Thursday, September 17, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
/ARTS WEEKLY/MUSIC-HONG KONG: Hardcore, Wild and Socially Conscious
Sonny Inbaraj
- King Lychee’s music is not for the faint-hearted. This is hardcore punk angry screaming with earsplitting guitar screeches and super fast pounding drum beats coupled with wild stage antics – the kind of stuff rightist Christian fundamentalists would term ‘devil’ music.
‘Devils’ the band’s members might be, but their lyrics are not of Satan worship or of the advocating of violence. Quite to the contrary, this four-piece hardcore band from Hong Kong sings – or rather screams – about social justice, peace, love, respect for the elderly and democracy.
And it is not just youth idealism and idle talk. King Lychee is dead serious about its music and is donating the proceeds of its second CD, ‘Stand Strong’, to the Senior Citizen Home Safety Association of Hong Kong.
”We don’t have a very good social security system in Hong Kong. The people who are old have nothing…the people who are cleaning up the trash, the street-sweepers whatever – 90 percent of the time are old people, fragile people,” Riz Farooqi, King Lychee’s founder and lead singer, tells IPS in an interview during the band’s one-night performance here in December.
Farooqi says the band decided to do something for the elderly after its members were moved by an image that still remains strong in their minds.
”There’s a steep hill in Hong Kong called Lan Kwai Fong, with bars and all that. I remember one night when everyone was coming home drunk and we saw an old man with frail hands pushing a cart filled with trash up the hill,” Farooqi recalls.
”People refused to get out of his way and no one wanted to help this poor old man. We were so moved and that image really stuck in our minds. We wanted to do something to help people like him,” he adds.
In ‘Frail Hands’, King Lychee asks: ”In Asian culture we are taught to treat the elderly as treasures. But instead of treating them as assets, we treat them as a social burden. What happened? When did the tables turn so drastically?”
King Lychee has been around since 1999 and is currently on tour in South-east Asia to promote its latest CD.
Farooqi, who was already into heavy metal guitar-playing in the likes of Axel Rose of the U.S. band Guns N’ Roses, tells about the early origins of King Lychee.
”I went off to the United States to study and when I came back in 1999, that was when the nu-metal (post-heavy metal) bands Korn and Linkin Park exploded in Hong Kong. Everyone assumed that that kind of music was hardcore,” he recalls, much to his dismay.
”I said to myself ‘these kids were so wrong’ and I took it upon myself to fix it somehow,” adds Farooqi.
The just-returned Farooqi, with a business degree in hand from the University of Massachusetts, then started a bilingual webzine, which was in English and Cantonese, called ‘Start from Scratch’.
”I knew if I wrote in English, it was not going to work at all. It would just go over the heads of kids. They needed something in their own language,” he points out.
The webzine led to the formation of King Lychee with like-minded musicians – the Chung cousins, Alex (bass and vocals) and Andy (guitar), and Kevin Li (drums). The band’s debut album, ‘We Are Who We Are’, was released in 2000.
”We wanted the kids to see and feel what we said in the webzine. So King Lychee was our mission to educate kids what hardcore is all about,” says Farooqi. ”It’s about helping the unfortunate and singing about stuff that matters.”
Some might accuse them of being brainwashing cult rockers and Farooqi does not dispel that.
”Hardcore is not just about the music – there is a message behind it. That’s what we try to tell the kids who come to our shows.”
Hardcore originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, primarily in and around Los Angeles and Washington DC, but also in New York City, Vancouver, Boston, and other cities.
Former Washington DC club promoter Steven Blush claimed in his book ‘American Hardcore: A Tribal History’, that hardcore was punk rock adapted for suburban teens. Hardcore lyrics often express righteous indignation at society, usually from a politically left perspective.
The origin of the term ‘hardcore punk’ is murky. However, the general consensus is that the term originated with an album by the Canadian band D.O.A., entitled ‘Hardcore ’81’.
For Farooqi, political rights are just as important as social rights and King Lychee’s new composition ‘She’ aims to remind Hong Kong’s people of that.
”I just want kids to open up their minds and challenge the system,” says Farooqi when he talks about the control of Hong Kong by mainland China.
The hardcore band leader talks about ‘She’. ”We’re so different from China and ‘She’ represents our freedom. A couple of years ago, the Hong Kong government wanted to curtail our rights by passing Article 23 that was going to restrict a lot of freedoms and ‘She’ was a response to that,” reveals Farooqi.
Five years after its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, Hong Kong faced the gravest threat to its civil liberties in the form of Article 23.
On Sep. 24, 2002, the government released its proposals for the anti-subversion law. Protests against the bill led to a massive demonstration on Jul. 1, 2003 where half a million Hong Kong residents took to the streets to demand the withdrawal of the article.
In the aftermath of the political crisis, two cabinet ministers resigned and the bill was shelved indefinitely and finally withdrawn.
The last time there was such a huge, disciplined display of people power in Hong Kong was when a million or so Hong Kong people took to the streets after Jun. 4, 1989. They were protesting the Tiananmen massacre, thereby destroying forever the myth that Hong Kong was inhabited by a politically apathetic citizenry.
”The Hong Kong government is like a puppet regime. They’ll just sit back and nod their heads to whatever Beijing tells them to do,” tells Farooqi. ”But for the Hong Kong people, it doesn’t work that way.”
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