When they had torn down about half of the illegal housing on the site of Park Number 7, I finally eked out a little time to go over for a walk around. Many smashed bricks and half-toppled walls hindered my progress, and the lanes and alleys I remembered seemed misplaced. It was a quiet and low-key afternoon. Although many residents were packing up their things to leave, everyone spoke to one another with lowered voices. I met some old veterans, and in the distance saw two families of citified aborigines. It was a desolate scene--when suddenly I heard someone call my name from behind my back.

Voice of the city: That was the most recent time that I saw Wong Chia-ming--at the edge of city life where only the marginal people can regularly be seen. At that moment several friends were helping to put what he calls his "non-corporeal belongings" onto a small pickup truck. It was only then that I knew that Wong Chia-ming had lived there for a long time.

In my impression, only the most marginal people--old soldiers, car washers, people just up from the countryside to look for work in Taipei -- lived in the illegal housing on the broad expanse of the site of Park Number 7. This was a far cry from the elegant little coffee shops in trendy eastern Taipei where I usually saw Wong.

But, when I thought about it some more, there wasn't that much difference between the Wong Chia-ming who appeared here and the one in my original impression.

I remember a seminar where we were discussing some new pop music tapes that had just come on the market. Wong rushed to rebuff Han Cheng- hao and myself: "But this album of the Crickets is a rare case of creating something that has not existed before in Mandarin pop music--music that people can dance to." Indeed on several other occasions, he always couldn't help but stand on the side of the mass audience for popular music, taking sides against a few of his elitist friends including me.

Precisely like the place he has chosen to live, the issues he has taken up are also those of the ordinary people. In the past few years, while most intellectuals have still been discussing the development of highbrow culture or elite culture, his attention had already turned to the most commonplace culture of daily life, including things like pop music or baseball.

Showing the pulse of mass culture: Right at the beginning of the Preface to the recently published From Luo Ta-you to Cui Jian--The Loci of Contemporary Popular Music, he makes this appeal: "Let's everybody keep an eye on the centers of the trends in contemporary life." As for his own critical viewpoint, because it "isn't a cold blooded analysis, of course it is impossible that it should be absolutely objective. Thus I often avoid judgements of good and bad, and look at pop music from the angles of mass culture and social direction."

Yet, just because of this broad-mindedness, his music criticism can often produce acute observations, and can penetrate the true pulse of mass pop culture even earlier than most music critics.

Pop music has always flourished in Taiwan. But even before the Native Literature Movement of the late 1970s, so-called Mandarin pop had long been rejected by university students. In the university culture of the 1960s and 1970s, western music played an inseparable role; the music played on the American military station became the most popular. The relationship between western music and Mandarin pop was set as an opposition between high-level culture and a devalued vulgar culture.

Later came the folk music movement, which quickly took the place of western music in the cultural lives of university students and most intellectuals.

From Luo Ta-you to Cui Jian records and makes observations on an even more recent development, which is the tide of singer-songwriters, of whom Luo Ta-you was the first. As campus folk music gradually became the mainstream of popular music, and after the original concern for social issues had been replaced by new romantic themes, the release by Luo Ta-you in 1982 of "Chih, Hu, Cheh, Yeh" and "The Little Town of Lukang" once again energized the possibility that song and society could be linked, and the new singer-songwriter trend began to emerge.

Keeping records: The kinds of pop music to which Wong Chia-ming devotes his attention are the many new creative styles which have emerged on the Taiwan pop music scene under the impetus of the new singer-songwriter trend.

Although the title of this book suggests music criticism, it is really equivalent to a record of the development of this kind of pop music in these years. Over the last four or five years he has writ ten criticism for the newspaper columns "Black Disc" and "Observations on Music." In fact the pop music he has written about is even broader than the book implies, since he has been serving as the equivalent of a gatekeeper, immediately providing needed assessments of the new products continually being put out by the record companies. But the number of essays collected in this book might not be even a third of all those, only taking those reviews or interviews relating to creative singer-songwriter type artists, mainly Luo Ta-you, Chang Hung-liang, Chen Ming-chang, Simon Hsueh, Hou Teh-chien, and Lim Giong.

In addition, he has been quite interested in the problem of ideology in pop music. As for singers like the Little Tigers, Wang Chieh, or Chang Yu- sheng, and the phenomenon of record companies commercially packaging people from head to toe, he has not only expressed his discomfiture; even more importantly, he has done an in-depth analysis of this music--which undeniably has found wide appeal--and even affirmed some of the cultural phenomena expressed in it, such as the youth sub-culture.

In these years, following the "manufacturization" of popular culture in Taiwan, with it being produced in assembly-line fashion, some more sensitive people from the arts have begun an in depth discussion of the social meaning of these phenomena.

Finding the culture in daily life: There has already been a rather thorough shift in the traditional intellectual stereotype of popular culture as vulgar. They even use criticism as an entree to obscure the division between high-level and low-level culture. Among these newly rising critics, some have been strongly affected by Western critical theory and tend to focus on-macrotheories of mass culture, such as social structure, ideology, collective sub consciousness, historical network analysis, and so on.

But Wong Chia-ming's critiques are a different type of participation. He sets himself up as one of the masses, and uses a more pragmatic under-standing of life immersed in popular culture. His columns are thus more approachable and less esoteric--but the viewpoint remains sharp. This special characteristic is perhaps a response to his residing with the ordinary people at the margins of city life.

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Author: Wong Chia-ming

Publisher: China Times Publishing Company

Price: NT$200

Pages: 266