in terms of ‘Hong Kong’s synchronous temporality with Japan’ – something Tokio is immediately struck by - which has displaced Japan’s sense of cultural superiority to other Asian nations,

facilitating a more dialogic engagement with other Asian cultural modernities; dialogic in the sense that it involves self-transformation and a re-definition of one’s own culture through self-critical insights into Japanese modernity and the dominant conception of a Japan/Asia binary.⁴⁶

But what Law presents in Autumn Moon is much more a portrayal of Hong Kong as a site of transience, anomie and apparent cultural homogeneity which offers little attraction to the Japanese flâneur seeking consumer pop-cult stimuli. Tokio’s trip to Hong Hong seems largely motivated by boredom, and although he is clearly hoping to experience encounters that generate a ‘dialogic engagement’; on his arrival there he records a number of synchronous features with Tokyo: the same date (August 31), time, temperature and facades of buildings, and Hong Kong girls – one of which he engages as a prostitute - seem to him to be just like Japanese girls. In keeping with this synchronicity with Japan, one of our earliest encounters with Pui Wai in the film - after the opening scene in which her parents and brother leave for Canada - is singing a Japanese pop song on a lounge-room karaoke machine with two of her friends, one of whom is about to migrate to Australia (which occasions Pui Wai’s voice over ‘By the time I’m 20 maybe we could all be married to foreigners’).⁴⁷

At the same time Nagase’s presence as protagonist of Autumn Moon gives the film a transnational, cosmopolitan orientation, and the associations he evokes with Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, where he was a disgruntled tourist decidedly underwhelmed by the Memphis he visits on a pilgrimage to Elvis, are difficult to overlook. Nagase frequently appears in Autumn Moon with a cigarette hanging languidly from his mouth, as he did in Mystery Train, and the tracking shots of Hong Kong from trains and taxis in Law’s film have affinities with those used in more than one Jarmusch film. In a cursory mention of the screening of Autumn Moon at the 1992 Toronto film festival in Film Comment, Jonathan Rosenbaum lumps it together with In the Soup and Zebrahead as ‘English language independent features’ displaying ‘quaint cultural-ethnic interfacing à la Jarmusch’.⁴⁸ In a similar vein, a reviewer of the 1992 Locarno festival (where Autumn Moon was awarded the Golden Leopard, the main prize, along with two other awards), claimed rather deprecatingly in Cinemaya that in its evocation of European road movies the film ‘tries to imitate Wenders’.⁴⁹ Chinese critic Yan Zhong Xian made a more constructive comparison with Wenders’ Paris Texas in the Taiwan film journal Image Keeper, suggesting that both directors share a use of ‘different quality images to differentiate modes of narrative expression’.⁵⁰ Both Wenders and Jarmusch, of course, specialise in often loosely and fragmentedly narrated road movies featuring displaced male protagonists who are often drifters and ‘nomads’, if not foreigners or migrants, and Law’s use of tracking shots in Autumn Moon, together with its lack of any strong narrative drive, may have some stylistic similarities to both these directors. Nagase went on to play the protagonist in Fridrik Thór Fridriksson’s Cold Fever (1994), an ‘Icelandic-Japanese road movie’ which has also been compared to Jarmusch and Wenders, and which ends with a ritualistic ceremony with has affinities with the one that concludes Autumn Moon. He also featured in the Japanese sequences of Hal Hartley’s Flirt (1995), making him representative of a certain Japanese cosmopolitan ‘cool’ in Western cult movies.

Another important, if less obvious, Japanese inflection in Autumn Moon is its stylistic use of what Noël Burch has referred to as decentring ‘pillow shots’ in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, who is one of the principal cinematic influences Law has acknowledged.⁵¹ Ozu was, of course, also a strong influence on Wenders and his peers after his recuperation by Western cineastes in the 1970s, and Chinese-American director Wayne Wang has acknowledged his own debt to Ozu’s ‘pillow shots’ which he defines as ’shots (usually accompanied by music) that appear between sequences, with no obvious narrative connection with what went before or what comes after … they signify the passing of time, and they establish the environment as a “character” in its own right’.⁵² This is a particularly apt description of the intermittent aerial tracking shots over the surfaces and tops of high rise buildings which punctuate Autumn Moon, as Fore states, ‘visualising them as abstracted geometric patterns rather than as homes that people live in … elements of Hong Kong’s built and natural environment are introduced as part of a desire to construct a (partial) catalogue of disappearance, an image of the receding of the city’s identity just as it is being formed’.⁵³ In this way, Hong Kong is constructed emphatically as a central character (albeit somewhat inscutable) in Autumn Moon, and Ozu’s deployment of a formalist ‘parametric’ cinema, which disrupts and disregards the cause and effect linkages of conventional narrative flow by interpolating ‘intermediate spaces’⁵⁴ into various scenes, exerts an important stylistic influence on Autumn Moon. It also lends considerable stylistic weight to the film’s primary focus on characters and environment and its portrayal of a Japanese tourist’s view of Hong Kong, as marked particularly by the use of sequences from Tokio’s camcorder, which amounts to a highly reductive, metaphorical and flattened-out portrayal of its topography which is high on the scrutiny of surfaces but low on narrative connections.

English Dialogue as a ‘Third Space’

Nagase brings a Westernised, cosmopolitan outsider’s perspective to Autumn Moon which also serves to highlight some of the more syncretically Western features of Hong Kong. The fact that the dialogue between Tokio and Pui Wai is in halting English, their only common language (with occasional uncomplimentary asides from each in Japanese and Cantonese) contributes to the sense of displacement experienced by both characters, as well as serving as a reminder that English is the language spoken in most of the countries Pui Wai’s friends and family are emigrating to, as well as being the cosmopolitan tourist’s lingua franca. Law has expressed her fascination with language and dialect, and described the film as ‘multilingual’ (like Floating Life, which is in English, Cantonese and German), reflecting her own bilingual upbringing which involved attending an Anglo-Chinese school, but speaking Cantonese at home.⁵⁵ Yue has extrapolated on the postcolonial implications of this:

Autumn Moon is multilingual, sliding easily from one lexicon to another. The film … is in Cantonese, Japanese and English. English bears the pidgin traces of Japanese; Cantonese is infused with the syntaxes of Mandarin, and in some instances, the dialogue shifts from one language to another in one sentence. This linguistic device reflects not only the ambiguity of origins and belongings (of language and culture); its creolisation is characteristic of the legacy of Hong Kong’s postcoloniality. Here, the subversive force of hybridity disarticulates and re-enunciates its symbolic meaning through the destabilisation and carnivalisation of the linguistic dominion of ‘English’ with different semantic and lexical codes. This linguistic device reveals Hong Kong as a paradox of cultural memories caught between the empires of Britain and China. It indicates a hybrid cinema and a place that is global, local, transnational and diasporic.⁵⁶

Fore has invoked Homi Bhabha in suggesting that Tokio and Pui Wai’s friendship takes place in ‘a “third space” in which barely articulate English is the lingua franca and the inevitable gaps in communication are filled in with gestures, body languages and silences’.⁵⁷ In a film which Law has stated is about the absence of ‘linkages and connections’,⁵⁸ English nonetheless becomes an important common currency in which Tokio and Pui Wai are able communicate some important existential and emotional home truths to each other in a reasonably succinct and economical manner. They are forced to speak frankly and simply, and in the process establish a brother-sister-like relationship. In their first encounter, Pui Wai cautions Tokio about the fish in the polluted harbour he is fishing in, in what is possibly an ironic reference to Hong Kong’s history, in Abbas’ words, ‘from fishing village to British colony to global city to one of China’s Special Administrative Regions’.⁵⁹ Tokio mimics Pui Wai’s sing-song question ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ with his childlike rejoinder ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ emphasising that they both appear to be killing time and at something of a loose end. Communicating in English also enables Tokio to establish an uncertain conduit, via Pui Wai’s translations, to Pui Wai’s grandmother, who speaks only Cantonese, but who represents a vital link with the traditional Chinese culture, traditions and customs he is seeking, as well as a reminder of the importance of memory and the past.

But the occasional alienness of English as a ‘linguistic dominion’ to both protagonists is underscored in one crucial, ‘ice breaking’ exchange in the film, during Tokio and Pui Wai’s first encounter, which illustrates that the two also have deeper linguistic links which relate to traditional Chinese culture. Pui Wai is unable to understand when Tokio says he is ’bored’, so he writes the word down for her as the kanji for ‘agony’, or the Chinese character men, the literal meaning of which, as he explains, is ‘My heart is trapped … inside the door’. Pui Wai understands immediately, and replies in English, ‘You better open your heart’ to which Tokio responds, grimacing, hand on heart, ‘Too painful!’ This process encapsulates graphically through its use of the Chinese character what gradually happens between the two characters in the remainder of the film. It also spells out Tokio’s embodiment of one of the film’s principal themes - the absence of the desire for any real affective connections in an environment dominated by business, technology, tourism, anomie and electronic gadgetry.

