Taiwan Today

Holo musicians are enjoying success by staying true to their historical roots.

On a warm summer’s evening earlier this year at a packed open-air concert in northern Taiwan’s Taoyuan City, singer-songwriter Hsieh Ming-yu (謝銘祐‬) paused between songs and a hush fell over the crowd. “There’s nothing more natural in life than speaking your mother tongue,” the 49-year-old said as the audience erupted in cheers.

Mother tongue for Hsieh is not Mandarin, but Holo. Also called Taiwanese, it is the language of the country’s largest ethnic group, which the Ministry of the Interior put at 65 percent of the population in 2017. Hsieh’s statement might not sound extraordinary today, but it would have been unlikely a few decades ago. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, during the martial law era, the use of non-Mandarin languages was restricted in music, film and on TV and banned in schools.

Hsieh started his career in the 1990s in Taipei City and went on to pen hundreds of songs for top Taiwan and Hong Kong pop stars, including Vivian Hsu (徐若瑄‬), Andy Lau (劉德華) and Anita Mui (梅艷芳), but he wrote in Mandarin. Even though the restrictions had ended by then, after decades in the dark, Holo music was not that popular and it made more commercial sense to compose lyrics in the dominant language.

In the early 2000s, Hsieh gave up his high pressure job and returned home to Tainan City, southern Taiwan, where he started writing and singing folk pop music in his mother tongue. That career change set him on the path to stardom. At the 2013 Golden Melody Awards (GMA), Taiwan’s answer to the Grammys, he won best Taiwanese album for “Tainan” and best Taiwanese male singer, a title he nabbed again last year.

His success mirrors that of the genre as a whole. Holo music is enjoying a resurgence today thanks to talented artists such as Hsieh who are staying true to their roots, as well as its association with a growing Taiwan identity.

Sunflower Song

A defining moment for the genre came in 2014 with the Sunflower Movement. This campaign was named for the flowers carried by student demonstrators who occupied the Legislative Yuan to oppose a proposed services trade deal between Taiwan and China. These protesters adopted the anthem “Island’s Sunrise” by pop punk band Fire EX as their theme song. Lead vocalist Sam Yang (楊大正), in his early 30s, sings in Holo, “now is the time for courageous Taiwan people,” which chimed with the growing nativist sentiment. A year later “Island’s Sunrise” was crowned GMA song of the year and in 2016 the band was invited to perform it at President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) inauguration.

The presidential event was not the only official sign of approval for Holo music. Underpinning the genre’s rise are several government efforts to support the industry. Hsieh’s summer concert was part of a series of music and folk art events organized by the Taoyuan City Government for the Minnan Cultural Festival. Launched in 2012 as a vehicle to pay tribute to Holo and folk culture, the celebration takes place over a two-month period every summer and features art performances, music concerts, opera and temple festivals.

In 2003, the government-organized GMA split its non-Mandarin music category into Holo, Hakka and indigenous language groups. Acknowledging its popularity, Taiwanese was further divided into male and female entrants.

As an indication of how far the music has come, three of the five nominations for GMA song of the year in 2018 were sung in Holo, including the winner, “He-R” penned by Crowd Lu (盧廣仲). His hit was the theme song for popular Holo-language TV drama screened last year in Taiwan “A Boy named Flora A,” which also streamed on Netflix.

Social Awakening

The seeds for the link between Holo music and a modern Taiwan identity had taken root several decades before at the end of the 1980s after martial law was lifted and the censorship was relaxed. Holo singers and songwriters were ready to use their new freedom.

A surge of energy and creativity propelled the genre back 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 two rock musicians: singer-songwriter Lim Giong (林強) and Wu Bai (伍佰). Lim’s album “Marching Forward” was a best-seller in 1991 and the title track, in which he sings about moving to Taipei in search of a better life, was also selected as GMA song of the year. Wu exploded onto the scene in 1992 with his feisty album “Falling for Someone Is a Happy Thing,” which mixed Holo and Mandarin lyrics. Both artists, now in their 50s, are still major stars.

Most emblematic of the times was the album “Songs of Madness” (1989) by a group of Holo musicians fronted by Chen Ming-chang (陳明章‬), who is now a legend in the field. Their sound was a blend of rock and folk and their lyrics were edgy, raw and political.

“In the post-martial law era, in pop and indie music circles, Holo songs became a chief vehicle for many activists and artists to express their musical and social ideas,” said Li Bi-chhin (呂美親), a professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. At that moment, Li noted, “as society was beginning to open up, Holo became an important channel for Taiwan people to voice their strong feelings of identity.”

Emerging acts are still taking their inspiration from the greats of that era. Lead vocalist Ng Ki-pin (黃奇斌) of indie outfit EggPlantEgg, which hit the scene in 2014, describes the band’s music as borrowing from the artistic and sociocultural influences of performers like Lim and Wu. “We’re carrying on from the success of our predecessors in developing Holo music to its fullest potential,” the 27-year-old said.

The group is composed of a drummer, Ng, who also plays keyboards, and two guitarists. “Our work comes naturally from our everyday imagination in our bilingual world,” Ng noted. They have hit on a winning formula: EggPlantEgg bagged best new artist and best Taiwanese album for “Cartoon Character” at the 2018 GMA.

Traditional Tastes

Artists are also using distinct cultural styles anchored in the island’s history to set the genre apart from mainstream Mandarin pop and lend it a unique flavor.

Perhaps the most enduring of these is a Holo music tradition known as “liam kua,” a form of storytelling that combines music with the spoken word and dates back to at least the 18th century. Li described some of Wu’s songs as “half liam kua and half rock.” Other scholars see Lim’s album “Marching Forward” as being a direct tribute to the liam kua tradition with its storytelling style and plain lyrics.

Taiwanese opera, which is derived from liam kua, is another, albeit less obvious, influence that finds its way into contemporary Holo-language music. Chen, of “Songs of Madness” fame, credited the form as being a major inspiration to his work.

A third factor, a legacy of the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945), borrows from the East Asian nation’s “enka” musical style and is often described as a mournful ballad. Itinerant musical troupes, called “nakasi” and usually composed of a singer, guitarist and drummer, would travel between hotels, restaurants and dance halls to perform their slow, sad melodies.

Enka permeates the compositions of some big Holo acts today. Most notably, Huang Yee-ling (黃乙玲), now in her late 40s, has enjoyed fame since the 1980s with this melancholy formula. It has also been revived in theaters. This July, the musical “Farewell Beitou,” performed completely in Holo with Chen as musical director, was a sellout every night during its nine-day run at Taipei’s National Theater before it went on tour to Taichung and Kaohsiung cities in central and southern Taiwan, respectively. Fire EX’s Yang played the son of a nakasi band leader, and his billing gave the play added allure.

From protest to pop, opera to enka, modern Holo music is expressing itself in a myriad of forms. The binding factor, though, is the language. Ng from EggPlantEgg said his band’s music flows out of an emotional attachment to their mother tongue. The style may contain elements from the past or embody more modern ingredients and it may be hard to define, but in the end it can simply be understood by the “weight of the language.”

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