Taiwan Today

For the past 25 years, music fans across the Mandarin-speaking world have turned their attention to Taiwan for the annual Golden Melody Awards. The event, which was born as a result of Taiwan’s dominance in the Mandarin pop (Mandopop) music industry, is the most prestigious awards ceremony of its kind and honors the most iconic, innovative and commercially successful Mandopop artists. Over the years, the show has also taken on considerable cultural significance, as its expansion to include foreign artists and native languages has influenced and reflected the development of Taiwanese society. Today, the event stands as a shining example of the nation’s commitment to promoting musical creativity and multicultural understanding.

The origin of the Golden Melody Awards can be traced back to 1986 when a government department that handled radio and television affairs under the now defunct Government Information Office (GIO) began selecting outstanding songs in an effort to promote the local music industry. The first actual Golden Melody Awards, which honored artists in 11 categories, were not held until 1990. Responsibility for film, music, publishing, radio and television was transferred to the Ministry of Culture (MOC) when the GIO was dissolved as part of a government restructuring program in 2012, and the Golden Melody Awards are now organized by the MOC’s Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development (BAMID).

In fact, there are now two tracks for the awards, one celebrating talent in the pop music industry and another that honors accomplishments in traditional music. This division was instituted in 1997 and separated the event into awards for pop and non-pop music. In 2001, the separate tracks were officially designated as the Popular Music Category and the Traditional Music Category. And beginning in 2007, the Golden Melody Awards were formally split into two ceremonies, one for each category.

Since that time, both of these events have grown in size and stature.The 2014 Popular Music Category, which was televised live from the Taipei Arena in Taipei City on June 28, awarded prizes in 25 categories. Meanwhile, the Traditional Music Category presentation, which was organized by the National Center for Traditional Arts in Yilan County, northern Taiwan and held at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei on August 9, honored artists in 13 categories.

One of the most significant changes to the awards occurred in 1998 when the ceremony started recognizing the work of foreign musicians—primarily artists from Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore—that was being released in Taiwan. The organizers decided to include overseas performers due to their growing success and popularity in the Taiwanese music scene. Both at home and abroad, the awards are now considered top honors for Mandopop performers. At this year’s ceremony, Lin Jun-jie (林俊傑) from Singapore won best male Mandarin singer, while Penny Tai (戴佩妮) from Malaysia won best female Mandarin singer. “Each year, many singers are drawn to Taiwan to release their albums because they know that being shortlisted for the Golden Melody Awards can bring them considerable attention in the Mandopop music market,” says Tseng Chin-man (曾金滿), who heads the BAMID’s Music Division. The prestigious status of the awards “reflects both their overall importance to people in the region as well as Taiwan’s leadership in the Mandopop industry,” notes Tseng.

Honoring Musical Innovation

Pop music is by far the most dynamic sector in Taiwan’s entertainment industry. A report from the Recording Industry Foundation in Taiwan, a member group of the Zurich-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, points out that more than 70 percent of the Mandarin music in mainland China comes from Taiwan. Although economic and social development in mainland China has fostered a rapidly growing pop culture, Taiwan’s music industry holds a competitive edge in the Mandarin-speaking world as a result of the creativity that thrives in the Republic of China’s vibrant democracy. “Taiwan boasts freedom of speech, rich cultural traditions and pluralistic social values, which result in great creative energy and a wide diversity of sophisticated pop music works,” Tseng notes.

The BAMID division director points out that the goal of the Golden Melody Awards is to recognize not only established artists and works but also “beautiful music that is less well-known among the general public.” The juries that chose the winners of the Golden Melody Awards this year and last year were headed by Ni Chung-hua (倪重華), an entertainment industry veteran and chairman of the board of Xi Union Cultural-Creative and Consulting Co. Ltd. in Taipei. Ni says that by recognizing innovation, the awards can honor the best work rather than simply acknowledge the latest hits. “We expect the shortlists for the awards to indicate the future direction of the music industry,” he says. He notes that he and his fellow judges had to listen to more than 10,000 songs this year. “Instead of just picking bestsellers, we want to highlight upcoming market trends and foster an organic relationship between music and society,” he adds.

Over the years, the Golden Melody Awards have responded to and encouraged social trends in Taiwan, notably the promotion of native languages. The Golden Melody Awards were established at a time when the use of non-Mandarin local languages was no longer hampered by the influence of the decades-old restrictive martial law period, which ended in 1987. The awards came to represent and reinforce the linguistic diversity in Taiwan. In 1991, the awards separated Mandarin and non-Mandarin entries into different categories. In 2003, the Golden Melody prizes for non-Mandarin singers were further divided into Taiwanese, Hakka and aboriginal language categories, with the best album category following suit two years later in 2005. “This is part of Taiwan’s policy to preserve and promote local language traditions,” Ni says. “It’s a good way to encourage cultural exchanges through music.” For example, the album I Am Ayal Komod by Chang Chen-yue (張震嶽) won this year’s Golden Melody prize for the Best Mandarin Album. Chang is a member of the indigenous Amis tribe and Ayal Komod is his Amis name.

