文章源出处：Broadly Vice <The Teen Girls Trying to Make It in Hong Kong's 'Cantopop' Music Industry>
撰写：Justin Heifetz
翻译：ccc0108@Janicebar
齐乐平、卫兰、周锡汉
In the 1980s, women hoping to succeed in the tiny, but thriving Cantonese pop music industry had legitimate hopes of a rags-to-riches fairytale. Today, that career is basically off limits to anyone who isn't wealthy.
在上世纪80年代，女性希望能从蓬勃发展的粤语流行乐坛中取得成就，虽然市场有其局限性，但依然可以顺理成章地飞上枝头变凤凰。然而今天，歌手这份职业基本上只是属于富裕阶层。
At Warner Music, one of the biggest music production companies in Hong Kong, many aspiring Cantonese pop singers in the city begin their careers. But for nearly all of the wannabe starlets who'll start out here, this office is, more often than not, the end of the road, too.
华纳唱片，是香港本地最大的音乐制作公司之一，许多想在香港一展抱负的粤语流行歌手都在此开始他们的职业生涯。但对于几乎所有从这里开始的小明星来说，他们的星途，也往往是在这个办公室走到尽头。
"You really only discover talent once every ten years," says Schumann Lee, who's been producing Hong Kong's for more than 20 years. We're sitting at a long wooden table on the top floor of the glittering glass YHC Tower in industrial East Kowloon with Randy Chow, one of the city's hottest up-and-coming producers, and Robin Ch'i, Warner's local A&R—arts & repertoire—manager, who finds its music talent.
我们正坐在一个长木桌上，玻璃窗闪闪发亮，在这个位于东九龙工业区恩浩国际中心顶楼的办公室里，与超过20年经验的音乐监制兼资深音乐人李舒文（Schumann Lee）、业内最炙手可热又年轻可为的音乐制作人周锡汉（Randy Chow），以及在幕后负责发掘艺人的香港华纳唱片A&R艺人经理齐乐平（Robin Ch'i）做访问。舒文说：“真的每十年才会出一个人才。”
"Now, young artists have [distractions like] Pokémon Go and say, 'Come on, let's catch it.' It's much harder for them to [focus on] one thing, like music," Lee says.
“现在，年轻歌手们有很多令他们分心的事，如Pokémon Go，他们会说‘来吧，让我们抓住它。’这让他们更难专心去做一件事，例如音乐，”舒文继续说。
Cantopop music by nature is lovey-dovey and emotional, and the lyrics tend to be sad. "The true Cantopop songs are karaoke love songs," says Ch'i. While this hasn't changed at all over the years, the profile of the female Cantopop artist has shifted dramatically.
粤语流行音乐的本质就是“甜到漏”和情感丰富的，而歌词往往是伤感的。齐乐平说：“真正的粤语流行曲都是卡拉OK式情歌。”这事实多年来并没有改变，但粤语流行女歌手的特质却发生了巨大的转变。
Cantopop first hit its stride in the 1980s, and pop stars mostly came from poor family backgrounds, Lee tells me. They would perform in public, like in the busy, neon-soaked Mong Kok neighborhood, or at bars and nightclubs. Sometimes, they'd be discovered.
粤语流行曲首先在上世纪80年代兴起，女歌星大多来自贫穷的家庭，舒文告诉我。她们多在公众场所表演，如在繁忙的、霓灯初上的旺角附近、或在酒吧和夜总会。她们常常就这样被发掘了。
Anita Mui was one of these girls. Arguably one of the biggest Cantopop stars of all times, she's immortalized in a bronze statue overlooking Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor. When she passed away of cancer in 2003, the city collectively mourned her death. Mui was a real, relatable girl: She grew up without a father, dropped out of school, and had to provide for her family from early on. And her on-stage style was revolutionary: She brought flamboyant, outrageous costumes to the stage in Hong Kong. When she toured the UK, she was dubbed "the Madonna of Asia."
梅艳芳是这些女孩之一。可以说，她是粤语流行曲时代其中一个最灿烂瞩目的明星，她那不朽的铜像正眺望着香港维多利亚港。当她在2003年因癌症去世时，全城为她哀悼。阿梅是一个真实的、“接地气”的女孩：她幼年丧父，从小辍学，年纪轻轻就要走到社会工作养家。而她在舞台上的风格却是创新的：她把华丽、造型夸张的表演带到香港的舞台，她在英国开演唱会时，更被冠以“亚洲麦当娜”的称号。
卫兰演唱《梦伴》，向梅艳芳致敬
But Hong Kong's music scene soon moved away from the days of singers like Anita Mui pulling themselves up from their bootstraps. Now, girls who try and break into the industry have mostly lived abroad and come from wealthy families; they tend to be just returning from the West and attending expensive international high schools in Hong Kong. "They think they have talents that their friends don't have," Ch'i says. These girls tend to be around 16 or 17 years old, and I can't meet any of them because of their busy, intense schedules—they're booked up for months. (It's clear from my meeting with these talent makers in Hong Kong that the industry mostly operates on hard gender lines: men molding the female talent.)
