According to lead vocalist Ng Ki-pin, the band’s music flows out of members’ emotional attachment to their mother tongue. It also taps into the artistic and sociocultural influences of Holo performers from the 1990s with the aim of developing the genre to its fullest potential, he added.
Holo, also called Taiwanese, is the language of the country’s largest ethnic group. According to the Ministry of the Interior, Holo people accounted for 65 percent of Taiwan’s population in 2017.
From the 1960s to the late 1980s, the use of non-Mandarin languages was restricted in music, film and on TV and banned in schools. When censorship was relaxed with the lifting of martial law in 1987, a surge of creative energy propelled Holo music into the limelight, sparking what is now referred to as the New Taiwanese Songs movement, which lasted well into the 1990s. Momentum was driven by the groundbreaking efforts of rock stars like Lim Giong and Wu Bai.
(from left) EggPlantEgg drummer Jean Lai, guitarist A-ren Tsai, lead vocalist Ng Ki-pin and guitarist A-der Hsieh are fostering a resurgence in Holo music. (Staff photo/Huang Chung-hsin)
EggPlantEgg’s music is at once a tribute to and modernization of the genre’s soulful indie rock traditions. “Our work comes naturally from our everyday imagination in our bilingual world,” Ng said.
Composed of Ng, who also plays keyboards, drummer Jean Lai and guitarists A-ren Tsai and A-der Hsieh, the band is resonating with local audiences. It bagged the prizes for best new artist and best Taiwanese album for “Cartoon Character” at the 2018 Golden Melody Awards, Taiwan’s equivalent of the Grammys.
The group’s first record “Cartoon Character” is winner of best Taiwanese album at the 2018 Golden Melody Awards. (Courtesy of EggPlantEgg)
In late September, the group followed up the smash-hit record with the release of new track “Wave Wandering.” The music video for the song, which has accumulated more than 3.2 million views on YouTube, again demonstrates the band's commitment to promoting Holo.
As the written form of Holo is not widely known, the video presents the song lyrics in the Ministry of Education-developed Romanization system for the language. This approach remains underutilized, with Holo song lyrics traditionally depicted using Chinese characters with similar pronunciations.
For EggPlantEgg, fostering this writing method is part of the band’s broader effort to promote Holo culture. According to Ng, their style may contain elements from the past or embody more modern ingredients, but in the end it can simply be understood by the “weight of the language.” (E) (By Pat Gao)
Write to Taiwan Today at ttonline@mofa.gov.tw
(This article is adapted from “Island Identity” in the September/October 2018 issue of Taiwan Review. The Taiwan Review archives dating to 1951 are available online.)