Taiwan's pop songs have been anchored in Mandarin-language love themes for years. Pop music is now available in a variety of dialects, but critics say that radio music hasn't really shown any growth. Where is Taiwan's popular music heading?
Tune into any of Taiwan's radio stations, and 95 percent of the songs you hear are likely to be about love. Somebody has lost a love, someone else just dumped their love, and one lucky person has found a new love. Welcome to the world of Taiwan's pop music, a mixture of the sound of the moment and, well, love. And that's great, yes? Not really. Mankind cannot live by love alone. Putting it another way, love and pop do not a culture make.
Romantic songs, slow or fast, have always accounted for the great majority of Taiwan's pop music. The week this story was written was sort of an erratic moment in the singles charts, as only half of the songs were about love. The standouts were a rap number, a mid-tempo rock tune about a violent shooting, a friendship-praising folk song, an R&B shuffler about finding oneself, and a hi-NRG dance tune called "I Wanna Fly." Sitting on top of the singles charts was a guitar-laced ode to lost love and futile hope, "I'm Waiting For You," by René Liu.
The pop industry is so characterized by love themes in Taiwan that you'd think the people here must be the most lovable on earth. That may or may not be true, but local critics see it as aesthetic poverty, because there are so many other things out there to sing about. "Our lyricists are too smart for their own good," says Huang Sun-chuan, editor-in-chief of Pots Weekly, a Taipei-based alternative newspaper. "They write songs with all the profundity of the silly love poems that young people write."
One of the reasons Taiwan's popular music may have a common theme is that the dividing line between pop and other sounds is a little more blurred. This is not the case in other Chinese-speaking areas such as Hong Kong or Singapore. "Hong Kong has its own money-driven pop bands, and a very distinct alternative scene," says Chang Chao-wei, author of the 1994 book about the late 1970s folk-song movement Who Are Singing Their Own Songs Out There? "Here in Taiwan, we go from one extreme to another, yet still stay planted somewhere in between and call it pop."
This fluidity gives pop songs that don't talk about love the ability to earn high radio rotation and subsequent album sales. Rock group Wu Bai and China Blue's smash single "Air Raid Alarm" from their 1998 Taiwanese album Lonely Tree, Lonely Branch fuses the events during the Japanese colonial period with an insinuating historical consciousness. "Ah, these kinds of things/I was never told about them in school/...We don't know when the airplanes will come again" lead singer Wu Bai croons over a heavy rock beat. A locally toned song such as this could never have been conceived, much less become a hit, twenty years ago. But before coming to what it took for pop music's scope of creativity to expand, it's necessary to understand the past.
For noted movie director Tsai Ming-liang, the simple, graceful Mandarin songs sung in the 1960s that he inserted into his Cannes-honored 1998 movie The Hole claim a greater artistic authority than their modern counterparts. "In the days when Ke Lan [a popular sixties female vocalist] was around, we had singers who possessed real talent, songs that had their own characteristics, and a 'big-stage' atmosphere," he said in an interview last year with PC Home Online magazine. "Present-day pop songs are too technical, too mechanical. All the market wants are idols and beautiful faces."
This may be perceived as generation-gap scoffing from people who have shimmering memories of the 1960s. But these sentimental Mandarin songs were actually criticized in their day as mi mi chih yin, or decadent music, and listening to them was slightly rebellious.
But not everyone enjoyed the indulgent strums of the 1960s. "At that time, there were few lyricists and composers in Taiwan's pop-music circles," says Lo Hsiao-yun ( §p?), a music critic who worked in the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) for nearly thirty years, hosting musical programs. "Pop songs were made up of fixed patterns in a very limited range. It seemed that they were all cut in the same factory." Melodies that were borrowed from Japan and the West helped ease this shortage of local talent until the early 1970s.
In April 1975, ROC President Chiang Kai-shek passed away. Bereft of a powerful leader and experiencing bumpy international ties, society began to feel a need for self-assurance. It was during this time that mawkish love songs and servile copies of foreign songs started to be rejected as fluff. In September the same year, folk singer Yang Hsuan released Modern Chinese Folk Songs, a landmark album in which he set to music and sang poems by Yu Kwang-chung. "I feel something Chinese that has been repressed for so long is struggling to break through," Yang once remarked. "This growing force produces such an emotional agitation in me that I can hardly go on singing."
While disco and light rock would soon be topping sales charts in the West, Yang's heartfelt efforts turned feel-good folk music into the island's big sound. The style's nickname, "campus songs," wasn't quite a true fit, because most of its stars didn't become famous on campuses. Schools were, however, still an important part of this burgeoning scene, as many young people began to pick up guitars and write their own songs. "At that time, the many folk song concerts held on campus were at least as significant as the albums being released," says Chang Chao-wei.
Then in 1977, the first Golden Melody Awards were established as a yearly contest for the new young breed of amateur pop artists. Its modestly dressed winners quickly replaced heavily made-up TV celebrities as the stars of the day. "The songs sung on campus, in contests like the Golden Melody Awards or in social gatherings, were received differently than the lightweight stuff found on TV or radio," Chang says.