但香港乐坛很快便远离了像梅艳芳那时自立自强的一幕。现在，那些试图入行的女孩多在外国居住或来自富裕的家庭，她们从西方回港或就读香港本地昂贵的国际学校。“她们认为自己有其他同龄伙伴里没有的才华，”齐乐平说。这些女孩大多是16或17岁，他甚至不能与其中的任何女孩约上见面洽谈，因为这些女孩都很忙，日程排得满满的，如果要见面的话都得排到好几个月以后了。（记者在与这些音乐制作人见面后才明白，音乐行业在性别上有明确的界定：男性负责塑造女性的才能。）
This new crop of young girls has created an interesting, if complex, problem for Cantopop producers: Right now, Warner Music doesn't have many Chinese girls on contract who can read Chinese characters. In fact, only two out of their six female artists can.
新一代年轻女歌手给粤语流行歌监制制造了一个有趣、但也许是复杂的问题：现在，华纳唱片并没有签下很多能看懂中文字的华人女孩。事实上，在六位女艺人中，只有两位能看懂中文。
卫兰、卫诗、连诗雅和曾若华不谙中文
"They can speak Cantonese," Lee says. "They just can't read it."
“她们会讲粤语，”舒文说，“只是她们看不懂中文。”
To get the girls through the process of reading sheet music to Chinese songs, producers like Lee and Chow have them read phonetics instead of the characters themselves. On a basic level, then, these girls don't know what they're singing—other than sounds from letters. And because Cantonese words are so linguistically and tonally complex—more so than Mandarin—this can often become a complicated stumble in the studio.
为了使这些女孩子明白乐谱中的中文歌曲，监制舒文和周锡汉便要给她们朗读发音，而不是让她们认字。基本上，这些女孩不知道自己在唱什么，除了知道那是曲谱上的发音。粤语的语音和调子比普通话更复杂，这常常成为录音室里复杂的难关。
卫兰、卫诗接受“华纳中文班”训练
"We explain [the lyrics] to them word by word, line by line, and give them a back story about everything that happened in the song. Phonetically, they write down their own syllables and then ask, 'What does this line mean?' and you tell them, and they'll digest it and try to sing it," says Ch'i.
“我们逐字逐句解释歌词给她们听，并给她们介绍这首歌的背景故事。在发音上，她们写下自己习惯用的拼音，然后会问‘这是什么意思？’你便要告诉她们，让她们消化，然后尝试将感觉唱出来，”齐乐平说。
"It's one of the weirdest things in the world," Chow adds. "Every lyric, every word—to me, there's a color to it—it has meaning. But when you don't understand it, then you can't bring that color to the voice, and that's the challenge for me."
这是世界上最古怪的事之一，”周锡汉补充道。“所有的歌词，每个字，对我来说，都有它的意思。但当你不明白的时候，你便不能带出那个声音的独特特色，这便是对我作为制作人的挑战。”
With the amount of training required, it's no surprise that these girls, living from coast to coast through their formative years, are coming into the industry from money—now, they need it. In space-hungry Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, there are only a couple of music studios—and they're expensive. The studios themselves are struggling to pay rent.
完成了一定量所须训练后，毫无疑问的是，那些在海外成长多年的女孩正为了金钱进入乐坛。她们需要它。说到做音乐的场地，香港非常缺乏，作为世界上其中一个人口最密集的城市，香港只有一两间音乐录音室，而它们非常昂贵。录音室本身也在努力赚取收入，以支付房租。
"The first three-to-five years of a girl's singing life, she's not making any income," says Chow. "So it's switched to wealthier girls. Their first hit songs are just to pay off their debt." Ch'i says that none of the three have encountered a truly "local" girl come through Warner.
周锡汉说：“在女歌手歌唱生涯的前三到五年，她会没有任何的收入，”所以我们签约的对象改成了‘白富美’，这样当她们推出第一首流行歌便可以为她们还清唱片公司的债务（唱片公司推出新人需要前期投入大量制作、宣传费用）。”齐乐平说，但他们三人到现在为止还没有在华纳遇过真正的“本地”女孩。
By far, the millennium's most successful Cantopop star today is G.E.M., who was at the right place at the right time when she was discovered on stage. She had all the right ingredients that would make her the perfect Chinese pop star: She's a Shanghainese girl—so she was born on the Mandarin-speaking Chinese mainland—raised in Hong Kong, and she was exposed to the West early on. Able to switch fluidly between Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, her charm literally translates; she's won over audiences from Hong Kong to the sprawling Chinese mainland—and now, even stateside, where she's the talk of Chinatowns from Boston to San Francisco.
