It wasn't so long ago that Wade Davis and Jimmy Moe, a couple of English teachers from Taichung, were promoting a fledgling outdoor concert in Kenting called Spring Scream (春天吶喊).
During its first year in 1995, only a couple of hundred people came to their Kenting beach show. This year, about 3,000 showed up, making it one of Taiwan's premier outdoor music festivals and a model for those to come.
The original music scene that they've supported for so long is finally picking up steam, and now local concert organizers are setting up their own shows. Three of them will happen around Taipei over the next two weekends,
providing some of the few chances outside of Spring Scream for bands to play beyond the confines of smoky urban pubs and in front of audiences larger than a hundred of their friends.
But unlike Spring Scream, the upcoming events will have sponsors. Moreover, they will not be run by English teachers; they'll be backed by record companies, Internet firms, and even government agencies. This does not mean,
however, that they'll all be completely uncool.
Ho-Hai-Yan (國際海洋音樂祭), which happens at Fulung Beach tomorrow, has gleaned a lot of talent from Spring Scream, taking seven of its best foreign/foreigner bands, seven of its best local bands, and letting them battle on dual stages. A third stage will give other bands, mostly from
local independent record labels, a chance to play. Better yet, the whole thing is free.
The event is organized by TCM (Taiwan Color's Music or 角頭音樂), the local record company that has recently been chosen by the mainstream label Magic Stone (which promotes both Wubai [伍佰] and Faith Yang [楊乃文]) as a vehicle for bringing bands up out of the underground scene. In addition to so-called underground rock, TCM has a major focus on aboriginal music and Taiwan folk.
TCM is headed up by a man called Zhang 43 (張43) - it's a name he chose himself, because he's "getting ready for the digital age". Zhang is a musician, though now he also produces seven or eight CDs a year for other bands. He believes that "performing is most important", as is "spirit and energy", which are some of the values he's trying to instill through this weekend's Ho-Hai-Yan, which derives its name from an aboriginal ocean song.
Like everything else in Taiwan, however, the concert will not be completely divorced from politics and profit motive. The show's major financial backing is coming from the cultural funds of the DPP-controlled Taipei County Government, which will be arranging for extra evening trains to ferry concert-goers home from the show. And it would be hard to say that TCM is not DPP friendly, especially since they put out a CD of what are basically
karaoke tunes by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), Kaohsiung Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), and the rest of the DPP all-stars earlier this year.
CD sales and other types of vending will also take place at the Fulung show. Zhang estimates that the independent record companies present should be able to gross around NT$1 million at the event.
It is also rumored that Ho-Hai-Yan will be followed by a DJ driven after-party that could potentially last all night. TCM, however, is unable to confirm or deny those rumors.
A week later, the Taiwan Rock Festival (野台開唱) will also go off mostly according to the spirit of rock for rock's sake. The hundred-band concert is letting everybody play and charging a nominal ticket price (NT$30 or less) to see it. The major organizer is the Taiwan Rock Association (全國搖滾聯盟), which started out by linking university rock and roll clubs across Taiwan, and has grown into something of a non-profit organization for promoting rock music. Naturally, the group doesn’t have much money itself. That’s why it has hooked up with music.com.tw and several other Internet companies who are hoping to gain publicity through sponsorship.
Also next weekend, the Simply Jeans Rock Band Concert (Simply Jeans 世紀Band搖滾) sponsored by Giordano will be the most pop-oriented of the three events, putting Taiwan's five most popular and most produced live-performance bands together on an outdoor stage at Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek Memorial.
With the possible exception of Luan Tan, an east coast band that's been nurtured by mainstream music and is a two-time winner of best group at Taiwan's version of the Grammies, the other bands (Backquarter, Mayday, Tolaku, and the Boss Band) are all Spring Scream veterans, especially Backquarter. The band has played Spring Scream since 1996, which is about when they started to write original songs. Though all these groups are contenders for massive popular success, Mayday is making the most progress for the moment. The major Taiwan label, Rock Records, is pushing their brand
new CD from record stores to 7-11, and their video appears several times daily on Channel [V].
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
RSS