McDonalds as a Site of Memory

After he establishes contact with Pui Wai, Tokio symbolically throws away his tourist restaurant guide, renouncing his role as tourist, and asks Pui Wei to take him to her ‘favourite restaurant … Traditional’. This turns out, equally symbolically, to be an empty McDonald’s, which she defensively explains has ‘a long, long history in America’, but goes on to reveal is a key emotional site for her, as her most important memories reside there. All her birthdays from the age of one to ten were celebrated there with her extended family and friends, while in the past five years it has provided a place ‘to cry’ with her classmates (at least until they all emigrate). As Yue extrapolates:

For Tokio, McDonald’s is just a global sign of American imperialism: from Toronto to Singapore to Taipei to London, it is, as his travels have attested to, the same all over the world. For Pui Wai, this particular McDonald’s is different. In the quintessential little corner set aside for children’s parties is the place of an adolescent’s cultural memory of belonging and loss. … In this scene, the place of McDonald’s, as the site that constitutes the friendship, serves as a point of intersection and transition. As a place that demythologises Tokio’s search for the imaginary and authentic traditional ‘Chinese’ culture and a place where Pui Wah can localise, domesticate and indigenise, it functions as a shared discursive space for Pui Wah and Tokio’s friendship. In Pui Wah’s pre-post 1997 memories, McDonald’s is like Hong Kong: transnational and diasporic. From the ‘nowhere and ‘everywhere’ global sign of the big ‘M’ lies the floating place of a heterotopic Hong Kong where imagined geographies are demystified and transnational cultures are negotiated.⁶⁰

Certainly the scene demonstrates how a McDonald’s restaurant can be indigenised and imbued with local and personal significance, and is not necessarily always the encoded symbol of globalised US homogeneity it is often regarded as. As such, Pui Wei’s valorisation of McDonald’s corroborates US anthropologist James Watson’s rather partisan gastronomic claims about the impact of McDonald’s in Hong Kong over a thirty-year period: ‘Since the 1970s, an entire generation of Japanese and Hong Kong children have grown up with McDonald’s; to these people the Big Mac, fries, and Coke do not represent something foreign. McDonald’s is, quite simply, “local” cuisine’. Watson also observes more usefully that branches of McDonald’s have been appropriated by middle school students in Hong Kong as ‘hangouts for studying, gossiping, picking over snacks; for them, the restaurants are the equivalent of youth clubs’. He goes on to make the rather exaggerated claim that this illustrates how for many young people in Hong Kong ‘the transnational is the local’ and McDonald’s is part of a ‘lifestyle … emerging in Hong Kong that can best be described as postmodern, postnationalist, and flamboyantly transnational.’ With its organised children’s birthday parties and its use by Hong Kong teenagers as a ‘substitute home’, he argues that McDonald’s ‘is not perceived as an exotic or alien institution: the children of Hong Kong have made it their own … [it] has become such a routine feature of Hong Kong’s urban environment that most young people cannot imagine life without it’.⁶¹ But in the present tense of Law’s film, the empty McDonald’s also becomes the site of an exodus, a social and cultural vacuum, and a rather impoverished substitute for a lack of any distinctively localised sense of identity, home, heritage or ‘independent thinking or inquisitiveness’ which Law sees in the younger generation in Hong Kong.⁶² But Tokio’s indignation at his McDonald’s experience does have a positive outcome – it prompts Pui Wai to invite him home to sample her grandmother’s impressive traditional Cantonese cooking, which is something else she is able to take for granted along with frequenting McDonald’s, and provides Tokio with an opportunity to sample non-touristic traditional Chinese food and experience the Chinese traditions Pui Wei’s grandmother embodies. Pui Wei’s own lack of familiarity with some of these traditions is immediately illustrated by her grandmother reprimanding her for trying to light incense sticks for the family shrine on the gas cooker. Consequently both characters enter a realm of Chinese ancestral tradition which enables them to develop a stronger sense of belonging and access sites of cultural memory.

The McDonald’s scene, which Yan Zhong Xian has described as ‘a wonderful portrait of the loss of a sense of history’ also serves to illustrate the importance of memory and history as fundamental to a sense of identity.⁶³ Abbas has claimed that due to their traumatic history of colonisation, ‘Hong Kong people have little memory and no sentiment for the past’, but Pui Wai is aware of the need for memories, in contrast to Tokio, who although only in his mid-20s, seems to be something of an amnesiac.⁶⁴ He cannot remember if the temperature in Tokyo is measured in celsius or fahrenheit, or whether his first girlfriend’s sister is married, or his first kiss, and the ‘measuring gaze’ of his camcorder seems to function as a recorder of facts, statistics, locations, prices and purchases in Hong Kong that he would otherwise forget.⁶⁵ This reliance on Japanese technological means of memorialising things is echoed by Pui Wai’s comment that she has ‘become a recording machine’ as her family in Canada have asked her to videotape Cantonese-language TV programs for them. The loss of memory has wider resonances in the totally modern, functional urban landscape of Hong Kong which the film portrays, where little sense of history has been able to survive. Abbas has suggested that one of the main features of the new Hong Kong cinema is its ‘sensitivity to spatial issues, in other words, to dislocations and discontinuities and its adoption of spatial narratives both to underline and come to terms with … historical anachronism and achronisms: space as a means for reading the elusiveness of history’.⁶⁶ Abbas links this with problems of affectivity, and Autumn Moon’s scrutiny of the surfaces of buildings and streetscapes, and its characters’ searches for mementos and connections with their history underlines this loss of history which could be read as an endemic feature of the postmodern condition which they are resisting. In an article which reads the film in terms of a portrayal of fragmentation, disjunction and simulation, and the loss of subjectivity, history and a sense of reality, Yan Zhong Xian notes:

Hong Kong, although it is a city of 6 million people, has no important buildings of a ‘commemorative nature’ and possesses no dominating metropolitan open spaces of a commemorative nature. Government departments were established in completely average looking office buildings, and the classical style buildings that remained from the early period of English colonisation have completely disappeared in the process of metropolitan development. This so-called super-modernist city has come about as a result of its need for the development of a relatively high degree of functionality (public transport, economy, housing) and even more as a result of its attitude of regarding its pursuit of a cosmopolitan look as progress and of opposing the classical historical aspect. Autumn Moon makes news of this abundantly clear to its audience.⁶⁷

In one of the voice-over monologues Law and Fong give each of the three main characters in the film, Tokio, perhaps influenced by his use of his camcorder as a ‘recording machine’, expresses a desire to be interviewed. He lists the subjects that no one has asked him about for a very long time: his home town, brothers and sisters, favourite colour, horoscope, the year he stopped growing up, his shoe size, father’s occupation, grandparents’ teeth, first interest in girls’ breasts, first lovemaking, the happiest and most painful moments of his life, what he is most afraid of, and what makes life worth living. This monologue, which is addressed to Miki, whom he encounters by chance in an empty square (and first sees through the lens of his camcorder), occasions tears, and expresses his lack of any enduring sense of important memories. Law has justified his series of frenetic sexual encounters with Miki, a journalist working for a Japanese news agency in Hong Kong, in terms of expressing the idea of the body reliving memories, but they also represent a link to home, Tokio’s past and memories of his first love affair.⁶⁸ The latter is also invoked by Pui Wai’s conversation with Tokio about her first boyfriend: ‘This is a girl in love’, Tokio comments in Japanese. Pui Wai tells him of her (seemingly unrequited) feelings for her boyfriend, who is more concerned with emigrating to the USA and studying nuclear physics at university, but Tokio can only tell her of the diminishing of his heart beat after hundreds of kisses with hundreds of girls (and even with the same girl). Pui Wai runs away when he tells her ‘now I can’t even remember my first love’s face’. But her overnight trip with her boyfriend to Lantau island - the site of the new Chek Lap Kok international airport completed in 1998, which according to Abbas is ‘a kind of city within a city, but a city without citizens, a semiotic or informational city populated by travellers and service personnel’, only reaffirms the transience of their relationship.⁶⁹

Pui Wai’s recollections of her grandfather while her grandmother is in hospital provide an opportunity for Tokio to participate in a sense of her personal history in Hong Kong. This is represented symbolically by his holding up an old Chinese suit from an old photograph of Pui Wai’s grandfather at about his age, and by the old cigarette tin, writing materials and one of the grandfather’s landscape painting - the only one that remains since all the others were thrown away when Pui Wai’s grandmother moved to her parents’ house. These old family memories contrast with the present, in which Pui Wai’s parents have declared her grandmother to be dead on their immigration papers, a common ploy resorted to in Hong Kong in order to expedite the immigration process. Consequently the identity of the grandmother (who is never named in the film) has been negated along with the traditional Cantonese culture, history and cuisine she embodies, and her monologue, which Tokio dutifully records on his camcorder at her hospital bed, is about her preparations for death. She expresses her desire for a big, comfortable coffin, and to be buried in the Buddhist cemetery. Her main desire is that her children have a long, prosperous and safe life, and she does not want them to return from Canada to see her unless they are ‘free’. This selfless concern for her family is made more tragic by our awareness that it is completely unreciprocated, and the grandmother, together with her cat which Pui Wai and Tokio must take responsibility for feeding when she goes into hospital, and the Cantonese opera she falls asleep watching on television, becomes an acute reminder of the callous loss of history, memory and tradition the transient Hong Kong migrant is prepared to experience.

Inspired by the grandmother and her memorabilia, a sense of their own loss of history and memory and the sense of identity they engender motivate Pui Wai and Tokio to celebrate the Autumn Moon festival in a deserted fishing village, where the old people have all died, and the young people have all disappeared, in the final sequence of the film. Shots of the desolate remains of the village almost evoke the wasteland of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The Chinese mid-autumn festival has similarities with the Bon festival in Japan, which Tokio invokes, in which the full moon represents reunion, and the ancestors are welcomed and then dispatched on a boat. The full moon in Chinese tradition is synonymous with a sense of home, family and love, while autumn also obviously represents transition between summer and winter which is a key theme in the film. Hence the festival which gives the film its title represents a ritual celebration and consolidation of time, place and identity which amounts to a final coming to terms with transition and transience, and in Pui Wai’s case, the inevitability of migration. The final festival scene begins with Tokio and Pui Wai fishing from a rock, echoing their first encounter, as well as Hong Kong’s origins as a fishing village. Tokio’s voice over recalls what Pui Wai has told him about her parents bringing her to this spot to catch ‘delicious’ fish when she was small, a family ritual that was discontinued once her father had to earn extra money for migration. This spot by the sea also echoes the news that Pui Wai has received on the phone, that her family have just bought a house by the sea in Canada. Tokio goes on to relate that Pui Wai has told him she has forgotten about her boyfriend, and he has urged her not to, since he has ‘forgotten too much’, and this sequence also underlines the importance of preserving memories. They light lanterns along the main street of the deserted ghost town, and make little boats, he from paper, following Japanese tradition, she from a papaya skin, in which they float lanterns on the water. They then set off fireworks as Pui Wai’s voice over records that this will be her last mid-autumn festival in Hong Kong, and she recites all she can remember of a poem her grandfather taught her: ‘Faded spring flower, autumn moon/ The past, what do we know of you?/ At my home last night the east wind blew – can’t remember the rest.’ The film ends with a long close up of their faces looking upwards, illuminated by fireworks, followed by aerial shots of a deserted part of Hong Kong by night. This ritualised conclusion, which has affinities with the similarly ritualistic conclusions of Farewell China and Floating Life, represents an attempt to re-invoke a sense of history and memory, lay to rest anxieties about future uncertainties and express a sense of both belonging and loss which unites the two characters in a cross-cultural ceremony of expiation. Pui Wai’s rite of passage through first love and leave-taking is counterbalanced by Tokio’s overcoming his boredom and sense of familiarity through immersion into aspects of traditional Chinese culture (mainly through Pui Wai’s grandmother) and evocations of his own cultural traditions. His journey in the film corresponds to a progression through tourist stereotypes and superficial classifications and quantifications to a state of understanding and friendship which enables him to gain insights into the transitional state of Hong Kong and the importance of tradition in discovering the routes to a sense of identity that has a connection to personal and historical ‘roots’.

