Last weekend Hwang Da-wang (黃大旺), an experimental karaoke singer who performs under the stage name Black Wolf Nakashi (黑狼那卡西), won an award at the Taipei Film Festival for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. He made it onto the jury’s radar because he was the featured subject of an hour-long documentary, Taipei TICS (台北抽搐), which documents his bizarre style of performance and the troubled mental processes behind it.
The film shows Hwang to be an unfashionable and lonely nerd obsessed with Japanese comics and all sorts of pop music. His point of difference from other nerds is that he turns all his repressed urges — sex, popularity, success — into cathartic comic book diaries and a one-man stage show of so-bad-they’re-good karaoke performances. In his karaoke routine, he’ll sing everything from Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit to Frank Sinatra’s My Way to Mando-pop standards, morphing the lyrics into all sorts of comic malapropisms.
By calling his show Black Wolf Nakashi, he quite rightly taps into Taiwan’s tradition of troubadour nakashi musicians, though obviously giving it a bizarre, postmodern twist. He performs with another of Taiwan’s top comic musical parodies, the Clippers (夾子電動大樂隊), headed by Xiao-ying (小應). Understanding the jokes may test your Mandarin, but both are seasoned performers whose humor can frequently transcend language.
Photo courtesy of Manic Sheep
■ Huang Da-wang and the Clippers perform tonight at Riverside (河岸留言), B1, 2, Lane 244, Sec 2, Roosevelt Rd, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路三段244巷2號B1). Tickets are NT$350 at the door.
TAIWAN’S ROOKIE CHAMPS AT FUJI ROCK
Every year more than a 1,000 bands apply to the Rookie-a-go-go stage at Fuji Rock, Asia’s best known music festival. From the applicants, around 15 bands are chosen to perform at the festival, and from those select few, the fans choose a winner, which is then invited to perform on one of Fuji Rock’s main stages the following year.
Photo courtesy of Huang Da-wang
At last year’s Fuji Rock, and for the first time ever, the winner was not a Japanese band. It was Taiwanese group called Manic Sheep, who describe their music as “shoegaze” and “noise-rock.” They will perform on Sunday on Fuji Rock’s Red Marquee stage, paving the way for other later performers, including Jenny Lewis, Ryan Adams and Takkyu Ishino.
“We didn’t really have any expectations. We knew about the competition and just decided to enter,” says Chris Lo (羅玉婷), 27, the singer and guitarist who started Manic Sheep in 2010.
“When we applied, we didn’t think we’d get in. And once they announced the bands, time was really short. We didn’t have any time for it to really sink in. They made the announcement, and then suddenly we were going,” Lo says.
As rookie stage performers last year, Manic Sheep had to pay their own transport and lodging. The Rookie-a-go-go stage is outside of Fuji Rock’s main gates in an area called the Palace of Wonder. It is a freak-zone for carnival acts, stunt shows, giant sculptures made of automobile parts and a big-top tent for ska and brass bands.
Manic Sheep played in the middle of this mad party, and they absolutely killed it. Lo, wearing a white dress and playing a bass guitar almost as big as she is tall, belted out her beat-heavy drone rock, adding the counterpoint of her prettified vocals. Manic Sheep won over the Japanese crowd in no time, and at the end of the weekend they ranked first in the on-site fan voting.
On-line voting however continued until March of this year, so the band did not know it had won until a couple months ago.
“We were really surprised,” Lo said. “This time we’ll prepare a more complete set. Last year we were on the Rookie stage, so rehearsal and soundcheck were really short. You went up on stage, plugged in your instruments, and, once sound came out, you started. This year we can prepare some more complicated stuff. We’ll have a regular 40-minute set.”
Lo started Manic Sheep as a solo project in 2010. She was trained in classical piano as a child, then learned to play bass guitar and other rock instruments in her high school’s rock ‘n’ roll club. She initially started Manic Sheep as a platform for her electronic compositions, but after a year she restacked the group to a standard rock line-up of bass, guitar and drums.
Lo chose the band name by borrowing the word “manic” from the Manic Street Preachers — a band she was into at the time — and combining it with “sheep”, after the Pink Floyd song on the album Animals. This was a revelation for me, as I had always assumed Manic Sheep was a metaphor for a large, highly neurotic flock of sheep-like followers, or basically, Taiwanese youth.
Lo’s lyrics, mixing Chinese and English, have a way of capturing the attitude of her generation — which is to say boredom, insomnia, being suffocated by relationships and other sorts of middle-class malaise. On her BandCamp.com page, one commenter declared her song Boring Love Should Be Ended At A Raining Night to be “scientifically proven to be the most indie song title of the last decade.” Another song is titled You Lie, You Choke the Rules We Trust.
“I get all my subject matter by choosing from my diary,” Lo says. “If one day I’m in a bad mood, I’ll just force something out. But I don’t really like explaining why I write about certain things. It’s really interesting, when I don’t explain, then everyone comes up with their own different interpretations.
■ Manic Sheep performs Sunday at 10:50am at Fuji Rock Festival in Japan. For more information go to: www.fujirock-eng.com.
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