The world is smaller and smaller, and the sentiments of Chinese all over the world have more and more in common.
The excitement kicked up across the Taiwan Straits by the Taiwan music industry beginning last year has become even greater. Whether at concerts, jam sessions, or benefits, you can always find stars, producers, or record company reps from Taipei. "Last year at the Wangfu Hotel in Peking, I finally met a friend from Taiwan that I hadn't seen in fifteen years," recalls Hsieh Teh-sha, of the Broadcasting Corporation of China. At the same time, there are more and more Hongkong singers coming to make albums on Taiwan. Also, the Mandarin language record charts in places like Malaysia, Singapore, and North America get hotter and hotter. It seems that overnight pop music has generated a common mood enjoyed by Chinese everywhere.
"It's still easiest to express yourself in your mother tongue," says Singapore interior designer Oliver Yah. For precisely this reason, Mandarin songs produced under many different social conditions are nevertheless widely accepted. In this trend of Mandarin music which has taken shape in the last few years, Taiwan is the hub.
Folk Songs Catch On: Angus Tong, Pan Mei-chen, Chiang Yu-heng, and Chao Chuan, all from Taiwan, have become all the rage in the mainland. Tong's "In Fact You Don't Know My Heart," has sold one to two million copies of the copyrighted version; it is estimated there are over 10 million pirated copies.
Chiang Hong-liang and Wang Chieh, also from Taiwan, are most popular in Hong Kong and Kwangtung. Although Hongkong stars like Liu Teh-hwa, Tu Teh-wei, and Lin Yi-lien have made their own marks in Taiwan, last year the most requested karaoke song in Hongkong was still "Silent Ending," a number of Taiwan origin.
In the Singapore-Malaysia area, of the top twenty tunes on the Rediffusion radio Mandarin pop charts, ten were products of Taiwan. Wang Chieh's "I Want to Fly" was the most popular song continuously for 70 weeks. Seven or eight years ago, Rock Records couldn't even sell 3,000 copies of a recording in the Singapore-Malaysia area; today Chen Shu-hwa's "Moment of Waking from a Dream" has approached 150,000. All kinds of signs indicate that the dominance and vigor of Cantonese songs from Hongkong in Singapore and Malaysia has been swept away.
Record producer Su Lai believes that this success is "because we have been cultivating longer than others." He points out that in the 1970's the folk music movement in Taiwan produced many talented people, including the still popular Angus Tung, Tsai Chin, and Chi Yu. Most importantly, it produced behind the scenes talent, like nowproducers Lee Tsung-sheng, Chou Chih-ping, Huang Ta-chun, and Tai Pi-mei. As a result, Taiwan's record companies have been somewhat more idealistic and adventurous than in Hongkong, which is more derivative and commercial. For example, though Luo Ta-you's first album was different from run-of-the-mill pop, Rock Records took the leap and issued it. Folk music also created a vogue for campus songwriting, and today one can still find campus folk song competitions continuously generating new talent.
Many record companies also use this approach to search for new talent. For example, Lin Chiang was discovered through a competition sponsored by Rock Records. Blue and White Records sponsors the "National Youth Songwriting Contest" from time to time. The currently hip Pan Mei-chen was discovered this way. The most important thing is that "singing live" has become the primary condition for making it in the business, so that those with real ability have gradually become the mainstream.
Creativity's the Key: "At the end of the 1980's, because of the development of the mass media, the record companies began to package and sell their singers like toothpaste. They would get specialists to create an image from head to foot; there would be hard sell advertising in order to promote the singer and the record as intensely as possible. Add to this that with progress in recording technology a song could be recorded tens of times, and, with editing by a skillful engineer and the addition of effects and background vocals, you could get the sound needed to be successful. To be a star at that time, one didn't have to sing; the image was enough," points out one veteran record producer.
In that era of handsome boys, beautiful women, and little cuties, every company did the same thing, concentrating its attention on promotion and churning out songs. As a result, it was an era of rapid rises and more rapid demises. Some said that singers like Liu Wen-cheng, feng Fei-fei, and Teresa Teng, who had come along at the beginning of the 1970's and remained popular for more than a decade, were "the last of the superstars."
But after the rise of campus folk music, the singer's own creativity gradually became the thing. The topography of the music scene shifted, and beauty was no longer a guarantee of success. Singing ability and creativity had become the entrees to the big time. Take for example the song "I'm Very Ugly But I'm Very Gentle," in which Chao Chuan relied on the strength of his voice to make it a hit. Even if there are still "teen idols" like Wang Chieh, even these often write their own lyrics and music. Most "idol" types at least must be able to sing live.