Ambient Drifting: Autumn Moon’s Soundscapes

In an interview about The Goddess of 1967, Law used the Chinese word hei-fen to invoke the way in which atmosphere and tone in a film combine to generate an understanding of the totality of the situation, events and characters of a film. Music, she argues, plays an important role in this process, and ‘film music should be able to work as independently as dialogue in a film … to bring out a lot of things you don’t say in the dialogue, which is maybe the subtext, or is just something unsaid’. Film music functions for Law as a way of ‘saying something of the inner world of [a] character or … a yearning for a world they do not have’, an observation which is particularly appropriate to the use of music in Autumn Moon.⁷⁰ Film music remains a comparatively neglected area in cinema studies,⁷¹ despite Schopenhauer’s statement that ‘suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it’, which is an appropriate evocation of the role film music can play in providing suture and a ‘third dimension’ to cinematic narrative, situations and characterisation.⁷²

The music in Autumn Moon is by Tats Lau, who subsequently wrote the award-winning music for Law’s Temptation of a Monk and her Wonton Soup segment of Erotique (1994), and has been referred to as the ‘godfather’ of Hong Kong’s tiny alternative avant-garde music scene, as well as being part of the highly politicised Cantopop duo Tat Ming Pair. Composed and performed by Lau in collaboration with Tommy Wai, it embodies important underscoring features of film music. The term ‘ambient music’, as defined by British composer Brian Eno, is an apt description of the highly modal, drone-like, minimalist score that Lau and Wai constructed and performed for the film. Eno invented the term in 1978 as ‘music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment’, retaining a ‘sense of doubt and uncertainty’, and inducing ‘calm and a space to think’ rather than aiming to be cheerful. Its principal features are ‘stillness, homogeneity, lack of surprises, and, most of all, lack of variety … we wanted it to be continuous, a surrounding.’⁷³ This is very much the function of the music in Autumn Moon, which consists of predominantly slow, repetitive patterns of instrumental music for electric guitar, acoustic guitar, piano and fretless bass, augmented with Chinese stringed instruments the erhu (2 strings), sanxian (3 strings) and ruan. Its reliance on extended amplified notes (which are frequently ‘bent’ through distortion and feedback) with little rhythmic pulse (no drums) gives it a laconic, floating quality which complements sonically the drifting state of the film’s principal characters as well as the ‘parametric’ function of the film’s scutiny of architecural surfaces. The subtle use of Chinese instruments as tonal colouring also evokes the themes of Chinese identity which are important to the journey undergone by the three principal characters in the film, without being self-conscious, essentialist or obvious about their sonic associations. Yan Zhong-Xian considered the music in the film to be an important indicator of the film’s changing moods, describing it as alternating between a ‘lustreless melancholic soundtrack’ at the beginning, and a ‘benedictory, celebratory feeling’ in the first sequence of aerial shots over the city. During the film’s final aerial sequence, he notes, there is a return to ‘the heavy depressive music of the film’s beginning, expressing the feeling of sadness of the city and its role. It seems to be giving a sincere, yet helpless description of a kind of “fragmented” spatial image’.⁷⁴ This indicates the music’s role in expressing a sense of deracination and alienation in its lack of any cohesive, narrative melodies, which reflects the film’s own minimal narrative. Lau and Wai’s music is used non-diegetically throughout the film, as opposed to the highly diegetic karaoke scene, where Pui Wai and her friends sing a Japanese pop song, credited as ‘Without Love’ by Pink Cloud. Usually accompanying tracking shots - from the taxi Tokio takes from the airport, for example, or in the aerial sequences - the music combines, road movie-style, with the film’s architectural facades to establish an often lugubrious sense of desertion and emptiness. It is a key atmospheric element in the film’s enunciation of themes of migration, transition and loss of identity.

Given Law and Fong’s subsequent migration to Australia, Autumn Moon and its soundtrack, released more than a year after the film with restructured versions of the three main characters’ central monologues set to music, and at least two additional songs not included in the film, can be read as their own rather lugubrious personal swan-song to pre-handover Hong Kong. Autumn Moon expresses an even stronger sense of the postcolonial melancholy and loss which David Eng finds in Floating Life (1999), but its final scene can be read as a highly modernist reconciliation of a fragmented, transient and rootless present with a sense of the importance of memory, tradition and the past. As Fore has pointed out, the film deals with ‘fundamentally humanistic notions’ and ultimately demonstrates that ‘the attempt, individually and collectively, to understand the significance of 1997 is not easily distinguishable from the ongoing, quotidian search for emotional fulfillment, which in turn is not usefully separable from the quest for identity within a culture in a state of crisis.’⁷⁵ Pui Wai and Tokio’s final quiet celebration of the Autumn Moon festival – traditionally an expression of family unity - is a ritual marking their transition from a state of transient anomie to a sense of connectedness to the past and history (with autumn as a transition between summer and winter), and even a sense of home and belonging in not-quite-lost origins. The film’s predominantly melancholic tenor and elliptical narrative progression nonetheless leave a poignant residual sense of loss and disappearance – of history, tradition, family unity, memory – which Pui Wai and Tokio succeed at least in partially identifying and reconciling through their connection with the grandmother. As such, it stands as an important cinematic testament to Hong Kong’s uneasy emergence from its post-colonial anxieties in its emphasis on the importance of maintaining and reinvigorating the Chinese ‘roots’ embodied by Pui Wai’s grandmother, in order to enable the ‘routes’ of Pui Wai and Tokio’s migration and travel to be fruitful. It is a similar value of ‘roots’ to that which Paul Gilroy has emphasised in his reading of Jameson’s view of postmodernity as ‘another equally Eurocentric master narrative’ which emphasises ‘the new depthlessness, the weakening of historicity, the waning of affect’ at the expense of non-European, modernist cultural forms which use the ‘technological means at their disposal not to flee from depth but to revel in it, not to abjure public history but to proclaim it!’⁷⁶ Autumn Moon, in its emphasis on history, memory and affective links between generations, aligns itself with this modernist ethos.

Author’s Note: This article is based on a paper given at the 10th History and Film Conference at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand, in December 2000, and a seminar given at the Cultural Studies department of Lingnan University, Hong Kong in May 2001. I am grateful to Haiyan Wang and Peter Le Baige for their assistance with translations from Chinese.

Notes

Discography

Tats Lau and Tommy Wai, Music from Autumn Moon, Hong Kong: Sound Factory/Red Cat, 1994.

Not just black noise, hip-hop mondial

Multikulti, rhizomatic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you, growing like wildfire through the cracks and fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the so-called global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

From its origins in Jamaican sound systems and DJs toasting, exported to New York by Kool Herc Its multikulti manifestations with Latino graffiti writers and Puerto Rican and Filippino-American breakers taking it way outside the USA Into the Middle East, for example

Shehadin the Martyrs in Palestine saying it in anasheed, chanting to an Islamic beat

Ahlam from Morocco mixing beats in ’95 with Bill Laswell on ‘Acting Salaam’

Tribal bass dub with a parental advisory sticker: ‘Warning -contains messages from Arabs’, on the Barbarity label with Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects

In Lod, Israel, TN Tamer Nafar the Arab Palestian rapper in the State of Israel, rhyming in Hebrew and Arab, Salaam Aleikum!

And Shabak keeping hip-hop alive in Israel, along with Booyaka, Subliminal and Israel’s Most Wanted

Aki Nawaz and Fundamental stirring it up against racist violence in the UK with ‘Dog Tribe’

And Hustlers HC and Asian Dub Foundation doin it for Inglan’ and Inglanistan

And the Sons of Hagar right here in Seattle, named after Abraham’s wife and Ishmael’s mother, rapping about polygamy in ‘Sistersss’ and about the Palestinian revolution

60 groups in Oran, 100 in Algiers, making Algeria the hip-hop leader of Arab nations and the Islamic world

MCs mixin and code switching in Arabic, French and English

MBS in Ouled El Bahja talkin about the daily war in Algeria Intik, De Men, Hamma, K2C, Darkman, Cause Toujours and K Libre on Algerap

Arab-French MCs fighting Islamophobia –

Saliha, ‘une fille rappeuse’, ‘une exclue, une petite Beurette’, with ‘Enfants du Ghetto’ and Siria Khan’s ‘La Main de Fatma’ on Rapattitude in 90 and 92

IAM’s pharaoism on the Planet Mars in Marseille, le cote obscur, and Yazid’s ‘Islam’ and ‘je suis l’Arabe’, Mafia Maghrebine, 113, K-Rime, Cause Toujours, Kery James, Clotaire K representing Beyrouth Ecouere – Gutted Beirut

French hip-hop, the second kingdom, second biggest hip-hop industry in the world

Where Islam is the second biggest religion, and banlieue hip-hoppers from Arab, African, Caribbean and Southern European origins turn the red white and blue into the black white and beur, enriching the language with verlan reverse slang, and veul, reverse reverse slang, where Arab bnecoems beur and beur becomes rebeu

Suprême NTM and Ministère Amer charged fined and suspended prison sentences for dissing the police

19 hip-hop artists joined forces for ’11 minutes 30 contre les lois raciste’ 11 minutes 30 seconds again the racist laws

Where hip-hop is an educational institution, in the land of La Haine and Le Pen, where Saian Supa Crew

Join hands through the darkness with DLT down in Aotearoa /New Zealand

MC Solaar, born in Dakar, setting the standard with his ‘radicool’ prose combat, a million seller, sowing the wind and reaping the tempo, a cliché in France now, but the only French rappeur to get through the US customs with Guru and Missy Elliot, even if Dee Nasty got there first

And hundreds of others following le flow – Assassin, Arsenik, ABS, Afrodiziac, Aktivist, Alliance Ethnik, Addis Posse, Alarme, Argotrip, Akhenaton – and that’s just the ‘a’s!