Folk music rode high on a crossover peak until the last Golden Melody Award contest was held in 1981. In the early 1980s, newly moneyed record companies, staffed by key figures in the folk-song movement, increased their marketing budgets. The folk fad was then devoured in the commercial mechanism of pop music. For BCC's Lo Hsiao-yun, there was never a distinction between folk songs and pop music in the first place. "The emergence of folk songs in the 1970s repre sented the intervention of young people who employed simple and direct ways of expressing their emotions," she says. "Folk songs are part of pop music, no more and no less. There's no need to make a distinction between them, unless someone wants to take advantage of that distinction to fish for fame and praise."
The next significant event in the history of the island's pop music would come with the release in 1989 of a Taiwanese compilation album called Songs of Madness. Up until 1987, the year martial law ended, programming in languages other than Mandarin was given limited time on television stations. Songs in Taiwanese and other dialects, as well as aboriginal tongues, were shortchanged in broadcast promotional activities. The compilation brought Taiwanese pop more exposure, and the title track helped Chen Ming-chang find a springboard to fame. Singer Lim Giong, born in the southern coastal city of Tainan, took Taiwanese rock further with his Marching Forward album, which sold 500,000 copies and officially cemented Taiwan ese as part of the commercial pop scene.
Hakka, the dialect of Taiwan's second-largest ethnic group, has also been woven into pop music, although it hasn't had as much commercial success as Taiwanese pop. "Hakka has been revitalized by its use in pop songs," Pots Weekly's Huang Sun-chuan says. "This is significant for both the young and old members of the Hakka community, which has only been used to traditional music."
But it would take a foreign act to rake one of the island's oldest, and most underrated, forms of music into the main stream. The now-famous use by German pop group Enigma of Difang Duana's vocals in 1994 lifted aboriginal music far above its previous lowly station in obscure educational recordings. This set the scene for a new breed of younger indigenous pop artists such as Chang Hui-mei and male duo Power Station. Chang, or "Ah Mei", has become so popular in mainland China that her voice is often jokingly said to have "retaken" the mainland for the ROC.
Commercialism seems to have been necessary to make the island's non-Mandarin voices heard. "A well-established commercial institution always needs new voices or alternative elements to maintain its competitiveness," says Huang Sun -chuan. "Taiwan is maturing and will witness a closer connection between the commercial mechanism and its other cultures."
But when the China Times, one of the island's largest newspapers, made a list of the ten best Chinese pop albums last December, there was no consensus on what form that growing maturity took. The general feeling among the six reviewers was that pop music has lost some of its splendor and creativity. One of the paper's music critics, Ma Hsin, wrote that Taiwan was trapped in a peculiar pop dilemma: "Older singers are retiring and leaving vacancies that newer stars are not mature enough to fill. The fresh talent only intends to copy their forerunners."
Huang Sun-chuan feels it is the earnings-over-quality factor that has placed the music industry in this predicament. "The worst part of the commercial mechanism is that it will quickly use a singer up," he says. "If artists are pressured to continually release hit records and don't get the chance to take a break and reflect, they will be gone in no time."
The industry as a whole seems to lack a sense of balance, in that there are too many styles of pop released and not enough real criticism. This, Chang Chao-wei says, has led to a "superficial pluralism." "Popular music reviews tend to be light, thin, short, and small," he adds. "What we are led to see is the glossy fashion image of pop instead of the whole musical commu nity or the culture behind the music."
The China Times 1999 round-up stated that, despite the great number of new singers, the pop circle has seen little progress except with the emergence of student bands. "While bands in mainland China are presenting original ideas and independent musical tastes, can Taiwan, in its state of musical stagnation, still lead the Chinese pop world in the new cen tury?" Ma Hsin wrote. "Will we be fed pop music by someone else in the next three to five years?"
Mayday, one of the student bands praised in the China Times article, struck pay dirt with their eponymous debut album released at the end of last year. For many years, Taiwan's alternative bands have beavered away in cavernous bars and at music festivals held all around the island, known only to a handful of audiences. These events have provided opportunities for younger musicians to improve their skills and give audiences a different type of sound. Mayday, discovered in one such Taipei bar, has come up with a successful mix of rock independence and radio-playable pop. "Mayday is like an intermediary between pop and the underground," says Huang Sun-chuan. "They have been blessed with the creative characteristics of an underground band, but without the somber themes of drug addiction or political strife."
From the other side of the Taiwan Strait comes Flowers, also a student band. The Beijing band took their punk-pop album to the top ten of the island's charts last December. The trio is one of the most successful groups from mainland China, and more of its best-selling acts may soon wind up on local radio hit lists.
But for the time being, what characteristics can Taiwan's pop scene call its own--apart from love songs and occasional bursts of creativity in underground sounds or lesser-known dialects? "Taiwan's pop music can be very American or Japanese, yet it still contains something that is essentially Taiwanese," Chang Chao-wei says. "I can't pinpoint what the Taiwanese part is, though. Maybe it's something to do with the language."
As Chang says, music represents the way we imagine our lives, the environment, and ultimately the world. The island is currently facing globalization, along with calls not to forget local traditions. Maybe it's this uncertainty about the future, coupled with past struggles, that has driven Taiwan to weave a love-filled world from its pop music.