In June 2023, Hong Kong applied to the court for an injunction to prohibit citizens from broadcasting or distributing “Glory to Hong Kong,” a protest anthem widely performed during the Anti-Extradition Bill and Pro-democracy Protests (2019–20) on the eve of the National Security Law (Hong Kong) (NSL(HK)) enactment (June 2020). The city went from being a “semi-democratic” to a “semi-authoritarian” police state (Tai 2020), security forces exercising “rule-by-law” (Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008) instead of a liberal “rule-of-law.” Local buskers who performed the song on the streets were arrested under charges such as “public disorder” and “possessing an offensive weapon”. The song was famously and mistakenly played as the “national” anthem in several international sporting events, triggering the government to ban it since it “violated national security.” Paradoxically, the prohibition threatened those who performed the song publicly while implicitly endorsing its subversive power.

In the prohibition, sound, aurality, and the law intersect, forcing a new habitus delimiting the spoken and the heard (LaBelle 2021). Joining song to space, singing and listening marked unprecedented political territories, which I call political aurality. This paper examines ethnographic materials, archival videos, and legal documents to trace how Hong Kong’s political aurality becomes entangled with the new “lawscape” (LaBelle 2021). Taking “Glory to Hong Kong” as a case, the paper reveals Hong Kong’s loss of freedom in the process of politicized listening demarcated by “authoritarian legality” (Chen and Fu 2019) at this critical moment in history.

Since the beginning of the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman at the hands of Iran's police, ongoing protests have been happening in Iran and the diaspora, significantly in the United States. The soundscapes of Iranian protests in the United States are directly influenced by American social movements, specifically Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name (Mosley 2020; Siamdoust 2023). My fieldwork in the US reveals a striking adaptation of these movements' slogans into the lexicon of Iranian communities, as chants of "Say his/her name" reverberate through the gatherings. My discussion considers these global dialogues and interactions through sounds and similar patterns of resistance among oppressed groups that transcend national boundaries during social movements (Melucci 1996; Hollander and Einwohner 2004; Manuel 2019). This research sheds light on how the soundscape of feminist and political movements intersect among Iranians in the US. How does intersectionality unite people globally during social movements? To what extent do Iranian diasporic communities in the United States align their protest's soundscape with their host societies' expectations? Why do Iranians draw from Western slogans and songs to convey their national struggles and grief?

During the 2019 social movement in Hong Kong, we witnessed a creative outpour of music that responded to and contributed to the social movement. This paper enriches the academic literature on Hong Kong social movement music, by putting the spotlight on a particular piece of remix music on YouTube, “Fat Mama Has Something to Say.” “Fat Mama Has Something to Say” was a timely and comical response to the police brutality incidents in the 2019 Hong Kong social movements. In this music video, an anonymous netizen remixed a pro-Beijing celebrity, Maria Cordero’s pro-police speech into lyrics that criticized the police, and the melody was autotuned to Sia’s Chandelier. The “Fat Mama” song very quickly became immensely popular online, and was extensively used in the social movement. This paper explores what made the “Fat Mama” song so popular and effective, and analyses such with the theoretical concepts of oscillatio, asyndeton, and the Grotesque. This paper contributes to the newly explored academic dimension of remix music on YouTube, and offers new insights into how remix music could be used as protest music, in this particular case study of the “Fat Mama” song during the 2019 Hong Kong social movement. Serving as a case study, this song also showcases a divergence from the current literature on protest music, and proposes another model for understanding the impacts of protest music.