Inspiring Francophone hip-hoppers in Montréal – Dubmatique, crossing the axis from Dakar to Paris to Montréal, keepin it réal,

Along with female MCs in La Gamic, La Costellation

Shout outs for les femmes du hip-hop francais – Ste Srausz, Les Nubiennes, Siria Khan, Saliha, Unique and Résolument féminin, B Love, Princess Anies, Lady Laiste, the black mama of Zulu rap, and B Side, who started it back in ’82 with ‘Change de Beat’

Global shout outs to the small but growing feline nation of women in hip-hop: Michie Mee in Canada, Feven in Sweden, La Pina in Italy, Da Drill in Bulgaria, Sabrine Setlur aka Schwester S, Cora E, Meli’s Skills en Masse and Tic Tac Toe in Germany, MC Trey, Maya Jupiter and her sisters on Native Tongues in Sydney, Moana, Teremoana Rapley, Nemesis and Sheelaroc in Aotearoa, and many many more

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you, growing like wildfire through the cracks and fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Startin’ right in the USA, with the Hispanic causing panic -

Chicano Frost’s Calo and Spanglish, doin’ it for La Raza (rasa)

Ya Estuvo, blitzin’ the culos, inspiring Latino MCs all over South America

Like Claudio Yarto, MC of Calo in Mexico

Taught himself to rap from Frost’s tapes

Colombia’s rap cartel pushing up from under, la Pozze Latina in Chile, El Sindicao Argentino del hip-hop, Racionais MCs and Cambio Negra in Brazil, Terra Firma representing Brazil in Adelaide

Fidel Castro proclaiming rap music is the existing revolutionary voice of Cuba’s future, Orishas representing Cuba in Paris, SBS, Reyes de la Calle and many more at the Cuban National Hip-hop festival in Havana, Italian rappers switching to Latin lingos and regional dialects

After freestylin’ with Frost in Rome in 92

South African coloured rappers like Brasse Vannie Kaap, Brothers of the Cape

Sayin’ it in Afrikaans, English, xhosa, Arabic, ebonics and prison slang

Finding more to identify with in Latino hip-hop than the African American kind

So Cypress Hill claim they’re funky bilinguals?

Hey should take a few language lessons from Silent Majority, the funky multilinguals,

Macaronic rap, Lausanne on the map, rhymin’ is the art, part of a global thing

La majorité silencieuse, not just a pale copy of the USA

MCs code switching through French, Spanish, Swahili, English and Jamaican patois –

Dans une autre langue, in another language and another one

Hookin’ up with MC Carlos from Sens Unik:

‘OK!OK! El rap es Americano

But if American was yellow our music would be Chinese

Senor C does it in Spanish

And is proud of his Latin blood

Music is contagious and rhythm is a plant

That grows from New York to Martignan’

American Indian voices don’t seem to enter the US hip-hop equation

The pow wow hip-hop of Robbie Bee and the Boyz from the Rez,

Ebony warriors straight outta Albuquerque, hoka hoka hey!

Native American rap from Litefoot, signifying Sitting Bull on ‘A Good Day to Die’,

On a Mission with Frost, indigenising Woody Gythrie on ‘My Land’

Btaka Brown’s Cherokee Indian funk , WithOut Reservation, Caspar the Hopi reggae rapper

John Trudell - Graffiti Man’s sure got something’ to say,

Nation conscious rap, rockin’ the res, ranting and rolling

Zimbawe Legit, Dumi Right and Akim

The real brothers from the mother landed in the US in 1992

Rappin in Shona and Ndbele

Coined the phrase doin’ damage in our native language

Got a little help from DJ Shadow’s Legitimate Mix

Censoring their lyrics, and where are they now?

Back in Zimbabwe cos they dared to criticise

Lost tribal followers and bogus Afrocentricity

Positive Black Soul, straight outta Dakar in Senegal

Swutchin from English to French and Wolof,

Salaam to the real Nubians,

The brother men from another land known as the motherland

The new underprivileged party representing Djoko, Unity

Inspiring a whole new generation of Senegalese hip-hop

Da hop from Dakar with Bideew Bou Bess,

Wa BMG 44, Boul ‘n’ Bai and Kantiolis

Keepin it multilingual down there in Dakar

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you growing like wildfire through the cracks and tiny fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the so-called global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Travelling the world over, from up in Greenland, Kalaalit hip-hoppers the Nuuk Posse sayin’ it in Greenlandish, Inuit, Danish and English, sampling whalesong and throatsong, mixing Public Enemy and trip hop Contesting the dominance of the Danish language, and Quarashi in Iceland

All the way down to Planet Cape Town, South Africa, the ghetto code of the Universal Souljaz, Prophets of Da City, Cape Crusaders re-releasing Nelson Mandela, Black Noize and Grave Diggers’ Productions

To Ranking T, raggamuffinement votre on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean,

And Da West Indies Krew doin it in kreyol, Brother Resistance coining rapso in Trinidad,

To Bad Balance, Raketa and Malshishniki in Russia, LiRoy, Molesta and more than 250 hip-hop releases in Poland,

Parazitii, B.U.G. Mafia, Akcent, La Famiglia, Maijuana, Racla, Da Hood Justice, more than 60 hip-hop artists in Romania, G Play and many more in Hungary, Goumeni Glavi, the Rubberheads, Misha Shamara, DJ Dido, Upsurt, Momshevski Sviat, Romanetza I Enchev, Igrachite, Dreben G, Pikaso, Spenz and Sniper Records in Bulgaria, where hip-hop is stealing the thunder from chalga and ethnopop

Rapmasters and JAR in the Czech Republic, Trosky in Slovakia, Lukas, Sindikatas and Skamp in Lithuania, with asides in French and English,

Skandalnavia Hip-hop, Tommy Tee, Warlocks and Diaz in Norway, Clemens and the Funk Flush in Denmark, Petter, the Latin Kings, Global Warming, Feven and many more in Sweden,

Papa Dee, the original black Viking, beating back Scandinavian skinheads

Finland - not all Bomfunk MCs and Darude – the second coming of Suomi hip-hop

Kwon’s multicultural dynasty, Fintelligens hooking Helsinki up with Petter and Peewee in Stockholm, Ritarikunta outta Turku, Avain, Seremoniamestari, Tulenkantajat, Skillsters, Ezkimo,

Doin’ it in Finnish but the hip-hop language is universal

Big up to Paleface The Pale Ontologist, the iconoclast, Finnish but sayin’ it in English, a Nordic parody of Eminem, blowing your house down, denouncing hip-hop as a punitive community, where not even old school heads are granted diplomatic immunity, tellin’ MCs to stop sayin’ the darndest things, and spittin’ self-possessed shit and start teaching, and Father Metro, and Giant Robot doin it in English too

7 (siete) Notas 7 Colores, Violadores del Verso, Solo los Solo, Hippaly in Spain,

El Payo Malo tellin’ us da donde venga with flamenco samples in Andaluz,

Negu Gorriak rapping Basque nationalism for the 90s

Black Company and Da Weasel’s Microcosmica, Casos de policia and Para noia in Portugal,

Osdorp Posse and Spookrijders doin’ it for Nederhop in Holland, Starflam Combattants surviving in French, Spanish and English in Belgium

The Cosirappteam in Slovenia, world championship skiers MCing ‘I Ski fast I ski slow’ in Slovenian and English in 94,

Dissed by Ali En, and followed by Klemen Klemen and Pijama

Street Explosion in Ljubliana 2000, with Blackout 00 and Megablast from Zagreb

The Ugly Leaders from Rijeka, Croatia, with DJ Pimp and Lyrical Maniac MC Condom X representing the war in Bosnia

Freundeskreis outta Stuttgart called hip-hop Esperanto

The philosophy of streetpoetry, a lingua franca

MC Miliano, soulguerillero, international linguist and lyricist

Hookin’ up with immigrants, a transnational underground culture

La langue d’amour die sprache der liebe the language of love

A transnational lingo defeating bankrupt cultures

Fast to learn and easy to understand

Advanced Chemistry started the immigrant hardcore in Germany

Italian, Ghanaian and Haitian Germans straight outa Heidelberg

Attacking racism with ‘Fremd im eigenen land’ foreign in my own country

And Turkish-German rappers Karakan, Erci E and Da Crime Posse showing the way with Cartel, Oriental hip-hop splashing down in Turkey, blitzing Krauts with Attitude like Die Fantastichen Vier

Texta in Austria, breaking down language barriers with Sprachbarrieren

Hip-hop in Italy started in English in 1990 with Italian Rap Attack – DJ Skizo in there with Radical Stuff, most of the others now long forgotten,

Except Frankie Hi NRG fighting da faida in Italian with a lone jew’s harp and a Frost sample of El Chicano’s ‘Viva La Tirado’

The social centres and the Rome militants - Onda Rossa Posse, Assalti Frontali, AK47

Papa Ricky and the Isola Posse All Stars at the Kantiere in Bologna

Almamegretta mixing Neapolitan song, dub and hip-hop in Sons of Hannibal, Attacking racism by tracing Italians’ descent from Africa

99 Posse and Possessione talking about the place where they live in Napoli dialect

Comitato and LHP at the Leoncavallo in Milano, Africa Unite and Mau Mau in Torino, South Posse in Calabria, Suoni Mudu and the Salento Posses doin’ it in Salento dialect, Sud Sound System inventing rappamuffin and tarantamuffin,

Nuovi Briganti in Messina, Sa Razza in Sardinian

Papa Ricky son of an opera singer, other posses sampling Rossini’s ‘Barber of Seville’

MCing started with recitativo in 17th century Italian opera

And the first ghetto was the Jewish quarter in Venice

So maybe hip-hop was originally Italian?