"Right now the audience likes singers with creativity, and their performance life is relatively long," says Cheng Chung-yung, director of PR at Blue and White. This change in the ecology of the music world injected new life into the pop music scene in Taiwan, and has generated pluralization and set a foundation for overseas expansion.
Forty Years of Ups and Downs: Thirty years ago, Taiwan pop music was "in" in Southeast Asia for a time. Lin Chin Ching, broadcaster for RTM radio in Kuala Lumpur, recalls that Malaysia had had a Chinese language radio station since the end of WWⅡ. In the 1960's, stars like Yao Su-jung, Chin Shan, and Chen Fen-lan began to get popular. In particular, Yao broke the old mellow performing style with shouting and expressions of emotion; this really hit home with Chinese in Malaysia at that time, who were depressed by anti-Chinese sentiment and the bad economy.
Liu Wen-cheng was the most popular of the successor generation. Ten years ago Singapore TV had a program called "Who's Most Like the Star?" in which audience members came up to imitate their favorites; Liu was the one imitated most often. Even today, the recordings of Liu and Feng Fei-fei still have a prominent place on the charts in Singapore and Malaysia.
While a vast number of flash-in-the-pan stars appeared out of Taiwan's muc scene in the 1980's, Cantonese music made for popular TV series hit the Southeast Asian Chinese song market in a big way. Even in Taiwan itself, the flashy, stylish stars with the Cantonese-accented Mandarin swept young people off their feet.
After ten years of regrouping, Taiwan's pop music world is taking to the field again.
The Market Grows: Still, much of the credit for the popularity of Taiwan Mandarin pop music in Chinese communities must go to market expansion created by a number of environmental factors. The impact of the broadcast media had been the most important.
What is now called "pop music" has its roots in the music used as filler in films. The songs sung most commonly in Taiwan and Hongkong in the 1960's were movie numbers.
Taiwan Mandarin pop music at first also made its way to overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and North America through movies and TV series. The sales of recordings for singer Feng Fei-fei would go hand in hand with the ticket sales of the Lin Ching-hsia films for which they were made.
The discovery of karaoke added fuel to the fire. Karaoke, bringing together the virtues of self-expression, letting your hair down, and friendship, has already gone from a simple microphone to the big screen laser disk KTV, strengthening people's desire to get out and sing and stimulating the production of songs. "You will find that in order to accommodate this trend, lyrics are becoming more simple and repetitive," points out music critic Ong Chia-ming. Songs have followed the entree of the karaoke industry into Southeast Asia to become successful in Singapore, Malaysia, and other areas.
Radio has always been the main conveyance for pop music. The flourishing of the campus folk song trend is due in no small part to introduction and promotion by BCC DJ Tao Hsiao-ching. She also initiated introductions of writers of the lyrics and music, thus stimulating audience interest and affirmation for the creators, and encouraging even more people to get into the creative process.
Radio Drives the Charts: Radio is even more crucial for those areas outside of Taiwan.
In this regard, Malaysia's "Rediffusion" radio has done a great deal. Since 1988, the station has put out a Mandarin song pop chart. Besides introducing new songs and announcing the results of the listener, requests every week, more than a dozen DJ's also have repeated meetings every December to come up with an annual pop chart. The audience vote reveals the degree of popularity in the market, the latter the evaluation of more specialized DJ's.
"We are very strict about our annual chart, so much so that people in the record industry call us the 'style maker chart,'" says Wong Lai Ngo, Senior Programme Manager. Take for example the songs of Taiwan star Cheng Chih-hwa, which have a certain socially critical perspective. The record company thought they wouldn't find an audience in Malaysia, and didn't plan to issue an album there. However, Rediffusion put its mark of quality on these songs and was the first to broadcast them. The audience response was very enthiusiastic, and only then did the company bow to pressure and release an album. Now companies even release a "golden hits" cassette based on the station's annual chart.
Malaysia's record approval system also is an invisible hand helping Taiwan pop music. Malaysia is an Islamic country and its customs are relatively reserved. Thus it is prohibited to air any songs suggesting sex or violence. "Hongkong has always been liberal," says Chin Tien Shoong of Radio Television Malaysia, "so sometimes the lyrics are a little too explicit." In comparison, there are more opportunities for Taiwan products to get on the radio, thus raising their status in the charts.
Hong Kong Stars, Mandarin Songs: Besides the media, economics is another determinant for pop music.
In Taiwan itself, following the rise in the national income, buying a cassette tape has become ordinary consumer behavior. This allows songwriting to become a profession, says Su Lai, who made his own fame writing. Ten years ago when his mother called from the South, the first question was always, "Do you have enough to eat?" Today he is planning a one-year trip around the world.
