Made in Taiwan

Studies in Popular Music

Eva Tsai, Tung-Hung Ho, Miaoju Jian, Eva Tsai, Tung-Hung Ho, Miaoju Jian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351119122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Made in Taiwan: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Taiwanese popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Taiwanese music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Taiwan and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Taiwan, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Trajectories, Identities, Issues, and Interactions.

Part I

Trajectories

Preamble

Part I comprises three chapters that offer historical perspectives on the formation of Taiwanese popular music in the decades following World War II. They differ in their coverage of periods and moments, but all take into account national and international political factors that affected the development of twentieth-century Taiwanese popular music, specifically the Cold War, regional links between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and the music industry’s tribal–urban dynamic. Together, these trajectories contribute to a nonlinear historiography of Taiwanese popular music.

Chapter 1, “Profiling a Postwar Trajectory of Taiwanese Popular Music: Nativism in Metamorphosis and Its Alternatives,” juxtaposes popular music with the discourses and practices of nativism. Tung-hung Ho draws upon the theoretical legacies of British cultural studies to examine how the interactions between music and social forces shape the politics of cultural nativism. The chapter assesses five social conjunctures (moments) from which Taiwanese popular music culture has evolved. Ho is cautious about the pitfalls of nativism and suggests that we formulate a historiography around “alternative nativism” as a way to challenge the poles of exclusionary nativism and celebratory globalism.

The next chapter, “Producing Mandopop in 1960s Taiwan: When a Prolific Composer Met a Pioneering Entrepreneur,” offers a focused contextualization of Mandarin popular music in and around the 1960s. Szu-wei Chen’s choice of historical period and the approach are particularly important since national pop-music genres like Mandopop were codified in a rather ahistorical fashion in the 1990s with the coinage of J-pop, K-pop, and Cantopop. Chen’s account of the collaboration between a prolific musician, Chou Lan-ping, and a pioneering entrepreneur, Liao Chien-yuan, reveals a crucial fact that is often ignored: Taiwan was a site of Mandarin popular-music production in the 1950s. Taiwan was not, as is commonly believed, just a passive recipient of Mandarin ballads and singers from Shanghai and Hong Kong during the Cold War.

In a sense, Chapter 3, entitled “The Development of the Indigenous ‘Mountain Music Industry’ and ‘Mountain Songs’ (1960–1970s): Production and Competition,” could be seen to both supplement and challenge the previous chapters. Indigenous music is, after all, the music “most native” to Taiwan. Yet multiple successive colonizations have also led to the marginalization of indigenous music within the discourse of Taiwanese popular music. As described in the Introduction, Mandarin popular music in the 1970s interacted extensively with indigenous music. However, Mandarin pop singers of indigenous backgrounds generally did not begin disclosing their ethnicities until the late 1990s, when identity politics gained traction and the social sphere became more pluralistic. Kuo-chao Huang dives into that pre-politically correct period to examine the industrial formulation of “mountain music.” The preservation of the term “mountain music” (after the offensive and racist “mountain people” or shandiren, the Mandarin term formerly used to refer to indigenous peoples) not only orients us toward an important social and cultural history but also engages us in a discursive struggle. Contemporary discussion of indigenous popular music frequently raises questions about authenticity and purity. Huang’s chapter does not declare a certain position. It vividly illustrates the tremendous adaptive power of many Taiwanese indigenous singers who, no matter what language they perform in, have been influential in the Taiwanese popular-music industry despite almost never being considered a part of Mandopop.

1

Profiling a Postwar Trajectory of Taiwanese Popular Music

Nativism in Metamorphosis and Its Alternatives

Tung-hung Ho

Introduction: The Necessary Ambiguity and Difficulty of Cultural Nativism

To profile is to sketch with a perspective. The local popular-music industries have been in decline since the 2000s due to globalization and digitization, China’s growing importance in Mandarin popular music, and the fragmented domestic market long shared by Anglo-American, Japanese, and Korean popular music. These situations brought out concerns about the fate of cultural identities in Taiwan. As stated in the introduction of this book, one of the pressing issues in relation to cultural identity in Taiwan since the early period of the twentieth century has been the troubling theme of nativism. This chapter intends to sketch out a historical trajectory of Taiwanese popular music, organized around key moments and manifestations of nativism.

Nativism is a word many critical intellectuals and activists use with caution, especially in the global climate of right-wing populism. Nevertheless, this chapter ventures into this risky territory to recover the productive meanings and forms of nativism in the development of popular music in Taiwan. Certain historical moments, events, and incidents of popular-music practices will be narrated and examined for the ways they engage with and transform cultural nativism. Be it a repetition, a derivative, or an active challenge, cultural nativism gave power to popular music, and, time after time, helped configure the cultural and political identities in Taiwan.

Here I want to first make a difference between musical identification and social identifications that we call identities, for we appreciate and evaluate music through not so much intellectual practices as emotional connections, imaginations, and identifications. Therefore, music is not only treated as a medium to form social identities, but in itself is a mediated identification in and through which social or political issues or identities might be reflected, refracted, twisted, or remade (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Hesmondhalgh 2014).