Hellenic hip-hop with TXC, Nebma, Active Member, Himiskoubria and the Terror X Crew sayin it in Greek London Posse defining UK hip-hop, Tricky, Massive Attack and Aspects on the Bristol tip, The Streets’ ‘Original Pirate Material’ straight outta Birmingham into London, sounding more like John Cooper Clarke than LL Cool J

Big Dada on the avant tip with cLOUDDEAD, Ty, Roots Manuva and TTC’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une disque’, remixing Foucault’s remix of Magritte’s ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’

Y Tystion, straight outta Aberystwth, testifying in Welsh, doin’ it for cool Cymru (Kimru), denouncing New Britain and old lies, and Manau’s Panique Celtique bringing Celtic hip-hop to Breton and the top ten in the French charts

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you growing like wildfire through the cracks and tiny fissures

Of the homogenised cement-headed global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Across to Asia with LMF, the Lazy Clan from Kowloon East Side, Hong Kong

9 tone Cantorap, a linguistic rubik’s cube,

Scratch rider world champion DJ Tommy on the decks, sampling Bruce Lee and dissing grass without roots, mixing thrash metal with Cantopop and Cantonese opera, representing street kid triads in housing estates – Respect 4 da Chopstick hip-hop!

Rock star Cui Jian’s raps on ‘Power to the Powerless’ attacking materialist idiots and the Hong Kong handover,

Paving the way for the Chinese MC Brothers in Beijing, sampling Nintendo and Nirvana, rappin in Mandarin, a language spoken by more people in the world than English

Khmer Rap by Khmer Rouge, pirated in Phnom Pheng, unbeknown to its author, Prach Ly the Cambodian American rapper from Long Beach, telling his tribe about the legacy of Pol Pot’s year zero, Laostha in Laos, Too Phat, Reefa, Naughtius Maximus and Poetic Ammo in Malaysia saying the world is yours with intellectual poetry, pop rap in English, and with Sheila Majid, sayin’ it in Malay,

Dick Lee the mad Chinaman, rapping in Singlish in Singapore with the Kopi Kat Klan,

Tao Saji started it in Korea, now MP’s 2000 master plan has taken it away, with Da Crew, Joosuc, Tequila Addicted, South Side Allstraz, Soul Chamber, and Tasha brilliant bilingual Korean-American Wonderwoman with Tiger JK from Drunken Tiger, combatting Ice Cube’s racism on ‘Black Korea’

And the Mountain Brothers, Styles, Peril-L and Chops from Penn State representing Asian-American hip-hop inscrutably

Along with the Seoul Brothers dissing ‘Yellow brothers and sisters fakin’ perpetratin’ like Barbie and Ken’ and refusing to perform novelty racist caricature shit jumping out of Chinese takeout boxes on Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Rice Rice Baby’

And Yellow Peril, formed in response to racist violence in New Jersey, decrying ‘Asian sisters made into Hollywood hos’ by gweilos in Miss Saigon and the like

And Filipino hip-hop, Flip hop, not just Filippino-Americans like the Invisibl Scratch Piklz, but MCs sayin it in Tagalog, like the Ghetto Doggs collective,

And Sudden Rush’s Na Mele Paleoleo , True Hawaiin hip-hop

And Japan’s hardcore crews battling JRap with the Little Bird Nation and Schadarapa bridging the gap

Microphone Pager coming out of the Hokoten and Yoyogi Park, DJ Krush and B Fresh and K Dub Shine, Zeebra, Rhymester, Buddha Brand and BOSS the MC

ECD called it ‘a flame flying across the ocean’ from the USA, which ignited the fuel already there in Shibuya And Sheelaroc in Christchurch sharing the mic from New Zealand to Japan

Japanese hip-hop re-surfacing in Australasia with Dieske and Ryo in Two Dogs in Brisbane, making Australian hip-hop multicultural and multilingual

Wizdm,a South American Aussie with Brethren in Sydney, passing the spoon in ‘Pasa La Cuchara’, ‘Que passa Gough Whitlam, Ciao Pinochet’

And Ila Familia pa’ mi gente for their people in Sydney MCing in Spanish and Spanglish and English

Sleek the Elite bangin’ the mike for the children of the cedar, Lebanese –Australian hip-hop along with South West Syndicate,

Mass MC hooking up with global Italian hip-hop, and Et-Nik Tribe settling the score, romanicin’ the racist

And all the way back to Down Under by Law in 1988, Westside Posse becoming Sound Unlimited from the underside making it to a major label, and Def Wish Cast’s AUST down under coming upper defining Australian hip-hop

The Arrernte Desert Posse and Blakjustis rapping for Aboriginal women, passing it on to Native Rhyme Syndicate putting indigenous Australian hip-hop on the map,

Songlines passing through Brutha Black in SWS, Hip-hop a Place of Peace and Desert Rap, and Wire in Western Sydney with Trey and Maya Jupiter

Curse ov Dialect in Melbourne reincarnating rap from the dead, with ‘all cultures clashing’

Hou from Koolism in Canberra passing the kava bowl and the alali drum and the tapa cloth to MC Trey and King Kapisi, Pacific island Polynesian hip-hop following the rhymes ‘from the kingdom of Tonga to Western Samoa,

To Fiji, to the Cook Islands, to Tahiti to Aotearoa’

And Te Kupu in Upper Hutt Posse starting it in te reo Maori in 88, praising the warrior chiefs in Aotearoa with E Tu, finding the hip-hop whakapapa in Maoitangi, mixing patere with haka and waiata and karanga for the tangata whenua

Dam Native greeting the funk with their Mauri, and Iwi, DLT, Che Fu, MC Wiya, doin’ it in Maori language

The Dawn Raid Colective, P Money, Deceptikonz, Ill Semantics, Aotearoa hip-hop getting out to the masses,

And King Kapisi’s Samoan hip worldwide, inspiring Nesian Mystik’s N.Z.H.I.P.H.O.P

Aotearoan and Australasian hip-hop worldwide

Global hip-hop worldwide

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you growing like wildfire through the cracks and tiny fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the so-called global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Indigenising hip-hop all over the world

Smiling At Strangers is bound to stir up local hip hop purists - as Joelistics states in the press release, ’somewhere along the way hip hop became a tired corporate beast that ran to a formula and trotted out the same lame cliches. Kind of like the cheerleader for capitalism. … TZU have always flown by the seat of our pants. With this album we wanted to push ourselves to do something different … from the local scene and the international scene. We challenged ourselves to write an album where we played all the instruments and wrote songs that were equally influenced by Muddy Waters and A Tribe Called Quest. A lot of inspiration for the songs comes from the concept of “What would it sound like if the Beatles made hip-hop? What if Ray Charles was taken to a jam with DJ Krush and the Kinks. What would that sound like?’

The result is sometimes rough but always adventurous, if lyrically not as cutting edge as TZU’s best work, and whether its more rock orientation will lead to the kind of crossover success enjoyed by 1200 Techniques will probably depend on how Mushroom markets it. What remains consistent is TZU’s characteristically wild, crazed and often exhilaratingly imaginative approach to hip hop that is more aligned with Paso Bionic’s other crew, the avant-garde lunatics Curse ov Dialect.

TZU formed in Melbourne in 1999, incorporating members of Curse Ov Dialect (notably DJ Paso Bionic, who shares production duties with Kiwi DJ Yeroc) and Pan, most notably lyricist, DJ, fruit vendor and Yoga teacher Seed, and represent the new generation, good time, party end of hip-hop, but with old school conscious lyrics and intellectual overtones. These are signalled by their name, a reference to Lao Tzu, ‘the original ancient Chinese B-Boy sage who freestyled the Tao Te Ching 3000 years ago (and we’re still feeling it)’ - lead rapper Joelistics, a part time teacher and high school hip-hop and theatre workshop facilitator, is Eurasian and takes his Daoist heritage seriously. He also name checks the I Ching-influenced writing of ‘the Magellan of psychedelic headspace’, Terence McKenna, on ‘language as the furniture for thinking and feeling and the building blocks of culture’. Joelistics is an engaging rhymer, and a champion freestyler, guesting with Sydney agit-rap group the Herd and showcasing his rapid-fire improvisatory MC skills regularly in ciphers at events such as the Newcastle Sound Summit. Position Correction, released by Mushroom subsidiary Liberation, follows on from the group’s more tentative, self-produced debut, the 6 track EP, Um …Just a Liddlebidova Mic Check.

It leads off with the relaxed, loping beats of ‘Who?’, an introduction to the group, which is also the subject of a high-energy ghetto-style video clip, ‘We Are TZU’, which looks like it was filmed in an underground car park. (It is featured on the giveaway CD Rom with issue number 11 of Stealth magazine, the local hip-hop mouthpiece, along with an interview with Joelistics.) ‘Summer Days’ is an exercise in hot weather hedonistic party rap, while the up-tempo guitar-driven title track introduces the group as ‘backpacking rat pattern back fashioned Fat Latin bushwalking nutcracking wordsmith tactitians’ while attacking current government spending cuts on education and the environment, mistreatment of asylum seekers and support for those who demonstrate. ‘The Horse You Rode in On’ is a full-on political diatribe against Aussie patriotism, the government, talkback radio, ‘redneck clucks’ and a range of other establishment forces, expressing ‘the kickback from toes you tread on’, and quoting the Herd’s ‘burn down the parliament’ along the way. The album ends with the ten-minute ‘Travel Song’, a freewheeling, Kerouac-like stream of consciousness recollection of travel experiences in the Himalayas, tropics, and elsewhere, backed by an insistent Hammond organ figure and bassline and small string orchestra. A slow church organ-like figure, swelling into an orchestral interlude, completes the quasi-classical final segment of the album, which covers a wide range of moods, styles and tempos, and represents another new direction in Australian hip-hop coming from an idiosyncratic Melbourne push which is making an important impact on local indigenisations of the genre.