Secondly, with "economic reform" in the mainland, things are more open there. The one billion person market is an enormous incentive. In Hongkong, the sale of 50,000 tapes would make a platinum record. But Angus Tung's release sold one to two million in the mainland. Kenny Y.W. Lau of PolyGram records in Hongkong says frankly, "In the future the greatest market for Mandarin songs will be the mainland." As a result, Hongkong stars are switching over to Mandarin tunes to break into the mainland market; they can also kill two birds with one stone by getting a foothold in the Taiwan market, where piracy is already under control.
In terms of the evolution of pop music, Cheung Man Sun of Radio 2 of Radio Television Hongkong points out that in the 1950's Hongkong was very poor. Few people had radios, and fewer listened to pop music; most stuck with Cantonese opera. In the 1960's, films and arts troupes allowed several people to become popular for a short time. But thereafter it was the domain of the Beatles and other English-language groups. In the 1970's, Hsu Guan-chieh led the way in the writing of new lyrics and music for Cantonese songs. Add to this the popularity of the TV series and this brought a vogue of "TV theme" songs.
Cantonese music flourished for a time but there was not enough of a talent pool. For a year or two attention turned to Taiwan, but Hongkongers are fond of modern, extravagant performers, and thus Taiwan singers such as Lin Shu-jung, who sang "Silent Ending," found that their songs were popular in Hongkong but that they were not!
In order to cultivate real talent and deal with the next round, those with foresight in Hongkong began to develop creative talent. Radio Television Hongkong turned its English/Japanese/Chinese Radio 2 into an all-Chinese station.
"Today's fans care about the lyrics and the music," says DJ Chou Mei-yin. "After our Chinese station began operations, those with real creative talent knew that they had a forum, and turned out good stuff. For example, the music of Lin Yung-liang or the lyrics of Chou Li-mao have been very well received."
Singapore Goes For Oldies: The broadening of the market for Mandarin songs in Singapore is due mainly to the local government's policy to "promote Mandarin," with an assist from karaoke.
"Singapore has every kind of music, but none has become the mainstream," says former hot property Chin Chun, with a tinge of disappointment. The local music is too derivative and lacks its own style.
"The level of the Mandarin in Singapore is usually not high; many people can only speak it but not write it. If mere writing is considered a big deal, how can we get lyrics of adequately high standards?" asks Wang Chung-chun, a columnist who is well versed in the music of the 1940's.
Aside from a few current stars like Kuo Fu-cheng, Wang Chieh, or Angus Tung, it seems that Singapore is still stuck in the pop songs of the 1940's. No matter whether in the taxi or in karaoke, it's always the same old tunes. "This is perhaps because the thinking of most people is relatively conservative, and also that the old songs are easier on the ears," says Wang Chung-chun. Recently, Fei Yu-chin released a series of cassettes which used traditional songs with modern stories to attract many twenty and thirty year olds. This is perhaps one reason why these songs have persisted. He predicts that the next generation will still like the old songs.
Slow Ballads Tops in Malaysia: In Malaysia, the slow song is king. In random interviews in major cities, almost every person said that they preferred slow, emotive numbers like "In Fact You Don't Know My Heart." Angus Tung is the favorite singer of almost everyone. In contrast, Luo Ta-you is rather lonely.
"This is perhaps related to the pressure that Chinese in Malaysia are under," says Chong Tien-siong, Malaysia Bureau Chief for Yazhou Zhoukan. It is very difficult to live abroad, and it is necessary to work harder. In order for young people to fit into the multi-cultural society, it is necessary to study Chinese, Malay, and English from a young age, and the pressure is no less than that on an adult. Gentle and warm tunes are just right for mellowing them out.
"Most listeners like an immediate feeling, and don't want to listen to incomprehensible or complex lyrics," says Wong Lai Ngo. No one wants to clutter their mind with complex matters, and songs that are direct and relatively conversational are more readily accepted. Taiwan star Chang Hung-liang's "Do You Know I Am Waiting For You" was very popular in Malaysia. Even small children could chide parents returning home late by singing the title line.
Crossing the Pacific to North America, currently the market for Mandarin songs is small. As Hsieh Teh-sha understands it, the older emigrants prefer the old songs, or newer versions by Fei Yu-chin or Tsai Chin. The young overseas students are too busy to listen to music. But with new immigration, market potential is gradually taking shape. For example, this year when an LA radio station celebrated its first anniversary, it invited Tsai Chin to perform, leaving the audience captivated. Chou Hwa-chien, also well-loved, so swept away the young ladies in his audience that they nearly had to stop the show.