Second, nativism as a discourse and political project has been criticized for its conservative, xenophobic, and exclusionary force in the hands of political agents trying to consolidate social power toward proto-nationalist or racist sentiment when facing foreign forces.¹ Yet nativism can also convey the desire for some people to have their daily experiences and sensibilities—the stuff of individual or collective identity—affirmed. While the term “native” does help to describe in-born or locally rooted characters, it is double-edged.

What might “nativism” mean in popular music? There is no set answer. For people accustomed to the global, digital flow of popular-music genres, nativism could be a counterforce to cultural exchange. Yet, in a different historical context, such as for people living under the Japanese colonization or under the KMT regime, nativist cultural practices in popular music could be a social matter of autonomy and identity. Nativism is, as Said asserts (1993: 275), a “dangerous” term because it is more often than not an endeavor toward a political project that is in conjunction with discourses of nationalism and nationality in spite of the reality that for people living under imperialist colonial rule, nativism is a call that proved to be unavoidable. So long as we take nativism as nurtured rather than natural, then we can see the development of music cultures and industry in postwar Taiwan as composing of different “moments” in succession, within which musicians and their work have inevitably encountered issues of identity using nativism as an armor.²

In the following, I will profile five key moments in Taiwan’s development of popular music in which “modernization” and “the urgency to form our music” were taken up by different stakeholders. The first moment, spanning from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, was set off by Anglo-American popular music against the backdrop of Cold War in Asia. Taiwanese musicians made “hot music,” which was at once a derivative and differentiation (by pop-rockization). The second moment materialized during the movement of modern Chinese folk song and campus song in the 1970s. Inspired by Anglo-American folk music, college-educated youths wrote and performed music to interrogate the possibility of “our modern Chinese songs,” which later proved to have commercial value in the mainstream industry. The third moment surveyed the industry practice of a critical indie label—Crystal Records—during the heyday of Mandarin pop music in the 1980s and 1990s. In a competitive and collaborative relation with the lucrative majors, Crystal Records branded itself with diverse and syncretic local and international genres as well as languages.

And what happens after musical nativism has found a new generation of young Taiwanese whose idea of nativism was more celebratory and also more naturally affiliated with “Taiwan” (as opposed to “free China” from the 1950s to the 1970s)? The success of the music festival, Taike Rock, will illustrate the fourth moment in the new millennium. The current moment, the fifth moment (the 2010s), is a time in which Taiwan deals gingerly with China as an economic-cum-political force amid the regional success of Japanese and Korean popular music. Musical nativism and political nativism competed and collaborated in unpredictable and “twisted” directions. I shall provide illustrative anecdotes and advocate for pluralist musical nativisms of Taiwan’s popular music in the conclusion.

The First Moment: “Hot Music” and the Routes of Pop-Rockization in Taiwan

The signing of the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty in 1954 brought Taiwan under the United States’ strategic protection umbrella and anti-Communist alliance in East Asia. It also brought in the American Forces Network (AFN) and American soldiers. The Armed Forces Network in Taiwan (AFNT) played various genres of the US popular music, which prompted several local radio stations in Taipei to begin playing American popular music. In the post-Korean War era from the 1960s to the 1970s, American military clubs (outside of base camps, off-limits to civilians) in big cities around the island offered performance stages to the local bands. From 1965 onwards, American GIs deployed to the Vietnam War visited Taiwan as their “rest and recreation” island, and this stimulated the local band scene, especially in Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung. In 1968, it was estimated that there were over half a million American soldiers in Taiwan. Meanwhile, the local pirate-record business seized the opportunity to create an anglophone music market based on the top charts in the US music magazines. Several American musicians toured Taiwan, including Louis Armstrong, the Silver Convention, and the Fifth Dimensions. Yet the local bands’ live performances were only available to urban college students as one-off events in public halls during the summers.

The coming of Anglo-American pop-chart music meant that the spread of Anglo-American music in postwar Taiwan was largely a by-product of the US military imperialism (see also Chu, Chapter 6 in this volume). This does not mean that Taiwanese consumers and musicians internalized the process passively. Not dissimilar to Japan and South Korea, Taiwan became a recipient of Anglo-American music under the Cold War context. Yet the reception of Anglo-American music could not have happened without certain material conditions, such as music venues catering to the GIs, affluent local youths, media, and, most importantly, actual records to buy and own.

When played on local radio in Taiwan around 1956, Anglo-American popular music was called remen yinyue, literally “hot music” (see Fig. 1.1). Due to the unregulated or yet-to-be-regulated copyright laws, pirated records prevailed and mediated youth attraction to remen yinyu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Problematizing and Contextualizing Taiwanese Popular Music
• Part I Trajectories: Preamble
• Part II Identities: Preamble
• Part III Issues: Preamble
• Part IV Interactions: Preamble
• Coda: Preamble
• Afterword
• A Selected Bibliography on Popular Music in Taiwan
• Index