截至目前，千禧年以来最成功的粤语流行歌星是G.E.M.，因为她在最适合她的地方、最适合的时间在舞台上挖掘。她拥有所有最合适的元素，让她成为最完美的华语流行歌星：她是一个上海女孩，出生于讲普通话的中国大陆、在香港成长，她很年轻便接触到了西方音乐。她能在普通话、粤语和英文之间流利切换，并能展现她的魅力。无论是在香港，还是在庞大的中国大陆，她都赢得了观众的支持，乃至在海外美国，从波士顿到旧金山，她都是所有唐人区里热议的主题。
G.E.M.—or Gloria Tang—got started professionally singing as a teenager in Hong Kong but later was discovered during a televised singing competition on the Chinese mainland. Now 25, she's a bit different than today's girls at Warner. She didn't attend a fancy international school in Hong Kong—and most notably, she can read Chinese.
G.E.M.，一个在香港开始职业歌手生涯的少女，后来在中国大陆的电视歌唱比赛受瞩目。现年25岁，她与如今华纳的女歌手有点不一样，她并没有在香港著名国际学校就读，最值得关注的是，她能看懂中文。
卫兰已与少女时期的邓紫棋相识
G.E.M. started her career at Hummingbird Music in Hong Kong—and she is its only significant artist—but the likelihood of another G.E.M. coming out of Hong Kong anytime soon is probably slim. "There's a large Cantonese-speaking audience, but the trend's not there at the moment," Ch'i says. Cantopop stars these days aren't seeing much success outside of the city—despite dreams of stardom in Australia, Canada, and the US, which all have large Cantonese-speaking communities.
G.E.M.是在香港的蜂鸟音乐开始她的职业生涯，她也是蜂鸟音乐里唯一重要的签约歌手，但要在香港随时随地复制另一个G.E.M.的可能性却很小。“这里有一个很大的粤语观众群，但当下趋势却不在这里，”齐乐平说。粤语流行曲歌手的星途在其他地区并不是那么的顺畅，尽管澳大利亚、加拿大和美国都有很多讲粤语的社群。
"I don't think I consider any new-generation Cantopop singers as having made it," says Ch'i. "I'd probably say Janice [Vidal], but she's not new—she's been around ten years. In the past five years, I can't name any females that have made it."
“我不认为在新一代粤语流行歌手中有哪位取得了非常大的成功，”齐乐平说。“我会说卫兰，但她不算新人，她出道十年之久。但在过去的五年，我说不出任何一个我认为真正闯出了名堂的女歌手。”
卫兰在加拿大华人群体中有一定音乐市场
Ch'i also points out that G.E.M. herself didn't even technically make it as a Cantopop star. Although she came out of a Hong Kong production company, she wasn't thrust into fame until she started singing in Mandarin for an audience on the Chinese mainland.
齐乐平指出，技术上G.E.M.甚至不能被视为粤语流行歌手。虽然她出身于香港制作公司，但她并没有真真正正在香港的大红大紫，直到在中国大陆演唱国语歌。
One of the hardest things for Warner's Cantopop talent makers is watching these young girls fail—especially when they're hardworking and good at their craft. "It's devastating," says Chow. The market just isn't big enough for many Cantonese signers—and Hong Kong, with its outrageously expensive overhead, is a tough place to make it as a dreamer.
对华纳而言，最难过的莫过于看到有天赋的年轻粤语流行歌手失败，尤其是那些很努力、歌艺也很不错的歌手。周锡汉说：“这是毁灭性的。”香港音乐市场并不大，却不能容纳那么多的粤语流行歌手，因为一切都伴随着昂贵的开销，这是一个梦想家很难维持的。
There's still an alternative, though, for artists who want to find their niche singing in Cantonese, steps down from stardom. There's a rather unusual local appetite for music called the "hi-fi market." It's chill, has very low instrumentation, and tends to feature a lot of breathing. Hi-fi, in Hong Kong, still sells.
然而，我们仍然有另一个选择。如果歌手想在香港流行音乐乐坛找到自己的位置，那便要放下明星的光环，从“神坛”走下来。本地有一个要求非常特别的音乐市场，叫“高保真度（Hi-Fi）市场”。它比较平淡，不要求高科技和大量仪器，而注重于大量的呼吸声。高保真音乐在香港还是非常畅销。
Bianca Wu, who sings slow, jazzy Cantonese-language covers of classic tunes, heavily produced in-studio, is one of the most successful hi-fi artists in the city. In some ways, she's broken the mold by moving into hi-fi in her 30s—most hi-fi artists are much older. "Hi-fi artists tend to be mature women singing covers, but she's younger and better looking," Lee says. Wu's just been in New York recording a new album with LMC, a Hong Kong label.
