Taiwanese Language Songs Move Forward

It has taken people by storm, and its future looks good.

　One day, a young man named Ah Tsao woke up early, saw that the weather was good, and, having nothing to do, decided to go to Hsimenting to see a movie and hang around. Little did he expect that he would be intercepted at the intersection by fully armed civil and military police.

　It was only after asking around that he found out some people were demonstrating, and that the streets were full of people. The young man, unable to get to his movie, did not know how to express his protest, but couldn't help saying to himself: "I'm just a young man from the farm/and this is the first time in your fine city/I wanted to go see a movie and take a stroll on the streets/whatever you're fighting about doesn't matter to me/please, please let me by...." (from "Democratic Ah Tsao").

　On the platform for the northbound train, a young man who has just gotten out of the military, carrying a few simple things, waves goodbye to his friends who have come to send him off. He's not going off wandering, or to take a ship, but heading to Taipei to start a business. As the train pulls out, in his mind there's the sound of music saying, "I'm afraid of nothing, move forward...." (from "Move Forward").

　A 37-year-old woman, having been a wife and a mother, one quiet night suddenly looks back on the road that has led her to where she is, and can't help but emote over the ever-changing fortunes of life: "One thread, two threads, ten threads, one hundred threads/the fate of puppets depends on people moving their strings one by one/the thread of emotion, the thread of life, the thread of profession/my fate and yours, if we dare to try our best, can we win?" (from "Puppets").

　Starting about three years ago, albums of Taiwanese pop music, with lyrics like these that broke through old stereotypes and emphasized personal creative style, began appearing on the market. Their works proved that the contents of Taiwanese songs could, like the Mandarin songs of Luo Ta-you, directly criticize and satirize reality. Or they can, like Chang Yu-sheng's "My Future Is Not a Dream," sing out youthful optimism about the future. Or they can evoke the life experience of a mature woman.

　Singing a new tune: Besides the creativity in the lyrics, the musical forms of these new songs makes an even more significant break with the traditional Japanese flavor of Taiwanese music. They use modern styles like Western rock and roll, rap, and heavy metal; or fit in traditional Fukienese nankuan or pei-kuan or Taiwanese opera; or even lay out uniquely new melodies. If you don't pay close attention to the lyrics, at first it's almost impossible to guess that these are Taiwanese songs.

　Take for example the album Go Crazy, produced by the Blacklist Workshop, organized by Chen Ming-chang, Wang Ming-hui, Lin Wei-che, and others, as well as the cooperative albums Dramatic Ant and Catering they have released. Or there's Chen Ming-chang's solo albums Live Works and Afternoon Drama. Lin Wei-che has also formed BABOO, which has issued the album New Taiwan Dollar. All of them offer a fresh experience for listeners. Besides these, a few younger singers like Chu Yue-hsin, Lim Giong, and Hsiao Fu-teh are using this innovative style of Taiwanese music to break in. Many famous Mandarin pop veterans are also giving it a try, as in Luo Ta-you's Hometown, Hsu Ching-fu's I Really Want to Fly and Chen Hsiao-hsia's Big-Footed Sister.

Although there are only ten or so of these albums, they have generated a tremendous response and good reviews, and among them there is no shortage of big sellers.

Getting to intellectuals: The piece "I Really Want to Fly" by the trained vocalist Hsu Ching-chun is the first Taiwanese language song to win the top prizes for best music and best lyrics for a regional dialect song. She also won the best female local dialect singer award for this year with this production.

Newcomer Lim Giong's first album Move Forward has sold more than 300,000 copies, a figure that has made the experts sit up and take note.

Blacklist Workshop made its way onto campuses doing live concerts, immediately winning the attention of college and university students. There were only 20 or 30 people at the first shows, growing to hundreds and then thousands, including setting a record of 34 performances in a single month.

"This kind of work qualifies as a 'long endurance seller' in the market," points out A-Da Im, head of Crystal Records, which has issued a series of works by Blacklist Workshop, like the two albums Go Crazy and Afternoon Drama. Although at present sales have reached only 100,000 and 40,000 respectively, since being published three years ago the numbers have been continually rising, and the future market still looks upbeat. Where did this trend come from?

New room to groove: "It offers different space for development," says Li Tsung-sheng, vice general manager of Rock Records and a record producer who himself became famous through folk songs. After long-term development, the current Mandarin pop music market is saturated for all categories, and there is little room for innovation.

Comparatively speaking, although Taiwanese music began developing in the Japanese occupation era, because of limits on regional dialect programming for TV and radio, as well as the "cold shoulder" long given to it by intellectuals, the target audience has always been working class.

"Correspondingly, this has reserved a considerable amount of space for those who want to try something new to strut their stuff," he adds.

Chen Ming-chang, who was born and raised in Peitou, is an example. Early on when campus folk music was in fashion, he participated in the Golden Rhythm singing competition, but lost because his Mandarin was not very good. It was only when he heard Chen Ta's "Remembering" that he woke up to the fact that "Taiwanese music could also be very moving," and thus turned to writing and performing Taiwanese language compositions.

Turning Mandarin and Taiwanese inside out: The short-term reason is the liberalization of politics and relaxation of taboos. Hsu Ching-chun notes that since the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the lifting of the ban on new newspapers, the social mood has become increasingly free and pluralized. Local Taiwanese culture is gaining respect, and limits on use of Taiwanese are being relaxed. This greatly increases the opportunities to perform, thus naturally heightening the willingness of singers to devote themselves to it.

Moreover, according to statistics, Taiwanese account for 70% of the population of Taiwan, or more than 15 million people, for many of whom Taiwanese is the regular language of daily life. Singer Chen Hsiao-hsia states that her father is from Kwangtung, but she learned authentic, fluent Taiwanese from her mother, giving her the feeling that "when I sing Taiwanese songs it's like talking to my mother."

