Abstract
Presenting an overview of past academic research on the notion of "underground" and connecting it with current marginal music practices in Hong Kong, the authors provide the beginning of a new definition for what "musical undergrounds" might be in Hong Kong. Specifically, they frame several stylistically diverse "micro-scenes" in the city as often sharing traits of nomadism, fragmentation, and marked institutional marginality. They contend that what is considered as "underground" musically in Hong Kong is produced through a range of articulated translocal processes confounding any simple identification.
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Notes
- 1.
As evidenced by the global mainstream success of artists such as Billie Eilish.
- 2.
Sparke criticizes Appadurai’s take on locality for ignoring the larger political economic factors and the objective persistence of nation-state and structural factors that are part of this production of locality. In his “critical geographies of displacement and disjuncture” (Sparke 2005, p. xii), Sparke notes that deterritorialization involves processes of reterritorialization that are often beneficial to the ‘neoliberal business elite’ (Sparke 2005, p. xx).
- 3.
Through translocalism, Appadurai wants to give an account of the lived local experiences in a globalized and deterritorialized world (Appadurai 1991, p. 196; see also Appadurai 2003, for the notion of ‘production of locality’). In his research, Appadurai points to the reproducibility of the locality through the mediation of neighbourhood-as-actualized-localities (Appadurai 1996, p. 178). For Barone, scenes stand for Appadurai’s neighbourhoods, while sceneness pertains to Appadurai conceptualization of the local as translocal.
- 4.
Yang Yeung, whose perspective is present in this book, is an important actor in the city’s cultural landscape providing a significant counter-example to this trend. Co-owner of the Twenty Alpha experimental music venue Wendy Lee and sound artist/experimental musician Fiona Lee are two other key female actors in the city’s undergrounds.
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Charrieras, D., Mouillot, F. (2021). Introduction: Nomadism, Fragmentation, and Marginality - The Hong Kong Music Underground in the East Asian Context. In: Charrieras, D., Mouillot, F. (eds) Fractured Scenes. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5913-6_1
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