K歌之王意思：將這煽情奉獻給你

English

The song

《K歌之王》 (“King of Karaoke”) appeared on Eason Chan’s 2000 album 《打得火熱》. The lyric is by Albert Leung (林夕), and the music and arrangement are by Chan Fai-young (陳輝陽). On the surface it is a love song: a man who can sing every ballad on the karaoke list still cannot sing one person into loving him. What sets it apart is that Leung built the lyric out of more than twenty Cantonese song titles. A Mandarin version followed, also written by Leung, with a different story. More than two decades on, it is still a karaoke-room staple.

A song made of other songs

The usual reading of 《K歌之王》 has two parts, and both are right. It is a clever song: Albert Leung stitched more than twenty Cantonese song titles into the lyric, a collage (集句) that rewards anyone who grew up in a karaoke room. And it is a sad song: a man who can sing every love song on the list still cannot make one person love him. Some listeners hear a satire of the karaoke-ballad industry. Leung has said that was never his intention. His own account is plainer. He had written a great many lyrics, and none of them won over the person in this song. The more fiercely he loves, the more she finds it cloying (肉麻).

That account is where a reading should start. The consensus treats the borrowed titles as a game played with the listener. Inside the song, the borrowing is the singer’s situation. He has no words of his own. When he sings 「將這煽情奉獻給你」, “I offer you this sentimentality,” he names what he is handing over: not his feeling, but feeling as it has already been written, performed, and charted. He admits elsewhere that he is singing, cheaply, the sexiness that love songs put on paper. He knows the goods are second-hand. He gives them anyway, because they are the only goods he has.

Whose words are we speaking?

It would be easy to stop there and pity him, as if he suffered from a poverty the rest of us escape. We do not. Nobody invented the sentence “I love you.” Most people in Hong Kong knew what heartbreak was supposed to feel like years before their hearts were broken, because Cantopop taught them. We learn the shape of a feeling from songs, films, and other people’s confessions, and then we have the feeling, and it arrives already dressed. The singer in 《K歌之王》 is only an exaggerated case of everyone.

So the real question is not whether borrowed words can be sincere. All words are borrowed, so if borrowing ruled out sincerity, nobody would ever be sincere. The question is why borrowed words carry love in some cases and fall flat in others.

The obscene and the half-owned

Roland Barthes gives the first half of an answer in A Lover’s Discourse (1977). The lover, he argued, speaks in figures: ready-made scenes and phrases the culture has already supplied, such as waiting, jealousy, and the declaration. Even “I love you” is a formula that means something only in the moment it is said. He added a sharper point. In modern life, he wrote, the sentimental has replaced the sexual as the thing that embarrasses people. It is love’s sentimentality that now counts as obscene. That is the exact mechanism of 肉麻. The singer is not rejected because he is insincere. He is rejected because sincerity in love can only be spoken in the discredited language of sentiment, and the better he speaks it, the more it sounds like a show.

Barthes explains the cringe. He does not explain why the same formulas sometimes work. For that, Mikhail Bakhtin is more useful. In “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35) he observed that the word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes one’s own only when the speaker populates it with their own intention and their own accent. Borrowing, on this view, is the ordinary condition of speech, not a failure of it. What matters is whether the accent comes through, and an accent can only be heard by someone who knows the voice. The words are common property. The accent is private, and the listener has to have learned it.

This moves the problem from the speaker to the relationship. A borrowed confession does not fail because it is borrowed. It fails when it is aimed at someone who has no way to hear what the speaker has added to it.

The good-morning picture

Consider the family WhatsApp group in a Hong Kong household. Every morning at seven, a mother forwards an image of lotus flowers with gold characters wishing everyone good health. She did not design it or write it, and hundreds of thousands of other mothers are sending the same picture. Her children know exactly what it means. It means she is awake, she is thinking of them, and she is not going to say so in any other way. The picture is entirely borrowed, and it carries love without any loss, because the people receiving it have spent their lives learning her accent.

Now put that beside the karaoke room. A colleague waits all evening to book 《K歌之王》 until the person he likes walks in. He sings it well. The room applauds. She tells him, kindly, that he has a lovely voice. It is the gentlest refusal available, and it is precise: she has heard the voice, not the man. They have exchanged a few dozen sentences in six months. There is no accent she could hear under the song, so all she hears is the song, sung competently, by someone who is not Eason Chan.

The difference between the two scenes is not sincerity. The colleague is at least as sincere as the mother. The difference is history. Borrowed words can hold a feeling only when the listener already knows the person holding them.

Hearing the apology again

That changes the line 「我唱得不夠動人你別皺眉」, “if I don’t sing it movingly enough, don’t frown.” At first it sounds like an apology for a technical fault, as if the problem were vocal skill. After Bakhtin, it reads differently. The better he sings, the closer he gets to the original recording, and the less of himself is left in it. He is apologising for the wrong thing. Singing more movingly would not help. Only being known would.

The song holds one more turn, and it belongs to Leung. His profession is writing the words that a whole city borrows. The King of K-songs is, in the end, the lyricist: the man who has supplied everyone else’s confessions and finds that, pointed at the one person he wants, they come back to him as someone else’s.

Where does this reading stop? Barthes’s lover is alone, rehearsing speeches in his head, and the karaoke room is not. Among friends, borrowed songs work well: a table of people singing a ballad none of them wrote is how feelings get shared without anyone having to confess. The borrowing fails only when it is used as proof, aimed at one person who does not yet know you. There is also an irony that neither Barthes nor Bakhtin could have supplied. 《K歌之王》 has become one of the songs people book to say what they cannot say. Leung wrote about the failure of borrowed words and added new ones to the stock. The song does not escape its own trap. It is honest about being in it, and that honesty is the part of it that is not second-hand.

The line I keep

The line I keep coming back to is not the hinge. It is 「便宜地唱出寫在情歌的性感」, “cheaply singing the sexiness written in love songs.” The word 便宜, cheap, is his verdict on himself. He knows the price of what he is offering, and he offers it anyway. I find that harder than writing something original. Anyone can be embarrassed by a cliché. It takes something else to know it is a cliché and still say it to someone’s face, because it is all you have.

Two questions stay with me. Is there a song you once let speak for you, and did the person ever hear it the way you meant it? And what if she did hear his accent under the song, and her kind “you have a lovely voice” was not a failure to hear him but a choice not to? Then the song would be about something else. I am not sure yet what.