The juries have shown that they are not afraid to recognize artists who tackle sensitive topics in their music. In his album My Early 30s, this year’s best male Taiwanese-language singer Jacky Chen (陳建瑋) sings about recent protests against the government’s land acquisition policy as well as Taiwanese young people’s anxiety over emerging mainland Chinese power, among other social and political motifs. Chen is a relatively new presence in Taiwan’s pop music scene. Huang Yee-ling (黃乙玲), who won the prize for best female Taiwanese-language singer this year, is renowned for a career that spans more than three decades. Huang received an earlier Golden Melody title in the same category in 2006, when rocker Wu Bai (伍佰) was her male counterpart.

Breaking Free

Beginning in the late 1980s, Huang and Wu Bai were major forces behind the emergence of pop music sung in Taiwanese, which is also known as Hokkien or Holo. It is the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group and has become a strong alternative to the country’s mainstream Mandopop market. Huang recorded her first album the year martial-law rule came to an end, while Wu Bai released his first album, titled Falling for Someone is a Happy Thing, in 1992 as a collection of Mandarin and Taiwanese songs. Wu Bai’s first work, together with the energetic rock style of Lim Giong’s (林強) 1990 Taiwanese-language album Marching Forward, broke free from the genre’s typical slow, sad style and helped foster a surge of native cultural creativity, commonly known as the New Taiwanese Songs movement. In 1991, the title track “Marching Forward” from Lim’s album won the Golden Melody Award for best song.

With Taiwan’s growing population of immigrants from Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, Ni suggests that future Golden Melody categories recognize works sung in the native languages of these residents, too. For him, this is a sensible approach to address social and cultural realities that Taiwanese people should learn to embrace. “Taiwan seems reluctant to integrate with other Asian societies,” he says. “But internationalization isn’t just about speaking English. More significantly, it’s also about cross-cultural understanding.”

Ni, a leading trendsetter in Taiwan’s pop music circles, is widely recognized as a central figure in introducing and shaping Taiwanese-style rock and hip hop music. Chang, Lim and Wu Bai all released their first albums under the Mandala Works label, which Ni founded in 1987 and operated for around a decade before merging it with another record company. “Our efforts to promote Taiwanese-language music and indigenous culture came to reflect the calls for social change at that time,” Ni recalls. He believes that the high caliber of emerging talent in Taiwan will continue to advance pop music development. “A true Mandopop golden age has yet to emerge,” he says.

Ni points to the new commercial model that is developing in the music industry via the Internet and suggests that the Golden Melody Awards incorporate digitally released works. “That means the jury may have to review 80,000 or 90,000 songs,” Ni says. Above all, he insists that, instead of just endorsing commercial success, the core mission of the awards is to provide recognition to talented young musicians. “Their creativity is the future of Taiwan,” he notes. Ni, Tseng and many others anticipate that the innovation and creativity that drive the country’s music industry will continue to grow, and that over the next 25 years the Golden Melody Awards will be honoring artists from an even more diverse and vibrant pop music scene.

A Short History of Mandarin Popular Music

Mandarin Chinese is by far the most commonly spoken language on the planet. More than twice as many people communicate in Mandarin, with approximately 1.2 billion speakers, than either Spanish or English, the second and third most widely spoken tongues, respectively. This dialect of Chinese is the official national language in both Taiwan and mainland China, one of the four official languages of Singapore, and spoken by many people in Malaysia and Indonesia.

The widespread use of Mandarin is apparent in the type of music enjoyed by the majority of people in the region—Mandopop. Taiwan is the primary source of this music, with the nation’s small size standing in sharp contrast to the mammoth success and extensive reach of its music industry today. Taiwanese singers and songwriters have come to dominate the pop scene throughout Mandarin-speaking societies. Taiwan even has its own version of the prestigious Grammy Awards that are presented each year in the United States in celebration of talent in the industry. Known as the Golden Melody Awards, the Taiwanese event celebrated its 25th anniversary this year.

The advent of popular tunes sung in Mandarin dates back to the 1920s in Shanghai where this type of music was known as shidaiqu, or “song of the era.” Even though the people in this city spoke primarily in the local dialect of Shanghainese during their daily lives, Mandarin became the language for lyrics in the wake of a movement to unify the nation that began toward the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and continued with the young Republic of China government. In fact, shidaiqu became the popular music of that period throughout mainland China and remained so until the middle of the 20th century.

The center of the music industry moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong in the early 1950s, when popular songs began to be sung in English as well due to Western cultural influences. Eventually, Cantonese lyrics became popular too, giving rise to the expression Cantorock in the early 1970s to describe rock’n’roll sung in Cantonese. This was later modified to Cantopop to identify popular music in Cantonese. The term Mandopop was then coined around 1980 as the demand for Mandarin popular music out of Taiwan increased across the region.

—Douglas Ellsworth

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw