Pop as Art and Artifact

FINGERGAP, "Shan Shan 160"

Resending today’s feature with the album link. Enjoy!

Apparently there was a lot of consternation in the electronic music world circa 2023, when DJs started incorporating more pop edits into their sets. It seems that peppering club floors with assorted fragments of pop culture undermined the artistic integrity of these rarefied spaces, which is a position I can respect but personally don’t care much about. The status of music as an object of immutable aesthetic value has always been less interesting to me than that music’s interaction with the socio-cultural context that created and sustains it. From that perspective, dropping a Britney remix in Berghain is more fascinating than blasphemous. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but when that nostalgia is shared by a few hundred people reacting to it communally in real time, it’s also a sociologically significant event.

Leo Cheng gets this. The Hong Kong artist, who works under the name FINGERGAP, has spent several years fusing forward-looking genres like footwork with the sentimental stylings of his hometown’s native Cantopop. The combination comes off incongruously on paper but works surprisingly well IRL, injecting Cantopop’s more maudlin balladry with a new energy while simultaneously grounding footwork’s frenetic tempos with a tighter focus on melody. “Canto-pop used to be very varied with songs in all tempos,” says Cheng over email. “But in the last two decades the slow, sappy ballads have overpowered and outnumbered other genres.” His album Shan Shan 160 reverses this trend, re-contextualizing Chinese pop with rapid-fire rhythms that allow them to travel anywhere the global club scene has taken root.

But the songs, unsurprisingly, hit hardest in Hong Kong, where Cantopop is stitched into the psychological fabric of society. At a certain level of ubiquity, songs are no longer just art but cultural artifacts, the type of generational touchstones that resonate simply because they were always there, playing in the background of a people’s collective consciousness. They’re important not because they’ve received critical approval but because they’re broadly recognizable, allowing them to create connections across a bridge of common familiarity. “I usually curate my set with my remixes of famous Canto-pop songs and my original tracks like those in 'Shan Shan 160,'” says Cheng. “For those remixes, almost every time there would be people coming up and say 'I can't imagine hearing this song here!'”

This is the same sentiment at work when pop edits are played in clubs across the world. It also shows how, even in today’s globalized pop landscape, the idea of an “international DJ” is somewhat perplexing. The best DJing requires a fluency in the context your audience is coming from, a knowledge of the songs they grew up with and around, sometimes buried so deep in the wells of memory that they might not even remember them until a reintroduction is brokered in the welcoming heat of a dance floor. DJing is an art, yes, but it’s also a skill, and the most skilled DJs are well-versed in wielding the artifacts their audience will share.

Shan Shan 160, then, is fundamentally an act of translation. Combining a Chicago-born house offshoot with the legacy pop music of an East Asian island city collapses the cultural distance between two markedly different places, allowing FINGERGAP’s music to step fluidly between them. It’s the type of stylistic chimerism that has been supercharged by the Internet but has long existed anywhere that people from disparate backgrounds have congregated to trade, work, or dance. Music has always migrated, but often quietly and just outside our view. Shan Shan 160 is one of those rare records that lets you catch its movement mid-flight.

Bonus Pick: For a more comprehensive glimpse of just how far footwork has spread, check out this classic EP from Bengaluru’s Oceantied.

PC: Leo Cheng