Perspective -2

Who to blame?

I remember the Thai food in Kowloon City is very good, many years ago. However, the quality of Thai food in Kowloon City is getting worse and worse. Should we blame the restaurants of not keeping quality? Or should we blame the long queue outside the restaurants even the food is bad? Or should we blame the system behind? Like the magazines who praise every restaurant in Kowloon City even the food is bad, in order to boost sells and mobilize people to consume, under the same pattern? They all should be blamed, yet, nothing is necessary to be blamed at all, because the choice is yours, you can choose not to go there.

The music culture is bad in Hong Kong, should we blame the people who is making bad music? Should we blame the people still choose to listen to the bad music even it is bad? Finally, should we blame the whole music industry system behind to treat music only as a consumption and leisure, but not for the sake of music? I always wish the people love music like the way I do, the degree of loving music. Honestly, I treat music as consumption and leisure more than anyone does, that is why I buy records, t-shirts, musical instruments and equipment, spending all my money to study popular music culture. The thing I want to make a moan is the popular music I love is not popular enough here. The level of getting unpopular is that it doesn’t happen the way in which it makes you consume, at least getting a record in CD shop. Maybe we can look at a little bit broader to see music as a commodity in the whole industry. For instance, we don’t buy records nowadays, but we do buy a lot of Apple device and listen to music through them. In the meantime, the industry adjusts the sells pattern because of the emergence of the MP3 player. The unit of calculating sells is not measured by records unit now, it is now measured by “track” units. I do not see anything wrong with it, if a band could make 12 units of good songs, people should be willing to buy all 12 tracks no matter they buy them from “track to track” or a whole album. The better the case is the consumption would be duplicated, like you buy some tracks and discover the whole album actually is very good, then you buy the whole album. Society is changing as well as the technology. We leave the room for the future great artists here. Yet, the underlying problems here are, is popular music “popular” enough? Or the only thing popular is the word “popular” but not the music?

I do hope it is not so critical, just hoping a little critical for the sake of music. I understand Hong Kong has its own pattern of music industry, but most of the pop songs are generated from the 1920’s Tan Pan Alley pattern of making music. Is it good for music? To ask again, is it our “own” pattern of music making at all?