A million-seller
Belting out a Wu Bai song in a KTV parlor is an eminently satisfying experience, but his are not the only Taiwanese songs to have benefited from the KTVs. Traditional enka tunes have also seen a resurgence as a result both of their popularity with KTV patrons and of the experimentalism now prevalent in Taiwanese-language music.
When Taiwan's economy took off in the 1980s, the growing wealth of society led to a tremendous increase in blue-collar workers' disposable incomes. This in turn brought about a revival in the Taiwanese-language music scene, which was then still dominated by enka songs. Albums such as Hung Jung-hung's A Little Umbrella, Shen Wen-cheng's No One Knows What's in My Heart, Judy Chiang's The Coast Where We Parted and Chen Hsiao-yun's Dancing Girl began circulating in night markets and at restaurant shows.
Taiwanese music's audience was limited in the 1980s by its continued use of nakashi-style arrangements and its earthy lyrics. However, the music found a new audience in the 1990s when singer Judy Chiang signed with Dianjiang Records. When Dian-jiang, a company better known for producing Mandarin albums, recorded Chiang, it retained Taiwanese music's traditional electronic keyboard accompaniment, but applied its own finely honed sense of style and packaging to the songs. The result not only raised the bar on Taiwanese music's production standards, but also won the music its first-ever white-collar audience. When The Truth in the Wine was released in 1992, it sold more than a million copies, announcing to all that Taiwanese music was ready to go head to head with Mandarin music in the marketplace.
While the lyrics to the title track, "The Truth in the Wine," worked the familiar "woman mistreated" territory, the song's emotional honesty made it the number one choice of KTV patrons. Even the "pink collar" urban women who had scorned Taiwanese-language songs for their "crudity" took to belting out "The Truth in the Wine" on their trips to the KTV. A Miss Liu, who works for an American firm and grew up in a military dependents' village, is typical of this group when she says that "The Truth in the Wine" completely changed her view of Taiwanese songs.
"Politics do nothing for me, and Taiwanese songs about social issues hold no interest. 'The Truth in the Wine' sounds like a Mandarin pop ballad, but Judy Chiang's performance of it gives would-be KTV stars a great chance to show off their chops. You never quite get it right; but every time you sing it, you feel like you are getting closer to what she did with it." Miss Liu says that she also likes Judy Chiang's later "Love Me Three Minutes," Chang Hsiu-ching's "Bus Stop," Li Yi-chun's "The Dragon-lady Spirit of the Bitter Sea," Chen Lei's "Strong Winds" and Tsai Chiu-feng's "Silver in Gold" very much.
Taiwanese music is in the ascendant. Sales are on the rise, and several cable TV networks have begun running Taiwanese-language song competitions. Young people are gravitating to performers such as Tony Sun and PGST, and the record companies, who see the writing on the wall, are now packaging them as pop idols.
Election "flowers"
Taiwanese songs are the music of the working people, and contain a strong element of social criticism. They have therefore been associated with the democratic reforms of the last 20 years, and have more recently become an element of election campaigns. The custom got its start in 1993 during Taiwan's first direct mayoral elections, and Taiwanese campaign songs were used as recently as the 2000 presidential elections. Chen Shui-bian got the ball rolling during the 1993 Taipei mayoral campaign when he asked Lu Han-hsiu, a Taiwanese-language poet, and musician Chan Hung-ta to write campaign songs for him. Among the songs they produced were "Spring Flower" and "Happy New Hometown."
The latter resembles the songs riverboat rowers use to keep time, and was also reminiscent of the election songs of the opposition of an earlier day. "Spring Flower," on the other hand, was something new. The lyrics told the story of Taiwanese-opera star Pan Li-li, whose marriage was once the talk of Taiwan. Pan had willingly given up the luxuries of city life to marry the boy-next-door from her impoverished childhood. The two worked hard to make a living, and somehow found a way to buy some orchards in the mountains of Nantou. To Pan, life's greatest joy was to grow old in the country with her spouse. Her story was analogous to Chen Shui-bian's, who stuck by his wife after she was crippled by an automobile accident. The song, which succeeded in heating up an already hotly contested election, became a classic among campaign songs and is still sung today.
Now candidates in elections large and small have taken up the Taiwanese-campaign-song strategy in the hope of replicating Chen's success. In the 2000 presidential election, for example, the mainland-born James Soong asked the Taiwanese singer Wang Chien-chieh to sing a campaign song for him to show his commitment to ethnic harmony. Wang stayed involved with Soong's campaign all the way to the election.
A living music
The Kaohsiung mayoral elections of the same year popularized a somewhat different group of campaign songs. Lin Ti-chuan, a product of the student movements of the 80s who was running for the Kaohsiung city council, was taken with the work of Cheng Chih-jen, who had achieved a degree of fame writing Taiwanese-language songs about disadvantaged groups. With Cheng's permission, Lin began playing his "Formosa Song" and "The Fields of Home" on southern Taiwan's then-underground Voice of Southern Taiwan radio station. "Formosa Song" and "Bright Moon" are now viewed as modern Taiwanese classics, and have even found their way into primary-, middle- and high-school music textbooks.
Cheng's songs became popular in spite of not having been commercially distributed, demonstrating the resiliency that Taiwanese music has gained by being rooted in the hearts of the people. Although the major record labels are facing tough times and releasing fewer albums, many artists are still getting their work to the public through independent labels. In fact, the indies are becoming an important distribution channel for Taiwanese-language music. One of the better known of these is Taiwan Colors Music, which has garnered a great deal of attention at recent Golden Melody Awards and has handled the work of artists such as Heng Chun and BackQuarter.
Even indies with more limited budgets are continually recording new albums of Taiwanese enka music which they then distribute through Taiwan's night markets. Other artists, such as Huang Hui-hung, who has a day job at the Ministry of Education, are recording and releasing albums on their own, which they then donate to charities or organizations supporting the arts to distribute. In short, Taiwanese music remains very much alive in spite of Taiwan's recent economic downturn.
Music responds to the times, and Taiwanese music is no exception. Over the years, Taiwanese-language songs have grown into something more than sentimental ballads and criticisms of society. The Taiwanese music of today's youth, as represented by artists such as Jay, MayDay and Luan Tan, speaks in the mixture of Mandarin and Taiwanese familiar to young people. Where has the Taiwanese language gone? Nowhere-it is in every word we utter. Where has Taiwanese music gone? Nowhere-it is still part of our lives, giving voice to our joys and pains.
At least within Taiwan's music community, there are no more language barriers.