Anita Mui’s 10 best songs: Canto-pop legend’s greatest hits ranked ahead of the release of biopic of the Hong Kong singer in November
- The Hong Kong-born singer’s distinctive voice and charismatic stage presence set her apart, and her songs challenged the conservatism of Chinese culture
- She sang about sex in Bad Girl, flaunted an androgynous look in the music video for Split the Iceberg and plumbed the depths of melancholy in Homecoming
With a melancholic contralto voice and charismatic stage presence, Anita Mui Yim-fong, who died from cervical cancer in 2003, was the biggest female Canto-pop singer in Hong Kong.
Unconstrained by the conservative social mores of the 1980s, she embraced liberal Western values and sang about a girl’s first sexual encounter in Bad Girl (1985).
In the music video for Split the Iceberg (1986), she wore a broad-shouldered blazer and loose-fitting trousers to pull off an androgynous look that had never been adopted by female Hong Kong entertainers before.
In his 2019 book about the singer, Dream and the City: Anita Mui and Hong Kong Popular Culture, Lei Chin-pang, assistant professor in communication at the University of Macau, points out that Mui’s image was without precedent in the Chinese community then.
“Her ever-changing image represented the endless possibilities of Hong Kong women and the drastic changes of Hong Kong society and culture then,” he wrote in the book.