胡琳，主要翻唱缓慢、爵士经典的粤语歌，歌曲全在录音室斥巨资制作，是全城其中一个最成功的高保真度（Hi-Fi）歌手。她首先打破某些僵念，30多岁便灌录高保真度音乐，通常这些歌手都是年纪比较大的。“高保真度歌手往往翻唱名曲，以及比较成熟，她既年轻又漂亮，”舒文说。而胡琳则刚刚在纽约为香港LMC音乐品牌灌录新专辑。
卫兰和胡琳
Both Wu and another famous hi-fi singer, Susan Wong, started off as front-line Cantopop singers before moving into the more relaxed hi-fi market. "Most Cantopop artists will fail, to be honest," says Lee. "The Hong Kong solution—and it's not something you can do in the US—if the artist can sing, but they're going downhill, is resorting to a hi-fi audio release. If I have to do it, I have to do it." For Lee, this is the last resort to save an artist.
无论是胡琳，还是另一位著名高保真度歌手黄翠珊，最初都是粤语流行曲的一线歌手，之后才转移到竞争比较宽松的高保真度市场。舒文说：“说实话，大多数粤语流行歌手都不会成功。在香港可以用来解决问题的方案不能用在美国。如果一个在香港唱的不错的歌手，但他正在走下坡，我们便用制作高保真度歌曲来挽救他。如果我必须要这样做的话，我便会这么做。”对对于舒文来说，这方法是用来挽救歌手的最后一著。
Ch'i says it's tougher for a Cantopop girl to make it in Hong Kong, regardless of her talent as a singer, than it would be for a girl in America or anywhere else in the West. In addition to their music careers, Cantopop singers in Hong Kong are expected to act, appear on game shows, model, and more. "Justin Timberlake wanting to act is a hobby," he says. In Asia, Lee says, music artists to have to do "the three big things—film, TV, and music."
齐乐平说，无论有没有作为歌手的天赋，与美国或西方其他地方的女孩相比，一个女孩想要在香港粤语流行乐坛成名更艰难。香港粤语流行歌手除了自己的音乐事业外，还要参与电影演出、电子游戏节目以及做模特儿等，“贾斯汀想去演电影是一种爱好。”。舒文说，在亚洲，歌手不得不做的三件大事是：电影、电视和音乐。
The Cantopop industry has another hurdle to overcome when it comes to staying afloat: the Mandarin pop industry. Mainland China is working up momentum, but it churns out its own singing starlets in droves. Lee and Chow say that while the industry's infrastructure on the mainland is still poor, it's getting closer to a place where it can begin to thrive.
如果要保持香港粤语流行乐坛的地位，它将要克服另一个障碍：国语流行乐坛。中国大陆的乐坛正处于上升状态，但已经令很多有名的歌手趋之若鹜。舒文及周锡汉均称，虽然音乐行业在大陆的基础依然不扎实，但它已开始茁壮成长。
This also means that when girls fail at making it as Cantopop stars, they often try to find success in mainland China, where they can join the cast of a second-rate television drama. "Because we're so close to China, everything is going up north," Chow says. Lee says that if a girl is good-looking and she's failed in Hong Kong, she tends to find her way to the Chinese mainland. "It's better to have money there than to be a singer here," Lee says.
这也意味着，当这些女孩不能成为粤语流行歌手，她们会试图在中国大陆找寻成功的机会，例如参与国内二线电视剧的演出。周锡汉说：“因为我们和中国大陆太近了，所以一切都是向北看”。而舒文表示，一个长得漂亮的女孩如果在香港失败了，自然会找门路向中国大陆发展，“她们宁愿在大陆赚钱，也比在香港做歌手好。”
Adding insult to injury, in Hong Kong, the Cantopop industry faces an uphill battle culturally. Because of the city's British colonial past, people there tend to idolize anything that's foreign, and cast away what's domestically produced. Hong Kong's local industry is losing out not only to mainland China's growing music scene, but also K-Pop—South Korea's tourism bureau is investing heavily in promoting the music overseas—and popular songs coming in from Japan.
香港粤语流行乐坛正在文化上面临着一场艰苦的战争，令这行业更雪上加霜。因为香港在过去曾作为英国殖民地，人们倾向于崇拜任何外国事物、抛弃本地出品。香港本地粤语流行乐坛不仅输给了日益成长的中国大陆乐坛，也输给了由韩国旅游局大量投资、推广到海外的韩国流行音乐，以及来自日本的流行音乐。
"Cantonese listeners are much more critical of Cantonese music, and they just criticize and criticize—it's very Hong Kong," Ch'i says. "Everything foreign is good, but everything local they criticize first before they can see any good in it."
“粤语听众对广东歌非常严苛，他们对之作出批评和更多的批判，这就是香港的风格，” 齐乐平说。 “在香港，外国的一切是都是好的，但本地的一切，他们会在感受美好一面之前先作出批评。”
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