Her debut 10 track album opens in an appealingly laid back and melodic mode, with keyboards and lush instrumental backing (including a cello on ‘Blind is the Dollar’) occasionally reminiscent of the Bristol trip hop sounds of Massive Attack and Tricky, becoming feistier and the more up-tempo in the second half, with the guitar-driven move-your-butt funk of ‘It’s the Way, the more aggressive ‘As I Escape’, about the on-the-street experience of graffiti writing, which samples Sydney MC Hyjack, and the pounding, Ser Reck-produced final track ‘Gravity Warriors’ about her eponymous break dance crew. Also backed by the scratches of her regular DJ Bacon and production team Mobius Cube, she alternates singing and a soft, melodic rap style on tracks such as the opening ‘Time to Myself’, a claim to privacy with references to ‘juniper berries and frangipani’, and ‘Ghosts of Poets’, which refers to her influences and inspirations as a rhymster. While sometimes straying into new age territory, with references to aromatherapy, she also delivers a laid-back form of conscious rap which attacks commercialisation. While too many tracks are self-reflexive, dealing with the experiences of writing and delivering rhymes and performing on stage, as well as participating in the other elements of hip-hop, this is a musically diverse release and a welcome addition to the steadily growing number of Australian hip-hop releases by women MCs.

DeFocus is the most recent showcase of Clan Analogue artists’ work, and its subtitle ‘Low Res’, apart from suggesting the rock musician at the centre of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Idoru, derives from the low resolution electronic production that predominates on this compilation. As Clan Analogue’s website states, it ‘steers a path through ambient dub, minimalist techno, electro noise and lo fi’. Throughout the sixteen tracks, ‘anti-production, accidental noise, low bit-rate recordings and analogue tape dropouts make sporadic appearances’ challenging listeners to ‘question their received notions of electronic production’. The ‘error messages’ of the cut-click-glitch mode of electronica pioneered by the more ear-bleeding approach of the Viennese label Mego predominates here, although often in the more melodic, listener-friendly versions of the sub-genre popularised by British artists such as Pole and Four Tet. But it is often hard to distinguish these tracks from standard techno fare. Monotonously repetitive beats tend to predominate, ranging from the standard thud-thud-thud-thud techno brutalism of Fluffy T Bunny to the slowed-down brutalist drum and bass of Alex Davies, the rubber band pulse of Terry Nation and the more melodic ambient dub of Deep Child’s ‘Refugee Dub’, which does little to justify its title. Clan founder Kazumichi Grime offers a more melodic, but darkly ambient pulse on the Terry Riley-like ‘Monomental’, Pretty Boy Crossover mix static, electronic buzz, echo and vocal samples on  ‘Switch’, CSB VS. Windup Toys combine music box-like chimes and electronic bleeps and swooshes with a insidously insistent, reverberating bassline, while it is a relief when beats drop out altogether on the final two tracks, Able Child’s electronically modulated lion roars and the funereal keyboard loops of Zog’s “April DX’.  An acquitred taste no doubt, and not especially challenging in relation to other recent electronic music production of the Ninja Tunes variety, but at least this is refreshingly non-commercial, local, do-it-yourself fare.

Beyond Underground is accompanied by a limited-edition comic book, written and illustrated in black and white by Mistery, which recounts the ‘expanded story’ of the album. This is an impressive production, although it is badly in need of a spell check, and like the album, has a certain uniformity of style which limits its appeal. Strongly influenced by Mad Max, especially on the video release for the album’s single ‘Intercepta’, which features Mad Max replica cars, stunt men and Emil Minty, the ‘feral kid’ from Mad Max 2, the album also boasts influences from Journey to the Centre of the Earth, War of the Worlds, The Crow, Sleepy Hollow and The Matrix, as well as the film music of Henry Mancini, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and others. These are difficult to detect, given the rather regular beats and dual vocal delivery throughout, give or take a few orchestral flourishes. Mistery’s narration which links the 20 tracks is ponderously flat and featureless, and even Morganics’ news reader, who leads off the album with a report from Broken Hill on the post-apocalytic state of the nation, sounds unconvincing and underwehelming. It’s largely a problem of tone – there is a lack of humour and variety of moods and emotions here, with most tracks delivered with a relenlessly declamatory solemnity where touches of irony and levity would have been welcome. ‘Profit or Prophet’ takes a swipe at the Australian music industry and its relegation of hip-hop to an underground cottage industry, but without achieving much impact, and ‘Power of Words’ features a few lines in Spanish to little effect, while guests like Sleeping Monk, Mass MC, Ser Reck and DJs Nick Toth, Nino Brown and Flagrant don’t make much of a lasting impression on proceedings (and as with so much hip-hop, there is a dearth of female voices). One can’t help the impression that in their long absence from recording, Brethren have been overtaken by more recent developments in Australian hip-hop, with groups like Curse Ov Dialcet and TZU and artists like Maya Jupiter, Macromantics and Liones offering far more experimental, adventurous and variegated excursions into the genre. Brethren’s faintly ludicrous sci-fi gangsta pose in front of the Intercepta car on the back cover of the CD, in black replicant-like garb and dark glasses, weilding lethal looking artillery, seems only to confirm that this may be a key moment of local hip-hop history, but it is not a very enduring or exciting one.

I start with an example from Zimbabwe that challenges the standard rhetoric about the Afrodiasporic and Afrocentric aspects of African-American rap and hip-hop (e.g., Rose). In the title track of Doin’ Damage in My Native Language, an EP produced in the United States in 1992, Zimbabwe Legit (brothers Dumisani and Akim Ndlouvu) provide English translations of key expressions employed in their Zimbabwe regional tribal dialect, Ndbele (Jones 111). These English expressions (“Power to the people”; “The ghettos of Soweto”; “You know where to find me–in Zimbabwe”) serve for the Anglophone listener both to locate Zimbabwe Legit firmly in its county of origin, Zimbabwe, and to indicate the proximity of that country to South Africa. In addition, the brothers Ndlouvu prioritize their native dialect as the main source of their art of rhyming, which finds local equivalents for certain rhetorical attributes of African-American “nation conscious” rap. The back sleeve cover and the CD itself highlight and celebrate words in Ndbele as a form of “concrete poetry,” but Zimbabwe Legit’s raps also incorporate Shona, the more “standard” language of Zimbabwe. So the linguistic “damage” done by Zimbabwe Legit is directed not only against the English language of their colonizers–which Zimbabwe Legit needs to use in order to be accessible in the United States–but also against standard linguistic practices in Zimbabwe. This concern for linguistic authenticity is furthermore linked to broader notions of authenticity and Afrocentricity. In a track entitled “To Bead or Not to Bead,” the brothers Ndlouvu criticize African-American rappers who assimilate African fashions such as hair beading. This track is entirely in English, and includes an apparent reference to the rhetorical embrace of the Italian-American Mafia by African-American gangsta rappers:

Some MCs would rather be Italian/Now sportin’ beads and a black medallion/Medallion on your chest, but do you feel it in your heart?/Jump off the bandwagon and pull the cart. (Qtd. in Jones 106)

Despite its inventiveness and its “authentic” African origins, Zimbabwe Legit was a distinctly minor voice in the chorus of African-American hip-hop in 1992, and the group subsequently disappeared without a trace from the United States music industry. An entry about Zimbabwe Legit on the Rumba-kali African hip-hop website describes it as the first African hip-hop crew to break into the United States and European markets. When Zimbabwe Legit’s Ndlouvu brothers were college students in the United States, they secured a record deal and an unreleased album produced by African-American hip-hop producer, Mr. Lawng (for the Black Sheep label). Dumi Ndlouvu later went on to become part of the rap group called the Last 8th, and he now goes by the name Doom E. Right.

Another marginalized African rap group which shares Zimbabwe Legit’s multilingual dexterity is Positive Black Soul, a duo from Senegal who rap in a combination of English, French, and their native Senegalese language, Wolof, thus managing to address two major global linguistic groups in the African diaspora as well as those in their own locality. In the track “Respect the Nubians,” Positive Black Soul identifies itself in English in relation to African-American rap as “a brother man from another land known as the motherland.” In “Djoko” (Unity), rapped in a mixture of Wolof and French, they address more local concerns, describing themselves as “a brand new (political) party … we are underprivileged, but we want the good life.” Their multi-lingual rhymes enable them to address their immediate constituency as well as audiences in the United States and the world at large (the album sleeve contains the lyrics to all theft tracks in English translation). Unfortunately the United States and the world at large didn’t seem to be listening, and the first album by this innovative group did very poor business in the English-speaking world.

Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome” is aptly applicable to hip-hop culture and rap music, which has rapidly become globalized and transplanted into different cultures throughout the world. This rhizomic process is expressed directly in the work of another rap group, Silent Majority, which is based in Switzerland and raps in a mixture of English, Jamaican patois, French, Spanish, and Swahili. Referring to themselves as “funky multilinguals,” Silent Majority’s members foreground their collective linguistic dexterity in a track entitled “Dans une autre langue” (In Another Language). In it, guest Spanish rapper MC Carlos from the bilingual Lausanne-based group Sens Unik states:

Ok! ok! el rap es americano/Pero, si el americano fuero amarillo/Mi musica saria una musica de chino/…. /La musica es contagiosa y al ritmo es una planta/Que cresce de Nueva York a Martignan

[Ok! ok! rap is American/But if American was yellow my music would be Chinese music/…. /Music is contagious and rhythm is a plant/That grows from New York to Martignan]

This use of the trope of rap music as a “plant” neatly corresponds to Deleuze’s “rhizome” and serves to emphasize the “glocalization” of rap, which, although a worldwide phenomenon, is, like African-American rap, still very much concerned with roots, family, locality and neighborhood. As Sens Unik’s MC Rade puts it in the same track, in a mixture of French and English: “Our music is not a pale copy of the United States, Lausanne on the map, rhymin’ is the art, part of a global thing.” Perhaps one of the most peripheral examples of the global linguistic indigenisation of rap as a “resistance vernacular” is the Nuuk Posse from Greenland, which uses its distinctly minority language (Inuit) to rap about the domination of their country by the Danish language (Barnes 1997).

