Aboriginal performers and songs using the Taiwanese language swept away most contenders at Friday night's 11th Golden Melody Awards.
The event, similar to the Grammy Awards, drew a slew of performers from Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in spite of a torrent of rain that threatened to dampen the music industry's biggest party of the year.
Best Pop Album of the Year honors went to Mavis Fan (
PHOTO: SHEN ZHAO-LIANG, LIBERTY TIMES
Despite all the glam and glitz, the hokey dance pieces, and the sometimes ditzy sounding hosts, the main theme of the evening was somewhat serious, focusing on Taiwan's cultural and musical identity.
The amount of sentiment invested for many of the performers was made abundantly clear when an Aboriginal -- Difang (Kuo Ying-nan,
After a moving speech given in the Ami language, he told the Taipei Times that he "would celebrate the event by drinking a loving cup with the members of his tribe."
He said it was his greatest regret that "children were no longer taught to speak and sing the songs of the tribe."
Taiwan's Aboriginal heritage was given a further boost when Chen won Best Male Performer. He also won in the Best Song Writer category for "Voices of the Sun, Wind, and the Grassland", for which his niece Samingad (
Chen said his victory was an indication of the importance that Taiwan is finally putting on tribal music, and he hoped that this recognition would influence the next generation to preserve Taiwan's tradition of Aboriginal music.
He himself can be seen as a sign of hope for the genre as his grandfather, Lu Sen-bao (
Taiwan's other ethnic groups also got a thumbs up with Labor Exchange (
Even in the smallest of the major league awards -- Best Male and Female Performance for Non-Mandarin Songs -- Taiwanese identity was clearly in the ascendant. Joy Topper (
Said Topper: It was "a meaningful event for Taiwan's record industry, for it indicated a willingness to accept diverse genres of music."
For the female category there was no surprise when Chiang Hui (
"That we have a separate category means that I can now sing as a Taiwanese, that this music truly belongs to Taiwan," she said.
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