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Brothers gonna work it out

By David Momphard
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Nov 01, 2003, Page 16

Hip-hop has long been the domain of disaffected youth from tough neighborhoods in places like the Bronx, South Central and East LA. But Orchid Island? The subtropical tourist destination hardly seems a breeding ground for angst-ridden youth. But ask any of the T-Ho Brothers (鐵虎兄弟) and it makes perfect sense.

"You know, any place you go, no matter how rich the society, there are always going to be people on top and people on the bottom," said Patrick Chen, who goes by the moniker Red-I. "That's just the way it is. You need slaves. Jeff's is the typical slave story."

The Jeff he's referring to is Chen Ming-kang (陳明康), a Tao native of Orchid Island and the youngest of the T-Ho Brothers, a hip-hop outfit signed to local independent record label Taiwan Colors Music (TCM, 角頭音樂). They' ve been rapping and recording together for the past two years and get together when each of the trio has time away from their day jobs. Red-I's highest-profile job is back-up vocalist for A-mei (張惠妹) and turntablist DJ Ty (DJ鈦), Chiu Yu-tai (丘聿台), produces music out of his Titanium Studios. Jeff, the group's other MC, works as a contract day laborer. T-Ho's eponymous first album was released last month.

Their sound is the first of its kind to be born in Taiwan, where pop music is largely a pantheon of pretty faces. It is easily recognizable by its English, Chinese and Tao lyrics that lash out at authority and exhort Taiwanese to love the place they call home.

It's a message from an unlikely source. The Tao of Orchid Island are one of Taiwan's most disenfranchised Aboriginal groups, forced to live with the nuclear waste shipped to their island from Taiwan and, according to Jeff, relegated to menial labor when they leave in search of a better life. Red-I, from the Paiwan tribe and a native of Pingtung, considers himself Taiwanese -- "I got no claim to nothing else," he says -- but is often seen by his peers as being less than local, perhaps because he's spent most of his 30-something years traveling the globe. He's even appeared on TCM's compilation, Foreigners in Taiwan (台灣阿兜仔).

"To be Taiwanese is something you have inside your heart," Red-I says. "A lot of people say that the Taiwanese that grew up overseas are foreigners and not really Taiwanese. But a lot of times they're more Taiwanese because they weren't taught all the stuff they used to teach in schools here."

He mentions the recent death of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, or Soong Mayling (宋美齡), her husband -- China's "biggest opium drug lord," in Red-I's words -- and the tyranny of the KMT's early years in Taiwan. It's a familiar topic that even made its way onto their album in a track titled KMT 1947.

"Ya can't erase our history," Red-I sings. "Now 2003, Taiwan's still struggling to be a country/ So you thought you could control my fate/ you know, the one you just ate!/ Now the dead have risen, walking, talking about 228!"

"Those people that left Taiwan had to leave," Red-I says of the many Taiwanese who went into self-imposed exile after the KMT massacred thousands of Taiwanese starting with an incident on Feb. 28, 1947. "They had to leave, man."

The most traditionally Taiwanese among the group is the man responsible for the music, DJ Ty. But asked about the racial consciousness that's laced throughout T-Ho's lyrics, Ty changes the subject.

"My part is just doing the music," he says. "I was brought up with Western music and I've heard a lot from the 60s and 70s. ... Western people always like to do a lot of sampling. In hip-hop they sample stuff from the 60s and 70s, taking a loop or break. But I'd never heard any Eastern tracks that were done with samples of traditional stuff. So in this project I took a lot from Aboriginal music and from 60s pop music -- a hit or a riff -- and added it together, put a concept on top and talked with Jeff and Patrick about how to put the track together."

"I'd guess that 80 percent of the songs were done right then, right there, one time," Red-I adds. "Nothing was pre-prepared. We didn't have any definite direction of where to go. There were a lot of elements that kept being added."

"Patrick had the idea," Ty says, "and I agreed -- we wanted to bring in a lot of people, collaborate their talents and try to create different vibes on different tracks."

The most prominent of those elements are the backing vocals of popular Aboriginal artist Samingad (紀曉君) and her younger sister Jia-jia (紀家家). The melodies they add soften the blow of Jeff and Red-I's one-two combination of jabbing lyrics and are at their best on tracks such as Pililabaku (霹靂喇叭褲), Taiwan T-Ho (台灣鐵虎) and Samingad's Puyuma Song.

"I just wanted to see Samingad," Red-I adds. "That girl's got it, man."

The strongest aspect of their music isn't Samingad's singsong melodies, however, it's the lyrics that bite into Taiwan's culture and politics. In Conquer (我的那根), Red-I uses his reggae-styled wail to exhort his fellow Aborigines to stand up against oppression. Jeff sings about a topic close to his heart in Orchid Island Protest (核能牌丁字褲), the Chinese title of which translates to something like "nuclear G-string."

He raps in Tao about how angry his people are for having their homeland made into a nuclear waste dump. How natives of Taiwan ignore Orchid Island and choose not to visit the place they consider little more than a radioactive dump. By contrast, in tracks such as Formosa 2003 they sing of their love for Taiwan and the need for its diverse population to heal past wounds in order to have a peaceful future together. "Formosa, Formosa, you got to recover/ Taiwanese identity you got to discover/."

In a climate as politically charged as Taiwan's, T-Ho are among the very few local artists who choose to incorporate politics in their music.

"Maybe they think it's not their problem," says the normally quiet Jeff. "They care about selling their music in the mainland and so they sing about falling in love and falling out of love."

Red-I has his own take on it. "You don't speak about other people's bad shit, man. You don't do that in Chinese society, put things out in public like that. That's airing your laundry, man."

So are they trying to accomplish something with their music?

"I'm hoping to," Red-I says. "I want to create controversy in people's minds. You gotta think about these things. ... I just want people to know that Taiwan isn't a bad place, man."

T-Ho will perform tonight as part of the Asia Acoustic Music Festival, at the Taipei County Plaza in Banqiao beginning at 6pm. The line-up includes Samingad, Panai and the AM band, as well as Bobin and the Mantra Band from Nepal and the OK Band from Hokkaido. Admission to the concert is free. "It' s gonna be live hip-hop," Red-I warns. "People gonna be going `Man, that's not acoustic! That's fucking karaoke!"

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