Nothing Lasts Forever: Juno's Style Music

Few days ago, Juno Mak has launched his second great hits album – “Nothing Lasts Forever”. In the album, it consists of 14 pervious pieces with three new songs. Those new songs are “超生培慾”, “紙箱國” and “上春風的課”. Base on the interview in Ming Post, Juno said that these three new songs are talking different scenario of love. “超生培慾” is a song about the crazy act of a fetishist. A guy loves the feeling of his mother’s hand touching his face in his childhood. After his mother died, he is going to kidnap women back home and make them look like his mother. Then, he cut their hand off and collects in the gallery. “紙箱國” is a love story of a vagrant. Juno stated that he interests in vagrants living style and think them still have right to love. “上春風的課” is another love story between teacher and student.

Juno is not a famous and popular main stream singer in Hong Kong. But his music is conform Adorno’s notion of standardization and pseudo-individualisation. Observing the melody of these songs, we can find that the songs’ structure is very similar to other local singers’ songs. Most of them are written by several famous songwriters and lyricists. Making songs are easier for audiences to accept.

However, Juno tries to make his music more outstanding from those main stream productions. He put afford on the message delivery of the songs. Usually, he applies the ideologies in each song. “吃鯨魚的人” is a song with the ideology of environment and animal protection. Besides, having artistic album cover is also a symbolic Juno’s style which easy to differentiate from others. From these unique features, it is match with what Adorno’s notion of pseudo-individualisation.

Many people on the internet have criticized that Juno’s music is piled up by his father money. Someone even evaluate his vocal can’t get to the high key and the lyrics of his songs are meaningless and abstract. However, I have an alternative view on his music. I agree that his vocal is really weak when he sings at higher key. But I think he has a strong sense of creative and searching high quality of music composition. In his recent works, he is going to combine the Pop-rock with the Orchestra elements. It creates different complex layers on melody structure. For the abstract theme of the song, it seems that different audiences may have different interpretation on same song. It is difficult for artists to control audiences’ thought.

Lastly, after listening to the album, my opinion is Juno really easy to lose his voice when he is singing at the high key section of his song. However, the composition of each song is really high quality, especially the Orchestra component at the background of the melody.

Kwok Ling Chun, Benson 10345886