At the 20th Golden Melody Awards (第二十屆金曲獎) that took place at Taipei Arena (台北巨蛋) on Saturday night, pop sensation Jay Chou (周杰倫) took home the Best Mandarin Male Singer, Best Song and Best Music Video awards. Crowd Lu (盧廣仲), a young pop star on the rise, received top honors in the Best Newcomer and Best Composer categories for his debut album 100 Ways of Living (100種生活).
The Nanwan Sisters (南王姐妹花), a trio of Puyuma (卑南) singers from Taitung won the Best Aboriginal Album Award, and, much to their surprise, beat out pop groups such as Da Mouth (大嘴巴) to win best singing group as well.
The Taipei Times caught up with some of the winners and jury members backstage to ask their views about the awards.
Award-winning Pau-dull (陳建年) said the Nanwan’s Sisters’ eponymous album, for which he picked up Best Album Producer Award, took two years to complete at his home on Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and a makeshift recording studio in Taitung. The recording sessions usually began around 10pm, after the three Sisters, all mothers, put their children to bed.
“I am just an amateur, making music the way I like,” said the Puyuma musician. “I often ask myself: what is pop music? Are the songs in my tribe not pop music? I feel that it doesn’t matter as long as it’s music people love to hear. For this album, I didn’t attempt to make pop or convey cultural messages. I wanted to document the three sisters’ voices.”
Pau-dull said that if he produces another Aboriginal album, he wants to find a person who loves to sing rather than one who knows how to sing beautifully, “like an Aboriginal mother who hums and sings in the tribe with a comforting and natural voice,” said the full-time policeman, who makes music in his spare time.
As sunshiny and dorky-chic as his music, Lu explained why the daily routine of eating breakfast featured predominantly in his album: “Eating breakfast is a very rock ’n’ roll thing to do. I come from a small town in Tainan. Workers there eat lots of food to begin the day. When I first came to Taipei, I found that people here don’t eat breakfast, and I thought, ‘breakfast rocks!’” the 24-year-old singer and songwriter said.
Winner in the Best Hakka Singer category, his fourth Golden Melody Award, Liu Shao-hsi (劉劭希) bemoaned Hakka musicians’ low profile and said they should be given more opportunities to showcase their diverse sounds.
“We’ve been innovating traditional music for more than a decade, but younger musicians still lack a platform to show off their creations, not even on Hakka television channel. You don’t hear Hakka voices at government-funded events and activities. Even if you do, it’s mostly stereotypical sounds, through which members of the general public come to know of Hakka music,” Liu said backstage after the ceremony. “I am not saying that the Golden Melody Awards are of no worth. But without other measures and platforms to encourage our music, it is just a once-a-year ritual at which Hakka musicians feel as out of place as aliens.”
Suggestions for improving the Golden Melody Awards include changing the competition’s language-based classifications to a genre-based system.
“People still have a limited perception of how Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka music should be. They can’t imagine Hakka music as rock ’n’ roll or electronica,” Liu said. “I am all for genre classification. It’s an ideal. Actual changes will come when people have more understanding about music.”
To Ma Shih-fang (馬世芳), music critic and a Golden Melody jury member, there is no doubt that the awards should focus on music rather political or linguistic agendas.
“I like the comparison of the Golden Melody to baseball made by Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥). For baseball, we have the best player of the year, but not the best Hakka or Aboriginal player,” Ma said. “I understand that the Government Information Office (GIO, 新聞局) sets the language-based categories as a means to encourage native-language music. But does the policy work? The government-funded event is innately awkward. On the one hand, it provides entertainment value and effect. On the other, it is closely connected to national policies.”
In a bid to enhance the competition’s credibility and impartiality, starting this year the judging process has been divided into two sections: a preliminary round, with 40 judges, followed by the final stage, with 19 judges, 15 of whom served in the first section.
“An award is not like sports where the winner is decided at the click of a stopwatch,” Ma said. “There is no such thing as a completely fair and objective result. It’s always a compromise reached among different opinions. I am fine with these changes as long as … the jury committee is independent of governmental officers, record companies and sales figures.”
Chen Le-jung (陳樂融), convener of this year’s jury panel, welcomed changes to the award system.
“The jury has been off limits to those artists and professionals in related fields who participate in nominated works. That proviso may be lifted if the jury is expanded and no individual judge is powerful enough to influence the results. This way, those who are active in the industry can express their ideas and people will stop saying that the Golden Melody Awards judges are a bunch of has-beens,” Chen said.
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