Taiwan Today

Inside the Scum nightclub in downtown Taipei, there is hardly room to move. The smell of cigarette smoke and beer hang heavy in the air. People grapple for space anywhere they can —standing on chairs, on the bar, in the hallway leading to the bathroom. Long black hair, on both female and male heads, swings back and forth to the sound of screaming guitars and booming drums. On stage, the four members of the Taiwan band Assassin are thrashing out their rallying song "My Time is Coming" in Chinese and English. As one of Taiwan's few heavy metal bands, the group is far from your typical Taiwan music act. The most obvious difference is Assassin's rebellious image and loud music. In an industry dominated by clean-cut stars in schoolish clothes singing mellow love ballads, these four guys in their twenties stand out. They play their fast, intense music wearing jeans and T-shirts, their hair hanging in front of their faces. Assassin is also different simply in being a band. A quick perusal through any record store in Taipei will show that 95 percent of the island's records are released by individual singers working with back-up musicians they may not even know. At Assassin's core is 28-year-old Yuan Hsin-wei (袁欣瑋), who first heard heavy metal music about ten years ago at a shaved-ice stand in the trendy Hsimenting district of Taipei. The owner of the stand often played videos of live concerts by Western heavy metal bands. "It wasn't like anything I had ever heard before," Yuan recalls. "It was faster, more wild." From then on, he was determined to capture that same energy. He founded the band in 1985 by recruiting his younger brother Yuan Hsing-kuo (袁興國) and drummer Tsai Ming-hung (蔡明宏). Current lead guitarist Yang Sheng-cheng (楊聲錚) joined five years later. At first, the group played mostly songs by foreign groups in the few Taipei pubs that were willing to take a risk on unconventional music. Included in their sets were covers of well-known American metal bands such as Metallica and Ozzy Osborne, as well as the Japanese metal band Loudness. Meanwhile, Yuan picked up extra cash by teaching piano, which he studied as a youth. And he and his brother kept expenditures down by living at home. Drummer Tsai also kept his daytime job to support himself and his wife. Yuan admits that audience reaction was not enthusiastic at first, but word soon spread that their music was at least different. Soon they built a solid following and now pack live music pubs most weekends of the year, although their music does not attract mainstream fans. "The people who like it, love it," Yuan says. "But there are only so many people in Taiwan right now that are fans of the genre." As the band gained confidence, they started altering the songs they played, changing the tempo or trying out guitar solos. Eventually, they wrote a number of original songs, many of which appear on their 1993 debut album, Your House Is a Zoo, distributed on the BMG label. One song that stands out on this record is "The Love Affair of the Wagon Driver," a traditional Chinese folk song transformed into a rock-and-roll tune with electric guitars and loud, repetitive vocals. The sun rises, the sun sets again From morning to night, my road never ends Never full and never warm Ay ay yo, ay yo, ay ay yo! Every day toilsome, every day busy... Hey beautiful girl in front of me Where do you live? Hurry and board my wagon Let me take you home.... "It's about a person who doesn't have any money but still manages to be happy—it's a lot like the lifestyle of a modern-day musician," Yuan says. "Part of the reason we chose this song is that it's one most people know the Iyrics to. People can more readily accept a heavy metal song if it's familiar." In America, heavy metal musicians tend to cultivate a wild living, drug-abusing, anti-social image. But Assassin wants nothing to do with this. The four-man outfit from Taipei is more into fun than drugs, more into a positive social message than trashing hotel rooms and biting the heads off bats. The Yuan brothers even continue to live at home with their parents. "Most people associate heavy metal with evil or drugs," Yuan Hsin-wei says. "But we think of music as a happy thing. We don't want to give our listeners gloomy messages or give them a lot of pressure. We just want to make them happy." Despite their quasi-rebellious image and sinister name (chosen at random from an English dictionary), Taiwan's "establishment" seems to approve of Assassin. "The students love them," says Chungshan Girls' High School Principal Liao Yu-hsiu (廖玉秀), who booked the band for a recent concert to celebrate Youth Day. "Their show was great; the only problem we had with them was that they played too long—we couldn't get them off the stage!"