The variety of ethnic origins among French rappers, from the French Caribbean to the Arab populations of North Africa to other parts of Europe, is notable. The origins of French hip-hop in the immigrant and working class housing projects of the banlieues (outer suburbs) of French cities, as displayed in Matthieu Kassovitz’ 1995 film La Haine (Hate), are also notable. A broad variety of musical inflections ranging from hard-core rap to reggae and raggamuffin distinguish French rap from U.S. rap and give it features more in common with British and Italian hip-hop. The “adaptation” period of French hip-hop in the 1990s involved the growth of hard-core rap and Zuluism (based on Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation), where African-American models were adapted directly to French realities, but other concepts, such as Afrocentrism, could not be translated wholesale into the French context. Andre Prevos shows how French rap crews like IAM attempted to circumvent the “return to Africa” ideology prevalent among some U.S. rappers in order to avoid playing into the hands of French right-wing anti-Arab movements like Le Pen’s National Front (“Post-Colonial”). Consequently IAM constructed an elaborate “Pharaonic” ideology and mythology which boasts about Africa, but not black or Arabic Africa, rather adapting the Africa of Ancient Egypt into a religious symbology. They also mythologize their native Marseilles, a marginalized city with a high non-European immigrant population, as “le cote oscur” (the obscure side) of France, and rap in Marseilles dialect. As Steve Cannon has noted, there is in Afro-French rap “a closer physical and therefore less mythical relationship of (black) rappers in France to the `pays d’origine’ [African homeland] than in the USA” (164). Cannon also notes that, despite the fact that only six percent of the population of France consists of non-European immigrants, rap and hip-hop have become a vital form of anti-racist expression for ethnic minorities:

studies of hip-hop in France in the 1980s and 1990s suggest that not only is the most numerical participation in both production and consumption of hip-hop “products” among people of minority ethnic origin, but also that hip-hop in France is characterized to a great extent by its role as a cultural expression of resistance by young people of minority ethnic origin to the racism, oppression, and social marginalization they experience within France’s banlieues and in its major towns and cities. (155)

Like a number of other non-Anglophonic countries, the first compilation of rap music in Italy was almost entirely in English. Called Italian Rap Attack and released in 1992 by the Bologna-based dance label Irma, it included a brief sleeve note by radio DJ Luca De Gennaro declaring that “rap is a universal language, in whatever language and whatever part of the world it is performed.” But in fact the only Italian-language track on the compilation was Frankie Hi NRG’s “Fight da faida,” with its half-English, half-Italian refrain urging resistance against Mafia blood feuds. This track deservedly became the most re-released and most famous Italian rap track of the 1990s. It was a courageous declaration of resistance against the Mafia, and, in marked contrast to the celebration of Martin Scorsese’s Italian-American mafioso stereotypes in American gangsta rap, it became one of the dominant polemics of “nation conscious” Italian rap. Frankie Hi NRG’s barrage of internal rhymes also illustrated the greater facility for rhyming that the Italian language had over English, while his use of a brief burst of a woman rapping in Sicilian dialect was also a first:

Padre contro figlio, frateno su fratello/Partoriti in un avello come came da macello;/Uomini con anime/Sottili come lamine,/taglienti come il crimine/Rabbiosi oltre ogni limite,/Eroi senza terra/Che combattono una guerrafDa la mafia e la comorra, Sodoma e Gomorra,/Napoli e Palermo,/Succursali dell’Inferno.

[Father against son, brother against brother,/Born in a grave like butcher’s meat;/Men with minds/As sharp as blades,/Cutting like crime/Angry beyond limits,/Heroes without land/Fighting a war/Between the mafia and the camorra, Sodom and Gomorrah/Naples and Palermo/Regions of hell.]

Although there are Italian posses based in the major cities like Rome and Milan, a notable feature of Italian rap is a tendency to manifest itself in smaller and more marginal regional centers. If Turin and Naples became major localities for rap music, Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria, and Puglia were just as important. A nationwide network of centri sociali (social centers), which were often set up in occupied disused buildings, became the focal point for Italian hip-hop culture. As Italian rappers began experimenting in their native language, they also Italianized U.S. hip-hop expressions like “rappare,” “scratchare,” and “slenghare” (to use slang) and began to rap in their regional dialects. Some rappers also revived the oppositional political rhetoric of the militant student groups of the 1970s, and in some cases began to excavate Mediterranean regional folk music roots which had been neglected since the Italian folk music revival of the late 1960s. A distinctive musical syncretism also emerged among the Italian rap groups that pushed out the parameters of hip-hop and more often than not became fused with raggamuffin reggae (“ragga”), dance hall, and ska influences. This led to the coinage of the term “rappamuffin” in a 1992 Flying Records compilation of Italian rap and ragga entitled Italian Posse: Rappamuffin d’Azione. The Sud Sound System, based in Salento on the Southern Adriatic Coast, took this even further, referring to their hybridized music as “tarantamuffin,” referring back to the dance tradition known as tarantella. The hybridizations of both Sud Sound System and the Marseilles-based Marsilia Sound System were studied by the French ethnomusicologist George Lapassade and his Italian collaborator Piero Fumarola, and as Felice Liperi has indicated, the use of dialect in Italian rap was partly a consequence of both technical considerations and the choice of polemical subject matter: Clearly the motivation was not only cultural, it was also technical. Italian DJs and musicians who chose the musical idiom of rap, which is based on the relation between words and rhymes, found dialect a more malleable language in which to combine rhythm and rhyme. But it is also true that once they found themselves talking about the domination of the mafia in the south and urban disintegration, a more coherent use of the language of these localities came spontaneously. Dialect is also the language of oral tradition, and this brings it closer to the oral culture of rap. (201)

This is particularly evident in the work of the Bad-based group Suoni Mudu, which superimposes a street map of Bad on its name and enacts a mock Mafia murder on the cover of its polemical 1996 mini-album, Mica casuale sara (Hardly by Chance). The CD cover includes the lyrics to their track “Citt e camina (L’ambiente)” (City and Hearth [Where I Live]) in both Barese dialect and “standard” Italian. This begins with an address to local Christian Democrat and neo-fascist politicians and then proceeds to mark out a criminal cartography of Bad:

Ind’a Libberta acchemma] [nne l’omerta/Ind’a Sambasquhle acchemma] [nne u criminale/A Japigie stene na Coop addo vennevene la robba / A Carrassi uno scippo] [ogni due passi.

[A conspiracy of silence rules in Liberta/Organized crime rules in San Pasquale/There was a co-op in Japigia which sold drugs/In Carrassi a bag gets snatched every two meters.]

The track exposes a conspiracy between the government, the police, the Mafia and their Calabrian and Neapolitan equivalents (the Ndrangheta and the Camorra), and expresses similar sentiments to those of “Fight da faida,” but they are articulated very differently. The loping ragga beat gives the track a sense of grim resignation as well as denunciation, and the sung refrains--”Poverannu” (poor us) and “Ste fatt’u sccehe” (the die is cast), which use a female voice--draw on local musical idioms to express a sense of grief. Barese dialect is also used for its musical attributes, as in the line “Ask me for two hits (of heroin), there, give him two hits,” which in Barese is sing-song: “Di du, da d&amp; de du.” As Goffredo Plastino has noted, “dialect is also used for its different musicality with regard to Italian, for the greater possibilities of rhythmic and musical organisation of phrases which it allows” (100). The use of local expressions, the perorations through the main precincts of Bari, and the roll call of politicians also give the track a specificity and sense of locality which “Fight da faida” lacks. Suoni Mudu provides a detailed and intimate cartography of the Bari criminal underworld which is fleshed out by its idiomatic use of the “minor language” of Barese dialect. “Fight da faida,” on the other hand, like the Rome-based rappers Menti Criminali (Criminal Minds), addresses the whole of Italy by using standard Italian. As a member of Menti Criminali put it, “my rhymes are written in [Standard] Italian so that what I experience and feel is clear from Sicily to Milan.” But this kind of clarity often involves sacrificing a sense of local identity which is vital to the regional diversity of Italian rap. In the case of the Sardinian group Sa Razza, rapping in Sardinian dialect serves as a means of defending local (and national) pride. As the group puts it in its track entitled “The Road”: “We prefer Sardinian slang rap. You have to defend your pride in being Sardinian, brother. That’s why we’re rapping, here the only hope is for my people to survive. Survive on the road” (Qtd. in Pacoda 42). For the Sicilian group Nuovi Briganti, rapping in the dialect of Messina is a way of maintaining contact with the poor and dispossessed people of its locality, who have difficulty expressing themselves in “standard” Italian: <blockquote>We are based in one of the most devastated areas of the city, and the people in the neighbourhood have difficulty expressing themselves in [Standard] Italian. They’ve been used to speaking dialect since they were children. And they were our first reference point, the people who have followed us since we began. And rap is about communication. (Qtd. in Pacoda 42)</blockquote> A more paradoxically polemical use of Italian dialect as “resistance vernacular” occurs in a track by the Calabrian group South Posse, which was based in Cosenza until it disbanded in 1995. In “Semplicemente immigrato” (Simply Immigrated), Luigi Pecora, an Italian of Ethiopian origin, also known as Louis, uses the dialect of Cosenza as a way of expressing his adopted Calabrian “roots.” As Plastino has stated, here “dialect serves the function of identifying the privileged interlocutors of a discussion, the people of Cosenza, and challenging them to a dialogue. At the same time ... it is a way of elaborating a personal style” (98). Influenced by the dialect ragga-rap of Sud Sound System, Pecora wrote “Simply Immigrated” in dialect as a way of expressing his ability to belong to Cosenza, and to get closer to the inhabitants, who he addresses as “brothers”: <blockquote>Eppure molti dicono tutto il mondo e paese/Eppure troppi dicono vattene al tuo paese/Ma dicu ma moni tu chi cazzu vu I mia/Ca signu vinutu druacu a lavura pe fatti mia ...</blockquote> <blockquote>[Many people say all the world’s your home town/Too many people say go back to where you came from/I’m telling you what the fuck do you want me to do/I came here to work and mind my own business.]</blockquote> The simplicity of the language used here is abetted by musical repetitions of particular words, and there is a shift in the track from the direct address ofT’ and “you” to “he” and then “we,” indicating that the narrator identifies with both the immigrant and the native Italian. The use of dialect here is strategic, an act of defiance, and to emphasize this Pecora raps the first two lines in standard Italian before shifting into dialect in the second two. As Plastino notes, this mixture of dialect and Italian corresponds to

the way a young person from Cozsenza talks today, which is what Luigi Pecora wanted to identify himself with to communicate more clearly…. The reference to “roots” is made to indicate the need to establish an exclusively linguistic relationship to one’s region. (100)

But South Posse also uses dialect to rap about racism, in the context of both the discrimination against southern Italians by northern Italians and the exclusion of immigrants from Africa, who are often refered to as “extra-comunitario,” a euphemism used to describe non-Europeans.