The Future Belongs to Whom?: Who will get the largest pieces of this growing pie? Su Lai is optimistic it will be Taiwan, based on the current superiority and strength enjoyed by Taiwan pop. Moreover, "our Chinese level is the best," argues Su. Because the Cultural Revolution in mainland China cut off education, even today the literary level is not up to that of Taiwan. Bilingual or multilingual locales like Hongkong, Singapore, or Malaysia are naturally not even in the running.
Music critic Ong Jia Ming, the music critics, who has been to the mainland, believes that, "In fact there is not an enormous difference between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits in terms of music or lyrics; it's just that the equipment and technology there is so poor that it affects the quality. There's also not enough mass media, so it is hard to spread the musical world."
"Moreover, cultural control in the mainland is relatively strict, which affects materials for creativity," says Hsieh Teh-sha, saying that for example when Chao Chuan wanted to sing a song "Does China Have Rock and Roll?" at a concert in the mainland, the authorities said that the words "rock and roll" were too provocative, and asked that the words be changed to "tradition."
Although political control is tight, some pop music like that of Tsui Chien has been able to make its way out. Given the influence of exchange with Hongkong and Taiwan, is it likely the pop music world, like the folk music world in Taiwan, will only be able to bear fruit after ten years of learning? Or will the time frame be greatly reduced?
As for Hongkong, although singer-songwriter Luo Ta-you, who is currently constructing a "Music Factory" in Hongkong, says that the level of lyrics and music still needs at least five years to catch up to Taiwan, Hongkong is already in hot pursuit. Besides a large increase in the number of singers doing Mandarin songs, they have begun to develop creative talent. Given the pace and flexibility characteristic of the Crown colony, you can't ignore their future potential.
The pie of Mandarin music is getting ever larger, but similarly the competition is becoming more and more intense.
(Tang Jung/photos by Diago Chiu/ tr. by Phil Newell)
[Picture Caption]
Most Chinese-Malaysians are fluent in English, Mandar in and Malay, giving them a wide choice of songs to appreciate. Still, record store owners say they like Mandarin songs best--especially those by singers from Taiwan.
The hosts of Malaysia's Rediffusion radio choose songs based on their own specially oultivated tastes.
These stars were once all the rage on the Taiwan pop music scene. Liu Wen- cheng, Feng Fei-fei, Teresa Teng, and Chin Shan still seem as popular as ever in Malaysia and Singapore, and their tapes sell just as well. (Sinorama photo file)
Broadcasts of TV series in Malaysia and Singapore helped make their theme songs hits.
One-time folk singer Su Lai thinks the campus folk song movement ushered in an important revolution in pop songs, opening a path for creativity and expanding their field of vision.
(Sinorama photo file)
Some of the singers from the folk song movement of the '80s are still performing and some have stepped aside, but they have all left us many fine songs to listen to. (Sinorama photo file)
So you wanna be a star? First you have to win your spurs at a folk music restaurant. (photo by Tsai Wen-hsiang)
Since belting out a tune can release pent-up pressures, and does not conflict with any moral norms, karaoke clubs have spread to all Chinese communities. The photo is from a karaoke establishment in Taipei.
Today, Taiwan Mandarin pop music has spread lo Chinese communities every where, but this is the result of a long period of cumulative effort. (Sinorama Photo fil e)
All the various singing and song- writing campetitions that appeared with the rise of the folk song movement ensured there was no dearth of talent. (photo by Lien Hui-ling)
The hosts of Malaysia's Rediffusion radio choose songs based on their own specially oultivated tastes.
These stars were once all the rage on the Taiwan pop music scene. Liu Wen- cheng, Feng Fei-fei, Teresa Teng, and Chin Shan still seem as popular as ever in Malaysia and Singapore, and their tapes sell just as well. （Sinorama photo file）
Broadcasts of TV series in Malaysia and Singapore helped make their theme songs hits.
One-time folk singer Su Lai thinks the campus folk song movement ushered in an important revolution in pop songs, opening a path for creativity and expanding their field of vision. （Sinorama photo file）
Some of the singers from the folk song movement of the '80s are still performing and some have stepped aside, but they have all left us many fine songs to listen to. （Sinorama photo file）
So you wanna be a star? First you have to win your spurs at a folk music restaurant. （photo by Tsai Wen-hsiang）
Since belting out a tune can release pent-up pressures, and does not conflict with any moral norms, karaoke clubs have spread to all Chinese communities. The photo is from a karaoke establishment in Taipei.
Today, Taiwan Mandarin pop music has spread lo Chinese communities every where, but this is the result of a long period of cumulative effort. （Sinorama Photo fil e）
All the various singing and song- writing campetitions that appeared with the rise of the folk song movement ensured there was no dearth of talent. （photo by Lien Hui-ling）
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