Glutter’s Hong Kong
Today is National Day. Which means it is a time to be a little patriotic. Today I went to a rap battle and then the amature DJ night at Chapter 3. Today I saw some of my struggling musician friends, people who are good, talented, and doing interesting stuff, people from this city, grew up in this city and yeah, sure some of us left for a while but we are back, and you know like people that no one knows, no one bothers with because everyone in this city is so busy looking at what other people are doing, what the west is doing, and spending their time trying to get what they think other places have here. If I hear one more person say that there is no scene in hong kong, I might just scream because the reason there isn’t a viable one here because no one bothers to come.
I have gone to see so many bands, DJs, films by people here, and some of them are fantastic, some of these people won awards in Cannes and Berlin, people who sell records overseas, and yet no one here bothers with them or know their name or buy their records. There is no fucking scene because no one goes support the local kids doing interesting things, I know coz I try and go to as many of these things there, a few of my friends will always pop down, have a drink, say hi to the people even if we are busy, and I never see all those idiots who complain how there is no scene here there. It’s like if you don’t know that you have to make the scene, that you have to support it at every turn, that it’s not some comodified, codified sold to you crap from the record companies and film industry and if those people haven’t done their bit then they shouldn’t complain, shouldn’t expect anything but what we have here. It takes time to build, yeah sometimes it is crap and shitty, but that is always how it is. Even in LA, even in SF, even in London.
There will always be new kids trying their stuff and some of it will sound really bad, but there will always be one or two who will make it through. So there. You can’t expect them to sound like the million dollars backed band, MC, DJ because they didn’t have the top commercial people morphing and tinkering with it. It’s going to be DIY, its going to sound raw, but that’s the beauty of being there when it starts. That’s the cool thing of being at the beginning. You watch people grow, you see how they change and improve, and watch them screw up and then every so often you get to be there when the first moment of magic happens, when everything comes together, and it sounds amazing, and you know its something, maybe you never hear it again, maybe you see it build.
And unless this city starts looking inwards and working with people here, the ones who know the city, the ones who know this place, and say the things that we can relate, we’re not going to make anything here. I don’t care what a foreigner thinks of this city. I don’t care how someone else talks about the Hong Kong experience. I want to hear what’s here, where I come from, by people who call it home.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 