In spite of the fact that Aotearoa/New Zealand is on the opposite side of the globe in relation to Italy, we find that there too indigenous language is used in rap as a form of “resistance vernacular.” The native inhabitants of Aotearoa, the Maori, constitute about thirteen percent of the 3.36 million population of Aotearoa, but forty percent of Maori are in the lowest income group, and twenty-one percent are unemployed, compared with 5.4 percent for pakeha (persons of European origin). Seventy-five percent of the Maori population is under thirty years of age, but forty percent of Maori youth are out of work and four out of ten leave school without having graduated. Since the 1980s, steps have been taken by Maori towards a renewal of their cultural and social traditions, and to regenerate te reo Maori (the Maori language), which is only spoken by about eight percent of the inhabitants of Aotearoa. This establishes it as a “minor language,” although it is the language of the indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, the tangata whenua (people of the land). The syncretization of aspects of traditional Maori waiata (song) and imported African-American musical forms is one which many Maori popular groups and performers have pursued in different ways and to varying degrees throughout the history of Maori popular music. Given the implausibility of entertaining strict notions of authenticity and purity in relation to Maori cultural traditions (or to any contemporary indigenous musical forms), the combination of traditional waiata (song) and popular musical forms from the United States is part of a cultural project of self-assertion and self-preservation which is linked with a global diaspora of musical expressions of indigenous ethnic minorities’ social struggles.

Maori rappers were quick to adopt the trappings of hip-hop culture and to explore its affinities with indigenous Maori musical and rhetorical forms. This is illustrated by the way concepts such as patere (rap), whakarongo mai (listen up) and wainua (attitude) are easily assimilated into hip-hop discourse. The first Maori rapper to release a recording was Dean Hapeta (D Word), with his group Upper Hutt Posse. Hapeta was part of a “lost generation” of Maori youth who didn’t have the benefits of learning the Maori language at school, as is now customary, and thus had to learn it himself. This informed the militancy with which he uses the Maori language in his raps. As Hapeta says, “Although I love and respect Hip-Hop, being Maori I only take from it what doesn’t compromise my own culture. But in spite of this I have found them both very compatible” (Qtd. in Frizzell 48; cf. 50).

Hapeta and other Maori and Pacific Islander rappers and musicians have substituted Maori and Polynesian cultural expressions for the African-American rhetoric of hip-hop, while borrowing freely from the musical styles of the genre (and it is an indication of the strong position traditionally held by women in Maori and Pacific Islander societies that the misogynist aspects of U.S. hardcore rap are totally absent from its Maori and Pacific Islander appropriations). The result is a further syncretization of an already syncretic form, but one which is capable of having strong musical, political, and cultural resonances in Aotearoa. In their 1996 album Movement in Demand (a title derived from Louis Farrakhan), Upper Hutt Posse combine the use of traditional Maori traditional instruments, militant patere and karanga (raps and calls to ancestors) and invocations of the spirits of the forest (Tane Mohuta) and the guardian of the sea (Tangaroa), and rhetoric borrowed from the Nation of Islam. The album also draws on the group’s reggae and ragga inclinations, funk bass rhythms, blues guitar riffs, and hardcore gangsta-style rapping which switches from English to te reo Maori. One of the album’s tracks, “Tangata Whenua” (“The People of the Land”) is entirely in Maori, a choice which runs the risk of receiving virtually no radio or TV airplay, as the national media in New Zealand still regard the Maori language as a threat to its Anglophone hegemony. Nonetheless, Hapeta completed a powerful video for “Tangata Whenu,” was previewed on a Maori language television program. It tells the story of a polluted river, a consultation with a kaumatua (elder), traditional Maori gods destroying a factory, and an expression of Maori sovereignty:

Ko Papatuanuku toku Whaea, ko te whenua ia/Ko Ranginui toku Matua, kei runga ake ia/Whakarongo mai kite mea nui rawa/He take o te Ao/He kaupapa o toku whakapapa/Ko IO MATUA KORE, te mama tuatahi/E ora! koutou! toku Iwi,/Whaia te wairua o te ahi/Whakatikangia te kupu, te mahi,/Whakatahea nga hee o Tauiwi,/Kia rere ai nga hiahia, nga moemoeaa,/O te hinengaro/Kia toko ai hoki te whakaaro moohio/Taangata Whenua–Ko Te Pake–Whakapapa/Taangata Whenua–Ko Te Take Me Te Mana/Taangata Whenua–Ko Te Hana O Te Haa/Taangata Whenua–Te Ahi Kaa

[Papatuuaanuku is my mother, the earth/Ranginui is my father, he is above/ Listen to the thing it’s very important/A root of the world/A foundation level of my genealogy/It is Io-matua-kore, the first parent Live! you all! my people,/ Pursue the spirit of the fire/Make correct the words, the work/Cause the wrongs of Tauiwi (the foreigner) to pass away/So the desires, dreams, can flow/Of the conscience/So wise thoughts can rise up also/People of the land–The durable lineage/People of the land–The root and the authority/People of the land–The glow of the breath/People of the land–The ever burning fire]

The track starts with a woman chanting a karanga (call to ancestors), and includes the sound of the purerhua (bull roarer), a traditional Maori instrument consisting of a piece of greenstone or wood rotated on a piece of string which makes a whirring noise associated with sounding the alarm. The track draws on key concepts in Maori philosophy, which are familiar to some pakeha, such as whakapapa (lineage), mana (authority), tangata (man), and kaupapa (strategy or theme of a speech). It also draws extensively on Maori oral traditions and rhetorical figures. The track is not translated into English on the lyric sheet of the album, which suggests that it is addressed to Maori only, although most New Zealanders know the meaning of the term tangata whenua. To adapt Zimbabwe Legit’s phrase, in “doin’ damage in [his] native language,” Dean Hapeta and the Upper Hutt Posse use the rhetoric, idioms, and declamatory styles of hip-hop to express Maori resistance and sovereignty, and in so doing, they indigenize it. Rap becomes subservient to an expression of Maori philosophy and militant dreams, and is thus absorbed into the wider project of Maori sovereignty. On 1 January 2000, Hapeta released Ko Te Matakahi Kupu (The Word that Penetrates), a twenty track rap album entirely in Maori, under his Maori sobriquet, Te Kupu (D Word).

From our consideration of hip-hop scenes in places like Zimbabwe, Italy, Greenland, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, we see that the the rhizomic globalization of rap is not a simple instance of the appropriation of a U.S./African-American cultural form; rather; it is a lingustically, socially, and politically dynamic process which results in complex modes of indigenization and syncretisim. The global indigenization of rap and hip-hop has involved appropriations of a musical idiom which has become a highly adaptable vehicle for the expression of indigenous resistance vernaculars, their local politics, and what Kong calls the “moral geographies” of different parts of the world. The “minor languages” of Maori and Italian dialects, together with the use of verlan and veul in French and the languages of other ethnic minorities within dominant languages such as French and English, however, pay a price for their status as “resistance vernaculars.” While the use of these vernaculars can be regarded as constituitive of deliberate strategies to combat the hegemony of the English language in both the global popular music industry in general and in hip-hop in particular (which, its African-American linguistic variants notwithstanding, still represents a dominant language), their limited accessibility in both linguistic and marketing terms largely condemns them to a heavily circumscribed local context of reception. In contrast, a hip-hop group such as the Swedish crew Loop-troop reflect the continuing dominance of the English language and American culture in the formation of global pop:

We’ve all had English in school since we were 10 years old and there’s a lot of sitcoms and films on TV that are English/American. The whole of Europe is becoming more and more like America basically. I guess we’re fascinated with the language. But the way rap in Swedish sounds is a little bit corny and I think it’s great that people as far away as Australia can understand us. I think that’s the main mason why we rhyme in English. (Qtd in McDuie 31)

What Looptroop risks in their embrace of the Anglophonic and American homogenization of Europe risks, of course, is the erasure of any distinctively local or even national features in their rapping and breakbeats. In contrast, Maori rapper Danny Haimona of Dam Native sees the popularity of U.S. gangsta rap and R&B among young Maori and Pacific Islanders as the biggest threat to their appreciation of their own culture expressed in local indigenous hip-hop:

There’s such an influx of American stuff, and we need to quell it, and we need to give these kids some knowledge on what’s really up…. Kids don’t want to be preached to, so what I’m trying to do is put it on their level, and take all the good influences from hip-hop, and bring it close to home. There is a good vibe out there for New Zealand hip-hop, but it’s being poisoned by the Americanisms–the Tupacs and the Snoop Doggy Doggs. You have to have a balance, and Dam Native are trying to help kids work out that they have their own culture, they don’t have to adopt Americanisms. (Qtd. in Russell 18)

In this context, the choice of local indigenous “resistance vernaculars” is an act of cultural resistance and preservation of ethnic autonomy, and as such, it is a choice that overrides any global or commercial concerns.

Note Throughout this essay, translations from French, Italian, and Spanish are by Tony Mitchell; translations from Maori are by Dean Hapeta and Tony Mitchell.

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Discography

Dam Native. Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted. BMG/Tangata Records, 1997.

Menti Criminali. Provincia di piombo. X Records, n.d.

Positive Black Soul. Salaam. Island Records, 1996.

Silent Majority. La majorite silencieuse. Unik Records, 1994.

South Posse. 1990-1994. CSOA Forte Prenestino, n.d.

Suoni Mudu. Mica casuale sara. Drum & Bass, 1996.

Te Kupu. Ko Te Matakahi Kupu. Universal/Kia Kaha, 2000.

Upper Hutt Posse. Movement in Demand. Tangata Records, 1996.

Various. Italian Rap Attack. Irma Records, 1992.

Zimbabwe Legit. Zimbabwe Legit. Hollywood Basic, 1992.