Lim Giong, who has been into Western music since he was a child, uses Western musical forms with vivid, vernacular Taiwanese, squeezing in the latest slang used by youth. In this way he has attracted a large following among young people who never before got much attention from Taiwanese record offerings.

As for the new BABOO group, they have an even stronger image of turning Taiwanese and Mandarin inside out. They not only run the two together, they even fit English and Aboriginal into the mix. "This is the way young people are used to using language," says lead singer Lin Wei-chih. Their group combines Taiwanese, Aboriginal, and Japanese bloodlines. "Music has to reflect the language of the time," he emphasizes.

Beautiful rhymes and complex tones: Another major attraction for singers and writers is the special character of Taiwanese with its capacity for creative rhyming and phonetic complexity (it has eight tones, compared to four for Mandarin).

During the Japanese occupation period, Taiwanese works were high in quality and in volume. Many of the songs of great Taiwanese artists of those days are still popular and are often sung today.

In the 1960's and 1970's, Taiwanese music nearly disappeared from the airwaves, but it did not die without a trace. Often the record-buying publics of singers like Yeh Chi-tien, nicknamed "the King of Formosan Song," made them even more popular than Mandarin singers.

In the last few years, more than a few singers who mainly sing Mandarin songs have turned to have a hand at a few well-known and favorite old Taiwanese classics. For example, Tsai Chin, Chang Ching-fang, Chen Shu-hwa, and others have gotten into it because of the rich themes and emotive melodies.

Need for a new sound: A new era needs new voices. Listeners tired of the countless soundalike tunes need a new place to vent their desires. But, if you want to touch the audience and win recognition, it is necessary that the compositions themselves touch people--that's the only way they'll get popular. Thus popular music can often reflect society at any given time.

Looking at the overall picture, what does this new wave of Taiwanese pop reflect?

"Today legislators fight over the microphone in the Legislative Yuan, and all kinds of political and social groups are taking bullhorns to the streets to demonstrate. Even the students go to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to have a sit-in. Society is entranced by the highflying prices of real estate and stocks....," says Chen Ming-chang. "Everybody has something they want to say, but how can you say it so that people will listen?"

Thus the album Go Crazy deliberately adopted a bold, direct method to criticize reality and to sketch out recent changes in society. He describes this as, "Make noise, get attention."

For example, "Democratic Ah Tsao" satirizes the frequent street demonstrations, while "Taxi" describes the condition of a taxi driver in traffic plagued Taipei. "Go Crazy" directly takes on the psychology of mad devotion to making money some people have.

No more hot and cold: The problem is, if you make noise for a long time, people will get annoyed. Singers have discovered that direct, sharp criticism is not always the best way to make an impression.

Chen Ming-chang's method of appeal in Afternoon Drama is "to go from hardness against hardness to softness." In the songs he sings of life experiences, no longer laughing coldly or parodying heatedly, hoping to get listeners to do some constructive thinking.

Hsu Ching-chun's I Really Want to Fly uses a classically trained vocalists's style along with gently flowing orchestration to give people a fresh idea about Taiwanese music. Although the style differs dramatically from that of Go Crazy, within these songs that on their face discuss romance and life there is deep social reflection. Hsu takes an example, saying how "Don't Look Down on Taiwan" clearly appeals to concern for one's native soil: If we treasure what our ancestors have done/please don't look down on Taiwan/although this land is overburdened/father's sweat and mother's blood/ have made it fertile.

They are also beginning to be concerned about some of the anonymous people at the lower levels of society. Of them, this appears most in the work of Lim Giong, from the old man who sells tempura by the roadside ("Black Wheel Uncle"), and the old woman who sells lotus blossoms to passing cars ("Lotus Blossom"), to the young girl selling betel nuts in the harbor ("Betel Nut Beauty," performed by Jackie Chan) to young kids who take amphetamines or belong to gangs ("You Are Really Incredible").

Quiet reflection with concern for life: In the eyes of music critics, for this current wave of Taiwanese songs to become a movement similar to that of campus folk music more than a decade ago will require more artists to join in, and requires even more high quality productions.

But it's worth taking note that in this fickle day and age, there are a number of young artists who are willing to reflect on things and be deeply concerned about the place they live, and who put their feelings into practice in life and in this land.

[Picture Caption]

Every generation has its geniuses. After writing "Move Foward," Lim Giong (on the left) has been designated heir apparent to carry on the legacy of great Taiwanese songwriters. (photo by Chang Jung-chien)

Chen Ming-chang can tell stories about the Peitou bath houses for days and nights on end without finishing. Better yet, let him sing about them! (photo courtesy of Crystal Records)

The new writers of Taiwanese songs are good at finding their material from the people. They have, for example, borrowed extensively from the wandering Nakahsi minstrels, who are popular at feasts and festivals in Taiwan.

Scenes from raucous and festive catered parties have also made their way into song.

(photo by Huang Lili)

(Right,left)Exhausting the range of comic and tragic, crying out about strange social phenomena, the songs stem from concern about one's homeland. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

Chen Ming-chang can tell stories about the Peitou bath houses for days and nights on end without finishing. Better yet, let him sing about them! （photo courtesy of Crystal Records）

The new writers of Taiwanese songs are good at finding their material from the people. They have, for example, borrowed extensively from the wandering Nakahsi minstrels, who are popular at feasts and festivals in Taiwan.

Scenes from raucous and festive catered parties have also made their way into song.（photo by Huang Lili）

Exhausting the range of comic and tragic, crying out about strange social phenomena, the songs stem from concern about one's homeland. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）